Foreign Policy

The May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden handed the White House one of its few major foreign policy successes, so it’s of little surprise that the Obama administration would push back on two new articles that allege that much of what the U.S. government told the world about the raid is false.

What’s interesting is just how strongly the administration — and its former officials — are denying the new claims.

In a rare on-the-record comment, CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani described the first article, written by Seymour Hersh and published Sunday in the London Review of Books, as “utter nonsense.”

Michael Morell, who was deputy director of the CIA at the time of the bin Laden raid, said he stopped reading Hersh’s article after finding “something wrong” in every sentence.

Hersh reported that the Pakistani government was holding the al Qaeda leader prisoner in the compound in Abbottabad where he was eventually killed. Hersh further reported that the CIA learned of bin Laden’s presence there not by tracking his courier, as the Obama administration has stated, but from “a senior Pakistani intelligence officer” eager to claim the $25 million reward, and that, contrary to the public version of events, the United States did not bury bin Laden at sea.

“It’s dead wrong — not even close to the truth,” said Morell, who details the events surrounding the raid in a chapter of his new book, The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism — From al Qaida to ISIS. “We didn’t learn about Osama bin Laden from a Pakistani official that we paid $25 million to. We learned about his whereabouts from following the courier.”

Late Monday afternoon, in a follow-up article, NBC News reported that it had separately been told by two intelligence sources that a Pakistani “walk in” had told the United States where the al Qaeda leader was hiding.

Current and former U.S. officials insisted that was not the case.

“A walk in did not give up bin Laden’s location,” said a U.S. government official, speaking after the NBC News story had been published. “The U.S. found him the way we said we found him,” added the official, who requested anonymity so as to discuss sensitive intelligence issues.

Additionally, Morell said in an interview Monday, Hersh’s assertion that the Pakistanis had foreknowledge of and participated in the raid that Joint Special Operations Command conducted under CIA auspices to kill bin Laden in his compound is not true. A former senior member of SEAL Team 6, the unit at the heart of the Abbottabad raid, described Hersh’s article as “laughable,” adding that bin Laden was found through “some luck and some good eavesdropping.” The former Team 6 member also spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Hersh for decades has gotten under the U.S. government’s skin. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the 1968 massacre — and cover-up — at My Lai during the Vietnam War. But his more recent reporting has come under harsh scrutiny, particularly his April 2014 article that a chemical attack in Syria widely attributed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad was in fact perpetrated by Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, in coordination with the Turkish government. Hersh’s latest article relies largely on the account of an anonymous source described as “a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.” The other principal sources  are two anonymous “longtime consultants to the [U.S.] Special Operations Command, and retired Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani, who headed Pakistani’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency in the early 1990s.

Spokesmen for the National Security Council and the Defense Department each issued very similarly worded statements that flatly refuted Hersh’s article on the bin Laden raid.

“The notion that the operation that killed Osama bin Laden was anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false,” said NSC spokesman Ned Price in an email. The Obama administration did not inform the Pakistani government until after the raid, Price said.

The Hersh article contained “too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions … to fact check each one,” said Pentagon spokesman Maj. Roger M. Cabiness II in an email. “We had been and continue to be partners with Pakistan in our joint effort to destroy al Qaeda, but this was a U.S. operation through and through.”

Photo: Aamir Qureshi/AFP

The world passed a milestone of sorts last month, as China finally surpassed the United States as the top global importer of crude oil. But what really matters for Beijing — and the world — is less the volume of Chinese imports than where that oil is coming from.

In that sense, China’s continued and, indeed, deepening reliance on volatile regions of the world for energy supplies, especially the Middle East, points to continued security vulnerabilities for Beijing for decades to come. That’s true despite efforts to diversify where China gets its energy from, and breakneck efforts by Chinese leaders to transform the country into a true maritime power.

In April, Reuters reported, China imported a record 7.4 million barrels of oil a day, just nipping the 7.2 million barrels a day imported by the United States, long the world’s oil glutton. By most accounts, that marked the first time China has imported more oil than the United States. By other measures, including net imports of all petroleum products, China had already elbowed its way into first place in late 2013.

Regardless of the exact timing, the emergence of China as the top crude importer is unlikely to be a one-off event. Oil production is still booming in the United States, reducing import dependence to levels last seen when President Richard Nixon was scandal-free. China, in contrast, continues to consume more oil despite an economic slowdown and efforts to shift the economy away from heavy industry and more toward services.

More important than the 7 million barrels is the fact that Chinese dependence on overseas oil, and especially on oil from the Middle East, has only grown in recent years. In 2007, according to Chinese customs data scoured by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, China imported 3.2 million barrels a day with 1.46 million barrels, or 46 percent, coming from the Middle East. In 2014, even before the recent record, China imported an average of 6.1 million barrels of oil a day. Of that, more than 52 percent — or 3.2 million barrels — came from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq.

In other words, despite years of effort to source more energy from places like Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, and Russia, China gets more oil today from the Middle East than all the oil it imported just a few years ago.

Those diversification efforts “will help stem the rate of growth of dependence on Middle East oil, but they don’t change the fundamentals,” said Bruce Jones, director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution and author of The Risk Pivot. “China will remain heavily dependent on Middle Eastern oil and gas for 30 or 40 years at least.”

In practical terms, that makes China acutely vulnerable to fallout from any energy-supply disruptions in the Middle East, without being able to do much about it. Earlier this month, for example, Iranian ships detained a cargo ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil-transit chokepoint. That prompted the U.S. Navy to escort some ships through the passage for a few days; now the Navy is just monitoring sea-lane security there. A recent study on Chinese naval operations concluded that “regional conflict is the most likely and most dangerous threat to sea-lane security.”

China has spent years trying to build a blue-water navy that could operate far from home. Since 2008 it has maintained a long-distance anti-piracy patrol off the coast of Somalia precisely to help limit the threat that pirates pose to shipping. But despite heroic efforts, including the launch of its first aircraft carrier and a rapid naval modernization, China is still decades away from matching U.S. naval capacities, which leaves it hostage to regional instability.

“There is a fundamental asymmetry between China’s reliance on Middle East oil supply, and its very minimal capacity to do anything to contain or mitigate political risk in the region,” Jones said.

More broadly, the strategic nightmare that has haunted Chinese leaders for two decades shows no sign of going away.

Former Chinese President Hu Jintao first fully articulated in 2003 what has become known as the “Malacca Dilemma.” That laid out Chinese fears that some unnamed power — such as the United States — could use its dominance at sea to blockade the narrow-but-critical sea lane in the Strait of Malacca near Singapore, through which about three-quarters of Chinese oil imports pass. Continued economic growth is the central pillar of legitimacy for China’s leadership; any serious and sustained energy-supply disruption would strike at the underpinnings of Beijing’s hold on power.

The “Malacca Dilemma” is behind some of China’s highest-profile diplomatic moves, from closer energy ties with Russia to the construction of a New Silk Road across Central Asia and a Maritime Silk Road across the Indian Ocean. But as the latest oil-import numbers show, those initiatives will likely only trim China’s vulnerability at the margins, without being able to address for at least a generation the existential worry that’s part and parcel of the country’s miraculous economic transformation.

Ultimately, China’s deep and continued reliance on energy imports, and especially crude from some of the most unstable parts of the world, will likely push Beijing to ramp up its diplomatic and military engagement not just in Africa or the Indian Ocean but in the broader Middle East. For a United States anxious to escape that morass and complete its own pivot to Asia, that might not be such unwelcome news.

Photo credit: FRANS CASPERS/Flickr

HONG KONG — The People’s Commune resides not on a utopian farm in the Chinese heartland, but on the second floor of a shabby building in Causeway Bay, one of Hong Kong’s busiest and most neon-packed shopping areas. Wedged between two watch stores offering timepieces costing tens of thousands of dollars and a money exchange joint, the narrow entryway leading up to the shop is plastered with adverts for its top offerings: coffee, baby formula, and banned books.

It’s an unlikely combination, but one logical for its appeal to the store’s patrons, mostly mainland tourists on shopping sprees. 19.1 million mainlanders, or more than 2.5 times Hong Kong’s resident population of seven million, visited the former British colony as tourists in 2014. Many are looking for things they can’t get at home, or at least not as cheaply. Gucci handbags, cosmetics, and safe baby food make the list, but so does something more risqué: books that Chinese authorities have deemed ideologically unfit.

On the day I visited in early May the little shop was mostly deserted. Two clerks chatted behind the cashier, while a lone customer, an African man, pecked away on his laptop in a corner. The place was not much of a coffee shop — three tiny tables cramped behind a book display case was the extent of its ambitions. The room felt so tight it wasn’t clear where an espresso machine would fit. In its entirety, the store was at most 1,000 square feet, but it was filled to the brim with books.

To browse the wares on offer in People’s Commune is to wade into the unpredictable swamp of political rumors about top-level Chinese politics. All kinds of colorful critters flourish outside the control of the Communist Party. Much of it is bunk; even an adventurous reader would be well-advised to keep careful mental distance from titles like Hu Jintao’s Unsuccessful Suicide, Li Keqiang’s Imminent Resignation, or The Conspiracy to Overthrow Xi Jinping in Five Years. (Hu is China’s former president; Li is its current premier, Xi its current president.)

The sordid and salacious seem to sell particularly well. When I asked the clerk about the types of book favored by the store’s clientele, she pointed to a bestsellers list near the door. Among this month’s leaders was the purported autobiography of Shen Bing, a beautiful presenter at China Central Television (CCTV), who is thought to be a mistress of Zhou Yongkang, the former security czar now being prosecuted for corruption. The account is probably not authentic — it would be virtually impossible for Shen to have written it in 2014, while she was under investigation for the Zhou case. But the combination of sex, fame, and power evidently proved irresistible to many mainland Chinese buyers, whose exposure to an accounting of Zhou’s misdeeds is mostly limited to terse, carefully vetted state media releases.

Hong Kong publishing houses are only too happy to fill the information void that mainland state control creates, churning out a steady supply of books and magazines about the Chinese leadership that usually make no attempt to substantiate any claims beyond throwaway references to “well-placed sources in Beijing.” Street newsstands often peddle the political drama pieces as well, jamming the glum faces of somewhat sinister-looking Chinese men in suits next to porn and Japanese anime.

But I’d not come in search of steamy liaisons and failed coups; I was looking for a memoir by Li Rui, a 98-year old retired Communist Party official now known as one of the party’s harshest internal critics. Li’s book represents a slice of the Hong Kong banned-book genre that offers real value: memoirs by bona fide eyewitnesses to history. One of the best-known examples is Prisoner of the State, a memoir by late, deposed Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The reformist Zhao was once among China’s most powerful men, but he made the mistake of openly sympathizing with student protesters amassed in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and spent almost two decades under house arrest. Prisoner of the State is based on tapes of his conversations with friends that had been smuggled out of China. Similarly, Li’s book, Li Rui’s Oral Account of Past Events, is based on a series of interviews and conversations from the early 2000s.

Li’s life is the stuff of legend. Born in 1917 to a merchant family, the still-idealistic Li landed in Yan’an, the “red capital” of China, in the 1940s. The communists had caught a breather in Yan’an after their epic Long March to escape from the ruling Nationalists, who launched a series of “encirclement campaigns” to exterminate the fledgling party. At Yan’an, Li became a newspaper editor and grew close to many of the communist leaders who would go on to govern China, but also had his first taste of the party’s wrath when he spent a year in detention over suspicion of being a Nationalist spy.

After the Communist Party won the Chinese civil war in 1949, Li was charged with directing the country’s (then non-existent) hydroelectric projects, and also served as Mao Zedong’s secretary for a few brief months in 1958. In 1959, Li was purged and sent to labor camp, and spent almost two decades in political wilderness, including six years in solitary confinement at the infamous Qincheng prison, which has held many Chinese notables. In 1978, after Deng Xiaoping came to power, Li was rehabilitated and tapped to be the deputy head of central organization department, the organ that is, essentially, the human resources branch for the party, which now has over 85 million members. Li was tasked with building a pipeline of younger cadres, and the men who would later take top posts in the party, like former President Jiang Zemin, Hu, and Xi all had personal contacts with Li while he evaluated party members for promotion.

Mao was “ruthless,” according to Li, who Li claims did not care about the death of millions during the disastrous Great Leap Forward, which amounted to a “mistake that Communist party made that was unprecedented in human history.” Li also painted Jiang in a negative light; after Li recommended Jiang for posts at key junctures of Jiang’s career, Jiang repeatedly sought Li’s advice and support throughout the 1980’s, but “acted like a stranger” after he becaming party secretary. Li had similar experiences with Hu, who ignored Li’s letters and advice after he ascended the throne. Li had woefully little to say about Xi, probably partly because Xi’s father was a close friend of his, but Li has continued to call for the party to institute democratic process to “save itself.”

As a bona fide party elder, Li has also emerged as a leading voice for political reform. After being sidelined once again after 1989 for criticizing the decision to use force against student protesters on Tiananmen Square, Li began to write extensively on his personal brushes with power, dealings with powerful men, and his having borne witness to the corruptive nature of power. His ripe old age, Yan’an credentials and past contributions to the party have protected him from anything worse than gentle warnings. Li gripes in the closing words to his memoir that his figurative “sons and grandsons in the party are now trying to rein me in.”

