Publications – Page 46

Dilip Hiro, “Whose century is it?”

August 18, 2020 - TomDispatch

For the Trump administration’s senior officials, it’s been open season on bashing China. If you need an example, think of the president’s blame game about “the invisible Chinese virus” as it spreads wildly across the U.S.

When it comes to China, in fact, the ever more virulent criticism never seems to stop.

Between the end of June and the end of July, four members of his cabinet vied with each other in spewing anti-Chinese rhetoric. That particular spate of China bashing started when FBI Director Christopher Wray described Chinese President Xi Jinping as the successor to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. It was capped by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s clarion call to U.S. allies to note the “bankrupt” Marxist-Leninist ideology of China’s leader and the urge to “global hegemony” that goes with it, insisting that they would have to choose “between freedom and tyranny.” (Forget which country on this planet actually claims global hegemony as its right.)

At the same time, the Pentagon deployed its aircraft carriers and other weaponry ever more threateningly in the South China Sea and elsewhere in the Pacific. The question is: What lies behind this upsurge in Trump administration China baiting? A likely answer can be found in the president’s blunt statement in a July interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News that “I’m not a good loser. I don’t like to lose.”

The reality is that, under Donald Trump, the United States is indeed losing to China in two important spheres. As the FBI’s Wray put it, “In economic and technical terms [China] is already a peer competitor of the United States… in a very different kind of [globalized] world.” In other words, China is rising and the U.S. is falling. Don’t just blame Trump and his cronies for that, however, as this moment has been a long time coming.

Facts speak for themselves. Nearly unscathed by the 2008-2009 global recession, China displaced Japan as the world’s second largest economy in August 2010. In 2012, with $3.87 trillion worth of imports and exports, it overtook the U.S. total of $3.82 trillion, elbowing it out of a position it had held for 60 years as the number one cross-border trading nation worldwide. By the end of 2014, China’s gross domestic product, as measured by purchasing power parity, was $17.6 trillion, slightly exceeding the $17.4 trillion of the United States, which had been the globe’s largest economy since 1872.

In May 2015, the Chinese government released a Made in China 2025 plan aimed at rapidly developing 10 high-tech industries, including electric cars, next-generation information technology, telecommunications, advanced robotics, and artificial intelligence. Other major sectors covered in the plan included agricultural technology, aerospace engineering, the development of new synthetic materials, the emerging field of biomedicine, and high-speed rail infrastructure. The plan was aimed at achieving 70% self-sufficiency in high-tech industries and a dominant position in such global markets by 2049, a century after the founding of the People’s Republic of China

Semiconductors are crucial to all electronic products and, in 2014, the government’s national integrated circuit industry development guidelines set a target: China was to become a global leader in semiconductors by 2030. In 2018, the local chip industry moved up from basic silicon packing and testing to higher value chip design and manufacturing. The following year, the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association noted that, while America led the world with nearly half of global market share, China was the main threat to its position because of huge state investments in commercial manufacturing and scientific research.

By then, the U.S. had already fallen behind China in just such scientific and technological research. A study by Nanjing University’s Qingnan Xie and Harvard University’s Richard Freeman noted that between 2000 and 2016, China’s share of global publications in the physical sciences, engineering, and math quadrupled, exceeding that of the U.S.

In 2019, for the first time since figures for patents were compiled in 1978, the U.S. failed to file for the largest number of them. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, China filed applications for 58,990 patents and the United States 57,840. In addition, for the third year in a row, the Chinese high-tech corporation Huawei Technologies Company, with 4,144 patents, was well ahead of U.S.-based Qualcomm (2,127). Among educational institutions, the University of California maintained its top rank with 470 published applications, but Tsinghua University ranked second with 265. Of the top five universities in the world, three were Chinese.

The neck-and-neck race in consumer electronics By 2019, the leaders in consumer technology in America included Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft; in China, the leaders were Alibaba (founded by Jack Ma), Tencent (Tengxun in Chinese), Xiaomi, and Baidu. All had been launched by private citizens. Among the US companies, Microsoft was established in 1975, Apple in 1976, Amazon in 1994, and Google in September 1998. The earliest Chinese tech giant, Tencent, was established two months after Google, followed by Alibaba in 1999, Baidu in 2000, and Xiaomi, a hardware producer, in 2010. When China first entered cyberspace in 1994, its government left intact its policy of controlling information through censorship by the Ministry of Public Security.

In 1996, the country established a high-tech industrial development zone in Shenzhen, just across the Pearl River from Hong Kong, the first of what would be a number of special economic zones. From 2002 on, they would begin attracting Western multinational corporations keen to take advantage of their tax-free provisions and low-wage skilled workers. By 2008, such foreign companies accounted for 85% of China’s high-tech exports.

Shaken by an official 2005 report that found serious flaws in the country’s innovation system, the government issued a policy paper the following year listing 20 mega-projects in nanotechnology, high-end generic microchips, aircraft, biotechnology, and new drugs. It then focused on a bottom-up approach to innovation, involving small start-ups, venture capital, and cooperation between industry and universities, a strategy that would take a few years to yield positive results.

In January 2000, less than 2% of Chinese used the Internet. To cater to that market, Robin Li and Eric Xu set up Baidu in Beijing as a Chinese search engine. By 2009, in its competition with Google China, a subsidiary of Google operating under government censorship, Baidu garnered twice the market share of its American rival as Internet penetration leapt to 29%.

In the aftermath of the 2008-2009 global financial meltdown, significant numbers of Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs returned from Silicon Valley to play an important role in the mushrooming of high-tech firms in a vast Chinese market increasingly walled off from U.S. and other Western corporations because of their unwillingness to operate under government censorship.

Soon after Xi Jinping became president in March 2013, his government launched a campaign to promote “mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation” using state-backed venture capital. That was when Tencent came up with its super app WeChat, a multi-purpose platform for socializing, playing games, paying bills, booking train tickets, and so on.

Jack Ma’s e-commerce behemoth Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014, raising a record $25 billion with its initial public offering. By the end of the decade, Baidu had diversified into the field of artificial intelligence, while expanding its multiple Internet-related services and products. As the search engine of choice for 90% of Chinese Internet users, more than 700 million people, the company became the fifth most visited website in cyberspace, its mobile users exceeding 1.1 billion.

Xiaomi Corporation would release its first smartphone in August 2011. By 2014, it had forged ahead of its Chinese rivals in the domestic market and developed its own mobile phone chip capabilities. In 2019, it sold 125 million mobile phones, ranking fourth globally. By the middle of 2019, China had 206 privately held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion, besting the U.S. with 203.

Among the country’s many successful entrepreneurs, the one who particularly stood out was Jack Ma, born Ma Yun in 1964. Though he failed to get a job at a newly opened Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in his home city of Hangzhou, he did finally gain entry to a local college after his third attempt, buying his first computer at the age of 31. In 1999, he founded Alibaba with a group of friends. It would become one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. On his 55th birthday, he was the second richest man in China with a net worth of $42.1 billion.

Born in the same year as Ma, his American counterpart, Jeff Bezos, gained a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University. He would found Amazon.com in 1994 to sell books online, before entering e-commerce and other fields. Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing company, would become the globe’s largest. In 2007, Amazon released a handheld reading device called the Kindle. Three years later, it ventured into making its own television shows and movies. In 2014, it launched Amazon Echo, a smart speaker with a voice assistant named Alexa that let its owner instantly play music, control a Smart home, get information, news, weather, and more. With a net worth of $145.4 billion in 2019, Bezos became the richest person on the planet.

Deploying an artificial intelligence inference chip to power features on its e-commerce sites, Alibaba categorized a billion product images uploaded by vendors to its e-commerce platform daily and prepared them for search and personalized recommendations to its customer base of 500 million. By allowing outside vendors to use its platform for a fee, Amazon increased its items for sale to 350 million — with 197 million people accessing Amazon.com each month.

