I introduced Wednesday the idea of barbarism. “Fascism,” “white supremacy,” “autocracy” and other such labels go some way toward describing our political moment, but, as I said, they are abstract and “do not carry the weight of blood and pain that ‘barbarism’ carries.” We can’t shame a president and Republican Party immune to shame, but we can, and must, name their behavior. When “liberty” means sacrificing the old and weak; when “law and order” means tolerating homicide by agents of the state; when “security” means kidnapping infants — that’s barbarism.

In this, I’m borrowing from the peerless Jedediah Britton-Purdy, who offered two definitions of barbarism in Dissent’s special issue on “Democracy and Barbarism.” First: “a system that makes people into one another’s enemies, victims, and oppressors.” Second: “a system that keeps its people in the dark and gives them no way out. A system, that is, that makes the world as it is both inescapable and unintelligible.”

I want to gloss his work more today by discussing a related aspect: perversion.

By this, I mean taking something we would normally think of as right and good, and turning it into something wrong and bad. Take, for instance, wearing masks in public. Any reasonable person would say that wearing a mask in the middle of a pandemic that has now killed more than 103,000 people (thirty-four 9/11s) and unemployed more than 40 million others is a no-brainer. At the very least, better to be safe than sorry. In fact, wearing a mask is for your benefit as well as the benefit of everyone around you.

Fortunately, polls tell us most people agree. Some don’t, of course, and that’s OK, except that they don’t stop at disagreeing. They take something right and good and turn into something wrong and bad, because doing so advances whatever agenda they might have, which might be merely the barbaric desire to watch the world burn, as Bruce Wayne’s butler said in one of the Batman movies. One propagandist went so far as to call masks a symbol of “social control” intended to deprive us of our freedom. That article, since retweeted by the president, is a perfect example of perversion. The headline: “Mandatory Masks Aren’t About Safety, They’re About Social Control.”

It’s a perfect example not only because it flips morality on its head, but because it masks (no pun intended) the context of power in which political behavior occurs. It conceals who’s doing what to whom. Indeed, there may be bad actors trying to control us, but they are not people wearing masks or politely asking that you wear one. More likely, they are people sabotaging the common good, creating conditions in which a deadly virus can spread more easily, thus pinning normal people between the need to stay healthy and the need to stay employed, literally robbing their freedom. If anyone is abetting social control, it’s paid propagandists yawping about “social control.”

Perversion comes in racist forms, too. It’s not just taking something that’s good and making it bad. It can pervert morality so what’s good for white people is bad for black people. White people carrying semi-automatic rifles to intimidate legislators responsible for the health and well-being of their constituents? That’s an exercise of their guaranteed constitutional rights. That’s good! Unarmed black people demanding justice after a white cop murdered an unarmed black man on video? That’s not good! Those are thugs fomenting a violent insurrection deserving the full force of the state.

Fox’s Tucker Carlson is a masterful pervert. In truth, it’s African-Americans and other citizens of color who need protection from the legitimate but unjust violence of the state. In Carlson’s perverse world, however, everything is upside down, backward and inside out. It’s “society,” Carlson said, that needs protection by the state from people suffering from the legitimate but unjust violence of the state. If that sounds like a recipe for crazy-making, that’s because it is — and it is intended. As Britton-Purdy said of systemic barbarism: It “makes the world as it is both inescapable and unintelligible.”

You could call all this hypocrisy, but that doesn’t have much affect on a president or a party immune to shame. Perversion, however, is more accurate and much more potent. Moreover, barbarism and perversion are retreats from civility, but they’re more than that. They are retreats from the social contract, common good and civilization. Some people are deserving of the law’s privileges and protections. Some people are deserving of the law’s restrictions and punishments. This hierarchy of power is inherently sadist, because sadism is inherent to its preservation. Someone must suffer. Someone will.

But not someone else. Perverts and barbarians like Tucker Carlson don’t believe they’re hurting themselves but in time everyone suffers. A free and open political community cannot endure when some of its members pervert its values. At some point, other members are going to understand, with finality, that those claiming to be champions of the republic are truly its enemies. When that happens, they will be barred from the public square, and from appealing to the common good. There can be no common cause or common fate with political perverts and barbarians. The only answer is exile.

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: 29 May 2020

Word Count: 865

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The president is expected to sign today an executive order that could weaken legal immunity shielding tech firms hosting third-party content on their websites. The order could empower regulators to “rethink a portion of law known as Section 230. … That law spares tech companies from being held liable for the comments, videos and other content posted by users on their platforms,” according to reporting by the Post.

Section 230 is problematic. Its virtues are worthy of serious and prolonged debate. Donald Trump, however, is hardly interested in the nuances of free speech, free press, and intellectual property. His interests are cruder and less noble, his goal badgering into submission social media companies daring to act as good corporate citizens who rightly see the need to prevent disinformation from poisoning our political discourse.

A public square-turned-brownfield is favorable to Trump. Take one look at his Twitter feed (just one!) to discover a defiled stew of demagoguery, violence and lies. Today, for instance, he retweeted a video in which a supporter says, “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” His feed embodies Jedediah Britton-Purdy’s second definition of barbarism: “a system that keeps its people in the dark and gives them no way out. A system, that is, that makes the world as it is both inescapable and unintelligible.”

Eventually, someone somewhere is going to bring up the word “socialism” to describe Trump’s attempt at intimidation and censorship. Twitter and other tech firms are, after all, private firms (though publicly traded). In these here United States, a president can’t straw-boss free enterprise into doing whatever he wants, and any whiff of government overreach or bureaucratic tyranny is a sign of “Communist Contagion.”

As I have said before, this lens is ideological and old. It’s a product of the mid-20th century, a time when the US really was the antipode to a real Communist state. Conservatives at that time, Republican as well as Democratic, branded liberals as “Communists” whenever they fought for a government of, by and for the people. By their conservative standard, any redistribution of wealth was “Communist.” By that same standard, the current Republican Party, which cut taxes for billionaires in the middle of pandemic, is more Communist than Vlad Lenin and Joe Stalin combined. Of course, that’s nonsense. But talking nonsense never stopped anyone from talking.

This lens needs upgrading so we can see clearly what’s happening in the 21st century. I’d submit what’s happening isn’t big-c communist in any way connected with the old Soviet bloc but it is, in fact, totalitarian in its objectives, one being censorship. On the one hand, the president will not be restrained from calling on supporters to scare and bully critics and rivals. (One of Trump’s sons this morning singled out a Jewish journalist for ridicule and scorn.) On the other, the administration is moving to conceal information deleterious to the president. It announced this morning that, contrary to precedent, it will not release economic forecasts indicating recession.

I suspect even the GOP’s donor class, busy as it is rehashing the hoary rhetoric of the Cold War, doesn’t suspect its grip on federal power may be slipping. It’s one thing for corporations to have captured government (which is currently the case), quite another to think government has captured corporations. But as economic growth slows and consumer demand collapses, it’s possible to imagine corporations becoming so dependent on the government to maximize shareholder value that they lose control to an authoritarian demagogue believing himself to be the embodiment of the state.

