Lebanon has announced that it will attempt to restructure a $1.2 billion bond due on 9 March, putting the country in default for the first time. Lebanon has been on the brink of default for some time and the situation aggravates the serious political crisis the country has been going through for some months. The political crisis stems from the archaic political system the country has used to balance its competing political sects–the constitution allocates important political positions to different religious communities. The Guardian reports:
“Lebanon’s sovereign debt rating slid into junk territory long ago, but investor confidence has fallen further since the mass protests erupted. Credit rating agencies have warned of further downgrades in the event of a default, but economists have stressed the need to protect Lebanon’s foreign currency reserves.
“Jad Chaaban, an economics professor at the American University of Beirut, blamed the political class for Lebanon’s predicament, accusing it of decades of corruption. The crisis ‘is the creation of a failed and criminal political class that has lied and robbed for more than 30 years,’ he said on Facebook.”
NBC is reporting that US officials have serious doubts about whether the Taliban will uphold its obligations under the recent agreement it signed with the US. According to the report:
“‘They have no intention of abiding by their agreement,’ said one official briefed on the intelligence, which two others described as explicit evidence shedding light on the Taliban’s intentions.
“Trump himself acknowledged that reality in extraordinary comments Friday, saying the Taliban could ‘possibly’ overrun the Afghan government after U.S. troops withdraw.
“‘Countries have to take care of themselves,’ Trump told reporters at the White House. ‘You can only hold someone’s hand for so long.’ Asked if the Taliban could eventually seize power, Trump said it’s ‘not supposed to happen that way, but it possibly will.'”
The report confirms what many analysts have suspected: that the US is really not interested in the way the war in Afghanistan ends as long as the US is able to withdraw its troops. The Taliban have carried out 70 attacks on Afghan government forces since the peace agreement was signed on 29 February. Many in Afghanistan view the agreement as a betrayal, as reported by the Washington Post:
“Many Afghans who see themselves most closely allied with American values — and most dependent on U.S. support — fear they have the most to lose from the peace deal. Supporters of women’s rights, civil society and some sectors of the country’s political and security establishment described reading the deal with a mix of disbelief and anger.
“’I want peace. All Afghans want peace. But I don’t think this deal will bring us peace,’ the Afghan official said, describing it as a step in the wrong direction that will further destabilize the country.”
The US withdrawal from Afghanistan will end the war for the US, but it will most likely lead to greater turmoil in the country. Other powers, such as Iran and Pakistan, will view the power vacuum as an opportunity to advance their own interests. And the peace agreement does little to protect human rights, particularly the rights of women. The withdrawal is a classic example of the priority of interests over values in a realpolitik world.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) announced yesterday that it would begin an investigation into alleged war crimes committed in the Afghanistan war by the Afghanistan government, the US, and the Taliban. The ICC was created by the Rome Statute in 1998 which went into effect in 2002. It was charged with the responsibility to address crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. Since its creation:
There have thus far been 27 cases before the Court, with some cases having more than one suspect.
ICC judges have issued 34 arrest warrants. Thanks to cooperation from States, 16 people have been detained in the ICC detention centre and have appeared before the Court. 15 people remain at large. Charges have been dropped against 3 people due to their deaths.
ICC judges have also issued 9 summonses to appear.
The judges have issued 8 convictions and 4 acquittals.
The US never signed the Rome Statute. The ICC Charter defers to national systems of justice to first investigate and prosecute war crime. Only if national authorities do not conduct such investigations and prosecutions will the ICC intervene. The US claims that its national systems of justice are more than adequate and that it therefore does not need the oversight of an international body. But the US rejected the ICC’s authority to investigate possible war crimes in Afghanistan and the rejection sought also to undermine the authority of the ICC:
“Today, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Appeals Chamber authorized an investigation into the alleged activities of the Taliban and U.S. and Afghan personnel related to Afghanistan. This is a truly breathtaking action by an unaccountable political institution, masquerading as a legal body.
