Shutterstock

Right-wing populists are all the rage these days. Donald Trump and his spleen control the White House, while his counterparts have taken over in Italy, Hungary, Poland, Colombia, India, and elsewhere. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former Svengali, hopes to inspire a worldwide revolution of nationalism-inflected right-wing extremism.

But what about left-wing populists? Bernie Sanders made an epic run at the presidency in 2016 only to fall short. Jeremy Corbyn likewise had a good showing in the last British elections, but he too remains distant from power.

Left-wing populism is also popular among certain political theorists, most notably the Belgian thinker Chantal Mouffe whose latest book champions an electoral strategy that appeals to disgruntled workers.

The major problem with left populism, however, is that it tends in practice toward autocracy. The examples of existing left populism — Venezuela, Nicaragua, and (to a lesser extent) the Philippines — are embarrassments to anyone who cares deeply about democracy and human rights.

In Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro presides over an economic collapse that has hit the poor the hardest. Corruption, human rights abuses, narcotrafficking: Venezuela under Maduro is a failed state masquerading as left-wing populism. In Nicaragua, former Sandinista Daniel Ortega has been gradually concentrating power in the hands of his presidency, his family, and his cronies, and he now faces a civil insurrection demanding “justice for those who have died at the government’s hand and a return to democratic governance,” as Rebecca Gordon wrote for TomDispatch. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte also claims to be a leftist but has launched a catastrophic drug war, which has left more than 12,000 people dead, and declared open season on human rights advocates.

Fortunately another wave of left-wing populists, considerably more democratic than what’s on offer elsewhere, has been building. The most prominent of these would-be leaders, Andres Manuel Luis Obrador (AMLO), has an excellent chance of winning the presidential election in Mexico this Sunday.

Can these global Bernies turn the Trump tide?

Toward a Definition

Left-wing populism has two legs, political and economic, and it is clothed in a particular style.

The economic leg is rather old-fashioned. Left populists appeal to those left behind by the forces of globalization by offering a program of government subsidies, job-creation projects, and fair trade. It’s an approach predicated on fairness — that the wealthier members of society should invest in the common good and in raising the living standards of the country’s most vulnerable.

Such a program is inspired, more or less, by a social democratic vision (or, if you prefer, a democratic socialist one). But populists also recognize that social democrats, and in some cases self-described socialists as well, have pushed the same austerity programs that their colleagues further to the right have championed. Because of their internationalist orientation, socialists have also been leery of appeals to nationalism (or, if you prefer, patriotism). So, their economic programs have a touch of globalism to them, whether in the form of worker solidarity across borders or transnational solutions to the global ecological crisis.

Left populists, on the other hand, appeal to the people of their own country first and foremost. They are leery of free trade deals, they are often close to unions, and they want to encourage the domestic consumption of industrial and agricultural production. It’s “America First” without the racism. It’s a variant of Bernie Sanders’s economic vision. It’s the mexicanismo of AMLO.

Politically, left populists square off against the elite. Members of the political elite are handy targets, for they can always be accused of being “out of touch.” In many cases, too, they are corrupt, and a broadside against the “swamp” is always a crowd-pleaser.

In almost every case, of course, the anti-elitist is a member of the elite as well, or else they wouldn’t have had the money, the political position, or the cultural notoriety to get on the ballot and attract sufficient votes. The political fortunes of these inside-outsiders rise and fall based on the credibility of their impersonation of a person “of the people.”

What distinguishes left populists from the left more generally is their focus on economics rather than identity politics. The left has worked hard to create a “rainbow coalition.” Left populists, while not exactly anti-diversity, prefer to emphasize pocketbook issues. They believe that the sharp economic divide between the haves and the have-nots — the 99 percent versus the 1 percent — provides a more useful way of contesting elections in the adversarial environment of Western politics. It also takes advantage of the swelling resentment of those who have been steamrollered by globalization.

Stylistically, left populists deploy a “common touch” by rolling up their sleeves, using simple and emotional language, and steering clear of the dreary policy nostrums of wannabe wonks. They do not go high when others go low. They are combative and sometimes even vulgar. You want these populists in your corner in a barroom fight.

And that’s, in essence, what politics has always been.

Left Populism in Motion

In Europe, the two most successful left populist movements have been Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain.

In Greece, the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) has been in power for three years. It has guided the country through one of its most difficult economic periods as the economy shrank by 26 percent. Greece hasn’t yet caught up to where it was in 2007 — and won’t for another decade, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Instead of embracing default and leaving the euro zone, Syriza negotiated the best deal it thought it could get from the European Union and the banks. But the population is still 23 percent poorer than it was before the crisis. Syriza has made any number of political compromises to stay in power, including an alliance with a far-right party. Having started as a populist party, it has governed largely as a conventional political force.

Podemos (We Can) began as the political expression of the indignados-led social movement that took to the streets in Spain in 2011 to protest the government’s austerity policies. Started in 2014, Podemos quickly became the country’s second largest party in terms of membership. But it has lost ground since then, largely because of its ambivalent position on Catalan independence. In a sign of its political irrelevance, the new government formed by Spanish Socialist Pedro Sanchez snubbed Podemos entirely.

The electoral failures of Podemos are indicative of the political fortunes of left populists more generally. In country after country, they’ve gone up against conventional parties and lost. The French Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Melenchon, failed to make it into a run-off in the presidential elections against Emmanuel Macron. South Korea’s Bernie Sanders, Lee Jae-Myung, made little headway in the Korean presidential elections last year. The Canadian Bernie Sanders, Niki Ashton, wound up third in the race to take over the leadership of the New Democratic Party. Iceland’s Bernie Sanders, Birgitta Jonsdottir, failed to lead her Pirate Party to victory in the small island nation.

In the last three cases, some very good leftish politicians have instead triumphed: Moon Jae-in in South Korea, Katrin Jacobsdottir in Iceland, and Jagmeet Singh of the New Democratic Party in Canada. Left populism generates a good deal of excitement and press attention, but so far it hasn’t won elections. Nor, in the case of Syriza, has it governed in unconventional ways.

But that might change, and soon.

AMLO and the Transformation of Mexico

Third time’s the charm, if the polls are correct.

Andres Manuel Luis Obrador (AMLO) has already run twice for the Mexican presidency and lost both times rather handily (though he claimed that the last election was rigged, which is entirely plausible in Mexico). This time around, he is leading the polls by a large margin. His nearest competitor, the candidate from the conservative PAN, is nearly 18 points behind.

There are several reasons for AMLO’s reversal in fortune. Corruption is a huge issue in Mexico, and the circle around current President Enrique Pena Nieto is awash in it. AMLO’s chief rival, Ricardo Anaya of PAN, has also run as an anti-corruption candidate. But then he became embroiled in a money-laundering scandal largely cooked up by the government. Still, the affair has undermined Anaya’s credibility.

Then there’s the Mexican economy, which has experienced only anemic growth under Pena Nieto. The rich, however, have done well, and it’s estimated that 70 percent of Mexico City’s police force work on behalf of private interests, like guarding banks. Meanwhile, the government spends a mere 7.5 percent of GDP on social programs (compared to 19 percent for the U.S. and 11.2 percent for Chile). Already a polarized country, Mexico has only become more so in recent years.

The last element in the triple whammy has been the explosive expansion of narco-trafficking and the murders that have accompanied it. In 2017, Mexico suffered 27,000 murders. With 11 journalists dead last year, Mexico was the second most dangerous country for reporters after Syria. The government seems incapable of reining in the drug cartels.

Finally, it doesn’t hurt AMLO that Donald Trump has directed an endless stream of racist invective at his country. Pena Nieto has certainly criticized the U.S. president, but early on he welcomed the Republican presidential candidate to Mexico and shook his hand. That sealed Pena Nieto’s fate as Mexico’s “most hated man” and provided AMLO with the opportunity to promote himself as a far more resolute defender of Mexican dignity.

Although very clearly opposed to the U.S. president, AMLO shares some stylistic characteristics with Trump. For instance, AMLO speaks very simply, as Trump does, and even makes up cutting diminutives for his opponents. The Mexican candidate takes aim at the elite — though as a political insider he is even more a member of the elite than Trump ever was — and bills himself as the anti-corruption alternative.

