Fair Observer’s Editor-in-Chief Atul Singh discusses John Bruton’s observation that Europe faces a tough winter. Bruton was prime minister and finance minister of Ireland. He was also the EU ambassador to the US.

Singh agrees with Bruton about his prognostication. Rising energy and, in particular, gas prices has led to record postwar inflation. Both households and industry are in trouble. Germany and Italy, the two European manufacturing strongholds, are suffering most.

Germany might face a winter of discontent. Italy has already elected Giorgia Meloni, a fiery populist politician, as its first woman prime minister. Meloni and her counterparts in Greece, Spain and Portugal face a grim challenge. Their economies are stagnant with high debts, aging populations and few jobs. High inflation is leading to higher interest rates. This makes debt more expensive and these southern economies might need another bailout.

So far, Germany has largely bailed out Southern Europe. That might be difficult given the state of the German economy. The economic trouble triggered by the Russia-Ukraine War will deepen divisions in Europe. The EU and its Euro project will face unprecedented strains in the pivotal winter ahead.

The post Why Europe Faces a Tough Winter | FO° Explainers appeared first on Fair Observer.

Last month, Elon Musk, a high-profile entrepreneur, offered, over Twitter of course, his own peace plan for the Russia-Ukraine War. His suggestions included UN-monitored elections in the annexed regions of Ukraine in which people could decide to join either Ukraine or Russia. He also suggested that Ukraine “remain neutral.” Simply put, this means that Ukraine must not join NATO. The backlash on online and offline media was swift and biting, and sometimes even profane.

Danielle Smith, Conservative premier of the province of Alberta in Canada, mused in April on a talk show, that given Ukraine’s proximity to Russia, why are we “surprised if Russia is upset because Ukraine has nuclear weapons and is aligned with the United States?” and therefore proposed that “the only answer for Ukraine is neutrality”. She faced severe condemnation for the statements, leading her to recently apologize for her “ill-informed comments”.

During the summer, US Democratic Congressperson Pramila Jayapal, together 30 progressive members of the Democratic party, wrote a letter to Biden urging him to engage in “direct talks with Russia” in order to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. When that letter became public last week, she hastily retracted it and is now facing anger from her own party.

Granted, one is an eccentric businessperson and the others are politicians. But upon calmer and wider reflection, their sentiments may not be totally bizarre, unacceptable or immoral. Firstly, Ukraine itself offered in March to accept neutral country status, dependent on certain security assurances from the West. And secondly, over the course of the past few months, several seasoned experts in foreign affairs have suggested similar compromises to end the war and calm relations with Russia.

Classifying the styles of foreign policy

The foreign policy of many nations  can be plotted somewhere along a continuum from that ranges from isolationism at one extreme to restraint and on to primacy (hegemony) at the other extreme. Isolationism  simplistically involves focusing exclusively on issues within one’s own country. Restraint entails being engaged with the outside world but limiting one’s geographic sphere of involvement and active engagement. Restrainers are seen as being more pragmatic and ready to consider compromises. Primacy means intervening in the situation of other countries, wherever they may be, and sometimes even preemptively. Primacists are seen as being idealists, viewing the world in black and white, and ready to fight for a cause till absolute victory. Today a significant number of foreign policy experts, cognizant of recent historical trends  and  aware of the importance of peace to enable cooperation on critical global issues, seem to be veering towards restraint.

Even before the Russia-Ukraine War began, with Russian troops  massing at the border, Stephen Van Evera, professor of Political Science at MIT, published a detailed paper titled To Prevent War and Secure Ukraine, Make Ukraine Neutral. In it he highlighted a key message: “Ukraine is a top priority for Russia, but it is not for the US “. 

Ukraine Fatigue? Your Urgent Duty: Read These Books

READ MORE

In May, senior statesman and master strategist Henry Kissinger advised Ukraine to give up some of its territory in order to broker a peace with Russia. This, from a man who had fled Nazi Germany as a Jewish refugee, became US secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, was known as a practitioner of Realpolitik, and played the key role in opening channels of communications between the US and both Russia and China.

Emma Ashford, Senior Fellow in the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center, urges the West to adopt a policy of restraint in the Russia-Ukraine War. That means supporting Ukraine while at the same time avoiding escalation, and being open to engaging in conversations about conditions for resolving the conflict. How could or should this war end? What might  an end to the war look like? Peering into the future, she hopes that “we will reach a point where both sides have, to some extent rethought their war aims and lowered those aims enough that there might be a settlement there”.

Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ( ), also suggests restraint. He points out that Biden’s positioning of the Russia-Ukraine War as a combat between the forces of autocracy and democracy has two serious weaknesses. The first is that it puts on display the hypocrisy of the US and the West in general, who have no qualms about being on friendly terms with Saudi Arabia, an intensely autocratic nation with serious human rights issues, including the gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.  The second is that the democracy vs. autocracy dichotomy is not clearly seen as good vs bad in many parts of the world, which helps to explain why the current US-led coalition against Russia does not include half the world. In addition, many people of color see it as a ‘white people’s war’. Countries that have decided to remain neutral include China, India, Indonesia, much of Latin America and Africa, and even Turkey.

Reunited by Art and Against the War in Ukraine

READ MORE

Interestingly, the West’s coalition does not include Israel, which has remained neutral because it has good relations with Russia and particularly with Putin. Israel has side-stepped Ukraine’s request for air defense systems and has limited its involvement to humanitarian aid.

A just war is always in the mind of the believer

Wars can rarely be deemed fair. Outcomes do not always favor “the good guys” and often, it can be difficult to determine who are the good guys. Usually both sides feel they are fighting a just war. But justice is seldom served. The aggressors are not always roundly defeated in the end. That only happens in Hollywood movies. Nobody is saying that Putin was right to invade Ukraine; in fact, even those who have accused the West of provoking the war have unanimously condemned Russia’s invasion. Sovereignty is something all nations hold dear. The differences lie now in their appreciation of how to best resolve the issue.

Zelensky sounds heroic when says he’ll fight to the last Ukrainian. But that cannot be entirely his decision when he is demanding other nations’ tax dollars and their unlimited commitment to the cause. In the coming year, theInternational Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that Ukraine will need external financing to the tune of $3-5 billion a month. 

The money and effort could instead be spent on each country’s urgent internal issues, notably around the question of healthcare in countries such as Canada, the UK and the US. Alternatively, the money and attention could be spent on critical global issues, such as combating the rising prices of food and fuel, the looming recession, future pandemics, and of course climate change. 

Chorus for Peace in Ukraine Sings Louder

READ MORE

This war has already created a food crisis throughout the world. While the privileged among us  will have to merely deal with rising food prices, others will face starvation. Money could be spent helping to feed people in need. In the midst of already rising fuel prices, OPEC Plus – which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia – decided to reduce their oil production. Europe in particular faces a cold winter. Money could be spent on developing alternative sources of energy, with the aim of liberating these nations from the grip of “petro-dictators.”. The World Bank warns of a global recession in 2023, along with “a string of financial crises in emerging markets and developing economies” Money could be spent on supportive measures for threatened economies. Finally,with the world distracted and divided by this war, it is difficult to focus and collaborate on future existential fights against new pandemics and climate change, issues that will need all our resources.

The morality of war and the complexity of history

Negotiation is always required to end a war. However, it becomes more difficult when one side believes it occupies the moral high ground and when the other side can be simplistically characterized as ‘evil’. When the US and its allies invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, did anyone place sanctions on the invaders? Whoever starts a war always deems the war just, believing that it is being conducted for valid reasons. The US made such arguments when it invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia is now trying to do the same thing with Ukraine. 

The major difference is that the US crossed an ocean and a continent to start a war, while Russia is fighting a neighbor. The US sees its sphere of influence as far-reaching and unlimited, while Russia is attempting to gain a bit of control over its own neighborhood. NATO expansion up to Russia’s doorstep is a key factor in Putin’s decision to go to war in Ukraine. As Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, explains; “Putin bears primary responsibility for this latest development, but NATO’s arrogant, tone-deaf policy toward Russia over the past quarter-century deserves a large share as well.” 

Making Sense of Vladimir Putin’s Long Game

READ MORE

Knowledge of history can help by putting events into perspective. Russia is neither the first nor the only country that has played the role of invader. In 1961, the US invaded Cuba in an attempt to overthrow the communist government of Fidel Castro The attempt failed after  three days but the US continues its embargo and imposes draconian sanctions against the small island country to this day. More recently, the US invaded Iraq on the spurious pretext of possessing weapons of mass destruction. That was shortly after invading Afghanistan in a war against terrorism. 2,456 US military personnel were killed, and some 176,000 to 360,000 Afghanis are estimated to have died over the first 13 years of the 20-year presence of NATO troops.

Before the start of the Russia-Ukraine War, the renowned Canadian historian, and currently a professor at Oxford University, Margaret McMillan said this: “History can help us to understand others … The more you know about them, the more success you’re likely to have in avoiding things that they may feel angry about or dealing with, the more finding ways of negotiating … I think we can see Putin as a typical authoritarian leader, but his particular goals and his particular animosities and his particular wishes for Russia are shaped by Russian history and by his own experience of Russian history.” 

In the interest of arriving at a quick resolution, minimizing human suffering and extensive damage to Ukrainian infrastructure, to say nothing of  the hopes of a peaceful future for our children, we cannot afford to be continuously swayed by the simplistic, subjective, and emotional rhetoric of conventional media. Even less so by social media. We cannot afford to be drawn into unthinking, jingoistic fervor. We’re happy to get teary-eyed when we hear John Lennon sing “Give Peace a Chance”, but we refuse to engage with the practical implications of his lyrics. We idealistically and lazily tend to see countries and people – especially those in conflict – in binary terms: as good or bad, right or wrong. But reality is more nuanced, more complicated, and more difficult to deal with.

New Congressional Amendment Benefits War Profiteers, Risks World War III

READ MORE

We need to educate ourselves on history. We cannot see incidents as isolated, but as part of an ongoing story. And we need to develop a more mature, pragmatic and broader perspective about possible solutions. This would serve us well, not only in this war with Russia, but in a long list of possible future conflicts. There are plenty to choose from, including ones that involve Haiti, Ethiopia, Iran, Afghanistan, the Koreas, and most threateningly, China.

The disapproving reaction to the comments of Danielle Smith in Canada and to Elon Musk’s and Pramila Jayapal’s in the US, does not reflect well on either nation. Both are supposed to be liberal democracies, where freedom of speech is respected and the voicing of different perspectives is encouraged. Suppressing differing perspectives limits our society’s capacity for problem-solving. Suppressing perspectives that point towards restraint and encourage negotiation will inevitably result in a protracted war in Ukraine, increasing tensions with Russia, likely future conflicts with China, and a poorer future for us all. As a civilization, we deserve better.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Restraint, an Intolerable Alternative to the Excitement of War? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Contrary to the view of a number of prominent realist academics and left-leaning journalists, supporting Ukraine militarily is not unwise. While the view that peace can be achieved through diplomacy and dialogue, rather than military aid, is a noble one, it is also disingenuous. What this loud minority fails to understand is that Russia has no interest in diplomacy or peace and will not stop destabilizing Ukraine and the wider region until it is forced into retreat.

This comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its ninth month. While numbers are difficult to verify, it is estimated that the war has left both Russia and Ukraine with over 100,000 troops dead or wounded. With Russia still attempting to advance further into Ukrainian territory and with Ukraine’s recent offensive to retake Kherson, there is no end in sight for this conflict.

From the beginning of the invasion, the US, the UK, the EU and Australia have provided Ukraine with humanitarian and military aid to protect its sovereignty and its people. The US has provided over $38 billion in military and humanitarian aid. Similarly, the UK and the EU have both provided around $4 billion.

What the Realists Do Not Realize

In the eyes of critics, such as the prominent realist academic John Mearsheimer, this assistance represents a dangerous escalation that will lead to the unnecessary deaths of Ukrainians. These critics instead argue that Ukraine should sue for peace and accept territorial loss to Russia.

But this criticism falls over for multiple reasons.

First and foremost, Russia has illegally invaded Ukraine, a sovereign state under international law. Since 1945, the world has moved on from territorial expansion through force of arms, where powerful states devour small, less powerful ones. Instead, the 20^th century saw the construction of international laws, treaties, and norms on how states should behave. Russia’s actions in Ukraine are a direct violation of these tenets. Therefore, the implementation of economic sanctions and providing aid to a state fighting for survival is not an act of escalation. It is to ensure that international rule of law is upheld and no longer undermined. 

Ukraine Fatigue? Your Urgent Duty: Read These Books

READ MORE

Second, Russia has clearly committed war crimes in Ukraine, a gross violation of international human rights law. Ukrainians have been killed by targeted missile strikes on civilian areas, including the total destruction of the port city of Mariupol, resulting in over 4,000 deaths according to the UN. 

Human Rights Watch has also documented war crimes committed by Russian forces in Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Kyiv as well as the now infamous massacre in Bucha where Russian troops carried out executions and extrajudicial killings of civilians. HelpingUkrainians protect their homes and families from such atrocities is to stand in solidarity against a despotic state. 

Third, critics of the West ignore one crucial factor: that Ukrainians widely support defending themselves, and their sovereignty. A recent poll has found that an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians, 89%, do not support a peace deal that involves losing territory to Russia. Further, 78% approve of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s response to the invasion. 

Peace Under Western Hegemony

Peace advocates have challenged the motives of the West in their support of the Ukrainian cause. The claim is that the West’s involvement has less to do with aiding Ukraine and more to do with maintaining its hegemony. 

This mirrors comments made by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who declared recently that the conflict is a ”proxy war“ between NATO and Russia. This argument is designed to remove any agency from Ukrainians to make their own decisions and it is demonstrably wrong, particularly when defending the country is so popular with Ukrainians.

Critics also ignore that Russia has no interest in peace. While there are demands that Ukraine cede  the Donbas and the south to Russia in a peace deal, it ignores that Russia has recently, and publicly, stated that it has ambitions greater than these two regions. This is obvious considering that Russia initially attempted to take Kyiv and topple the Ukrainian government. These calls are also offensive to Ukrainians who have spent the past six months defending their country from what is an illegal invasion.

Even if a deal is reached, history shows us it wouldn’t result in long-term stability for Ukraine. Russia has been destabilizing Ukraine for decades, including the illegal invasion and annexation of Crimea or by sending troops into the Donbas to support separatists. Critics fail to understand that Russia will not stop intervening in Ukrainian affairs because it does not tolerate the country’s desire to improve political and economic ties with the West.

Ukraine Is Inching Towards Victory

Most importantly, Ukraine is winning this war. Russia has failed to meet its initial objectives in occupying Kyiv and forcing regime change. It has pivoted strategically and publicly to focus on the Luhansk and Donetsk regions and the south of the country. It has also lost tens of thousands of men and countless numbers of vehicles and equipment. With economic sanctions targeting military technology, replacing this equipment is difficult. Ukrainian bravery and ingenuity aside, military aid from the West has undoubtedly played a large role in this success.

This support has culminated in the recent acquisition by Ukraine of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, which has enabled its military to strike successfully at Russian targets in the Donbas and the Crimea. On November 11th, Ukraine entered the city of Kherson, pushing Russian troops to the east.  Both Ukrainians and the West want peace. But this shouldn’t come at the expense of Ukraine’s dignity, territory, and sovereignty. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the war crimes it has committed, is a clear affront to international law. Therefore, supporting Ukraine in its defense is not just a fight to assist an innocent party against a larger aggressor, as worthwhile as that is. It is also a fight to protect  the international rule of law and human rights. That is a fight worth supporting. 