Li’s book made international news when his daughter, Li Nanyang, sued Chinese customs for confiscating 50 copies of the book when she tried to cross the border from Hong Kong into mainland China. In an opinion piece about the case, the staunch party-advocate Global Times dismissed Ms. Li’s actions as “divorced from China’s reality,” but acknowledged that bringing one or two banned books into China for one’s own enjoyment is a common, albeit “controversial,” practice. There is little chance that Ms. Li will have her day in court, and she probably does not expect to. If her goal was to call further attention to the informational wall China has built around its citizens, then she has already succeeded.

Since banned books are widely available in Hong Kong at bookstores and newsstands, probability dictates that a fair number of them must have seeped through the porous customs check into China. But a valuable and weighty memoir like Li’s is apparently rarer contraband than the frivolity and smut that’s mostly on offer in Hong Kong. For mainland Chinese readers, flipping through banned books is like peering through a looking glass to a strange world. But what they see seldom takes them any closer to the truth.

Image via Flickr/credit: I’m Goldfish

In 1962, in the depth of the Cold War, the Vatican excommunicated communist-revolutionary-turned-Cuban-president Fidel Castro after he banned religious celebrations and the building of new churches in Cuba, which would later declare itself an officially atheist state. But half a century later — two decades after the Cold War’s end — Fidel’s brother Raúl, Cuba’s current president, says he’s so impressed by Pope Francis that he’s considering going back to church.

After a very friendly visit with Francis at the Vatican, Castro told reporters on Sunday, “I read all the speeches of the pope, his commentaries, and if the pope continues this way, I will go back to praying and go back to the church, and I’m not joking.”

Castro visited Francis on his way back from Moscow, where he was reportedly the only Western Hemisphere leader to attend celebrations marking the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazism. The Moscow stop was a reminder that Cold War ties — and divisions — run deep. But they’re not immutable: Francis will reciprocate Castro’s gesture later this year and become the third pope of the last three to have held the office who have visited Cuba since the Cold War ended.

“When the pope goes to Cuba in September,” Castro said, “I promise to go to all his Masses, and with satisfaction.” He added that he had “always studied at Jesuit schools” — an allusion to the time before the revolution that brought his brother to power in 1959.

Warming relations between Havana and the Vatican demonstrate a broader trend of reconciliation between the once-hostile ideologies, which has accelerated under social welfare-minded Francis.

The basic principles behind Communism and Catholicism have been fundamentally at odds ever since Karl Marx famously wrote that religion is “the opiate of the masses.” Antipathy arguably reached its height with the Vatican’s 1949 “Decree against Communism,” which excommunicated all Catholics involved with communist groups. It continued with Pope John XXIII’s endorsement of democracy over other forms of government in 1963, and Pope Paul VI’s condemnation of “atheistic communism” as chief among “such ideologies as deny God and oppress the Church.” Later, many credited Pope John Paul II with helping speed the fall of communism in his native Poland, where Catholic churches served as centers of political opposition.

More recently, and particularly with Francis’s emphasis on egalitarianism and fighting poverty, the two ideologies’ goals, at least as preached by Francis and the Castros, have started to sound more similar. After the Cold War ended, Cuba  lifted restrictions on Catholic practice, allowed Catholics to join the Communist Party, and removed its constitution’s declaration of atheism. Catholics – nominally about 60 percent of Cuba’s population — no longer have to practice in secret, although many who’ve been baptized don’t practice regularly.

Fidel Castro visited the Vatican in 1996, paving the way for Pope John Paul to become the first pope to visit Cuba in 1998. Pope Benedict met Fidel and Raúl, both of whom were baptized and have showed some religious tendencies in the past, in Havana in 2012. Last year, the BBC reported that building was underway on the first new church since a freeze on construction after the Cuban Revolution.

Now, as a 2013 Atlantic article titled “The Vatican’s Journey from Anti-Communism to Anti-Capitalism” points out, Francis has declared “a new enemy for the Catholic Church: modern capitalism.” According to Francis, “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.” But “this opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”

With the Cold War long over and communism soundly defeated as an ideology in all but a handful of countries – Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and (nominally) China — Francis argues that for the welfare of mankind, states need to exercise more, not less, control over financial markets.

Some who don’t see many similarities between the two -isms have raised alarms that Francis is abandoning one for the other. Rush Limbaugh, for example, has accused Francis of practicing “pure Marxism” in place of Catholicism. Francis has graciously responded that “Marxist ideology is wrong, but I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people.”

Still, Communism and Catholicism now have more to talk about than they have for the past several decades. As the Atlantic’s Emma Green pointed out, Argentina-born Francis’s message seems to be crafted less for North America and Europe — the epicenters both of recent church scandals and of what Francis sees as individualistic capitalism’s corrupting influence — and more for Latin America and Africa, where economic development has left many behind.

On Sunday, Castro and Francis spoke in their native Spanish, building on a dialog that Castro has credited with helping thaw relations with the United States under President Barack Obama and move toward a lifting of sanctions that – along with communist rule itself — have helped impoverish the country.

During Castro’s visit with the Pope, the Associated Press reported, “Francis gave Castro a medal depicting St. Martin of Tours, known for caring for the destitute. ‘With his mantle he covers the poor,’ Francis told Castro, saying more efforts on behalf of the poor are needed.”

That’s definitely one thing both leaders can agree on.

GREGORIO BORGIA/AFP/Getty Images

As President Barack Obama and the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) sit down at Camp David this week, the White House’s goal is clear: reassure America’s Middle Eastern partners that it remains committed to their security. But the summit is clearly not off to a good start, with only two of the six GCC monarchs planning to attend — and King Salman of Saudi Arabia waiting until the last moment to announce he is not coming.

According to media reports, the Obama administration is preparing to assuage skepticism toward the potential nuclear agreement with Iran by focusing on new security arrangements and billions of dollars in weapons that the United States may offer to sell to the Gulf states. Arms sales and security guarantees may be a piece of the equation — but they won’t be enough. The most effective way for the Obama administration to make headway with the Gulf is by signaling a more comprehensive approach to countering Iranian influence in the Middle East.

What the Gulf states fear most is that in the aftermath of a nuclear agreement, the United States will cut a deal with Tehran to divide the region and abandon its Arab partners. Saudi Arabia has been the most vocal in expressing concerns that the United States is so interested in achieving an agreement on the nuclear question that it is willing to tolerate Iran’s unchecked influence throughout the region. To many of America’s partners, Iranian nuclear ambitions are inextricably linked to Tehran’s aggressive support of its proxies through the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which provides training, funding, and support for Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, among other groups.

So far, America’s allies have a poor record of responding to Iranian interventionism in the Arab world. In Syria, where the IRGC is operating overtly and covertly, the response of U.S. Gulf partners has been reactive — favoring support for militant Sunni Islamist forces to counter Iranian influence. Fighting the fire of Iranian proxies with the fire of radical Sunni fighters may be expedient, but it is unhelpful in realizing the longer-term goal of greater regional stability.

But it’s going to take more than ever-larger arms sales to convince the Gulf states that Iran isn’t on the march in the Middle East. In 2014, U.S. allies in the GCC outspent the Iranians by a margin of more than seven-to-one, investing over $113.7 billion in their militaries compared to Iran’s $15.7 billion. The United States has long given its Gulf allies some of its most advanced military equipment, such as the F-15 and F-16 fighter jets that it sold to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Riyadh alone spent more than $80 billion on defense in 2014. And Saudi air defenses — bolstered by advanced F-15 fighters, top-of-the-line intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and missile defense capabilities — are more than capable of defending the kingdom from Iran’s conventional military attacks. Yet, anxiety in the region is still high.

There are a number of steps Obama can take this week beyond arms sales to reassure his Gulf partners. He can start by putting the regional challenges caused by Iran at the top of the agenda at Camp David: If the president and his team start the discussion with a focus on what the Gulf states view as their top priority, instead of focusing on the Iranian nuclear challenge, it would send a strong message that the United States is listening to its partners’ concerns.

As part of this effort, the United States might also consider increasing interdictions of Iranian weapons shipments, improving intelligence cooperation, pursuing more aggressive joint covert actions against Iranian-supported terrorism, and finding ways to expose Iranian operatives and embarrass Iran when it pursues irresponsible destabilizing policies in the Middle East. The United States has already started to increase its support for such efforts by providing intelligence for the Saudi military operations against the Houthis in Yemen, and increasing its naval presence to deter Iranian arms shipments in the Gulf. The United States also sent a strong signal in the aftermath of the Iranian seizure of the container ship Maersk Tigris, beginning military escorts of U.S. and British commercial vessels throughout the Gulf, which likely played a role in the ship’s release.

The Obama administration should also embark on a long-term effort to train these U.S. allies how to more effectively counter Iran. There is already a potential model in Jordan, which is particularly focused on building the capacity of partners on the ground to defeat jihadists such as the Islamic State. The Jordanians are set to take the lead in a mission to train Iraqi Sunni Arab National Guard units, and Amman is expressing public intent to recruit and train Syrian fighters from tribal groups that live in Islamic State-controlled areas of eastern Syria. Other U.S. allies — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey — are scheduled to provide training sites and support for the U.S.-led program to train and equip Syrian rebels, which has already reportedly begun in Jordan.

The United States can also send a message to both its partners and to Iran that it is not abandoning the region by enhancing the current U.S. force posture in the Middle East. Obama should tell his GCC allies that the approximately 40,000 U.S. military personnel, and the robust U.S. naval and air capabilities, are not only in the Middle East to stay but will be enhanced. Forward stationing more advanced manned and unmanned aircraft and missile defense assets in the region, for instance, would help assure America’s wary partners.

Of course, all of these steps do not preclude increased arms sales to the Gulf States. But ideally, those should focus on defensive capabilities such as minesweepers and ballistic missile defense. They should also include the types of capabilities that would make our Arab partners more effective at countering the unconventional Iranian challenge, such as tactical tools like night vision goggles and weapons optics, and also more strategic capabilities such as advanced unmanned aerial vehicles and the networking architecture to enhance air and maritime domain awareness.

In the end, it will not be possible for President Obama to fully reassure America’s regional allies in the aftermath of a nuclear deal with Iran. Their concerns about a “Persian pivot” will remain, and their distrust of the president will make U.S. relations with the Gulf states difficult. But if Obama is able to begin to implement an effective reassurance strategy, he can hand off a better situation to his successor — who will have to do the bulk of the work in repairing some of America’s relations with the Gulf states in the aftermath of a nuclear deal with Iran.

Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images

Ex-CIA officer Joe Weisberg debuted his TV show The Americans in January 2013, chronicling the lives of two “illegals”—deep-undercover Russian spies seemingly living a normal American existence. Weisberg’s series was partly inspired by 10 illegals who had been apprehended on U.S. soil three years earlier. That event also revealed something far more dramatic, according to investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov: Russian intelligence appeared desperate to relive the glory days of the long-defunct Communist International (Comintern), a Soviet-era organization that recruited party sympathizers from around the world, while strengthening state security in the meantime. Weisberg, whose show recently aired its third-season finale, and Soldatov, whose book on Russian surveillance, The Red Web, will be published in September, recently debated the merits of illegals, trusting agents, and the world according to Edward Snowden.

Joe Weisberg: I have a dual perspective on the use of illegals. What is the point of continuing to run them? On the one hand, I see no purpose in it whatsoever—of putting all this effort into training these people and giving them these deep covers when they really have nothing to do, very little access, and no way to produce useful intelligence. On the other hand, I feel the same way really about all espionage; it’s all useless. Even the SVR [the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service] officers in the embassies, it’s the same for them. I don’t think they have access, and I don’t think they produce useful intelligence either. But, if you look at it differently, the illegals at least really have much better cover. Unless there’s a traitor who gives them up, they are generally impossible for the intelligence services to discover. So in a certain sense, it makes more sense to use illegals.

Andrei Soldatov: I have to disagree with you. My opinion is that illegals are the most unofficial way to do intelligence because it means that you have your officers trained for years and years to pretend that they are, in this case, Americans. The illegals who were used for many years in the United States were put in a very dangerous situation: These people were not protected by diplomatic power. If they’d been exposed, they would have been in a position to provide all details to counterintelligence. Many years ago, I had a very interesting conversation with someone from the SVR who told me a fascinating story. He said that some of these illegals in the United States, as they retired, they asked as a special reward to stay in the country. And I thought, they want to live in this culture they spent their life trying to undermine. If the people that trained and spent their careers in the United States do spend the rest of their lives also in the United States, they’re very vulnerable to counterintelligence. I would be very cautious of these people if I were in charge of Russian foreign intelligence.

JW: There’s a very interesting memoir by a former Directorate S officer who claims that the illegals were never fully trusted—for exactly the reason you’re saying. He says they were sometimes given a drug that was undetectable and a sort of truth serum. They were then questioned under the influence, sometimes waking up and not necessarily realizing they had been drugged. That was the level at which the Soviet Union didn’t fully trust its own agents.

AS: That brings us to an interesting question: Why did Soviet and now Russian intelligence actually decide to use illegals? Why do we have this strange practice of sending Russian nationals to pretend that they are American or British or French? It’s a unique thing that nobody except Russia actually uses. Comintern might have had one of the most successful intelligence agencies because it actually consisted of nationals of many countries, including Americans, the British, and all kinds of Europeans, united by the idea of communism. All these guys were recruited not by Soviet intelligence but by Comintern officers. The problem with Comintern, though, was that in 1943, when Stalin decided to disband it completely, many of these people were actually sent to jail or killed. Not too long after, KGB intelligence started a special avenue for training illegals; they were pressured to find some sort of replacement to that success.

