The French conducted the first round of their parliamentary elections and Emmanuel Macron’s new party appears headed for a significant victory, suggesting that it might get between 390 and 430 of the 577 seats available. Given that the party, En Marche!, was only founded last year, this possible outcome is stunning. Unfortunately, the election also saw a significant number of non-voters, with only 49% of registered voters actually casting a ballot. But even the abstentions indicate that the established parties of France, which have been around for a very long time, do not seem to command the loyalty of the voters–a troubling sign.
Elena Milashina, a reporter for the Russian magazine, Novaya Gazeta, has written about an intense campaign in Chechnya against gays. Chechnya has a long history of unrest against central control from Moscow–most of its residents are Muslim. It has been ruled by Ramzan Kadyrov who, in return for professing total loyalty to President Putin, has been allowed to run the region essentially as a fiefdom. The campaign against gays includes torture, detention, and murder, but Moscow has done little to protect its citizens human rights. Without the courage of reporters like Milashina it is unlikely that the world would be aware of this horrific situation.
Paul Pillar is one of the most learned and intelligent analyst of Middle Eastern affairs and he has written a short essay for the National Interest on the dust-up between Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The dispute itself seems larger than the issues involved, and Pillar makes the case that the Trump Administration has unnecessarily aggravated the tensions because of its hard-line against Iran. Fortunately, it appears as if Kuwait and Oman are trying to mediate the crisis to avoid it spilling over into violence.
The US gained control over Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Since that time, the island has been an American territory–an ambiguous relationship. It was not a colony and the people of Puerto Rico have since gained American citizenship. But is was not a state in the United States and the people do not have the right to vote in a national election, nor do they have a vote in Congress. For the fifth time since 1898, the people will have a chance to vote on their preferences. There will be a referendum tomorrow that offers three choices: the status quo, independence, or statehood. The last vote in 2012 favored statehood, but because of a poorly worded referendum, the US Congress ignored the vote. The odds are that the Puerto Ricans will favor statehood because the island is facing a crippling budget crisis that it cannot address on its own. It is, however, unlikely that the Republican Congress will honor the vote since the island leans Democratic.
In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008-09 the US Congress passed what came to be known as the “Volcker Rule”. Named after a former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the rule did two things: “The first limits banks’ ability to buy and sell exotic financial instruments, and the second limits the ability of banks to operate and invest in hedge funds and private-equity funds.” The risky investments of the banks leading up to the crisis led to a widespread financial collapse, one that, according to the Globe and Mail cost the US trillions of dollars:
“In a paper for the Dallas Federal Reserve, economists David Luttrell, Tyler Atkinson and Harvey Rosenblum calculate that the total cost to the U.S. of the financial crisis was something in the order of $6-trillion (U.S.) to $14-trillion. The top end of this range represents one full year of U.S. economic output. If they were to add in what they call “broader” measures that reflect the lingering trauma of the recession, they figure that the actual cost could be twice as high.”
The US House of Representatives has just passed legislation that repeals the Volcker Rule. It appears as if we never learn.
The US is sending troops to help the Philippines fight an armed insurgency in the southern island of Mindanao. The Philippines has a law preventing foreign forces from fighting within its territory, so the US troops are there just as advisors. Under President Duterte, the Philippine had adopted a rather hostile attitude toward the US, but that stance appears to have changed since the election of President Trump. The Philippines is mostly Christian, but the southern islands have primarily Muslim populations and the US regards the insurgency as part of the campaign against Daesh (the Islamic State). The US is no stranger to armed conflict on Mindanao. In the second part of the Spanish-American War, the US fought against Filipino insurgents led by the leader, Aguinaldo. It was a brutal war: “An estimated 20,000 Filipino troops were killed, and more than 200,000 civilians perished as a result of combat, hunger, or disease. Of the 4,300 Americans lost, some 1,500 were killed in action, while nearly twice that number succumbed to disease.” US General Smedley Butler fought in the war, and at the end of his military career, he wrote:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
― Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier
British Prime Minister May indicated that she will try to create a majority in Parliament by inviting the Democratic Unionist Party from Ireland to join in a coalition with the Conservative Party. When she called for the elections 7 weeks ago, May anticipated a 100-seat Tory majority in the House of Commons–they ended up losing 13 seats and their majority in the House by eight seats. The defeat was stunning and comes just as Great Britain will begin its Brexit talks with the European Union. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) held 10 of the 18 seats allocated to Northern Ireland in the election and it was founded “by Ian Paisley” and “is the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly and the fifth-largest party in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.” The marriage between the Tories and the DUP will be difficult since the DUP has a strong stance against a “hard” Brexit and favors a strong continued relationship with the EU from the outside. Meanwhile, the Scottish National Party has indicated that it would work with the Labor Party and Jeremy Corbin.