Trump is trying to blame China for the pandemic, with mixed success, but he goes out of his way to compliment, flatter and suck up to that country’s leader, Xi Jinping. Take that for what you will, but understand that Xi’s government is also refusing to release economic forecasts that might indicate recession (which is certainly the case). I see Xi as modeling something for Trump — a corporatist state in which corporations, as they do in China, kneel before the state, gladly kneel in fact, for kneeling is profitable.

We are seeing hints of this dynamic happening here already. Facebook’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg, criticized Twitter’s decision to fact-check Trump. To defend the integrity of the public square would take work and resources, and cut into profits. Better to give in to Trump’s bad faith demands for free and unfettered “free speech” so that he and his confederates can turn the public square into a toxic wasteland in which citizens can’t figure out what’s true, what’s false, before surrendering to will of Dear Leader.

It’s easy this way. It’s better this way. It’s more profitable this way.

America is turning into China.

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: 28 May 2020

Word Count: 780

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Many economists believe that a recession is already underway. So do millions of Americans struggling with bills and job losses. While the ghosts of the 2008 financial crisis that sent inequality soaring to new heights in this country are still with us, it’s become abundantly clear that the economic disaster brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has already left the initial shock of that crisis in the dust. While the world has certainly experienced its share of staggering jolts in the past, this cycle of events is likely to prove unparalleled.

The swiftness with which the coronavirus has stolen lives and crippled the economy has been both devastating and unprecedented in living memory. Whatever happens from this moment on, a new and defining chapter in the history of the world is being written right now and we are that history.

Still, to get our bearings, it’s worth glancing back nearly a century, to a time when another economic crisis ravaged the country. While the U.S. has come a long way since the Great Depression, there are still lessons to be learned from it about where we might be heading today. Four key factors from that era — unemployment, the economy, the market, and the Federal Reserve’s response — can provide us with a roadmap for putting this era into historical context.

Unemployment then and now In 1933, the height of the Great Depression, the U.S. unemployment rate reached a stunning 24.9%. In an eerie parallel with today, that double-digit increase had leapt from an era of remarkably low unemployment, 3.2% in the crash year of 1929. By mid-1931, mass layoffs were the new norm and despair was acute and widespread.

Fast forward to the present. In February, the unemployment rate stood at a similar 3.5%. Yet, by May 22nd, in the aftermath of city and state shutdowns and coronavirus shocks, including the collapse of the airline industry and professional sports, new filings for unemployment claims hit an estimated 40 million in 10 weeks, the most jobs lost in the shortest period in American history.

In April, the official unemployment rate reached 14.7%, the worst since the Great Depression, and that official figure doesn’t even account for the full scope of the disaster underway. It excludes workers the Bureau of Labor Statistics considers “marginally attached” to the workforce, meaning those not looking for a job because the prospects are so dim, or those who were only laboring part-time. If you factor them in, the unemployment rate already stands at a Great Depression-level 22.8%. Some industries, of course, felt more pain than others. Employment in the leisure and hospitality sector, for instance, fell in April by 7.7 million, or 47%.

Worse yet, low-wage workers have taken the hardest hit. According to a recent Federal Reserve survey, although one in five American workers have lost their jobs, among the lowest-earning Americans, 40% have done so. Among the highest-earning American workers (many of whom could work from home), the rate was “only” 9%.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard has already predicted that the unemployment rate could reach 30% before the end of June. Other Fed economists have suggested that it could go even higher, exceeding Great Depression levels, a chilling thought. As the country, pushed by President Trump’s reelection desires, “reopens” relatively quickly (at whatever cost in further Covid-19 deaths), many workers will undoubtedly be brought back or rehired, but there’s no avoiding the obvious reality that any number of “temporary” layoffs will become permanent realities.

The economy: A century apart yet much the same When Covid-19 first hit and self-isolation set in, the stock market plunged and many businesses were forced to shut down normal operations. Various economists and media commentators then began musing about a V-shaped economic rebound — that is, a quick drop followed by a quick recovery.

As the fallout and uncertainty only expanded, however, it’s become increasingly evident that such a pattern was a fantasy. At this point, the best recovery outcome imaginable would be U-shaped in which the bottoming-out period lasted significantly longer before we started heading up again. But don’t count on that either. Consider the possibility of an elongated L, in which for the vast majority of Americans the economy just limps along for endless months, if not years (even if the stock market rallies).

In 1930, the American gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 8.5% as the economy contracted in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929. It would shrink a further 6.4% in 1931 and another 12.9% in 1932. It wasn’t just the crash that did in that economy. The economic excesses of the 1920s and the borrowing that supported it were also responsible. Money funneled into the stock market in a previous age of inequality fueled grotesque financial speculation. Instead of financing productive investments, the markets provided only the illusion of stability and prosperity while enriching the few at the top. (Sound familiar in the age of Donald Trump?)

Yet the Republican president of that moment, Herbert Hoover, didn’t want to admit that the bottom had truly fallen out on his watch. On May Day 1930, for instance, he declared, “We have now passed the worst, and with continued unity of effort, we shall rapidly recover.” (Such a claim, too, should ring a few bells in 2020 America.) That statement became the marker for a nearly two-year Dow Jones average dive to a Depression-low of a mere 41 points on July 8, 1932. His inability to truly take in what was right in front of his eyes only lengthened the Great Depression.

Turning to the present, the CARES Act, signed into law by President Trump on March 27th, unleashed an estimated $2.2 trillion in government relief (significant parts of which were aimed at giant corporations and the wealthy). That, combined with the Federal Reserve’s backing of the economy, could add up to perhaps $6.2 trillion. What promptly transpired for Wall Street, which had previously seen the Dow plunge 34%, was one of the best months for the stock market in more than 33 years.

Beltway leaders had learned the pivotal lesson of the moment: even if the market’s not the economy, it always craves more. They stood ready to green-light Wall Street with yet another stimulus package skewed to help corporate interests, even as the majority of Americans on Main Street were simply left further behind.

Meanwhile, the gross domestic product had fallen 4.8% in the first quarter of 2020, before Covid-19 and the corresponding social shutdown really hit hard. In other words, GDP for the second quarter of this year is guaranteed to be truly awful. Estimates of its contraction range from 20% to 30%, either of which would eclipse the contractions of the Great Depression era.

The stock market: A casino shadowing an economic problem The Roaring Twenties claimed that moniker not just thanks to the free-flowing bootlegged booze but rampant financial speculation — and the lack of rules to protect citizens from nefarious Wall Street shenanigans. Having hit record highs in the summer of 1929, stock prices began their decline that September. By mid-October, the fall had gained steam. On October 24th, as panic set in on what would become known as “Black Thursday,” a then-record 12,894,650 shares were traded by investors and speculators seeking to lock in profits before the bottom fell out of the market.

By the next Monday — “Black Monday” — it had gone into free fall. And that would be followed by “Black Tuesday,” when stock prices plummeted yet further amid record trading volume. Billions of dollars were lost and thousands of investors wiped out. (Once upon a time, I even wrote a novel about that era called — you guessed it — Black Tuesday.)

