When I wrote Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business, I decided that it would be my final treatise on the subject. I had already spent a quarter-century of my life writing and lecturing about the need for diversity in journalism and how the lack of it had resulted in the stilted and often demeaning portrayals of African Americans and other people of color. These portrayals excite the bogeyman in the American imagination that results in police brutality, mass incarceration, and the everyday bigotry that defines the lives of black people.

My previous book, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, tells the story of a young African who was kidnapped from the Congo and exhibited in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. My first book, Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, published a little more than two decades ago, chronicled the uphill battle of black journalists to portray the multidimensionality of African American life in mainstream newsrooms that crave stereotypes.

Despite the decades I and countless others have spent illustrating the consequences of racial injustice, many institutions are having the same conversations they had when I began my journalism career, in the early 1980s. The radical underrepresentation of African Americans and other people of color persists in practically every profession, from journalism, tech, and fashion to Hollywood and higher education. Meanwhile racial injustice, a trademark of the current presidency, is as pronounced and prevalent as ever, powered by the indifference of white America.

Now, as I watch the nation explode over the egregious videotaped police murder of yet another unarmed black man, I think about the legions of African Americans throughout history who have eloquently appealed for justice and a semblance of equality that for centuries have eluded black people. I wonder what more can be said that hasn’t already been stirringly expressed by our best and brightest: from Benjamin Banneker, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Ida B. Wells to James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Michelle Alexander, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I wonder, too, about the works of art that might have been created had brilliant writers like Baldwin not been distracted by racism. And I think about how much of my own life has been consumed (squandered?) by the same preoccupation, to little avail.

As black America grieves the loss of yet another irreplaceable life, I cannot conjure new words to convey what so many have already said following the deaths of Amadou Diallo, Michael Stewart, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. “Black Lives Matter?”

I have been heartened by the presence of so many white protesters around the country and across the globe. I’m also encouraged by the rare words of outrage from leading white politicians. This is, after all, a battle for the soul of white America, which has, through conditioning, become detached from its own humanity. Perhaps the grotesque murder of George Floyd was graphic enough to break through the malaise and complicity of silence. Perhaps these officers will suffer consequences most do not. (Then again, perhaps they won’t.)

Through centuries of oppression, African Americans have learned how to navigate the maddening hypocrisy and brutality of American racism. We know well the antics of the Amy Coopers who callously — and strategically — weaponize race. We’re not surprised to learn we die of Covid-19 at four times the rate of whites. Such disparities are par for the course. Through all of the trauma and blatant injustice, most of us continue to play by rules perpetually rigged against us and somehow manage to preserve our sanity while performing beyond reasonable expectation. But we cannot cure the pathology of American racism.

Now that the curtain has again been ripped back, and no one can any longer claim innocence or ignorance, it’s time for white America to demonstrate, through its deeds, the principles of fairness, decency, and justice it claims to hold dear. African Americans have done enough, said enough, documented enough, and sacrificed enough of our fleeting hours to the cause of justice. It’s now time for white America to put some skin in the game. This one’s on you.

Pamela Newkirk is a professor, journalist, and award-winning author whose most recent book, Diversity Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business, examines the five-decades long quest to diversify the American workplace. She is a trustee of the Public Concern Foundation, publisher of The Washington Spectator.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 June 2020

Word Count: 701

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The president of the United States is known the world over for his infidelity to the whole truth. The most recent tally from the Washington Post has him at 18,000 false or misleading statements since taking office. If telling a lie puts Donald Trump in a better light, by his estimation, he will tell it. Conversely, telling the truth rarely puts him in a better light, because he’s a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad president.

Given this incontrovertible fact, I can’t stop thinking about the time earlier this month when the president told the truth even though telling a lie would have probably put him in a better light. I can’t stop wondering if this rare moment of truth, like flickering candlelight in the dead of night, touched supporters in ways they’ve never been touched, and if it did what all the lies could not: introduce, or perhaps deepen, doubt.

The time I’m thinking about is when the president emerged from the White House bunker where he had been hiding for the weekend from demonstrators demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white cop. After enduring days of withering criticism for appearing to be scared of facing protesters, Trump decided on a show of strength. The White House or the Department of Justice ordered federal authorities to tear gas peaceful protesters out of the way so Trump could stand with the Bible in his hands in front of nearby St. John’s Church. That photo op, according to polling by USA Today and CNN, would be described later as a “defining moment.”

Much has already been said about the photo op. Trump didn’t say a prayer, didn’t go into the church, didn’t do much of anything worthy of a president who enjoys a commanding influence over the country’s large and politically powerful bloc of white evangelical Christians. But not much has been said of what he said about the Bible he was holding, other than the completely obvious: that Donald Trump, a thrice-married womanizer subject to serial accusations of sexual assault, cares nothing for scripture, doesn’t even know how to talk about the Bible with knowledge, much less reverence.

A reporter asked: “Is that your Bible?” Trump answered: “It’s a Bible.”

Other than some social-media tittering, little or nothing has been said of the fact that Trump for once told the truth. No one to my knowledge has wondered why he didn’t just lie? Saying that the Bible was his, after all, would have been in keeping with the purpose of the photo op, which, we were told, was shoring up lagging support among white evangelical Christians during a time in which his image as a strong leader was in jeopardy. This president lies about virtually everything else. Why not this time?

The answer I keep coming back to is that telling the truth this one time was, by his estimation, putting himself in a better light according to the people constituting the president’s real audience, which, in this case anyway, was not white evangelical Christians. Instead, his real audience was people who accept the artifice of photo ops as a given and play along: the press corps. By telling the truth instead of lying like he normally would, the president might have made a grave political error. By telling the truth, he might have drawn attention to the artifice, possibly heightening awareness among white evangelical Christians that this president is taking them for fools.

By saying “it’s not my Bible,” Trump in effect winked at the press, letting White House correspondents in on the joke he’s been playing though the joke required gassing peaceful protesters out of the way for the punchline to work. This, in combination with holding the Bible as if it were a Trump Steak, may have had the effect on twice-born Christians of draining the holy from the moment. By telling the truth, the president broke the fourth wall to confess to playing a fake Christian on television.

I have been, and I still am, very skeptical of the president losing support among white evangelical Christians. At the rate he’s going, however, Trump won’t have to lose too many to lose the election. Christianity in this country is transforming just like every other social phenomenon. The protests over George Floyd’s murder are taking on the form of a religious movement that even twice-born conservatives are not immune to.

The president can’t afford to lose too many supporters, yet he’s given ammunition to minority voices inside the evangelical community to stand against him in November.

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.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 June 2020

Word Count: 765

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They were relegated to the protest equivalent of a ghetto. Their assigned route shunted them to the far fringes of the city. Their demonstration was destined for an ignominious demise far from any main thoroughfare, out of sight of most apartment buildings, out of earshot of most homes, best viewed from a dinghy bobbing in the Hudson River.

Those at the head of the march had other ideas. After a brief stop at city hall, they turned the crowd onto the main drag, Washington Street, and for the next few hours, a parade of protesters snaked through Hoboken, New Jersey.

“Whose streets? Our streets!” is a well-worn activist chant, but for a little while it was true as Hoboken’s motorcycle cops played catch-up and the march turned this way and that — first, uptown on Washington, where a conspicuous minority of businesses were boarded up, expecting trouble that never came. Then, a left onto Sixth, another onto Jackson. Monroe. Park. Finally, back to Washington and onward.

All the while, the voices of the mostly white marchers, being led in call-and-response chants mainly by people of color, rang through the streets and echoed off high-rent low rises.