“We call on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt to ease the blockade against Qatar. There are humanitarian consequences to this blockade. We are seeing shortages of food, families are being forcibly separated, and children pulled out of school. We believe these are unintended consequences, especially during this Holy Month of Ramadan, but they can be addressed immediately.”
But an hour later in a press conference with the President of Romania, US President Trump said:
“The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has been a funder of terrorism at a very high level….I’ve decided, along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, our great generals, and military people, the time has come to call on Qatar to end its funding. They have to end that funding. And its extremist ideology in terms of funding.”
One would be hard pressed to figure out what the American position on Qatar is, and, given the state of the embargoes against Qatar, there is not much time to offer help to the people of Qatar.
Vision of Humanity publishes an annualGlobal Peace Index. It is a fascinating attempt to create measures of peacefulness, internal and external, and the effort is much more broadly based than the typical indices of violence in international relations. According to the 2017 edition:
“Most of the nations in the GPI became more peaceful over the last year. 93 countries improved while 68 deteriorated. Over the longer run however, there has been an increase in ‘peace inequality’, with most countries having only small increases in peacefulness, while a handful of countries have had very large deteriorations in peace.
“Iceland remains the most peaceful country in the world, a position it has held since 2008. It is joined at the top of the index by New Zealand, Portugal, Austria, and Denmark, all of which were ranked highly in the 2016 GPI. There was also very little change at the bottom of the index. Syria remains the least peaceful country in the world, followed by Afghanistan, Iraq, South Sudan, and Yemen.”
It appears as if no British party will win a majority of seats in Parliament. So if a government is to be formed, it will have to be a coalition government, most likely one with Labor pairing with either the Liberal Democrats or the Scottish National Party (there are actually other possibilities as well, but they seem remote right now, but we shall see). This result would not have been predicted two months ago when Prime Minister May called for a general election. The Conservatives seemed to be poised for a stunning victory. But Labor’s Jeremy Corbyn, who seemed to be a relic of a long-past left-wing fantasy, has pulled off a rather dramatic election. It is hard to square this election with the Brexit vote and it augurs ill for the negotiations with the EU.
There is an interesting trade war going on between the US and Mexico. Cane sugar and beet sugar farmers in the US want to restrict the importation of Mexican refined sugar. That action would raise of the price of refined sugar in the US since Mexico is a more efficient producer of sugar than the US. Mexico, however, has threatened to retaliate by limiting the importation of high fructose corn syrup from the US, a move that would damage corn farmers in the US. The battle between two agricultural giants in the US–cane sugar vs. corn–will likely lead to increased lobbying by both and an increase in campaign contributions. In the end, however, the losers will be American and Mexican consumers who will pay higher prices for one of those two (or, in the worst case, both) products. We will have to monitor the outcome of the current talks between the US and Mexico.
Tracking refugees is very difficult. Many of them move in a manner specifically designed to avoid being identified. But many refugees use smartphones to communicate with loved ones left behind, and smartphone usage can identify the movement of refugees anonymously. The Pew Research CenterGoogle searches in Arabic and Turkic languages has examined to determine how and when refugees move and the circumstances that determine their movement. It is an intriguing example of how “big data” can offer an insight into social activities that are difficult to measure otherwise.