By then, the Dow had dropped 24.8% in three days, though for several weeks thereafter stock prices would partially recover and bond prices rise on rumors that the Federal Reserve was going to purchase government securities. (Again, that should sound familiar in 2020.)

Bankers, then fortified by the Fed, did indeed inject yet more speculative money into the market in the post-crash moment, yet none of this could hide what were by then obvious systemic problems in the economy, which meant that prices soon headed south again. By July 1932, stocks were worth only 20% of their 1929 values and the country had plunged into the Great Depression. It would take years, substantive federal action, and ultimately an industrial mobilization for World War II to truly turn the situation around.

Fast forward to 2020. By March 23rd, when the coronavirus sell-off was underway, the Dow had lost about 35% of its value. Since then, equity markets, though down significantly from their February peaks, have rallied and the Dow has risen about 30%.

As in 1929-1930, this could all prove to be an illusion, especially since the market’s April rally did not reflect the longer-term economic issues that lie ahead. It was in large part a response to something that didn’t exist during those crash years of the Great Depression: an extremely amped up Federal Reserve.

The Fed: A revamped mechanism from the last depression In the wake of the Crash of 1929, Wall Street bankers pushed the Fed to keep interest rates low so they could borrow money more easily to make up for their losses. In May 1932, the Fed finally initiated a massive bond-buying program, agreeing to purchase $26 million of them from its member banks each week.

The idea was that those banks would sell their U.S. Treasury bonds to the Fed and use that money to pay off their debts. They could then lend out the remaining cash to a desperate Main Street. As it happened, however, they didn’t launch such a generous loan program (another Great Depression reality that might ring a bell today).

The Fed eventually lowered rates from to 2.5% in 1934 to 1.5% in September 1937 to inject more money into the system. That did not, however, inspire an outpouring of lending either, nor did rates make it down to zero.

In the wake of the Covid-19 shutdowns, the Fed has indeed cut rates to zero. As Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said on May 13th, “The scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent, significantly worse than any recession since World War II.” He added: “We have acted with unprecedented speed and force.” His counterpart, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, even termed what was going on “a war.”

Because of quantitative easing — the Fed’s purchasing of securities, a term that didn’t exist in the Great Depression era — its balance sheet now sits at nearly $7 trillion spent. That’s almost double the figure from just last summer and equivalent to one-third of the $21.5 trillion gross domestic product. The Fed has been injecting money into the markets and scarfing up securities backed by debt at — to steal a term the president only recently applied toward developing a coronavirus vaccine — “warp speed.”

With a genuine arsenal at its disposal to fight this “war,” the Fed’s activities are jacked up on the financial equivalent of steroids. The nation’s central bank is prepared to provide money to the financial system in quantities and ways unimaginable in the Great Depression era.

Why history matters What’s happening today is not, of course, a replica of the Great Depression. That nightmare was catalyzed by a prolonged market crash, thanks to banks lying about the real value of certain securities and too much debt in the system. Today’s crisis has been catalyzed by a viral pandemic spreading across the planet, by supply-and-demand shocks the world over, and by the collapse of a global economic system, as well as widespread lockdowns. Yet certain factors are common to both eras in which economic disaster was exacerbated by too much corporate debt, a Fed-stoked market rally, and grotesque levels of inequality.

A century ago, the Fed put just a financial toe in the water to support the markets on the assumption that this would be enough to sustain the economy. Today, it has jumped in big time and Chairman Powell has vowed that it “is not going to run out of ammunition.” The result could be a financial tug of war that lasts years.

The Fed can electronically print money, but it can’t print jobs. It can buy bonds, but it can’t cure a virus. It can continue to try to stimulate the market, but it can’t banish fear. As it happens, the economy needs much more than Fed-style monetary support. As even Powell noted on May 13th, “Additional fiscal support could be costly, but worth it if it helps avoid long-term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery. This tradeoff is one for our elected representatives, who wield powers of taxation and spending.”

What’s needed, above all, is greater strategic action from Washington politicians who are more desperately divided and tribalized than ever in the Trump era. History tells us that political actions matter even more in times of crisis. During the Great Depression, the state of the country became so bad that, in 1932, Herbert Hoover lost the presidential vote to Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide. However, it took until 1934, even with a president ready to do much to help Americans in trouble, for the country to slowly emerge from the malaise.

Though unemployment remained near 22% then, the national mood lifted (and people started to spend again) in part thanks to growing confidence in President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Those included the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority — the nation’s first regional supplier of public power — numerous jobs programs, and the passage of the Social Security Act. Add to that the regulation of the banking system through the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which protected ordinary people’s bank deposits and note as well that such forward-looking, economy-stabilizing programs were bipartisan acts.

In the face of devastation today, despite multi-trillion-dollar federal stimulus packages, real political action has been lackluster at best. Relief efforts have been skewed toward helping banks and big corporations rather than the Main Street economy. No substantive plan has been offered for real national action to get people working again in ways that would reflect the new norms of the Covid-19 era.

Roosevelt saw such an opportunity to bolster confidence by taking on banking reform (with the surprising help of bankers), launching public works initiatives, and establishing infrastructure programs meant to build up the nation, the very opposite of the speculative activity that enflamed the Crash of 1929. That’s just the sort of thing that’s needed to sustain the economy in our truly bad times (whether the coronavirus becomes seasonal or not).

Floating trillions to Wall Street banks and big corporations might push their share prices up, but it won’t solve the issues that truly matter. Struggling small businesses, stranded high school and college graduates with nowhere to land, and workers in devastated businesses that won’t see their jobs return any time soon are now guaranteed one thing: they’ll be left behind by just about any version of an attempted bipartisan “recovery.” For them, a Newer Deal is desperately needed, one that provides a cushion for workers, new openings for the young, better healthcare prospects for all, and infrastructure projects that meet the challenges of a post-coronavirus world.

As President Roosevelt told Americans in the midst of the Great Depression: “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

As long as Donald Trump is in the White House, focusing on optimizing his reelection prospects, he alone has a rendezvous with destiny. But it’s crucial, now more than ever, not to lose sight of the dream that tomorrow can be better than today. The only real way forward, in the end, is to meet the complex challenges of the Covid-19 moment with creative and long-lasting solutions.

Nomi Prins, a former Wall Street executive, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). Her latest book is Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World. She is also the author of All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power and five other books. Special thanks go to researcher Craig Wilson for his superb work on this piece.

Copyright ©2020 Nomi Prins — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 May 2020

Word Count: 2,664

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TUNIS — France is moving to regain its lost influence in Tunisia, in a move seen as an attempt to break its isolation in Libya, especially after recent gains on the ground made in western Libya by Islamist militias backed by Turkey.

French Foreign Minister John-Yves Le Drian expressed his concern Wednesday that “a Syrian scenario is being played out in Libya,” describing the situation as “very disturbing.”

On Tuesday evening, Tunisian Defence Minister Imed Hazgui discussed by phone the situation in Libya with his French counterpart, Florence Barley. The Tunisian minister stressed his country’s opposition to all forms of foreign interference in Libya, and reiterated Tunisia’s call for a Libyan-Libyan solution to the conflict.