China also led the world in mobile payments with America in sixth place. In 2019, such transactions in China amounted to $80.5 trillion. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the authorities encouraged customers to use mobile payment, online payment, and barcode payment to avoid the risk of infection. The projected total for mobile payments: $111.1 trillion. The corresponding figures for the United States at $130 billion look puny by comparison.

In August 2012, the founder of the Beijing-based ByteDance, 29-year-old Zhang Yiming, broke new ground in aggregating news for its users. His product, Toutiao (Today’s Headlines) tracked users’ behavior across thousands of sites to form an opinion of what would interest them most, and then recommended stories.

By 2016, it had already acquired 78 million users, 90% of them under 30.

In September 2016, ByteDance launched a short-video app in China called Douyin that gained 100 million users within a year. It would soon enter a few Asian markets as TikTok. In November 2017, for $1 billion, ByteDance would purchase Musical.ly, a Shanghai-based Chinese social network app for video creation, messaging, and live broadcasting, and set up an office in California.

Zhang merged it into TikTok in August 2018 to give his company a larger footprint in the U.S. and then spent nearly $1 billion to promote TikTok as the platform for sharing short-dance, lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. It has been downloaded by 165 million Americans and driven the Trump administration to distraction. A Generation Z craze, in April 2020 it surpassed two billion downloads globally, eclipsing U.S. tech giants. That led President Trump (no loser he!) and his top officials to attack it and he would sign executive orders attempting to ban both TikTok and WeChat from operating in the U.S. or being used by Americans (unless sold to a U.S. tech giant). Stay tuned.

Huawei’s octane-powered rise But the biggest Chinese winner in consumer electronics and telecommunications has been Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies Company, the country’s first global multinational. It has become a pivot point in the geopolitical battle between Beijing and Washington.

Huawei (in Chinese, it means “splendid achievement”) makes phones and the routers that facilitate communications around the world. Established in 1987, its current workforce of 194,000 operates in 170 countries. In 2019, its annual turn-over was $122.5 billion. In 2012, it outstripped its nearest rival, the 136-year-old Ericsson Telephone Corporation of Sweden, to become the world’s largest supplier of telecommunications equipment with 28% of market share globally. In 2019, it forged ahead of Apple to become the second largest phone maker after Samsung.

Several factors have contributed to Huawei’s stratospheric rise: its business model, the personality and decision-making mode of its founder Ren Zhengfei, state policies on high-tech industry, and the firm’s exclusive ownership by its employees.

Born in 1944 in Guizhou Province, Ren Zhengfei went to Chongqing University and then joined a military research institute during Mao Zedong’s chaotic Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). He was demobilized in 1983 when China cut back on its engineering corps. But the army’s slogan, “fight and survive,” stayed with him. He moved to the city of Shenzhen and worked in the country’s infant electronics sector for four years, saving enough to co-found what would become the tech giant Huawei. He focused on research and development, adapting technologies from Western firms, while his new company received small orders from the military and later substantial R&D (research and development) grants from the state to develop GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) phones and other products. Over the years, the company produced telecommunications infrastructure and commercial products for third generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G) smartphones.

As China’s high-tech industry surged, Huawei’s fortunes rose. In 2010, it hired IBM and Accenture PLC to design the means of managing networks for telecom providers. In 2011, the company hired the Boston Consulting Group to advise it on foreign acquisitions and investments.

Like many successful American entrepreneurs, Ren has given top priority to the customer and, in the absence of the usual near-term pressure to raise income and profits, his management team has invested $15 to 20 billion annually in research and development work. That helps explain how Huawei became one of the globe’s five companies in the fifth generation (5G) smartphone business, topping the list by shipping out 6.9 million phones in 2019 and capturing 36.9% of the market. On the eve of the release of 5G phones, Ren revealed that Huawei had a staggering 2,570 5G patents.

So it was unsurprising that in the global race for 5G, Huawei was the first to roll out commercial products in February 2019. One hundred times faster than its 4G predecessors, 5G tops out at 10 gigabits per second and future 5G networks are expected to link a huge array of devices from cars to washing machines to door bells.

Huawei’s exponential success has increasingly alarmed a Trump administration edging ever closer to conflict with China. Last month, Secretary of State Pompeo described Huawei as “an arm of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state that censors political dissidents and enables mass internment camps in Xinjiang.”

In May 2019, the U.S. Commerce Department banned American firms from supplying components and software to Huawei on national security grounds. A year later, it imposed a ban on Huawei buying microchips from American companies or using U.S.-designed software. The White House also launched a global campaign against the installation of the company’s 5G systems in allied nations, with mixed success.

Ren continued to deny such charges and to oppose Washington’s moves, which have so far failed to slow his company’s commercial advance. Its revenue for the first half of 2020, $65 billion, was up by 13.1% over the previous year.

From tariffs on Chinese products and that recent TikTok ban to slurs about the “kung flu” as the Covid-19 pandemic swept America, President Trump and his team have been expressing their mounting frustration over China and ramping up attacks on an inexorably rising power on the global stage. Whether they know it or not, the American century is over, which doesn’t mean that nothing can be done to improve the U.S. position in the years to come.

Setting aside Washington’s belief in the inherent superiority of America, a future administration could stop hurling insults or trying to ban enviably successful Chinese tech firms and instead emulate the Chinese example by formulating and implementing a well-planned, long-term high-tech strategy. But as the Covid-19 pandemic has made abundantly clear, the very idea of planning is not a concept available to the “very stable genius” presently in the White House.

Dilip Hiro writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the author, among many other works, of After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World. He is currently researching a sequel to that book, which would cover several interlinked subjects, including the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Released: 18 August 2020

Word Count: 2,704

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Sadism is still the point

August 17, 2020 - John Stoehr

There’s still too much confusion over the president’s bond with white evangelical Protestants (WEPs). I suppose there will always be as long as outsiders presume that Donald Trump’s strongest supporters believe in loving thy neighbor as thyself.

Once you see that WEPs do not apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally, things become clearer. Once this Christian concept is removed from the discussion, “paradoxes” melt into the air. What’s left is a natural alignment of political interests.

How do I know WEPs don’t truly believe in the Golden Rule? From life experience. I know what I’m talking about.

All you have to do is listen carefully, however, and know what to listen for. Elizabeth Dias wrote a big piece in the New York Times last week trying to clear up the “contradiction” of WEPs standing by Trump “when he shut out Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border. When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as if they were true. When he was impeached.” A source explains helpfully that there’s no contraction at all.

“The years of the Obama presidency were confusing to her,” Dias wrote of her source. “She said she heard talk of giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the minority.”

The source: “I do not love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country. I think Trump is going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to all. Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”

This makes no sense to outsiders. Freedom for “gay people and members of minority groups” is not taking anything away from anybody. This makes no sense because outsiders do not generally accept a worldview in which power is ordered. First God, then man, then woman, then child. White over nonwhite. Heterosexual over LGBTQ. Christian over non-Christian. When you believe with your whole being that power is ordered according to God’s will, “giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups” is not political equality, as outsiders would often see it. It’s knocking you out of the order of power. It’s taking something away. Equality is literally theft.

When political equality is theft, you cannot apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally. If you did, you’d be complicit in a crime. The Golden Rule demands white people share power with nonwhite people. It demands husbands share power with their wives. Neither can ever be done.

A wife, according to the same source in Dias’ reporting, must “submit” to her husband in accordance with God’s law. If she does not, she’s trying “to rule over him.” Same for whites and nonwhites. If white people are not at the top of the order, they are being ruled over. This is why Dias’ source says that, “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.” The more for “them,” the less for “us.” They believe Trump prevents that from happening.