“It is all the more reckless for this ruling to come just days after the United States signed a historic peace deal on Afghanistan – the best chance for peace in a generation. Indeed, the Afghan government, itself, pleaded with the ICC to not take this course. But the ICC politicians had other goals.
“The United States is not a party to the ICC, and we will take all necessary measures to protect our citizens from this renegade, so-called court.
“This is yet another reminder of what happens when multilateral bodies lack oversight and responsible leadership, and become instead a vehicle for political vendettas. The ICC has today stumbled into a sorry affirmation of every denunciation made by its harshest critics over the past three decades.
Turkey and Russia have agreed upon cease-fire lines in the Syrian province of Idlib which consolidates Syrian gains at the expense of Turkish interests. But it seems clear that Turkish President Erdogan had little choice but to accept the losses:
“Sinan Ulgen, visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe and a former Turkish diplomat, said Erdogan had to make concessions to Putin because the alternative – a return to military conflict – would be ‘a lose-lose scenario for Turkey’.
“Russia’s air control over Idlib, although challenged by Ankara when it carried out waves of drone assaults on Syrian forces and shot down three Syrian warplanes, would have left Turkish troops exposed to lethal firepower.
“At least 34 Turkish soldiers were killed in an air strike in Idlib last week, the deadliest attack suffered by the Turkish military in nearly three decades.
“’Turkey sat at the negotiating table with this military vulnerability,’ Ulgen told Reuters. ‘Achieving a ceasefire was important from that aspect, but this ceasefire had a cost.’”
It is likely that President Erdogan now regrets his decision to demand the removal of US troops from Syria. There is no likelihood that US troops would have engaged Russian troops, but Syrian President Assad could not have afforded to take such a risk. Erdogan was playing checkers but President Putin, as always, was playing chess.
Freedom House is a non-partisan organization that publishes an annual report on the state of personal freedoms in the world. It is an organization that is committed to a liberal ideology that is primarily concerned with the institutions protecting representative democracy, market capitalism, and human rights. It has just published its report for 2020 and, not surprisingly, it found that individual freedoms have been increasingly constrained globally:
“Freedom House found that 2019 was the 14th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. The gap between setbacks and gains widened compared with 2018, as individuals in 64 countries experienced deterioration in their political rights and civil liberties while those in just 37 experienced improvements. The negative pattern affected all regime types, but the impact was most visible near the top and the bottom of the scale. More than half of the countries that were rated Free or Not Free in 2009 have suffered a net decline in the past decade.
“Ethnic, religious, and other minority groups have borne the brunt of government abuses in both democracies and authoritarian states. The Indian government has taken its Hindu nationalist agenda to a new level with a succession of policies that abrogate the rights of different segments of its Muslim population, threatening the democratic future of a country long seen as a potential bulwark of freedom in Asia and the world. Attacks on the rights of immigrants continue in other democratic states, contributing to a permissive international environment for further violations. China pressed ahead with one of the world’s most extreme programs of ethnic and religious persecution, and increasingly applied techniques that were first tested on minorities to the general population, and even to foreign countries. The progression illustrated how violations of minority rights erode the institutional and conventional barriers that protect freedom for all individuals in a given society.”
Many societies do not share the same emphasis on personal freedoms and even within liberal societies there are many who place a higher priority on values other than personal freedom, such as justice, equality, or social stability. The Freedom House report uses India as a revealing case study, but supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi would argue that India should take further steps to protect India’s identity as a Hindu nation, despite its liberal constitution. Michael Carpenter has written an essay for Foreign Affairs that looks more generally at the growth of illiberal politics in the world today.
Here is a video of a talk I gave to the World Affairs Council of Western Massachusetts yesterday in Springfield, MA. The topic was “America and the Middle East: Will the Wars Ever End?” I appreciate the opportunity to discuss the topic with such a well-informed and engaged audience.