Hands up! Don’t shoot!

No justice! No peace!

Say his name! George Floyd!

As an ever-more middle-aged white guy who, a decade ago, traded covering U.S. protests for reporting from African war zones, I have little of substance to add to the superlative coverage of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that have erupted across the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. For that, read some of the journalists who are on the front lines innovating and elevating the craft, like the great Aviva Stahl’s real-time eyewitness observations, incisive interviews, and on-the-fly fact-checking, while marching for miles and miles through the streets of Brooklyn, New York.

Instead, bear with me while I ruminate about something I said to Tom Engelhardt, the editor of our website, TomDispatch, at the beginning of March when our lives changed forever. Instead of simply bemoaning the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic — however devastating and deadly it might prove to be — I uncharacteristically looked on the bright side, suggesting that this could be one of those rare transformative moments that shifts the world’s axis and leads to revolutionary change.

I bring this up not to brag about my prescience, but to point out the very opposite — how little foresight I actually had. It’s desperately difficult for any of us to predict the future and yet, thanks so often to the long, hard, and sometimes remarkably dangerous work of organizers and activists, even the most seemingly immutable things can change over time and under the right conditions.

A latter day lynching Despite my comments to Tom, if you had told me that, in the span of a few months, a novel coronavirus that dates back only to last year and systemic American racism that dates back to 1619 would somehow intersect, I wouldn’t have believed it. If you had told me that a man named George Floyd would survive Covid-19 only to be murdered by the police and that his brutal death would spark a worldwide movement, leading the council members of a major American city to announce their intent to defund the police and Europeans halfway across the planet to deface monuments to a murderous nineteenth-century monarch who slaughtered Africans, I would have dismissed you. But history works in mysterious ways.

Four hundred years of racism, systemic abuse of authority, unpunished police misconduct, white skin privilege, and a host of other evils at the dark core of America gave a white Minneapolis police officer the license to press a black man’s face to the pavement and jam a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes. For allegedly attempting to buy a pack of cigarettes with a phony $20 bill, George Floyd was killed at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by police officer Derek Chauvin.

At the beginning of the last century, whites could murder a black man, woman, or child in this country as part of a public celebration, memorialize it on postcards, and mail them to friends. Between 1877 and 1950, nearly 4,000 blacks were lynched in the American South, more than a death a week for 73 years. But the murders of blacks, whether at the hands of their owners in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries or of unaccountable fellow Americans in the latter nineteenth and twentieth centuries never ended despite changes in some attitudes, significant federal legislation, and the notable successes of the protests, marches, and activism of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

From 2006 to 2012, in fact, a white police officer killed a black person in America almost twice a week, according to FBI statistics. And less than a month before we watched the last moments of George Floyd’s life, we witnessed a modern-day version of a lynching when Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, was gunned down while jogging on a suburban street in Glynn County, Georgia. Gregory McMichael, a 64-year-old white retired district attorney, investigator, and police detective, and his son Travis, 34, were eventually arrested and charged with his murder.

Without the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump administration’s botched response to it, without black Americans dying of the disease at three times the rate of whites, without the suddenly spotlighted health disparities that have always consigned people of color to die at elevated rates, without a confluence of so many horrors that the black community in America has suffered for so long coupled with those of a new virus, would we be in the place we’re in today?

If President Trump hadn’t cheered on the efforts of mostly older white protesters to end pandemic shutdowns and “liberate” their states and then echoed a racist Miami police chief of the 1960s who promised “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” essentially calling for young black protesters to be gunned down, would the present movement have taken off in such a way? And would these protests have been as powerful if people who had avoided outside contact for weeks hadn’t suddenly decided to risk their own lives and those of others around them because this murder was too brazen, too likely to end in injustice for private handwringing and public hashtags?

In Minneapolis, where George Floyd drew his last embattled breath, a veto-proof majority of the city council recently announced their commitment to disbanding the city’s police department. As council president Lisa Bender put it:

“We’re here because we hear you. We are here today because George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. We are here because here in Minneapolis and in cities across the United States it is clear that our existing system of policing and public safety is not keeping our communities safe. Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period.”

A month ago, such a statement by almost any council chief in any American city — much less similar sentiments voiced across the nation — would have been essentially unthinkable. Only small numbers of activists working away with tiny chisels on a mountain of official intransigence could even have imagined such a thing and they would have been dismissed by the punditocracy as delusional.

But the reverberations of George Floyd’s death have hardly been confined to the city where he was slain or even the country whose systemic bigotry put a target on his back for 46 years. His death and America’s rampant racism have led to soul-searching across the globe, sparking protests against discrimination and police brutality from Australia to Germany, Argentina to Kenya. In Ghent, Belgium, a bust honoring King Leopold II was defaced and covered with a hood bearing Floyd’s dying plea: “I can’t breathe.” In Antwerp, Leopold’s statue was set on fire and later removed.

It was Leopold, as TomDispatch regular Adam Hochschild so memorably documented in King Leopold’s Ghost, who, in the late nineteenth century, seized the vast territory surrounding Africa’s Congo River, looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and presided over a fin de siècle holocaust that took the lives of as many as 10 million people, roughly half the Congo’s population. Belgian activists are now calling for all the country’s statues and monuments to the murderous monarch to be torn down.

A cultural renaissance or a societal black death? Like the island off its coast, Hoboken was born of a great swindle. In 1658, the Dutch governor of Manhattan reportedly bought the tract of land that now includes that mile-square New Jersey city from the Lenape people for some wampum, cloth, kettles, blankets, six guns and — fittingly enough, given Hoboken’s startling bars-to-area ratio — half a barrel of beer.

In other words, the city where I covered that demonstration is part and parcel of the settler colonialism, slavery, and racism that forms the bedrock of this nation. But even in that white enclave, that bastion of twenty-first-century gentrification, in the midst of a lethal global pandemic with no cure, 10,000 people flooded its parks and streets, carrying signs like “Racism is a pandemic, too” and “Covid is not the only killer” that would have made little sense six months ago.

There were also posters that would have been shocking in Hoboken only several weeks ago, but didn’t cause anyone to bat an eye like “ACAB” (an acronym for “All Cops are Bastards”) or “Are you a:

[ ] Killer cop

[ ] Complicit Cop”

Not to mention dozens and dozens of signs reading “Defund the Police” or “Abolish the Police.” Suddenly — to most of us, at least — such proposals were on the table.

In reality, social change rarely occurs by accident or chance. It usually comes in the wake of years of relentless, thankless, grinding activism. It also takes a willingness to head for the barricades when history has illuminated the dangers of doing so. It requires persistence in the face of weariness and distraction, and courage in the face of abject adversity.

Where this movement goes, how it changes this nation, and what it spawns around the world will be won or lost on the streets of our tomorrows. Will it mean an America that inches closer to long-articulated but never remotely approached ideals, or usher in a backlash that leads to a wave of politicians in the Trumpian mold? In moments like this, there’s no way of knowing whether you’re on the cusp of a cultural Renaissance or a societal Black Death.

It takes a long time, but the Earth’s orbit and axis do change and once they do, things are never the same again. Already, from Minneapolis to Antwerp to modest Hoboken, this world is not what it was just a short while ago. A man forced to die with his face pressed to the ground may yet shift the earth under your feet.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch (where this article originated) and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.