In other ways, though, AMLO is definitely the Bernie Sanders of Mexico. He was the mayor of a city, like Sanders, though Mexico City is quite a bit bigger than Burlington, Vermont. He governed in the same pragmatic way that Bernie did, often partnering with the business community. As Jon Lee Anderson writes in The New Yorker, AMLO “succeeded in creating a pension fund for elderly residents, expanding highways to ease congestion, and devising a public-private scheme, with the telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim, to restore the historic downtown.” The latter is reminiscent of Sanders’s deals to revive Burlington’s waterfront.

To win the more conservative north, AMLO has partnered with wealthy businessman Alfonso Romo, who is also slated to be his chief of staff. The proposals designed to win favor from the business community include, as Anderson reports, “establishing a thirty-kilometer duty-free zone along the entire northern border, and lowering taxes for companies, both Mexican and American, that set up factories there. He also offered government patronage, vowing to complete an unfinished dam project in Sinaloa and to provide agricultural subsidies.”

Given these pragmatic partnerships, AMLO might follow the lead of Syriza and govern more like a conventional politician than his campaign suggests. That would certainly be a relief to Mexico’s political and economic elite, which is practically quaking in its boots at the prospect of AMLO taking over.

But there’s a good possibility that AMLO, like Trump, will follow a more surprising trajectory once in power. In his bid to clean the Augean stables of Mexican politics, he has “vowed to slash pensions for former presidents and eliminate private insurance for elected officials. He has promised to cut his own salary in half, to sell Peña Nieto’s presidential jet, and not live in Mexico’s presidential palace.”

On the economic side, AMLO has promised to increase the minimum wage, support farmers so that they don’t feel that they must seek a better life across the border, and possibly renationalize the oil sector. He wants to increase government funding for education and pensions, which will appeal to old and young alike.

The urgency of AMLO’s campaign can be measured by the vitriol of those who attack him, including former foreign minister Jorge Castenada. “People don’t go to his rallies or listen or believe in him because he speaks intelligently or eloquently or charismatically,” the former leftist intellectual says. “They go because of what he represents — the end of the system.”

AMLO indeed represents the end of the system, a system that has impoverished so many and permitted narco-traffickers to operate with impunity. Mexicans are desperate for something different. Only AMLO promises a break with the present — even as he emphasizes continuity with Mexico’s more glorious past.

AMLO is likely to shake things up in Mexico. But will he also shock left populism back into life around the world?

His electoral victory, but more importantly his new style of governance, could inspire politicians elsewhere in Latin America, Europe, and Asia to offer a more popular alternative to right-wing populism. That would be quite a gift that Mexico gives to the world, one almost as important as chocolate and chili peppers.

The post Next Stop for the Global ‘Bernie’ Movement: Mexico? appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the editor of OtherWords.org.

Shutterstock

French President Emmanuel Macron has been crusading to all corners of the world, receiving applause for his impassioned pleas on behalf of the postwar liberal order in the face of rising authoritarianism and nationalism.

This spring, in his address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the new French leader compared the ongoing political divisions within Europe to a “civil war” and pledged to never “yield to any fascination for authoritarian sovereignties” — a clear reference to the ongoing democratic backslide in Hungary and Poland.

“I do not want to be part of a generation of sleepwalkers,” the 40-year-old president declared. “I want to belong to a generation which has made a firm decision to uphold its democracy.” He also pledged to “defend European sovereignty because we fought for it.”

A few days later, the French president was in Washington D.C. as President Donald Trump’s first visiting head of state. In his address to the U.S. Congress, Macron reiterated the need to stand up for democracy and urged lawmakers to preserve and strengthen the liberal international order the U.S. itself helped to create. “The United States is the one who invented this multilateralism,” Macron said. “You are the one now, who has to help preserve and reinvent it.”

Yet in practice, Macron’s own relationship to democracy has often contradicted his lofty rhetoric. Although 63 percent of French people think Macron has improved the image of France abroad, 58 percent are dissatisfied with his presidency — and 73 percent described him as authoritarian, according to a recent IFOP poll. And no wonder: Macron has repeatedly undermined democratic processes in France to implement his unpopular neoliberal reforms.

As a former investment banker at Rothschild, Macron envisions the transformation and revitalization of France through a Silicon-Valley-style neoliberalism, which embraces the “creative destruction” theory of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. And, as a graduate student of the elite National School of Administration and a former finance minister, he also envisions governance through the lens of a French technocrat, who believes in the verticality and centralization of power.

Both perspectives reflect a thin conception of representative democracy — one that puts the supposed needs of the market over popular deliberation and participation.

Extreme Centrism

In his presidential campaign book Revolution, Emmanuel Macron blames the inaction, disconnection, and elitism of traditional French political parties for the rise of extremism and democratic decline. Running as a “neither right nor left” independent, the former investment banker promised to transcend this traditional divide to modernize and transform the French political and economic system into a “startup nation” driven by innovation and a “spirit of conquest.”

His first year of presidency, however, has proven that he is neither a centrist nor an avant-garde leader, but rather an old-fashioned, right-leaning neoliberal determined to overhaul France’s hard-won social model under the guise of modernism and emancipation.

In an interview with Les Inrockuptibles, Canadian intellectual Alain Deneault describes Macron’s governing style as “extreme centrism.” If this label sounds like an oxymoron, Deneault argues that Macron’s political approach is extreme in the sense that “its policies are destructive, unfair, and imperialistic. They consist of maximizing the profits of big corporations and shareholders, and facilitating access to tax havens.” Macron’s regime is also extreme from a moral standpoint, because it uses “intimidating discourses” and is “intolerant towards anything that is not its own,” Deneault adds.

Deneault compares Macron and his party, La Republique En Marche (The Republic on the Move), to an “ideological steamroller which aims at convincing people that there is an imperious urgency — without taking the time to debate — to apply a political vision, his specifically.”

Indeed, Macron has been using his executive privileges to rule by decree and bypass parliament to speed through often unpopular reforms. Aiming to make France friendlier to the globalized business elite, he enacted “pro-business” labor laws making it easier for employers to hire and fire employees, slashed the corporate tax rate from 32 percent to 25 percent, and scrapped the longstanding impôt sur la fortune, or wealth tax, which taxed non-professional net wealth above about $1.5 million.

During a recent interview with the business magazine Forbes, Macron announced that he plans on repealing the 30 percent “exit tax” implemented in 2014 to discourage tax evasion. “People are free to invest where they want,” Macron told Forbes. He then compared the economy to a marriage: “If you are able to attract, good for you, but if not, one should be free to divorce.”

Partly in response to the Fourth Railway Package, an EU-led mission which aims to “revitalize the rail sector and make it more competitive vis-a-vis other modes of transport,” the French government pushed through major reforms of the state-owned rail operator SNCF. This controversial move has sparked fierce protests from unions, who have been fighting back with nationwide rolling strikes since March.

Chris Wallace asked the French president on Fox News Sunday if he would back down in the face of the increasing opposition. Macron firmly stated, “No chance.”

When asked why he won’t yield, Macron repeatedly uses a variation on Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan, “There is no alternative,” which becomes in Macron’s mouth: “There is no other choice.” The slogan is slightly different, but the idea is the same. His neoliberal reforms aren’t presented as policy choices, but as an essential and natural step in the course of French history that cannot be altered.

On June 14^th, the French Senate overwhelmingly agreed to turn the SNCF into a joint-stock company and scrape some of the rail workers’ employment benefits. Unions fear it’s the first step toward full privatization.

New Binarism

Macron hasn’t transcended the traditional left-right dichotomy he deemed archaic. Instead, he replaced it with a new binary that divides the world between those he calls the “backward-looking conservatives” and those, like him, who are “progressives reformers who embrace modernism.” If you’re not part of the latter camp, then you will be squeezed out.

This binarism comes out frequently in his speeches. Recently he described a train station as a place where you meet “those who succeed” and “those who are nothing.” He often describes those who oppose his neoliberal reforms as “slackers and cynics.” In other speeches, he pits “the doers” against “the do-nothings,” the “rationals” versus the “ideologues,” or the “optimistic globalists” against the “reactionary populists.”

In sum, Macronism doesn’t transcend political divides, but instead redefines them as a battle between “progressive modernists” and “reactionary slackers.” Hiding behind the argument of rationalism and efficiency, Macronism seeks to “fix” the economy by cozying up to a tiny wealthy elite who has been binge-eating resources and capturing wealth at shocking rates.