The French minister expressed satisfaction at  the current state of relations between Tunisia and France and pledged to further develop them with the aim of developing a joint long-term plan, according to the Tunisian statement.

Barley also invited her Tunisian counterpart to head the Tunisian delegation to the 28th session of the joint French-Tunisian Military Committee to be held in Paris in late September.

The two ministers discussed ways to strengthen Tunisian-French military cooperation in various fields, especially in training officers, exchanging expertise and upgrading military equipment.

Since 2011, the US, and to a certain extent Turkey, have had a virtual monopoly on military cooperation and training agreements with Tunisia. Both countries have provided arms and equipment to the Tunisian armed forces, a development reflecting France’s declining influence in the domain.

The United States’ main contribution has been in the field of surveillance. Washington has provided and installed surveillance systems on the Tunisian-Libyan border, an electronic monitoring system along the Tunisian coastline and a highly sensitive long-range radar and camera monitoring stations extending from the Tunisian-Libyan maritime border to the Tunisian-Algerian border.

Tunisian political analyst Mustafa Abdelkabir said that Tunisian-French relations are important for Paris, which explains why the French defence minister insisted on the need to strengthen military cooperation.

He told The Arab Weekly that “the important strategic location of Tunisia and its geography are important to Paris and to all countries that have a military interest in Libya.”

“What has been happening recently in Libya seems to indicate that an international military showdown will most likely be taking place soon in Libya, especially after the recent developments due to the increased Turkish role in Libya that led to the takeover of the Al-Watiya base by the GNA forces,” Abdelkabir said.

A few reports have pointed out that Turkey has begun taking concrete steps to establish a permanent military presence in Libya by taking complete control of the Al-Watiya strategic airbase. Turkish designs are seen as having American blessings, which would be a serious blow to France’s plans in western Libya.

Paris has thus joined ranks with Greece and Cyprus and opposed the agreement to demarcate the maritime borders between the Islamists’ government in Tripoli and Turkey, even though the agreement does not represent a direct threat to its interests.

France is one of the major European countries opposed to Turkish intervention in Libya. It has criticised Ankara for breaching the international resolution banning the sale of arms to Libya and, with Greece, it is leading the IRINI operation to stop the flow of arms to Libya.

The French and Greek positions impede American and Turkish efforts to bring NATO onto the Libyan scene.

France supports the Libyan National Army (LNA) and has always worked to frustrate decisions and plans within the European Union seeking to condemn the LNA or its leader, Field-Marshal Khalifa Haftar.

Islamists in Libya accuse France of providing military support to the LNA. In 2016, they made a big case out of a plane crash that killed three French citizens onboard. The French authorities said at the time that its citizens were on an intelligence gathering mission.

France has been trying since 2011 to invest in Libya and get what it was unable to achieve during the time of the late leader Muammar Qaddai.

In 2010, France won a contract to develop the Nalut gas field in western Libya, but Qaddafi cancelled the contract with the French energy company Total following a legal conflict over the company’s sale of part of its stake to Qatar.

Experts speculated that the dead deal with Total may have been behind France’s rush in 2011 to topple the Qaddafi regime.

“France is one of the countries that has a great deal of weight on Libyan issues,” said Abdelkabir. “It is one of the first countries to call for toppling Muammar Qaddafi’s regime and found legitimate excuses for NATO forces to intervene in Libya even before the green light from the UN Security.”

“The French believe that they earned some merit by bringing down the Qaddafi regime and should have some priority in this file, but international competition is raging in Libya today with the multiplicity of foreign and international parties involved and the growing Turkish role and Russia’s entry on the Libyan scene … All the major powers are eying Libya’s gas, oil and natural resources,” he added.

America’s indirect support for Turkey’s intervention in Libya has raised speculation about the prospect of French support for Russia’s presence there.

A statement by the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) on Tuesday expressed real US concern about Russia repeating the Syrian scenario in Libya. The statement quoted US military leaders as warning against Russia seeking to turn the balance of power in the Libyan conflict in its favour.

Mona El-Mahrouki and Amna Jibran are Tunisian writers.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 May 2020

Word Count: 911

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We all remember moments from Sept. 11, 2001. We remember those moments in up-close and high-def detail. The smoke, the dust, the death — these seared our minds and we vowed: never forget. We promised, as a nation, never forget. Three thousand people were dead in a flash of fire. I suspect most of us have faithfully kept that promise.

Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Will the Republicans remember? Can they keep their promise without reminding us of the hundreds of thousands who will have died by then from Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus? Can they honor the memory of 3,000 Americans without dishonoring the memories of many, many more? I don’t see how.

I don’t see how they can in good faith recall America post- 9/11 without recalling America post-pandemic, and inviting comparison. On the one hand, a GOP president, unpopular and divisive, found the will to speak for a nation in grief. On the other hand, a GOP president, more unpopular and more divisive, speaks for himself only, leaving mourners alone to cradle their pain, elevating trumpery over tragedy. We have now seen the equivalent of thirty-three 9/11s. We will see tens of times more by the time of its 20th anniversary. It might be best for the Republicans to break their promise.

Of course, they already have.

You don’t follow a man to hell without forgetting, without willfully forgetting, because remembering commitments to democracy, principle and the American way is at best painful, at worst an impediment to gripping power more tightly. As my friend Frank Wilkinson said, Donald Trump is not at odds with his party. He has not only the GOP’s blessing but its abetting. It has helped him break the law. It has helped him cover up crimes. (I’d add that it has helped him get away with treason.) The 2020 election, Frank wrote, is a choice between competing futures: one democratic or one authoritarian.

Frank points out two problems worth prolonged discussion. The first is the problem of what to do when one party is lawless while the other upholds the rule of law. There is no immediate answer. There may never be an answer. Time will tell, obviously. But whatever its solution may be, it’s in connection to the second problem, which is that most Americans have not figured the peril the United States is facing. Frank says:

 Because neither the news media nor the nation’s larger political culture has reckoned with the GOP’s authoritarian evolution, the habitual response is to mislabel GOP authoritarianism as hypocrisy. Calling out hypocrisy is a pointless shaming mechanism for a party that has broken free of shame. Worse, it camouflages a war on democracy as democratic politics as usual.

There is no point in shaming liars, cheats and scoundrels, but there is a point in naming. It’s one thing to say the choice is between democracy and autocracy. But there’s something else going on, something more emotional and right, in saying the choice is between good and evil, and because “good and evil” is too childish, let’s put it this way instead: The 2020 election is a choice between freedom and barbarism.

“Barbarism” is problematic to be sure. It’s usually reserved for describing “uncivilized” societies. The word invokes days of colonialism and imperial hubris. In the weeks and months after 9/11, especially in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Fox News commentators sometimes intimated barbarism when they said Muslims don’t understand diplomacy. All they understand is expressions of power. Even if we’re wrong about weapons of mass destruction (and we were), we’re still right to invade.