AS: The scandal of illegals in 2010 was portrayed in Russia as a huge victory for the SVR, despite the fact that these guys were all caught—a PR celebration to say that Russian intelligence is back. But in the United States, the perception was completely different. How can you explain this contradiction?

JW: Well, the very first response was the FBI saying, “These guys are so dangerous.” But very quickly the media caught on to the fact that even the FBI couldn’t present any proof that they had actually done anything. Soon the reporting turned to the idea that these guys had no value and weren’t a real risk. It took about half a year for the intelligence community to fight a kind of rear-guard action, to say, “Here’s what the illegals might have been doing that was really dangerous, so you should be scared of them.” For example, one of them was close to somebody who was close to Hillary Clinton. And also they may have been communicating with people in the NSA [National Security Agency]. It’s in the [U.S.] intelligence community’s interest for the illegals to have posed a major, serious threat. When it was time to do The Americans, I was less interested in the reality of what illegals did or didn’t do. I was interested in the perception, in the spies among us, and in the fear at that time—Ronald Reagan, the evil empire. Of course, the illegals were actually there to act in wartime, to go and blow things up, poison water supplies—things like that. They did have a fairly insidious mission; it just wasn’t really acted upon. So I wanted to put back together a fantasy of the worst possible things and make it more dramatic. There’s no question that in the show these guys are much more active and are doing much worse things than illegals ever did. There’s some conflict between that and the main purpose of the show, which is really to say, “Take a look at the enemy; the enemy is really just like you, so stop seeing them so much as your enemy.”

AS: Yes, I think that’s a very good point to look at the actions. That was always the commentary from the SVR guys. One point of the illegals was always to act in a “special period,” which actually means war—to have a special cache of weapons in times of war, that illegals might use to hide weapons and explosives. In the scandal in 2010, everybody tried to get comments from the SVR. Eventually, a general was dispatched. When he was asked, “Well this program is so expensive, we have left these guys for years, and what is the result?” he said the same speech: “Well, in ‘a special period,’ these guys might be useful.” So they developed this program when they had in mind a “period” when there might be a big war between Russia—or the Soviet Union—and the United States. They developed special procedures and they still work from these procedures. They still have the same principles. It’s fascinating, that so many years have passed, nobody thinks about the big war between the two super powers, but nevertheless, they still have these things.

JW: I’ll tell a favorite illegals story: They were also sent to Eastern Europe, interestingly enough—to the Soviet allies. For example, there was an illegal that was sent to Czechoslovakia in 1968; this person, like many of the illegals, had become somewhat westernized and he sent back to Russia these very honest accounts about what was going on and was really sort of pro-the forces of Czechoslovakia that were fighting for freedom and independence. This person was fearless and, to a certain degree, because of some of the politics of the illegals program, was able to send these reports and didn’t have any repercussions for it. Of course the general officers in the embassy were under great pressure to say what everybody wanted to hear. That was a problem with Soviet intelligence throughout the entire Soviet period—that you couldn’t really give accurate intelligence because you could lose your job over it. But this illegal was able to go into Czechoslovakia and say, “Look, these people are not so bad; they are kind of doing something decent”—and send these reports back to Moscow.

AS: That’s such an interesting story. There were at least some sort of results from this kind of program.

JW: You speak and you write very freely about everything going on in Russia. Are you afraid of being arrested?

AS: Well, I was first interrogated by the FSB many years ago, in 2002. So I might say I got used to it. But three years ago, it was impossible to accuse journalists of state treason because they were special marked in the registration—you could not be accused of espionage if you had no access to classified information. But then this was changed by Russian legislators. Now it’s possible to accuse journalists or others of state treason even if they had no access to any kind of secrets. And of course this put the journalists in a special and very awkward situation. The Russian system of censorship is based mostly on instigating self-censorship. It’s not about real suppression. It’s based on intimidation. You are not actually told what to do; you need to guess. And I try to fight this hold of self-censorship, trying to think what might the reaction be of the American or British or French journalists in this situation.

But thanks to the Internet, we’re sometimes able to find a way to bypass the censorship. Something that’d be impossible to publish in Russian media, if you find a way to have your story published first on the web, after that, Russian publications might translate the story and publish it in Russian.

JW: When people do self-censor, are they afraid that, as some journalists have been, that they’re going to be beaten up on the street? Or is the primary fear that they’ll be arrested, tried in a court, and sent to prison?

AS: It’s about different things. First, you might very quickly lose your job if you publish something sensitive. The owners are mostly pro-Kremlin oligarchs, and these guys know the rules. They know how to put pressure on the editors and the editors might talk to the journalists and find out that everybody understands the rules. The last time I was able to work for a Russian publication full time was in 2009. So this is a reality. But also we have all kinds of personal friends and we have Russian investigative journalists who’ve been killed. The most famous is Anna Politkovskaya, who was killed in 2006. And you know, just recently, Boris Nemtsov was killed very close to the Kremlin. So you might say what you want to say but everybody understands this as a message, that you should be very cautious. And this message is very well understood.

AS: The thing about Edward Snowden that is usually is not understood in the United States and the rest of the world is that Snowden is completely unavailable for Russian journalists and for foreign journalists based in Moscow. All of the interviews he’s done over the last year and a half were conducted by people coming from the United States, specifically to interview him. We don’t quite understand the reasons for the secrecy, because in December Snowden said that he doesn’t feel like he’s in danger, that he can walk freely, cross the streets, use the underground. Of course this lack of transparency doesn’t help because Snowden’s presence in Moscow coincides with a huge offensive sponsored by the Russian authorities on the Internet. And many of the oppressive measures are justified in Russian legislatures by his revelations. They’re now trying to force global companies like Google and Facebook to relocate their servers to Russia, arguing that we need to protect personal data of Russian citizens from NSA spying. But the goal is obvious: to provide back doors to these systems for Russian secret services.

JW: Do you think that had it not been for Snowden, the authorities would have simply found another excuse to do that?

AS: That might have been possible, but remember that before Snowden, Russia failed to make other changes to the Internet. But now they had an excuse. Part of the problem is that Snowden failed to really fight for Internet freedom in places outside the United States.

JW: He seems like someone who must be horrified by what the Russian government is doing with the Internet. It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that he’s not speaking out strongly because of his own personal interests. Is that eventually going to become too much of a conflict for him and he’ll have to speak out from his conscience? Or is he going to live out the rest of his days in Moscow swallowing his conscience?

Soldatov: courtesy photo; Weisberg: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

During a four-hour helicopter ride over the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara in early February, Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz and Russia’s Gazprom boss, Alexey Miller, mapped out plans that could potentially rebuild the long-adversarial relationship between their two countries. The men scouted the likely path of “Turkish Stream,” Moscow’s latest grandiose pipeline proposal, which would channel natural gas from the Russian coastal town of Anapa all the way to Ipsala, on Turkey’s border with Greece.

But Yildiz and Miller also traced what could be the newest fault line in Europe’s geopolitical landscape. That helicopter ride, and the subsequent formal agreement signed in early May, suggest Turkey’s patience with Brussels is wearing thin—the EU, after all, has been slow-footing the country’s membership for decades now—and Ankara’s willingness to support Europe’s foreign-policy priorities, from diversifying energy resources to isolating Russia, is diminishing. Now, this one pipeline, which could deliver gas as early as next year, could have the power to embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin, endanger a critical alliance the West has spent decades cultivating, and upend Eurasia’s entire energy and security landscape.

In other words, Turkey would become a middleman for Europe’s energy buyers, and it would be precisely the linchpin Moscow needs to keep an energy hold on the continent.

To be sure, Turkey has long been at the center of global pipeline politics. Since the 1990s, Europe has fantasized that natural gas pipelines would someday push fuel from the Caucasus and Central Asia to Europe. And Turkey’s privileged geographical position would indeed allow for this, while there’s abundant gas in places such as Azerbaijan. Europe’s dreams finally seemed to be coming true in March 2015, when, after years of development, Turkey and Azerbaijan broke ground on a trans-Anatolian pipeline designed to shuttle gas from the Caspian Sea, through the Caucasus and Turkey, and into Europe.

But here’s the rub: Europe doesn’t consume enough gas to justify two new massive pipelines. Put simply, the road goes through Turkey, and Turkey will decide whom Europe will deal with on energy.

Turkey’s games with Europe, while not a complete about-face, are nevertheless jarring. Ankara has been Western-leaning and secular since the end of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I—an allegiance that was cemented in 1952, when the country joined NATO. But that started to change at the turn of this century, when Ahmet Davutoglu, currently the prime minister and a longtime advisor to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, began trying to forge much closer ties with nearby Muslim countries and crafting an increasingly independent stance toward Washington and NATO. (In 2003, for instance, Ankara notably refused permission for the U.S. 4th Infantry Division to cross Turkey to invade Iraq. More recently, Turkey has proved a reluctant partner in the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State and has taken an antagonistic approach to Israel after years of good relations.)

Turkish Stream, then, might be viewed as the culmination of Davutoglu’s vision: The country is moving to become a neo-Ottoman powerhouse and the center of Eurasia’s energy structure.

Such rebranding comes just in time for Russia, which, for nearly 10 years, has been looking for a way to keep a reluctant Europe hooked on its energy while sidestepping a problematic Ukraine. Starting in 2007, Putin began championing “South Stream,” a Russian-built pipeline meant to carry Russian gas across the Black Sea, through Turkish waters, into Bulgaria, and then into the rest of Europe. Moscow only grasped in 2014 that the plan didn’t comply with EU law: Brussels isn’t too keen on monopolies, especially ones that control both energy and the pipes that carry it.

Nonetheless, Russia was already well on its way to scheming a new way forward. In December, while in Ankara for a one-day trade and economic mission, Putin abruptly announced the death of South Stream in the middle of a news conference and debuted the new Turkish Stream. Russia and Turkey’s energy relations, Putin said, “have reached a truly strategic level.” Although the initial announcement came as a surprise to nearly everyone, including Russian energy officials and Turkish authorities, just two months later Yildiz and Miller were boarding that helicopter for their scouting mission.

What’s significant—and problematic—about Turkey’s apparent leap into Russia’s embrace is that Ankara has been both a bulwark of Western security architecture for more than 50 years and a key to Europe’s plot to reduce reliance on Russian energy, an even more urgent priority since the start of the Ukraine crisis. In one fell swoop, Erdogan’s Turkey seems to be abandoning its wilting dream of joining Europe and appears to be throwing in its lot with the one country most determined to undermine the global order in general, and European security in particular.

From Brussels’s point of view, Turkey would likely be a more reliable transit country for energy supplies than Ukraine, but it still lacks much of the physical infrastructure needed to serve that role, such as natural gas storage tanks. What’s more, unlike existing pipelines between Russia and Europe, Turkish Stream wouldn’t even deliver gas directly to the European Union; rather, the gas would be held in Brussels’s backyard in the hope that it would spend billions of dollars to go and fetch the gas at the Turkey-Greece border.

For Moscow, the upside of Turkish Stream is obvious: If it were built, Putin would finally succeed in isolating Ukraine, while still keeping big parts of Europe reliant on Russian fuel. And for Ankara, Turkish Stream could be the vehicle for finally achieving Davutoglu’s dream of reinventing Turkey. But for all his yearnings to resuscitate former glories, he seems to be overlooking the country’s complicated history with Russia.

For 400 years, from the middle of the 16th century through the height of the Cold War, Turks and Russians battled constantly for supremacy in the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, and Crimea. And those issues haven’t been collecting dust in history books. After a couple of decades of peace, the hundreds of thousands of Turkic Tatars living in the Crimean peninsula are again dreading Russian reprisals reminiscent of the Stalin years; Russia is ramping up naval activities in the Black Sea; and Putin is eyeing a greater military presence near Turkey, including new basing agreements with Cyprus and Syria. This is all compounded by long-
standing differences over the conflict in Syria: Turkey wants to oust President Bashar al-Assad and has let Islamist groups run rampant, while Russia staunchly backs its Syrian ally.

Thus, Turkey’s part in the newest pipeline project and the cementing of a strategic relationship with Russia amount to a massive bet that centuries of historical rivalry and animosity can be erased with cheap gas, some spit in a palm, and a friendly handshake. That calls to mind the old Turkish proverb: “The sheep separated from the flock is soon eaten by the wolf.” Or, in this case, the bear.

Illustration by Matthew Hollister

Twenty years after his presidency ended, Harry Truman reflected on firing General Douglas MacArthur, noting in Time magazine that, “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”

It’s difficult to imagine a contemporary politician talking about the American military that way. And it wasn’t just in retirement that Truman was tartly critical: while president he complained that only Stalin had a more effective propaganda machine than the U.S. Marine Corps But Truman, like most men of his generation, had done military service in the war. So even if he considered it politic to apologize to the Marine Corps, he had standing to be critical. America also had a public much more familiar with its military because of conscription and recent large-scale wars.

Forty years after the end of conscription, America’s military needs are met by half of one percent of our population serving. Americans tend to like their military more and know it less. This has occurred simultaneously with the collapse of public trust in our elected officials, which may be affecting the civil-military relationship at its highest levels. Politicians covet military leaders’ support and retired military leaders’ endorsements in ways that may not be healthy for either the republic or its military.

Civil-military relations remain an unequal dialogue, the military subordinate to elected political leaders. No squawk was heard from the military when General Stanley McChrystal was relieved for disrespecting Vice President Biden — not even when General Jim Mattis was retired early for no stated reason. Our military knows its leaders serve at the pleasure of the president.