Although top income shares have increased much more in the U.S. than in France, French economist Thomas Piketty argues that France has not been exempt from rising inequality. His new study on income inequality in France shows that “between 1983 and 2015, the average income of the richest 1 percent has risen by 100 percent (above inflation), and that of the 0.1 percent richest by 150 percent, as compared with barely 25 percent for the rest of the population.”

In the meantime, at the global level, “the top 1 percent richest individuals in the world captured twice as much growth as the bottom 50 percent individuals since 1980,” according to the 2018 World Inequality report. Trickle-down economics clearly work — for the rich.

In the world of Macronism, pluralism isn’t the essence of a functioning democracy, efficiency is. In the world of Macronism, the democratic debate is reduced to a thumbs up/thumbs down activity. In the world of Macronism there is no other choice but Macronism.

The post Emmanuel Macron’s ‘Extreme Centrism’ Is a Threat to Democracy appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Juliette Legendre is a researcher for Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Charging Bull by Arturo Di Modico (photo by Sam Valadi via Flickr)

Conventional wisdom holds that China is on the ascent and the United States is in decline, that China’s economy is roaring with raw energy and that Beijing’s “Belt and Road” mega-project of infrastructure building in Central, South, and Southeast Asia is laying the basis for its global economic hegemony.

Some question whether Beijing’s ambitions are sustainable. Inequality in China is approaching that in the United States, which portends rising domestic discontent, while China’s grave environmental problems may pose inexorable limits to its economic expansion.

Perhaps the greatest immediate threat to China’s rise to economic supremacy, however, is the same phenomenon that felled the US economy in 2008—financialization, the channeling of resources to the financial economy over the real economy. Indeed, there are three troubling signs that China is a prime candidate to be the site of the next financial crisis: overheating in its real-estate sector, a roller-coaster stock market, and a rapidly growing shadow-banking sector.

China’s Real Estate Bubble

There is no doubt that China is already in the midst of a real-estate bubble. As in the United States during the subprime-mortgage bubble that culminated in the global financial crisis of 2007–09, the real-estate market has attracted too many wealthy and middle-class speculators, leading to a frenzy that has seen real-estate prices climb sharply.

Chinese real-estate prices soared in so-called Tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai from 2015 to 2017, pushing worried authorities there to take measures to pop the bubble. Major cities, including Beijing, imposed various measures: They increased down-payment requirements, tightened mortgage restrictions, banned the resale of property for several years, and limited the number of homes that people can buy.

However, Chinese authorities face a dilemma. On the one hand, workers complain that the bubble has placed owning and renting apartments beyond their reach, thus fueling social instability. On the other hand, a sharp drop in real-estate prices could bring down the rest of the Chinese economy and—given China’s increasingly central role as a source of international demand—the rest of the global economy along with it. China’s real-estate sector accounts for an estimated 15 percent of GDP and 20 percent of the national demand for loans. Thus, according to Chinese banking experts Andrew Sheng and Ng Chow Soon, any slowdown would “adversely affect construction-related industries along the entire supply chain, including steel, cement, and other building materials.”

The Shanghai Casino

Financial repression—keeping the interest rates on deposits low to subsidize China’s powerful alliance of export industries and governments in the coastal provinces—has been central in pushing investors into real-estate speculation. However, growing uncertainties in that sector have caused many middle-class investors to seek higher returns in the country’s poorly regulated stock market. The unfortunate result: A good many Chinese have lost their fortunes as stock prices fluctuated wildly. As early as 2001, Wu Jinglian, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading reform economists, characterized the corruption-ridden Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges as “worse than a casino” in which investors would inevitably lose money over the long run.

At the peak of the Shanghai market, in June 2015, a Bloomberg analyst wrote that “No other stock market has grown as much in dollar terms over a 12-month period,” noting that the previous year’s gain was greater “than the $5 trillion size of Japan’s entire stock market.”

When the Shanghai index plunged 40 percent later that summer, Chinese investors were hit with huge losses—debt they still grapple with today. Many lost all their savings—a significant personal tragedy (and a looming national crisis) in a country with such a poorly developed social-security system.

Chinese stock markets (now the world’s second-largest, according to The Balance, an online financial journal) stabilized in 2017, and seemed to have recovered the trust of investors when they were struck by contagion from the global sell-off of stocks in February 2018, posting one of their biggest losses since the 2015 collapse.

Shadow Banking Comes Out of the Shadows

Another source of financial instability is the virtual monopoly on credit access held by export-oriented industries, state-owned enterprises, and the local governments of favored coastal regions. With the demand for credit from other sectors unmet by the official banking sector, the void has been rapidly filled by so-called shadow banks.

The shadow-banking sector is perhaps best defined as a network of financial intermediaries whose activities and products are outside the formal, government-regulated banking system. Many of the shadow-banking system’s transactions are not reflected on the regular balance sheets of the country’s financial institutions. But when a liquidity crisis takes place, the fiction of an independent investment vehicle is ripped apart by creditors who factor these off-balance-sheet transactions into their financial assessments of the mother institution.

The shadow-banking system in China is not yet as sophisticated as its counterparts on Wall Street and in London, but it is getting there. Ballpark estimates of the trades carried out in China’s shadow-banking sector range from $10 trillion to more than $18 trillion.

In 2013, according to one of the more authoritative studies, the scale of shadow-banking risk assets—i.e., assets marked by great volatility, like stocks and real estate—came to 53 percent of China’s GDP. That might appear small when compared with the global average of about 120 percent of GDP, but the reality is that many of these shadow-banking creditors have raised their capital by borrowing from the formal banking sector. These loans are either registered on the books or “hidden” in special off-balance-sheet vehicles. Should a shadow-banking crisis ensue, it is estimated that up to half of the nonperforming loans of the shadow-banking sector could be “transferred” to the formal banking sector, thus undermining it as well. In addition, the shadow-banking sector is heavily invested in real-estate trusts. Thus, a sharp drop in property valuations would immediately have a negative impact on the shadow-banking sector—creditors would be left running after bankrupt developers or holding massively depreciated real estate as collateral.

Is China, in fact, still distant from a Lehman Brothers–style crisis? Interestingly, Sheng and Ng point out that while “China’s shadow banking problem is still manageable…time is of the essence and a comprehensive policy package is urgently needed to preempt any escalation of shadow banking NPLs [nonperforming loans], which could have contagion effects.” Beijing is now cracking down on the shadow banks, but these are elusive entities.

Finance is the Achilles’ heel of the Chinese economy. The negative synergy between an overheating real-estate sector, a volatile stock market, and an uncontrolled shadow-banking system could well be the cause of the next big crisis to hit the global economy, rivaling the severity of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 and the global financial implosion of 2008–09.

Instead of War…

Rather than gearing up for a military face-off in the South China Sea or engaging in a trade war with Beijing (which no one will win), the United States and its allies might be better advised to prepare for the threat that China’s economic weakness poses to the US economy and, indeed, the world’s.

Global financial reform—a task urgently needed (but never undertaken) after the 2008 financial crisis—is one area where cooperation would immeasurably benefit China, the United States, and the rest of the planet. The loss of $5.2 trillion during this February’s global financial meltdown has highlighted the necessity of putting stronger restrictions on the global movement of speculative capital before it spawns a bigger crisis in the real economy. The regulation of dangerous real-estate-backed securities and derivatives—the same types of instruments that triggered the 2008 financial crisis, and which are now making their appearance in Asian markets—should be a top priority.

When it comes to trade, there are far better strategies than a trade war to deal with Beijing. It is true that the export of jobs to China by US corporations, supported by free-trade and globalization enthusiasts in government, has been a major cause of the deindustrialization of significant parts of the United States, but the solutions lie in building bridges, not walls. First, we need formal or informal trade agreements to limit select industrial exports to the United States, much like the Reagan-era arrangements with Japan to limit automobile exports bought time for the US car industry to retool and recover. Second, we need an industrial policy, drawing from the current playbook of Germany and China, in which an activist state channels private and public investment and promotes job creation in cutting-edge industries, such as renewable-energy-based infrastructure and transportation.

None of this is as simple—or as foolish—as a military face-off near the Chinese coast. Too often, for America’s national-security managers, the US military is a hammer, and every problem looks like a nail. But as US officials begin to address the rise of Chinese power, they would do far better to understand the stake that the United States and the rest of the world now have in a healthy Chinese economy, and worry more about avoiding its economic implosion than about planning for a military explosion.