Copyright ©2020 Nick Turse — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 June 2020

Word Count: 1,815

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Tom Cotton gave a Senate speech Thursday in which the Arkansas Republican, and a figure who’s key to advancing Trumpism beyond Donald Trump, mocked the push to remove statues memorializing “heroes” and other notables of the dead Confederacy:

 The idea that we all need safe spaces from mean words. Trigger warnings on op-eds or TV shows that might constitute a microaggression. This is the language of the campus social justice seminar but increasingly it’s the language of our workplace. Are we going to tear the Washington Monument down? Are we going to rename it the Obelisk of Wokeness?

“Obelisk of Wokeness” is actually pretty cool-sounding, so it naturally got attention. The best came from novelist Gary Shteyngart: 

Fact: The Obelisk of Wokeness is the world’s tallest and wokest obelisk. Originally called the Washington Monument, it was renamed to celebrate the defeat of Donald Trump & his racist minions in 2020.

Cotton deserves mockery, lots of it, but we shouldn’t follow him down the rabbit hole of amorality and indeterminacy where everything is as good or bad as everything else, and nothing matters. Cotton and his GOP confederates benefit from the impression that language is an end in itself and not a representation of people, things, actions and ideas. When words become all, it’s quite easy to conceal who’s doing what to whom. They would love debating “defunding the police,” but not white cops murdering black men.

The thing about Cotton’s argument is that it’s not an argument at all. Arguments, honest ones anyway, come from people who care about not being wrong, at the very least, because not being wrong is the point of the exercise in logic. When comparing the Washington Monument to, say, statues of General Robert E. Lee, Cotton doesn’t care about being right, because being right is beside the point. His objective is discrediting his opponents, tarring them as unreasonable, even as his own “argument” departs from fact and reason, distorting our sense of reality and making us feel crazy.

Insane “arguments” turn plaintiffs into defendants, victims into perpetrators. The Confederates really did betray the United States. They really did defend chattel slavery. They really did invade our nation with the express purpose of overthrowing and replacing a civilized republic with a barbarous slave regime. As “arguments” pertain to historical figures like Columbus, he did indeed sail the ocean blue, but the Italian sailor also really did foment genocide on Hispaniola, mutilating and torturing natives, and selling their children to sex slavers — if he didn’t first feed the babies to his dogs.

Plaintiffs in the statue-removal movement urge us to honor people worthy of honor, not traitors, sadists and criminals against humanity. Yet to hear Josh Hawley tell it the plaintiffs are trying to “erase history.” For The Federalist, the GOP senator from Missouri wrote that the plaintiffs are so cynical and acting so contrary to their claim of seeking healing, that there’s only one conclusion: “The Left Wants a Civil War.” Given the well-documented history of the Republican Party’s soft civil war over the last 40 years, this is gaslighting, my friends, so masterful as to be the envy of Vladimir Putin.

Insane “arguments” are also perverse. Two Buffalo cops really did shove a 75-yer-old protester so hard he fell backwards, cracking his skull on the concrete, and the same two police officers really did walk on by as the elder lay bleeding out. These are indisputable facts captured on video. I watched it. But US Senator Joni Ernst can’t comment until the facts are known (they are known). But, the Iowa Republican said, we might wonder if the victim did anything to justify violence (he didn’t). Facts become questions. Questions become facts. The point isn’t being right. It’s power.

The other thing about Tom Cotton’s “argument” is that it presumes that systemic racism and state-sanctioned violence against out-groups for the safety and benefit of in-groups is fake. Slavery is ended. Racism doesn’t exist anymore. You are not really seeing white police brutality that you really are seeing on newscasts and social media. Instead of believing the evidence of your eyes, Cotton is saying in other words, believe us when we say there’s a few bad apples in police departments, to be sure, but these protesters, like the PC police, are hyping things for their own political reasons, not moral and humane reasons, and any reaction to it, including civil war, is justified.

The “culture war,” as the conflict over language is often called, was made possible by a majority of white people deciding that racism existed only when it was overt. Fights over political correctness, therefore, were fights that would never come to an end as long people like Cotton, Hawley and Ernst had plausible deniability on their side.

George Floyd’s death and the reaction to it mean deniability is implausible.

And yet they still deny.

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.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 June 2020

Word Count: 812

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The Republican Party’s influence over the meaning of patriotism over the last 50 years cannot be overstated. Americans inside and outside the party today still credit Ronald Reagan, considered the father of modern conservatism, for defeating the Soviet Union, leading to international conditions by which the US remade the world in its image. Americans inside and outside the GOP, especially after September 11, 2001, equated the Republican Party’s rah-rah militarism with love of country. In the early years of this century, being a Republican was almost synonymous with being a patriot.

The Republican grip on the meaning of patriotism was so nearly total that when black activists demanded the removal of statues in public squares across the south that honored generals, war heroes and other notables of the old Confederacy, the patriotism of their defenders, who were always Republican, was never in doubt. News stories in fact never touched on patriotism or loyalty. The press framing was instead nearly always between activism and “heritage” or anti-racism and racism — if you were lucky. The same dynamic played out in every controversy over the Confederate flag.

Compare that to the last fortnight. An outgrowth of the massive nationwide protests demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd has been a renewed push to remove Confederate statues — and there’s been almost no resistance. Protesters aren’t even waiting for due process. They’re just tearing them down. So far, the public seems to approve. The NFL, meanwhile, apologized for not taking Black Lives Matter seriously. NASCAR announced a ban on the Confederate flag. Senate Democrats are daring the president to veto a defense spending bill that includes provisions requiring the renaming of major military bases named after Confederates, like Fort Benning.

It bears repeating the Confederacy left the United States in order to preserve slavery. The men memorialized in public squares across the south, looking regal on their high horses, gazing over the landscape with eyes heavy with the wisdom of the ancients, betrayed us. Traitors, all of them, and what’s more they invaded and tried bringing down the United States, killing 750,000 in the process. To honor these “heroes” is to honor slavery and racism. It’s to honor sadism and treason. It’s to honor the enemy.

All that was clouded by tales of a “culture war” in which fierce rivals fought each other but who were loyal to the same country. That “culture war,” however, started receding from the foreground on the day the Republican Party formally nominated Donald Trump for president. During the 2016 Republican National Convention, someone passed around little Russian flags. It was supposed to be a joke, it was reported afterward, a way of mocking Democrats who accused Trump of being in the Kremlin’s pay in order to compensate for Hillary Clinton’s flaws. But the flags were no joke.

They were prescient. Over the course of Trump’s first term, we learned of Russia’s covert operation to sabotage the president’s Democratic rival in order to aid and abet Trump’s candidacy. We learned of Republican congressional leaders, in full knowledge of the Kremlin’s ongoing violation of our sovereignty, standing aside and letting it happen. And we witnessed earlier this year the Republican Senate acquitting the president of an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people. As they stood with the Confederacy, the Republicans stood with Trump. As they stood with foreign enemies of the past, they stood with foreign enemies of the present.

All this leaves a vacuum being filled by black activists, feminists, liberals, socialists, honest conservatives, former Republicans — a massive cross-demographic coalition threatening to bulldoze the GOP. Protesters had public support before the president gassed them out of the way for a photo op. Afterward, support went through the roof, according to USA Today. That was “defining moment,” the paper said. It appears to have crystallized something in the American psyche, made something once fluid permanent, forced a majority to see anti-racism is patriotism par excellence. More importantly, perhaps, a majority of the people can see, and (I dearly hope) will continue to see, that systemic racism in a diverse republic is the most fascist thing of all.

The once-fraught debate over Confederate statues is no longer fraught. It’s no longer between activism and “heritage” or anti-racism and racism. There’s not even a mushy middle in which the understanding of the Civil War is “complicated” while imbuing traitors and sadists with nobility and grace. That time is over. What had been an argument now appears settled. This is what happens when a major political party not only abandons patriotism, it sides with the enemies of the past and the present.