But the president is more reliant on military leaders than civilians often acknowledge. At some point in nearly every presidency comes the moment when the Commander in Chief has to depend on our military: bad guys to be killed, hostages to be rescued, Embassies to be evacuated, countries to be liberated or defended. That is when sound military advice is essential. And in an age where the American public knows little about its military and distrusts its politicians, the public looks to the military to validate the political leaders’ choices.

The American military has disparate views on whether it is the professional responsibility of military leaders to advocate for the president’s policies. As a political matter, it is hugely injurious to the president for them not to. Which means trust is at a premium for the president in choosing his senior military advisors.

Unfortunately, that often results in civilians choosing military leaders they’re “comfortable with.” That’s the wrong criteria, if the president wants both good counsel and reliable shielding by his military leaders. Military culture is distinct from our broader popular culture, and the leaders who grow up in it are often not “comfortable.” Like politicians, military leaders also have constituents. When the best of them talk, they do not talk only to the American public, but also to and for soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and coast guardsmen with their lives on the line — so they often cannot talk in ways comfortable to civilian leaders or come up with limber options to finesse political problems.

And when political leaders talk about the military, they very often talk piteously, instead of commending the post-traumatic growth many veterans are experiencing, the strong marriages that withstand extended and stressful separation, the resilient kids who excel in school despite frequent moves. President Obama often talks about the burden of visiting wounded veterans and writing letters to grieving families. He sometimes seems to talk more about social issues in the military than the wars we are fighting. But he has selected a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deeply respected for his war fighting skills rather than his views on gender integration or global warming or for being a “first.” Perhaps the president begins to get the feel of military culture. Or we could chalk it up to the beneficial influence of Ashton Carter as Defense Secretary. Either way, the Obama administration has made a good choice in General Joe Dunford.

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

To keep up with Democracy Lab in real time, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. 

Javier Corrales spells out the true cause of Venezuela’s economic malaise — and it isn’t the oil.

Wai Moe explains why Kokang rebels are making life hard for the Burmese military and what this means for the country’s relationship with China.

Asma Ghribi reports on a new Tunisian security law that harkens back to the old dictatorship’s repressive methods.

Christian Caryl asks why, despite many years of bitter experience, we still allow genocides to happen.

Alexander Motyl argues that Kiev is better off now that Ukraine’s ruined eastern Donbass region is Russia’s responsibility.

And now for this week’s recommended reads:

In a must-read essay, the Economist scrutinizes the state of democracy in the world: what has gone wrong, why, and how to fix it.

The International Crisis Group looks ahead to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s 2016 presidential and legislative elections on which the political future of the country depends.

In the Daily Beast, Jamie Kirchik spares no criticism for former Florida representative Bob Wexler, who has heaped praise on Kazakhstan’s recent election (in which President Nazarbayev received 97.5 percent of the vote).

Middle East Briefing warns that the Assad regime may collapse with little warning, and calls for the international community to impose a “dis-entanglement plan” to prevent horrific bloodshed. (In the photo, rebel fighters under the Free Syrian Army take part in a military training near Aleppo.)

Bloomberg’s Kateryna Choursina, Volodymyr Verbyany, and Alex Sazonov take stock of the diminishing fortune of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, whose candy company is shedding value along with the rest of Ukraine’s economy. Writing for openDemocracy, Jack Davies reports on a plague of western sex tourists taking advantage of the Ukrainian conflict to prey on vulnerable women.

Sarah Mendelson publishes a new CSIS report examining how governments attack civil society and looking at potential responses.

The Irrawaddy’s Kyaw Hsu Mon details the struggles of Burma’s private newspapers, squeezed by high production costs and competition from the state-run press.

And finally, the Syrian Observer notes that Syria and Russia have signed an agreement to “enhance cooperation in election-related expertise.”

Photo credit: BARAA AL-HALABI/AFP/Getty Images

For the countries that border the Arctic Ocean—Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark (through its territory of Greenland)—an accessible ocean means new opportunities. And for the states that have their sights set on the Lomonosov Ridge—possibly all five Arctic Ocean neighbors but the United States—an open ocean means access to much of the North Pole’s largesse. First, though, they must prove to the United Nations that the access is rightfully theirs. Because that process could take years, if not decades, these  countries could clash in the meantime, especially as they quietly send in soldiers, spies, and scientists to collect information on one of the planet’s most hostile pieces of real estate.

While the world’s attention today is focused largely on the Middle East and other obvious trouble spots, few people seem to be monitoring what’s happening in the Arctic. Over the past few years, in fact, the Arctic Ocean countries have been busy building up their espionage armories with imaging satellites, reconnaissance drones, eavesdropping bases, spy planes, and stealthy subs. Denmark and Canada have described a clear uptick in Arctic spies operating on their territories, with Canada reporting levels comparable to those at the height of the Cold War. As of October, NATO had recorded a threefold jump in 2014 over the previous year in the number of Russian spy aircraft it had intercepted in the region. Meanwhile, the United States is sending satellites over the icy region about every 30 minutes, averaging more than 17,000 passes every year, and is developing a new generation of unmanned intelligence sensors to monitor everything above, on, and below the ice and water.

If Vienna was the crossroads of human espionage during the Cold War, a hub of safe houses where spies for the East and the West debriefed agents and eyed each other in cafes, it’s fair to say that the Arctic has become the crossroads of technical espionage today. According to an old Inuit proverb, “Only when the ice breaks will you truly know who is your friend and who is your enemy.”

thousands of miles from the frigid
north, the actual decision on which country gets what slice of the Arctic will be made in midtown Manhattan by 21 geologists, geophysicists, and hydrographers who compose the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, established under the Convention on the Law of the Sea. This treaty is a sort of international constitution establishing the rights and responsibilities for the use of the world’s oceans.

Although approved in 1982, after nearly a decade of meetings and conferences, the convention did not go into force until 1994; since then, it has been what sets limits on offshore mining. The treaty also regulates a country’s exclusive economic zone—how far from its shoreline a nation can legally fish and tap the minerals under the seabed. Thus, beyond the 200-nautical-mile limit of this zone, none of the five Arctic Ocean countries has the right to touch the enormous body of mineral wealth below the ice. The treaty, however, allows any nation to lobby for up to 350 additional nautical miles, and sometimes more, if it can prove that an underwater formation is an extension of its dry landmass.

Today, nearly 170 countries have ratified or acceded to the treaty, but the United States has yet to do so. In fact, out of the five Arctic Ocean nations, the United States is the only outlier. Upon the convention’s inception, President Ronald Reagan’s administration, with its free-enterprise philosophy, could not “as a matter of principle” sign on to something that encouraged a “mixed economic system for the regulation and production of deep seabed minerals,” wrote Leigh Ratiner, one of the U.S. negotiators for the treaty, in a 1982 Foreign Affairs article. One of Reagan’s attorneys general, Edwin Meese, later went so far as to call the treaty “a direct threat to American sovereignty.” Despite its being signed later by President Bill Clinton and having the backing of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama—as well as the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Navy leaders, environmental groups, and the oil and shipping industries—
conservative Republican senators continue to argue that the agreement would somehow subjugate the U.S. military and business interests to U.N. control.

Each Arctic Ocean country, upon ratifying the convention, is allowed 10 years to present scientific proof to the commission that its continental shelf extends beyond its exclusive economic zone. In December 2014, when it became the latest to submit bathymetric, seismic, and geophysical data to the United Nations, Denmark joined Russia and Canada in the fight for a piece of the Lomonosov Ridge. And though this has been an expensive contest for all involved, costing each country millions of dollars, the tactics at times have been cheap, if not utterly bizarre.

The first to approach the U.N., in 2001, Russia asserted that it had ownership not only of the North Pole, but also of an area amounting to about half the Arctic. To symbolically emphasize this point six years later, a Russian submersible carrying Artur Chilingarov, an avid explorer and then deputy speaker of the Duma, planted a rust-proof titanium Russian flag on the ocean floor 14,000 feet beneath the North Pole. The event triggered an outcry from Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay. “This isn’t the 15th century,” he said. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory.’” Chilingarov shot back: “If someone doesn’t like this, let them go down themselves … and then try to put something there. Russia must win. Russia has what it takes to win. The Arctic has always been Russian.” Adding to the political theater, soon after the flag-planting ceremony, the Russian air force launched cruise missiles over the Arctic as part of a military exercise.

Not to be upstaged by Moscow’s flag stunt, in December 2013, the government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared that Santa Claus is a Canadian citizen and announced plans to claim ownership of the North Pole. “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic,” Harper had said in a 2007 speech at a naval base outside Victoria, British Columbia. “We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this government intends to use it.” The idea, according to Harper’s “Northern Strategy,” is to assert Canadian presence in the Arctic by “putting more boots on the Arctic tundra, more ships in the icy water and a better eye-in-the-sky.” But some Canadians think the prime minister has gone too far. “[N]ow Harper has become the Putin of the Arctic,” chided Heather Exner-Pirot, managing editor of Arctic Yearbook, in a 2013 blog post.

To meet its 10-year deadline, Norway filed its arguments to the U.N. in 2006, claiming that its seabed extends into both the Atlantic and the Arctic oceans in three places: the Loop Hole in the Barents Sea, the Western Nansen Basin in the Arctic Ocean, and the Banana Hole in the Norwegian Sea. But depending on the outcomes of various expeditions underway, including Kristoffersen and Tholfsen’s work on the ice floe, the country might return for a piece of the Lomonosov Ridge. It’s banking on some flexibility baked into the treaty: As long as a nation meets its 10-year deadline, it isn’t penalized for follow-up submissions.

When Denmark presented claims to the U.N. that the Lomonosov Ridge is the natural extension of
Greenland—a self-governing Danish territory with the nearest coastline to the North Pole—it also offered the commission evidence that now overlaps with studies presented by Russia and Canada. And this could prove to be drastically more complicated than it first might seem.

Given that the commission generally meets but twice a year, the pace at which it moves is anything but fast. For example, at the 30-year anniversary of the Law of the Sea treaty, the U.N. published a progress report stating that since the commission was formed in 1997, various countries around the globe, including those that border the Arctic, had submitted 61 claims to define new borders in the world’s oceans. However, in that same time, the commission had only managed to issue 18 sets of responses. In recent years, the 2012 report highlighted, the commission’s workload had “increased considerably,” and member countries had indicated plans for 46 future submissions.

This existing backlog does not bode well for settling matters quickly in the Arctic, especially now that those claims are becoming even more complex. Denmark seemingly attempted to reduce some of this wait time by petitioning the commission to recognize only the scientific merits of each of the country’s claims. Once these are established, according to Denmark’s submission, the Arctic nations will determine for themselves where the final boundaries will be drawn—a right allowed under the treaty.

In some ways, this tangled, bureaucratic system has worked out for the polar countries, perhaps even enabled them. Over the past few decades, they have happily assumed something akin to Arctic squatters’ rights, taking special liberties to explore the ocean’s bounty while simultaneously expanding control, both mechanical and human, as the ice continues to shrink. With or without a U.N. decision, the Arctic countries likely aren’t budging anytime soon.

today, woven tightly into the very fabric
of Arctic life is espionage: Technicians eavesdrop on civilian, government, and military communications, radar signals, and missile tests. They also conduct surveillance photography of any military equipment, ports, or bases. In December 2014, during a news conference in Moscow, Col. Gen. Viktor Bondarev, the head of Russia’s air force, noted that there had been a dramatic increase in foreign spy flights, including ones in the Arctic. “In 2014, more than 140 RC-135 flights have taken place, compared to 22 flights in 2013,” he said. But the same goes for the Russians, according to defense officials: NATO intercepted more than 100 Russian aircraft in 2014, three times more than the year before.

Russian President Vladimir Putin views the far north in a vehemently nationalist light. “The Arctic is, unconditionally, an integral part of the Russian Federation that has been under our sovereignty for several centuries,” he said in 2013. To put muscle behind this statement, in March 2015 the Russian military launched a massive five-day show of force in the Arctic involving 38,000 servicemen and special forces troops, more than 50 surface ships and submarines, and 110 aircraft. Two months earlier, the first of about 7,000 Russian troops began arriving at a recently reopened military air base at Alakurtti, north of the Arctic Circle; 3,000 of them will be assigned to an enormous signals intelligence listening post designed to eavesdrop on the West across the frozen ice cap.

More than a dozen additional bases are slated for construction. In October 2014, Lt. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Management Center, told the Russian Defense Ministry’s public council that Moscow plans to build 13 airfields, an air-to-ground firing range, and 10 radar posts. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu informed the council, “In 2015 we will be almost fully prepared to meet unwelcome guests from east and north.”

Eavesdropping on the Russians across the North Pole is a Canadian listening post so high in the Arctic that it’s closer to Moscow than to Ottawa. Known as Alert and located on the northeast tip of Ellesmere Island in the territory of Nunavut, it is just 500 miles from the pole and is the northernmost permanently inhabited location in the world. A welcome sign declares, “Proudly Serving Canada’s ‘Frozen Chosen.’”

There, in some of the harshest weather on Earth, staffers maintain critical antenna networks used to intercept key Russian signals containing Arctic troop movements, aircraft and submarine communications, and critical telemetry from missile tests and space shots. In recent years, as technology advanced and the Russian buildup began, Canada moved hundreds of earphone-clad operators to Leitrim, a listening post near Ottawa; at this base, several satellite dishes eavesdrop on military and commercial communications satellites.