The post China’s Bigger Economic Threat appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Walden Bello is the international adjunct professor in sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and the author of 21 books, including the soon-to-be-published The Fall of China: Preventing the Next Crash. Reprinted, with permission, from The Nation. 

Shutterstock

The U.S. Congress has power over two very important things: money and information.

It can, in theory and practice, end a war by refusing to fund it. It can — and has — compelled the leading architects of American foreign policy — CIA directors, national security advisors, secretaries of defense — to answer for their uses and abuses of executive power publicly and under oath.

As anyone who has served in it will tell you, Congress has never experienced a “golden age” of dispassionate bipartisanship or attachment to high principle. Yet its recent failures seem to reflect dangerous signs of decay: the rubber-stamping of a new CIA director implicated in the worst excesses of the agency’s torture program; the inability to even moderately question wars that have comfortably outlasted Vietnam; and almost total indifference to arms deals struck by the White House.

The story of how and why we got here is a vivid illustration of our deepening political dysfunction. But it also hints at how Congress can be renewed at a time when we desperately need it.

“An Invitation to Struggle”

As with so many key questions, the U.S. constitution gives mixed answers on the role of Congress in American foreign policy.

Countless books and articles have been written on the subject, but the basic problem is this: The president gets the imperious job title of “commander-in-chief,” while his puny legislators reserve the power to declare and fund wars.

Because the summer of 1787 was hot, and some of our saintly “framers” either stopped paying attention, got drunk, or went home as the supreme law of the land was being written, fundamental tensions like these were never resolved. Instead, an “invitation to struggle” awaited future generations.

Historically, this “struggle” has exhibited some common features: our esteemed members of Congress becoming peculiarly concerned about presidential power only when the opposite party occupies the White House; war-authorizing resolutions usually passing by lopsided margins; and anything seriously restricting executive power coming only after media or public pressure.

Nonetheless, we can find critical turning points in this history. The National Security Act of 1947 may be the most significant.

This legislation — overwhelmingly passed by the House and the Senate — amounted to an impressive act of self-sabotage, creating two new institutions that would go on to ultimately boast a long record of undermining, defying, and even, in one case, spying on members of Congress: The National Security Council (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

When Congress Cared

This was difficult to foresee at the time. Some senators, such as the Wyoming Republican Edward Robertson, feared that the CIA would become “an American Gestapo” and “an invaluable asset to militarism,” but they were comprehensively defeated by those evoking the Soviet “menace.”

Members of Congress rarely questioned the extra powers amassed by the executive branch — either because they felt it was an acceptable compromise in fighting Communism, or because they simply couldn’t be bothered. Many were seemingly so indifferent that they started to treat important committee hearings as their afternoon nap time.

But some serious abuses of power jolted them awake.

The first was Vietnam. It took mass draft file burnings, marches on the Pentagon, shootings on college campuses, and mutiny within the army, but Congress did, eventually, play an important role in ending our disastrous military adventure in Southeast Asia.

It helped, initially, to challenge the Johnson administration through the 1966 Fulbright Hearings, and later gave dissident veterans the opportunity to make their case against the war in live, public, televised testimonies.

More substantively, Congress exercised its “power of the purse.” The Church-Cooper amendment of June 1970 cut off financial support for Nixon’s extension of the war into Cambodia, and further actions in 1972 and 1973 — along with a denial of President Ford’s last-minute funding request in 1975 — finally wound down operations in Vietnam and Laos.

Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church was arguably the most important figure behind this assertion of congressional authority. He would go on to lead by far the Senate’s most extensive inquiry into the nation’s intelligence agencies, which exposed everything from a comical list of half-baked CIA assassination plots to the FBI’s notorious “COINTELPRO” surveillance and infiltration of numerous domestic political movements.

The work of Church and his committee — whose other outstanding members included Walter Mondale and Gary Hart — both broadened our knowledge of and strengthened our protections against the “Deep State.” The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978) constraining warrantless wiretapping and the Intelligence Oversight Act (1980) constraining covert action were two of its most significant legislative fruits.

Retreat

The contrast with today couldn’t be more striking.

It took time, but Congress acted on Vietnam. Today, only a small minority of legislators dare to speak about our much longer involvement in Afghanistan, even though Congress receives voluminous — and often shocking — quarterly reports on the war’s progress from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

With the notable exception of the 2014 Senate torture report (which was itself heavily watered down as a result of CIA pressure), the intelligence agencies find congressional oversight less stressful than their Twitter feeds.

The “power of the purse” barely touches the Pentagon, despite its history of waste and mismanagement. Instead, it gets a big, shadowy, ominously named “Overseas Contingency Operations” funding stream — again without any serious dissent from Congress.  

Many explanations have been offered for this malaise: personal disinterest, lack of public and media attention, the “imperial presidency,” the financial power of the defense industry.

All are basically true on some level.

Yet, one timeless and overarching fact remains: unchecked power will be abused. Faced with the current commander-in-chief, the need for Congress to confront it is more urgent than ever.

The post Why We Need a Congress that Cares About Foreign Policy appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Harry Blain is a PhD student in political science at the Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York).

(Photo: UNHCR Photo Unit / Flickr)

It’s a famous story, though perhaps not famous enough.

The 1939 voyage of the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner, was recounted in a 1974 book and a 1976 film (both titled Voyage of the Damned) as well as a 1994 opera. This history is not forgotten. Yet so many unfortunate people around the world are still doomed to repeat it.

In 1939, the MS St. Louis carried more than 900 Jewish refugees away from Germany. The ship docked in Cuba, but the government there allowed only a handful of passengers to disembark. The others learned to their surprise that Havana didn’t recognize their visas. So, the ship headed to the United States. But the Roosevelt administration also refused to accept the refugees — and even sent out the Coast Guard to make sure that the ship didn’t try to dock illegally and unload its passengers. Canada, too, refused to get involved.

So, the MS St. Louis returned to Europe where it put in at Antwerp. Some of the passengers made their way to the United Kingdom. The rest were caught up in the turmoil of the subsequent Nazi invasions of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Ultimately, 254 of the original passengers died in the Holocaust.

In 2012, the U.S. State Department officially apologized to the survivors of the incident. Canada plans to follow suit this year.

But those apologies mean little to the people who currently face a similar situation. Today, thousands of refugees face grave harm if they return to their countries of origin. And yet the United States, Turkey, Israel, China, and others blithely return these refugees as part of a worldwide crackdown on “illegal” immigration.

This week, as the international community marks World Refugee Day, 22.5 million people have fled their countries to seek refuge elsewhere. In 2016, a mere 189,000 were resettled. That’s less than 1 percent. It’s as if the entire population of Taiwan were uprooted and forced to find a new country, but only a single neighborhood from the capital city managed to find safe harbor.

Donald Trump is at the forefront of this scandalously cruel approach to refugees. But he’s not alone. Here are four examples from around the world of how governments continue to turn away the modern-day equivalents of the MS St. Louis.

Trump’s Dream

The world is experiencing the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. The Trump administration’s response has been to reduce the annual number of spots available for refugees from around 70,000 to 45,000, the lowest number since 1980. And the administration is doing whatever it can to ensure that even this lower number won’t be reached.

Syria, still convulsed by civil war, has produced the world’s largest group of refugees: over 5.5 million people. In the last year of the Obama administration, the United States accepted about 15,000 Syrian refugees, which paled in comparison to Germany (not to mention Turkey, Jordan, or Lebanon). This year, as of mid-April, the Trump administration has allowed in 11. “The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” Trump said this month.

It gets worse. The Justice Department announced last week that asylum-seekers couldn’t claim gang warfare or domestic violence as reasons to stay in the United States. This comes at a time when displacement because of violence is climbing rapidly in Central America, a trend affecting 16 times more people at the end of 2017 than in 2011. Indeed, many of the people desperately trying to get across the U.S. border, including unaccompanied minors, are escaping not just general violence but very specific death threats.

In The New Yorker, Sarah Stillman reported on her project to create a database of all those whom the U.S. government has deported into harm’s way. The stories included Laura S., who pleaded with U.S. border patrol not to return her to Mexico, where her ex-husband, a member of a drug cartel, had threatened to kill her. U.S. agents ignored her entreaties. In Mexico, Laura S. tried to steer clear of her ex-husband. But he was determined, and he eventually succeeded. Her charred skeleton was found in her burned-out car. Thanks to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the de facto indifference of the U.S. government to claims of domestic violence has become de jure.