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.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 June 2020

Word Count: 771

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America’s pundits and politicians have largely concluded that a new Cold War with China — a period of intense hostility and competition falling just short of armed combat — has started. “Rift Threatens U.S. Cold War Against China,” as a New York Times headline put it on May 15th, citing recent clashes over trade, technology, and responsibility for the spread of Covid-19. Beijing’s decision to subject Hong Kong to tough new security laws has only further heightened such tensions. President Trump promptly threatened to eliminate that city-state’s special economic relationship with this country, while imposing new sanctions on Chinese leaders. Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans in Congress are working together to devise tough anti-Chinese sanctions of their own.

For anyone who can remember the original Cold War, the latest developments may seem eerily familiar. They bring to mind what occurred soon after America’s World War II collaboration with the Soviets collapsed in acrimony as the Russians became ever more heavy-handed in their treatment of Eastern Europe. In those days, distrust only grew, while Washington decided to launch a global drive to contain and defeat the USSR. We seem to be approaching such a situation today. Though China and the U.S. continue to maintain trade, scientific, and educational ties, the leaders of both countries are threatening to sever those links and undertake a wide range of hostile moves.

Admittedly, some of the steps being discussed in Washington to punish China for its perceived bad behavior will have little immediate impact on the lives of Americans. A lot of the threats, in fact, may turn out to be little more than good old-fashioned chest thumping. Consider, for instance, the proposal floated by the top-ranking majority and minority members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe and Rhode Island Democrat Jack Reed, to fund a multibillion dollar “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” intended to bolster American forces in Asia. That effort, they avowed, will “send a strong signal to the Chinese Communist Party that the American people are committed to defending U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

Well, that was easy! All we, the taxpaying citizens of the United States, need to do in this opening salvo of a new Cold War is salute Congress as it funnels yet more billions of dollars to the usual defense contractors and thereby “send a signal” to Beijing that we will “defend U.S. interests” somewhere far across the globe. (Now there’s a moment to wave your American flag!)

But don’t count on such a moment lasting long, not if a new Cold War starts in earnest. A quick look back at the original one should remind us that we’ll all pay a price of some sort for intensifying hostility towards China (even if a hot war isn’t the result). Perhaps, then, it’s none too soon to consider how such a world would impact you and me.

A feeble economic recovery For most Americans, the first consequence of an intensifying Cold War could be a weaker than expected recovery from the Covid-19 economic meltdown. Anything that stands in the way of a swift rebound — and a new Cold War with China falls into that very category — would be bad news.

Unlike in the original Cold War, when Washington and Moscow maintained few economic ties, the U.S. and Chinese economies remain intertwined, contributing to the net wealth of both countries and benefiting this country’s export-oriented industries like agriculture and civilian aircraft production. Admittedly, such ties have also harmed blue-collar workers who have watched their jobs migrate across the Pacific and tech companies that have seen their intellectual property purloined by Chinese upstarts. Donald Trump stoked resentments over just such issues to get himself elected in 2016. Since then, he’s sought to disentangle the two economies, claiming we would be better off on our own. (America first!) As part of this drive, he’s already imposed stiff tariffs on Chinese imports and blocked Chinese firms from gaining access to American technology.

Feel free to argue about whether China has abused international trade rules, as Trump and his allies have charged, and whether imposing tariffs (paid for by American importers and consumers, not Chinese suppliers) is the best way to address that country’s economic rise. The key thing to note, however, is that economic growth in both places had slowed in the wake of Trump’s trade war even before Covid-19 hit. As 2019 drew to a close, in fact, the prospect of yet higher tariffs and intensified economic warfare was already dragging down the whole global economy.

And while some experts believe that a relaxation of tariffs and other steps to improve U.S.-China trade would stimulate the economy in tough times, Trump and his China hawks, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, appear to view this moment as the perfect opportunity to double down on anti-Chinese measures. The president has already hinted that he’s prepared to order yet more tariffs on Chinese products and take other steps to hasten the “decoupling” of the two economies. “There are many things we could do,” he told Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business in mid-May. “We could cut off the whole relationship.”

Cut off the whole relationship? Some policymakers claim that such a decoupling would stimulate growth at home as American firms shifted manufacturing back to the United States and its close allies. This argument, however, ignores two key factors when it comes to Americans desperate for work now: first, many of the tasks currently performed by Chinese workers will be shifted to plants in Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, and other low-cost manufacturing hubs; and second, any relocation of entire production lines to this country will take years to accomplish and, in the end, undoubtedly wind up employing more robots than workers. Bottom line: economically, an intensifying Cold War is guaranteed to scuttle any chances of a rapid recovery from the Coronavirus Depression, dampening employment prospects for millions of Americans.

Military spending, not recovery stimulus And here’s another thing a new Cold War guarantees: a significant increase in military spending at a time of ballooning national debt and a desperate need for investment in domestic economic recovery.

By the end of June, unless Congress votes additional assistance, much of the $2.2 trillion in emergency pandemic relief voted by Congress will have been used up, leaving millions of jobless Americans and many small business owners in dire straits. Democrats in the House of Representatives did unveil a plan for an additional $3 trillion in emergency funding, including aid for struggling states and cities and another round of direct payments to citizens. White House officials and many Republicans insist, however, that any further giveaways to ordinary Americans will raise the federal debt to unsustainable levels (a problem that never worries them when it comes to tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy). So passing anything like that stimulus package appears ever less conceivable and July may leave millions of Americans unable to pay rent as well as other essential expenses.

When it comes to increased military spending, however, Republicans have no such qualms. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, for example, has introduced a $43 billion Forging Operational Resistance to Chinese Expansion (FORCE) Act. (Nifty title, huh?) Its goal, he claims, would be to “help thwart the Chinese Communist Party’s main geopolitical aim [of] pushing the United States out of the Western Pacific [and] achieving cross-strait unification with Taiwan via military force.” It includes, among other things, $3.9 billion for another Virginia-class submarine (that’s in addition to the $4.7 billion requested for such a sub in the Pentagon’s proposed 2021 budget) and $3 billion for more of one of the most expensive weapons systems in history, the F-35 jet fighter (and that’s in addition to the $4.6 billion requested for 48 of them in that same budget).

With the Democrats desperate to demonstrate their own anti-Chinese credentials, passage of the FORCE Act, or the somewhat more modest Pacific Deterrence Initiative introduced by Senators Reed and Inhofe, appears to be a sure thing. In fact, the need for yet more military funds may prove to be the Republican rationale for rejecting calls for additional pandemic relief.

But won’t higher military spending act as an economic stimulus, just as it did during World War II when it helped lift the United States out of the Great Depression?

Indeed, passage of the FORCE Act or a variant of it will pump additional money into the economy. But today’s military-industrial complex bears little relation to the one of 80 years ago when millions of workers were mobilized to churn out thousands of tanks and planes monthly in an all-out drive to defeat Nazi Germany. Nowadays, military hardware has become so complex that most of any dollar spent on a new plane, tank, or ship goes into specialized materials and computer systems, not armies of laborers. So the billions of dollars for one new submarine and additional F-35s are likely to generate only a few thousand extra jobs, while spending the same amounts on health care or elementary school education would generate many times that number.

Conscription And then there’s the issue that should be on the minds of every young man and woman in America (along with their parents, grandparents, and loved ones): the draft.