Canada shares its intelligence from Alert and Leitrim with its close partner, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), and the United States reciprocates through its Thule Air Base in western Greenland. More than 700 miles north of the Arctic Circle and more than 60 miles from the nearest Inuit village, Thule is not just one of the world’s most isolated facilities, but also one of the most highly classified. With a trio of bulbous igloo-like radomes on a wind-swept cliff about three miles from the base, personnel in a gray, windowless operations building send operational commands to more than 140 satellites in orbits from 120 miles to 24,800 miles above the planet.

Among the satellites the station controls are those that fly over Russia and its Arctic bases every 90 minutes, taking detailed photographs with cameras capable of spotting objects on Earth only a few inches long. Technicians feed directions to satellites about 20,000 times a year on average, said unit commander Austin Hood in a 2012 article in Airman, a U.S. Air Force publication. In addition, the station sends commands to many of the NSA’s eavesdropping satellites with instructions on which frequencies to monitor, such as those for telephone communications and Internet data.

in 2013, concerned about the possibility
of Russian drones in the Arctic, the Canadian government produced a classified study that explored the possibilities and limitations of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Unless “UAVs gain aerial refueling capabilities,” it reported, Russia could not spy in Canadian Arctic territory. And though Canada has orbited Radarsat-2, a synthetic-aperture radar surveillance satellite capable of seeing through clouds, in order to keep track of events and military movements (including in the Arctic), this technology apparently wasn’t stealthy enough for the country: In August 2014, defense employees began carrying out experiments to test the feasibility of developing drones for use in the Arctic.

The response? Three months later, in November, a Russian government spokesman announced that Moscow will build a drone base slightly south of the Arctic Circle and just 420 miles away from mainland Alaska. When completed, this base will make Russia the only country to have this technology in the Arctic skies.

Norway is also becoming nervous about Russia. In March 2015, around the same time that Moscow showed off its 38,000 troops, Norway acted similarly, dragging out 5,000 soldiers and 400 vehicles for its own Arctic military exercise. But rather than spying on Russia with satellites, Norway is putting its spies to sea. In December 2014, Prime Minister Erna Solberg christened the $250 million Marjata. Built for the Norwegian Intelligence Service and expected to become operational in 2016, the vessel will be among the world’s most advanced surveillance ships, according to information released by the Norwegian military.

“The new Marjata will be an important piece in the continuation of the Intelligence Service’s assignments in the High North,” Lt. Gen. Kjell Grandhagen, head of the service, said in a statement. He also told a Norwegian newspaper that the Marjata’s task “will be to systematically map all military and some civilian activity in areas close to Norway.” Designed largely for eavesdropping on Russian communications and other signals, according to the Norwegian government-owned news service NRK, it will also identify things like the frequencies of Moscow’s radar systems—information that is critical in order to jam them should hostilities break out.

Beneath the Arctic ice, the United States and Russia remain adversaries, vestiges of the Cold War. Since the USS Nautilus first slid under the North Pole in 1958 and the USS Skate became the first to surface there less than a year later, U.S. submarines have completed more than 120 Arctic exercises.

With 72 subs, the United States has an advantage in numbers over Russia, which has about 60. But Russia is debuting a new generation of vessels that are far quieter and much more difficult for U.S. defense systems to detect. According to an article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, the “alarmingly sophisticated” Russian fleet “will likely dramatically alter the world’s future geopolitical landscape.” The author, veteran submariner Lt. Cmdr. Tom Spahn, said the armament on the Yasen, Russia’s new fast-
attack submarine, includes supercavitating torpedoes that can speed through the water in excess of 200 knots, about the equivalent of 230 miles per hour. This “makes her truly terrifying,” Spahn wrote. The new Russian subs, that is, will be stealthier and far deadlier than any ever known.

one evening in november 2014, u.s. radar operators spotted six Russian aircraft—two Tu-95 “Bear” long-range bombers, two Il-78 refueling tankers, and two MiG-31 fighters—heading toward the Alaskan coast. They had entered a U.S. air defense identification zone, airspace approaching the American border where aircraft must identify themselves, and they were getting closer when two U.S. F-22 fighter jets were dispatched to intercept them. About six hours later, Canada detected two more Russian Bear bombers approaching its Arctic airspace. Like the United States, Canada scrambled two CF-18 fighter jets to divert the bombers within about 40 nautical miles off the Canadian coast.

Although the Bears are designed to drop bombs, they are also used to collect intelligence and eavesdrop on military communications. This was most likely their purpose in flying close to the U.S. and Canadian Arctic coasts. To be clear, Moscow wasn’t doing anything Washington doesn’t do itself: The United States regularly flies its RC-135 aircraft—a variant of a Boeing 707 that sucks signals, from radar beeps to military conversations to civilian email, from the air like a vacuum cleaner—near Russia’s northern territory.

As the planes get closer, spying becomes bolder. And though this strategy might be necessary for Russia, Canada, Denmark, and Norway as they vie for supremacy in the new Great Game, this isn’t a strategy that is necessarily logical for the United States, a country not party to the Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Even if the Senate were to ratify the treaty, it is likely that, by the time it submits its claim to the commission, much of the icy region will be accounted for. And given the rightward turn in Congress, the odds that the treaty will be ratified during the Obama administration are slimmer than ever. In the words of one U.S. Coast Guard admiral quoted about the Arctic in a 2010 Politics Daily article, “If this were a ball game … the U.S. wouldn’t be on the field or even in the stadium.”

In the next few years, as the Arctic Ocean opens for business, American spies will still be busy feeding directions to satellites that spin over the North Pole, while the United States’ polar neighbors will be busy exploiting the resources beneath it and leading convoys through the ice in new shipping channels above it. With this kind of Arctic strategy, in other words, the United States will remain frozen in another era.

Well, that didn’t work out as expected. A voter in Wales drew a penis on his ballot during Britain’s Thursday election and it ended up counting as a vote. The depiction of the male anatomy was penciled in next to the name of a Tory candidate for Parliament, presumably as a protest, and vote counters put the ballot in Glyn Davies’ column.

“One voter decided to draw a detailed representation of a penis instead of a cross in my box on one ballot paper,” Davies told the South Wales Evening Post. “Amazingly, because it was neatly drawn within the confines of the box the returning officer deemed it a valid vote.”

Davies held his Wales seat with 45 percent of the vote.

The Tory MP thanked the anonymous penis artist for the contribution to his victory. “Not sure the artist meant it to count, but I am grateful,” Davies said, according to the Evening Post. “If I knew who it was, I would like to thank him [or her] personally.”

GEOFF CADDICK/AFP/Getty Images

You missed it? How could you? The second-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) was issued last week with much fanfare, at least at the State Department. As may befit a late second-term document and a department whose budget resources have topped off and are starting to decline, the new QDDR is pretty unambitious. Thin gruel, in fact, for the future of America’s civilian statecraft. And that might explain why it didn’t get a lot of coverage.

Some people want the QDDR to tackle big strategy issues, but it is really about reforming and strengthening the structures and processes that run America’s foreign policy. It might be nice to have a big-picture strategy document, but you can’t pull the strategy cart if you don’t have the horses.

And this QDDR is even less ambitious than the first one. It doesn’t offer the foreign-policy community the fundamental reforms it needs to recover the primacy to direct America’s strategy and deliver the goods: an integrated approach to dealing with the governance challenges around the world, strengthened security institutions subordinated to stronger governance, or even an internal strategy and resource-planning process that would enable the State Department to make the hard choices it must with inevitably constrained budgets.

QDDRs are not like QDRs — the original Quadrennial Defense Review, done at the Department of Defense (DoD) since the mid-1990s. When then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set out to produce the first QDDR, published in 2010, the goal was not to lay out a strategy for U.S. foreign policy, but to improve the capabilities of the State Department to execute that strategy.

I was pretty hard on that QDDR at the time. It did make a decent effort to clarify that the State Department is not the Defense Department, emphasizing the role the State Department should have in conflict prevention and resolution, calling for major improvements in the State Department’s planning and budgeting, and clarifying the department’s relationship with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Although fairly unexciting, these were all good bureaucratic things to do.

But the first QDDR missed a great opportunity for fundamental change — change it might have pulled off with the star power of Clinton, which would have elevated the State Department to real foreign-policy leadership and would have eliminated some serious organizational dysfunction. It did not broaden the mission of the Foreign Service to include dealing with governance issues in other countries. It did not change training of Foreign Service officers fundamentally to provide skills in strategic planning and program development and management, and to make mid-career training and education available. It did not reform a broken architecture for security assistance at the State Department or make an effort to recapture leadership over U.S. security assistance policy from the Defense Department.

It did not end the division of planning and budgeting between a stovepipe over on the “management” side that does personnel, buildings, security, administration, and IT/communications support, and the other stovepipe over in the foreign assistance program office that plans and budgets for U.S. foreign assistance. And it did not even discuss the reality that the United States has far too many foreign assistance programs — an uncoordinated diaspora of offices and agencies scattered around the bureaucratic universe in D.C. from the Justice Department to the DoD to the Commerce Department to the Export-Import Bank to the Treasury Department and beyond, to the bewilderment of anyone the United States does business with overseas.

So I hammered away a little last year in this column after the new QDDR was launched, urging the new team to at least try to address some key institutional problems that make the State Department (and its USAID partner) dysfunctional and unable to lead U.S. foreign policy. I picked three themes: 1) make governance dilemmas in the world a core mission of U.S. foreign policy, and build the programs and training to implement that priority; 2) take civilian control of U.S. security assistance (much of it is now at DoD), and embed that effort in stronger civilian governance overall; and 3) centralize and empower a capacity at the State Department to do integrated strategic and resource planning.

It will not surprise you that this latest QDDR did not go for the gold on any of these three core problems. At best it gets a fairly weak incomplete. Secretary of State John Kerry, like his star-powered predecessor, earned few points; in the end he didn’t actually put his credibility and heft on the line to get fundamental change, a change the department needs if it is going to give reality, not talk, to its claim that it is the lead institution for U.S. foreign policy.

Make Governance a Mission and Build the Tools

Governance actually gets a lot of verbal attention in this QDDR — more rhetoric than it got in the first one, as I was reminded by several people who worked on the report. But some of that rhetoric is misleading, and some of it is even dangerous.

What’s wrong in the rhetoric? Specifically, on p.18, the QDDR says, “the movement toward accountable governance and the expansion of the global middle class are two of the most promising opportunities in recent human history.”

Unfortunately, neither statement is true. Accountable governance is not on the rise; it is being struggled for, and that struggle is failing, most notably in states like Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States made a big show of promoting democracy. (And, for the record, the global income gap is widening, threatening the existence of the middle class, even in places like the United States. See Hedrick Smith’s Who Stole the American Dream? or Joseph Stiglitz’s The Great Divide.)

So if the State Department is going to take the global problem of weak, ineffective, corrupt, unaccountable governance seriously, it has to start with reality, not wishful thinking. That leads me to the dangerous part. What do they mean by “governance”? The language in the QDDR is a bit slippery here, but one word keeps cropping up: “democracy.” On page 28, for example, it reads, “Democracy, accountable governance, and respect for human rights are essential for a secure, prosperous, and just world.… We are at a critical moment for democracy.” What the report is underwriting, once again, is that long, elusive, exceptionalist American project of bringing “democracy” to the world.

Thought we were over that, given, most recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, no, here it is again — the American dream abroad, at least in language terms. After years of worrying this issue, my thinking is that the United States would do pretty well (and that is hard enough) to help other governments become more efficient and effective at providing the services they use their tax money to provide, while becoming a bit less corrupt and certainly more “responsive” to their citizens (the QDDR says “accountable,” which is certainly a more realistic goal than “democratic”).

But to plant the flag in “democracy,” a thing the United States isn’t even doing well itself, sets up the State Department for something that neither it nor anyone else can do abroad — create democracies. Put that one on the shelf.

Plus, the QDDR does little to strengthen the State Department’s tool kit when it comes to governance. There is nothing here as basic as saying the department will revise the standards it uses for training and promoting Foreign Service officers to include knowledge of governance and the ways in which the United States might, at least minimally, focus its assistance agenda in that direction. Oh, there is language about USAID’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance. And if the department were really focused on governance, as I said last year, it should certainly start by making USAID fully buy that mission as a necessary precursor to successful “development.” But, there they go again; “democracy” gets the headline, not governance.

And if fragile states are part of the governance target, there is nothing new here about how to deal with that. It’s the same old, same old bureaucratic solutions, including rhetoric about the role of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO), created in the last QDDR. The CSO got itself torn in two last year in a conflict, I am told, between people who wanted it to be on the front lines of fragile-state transition, with teams in the field, and people who wanted it to retreat into planning in D.C. for somebody else to act on.

The State Department’s inspector general wrote up this sad story last year. And, apparently, the latter team won, and the QDDR group did not get the memo about how CSO’s nails got clipped this April, when its missions overseas were scrapped. According to an anonymous submission to DiploPundit, one of the best trackers of the inside stories at the State Department, the CSO will be even less relevant than it was:

Yes, the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO) has a new mission: “CSO advances the Department of State’s understanding of how to anticipate, prevent, and respond to violent conflict through analysis and planning; monitoring, evaluation, and learning; and targeted, in-country efforts that inform U.S. government policymaking.”    Since there’s no longer any mission element about stabilization and stabilization operations, why is that being left in the Bureau’s name?

Security Assistance Is Still a Hot Mess

If I only got a rhetorical half-loaf on governance, what about getting the State Department’s act together on security assistance programs? They weren’t even discussed in 2010’s QDDR. They’re barely discussed in this year’s QDDR, with just a paragraph on security-sector reform and one on security-sector governance. But America’s deepest engagement in the governance of other countries is being driven by the GWOT (George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror), which has become Countering Violent Extremism. When war is the metaphor (and in Syria/Iraq, the reality), armies are the tool, and the United States is deeply engaged with the armies of the world.

