Police officers in the United States use deadly force far more often than police in Europe, in many cases 10 to 20 times more often. American police departments also have much shorter initial training periods than European police departments; focus less on “soft skills” such as problem-solving, community relations, and de-escalation; and also require far less formal education for newly hired recruits.

In fact, law enforcement training in the United States tends to stress taking charge of every situation with an immediate show of force, making demands for unquestioned compliance, and relying on arrests and even the use of deadly force to solve encounters with people perceived as being noncompliant. This dramatic difference in police training undoubtedly plays a major role in the lopsided numbers of fatal police shootings and arrests in the United States when compared with those on the other side of the Atlantic. These grim statistics can no longer be accepted as the normal cost of doing business for American law enforcement agencies.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, “The U.S. approach to policing differs from those of other advanced democracies, in areas including organization, funding, training, relations with minority communities, use of force, and accountability.” The short training requirements of American police departments make it difficult to cover more than just the basic fundamentals of police work needed to function on the streets. More complex and, many observers say, critical topics, such as dealing with mentally challenged individuals and people suffering from substance abuse are not adequately taught in the vast majority of American police academies, if they are taught at all. There is just no time.

I served as a police officer, a street cop, with the Yuma, Arizona, Police Department from 1982 to 1987. I attended the Arizona Law Enforcement Training Academy in Tucson, where I received my initial 400 hours of law enforcement training and state peace officer certification. Although the training was rigorous, the courses in-depth, and the instructors excellent, the total training I received only amounted to 10 weeks of academy instruction before I was released to my law enforcement agency for assignment and follow-on training in department-specific policies and procedures.

At the time, I believed my police academy training was first-rate and more than sufficient. It did, in fact, prepare me for most of the routine situations I would later encounter on the job. However, I soon learned that I was only taught one way of dealing with aggressive or uncooperative people on the street: employ immediate threats of violence and overwhelming force, including deadly force if necessary for noncompliance. To be sure, my instructors did suggest that we try to de-escalate the situation if possible but not to hesitate to take charge and even to “draw down” on the subject (point your weapon) if need be. In conversations I have had with many police officers over the years, I’ve learned that my academy training on responding to uncooperative people was virtually the same training given to officers everywhere.

Initial law enforcement training for American police officers in the more than 18,000 police departments in the country ranges from as little as eight weeks at a police academy for newly hired officers in Mississippi to six months for basic law enforcement education for new recruits of the Los Angeles and New York Police Departments.

The second and perhaps most important difference between European and American police agencies is in the focus of both the training received by new police officers and their jobs once they complete their training and join their respective agencies. In America, virtually all police departments stress a “take charge and dominate the situation” attitude that is taught and routinely reinforced from the first day a recruit arrives at the police academy. This is in stark contrast to the European focus on de-escalation and community-building. I can personally attest to being told to “kick ass and take names” at several points during my initial police training, both while attending the police academy and afterward, while a probationary officer. The phrase “we own the streets” was also drilled into my head during my academy training. That sentiment often sets the stage for an “us against them” philosophy that only seems to harden as police officers gain more experience.

An American police officer is expected to project an aura of strength and of being in total control of their assigned beat while on patrol. Total obedience to an officer’s commands is required of the public. When that demand for total obedience is threatened or challenged, arrests and use of force, sometimes deadly force, are authorized. This officially sanctioned use of deadly force has reached unprecedented and even criminal levels of violent police behavior in the past several years.

In large urban areas like Los Angeles, for example, some police units have taken that demand for total obedience to an extreme. There are deputies and units within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office that operate just like the criminal gangs they are sworn to protect the citizens against, with officers behaving like gang warlords, demanding strict obedience and employing “executioners,” including fellow deputies, when their “subjects” do not toe the line.

I believe that the emergence of criminal police gangs is very possibly an unintended and disturbing outgrowth of several factors prevalent in police departments throughout the United States, including: an institutionally sanctioned attitude of “take charge of the situation at all costs” (including the use of lethal force); poor background vetting of new officers (including violent and racist social media posts); loosening recruitment standards (waiving minor crimes and drug use, allowing violent and racist tattoos, etc.); and insufficient training of new police officers, including little to no training in critical areas involving de-escalation and dealing with the mentally ill and substance abusers.

Those factors are a perfect recipe not only for producing chronic disciplinary problems among individual officers but also for allowing large-scale criminal activity to flourish by the very officers hired to protect the American public from just such activities. New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, and other large urban areas in the United States have also experienced recent incidents of rogue police gangs and individual officers involved in committing serious crimes, often involving firearms, resulting in serious injuries and death.

Although the national population of African Americans is around 13 percent and has held steady at that figure for many years, Black people account for about 24 percent of all fatal police shootings in the United States and are killed by police at a rate that is almost 2.5 times higher than police shooting fatalities involving white victims. It is not difficult to appreciate the level of distrust that many African Americans have for the police, and why the Black Lives Matter movement has found such traction in light of the increasing number of videotaped killings of Black men by (usually white) police officers in the United States. I would be less than truthful if I said that I had not personally observed situations where a double standard applied when police dealt with a call involving a Black suspect versus a white suspect. I believe that if they were also being truthful, most white police officers would admit to the same thing.

The values in Europe governing the use of lethal force by the police are different in the extreme. In the United States, police officers can use deadly force if they “reasonably perceive imminent threat and grave harm.” The difference in the attitudes of the American and European police cultures is evidenced in an important phrase contained in the European Convention on Human Rights. That foundational document states that police can only use deadly force when “absolutely necessary.” The European law enforcement agencies and nations subject to that convention take that phrase and its meaning very seriously.

To prevent situations where the use of deadly force might become “absolutely necessary,” the institutions responsible for training newly hired police officers in Europe make a concerted effort to stress the use of nonlethal methods in dealing with potentially violent situations, including dealing with people who are intoxicated, mentally ill, suicidal, violent, armed, and posing other life-and-death situations. They not only stress nonlethal solutions, they provide the officer trainees with sufficient blocks of training in nonlethal methods of problem-solving so the officers do not usually even consider drawing their weapons in such situations.

By comparison with American police training, initial law enforcement education in Europe is much longer. For example, initial police training lasts two years for recruits in Austria and two and a half years in Germany. In Finland and Norway, prior to becoming sworn police officers, trainees must first complete a bachelor’s degree while simultaneously doing an internship with a police department. This training is significantly longer and more comprehensive than that given to any American police officers.

Although all European police training involves substantial practice and qualification with firearms, as stated earlier, law enforcement training also integrates a large block of defensive tactics not involving the use of deadly force, i.e., nonlethal defensive tactics. For example, “By law, police officers in Germany are required to receive two hours of defensive tactics instruction every week while they participate in basic training.” That training involves various forms of the martial arts, such as jujitsu, judo, and kung fu. Spread out over the required two-and-a-half-year curriculum, that amounts to hundreds of hours of training in the use of nonlethal force, leading to a formidable amount of training in defensive tactics not requiring the use of a firearm. With this extensive emphasis on defensive tactics and the confidence-building that results, police in Europe are able to deal more often with potentially life-threatening situations without resorting to the use of lethal force — situations that, in the American context, often end up with the use of a firearm.

Our country is going through a deep soul-searching, as perhaps never before, on issues of police abuse and systemic racism. Many Americans who never gave any thought to the concept of police violence or the unjust treatment of Blacks by law enforcement have been forced to confront these realities. The sheer number of police encounters ending in death or serious injury to the public, in particular to African Americans and other people of color, cries out for fundamental reforms — we need to fix our system of pre-employment vetting, increase basic educational requirements, and require both a substantial increase in the length of law enforcement training and a drastic overhaul of its curriculum.

I have read many statements from across the country calling for “defunding the police,” and I have also read (although to a lesser degree) calls to “abolish the police.” I realize that both the calls for defunding the police and abolishing the police come from a place of acute pain and are usually meant more as a call to drastically reorder the priorities for the budgeting of police departments, to draft new policies and procedures for police behavior, and to implement new and transparent disciplinary procedures. I understand these demands and mostly agree.

However, to this writer, it’s important that we as a nation do not react to the tragic cases of intolerable police violence with poorly conceived plans for both taking a scalpel to police budgets and restructuring police departments from the ground up. Neither is a simple task. Abolishing a given police department entirely can have catastrophic consequences, and I hope all jurisdictions contemplating such a move will thoroughly review the long-term consequences for public safety beforehand. When a well-intentioned small-scale version of abolishing police presence was attempted for only a few blocks in downtown Seattle last summer during the George Floyd riots — the creation of the so-called “Capitol Hill” district—chaos ensued, along with two murders and several serious assaults. It was soon dismantled.

A community cannot function without a working police department; to do so would place the lives of everyone in the community at risk. Social workers, psychologists, and drug rehabilitation counselors are not trained, nor do they have the legal authority, to confront an armed assailant, a gang fight, a burglary or bank robbery in progress, or any number of other serious and potentially violent law enforcement situations. As much as well-meaning critics of the police and other thoughtful individuals would like to think that there is a quick fix and a viable alternative to police misconduct by doing away with most police officers and replacing them with human service workers and community activists, in reality that would result in placing the human services workers, community activists, and victims of crime in unnecessary danger. That is not the answer.

The answer to unacceptable levels of police violence and misconduct, officer-involved shooting fatalities, systemic police racism, and criminal activities of all kinds committed by the police is to hire better-educated police officers who have no criminal convictions; no history of untreated substance abuse; no violent behavior of any kind; no chronic credit problems, dishonorable military discharge or evidence of racial, ethnic, gender, or religious hatred.

It’s also now essential that we identify potential white supremacist police recruits and root out current police officers with affiliations to white supremacist and other violent, radical anti-government groups, including militias. Police recruits should be required to have a minimum of a four-year college degree. Police academies must substantially increase their course length to at least one year and add blocks of training on nonlethal tactics, de-escalation, dealing with substance abusers and the mentally ill, community policing, race relations, anger management, stress reduction, availability of social services for victims, and more. The use of lethal force must truly be taught as a last alternative. Most importantly, the “us versus them” attitude must become: “We are all in this together.”

Rewriting police department policies to require that community services workers respond to nonviolent calls for services that can reasonably be handled by professionals other than police officers would also be a huge step in decreasing violent encounters with the police and would build trust between the community and its police department. Every call for service does not have to have a sworn police officer respond. In fact, having a police officer respond to certain calls for service can, and often does, make the situation worse. A social worker, drug rehabilitation counselor, or housing specialist might be far more appropriate. Familiarizing themselves with the curriculum of a representative European police academy would give American law enforcement agencies all the examples necessary to revamp their own training curriculum to better meet the needs of their community. It can be just that simple.