Turkey has begun an offensive against Syrian forces in the province of Idlib, responding to a Syrian attack that killed 30 Turkish soldiers. Turkish forces claim to have shot down two Syrian jets and to have hit 200 Syrian regime targets with artillery and drone strikes. Under an agreement with Russia and Syria forged in 2018, Turkey has the right to maintain 12 observation sites in Syria, but those sites have come under attack by Syrian forces. The counteroffensive is a delicate operation since the Turks do not wish to engage Russian forces which are supporting the Syrian troops, but making those distinctions between Russian and Syrian forces is difficult.
On another front, Turkey is releasing Syrian refugees on its western border and many of those refugees are trying to seek asylum in Greece. Once in Greece, those refugees will try to move to other EU countries. The EU wants to avoid that influx for political reasons which have been aggravated by fears of the coronavirus. The Turkish move is an attempt to put pressure on Europe to offer support to Turkey in its confrontation in Syria. Barring a Syrian or Russian attack on Turkish soil, there is probably no way that Europe would offer military support to Turkey, particularly in light of the long-standing tensions between Turkey and the EU. But “Erdogan said Turkey, home to some 3.6 million refugees, did not plan to close the borders because ‘the (EU) should keep its promises’. He was referring to the 2016 deal with Brussels to stop the flow of refugees in exchange for billions of euros.”
Turkish President Erdogan is scheduled to meet with Russian President Putin in Russia on Thursday. They will undoubtedly discuss measures to assure that Turkish troops do not fire on Russian troops in Syria. But whether Putin can make any promises about the behavior of Syrian troops is unlikely. Russia has sent large amounts of military equipment to Syria in response to the Turkish attacks. Those weapons could be a bribe to induce Syrian President Assad to hold back. Or they could be a clear statement that Russia backs its Syrian ally wholeheartedly. Russia has sent two naval frigates armed with cruise missiles through the Bosporus Strait into the eastern Mediterranean, signaling its intent to support Syria.
The US, Afghanistan, and the Taliban have signed an agreement that some hope may lead to peace in Afghanistan. The agreement is the result of protracted negotiations between the US and the Taliban which have been conducted in Qatar. The text reflects the extraordinary dance all sides had to make in order to save face–the title of the text is convoluted: “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban and the United States of America”. The language reflects the desire of the US not to create the illusion that the Taliban is equal in status to the government of Afghanistan.
The agreement was signed after a week-long “test” of the willingness of both the US and the Taliban to limit violence (it is not clear to me what a week-long hiatus means in the context of a war that has been going on for 19 years). The US has agreed to withdraw
“….all of its military forces and supporting civilian personnel, as well as those of its allies, within 14 months. The drawdown process will begin with the U.S. reducing its troop levels to 8,600 in the first 135 days and pulling its forces from five bases.
“The rest of its forces, according to the agreement, will leave “within the remaining nine and a half months.”
“The Afghan government also will release up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners as a gesture of goodwill, in exchange for 1,000 Afghan security forces held by the Taliban.”
Further:
“The U.S. intends, along with members of the United Nations Security Council, to ‘remove members of the Taliban from the sanctions list with the aim of achieving this objective by May 29, 2020’ — and Washington, in particular, aims to remove the group from U.S. sanctions by Aug 27, 2020….
“The Afghan government will also begin negotiations with the Taliban to map out a political settlement which would establish the role the Taliban would play in a future Afghanistan. These negotiations are expected to start next month. One of the first tasks in these intra-Afghan talks will be to achieve a lasting ceasefire in Afghanistan.”
The last point is important because the Taliban has refused to engage the Afghan government as long as US troops were in the country. Apparently, the commitment to withdraw was sufficient to induce the Taliban to consider changing its position.
There is considerable ambiguity in the agreement. The Taliban are supposed to cease working or communicating with al Qaeda, the group that led the attacks against the US on 11 September 2001 and was the target of the US invasion in October 2001. But one of the most important groups within the Taliban is one led by Sirajuddin Haqqani who is a deputy in the Taliban but also a member of al Qaeda.