America does it through security assistance and what the DoD calls “security cooperation,” or “building partner capacity.” And the country handed a lot of that task over to the Defense Department, despite decades of having budget and policy responsibility in the State Department, spending upwards of $15 billion a year doing it.

There are lots of ways the QDDR could have tackled this mess. Calling for a strategic overview of security assistance policy, for example. There has never been one, and despite the publication of a presidential policy directive in 2013 (PPD 23), there is still no coordinated strategy. Instituting a systematic evaluation of the payoff from spending more than $10 billion a year (including by the DoD) would be a good idea.

Challenging other countries to make sure accountable governance overall is part of what determines their eligibility for U.S. security assistance dollars would be a nice thing.

And frontally dealing with the reality that the Defense Department and the combatant commanders have pretty much taken control of security assistance and cooperation and it is time to return policy and budget responsibility to the civilian foreign-policy agency — well that just seems to be a bridge way too far. The paragraph in the QDDR on security-sector governance simply describes, in vague language, what the United States purports to do now; it offers nothing new. And the report even says the State Department is in charge of security assistance “with the exception of DoD SSA [security sector assistance] appropriations,” which kind of begs the issue.

Last year I wrote, “The State Department rarely takes its statutory responsibility for security assistance seriously as a core mission.” I know, from personal experience, that the people who work this issue at the department, at the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs and at the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (can we change that first word?), do take it seriously. The QDDR did not, and is not, going to help them much in reforming the system.

Strategy, Planning, and Budgeting Take a Hike

And how about that third priority issue for the State Department — making strategic planning a reality and tying in all the planning and budgeting so that the department actually has something we can call a respectable strategic plan?

The QDDR is pretty good about the progress made here over the past six years. There actually is a functioning foreign assistance budget process. It even includes planning at the embassies, which do integrated country strategies and pass them back to Washington, where regional bureaus do joint regional strategies and where functional bureaus (like CSO and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor) do functional strategies. And every year, the embassies and bureaus do a resource request for the next year. Under strong leadership, the State Department’s foreign assistance budget office has made a real contribution to budget planning at the department, more than I have seen in over 20 years following that process.

But, and there is a big but, the pieces are not together to do a real strategic plan at the State Department, and the QDDR does not make any progress on assembling them. For one thing, broader strategic planning, to the degree it is done, is done in that other planning office I mentioned — the management side of Foggy Bottom. This means, of course, that people, IT, communications, buildings, and, above all, personnel policy are not meshed with program planning in the foreign assistance office. Not something the Pentagon’s Programming, Planning, Budgeting, and Execution System would let happen for a nanosecond.

Do people, training, and investments in support have nothing to do with programs? Not plausible, but the new QDDR does not bite the bullet and finally create a full-service planning and budgeting office under the secretary of state. Ducked that one, again.

And while they were not at it, they also ducked the question of making that office a statutory one. Right now, the foreign assistance office just depends on the goodwill of the secretary; the next one could blow it away without any trouble, and might. And there would go all that previous progress.

Wait Until Next Year

This time around, the QDDR took a walk, by and large. It described a lot of what the State Department does now, made some of it look new, took a few small steps ahead, but punted on the big ones. Which leaves the job to the next secretary, and to the next QDDR, if it happens. If past is prologue, the next secretary of state will look at the management and planning side of Foggy Bottom and leave it to someone else while he or she flies around the world doing the “fun” stuff. And the longtime effort to reform and strengthen the State Department will be handed off again, as it has been for decades.

Photo credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In August 2013, just months after being selected to lead the Catholic Church, Pope Francis told an interviewer that the Holy See’s clergy and diplomats should be less fixated on questions of sexual morality and show greater concern for the fate of billions of people abandoned by a modern “throwaway” culture that pays little heed to the world’s poor and persecuted.

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive methods,” Pope Francis said in the interview, in which he underscored the importance of promoting peace and tackling poverty and wealth inequality. “The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”

The comments marked the start of a major rebranding campaign for the Catholic Church, whose image has been tarnished in recent years by the hierarchy’s failure to crack down on sexual abuse by priests and its clergy’s reputation as hard-bitten crusaders more committed to enforcing stringent moral codes than promoting peace and ministering to the world’s neediest.

Two years into his papacy, Pope Francis has also managed to successfully restore the Holy See’s reputation as an important diplomatic player. He has cultivated a personal image as peacemaker and truth-teller, brokered secret diplomatic talks between the U.S. and Cuba, and forced the world to confront uncomfortable truths, from the Armenian genocide to the deadly exodus of thousands of immigrants into Europe. He has also emerged as a powerful voice of compassion for those long living on the fringes of the church, or at least treated as second-class citizens, including the destitute, women, and openly gay Catholics.

But at U.N. headquarters, a central clearinghouse for world diplomacy and the September destination of the first papal visit since 1995, diplomats say the objectives of the Holy See have changed little under Pope Francis, and that the pope’s envoys remains very much entrenched on the front lines of the culture wars the pope himself has suggested he wants to leave behind. In debates on issues from development to poverty, the Holy See’s observer mission continues to serve primarily as a bulwark against efforts by Western governments to expand progressive policies, including sexual and reproductive rights, that have long been anathema to the church.

Archbishop Bernardito Auza, a Filipino priest Pope Francis appointed as the Vatican’s de facto ambassador  to the U.N. last year, frequently uses the U.N. pulpit to promote the church’s conservative values, denouncing abortion and efforts to restrict population growth, and decrying the rise of artificial insemination as beneath the dignity of women and men alike. “Men are human beings, not horses, and any attempt to diminish men basically to purveyors of biological material is unworthy of their dignity,” he said in a March 19 speech at the Dag Hammarskjold Library Auditorium at U.N. headquarters. “Children must be begotten in love, not manufactured in labs.”

U.N.-based diplomats say that the pope, as well as Auza, have outlined a wide-ranging diplomatic agenda in their public statements. But they say the message hasn’t trickled down to the Holy See’s negotiators in New York. “We have been very happy to hear some of the signals that have come from Pope Francis: He has been more progressive and indicated that he didn’t want the church to be as dogmatic as it has been,” said one Western diplomat who has negotiated with the church’s diplomats at the United Nations. “But when you look at what is happening on the ground here in New York, you don’t really see that change at all.”

A review of a confidential internal negotiating text from a recent conference on the Commission on Population and Development, obtained by Foreign Policy, show the Holy See’s negotiator working to strip out references to “reproductive rights,” which the Vatican sees as a green light for abortion, and “gender equality,” a phrase the Vatican views as an implicit endorsement of transgender rights.

“We are not sure whether [the pope] doesn’t have the influence in the organization you would hope he has, or he didn’t mean it,” the diplomat added.

Indeed, there is little doubt that Francis is already walking a delicate line between conservatives who share his predecessor’s more traditional views of gay marriage and abortion and pragmatists more amenable to softening those stances.

Defenders of the pope also say the Vatican’s diplomatic activity is by no means limited to matters of sex and reproductive rights.

Pope Francis and his U.N. envoy have taken advantage of the Catholic Church’s status as the only religion recognized as an observer state at the U.N. to promote a range of other causes, from the abolition of nuclear weapons and the fight against climate change to the protection of migrants and Christian minorities in the Middle East and Africa. His role in opening the door to talks between the U.S. and Cuba stands as one of the more remarkable diplomatic achievements of the past decade.

“The word on the street is that Francis matters,” said John Allen Jr., associate editor at the Boston Globe and its Catholic coverage website Crux, and author of nine books on the Vatican and Catholic affairs. Allen said that “delegates are now constantly approached by their governments for reads on what the pope is up to.”

From Backwater to Diplomatic Hot Spot

Only four years ago, the Vatican was in danger of becoming a diplomatic backwater. Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had previously been the guardian of Catholic doctrine in the Vatican. Benedict had taken an interest in the major challenges of the day, earning the moniker of the “green pope” and playing a role in urging Iran to release 15 British sailors. But he showed less interest in diplomacy than his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who has been credited with working with President Ronald Reagan to topple the Soviet Union.

In Rome, diplomats wondered aloud whether diplomatic embassies at the Vatican even made sense, recalled Allen.

In November 2011, Ireland, a major Catholic country, withdrew its ambassador from the Vatican following protests by then-Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who accused the Holy See of obstructing an investigation into sex abuse. Ireland claimed the decision was designed to save money, but many diplomats suspect it was a result of the sex abuse dispute.

Vatican officials feared it was the start of a diplomatic exodus from the Vatican by governments that felt embassies weren’t worth the expense given the Holy See’s diminished diplomatic profile, according to Allen.

“There was a perception during the Benedict years that the Vatican had become less relevant,” he said, noting that the church’s Vatican diplomacy has under Pope Francis evaporated such notions. “Nobody is talking about that anymore.”

In an April interview with the Wall Street Journal, President Barack Obama said the United States consults “very closely” with the church about how the U.S. can help protect religious minorities in conflict areas.

Obama will meet with the pope at the White House in September, where he intends to discuss climate change and matters of “war and peace,” including in the Middle East, “where Christians have been viciously attacked,” the president said in the interview.

In a March speech at Durham University in England, Britain’s envoy to the Holy See, Nigel Baker, said his “embassy, and the other 80 or so resident embassies to the Holy See from governments around the world, have never been busier, because their is a real interest in and demand for our reporting on the views of Pope Francis and the Holy See on the key issues of the day.”

Other countries have sought to leverage the Pope’s charisma and influence to advance their interests. A spokesman for Israel’s foreign minister, for example, said his government is looking to expand relations with the Vatican to collaborate on countering radical Islam.

“We would like to further upgrade our relations with the Vatican, and start a broader and more significant dialogue on issues of mutual concern such as the fate of Christian minorities in the Middle East and Africa and the rise of radical Islam,” Emmanuel Nahshon, Israel’s foreign ministry spokesman told FP. “As part of this dialogue, we would like to see an official visit of top Vatican officials in Israel.”

The Israeli officials remarks follows a round of high profile Middle East diplomacy by Pope Francis, who traveled to the region early on in his papacy and invited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israel’s then President Shimon Peres to Rome to pray together for peace in the Middle East. The symbolic meeting was followed by the launch of Israel’s military incursion into Gaza as part of Operation Protective Edge. But it highlighted Pope Francis’ commitment to engaging in even the most controversial political and military crises.

“It’s the Same Hardline”

Pope Francis intends to highlight his diplomatic ambitions in a high-profile trip next September to the United Nations, where he will address the U.N. General Assembly at a Summit on Sustainable Development, which will endorse a new set of 17 development goals, known as the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. He will also back as many as 169 more detailed targets that can be met by 2030, including the eradication of poverty and hunger, increase opportunities for the education of children and women, and the promotion of economic growth that is environmentally sustainable.

The visit aims to underscore the church’s commitment to addressing “poverty and social justice” and drawing attention to the international community’s responsibility to uphold “religious freedom” and defend minorities from persecution, Auza said in an interview with the Deseret News previewing the pope’s visit

“In the Middle East, the United Nations has been in a sense powerless, it has not been able to find a way how to stop bloodshed and persecutions, especially against Christians and minorities,” he said.

Behind the scenes most of the Holy See’s diplomatic influence has been mustered to advance the Vatican’s position in supporting a traditional view of the human family that leaves little room for gays.  During negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals, the Holy See has largely devoted its energies to pushing back on efforts by Western government to expanding reproductive rights and the protections afforded women, girls, and gays. “They are focused on very few issues; the only time you hear about them in negotiations is on issues relating to abortion, women’s rights, the family,” said a European diplomat. “I really haven’t encountered them on any other issues in last years.”

A second Western diplomat who has negotiated across the table from the Catholic Church’s diplomats for years said the Vatican’s traditional negotiating positions and policy preferences haven’t changed under Francis.

“The new pope he has a different outlook on the world, which could really launch the [Catholic Church] in a whole different type of dialogue at the U.N.,” the diplomat said. “But they don’t do that. Not much has changed when you get into the negotiating room. It’s the same hardline.”

Last month, the Holy See’s diplomats continued it push to restrict sexual rights in negotiations before the Commission on the Status of Women. “The one thing they tried to do was insert the word “fundamental” before any mention of the human rights of women and girls,” recalled Shannon Kowalski of the International Women’s Health Coalition. “In their minds, this would potentially exclude reproductive rights, sexual rights or other human rights that have not been explicitly agreed in U.N. treaties. They also opposed reference to the role of women’s organizations or feminist organizations in advancing gender equality.”

In a separate debate last year on the Sustainable Development Goals, a centerpiece of the pope’s diplomatic priorities at the United Nations, Francis’s representative expressed concern that the negotiations were heading towards perilous moral waters.

“For a large number of countries, ‘reproductive health’ and ‘reproductive rights agenda infringes on their national sovereignty in the politically and morally fraught questions of abortion,” Archbishop Francis Chullikatt, the Holy See’s former nuncio at U.N. headquarters, said last May in a statement on one of the SDG’s goals.

Two months later, the Holy See issued a statement indicating that they could only partially join the consensus on the final document to be endorsed by world leaders because it included references to phrases like “sexual and reproductive health” and “reproductive rights” and “family planning.”