[Naveed Ahsan edited this article.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Ending War Means More, Not Less, Support for Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

As President Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping arrived on the resort island of Bali, Indonesia, for their November 14th “summit,” relations between their two countries were on a hair-raising downward spiral, with tensions over Taiwan nearing the boiling point. Diplomats hoped, at best, for a modest reduction in tensions, which, to the relief of many, did occur. No policy breakthroughs were expected, however, and none were achieved. In one vital area, though, there was at least a glimmer of hope: the planet’s two largest greenhouse-gas emitters agreed to resume their languishing negotiations on joint efforts to overcome the climate crisis.

These talks have been an on-again, off-again proposition since President Barack Obama initiated them before the Paris climate summit of December 2015, at which delegates were to vote on a landmark measure to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (the maximum amount scientists believe this planet can absorb without catastrophic consequences). The US-Chinese consultations continued after the adoption of the Paris climate accord, but were suspended in 2017 by that climate-change-denying president Donald Trump. They were relaunched by President Biden in 2021, only to be suspended again by an angry Chinese leadership in retaliation for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2nd visit to Taiwan, viewed in Beijing as a show of support for pro-independence forces on that island. But thanks to Biden’s intense lobbying in Bali, President Xi agreed to turn the interactive switch back on.

Behind that modest gesture there lies a far more momentous question: What if the two countries moved beyond simply talking and started working together to champion the radical lowering of global carbon emissions? What miracles might then be envisioned? To help find answers to that momentous question means revisiting the recent history of the US-Chinese climate collaboration.

The Promise of Collaboration

In November 2014, based on extensive diplomatic groundwork, Presidents Obama and Xi met in Beijing and signed a statement pledging joint action to ensure the success of the forthcoming Paris summit. “The United States of America and the People’s Republic of China have a critical role to play in combating global climate change,” they affirmed. “The seriousness of the challenge calls upon the two sides to work constructively together for the common good.”

Obama then ordered Secretary of State John Kerry to collaborate with Chinese officials in persuading other attendees at that summit — officially, the 21st Conference of the Parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP21 — to agree on a firm commitment to honor the 1.5-degree limit. That joint effort, many observers believe, was instrumental in persuading reluctant participants like India and Russia to sign the Paris climate agreement.

“With our historic joint announcement with China last year,” Obama declared at that summit’s concluding session, “we showed it was possible to bridge the old divides… that had stymied global progress for so long. That accomplishment encouraged dozens and dozens of other nations to set their own ambitious climate targets.”

Obama also pointed out that any significant global progress along that path was dependent on continued cooperation between the two countries. “No nation, not even one as powerful as ours, can solve this challenge alone.”

Trump and the Perils of Non-Cooperation

That era of cooperation didn’t last long. Donald Trump, an ardent fan of fossil fuels, made no secret of his aversion to the Paris climate accord. He signaled his intent to exit from the agreement soon after taking office. “It is time to put Youngstown, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; and Pittsburgh, PA, along with many, many other locations within our great country, before Paris, France,” he said ominously in 2017 when announcing his decision.

With the US absent from the scene, progress in implementing the Paris Agreement slowed to a crawl. Many countries that had been pressed by the US and China to agree to ambitious emissions-reduction schedules began to opt out of those commitments in sync with Trump’s America. China, too, the greatest greenhouse gas emitter of this moment and the leading user of that dirtiest of fossil fuels, coal, felt far less pressure to honor its commitment, even on a rapidly heating planet.

No one knows what would have happened had Trump not been elected and those US-China talks not been suspended, but in the absence of such collaboration, there was a steady rise in carbon emissions and temperatures across the planet. According to CO.2.Earth, emissions grew from 35.5 billion metric tons in 2016 to 36.4 billion tons in 2021, a 2.5% increase. Since such emissions are the leading contributor to the greenhouse-gas effect responsible for global warming, it should be no surprise that the past seven years have also proven the hottest on record, with much of the world experiencing record-breaking heat waves, forest fires, droughts, and crop failures. We can be fairly certain, moreover, that in the absence of renewed US-China climate cooperation, such disasters will become ever more frequent and severe.

On Again, Off Again

Overcoming this fearsome trend was one of Joe Biden’s principal campaign promises and, against strong Republican opposition, he has indeed endeavored to undo at least some of the damage wrought by Trump. It was symbolic indeed that he rejoined the Paris climate accord on his first day in office and ordered his cabinet to accelerate the government’s transition to clean energy. In August, he achieved a significant breakthrough when Congress approved the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which provides $369 billion in loans, grants, and tax credits for green-energy initiatives.

Biden also sought to reinvigorate Washington’s global-warming diplomacy and the stalled talks with China, naming John Kerry as his special envoy for climate action. Kerry, in turn, reestablished ties with his Chinese colleagues from his time as secretary of state. At last year’s COP26 gathering in Glasgow, Scotland, he persuaded them to join the US in approving the “Glasgow Declaration,” a commitment to step up efforts to mitigate climate change.

However, in so many ways, Joe Biden and his foreign policy team are still caught up in the Cold War era and his administration has generally taken a far more antagonistic approach to China than Obama. Not surprisingly, then, the progress Kerry achieved with his Chinese counterparts at Glasgow largely evaporated as tensions over Taiwan only grew more heated. Biden was, for instance, the first president in memory to claim — four times — that US military forces would defend that island in a crisis, were it to be attacked by China, essentially tossing aside Washington’s longstanding position of “strategic ambiguity” on the Taiwan question. In response, China’s leaders became ever more strident in claiming that the island belonged to them.

When Nancy Pelosi made that Taiwan visit in early August, the Chinese responded by firing ballistic missiles into the waters around the island and, in a fit of anger, terminated those bilateral climate-change talks. Now, thanks to Biden’s entreaties in Bali, the door seems again open for the two countries to collaborate on limiting global greenhouse gas emissions.  At a moment of ever more devastating evidence of planetary heating, from a megadrought in the US to “extreme heat” in China, the question is: What might any meaningful new collaborative effort involve?

Reasserting the Climate’s Centrality

In 2015, few of those in power doubted the overarching threat posed by climate change or the need to bring international diplomacy to bear to help overcome it. In Paris, Obama declared that “the growing threat of climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other.” What should give us hope, he continued, “is the fact that our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it.”

Since then, all too sadly, other challenges, including the growth of Cold War-style tensions with China, the Covid-19 pandemic, and Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, have come to “define the contours” of this century. In 2022, even as the results of the overheating of the planet become ever more obvious, few world leaders would contend that “it is within our power” to overcome the climate peril. So, the first (and perhaps most valuable) outcome of any renewed US-China climate cooperation might simply be to place climate change at the top of the world’s agenda again and provide evidence that the major powers, working together, can successfully tackle the issue.

Such an effort might, for instance, start with a Washington-Beijing “climate summit,” presided over by presidents Biden and Xi and attended by high-level delegations from around the world. American and Chinese scientists could offer the latest bad news on the likely future trajectory of global warming, while identifying real-world goals to significantly reduce fossil-fuel use. This might, in turn, lead to the formation of multilateral working groups, hosted by US and Chinese agencies and institutions, to meet regularly and implement the most promising strategies for halting the onrushing disaster.

Following the example set by Obama and Xi at COP21 in Paris, Biden and Xi would agree to play a pivotal role in the next Conference of the Parties, COP28, scheduled for December 2023 in the United Arab Emirates. Following the inconclusive outcome of COP27, recently convened at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, strong leadership will be required to ensure something significantly better at COP28. Among the goals those two leaders would need to pursue, the top priority should be the full implementation of the 2015 Paris accord with its commitment to a 1.5-degree maximum temperature increase, followed by a far greater effort by the wealthy nations to assist developing countries suffering from its effects.

There’s no way, however, that China and the US will be able to exert a significant international influence on climate efforts if both countries — the former the leading emitter of greenhouse gasses at this moment and the latter the historic leader — don’t take far greater initiatives to lower their carbon emissions and shift to renewable sources of energy. The Inflation Reduction Act will indeed allow the White House to advance many new initiatives in this direction, while China is moving more swiftly than any other country to install added supplies of wind and solar energy. Nevertheless, both countries continue to rely on fossil fuels for a substantial share of their energy — China, for instance, remains the greatest user of coal, burning more of it than the rest of the world combined — and so both will need to agree on even more aggressive moves to reduce their carbon emissions if they hope to persuade other nations to do the same.

The Sino-American Fund for Clean Energy Transitions

In a better world, next on my list of possible outcomes from a reinvigorated US-Chinese relationship would be joint efforts to help finance the global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Although the cost of deploying renewables, especially wind and solar energy, has fallen dramatically in recent years, it remains substantial even for wealthy countries. For many developing nations, it remains an unaffordable option. This emerged as a major issue at COP27 in Egypt, where representatives from the Global South complained that the wealthy countries largely responsible for the overheating of the planet weren’t doing faintly enough (or, in many cases, anything), despite prior promises, to help them shoulder the costs of the increasingly devastating effects of climate change and the future greening of their countries.

Many of these complaints revolved around the Green Climate Fund, established at COP16 in Cancún. The developed countries agreed to provide $100 billion annually to that fund by 2020 to help developing nations bear the costs of transitioning to renewable energy. Although that amount is now widely viewed as wildly insufficient for such a transition — “all of the evidence suggests that we need trillions, not billions,” observed Baysa Naran, a manager at the research center Climate Policy Initiative — the Fund has never even come close to hitting that $100 billion target, leaving many in the Global South bitter as, with unprecedented flooding and staggering heat waves, climate change strikes home ever more horrifically there.

When the US and China were working on the climate together at COP26 in Glasgow, filling the Green Climate Fund appeared genuinely imaginable. In their Glasgow Declaration of November 2021, John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, affirmed that “both countries recognize the importance of the commitment made by developed countries to the goal of mobilizing jointly $100b per year by 2020 and annually through 2025 to address the needs of developing countries [and] stress the importance of meeting that goal as soon as possible.”

Sadly enough, all too little came of that affirmation in the months that followed, as US-China relations turned ever more antagonistic. Now, in the wake of Biden’s meeting with Xi and the resumption of their talks on climate change, it’s at least possible to imagine intensified bilateral efforts to advance that $100 billion objective — and even go far beyond it (though we can expect fierce resistance from the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives).

As my contribution to such thinking, let me suggest the formation of a Sino-American Fund for Green Energy Transitions — a grant- and loan-making institution jointly underwritten by the two countries with the primary purpose of financing renewable energy projects in the developing world. Decisions on such funding would be made by a board of directors, half from each country, with staff work performed by professionals drawn from around the world. The aim: to supplement the Green Climate Fund with additional hundreds of billions of dollars annually and so speed the global energy transition.

The Pathway to Peace and Survival

The leaders of the US and China both recognize that global warming poses an extraordinary threat to the survival of their nations and that colossal efforts will be needed in the coming years to minimize the climate peril, while preparing for its most severe effects. “The climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time,” the Biden administration’s October 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS) states. “Without immediate global action to reduce emissions, scientists tell us we will soon exceed 1.5 degrees of warming, locking in further extreme heat and weather, rising sea levels, and catastrophic biodiversity loss.”

Despite that all-too-on-target assessment, the NSS portrays competition from China as an even greater threat to US security — without citing any of the same sort of perilous outcomes — and proposes a massive mobilization of the nation’s economic, technological, and military resources to ensure American dominance of the Asia-Pacific region for decades to come. That strategy will, of course, require trillions of dollars in military expenditures, ensuring insufficient funding to tackle the climate crisis and exposing this country to an ever-increasing risk of war — possibly even a nuclear one — with China.

Given such dangers, perhaps the best outcome of renewed US-China climate cooperation, or green diplomacy, might be increasing trust between the leaders of those two countries, allowing for a reduction in tensions and military expenditures. Indeed, such an approach constitutes the only practical strategy for saving us from the catastrophic consequences of both a US-China conflict and unconstrained climate change.

[TomDispatch first published this article.]

The post Is (Green) Diplomacy the Only Way Forward Now? appeared first on Fair Observer.

An ethnically diverse Himalayan region of Kashmir has been a subject of a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan since the partition in 1947. Despite both countries claiming full control over the region’s entirety, Kashmir  divides into an Indian-administered part and a Pakistan-administered part.      

For the last three decades, Indian-controlled Kashmir has been characterized by unrest due to a separatist insurgency opposing Indian rule. Although India’s fragile relationship with Kashmir is not a new issue, tensions intensified when in 2019, India revoked Article 370, depriving the region of its special status and a certain degree of autonomy attributed to it. 

Article 370 allowed Kashmir to have its constitution and to make decisions regarding property ownership and permanent residency. As a result, Indians from other parts of the country could not purchase property and settle in Kashmir. Scrapping Kashmir’s special status meant that from that point onwards, the state would have to abide by the Indian Constitution.

What Lies Behind India’s Bold Bet on Kashmir?

READ MORE

Fearing state-wise unrest after announcing the decision, the Indian government increased the number of troops in the region and has since maintained a massive army presence in Kashmir. But is the high army presence in Kashmir necessary to maintain stability, or is it indicative of the Indian government violating people’s rights to demand absolute obedience?

Restricted freedoms 

Revoking Kashmir’s special status in 2019 was followed not only by Indian troops pouring into the streets but also by a communications blackout that only ended in 2021 and by restricting the media. These measures, adopted by India in anticipation of rather than in response to unrest in Kashmir, represented a serious violation of people’s freedom of expression. And although internet connectivity has been restored now, the curtailment of people’s fundamental liberties continues. 

“We are not allowed to protest in the streets. Protests can only happen in this one square,” Zahid, a participant in one of the recent protests, told me. This particular demonstration was about Finance Account Assistants (FAA) opposing the authorities’ decision to scrap the merit list, thus halting the selection process. 

Even in this one designated spot, demonstrations tend to be small. This is partly due to people fearing that the military might use force in case of a larger protest. Additionally, this is also because, after years of having their voices suppressed, the people have lost faith in being able to change the oppressive status quo. 

It Is Taboo to Talk About #MeToo in Kashmir

READ MORE

Another way the security forces have been curbing people’s freedom is in cases of unjustified violence. “Just the other day, I was beaten up because I asked why they had stopped the traffic and wouldn’t let us pass. Another incident occurred two days earlier, where a few drivers were beaten up. No action has been taken,” Viraj, a doctor who lives in Srinagar, said. 

Militarized Kashmir

India-administered Kashmir is one of the world’s most militarized areas. At any given moment, tens of soldiers patrol the streets of Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital, and checkpoints can be seen at every corner. 

“This is the reality of life in a conflict zone. People from outside the region often see Kashmir as a tourist paradise, but those who live here feel a sheer amount of pressure,” Viraj said. “Just seeing weapons has psychological effects on regular people. ” Viraj added that rebellions are bound to occur when you ‘pressure people into obedience.’

Still, by ensuring that people know they are constantly being watched by the military capable of using excessive force, India has ingrained a sense of vigilance in people’s minds. Nowadays, there are significantly fewer revolts, and massive strikes involving stone pelting have become a thing of the past. 

What cannot be overlooked, however, is the fact that heavy military deployment has had a fair share of tangible success in enhancing the security of the region. The number of terrorist incidents decreased from 417 in 2018 to 229 in 2021, according to Amit Shah, the Minister of Home Affairs. And, for some Kashmiris, increased army presence has improved their sense of safety.  

After Afghanistan’s Fall to the Taliban, Will Kashmir Be Next?

READ MORE

“The presence of Indian forces is essential to protect the people of Kashmir, especially those who are not radicalized and do not support the insurgency against the government,” Kamal, Kashmir’s resident, said.  

The paradox of Kashmir

Currently, Kashmir is experiencing a period of relative stability and peace, but security challenges persist, so there is a risk that this order will be short-lived. 

“There has been a security threat in Kashmir since 1990,” Kamal said. “The government has been changing since then, but the army presence has been a constant.” 