In contrast to the original Cold War, young men in this country are no longer obliged to serve in the U.S. military, though they (and their female counterparts) may choose to do so, whether for patriotic reasons, economic need, or both. Even though the United States has been continuously involved in “forever wars” since the 9/11 attacks, the armed services have been able to use a variety of economic and educational incentives to keep the ranks filled (and avoid the public outcry over those wars that would surely have accompanied a draft). This was possible in part because the numbers of soldiers engaged in combat at any given moment was not huge in comparison to, say, the Korean or Vietnam War eras and because vast numbers of troops were no longer on tap to “contain” the Soviet Union in Europe.

A full-scale Cold War with China could, however, prove another matter entirely, even if Pentagon manpower requirements were somewhat diminished by U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq. Large force deployments will undoubtedly be needed to engage in a modern version of the “containment” of China, not to speak of deterring the further adventurism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Can this be done with an all-volunteer military? Not if tensions rise with Beijing.

Count on it: at some point, the question of conscription is bound to come up. So far, the Department of Defense has not opted for reinstating the draft — a move that would require congressional approval and undoubtedly ignite intense political debate of the sort top officials would prefer to avoid right now. Still, the leadership’s overarching guidance, the National Defense Strategy of 2018, made it quite clear that the United States must expect to face years of intense rivalry with its “great power competitors” and that such an epic struggle could well require the full mobilization of America’s war-making capabilities. “Long-term strategic competition [with China and Russia],” it claimed, “requires the seamless integration of multiple elements of national power.” Conscription was not specifically mentioned, but given the new focus on a rising China and a reckless Russia, it will be on the table sooner or later.

Repression and discrimination Another feature of the original Cold War that you should expect in a new one is an environment of repression, intolerance, and discrimination. In this case, it would be against Chinese-Americans, Chinese students and researchers currently in this country, and non-Chinese viewed as in any way beholden to that power. Sadly enough, signs of this have already emerged. Officials from the FBI and the National Security Council have, for instance, been dispatched to leading Ivy League universities to warn administrators against admitting or retaining Chinese students who may be collecting scientific and technical information to share with government-sponsored institutions at home. Concurrently, some 30 Chinese professors with ties to such institutions have had their visas denied, despite a history of collaboration with American academics. In a more dramatic move, the chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department, Charles Lieber, was arrested in January for failing to report income he had received from a Chinese university.

Many American academics have criticized such actions as an assault on academic freedom. Increasingly, however, U.S. officials insist that they represent a necessary component of the new Cold War. And while those officials also insist that our adversary in this struggle is the Chinese government or people associated with it (however tangentially), many Chinese-Americans are increasingly experiencing suspicion and hostility just for being Chinese. “Chinese-Americans feel targeted, and that’s really hurtful,” said Charlie Woo, a prominent Chinese-American businessman.

The experience of the first Cold War suggests that this sort of intolerance and repression will only increase with potentially chilling effects on intellectual freedom and the already deeply unsettled racial situation in this country.

Hot war And never forget that cold wars always risk becoming hot ones. Looking back, it’s easy enough to remember those years of the U.S.-USSR standoff as a relatively war-free era, since the two superpowers were fearful that a direct conflict of any sort between them might spark an all-out thermonuclear conflagration, leaving a planet in ruins. In reality, though, both sides engaged in a grim assortment of bloody “proxy wars” — regional conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, among other places, involving troops from one superpower and local allies armed by the other. In addition, the U.S. and the Soviet Union nearly found themselves in direct conflict on several occasions. The most notable, of course, was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when Moscow installed nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in Cuba and the U.S. nearly went to war — which would probably have turned into a nuclear conflict — to remove them. Only a last-ditch negotiating effort by President John F. Kennedy and his Russian counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, averted such an outcome.

It’s easy enough to imagine that both contemporary versions of such proxy conflicts and of the Cuban Missile Crisis could emerge from a growing confrontation with China. An incident on the Korean Peninsula, no matter how it was sparked, could quickly turn into just such a proxy war. The greatest danger, however, would be U.S. and Chinese forces facing off directly, perhaps due to a naval clash in the East or South China Sea.

At present, American and Chinese warships encounter each other on a regular basis in those waters, often coming within shooting (or even ramming) range. The U.S. Navy insists that it’s conducting permissible “freedom of navigation operations” (FRONOPS) in international waters. The Chinese — claiming ownership of, and often building up, the many small atolls and islets that dot those seas — accuse the American ships of infringing on their national maritime territory. On occasion, Chinese gunboats have sailed dangerously close to them, forcing them to shift course to avoid a collision. As such incidents multiply and tensions increase, the risk of a serious faceoff involving loss of life on one or both sides is bound to grow, possibly providing the spark for a full-scale military confrontation. And there can be no question of one thing: an intensifying Cold War with China will only increase the odds of such a thing happening.

No one can say at what point you or any of us will begin to feel the direct effects of this new Cold War, only that, as tensions and hostile acts heighten, the consequences will prove harsh indeed. So cheer now, if you approve of measures already taken to isolate and punish Beijing, but think carefully before you embrace a full-blown Cold War with China and all that it will entail.

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 ©2020 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 June 2020

Word Count: 2,638

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We’re seeing the birth of a new media narrative that we should be aware of before smothering it in the crib. The narrative goes like this: the president is going to lose. A related subtext goes like this: the president is going to lose so badly to Joe Biden that in the future no one, not even Donald Trump’s House terriers, is going to admit they supported him. Another variation comes from the National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar, who wrote Sunday: “Republican loyalty to Trump won’t survive a November loss.”

This narrative is the result of new polls showing people drifting away who would not normally drift away, including senior citizens, who usually approve of Republican incumbents, as well as some working class white voters and some white evangelical Christians. This pattern is the result of nationwide protests demanding justice for George Floyd, demonstrations of a once-in-a-lifetime cross-racial solidarity that might signal, as I have argued, a transition from the old political regime to a new one.

More importantly, this narrative is the result of white Americans starting to view the United States, its history, and its institutions through the lens of the African-American experience, which is to say, seeing, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that black people experience all the time fascism at the hands of corrupt police officers, and that black people, as a result of that experience, understand better than any other cohort that fascism or its variants will be with us long after Donald Trump is out of power.

It’s one thing to say white people are starting to see the world through black eyes, as I have, but quite another to assert a cultural shift among white Americans, and that recent polling is evidence of that shift. That is an enormous and dangerous assertion that could lay the groundwork for a repeat of 2016, when, as you will recall, everyone, including Trump, believed he couldn’t win — all the way up to the moment he did. We need to push back against this new media narrative. We need to push back even if polling is right in suggesting a Democratic victory. Better yet, let’s smother it.

Here’s what polling isn’t telling you because polling can’t: Donald Trump is the reason why white Americans are starting to see the fascism that has informed, shaped and built our law enforcement institutions. Black Lives Matter activists tried to tell white Americans. They tried telling us that systemic racism is real and that we must act in the name of democracy, liberty and justice. But many white Americans could not quite believe things were as bad as that, because a biracial cosmopolitan intellectual sat in the Oval Office. Barack Obama seemed the embodiment of a “post-racial America.”

Systemic racism allows white Americans to live their whole lives not knowing what cops do to people of color, especially black people. But after 2016, and after Trump took sides with white supremacists, sadists and despots, white Americans could not not be aware of what was happening, and eventually, after black people raised hell in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, white people figured out being anti-Trump was like being anti-racist, the consequence being a historic convergence and uprising. (I still think it is, or should be, a pan-religious movement as well as a political one.)