I want to close by briefly mentioning a critical issue that, unless addressed on a national level, will inhibit the effectiveness of all the recommendations I have just cited. That is the issue of the American gun culture. One of the main reasons European police officers are able to use nonlethal force and feel confident in their ability to control situations is the fact that the officer can be almost certain that even the most violent, noncompliant subject will be unarmed. That one fact gives the officer a huge psychological (and physical) edge in such encounters and substantially lowers the chances of a fatality.

That same scenario in America is altered simply because of the prevalence of weapons the officer might encounter on any given day. We live in a country where the public is fiercely protective of the right to bear arms, to the point where many now feel justified in shooting a police officer to defend that right. Recent incidents where several heavily armed militias stormed state capitols to voice their displeasure with mask mandates during the coronavirus pandemic illustrate the potential for deadly encounters that American police officers must deal with every day.

All the police recruitment vetting, training, and policy rewriting will struggle with the task of emulating the European example and lowering the number of police involved in shooting fatalities until the out-of-control gun culture in this nation is addressed by both lawmakers and the American public. That is also a goal we must address in earnest.

David DeBatto is a retired U.S. Army counterintelligence special agent and Iraq War veteran and former police officer. He is an author, analyst, and consultant.

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 March 2021

Word Count: 2,678

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This country is in a crisis of the first order. More than half a million of us have died thanks to Covid-19. Food insecurity is on the rise, with nearly 24 million Americans going hungry, including 12 million children. Unemployment claims filed since the pandemic began have now reached 93 million. Given the level of damage to the less wealthy parts of this society, it’s little wonder that most Americans chose pandemic recovery (including the quick distribution of vaccines) as their top priority issue.

Keep in mind that our democracy is suffering as well. After all, former president Donald Trump incited an insurrection when he wasn’t able to win at the polls, an assault on the Capitol in which military veterans were overrepresented among those committed to reversing the election results (and endangering legislators as well). If you want a mood-of-the-moment fact, consider this: even after Joe Biden’s election, QAnon followers continued to insist that Trump could still be inaugurated to his second term in office. Addressing economic and political instability at home will take significant resources and focus, including calling to account those who so grossly mishandled the country’s pandemic response and stoked the big lie of questioning the legitimacy of Biden’s election victory.

If, however, you weren’t out here in the real world, but in there where the national security elite exists, you’d find that the chatter would involve few of the problems just mentioned. And only in our world would such a stance seem remarkably disconnected from reality. In their world, the “crisis” part of the present financial crisis is a fear, based on widespread rumors and reports about the Biden budget to come, that the Pentagon’s funding might actually get, if not a genuine haircut, then at least a trim — something largely unheard of in the twenty-first century.

The Pentagon’s boosters and their allies in the defense industry respond to such fears by insisting that no such trim could possibly be in order, that competition with China must be the prime focus of this moment and of the budget to come. Assuming that China’s rise is, in fact, a genuine problem, it’s not one that’s likely to be solved either in the near future or in a military fashion (not, at least, without disaster for the world), and it’s certainly not one that should be prioritized during a catastrophic pandemic.

While there are genuine concerns about what China’s rise might mean for the United States, it’s important to recognize just how much harm those trying to distract us from the very real problems at hand are likely to inflict on our health and actual security. Since the beginning of the pandemic, in fact, those unwilling to accept our failures or respond adequately to the disease at hand have blamed outside forces, most notably China, for otherwise preventable havoc to American lives and the economy.

Trump and his allies tried to shirk accountability for their failure to respond to the pandemic by pushing xenophobic and false characterizations of Covid-19 as the “China virus” or the “kung flu.” In a similar fashion, the national security elites hope that focusing on building up our military and building new nuclear weapons with China in mind will distract time and energy from making needed changes at home. But those urging us to increase Pentagon spending to compete with China in the middle of a pandemic are, in reality, only compounding the damage to our country’s recovery.

Militarizing the future Given the last two decades, you won’t be surprised to know that this misplaced assessment of the real threat to the public has a firm grip on Washington right now. As my colleague Dan Grazier at the Project On Government Oversight pointed out recently, confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III and Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks included more than 70 (sometimes ominous) mentions of China.

So again, no surprise that only a few weeks after those hearings, Biden announced the creation of a new China task force at the Pentagon. As the press announcement made clear, that group is going to be a dream for the military-industrial complex since it will, above all, focus on developing advanced “defense” technologies to stare down the China “threat” and so further militarize the future. In other words, the Pentagon’s projected threat assessments and their wonder-weapon solutions will be at the forefront of Washington thinking — and, therefore, funding, even during this pandemic.

That’s why it’s easy enough to predict where such a task force will lead. A similar panel in 2018, including lobbyists, board members, and contractors from the arms industry, warned that competition with China would require a long-term increase in funding for the Pentagon of 3% to 5%. That could mean an almost unimaginable future Department of Defense budget of $971.9 billion in fiscal year 2024. To pay for it, they suggested, Congress should consider cutting social security and other kinds of safety-net spending.

Even before Covid-19 hit, the economic fragility of so many Americans should have made that kind of recommendation irresponsible. In the midst of a pandemic, it’s beyond dangerous. Still, it betrays a crucial truth about the military-industrial complex: its key figures see the U.S. economy as something that should serve their needs, not the other way around.

Of course, the giants of the weapons industry have long had a direct seat at the table in Washington. Despite being the first Black secretary of defense, for instance, Lloyd Austin III remains typical of the Pentagon establishment in the sense that he comes to the job directly from a seat on the board of directors of weapons giant Raytheon. And he’s in good company. After all, many of the administration’s recent appointees are drawn from key Washington think tanks supported by the weapons industry.

For instance, more than a dozen former staffers from, or people affiliated with, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) have joined the Biden administration. A recent report by the Revolving Door Project found that CNAS had repeatedly accepted the sort of funding that went comfortably with recommendations it was making that “would directly benefit some of the think tank’s donors, including military contractors and foreign governments.” When it came to confronting China, for instance, CNAS figures urged the Department of Defense to “sustain and enhance” defense contractors so that they would become ever more “robust, flexible, and resilient” in a faceoff with that country.

Sadly, even as the Pentagon’s budget remains largely unchallenged, there’s been a sudden reawakening — especially in Republican ranks — to the version of fiscal conservatism that looks askance at providing relief to communities and businesses suffering around the country. Recent debates in Washington about the latest pandemic relief bill suggest once again that the much-ballyhooed principles of “responsibility” and “fiscal conservatism” apply to everyone — except, of course, the Pentagon.

Putting Covid-19 relief spending in perspective The price tag for the relief bill presently being debated in Congress, $1.9 trillion, is certainly significant, but it’s not far from the kind of taxpayer support national security agencies normally receive every year. In 2020, for instance, the real national security budget request surpassed $1.2 trillion. That request included not only the Pentagon, but other costs of war, including care for veterans and military retirement benefits.

Over the years, such costs have proven monumental. The Department of Defense alone, for example, has received more than $10.6 trillion over the past 20 years. That included $2 trillion for its overseas contingency operations account, a war-fighting fund used by both the Pentagon and lawmakers to circumvent congressionally imposed spending caps. Reliance on that account, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office assured Congress, only made it likelier that taxpayers would fund more expensive and less optimal solutions to America’s forever wars.

In the past, the justification for such excessive national-security spending rested on the idea that the Defense Department was the key to keeping Americans safe. As a result, the Pentagon’s ever-escalating requests for money were approved by Congress year after year without real opposition. Disproportionate funding for that institution has, however, come at a significant cost.

Caps on non-defense spending under the Budget Control Act of 2011 meant that civilian agencies were already underfunded when the pandemic hit. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, “Overall funding for programs outside veterans’ medical care remains below its level a decade ago.” The consequences of that underspending can also be seen in our crumbling roads and infrastructure, to which, in its last report in 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a D+ — and the situation has only grown worse since then.

Job protection is the other common refrain for those defending high funding levels for the Pentagon and, during a pandemic with such devastating employment consequences, such a concern can hardly be dismissed. But studies have consistently shown that military spending is a remarkably poor job creator compared to almost any other kind of spending. Some of us may still remember World War II’s Rosie the Riveter and mid-twentieth-century union support for defense budgets as engines for job creation. Those assumptions are, however, sorely out of date. Investing in healthcare, combating climate change, or rebuilding infrastructure are all significantly more effective job creators than yet more military spending.

Of course, non-military stimulus spending has been far from perfect. Even measuring the effects of the first relief package passed by Congress has proven difficult, especially since the Trump administration ignored the law when it came to reporting on just how many jobs that spending either preserved or created. Still, there’s no question that non-military stimulus efforts are more effective, by orders of magnitude, than defense spending when it comes to job creation.

Needed: A new funding strategy to weather future storms The uncomfortable truth (even for those who would like to see a trillion dollars in annual Pentagon spending) is that such funding won’t make us safer, possibly far less so. Recent studies of preventable military aviation crashes indicate that, disturbingly enough, given the way the Pentagon spends taxpayer funds, more money can actually make us less safe.

Somewhere along the line in this pandemic moment, Washington needs to redefine the meaning of both “national security” and “national interest.” In a world in which California burns and Texas freezes, in which more than half-a-million Americans have already been felled by Covid-19, it’s time to recognize how damaging the over-funding of the Pentagon and a myopic focus on an ever more militarized cold war with China are likely to be to this country. As the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Stephen Wertheim has argued, it’s increasingly clear that an American strategy focused on chasing global military supremacy into the distant future no longer serves any real definition of national interest.

Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman recently pointed out at Foreign Affairs that “the coming era will be one of health crises, climate shocks, cyberattacks, and geoeconomic competition among great powers. What unites those seemingly disparate threats is that each is not so much a battle to be won as a challenge to be weathered.” While traditional defense threats still loom large in what passes for national debate in Washington, the most likely (and potentially most devastating) threats to public health and safety aren’t actually in the Pentagon’s wheelhouse.

Weathering those future crises will continue to require innovation and creativity, which means ensuring that we are investing adequately not in the hypersonic weaponry of some future imagined war but in education and public health now. Particularly in the near term, as we try to rebuild jobs and businesses lost to this pandemic, even the Pentagon must be forced to make better use of the staggering resources it already receives from increasingly embattled American taxpayers. Rushing to produce yet more useless (and sometimes poorly produced) weapons systems and technology will only increase the fragility of both the military and the civilian society it’s supposed to protect.

Make no mistake: the addiction to Pentagon spending is a bipartisan problem in Washington. Still, change is in order. The problems we face at home are too overwhelming to be ignored. We can’t continue to let the appetites of the military-industrial complex crowd out the needs of the rest of us.

Mandy Smithberger writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

Copyright ©2021 Mandy Smithberger — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 March 2021

Word Count: 2,038

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“Are you okay?” asked a friend and military spouse in the voicemail she left me on the afternoon the mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol so violently. At home with a new baby, her Navy reservist husband stationed in Germany, the thoughts running through her head that day would prove remarkably similar to mine. As she said when we spoke, “It’s as if the U.S. has become a war zone.”