Here lies the inherent paradox of the situation in Kashmir. The longer India’s military rule continues, the more people will be turning against the Indian government and joining the ranks of militant groups. At the same time, this leads to increased security threats, and the Indian government has no choice but to retain its troops in the region to keep the situation under control. 

15 Facts About the Kashmir Conflict

READ MORE

And removing the army, which is seemingly what many Kashmiris want, could potentially trigger chaos and uproar. “There would certainly be more unrest if the army were removed without any improvements in administering the region,” Kamal told me. So, before the possibility of one-day withdrawing Indian troops from Kashmir can even be considered, fundamental reforms to how the troubled territory is governed are necessary. 

When the Indian government took back Jammu and Kashmir’s limited autonomy, it announced that the conflict was resolved and that the region’s integration with the rest of the country was officially complete. In reality, however, resolving the tensions between the Indian government and the people of Kashmir remains a distant dream.

[Conner Tighe edited this article.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post India’s Atrocities in the Himalayas: Kashmir Under Attack appeared first on Fair Observer.

On September 16, a young Kurdish girl named Jina (Mahsa) Amini died in the hospital after being beaten to death in the custody of Iran’s morality police.

In a widely shared video of Jina’s funeral, her father cries out, “This is the daughter of Kurdistan, the child of those who demand freedom. She is the symbol of resistance. Today, the women of Kurdistan are a symbol of resistance for the whole world.”

Her death and the words of her grieving father ignited a women and youth-led protest movement in Kurdistan that swept all of Iran and initiated a global solidarity movement for women, life and freedom. The violent response of Iran to the protests has resulted in the death of over 248 protesters and the arrest of more than 12,575 others, reported HRANA human rights group on October 23.

Iran Attacks Kurds Yet Again

A few days after the protests began, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) took military action across the border by launching missiles and drone attacks against Kurdish opposition camps. The strikes wounded 58 people and killed 13 others, including children, an infant, and a pregnant mother.

Derecognize Mullahs, Forge New Government in Exile for Iran

READ MORE

According to Reuters, Iranian officials and state media have justified the brazen attack on the grounds that Kurdish opposition groups are using Amini’s case as an excuse to separate Kurdistan from Iran.

The continued militarization and economic impoverishment of Kurdish cities by Iran and its imprisonment and execution of Kurds are rationalized based on this accusation of separatism.

Many analysts were surprised that Iran was blaming the Kurds and resorting to unjustified military force against them. However, to Kurds, this attack was expected, as it has been their ill-fate to be the target and scapegoat of the Iranian state: a state that continues its onslaught on Kurdish lives through unjustified imprisonment, execution and assassination.

The story of the Kurds in Iran is similar to that of their brethren in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. Being Kurdish in Iran is tantamount to being a criminal. Standing for your identity and advocating for your linguistic, political or economic rights can get you imprisoned and often executed. With few rights and little economic opportunity, the Kurds have few options but to stand defiant against the regime at the risk of death.

A Brave Story of Resistance

The crimes of the Islamic Republic of Iran against the Kurds in Iran are extensive because the Kurds have always been the most outspoken critics of the establishment in Tehran. They have paid heavily with their lives for their stance against the tyrannical rulers in Tehran. They even engaged in a full-scale rebellion against the Khomeini regime after his fatwa against the Kurds in 1979.

Revolution Erupted in Iran Because of Mohammad Reza Shah

READ MORE

The Kurds defied the regime and stood against Khomeini’s government from the inception of the Republic. In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini feared the Kurds so much that in his first week as supreme leader of Iran he offered them over $75 million in oil revenue to buy their loyalty and ward off a Kurdish rebellion. When the Kurds refused to join his so-called Islamic Republic, he declared a fatwa against them and went to war with Kurdistan.

The shocking part of this tragedy is that this phobia of Kurds that informed Khomeini’s fatwa and war against Kurdistan is a significant part of the Persian psyche today.

Outside of Iran, Persian media outlets and even many protesters who struggle for human rights and an end to the regime, share this fear of the Kurds. They often attempt to intimidate and strong-arm Kurds into taking down their Kurdish flags, and when Kurds insist on talking about their rights, they are told not to speak of this and to stand in unity. This attempt to silence Kurds even in the diaspora, where freedom of expression and other democratic rights are guaranteed and protected by law, illustrates how irrational but deeply rooted this phobia is in the Persian psyche.

This irrational phobia of Kurds and Kurdistan is very much what governs the Persian perspective on the Kurds in Iran. It is a phobia that oppressors across the Middle East share and use as justification for denying Kurdish rights and identity. This phobia informs the forced assimilation, extrajudicial killings, unlawful detention and increased securitization of Kurdistan.

It is thus, fundamentally important to deconstruct and debunk this phenomenon in order to end the intentional, irrational and unjustified persecution of the Kurdish people. It is only through overcoming this phobia and ending the negative connotations of the label of separatism that Iran’s Persian population can build lasting unity and understanding with Kurds, Baloch and other ethnic communities in Iran. This unity is essential in overthrowing the theocratic state of the ayatollahs and establishing an inclusive and truly democratic Iran.

[The Washington Times published a version of this piece earlier.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Why Does the Islamic Republic of Iran Fear its Kurdish Population? appeared first on Fair Observer.

As the war in Ukraine has dragged on for nine months and a cold winter is setting in, people all over the world are calling for a Christmas truce, harkening back to the inspirational Christmas Truce of 1914. In the midst of World War I, warring soldiers put down their guns and celebrated the holiday together in the no-man’s land between their trenches. This spontaneous reconciliation and fraternization has been, over the years, a symbol of hope and courage. 

Here are eight reasons why this holiday season too offers the potential for peace and a chance to move the conflict in Ukraine from the battlefield to the negotiating table.

1. The first, and most urgent reason, is the incredible, daily death and suffering in Ukraine, and the chance to save millions more Ukrainians from being forced to leave their homes, their belongings and the conscripted menfolk they may never see again. 

With Russia’s bombing of key infrastructure, millions of people in Ukraine currently have no heat, electricity or water as temperatures drop below freezing. The CEO of Ukraine’s largest electric corporation has urged millions more Ukrainians to leave the country, ostensibly for just a few months, to reduce demand on the war-damaged power network. 

The war has wiped out at least 35% of the country’s economy, according to Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal. The only way to halt the meltdown of the economy and the suffering of the Ukrainian people is to end the war. 

Ukraine Fatigue? Your Urgent Duty: Read These Books

READ MORE

2. Neither side can achieve a decisive military victory, and with its recent military gains, Ukraine is in a good negotiating position.

It has become clear that US and NATO military leaders do not believe, and possibly have never believed, that their publicly stated goal of helping Ukraine to recover Crimea and all of Donbas by force is militarily achievable.

In fact, Ukraine’s military chief of staff warned President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in April 2021 that such a goal would not be achievable without “unacceptable” levels of civilian and military casualties, leading him to call off plans for an escalation of the civil war at that time. 

Biden’s top military advisor, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, told the Economic Club of New York on November 9, “There has to be a mutual recognition that military victory is probably, in the true sense of the word, not achievable through military means…” 

French and German military reviews of Ukraine’s position are reportedly more pessimistic than US ones, assessing that the current appearance of military parity between the two sides will be short-lived. This adds weight to Milley’s assessment, and suggests that this could well be the best chance Ukraine will get to negotiate from a position of relative strength.

Chorus for Peace in Ukraine Sings Louder

READ MORE

3. US government officials, especially in the Republican Party, are starting to balk at the prospect of continuing this enormous level of military and economic support. Having taken control of the House, Republicans are promising more scrutiny of Ukraine aid. Congressman Kevin McCarthy, who will become Speaker of the House, warned that Republicans would not write a “blank check” for Ukraine. This reflects the growing opposition at the base of the Republican Party, with a Wall Street Journal November poll showing that 48% of Republicans say the US is doing too much to help Ukraine, up from 6% in March. 

4. The war is causing upheavals in Europe. Sanctions on Russian energy have sent inflation in Europe skyrocketing and caused a devastating squeeze on energy supplies that is crippling the manufacturing sector. Europeans are increasingly feeling what German media call Kriegsmudigkeit. 

This translates as “war-weariness,” but that is not an entirely accurate characterization of the growing popular sentiment in Europe. “War-wisdom” may describe it better. 

People have had many months to consider the arguments for a long, escalating war with no clear endgame—a war that is sinking their economies into a recession—and more of them than ever now tell pollsters they would support renewed efforts to find a diplomatic solution. That includes 55% in Germany, 49% in Italy, 70% in Romania and 92% in Hungary. 

Peace Talks Essential as War Rages on in Ukraine

READ MORE

5. Most of the world is calling for negotiations. We heard this at the 2022 UN General Assembly, where one after another, 66 world leaders, representing a majority of the world’s population, eloquently spoke out for peace talks. Philip Pierre, prime minister of Saint Lucia, was one of them, pleading with Russia, Ukraine and the Western powers “to immediately end the conflict in Ukraine, by undertaking immediate negotiations to permanently settle all disputes in accordance with the principles of the United Nations.”

As the Amir of Qatar told the Assembly, “We are fully aware of the complexities of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and the international and global dimension to this crisis. However, we still call for an immediate ceasefire and a peaceful settlement, because this is ultimately what will happen regardless of how long this conflict will go on for. Perpetuating the crisis will not change this result. It will only increase the number of casualties, and it will increase the disastrous repercussions on Europe, Russia and the global economy.”

6. The war in Ukraine, like all wars, is catastrophic for the environment. Attacks and explosions are reducing all kinds of infrastructure–railways, electrical grids, apartment buildings, oil depots–to charred rubble, filling the air with pollutants and blanketing cities with toxic waste that contaminates rivers and groundwater. 

The sabotage of Russia’s underwater Nord Stream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Germany led to what may have been the largest release of methane gas emissions ever recorded, amounting to the annual emissions of a million cars. The shelling of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, including Zaporizhzhia, the largest in Europe, has raised legitimate fears of deadly radiation spreading throughout Ukraine and beyond.

Is Ukraine Going too Far in its War?

READ MORE

Meanwhile, US and Western sanctions on Russian energy have triggered a bonanza for the fossil fuel industry, giving them a new justification to increase their dirty energy exploration and production and keep the world firmly on course for climate catastrophe. 

7. The war has a devastating economic impact on countries across the world. The leaders of the world’s largest economies, the Group of 20, said in a declaration at the end of their November summit in Bali that the Ukraine war “is causing immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy — constraining growth, increasing inflation, disrupting supply chains, heightening energy and food insecurity and elevating financial stability risks.”

Our long-standing failure to invest the relatively small proportion of our resources required to eradicate poverty and hunger on our otherwise rich and abundant planet already condemns millions of our brothers and sisters to squalor, misery and early deaths. 

Now this is compounded by the climate crisis, as entire communities are washed away by flood waters, burned out by wildfires or starved by multi-year droughts and famines. International cooperation has never been more urgently needed to confront problems that no country can solve on its own. Yet wealthy nations still prefer to put their money into weapons and war instead of adequately addressing the climate crisis, poverty or hunger. 

8. The last reason, which dramatically reinforces all the other reasons, is the danger of nuclear war. Even if our leaders had rational reasons to favor an open-ended, ever-escalating war over a negotiated peace in Ukraine – and there are certainly powerful interests in the weapons and fossil fuel industries that would profit from that – the existential danger of what this could lead to absolutely must tip the balance in favor of peace.

We recently saw how close we are to a much wider war when a single stray Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile landed in Poland and killed two people. Zelenskyy refused to believe it was not a Russian missile. If Poland had taken the same position, it could have invoked NATO’s mutual defense agreement and triggered a full-scale war between NATO and Russia. 

If another predictable incident like that leads NATO to attack Russia, it can only be a matter of time before Russia sees the use of nuclear weapons as its only option in the face of overwhelming military force.

Business Insider Makes the Case for Nuclear War

READ MORE

For these reasons and more, we join the faith-based leaders around the world who are calling for a Christmas Truce, declaring that the holiday season presents “a much-needed opportunity to recognize our compassion for one another. Together, we are convinced that the cycle of destruction, suffering and death can be overcome.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Eight Reasons Why Now is a Good Time for a Ukraine Ceasefire and Peace Talks appeared first on Fair Observer.

Recently, an agent of the Department of Homeland Security called me and started asking questions about a childhood acquaintance being investigated for extremism. I put him off.  My feelings about this were, to say the least, complex. As a military spouse of 10 years and someone who has long written about governmental abuses of power, I wanted to cooperate with efforts to root out hate. However, I also feared that my involvement might spark some kind of retaliation.

While I hadn’t seen the person under investigation for years, my memories of him and of some of the things he’d done scared me. For example, when we were young teens, he threatened to bury me alive over a disagreement. He even dug a hole to demonstrate his intent. I knew that if I were to cooperate with this investigation, my testimony would not be anonymous. As a mother of two children living on an isolated farm, that left me with misgivings.

There was also another consideration. A neighbor, herself a retired police officer, suggested that perhaps the investigation could be focused not just on him, but on me, too. “Maybe it’s because of stuff you’ve written,” she suggested, mentioning my deep involvement in Brown University’s Costs of War Project, which I co-founded as a way of dealing with this country’s nightmarish wars of this century.

Chorus for Peace in Ukraine Sings Louder

READ MORE

Indeed, the American version of the twenty-first century, marked by our government’s devastating decision to respond to the September 11, 2001, attacks with a Global War on Terror — first in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and then in other countries across the Middle East — has had its grim effects at home as well.  It’s caused us to turn on one another in confusing ways. After all, terror isn’t a place or a people. You can’t eradicate it with your military.  Instead, as we learned over the last couple of decades, you end up turning those you don’t like into enemies in the bloodiest of counterinsurgency wars.

I’ve researched for years how those wars of ours also helped deepen our domestic inequalities and political divisions, but after all this time, the dynamics still seem mysterious to me. Nonetheless, I hope I can at least share a bit of what I’ve noticed happening in the conservative, privileged community I grew up in, as well as in the military community I married into.

Around the time I co-founded the Costs of War Project in the early 2010s, I fell in love with a career military officer. Our multitrillion-dollar wars were then in full swing. At home, the names of young Blacks killed by our police forces, ever more ominously armed off the country’s battlefields, were just seeping into wider public consciousness as was a right-wing political backlash against prosecutions of the police. Anti-government extremist militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, some of whom would storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to violently block the certification of an elected president, were already seething about the supposed executive overreach of the Obama administration and that Black president’s alleged foreign birth. But back then, those guys all seemed — to me at least — very much a part of America’s fringe. 

How 9/11 and the War on Terror Shaped the World

READ MORE

Back then, I also didn’t imagine that men in uniform would emerge as a central part of the leadership and membership of such extremist groups. Sadly, they did. As journalist Peter Maass pointed out recently, of the 897 individuals indicted so far for their involvement in the January 6th violence, 118 had backgrounds in the U.S. military and a number of them had fought in this country’s war on terror abroad. Nearly 30 police officers from a dozen different departments around the country similarly attended the rally that preceded the Capitol riot and several faced criminal charges.

What also sends chills down my spine is that federal law enforcement agencies turned their backs on the warning signs of all this. Had the FBI acted on information that extremist groups were planning violence on January 6th, it might not have happened.

A Nation Rich in Fear

If one thing captured the spirit of the post-9/11 moment for me, in retrospect, it was the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has defined itself as a “whole-of-society endeavor, from every federal department and agency to every American across the nation.” Expenditures for that new department would total more than $1 trillion from 2002 through 2020, more than six times expenditures for similar activities at various government agencies during the previous 20 years.

Held Together With String, Can America Hold?