Another method by which the Trump administration is sending people into harm’s way is by rescinding temporary protected status (TPS). Head of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen has dutifully implemented the president’s directive to kick out as many people from the United States as possible. Reports USA Today:

Nielsen has now cut TPS for El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan, which represents 98% of the people covered by the program. That means TPS enrollees from those countries, many of whom have legally lived in the U.S. for nearly 30 years, must return home in the coming months or risk becoming undocumented immigrants.

Imagine FDR not only refusing to accept the MS St. Louis but sending tens of thousands of German Jews, who had been living in the United States for decades, back to Nazi Germany.

Trump’s policy on refugees is only part of his larger assault on immigrants, from the Muslim travel ban and the separation of families at the border to his attempt to deport the 800,000 Dreamers. Even the Republican Party is abandoning Trump on the key elements of his anti-immigrant platform. But Trump wants to make America as white as possible — by all means necessary.

Israeli Cognitive Dissonance

Around 35,000 Eritreans and Sudanese are currently seeking asylum in Israel. They have escaped war and massive human rights violations. Although many have lived in Israel for nearly a decade, speak Hebrew, and send their children to Israeli schools, the government wants to deport them to Rwanda or Uganda. There they faced considerable risks of imprisonment or even forced return to their home countries. Worse, it turned out a couple months ago that the Israeli government didn’t have any agreements with Rwanda and Uganda to protect the deportees.

The government also didn’t count on the public pushback. Writes David Shulman in The New York Review of Books:

El Al pilots and flight crews refused to fly the deportees to their deaths. Doctors, academics, lawyers, and many ordinary citizens, including Holocaust survivors and their relatives, spoke out. Some synagogues joined the struggle. Many stressed the unthinkable cognitive dissonance that arises from watching a Jewish state, founded by refugees from lethal oppression, sending tens of thousands of desperate African refugees to an unknown and precarious fate.

In a recent report, Amnesty International blasted the government of Benjamin Netanyahu for its policy. The organization’s head of refugee and migrant rights, Charmain Mohamed, was pointed in her denunciation: “Israel is one of the most prosperous countries in the region but it is going out of its way to shirk its responsibility to provide refuge to people fleeing war and persecution and who are already on its territory.”

As in the United States, the courts have proven to be a major obstacle to the assault on immigrants. Despite the High Court’s rejection of the government’s attempt to deport the Eritreans and Sudanese, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to push the Knesset to override the judicial decision.

As with Trump, Netanyahu is acting on behalf of the besieged majority, in this case Israeli Jews. His appalling immigration policies are of a piece with his apartheid treatment of Palestinians.

Repatriation to Afghanistan

Afghanistan is one of the poorest and most violent countries in the world. It also, after Syria, produces the most refugees in the world. On top of the one million people who have been internally displaced, there are nearly 6 million Afghan refugees, most of them living in either Pakistan or Iran.

Most, but not all.

About 300,000 Afghan refugees live in Europe. Many more have applied for asylum. European governments have been rejecting most of those applications, arguing that Afghanistan no longer poses a sufficient danger to returnees. Yet in 2017, for the fourth year in a row, more than 10,000 Afghan civilians died or were injured in the war. This comes on top of the combat deaths of Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters, which totaled more than 20,000 last year.

Even for those not on Taliban target lists, these refugees are returning to a dangerous and unstable country. Reports Pamela Constable in The Washington Post:

Insurgents control or influence nearly 40 percent of Afghan territory and stage frequent attacks in cities. Some of their families have fled rural fighting, weakening their social support networks. The returnees may not face imminent harm, but they see no way to build a future.

Pakistan and Iran have been even more forceful with their deportations. Since January, Iran has sent home 242,000 Afghan refugees; in the last 15 months, Pakistan has expelled 260,000 Afghans. These repatriations are an extraordinary burden on a country ill prepared to provide services to its current population. There are few jobs available for the returnees and little in the way of assistance from international organizations.

A recent ceasefire brought some hope that the Afghan government and the Taliban could work out the terms of a peace agreement. But the Taliban have rejected a proposed extension and vow to continue fighting.

Back to the Gulag

Donald Trump thinks that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is “smart” and “very talented.” The U.S. president didn’t raise human rights issues at the recent Singapore summit — and perhaps that’s for the best, given the focus on nuclear issues and Trump’s own distressing lack of interest in human rights.

But the human rights situation inside North Korea remains dire, particularly for the 80,000-130,000 trapped in the complex of labor camps. Tens of thousands of North Koreans have escaped to China and other countries. Even if they left North Korea for economic reasons, they risk imprisonment in the North Korean gulag if they return. Thus, according to international law, North Koreans in China should be considered refugees sur place, since they have acquired a well-founded fear of persecution after leaving their country. Sending such refugees back is a clear human rights violation.

Yet China continues to detain and send North Koreans back across the border. With the threat of repatriation hanging over them, North Korean women are particularly vulnerable and frequently subjected to trafficking and forced prostitution.

There’s not a lot that either the United States or South Korea can do to persuade North Korea to dismantle its gulag or improve the conditions there. Pyongyang is largely resistant to “name and shame” tactics (though human rights organizations should obviously continue the practice).

However, Seoul and Washington can pressure Beijing to observe international aw by not repatriating North Korean refugees. South Korea has a population of 30,000 North Korean refugees who have become South Korean citizens. That hasn’t prevented Seoul from negotiating agreements with Pyongyang or holding two recent inter-Korean summits. At the very least, China should stop rounding up North Korean refugees, even if it doesn’t accord them proper status.

In 1939, the United States, Canada, and Cuba all refused to help a boatload of desperate refugees from Europe. Today, the world faces an ever-growing flotilla of the desperate. And the response is the same: go back to the hell you just escaped.

The world leaders who adopt this policy have no shame. In the case of Donald Trump and those like him, they’re even proud of it. They richly deserve a return ticket — back to the rocks from under which they crawled.

The post World to Refugees: Go to Hell appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.

Spanish Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez (Shutterstock)

As a new, Socialist-led government takes over in Spain, freshly minted Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez faces at least two daunting tasks: 1) cleaning up the wreckage wrought by years of European Union-enforced austerity, and 2) resolving the Catalan crisis exacerbated by Madrid’s violent reaction to last fall’s independence referendum. Unfortunately, his party’s track record is not exactly sterling on either issue.

Sanchez, leader of the Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), patched together parties in Catalonia and the Basque region, plus the leftist Podemos Party, to oust long-time Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of the right-wing People’s Party (PP). But is the telegenic former economics professor up to the job, and will his party challenge the economic program of the EU’s powerful “troika” — the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission?

The answers to those questions are hardly clear, and in many ways the cross currents and rip tides of Spanish politics still resemble Gerald Brenan’s classic study of the Civil War, The Spanish Labyrinth.

Too Centrist for Comfort

While the issue that brought Rajoy down was corruption — a massive kickback scheme that enriched scores of high-ranking PP members — his party was already weakened by the 2015 election, and he has been forced to rely on the conservative Ciudadanos Party based in Catalonia to stay in power. In short, it was only a matter of time before he fell.

Sanchez promises to address the “pressing social needs” of Spaniards, although he has been vague about what that actually means. But Spain is hurting. While economic growth returned in 2013, unemployment is still at 16.1 percent, and youth joblessness is 35 percent. Rajoy took credit for the economy’s rebound from the massive financial meltdown in 2008, but there’s little evidence that budget cuts and austerity did the trick. The two main engines for growth were cheap oil and a weak currency.

The job growth has mainly been in short term and temp jobs, with lower pay and fewer benefits. That’s not specific to Spain, however. Of the 5.2 million jobs created in the EU between 2013 and 2016, some 2.1 million of them have been short term, “mini” jobs that have been particularly hard on young people. Many continue to live at home with their aging parents, and 400,000 have emigrated to other European countries.

Education, health care, and infrastructure have all deteriorated under a blizzard of budget cuts, and Sanchez will have to address those problems. His party’s record on the economy, however, has been more centrist than social democratic, and the PSOE basically accepts the neo-liberal mantra of tax cuts, deregulation, and privatization. It was PSOE Prime Minister Jose Zapatero who sliced more than $17 billion from the budget in 2010, froze pensions, cut child care funds and home care for the elderly, and passed legislation making it easier to lay off workers.