Do a Google search and you’ll find very little suggesting that the January 6th attack on the Capitol in any way resembled a war. A notable exception: a Washington Post op-ed by former Missouri secretary of state and Afghanistan combat veteran Jason Kander. He saw that day’s violence for the combat it was and urged congressional representatives and others who bore the brunt of those “armed insurrectionists” to seek help (as, to his regret, he hadn’t done after his tours of duty in combat zones).

Now, take a look back at that “riot” and tell me how it differs from a military attack: President Trump asked his supporters to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He swore he would go with them, though he didn’t, of course, just as those who launched and continued our “forever wars” of the last almost 20 years sent Americans to fight abroad without ever doing so themselves. Trump’s small army destroyed property with their metal baseball bats and other implements of aggression, in one case even planted pipe bombs near Republican and Democratic party headquarters (that didn’t go off), and looted congressional chambers, including carrying away House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern.

The rioters used intimidation against those in the Capitol. Some screamed insults like “traitor” and the n-word (reserved, of course, for the black police officers protecting Congress). One rioter wore a sweatshirt emblazed with the words “Camp Auschwitz,” a reference to the Nazi death camp. Make no mistake: the America these rioters envisioned was one full of hate and disdain for difference.

In their disregard for pandemic safety protocols, they employed the equivalent of biological warfare against lawmakers and the Capitol police, breaking into the building, screaming and largely unmasked during a pandemic, forcing lawmakers to jam into enclosed spaces to save (but also endanger) their own lives. The rioters smeared blood on walls and on the busts of former presidents. Their purpose was clear: to overturn democratic processes by brute force in the name of what they saw as an existential threat to their country, the certification of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president and vice president.

Among those aggressors were veterans and some active-duty personnel from elite U.S. combat forces (as well as from police departments) who brought years of expertise to bear on orchestrating an attempted takeover of our government, based — much like the costliest of our still-ongoing wars, the one in Iraq — on lies told by their commander in chief (“Stop the steal!”).

My own personal war To fight wars, you need to summon a mix of rage, adrenaline, and disregard for the humanity of those whose project you seek to annihilate. That seemed evident in the mob of the supposedly pro-law-and-order president that attacked Congress, their acts leading to five deaths — including that of Capitol Hill police officer Brian Sicknick, a former New Jersey Air National Guard member. More than 140 police officers who tried to protect lawmakers sustained injuries: Some, who were not given helmets prior to that day, are now living with brain injuries (which, as a therapist, I can assure are likely to come with debilitating lifelong implications). Another officer has two cracked ribs and smashed spinal disks. Yet another was stabbed by a rioter with a metal fence stake. Still another lost his eye.

These deaths and injuries will have ripple effects for the spouses, children, friends, employers, and others in the communities where those officers live. And they do not include the countless invisible injuries (such as post-traumatic stress disorder) that result from such war-like scenarios. In this respect, the cost of armed violence to human life is incalculable.

While that attack on the Capitol was underway, at the tiny community mental health clinic where I work as a therapist, I was speaking to clients who had migrated here from countries plagued by armed conflict. I listened to concerns that the far-right nationalist attack on the Capitol would, sooner or later, inspire violence against their own families. After all, those storming the Capitol backed a president who had referred to immigrants as “animals” and whose administration had put the children of undocumented migrants in cages — or sub-prison like conditions with zero-provision for their care. In the days after the attack, an acquaintance of mine, an African American man, was indeed pursued by a carful of people wearing Trump hats and shouting racial slurs. (They slowed their vehicle and followed him down the road towards his Maryland apartment.)

The day of the riots, I arrived home from my job to find my husband, a Naval officer, in front of the television news, tears in his eyes and sweat dripping down his face. My children, unprepared for bed (as they should have been), were staring at him in confusion. That night, he and I bolted awake at every sound, as we had in the weeks after Trump was first elected.

Of course, given our incomes and our home in the countryside outside Washington, D.C., we were about as far from danger as one could imagine. Still, our sense of distress was acute. After the riot was over, my husband, gritting his teeth, wondered: “Why aren’t the Capitol floors covered in rioters in zip ties right now?” We noted that, if there had been Black Lives Matter slogans and black fists on the flags and banners those rioters were carrying, the National Guard would have arrived quickly.

As time wore on, my husband and I attempted to comfort each another and explain those televised scenes of violence to our two children, four and five, who had been stunned both by glimpses of what grownups could do and by how visibly upset their father had become. And we weren’t alone. I soon found myself scrolling through texts and voicemails from other military spouses with similar fears who wanted to know if my husband and I were okay and if the violence in the Capitol had made it anywhere near our home.

In our minds, fearful scenarios were playing out about what January 6th might mean for military families like ours — and little wonder, since in those tense two weeks before Joe Biden’s inauguration, the military still answered to a commander in chief who had visibly incited the possible takeover of our government. What would the military members of our families be asked to do in the days to come, we wondered, and by whom? What would have happened if those rioters had actually succeeded in hanging Mike Pence or slaughtering other members of Congress?

Preparing for war In truth, in Donald Trump’s America, my spouse and I had been conjuring up scenarios of violence for months. We had found ourselves obsessed with the fears of rising political violence in what, during wartime, used to be known as the home front in the country with the most heavily armed civilian population on Earth. (I had even written about that very subject in those very months.) No wonder then that, before November 3rd, I was so focused not just on dispelling Trumpian disinformation about the election to come, but on helping voters locate their polling stations and finding transportation to them.

As it happens, my husband’s jobs in recent years have often involved anticipating war and what our military would do if Americans ever faced it on our own soil. He’s served as an officer on a battleship and three nuclear and ballistic-missile armed submarines. He’s had to collect intelligence under the leadership of presidents with very different levels of impulse control. Most recently, he’s worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinking through scenarios in which the United States might be engaged in nuclear war — and what the costs might be.

Together, we have been amazed at how few Americans, other than our fellow military families, have been preoccupied with the violence beginning to unfold on our nation’s streets and the way, in some strange fashion, America’s distant, never-ending wars of these last nearly 20 years were threatening to come home.

One lesson of these years, in an America with an “all-volunteer” military, is that wars essentially don’t exist unless you’re directly or indirectly involved in fighting them. At no time did that seem more evident to me than on January 6th, in the divergent responses of my own family and those we know who aren’t in the military. If you’re interested (as I am as a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project) in how, during these years, voters and their representatives have justified (or simply ignored) the decision to “solve” our global problems with unending war, then you might frame what happened on January 6th in these terms: some 74 million Americans voted for a president who portrayed those who disagreed with him as existential threats to America.

In the meantime, for almost two decades our government has invested staggering, almost unimaginable sums in this country’s military machine (and the war-making industries linked to it), while diverting funds from key social services, ranging from healthcare to domestic job creation. Meanwhile, it has consistently “retired” military-grade weaponry from our war zones into the hands of police departments across the country and so onto our city streets. I mean, given such a formula, what could possibly go wrong? Why would anyone connected to the military be worried?

Of course, why wouldn’t we worry, since we — or our loved ones — are the people who are ordered to participate when wars of any kind happen?

The isolation of military service There are about two million Americans who serve in the U.S. military and 2.6 million more who are military spouses and dependents. Altogether that’s just a little more than 1% of our entire population. We are, believe me, in another world of fears and worries than the rest of you. We’ve been involved, directly or indirectly, in fighting those godforsaken wars launched after 9/11 for almost two decades now. You haven’t. You’ve generally thanked us religiously for our “service” and otherwise forgotten about those wars and gone about your business. We haven’t. Our sense of the world, our fears, are different than yours.

We military spouses are charged with comforting and caring for those who serve, especially (but not exclusively) when they are sent to one of the many countries where that never-ending “war on terror” continues to be fought into the Biden years. Caring for those who serve is no small task in a country where the very act of trying to get mental-health care could be a career-ending move for a soldier. Families are often their only recourse.

Military spouses also care for children in mourning, temporarily or in some cases permanently, over the loss of a parent. In an anemic military healthcare system, we are often left to marshal the necessary care for ourselves and our children, even as many of us struggle with depression, anxiety, and trauma thanks to the multiple, often unpredictable deployments of those very loved ones and being left alone to imagine what they’re going through. According to a recent op-ed by my colleague and military spouse Aleha Landry, approximately 25% of us are unemployed in this Covid-19 moment. On average, we also earn 27% less than our counterparts in the civilian world, not least of all because the burden of childcare and frequent redeployments prevent us from moving up in our chosen fields of work.

In this pandemic-stricken, distinctly over-armed world of ours, in which nationalist militia groups (often with veterans among them) backing the former president continue to talk about war right here in what, after 9/11, we came to call “the homeland,” it’s not surprising how increasingly anxious people like me have come to feel. Personally, what January 6th brought home was this: as a military spouse, I was living in a community that didn’t know my family, while my husband, in his own personal hell of hypothetical nuclear wars, could be called upon at any time to represent a president who had incited an assault on the Capitol, leaving my children and me alone. And that, believe me, was scary.

I was struck, for instance, that a military spouse I became friends with and who occupied a very different part of the political spectrum from me nonetheless feared that, in the event of conflict, she would be vulnerable — and it wasn’t just foreign conflicts that she was worrying about after Trump was elected. At one point, her husband had told her, “If you see a flash in the sky, then take the kids and drive in this direction,” indicating a spot on the map where he felt, based on wind patterns, nuclear fallout was less likely to blow. After the Charlottesville Unite the Right riot of 2017, she stocked up on food, water, and extra gas so she could head for Canada if armed conflict broke out among Americans. “We’d be alone,” she told me, “because obviously, he’d be gone.”

Stopping our endless wars These, then, are the sorts of fears that arise in my militarized world on this careening planet of ours. Yes, Joe Biden is now president, but this country is still on edge. And the military that’s been fighting those hopeless, bloody wars in distant lands for so long is on edge, too. After all, military personnel were present in significant numbers in that mob on January 6th. Almost one in five members of Trump’s invading crew were reportedly veterans or active military personnel.

Sometimes, the people I feel closest to (when I do my work for the Costs of War Project) are the women who must mother and maintain households in the places my country has had such a hand in turning into constant war zones. Right now, there exist millions of people living in just such places where the anticipation of air raids, drone attacks, suicide bombings, snipers, or sophisticated roadside IEDs is a daily reality. Already, over 335,000 civilians (and counting) have been killed in those foreign war zones of ours. Mothers and their children in such lands are often cut off from hospitals, reliable food, clean water, or the infrastructure that would help them get to school, work, or the doctor. Unlike most Americans, they don’t have the luxury of forgetting about war. Their spouses and children are in constant danger.