READ MORE

With its hundreds of thousands of workers, DHS often seems susceptible to overusing its authority and ignoring real threats. Case in point: of the approximately 450 politically motivated violent attacks taking place on our soil in the past decade, the majority were perpetrated by far-right, homegrown violent extremists. Yet all too tellingly, the DHS has largely remained focused on foreign terrorist groups — and homegrown jihadist groups inspired by them — as the main threats to this country.

Thanks to the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, federal authorities were also empowered to obtain the financial and Internet records of Americans, even if they weren’t part of an authorized investigation. In the process, the government violated the privacy of tens of thousands of citizens and non-citizens. Authorities at government agencies ranging from the FBI to the Pentagon secretly monitored the communications and activities of peace groups like the Quakers and Occupy Wall Street activists. Worse yet, in June 2013, Americans learned that the National Security Agency was collecting telephone records from tens of millions of us based on a secret court order.

Such practices only seemed to legitimize vigilantism on the part of Americans who adopted the DHS’s mantra, “If you see something, say something.” Incidents of racial profiling directed towards people of Muslim and South Asian background spiked early in the post 9/11 war years and again (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn!) after Donald Trump entered the White House in 2017.

Sometime before that, a relative visiting me noticed a darker-skinned man, a tourist, taking photos of historic buildings in my community, while speaking on his phone in Arabic. To my shame, she began questioning him, based on “a feeling that something was wrong.” In other words, well before “The Donald” put “fake news” in the contemporary American lexicon, feelings and not facts all too often seemed to rule the day.

“Is that the Russia?” or Dangers Near and Far

Terrorism was at once everywhere and nowhere for those who were supposed to be fighting that war on terror, including members of the military. In 2013, when my husband was on a months-long deployment at sea, another wife, whom I had texted about having a party for the crew on their return, texted me back a warning. I had, she claimed, jeopardized the safety of my husband and other crew members on his boat. After all, what if some foreign enemy intercepted our exchange and learned about the boat’s plans?

Four years later, in the shadow of Donald Trump’s presidency, it only got worse. A stressed-out, combat-traumatized commander, who took over the vessel to which my spouse was next assigned, emailed us wives weekly warnings against sending messages just like the one I had dispatched years earlier. He also ordered us not to email our husbands anything that could be imagined as negative, even if it reflected the realities of our lives: sick children, struggles with depression, financial troubles when we had to miss workdays to be a single parent. According to him, to upset our spouses in uniform was to jeopardize the security and wellbeing of the boat and indeed of America. He could read our emails and decide which ones made it to our loved ones. It was an extreme atmosphere to find myself in and I started to wonder: was I an asset or a threat to this country? Could my harmless words endanger lives?

One summer evening toward the end of another long deployment at sea, a fellow spouse tasked with disseminating confidential information about the boat our spouses were on arrived at my home unannounced. I was feeding my older toddler at the time. She whispered to me that our husbands’ boat was returning to port soon and swore me to silence because she didn’t want anyone beyond the command to know about the vessel’s movements. It was, she said, a matter of “operational security.” Then she took a glance out the window as though a foreign spy or terrorist might be listening.

What Was Operation Boulder?

LISTEN NOW

“Oh! That’s great!” I replied to her news. Later, I tried to explain to my bewildered child what “operational security,” or keeping information about daddy’s whereabouts away from our country’s enemies, meant. He promptly pointed toward that same window and said, “Is it the Russia? Does the Russia live there?” (He’d overheard too many conversations at home about nuclear geopolitics.) The next day, pointing to a mischievous-looking ceramic garden gnome in a neighbor’s yard, he asked again, “Is that the Russia?”

It was not Russia, I assured him. But six years later, in a weary and anxious country that only recently gave The Donald a true body blow, I still wonder about the dangers of our American world in a way I once didn’t.

The 2020s and the Biggest-Loser-in-Chief

Eventually, my family and I settled into what will hopefully be our final stint of military life — an office job for my spouse and a home in rural Maryland. But somehow, in those Trump years, the once-distant dangers of our world seemed ever closer at hand.

This was the time, after all, when the president felt comfortable posting a meme of himself beating up a CNN journalist, while his Homeland Security officials detained peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon. I soon began to wonder whether returning to something approximating normal civilian life was ever going to happen in this disturbed and disturbing land of ours.

The Next Surge of Trumpism

READ MORE

Motorcyclists sporting confederate flags drove by on the rural highway in front of my house. Blue Lives Matter flags fluttered in a nearby town after the police murdered George Floyd. Even years after Trump left office, as the polls leading up to the midterm elections seemed to indicate a coming red wave, I wondered if I had been wrong to imagine that our fellow Americans would choose democracy over… well, who knew what?

As part of that election campaign, I wrote nearly 200 letters to Democratic voters in swing states urging them to get to the polls as I was planning to do. Remembering a trend my friends and I had started on social media in 2020, I considered posting a funny photograph of my sweet, excitable rooster, Windy, sitting next to piles of letters, with the caption, “Windy is vigilant about the state of our democracy! Are you?”

Then I thought twice about it, another sign of our times. It occurred to me that if I did participate in an investigation against an angry person in uniform, the one I had once known, I risked retaliation and — yes, I did think this at the time — what better target was there than our strange outdoor pet? On realizing that it was I who was now starting to think like some fear-crazed maniac, I forced myself to dismiss the thought.

Of course, that predicted red wave turned out to be, at worst, a ripple, while election denialism and voter intimidation seemed to collapse in a post-election heap. None of the most extreme MAGA candidates running for top election positions in swing states won. Was it possible that Americans had started to see the irony, not to say danger, of voting for public officials who attack the basic tenets of our democracy?

In the end, I told the guy investigating my childhood acquaintance that I couldn’t help him, feeling that I had nothing new to add for a crew with such sweeping powers of surveillance. To my relief, he simply wished me the best. The normal tenor of that conversation changed something in my thinking about the government and this moment of ours.

I found myself returning to an older (perhaps saner) view of our times, as well as the military and law enforcement. Yes, our disastrous wars of this century had brought home too many unnerved, disturbed, and damaged soldiers and small numbers of them became all too extreme, while over-armed police forces did indeed create problems for us.

However, it was also worth remembering that the military and the police are not monoliths. They aren’t “blue lives” or “the troops,” but individuals. They are part of all our lives, as fallible as they are potentially capable of helping us form a more perfect union instead of the chaos and cruelty that Donald Trump exemplifies. Were Americans — all of us from all walks of life — more willing to stand up to bigotry and extremism, we might still help change what’s happening here for the better.

[TomDispatch first published this article.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How Terror Came Home and What to Make of It appeared first on Fair Observer.

All discussions of procurement inevitably lead to a comparison between the model followed by the milk procedure co-operative societies, the Amul Model, and the procurement of cereals and pulses by agriculture marketing societies. Why is it that Amul scores exceptionally well in both stakeholder trust as well as public confidence, while procurement undertaken by FCI and NAFED is often mired in controversy?

Having worked as the CEO of a multi-district milk producers co-operative society as well as the managing director of an apex agriculture marketing co-operative NAFED, I would like to share with the readers how the two systems differ. But more importantly, what can be done to make procurement of cereals and pulses as transparent as the milk procurement operations?

Let us first look at the similarities before we discuss the differences. The commonality between milk producers and farmers who grow cereals and pulses is that both are marginal and small producers. Very few of them have physical assets or production surpluses. Neither has the infrastructure to market their produce independently and directly to the market. The volumes they produce also make it difficult for them to add value at the farm gate. Both need the intervention of their co-operative or a state agency to get a fair and remunerative price. In fact, on the face of it, a milk producers co-operative has a greater challenge, since the product is extremely perishable, whereas both cereals and grains have a longer shelf life.

Indian Agriculture Still Faces Problems

WATCH NOW

Perhaps, it is this aspect of perishability that makes the milk producers more disciplined, for unless they pour the milk at the procurement center within the designated time, they will literally miss the milk van. However, more than that, it is the robust system set in place by Verghese Kurien, known as the “Father of the White Revolution” in India, that ensures complete transparency and absolute ease of doing business, First, the member can pour any quantity, from less than a liter to multiples thereof. After it is measured, it is checked for quality, and although today the content in fat and solids is measured by a machine, from the earliest times, a lactometer and a centrifuge machine were installed in every primary procurement center to record the quality. The price per liter of milk was contingent on the quality of milk, and there was a positive incentive for better quality. 

Cereals and pulses: a different story

However, when it comes to procurement of cereals and pulses, the complexity takes on a new dimension. The first issue is that of the sheer volume on account of the seasonality of the production cycle. The second is the absence of grading /sorting machines at most of the procurement centers. Therefore, the decision concerning whether the produce adheres to FAQ (fair average quality) norms is based on what the procurement officer on the spot decides.  There is the permanent risk  of a genuine (human) mistake. But there is equally a risk of  establishing perverse incentives and encouraging collusion, for if the produce is below FAQ, then the stock value will be significantly diminished, and if non-FAQ stock is procured, it will receive the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for which it is otherwise ineligible.

No wonder then, that while, over the years, the business of Amul and milk producers’ societies has been growing, becoming ever more salient, the procurement operations of FCI and Nafed continue to be  mired in controversy. Significantly,milk collection is undertaken every single day, 365 days a year, whereas the procurement operations for cereals and pulses occur once a year and in an episodic fashion. Moreover, unlike Amul, which has devoted its time, energy, and domain expertise to ensure both forward and backward linkages, the same cannot be said for Nafed and the state marketing agencies. Another important factor is liquidity. 

Why Are India’s Farmers Protesting?

READ MORE

Although milk is literally a liquid product, the sector is not beset with liquidity issues. The producers receive their payment on a daily or weekly basis. On the other hand, FCI and Nafed often face a cash crunch as they are dependent on a budget line, and even bank guarantees have a certain limit. As such, even though the payment systems have become quite streamlined thanks to IT interventions, the basic problem of a lack of resources to ensure timely payments remains, and this affects the trust the system grants to the farmer. This may explain why the stranglehold of the intermediary (arthiya) over the procurement of cereals and pulses continues to remain as strong as ever.

There is one more lesson to be learned from studying the workings of a milk producers society. This relates to the well-established system of strengthening the equity base of the co-operative society, at all levels. Thus, if the milk producer is receiving forty rupees per liter of milk as the procurement price from the district milk union, it would retain a small amount ― say 25 to 50 paise per liter of milk ― to be allocated to the equity of the society. Over weeks and months, this amount totals up to a few thousand rupees, if not a lakh or more, thereby enabling the primary society to build its basic infrastructure: a state of the art office, a motorcycle for the veterinary field assistant, or a refrigerator for storing vaccines and medicines. Likewise, the district milk union also retains a small amount for its equity fund, thereby making the co-operative independent of government; both in terms of funds and its internal operations.

Daring to imagine the future and making it happen

Is there a way out? Certainly. It is high time the newly created ministry of co-operation led by Amit Shah brings out a compendium of best practices in cooperation that can be replicated in sectors other than milk and applied in states beyond Gujarat and Maharashtra, where the co-operative movement is quite salient and strong. Because only when the procurement of an entire range of commodities ― from oranges in Tamenglong (Manipur) and apples in Uttarkashi to raw honey in the Sundarbans ― is put on an even and transparent keel will the rural economy receive the necessary impetus. Successful co-operative professionals as well as elected officials may be appointed as professors of practice in the regional and district level cooperative training institutions and farmers should be encouraged to undertake study visits across the country.

Don’t Allow the Buffalo in India to Be Cowed Down

READ MORE

The reach of the co-operative sector is extensive, but many have become mere agencies implementing government programs. We can only hope that an exposure to some of the successful societies will prove inspirational, as well as meaningful.  Secondly, the Agri Infra fund announced by the prime minister, as well as the Rural Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF) of National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) must be used to set up a network of grading and sorting machines in all the procurement centers so that the farmers can get their produce sorted and graded against the parameters on which procurement will be made. It is true that the initial costs at Rs twenty odd lakh rupees per machine may be on the higher side, but it will have multiple positive fallouts, the most important being the ushering in of transparency and fair play in these operations.

At the end of the day, we need interventions, both in terms of processes as well as technologies, to help the primary producers in sectors other than milk reap similar benefits and set in motion a virtuous cycle of economic transformation in the hinterland.
[The Print first published a version of this article.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can India’s Ailing Agricultural Procurement Find a New Model? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The quantum revolution in physics is changing not only our understanding of the world we live in but also the way we’re likely to be living in the future. After Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the quantum revolution was the second major game-changing physical theory of the 20^th century. Albert’s theory gave us the atomic bomb and nuclear power, two factors that have indelibly marked human history. Quantum mechanics has so far had less impact. But the media keep telling us that a revolution is in the offing. We must get ready for the age of quantum computing.

So, what is a quantum computer? In a Wall Street Journal Magazine interview back in 2017, Bill Gates famously admitted that quantum computing is “the one part of Microsoft where they put up slides that I truly do not understand.” In the same interview, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella (who replaced Gates) described quantum computing as “the next breakthrough that will allow us to keep up this exponential growth in computing power and to solve problems.” That’s one way to dodge the question. Focus on the promise of future earnings.

Some believe that quantum computing may never happen, at least not in the way and especially on the scale that its promoters expect. Sankar Das Sarma, writing for the MIT Technology Review says he loves the idea, but points to one obstacle. “The only problem? Actually making a quantum computer that could do it.” He isn’t alone in thinking that theoretical and physical obstacles are too many to count on it happening any time soon.

Sabine Hossenfelder, a German theoretical physicist who popularizes scientific knowledge on YouTube is even more severe. She cites numerous colleagues who agree with her conviction that there will never be a quantum computer. She also cites Oxford physicist Nikita Gourianov who in a recent article in the Financial Times offers a potted history of the last decade of quantum computing as a business proposition:

“By the 2010s capital had become cheap, and investors started taking notice, even if they had no real understand of the technology (beyond the “a qubit can simultaneously be both one and zero” cliché). As more money flowed in, the field grew, and it became progressively more tempting for scientists to oversell their results. With time, salesman-type figures, typically without any understanding of quantum physics, entered the field, taking senior positions in companies and focusing solely on generating fanfare. After a few years of this, a highly exaggerated perspective on the promise of quantum computing reached the mainstream, leading to a greed and misunderstanding taking hold and the formation of a classical bubble. “”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Oversell (results):

A verb describing a fundamental skill without which modern capitalism, especially in the technology sector, could not work.

Contextual note

A famous English proverb tells us that “a good wine needs no bush.” This is generally understood to mean that a worthwhile product doesn’t need to be advertised or actively promoted. It sells itself. Its inherent qualities are its only sales pitch.

The expression is puzzling today because of the word “bush.” It refers to a practice dating back to Roman times, when inns would display a bundle of greenery to announce the sale of local wine or beer, presumably made from the “bush” on display. In England, as recently as the 19^th century, pubs suspended the greenery from the end of a pole called the “Ale Stake.” People familiar with the quality of the brew didn’t need to see the bush to know where to go. 

The popularity of the proverb demonstrates a bit of traditional wisdom that all cultures like to celebrate. Quality sells, and more effectively than the smoothest salesperson. Authenticity rules. Perhaps it was true once upon a time and in some places, especially when communities functioned more or less as organic wholes. There were times in the past when markets and communities were largely co-synonymous.

The 20^th century became the age of mass production and advertising. Madison Avenue crafted what some thought of as the “science of persuasion.” It cultivated the supreme skill of overselling. It focused on industrialized consumer products, from tobacco and chewing gum to house appliances and cars, from typewriters to home computers.

But quantum computing is anything but a consumer product. It isn’t even a product, since it doesn’t yet exist in any viable form. Gourianov isn’t thinking of Don Draper or any of the other Mad Men of Madison Avenue. He isn’t referring to high-powered marketing executives or to Athur Miller’s poor, hapless Willy Loman. He makes it clear that the people who “oversell their results” are not specialists of marketing and sales, but, in this case, scientists.