It was anger at the Socialists over rising unemployment that swept Rajoy and the PP into power in 2011. The PSOE has never recovered from that debacle, dropping from 44 percent of the vote to 24.9 percent today. It has only 84 deputies in the Parliament, just 14 more than Podemos.

When Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias proposed forming a government of the left, Sanchez rejected it and instead appointed all PSOE people to the cabinet. However, he will have to rely on support from the left to stay in power, and there’s no guarantee that it will be there unless the Socialists step away from their centrism and begin rolling back the austerity measures.

Sanchez has a mixed record on leftism vs. centrism. He was ousted from the party’s leadership last year by the PSOE’s right wing when he considered forming an earlier united front of the left. It was the party’s rank and file, angered at the right-wing Socialists, that allowed Rajoy to form a minority government that put him back in power. Still, so far Sanchez has been unwilling to consider the kind of alliance of left parties that has been so successful in Portugal.

A Regional Balancing Act

The new government will also need the support of the two Catalan parties, and that will likely be an uphill slog. The Catalans just elected a government that supports independence, although its president, Quim Torra has called for “talks.”

The current Catalonia crisis was ignited when Rajoy torpedoed a 2006 agreement between the Spanish government and the Catalan government that would have given the province greater local control over its finances and recognized the Catalans’ unique culture. Under the prodding of the PP, the Constitutional Court overturned the agreement and shifted the dispute from the political realm to a legal issue.

At the time, the idea of independence was marginal in Catalonia, but the refusal of Rajoy to even discuss the issue shifted it to the mainstream. “Independentism, which until 2010 was a decidedly minority option in Catalonia, has grown immensely,” according to Thomas Harrington, a Professor of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College, CT.

The Catalans began pressing for a referendum on independence — nearly 80 percent supported holding one — although it was initially seen as non-binding. Even though Podemos did not support the idea of independence, it backed the basic democratic right of the Catalans to vote on the issue. The PSOE, however, was as hard-nosed on the issue as Rajoy and the PP. Not only did the Socialists not support the right of the Catalans to vote, they backed Rajoy’s crackdown on the province (although they eventually decried the violence unleashed on citizens trying to vote during last October’s referendum.)

Some 2.3 million Catalans out of the 5.3 million registered voters went to the polls and overwhelmingly endorsed independence, in spite of the fact that Rajoy sent some 10,000 National Police and Guardia Civil into the province to seize ballots, beat voters, and injure more than 850 people. Legal procedures have been filed against over 700 mayors and elected officials, and the Catalan leadership is either in jail or on the run. While Sanchez said the crackdown was “a sad day for our democracy,” he will have a lot of explaining to do to the Catalan government.

Unlike Rajoy, Sanchez says he wants a dialogue with the Catalans, although he also says he intends to uphold the Spanish constitution, which does not permit secession.

Catalan society is deeply split. The big cities tend to be opposed to independence, as are many trade unions. The left is divided on the issue, but many young people support it. As the Financial Times’ Tobias Buck points out, “The younger generation, who have been schooled in Catalan and have less contact with the rest of Spain than their parents, are among the most enthusiastic backers of independence.”

It is also clear that the brutality of Rajoy’s assault has moved people in that direction, although polls show independence still doesn’t have a majority. But in a sense, that is irrelevant. When almost half the population wants something, that “something” has to be addressed — and if Buck is right about the demographics, time is running out for Madrid.

Sitting on Bayonets

There are other serious constitutional issues that need to be addressed as well. Rural areas are greatly favored over cities. While it takes 125,000 voters in Madrid to elect a representative, in some rural areas it takes as few as 38,000. There is also a need to address Rajoy’s draconian laws against free speech and assembly.

Just how stable Sanchez’s government will be is unclear. He must keep the Basques and the Catalans on board and do enough on the economy to maintain the support of Podemos.

The PP is badly wounded, and the right-wing Ciudadanos Party — the only one that voted against the no confidence resolution that brought down Rajoy — will be looking to fill that vacuum. Ciudadanos calls itself the “center,” but its economic policies are the same as those of the PP, and it is rabidly opposed to separatism. It performed poorly in the last election and in regional elections in Galicia and the Basque region. It did well in the recent Catalan elections, but that is because the Popular Party collapsed and its voters shifted to Ciudadanos.

Sanchez must recognize that the Catalan issue is political, not legal, and that force is not an option. As Napoleon Bonaparte’s Foreign Minister Talleyrand once remarked, “You can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them,” summing up the truism that repression does not work in the long run.

The post Can Spain’s Socialists Avoid Their Past Pitfalls? appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com and middleempireseries.wordpress.com. 

Shutterstock

Some critics have knocked President Trump for making “too many concessions” to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the historic Singapore Summit — the first-ever meeting between a U.S. president and North Korean leader.

Trump’s foreign policy instincts have had me white-knuckled for the past year and a half. But against a backdrop of possible nuclear war, it would be overly cynical not to recognize the meeting’s potential for good.

At best, the meeting set the stage for North Korea’s denuclearization — and possibly even an end to the nearly 70-year-old, stalemated Korean War. If you’re against war, this is a good development.

Just six months ago, reasonable people had reasonable fears of the world’s first two-sided nuclear war, as President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un traded middle-school insults and flaunted their nuclear arsenals.

There are still countless ways the negotiations could go wrong, and real reasons to fear that hardline members of the administration — and its opposition, too — would allow that to happen. But diplomacy offers chances for bigger gains, and smaller losses, than war.

Unfortunately, the U.S. spends more than 20 times more on war and militarism than we do on diplomacy each year.

Our choices have been stark.

The U.S. chose war in Iraq over diplomacy in 2003. Our leaders chose certain risk over likely rewards by pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. And they chose a lone plunge backward over a carefully planned march forward when they stepped back from the Paris climate accord before that.

This must not happen when it comes to the North Korea negotiations.

The costs of war are horrifying. The current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the U.S. $5.6 trillion, and 6,800 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives. That doesn’t include non-fatal casualties, or the human and economic costs of PTSD and family stress that echo far beyond the battlefield.

And it doesn’t count the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who have been needlessly killed throughout our warzones. A full-scale war with North Korea would likely be many times worse.

The North Korea negotiations are far from over, and could still tip from a fragile diplomacy back to middle-school insults and perhaps even to war. But we can and should be more optimistic than that. Diplomacy isn’t just the better way. It’s the only way.

For the Korean talks to work, this administration will have to value diplomacy more than it did in its narrow-minded rejection of the Iran deal. It will have to value diplomacy more than it did when it pulled out of the Paris climate agreement.

There’s so much to gain from open communication and keeping our word. And there’s so much more to lose if we allow things to fall apart.

The post Trump’s Giving Diplomacy a Chance. His Critics Should, Too. appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Lindsay Koshgarian directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, which published an earlier version of this piece. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

Shutterstock

In the wake of the disastrous G7 meeting in Canada and the successful summit in Singapore, it’s hard to know what to call U.S. foreign policy these days.

It’s not just unilateralism, where Washington acts alone and allies be damned. Nor is it merely unipolarism, in which the United States targets all hegemonic challengers in an effort to preserve its position as the world’s dominant military and economic power.

Let’s coin a new term: unileaderism.

According to unileaderism, only the U.S. president makes foreign policy decisions of any import. Those decisions do not betray any strategic thinking. They may well be contradictory. And they often leave other members of the administration — not to mention Congress and the American people — totally baffled.

Unileaderism, at least as it’s embodied by Donald Trump, is a philosophy bound up entirely in the personal quirks of the president himself. Instead of strategy, there are only tactics: wheedling, bluffing, threatening. It’s like playing tennis against someone with John McEnroe’s legendary temper and will to win, but few if any of his actual skills.

Neither unilateralism nor unipolarism can explain the spectacle of the last week, when Trump blasted U.S. allies at the G7 meeting in Canada and then blasted off for Singapore to negotiate with the leader of the longest standing adversary of the United States. Only unileaderism can capture this surreal reversal of traditional U.S. foreign policy norms.

The summit with Kim Jong Un was Trump at his most theatrical. He flattered the North Korean tyrant and signed a declaration of little substance. He showed off his limousine. He played Kim a White House-produced video crafted to appeal to the North Korea leader’s vanity and nationalism (for instance, by juxtaposing images from North Korea with those from around the world, by barely mentioning South Korea, and by ignoring China and Japan altogether).