Democrat or Republican, the presidents of the past 20 years are responsible for the violence that continues in those war zones and for the (not unrelated) violence that has begun to unfold at home — and even, thank you very much, for my own family’s fears and fantasies about war, up close and personal. It’s about time that all of us in this disturbed country of ours at least bear witness to what such violence means for those living it and start thinking about what the United States should do to stop it. It can’t just be the most vulnerable and directly involved among us who lose sleep — not to speak of lives, limbs, mental stability, and livelihoods — due to the cloistered decisions of our public leaders.

Believe this at least: if we can’t stop fighting those wars across significant parts of the planet, this country won’t remain immune to them either. It hasn’t, in fact. It’s just that so many of us have yet to fully take that in.

Andrea Mazzarino writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Copyright ©2021 Andrea Mazzarino — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 March 2021

Word Count: 2,627

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CAMBRIDGE, MA — The United States Director of National Intelligence’s release Friday of the classified report on the CIA-led investigation of the murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi marks a critical moment of decision for the U.S. government — but also for others around the world who have long acquiesced in the brutality of Arab and other authoritarian regimes.

The report does not offer any new evidence that had not previously leaked about individuals and offices linked directly to the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who played roles in the murder. Its importance is that it provides the most conclusive and credible proof yet of the Crown Prince’s direct complicity in the pre-meditated and gruesome assassination, and it forces many individuals and governments to make a decision they had long put off: Do they sanction the Saudi Arabian crown prince and government for this criminal act, or do they just make symbolic gestures to express their disapproval and continue their political, commercial, and security relations with this leading Arab country?

A Saudi Arabian assassination squad, with several members who were in the crown prince’s entourage or worked with him, flew to Istanbul in October 2018 in two private jets owned by a company controlled by the crown prince. They killed Khashoggi then dismembered his body, which has never been found. The government lied about the murder, then in the face of evidence made available in Turkey it finally admitted that Khashoggi had died in a Saudi arrest operation gone bad, but which had nothing to do with the crown prince.

The DNI report’s conclusion is based on the CIA assessment on the crown prince’s

“control of decision-making in the kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of [Mohammed bin Salman’s] protective detail in the operation, and support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi”.

The report concluded unambiguously,

“We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”

The fact that the killers took a bone saw with them suggests that murder was in their mind from the start. The U.S. report follows the work in 2019 of United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions Agnès Callamard, whose six-month-long investigation of the murder concluded that Saudi Arabia was involved in a “deliberate, premeditated execution” of Khashoggi.

“There is sufficient credible evidence regarding the responsibility of the crown prince demanding further investigation,” she said.

The combination of the CIA and Callamard assessments now forces the U.S. government in the first instance to decide how it will move ahead in its relations with the Saudi kingdom, which the Biden administration has said it seeks to “reassess” and “recalibrate.” The U.S. government quickly announced Friday afternoon that it will sanction and restrict the entry into the U.S. of individuals who were part of the murder plot or who were involved in targeting, harassing, or surveilling dissidents and journalists in other countries.

These seem like mild actions that have been taken often against other countries without deterring criminal deeds. Yet the mention of acting firmly if Saudi Arabia takes actions against its dissident nationals abroad is new and perhaps significant, because targeted dissidents freely share facts with foreign intelligence and political agencies that help build a strong case against Arab tyrants.

An important reason to act firmly now against the Saudis is that their actions are typical of many other autocratic Arab regimes who look up to the Riyadh government. The entire region will pay a terrible price if a case as clear cut as the culpability of the Saudi crown prince here is not punished severely. For if his criminal and brutal deeds inside and beyond his own country continue to happen, the Arab region will keep spinning out of control into hellholes of gangster states and mafias where human life has little value and citizens have no rights.

What action to take is the big question that the U.S. and other governments must answer quickly, along with the private sector and international organizations that work with Saudi Arabia. Ideas being discussed include stronger sanctions against individuals, isolating political leaders from diplomatic engagements, launching a more rigorous international investigation into the accusations against the Saudi crown prince, and reducing commercial and military ties with the kingdom.

The problem, though, is that it will be extremely difficult to remove Mohammed bin Salman from his position as crown prince, given his strongman’s total grip on security, economic, information, and political power centers in the country. His father King Salman also is not in good health and may or may not be capable of dealing with the repercussions of his son and heir’s apparent criminal behavior. Most of Mohammed bin Salman’s domestic and foreign policies have failed, especially the Qatar blockade and the war in Yemen. To make things worse, he has achieved the dubious feat of turning a once low-key monarchy into yet another brutal Arab authoritarian society where no one dares speak their mind for fear of jail or death — following the model of the late Saddam Hussein or Moammar Gaddafi.

The most important reaction we should look for is probably inside Saudi Arabia, among the thousands of royal family members and the economic and security elite. However displeased or even ashamed many Saudis may be about seeing their country and leaders blackballed for their criminal murder plot and repeatedly lying about it, they have no means to express themselves in the kingdom. Well encrypted and anonymous social media are an option (but it is likely that with the assistance of their pals Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the Saudi security agencies have preemptively plugged any likely route for citizens to express their views).

International pressure is crucial to reduce or end such criminal behavior by Arab officials, but also to offer some hope for ordinary Arab men and women that they might anticipate a future in which they are more than the mere sheep and donkeys that they now feel like. The Saudi and other existing Arab judicial systems will not do this, as the Saudi case indicates. A Saudi Arabian security court convicted eight men for murdering Khashoggi, and five were sentenced to death. Their punishments were later commuted, allegedly because members of the Khashoggi family forgave the killers.

Ms. Callamard noted after her investigation that the Saudi trial represented “the antithesis of justice,” and other leading international human rights organizations said the same thing.

 

Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement at the American University of Beirut, a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2021 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 February 2021

Word Count: 1,088

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The ascent of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States in 2016 did not take place in a vacuum, nor did his grab for unprecedented executive power that far transcend democratic norms.

Starting back in the Soviet era, the KGB and its successors methodically studied various components of the American body politic and the economic forces behind it — campaign finance, the US legal system, social media, the tech sector, K Street lobbyists, corporate lawyers, and the real estate industry — and exploited every loophole they could find. In the end, they began subverting one institution after another that was designed to provide checks and balances to safeguard our democracy, including our elections, our executive branch, the Department of Justice, and the intelligence sector.

For the most part, the American media covered the Trump-Russia scandal as if it were a series of major criminal inquiries — following the investigations, prosecutions, and trials of Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and other Trump associates; the Mueller Report; Trump’s impeachment and no-witness acquittal in the Senate; and all the rest.

But the investigation began as a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal probe, and therein lies the problem. Successful intelligence operations often have far higher stakes than ordinary crimes. After all, paying hush money to a porn star out of campaign finances is illegal and can result in jail time, as it did for former Trump layer Michael Cohen. But it pales in significance to installing a Russian asset in the Oval Office. And, believe it or not, that may be perfectly legal.

That’s because, as the KGB and its successor know all too well, intelligence operations are designed within the law, which, thanks to lax regulations, lax enforcement, and the very nature of counterintelligence, has given the plenty of latitude. After all, this is a country in which laundering massive amounts of money through anonymously purchased estate can be done with virtually no risk. It is a country in which it is possible to take money from Russian intelligence, to establish communications with Russian intelligence, and, in effect, Russian asset without breaking the law. It is a country in which the Russians can hire highly paid attorneys as lobbyists, who happen to have access to loads of important secrets, and use them to get what they want.

When one thinks about it like that — as an intelligence operation rather individual crimes — suddenly the interactions of Trump and Trump himself with dozens of Soviet émigrés, Russian mafiosi, businessmen, and the like over forty years can be seen in an entirely different light, not so much as crimes but as part of standardized intelligence operations that served to bring Trump into the KGB’s fold, that tested him to see if he was worth cultivating, that compromised him through lucrative money-laundering schemes, sycophantic flattery, pie-in-the-sky Trump Tower Moscow projects, extravagantly well-paid franchising projects, and more.

One might think questions Trump’s ties to Russia would have been fully addressed by now. After all, the Trump-Russia scandal began to unravel almost immediately after his inauguration. Indeed, less than a month after Trump became president, on February 13, 2017, he got rid of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for lying about his ties to the Russians. The very next day, Trump urged FBI director James Comey not to investigate Flynn. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go,” said Trump.

According to the Mueller Report, “The circumstances of the conversation show that the President was asking Comey to close the FBI’s investigation into Flynn.”

But Comey refused to do the president’s bidding — which would have breached the invisible firewall between the executive branch and the FBI — so on May 9, 2017, Trump fired him, too, and then told the world that the entire Trump-Russia thing was a hoax.

The difference between counterintelligence and criminal investigations is not some minor legal distinction. It’s fundamental. Criminal investigations are intended to lead toward prosecution; counterintelligence are not. Instead, they are undertaken to thwart an adversary’s spying, espionage, or sabotage — the adversary in this case, of course, being Russia.

Even though they are not about breaking the law per se, counterintelligence investigations may well involve issues that are far more serious than criminal probes. In this case, the point of a counterintelligence investigation was to protect the United States from Russian interference in America’s elections. From cyberwarfare. From disinformation. From Russian assets who had been groomed for years, perhaps decades, and were finally in place to do real damage to vital American institutions.

So is Trump a Russian asset?

Yes.

But it’s complicated. “When people start talking about Trump’s ties to the KGB or Russian intelligence, some are looking for this super-sophisticated master plan, which was designed decades ago and finally climaxed with Trump’s election as president of the United States,” said Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB who came to the United States and now lives outside Washington, DC.

What happened with Trump can best be seen as a series of sequential and sometimes unrelated operations that played into one another over more than four decades.

That’s a big difference between the KGB and some HUMINT [human intelligence] agencies,” Shvets told me during my first interview in what became an extended series of conversations that began in fall 2019. “The KGB is very patient. It can work a case for years. Americans want results yesterday or today; as a result, they have none.”

Excerpted from American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery, by Craig Unger. Published with permission of the author and Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Craig Unger

Copyright © 2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 February 2021

Word Count: 923

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Slowing the pace of climate change and getting “tough” on China, especially over its human-rights abuses and unfair trade practices, are among the top priorities President Biden has announced for his new administration. Evidently, he believes that he can tame a rising China with harsh pressure tactics, while still gaining its cooperation in areas of concern to Washington. As he wrote in Foreign Affairs during the presidential election campaign, “The most effective way to meet that challenge is to build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China’s abusive behaviors and human rights violations, even as we seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge, such as climate change.” If, however, our new president truly believes that he can build an international coalition to gang up on China and secure Beijing’s cooperation on climate change, he’s seriously deluded. Indeed, though he could succeed in provoking a new cold war, he won’t prevent the planet from heating up unbearably in the process.

