The United Kingdom is not the only state facing a secessionist movement (Scotland): Many in Catalonia are demanding their independence from the Spanish state. Catalonia was an independent state until 11 September 1714 when Spain conquered it and integrated its territory into the Spanish state. The Catalonians believe that they have a sufficient economic base for independence and a culture that is truly different from Spanish culture. They are demanding a referendum in November, but the Spanish government is trying to block that option.
The states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and the United States have signed what is known as the Jeddah Communique. The communique is a mutual pledge to staunch the flow of funds and foreign fighters to the Islamic State. Most interestingly, the communique also contains the following clause: “as appropriate, joining in the many aspects of a coordinated military campaign against ISIL.” The cooperation is an initial step toward implementing the policy of containing the Islamic State, but the additional steps are highly problematic.
Uri Friedman has a very thought-provoking piece in The Atlantic on President Obama and the problem of a perpetual war. I think that it is safe to say that the US is finding itself in a foreign policy situation that defies simple explanation or solutions. Friedman refers to Obama’s speech last night as “bewildering” and, as I have read the speech several times over, I agree with the characterization.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has announced that many Russian troops have left Ukrainian territory, raising hopes that the current cease fire may yet deepen and take hold. Despite violations of the cease fire, Poroshenko has announced plans to give the eastern parts of Ukraine far greater autonomy, although not the independence that many of the rebel separatists have demanded. The pullback comes as the EU announced a waiting period before implementing new sanctions on Russia, so we will have to see whether or not the withdrawal can be fully verified. But if true, it will be hard to dismiss the possibility that the threat of sanctions actually achieve its objectives.
A new poll suggests that 71% of the American people support air strikes against the Islamic State, a dramatic increase from similar polls in the last few months. The widely publicized beheadings conducted by the Islamic State no doubt contributed to the change in sentiment, but it is hard to articulate a dramatic change in the possible threats posed by the Islamic State to the US homeland. The discrepancy between real and imagined threats in this case is quite striking. The change also reflects an easier path for US President Obama, although the obstacles to effective military actions against the Islamic State remain.
Philippine President Benigno Aquino has asked the Congress to approve a law that would extend create a more autonomous province for the Muslims in the southern part of the country. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) has waged a long struggle against the central authority of the Philippines for many years, and the death toll of the war is likely more than 120,000. The new agreement will replace a previous experiment in greater autonomy that proved unsatisfactory to both sides, so it is difficult to be optimistic about the new agreement.
US President Obama is going to speak on television on Wednesday evening (9 pm) to outline his strategy on dealing with the threat posed by the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria. The speech will be a critically important one as intervening in yet another Middle East conflict is clearly not consistent with his own personal inclination nor with the current mood of the American people. We should all listen carefully to the speech since the threat of terrorism has in the past been used to justify interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq which did not necessarily advance US foreign policy objectives. How he characterizes the threat to the US is going to be the point on which we all focus. The pressure Obama is getting from conservatives in the US–including members of the George W. Bush Administration–is intense.
Fawaz A Gerges is a scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science who has followed the growth of the Islamic State. He has written a piece for the BBC that asks the question, “why is the Islamic State so violent?” Gerges traces the roots of the movement and positions the Islamic State in a line of opposition movements within the Muslim world that makes the organization more comprehensible. His overview is worth reading. Michael Ignatieff offers a comparative view of the Islamic State in the context of the array of Muslim opposition groups in Spiegel which gives the organization a valuable baseline for analysis.
Some Socialist Parliamentarians in France are threatening to abstain in a vote of no-confidence in President Hollande. It’s unclear how many Ministers may abstain from the vote, but the Socialists currently have only a one vote majority in Parliament. If the no-confidence vote does pass, then the French government may collapse next week, and it’s anyone’s guess how a new government will be constituted. The National Front, a right-wing Party under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, has been making steady inroads into the French electorate, but probably not enough to secure a majority. The last thing France needs right now is a broken government. With economic growth slowing dramatically, the government needs to be viewed as strong and capable. Additionally, the Scottish referendum is due to be held on 18 September, two days after the no-confidence vote in France. So Europe as a whole may be severely jolted next week.
Polls indicate that Scottish nation may vote to secede from the state of the United Kingdom, and economic markets with exposure to Scottish investments dropped precipitously on the news. Investors do not believe that Scotland can survive as an independent state, and pulled their money out those investments. The tension between the political drive for independence and sovereignty and the economic drive for globalized markets is very obvious in this situation. As the news settles in on Scottish voters, we shall have to see whether the economic imperative overrides the political sentiment.
The World Health Organization is warning that Liberia may experience a dramatic increase in the number of Ebola virus cases. Liberia already accounts for over half of all the deaths from the virus in the West African outbreak, and the medical infrastructure is already almost completely broken to deal with the crisis. I have a personal, as well as humanitarian, interest in this horrible situation: one of my college roommates serves with Doctors without Borders and is currently in Monrovia, Liberia helping to set up hospital facilities for those infected with the virus.