Despite its problematic history, it’s an ideal word to describe our times. The president and the Republicans are not only hostile to science, free speech, free press and the truth itself. They are not only dedicated to preserving the old sadist hierarchies of power. They are pushing Americans back into a workplace infected with a deadly virus in order to maximize short-term returns. They are treating people like a commodity, like “human capital stock,” not citizens with inherent rights and privileges. They are forcing human beings to choose between their health and their wealth. They are literally robbing them of their freedom to work for a better future for themselves.

Sure, we can use words like “fascism,” “white nationalism,” “autocracy” and such to characterize the president’s endless attack on institutions, laws, norms and values. But these are abstract and do not carry the weight of blood and pain that “barbarism” carries. When “assimilation” means conformity or punishment, that’s barbarism. When “liberty” means sacrificing the old and the weak, that’s barbarism. When “law and order” means tolerating homicide by agents of the state, that’s barbarism. When “security” means kidnapping infants and toddlers, that’s barbarism. When “peace and prosperity” means turning a blind eye to 100,000 dead Americans, that’s barbarism.

When the Republicans honored their vow to remember the victims the 9/11, they participated in a political community of shared values and purpose. We grieved as a nation. The body politic mourned as one body. They no longer participate, though. They have long since taken their ball and gone home.

So it’s no longer possible to shame them and so calling out hypocrisy is meaningless. Naming, however, creates a presence, a moral standard over which they have no control but they must nevertheless confront. If the Democrats have no good way of countering a lawless GOP without resorting to lawlessness themselves, name it. It’s not freedom. No escape. A trap.

It’s barbarism.

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: 27 May 2020

Word Count: 937

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National character is something conservatives, especially elected Republican officials at all levels of government, say they take very seriously. They tell the story often of the United States being the land of the free and the home of the brave. Americans are a hardy folk, they say, ready to face any hardship, determined to overcome any tyranny despite the odds. No one can defeat an idea, they say. In America, that idea is freedom.

If American behavior during the Memorial Day Weekend is any indication, however, that story is false. If our behavior during a pandemic that has killed more than 99,900 people in two months, the equivalent of thirty-three 9/11s, is any indicator, that story is perverse in its distortion of reality. Sure, we want freedom. We don’t want to work for it, though. We want liberty. We don’t want to sacrifice, though. The US isn’t the land of the free, home of the brave — more like land of the weak, home of the depraved. When the going gets tough, we don’t get going. We say whatevs, and head to the beach.

It’s too easy to blame the president. Donald Trump won’t wear a mask. He mocks “social distancing.” He pushes a revival of an economy in the ditch (even though the economic performance probably won’t have anything to do his eventually victory or defeat). As the death toll surpasses 100,000, he expresses no grief, no sympathy, no hope. Instead of revering Americans who died for our liberty, he goes golfing, and throws punches from the safety of Twitter. He was born on third base, but it’s worse than thinking he hit a triple — the accident of his birth means he won the World Series.

But blaming Trump for ordinary behavior is wrong. We shouldn’t give a pass to grown men and women when they choose not to wear a mask, thinking “Well, that’s what happens when leaders fail.” A leader is not a nation. A nation — a people with its own character and cast of mind, its own values separate from leadership — should not be graded on a curve. Our luck ran out with the election of a world-historical liar, but we rise to the occasion or don’t. We work together in facing calamity or don’t. We are a union — or we’re a mishmash of states that can’t stand each other, and won’t stand.

I’m glad to see the cable news networks heading out to interview beach-goers and start-of-summer revelers who have decided to ignore even modest social-distancing guidelines. I’m glad to see people going on record as being ignorant, lazy or misinformed, and therefore dangerous to public safety and health. I’m glad to see exposure of the lie that wearing a mask is somehow a violation of individual liberty.

But the question I keep wanting to ask, as I watch people rationalize the irrational, is: What would you say to other Americans who lost a husband or mother to Covid-19, but could not touch them — could not be in the same room as they were dying — for fear of being infected? What do you say to people whose loved ones were buried by strangers? A less charitable question but worth asking: Aren’t you pissing on their graves?

It’s not hard to imagine the general contour of the answers to those questions, though, to be sure, the answers themselves would be various and sundry. Basically, it would be: you do you. But in the context of a pandemic, in which your decisions affect me just as my decisions affect you, you do you is as polite as it is dishonest. In reality, we’re all in this together and those who won’t see that are a serious problem. An honest answer, moreover, would be: I don’t care about my fellow Americans, I don’t care about the number of dead, and yes, I am pissing on their graves and I’d be happy to do it again. They’d never say this in front of TV cameras, of course. That would take courage.

Allow me to be clear: I don’t really think America is the land of the weak and the home of the depraved. Polls show a massive and silent majority doing what needs to be done, taking extra care to get on with life without accepting unnecessary risks. Most people in this country are indeed rising to the occasion. They just don’t get play on CNN.

But there are people in this country, there have always been people in this country, who embody a wholly imaged nation within a nation, a confederacy in which “real Americans” are chosen by God to rule in God’s name. “Real Americans” believe in order more than law, control more than freedom, conformity more than individualism. A nation within a nation is built to maintain hierarchies of power. Power corrupts. This “nation” is, therefore, soft and decadent, selfish and disloyal, and willing to wound itself to wound it’s enemies. It’s a perversion, in other words, of the real America.

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: 26 May 2020

Word Count: 834

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Covid-19, an ongoing global human tragedy, may have at least one silver lining. It has led millions of people to question America’s most malignant policies at home and abroad.

Regarding Washington’s war policies abroad, there’s been speculation that the coronavirus might, in the end, put a dent in such conflicts, if not prove an unintended peacemaker — and with good reason, since a cash-flush Pentagon has proven impotent as a virus challenger. Meanwhile, it’s become ever more obvious that, had a fraction of “defense” spending been invested in chronically underfunded disease control agencies, this country’s response to the coronavirus crisis might have been so much better.

Curiously enough, though, despite President Trump’s periodic complaints about America’s “ridiculous endless wars,” his administration has proven remarkably unwilling to agree to even a modest rollback in U.S. imperial ambitions. In some theaters of operation — Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Somalia above all — Washington has even escalated its militarism in a fit of macabre, largely under-the-radar pandemic opportunism.

For all that, this is an obvious moment to reflect on whether America’s nearly two-decade-old “war on terror” (perhaps better thought of as a set of wars of terror) might actually end. Predictions are tricky matters. Nonetheless, the spread of Covid-19 has offered a rare opportunity to raise questions, challenge frameworks, and critically consider what “ending” war might even mean for this country.

In some sense, our post-9/11 wars have been gradually subsiding for some time now. Even though the total number of U.S. troops deployed to the Middle East has actually risen in the Trump years, those numbers pale when compared to the U.S. commitment at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The number of American soldiers taking fire overseas has, in recent years, dropped to levels unthinkably low for those of us who entered the military around the time of the 9/11 attacks.