Biden is certainly aware of the dangers of global warming. In that same Foreign Affairs article, he labeled it nothing short of an “existential threat,” one that imperils the survival of human civilization. Acknowledging the importance of relying on scientific expertise (unlike our previous president who repeatedly invented his own version of scientific reality), Biden affirmed the conclusion of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that warming must be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels or there will be hell to pay. He then pledged to “rejoin the Paris climate agreement on day one of a Biden administration,” which he indeed did, and to “make massive, urgent investments at home that put the United States on track to have a clean energy economy with net-zero [greenhouse gas] emissions by 2050” — the target set by the IPCC.

Even such dramatic actions, he indicated, will not be sufficient. Other countries will have to join America in moving toward a global “net-zero” state in which any carbon emissions would be compensated for by equivalent carbon removals. “Because the United States creates only 15 percent of global emissions,” he wrote, “I will leverage our economic and moral authority to push the world to determined action, rallying nations to raise their ambitions and push progress further and faster.”

China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases right now (although the U.S. remains number one historically), would obviously be Washington’s natural partner in this effort. Here, though, Biden’s antagonistic stance toward that country is likely to prove a significant impediment. Rather than prioritize collaboration with China on climate action, he chose to castigate Beijing for its continued reliance on coal. The Biden climate plan, he wrote in Foreign Affairs, “includes insisting that China… stop subsidizing coal exports and outsourcing pollution to other countries by financing billions of dollars’ worth of dirty fossil-fuel energy projects through its Belt and Road Initiative.” Then he went further by portraying the future effort to achieve a green economy as a potentially competitive, not collaborative, struggle with China, saying,

 

“I will make investment in research and development a cornerstone of my presidency, so that the United States is leading the charge in innovation. There is no reason we should be falling behind China or anyone else when it comes to clean energy.”

Unfortunately, though he’s not wrong on China’s climate change challenges (similar, in many respects, to our own country’s), you can’t have it both ways. If climate change is an existential threat and international collaboration between the worst greenhouse gas emitters key to overcoming that peril, picking fights with China over its energy behavior is a self-defeating way to start. Whatever obstacles China does pose, its cooperation in achieving that 1.5-degree limit is critical. “If we don’t get this right, nothing else will matter,” Biden said of global efforts to deal with climate change. Sadly, his insistence on pummeling China on so many fronts (and appointing China hawks to his foreign policy team to do so) will ensure that he gets it wrong. The only way to avert catastrophic climate change is for the United States to avoid a new cold war with China by devising a cooperative set of plans with Beijing to speed the global transition to a green economy.

Why cooperation is essential With such cooperation in mind, let’s review the basics on how those two countries affect world energy consumption and global carbon emissions: the United States and China are the world’s two leading consumers of energy and its two main emitters of carbon dioxide, or CO2, the leading greenhouse gas. As a result, they exert an outsized influence on the global climate equation. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China accounted for approximately 22% of world energy consumption in 2018; the U.S., 16%. And because both countries rely so heavily on fossil fuels for energy generation — China largely on coal, the U.S. more on oil and natural gas — their carbon-dioxide emissions account for an even larger share of the global total: China alone, nearly 29% in 2018; the U.S., 18%; and combined, an astonishing 46%.

It’s what will happen in the future, though, that really matters. If the world is to keep global temperatures from rising above that 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, every major economy should soon be on a downward-trending trajectory in terms of both fossil-fuel consumption and CO2 emissions (along with a compensating increase in renewable energy output). Horrifyingly enough, however, on their current trajectories, over the next two decades the combined fossil-fuel consumption and carbon emissions of China and the United States are still expected to rise, not fall, before stabilizing in the 2040s at a level far above net zero. According to the IEA, if the two countries stick to anything like their current courses, their combined fossil-fuel consumption would be approximately 17% higher in 2040 than in 2018, even if their CO2 emissions would rise by “only” 3%. Any increase of that kind over the next two decades would spell one simple word for humanity: D-O-O-M.

True, both countries are expected to substantially increase their investment in renewable energy during the next 20 years, even as places like India are expected to account for an ever-increasing share of global energy use and CO2 emissions. Still, as long as Beijing and Washington continue to lead the world in both categories, any effort to achieve net-zero and avert an almost unimaginable climate cataclysm will have to fall largely on their shoulders. This would, however, require a colossal reduction in fossil-fuel consumption and the ramping up of renewables on a scale unlike any engineering project this planet has ever seen.

The Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development at Tsinghua University, an influential Chinese think tank, has calculated what might be involved in reshaping China’s coal-dependent electrical power system to reach the goal of a 1.5-degree limit on global warming. Its researchers believe that, over the next three decades, this would require adding the equivalent of three times current global wind power capacity and four times that of solar power at the cost of approximately $20 trillion.

A similar transformation will be required in the United States, although with some differences: while this country relies far less on coal than China to generate electricity, it relies more on natural gas (a less potent emitter of CO2, but a fossil fuel nonetheless) and its electrical grid — as recent events in Texas have demonstrated — is woefully unprepared for climate change and will have to be substantially rebuilt at enormous cost.

And that represents only part of what needs to be done to avert planetary catastrophe. To eliminate carbon emissions from oil-powered vehicles, both countries will have to replace their entire fleets of cars, vans, trucks, and buses with electric-powered ones and develop alternative fuels for their trains, planes, and ships — an undertaking of equal magnitude and expense.

There are two ways all of this can be done: separately or together. Each country could devise its own blueprint for such a transition, developing its own green technologies and seeking financing wherever it could be found. As in the fight over fifth generation (5G) telecommunications, each could deny scientific knowledge and technical know-how to its rival and insist that allies buy only its equipment, whether or not it best suits their purposes — a stance taken by the Trump administration with respect to the Chinese company Huawei’s 5G wireless technology. Alternatively, the U.S. and China could cooperate in developing green technologies, share information and know-how, and work together in disseminating them around the world.

On the question of which approach is more likely to achieve success, the answer is too obvious to belabor. Only those prepared to risk civilization’s survival would choose the former — and yet that’s the choice that both sides may indeed make.

Why a new cold war precludes climate salvation Those in Washington who favor a tougher approach toward China and the bolstering of U.S. military forces in the Pacific claim that, under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist regime has become more authoritarian at home and more aggressive abroad, endangering key U.S. allies in the Pacific and threatening our vital interests. Certainly, when it comes to the increasing repression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang Province or pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, there can be little doubt of Beijing’s perfidy, though on other issues, there’s room for debate. On another subject, though, there really should be no room for debate at all: the impact of a new cold war between the planet’s two great powers on the chances for a successful global response to a rapidly warming planet.

There are several obvious reasons for this. First, increased hostility will ensure a competitive rather than collaborative search for vital solutions, resulting in wasted resources, inadequate financing, duplicative research, and the stalled international dissemination of advanced green technologies. A hint of such a future lies in the competitive rather than collaborative development of vaccines for Covid-19 and their distressingly chaotic distribution to Africa and the rest of the developing world, ensuring that the pandemic will have a life into 2022 or 2023 with an ever-rising death toll.

Second, a new cold war will make international diplomacy more difficult when it comes to ensuring worldwide compliance with the Paris climate agreement. Consider it a key lesson for the future that cooperation between President Barack Obama and Xi Jinping made the agreement possible in the first place, creating pressure on reluctant but vital powers like India and Russia to join as well. Once President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement, that space evaporated and global adherence withered. Only by recreating such a U.S.-China climate alliance will it be possible to corral other key players into full compliance. As suggested recently by Todd Stern, the lead American negotiator at the 2015 Paris climate summit, “There is simply no way to contain climate change worldwide without full-throttle engagement by both countries.”

A cold war environment would make such cooperation a fantasy.

Third, such an atmosphere would ensure a massive increase in military expenditures on both sides, sopping up funds needed for the transition to a green-energy economy. In addition, as the pace of militarization accelerated, fossil-fuel use would undoubtedly increase, as the governments of both countries favored the mass production of gas-guzzling tanks, bombers, and warships.

Finally, there is no reason to assume a cold war will always remain cold. The current standoff between the U.S. and China in the Pacific is different from the one that existed between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in Europe during the historic Cold War. There is no longer anything like an “Iron Curtain” to define the boundaries between the two sides or keep their military forces from colliding with each another. While the risk of war in Europe was ever-present back then, each side knew that such a boundary-crossing assault might trigger a nuclear exchange and so prove suicidal. Today, however, the air and naval forces of China and the U.S. are constantly intermingling in the East and South China Seas, making a clash or collision possible at any time. So far, cooler heads have prevailed, preventing such encounters from sparking armed violence, but as tensions mount, a hot war between the U.S. and China cannot be ruled out.

Because American forces are poised to strike at vital targets on the Chinese mainland, it’s impossible to preclude China’s use of nuclear weapons or, if preparations for such use are detected, a preemptive U.S. nuclear strike. Any full-scale thermonuclear conflagration resulting from that would probably cause a nuclear winter and the death of billions of people, making the climate-change peril moot. But even if nuclear weapons are not employed, a war between the two powers could result in immense destruction in China’s industrial heartland and to such key U.S. allies as Japan and South Korea. Fires ignited in the course of battle would, of course, add additional carbon to the atmosphere, while the subsequent breakdown in global economic activity would postpone by years any transition to a green economy.

An alliance for global survival If Joe Biden genuinely believes that climate change is an “existential threat” and that the United States “must lead the world,” it’s crucial that he stop the slide toward a new cold war with China and start working with Beijing to speed the transition to a green-energy economy focused on ensuring global compliance with the Paris climate agreement. This would not necessarily mean abandoning all efforts to pressure China on human rights and other contentious issues. It’s possible to pursue human rights, trade equity, and planetary survival at the same time. Indeed, as both countries come to share the urgency of addressing the climate crisis, progress on other issues could become easier.

Assuming Biden truly means what he says about overcoming the climate threat and “getting it right,” here are some of the steps he could take to achieve meaningful progress:

• Schedule a “climate summit” with Xi Jinping as soon as possible to discuss joint efforts to overcome global warming, including the initiation of bilateral programs to speed advances in areas like the spread of electric vehicles, the improvement of battery-storage capabilities, the creation of enhanced methods of carbon sequestration, and the development of alternative aviation fuels.

• At the conclusion of the summit, joint working groups on these and other matters should be established, made up of senior figures from both sides. Research centers and universities in each country should be designated as lead actors in key areas, with arrangements made for cooperative partnerships and the sharing of climate-related technical data.

• At the same time, presidents Biden and Xi should announce the establishment of an “Alliance for Global Survival,” intended to mobilize international support for the Paris climate agreement and strict adherence to its tenets. As part of this effort, the two leaders should plan joint meetings with other world leaders to persuade them to replicate the measures that Biden and Xi have agreed to work on cooperatively. As needed, they could offer to provide financial aid and technical assistance to poorer states to launch the necessary energy transition.