Vatican diplomats also sought to restrict sex education to youngsters, saying the “primary responsibility lies with parents,” a provision that would restrict minor’s access to sex education.  Finally, the Holy See’s delegation pointed out that it understands any reference to the word “gender” in a final document to mean “male or female” only, a move aimed at heading off any language affording rights to gays or transgender people that don’t identify themselves in traditional sexual roles.

They also denounced violence and discrimination against women and girls, forced marriage, and reinforced the church’s commitment to achieve equal access to education and employment opportunity, and address of unpaid care work.

Kowalski, of the International Women’s Health Coalition, said that while Pope Francis has projected a more progressive image, she has seen no evidence in a shift in the Holy See’s policies at the United Nations.

“We have really seen a continuation of business as usual,” said Sharon Kowalski. “We always saw them honing in on language about sexual rights. There have been a lot of proposed goals on poverty eradication and on reducing equality and the Holy See hasn’t said anything. They have been quiet.”

Hanging With Ban Ki-Moon

Many diplomats say it is misleading to judge the pope’s diplomatic outreach on the basis of what his envoys do at the United Nations. Most of the serious diplomatic outreach takes place in the Vatican, they say, not in the corridors of the United Nations.

One western diplomat recalled a recent meeting between an envoy from his government and high-level Vatican diplomats eager to protect Christians. During the meeting, church officials raised a broad range of concerns, from the stalled Middle East peace process to the Iranian nuclear deal to the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East and North Africa.

“On the protection of Christians they asked us to be open and upfront and to name the issue as a problem,” according to the diplomat. They also urged the governments to be careful not to inadvertently “contribute to the further exodus of Christians” from Iraq and Syria through overly generous immigration policies. “The main message was ‘the Christians need to return. They belong there,'” the diplomat recalled.

The deadly exodus of migrants who leave North Africa and attempt to make it to Europe is a top diplomatic priority for Francis and his diplomats. The Vatican routinely scolds European envoys traveling through Rome about their failure to do more to to address the problem. Rome’s message is a blunt one: “The Mediterranean should not become a cemetery and the Europeans have a common responsibility to do something about it,” said one European diplomat.

Francis’s personal outreach to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been particularly active. Last month, Francis hosted Ban at the Vatican for a discussion about climate change and the fate of the African and Middle Eastern refugees risking their lives on deadly boat trips in search of a better future in Europe. “They are men and women like us, our brothers seeking a better life, starving, persecuted, wounded, exploited, victims of war. They were looking for a better life,” Francis told thousands of followers during April 19 prayers in St. Peter’s Square. Next month, the pope plans to issue his first papal encyclical on the impact climate change inflicts on the world’s poorest.

Behind closed doors at the Vatican, the Pope assured Ban of his commitment to fighting climate change. But the discussions soon veered off onto other topics, including the link between migration and human trafficking and the need to tackle the root cause of poverty and inequality. They also touched on nuclear disarmament, the conflict in South Sudan, and the role that sports can play in promoting peace. “It was a really wide ranging discussion; I think there is now wider common ground bet the U.N. agenda and the pope’s agenda,” according to a senior U.N. diplomat. “I think [Pope Francis’s] heart is in the U.N. agenda.”

Francis invited Ban to the Vatican shortly after he was appointed pope, and they have met at least once every year. Last year, the U.N. held its annual meeting of heads of U.N. agencies in Rome, a gathering that brought together more than 40 of the U.N.’s top officials. The pope went around the room to shake each and chat with each of the participants.

Those early meetings led to collaboration between Jeffrey Sachs, a senior adviser to the U.N. chief on sustainable development and the director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Religions for Peace.  On April 28, they organized an interfaith conference entitled “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Humanity.”

A statement underscored the role of mankind has played in causing global warming and called on wealthy nations to underwrite the costs of developing countries trying to respond to the devastating impact of climate change. “Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity,” it stated.

“If the pope is involved it increases the outreach,” said Janos Pasztor, a senior advisor to the U.N. chief on global warming, noting that Ban and Francis have agreed to join together in raising public awareness of climate change. “The pope is the number one potential mobilizer in the world; he speaks to 1.2 billion Catholics, plus a lot of other people.”

Who Am I to Judge?

Francis has also raised hopes that his papacy that would strike a dramatically different approach to gays than his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who once signed a Vatican letter asserting that homosexuality is “an objective disorder” that reflects a “strong tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil.”

Francis has spoken compassionately about gays, suggesting the church would be accepting of them. In February, the Vatican for the first time granted VIP seats to the New Ways Ministry, a group of visiting gay and lesbian Catholics, to a weekly audience with the pope at St. Peter’s Square.

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?,” he said in an August 2013 interview.” Last October, the Vatican issued a report indicating that “homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer the Christian Church.”

The pope’s remarks were embraced as the dawn of a more compassionate church that would focus on the matters that affect all humanity.  But on the eve of the pope’s upcoming visit to the United Nations, advocates for gays, women and other marginalized groups have been disappointed on that front, saying the Holy See’s diplomats have invested most of their diplomatic resources into leading a cultural war.

In an early test of the Vatican’s tolerance for homosexuality, France selected in January an openly gay diplomat, Laurent Stefanini, to serve as its envoy to the Vatican.  Paris has yet to hear back, though the pope invited Stefanini, a Catholic who had served at the Vatican for four years, to prayer.

“The Vatican’s refusal to acknowledge his credentials was a slap,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of Dignity USA, an organization of gay and lesbian Catholics. Duddy-Burke initially welcomed the Vatican’s stance on gays in the church as an “undeniable breakthrough.” Now, she said, she has situated herself in the “wanting to be hopeful but still skeptical camp” about the Pope’s outreach to gays and others.  “It totally gives lie to the sense that gay people are welcome in the Church.”

The Vatican’s views on homosexuality reveals a deep seated anxiety about the way that U.N. bureaucrats and Western governments have framed international discussion on development and concerns about efforts to control population.

Those concerns were heightened in debates on population and women’s rights in the mid-1990s in Cairo and Beijing, which fueled calls for universal access to reproductive health services and family planning information by 2015.

The Vatican’s principle preoccupation is less about sex than about what it views as the emergence of radical new definition of gender, which see human beings, not simply as men and women, but as individuals who can determine their own sexual identity control their natural reproductive cycle.

For the Church, this represents an affront by liberals and feminists to the natural biological order and the traditional family, headed by a man and woman, and contributes to homosexuality, abortion and the erosion of the family.

Under Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican launched an inquiry into the largest the Leadership Conference of Women Religious on the ground for promoting “radical feminism” themes incompatible with the Catholic faith. They were cited for straying from church doctrine on issues like birth control and an all-male priesthood and scolded for devoting too much time to tending the on poverty and economic inequality while remaining  silent about abortion and same-sex marriage. Last month, the Vatican reached a settlement with the nuns that effectively ended the stand off.

Pope Francis “hasn’t changed the church’s position on abortion or gay marriage but his attitude is everybody already knows where the church stands on that,” said Father Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest who serves as a senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter. “We don’t have to beat a dead horse.”

The Pope is Not Waiving the White Flag in the Culture Wars

Other observers say Pope Francis is facing a difficult balancing act, and that some may have had unrealizable expectations on liberal causes, including gay rights and abortion.

“The Catholic Church has always been pro-life and also in favor of peace and justice, and this is true of Pope Francis,” according to Allen. “The fact that he probably speaks more about the poor and migrants and the environment than pro-life matters is not intended to get the Vatican out of the pro-life game.”

The Catholic hierarchy is largely divided into camps: the theologians, who ascribe to a pure reading of church doctrine, and the diplomats, who think the church should be more focused on matters of peace and justice. For now, the diplomats are in ascendance at the Vatican, but the pope has had to assure the theologians that he is not rewriting church doctrine. Last August, Francis visited a so-called cemetery for “abortion victims” outside of Seoul South, Korea, to underscore the church opposition to abortion. Francis has “to convince the pro-life contingent in the church that he is not their enemy,” said Allen. “And he has done stuff to make clear he is not waiving the white flag in the culture wars.”

Photo by Vatican Pool/Getty Images

You know all those “salute to the troops” stuff thrown up on football scoreboards? It turns out that the NFL charges for at least some of them. And we’re the chumps footing the bill.

No, this is not from the Duffel Blog or Onion. Christopher Baxter of NJ.com

reports that the Pentagon, which is begging Congress for big bucks, actually paid NFL teams $5.4 million of your hard-earned money.

For example, the Jets were paid nearly $400,000 for several promotions, including, according to the contract, “A videoboard feature – Hometown Hero. For each of their 8 home game [sic], the Jets will recognize 1-2 NJARNG Soldiers as Home Town Heroes. Their picture will be displayed on the videoboard, their name will be announced over the loud speaker, and they will be allowed to watch the game, along with 3 friends or family members, from the Coaches Club.”

This is one of the crassest manipulations of patriotism I have ever seen. As a friend points out, it makes the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk look prescient but way too gentle.

(HT to JH)

Seymour Hersh says that pretty much everything written about the killing of bin Laden is wrong. Here is his account. Lots of anonymous sources, but good questions raised. In a nutshell, he says that Pakistani officials told the U.S. where bin Laden was, and that they allowed the incursion of American aircraft into their airspace. He also says there is no evidence that bin Laden actually was buried at sea.

A friend asks, Who benefits from Hersh’s version? The answer is, on more than one account, that the Pakistani military does. That is, Hershs’ retired officials are stating that 1. Pakistan did indeed help the U.S. get bin Laden, and 2. That Pakistan’s air defenses are better than they appear, so India shouldn’t get any ideas. The friend also notes that there have been a whole bunch of accounts of how bin Laden was found and killed, and that these accounts have been very consistent. Americans are not good at maintaining official fictions.

The Washington Post ’s Erin Cunningham tweets, “Easy for Pakistani officials to claim after the fact that they knew of the bin Laden raid. Not sure how that’s proof of anything. Also clear he [Hersh] hasn’t read Joby Warrick’s deeply reported book ‘Triple Agent,’ released July 2011.” More here.

Bottom line: I am inclined to doubt the assertions of the Hersh article. I wonder if that it is why it appeared in a British publication, rather than the New Yorker, for which he often writes.

Quote of the day: Hersh is quoted by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn as saying that, “Pakistan has a good army, not a bad army, but the cover story made it look bad.” He also asserted, incorrectly, that Pakistan is a “total ally” of the United States. Hmm.

Wikimedia Commons/Institute for Policy Studies 

It is a long article, but after a few paragraphs you will know if you need to read it.

Wikimedia Commons; Warner Bros.

Afghanistan

19 kidnapped Hazara passengers released

Nineteen passengers who were kidnapped by militants from a bus in February in southern Afghanistan were released on Monday (BBC, Pajhwok, AP). The passengers on the bus — all from the minority Hazara community — were abducted while traveling home from working in Iran. Assadullah Kakar, who was one of the negotiators working to secure the release of the passengers, told BBC that the 19 passengers were released in exchange for 22 children of the families of insurgents from Uzbekistan who were being held in government prisons. However, Pajhwok Afghan News reported that the passengers were exchanged for 28 Taliban prisoners who were in government custody. It is unclear what militant group kidnapped the group of passengers; some reports say the Taliban is responsible while others suggest the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is to blame.

Taliban attack second bus in a week

A suicide bomber attacked a bus carrying Afghan government employees in Kabul on Sunday, killing three people (Reuters). The attack was the second in just a week in the same area of the capital. The bus was carrying mostly employees from the attorney general’s office who were returning home from work. Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility for the attack. Last Monday, another suicide bomber targeted a bus in the same area, killing one person and wounding 15 others.

Pakistan

Author says Pakistan knew about bin Laden raid

In a story published in the London Review of Books on Sunday, Seymour Hersh wrote that Pakistan not only knew about the U.S. raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, but that they led the United States to him in the first place (LRB). Hersh contends that the idea that the Pakistan Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) were not told about the raid in advance is false and that “the White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll.” Hersh asserts that a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached the CIA’s station chief at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad in 2010 and offered to lead them to bin Laden, starting an investigation and eventual cooperation with Pakistan’s Army and the ISI (Dawn).

The White House position remains that the Pakistani Army and ISI were never informed of the U.S. mission. Others also dispute the evidence Hersh uses to support his claim. Bonus Read: “Was the bin Laden killing story a lie?” Peter Bergen (CNN).

PM, Army Chief to visit Kabul

Prime Minister Nawaz Shairf and Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif, along with a high-level delegation, will visit Afghanistan on Tuesday (ET, Dawn). The Express Tribune reports that three major issues will be discussed during the visit: negotiations with the Afghan Taliban, the allegations of India’s spy agency presence in Afghanistan, and Pakistani military operation Zarb-e-Azb against the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups. The trip tomorrow will be Sharif’s second visit to Afghanistan and the first after the installation of the National Unity Government in Kabul.

India

Former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister acquitted in corruption case

Jayalalithaa Jayaram, the former chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu and a former movie star, was cleared of all charges by the Karnataka High Court in a 19-year old corruption case. Jayalalithaa had been convicted and jailed last year for holding 530 million rupees ($8.7 million) in unaccounted cash and other assets, but she appealed, and the verdict has been overturned (The Times of India, The Hindu, NDTV). Current Chief Minister O Panneerselvam, who had been hand-picked by Jayalalithaa to succeed her after her conviction, is expected to resign, paving the way for Jayalalithaa to return to her post as early as May 17. Jayalalithaa is also expected to resume leadership of the AIADMK party, which holds the third largest number of seats in the lower house of India’s parliament (Reuters). Subramanian Swamy, one of the petitioners in the case and a leader of the rival BJP, expressed surprise and announced his plans to appeal the decision.