Monsoonal rains have devastated areas of Kashmir, an area in South Asia claimed by both India and Pakistan and a source of incredible tension between the two states since the time of partition in 1947. Despite recent fighting in the province, both India and Pakistan have decided to work together to alleviate the misery caused by the intense flooding. One should not expect too much from this limited cooperation, but any attempt at conciliation is to be welcomed.
A book published in 1972 predicted that humanity would face a collapse sometime in the 21st Century due to population growth, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. The book, The Limits to Growth, was the first to harness the new power of computers to model human processes and their interaction with the environment. At the time it was dismissed as a scare-mongering, Malthusian polemic. But the book changed the way we all thought about anthropomorphic change. Unfortunately, the predictions of the book seem to be tracking reality.
The Nigerian army has been unable to enter the capital city of one of the nation’s states because it is tightly held by the Islamic group, Boko Haram (“Western Education is a Sin”). The group has been active in the northern, mostly Muslim, part of Nigeria, and its objective is to establish an Islamic State independent of the mostly Christian southern part of the country. The central government has been unable to maintain control over the area, and Boko Haram has been active consolidating its control, not only through military activities, but also by taking on economic and social actions to help the poverty-stricken area.
There are rumors in the press that the EU will announce very tough new sanctions–including ones against the oil and gas industry on which Europe is highly dependent–against Russia in response to its actions in Ukraine. One interesting dynamic of the sanctions debate is the relative quiescence of China. By all rights, China should be very concerned about outsiders supporting separatists given the dissent within the Uighur and Tibetan populations–it clearly does not wish their own groups to be supported by outsiders. On the other hand, China will be the beneficiary of these sanctions: they will weaken both Europe and Russia, and Russia will turn to China for aid, giving China the advantage of both Europe and Russia.
Al-Shabab in Somalia confirmed that Ahmed Abdi Godane was indeed killed in an American operation, but also announced that its new leader would be Ahmad Umar. Further, the radical group confirmed that it remained allied with al-Qaeda and would not ally itself with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The Kenyan President, Uhuru Kenyatta, expressed satisfaction that Godane, the man who had planned a terrorist attack in Kenya last year, had been killed. It is highly likely, that al-Shabab will attempt another attack as soon as possible to prove that it has not been weakened by the loss of its leader.
Sierra Leone has imposed a four-day lockdown of residents in an attempt to control the spread of the Ebola virus. The lockdown will begin on 18 September and residents will not be allowed to leave their homes. About a quarter of the deaths recorded this far have occurred in Sierra Leone, and the lockdown is a last-ditch attempt to prevent further spread of the virus. Unfortunately, the lockdown is unlikely to succeed since most new cases will probably be concealed from the authorities.
Since the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, there has been a dramatic spike in anti-Semitic incidents in Europe. European public tend to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian position than is the case in the US. But the rise in anti-Semitic acts unfortunately resonates with a terrible history in Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is taking a very strong position to oppose the trend.
Chrystia Freeland is a very perceptive analyst, and she has written an op-ed piece on Ukraine that merits a close analysis. As a cease-fire is announced, we are still uncertain of its terms and many doubt that it will last. But the 5 month-old conflict has been beset by confusion, misleading statements, and outright falsifications. In world politics, we should assume that most diplomatic statements should be only loosely interpreted and that the words are generally a cover-up for other activities. It is always best to pay closer attention to actions rather than the rhetoric.
At the close of the NATO summit in Wales, US President Obama announced the creation of a “core coalition” of ten countries who are prepared to fight the Islamic State, initially in Iraq. The countries in that coalition include the US, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark, but only one of the ten (Turkey) is a Muslim country. The coalition is not prepared yet to fight the IS in Syria since that would be implicit support for the Assad regime which the coalition countries oppose. Additionally, the coalition did not announce any plans to work with Iran which also opposes the Islamic State. The traditional alliances in the Middle East are slowly changing very dramatically.
A few weeks ago, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff seemed assured of re-election. But when one of her opponents died in a plane crash, he was replaced by Marina Silva who is a noted environmental activist in Brazil. Since that time Silva has steadily climbed in the polls, largely on a platform of anti-corruption and transparency. Silva is hard to categorize: she is an activist who has emphasized the free market in an attempt to allay the fears of corporations in Brazil. The election will be held in October, and right now the race is very tight.
I often read essays that are intelligent but whose conclusions are hard to accept. Such is the case with the essay by Thomas Mahnken in Foreign Policy (for my Mount Holyoke students, you will have to read this on a College computer–the College has a subscription to the Journal). His use of von Clausewitz in his analysis rings true, but he forgets the most important proposition articulated by the noted military strategist: was is nothing more than politics carried out by other means. Thus, when Mahnken argues at the end that the US should “go to war” with the Islamic State, I am uncertain what the political objective would be: would it be some sort of settlement, or would it be the extermination of all IS adherents? The former is difficult to conceive; the latter is slaughter, not war.