That said, in these years, even unwinnable, unnecessary wars have proven remarkably unendable. For evidence of this, look no further than that perennial war hawk Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Given the lack of success of the various campaigns run by U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, across that continent and the Pentagon’s stated desire to once again pivot to great-power competition with China and Russia, just before the pandemic arrived on our shores Secretary of Defense Mark Esper announced plans for a modest troop drawdown in parts of Africa. Appalled by even such minor retrenchments, Graham, leading a bipartisan group of lawmakers, reportedly confronted Esper and threatened to make his “life hell,” should the secretary downsize U.S. forces there.

Less than two months later, AFRICOM declared a public-health emergency at the largest of this country’s African bases in Djibouti amid concerns that even far smaller, more spartan American facilities on that continent lacked the requisite medical equipment to fight the spreading virus. Whether the pandemic facilitates Esper’s contemplated reductions remains to be seen. (A mid-April AFRICOM press release offering reassurance that the “command’s partnership endures during Covid-19” doesn’t bode well for such a transformation.)

Still, the disease will surely have some effect. Just as quarantine and social-distancing measures have transformed people’s lives and work in the U.S., Washington’s war fighting will undoubtedly have to adapt, too. Minimally, expect the Pentagon to wage wars (largely hidden from public view) that require ever fewer of its troops to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with allies and fewer still to die doing so. Expect Washington to mandate and the Pentagon to practice what might increasingly be thought of as social-distancing-style warfare.

Soldiers will operate in ever smaller teams. Just as senior leaders constantly counseled us junior officers in the bad old days to “put an Iraqi face between you and the problem,” so today’s and tomorrow’s troopers will do their best to place drones or (less precious) proxy lives between themselves and enemies of any sort. Meanwhile, the already immense chasm between the American public and the wars being fought in its name is only likely to widen. What may emerge from these years is a version of war so unrecognizable that, while still unending, it may no longer pass for war in the classic sense.

To grasp how we’ve made it to a social-distancing version of war, it’s necessary to go back to the earlier part of this century, years before a pandemic like Covid-19 was on anyone’s radar screen.

American wars don’t end, they evolve When, as a young Army lieutenant and later captain, I joined what were then called “surges” in Iraq in 2006 and Afghanistan in 2011, conventional foot soldiers like me were the main game in town. The doctrine of counterinsurgency, or COIN, then ruled the Pentagon’s intellectual roost. The trick, so key commanders believed, was to flood the war zone with infantry brigades, securing the conflict’s “center of gravity”: the locals. Behind the scenes, Special Operations units were already taking on ever-larger roles. Nevertheless, there were ample “boots-on-the-ground” and relatively high casualties in conventional units like mine.

Times have changed. Full-scale invasions and long-term occupations, along with COIN as a war-on-terror cure-all, long ago fell out of favor. By Barack Obama’s second term, such unpopular and costly campaigns were passé. Even so, rather than rethink the efficacy of imperial interventionism, Washington simply substituted new methods masquerading as the latest strategy of success.

By the time Donald Trump delivered his “American carnage” inaugural address, the burdens of Washington war-making had flipped. When I served in Iraq and Afghanistan, about half of the Army’s 40-odd combat brigades were deployed in those two regional theaters at any given time. The remainder were training for their next rotations and already on the “patch chart” where each unit’s logo indicated its future scheduled deployment. This was the life on the conveyor belt of American war that a generation of soldiers like me lived. By January 2017, however, the number of conventional brigades deployed in the war on terror could be counted on one hand.

For instance, the Army’s most recent round of deployments, announced this April, included just six brigades. Of these, two were aviation units and, among the ground forces, one was headed for Europe, another for Kuwait. Only two ground combat brigades, in other words, were slated for Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan and one of them was a reconstituted Security Force Assistance Brigade — essentially a skeleton crew of officers and noncommissioned officers meant to train and advise local troops. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s Special Operations forces, which had by then crested above 70,000, a figure so large as to raise questions about how “special” they remained, stepped onto that conveyor belt. America’s commandos now bear most of the burden of forever-war deployments and (modest) casualties.

A two-tier war-making system When the virus struck, the Pentagon had long been developing a bifurcated military machine with two separate and largely discrete roles. The commandos — with key assists from drones, CIA paramilitaries, local proxies, and private security contractors — continued to fight the lingering war on terror. They were generally handling the lethal end of American war, calling in airstrikes, while training, advising, and sometimes even leading often abusive indigenous forces.

Conventional active-duty brigades — reduced to 32 — were largely given quite a different task: to prepare for a future revamped Cold War with Russia and, increasingly, China. That crew — infantry, armored brigades, and Navy carrier squadrons — had the “new,” purportedly vital mission of checking, containing, or challenging Moscow in Eastern Europe and Beijing in the South China Sea. Senior generals and admirals were comfortable with such Cold War-style tasks (most having been commissioned in the mid-1980s). However, viewed from Russia or China, such missions looked increasingly provocative as ever more American riflemen, tanks, and warships regularly deployed to former Soviet republics or, in the case of the Navy, to Western Pacific waters that abut China, making the risk of accidental escalation seem ever more conceivable.

Meanwhile, those shadowy special operators were directing the ongoing shooting wars and other conflicts, which, though given precious little attention in this country, seemed patently counterproductive, not to say unwinnable. For the Pentagon and military-industrial-complex profiteers, however, such unending brushfire conflicts, along with a new great power build-up, were the gift that just kept giving, a two-tiered modus operandi for endless war-funding.

Enter the coronavirus.

In cold blood Thought of a certain way, American war will, in the future, increasingly be waged in cold blood. While Covid-19 spreads virally through respiratory droplets, the disease of endless war continues to be blood-borne (even if ever less of it is American blood), ensuring that the social-distancing-style combat of the future could become even more of an abstraction here.

In addition, the preferred post-pandemic warriors of that future may not be uniformed soldiers, special or otherwise, or necessarily American — or in some cases (think drones and future robotic weaponry) human. U.S. war fighting has already been increasingly privatized. Only recently, Erik Prince, the former CEO of the private military company Blackwater, an influential Trump ally as well as the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, pitched the president on a far-fetched plan to privatize the whole Afghan War.

The Donald passed on the offer, but that it was even considered at such a high level suggests the role of private contractors and soldiers of fortune in future American war-making may be here to stay. In that sense, the recent fiasco of an armed raid led by former Green Berets-turned-mercenaries and aimed at the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro may prove as much a foreboding glimpse of the future as it was a farce.

When uniformed U.S. service members are deemed necessary, the trend toward using just handfuls of them to run an increasingly proxy-war machine is likely to accelerate. Such teams will fit well with public-health guidelines limiting gatherings to 10 people. For instance, drone ground control stations, essentially mobile trailers, require only a pair of operators. Similarly, the military’s newest cyberwar branch (formed in 2015) may not be made up of the hackers of Donald Trump’s imagination (“somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds”), but they, too, will work in tiny teams abroad, and at a great distance. Pushing those guidelines just a tad will be Army Special Forces A-Teams of 12 Green Berets each, which may prove to be core building blocks for a new American version of post-pandemic warfare.