Don’t get me wrong: I’m thrilled that Trump sat down with Kim and initiated a détente between the two countries. Trump’s pledge to stop war games with South Korea is a major step forward. As for the declaration, it was a good thing, not a bad thing, that it didn’t go into details. North Korea doesn’t want to denuclearize immediately, and Trump doesn’t really understand the particulars of the process anyway. Anything more detailed would have been a conversation stopper.

But the mutual respect that the two leaders expressed was all about unileaderism: their preference to rule without any regard for democracy or human rights. The format of their 30-minute colloquy was telling: just the two leaders with their translators and no advisors. It was a throwback to the diplomacy of yesteryear, when royals met to determine the boundaries of their respective kingdoms.

The contretemps in Quebec was far more disturbing. Trump refused to sign the G7 declaration, continued to pursue tariffs against major U.S. trading partners, and insulted Canadian leader Justin Trudeau to boot. It was an extraordinary display of presidential pique.

Trump’s tantrum about Trudeau divided his administration into those who leapt into the fracas to slap the Canadian prime minister and those who shifted into high gear to repair the fraying U.S. relationship with its northern neighbor. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer continued to work with his Canadian counterparts to negotiate a new NAFTA. But White House trade advisor Peter Navarro sided with Trump by saying that “there’s a special place in hell” for Trudeau — the kind of epithet once reserved for the mortal enemies of the United States.

It was like something out of Canadian Bacon, the satirical 1995 film about a president hoping to boost his dismal popularity by promoting a war against the Canucks. Has America been suddenly plunged into wag-the-beaver territory?

Meanwhile, Trump’s proposal to bring Russia back into the G7 caught many of his colleagues off guard, including the National Security Council. Methinks the NSC doth protest too much. This is the same president who congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin on his recent electoral win even though his aides had written “DON’T CONGRATULATE” in all-caps on his briefing notes. This president delights in ignoring even is closest “advisors.”

Trump’s invite to Russia is no surprise. The president wants his buddies at the G7. Angela Merkel is not his buddy. Vladimir Putin is. Trump treats world affairs like it’s an elementary school club.

Unileaderism may well be the logical endpoint for a country that has used unilateralism to preserve its unipolarism. And Trump is certainly the product of a particular tendency within the U.S. political culture that rejects liberalism and multilateralism.

But it goes beyond that. In its rejection of strategy in favor of tactics, Trumpism is a repudiation of geopolitics altogether. Trumpism isn’t a new kind of opening in the chess game of international relations. The president, out of rage and stupidity and arrogance, has simply picked up the board with all of its pieces and flung the whole thing against the wall. He’s playing a different game altogether.

The Trump Doctrine

Ordinarily when pundits come up with a doctrine to define an administration’s approach to the world, they put a label on a collective stance — even though the label inevitably goes by the president’s name.

In the case of the Trump doctrine, however, the philosophy points more to the president’s gut instincts rather than an approach hammered out by a group of “Vulcans” (in the case of George W. Bush) or a set of liberal internationalists (Barack Obama). The Trump doctrine boils down to Trump. And the word “doctrine” is something of an overstatement.

In this week’s Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg canvassed administration officials for their one-sentence characterization of this Trump Doctrine. Goldberg narrowed it down to the pugnacious phrase: “We’re America, Bitch.”

The phrase reveals the Trump approach for what it is: sexual harassment.

When he calls other leaders “weak,” Trump is resorting to the old playground epithet: they are “pussies.” And, as he put it so indelicately in the Access Hollywood tape, he feels perfectly free to grab them by the pussies. The president is using the power invested in his office to take what he wants.

Rape, it has often been said, is not about sex: it’s about power. Having divided the international community into female (Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau) and male (Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un), Trump is now buddying up with his locker-room pals and boasting of how’s taken advantage of the “weaker sex.”

Goldberg writes:

To Trump’s followers, “We’re America, Bitch” could be understood as a middle finger directed at a cold and unfair world, one that no longer respects American power and privilege. To much of the world, however, and certainly to most practitioners of foreign and national-security policy, “We’re America, Bitch” would be understood as self-isolating, and self-sabotaging.

Sexual harassment, thanks to the #MeToo movement, has become self-sabotaging. Has the G7 just had their #MeToo moment? Perhaps America’s top allies are finished with appeasing Trump and saying “yes” when they really mean “no.” I look forward to the photo op with Merkel and Macron both wearing their pink pussyhats in solidarity with Trump protesters worldwide.

The End of Geopolitics?

The G7 represents the liberal international order: an attempt by the world’s top economies to manage disputes and develop a common commitment to certain principles like free trade. The grouping is an acknowledgment that global capitalism can’t survive by the “invisible hand” alone and needs the guidance of many hands.

The G7 has been spectacularly ineffective in addressing the major issues of the time: global poverty and inequality, climate change, pandemics. It doesn’t represent robust multilateralism. It leaves out obvious players like China and India. It makes no effort to represent voices of the powerless.

Still, the G7 has been a very modest check on both U.S. unilateralism and unipolarism. And now it’s emerging as a counterbalance to Trump’s unileaderism. The president’s combative trade policies and indiscriminate use of personal invective are uniting much of the world against the United States. The approval rating of the United States, across 134 countries, dropped in two years from 48 percent to 30 percent, according to a 2018 Gallup poll.

On the other hand, the American public’s satisfaction with U.S. standing in the world reached a 13-year high in 2018, a worrisome sign for those of us pushing for progressive foreign policy alternatives. Trump’s unileaderism strikes a chord with a segment of the American public. It’s not just the Russians who crave an “iron fist” leader.

Trump’s tactics run afoul of the basic laws of geopolitics: identifying long-term goals, developing corresponding strategies, and cultivating key allies to achieve those goals. The allies that Trump has cultivated — Poland, Hungary, Russia, North Korea, the Philippines — don’t advance any particular national security interests. They reflect only the personal preferences of Trump himself.

According to a progressive take on foreign policy, the United States should relinquish its unipolar status as part of a transition to a peaceful multilateral order. Trump’s unileaderism won’t, in the end, preserve this unipolar status. It will ultimately destroy the international community and the very possibility of geopolitics. As the United States sinks further into aggressive resentment, the world will splinter into hundreds of “Make [My Country] Great Again” warring factions.

Bush Times Ten

Beginning with the Reagan administration, the concept of a “unitary executive” has gathered force in both constitutional law and presidential practice. According to this theory, the president controls the entire executive branch. So, for instance, George W. Bush expanded presidential power through his use of signing statements that reinterpreted legislative decisions.

Trump has taken this concept to a whole new level with his meddling in the Russiagate investigations and his willingness to pardon everyone indicted in the matter, even himself. Here’s a president who can’t seem to wait to get rid of his chief of staff because he no longer wants to have anyone managing him. Trump can’t be bothered with briefings because he prefers to make decisions based on some cocktail of his own hormonal urges and what he gleans, often mistakenly, from Fox News.

Unileaderism raises the doctrine of the unitary executive to the power of 10. It’s bad enough that a deeply insecure man-boy has latched on to this doctrine. Much worse will happen when a canny adult adopts the same approach. Trumpism without Trump would finalize America’s descent into the maelstrom.

The post Call It ‘Unileaderism’: Trump’s Foreign Policy of One appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.

Israeli police patrol the Gaza coast (Photo: Edo Medicks / Flickr)

“They just seem — well — less developed, less innovative, less productive than the Israelis.”

This was one of the many objections I faced during a recent attempt to secure support for a petition condemning the 12-year siege of Gaza. While it seemed honest, it was also probably influenced by a time-honored propaganda tactic: the celebration of Israel’s economic and technological achievements in everything from renewable energy to its “startup ecosystem,” as opposed to the stagnation, corruption, and cronyism of the Arab and Muslim world.

Making the Desert Bloom

Few proponents of this narrative put it quite as bluntly as “the cool kid’s philosopher,” Ben Shapiro, did in 2010. “Israelis like to build,” he wrote on Twitter. “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock.”

All the same, there seems to be something inherently appealing about supporting a country that has “made the desert bloom.” Who can argue with the basic facts? Rationing of oil and food existed in Israel as late as the 1960s; now it boasts “the highest density of startups of any country in the world.” From 1986 to 2016 its GDP grew by 180 percent. Its unemployment and debt-to-GDP figures make some developed nations look like banana republics.