They believe Trump is “restoring their freedom.” Utter nonsense. What they are really saying is that the president will prevent people lower down the order of power from achieving more freedom and equality, “violating” their “freedom.” He must do that by any means, even if he confiscates kids from their mothers, bans a world religion, or commits treason. None of that matters as much as maintaining the supremacy of a religious identity built on sand. And make no mistake: this is a religious identity.

These are very real anti-democratic Christians hostile to critical thinking, modernity, pluralism, and all forms of equality. “It’s almost like it is a reverse intolerance,” a WEP source told Dias. “If you have somebody that’s maybe on the liberal side, they say that we are intolerant of them. But it is inverse intolerant if we can’t live out our faith.”

If WEPs believed in the Golden Rule, they’d never tolerate other people’s pain. They do tolerate it, however. Indeed, they like it. It feels good to see the president “restoring their freedom.”

When WEPs say they want to “live out our faith,” what they mean is sadism is and should be a natural consequence of the natural order of things in which God’s people are chosen to rule in God’s name. “Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is,” Dias wrote. “They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are.” That’s correct, but take that to its logical conclusion.

His enemies are their enemies. His pleasures, their pleasures. Their bond is far from a contradiction. It’s an alignment of political interests in which sadism is the point.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

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Released: 17 August 2020

Word Count: 804

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Embracing the GOP’s crazy isn’t crazy

August 13, 2020 - John Stoehr

Nate Silver’s team of data journalists released its highly anticipated survey this week showing the president has a 29 percent chance of getting reelected while Joe Biden has a 71 percent chance of defeating him. This kind of punditry should give you heartburn.

I don’t mean because we were fooled last time. I mean this kind of data analysis presumes too much. One, that the election will be fair. Two, that the results will be clear. Three, that Donald Trump will accept the results.

The survey’s intent is accessing likely outcomes, but its effect is suggesting there’s more stability than there really is. Put differently, it doesn’t see, because it cannot see, baked-in forms of chaos. Our political system was designed in such a way as to incentivize its own undoing.

Remember these facts: the president does not need to win a majority of the national vote. He does not need to win a majority of votes in any particular state. Indeed, no one, not even the president and his GOP confederates, expects him to win a majority of votes, nationwide or statewide. The only thing that matters is a handful of states and their electoral votes, because people will not determine the outcome. Only states will.

The Republicans understand their advantage is structural, not political. And in case you’re wondering, no, they do not feel guilty about it being anti-democratic. Should Trump win the Electoral College vote, they will declare him the rightful and legitimate president even though 2020 would mark the third time in six elections in which a Republican lost the popular vote.

For reasons like this, the Republican Party will not change. Not if Trump loses. Not if he dies in a landslide. The political system itself is far too advantageous. The only way to change the GOP is to change the system.

We could talk about reforms, like nuking the filibuster or adding a state, but I’d rather talk about the problem. Most people do not appreciate how bad it is. They’d rather think the way Nate Silver and his team thinks — Trump has this or that much chance of losing, Biden has this or that much chance of winning, giving the impression that the country is this close to returning to normal. It’s highly numerate analysis, yes, but it’s highly myopic. It fails to see, because it was not intended to see, our system is the problem. If we return to normal, it’s a matter of time till we’re back where we are.

Consider the case of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a Republican primary Tuesday and is now heading for Washington. She’s a promoter of “the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose followers believe Trump is battling a cabal of ‘deep state’ saboteurs of his administration who worship Satan and traffic children for sex,” according to reporting by the Washington Post.

She has also made racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments, asserting that Black people are ‘held slaves to the Democratic Party,’ likening the election of the first two Muslim women to Congress to an ‘Islamic invasion of our government’ and calling George Soros, the liberal Jewish donor and Holocaust survivor, a ‘Nazi himself trying to continue what was not finished.’

Naked racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia are bad things in our current climate, so you’d think the Republicans would run away, screaming. They aren’t. Not only is the president embracing Greene as one of his own, the House Republicans are looking forward to seating her (though some have expressed misgivings in private). This is being interpreted as the last gasp of a political party unraveling completely, a party that’s prepared to commit suicide. It’s just crazy to welcome someone that crazy!

No, it’s rational. First, because Greene is from a safe district. The more extreme the Republican candidate, the better. Second, because “willingness to tolerate extreme and bigoted positions,” as the Post put it, aligns perfectly with the Republican Party’s structural advantages. Racism and the other forms of bigotry, while they might appear to be dangerous liabilities, are in fact quite valuable assets. Chaos and fascism are not buggy glitches in the American political system. They are, alas, immanent features.

In the hours since Biden’s tapped Kamala Harris as his running mate, the president had waded farther into the slough of sadism. The farther he goes, according to critics, the stronger Biden gets. Well, maybe, depending on the size of November’s electorate. But all things being equal, which is a realistic starting point, that kind of thinking may be as myopic as Silver’s team’s: it does not take into account the Republicans’ built-in advantages.

The president and his allies are not crazy to think going full-bore fascism is good campaign strategy. Going to the wall isn’t suicidal when the wall is on your side. All he has to do is move just enough people in just enough states. Even if Trump loses, someone will replace him, eventually, and he will have a GOP-friendly system to thank.

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Released: 13 August 2020

Word Count: 830

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Andrew Bacevich, “Biden wins, then what?”

August 13, 2020 - TomDispatch

Assume Joe Biden wins the presidency. Assume as well that he genuinely intends to repair the damage our country has sustained since we declared ourselves history’s “Indispensable Nation,” compounded by the traumatic events of 2020 that demolished whatever remnants of that claim survived. Assume, that is, that this aging career politician and creature of the Washington establishment really intends to salvage something of value from all that has been lost.

If he seriously intends to be more than a relic of pre-Trump liberal centrism, how exactly should President Biden go about making his mark?

Here, free of charge, Joe, is an action plan that will get you from Election Night through your first two weeks in office. Follow this plan and by your 100th day in the White House observers will be comparing you to at least one President Roosevelt, if not both.

On Election Night (or whatever date you are declared the winner): Close down your Twitter account. Part of your job, Joe, is to restore some semblance of dignity to the office of the presidency. Twitter and similar social media platforms are a principal source of the coarseness and malice that today permeate American politics. Remove yourself from that ugliness. Your predecessor transformed a presidency that had acquired imperial pretensions into an office best described as a cesspool of grotesque demagoguery. One of your central tasks will be to model a genuine alternative: a presidency appropriate for a constitutional republic, where reason, candor, and a commitment to the common good really do prevail over partisan name-calling. That’s a lot to ask for, but returning to a more traditional conception of the Bully Pulpit would certainly be a place to start.

During the transition: Direct your press secretary to announce that on January 20th there will be no ritzy Inaugural balls. Take your cues from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration for his fourth term in office, a distinctly low-key event. After all, in January 1945, the nation was still at war; victory had not yet arrived; celebration could wait. Our present-day multifaceted crisis bears at least some comparison to that World War II moment. So, as you plan your own inauguration, ditch the glitz. A secondary benefit: you won’t have to hit up wealthy donors for the dough to pay for the party. And with no party, you won’t have to worry about inaugural festivities triggering another spike in Covid-19 infections.

In addition to selecting a cabinet and ignoring your predecessor’s bleating, the main focus of your transition period has to be policy planning. When you take office, the coronavirus pandemic will still be with us: that’s a given. Even if optimistic predictions of an effective vaccine becoming available by early 2021 were to pan out, we won’t be out of the woods. Not faintly. So your number-one priority during the transition must be to do what Trump never came close to doing: devise a concrete national strategy for limiting the spread of the virus along with a blueprint for prompt and comprehensive vaccine distribution when one is ready.