There are some who believe that the agreement is nothing more than a face-saving way for the Trump Administration to get out of a war that was incredibly expensive and not very effective. The Taliban controls most of Afghanistan other than the immediate vicinity of the capital city, Kabul. And some conservatives in the US believe that the Taliban will not honor the agreement in much the same way that North Vietnam used the peace agreement with the US in 1973 as a prelude to its invasion of South Vietnam in 1975. Additionally, many do not believe that the agreement provides sufficient guarantees for the rights of women and girls in the country and that the Taliban will revert back to its oppression of women prior to 2001.
Indeed, the total spending on the wars associated with the “war on terror” since 2001 as estimated by researchers at Brown University is considerable: “The United States has appropriated and is obligated to spend an estimated $5.9 trillion (in current dollars) on the war on terror through Fiscal Year 2019, including direct war and war-related spending and obligations for future spending on post 9/11 war veterans”.
There is no evidence that these efforts have materially changed the security situation of the US in any meaningful way. Even if the current agreement with the Taliban is fundamentally flawed, it is accurate to say that the policy of seeking a peace through military action was a fool’s errand.
NATO has offered words of support to Turkey in its current standoff with Russia over Idlib, Syria. But the idea of a “no-fly” zone suggested by some members of the US Congress was not part of the words of solidarity. NATO is obliged to come to the defense of its members, but only if their national territory is attacked. Since the Russian air strike that killed Turkish soldiers occurred on Syrian territory, NATO does not have to act under Article 5 of its charter:
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
NATO is extremely reluctant to be drawn into the dispute between Turkey and Russia for both strategic and political reasons. Russia likely does not approve of Syrian President Assad’s decision to retake all the territory in Idlib, but it has nonetheless stood by its ally. According to The Economist: “Russia denied responsibility, but suggested that Turkey may have invited the attack by placing its troops alongside Syrian rebels and not informing Russia of their location. Just hours after the strike Russia sent two warships armed with cruise missiles to the eastern Mediterranean. The warships sailed through the Bosphorus, which bisects Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city.” The Russian stance complicates NATO’s decision-making with respect to defending Turkey. Time magazine points out:
“The allies are extremely reluctant to be drawn into a conflict of Turkey’s making, and particularly because President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used up a lot of good will by testing his fellow NATO members’ patience for quite a while.
“The Syria offensive comes on top of tensions over Turkey’s purchase of Russian-made S400 missiles, which threaten NATO security and the F-35 stealth jet. Erdogan also purged thousands of Turkish military officers following the failed coup in Turkey in 2016 and some have sought, and been granted, asylum in Europe.
“But despite high political-military tensions, Turkey is too important to eject from the 29-member alliance.
“Turkey is of great strategic importance to NATO. The large, mainly Muslim country straddles the Bosporus Strait, making it a vital bridge between Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. It’s also the only waterway in and out of the Black Sea, where Russia’s naval fleet is based.
“NATO allies also rely on the Incirlik air base in southeastern Turkey as a staging point for access to the Middle East. The alliance runs aerial surveillance operations from Incirlik and the United States has nuclear weapons stationed there.”
Turkish President Erdogan may well be rethinking his relationship with NATO, but he has certainly squandered that source of support in the immediate crisis. How President Erdogan will respond to the Russian challenge will determine a lot:
“The irony of Erdogan spending so much time and effort to distance himself from NATO and the EU and now clamoring for their help will not be lost on the Russians. Still the Kremlin’s risky strategy could backfire if Erdogan decides to press on with a ground offensive against Assad’s army and deploys Turkey’s air force. In the “who blinks first” game, it is not clear who will carry the day.
“This conflict may still end to Putin’s satisfaction — if he acts quickly enough on the ground in Syria to preempt any Turkish action. Massive bombardment of Idlib would achieve it; civilian casualties were never of concern to Putin and his generals. Or perhaps some kind of shaky compromise was cobbled together after he spoke with Erdogan on the phone Friday. But in the long term Putin may have created new problems for himself.