Solidarity can be fragile, though. It takes time for new coalitions to ripen in the form of electoral politics, deepen in the form of policy and programming, and broaden to the point of becoming the conventional wisdom of the status quo. At the same time, white Americans can be fickle allies, as students of black history know, and given that history, it probably won’t take much for white Americans to think the problems we are facing have been solved. All it would take, I would say, is Donald Trump’s defeat.

It’s not hard to imagine, after the results of the election are in, white Americans high-fiving each other before packing up to go home, leaving black Americans to fight for liberty and justice alone. This scenario is not just plausible, it would be, if it happened, a monumental demonstration of white privilege, a demonstration already being keyed up and primed by a media narrative about a cultural shift among white voters, as if those shifts are permanent, and about Republican lawmakers accepting the inevitable and starting to grieve, all of which suggests to white people the job is nearly done.

It’s not. The conditions that gave rise to a fascist president will outlive him unless white Americans do what they usually have not done: checked their privilege.

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.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 June 2020

Word Count: 772

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One of the many hard-to-watch videos that surfaced last weekend showing white police officers intimidating, harassing, injuring and otherwise assaulting peaceful protesters demonstrating after the murder of George Floyd came from Buffalo.

In the video, a white elderly man can be seen walking in one direction on the sidewalk while an armed and armored “emergency response team” is walking in the opposite direction on the same sidewalk. Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old Catholic Worker well-known locally, stops to exchange words with two officers. The officers then shove Gugino so hard he falls backward, slamming his head on the concrete. As he lies supine, immobile and bleeding, the officers keep walking, as does the riot squad.

Officers Aaron Torgalski and Robert McCabe, who are white, were arrested Saturday and charged with felony assault. Suspended without pay, they pleaded not guilty at their arraignment. Their release on personal recognizance was met with cheers from supporters. One American News, a startup trying to out-Fox Fox News, has taken up their case for a story about law and order versus anarchy. This morning, the outlet’s most important viewer took out of his busy day the time to tweet the following:

 

Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?

Before I unpack this, let’s be clear about something. There is no ambiguity — there is no doubt whatsoever — what Torgalski and McCabe did. The video, by WBFO, the city’s NPR affiliate, shows what happened. There is only one unknown, what Gugino said to them, which could not have been so bad that two armed and armored cops in prime physical health were justified in assaulting a septuagenarian peace activist.

Because video evidence is so total in removing all doubt about who did what to whom and how, it leaves the police officers and their defenders little or no room to move short of departing the world of facts and reason entirely, which is what OANN apparently did. It dipped into the toxic slough of conspiracy theory to invent a story about a covert agent of Antifa sabotaging cops before setting them up for a fall.

It’s truly hard finding the words to capture how despicable the president’s tweet is. Blaming an old man for his injuries is peak gaslighting, a superlative act of sadism. But if we stop there, if we stop with merely knocking down Donald Trump’s bonkers mindset, democracy will not have learned what it must to survive. As I keep saying, the moral corruption eating the heart out of the United States won’t stop with Trump’s defeat. If citizens are to take back their sovereignty, they must take the next steps.

Next steps include seeing the invention of fake enemies in order to justify virtually any government response to the president’s real enemies. Antifa, or Anti-Fascist, is a real thing. (Indeed, the US, in defeating Nazi Germany, was once a nation of Antifa.) But it is not what the president or his confederates say. They talk about it as if it were a highly organized underground organization operating in the shadow. It is no such thing. New York Jets fans are better structured and more determined. Antifa is a loose network (though “network” is too strong) of ideologically aligned activists, some of whom prefer streetfighting, most of whom are nonviolent anti-fascist activists. The most famous member of Antifa is fascist Richard Spencer’s celebrated assailant.

I very much doubt a 75-year-old peacenik like Martin Gugino has ever even heard of Antifa, but that doesn’t matter to Trump, who desires more than anything a means of discrediting a popular uprising in the form of Black Lives Matter protests that are growing in strength and threatening to topple him in November. More frighteningly, what matters to Bill Barr, the United States Attorney General, is the invention of a criminal to which prosecutors can affix a crime, with which to destroy the president’s real enemies. Barr has defined Antifa so broadly as to include virtually any American protesting for justice. He is deploying a tactic familiar to fascists all the world over.

By accusing a victim of a crime of being the true criminal, the president is gaslighting Gugino as well as the rest of us. But he’s not doing anything cops don’t do all the time. Gugino was shoved. That’s clear. Anyone with eyesight could see that. Yet the Buffalo Police Department issued a statement saying Gugino “tripped and fell.” This is not an exception. Lying is endemic in police departments. Ask any local reporter on the cops beat. They regularly depart the world of fact and reason when the world of fact and reason challenges the maintenance of the in-group’s domination over the out-group. (The out-group, depending on the circumstances, can be anyone who’s “anti-cop”; and like Barr, police departments often invent crimes to enforce, like breaking curfew.)

That’s textbook fascism.

Remember, Gugino is elderly. He’s white. He’s well-known. Now imagine, or recall, what communities of color are right now experiencing — the gaslighting, the sadism, the disrespect and outright violation of guaranteed civil rights and civil liberties. Thanks to racism, white Americans can live their whole lives not knowing what their fellow citizens endure. Thanks to a fascist president, they know. Defeating him, however, isn’t enough. In one sense Barr is right. All of us are, or should be, Antifa.

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.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 June 2020

Word Count: 924

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It was a bare-knuckle brawl of the first order. It took place in Washington, D.C., and it resulted in a KO. The winners? Lobbyists and the defense industry. The losers? Us. And odds on, you didn’t even know that it happened. Few Americans did, which is why it’s worth telling the story of how Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari money flooded the nation’s capital and, in the process, American policy went down for the count.

The fight began three years ago this month. Sure, the pugilists hadn’t really liked each other that much before then, but what happened in 2017 was the foreign-policy equivalent of a sucker punch. On the morning of June 5th, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and Bahrain announced that they were severing diplomatic ties with Qatar, the small but wealthy emirate in the Persian Gulf, and establishing a land, air, and sea blockade of their regional rival, purportedly because of its ties to terrorism.

The move stunned the Qataris, who responded in ways that would later become familiar during the Covid-19 pandemic — by emptying supermarket shelves and hoarding essentials they worried would quickly run out. Their initial fears were not unwarranted, as their neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were even reported to be planning to launch a military invasion of Qatar in the weeks to come (one that would be thwarted only by the strong objections of Donald Trump’s then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson).

To make sense of this now three-year-old conflict, which turned aspects of American policy in the Middle East ranging from the war in Yemen to the more than 10,000 American military personnel stationed in Qatar into political footballs, means refocusing on Washington and the extraordinary influence operations the Saudis, Emiratis, and Qataris ran there. That, in turn, means analyzing Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) documents filed by firms representing all three countries since the spat began. Do that and you’ll come across a no-punches-barred bout of lobbying in the U.S. capital that would have made Rocky envious.

The Saudis come out swinging The stage had been set for the blockade of Qatar seven months before it began when Donald Trump was elected president. Just as his victory shocked the American public, so it caught many foreign governments off guard. In response, they quickly sought out the services of anyone with ties to the incoming administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. The Saudis and Emiratis were no exception. In 2016, both countries had reported spending a little more than $10 million on FARA registered lobbying firms. By the end of 2017, UAE spending had nearly doubled to $19.5 million, while the Saudi’s had soared to $27.3 million.