That said, it would also be prudent to engage in quiet contingency planning to lay out possible courses of action should your predecessor refuse to acknowledge his defeat (“rigged election!”) or leave the White House.

On January 20th, the big day arrives.

Noon, Eastern Standard Time: With the chief justice of the Supreme Court presiding, take the oath of office in the East Room of the White House in the presence of Vice President Kamala Harris and your immediate family. No inaugural address, no parade, no festivities whatsoever. Make like you’re George Washington: he wasn’t into making a fuss. When the ceremony ends, have lunch and get down to work.

That afternoon: Issue an executive order directing the formation of a National Commission on Reconciliation and Reparations, or NCRR. Recruit Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates or another scholar of comparable stature to head the effort. While likely to be a lengthy and contentious endeavor, the NCRR will provide a point of departure for addressing the persistence of American racism by taking on this overarching question: What does justice require?

That evening: Speak to the nation from the Oval Office. Make it brief. Your address will set the tone for your administration. The nation has its hands full with concurrent crises. The moment calls for humility and hard work, not triumphalism. Don’t overpromise. Consider Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address as a model. Curb your inclination to blather. Abe only needed 701 words. See if you can better that.

Day 2: In a letter to House and Senate leaders, unveil the details of your coronavirus strategy, which must include: 1) a national plan to curb the existing Covid-19 outbreak and prevent future ones; 2) a nationwide approach to vaccine distribution; 3) a strategy for averting and, if needed, curbing the outbreak of comparable diseases; 4) adequate funding of key government pandemic relief and prevention facilities and activities. In the process, identify near-term and longer-term funding requirements that will require congressional action.

Day 3: Issue an executive order reversing the announced withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Accords. Describe this as just an initial down payment on the $2 trillion Green New Deal you promised Americans during the election campaign. Joe, if you can make meaningful progress toward curbing climate change, future generations will put you on Mount Rushmore in place of one of those slaveholders.

Day 4: Send a personal message to the German chancellor, the British prime minister, and the presidents of China, France, and Russia, declaring your intention to recommit the United States to the Iran nuclear deal that Donald Trump ditched in 2018. Quietly initiate the process of opening a back channel to the Iranian leadership. (I’ve got colleagues who might be able to lend a hand in laying the groundwork. Let me know if the Quincy Institute can be of help.) That same day, on your first visit as president to the White House press room, casually mention that the United States will henceforth adhere to a policy of no-first-use regarding its nuclear weapons. Simultaneously, tell the Pentagon to stop work on “modernizing” the U.S. nuclear arsenal. That’s $2 trillion that can be better spent elsewhere. No first use will flush “fire and fury like the world has never seen” down the toilet. Generals, weapons contractors, and aging Cold Warriors will tell you that you’re taking a great risk. Ignore them and you will substantially reduce the possibility of nuclear war.

Day 5: Issue an executive order suspending any further work on your predecessor’s border “wall.” At the same time, announce your intention to form a non-partisan task force to recommend policies related to border security and immigration, whether legal or otherwise. Ask former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro to chair that task force, with a report due prior to the 100th day of your presidency.

Day 6: Accompanied by Secretary of State Elizabeth Warren, visit the State Department for an all-hands-on-deck meeting. Let it be known that your administration will reserve all senior diplomatic appointments for seasoned Foreign Service officers. No more selling of ambassadorships to campaign contributors or old friends hoping to acquire an honorific title. Make clear your intention to revitalize American diplomacy, recognizing that the principal threats to our wellbeing are transnational and not susceptible to military solutions. The Pentagon can’t do much to alleviate pandemics, environmental degradation, and climate change. Those true national security crises will require collaborative action. Also use this occasion to announce the formation of a non-partisan task force that will recommend ways to reform and re-professionalize the Foreign Service. Top-flight diplomacy requires top-drawer diplomats. Ask former Ambassadors Chas Freeman and Thomas Pickering, both savvy global thinkers and seasoned diplomats, to co-chair that effort, with instructions to report back by July 11th, the birthday of John Quincy Adams, our greatest secretary of state.

Day 7: Begin your morning by inviting General Mark Milley to the Oval Office for a one-on-one meeting. Ask him to tender his immediate resignation as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Milley’s participation in the infamous Lafayette Square stunt, even if unwitting, renders him unfit for further employment. Later that same day, visit the remaining chiefs in the Pentagon. Explain your intention to commence a wholesale reevaluation of the U.S. military’s global posture — command structure, bases, budgets, priorities, and above all emerging threats. Ask for their forthright assistance in this endeavor, making it clear that anyone obstructing the process will be gone.

Day 8: Call on Ruth Bader Ginsberg in her chambers at the Supreme Court. Invite her to retire now that the Senate is in Democratic hands. Offer private assurances that her successor will be a) liberal; b) a woman; c) a person of color; and d) a distinguished jurist.

Day 9: Do what your predecessor vowed to do, but didn’t: end America’s endless wars. At your first full-fledged cabinet meeting, charge your new Defense Secretary James Webb with providing a detailed schedule for a deliberate, but comprehensive withdrawal (no ifs, ands, or buts) of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, with a completion date by the end of your first year in office.

Day 10: Visit Mexico City. Engage in a trilateral discussion with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. At day’s end, sign the Declaration of Tenochtitlan affirming a common commitment to democracy, the rule of law, human rights, economic growth, and continental security. Your predecessors have taken Mexico and Canada for granted. You will correct that oversight. In fact, no two countries on the planet are of greater importance to the wellbeing of the American people.

Day 11: Invite China’s president Xi Jinping for an informal meeting at Camp David at a date of his choosing. As you know, Joe, the United States and China are hurtling toward a new Cold War. Reversing the momentum of events will prove difficult indeed. This will require considerable personal diplomacy on your part. Given the need for the planet’s two major economic powers to cooperate on lowering greenhouse gasses globally, nothing is more important than this. Start now.

Day 12: Announce plans to visit NATO headquarters in the near future. Begin quiet consultations with European members of the alliance to nudge them toward taking responsibility for their own security. Let them know that before the year is out you intend to make public a 10-year timetable for withdrawing all U.S. forces from Europe. That will concentrate minds in London, Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere in the alliance.

Day 13: Convene a meeting of the best minds in tech (which, by the way, does not necessarily mean the wealthiest tech tycoons). Pick their brains on the issue of privacy. This challenge will extend beyond your presidency. You can at least highlight the problem.

Day 14: You’re 78, the oldest man ever to walk into the Oval Office as president. Be smart. Take a day totally off to recharge your batteries. You have a long way to go.

Joe, you’re a bit long in the tooth for the duties you’re about to assume. Keep in mind the adage that applies to all us old folks: time is fleeting. We never know how much we have left, so seize the moment. No offense, but your days (like mine) are numbered.

Good luck. I’ll be pulling for you.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.

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Released: 13 August 2020

Word Count: 1,901

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Marc Rotenberg, “The Tech giants come to Congress, and democracy wins a round”

August 13, 2020 - The-Washington-Spectator

It was a defining moment, and it was also long overdue. In the summer of 2020, with the country gripped by a global pandemic that also sharpened the wealth divide of the digital economy, a congressional committee brought the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to account. They asked why the firms, claiming to be neutral platforms, preferenced their own products. They asked why small businesses were afraid to openly discuss predatory business practices. And they asked about election interference, disinformation, civil rights, and privacy.

This was not the two days of photo ops that Mark Zuckerberg enjoyed when he appeared before Congress in the spring of 2018. In those days, members of Congress asked questions as if they were enrolled in Internet Companies 101. Little action followed. No new legislation. The dominance of the tech firms grew as shopping malls and small businesses across the country collapsed, long before a national health crisis.