“Erdogan will never forget his humiliation by Russia. It weakened him domestically and in the eyes of NATO allies. He may well start repairing relations with the alliance. He will not be making peace with the Assad regime, which means that Putin’s dream of leaving Syria behind may not come true.”
Erdogan will pressure Europe to support him through the threat of allowing thousands of refugees to migrant into Europe, a possibility that threatens greater political instability on the continent. But there is little that Europe can or is willing to do to rile Russia. And it is unlikely that President Trump wishes to cross Russian President Putin. So the most likely outcome is continued tension in Syria and the suffering of the civilian population. The world has decided not to come to their aid.
Barry Ritholtz maintains a blog named “The Big Picture” and the blog reflects his iconoclastic view of the market economy–he is a strong supporter of the market, yet regularly raises questions about how well the market addresses real economic problems faced by the majority of citizens. His most recent post reinforces the information in yesterday’s blog post. Ritholtz looks at the accumulation of wealth since the Great Financial Recession (GFC) of 2008-09 and the distribution of wealth has become increasingly concentrated: “Today, the Top 1% is wealthier than all of the Middle Class. This is a relatively new, post GFC phenomena. It is driven primarily by the rise of asset prices: Stocks, Bonds, Real Estate and Business holdings.This is why the top 20% has recovered to pre-crisis income but the rest economic strata has not.” Ritholtz argues that this concentration of wealth is primarily responsible for the political attractiveness of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
“The opportunity for economic mobility has shrunk.
“Call this what you will: A plutocracy, an oligopoly, a technocracy, a corporatocracy, a whatever — the massive Post-War middle class expansion that created so much wealth for ordinary families has morphed, starting around 1980, into something else entirely. Today, it has changed into low-tax economy that rewards capital and asset holders, and throws off much less towards the working class than it did last century.
“Hence, the rise of Donald and Bernie. They both exhibit a more similar appeal to their base then you might imagine.”
The analysis begs the political question of which candidate offers an effective response to this maldistribution of wealth. For Ritholtz, the concentration of wealth is something that the market itself could solve: “We have a robust economy yet still have lots of people not participating. We have an unemployment rate at 60-year lows, yet enormous sections of the labor pool are under-employed. Low inflation in the things we want, but higher inflation in the things people need. We simultaneously have great wealth and economic insecurity. That enormous wealth has flowed to mostly to Capital and asset holders, and not to workers or Labor.”
Russian airstrikes near Idlib, Syria, have reportedly killed 29 Turkish soldiers. The strike represents a dramatic escalation of the tension between Turkey and Russia, one which will be difficult for Turkish President Erdogan to ignore. The BBC reports:
“This is a new and dangerous escalation in an increasingly direct conflict between Turkish and Syrian government forces in Idlib. Both sides have suffered losses over the past few weeks. But the latest Turkish casualties come at a precarious moment.
“President Erdogan has threatened to mount a major military operation against President Assad’s forces if they don’t pull back from frontline positions near Turkish troops in Idlib within the next two days.
“For now there’s no sign of that happening. Turkey has already been stepping up its military support for the rebel fighters it backs as they mount a counter offensive to try to win back key towns they’ve recently lost.
“Behind this conflict looms the potential of an even bigger confrontation. Turkey and Russia have backed different sides in Syria, but have come together to broker battlefield deals in the past few years.
“That pragmatic rapprochement is now in doubt. Russian airpower has provided vital support for Syrian forces – if it is now being directed at Turkish military positions, that creates a huge new element of risk.”
There are urgent diplomatic efforts to avoid further escalation, but Turkey and Russia have been unable to reach any solutions since an abortive cease-fire was declared by both sides in 2018. The fighting around Idlib has displaced almost a million civilians and the humanitarian crisis is extreme. The world, however, seems to be indifferent to the suffering of so many.