Arwa Damon is a war correspondent for CNN and she has done an extraordinary job over the years reporting on some of the more dangerous and horrific circumstances of the wars in Syria and Iraq. She has posted a video of the recent fighting in Mosul, Iraq. The video is brutal and one should forewarned about the graphic images of violence in the battle. But there is little question that Daesh (the Islamic State) is deliberately targeting civilians in particularly ruthless ways. In recent days I have been reminded many times that the world is ignoring the growing violence in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan and is being diverted by stories which are, by comparison, silly and gratuitously fatuous.
Today is the anniversary of the invasion of France by British and American forces in 1944, commonly known as D-Day. The invasion was the first time the allied forces had opened up a second front in the war against Germany (the first front was in the east in deep Russia, a front that had been stuck in Stalingrad since 1942). By the time of D-Day, the Russians had suffered tremendous casualties, but had also pushed the Germans back out of the country. The invasion of France was the beginning of the end of the German Reich.
The Pew Research Center has released its survey of global public opinion about the economic future. By and large, the survey of publics in 18 different countries indicated that a slim majority believe that their economies are improving. However, in some countries the Center found that a majority believe that the economic future for their children will not be better than it has been in the past. There is a clear difference between rich and poor countries about how to view the future for their children:
“While publics in emerging markets and developing countries are not that happy about their current economic condition, a median of 56% nevertheless believe that when those who are children today in their countries grow up they will be better off financially than their parents. Just 38% voice the view that they will be worse off. Indians (76%), Nigerians (72%) and Chileans (69%) are particularly optimistic about economic prospects for the next generation.
“Publics in advanced economies are quite pessimistic about young people’s financial prospects, just 34% believe they will be better off than the current generation. Such despair is particularly strong in Greece, Japan, France, Australia, Canada, Spain and the UK, where roughly seven-in-ten people say today’s children will be worse off.”
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain all cut ties with Qatar, and were followed later by Yemen, Libya and the Maldives. The move signals discontent with Qatar’s relations with terrorists (specifically, the Muslim Brotherhood) and its contacts with Iran. The rupture is a major split among the Sunni governments, but it is not the first time the countries have broken contacts with Qatar. This most recent move is likely the result of pressure from the US on US President Trump’s recent trip to the region, as he wishes to make a strong campaign against jihadist groups a central feature of US foreign policy. At the same time, however, the rhetoric threatens the US military presence at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar–the largest US military base in the Middle East.
The US is sending a third aircraft carrier group, led by the USS Nimitz, to waters near North Korea. The Nimitz joins the USS Carl Vinson and the USS Ronald Reagan in the western Pacific. So three of the 11 US carrier groups are focused on North Korea, a concentration of supercarriers that is unusual. On Saturday, US Defense Secretary Mattis called North Korea, a “clear and present danger”, a strong characterization of an imminent issue.
Economics professor Richard Reeves has written a book, Dream Hoarders, which puts a different twist on the issue of income inequality in the US. Instead of focusing on the top 1% or 0.1%, Reeves focuses on the upper middle class, the top 20%, those families with incomes greater than $120,000 a year. His argument is that this class concentrates on dominating the options available to its children to the detriment of the bottom 80%. His data suggests that the composition of this top 20% does not change greatly over time. According to The Guardian:
“‘The upper middle class families have become greenhouses for the cultivation of human capital. Children raised in them are on a different track to ordinary Americans, right from the very beginning,” he writes.
“The upper middle class are ‘opportunity hoarding’ – making it harder for others less economically privileged to rise to the top; a situation that Reeves says places stress on the efficiency of the US economic system and creates dynastic wealth and privilege of the kind the nation’s fathers sought to avoid.
“’The US labor market is mostly meritocratic and not some kind of medieval cartel,’” Reeves told the Guardian, “’but it’s what happens before that that is unfair.’” The problem, he says, is that people enter the race with very different levels of preparation.
“’Kids from more affluent backgrounds are entering the contest massively well prepared, while kids from less affluent backgrounds are not. The well-prepared kids win, and everybody pretends to themselves it’s a meritocracy,’” he says.”
The study is consistent with others that have identified the lack of social and economic mobility in the US over the last 40 years.