Representative David Cicilline, the former mayor of Providence, had a different plan. Over the last few years, the chairman of a House subcommittee charged with antitrust pursued an in-depth investigation into the business practices of the largest tech firms, organized briefings and hearings, worked with Republican members, and let loose his talented staff. This week there was a hearing in Congress that, for the first time, actually treated tech company CEOs as if they were subject to the laws of the United States and not simply as donors to political parties or advisers to presidential candidates.

That was the milestone, and it is difficult to overstate its significance. Over the past decade, Washington has endured a form of agency capture unmatched in modern U.S. history. The revolving door spun fast in the halls of power, as tech company employees and policy advisers traded places with such frequency that there was barely time to update email addresses. Several of the D.C. advocacy groups, long funded by Silicon Valley to avoid government regulation — including the backers of net neutrality (which preferences Google’s dominant position for internet services) and section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (the immunity shield that preferences the speech of internet companies over actual publishers and journalists)—did a quick pivot. They embraced tech industry oversight.

Others held fast to their economic worldviews. Several members of the House committee, looking over the dais at tech firms checking in at more than $1 trillion in capital value, said “Big is not necessarily bad,” and perhaps there is some truth in that statement. Consider the cosmos. But “big and unaccountable” is necessarily bad. As the New Brandeisians have argued, monopoly power has far-reaching implications for American democracy. Tim Wu, Lina Khan, Barry Lynn, and others are drawing on lessons of history and the current experience of local communities to argue for an overhaul of antitrust law, largely out of concern that U.S. political institutions are at risk as economic power becomes more concentrated. As Brandeis had warned, “We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.”

Much of the current antitrust debate turns on the “consumer welfare standard,” a popular laissez-faire doctrine that has, at least in the last few decades, left U.S. firms subject to far less scrutiny than they deserved. There are still economists (many working for the tech industry) who believe that the consumer welfare standard remains a viable antitrust theory. They are living in an era that predates the internet economy, when price effects may have been a useful measure of market power. No one today is worried that the cost of Gmail may rise 10 percent next year. But a user looking for an alternative email service will have few places to turn. And even if they sign up for another service, there is no guarantee it will not simply be acquired by a tech giant. Just ask a user of WhatsApp who has their data now.

The consolidation of the tech industry is fueled by the desire for user data. That is why Facebook acquired WhatsApp. That is why Google is going after Fitbit. That is why, in the earliest days of the internet economy, Doubleclick—the internet advertising firm later acquired by Google—went after Abacus. This was not hard to see coming. The Electronic Privacy Information Center and other consumer groups argued almost 20 years ago that the Federal Trade Commission should have intervened in the Abacus deal. And we made similar arguments about the acquisitions of Doubleclick, WhatsApp, Nest, Fitbit, and many others. The FTC had two decades to develop an antitrust theory for the internet economy. But the FTC chairman, Joe Simons, recently told reporters, with a heavy heart, that it was unlikely that the FTC would complete the antitrust investigation of Facebook before the November election.

We also explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee, back in 2007, that Google’s increasing appetite for other internet services would disadvantage advocacy organizations as well as business competitors. We documented how Google promoted its own videos on “privacy,” while demoting ours, after the search company acquired YouTube. In Europe, where the debate over competition and remedies is much further along, the search company is now required to promote non-Google services. That is good for consumers, for new entrants, and for competition.

The failure of the United States to update U.S. privacy law has also fueled consolidation. In a world of privacy policies — but not actual privacy laws — consumers are left with take it or leave it propositions, an avalanche of legalese of interest only to privacy lawyers. And market-based models that would encourage the sale of personal data, now in vogue in Silicon Valley, reflect a profound misunderstanding of the modern-day right of privacy. Privacy today is about fairness, accountability, and transparency in automated decision-making. Those are the decisions that impact housing, employment, credit, education, and criminal justice. No one should have to pay to avoid unfair, opaque, or biased outcomes.

In discussions about regulating Silicon Valley, U.S. firms often point to the growing power of Chinese tech companies and genuine concerns about a political model that aligns large firms with centralized state authority and promotes mass surveillance. But the answer to that argument is more innovation, more competition, and more respect for democratic values, including privacy protection. Monopolists are not innovators, and if the U.S. is to maintain an edge in the increasingly high-stakes battle for technological leadership, it will require a movement away from de facto national firms. Innovation that is less dependent on the collection and use of personal data could also make U.S. businesses and government agencies more resilient as cyber conflict intensifies. The widely known secret is that vast troves of personal data of Americans is held now by foreign adversaries. Just ask Equifax or the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Outside of Congress, state attorneys general are also pursuing substantial investigations. Although there is some partisan angling and also overstated concerns about censorship of conservative views (let me know when the president is unable to tweet his nonsense to 83 million followers), the concern among attorneys general is long-standing. More than a decade ago, Connecticut Attorney General Blumenthal launched the successful investigation of Google “Streetview,” Google’s plan not only to conduct surveillance of towns and cities but also to track the location of Wi-Fi hotspots to displace a business competitor. Back in Washington, the FTC, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Department of Justice all took a pass, even after they learned that Google was also intercepting Wi-Fi communications.

So Representative Cicilline’s hearing this week also stands in contrast to “business as usual” and other congressional committees that have largely overlooked the FTC’s failure to use its antitrust authority and have also sat on legislation to update U.S. privacy laws. This should have been the year that Congress enacted a comprehensive privacy law and established a data-protection agency. Instead, personal data collection is accelerating as the country becomes ever more dependent on online services.

Whoever is chairing congressional committees next year should take their cues from Chairman Cicilline and embrace real oversight, regardless of who is in the White House. Federal agencies fail to safeguard the public when congressional committees fail to do their job. And it will require action by the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and others to restore competition to the internet industry. That was one of the many lessons in democratic government provided by the House Antitrust Subcommittee this past week in Washington.

Marc Rotenberg is director of the Center for AI and Digital Policy and former president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

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Released: 13 August 2020

Word Count: 1,422

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A running mate who actually matters

August 12, 2020 - John Stoehr

Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate. The first thing we should say is that running mates almost never matter. They have very little effect on voter behavior because voters usually just don’t care. Indeed, in the age of Donald Trump, they might care even less. Many people who are going to vote for Biden aren’t really voting for him. They are voting against the president, which means Biden is a secondary thought, which means his running mate is a tertiary thought — if Americans are thinking about vice presidents at all, which is unlikely, given how inconsequential they have been.

Consider, then, who Harris appeals to. It’s not voters who are already anti-Trump. As long as Biden didn’t pick Tulsi Gabbard or Marianne Williamson, they were going to support the Democratic nominee no matter who he picked. For voters who want things to go back to normal, presuming that’s possible, Harris turns out to be the “predictable” and “safe” choice according to nonpartisan analysts and people like David Axelrod, who habitually scolds the Democratic Party for being too liberal.

Barack Obama’s advisor wrote today: “In the end, Biden seriously considered others but returned to Harris as the ‘do no harm’ candidate, unlikely to thrill or outrage many. She may not seem the most comfortable fit as a governing partner, a quality Biden said he was seeking, but Harris was viewed as the safest pick to win in November.” Put another way, Harris isn’t going to affect the minds of anti-Trump voters much.

A word about Never-Trumpers. They make up a small percentage of the total anti-Trump vote. Most mean it. Some, especially some conservative pundits claiming a principled stand against the president, don’t. What they want is a Democratic Party that’s GOP-lite. What they want is a credible reason to vote for Trump without losing the credibility they have amassed in a media landscape rewarding claims to taking a principled stand against him.

After news broke about Harris, some of them made it known on Twitter that Harris being heartbeat away from the presidency was too much for them because of the usual racist reasons. To them, she isn’t a “do no harm” pick because any pick would “do harm.” Now the choice for them is between voting for the president or not voting at all. Let’s hope they double your vote by staying home.