• Presidents Biden and Xi should agree to reconvene annually to review progress in all these areas and designate surrogates to meet on a more regular basis. Both countries should publish an online “dashboard” exhibiting progress in every key area of climate mitigation.

So, Joe, if you really meant what you said about overcoming climate change, these are some of the things you should focus on to get it right. Choose this path and guarantee us all a fighting chance to avert civilizational collapse. Opt for the path of confrontation instead — the one your administration already appears headed down — and that hope is likely to disappear into an unbearable world of burning, flooding, famine, and extreme storms until the end of time. After all, without remarkable effort, a simple formula will rule all our lives: a new cold war = a scalding planet.

Michael T. Klare writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

Copyright ©2021 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 February 2021

Word Count: 2,665

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The floodgates of unsolicited foreign policy advice for the Biden administration are now wide open. Some sensible individuals offer useful suggestions. However, much of the advice is coming from former US government officials who participated in creating the very foreign quagmires they now audaciously propose to fix. Their policy prescriptions often reflect a serious lack of understanding of international issues that prioritises agendas pushed by domestic and foreign lobbies and narrow US goals over effective diplomacy.

I prefer to stay out of the policy advice game, and instead, only highlight a few enduring principles that might be useful in strengthening any major power’s foreign policy. This applies mostly to governments whose aggressive policies in the Middle East, defined by militarism, threats, sanctions, muscle-flexing, and self-congratulatory delusions of divinely sanctioned exceptionalism, have proven to be counterproductive and even dangerous.

Keeping in mind the history of American and European colonial powers’ domination of the region, I suggest four principles that would allow US foreign policy to make a difference and help resolve some of the crises the region faces.

The rule of law

Foreign policy towards the region must show respect for the international rule of law. Foreign powers create their own rules for how they behave in our region. They tend to ignore international law and norms when it suits them because they feel that power overrides rules and they have more power than Middle Eastern states.

This applies to military assaults, like the wars in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Syria. It is also valid when principles, such as freedom of speech, individual rights, nuclear non-proliferation, international justice and the right to anti-colonial struggle, have to be upheld. Today, for example, the entire world is watching closely the proceedings at the International Criminal Court regarding war crimes allegations in Israel and Palestine to see if international legal norms and accountability mechanisms are applied equally to Arabs and Israelis.

The arbitrary violation of international laws and rules by foreign powers has created so many of the crises the Middle East currently suffers from. To alleviate them international rule of law must be upheld.

Equal rights for Arabs and Israelis

Over the past century, in Western foreign policy towards the region, Israeli rights and aggressive Zionist ideology have enjoyed priority over Palestinian and Arab rights. Britain’s criminal duplicity, deception, and self-serving colonialism of 1915-1948 set the stage for a cruel century of Western powers consistently acquiescing to Zionist demands while trampling over Arab rights. This allowed the Zionist project to establish full control over historic Palestine, despite the fact that at the turn of the century Palestinian Arabs owned and inhabited 93 percent of its land.

If this principle continues to shape US and other foreign policies in our region, we can only expect continued popular resentment and resistance against both foreign powers and complicit Arab leaders.

It is time that the West understand that there is no need to continue this skewed policy because the Arab countries have all clearly and repeatedly expressed their willingness to coexist in peace and equality with a Jewish-majority Israel. The door to a negotiated permanent peace agreement is before us all, if only all sides viewed Arabs and Israelis as equal.

Only stick, no carrot?

Militarism, sanctions, and threats have increasingly become the main instruments of policy-making towards the Middle East, while dialogue, diplomacy, and compromise have often remained on the back burner. Because of its enormous military power, Washington is inclined to use it as a primary policy instrument.

But the high human cost and military failures of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, as well as the global “war on terror”, have demonstrated how ineffective brute force can be in resolving conflict. Military assaults, threats, and sanctions have wreaked havoc and instability in the region and deepened and prolonged its many crises.

By contrast, the successful negotiations that resulted in the Iran nuclear deal during the Obama administration remind us how effective serious diplomacy and mutual respect can be in resolving disputes and regional tensions.

The rights and needs of citizens

For far too long Western foreign policy towards the region has ignored the rights, needs, and sentiments of the Middle East’s ordinary citizens. Instead, it has solely engaged the elites, enriching them and serving their narrow clientelist interests.

If Arab citizens are treated as invisible people who have neither voice nor legitimacy, it should not be surprising that these same hundreds of millions of men and women support and partake in the ongoing uprisings across the region to evict their ruling elites.

The events of the past two decades confirm that as the majority of people steadily become poorer, more vulnerable, marginalised, and helpless, they ultimately turn against their leaders who are responsible for their plight. The rupture between citizens and most Arab governments is a recent, post-1980s, phenomenon, and it continues to worsen.

This has frightened some Arab leaders who are now embracing Israel as a way to secure American support and protection. Foreign powers which embrace corrupt and inefficient Arab leaders and promote normalisation of Arab-Israeli ties before the Palestinians secure their rights harm the wellbeing and trample the dignity of hundreds of millions of Arab citizens. This is a sure recipe for disaster.

If the Biden administration wants to leave a positive mark on the history of this region, it should learn the lessons of past failures and overhaul American foreign policy to affirm law, diplomacy, respect, and equality. These principles define the foundations of American life and democracy. They should also shape its foreign policy towards the Middle East and the rest of the world.

Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement and an adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri. (This article appeared originally at AlJazeera.)

Copyright ©2021 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 February 2021

Word Count: 940

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Like Gregor Samsa, the never-to-be-forgotten character in Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” we awoke on January 7th to discover that we, too, were “a giant insect” with “a domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments” and numerous “pitifully thin” legs that “waved helplessly” before our eyes. If you prefer, though, you can just say it: we opened our eyes and found that, somehow, we had become a giant roach of a country.

Yes, I know, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are now in charge and waving their own little limbs wildly, trying to do some of what needs to be done for this sad land of the disturbed, over-armed, sick, and dying. But anyone who watched the scenes of Floridians celebrating a Super Bowl victory, largely unmasked and cheering, shoulder to shoulder in the streets of Tampa, can’t help but realize that we are now indeed a roach nation, the still-wealthiest, most pandemically unmasked one on Planet Earth.

But don’t just blame Donald Trump. Admittedly, we’ve just passed through the Senate trial and acquittal of the largest political cockroach around. I’m talking about the president who, upon discovering that his vice president was in danger of being “executed” (“Hang Mike Pence!“) and was being rushed out of the Senate as a mob bore down on him, promptly tweeted: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

Just imagine. The veep who had — if you don’t mind my mixing my creature metaphors here — toadied up to the president for four endless years was then given a functional death sentence by that same man. You can’t fall much deeper into personal roachdom than that. My point here, though, is that our all-American version of roacherie was a long time in coming.

Or put another way: unimaginable as The Donald might have seemed when he descended that Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to hail his future “great, great wall,” denounce Mexican “rapists,” and bid to make a whole country into his apprentices, he didn’t end up in the Oval Office for no reason. He was the symptom, not the disease, though what a symptom he would prove to be — and when it came to diseases, what a nightmare beyond all imagining.

Let’s face it, whether we fully grasp the fact or not, we now live in a system, as well as a country, that’s visibly in an early stage of disintegration. And there lies a remarkable tale of history happening at warp speed, of how, in not quite three decades, the USS Enterprise of imperial powers was transformed into the USS Roach.

Once upon a time on earth… Return for a moment to 1991, almost two years after the Berlin Wall fell, when the Soviet Union finally imploded and the Cold War officially ended. Imagine that you had been able to show Americans then — especially the political class in Washington — that 13-minute video of Trump statements and tweets interlarded with mob actions in the Capitol that the Democratic House impeachment managers used in their opening salvo against the former president. Americans — just about any of us — would have thought we were watching the most absurd science fiction or perhaps the single least reality-based bit of black comedy imaginable.

In the thoroughly self-satisfied (if somewhat surprised) Washington of 1991, the triumphalist capital of “the last superpower,” that video would have portrayed a president, an insurrectionary mob, and an endangered Congress no one could have imagined possible — not in another nearly 30 years, not in a century, not in any American future. Then again, if in 1991 you had tried to convince anyone in this country that a walking Ponzi scheme(r) like Donald Trump could become president, no less be impeached twice, you would have been laughed out of the room.

After all, this country had just become the ultimate superpower in history, the last one ever. Left alone on this planet, it had a military beyond compare and an economy that was the heartland of a globalized system and the envy of the world. The Earth was — or at least to the political class of that moment seemed to be — ours for the taking, but certainly not for the losing, not in any imaginable future. The question then wasn’t keeping them out but keeping us in. No “big, fat, beautiful walls” were needed. After all, Russia was a wreck. China was still emerging economically from the hell of the Maoist years. Europe was dependent on the U.S. and, when it came to the rest of world, what else need be said?

This was an American planet, pure and simple.

In retrospect, consider the irony. There had been talk then about a post-Cold War “peace dividend.” Who would have guessed, though, that dividends of any sort would increasingly go to the top 1% and that almost 30 years later this country would functionally be a plutocracy overseen until a month ago by a self-professed multibillionaire? Who would have imagined that the American version of a peace dividend would have been siphoned off by more billionaires than any place else on earth and that, in those same years, inequality would reach historic heights, while poverty and hunger only grew? Who woulda guessed that whatever peace dividend didn’t go to the ultra-wealthy would go to an ever-larger national security state and the industrial complex of weapons makers that surrounded it? Who woulda guessed that, in official post-Cold War Washington, peace would turn out to be the last thing on anyone’s mind, even though this country seemed almost disarmingly enemy-less? (Remember when the worst imaginable combination of enemies, a dreaded “axis of evil,” would prove to be Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, all embattled, distinctly tertiary powers?)

Who woulda guessed that a military considered beyond compare (and funded to this day like no other) would proceed to fight war after war, literally decades of conflict, and yet — except for the quasi-triumph of the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — achieve victory in none of them? Staggering trillions of taxpayer dollars would be spent on them, while those billionaires were given untold tax breaks. Honestly, who would have guessed then that, on a planet lacking significant enemies, Washington, even six presidents later, would prove incapable of stopping fighting?

Who woulda guessed that, in September 2001, not Russia or Communist China, but a tiny group of Islamic militants led by a rich Saudi extremist the U.S. had once backed would send 19 (mostly Saudi) hijackers to directly attack the United States? They would, of course, cause death and mayhem, allowing President George W. Bush to launch an almost 20-year “global war on terror,” which still shows no sign of ending. Who woulda guessed that, in the wake of those 9/11 terror attacks, the son of the man who had presided over the first Gulf War (but stopped short of felling Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein) and the top officials of his administration would come to believe that the world was his oyster and that the U.S. should dominate the Greater Middle East and possibly the planet in a way previously unimaginable? Who would have imagined that he would invade Iraq (having done the same in Afghanistan a year and a half earlier), effectively helping to spread Islamic extremism far and wide, while creating a never-ending disaster for this country?