Today is the anniversary of the brutal repression of the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1989. The event was observed in Hong Kong, but only sporadically in the rest of China. We actually do not know how many people were killed in the military action against the protesters, who were primarily young activists calling for greater freedoms. That event marked the point at which an implicit contract was make between the Chinese Communist Party and the people of China: that political freedoms could be circumscribed as long as economic development continued to lift the Chinese people out of poverty. That contract underlies most of the Chinese government economic policies and why it regards economic growth as a necessary condition for all its policies. The event also signaled one of the most iconic expressions of the human desire for freedom as “Tank Man” confronted military tanks sent to put down the protests.
“Three-fourths of Venezuelans reported involuntarily losing an average of 19 pounds in 2016 because of rampant food shortages and runaway inflation, which is making basic goods unaffordable. A third of Venezuelans reported eating two or fewer meals a day last year—triple the number recorded a year earlier. Child malnutrition has reached crisis levels.
Part of the explanation for the economic collapse in Venezuela has to do with the collapse in oil prices in 2014. But the most compelling explanation rests on miserable governance. Both Hugo Chavez, the former President, and Nicolas Maduro, the current President, have completely disregarded key constituencies in Venezuela and trampled on democratic rules of procedure. They did so in the name of the poor in Venezuela, and there is little question that the lives of the poor improved temporarily under their rule–the continued support of the poor for Maduro makes the current situation so intractable. A young man, identified as a supporter of Maduro, was burned by an angry mob and has died.
Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day war between Israel and Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. In that time there have been countless hours spent negotiating on the disposition of the territories occupied by Israel during that war and there is little to show for those negotiations. Both the Israeli and the Palestinian side obviously see advantages in the stalemate, but the dispute continues to roil the region. There is no resolution in sight, nor does there appear to be any desire to resolve the conflict by any side.
Last Tuesday, the US conducted a test of an anti-missile defense system which was sent as a message to North Korea that there were defenses against a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The test was billed as “successful” but it was the 10th successful attempt out of 17 tries. There are significant reasons to doubt the ultimate effectiveness of an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system since the objective is extraordinarily complex: the effort is viewed as firing a bullet to hit a bullet. Nonetheless, an ABM system cannot be used as a message to a single state. Both China and Russia view the American efforts as an attempt to destabilize the nuclear balance of power. An truly effective ABM system would allow the use of nuclear weapons without any fear of reciprocal nuclear damage. The US needs to be far more circumspect in describing its effort to build an ABM system.
The US decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement is not the first time the US has recently abdicated its position as a leader in the international liberal system. The first step in that abdication was its decision to drop the trade agreement among Pacific countries. In both cases, however, China has indicated its willingness to become a decisive player in both arenas. On trade, Chinese President Xi made it clear at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland, that China was willing to emerge as a more reliabel trade partner than the US. Similarly, China’s position as a leader in developing renewable energy sources is clear. While US President Trump wishes to “bring coal back”, China as cut back substantially on its reliance on the worst of all the carbon-emitting energies. Willingness, however, is not the same as capability. We should wait to see whether China’s formidable domestic constraints allows it to become a dominant leader in the international system.
Floating Solar Farm in China
Even though the US and Great Britain have a “special relationship”, the bond between the US and Germany since 1945 has been the strongest of all the American alliances. It was a shock to me, therefore, to see this headline in Spiegel, one of Germany’s pre-eminent news magazines: “Donald Trump’s Triumph of Stupidity“. If one wishes to plumb the depths of European disillusionment with American policy, then I would highly recommend this article. It was written by the staff of Speigel, so it is not simply the screed of a lone reporter.
For those who listened to US President Trump’s speech on withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, he used a lot of evidence to back up his claims that the agreement would damage the US economy and give other countries an advantage over the US. Many of those claims should be contested, and PolitiFact has done a good job of checking Mr. Trump’s data. PolitiFact has an excellent reputation (it won the Pulitzer Prize) and I regard it as essentially non-partisan. It is disappointing that a policy would be based upon such loose interpretations of information. It is also unusual for a policy on a climate change agreement to be based entirely on economic interpretations. Nowhere in the speech did Mr. Trump address the costs of climate change on the economy–he simply assumed that climate change will not occur.