The process Gourianov describes ends up in the hands of two classes of people with an inordinate degree of influence over the modern world. The first class is “salesman-type figures” who take “senior positions in companies and [focus] solely on generating fanfare.” The second is the kind of people whose job is to describe what Gourianov refers to at the beginning of his article, those who can create financial bubbles which “occur when large groups of investors repeatedly make poor investment decisions, often due to greed, misunderstanding and easy money.”

Whether you’re a scientist, a journalist, an investor or a financial director, in today’s world you must learn the art of overselling.

Historical note

Science has moved into a new dimension. The late Rod Serling, the pioneer of television science fiction six decades ago, would undoubtedly place the science we see today smack in the middle of his “Twilight Zone.” The 21^st century has not yet closed the gap between Western civilization’s pragmatic idea of science as it existed in the 19^th century and the abstraction it has become thanks to relativity and quantum mechanics in the 20th century.

Relativity and quantum mechanics have become established features of our scientific landscape. Both are accepted as true, but there are serious problems of compatibility that haven’t been resolved. The debate over theory has led to a variety of imagined ways of resolving the contradictions. 

One of the most talked-about ideas imagined as a means of closing the gap between the macro theory of relativity and the micro theory of quantum physics is the multiverse. Britannica describes the concept  as “a hypothetical collection of potentially diverse observable universes, each of which would comprise everything that is experimentally accessible by a connected community of observers.” Some very serious scientists have in recent years posited the existence of such parallel universes in which multiple versions of each of our selves may exist, each time living through slightly different scenarios.

Another hypothesis that has appealed to both scientist-philosophers, like Nick Bolstrum, and scientist-entertainers like TV celebrity Neil de Grasse Tyson, is that what we are living in is somebody’s else’s computer simulation. These and other scientists and philosophers go so far as to claim that it is at least as probable as any other hypothesis. And of course, we mustn’t forget Elon Musk, who famously said there is only a “one in billions” chance that we’re not living in a computer simulation. He now claims that the mother of one (or perhaps two) of his children, Grimes, is a simulation “created in his brain.” She agrees. We expect the same may be true of Nole Skum, the hero of one of our “Fly on the Wall” columns.

In one of her YouTube videos, Sabine Hossenfelder calls the simulation hypothesis “pseudoscience” and “intellectual entertainment.” She categorizes it not as a scientific theory but as an act of faith and explains why.

Those non-scientists among us who are curious enough to try to keep up with the big issues that the physical sciences are grappling with today – whether it’s the multiverse, dark matter, quantum entanglement, simulated consciousness, or the speed of light as the universe’s speed limit – should realize one thing after examining these arguments. All the names mentioned above have mastered a skill that has nothing directly to do with their scientific or philosophical knowledge and expertise. In conformity with the iron-clad laws of our current stage of civilized hyperreality, they have all learned the art and science of overselling.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How to Find the Best Superposition for Your Quantum Computer appeared first on Fair Observer.

Why space exploration? Why should we as humanity pick up this baton and run with it? The answer to this question is deeper and perhaps more profound than the simple arithmetic of space exploration bringing us benefits like the fruit-flavored drink Tang and smartphones. 

The answer is even more profound than the US getting there before some other country occupies parts of the moon for lunar resources or the potential minerals we someday may gain from some asteroids. The answer is definitely deeper than the US remaining number one in the space competition. It is also more important than having a place to migrate in case of planetary destruction due to internal or external actors. 

The reason we explore space is is more encompassing and overwhelming.  

Our earth has been around for about four and a half billion years. Multicellular life emerged a billion years ago. During this period, there have been four to five  major mass extinction events like Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, and the Cretaceous — best known because dinosaurs were wiped out. 

Civilization’s Swift Move Toward Outer Space

READ MORE

Over the years, millions of species have gone extinct. The number may be as high as 50-95%. Yet life has reemerged in new forms. But the most intriguing, interesting, and, as yet, unexplainable thing is that not one single species out of those billions ever made something simple like clothing except for humans. How is that even possible? 

The Magic of the Drake Equation

It turns out that life is mysterious, even magical. And there might be life elsewhere in space. The Drake Equation, attributed to Dr. Frank Drake who passed away very recently, takes a stab at estimating extraterrestrial life. This equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It is made up of these terms:

N = R_* f_P * n_e * f_l * f_i * f_c * L

N     =      number of civilizations with which humans could communicate

R_* =      mean rate of star formation

f_P  =      fraction of stars that have planets

n_e =      mean number of planets that could support life per star with planets

f_l   =      fraction of life-supporting planets that develop life

f_i   =      fraction of planets with life where life develops intelligence

f_c  =      fraction of intelligent civilizations that develop communication

L      =      mean length of time that civilizations can communicate

This equation cannot be “solved” or even accurately calculated. Yetit retains considerable utility for discussions about extraterrestrial life and intelligence. If we assign reasonable numbers to each term in the Drake Equation, this yields N equal to anywhere from the thousands to the millions. Remember that this is just for the Milky Way, one of the trillions of galaxies in the universe.

The Fermi Paradox

In the summer of 1950, Enrico Fermi and co-workers Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York had several lunchtime conversations at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. During one of these conversations, Fermi blurted out, “But where is everybody?”.  Signs of life are hard to see in our observable universe, which has expanded considerably thanks to the Hubble and the Webb telescopes. The question still remains: “Where is everybody?”

Whether the Fermi paradox holds true or not, God, for those who believe, has granted us an immense responsibility: humans must find, connect with and preserve all lifeforms. On the other hand, If the Fermi paradox is false, we must be ready to protect ourselves if needed. In either case, the answer is the same. Space exploration matters.

The Calling: An Intellectual Effort

Humans are special. They have a large brain capable of imagination and exploration. After all, we are the only species to use clothing. Even our cousins, the great apes, do not do so. This does not mean our species is superior to others. However, we must shepherd  earth and all of its lifeforms to continue  evolution—the evolution now in the third dimension. In other words, space or for the nerds among us, the Z direction.

Evolution requires that more intelligent things are done almost continually. That requires that a society finds ways to demarcate and appreciate all life for its potential causes. This is perhaps a higher calling than others such as climate change or even human species survival. This is why devaluing appreciation of merit for other causes may hurt us as humanity, in future. 

An intellectual effort is needed. This includes merit in myriads of fields: from art, literature, science, space, sports, and others. This is what NASA and the space efforts of other countries are exploring. It is not just for the US or humanity, but for the entirety of lifeforms in this observable universe—whether the famous Fermi paradox holds or not!

For example, art produces visions and it assuages. They touch the “not-yet-imagined” part of this equation that we scientists need to fulfill the entirety of progress. We will need help from many strata of society: artists, writers, poets, philosophers, thinkers AND scientists can help realize the next step. We should care for the truly unfortunate, the truly downtrodden, but we should not lose sight of the stars in space above.

[Tasheanna Williams and Charlize Cheesman edited this article.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How Space Exploration Can Lead Us to Our True Destiny? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Europe has introduced a new set of rules for the financial sector focused on sustainability, social and environmental change. The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation was designed to increase transparency in sustainable investment markets and covers a broad range of environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics. This is good news, of course, perhaps long overdue, some would argue. 

The SFDR came into effect in March 2021 as a fundamental aspect of the European Commission’s sustainable finance agenda. The draft regulation, drawn up in November 2019, “lays down harmonised rules for financial market participants and financial advisers on transparency with regard to the integration of sustainability risks and the consideration of adverse sustainability impacts in their processes and the provision of sustainability‐related information with respect to financial products.”

In short, the regulation obliges financial asset managers, financial institutions and other actors providing financial services to disclose their approach to ESG considerations during their decision making processes. The idea is to encourage investors and asset managers to pay more attention to sustainability risk, environmental concerns and allay fears of greenwashing.

Changes and challenges

SFDR has certainly changed the ecosystem of many capital markets, but some investment houses have found that reporting has remained optional. They are, however, certainly aware that falling behind in the widespread push for ESG transparency could mean missing out on opportunities for capital raising and real sustainable value creation. The sustainable investment boom is here to stay, and with increased public scrutiny on private firms’ ESG practices, there is nowhere to hide for companies with weak credentials. A classic example of this development is Deliveroo’s recent IPO flop.

Isn’t It Time to Challenge the Growth Paradigm?

READ MORE

The European Union’s push for greener business practices and net-zero targets has only increased the pressure on the financial sector to do its bit. Along with the EU Taxonomy Regulation and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the SFDR is part of the EU’s sustainable finance framework that has been designed to support the European Green Deal, which aims to channel private investment towards the transition to a climate-neutral economy.

More specifically, the SFDR focuses on entity-level disclosure obligations, divided into three main areas. They are as follows:

• the integration of sustainability risks in the investment decision-making and advisory process,
• principle Adverse Impacts (PAIs) of investment decisions on sustainability factors, and
• transparency of information for products that either advertise their ESG characteristics (Article 8) or describe themselves as sustainable investments (Article 9).

Of course, these new rules have made waves in financial circles, not least in the private equity sphere. For many, they remain vague and open to interpretation, which has often led to generic and qualitative disclosures. The sector is still lacking in high quality, detailed industry guidance and quantitative data on ESG impact for investments.

ESG is not that new

With Europe quickly catching up and applying regulative measures regarding ESG on the financial sector, some firms have proven to be more prepared than others. Sustainable investing is of course not new, but for years it was considered high risk and low yield. This is no longer the case, with real value creation being found in companies whose ecological focus and social commitments remain high strategic priorities.

Should PR Agencies Not Represent Fossil Fuel Clients?

READ MORE

In the private equity sphere, ESG has been mainstreamed thanks to the growing realization that values creation and sustainability can go hand-in-hand. According to Anna Follér, Head of Sustainability, Sixth Swedish National Pension Fund, “basic ESG integration in private equity is a question of good hygiene, while advanced ESG integration offers a competitive edge. The private equity model is particularly well-placed to embrace ESG.” This is due to both collaboration and better access to reliable data, both of which “underpin robust ESG frameworks.” Private equity’s basic tenet, to build a better business than the one they bought in order to create value, is well adapted to creating sustainable growth on an upward trajectory.

Dominique Senequier, the CEO and founder of Ardian, the French private equity house making waves on the international scene, has long understood the potential of PE to be at the forefront of a global move towards sustainable investment. Back in 2020, the firm launched a Sustainable Measurement Methodology in order to quantify and analyze the environmental impact and sustainability outlook of its portfolio companies. According to Candice Brenet, the head of sustainability and managing director at Ardian, “we observed that management teams generally wanted to work on sustainability issues.”

“For 14 years Ardian has been gaining expertise in sustainability and arguing that finance must be a force for good. The instability that has rocked Europe in 2022 might encourage some to relax their focus on sustainability, at least temporarily. That would be a mistake. We are fully committed to our vision of Ardian as an agent of positive change”, said Dominique Senequier.This is because sustainability is now a key driver of value: “There is no contradiction of sustainable investments and sustainable returns, quite the opposite actually,” as Thomas Gottstein, CEO of Crédit Suisse put it. Indeed, the numbers support this assertion. Morningstar research focused on the long-term performance of 745 Europe-based sustainable funds has shown that the majority have done better than non-ESG funds over one, three, five and ten years.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post New European Regulation Forces Finance to Up its ESG Game appeared first on Fair Observer.

Australia and Japan have been in the news lately. The prime ministers of both countries got together to issue a Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation (JDSC). They reaffirmed their vital “Special Strategic Partnership.” The two leaders also promised to “strengthen economic security, particularly through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) and the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative.” So security now includes not only defense but also economics.

The Dragon in the Room

Why is love in the air for Australia and Japan? 

The answer is simple: China. 

The Middle Kingdom has taken an increasingly assertive posture in the Indo-Pacific. Beijing has made “historical claims” on the Senkaku islands claimed by Tokyo. It has increased its military maneuvers in the South and East China Seas, building artificial islands and bases. Closer to Canberra, China has intensified maritime activities in the South Pacific islands. It has even signed a pact with the strategically located Solomon islands. Such actions have fuelled insecurity in Tokyo and Canberra.

On the economic front, new realities have emerged. After the economic liberalization in the Deng Xiaoping era, China grew rapidly. Given the gigantic Chinese market, most Asian countries wanted to prosper from the China story. Trade increased exponentially.

Is China’s Belt and Road Initiative Strategic Genius, Arrogant Overreach or Something Else?

READ MORE

China-Japan trade grew dramatically as well. In 2021, China was Japan’s biggest trade partner and the trade volume crossed $370 billion. China-Australia trade grew too and reached $245 billion in 2020. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the country began to weaponize trade and bully its trading partners into submission. When Australia called for an independent probe into the origins of the COVID-19 virus, Beijing responded with a range of strict trade reprisals against Australian imports. Naturally, this made policymakers in Tokyo and Canberra cautious. They are attempting to change their trading patterns and rely less on China.

Strange Bedfellows

A century ago, Australia feared “economic infiltration” and racial takeover by the Japanese. In 1901, Australia implemented its White Australia Policy to exclude non-white immigrants and keep Australia a European nation. In World War II, both Japan and Australia were locked in a bitter conflict in Papua New Guinea. Mutual suspicion ran high and bilateral relations reached the nadir. In those years, Australia increasingly looked towards the US and Western Europe for identity, inspiration and security. It did not want much to do with its near abroad full of ragtag Asians. Much of Asia, especially Japan, saw Australia as a genocidal white outpost in their neighborhood.

In the 1950s and 1960s, mutual suspicion decreased. Both Japan and Australia were worried about a rising Indonesia. They shared concerns about Indonesian strongman Sukarno who was one of the founding fathers of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). As American allies, Japan and Australia were naturally concerned about Sukarno’s nationalist assertions and NAM.

India & Japan: Implications of Ukraine on Asia (Episode 2)

READ MORE

As a result, Intelligence cooperation between Japan and Australia slowly grew. This was accompanied by a commerce treaty signed in 1957 between Tokyo and Canberra. Gradually, closer economic ties decreased historic suspicions. Japan became Australia’s largest trading partner from the late 1960s onwards to 2007 when China replaced it. Additionally, Japan and Australia were also part of the American security architecture in the region. The US-led hub and spoke system contained the communists in the region during the Cold War. 

Unpacking the Updated JSDC 

As pointed out earlier, the new JSDC signed by Tokyo and Canberra comes at a time of rising Chinese ambition. Xi’s China seeks to extend its sphere of influence in Asia. Beijing’s rising influence comes at the cost of regional powers who do not subscribe to the Chinese worldview. They are anxious and want to oppose China. As a result, Asia is profoundly fractured. 

In this new geopolitical scenario, the JSDC makes sense. It builds local capacity to counter China. Japan and Australia do not entirely have to rely on the US to maintain peace and stability in the region. Both countries are deepening their military partnership. They are increasing interoperability, intelligence sharing, military exercises and defense activities on each other’s territories,

The two powers further seek to build on the Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) signed in January 2022. Besides Australia, the US is the only country with which Japan has signed the RAA. Japan also has an Acquisition and Cross-servicing Agreement (ACSA) with Australia. This agreement allows reciprocal provision of supplies and services between their defense forces. They are also collaborating in space, cyber and regional capacity building.

Will the Tokyo Olympics Increase Japan’s Soft Power?

READ MORE

The JDSC marks a shift in traditional Japanese reluctance to act proactively on military matters. In the last few decades, Japan punched under its weight in military issues. This was primarily due to its war-renouncing constitution. The updated JSDC reflects the internal debate in Japan over the role of its military and the country’s role in the world. Various Japanese strategists have called for revising Japan’s National Security Strategy. They are pushing for Japan to take an active regional role. Moreover, policymakers in Canberra are also stepping on the gas. Australia is on a shopping spree for military technologies from nuclear-powered submarines to unmanned aircraft and hypersonic missiles.