Harris might be “unlikely to thrill or outrage many,” as Axelrod said, but that presumes an electorate that will be the same size it’s been, which is another way of saying mostly white. It’s here that the assertion that vice presidents don’t matter starts to break down. They don’t matter when all electorates are equal. They do matter when electorates aren’t.

Listen to how CNN commentator Baraki Sellers put it to the San Francisco Chronicle before Biden’s announcement: “It’s not about getting those super-voters to the polls — those super-voters, they’re going to go the polls,” the author of My Vanishing Country said. “But what you want my mama to do is, you want my mama to be on the phones, out in her community getting people to the polls, engaging her sorority. You want them to be active participants, and that’s what Kamala brings.”

Harris is a “do no harm” choice for white voters already set to vote for Biden. But a biracial daughter of immigrants who self-identifies as Black is more than “safe” for nonwhite voters like Baraki Sellers’ mom. It’s these voters who have the power to expand the electorate, thereby fueling a landslide victory, which may be the only thing that can force the president out.

Harris isn’t just “the perfect antidote to Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-Black, xenophobic attitudes,” as USA Today’s Jill Lawrence and David Mastio wrote this morning. Like Obama, she is large and contains multitudes: progressive and moderate, safe and aspirational, conventional and inspirational. By choosing her, and promising that she’ll govern as his equal, Biden is signalling to that part of the electorate that has never been represented by a presidential candidate that the time is soon coming when a Black woman will be president — if and only if you do everything in your power to get everyone you know to go vote for me and Kamala.

A final word. Liberals and Democrats observed this morning that the president and his allies can’t land a punch on Harris. Some say it’s because she’s a “strong woman.” I don’t think that’s it. They are not attacking Harris so much as trying to bring back white voters who don’t want to vote for a racist (because they don’t think of themselves as racists) but will if Trump can show Biden and Harris are as bad or worse than he is.

Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary, was on Fox this morning. He said Harris “is just not that historically exciting to African Americans.” Others say she’s not really Black (her mom is Indian and her dad is Jamaican). The message to reluctant white voters: anti-racism is worse than racism. Come home to the GOP so the president can protect you. If this looks despicably cynical, that’s because it is. It probably won’t work, though.

While Biden and Harris are expanding the electorate, the president and his allies are chasing after a base of power that’s getting smaller.

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Released: 12 August 2020

Word Count: 890

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Where is the ‘master of the Senate’?

August 11, 2020 - John Stoehr

I hope you don’t take this the wrong way. I’m sure many of you already understand plenty about basic economics. You don’t need a novice like me explaining things. But I’m afraid I must explain, just a little, because the Senate Republicans keep using the fundamentals of economics as rationale for refusing to act responsibly. They must pass legislation to stimulate the economy or the nation faces dire consequences. The problem isn’t ideology, though. That’s a ruse. The problem is they’re bad at politics.

Beneath the debate to extend the flat $600-a-week in unemployment benefits, which is one of the issues preventing both sides from coming to an agreement, is a familiar talking point beloved of Republicans who call themselves conservatives. The federal government, we’re told, should not remit more money to workers than the amount workers would normally earn in the absence of a pandemic that has now killed more than 160,000 Americans, infected 5,000,000 more and dislodged scores of millions from their workplaces.

Remitting more money to workers than they would normally earn would be a disincentive to working, we’re told, which is a moral failing and economic one. No one should get money for which they have not exchanged their labor.

It’s worth bearing in mind nearly all the Senate Republicans are millionaires. For instance, Ted Cruz (Texas) has a net worth of $3,198,068. Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the majority leader, is worth $34,137,534. Thom Tillis (North Carolina) is worth $10,966,045. Susan Collins (Maine) is worth $7,873,086. Steve Daines (Montana) is worth $32,863,042. David Perdue (Georgia) is worth $30,098,571. Kelly Loeffler (Georgia) is worth a stunning $500,000,000. There are exceptions. John Thune (South Dakota), Senate No. 2, is only worth $310,512. Joni Ernst (Iowa) has a net worth of -$196,984. As someone in debt, she’s the most normal senator. All figures are as of 2018. (Lots of Senate Democrats are millionaires, but they favor extending the benefit.)

Most normal people, if they are able to work, trade labor for money. When you have as much money as most of these Senate Republicans have, however, you don’t trade labor for money anymore. You might work anyway, and that’s certainly the case when the Senate is in session (even if all they’re doing is mass-producing judges). But when you have this much money, it’s your money that’s working for you. (In Cruz’s case, his wedding did the heavy lifting. He married a banker.) The people saying it’s wrong for Americans to get money they have not worked for are the same people who do not work for their money. Their money does that work for them on Wall Street.

Moreover, the same people worried about disincentives to working debunk their own argument. They are rich. They don’t need (have incentive) to work. Yet they work anyway. Bottom line: Money is the most common reason why people work but it’s not the only reason.

You may have noticed an ugliness lurking in the shadows of conservative economic thinking — contempt for people who must work. Greater mortals (people whose money works for them) don’t work for “mere” money. They work for glory or honor or some noble cause.

Lesser mortals can’t do that. Their lot is to toil. The possibility of not having to work, on account of getting money from the government, must be viewed skeptically, because lesser morals, on account of not being greater mortals, can’t be trusted. If they don’t have incentive to work, they won’t work, a consequence that threatens to destabilize the political order, which is the natural order, which is the order maintaining the difference between greater and lesser mortals. Infuse this view with racism and classism, and you have GOP economics over the last four decades.

There’s a problem with this analysis, however. It takes Republican economic thinking too seriously. Fact is, Donald Trump and the GOP don’t know which way to turn, because they are so very bad at politics. The president thought he had the advantage after going around lawmakers. But that was a tell more than leverage. In signing four executive orders that purported to stimulate the economy, Trump broadcast loud and clear how desperate he was to strike a deal.

Moreover, those executive orders are not only small beer, according to analysis from Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, they also put added strain on states already beyond their budgetary limits. Meanwhile, all 50 governors, including Republicans, want Washington to bail their states out.

As for the Republicans in the current Congress, they don’t know what to do either. Some think Trump has already lost. They’re getting ready for the next Democratic president. Others aren’t doing even that, just hunkering down and preparing to say no to everything.

McConnell is renown for being a “master of the Senate,” but it turns out that that plaudit depends on his conference being united against things, not for things, putting him in the ridiculous position of accusing congressional Democrats of obstruction. (The House passed a three-and-a-half-billion dollar stimulus package back in May.) Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are holding the aces. All they have to do is wait.

It’s tempting, oh-so-tempting, to take GOP economics and knock it down, and sometimes that’s needed. But in this case, the problem isn’t ideology. Trump and the Republicans are bad at politics, and the rest of us may end up suffering for it.

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Released: 11 August 2020

Word Count: 894

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A new political era for Lebanon

August 11, 2020 - Rami G. Khouri

The Beirut port explosion is likely to go down in history as a turning point in Lebanon’s political configuration.

The blast, which killed more than 200 people, injured more than 6,000 and destroyed large parts of the city, has revitalised the Lebanese protest movement which had been trying to remove the entire political class since October 2019. Last year, when the economy finally collapsed under unbearable debt and mismanagement, many Lebanese people realised they had become pauperised, dispossessed and marginalised in their own country, forced to survive on their own, with few basic services from the government and little hope for the future.

The tens of thousands of citizens in the streets since August 7 have demonstrated new heights of distrust and anger at their government, whose incompetence and disregard for the people’s wellbeing had allowed the port explosion to happen. The mock hangman’s nooses set up during the protests clearly express the citizens’ sheer disgust with the political elite who have long ruled them and have driven them and the entire economy into bankruptcy and debt.