In the months following Donald Trump’s November triumph, the Saudis, for instance, added several firms with ties to him or the Republicans to an already sizeable list of companies registered under FARA as representing their interests. For example, they brought on the CGCN Group whose president and chief policy officer, Michael Catanzaro, was on Trump’s transition team and then served in his administration. To court the Republican Congress, they hired the McKeon Group, run by former Republican Representative Buck McKeon, who had previously served as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

And that was just registered foreign agents. A number of actors who had not registered under FARA were actively pushing the Saudi and Emirati agendas, chief among them Elliott Broidy and George Nader. Broidy, a top fundraiser for Trump’s campaign, and Nader, his business partner, already had a wide range of interests in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. To help secure them, the two men embarked on a campaign to turn the new president and the Republican establishment against Qatar. One result was a Broidy-inspired, UAE-funded anti-Qatar conference hosted in May 2017 by a prominent Washington think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. It conveniently offered Representative Ed Royce (R-CA) a platform to discuss his plans to introduce a bill, HR 2712, that would label Qatar a state sponsor of terrorism. It was to be introduced in the House of Representatives just two days after the conference ended.

Qatar, mind you, had been a U.S. ally in the Middle East and was the home of Al Udeid Air Base, where more than 10,000 American soldiers are still stationed. So that bill represented a striking development in American-Qatari relations and was a clearly traceable result of Saudi and UAE lobbying efforts.

The unregistered influence of players like Broidy and Nader was evidently backed by other FARA-registered Saudi and UAE foreign agents actively pushing the bill. For example, Qorvis Communications, a long-time public relations mouthpiece for the Saudis, circulated a document titled “Qatar’s History of Funding Terrorism and Extremism,” claiming that country was funding Al-Nusra, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other groups. (Not surprisingly, it included a supportive quote from David Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)

While that anti-Qatar crusade was ramping up in Washington, the president himself was being wooed by the Saudi royals in Riyadh on his first official trip abroad. They gave him the literal royal treatment and their efforts appeared to pay off when, just a day after the blockade began, Trump tweeted, “During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar — look!”

A week after the imposition of the blockade, the Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for Al Udeid Air Base to be moved to the UAE, a development the Qataris feared could open the door for an eventual invasion of their country.

However, this Saudi and Emirati onslaught did not go unanswered.

Qatar strikes back Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, was caught flat-footed by the influence operations of the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates. The year before Donald Trump became president, the Qataris had spent just $2.7 million on lobbying and public relations firms, less than a third of what the Saudis and UAE paid out, according to FARA records. But they now moved swiftly to shore up their country’s image as a crucial American ally. They went on an instant hiring spree, scooping up lobbying and public-relations firms with close ties to Trump and congressional Republicans. Just two days after the blockade began, for instance, they inked a deal with the law firm of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, paying $2.5 million for just its first 90 days of work.

They also quickly obtained the services of Stonington Strategies. Headed by Nick Muzin, who had worked on Trump’s election campaign, the firm promptly set out to court 250 Trump “influencers,” as Julie Bykowicz of the Wall Street Journal reported. Among others, Stonington’s campaign sought to woo prominent Fox News personalities Trump paid special attention to like former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. He was paid $50,000 to travel to Qatar just months later.

In September 2017, the Qataris also hired Bluefront Strategies to craft a comprehensive multimedia operation, which was to include commercials on all the major news networks, as well as digital and printed ads in an array of prominent publications, and a “Lift the Blockade” campaign on social media. Meanwhile, ads on Google and YouTube were to highlight the illegality of the blockade and the country’s contributions to fighting terrorism. Bluefront Strategies was to influence public opinion before the next session of the U.N. General Assembly that month. Qatar and its proxies then used the campaign “to target key decision-makers attending the General Assembly, including Trump” to gain support on that most global of stages.

Its agents weren’t just playing defense, either. They actively attacked the Saudi lobby. For example, Barry Bennett of Avenue Strategies, a PR firm they hired, sent a letter to the assistant attorney general for national security accusing Saudi Arabia and the Saudi American Public Relation Affairs Committee (SAPRAC) of FARA violations in their funding of an expensive media campaign meant to connect Qatar’s leaders with violent extremism and acts of terror.

Such counterpunches proved remarkably successful. SAPRAC eventually felt obliged to register with FARA. Meanwhile, Huckabee tweeted, “Just back from a few days in surprisingly beautiful, modern, and hospitable Doha, Qatar.” Finally, at that U.N. meeting, President Trump actually sat down with Emir al-Thani of Qatar and said, “We’ve been friends a long time… I have a very strong feeling [the Qatar diplomatic crisis] will be solved quickly.” They both then emphasized the “tremendous” and “strong” relationship between their countries.

The Qataris next mounted a concerted defense against HR 2712. Lobbying firms they hired, particularly Avenue Strategies and Husch Blackwell, launched a multifaceted campaign to prevent that legislation from passing. Elliott Broidy even claimed in a lawsuit that the Qatari government and several of its lobbyists had hacked his email account and distributed private emails of his to members of Congress in an attempt to discredit his work for the Saudis.

In November 2017, Barry Bennett from Avenue Strategies went on the attack, using a powerful weapon in Washington politics: Israel. He distributed a letter to members of Congress written by a former high-ranking official in the Israeli national security establishment explicitly stating that Qatar had not provided military support to Hamas, as HR 2712 claimed it had.

Three months later, Husch Blackwell all but threatened Congress and the Trump administration with the cancellation of a $6.2 billion Boeing contract to sell F-15 fighters to the Qatari military (and the potential loss of thousands of associated jobs) if the bill passed and sanctions were imposed on that country. All of this was linked to a concerted effort by Qatari agents to contact “nearly two dozen House offices, including then House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy,” to prevent the bill’s passage, according to a report by the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy where we work. Ultimately, HR 2712 died a slow death in Congress and never became law.

The Saudi bloc’s battle for the war in Yemen Just as Qatar started to turn the tide in the fight for influence in Washington, the Saudis and their allies faced another problem: Congress began moving to sever support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. On February 28, 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a joint resolution to withdraw U.S. support for that war. According to FARA filings, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP, representing the Saudi ministry of foreign affairs, contacted several members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, particularly Democrats, presumably to persuade them to vote against the measure.

That March, the firm sent out dozens of emails to members of Congress inviting them to a gala dinner with the key Saudi royal, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself. According to the invitation from the CGCN Group, another FARA-registered firm representing the Saudis, the “KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia]-USA Partnership Gala Dinner” was to emphasize the “enduring defense and counter-terrorism cooperation” and “historic alliance” between the two countries. It would end up taking place just two days after the Senate voted to table Sanders’s bill.

Emirati lobbyists similarly reached out to Congress to maintain support for their role in that war. Hagir Elawad & Associates, for example, distributed an op-ed written by the UAE minister of state for foreign affairs justifying the war, as well as a letter written by that country’s ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, to 50 congressional contacts defending the Saudi-led coalition’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties and arguing that “the United States has a clear stake in the coalition’s success in Yemen.”

When that conflict began, Qatar was still a member of the coalition, but the imposition of the blockade led it to withdraw its forces from Yemen. Qatari officials then used the country’s media empire, centered on the broadcaster Al Jazeera, to highlight the disastrous aspects of the ongoing war. In doing so, they provided the Saudis and Emiratis with yet another reason to focus their own influence machines on both Qatar’s and Al Jazeera’s destruction. (That network’s closure was, in fact, one of the original 13 demands the Saudis and Emiratis had made for lifting the blockade.)