The JSDC’s focus on intelligence cooperation is significant because both Japan and Australia have formidable geospatial capabilities in electronic eavesdropping and high-tech satellites. Experts believe that such intelligence cooperation will also provide a template for Japan to deepen intelligence cooperation with like-minded partners.

Secure Economics and Regional Dynamics

Japan and Australia now recognize that economics is closely tied to security. In this new deglobalizing world, words like friendshoring and secure supply chains have come into play. OPEC+ has cut oil production despite repeated US requests and sided with Russia. The US and the UK first supplied vaccines to their own populations before giving them to Europe or Asia. China used personal protective equipment for its people during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, Tokyo and Canberra want to set up a secure economic relationship in what the Pentagon calls a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

The Russia-Ukraine War has hit Japan hard. The country imports most of its energy. Supplies from Russia’s Sakhalin-2 project have stopped and Japan faces an energy shortage. Rising energy prices have increased its expenses and increased input costs for its products. Therefore, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has made energy resilience a priority. In this context, Australia is a reliable and valuable energy supplier to Japan. Already, Canberra is Tokyo’s biggest supplier of LNG and coal. Both countries seek to deepen this relationship.

Both countries have further announced an Australia-Japan critical minerals partnership. These minerals include rare earths that are crucial in clean energy technologies like solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries. These could well be the oil of the future. Japan as a leader in many of these technologies and Australia as an exporter of minerals might have a win-win long term relationship on the cards.

Is China’s Belt and Road Initiative Strategic Genius, Arrogant Overreach or Something Else?

READ MORE

The US also figures prominently in the updated JDSC. Japan and Australia have asked Washington to fill in the gaps for sustainable infrastructure needs. This is part of the role the Quad — the US, Japan, India, and Australia — seeks to play in countering China’s Belt and Road Initiative. 

To counter China, Japan and Australia also support ASEAN’s centrality in the Indo-Pacific. They have also reiterated their desire to implement the 2050 Strategy for Blue Pacific Continent through the Pacific Islands Forum. This initiative seeks to develop cooperation with Pacific Island countries in critical infrastructure, disaster recovery, and maritime security. This is a multilateral play to counter the Big Brother model that China follows and provide assistance for smaller countries from medium-sized powers they trust. Japan and Australia share concerns about Myanmar and North Korea as well.

In the new world order that is emerging, regional powers are assuming more importance. The US is tired after two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It cannot write a blank check for Indo-Pacific security and single-handedly take on China. Therefore, the US is leaning on allies to step up. This makes the updated JSDC important. In the words of Professor Haruko Satoh of Osaka University, “Strengthening the Japan-Australia partnership is crucial for the US-led hub and spokes security system in Asia.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post A New Fusing of Japanese-Aussie Synergies in the Indo-Pacific appeared first on Fair Observer.

When India was recently downgraded in global democracy rankings, it created a perfect storm within the academic and media establishments. The three democracy-ranking institutes that published the reports – Sweden’s Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem), the Economist Intelligence Unit and the US government-funded think tank Freedom House – were feted by all those opposed to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Supporters of the BJP dismissed these reports as yet another attempt to discredit India by hostile entities that feel increasingly threatened by the country’s unstoppable rise on the world stage under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. 

The reports cited human rights violations, oppression of religious minorities and muzzling of free speech and other factors to cast their verdict on the depressing state of the world’s largest democracy. V-Dem went to claim that India was no longer a liberal democracy, dubbing it an “electoral autocracy” on par with Russia. Freedom House declared that India was only “partially free”, ranking it 85th in the world.

These think tanks are nor alone in sounding the bugle on India’s deteriorating democracy. The New York Times and The Washington Post routinely describe the country as a dystopian hellscape teeming with Nazi-like Hindu storm troopers crushing dissent and criticism under the weight of their jackboots. But how accurate is this picture? 

Portuguese UN Chief Preaches to India: Is it White Savior Complex?

READ MORE

Professor Salvatore Babones, an American sociologist and statistician, published a rigorous analysis of think tanks rankings: “India at 75: Who are the Barbarians at the Gate?.” He questioned the credibility of these reports, their authors and the dominant Western narrative. It is important to note that key people in V-Dem are closely linked to the Pakistani establishment and have an interest in downgrading Indian democracy.

In this interview with Babones, we discussed the role played by India’s intellectual class in portraying the country as a fascist state, the dubious methods used by Western think tanks to arrive at their conclusions, the errors in the latest Global Hunger Index that places India at rock-bottom, why he had to register as a “foreign agent” with the Indian government, and his work on Donald Trump, populism and authoritarianism.

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Vikram Zutshi: Why does the Indian intellectual class malign India and portray the country as a “fascist state” as you have stated in your public appearances and articles? 

Salvatore Babones: I don’t think India’s elite intellectuals actually want to harm India. All indications are that what they actually want is to push India toward greater liberalism and an improved democracy. But sometimes idealism can go too far, especially when people become so wrapped up in the righteousness of their cause that they are willing to warp the facts in their favor.

India’s League of Internationalists

READ MORE

Intellectuals sometimes rightly accuse politicians of misrepresenting the truth. Politicians are, after all, politicians. Intellectuals should remember that they are not politicians. Their job is to tell the truth, even when they don’t like it. Unfortunately, too many intellectuals in India and elsewhere abuse the trust placed in them as guardians of truth to promote their own political agendas instead. They often present their own subjective opinions as objective truth.

Zutshi: What is the empirical basis for Freedom House and the other institutes to classify India as “partly free,” and what are the errors you have found in their methodology?

Babones: International democracy evaluations like that from Freedom House are mainly based on expert opinion. Freedom House has a particularly small panel of experts: 128 analysts and “nearly 50” advisors who together have to cover 211 countries and territories. These experts use their own opinions, buttressed by reports from think tanks, NGOs, and other sources, to make their evaluations. This approach is dubious at best, but in my research I haven’t criticized the method. I have instead focused on tracking down the evidence adduced by Freedom House in support of its rankings.

Some of this evidence is very obviously culturally biased. For example, Freedom House faults Indian states for banning cow slaughter, yet it does not seem to mind that horse slaughter is banned in the United States. Other evidence is purely mendacious. Freedom House criticizes India for journalist deaths, when in fact journalists are actually safer in India than in most of the rest of the world.

Zutshi: You had to register as a “foreign agent” for some work that you had undertaken for an Indian media company. Critics say that you represent Indian interests and hence cannot be seen as an unbiased commentator. Would you care to explain your side of the story? 

Babones: I accepted $4,000 for a consulting assignment two years ago, representing approximately 2.5% of my year 2020 income. Of course, I understand that $4,000 is a lot of money in a country like India, where the GDP per capita is just $2,000 per year. But for me, this was a small contract to help a private media company learn how to reach international audiences. To put this in context, India Today spent a similar amount of money to bring me to Mumbai for the recent India Today Conclave.

Unfortunately, critics have used the “foreign agent” label to imply some kind of negative behavior on my part. This perfectly illustrates the dishonesty of the intellectual class. Anyone who is educated enough to have looked up my foreign agency registration is aware that “foreign agent” is a technical term that merely means that I worked for someone — a “foreign principal” — outside the country. It is an epithet that may sound bad, but, in reality, only reflects the fact that I have always been scrupulously honest in my regulatory filings.

Zutshi: Tell us about your academic specialty and briefly summarize your 2018 book, The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism and the Tyranny of Experts. 

I am a comparative political sociologist. In 2018, I wrote the book you refer to. It was named among the “best on politics” by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). I am very proud that Barton Swaim, the WSJ reviewer penned: “Salvatore Babones, an American-born professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Sydney, doesn’t defend Mr. Trump or his administration. But he does suggest the Trump phenomenon may galvanize a revival of democratic self-rule. Mr. Babones, whose ideological affiliations remain a mystery to me, does not fear, as many American liberals do, that Mr. Trump is an ‘authoritarian’ president. He believes, rather, that the president’s populism is a protest against a different kind of authoritarianism: the rule of unelected “experts.” 

The book is a love-letter to populism, not an apologia for Trump. I don’t mind if intellectuals disrespect Donald Trump. I mind when intellectuals disrespect Trump voters. Democracy is founded on respect for the voters — all voters — and intellectuals too often forget that even the least educated voter has the same right to an opinion as the most educated intellectual.

Note that I wrote a book on progressive social policy in 2015. Last year, I wrote a book on Australian university reform that focused on problems with the international university rankings. As a quantitative social scientist with an MS in applied mathematics, I mainly teach social statistics and social policy analysis at the University of Sydney.

Zutshi: India’s ranking in the 2022 Global Hunger Index (GHI) is 107 out of 121 countries, slipping from its 2021 ranking of 101. You found errors in their methodology, implying that the ranking was falsified or at best sloppy. What is your rationale for doubting the GHI ranking for India? 

Babones: The key problem with India’s reported drop in the 2022 GHI was an incorrect figure for the 2014 GHI report. India’s reported 2022 fall was driven almost entirely by an incorrectly recorded rise in the number of children who have low body weight for their height. That is termed wasting. 

In fact, levels of wasting declined in India between 2014 and 2022, which is only natural, considering that India’s economy grew by 50% over that period. The problem is that the 2014 GHI figure for wasting was based on a projection, presumably provided by the previous government that was far too optimistic. When the actual 2014 data from India’s National Family Health Survey (NFHS) were released in 2015, they showed wasting levels were much higher than the estimates that had been provided to GHI in 2014.

India’s Tradition of Tolerance Offers Lessons in Light of Salman Rushdie’s Stabbing

READ MORE

Unfortunately, the GHI has still not corrected the 2014 numbers for India. They’re still reporting 15.1% wasting for 2014, when the true NFHS statistic for 2014 was 21.0%. This fell to 19.3% in 2022. So, India has experienced a fall, not a rise in wasting, making the GHI figures erroneous.

Remember, 2014 was an election year. The previous government may have recorded a dramatic reduction in wasting. This figure turned out to be incorrect. Yet GHI failed to take this into account.

This is just one example of how rankings unfairly rank India. India is doing much better at feeding its children and in running its democracy than Western experts and journalists give it credit.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Western Think Tanks are Wrong About Indian Democracy Declining appeared first on Fair Observer.

Every World Cup in future will be a cauldron of dispute, confrontation and conflict, a long day’s journey into hostility. Instability and strong emotions will turn what purists once regarded as quadrennial celebrations of global harmony into reminders that humanity is intractably divided, culturally, politically and religiously.

For over 90 years, the World Cup has rivaled the summer Olympics for scope, grandeur and athletic excellence. It still does. But, from this point, it will also be an occasion for gathering forces of dissent. Many will despair at the wrangling that’s changed the character of the 2022 tournament in Qatar, while others will be excited by the way sport can force into world focus problems, affairs or just situations that might otherwise be ignored or dismissed as unworthy of international attention.

Cultural Changes

Twelve years ago, when football’s world governing organization FIFA agreed to let the sheikhdom on the coast of the Persian Gulf with a tiny population of 2,200,000 to host the tournament, the problems posed seemed logistical: weather, accommodation, timing and so on. No one could have known what was coming. The Harvey Weinstein case came to the fore in 2017, and led to the subsequent surge of the MeToo movement. The comparably potent cultural movement of Black Lives Matter that grew after the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020. Gender fluidity and the challenge to the traditional sexual binary. Transgender politics, not only in sport but in every area of society. These were among the cultural shifts that changed … well, practically everything in society, including perceptions and expectations of sport.

The Greatest Show on Earth

READ MORE

The days when sports governors tried strenuously to prevent political or social issues fouling the onetime pursuit of amateur gentlemen are now gone. Sport is now fully weaponized and the majority of its fans not only accept but insist that it should be used as an instrument for exposing injustices and promoting causes (I have soon-to-be-published research that provides evidence of the rise of politicized fans).

Sports has a mixed record in promoting social change. While it’s hailed as partly responsible for bringing down South African apartheid, there is no persuasive evidence that boycotting South African sport was effective in any more than a symbolic way. The memorable black power salutes at the Mexico Olympics of 1968 are now iconic reminders of the fight against racism in the USA, though many neglect how athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who gestured with their gloved fists, were actually punished and demonized at the time rather than vaunted. Muhammad Ali is often regarded as champion of civil rights as much as a boxer, though, in 1964, when he dropped his name Cassius Clay and converted to the Nation of Islam he was attacked for his separatist philosophy.

Criticism of Qatar or Islam?

Some believe revealing Qatar’s exploitative treatment of migrant workers and its admonition of homosexuality will hasten a change in both. In the first instance, this is possible. In the second, unimaginable. Islam decrees that homosexuality is sinful. No Islamic country on earth, nor any Muslim, whether in the middle east, Britain, USA or anywhere else will demur. Qatar is among at least eleven other countries that consider homosexuality a capital offense, which may be punishable by death.

Macron Claims Islam Is in “Crisis.” Erdogan Disagrees

READ MORE

At this point, I should perhaps declare an interest: I am a white, cisgender heterosexual male, born in the UK, part-educated in Canada, having lived in Asia and the USA. In common with other sociologists, I understand the deep cultural significance of religion, but believe in the primacy of humanity, making me atheist. I am also reflexive, meaning that I don’t accept there is a neutral position from which to assess cultures: the very fact of my existence implicates me in culture and precludes objective analysis. I remain aware that I am steeped in the culture of my upbringing and mature development. So, while I’ve supported gay rights and opposed racism for my adult life and argue against others who do not, I try to resist privileging my own culture over all others. I include this detail because my interpretation of much of the recent condemnation of Qatar is that it is a disguised attack on Islam.

Close to a quarter of the world’s human population are Muslims. I find the Islamic code on homosexuality repugnant. I also acknowledge that its source is in faith and no amount of argument will change this. So, when Qatar is described by western journalists as “medieval,” it discloses a sneering, ignorant disrespect. And, when I hear western Europeans, who are not Muslims, describing their commitment to “cultural inclusiveness” or “inclusivity,” I suspect they mean excluding any party that disagrees with popular western principles, standards and values.

Intolerance is an old-fashioned word so maybe neo-intolerance is how we should describe the new form of western cultural pompousness. The affectedly — and usually self-congratulatory — manner with which west European liberals make pronouncements on practically anything that deviates from their own rules of thought and conduct is sure to be challenged. Possibly by the time of the next World Cup.

Politics and the 2026 World Cup

The 2026 World Cup will be shared by three hosts all from the same land mass and all predominantly Christian: Canada, USA and Mexico. Not all countries are equally worthy of opprobrium, of course. The USA will bear the heaviest burden, with laws on the possession of firearms framed in the nineteenth century (far from medieval) and laws on abortion that were reformed in 1973, but which may by the time of the World Cup, be retroceded to the 1820s. Mexico decriminalized abortion only last year. As for Canada, that perennially inoffensive territory in the north, consider: last year, Pope Francis publicly apologized for the 150,000 indigenous children who were separated from their families and taken to residential Catholic schools where they were beaten, starved and sexually abused, between 1881-1996. This will be one of a number of concerns regarding indigenous people that will surface when the World Cup arrives. 

Cristiano Ronaldo Faces Sexual Assault Allegations

READ MORE

Once more, there will be sanctimonious critics offering their insight, resonance and misplaced sense of superiority. There will also be earnest interrogation that will lead to useful and possibly productive developments. Qatar is not going to abandon Islam, but its citizens live on planet earth, eat, work, catch buses and do many of the same things as the rest of the world. That includes examining their lives from time to time — as we all do. They have been made forcibly and, I am guessing, uncomfortably aware of what many others regard as their shortcomings and may choose to revise them accordingly in future. 

What is football for?