People in Scotland will be voting on whether Scotland should break away from the United Kingdom and become an independent state on 18 September. The vote is currently too close too call, and there are reasons to be concerned about the move. Regardless of the consequences, however, the case study is intriguing. Secessionist movements are occurring all over the world right now (the Kurds, Russian speaking people in Ukraine, the Uighurs in China). By and large, these movements have a degree of violence. The Scottish case is interesting because the possible secession is proceeding in a perfectly peaceful manner. The division between the nation and the state is rarely accomplished in such a leisurely fashion.
The slowing European economy has forced the European Central Bank to take the unprecedented step of purchasing assets with money not necessarily backed up by tax revenues. The process is called Quantitative Easing and it is the official policy of the US, Japan, and the Bank of England. It is a risky policy because it contains the seeds of inflation (although under current conditions, those seeds will likely fall on barren soil). But inthe case of Europe, the policy may in fact break European Union law since it prohibits the European central Bank from lending directly to banks (it is supposed to lend only to sovereign governments). We’ll see whether Germany, which has a rabid fear of inflation given the history German hyperinflation in 1923, decides to contest the policy.
The rebel advances in Ukraine have been recently stemmed by forces loyal to Kyiv. But there is evidence that the separatists are once again regaining the intiative, thanks to support from Russia. What seems to be the most likely objective of the rebel advances is the city of Mariupol which would be an essential component of a land-bridge from Russia to Crimea. The city seems to be held primarily by forces loyal to Kyiv, but the majority of the population also speaks Russian. We should focus on the how quickly the separatists seem to be that that strategic city.
US President Obama’s speech in Estonia did not mince any words. It is rare for a statesperson to be so blunt. While he did not use the word “invasion” (which would have amounted to a declaration of war which is why the US is so reluctant to use the word), President Obama identified Russia as the source of the problems in Ukraine:
It was not the government in Kyiv that destabilized eastern Ukraine; it’s been the pro-Russian separatists who are encouraged by Russia, financed by Russia, trained by Russia, supplied by Russia and armed by Russia. And the Russian forces that have now moved into Ukraine are not on a humanitarian or peacekeeping mission. They are Russian combat forces with Russian weapons in Russian tanks. Now, these are the facts. They are provable. They’re not subject to dispute.
More importantly, President Obama rejected any possibility that the US would accept a decision imposed on Ukraine by force, and he identified the tactics of Russia as being unacceptable in the 21st century:
Let’s also be clear where we stand. Just as we refused to accept smaller European nations being dominated by bigger neighbors in the last century, we reject any talk of spheres of influence today. (Applause.) And just as we never accepted the occupation and illegal annexation of the Baltic nations, we will not accept Russia’s occupation and illegal annexation of Crimea or any part of Ukraine. (Applause.)
We now must wait for two things: President Putin’s response to Obama’s speech and the decision by NATO after the meeting on Thursday. The current thinking is that President Putin will back off slightly, but not give up any of the gains he has made in eastern Ukraine right now.
The US launched an attack on a suspected al-Shabab location, hoping to kill Ahmed Abdi Godane. Godane has been implicated in a devastating attack on a shopping mall in Kenya, an attack that was termed “retaliation” for Kenyan participation in an African Union operation that forced the terrorist group out of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Al-Shabab is an offshoot of al-Qaeda, and part of a growing number of similar groups that have emerged since the 1990s. Godane is a very high-ranking person in the organization, and his death would be a serious blow to the group. There has been, however, no confirmation that Godane was killed. The US is centrally involved in a number of ongoing anti-terrorist operations simultaneously, a very heavy intelligence and logistical burden.
NATO is going to meet this Thursday and the Islamic State and Ukraine are going to be the priority items for discussion. NATO recently announced that it was reviewing plans to create a high-readiness rapid reaction force to counter the Russian threat in Ukraine, as well as possible future threats to the Baltic states and Poland. In response, Russia announced that it would review its military plans to counter such a force. There is, however, a split within NATO about which threat is more urgent. The British and the Americans wish to focus on the Islamic State. The other members of NATO (the continental powers) are more concerned with Russian moves in Ukraine. It is likely to be a highly contentious meeting (although it is doubtful that NATO will air its dirty laundry in public).
The The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted a survey of Palestinians and found that Hamas is overwhelmingly popular in both the Gaza and the West Bank and would likely win any election pitted against its rival, Fatah which is currently led by Mahmoud Abbas. The poll found that the Palestinians prefer the Hamas strategy of armed struggle over Fatah’s strategy of negotiations. The poll reflects Palestinian perceptions of the outcome of the recent Gaza conflict, and it signals a sharp setback for the US preference for a negotiated peace.
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