From the moment it was founded in 1996, Al Jazeera had been an instrument of Qatari soft power, so it was hardly surprising that the UAE had long pressured members of Congress to force the network to register under FARA as a foreign agent. And Emirati lobbying efforts were not in vain. In early March 2018, 19 members of Congress signed and sent a letter to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions urging the Justice Department to demand that Al Jazeera be registered under FARA. Another such letter sent to the Justice Department in June 2019 by six senators and two representatives asked “why Al Jazeera and its employees have not been required to register.” According to FARA filings, all but one of those representatives had either received campaign contributions from or been contacted by a Saudi or Emirati lobbying firm. Al Jazeera, however, has yet to register.

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi Despite the efforts of Saudi and Emirati lobbyists in the early months of 2018, the emir of Qatar still managed to land an invitation to the Oval Office. At their meeting that April 10th, President Trump again described al-Thani as a “friend” and a “great gentleman” as well. The emir, in turn, thanked the president for “supporting us during this blockade.”

If Trump’s cozying up to him was a setback for the Saudis, the murder of critic and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi nearly did in the Saudi lobbying juggernaut as well. The CIA later confirmed that the crown prince himself had ordered that Saudi citizen’s assassination at the country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

As a result, some lobbying firms cut ties with the kingdom and its influence on Capitol Hill waned, as did positive public opinion about Saudi Arabia. In December 2018, the Senate passed the Sanders bill to end support for the war in Yemen. Both houses of Congress also passed a War Powers resolution to end involvement in that conflict, a historic congressional move in this century, even if later vetoed by President Trump (as were a series of attempts to block his treasured arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates).

Given the president’s unyielding support for the Saudis and Emiratis as especially lucrative customers for this country’s defense industry, the Qataris have clearly decided to crib the Saudi playbook. In May, that country purchased 24 Apache helicopters for $3 billion and, a few months later, agreed to pay for and manage a $1.8 billion expansion of Al Udeid Air Base to ensure the American military’s continued presence for the foreseeable future. In doing so, Qatar was visibly at work coopting two of the most powerful lobbies in Washington: the military and the weapons makers.

And the winners are… Though Qatar faced a near-existential threat to its survival when the blockade began, three years later it’s not only surviving, but thriving thanks significantly to its influence operations in Washington. They have helped immeasurably to deepen economic, diplomatic, and military relations between the two countries.

Meanwhile, the emir’s rivals in Riyadh not only failed to make their blockade a success, but saw their influence wane appreciably in the U.S. as they stumbled from one public relations fiasco to the next. Even their staunchest defender, Donald Trump, recently threatened to sever U.S. military support for the Kingdom if the Saudi royals didn’t end their oil war with Russia (which they promptly did).

In truth, however, the real loser in this struggle for influence hasn’t been Saudi Arabia or the Emiratis, it’s been America. After all, the efforts of both sides to deepen their ties with the military-industrial complex (reinforcing the hyper-militarization of U.S. foreign policy) and increase their sway in Congress have ensured that the real interests of this country played second fiddle to those of Middle Eastern despots. Certainly, their acts helped ensure near historic levels of arms sales to the region, while prolonging the wars in Yemen and Syria, and so contributing to death and devastation on an almost unimaginable scale.

None of this had anything to do with the real interests of Americans, unless you mean the arms industry and K Street lobbyists who have been the only clear American winners in this never-ending PR war in Washington. In the process, those three Persian Gulf states have delivered a genuine knockout blow to the very idea that U.S. foreign policy should be driven by national — not special — interests.

Morgan Palumbo is a researcher with the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy. Jessica Draper is a researcher with the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative and Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. This article originated at TomDispatch.

Copyright ©2020 Morgan Palumbo and Jessica Draper — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 June 2020

Word Count: 2,768

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The tide is not turning. The tipping point is not here.

And I’m very tired of otherwise very smart white people reducing all American politics to the victory or defeat of Donald Trump. One presidential election is not going to reform our government. One presidential election is not going to heal our wounds.

It’s as if the pundit corps and other elites can’t see with their own eyes what white police officers are doing — right now — to American citizens deemed the enemy. Do they believe electing a Democrat will mend a broken nation? Do they believe legitimate, institutionalized and legal sadism will end with Joe Biden’s presidency? I hope not.

In fact, corrupt police departments nationwide will benefit greatly from a Democratic turn, not in material ways, I hasten to add, but because the nation’s gaze will turn away from local atrocities committed in the name of law and order and instead toward a new administration and its palace intrigues. That will give rotten cop shops all the room they need to carry on, which means fascism as usual for black and brown people while for white people, it amounts to congratulating themselves for a job well done.

If white allies marching in the streets really believe that black lives matter, their united struggle for liberty and justice for all must not stop in November. Their united struggle must become part of America’s political culture, of the vocabulary we use to talk about national affairs, and central to our moral fiber. Culture, language, morality, black interest and white interest — these must be fused in order to become mainstream, and hence the beating heart of whatever new political regime awaits in the years ahead.

This is, or should be, a movement of morality as much as it is a movement of politics. Without a group effort, the George Floyd protests risk the same fate as the Occupy Wall Street Movement, becoming a political slogan more than a political program. White Americans may be experiencing a “great awokening,” as Matt Yglesias’ claimed last year. The key, however, will be staying woke long after Donald Trump is gone. And staying woke will require seeing politics as being about more than mere politics.

The Rev. William Barber of North Carolina believes the history of the United States can be broken into three epochs, or three “reconstructions,” in which white Americans and black Americans fused their interests — what he calls “fusion politics” — in order to create a new birth of freedom. The first reconstruction came after the Civil War with the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. The second reconstruction came in the late 1960s with passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. The third reconstruction, Barber believes, is currently progressing under the shadow of Barack Obama’s election, and the larger shadow of the white backlash against it. Each of these epochs saw more than fused interests, though. They saw fused destinies.

The pundit corps might not see it, but I suspect normal people are starting to. There’s something about George Floyd’s murder — under the illegitimate rule of a president who got away with treason before mismanaging a pandemic that has killed more than 112,500 Americans — that touches Americans spiritually, that pokes a throbbing knot of public sin, offensive not only to traditional faith in right and wrong, but to God, too. Normal people seem to feel we’ve taken a turn down a winding road toward cruelty and serfdom, and I sense a deep desire for correction, for the straight and the narrow, and for healing but especially redemption on the part of white allies, a yearning they wrongly believed was realized with the election of a black president.

You could say “injustice to one is injustice to all” is a political statement. But you could also say it’s also a religious statement. Moreover, demanding equal justice is faith in action. Here’s how the Rev. Michael Bulkley of Kingdom Life Christian Church in Milford, Conn., who spoke recently for a church coalition in New Haven, put it:

 Our country is broken. When something is broken and needs fixing you must start someplace. This afternoon is not a protest, [protests] are necessary, but equally necessary is that churches stand together in prayer, unity, and love. We represent churches from diverse backgrounds, culturally, theologically, generationally. But we are bound together by the recognition that we must stand against injustice, we must pray for peace, and we must love as Christ loved (italics are most emphatically mind).

“Prayer, unity and love” are the hallmarks of what might be called a new Great Awakening in which religious identity takes a backseat to religious action. White evangelical Christians, such as Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, of Texas, like to claim that the sin of racism can be cleansed by loving God. Faith alone, however, isn’t enough.

Doing unto others what you would have done unto you, the teachings of Christ and the “Golden Rule” principle common to all the world’s religions — these seem to be moving from the margins of political culture to the center. The tide is not turning. The tipping point is not here. Politics is about more than elections. It’s more than about politics. When the political and religious meaning of “good works” are fused, change will come.

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.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 June 2020

Word Count: 885

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