Visual Capitalist produced this graph which shows what countries are growing economically as a percentage of total global economic growth. China and the US still contribute more than 50% of economic growth in the world, but India is now growing faster than the European Union. Growth patterns change quite rapidly, so one should treat this graph as simply a snapshot in time. But it reveals a great deal about global economic growth. For example, there are no African countries in the list of growing economies.
One of the largest ice shelves in the world, Larsen C in Antarctica, is close to shedding an iceberg the size of the US state of Delaware. A massive crack has been growing on the shelf for some time, but the crack has grown 11 miles between 25 and 31 May indicating that it is close to breaking off. Since it is a shelf and floats on the water, the melting of the expected chunk of ice will not raise sea levels at all. But the loss of that ice means that the glaciers on the Antarctica continent will likely starting retreating faster as warmer ocean water penetrates under the glacier itself.
It is very difficult to place US President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change in the context of American foreign policy since 1945. The only real analogue is the US Senate’s decision to repudiate the League of Nations after World War I. Henry Cabot Lodge was the Senator from Massachusetts and he gave a speech in August 1919 in which he said:
“The independence of the United States is not only more precious to ourselves but to the world… Look at the United States today. We have made mistakes in the past. We have had shortcomings. We shall make mistakes in the future and fall short of our own best hopes. But is there any country today on the face of the earth which can compare with this in ordered liberty, in peace, and in the largest freedom?…
“I have always loved one flag and I cannot share that devotion [with] a mongrel banner created for a League.
“You may call me selfish if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any other harsh adjective you see fit to apply. But an American I was born, an American I have remained all my life. I can never be anything else but an American, and I must think of the United States first, and when I think of the United States first in an arrangement like this, I am thinking of what is best for the world – for if the United States fails, the best hopes of mankind fail with it.”
That decision was fateful. The US in 1918 was the only country capable of maintaining world order. Britain and France were exhausted; Germany was in exile; and Russia left the international system to establish an alternative world order but was too weak to make much progress on that front. The consequences of a “leaderless” world were horrific. Without a world order with a power willing to support that order, the world devolved into economic chaos, the hell of fascism, and massive human rights violations in Ethiopia, China, and the horror of the Holocaust. The US under President Roosevelt made a decision in 1944 not to repeat that mistake, and it constructed what we now know as the liberal world order based upon the UN, the Bretton Woods institutions, and an explicit commitment to international law.
Despite its imperfections and the refusal of the US in many cases to uphold that liberal world order itself, the post-war period has been marked by the absence of a war among the major powers and by extraordinary economic growth (In 1950, the world GDP was about $5 trillion; in 2017 it is about $90 trillion). The systematic (as opposed to episodic) movement away from that liberal world order started in 2003 when the US invaded Iraq without a UN Security Council sanction and engaged in significant human rights violations by the use of torture, extraordinary rendition, and the creation of the prison in Guantanamo. President Obama tried a softer approach to disengagement, but nonetheless remained committed to the liberal order.
President Trump’s policy of “America First” is consistent with the sentiments expressed by Senator Lodge in 1919, and I believe that the outcomes of that policy will be as catastrophic as those in the 1930s. The world system is not self-regulating and the US, as one of the strongest powers in the world, has a responsibility to uphold the world order. “America First” (and we should not forget that that slogan was used by those opposed to the US entry into World War II, among which were many American Nazis) is not consistent with US interests in a stable world order.
America First? More likely, America Alone.
In an earlier post, I lamented the position US President Trump took at the recent NATO meeting. In my mind, NATO represents the infrastructure of the liberal international order and Mr. Trump’s criticisms of European conduct was off the mark. Stephen Walt is one of the US’s premier realists and, although he is no fan of Mr. Trump, he has a different take on the matter. He believes that NATO has outlived its usefulness. His opening argument, that the counterfactual position Chancellor Merkel could have taken was absurd, is a red-herring. Of course, Europe needs to have control over its foreign policy, but an alliance does not necessarily forfeit sovereignty: States choose to make alliances. His argument, however, still deserves careful attention.
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