The attacks on and takeovers of ministries and public institutions demonstrate that people want to take direct control of governance and would not allow the same uncaring, thieving, and criminally negligent politicians to take back the reins of power.

The consistent protest slogan “all means all” has been re-emphasised and people have expressed their anger with all political forces. The protesters also made rare explicit criticism of Hezbollah as a member of the sectarian rulers they called “the mafia” or “a gang of thieves and criminals”. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah joined President Michel Aoun in rejecting an international investigation of the port explosion and also sounded like all the other discredited politicians in saying his party knew nothing about the ammonium nitrate that exploded in the port.

The events of the past few days have started to sweep aside the cruel recent past to reveal the few power centres in the country that will now battle it out, or, more likely, negotiate a transition to a new governance system.

We are likely to see new waves and methods of citizens confronting their state, and the state fighting back militarily, until this battle is resolved in the months ahead. This week, for example, citizens demanded that foreign donors do not channel humanitarian assistance through the government, who they fear might steal or sell the aid, or only share it with sectarian loyalists.

The citizen rebellion has sent its ominous message and revealed cracks within the governing elite. On August 9, a number of members of parliament and government ministers resigned under pressure from the streets. A day later, the rest of the cabinet along with hapless Prime Minister Hassan Diab stepped down, simply formalising their lack of authority in the face of the citizenry.

Lebanon is experiencing the same dynamics as other Arab countries have since 2010: the irresistible force of an enraged and pauperised citizenry marching in the streets to bring down a power structure that refuses to budge. Yet, like in Sudan, Algeria, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere, Lebanon’s exhausted and humiliated citizens have struggled against an entrenched militarised regime which is not easy to evict from power.

But Lebanon’s power structure is unlike any other Arab country’s and it is even more difficult to challenge. The main sectarian parties of Sunni, assorted Christians, Druze, and others have shown that they will retreat a bit and reconfigure power-sharing when threatened, if it keeps them in the governance and money-making game.

Last year’s events discredited the main sectarian parties in the eyes of most Lebanese, including some of those parties’ own supporters, whose standard of living has also deteriorated. These parties on their own now appear unable to prevent the demands for structural change. Parties like President Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and Saad Hariri’s Future Movement can only rule with the backing of Hezbollah, as we have seen in recent years.

Hezbollah represents something very different. It is more powerful than the state militarily, and more cohesive than any other single sectarian organisation. It is also structurally linked with Iran, Syria, and other militant parties in a regional “resistance” front. Hezbollah mostly operates behind the scenes through shifting alliances with leading Christian, Shia, and Sunni groups in the successive governments it has supported.

We might have entered a phase in Lebanon where, effectively, the two most powerful actors have emerged as Hezbollah and the mass of uncoordinated but probably unstoppable protest movement which wants to replace the current power structure with a more democratic and rule-of-law-based governance system.

If the protesters harness their immense popular support into a focused political process, they could eventually engage and remove the existing power elite, and then hold parliamentary elections that independent groups would oversee — two of their key demands. We should expect to see intense negotiations to agree on a new, non-sectarian elections law that would permit new elections, in turn leading to a new president and a fully re-furbished governance system. This would ideally be managed by a transitional emergency government of respected technocrats focused on stabilising the economy and supporting the majority of needy people.

Many of the now discredited sectarian elite will oppose this, but Hezbollah would probably accept it if it met certain criteria. The group will not allow the Lebanese state to crumble and it does not want to rule Lebanon on its own; at the same time, however, it will not surrender its sophisticated arms and capabilities that twice forced Israel into ceasefires and have achieved deterrence on the Israeli-Lebanese border.

So the big challenge for the protesters and all Lebanese now is: can the citizenry and Hezbollah work out a compromise agreement that allows a serious, capable government to assume power for a long transitional period that can start the revival of the country, while keeping Hezbollah’s arms off the negotiating table for now? And if this happens, and the day comes when the Lebanese people demand Hezbollah give up its autonomous military capabilities, is it possible to envisage those capabilities incorporated under the defence ministry and an associated border security system?

Many Lebanese have pondered these and other possibilities for many years, but no consensus has been reached. This has allowed the old bankrupt governing system to remain in place for so long, with Hezbollah’s backing, leading to the country’s shattered condition. This legacy of corrupt and inept officials in the foreground, with Hezbollah and its external supporters in the background, has now reached its end for most Lebanese people.

The moment of reckoning has arrived. The political elite has nothing left to steal from its people, the people have no more patience and want to hang all political leaders, and Hezbollah must define a new strategy that serves it and the rebelling people of Lebanon equally well.

Finding the answer to this riddle can no longer be the object of abstract discussions. Lebanon has no other choice but to go through with reconfiguring its political system and eventually incorporating Hezbollah into the national defence network. The elite has repeatedly failed and the people have risen up more than once. They will not stop until they have regained their dignity and their citizenship, and established a functioning state.

Rami G. Khouri is journalist-in-residence and 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

This article originated in Al Jazeera.

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Released: 11 August 2020

Word Count: 1,210

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Bob Dreyfuss, “October Surprise — Will war with Iran be Trump’s election eve shocker?”

August 11, 2020 - TomDispatch

Was Donald Trump’s January 3rd drone assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani the first step in turning the simmering Cold War between the United States and Iran into a hot war in the weeks before an American presidential election? Of course, there’s no way to know, but behind by double digits in most national polls and flanked by ultra-hawkish Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump is a notoriously impetuous and erratic figure. In recent weeks, for instance, he didn’t hesitate to dispatch federal paramilitary forces to American cities run by Democratic mayors and his administration also seems to have launched a series of covert actions against Tehran that look increasingly overt and have Iran watchers concerned about whether an October surprise could be in the cards.

Much of that concern arises from the fact that, across Iran, things have been blowing up or catching fire in ways that have seemed both mysterious and threatening. Early last month, for instance, a suspicious explosion at an Iranian nuclear research facility at Natanz, which is also the site of its centrifuge production, briefly grabbed the headlines. Whether the site was severely damaged by a bomb smuggled into the building or some kind of airstrike remains unknown. “A Middle Eastern intelligence official said Israel planted a bomb in a building where advanced centrifuges were being developed,” reported the New York Times. Similar fiery events have been plaguing the country for weeks. On June 26th, for instance, there was “a huge explosion in the area of a major Iranian military and weapons development base east of Tehran.” On July 15th, seven ships caught fire at an Iranian shipyard. Other mysterious fires and explosions have hit industrial facilities, a power plant, a missile production factory, a medical complex, a petrochemical plant, and other sites as well.

“Some officials say that a joint American-Israeli strategy is evolving — some might argue regressing — to a series of short-of-war clandestine strikes,” concluded another report in the Times.

Some of this sabotage has been conducted against the backdrop of a two-year-old “very aggressive” CIA action plan to engage in offensive cyber attacks against that country. As a Yahoo! News investigative report put it: “The Central Intelligence Agency has conducted a series of covert cyber operations against Iran and other targets since winning a secret victory in 2018 when President Trump signed what amounts to a sweeping authorization for such activities, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter… The finding has made it easier for the CIA to damage adversaries’ critical infrastructure, such as petrochemical plants.”

Meanwhile, on July 23rd, two U.S. fighter jets buzzed an Iranian civilian airliner in Syrian airspace, causing its pilot to swerve and drop altitude suddenly, injuring a number of the plane’s passengers.

For many in Iran, the drone assassination of Soleimani — and the campaign of sabotage that followed — has amounted to a virtual declaration of war. The equivalent to the Iranian major general’s presidentially ordered murder, according to some analysts, would have been Iran assassinating Secretary of State Pompeo or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, although such analogies actually understate Soleimani’s stature in the Iranian firmament.