The Manhattan Institute has published a fascinating report entitled “The Cost-of-Thriving Index: Reevaluating the Prosperity of the American Family”. The report is an attempt to determine how cost of living metrics actually capture the well-being of US families. We all well aware of the effects of inflation on income, but we lack the ability to translate that numeric index into something which actually tells us how well off the family living on that income may be. The report points out the inadequacy of simple numeric indices:
“It sounds like an absurd riddle, or perhaps a kindergarten-level math problem: the median male full-time worker earned $314 per week in 1979, while his counterpart at the median in 2018 earned $1,026;[3] who was better off?…
“The most commonly used index, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), estimates that inflation has reduced a dollar’s value by 71% from 1979 to 2018. Put another way, one 2018 dollar is worth 29 1979 cents. A different index preferred by the Federal Reserve and many economists, the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCE), published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), estimates that a dollar’s value has declined by 66%; so one 2018 dollar is worth 34 1979 cents.
“Using CPI, our 2018 worker’s $1,026 in 2018 earnings is worth $297 in 1979 dollars—or 6% less than the $314 in 1979 dollars earned by the 1979 worker. Using PCE, the 2018 earnings is worth $353 in 1979 dollars—a 13% gain.
“….the question is how well the typical male worker can provide for a family.
“This report shows that his ability to do so has degraded dramatically. A generation ago, he could be confident in his ability to provide for his family not only the basics of food, clothing, and shelter but also the middle-class essentials of a comfortable house, a car, health care, and education. Now he cannot. Public programs may provide those things for him, a second earner may work as well, his family may do without, although his television may be larger than ever. The implications of each is surely worth pondering. But the fact that he can no longer provide middle-class security to a family is an unavoidable economic reality of the modern era.”
Al Jazeera has published a very comprehensive analysis of the many Middle East Peace Plans that have been proposed since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. It then compares those plans with US President Trump’s most recent peace plan. The newspaper has put an extraordinary amount of information on the site and it is a remarkably useful summary of the different proposals. There is little question that Al Jazeera is sympathetic to the Palestinian position, but the presentation is fairly free of ideology. For students of the Middle East this site is a useful place to begin one’s research.
US President Trump visited India in a whirlwind trip, capped off by a very large rally of over 100,000 people. While the meetings between Trump and Indian Prime Minister Modi were going on, there were also large protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which grants Indian citizenship to people being persecuted for religious reasons in three neighboring countries–except for persecuted Muslims. These protests have been going on for some time, but they were quite violent while Mr. Trump was visiting, with ten killed and 150 injured. According to Reuters:
“The CAA has sparked accusations that Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party are undermining India’s secular traditions. The BJP denies any bias against India’s more than 180 million minority Muslims but objectors have staging protests and camping out in parts of New Delhi for two months.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi discussed a large arms deal worth about $3 billion that included Apache and Romeo MH-60 helicopters. There was no agreement, however, on a proposed trade deal. Trade has been a sore spot between the two states since 2018 when the US slapped tariffs on some Indian exports. Mr. Trump is popular in India with approval ratings around 50%. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi identify themselves as nationalists. Unfortunately, Mr. Trump did not use the occasion to criticize the discriminatory aspects of the CAA:
‘Trump, asked several times about Modi’s support for the new law, praised the Indian leader.
“’He wants people to have religious freedom,’ Trump insisted. ‘They have really worked hard on religious freedom.’
‘Trump appeared to back Modi’s concern that the majority-Hindu country is being overrun by Muslims.
“’He told me, I guess they have 200 plus, 200 million Muslims in India, and a fairly short while ago, they had 14 million,’ Trump said.
“India had about 35 million Muslims in 1951, according to the first census after independence, or about 9.8% of the population. The 201 million Muslims today are 14.2% of the population.
“Later, Trump was asked again about the citizenship law. ‘I don’t want to discuss that, and hopefully they’re going to make the right decision for the people,’ he said.”
The lack of criticism is not surprising given Mr. Trump’s antipathy toward Muslims.
World Politics News 