Football is ridiculous, isn’t it? Eleven grown men kicking a ball in one direction while another eleven grown men try to stop them and move the ball the other way. Can you think of anything more trivial and purposeless? The attention granted the World Cup might lead a friendly alien to assume the tournament takes us closer to world peace, or finding a cure for cancer, or maybe saving the planet from self-destruction. It does none of these things. But this sporting wasteland may yet produce some good: if, as I expect, World Cups from this point become cultural tinderboxes, then they might cease to be trivial and conjure larger, more meaningful campaigns that will bring genuine benefits.

Those who wish football and other sports to ablute themselves of politics will rue the day FIFA awarded the 2022 World Cup to what was once a British protectorate where they speak Arabic and which got rich through its oil. But the sustained fury the decision has engendered may yet be the greatest blessing, not to football, but to the world.

Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Qatar Will Change the World Cup Forever appeared first on Fair Observer.

[Arab Digest thanks Jim Crane for this article. He is an energy research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute in Houston, Texas. He worked for many years as a journalist based in Iraq and Dubai, and is the author of several books.]

The Texas shale phenomenon brought a huge surge in oil production in the US. We were producing about 6-7 million barrels per day (bpd) in the early 2000s. That jumped up really quickly and reached 13 million bpd by 2021. That’s the most oil any country has ever produced. I think the highest the Saudis have ever gotten was 12.4 bpd in 2020. 

OPEC, of course, watched this development. It first dismissed increased American oil production as a flash in the pan. Increasingly, over the years, OPEC became alarmed. Shale was basically stealing their market share. Shale captured almost 5 million barrels a day of OPEC’s market share. 

Shale and European Energy Security

READ MORE

To be fair, OPEC was not necessarily losing market share. The oil market was growing thanks to Chinese demand but OPEC was not capturing the growth. The OPEC nations were holding their production steady. And, at times, they were actually cutting production to prop up prices. Every time OPEC did that, US shale would swoop in and grab more market share as the ultimate free rider. This shale monster was growing and growing and OPEC didn’t really have an answer. 

Shale was basically undercutting OPEC, no matter what it did. If OPEC would cut production, the US would ramp up shale production and dampen the price increase OPEC was chasing. And then if OPEC tried to punish the market and punish producers with a big price war by flooding the market with extra production, shale investors would stop investing, those oil wells would decline naturally. And then the price wouldn’t drop as far.

Saudi Arabia Hugs Russia to Take Back Control

The shale sector was difficult for OPEC to cope with. It was making OPEC a lot less effective. And the Saudis found themselves largely alone. Their market power seemed to be evaporating. They needed another big producer to try and regain their influence over the market. Russia was the obvious choice. It was the world’s number two producer and exporter. By 2016, after various discussions and overtures, Russia began cooperating with Saudi Arabia and OPEC. Russia also brought along a couple of other allies with Kazakhstan being the most important one.

It was US shale that led to the formation of OPEC+ and this organization has since been going strong. The OPEC+ countries cut oil production by over two million barrels just before this year’s US midterm elections. This October cut was really extraordinary. Saudi Arabia has never pushed OPEC to cut production when the incumbent US president did not want it to. This time, US President Joe Biden wanted an increase in oil production. He wanted lower gasoline prices at the pump because American consumers believe that the president controls them.

Joe Biden’s Saudi Arabia Visit to Meet Mohammad bin Salman

LISTEN NOW

Instead, it is the Saudis who have the most influence over gasoline prices. They can increase production and lower gasoline prices, making them a non-issue for an American president. In the past, the Saudis obliged Barack Obama and Donald Trump. When the Saudis obliged Obama, the late King Abdullah was in charge. Under King Salman, equations with the Democrats have changed. The Saudis were willing to oblige Trump but decided to hurt Biden by cutting production and increasing prices.

It is clear that Saudi Arabia and OPEC value their oil market cooperation with Russia. The cartel has become more disciplined with Russia on board. Under Saudi-Russian dual leadership, OPEC+ has become stronger. Before the invasion of Ukraine, the Saudis had more to gain from this partnership. After the invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin is really the big winner. OPEC+ provides him the best stage for geopolitical influence. He seems to revel in the fact that he’s managed to shoehorn himself into this tight US-Saudi relationship.

The US and Saudi Arabia Drift Apart

The Saudis are unlikely to jettison Putin despite US pressure. They are making a point of making diplomatic visits and taking the Russian president’s calls. In contrast, they made a show of rejecting Biden’s calls last year. The Saudis seem to be signaling to Washington that there are consequences for spurning their Gulf Arab partners. Disagreements between the US and the Gulf states date back at least to the Arab Spring.

As shale production went up, the US did not worry too much about such disagreements. There was a feeling that we’re self-sufficient in oil. That gives us a free pass on not having to cater to our Middle East allies, at least to some of their demands. It turns out that the US motorist is just as exposed to global oil prices as ever. The Gulf oil exporters still remain the global price makers.

Oil Realpolitik Has Returned With a Vengeance

READ MORE

Saudi Arabia has spare capacity. That is the gap between how much a country actually produces and how much it could potentially produce if it went flat out and opened all the taps. Spare capacity makes Saudi Arabia special. It gives the Saudis their swagger on the geopolitical stage. They can always tap spare capacity in case of a natural disaster such as a hurricane or an earthquake. They can also do so in case of a political upheaval such as an invasion or an embargo. 

In the past, the Saudis leveraged spare capacity in concert with the US. When Washington wanted to invade Iraq or sanction Iran, Saudi Arabia unlocked its spare capacity to release extra oil into the global market. So in my classes here at Rice University, I used to say that the Saudis protect the US motorist from US foreign policy. After this October that might not be true anymore.

Saudi Arabia is now behaving differently. Biden campaigned on making the Saudis a pariah. Well, once he was elected, Saudi spare capacity was less available to the US. We had a really fast post-COVID recovery in oil demand and we had this big oil price shock. And we had OPEC+ basically saying that we’re just going to stick to our plan of drip-feeding oil to the global market by increases of 400,000 barrels a day. As a result, oil prices rose all the way up to $130 a barrel.

Unlike in the past, Saudi Arabia did not bring its spare capacity into play. Not only Biden but also Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson asked the Saudis to pump more oil. They refused. They claimed that the market was well supplied and that the price spikes were due to geopolitical risks or under-investment by producers afraid of climate action or some kind of a boomeranging pandemic. So they held that spare capacity in abeyance. 

Here in the US, Biden had to deal with high prices in an election year by releasing supplies from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), the world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil. The US consumes nearly 20 million barrels per day and the SPR is estimated to be over 700 million barrels. This is not how things are meant to work. In the past, the US was always able to tap Saudi spare capacity. This time, Biden went to Saudi Arabia but the Saudis refused to help.

[Arab Digest first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Saudi Arabia and Russia Have Now Teamed Up in OPEC+ appeared first on Fair Observer.

Vladimir Putin is playing the long game. The Russian leader believes that he can outwait all of his adversaries. Since he has ruled over Russia for more than two decades, he obviously has sound political instincts (as well as a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness). He is gambling that the Ukrainians, the Europeans, and the Americans will all eventually give up and let Russia consolidate its territorial gains if not complete control over Ukraine.

The Ukrainian leadership, on the other hand, believes that it can, with the help of US and European military equipment, expel Russian troops not only from the territory seized since the February invasion but even the lands in the Donbas region and the Crimean Peninsula that Russia occupied in 2014.

These completely incompatible objectives are surely a recipe for a long stalemate. Perhaps the conflict in Ukraine will come to resemble the Korean War, which featured dramatic battleground reversals in the first year followed by two years of stalemate before the warring parties, exhausted and chastened, finally negotiated an armistice.

Ukraine Fatigue? Your Urgent Duty: Read These Books

READ MORE

The Korean War is relevant for another reason. Like Kim Il Sung, Putin counted on Chinese support. During the Korean War, North Korea was saved by the intervention of the Chinese army. This time around, however, China is not sending any military hardware, much less any troops, to help Russia.

Putin might also be wrong about his assumptions about the weakness of his adversaries.

Ukrainian Resolve

The current Russian strategy has been to hold off Ukrainian military advances around Kharkiv in the north and Kherson in the south while bombing the country’s infrastructure. The massive campaign of aerial destruction has already damaged 40% of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, including a large portion of its solar and wind power installations, as well as water and sewage facilities.

Although this new aerial campaign has brought the war once again to major population centers like the capital Kyiv—and even to areas in the far west along the Polish border—it seems to have only strengthened the resolve of Ukrainians to fight back. According to a poll from the end of October, 86% of Ukrainian respondents believe that it’s necessary to keep fighting despite the devastating air strikes. Meanwhile, according to Russian polls, support for the war has fallen to new lows.

Is Ukraine Going too Far in its War?

READ MORE

On the ground, Russian forces recently abandoned Kherson, the only major Ukrainian city that the invading armies managed to seize. Even ardent Putin supporters are aghast at this latest sign of Russian military failure. It was only a few weeks ago that the Russian government declared Kherson part of the Russian Federation when it annexed four Ukrainian territories. Former Putin advisor Sergei Markov called “the surrender of Kherson… the largest geopolitical defeat of Russia since the collapse of the USSR.”

US Wavering?

Putin has also expected that political unity in the United States would eventually fragment in the face of rising energy and food prices. The Republican Party in Congress has indeed indicated that this unity is fleeting. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, in the lead-up to this week’s midterm elections, warned that his party was “not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.”

In reality, McCarthy only meant that he favored greater oversight of the funds, not a reduction in support. Only a few Republican legislators oppose military aid to Ukraine. In the midterms, Republicans failed to take the Senate and managed only a slim margin of victory in the House. Even if they wanted to, the Republicans are not likely to be able to change US policy on Ukraine.

Nor will the left wing of the Democratic Party significantly change administration policy. Despite all the hoopla around the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s letter on Ukraine that was unveiled and withdrawn in quick succession, most progressives support the provision of aid. Here, for instance, is a recent statement from Congressman Jamie Raskin, a prominent Congressional Progressive Caucus member and one of the letter’s signatories:

Ukrainians today give the democratic world a chance for a critical and historic victory, and we must rally to their side. It is important to be on the right side of a just war, and it is even more important to be on the right side and win. Just as Ukrainian resistance gives us hope, a Ukrainian victory would give us an opening to a much better future for all humanity. All champions of democracy over autocracy—whether they call themselves progressives, conservatives or liberals—should be doing whatever we can to ensure that Ukraine wins this just war as quickly as possible.

In the public at large, meanwhile, US military support of Ukraine enjoys strong support. Around three out of four Americans support the continuation of both economic and military aid to Ukraine.

What about Europe?

Putin has also expected European support for Ukraine to crumble in the face of a winter of rising energy costs. Here, there is a considerably wider range of opinion than in the United States. A plurality of both Greeks and Italians favor lifting sanctions against Russia. Hungarians, too, are skeptical about a tougher approach to Russia. By contrast, the rest of Europe is not in the mood to compromise with the Kremlin.

Although Putin might be cheered by the growing gap between Greece, Italy, and Hungary on the one hand and the rest of Europe on the other, he should be very worried about plummeting support for Russia among what had once been his most reliable allies: far-right political parties.

In Italy, for instance, Putin once enjoyed considerable influence with the far right. He counted Silvio Berlusconi, former prime minister and head of Forza Italia, as a close friend. Putin’s United Russia party had a close partnership with Matteo Salvini’s Lega party. Under ordinary circumstances, Putin should have been thrilled by the victory of the far right in the recent Italian elections.

But the head of the leading far-right party Brothers of Italy, Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, has made it clear that she will continue to support Ukraine. “Given our principal challenge today, Italy strongly supports the territorial integrity, sovereignty and freedom of Ukraine,” Meloni told NATO at a meeting last week. “The political cohesion of the alliance and our full commitment to supporting the Ukrainian cause are, from our point of view, the best response that NATO allies can give.”

Putin himself was once held in high regard by the European far right. Since the invasion of Ukraine, his approval ratings among voters affiliated with far-right parties has dropped dramatically. For instance, 62% of Lega voters in Italy once thought highly of Putin. That number has dropped to 10% today.

The Balance Sheet

If you add up all these factors, Ukraine has a considerable edge over Russia. It is maintaining its military support from the United States and the European Union, and recent elections in Italy and the United States have not altered those commitments. It is making incremental progress on the battlefield, as the Russian withdrawal from Kherson indicates. And Russian destruction of civil infrastructure, however extensive and punishing, has not sapped the will of the Ukrainian population.

Russia, on the other hand, faces numerous problems. It has few supporters in the international arena. It is having difficulty calling up enough experienced soldiers to replenish the front lines in Ukraine. And sanctions are reducing its ability to replace the military hardware it has lost so far in the war, as its overtures to Iran and North Korea for rather rudimentary arms indicate.

Given Ukraine’s battlefield successes and the willingness of the Ukrainian population to endure hardship in order to repel Russian invaders, this is no time to call for a ceasefire. Such a ceasefire would give Russia the time to reinforce its positions in occupied territory in Ukraine and train new recruits to prepare for a future counter-offensive. If Ukrainians change their minds and champion a ceasefire, then of course the United States should help negotiate one. But not until then.

The Russian left, too, understands this simple moral question. Anarcho-ecofeminist Lolja Nordic argues:

It is absurd to demand that an occupied country stop fighting for its liberation and essentially give up its land for peace. It’s the same as telling a victim of violence to not resist a person who tries to abuse, rape or murder them. Why would we tell that to Ukrainians?

Nine times out of ten, war is not the answer. But in this case, the Ukrainians didn’t ask for war. It was thrust upon them. So, the only appropriate answer to Russia’s invasion is a war of self-defense. And right now, Ukraine is winning it.

Down the road, a stalemate is possible, perhaps even likely. At the moment, however, the government of Volodymyr Zelensky sees no need to negotiate with a Kremlin that is equally uninterested in compromise. The difference for the Ukrainians, however, is that they have good reason to believe that they can achieve their goals of regaining occupied territory by military means in the coming months.

[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Ukraine Now Holds a Strong Edge Over Russia appeared first on Fair Observer.

For many people the news of a missile strike on Poland had a Dr Strangelove feel to it. Suddenly the launch of World War III might be only moments away, and with it the inevitable nuclear holocaust. In the world of hyperreality so carefully constructed for many decades by our political institutions; our media and our consumerist way of life, this was truly a moment of unwanted surrealism.

Fortunately, the masters of our official hyperreality stepped in to calms things down. Without any solid evidence but plenty of noble intentions, they found the most palatable explanation for this dramatic incident. As The Eurasian Times reported: “Polish President Andrzej Duda said it was ‘highly probable’ that the missile was launched by Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense.” He added that “there is no evidence that the Russian side launched it.”

The Ukrainians have been following a well-constructed hyperreal script. It contains a hallowed principle inherited from Russiagate. This new dogma bluntly states that if something bad happens anywhere in the world, it’s Putin’s fault. Following this script, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of the attack on Poland. He clearly hoped this would at alst push NATO into fully engaging in the war against Russia. But US President Joe Biden, who can be considered the producer of the film exploiting the hyperreal script, was quick to explain that the missile was not fired by Russia. Jan Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, quickly followed suit. Outside of Ukraine everyone agreed that the damage was done by a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile that had presumably gone astray.

According to Reuters Zelenskyy denied it. “I have no doubt,” he insisted, “that it was not our missile.” He “believed Tuesday’s explosion was caused by a Russian missile,” based on reports from Ukraine’s military which he ‘cannot but trust.’”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

No doubt:

A handy expression to affirm what a person possessing real or imaginary authority would like to be true, whether or not it is true.

Contextual note

According to Interfax-Ukraine Zelenskyy also had this to say: “Today, something that we have been warning for a long time has also happened. Terror is not limited to our state borders. Russian missiles hit Poland… Missiles hit NATO territory. This is a Russian missile attack on collective security! This is a very significant escalation.” The article described Zelenskyy as “urging Poland to take decisive action.”