Who woulda guessed that, in 2009, in the wake of a Great Recession at home, the next president, Barack Obama, would order a massive “surge” of forces into Afghanistan, a war already eight years old? Tens of thousands of new troops, not to speak of contractors, CIA operatives, and others would be sent there without faintly settling things.

By November 2016, when an antiquated electoral system gave the popular vote to Hillary Clinton but put Donald Trump, a man who promised to end this country’s “endless wars” (he didn’t) in the Oval Office, it should have been obvious that something was awry on the yellow brick road to imperial glory. By then, in fact, for a surprising number of Americans, this had become a land of grotesque inequality and lack of opportunity. And many of them would prove ready indeed to use their votes to send a message to the country about their desire to Trump that very reality.

From there, of course, with no Wizard of Oz in sight, it would be anything but a yellow brick road to January 6, 2021, when, the president having rejected the results of the 2020 election, a mob would storm the Capitol. All of it and the impeachment fiasco to follow would reveal the functional definition of a failing democracy, one in which the old rules no longer held.

Exiting the superpower stage of history And, of course, I have yet to even mention the obvious — the still-unending nightmare that engulfed the country early in 2020 and that, I suspect, will someday be seen as the true ending point for a strikingly foreshortened American century. I’m thinking, of course, of Covid-19, the pandemic disease that swept the country, infecting tens of millions of Americans and killing hundreds of thousands in a fashion unmatched anywhere else on the planet. It would even for a time fell a president, while creating mayhem and ever more fierce division in unmasked parts of the country filled with civilians armed to the teeth, swept up in conspiracy theories, and at the edge of who knew what.

Call it a sign from the gods or anything you want, but call it startling. Imagine a disease that the last superpower handled so much more poorly than countries with remarkably fewer resources. Think of it as a kind of judgment, if not epitaph, on that very superpower.

Or put another way: not quite 30 years after the Soviet Union exited the stage of history, we’re living in a land that was itself strangely intent on heading for that same exit — a crippled country led by a 78-year-old president, its system under startling pressure and evidently beginning to come apart at the seams. One of its political parties is unrecognizable; its presidency has been stripped of a fully functioning Congress and is increasingly imperial in nature; its economic system plutocratic; its military still struggling across significant parts of the planet, while a possible new cold war with a rising China is evidently on the horizon; and all of this on a planet that itself, even putting aside that global pandemic, is visibly in the deepest of trouble.

At the end of Franz Kafka’s classic tale, Gregor Samsa, now a giant insect with a rotting apple embedded in its back, dies in roach hell, even if also in his very own room with his parents and sisters nearby. Is the same fate in store, after a fashion, for the American superpower?

In some sense, in the Trump and Covid-19 years, the United States has indeed been unmasked as a roach superpower on a planet going to — again, excuse the mixed animal metaphors — the dogs. The expected all-American age of power and glory hasn’t been faintly what was imagined in 1991, not in a country that has shown remarkably few signs of coming to grips with what these years have truly meant.

Centuries after the modern imperial age began, it’s evidently coming to an end in a hell that Joe Biden and crew won’t be able to stop, even if, unlike the previous president, they’re anything but intent on thoroughly despoiling this land. Still, Trump or Biden, at this point it couldn’t be clearer that we need some new way of thinking about and being on this increasingly roach-infested planet of ours.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com (where this article originated). He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2021 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 February 2021

Word Count: 1,952

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In June 1990, future South African President Nelson Mandela addressed a joint session of Congress only months after being released from 27 years in a South African apartheid prison. He reminded the political leadership of the United States that “to deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. To impose on them a wretched life of hunger and deprivation is to dehumanise them.”

Three decades later, Congress would do well to finally heed that warning. In a moment of unprecedented crisis, when 140 million people in the richest country on the planet are poor or low-income, when tens of millions of them are on the verge of eviction and millions more have lost their healthcare in the midst of a pandemic, at a moment when Congress and the president are debating the next Covid-19 relief package, isn’t it finally time for human rights and guarantees to become the standard for any such set of policies?

I was introduced to the idea of using a human rights framework to address racism and poverty when I got involved in the National Union of the Homeless and the National Welfare Rights Union. From poor and dispossessed leaders building a human-rights-at-home movement, I learned about the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). I came to understand how the concept of inalienable rights laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution meant that all people should be guaranteed the right to jobs that pay living wages, an adequate standard of living, public education, and the ability to thrive (not just barely survive).

Today, Congress is being driven to respond to a crisis that has this country in its grip with a $1.9 trillion relief package. The lesson of history, however, is that such measures, when they align with the basic demands of justice, should not be piecemeal or temporary. They should not be opportunities accessible only to some but rather guarantees of promise and possibility for everyone. Plagues and pandemics are not simply storms to be weathered before a return to what passes for normal. Americans should not be fooled into thinking that the very policies and measures that left this world of ours a wreckage of inequality, racism, and poverty will now lift us out of this mess. Instead, our political leaders would do well to follow the principle of “Everybody In, Nobody Out.”

Matthew Rycroft of the United Kingdom Mission to the U.N. offered a warning to the Security Council appropriate to this pandemic moment:

 

“How a society treats its most vulnerable — whether children, the infirm or the elderly — is always the measure of its humanity. Even more so during instability and conflict. When a society begins to disregard the vulnerable and their rights, instability and conflict will only grow.”

The right not to be poor In 1948, after two bloody world wars punctuated by the Great Depression, the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, saw a need to safeguard basic rights and a minimum standard of living for people worldwide. The nations of the U.N., according to human rights scholar Paul Gordon Lauren,

 

“came to regard the economic and social hardship suffered during the course of the Depression as contributing greatly to the rise of fascist regimes, the emergence of severe global competition, and ultimately to the outbreak of war itself… They believed that poverty, misery, unemployment, and depressed standards of living anywhere in an age of a global economy and a technological shrinking of the world bred instability elsewhere and thereby threatened peace.”

At the time, the American government, ascendant on the international stage, saw some value in the framework of human rights, even if its actions at home and abroad didn’t match up to it. In reality, that same government was putting significant effort into separating political and civil rights from economic rights. It was using every tool in its toolbox from racism to Cold War paranoia to vilify the very idea of economic rights, let alone the interlocking nature of injustice and the need for wholistic remedies.

Social movements suffered from this ideological assault, as Black organizers in the 1950s and 1960s were blocked from the very idea of universal human (including economic) rights and pushed to focus more narrowly on the terrain of “civil rights,” as historian Carol Anderson has so vividly described in her book Eyes Off the Prize. Nearly two decades after the release of the UDHR, even on the heels of major civil rights victories, leaders of the Black freedom movement recognized that too much remained unchanged and a deeper fight was needed.

It was in this context that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and others began to articulate the necessity for a broad movement of the nation’s poor across racial lines. In 1967, a year before he launched the Poor People’s Campaign, he wrote:

 

“We have left the realm of constitutional rights and we are entering the area of human rights. The Constitution assured the right to vote, but there is no such assurance of the right to adequate housing, or the right to an adequate income. And yet, in a nation which has a gross national product of 750 billion dollars a year [$20 trillion in 2020], it is morally right to insist that every person has a decent house, an adequate education, and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family.”

While the language of human rights is still with us today, the old battle lines remain stubbornly drawn as economic rights are cast as impractical and unenforceable and civil rights reduced to statements of unity, while voting rights, immigrant rights, and indigenous rights are mercilessly abridged. The focus, at best, becomes the mitigation of poverty and racism, not their abolition, while the fundamental principles of human rights laid out in the UDHR — universality, equality, and indivisibility — are eternally undercut.

Sometimes economic rights are championed but their exercise drastically narrowed. For instance, a universal right to housing becomes the right to due process in eviction hearings; the right to health or food becomes the right to access certain welfare benefits. The result? Universal economic rights become limited opportunities offered, at best, to a limited population of the poor. In the process, attention is refocused on the individual lives and choices of the poor, rather than on the system that produces their poverty or what could transform it. And sadly enough, it becomes ever easier to ignore what should be the most fundamental of human rights, the right not to be poor.

How to build back better Recently, the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris announced that, three years after Trump withdrew the country from the U.N. Human Rights Council, it would rejoin as an observer, with the goal of eventually being voted back to full membership. That move, like Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization, as well as his intention to reengage with UNESCO and the Iran nuclear deal, undoubtedly reflects his interest in refortifying America’s international position in the post-Trump era. If he really wants to be an international leader and not just an observer when it comes to human rights, however, undoing the nightmare of the Trump years will only be part of the job that lies ahead.

There will be the continuing fight to ensure that Covid-19 relief is not disastrously watered down by false arguments about balanced budgets and deficits. The costs of inaction — a still-soaring death toll of 480,000 and counting and an estimated 460,000 extra deaths over the next decade thanks to pandemic-related unemployment and its costs — far outweigh the price of decisive action now. The deficits that should truly concern Americans are those in people’s paychecks, the lack of food in their refrigerators, and the grim unemployment numbers that make life a misery. Biden and the Democratic leadership have the presidency and a majority in both houses of Congress. Now is the time to move immediately on life-saving measures like raising the minimum wage to $15 (including for tipped workers).

And genuine Covid-19 relief that buoyed our beleaguered nation long enough for vaccines to be widely distributed would just be a start. After all, before the pandemic hit, Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health estimated that 250,000 Americans were dying annually from rising hunger, homelessness, and inequality, conditions that have only deepened over the last year. If the recovery from the 2007-2008 Great Recession is any indication, expect difficult years ahead, even when the pandemic eases. After all, that proved to be a low-wage recovery that disproportionately shifted women and people of color into temporary and precarious jobs. Not surprisingly then, in the decade after that recession, savings were spent down and household debt was on the rise — and only then did Covid-19 hit.

Shouldn’t the administration’s response to this crisis and the underlying fissures in our society (so badly exacerbated in the Trump years) be held to a genuine human-rights standard? In December, the Poor People’s Campaign, which I co-chair, released a set of 14 policy priorities for Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office, including not just temporary protections meant to weather the present storm, but permanent guarantees around jobs and income, housing, healthcare, and so much else. Such building blocks for a vibrant democracy and a life free of poverty should be treated as inalienable human rights. Grassroots organizers — whether the Nonviolent Medicaid Army fighting for healthcare as a human right, the Border Network for Human Rights struggling for a just immigration system, or the Homes Guarantee project demanding housing as a right, not a commodity — have been making this point for years.