Most disturbingly, American social-distancing ways of war will likely operate smoothly enough without suppressing terrorist groups any more successfully than the previous versions of forever war did, or solving local ethno-religious conflicts, or improving the lives of Africans or Arabs. Like their predecessors, future American wars in cold blood will fail, but with efficiency and, from the point of view of the military-industrial complex, lucratively.

Here, of course, is the deep and tragic paradox of it all. As the coronavirus should have reminded us, the true existential threats to the United States (and humanity) — disease pandemics, a potential nuclear Armageddon, and climate change — will be impervious to Washington’s usual military tools. No matter the number of warships, infantry and armored brigades, or commando teams, none of them will stand a chance against lethal viruses, rising tides, or nuclear fallout. As such, the Pentagon’s plethora of tanks, aircraft carriers (themselves petri-dishes for any virus around), and towers of cash (sorely needed elsewhere) will, in the future, be monuments to an era of American delusion.

A rational (or moral) system with any semblance of genuine legislative oversight or citizen input might respond to such conspicuous realities by rethinking the national security paradigm itself and bringing the war state to a screeching halt. Unfortunately, if America’s imperial past is any precedent, what lies ahead is the further evolution of twenty-first-century imperial war to the end of time.

Post-pandemic war Still, Covid-19 may prove the death knell of American war as classically imagined. Future combat, even if broadly directed from Washington, may be only vaguely “American.” Few uniformed citizens may take part in it and even fewer die from it.

During the prolonged endgame of wars that don’t really end, U.S. military fatalities will certainly continue to occur in occasional ones and twos — often in far-flung places where few Americans even realize their country is fighting (as with those four U.S. troops killed in an ambush in Niger in 2018 and the Army soldier and two private contractors killed in Kenya earlier this year). Such minuscule American losses will actually offer Washington more leeway to quietly ramp-up its drone attacks, air power, raiding, and killing, as has already happened in Somalia, with assumedly ever less oversight or attention at home. As in the Horn of Africa of late, the Pentagon won’t even have to bother to justify escalations in its war-making. Which raises a sort of “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there…” conundrum: if the U.S. is killing brown folks around the world, but hardly anyone notices, is the country still at war?

Moving forward, policymakers and the public alike may treat war with the same degree of entitlement and abstraction as ordering items from Amazon (especially during a pandemic): Click a button, expect a package at the door posthaste, and pay scant thought to what that click-request set in motion or the sacrifice required to do the deed.

Only in war, one thing at least stays constant: lots of someones get killed. The American people may leave their wars to unrepresentative professional “volunteers” led by an unchecked imperial presidency that increasingly outsources them to machines, mercenaries, and local militias. One thing is, however, guaranteed: some poor souls will be at the other end of those bombsights and rifle barrels.

In contemporary battles, it’s already exceptionally rare that a uniformed American is on that receiving end. Almost midway through 2020, only eight U.S. service members have been killed by hostile fire in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Yet many thousands of locals continue to die there. No one wants U.S. troops to die, but there’s something obscene — and morally troubling — about the staggering casualty disparity implicit in the developing twenty-first-century American way of war, the one that, in a Covid-19 world, is increasingly being fought in a socially-distanced way.

Taken to its not-unimaginable extreme, Americans should prepare themselves for a future in which their government kills and destroys on a global scale without a single service member dying in combat. After the pandemic, in other words, talk of “ending” this country’s forever wars may prove little more than an exercise in semantics.

Danny Sjursen writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. His forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, will be published in September. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill.”

Copyright ©2020 Danny Sjursen — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 May 2020

Word Count: 2,413

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CAIRO — The Suez Canal has been hit by a double blow. After absorbing the shock of stagnating global trade due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was hit by the steepest drop in oil prices in 18 years. Consequently, the canal is no longer as competitive as a corridor for global trade.

Three global shipping lines have already announced plans to reduce their operating costs by rerouting some of their cargo ships to take the route around the Cape of Good Hope. The concerned ships belong to the 2M alliance, which includes the Maersk Line of Containers, the MSC Line and the CMMA-CGM Line.

During the first quarter of this year, Saudi Arabia engaged in a fierce oil war with Russia after the collapse of the OPEC+ coalition grouping OPEC producers and allies from outside the organisation, led by Russia. This economic battle confused the oil market and pushed prices down to $19.33 a barrel of Brent crude by the beginning of April.

Developments near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait have added to the canal’s burdens. The ongoing conflict in Yemen and a spike in pirate activity in the strait have added to Cairo’s contribution to the costs of securing access to the Red Sea through the strait, in order to protect its interests and secure its shipping lane.

As Cairo seeks to preserve its important shipping artery, blows to its canal have continued to come, this time from Cairo’s ally, Moscow. Indeed the Russians have plans to pull the rug from under the Suez Canal by enticing shipping lines to move their cargo through the northern shipping lane of the frozen Antarctic Ocean.

Moscow is wooing shipping lines by offering to pay for any possible damage to their ships if they take the northern lane. In fact, there are already plans to transport liquefied natural gas through the north.

Moscow’s enthusiasm is dampened by commercial carriers’ reluctance to pay double the cost of insurance required for the northern lane, which they have to add to the cost of hiring the services of icebreakers. Moscow, however, is not giving up and continues to tout the Arctic route, promising to make it a year-long open lane by 2030. And that is not good news for the Suez Canal.

Ahmed al-Shami, a marine transport expert, played down the impact of Russia’s impact on the Suez Canal. He pointed out that last year, only about 6.5 million tons of cargo went through the Arctic Ocean, while 1.2 billion go through the Suez Canal every year.

He also described the decision made by some global shipping lines to reroute ships around the Cape of Good Hope as a temporary measure and a way to pressure the Suez Canal to grant extra incentives. The canal can withstand this pressure, he said, while the shipping companies may end up revising their strategy because cheap fuel is only one small part of operating costs.

The 192km Suez Canal cuts travel time between Asia and Europe by an average of 15 days. In addition, the Suez Canal Authority grants incentives and discounts to container ships coming from the ports of north-western Europe on their way to south-east Asia and the Far East, reducing transit fees by some 17%.

Revenues from the Suez Canal represent around 23% of the revenues of the services sector exports and about 3.7% of the revenues of the general state budget, in addition to 7% of the current account flows to Egypt.

Adel el-Lemai, head of Port Said Chamber of Shipping, pointed out that Suez Canal revenues are going to be negatively impacted by the global economic recession, as many cargo shipments around the globe have been cancelled.

The Suez Canal accounts for about 12% of the total volume of global trade traffic. Forty-one thousand container ships plow the ocean waters around the globe, linking markets in Europe with Africa, Europe and Asia. To move between continents, these vessels have no faster and easier transit corridor than the Suez Canal.

Othman Shawky, former director of the port of Nuweiba, pointed out that despite the decline in global oil prices, the Suez Canal remains the safest and fastest passage for container ships.

He pointed out that the Cape of Good Hope route is fraught with navigational dangers emanating from severe storms and bad sea conditions, as well as ongoing conflicts in some African countries that drive up insurance costs for ships.