Government seeks to protect rights of adopted daughters

The Indian government has proposed a change to the British-era Registration Act of 1908 that would protect the right to inherit property for adopted daughters. While a 2005 amendment changed the interpretation of the law to include daughters, the proposed change would make that inclusion explicit. “Since 2005, daughters have equal rights over property. This could make sure than an adopted girl is not left out as an heir. It is an important step to bring into practice the amended law of 2005,” said Ram Singh, an associate professor at the Delhi School of Economics (The Economic Times, The Times of India).

India’s lion population on the rise

India’s lion population has increased by 27 percent since 2010, according to the 2015 lion census conducted by the Gir Forest National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary (BBC). The number of lions has gone up from 411 in 2010 to 523 in 2015, according to the census, which was conducted by 2,500 officials and volunteers. In an encouraging sign, the number of lion cubs has been increasing as well as the overall population (The Indian Express). Gir Forest in the state of Gujarat is the only home to wild Asiatic lions.

— Udit Banerjea and Emily Schneider

Edited by Peter Bergen

SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images

By Paul McLeary and Ariel Robinson

Bring in the drones. In January 2014, the United States sent 14 unarmed ScanEagle drones to Iraq as a part of a larger weapons deal to assist then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in quelling what was then seen as a rekindled Sunni rebellion in western Iraq.

We haven’t heard much about those birds since the initial announcement was made, but last week, on May 7, the Defense Department said that Iraq had completed the $10 million deal with the Washington-state based ScanEagle maker Insitu Inc. to operate the drones, along with providing enough maintenance personnel to support the “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance services program and force protection services for the government of Iraq,” at Camp Taji, just north of Baghdad.

The ScanEagle has been a workhorse for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The five-foot long, 30-40 lb. drone is capable of staying aloft for 24 hours at a time.

In other ScanEagle news, does anyone else wonder what happened to the 12 ScanEagle and NightEagle drones that the Yemeni government bought in September 2014? Some $500 million worth of U.S. military equipment was lost earlier this year when Houthi rebels took over a series of military bases there, but we haven’t heard many details.

Standing room only. It wasn’t the greatest view, but the steps of the River Entrance at the Pentagon was a nice little spot to watch the 70 WWII-era planes fly over Washington last Friday to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII. A good chunk of the press corps and a few hundred other Pentagon staffers shuffled out of the building around lunchtime to see the show, and we found ourselves standing just a few steps down from Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who was safely ensconced in the shade while we worked on a “good base tan” to start beach season.

Carter actually stood just a few feet behind a small group of reporters — we’ve discovered over the past three months that he certainly doesn’t like standing in front of us — while his chief of staff Eric Fanning (until recently the Undersecretary of the Air Force) was out in his shirtsleeves chatting up a group of Air Force officers. The scene made us a little regretful that we’re not up to date on the full list on Air Force one- and two-star generals, since there were lots of brass from the air service milling about, unencumbered by their staffs.

We also had a front row seat for the Curtis Helldiver that had to peel off and make an emergency landing at National Airport. It flew almost right over the Pentagon on its safe descent on to the runway. No one was hurt, thankfully.

Who’s on first? On Sunday, The New York Times’ Helene Cooper reported that Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz would not attend the much-hyped Gulf Cooperation Council meeting that President Barack Obama is hosting at Camp David this week, in a move being seen as a snub to the Obama administration.

Just wanted to point out that FP’s own John Hudson reported last Thursday that  “a U.S. official told Foreign Policy the White House had not yet confirmed the attendance of a number of key officials in the GCC — a union that includes Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar.”

The weekend’s over and it’s time once again to start getting your daily fill of the mayhem and destruction — and occasional tentative stabs at hope and understanding — that our fellow human beings inflict on one another. Too dark? Let me know at paul.mcleary@foreignpolicy.com or on Twitter: @paulmcleary

Think Tanked

At 9:00 a.m. at the Brookings Institution, the shop’s Kenneth Pollack, senior fellow, Center for Middle East Policy talks “The future of Iraq: A conversation with Sunni leaders,” with Rafi al-Issawi, former Iraqi deputy prime minister and minister of finance, and Atheel al-Nujayfi, Governor of Ninewah Province. At 10:00 a.m. at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and retired Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright and Sean O’Keefe, former administrator of NASA, talk about “U.S. Strategy for Civil and Military Space.” And then at 10:30 a.m., The Center for Cyber & Homeland Security at the George Washington University hosts the “State of the Cybersecurity Union,” with Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency.

Counterterrorism

The Daily Beast’s Jamie Dettmer reports from Turkey that he’s hearing Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “has been moved from Iraq to the Syrian city of Raqqa, the terror army’s de facto capital, amid tight security two months after sustaining serious shrapnel wounds leaving his spine damaged and his left leg immobile, say jihadist defectors.”

“Those guys are badass,” a U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber crew member recently told U.S. News & World Report’s Paul D. Shinkman about Kurdish fighters in the Syrian city of Kobani. Shinkman took a trip down to Dyess Air Force Base in Texas to talk to B-1 crews recently back from bombing runs over Syria, with one officer telling him that the Syria mission “gave us a recharge on the whole conflict, even in Afghanistan…we weren’t in a rut – we were still executing missions, but there was something different this time.”

AFP reports that “the global terrorist threat has entered a ‘new phase,’ where media-savvy Islamist extremists are successfully drawing lone wolf attackers to their cause, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security [Jeh Johnson] warned Sunday.”

This was echoed by Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) who told CNN, “the combination of those two groups [Al Qaeda and ISIL] — their appeal to the lone wolfs and we see them acting in Belgium and in France and in Canada and the United States, so the threat factors and the nature of the threats are far more complicated and far more serious today than on September 12, 2001.”

Europe

Norway’s modernization plans for its defense forces have been making waves these last few weeks. Over the weekend, Defense News’ Vago Muradian spoke with Norway’s chief of defense, Adm. Haakon Bruun-Hanse, about a recently released report detailing the Norwegian military’s capabilities and weaknesses.

In Macedonia on Sunday, eight policemen and 14 gunmen were killed in an attack that authorities say was led by five Kosovars who were members of the now-disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army, the BBC reports. More than 30 Macedonians and one Albanian were involved in the attack that left more than 37 additional officers wounded. “It’s total destruction,” one Macedonian is quoted as saying.

Last month, roughly 40 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo took over a police station, demanding the creation of an Albanian state within Macedonia. Tensions have been running high since an uprising in 2001.

Yemen

The Los Angeles Times’ Zaid Al-Alayaa and Patrick J. Mcdonnell report that Yemeni rebels have agreed to a five-day, humanitarian cease-fire proposed by the Saudis.

Nigeria

A gunmen opened fire outside the College of Administrative and Business Studies in Potiskum, Yobe state, Nigeria, the AFP reports, killing 12. The shooter blew himself up when he ran out of ammunition, but there were no additional casualties.

Egypt

Egyptian presidential spokesman Alaa Yousef said on Saturday that “Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed as firm relations between Cairo and Moscow, expressing his country’s support for Egypt,” according to Egypt’s State Information Service. During a meeting between Putin and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the two leaders discussed bolstering their “already strong ties,” and “other issues of common concern.”  During the visit to Moscow, Sisi also met with his Vietnamese counterpart Truong Tan Sang.

The business of defense

“In the span of just a few weeks, a flurry of orders has reset the global fighter market,” writes Defense News in what’s bylined as a “staff report.” Since mid-February, Egypt, India, and Qatar all announced that they were planning to buy dozens of French-made Dassault Rafale fighter planes. In April, the United Arab Emirates said it was restarting talks with Dassault about the Rafale. Then, just last week it leaked that Kuwait was on the verge of buying up to 40 Boeing-made F/A-18 E and F Super Hornet strike fighters from the United States. “It’s a shocking amount of activity for a fighter market that often sees just one or two procurements a year globally, and one analysts say is being driven by world events,” in the Middle East, the story says.

One more thing

Finally, we know that it’s Seymour Hersh, but his new story in the London Review of Books about all of the lies behind the official narrative(s) of the bin Laden raid is a good read. Take it as you will.

Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthi movement, which have been fighting for nearly two months, have reached a plan for a five-day ceasefire, set to begin on Tuesday. A Houthi official posted on social media that they will accept the ceasefire if it proves to be “real and serious.” The pause will allow the delivery of critical humanitarian aid, but it is unclear whether the agreement will hold as neither side has strong control of its forces. In the meantime, though, Saudi airstrikes have continued, including strikes targeting the estate of ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh and more than a dozen Houthi leaders. Houthi forces have reportedly claimed responsibility for shooting down a Moroccan F-16 participating in the Saudi bombing campaign.

The United Nations has expressed its support for the planned pause in the conflict, but chafed at Saudi Arabia’s insistence on mediating humanitarian aid. U.N. policy states that the delivery of humanitarian aid should not be governed by a belligerent in a conflict. “The active engagement of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is appreciated,” U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Yemen Johannes Van Der Klaauw said. “However, in all crises, the emergency relief coordinator is mandated to lead the coordination of international relief activities and emergency response.” Some humanitarian organizations said they did not think sufficient aid could be delivered in five days to alleviate crises that include medicine, food, water, and fuel shortages.

Assad Regime Arrests Intel Chief for Coup Plot

The Assad regime has placed Ali Mamlouk, head of the country’s National Security Bureau, under house arrest amid accusations that he was plotting a coup. Mamlouk was reportedly communicating with Turkish intelligence to try to arrange the return of Rifaat al-Assad, who has lived abroad since plotting to overthrow his brother Hafez in the 1980s. Last month, two other security chiefs were taken out of power in mysterious circumstances: Gen. Rafiq Shehadeh, head of military intelligence, was fired after his supporters attacked and killed Rustum Ghazaleh, the head of the Political Security Directorate. The internal conflict is said to be a reaction to overbearing Iranian influence on the regime.

Headlines

• The Saudi government confirmed that King Salman will not attend the Gulf summit hosted by President Obama at Camp David this week and will send Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in his stead; other Gulf nations will also be sending diplomatic delegations instead of their monarchs.

• Libyan forces attacked a Turkish cargo ship carrying construction materials; Libyan officials said the ship was approaching rebel-held Derna, violating an embargo of the city, while Turkish officials say it was trying to reach Tobruk.

• European Union efforts to establish a quota system to distribute the burden of resettling migrants transiting the Mediterranean to Europe from North Africa have run into opposition from Slovakia and Estonia, possibly blocking its approval.

• Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davetoglu crossed into Syria to visit the tomb of Suleyman Shah, a figure from early Ottoman history, and said the Turkish flag “will fly over Suleyman Shah forever,” drawing criticism from the Assad regime for “a clear aggression.”

• An Egyptian court has sentenced ousted President Hosni Mubarak and his two sons to three years in prison on corruption charges, reaffirming a previous ruling; Mubarak was previously acquitted of murder charges for deaths during the 2011 uprising against his rule.

-J. Dana Stuster

MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP/Getty Images

All over the world, people are forgetting to call their mothers on this second Sunday of May. Get on that, if you live in one of the dozens of countries celebrating Mother’s Day on May 10 this year. In Brazil, Dia das Mães is an unusually big deal. Families gather for celebrations and meals. The retail sector sees a spike in business topped only by Christmas. And thousands of prisoners are released temporarily so that they can go home to visit the women who raised them.

Prisoners in Brazil who demonstrate good behavior and meet other requirements are allowed to take five breaks from prison per year: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Children’s Day, Christmas, and one additional, flexible day. During the Christmas furlough two years ago, 47,531 inmates across Brazil left prison on temporary release. Some 2,400 never bothered to return. The Department of Corrections in São Paulo did not respond immediately to questions regarding the size of this year’s mass furlough.

More than 550,000 Brazilians are behind bars — the fourth largest prison population in the world, after the United States, China, and Russia. By most measures, Brazil’s prisons are in horrid shape, plagued by severe overcrowding and rampant violence. In 2013, nearly 60 inmates were murdered — in a single prison. An investigation uncovered that gang leaders were systematically raping inmate’s wives during conjugal visits there as well. In another facility, three prisoners were beheaded during a riot. And beneath the searing horrors that make international headlines, ordinary prisoners face terrible miscarriages of justice, often waiting for years in overcrowded group cells just to stand trial. While spared some of the violence male inmates face, women prisoners also contend with harsh conditions of confinement and abusive treatment, according to Human Rights Watch.

Despite the high rate of escape — which could be reduced through electronic monitoring, according to InSight Crime — the furlough program has substantial benefits: It helps inmates remain engaged with their communities and families, and helps them reintegrate more easily after release. It also leads to a spike in lawbreaking: A 2015 report by the U.S. State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security reported “notable increases” in crime during holidays Brazil — attributable in part to the “liberal system of prison furloughs.”

“Many people in Brazil believe that inmates must suffer, enduring hunger and depravity,” Euza Beloti, a psychologist, told the New York Times in March. “This thinking bolsters a system where prisoners return to society more violent than when they entered prison.”

The furlough system encourages a more progressive approach. And not all furloughs mark traditional, wholesome occasions like Mother’s Day. A new, experimental program has begun granting furloughs for another reason: Rituals deep in the jungle during which inmates consume ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogen. “Each experience helps me communicate with my victim to beg for forgiveness,” Celmiro de Almeida, a homicide convict who has taken the drug nearly 20 times since going to prison, told the Times.

No word on how his mom feels about this method of rehabilitation. Call your mother!

Mario Tama/Getty Images