A new social contract built on human rights requires a fundamentally different approach to foreign policy and rampant American militarism as well. President Biden’s recent decision to scale back engagement in the human-rights catastrophe in Yemen is encouraging, though its results remain to be seen. It’s obviously time as well to end this country’s twenty-first-century forever wars, as well as the suffocating economic sanctions imposed on countries like Venezuela and Iran.

It’s morally indefensible that the U.S. spends 53% of every federal discretionary dollar on the Pentagon and that it has more than 800 military bases around the world; that the Pentagon itself is a giant greenhouse-gas emitter; and that this country is not only the largest arms dealer on the planet by far, but continues to “export” weapons of war to our police departments nationwide through the Pentagon’s 1033 program. Washington’s eternally militarized posture has led to countless human rights violations abroad, while only adding to a loss of human rights at home, as vital resources continue to be siphoned from our schools and hospitals into the military.

A governing agenda that wishes to protect the right not to be poor would at some point also have to reckon with a system that, even amid a pandemic, produced record numbers of billionaires. Last year, as unemployment rates reached historic heights, America’s billionaires gained more than $1 trillion in wealth.

America’s celebrity culture tracks the day-to-day life of the richest men on the planet like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and celebrates the charitable Covid-19 fighting spirit of people like Bill Gates. His big donations shouldn’t, however, distract us from the fact that the wealth of the world’s 10 richest men, including Gates, could buy vaccines for every person on the planet.

Intellectual property rights in a pandemic world As 2020 was ending and the world awaited the arrival of multiple Covid-19 vaccines, India and South Africa made an urgent proposal to the World Trade Organization. They requested that it temporarily suspend intellectual property rights to ensure that all nations could access and produce vaccines and other medical technologies like ventilators, masks, and protective gear. Dozens of other countries came forward to support that proposal, but a few powerful, patent-holding countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and members of the European Union rejected and ultimately quashed it.

On January 18, 2021, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that the world was “on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure” because of the unequal distribution of vaccines between rich and poor countries. Indeed, a new report estimates that at least 85 countries — mostly in Africa and parts of Asia — won’t have widespread coverage until late 2022 or even 2023, if ever. Meanwhile, vaccine hoarding among rich countries has already reached a fever pitch. And this global reality is being replayed in terms of vaccine distribution within the richest countries as well. In the United States, early evidence suggests that the wealthy are already getting significantly more vaccinations than the poor and people of color, even though Covid-19 rates are far higher in poor communities.

While all of this may have been predictable, it wasn’t inevitable. The WHO has cautioned that a “me-first” approach to the vaccines leads to shortages, hoarding, and the pushing-up of prices. And although the profits from this intellectual property are private, the six front-running vaccine candidates have had a total of over $12 billion of taxpayer and public money poured into them.

Intellectual property rights and exclusive vaccine contracts with Big Pharma aren’t the only reasons why Covid-19 is morphing ever more distinctly into a poor people’s pandemic. They are, however, barriers to a universal and equitable response to a virus that has exposed the world’s fragile interconnectedness. With a deadly novel virus on the loose and mutating, at a moment when access to a vaccine may be the difference between life and death, profit over people remains a hegemonic principle. And horrifyingly enough, changes in intellectual property policies over the last few decades may have done even more to increase inequality on this planet than tax cuts for the wealthy.

In the last year, we Americans have battled Covid-19 largely through the same world of trickle-down economics and “austerity” for the poor that was such a reality of the prepandemic world. The Trump administration’s response to the disease was a bitter mixture of triage, denial, and greed. The sins of our leaders will leave deep and lasting wounds, but there is, at least, a lesson to be learned from all the suffering, if we’re brave enough to take it in: life should come before profit, human rights before property rights. Amen.

Liz Theoharis writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she is the author of Always With Us?: What Jesus Really Said About the Poor. Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo.

Copyright ©2021 Liz Theoharis — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 February 2021

Word Count: 2,398

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Lebanon and its citizens have endured many hardships in recent years. The past 12 months alone have witnessed cumulative pain from multiple directions — economic collapse, political stalemate, the Beirut port explosion, an ongoing citizen rebellion against the ruling elite, and the stubborn impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two dimensions of Lebanon’s condition today are especially striking, however, and augur more difficult times ahead. First, Lebanon has become just another pauperized and increasingly militarized Arab country whose citizens rebel against state authorities. Simultaneously, the regional and international powers that once engaged in it for their own purposes seem less interested in saving it from its self-inflicted decline.

The most striking consequence of these dynamics is that Lebanon has lost its once distinct status as a society that stood apart from other Arab countries that were mostly centralized autocracies. Ever since its birth a century ago, Lebanon had been the region’s leader in endeavors that required the full use of the human mind and cultural spirit — press, education, research, banking, theater, publishing, advertising, cinema, art, and other activities. These flourished because the country’s cultural and religious pluralism allowed what no other Arab country provided: enough space for the individual Lebanese to develop his or her full talents, in a free and dynamic public sphere that accommodated a variety of views, and that was the envy of all other people in the region.

One among many That legacy weakened slowly in recent years and collapsed during the last year, bringing Lebanon to the point today where it shares many similarities with two main groups of Arab countries. One is the war-torn economic shells of their former selves (like Libya, Iraq, Yemen, or Syria), and the other is the tightly controlled authoritarian security states where individuals fear to publicly or privately express views that contradict the official line (like Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE). Lebanon now joins the hapless club of two-thirds of the Arab countries where major popular uprisings have challenged or even removed former tyrants from office since 2010.

In fact, Lebanese citizens’ views today mirror almost exactly those of other Arabs in Iraq, Algeria, and Sudan who continue to rise up in protest against their incompetent governments. Millions of citizens across the Arab World took to the streets to reform their governing systems, supported by a clear majority of the population. The 2019-20 annual regional poll by the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, the Arab Opinion Index, shows that an average of 70-80% of all citizens in Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, and Algeria support their ongoing, but momentarily pandemic-muted, uprisings to uproot current government leaders and systems. This wide support, however, does not seem to materialize in practice — only about 20% of citizens have actually participated in street demonstrations.

Socio-economically, the poll also shows that nearly three-fourths of all families in Lebanon and these countries do not have sufficient resources to cover their basic needs like food, shelter, health care, and education. Nearly one-fourth of all citizens want to emigrate, half or more view their government’s performance negatively, and over 90% see corruption as widespread in their society. In these four volatile nations as well as in the other polled countries, citizens see the main motivations of the uprisings as ending oppression and corruption, and improving poor living conditions and public services. While Lebanon has long been a formal member of the League of Arab States, it is now fully in the fraternity of distressed Arab countries whose desperate citizens and security-minded governments face off against each other.

A century of build-up The October 2019 “revolutionary uprising” was a high-water mark in the country’s continuing implosion and collapse which had been building up for decades. Despite the overlapping economic disruptions, COVID-19 pandemic, and port explosion, the protest movement remains more of a symptom rather than the cause of the cumulative, decades-long rot that has plunged a majority of Lebanese into poverty, vulnerability, marginalization, and desperation.

Like the many other stressed or war-torn Arab countries, Lebanon’s decline must be understood in its four concentric spheres of modern history, which vary by country, but all follow a similar pattern.

The 1920s period was the first and original line of state configuration and policy that ultimately brought many Arab states to their current disheveled condition. Back then, most of the modern Arab states were created by a combination of European colonial powers and local elites — totally without the input of their citizens on the shape, nature, values, or policies of their new countries. The second era that presaged today’s troubles in Lebanon and most Arab states was 1975-85, when the combination of massive new oil income and military officers who took control of governments in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Tunisia, and elsewhere ushered the region into a new era of centralized autocracy and authoritarianism. By the 1990s, this had morphed into socio-economic stagnation in terms of real quality of life among an increasingly pauperized citizenry that enjoyed no political rights to redress their pain. The third historical sphere is the period since 2005 when the Syrian government withdrew its troops and officials that effectively had run Lebanon for 30 years. Left on their own, Lebanese politicians and former warlords-turned-sectarian political leaders then chronically squabbled among themselves. In parallel, they collectively monopolized the public sector and enriched themselves and their followers while most public services steadily deteriorated. The final and most recent sphere is the last 18 months of disruptions from citizen uprisings that brought serious governance to a halt. This coincided with a period of economic fraying and a collapse of the value of the national currency due to unsustainable fiscal and monetary policies.

Lebanon is noteworthy for having long resisted the dilapidated economies and authoritarian political systems that defined so many other countries in the region in the past half a century or so. Today, however, the recurring incidents of a poverty-stricken citizenry protesting in the streets for its rights and a dignified life are increasingly met by a more militarized state that does not hesitate to use its arms and tear gas against its own citizens. Also troubling for Lebanon is the steadily rising pace of state courts, ministries, or security agencies that detain, arrest, and indict individuals for actions such as social media posts that had long been a hallmark of Lebanon’s robust free speech legacy. These two negative trends combine with the third and perhaps the most devastating one that seems to be a foundation of the country’s current ills — a government whose executive, parliamentary, and judicial branches do not seem to care enough about the suffering of the majority of impoverished citizens to take serious reform actions that would unlock billions of dollars of badly needed assistance.

Two main actors going forward The bottom line in Lebanon seems to draw a sad picture of a state that gave up on and neglected its citizenry in recent decades. In return, the citizenry is responding by actively seeking protest methods that would throw out the entire ruling elite and create a more participatory and accountable governance system based on the rule of law and social justice. Yet protesters and state authorities are deadlocked, and neither seems able to stifle the other. This is precisely the same situation that pertains in Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Palestine, Somalia, and other troubled Arab countries that seem to be failing the last century’s triple tests of statehood, sovereignty, and citizenship.

The big difference between Lebanon and other Arab countries though is the presence of Hezbollah, the powerhouse group that will never allow the country to fully collapse. Yet its policies will never be fully accepted by a majority of Lebanese, due to the group’s militarism, decision-making outside the state system, and close ties with Iran and Syria. As the state institutions and political elite continue to deteriorate and lose influence, foreign powers like Saudi Arabia, France, and the United States also seem less interested in stepping in to safeguard Lebanon as they have done for a century. This is due to their more pressing strategic priorities elsewhere in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the Horn of Africa, as well as the intractability of the Lebanese ruling elite in paying attention to anything other than their own self-interest, even if it means the slow corrosion of their country’s integrity.

This leaves Lebanon with two principal political actors: Hezbollah and the very incoherent but persistent protest movement that enjoys wide popular support. A key dynamic to watch in the coming months and years is how these two forces engage with each other and with their patrons and supporters abroad, and whether they can act in time to force the floundering governing elite to behave like adults and repair the society and economy they have almost destroyed.

Rami G. Khouri is Director of Global Engagement and an adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an executive board member of the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. He tweets @ramikhouri. This article appeared originally at the Middle East Institute website (mei.edu).

Copyright ©2021 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 February 2021

Word Count: 1,468

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