In its aftermath, Iran largely held its fire, its only response being a limited, telegraphed strike at a pair of American military bases in Iraq. If Soleimani’s murder was intended to draw Iran into a tit-for-tat military escalation in an election year, it failed. So perhaps the U.S. and Israel designed the drumbeat of attacks against critical Iranian targets this summer as escalating provocations meant to goad Iran into retaliating in ways that might provide an excuse for a far larger U.S. response.

Such a conflict-to-come would be unlikely to involve U.S. ground forces against a nation several times larger and more powerful than Iraq. Instead, it would perhaps involve a sustained campaign of airstrikes against dozens of Iranian air defense installations and other military targets, along with the widespread network of facilities that the United States has identified as being part of that country’s nuclear research program.

The “art” of the deal in 2020 In addition to military pressure and fierce sanctions against the Iranian economy, Washington has been cynically trying to take advantage of the fact that Iran, already in a weakened state, has been especially hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Those American sanctions have, for instance, made it far harder for that country to get the economic support and medical and humanitarian supplies it so desperately needs, given its soaring death count.

According to a report by the European Leadership Network,

“Rather than easing the pressure during the crisis, the U.S. has applied four more rounds of sanctions since February and contributed to the derailing of Iran’s application for an IMF [International Monetary Fund] loan. The three special financial instruments designed to facilitate the transfer of humanitarian aid to Iran in the face of secondary sanctions on international banking transactions… have proven so far to have been one-shot channels, stymied by U.S. regulatory red tape.”

To no avail did Human Rights Watch call on the United States in April to ease its sanctions in order to facilitate Iran’s ability to grapple with the deadly pandemic, which has officially killed nearly 17,000 people since February (or possibly, if a leaked account of the government’s actual death figures is accurate, nearly 42,000).

Iran has every reason to feel aggrieved. At great political risk, President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei agreed in 2015 to a deal with the United States and five other world powers over Iran’s nuclear research program. That accord, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), accomplished exactly what it was supposed to do: it led Iran to make significant concessions, cutting back both on its nuclear research and its uranium enrichment program in exchange for an easing of economic sanctions by the United States and other trade partners.

Though the JCPOA worked well, in 2018 President Trump unilaterally withdrew from it, reimposed far tougher sanctions on Iran, began what the administration called a campaign of “maximum pressure” against Tehran, and since assassinating Soleimani has apparently launched military actions just short of actual war. Inside Iran, Trump’s confrontational stance has helped tilt politics to the right, undermining Rouhani, a relative moderate, and eviscerating the reformist movement there. In elections for parliament in February, ultraconservatives and hardliners swept to a major victory.

But the Iranian leadership can read a calendar, too. Like voters in the United States, they know that the Trump administration is probably going to be voted out of office in three months. And they know that, in the event of war, it’s more likely than not that many Americans — including, sadly, some hawkish Democrats in Congress, and influential analysts at middle-of-the-road Washington think tanks — will rally to the White House. So unless the campaign of covert warfare against targets in Iran were to intensify dramatically, the Iranian leadership isn’t likely to give Trump, Pompeo, and crew the excuse they’re looking for.

As evidence that Iran’s leadership is paying close attention to the president’s electoral difficulties, Khamenei only recently rejected in the most explicit terms possible what most observers believe is yet another cynical ploy by the American president, when he suddenly asked Iran to reengage in direct leader-to-leader talks. In a July 31st speech, the Iranian leader replied that Iran is well aware Trump is seeking only sham talks to help him in November. (In June, Trump tweeted Iran: “Don’t wait until after the U.S. Election to make the Big deal! I’m going to win!”) Indeed, proving that Washington has no intention of negotiating with Iran in good faith, after wrecking the JCPOA and ratcheting up sanctions, the Trump administration announced an onerous list of 12 conditions that would have to precede the start of such talks. In sum, they amounted to a demand for a wholesale, humiliating Iranian surrender. So much for the art of the deal in 2020.

October surprises, then and now Meanwhile, the United States isn’t getting much support from the rest of the world for its thinly disguised effort to create chaos, a possible uprising, and the conditions to force regime change on Iran before November 3rd. At the United Nations, when Secretary of State Pompeo called on the Security Council to extend an onerous arms embargo on Iran, not only did Russia and China promise to veto any such resolution but America’s European allies opposed it, too. They were particularly offended by Pompeo’s threat to impose “snapback” economic sanctions on Iran as laid out in the JCPOA if the arms embargo wasn’t endorsed by the council. Not lost on the participants was the fact that, in justifying his demand for such new U.N. sanctions, the American secretary of state was invoking the very agreement that Washington had unilaterally abandoned. “Having quit the JCPOA, the U.S. is no longer a participant and has no right to trigger a snapback at the U.N.,” was the way China’s U.N. ambassador put it.

That other emerging great power has, in fact, become a major spoiler and Iranian ally against the Trump administration’s regime-change strategy, even as its own relations with Washington grow grimmer by the week. Last month, the New York Times reported that Iran and China had inked “a sweeping economic and security partnership that would clear the way for billions of dollars of Chinese investments in energy and other sectors, undercutting the Trump administration’s efforts to isolate the Iranian government.” The 18-page document reportedly calls for closer military cooperation and a $400 billion Chinese investment and trade accord that, among other things, takes direct aim at the Trump-Pompeo effort to cripple Iran’s economy and its oil exports.

According to Shireen Hunter, a veteran Middle Eastern analyst at Georgetown University, that accord should be considered a world-changing one, as it potentially gives China “a permanent foothold in Iran” and undermines “U.S. strategic supremacy in the [Persian] Gulf.” It is, she noted with some alarm, a direct result of Trump’s anti-Iranian obsession and Europe’s reluctance to confront Washington’s harsh sanctions policy.

On June 20th, in a scathing editorial, the Washington Post agreed, ridiculing the administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran. Not only had the president failed to bring down Iran’s government or compelled it to change its behavior in conflicts in places like Syria and Yemen, but now, in a powerful blow to U.S. interests, “an Iranian partnership with China… could rescue Iran’s economy while giving Beijing a powerful new place in the region.”

If, however, the traditional Washington foreign policy establishment believes that Trump’s policy toward Iran is backfiring and so working against U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf, his administration seems not to care. As evidence mounts that its approach to Iran isn’t having the intended effect, the White House continues apace: squeezing that country economically, undermining its effort to fight Covid-19, threatening it militarily, appointing an extra-hardliner as its “special envoy” for Iran, and apparently (along with Israel) carrying out a covert campaign of terrorism inside the country.

Over the past four decades, “October surprise” has evolved into a catch-all phrase meaning any unexpected action by a presidential campaign just before an election designed to give one of the candidates a surprise advantage. Ironically, its origins lay in Iran. In 1980, during the contest between President Jimmy Carter and former California Governor Ronald Reagan, rumors surfaced that Carter might stage a raid to rescue scores of American diplomats then held captive in Tehran. (He didn’t.) According to other reports, the Reagan campaign had made clandestine contact with Tehran aimed at persuading that country not to release its American hostages until after the election. (Two books, October Surprise by Gary Sick, a senior national security adviser to Carter, and Trick or Treason by investigative journalist Bob Parry delved into the possibility that candidate Reagan, former CIA Director Bill Casey, and others had engaged in a conspiracy with Iran to win that election.)

Consider it beyond irony if, this October, the latest election “surprise” were to take us back to the very origins of the term in the form of some kind of armed conflict that could only end terribly for everyone involved. It’s a formula for disaster and like so many other things, when it comes to Donald J. Trump, it can’t be ruled out.

Bob Dreyfuss is an investigative journalist and writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

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Released: 11 August 2020

Word Count: 2,055

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