Mohamed Hammad is an Egyptian writer.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 May 2020

Word Count: 734

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WASHINGTON — The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed Moroccan-born Belgian-American scientist Moncef Mohamed Slaoui as chief scientist of the committee tasked to develop coronavirus vaccines and treatments. Slaoui’s selection was based on his impressive academic and professional record and accomplishments in this field.

Slaoui has a confirmed track record of impressive results in the field of immunology and the discovery of several vaccines, including those against malaria, rotavirus, cervical cancer and pneumococcus. He also had a successful managerial stint heading the vaccine department at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline between 2011 and 2016, during which the company succeeded in producing 24 new medicines and vaccines for advanced viruses. He also served on the board of directors of Moderna, the firm that conducted the first vaccine test used to treat a COVID-19 patient in America a few days ago.

Born in 1959 in the city of Agadir in southern Morocco, Slaoui now resides in the United States. He realised early on that real strength in the future will not be connected to intercontinental ballistic missiles or slow-moving and range-restricted tanks, but rather to research labs and pharmaceutical and vaccine companies.

Slaoui has an impressive academic track record. He left Morocco to France to pursue his university studies, then settled in Belgium where he studied molecular biology and graduated from the Free University of Brussels. He completed a PhD in immunology from the Free University of Brussels, and then migrated to the United States, where he completed his scientific and academic path in his field of specialisation by teaching and researching at Harvard Medical School.

As chief scientist of the COVID-19 vaccine team, Slaoui will have access to extensive research and experimental infrastructure in the US with the aim of quickly developing experimental vaccines during the first stage of dosage and safety testing. He will work with government partners to ensure that any safe and effective vaccine will be manufactured in sufficient quantities.

To move towards this goal, Slaoui and his committee will rely on available results and resources from the network of research programmes and clinical trials. The first priority for Trump’s team is to develop a safe and effective vaccine to stop the infection from spreading and prevent future outbreaks, in line with the new strategic plan of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, which represents a comprehensive and coordinated effort to develop effective biomedical tools to combat COVID-19.

Slaoui will draw on his experience in the field to work with his team to adapt vaccines, treatments and methods previously used to treat the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and other severe coronaviruses, such as SARS, and apply them to the current pandemic.

Although developing an effective vaccine as quickly as possible is an important and strategic priority, Slaoui’s team will have to first identify and evaluate the effectiveness of drugs already approved for other diseases that have potential for treating COVID-19, in addition to extensive testing of new antivirals based on monoclonal antibodies.

Compound vaccines are a critical way to enhance public health coverage through coronavirus immunisation. In this context, and based on his research and experience, Slaoui believes that without having five or six vaccines grouped in one dose, it will be difficult to enter the game of the vaccine industry.

Despite Saloui’s appointment, the struggle continues over who will have the final say when it comes to manufacturing and marketing the new vaccine. The war against COVID-19 is a race for who will be first to corner the global strategic market of producing an effective and safe vaccine. Given the gravity and sensitivity of the new task force’s work, and given the visible conflict between Washington and Beijing, Slaoui will necessarily benefit from the official protocols of high-level security protection.

Slaoui, however, agrees with a number of other scientists that there is a much greater need for transparency on issues related to dealing with disease-causing organisms because of the possibility of their accidental release. The goal of transparency is to protect public safety at all levels and ensure that remedial actions are immediately taken in the event of an accident. What is important for these scholars is to avoid at all costs the atmosphere of a dangerous and unethical competitiveness in this domain between major powers, without ensuring the safety of all biological research labs, whether in China, the US or any other country.

Mohamed Mamouni al-Alawi is a Moroccan journalist.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 May 2020

Word Count: 728

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The president is rich, and, like the rich, he’s different from you, me and everyone we know. He has more money. Being rich means never having to face your fears, because why face your fears when you can pay someone to face them for you? Not all rich folks are cowards, of course. But when the going gets tough, Donald Trump gives up.

F. Scott Fitzgerald might have been describing the president when he said the rich “possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.”

Being rich means never having to see the truth about himself. In real life, Trump is weak. He’s decadent. He’s immoral. But in his made-for-TV life, initially charged to his dad’s account, his blindness is a blessing. He’s wealthy because he has good blood, and because of that good blood, he’s infallible. The president said as much Thursday of Henry Ford, America’s most notorious antisemite and Adolf Hitler’s inspiration: “Good bloodlines, good bloodlines — if you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.”

Not all rich are cowards, and not all rich are fascist, but the rich do tend to set the tone for the rest of the country. They establish an attitude the rest of the country tends to emulate, consciously or not. In our advance capitalist society, where the rich have become richer than any time in human history, all are encouraged to be like the rich. The result, for most of us, is a tiring tension between material desire and empirical reality, a posture of longing chastened by limits. For some, though, there is no tension, because there are no limits that can’t be overcome with the swipe of a credit card.

Being a rich country, in other words, does something to us. It makes a challenge feel like a hardship. It makes a hardship feel like an emergency. It makes emergencies feel insurmountable. And it makes caring about others, and about our nation as a whole, not only dependent on whether it does something for me but an injustice for demanding that I care. The US is facing a multiverse of crises. One is of morality and the democratic spirit. And I can’t think of a better illustration of that than a recent column in which grown men and women pity themselves for having to do dishes.

Yes, doing the dishes is something most people don’t think about. They just do it. But doing the dishes in an advance capitalist society that encourages everyone to be like the rich is an irony ideal for the Post’s Style section, where Ellen McCarthy penned a lament for this moment in which we must cook for ourselves, entertain ourselves, and clean after ourselves. “A sink perpetually brimming with dirty dishes is a proxy for all that is tedious and tiresome about life at the undramatic edges of this crisis,” she said.

It is incessant, like the quarantine. Repetitive, like our days at home. Demanding and messy, like the tasks that fill those days. And somehow fraught with shame and judgment: Who can claim to have their act together if they can’t fit their Brita pitcher under the faucet?

It’d be one thing to discuss the psychological impact of isolation, the trauma arising from rapid change, or the resulting depths of depression that can make ordinary chores seem gigantic. But no. The goal, apparently, is bewailing (while tactfully appearing not to bewail) the inconvenience of a pandemic that has killed more than 96,600 people and unemployed about 38 million more. The point, apparently, is complaining about the injury to one’s identity when one’s identity is wrapped up in the public performance of one’s social status. Complaining about doing the dishes is not somehow fraught with shame and judgment. It is, or it should be, so much so that any self-respecting newspaper editor would reject a lament for dirty dishes on sight.

Citizens, or members of a political community, do what needs to be done to achieve the ideals of self-determination and the greatest good for the greatest number. Consumers, however, don’t. Consumers want what they want whenever they want it, and they feel entitled to having every desire met immediately and completely. Consumers are not ready to sacrifice for the sake of others. Sacrifice means limits and limits are unfair. Who can claim to have their act together if they can’t fit their Brita pitcher under the faucet?

Many of our rich behave like citizens. Many don’t. Some, in fact, behave just like the president, and they encourage you, me, and everyone we know to be just like them.

Don’t.

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: 22 May 2020

Word Count: 821

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