There is therefore “no doubt” about one thing: that Zelenskyy is pushing Poland and NATO to declare war on Russia. The Ukrainian president sees this as a game-changer. He simply failed to realize that those who write the rules of the game aren’t quite ready for a change.

Ukraine Fatigue? Your Urgent Duty: Read These Books

READ MORE

This war has produced an interesting tug-of-war within it. Zelenskyy is pushing for a shift in the meaning of Joe Biden’s proxy war designed and managed explicitly to “weaken Russia.” Biden doesn’t hesitate to tell Ukraine’s clone of Winston Churchill that he is off script. Hyperreal must be respected. Zelensky may think otherwise, but for the US, it isn’t about Ukraine’s victory but Russia’s defeat. The US is ready to accept the total destruction of Ukraine and the decimation of its people if that’s what’s required to serve the goal of taking Russia out of the European equation. How else can one understand the idea that the US and the EU will keep fueling the war “as long as it takes?”

Western media was flummoxed by this unexpected moment of surrealism. Up to this point, for Western media the war appeared to be a heroic combat between a brave people and an evil invader. They treated like an ongoing sporting match or a playoff series taking place within an arena on the far side of Europe. So long as the two teams remained within the confines of the arena, the media could cheer for the home team and applaud its clever attacks and successful feints, and hiss at the opponent, whose every gesture was described as a war crime.

In the past week, Western officials and the media have provided no updates. An investigation is presumably pending, just as in the case of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines. In both cases, this may mean that the results of the investigations will be eternally hidden from public view, a pattern well know since the John F Kennedy assassination, from which crucial evidence is still being withheld 59 years later.

This incident highlights a problem that no one in the media wants to mention. Since that critical moment earlier this year when the Western media began to turn Zelenskyy into a bearded superhero clothed in a green t-shirt, the former actor and current war president assumes that anything he says will be dutifully echoed in the Western media and treated as gospel truth. For the media, any expression of doubt about the truth of any of his statements falls into the category of either heresy or Russian propaganda.

This time, in what’s turning out to be a “he said/she said” case, the media must decide whom to believe or to assume that all are lying, which is possible when the evidence is not on the table. For the moment the media appear to be going with the interpretation supported by Duda, Biden and Stoltenberg. It seems safe and requires no further comment.

Or does it? Zelenskyy’s insistent denial could be interpreted in three ways. First, he doesn’t want people to believe his army could make a mistake. Second, he doesn’t want the Poles to hold Ukraine responsible for the death of their countrymen out of fear that the traditional enmity between Ukrainian nationalists and Poles may be revived. That enmity played out in murderous, sometimes genocidal ways in the past. Or it was a false flag operation specifically designed to produce the effect Zelenskyy called for: the engagement of NATO against Russia. No one wants to talk about that.

Historical note

The civilization of hyperreality is a direct outgrowth of the industrial revolution and its evolved technology. In the early 20th century surrealism became a major movement in the world of art and literature. At the same time, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, working with corporations and presidents, was turning the US economy into a powerful machine driven by public relations and advertising and dedicated to transforming the worldview and mindscape of a docile public. Advertising’s imagery and messaging  became the breeding ground for a culture governed by hyperreality.

Surrealism and hyperreality differed in one important way: surrealism used illusion either to both entertain the public and challenge its thinking. The culture of hyperreality aims at conditioning the public’s thinking, replacing in people’s minds reality with a simulacrum.

New Congressional Amendment Benefits War Profiteers, Risks World War III

READ MORE

But another factor distinguishes the two concepts. Hyperreality reflects a rational, structured strategy engaged by a group of people who collectively exercise some largely invisible political or cultural influence. Working together, they produce a different idea of the world, better constructed, simplified and more attractive than everyday reality, with its multiple contradictions.

Surrealism seeks to trouble its public’s thinking. Hyperreality is designed to reassure and put questioning to sleep. A “surreal” painting, film or novel contains elements from the real world combined with something unusual, deviant or simply weird. It violates our accepted laws of perception. In the film, Un Chien Andalou by the surrealist pair Luis Bunuel and In a scene and Salvador Dali, a closeup reveals a colony of ants emerging from a hole in the hero’s palm. The hand is absolutely realistic. So are the ants. But the spectator sees this fantasized construction as something created by an author and achieved thanks to technology. No one could confuse this with reality.

Hyperreality, on the other hand, exists for the specific purpose of confusing the public. Propaganda is one form of hyperreality, a heavy-handed one. It relies on the industrial production of something intended to replace reality in people’s minds. The media provide the vector for that replacement.

The confusion over the story of who fired the missile that hit is an example of hyperreality inadvertently showing its seams. The event itself was real but the reactions have been surreal. When Stoltenberg affirms that the missile was Ukrainian but the fault lies with the Russians, it is like watching Bunuel’s film. It simply makes no sense. But it isn’t art. It pretends to be the truth.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.

Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Great Missile Mystery: A Ukrainian Whodunnit appeared first on Fair Observer.

When war separates people, arts reunite them. That was the goal celebrated last Saturday in Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California, where dancers impacted by the war in Ukraine danced together for the first time since the invasion, on February 24^th. The one-night-only special ballet performance, Reunited in Dance, was simulcasted for visitors in the plaza in front  of the concert hall because tickets were sold out in a matter of days. “This is an artistic, not a political event, but of course it’s impossible to separate the two, especially because ballet is Russia’s most powerful factor of  soft power. 

The stories behind this special reunion are as touching as the performance presented at René and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. Xander Parish is a British dancer responsible for the choreography. A year ago he married a fellow dancer, Anastasia Demidova. Together they made the decision to leave everything behind without saying anything to their friends in the Mariinsky. “If I had stayed in the Mariinsky Ballet, it would mean things were fine but they weren’t, even if I love my mentors and colleagues there. It’s sad when politics has that kind of effect on art”, says Xander. “It was very hard for every dancer. We are all against the war, but at the same time, we are all grateful to Russia for all it taught us in arts. But it was scary to leave by bus across Finland and Estonia, when airplanes prices charged by Turkish airlines were an extorsion” Parish explained.

Texas-born Adrian Blake Mitchell went on to dance six seasons atthe Mikhailovsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, together with the world-famous ballerina Polina Semionova. When the Russian invasion of Ukraine took place, flights were canceled and Mitchell found that it was impossible to cross borders with his small dog, Beau, either by train or bus. He took an Uber-like service to cross the Bridge of Friendship, as the border from Russia to Estonia is familiarly referred to. But the FSB agents (Russian security) realized he was American and asked him about his politics, his thoughts on Russia, where he worked and the countries he had traveled too. He broke out in tears when he finally managed to get to the other side of the bridge.

Russian Ballet’s Soft Power: Will Dance Outlast Autocracy?

READ MORE

Ukrainian dancer Vsevolod Maevsky, formerly with the Mariinsky Ballet, says he has lost all emotional balance in the present and no plans for the future. “All I want is that my sister and nephew, who decided to stay in Kiev because she didn’t find any jobs elsewhere, may survive, although I get very angry that she didn’t listen to me when I advised her to leave. I feel a  lot of contradictory emotion now. I think politics is all about nothing but the money. They don’t care about people. How can we build a new world if we put money and nationalities abovepeople?”Maevsky complained.

Swiss-born Laura Fernandez Gromova is Ukrainian on her mother’s side. Before joining the Mariinsky, she won three top prizes at the Prix de Lausanne ballet competition. She was in Moscow when the war started, but part of her family is in Mariupol, which suffered some of the deadliest bombardment. She still wonders if they are alive. She was advised not to show her Ukrainian passport. After leaving Russia, she thought her career might be over, until she received an invitation to dance at the Georgian National Company.

War’s heartbreak and the humanity of the arts

David Motta Soares left Brazil at the age of 12 to join the Bolshoi Ballet Academy. Living in Russia since that age, he says the decision to leave Russia was one of the hardest in his life, especially after European dance companies started to ban Russian dancers. “That’s sad and impossible. Every major dance company in the world has some Russian artists. Also, we don’t do politics. We bring people joy and happiness. We need to embrace, not exclude people,” says David, who booked an urgent flight to Turkey after the invasion and wrote on his Instagram account, a few days later, that he had quit the Bolshoi, “the place I called home for many years”. He describes the reunion with other dancers in Costa Mesa. “It was a fairytale to meet my colleagues in California and bring some joy in such a difficult moment. Art and sports have that responsibility, to put forward the human side of this war,” says the dancer, who is now in Germany, but with no long-term plans for the future.

The idea for Reunited in Dance was born a few months after the invasion of Ukraine and it was sponsored by Elizabeth Segerstrom and the Henry T. and Elizabeth Segerstrom Foundation. It premiered The Ballet Class, a new ballet choreographed by Xander Parish to Tchaikovsky’s The Children’s Album. The program included Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain, Eric Gauthier’s Ballet 101, and Ilya Jivoy’s BA//CH, closing with selections of Swan Lake, Le Corsaire, Paquita, Paquita, Don Quixote and others.Although Reunited in Dance was designed to be a one-night celebration, dancers were so excited with the project and happy with the long and warm applause of the audience that some of them have plans to join again soon. Parish, for instance, is thinking about forming a ballet company that embraces talents in exile. He explained why. “I believe that the spirit of that place, what we know, what we learned, who we became and who we are, can be preserved, and can be reunited.”,

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Reunited by art and against the war in Ukraine appeared first on Fair Observer.

The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021 after waging a 20-year insurgency with support from Pakistan and, to some extent, from Iran. Now that the Taliban is in charge, the direct and indirect influence of Islamabad over Afghanistan is profound.  In fact, many observers question the national legitimacy of the Taliban because they are seen as a proxy for Pakistan.

The Taliban is the product of Pakistan’s proxy wars driven by ideology. Thousands of religious madrassas that have taught millions promote extremism and violence. Their curriculum was developed in the 1980s for the mujahideen to unleash violence on Soviet troops. As is well known, the US and Saudi Arabia supported the mujahideen during the Cold War. In fact, hardline Saudi Wahhabi ideology deeply influenced the madrassas, the mujahideen and the Taliban.

When the US decided to withdraw from Afghanistan, the government collapsed and the Pashtun-led Taliban took over. Much of the world was stunned by this speedy takeover. Pakistan was the only major actor prepared for this development. Note that the Taliban  took over on August 15, 2021 and, as early as September 4, Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed, the chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was in Kabul. Hameed helped settle the Taliban’s internal disputes and paved the path for a caretaker government.

The same thing but different context

In many ways, the Taliban’s victory is a repetition of Afghanistan’s history. The 2020 US-Taliban deal was consistent with the 1988 Afghanistan-Pakistan Geneva Accords. That deal paved the way for the Soviet withdrawal and, subsequently, the collapse of the Afghan government.  For many Afghanistan experts, the US “peace” negotiation with the Taliban was a “proxy peace” process.

Afghanistan’s government was excluded from the 2020 deal. The US made a deal with a misogynistic, ethnonationalist, fundamentalist terrorist organization and abandoned the democratically elected government. This led to its speedy collapse.

Once the Taliban took over Kabul, they captured all the institutions of the state that had been built over 20 years since 2001. That year, the previous Taliban regime fell because the US intervened after the 9/11 attacks. Now, the Taliban are back and they have captured billions of dollars worth of US military equipment, which they are using to consolidate their power.

Although there is uncertainty in the region concerning the Taliban’s future, regional players, such as Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and China, have adopted a strategy of pragmatic engagement.  The Taliban also control all sources of the country’s income, which sustains their forces and protects their regime.

Contrary to the rhetoric and promises of the so-called Taliban 2.0, they have been pursuing the same brutal policies that characterized their reign in the 1990s. Extrajudicial killings, ethnic cleansing, discrimination against women and other oppressive measures are back. They have trampled civil society and lack political legitimacy.

The Talibanization of Afghanistan’s society is proceeding swiftly. They are building thousands of madrassas to promote their radical ideology. They have banned schools for girls, changed the education curriculum and impose their radical interpretations of Islam upon an ethnically diverse nation.

The Taliban have also maintained their relationship with terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. The killing of Aiman al-Zawahiri by the US on July 31, 2022 in Kabul demonstrates that the Taliban is still harboring top leaders of al-Qaeda and is a haven for terrorists.

Brutal repression, little legitimacy

The Taliban have imposed a primitive totalitarian regime on a diverse country. They have failed to create a formal political process or a vision for the country. Instead, the Taliban have used violence to rural Pashtun tribalism and hardline Islamic Sharia law on ethnic groups with very different cultures. They are marginalizing and often killing non-Pashtuns, particularly the Shia Hazaras.

Pashtuns are now in-charge of Hazara areas. Naturally, the Hazaras feel their homeland has been occupied. They have changed signs in universities from Farsi to Pashto even in Persian-speaking areas such as Balkh in the north. Signs outside ministries are also in Pashto. Naturally, non-Pashtuns are not pleased.

The Taliban’s policy toward women is extremely harsh. They have re-instituted their “gender apartheid,” decimating existing women’s rights, such as their right to travel, work, education, and participate in public life. Torture and extra-judicial killings are now common practice.

The Taliban’s highly centralized model of governance does not, cannot and will not function well. Once, Afghanistan’s kings had the mandate to control the country on behalf of a colonial power through a highly centralized system. This history created a highly centralized model of governance and fostered a psychology of ethnic domination within the Pashtun elites. The Taliban are deeply committed to this model.  

This centralized model has taken a hit. Both during the Soviet occupation and the 20-year democratic experiment, concentration of power abated. Unsurprisingly, the anti-Taliban fronts are calling for a decentralized political setup. Centralization is associated with brutality, dysfunction, and a crisis of legitimacy. The current centralization is no different. It is brutal, violent and oppressive.

The Taliban rejects elections and rules the country without any formally-defined constitution or system of checks and balances. There are no political processes that establish legitimacy. Most of the Taliban leaders and commanders are not familiar with Afghan society, and they cannot speak Persian, the lingua franca of the country.

The Taliban has also failed to behave like a normal state at the international level. No country has recognized them even when they are compelled to interact with the Taliban. Even Pakistan did not recognize them unilaterally. Their links with terrorist groups have been an added concern.

It seems unlikely that the Taliban should succeed in the long term. Their Pashtun ethnonationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, violent oppression and extreme centralization does not work in multiethnic Afghanistan. As proxies of Pakistan, the Taliban do not even command legitimacy among all Pashtuns.

More war and the danger of mass atrocities

The situation in Afghanistan is moving towards another round of conflict. The people are finally rising up against the brutal regime. In recent months, an insurrection is increasing in the north. The Taliban is crushing this with its customary savagery. The international community has largely overlooked war crimes in the north but resistance is strengthening.

In the online sphere, the “#StopHazaraGenocide” has been tweeted more than 17 million times and sparked protests in cities around the world. As the Taliban’s mass atrocities continue, so do protests. Women are protesting too.  Hundreds of them have taken to the streets in the provinces of Kabul, Balkh, Bamiyan, Herat and Ghazni. 

Given rising protests, the Taliban are likely to find it difficult to rule. To support the people, the international community must systematically monitor and document violence in Afghanistan. The Security Council and the Human Rights Council at the UN have a critical role to play. Overlooking the Taliban’s violence and building relationships with them is a bad idea. It sends a signal that they can continue their repressive rule. The international community must put pressure on the Taliban to to stop human rights violations, recommence girls education, and conduct political dialogue with other ethnicities, groups and stakeholders. If the international community fails to act, there will be even more death and suffering in Afghanistan.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Destiny of Pakistan’s Totalitarian Proxy Regime in Afghanistan appeared first on Fair Observer.