Compare this with the miserable spectacle of an Egyptian economy 40 percent controlled by its armed forces, a Saudi “rentier state” sustained by a slave-like, mostly South Asian underclass, or a growing casualty list of failed Iranian development plans and vision documents. Not to mention the Palestinians, whose leaders have often done an impressive job of squandering and misusing large sums of foreign aid money, or paying civil servants not to work as long as they belong to the right political faction.

“Redeeming the Soil”

In a broad sense, these were the points raised by the man who didn’t like my petition. And, like any good political operative, I dodged them: the only question on this piece of paper, I said, is whether we should defend — with our tax dollars and national diplomatic representatives — the self-proclaimed right of the Israeli military to shoot and kill non-violent protesters.

But, notwithstanding my attempt to stay “on message,” the economic questions do have to be answered. For one thing, they have significant political implications, lying at the heart of Israel’s national mythology since at least the late 19^th century, when early “Labor Zionists” committed themselves to “redeeming the soil” through agricultural settlements in Palestine.

In a more concrete way, “the economy” is not — and never should be — a purely academic curiosity. As our material foundation, it is capable of broadening, constraining, stimulating or destroying the possibilities of human life. It is at the core of our daily struggles and advances. Understanding its dimensions in Israel/Palestine, therefore, is essential to understanding what we vaguely call “the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Strangulation Hurts

Thankfully, despite what some officially-anointed “experts” tell us, the general picture is not particularly complicated.

Israel’s economic development has been remarkable, and much of it has been driven by the ingenuity of its citizens — but it helps when American aid reaches above 10 percent of your GDP in times when you really need it.

It helps too when you have full control over your borders, airspace, roads, water, schools, and electricity. When you don’t have to worry about well-armed, hostile colonists routinely setting fire to your olive trees. When you can go fishing without being shot, threatened, or humiliated by a professional national navy. When you can drink clean water, or plant in clean soil. When your imports and exports are not subject to the arbitrary restrictions of a government whose ministers openly support your mass expulsion.

Many of these inhuman and degrading conditions apply to everyone living in the occupied Palestinian territories. But they are uniquely crushing to the people of Gaza.

Although Palestinian leaders — both in Hamas and Fatah — are far from guiltless, it takes a heavy dose of intellectual casuistry to deflect blame from the de jure and de facto occupying power. Gaza’s economic catastrophe is not caused by a lack of entrepreneurial spirit or some politicians who can’t keep their hands out of the till. It is caused by an occupation regime that has embraced New York Senator (and, incredibly, now Senate Minority Leader) Chuck Schumer’s call to “strangle them economically.”

This strangulation has ranged from sinister calculations of near-but-not-quite starvation levels of daily caloric intake for Gaza, to more mundane but equally humiliating micromanagement of Gaza’s eggplant and tomato exports. Its primary consequence is what Harvard’s Sara Roy calls a “demeaning dependence on humanitarian aid” for at least 1.3 million Gazans (70 percent of the strip’s population).

And this is really the central point about the relationship between the economy and the conflict: it’s not a question of GDP per capita, aggregate growth, or even the unemployment rate. As any political scientist will not hesitate to tell you, there are too many poor people and not enough wars in the world to sustain the idea that poverty causes war.

In this sense, Gandhi’s often-quoted claim that “poverty is the worst form of violence” might not be an empirically sound one. But what we see in Gaza is not just poverty: it is, above all, humiliation. This, of course, can grind people down until they give up. However, it only takes a single outrage — a murder, a beating, an insult — to turn these slowly accumulating grievances into a political explosion. Israel learned this the hard way in 1987 and 2000, as did many Arab dictatorships in 2011.

It is good when we speak out against horrors like those that the Israeli military inflicted on Great March of Return protesters. But calling out the more insidious economic violence that dominates daily life in Palestine comes closer to the essence of the struggle. We cannot wait for the next massacre before we take up this task.

The post Wars Come and Go in Gaza, But Economic Violence Is Every Day appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Shutterstock

This article was jointly produced by Foreign Policy In Focus and In These Times.

Razan al-Najjar is the latest victim in Israel’s onslaught of Palestinians to go viral. The 21-year-old nurse was shot dead by a sniper. Her only weapon? A wad of medical gauze. She’d been treating protestors who’ve been rallying for their right to return to homes they were expelled from as refugees.

Unfortunately, the death of another unarmed civilian is hardly even news to Palestinians.

May 14, the day the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem in symbolic support of recognizing the city as Israel’s capital, was also the bloodiest day in this recent wave of demonstrations. In just one day, at least 50 Palestinians were killed and 2,400 more injured by the Israeli military. (Other counts put those figures even higher.)

This isn’t an anomaly. In this latest wave of demonstrations, Israeli forces have killed dozens of unarmed protesters and wounded thousands more. And they’re not apologizing.

The violence has additionally troubling implications for the United States—and not just for its foreign policy, but at home. That’s because U.S. police forces actually train extensively with the Israeli military. In fact, hundreds of federal, state, local, and even some campus law enforcement departments across the country have trained in some capacity with the Israeli forces now gunning down Palestinian protesters in droves.

Some notable ones include the Chicago police, responsible for shooting and killing 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. The Baltimore police too, who were responsible for killing 25-year-old Freddie Gray. And the St. Louis department, which was deployed in Ferguson when protests erupted after police killed 18-year-old Michael Brown—prompting Palestinians halfway across the world to begin tweeting advice for minimizing injuries when police deploy tear gas.

U.S. police departments are sent to Israel, or sometimes Israeli forces come to the United States, under the pretense of counter-terrorism training.

Apparently that training includes learning the benefits of “skunk water”—a liquid developed by Israel that’s used to break up anti-occupation protests like the ones occurring right now. After protests in Ferguson, the St. Louis department started stockpiling the stuff.

And that now infamous NYPD Muslim surveillance program? The NYPD Intelligence Division Chief responsible for that one got the idea from a similar program used to spy on Palestinians.

It begs the question of whom the U.S. police consider terrorists.

The former head of Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service) Avi Dichter—who has advocated dropping heavy bombs on civilian-occupied Gaza apartment buildings—believes there’s “an intimate connection between fighting criminals and fighting terrorists.” He calls these threats “crimiterrorists.”

But this isn’t a one-sided transfer of tactics. Dichter likes to think of the war on terror and the war on drugs in the same category. And when Israeli forces visit the United States, they also receive training from our police forces on the drug war tactics that have targeted Black and brown communities.

And just as well-documented as the U.S. police killings of Black Americans are the Israeli military killings, torture and surveillance of Palestinian adults and children.

Take 15-year-old Mohammed Tamimi. He was shot during a protest and had to have part of his skull removed. He was then taken by Israeli forces in the middle of the night, and beaten into confessing that they didn’t shoot him in the face, despite medical records and eyewitness accounts proving otherwise.

Of course, this story has an ending that Black Americans can also relate to — those in uniform will rarely be held accountable by the government.

While these connections may be new to some, the activists fighting both against the occupation of Palestine and for Black lives are not strangers to how their struggles are linked.

In 2015, Black and Palestinian artists and activists released a video and statement of Black-Palestinian solidarity in the face of state-sanctioned violence. And the Movement for Black Lives platform includes demands for the U.S. to divest from the occupation of Palestine.

The movement is taking root in many cities. In Atlanta, the group #ATLisReady released a list of demands following the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile — the first calling for the termination of the Atlanta Police Department’s involvement in Israeli training programs. And Jewish Voices for Peace launched “Deadly Exchange,” a campaign to end the sharing of the worst practices of policing.

And now, these movements are starting to notch some victories. Durham, North Carolina recently became the first city to ban trainings of U.S. police by the Israeli military.

The success of Durham’s training ban, spearheaded by Demilitarize from Durham2Palestine, is even more extraordinary when you consider the efforts of both the powerful pro-Israel and police lobbies to crack down on Black and Palestinian-led activist organizations.

While the joint forces of the Israeli military and the U.S. police are a terrifying and oftentimes deadly affront, a joint Black and Palestinian force for good is emerging as quite powerful itself. And as the death toll rises here and in Gaza, it’s needed now more than ever.

The post Why We Should Be Alarmed That Israeli Forces and U.S. Police Are Training Together appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Domenica Ghanem is the media manager at the Institute for Policy Studies.