At one stroke Donald Trump’s America has made a Libya out of Venezuela. It is no justification that the South American country was already part of the way to becoming a Caribbean Tripoli. Whatever happens, the United States has introduced a new element of chaos into the tumult that has been the state of Venezuela for several years.

By delegitimising Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and hailing opposition politician Juan Guaido as the rightful leader, Trump plunged the country into deeper crisis. All the signs point to Venezuela becoming the Western Hemisphere’s Libya — a country with more than one government, each supported by armed groups that seek to control the lucrative oil industry.

It did not have to be this way. The United States and Venezuela’s neighbours could have increased pressure on the Maduro government to resign in favour of an internationally approved interim process, backed by the Organisation of American States or the United Nations.

There was never any argument for letting Maduro continue the impoverishment of millions of his people, as well as the autocratic deconstruction of his country’s once-thriving multi-party democracy. On Maduro’s watch, Venezuela has suffered terribly, its once-prosperous economy shot to pieces, its people starving.

Venezuela, which is blessed with the biggest oil reserves of any country on Earth, is reduced to unimaginable inflation rates — 1,300,000% in the 12 months ending November 2018, a study by the opposition-controlled National Assembly stated. In 2017, eight-of-ten Venezuelans surveyed by Encovi, an annual assessment of living standards conducted by Venezuelan universities, said they did not have enough food at home.

It was never in doubt that Venezuela badly needed a fresh start but should Washington decide when and how? More to the point, the lessons of Libya should have been learnt.

In 2011, Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi used disproportionate force to deal with massive public protests and the West’s stated humanitarian concern elicited UN Security Council authorisation for intervention. Russia and China abstained.

The NATO initiative had France and Britain in the lead, participation from Italy, Libya’s former colonial master, and the United States “leading from behind.” Within 3 weeks, the mission went from ostentatious concern for the Libyan people to regime change.

By March 2011, France did for Libya’s flawed government what Trump’s America has done for Venezuela’s in 2019. France cut out the Qaddafi regime and recognised as Libya’s legitimate government the National Transitional Council, a discordant group that agreed only on the need for a post-Qaddafi era. The United States followed suit within a few months.

In October 2011, Qaddafi was captured and killed in a celebration of savagery that appeared to show Libyans to the world as bloodthirsty and lawless.

Subsequently, Libya’s transitional government failed to govern. It handed power in August 2012 to a General National Congress, which pursued Qaddafi’s supporters and refused to call the promised elections.

After polls did take place in June 2014, power was vested in the internationally backed House of Representatives but anti-Qaddafi militias refused to disarm and a new General National Congress appointed itself the legitimate government. From early 2016, there has been a third Libyan administration — the UN-backed Government of National Accord led by Fayez al-Sarraj.

Despite the proliferation of governments, Libya remains a largely ungoverned space, one ruled by militias.

The similarities between Venezuela tomorrow and Libya past and present go further than the gaggle of leaders. Their oil sectors may soon start to resemble each other.

Eight years after the toppling of Qaddafi’s regime, Libya’s oil output has not fully recovered because of competing militias and administrative breakdown in much of the country. Though it has the world’s ninth-largest oil reserves, Libya is unable to capitalise on its natural wealth. A case in point is Sharara, its largest oil field, which has been occupied by an armed group and has been closed for two months.

In the context of the continuing chaos, the plea of Mustafa Sanalla, head of Libya’s national oil company, is worth noting. On January 29, he said foreign powers should abandon “rushed unsustainable” solutions for his country.

Much the same might be said by Venezuelans for their country. No one, certainly not the people, is likely to win a Libya-style tussle between competing governments.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 February 2019
Word Count: 703
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When the United Nations proclaimed its Charter in 1945, it included therein a special privilege for five member states:  the power of the veto in its Security Council. Why these five states? There was a different reason for each of the five. No matter. The Big Five – the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the U.S.S.R. (now Russia), and China – still have this privilege today, and are unlikely to lose it in the foreseeable future.

But some things have changed fundamentally since 1945. Then the United States was unquestionably the strongest of the five, and largely dominated world political decision-making. This is no longer true. The United States has been in continual geopolitical decline since at least 1970. China, so relatively weak in 1945, has been in significant ascension. In particular, the leaders of the United States (and both the United Kingdom and France) are personally obliged to struggle to stay in power, whereas the leaders of China and Russia seem to worry less about their control of internal political decision-making.

This turnabout in internal stability has one major consequence. Precisely because the leaders of the three are under so much pressure, they concentrate their energies on working hard to reverse their weakness. They begin a largely futile game of unpredictable shifts in policy. And this leads most political leaders and analysts to ask the question: What will they do next?

The eyes of the world are especially focused on Donald Trump – a person without principle, extremely volatile, and personally mean and indifferent to the suffering he causes. What will he do next? No one really knows. The only thing about which we can be sure is that he will not give up or admit in any way that he was wrong in what he did at one point or another. This makes him simultaneously very weak and very dangerous. He is so arrogant that he believes his defeats are victories because they keep him on top of the media space.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 February 2019
Word Count: 331
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It was I believe Colin Powell who said that sending in troops in a dispute was easy, but extracting them almost impossible.

The present situation in the Middle East illustrates this axiom perfectly.  President Trump, like his predecessors, promised to withdraw U.S troops from Syria. And he renewed this promise just recently. Then he found, again like his predecessors, that fulfilling his promise aroused so much opposition, from all political quarters, that he had to renege on the promise.  He did this by redefining how long it might be before he actually withdraws the troops.

If one asks someone whether or not troops should be withdrawn from Syria, the answer depends on how far back they define the onset of the current situation.

For some it is a very short time, and for others an extremely long time. For me the origin of the situation in which we are all embroiled at present is at least several centuries ago. The United States is in the Middle East as part of a general imperialist policy – everywhere in the world including the Middle East.

One cannot understand the position of various states and multiple non-state actors otherwise than seeing that they represent different ways of trying to fight against imperialist intrusions into their affairs.

The only way the United States can extract itself is to renounce imperialist policies. Doing this will be extremely painful not only for the United States but for almost everyone living in the region. There is no way to avoid this. The pain will be severe and immediate. But this is the least painful thing to do. Unless we bite the bullet and do this, the pain will never end. The choices will always be bad.

Is it conceivable that imperialists cease being imperialist? Probably not. Is it possible that the multiple victims welcome the withdrawal of imperialist powers even if their immediate situation becomes worse as a result? Possibly.

There is no good choice, no non-painful choice, only a long-run adjustment to a more equitable situation.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 January 2019
Word Count: 339
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Donald Trump is using all his rhetorical skills to keep everyone’s eyes focused on him and on him alone. He is trying so hard precisely because it is increasingly evident to most politicians and public figures, in the United States and elsewhere, that he is constantly losing ground. More and more actors are ignoring his demands. This is most of all clear to donald trump himself.

So he does hurtful things to all and sundry simply to prevent others from assembling the votes for things that exclude mr. trump from the center of worldwide action.

He has closed down the U.S. government, or at least that part which has not yet gotten a renewed life of a few months. He has said that he is proud to have done it, to the dismay of almost all other political actors. He claims he will not relent until an absurd amount of money is voted for the construction of his beloved wall. The money will not be voted.

Why, I am asked, does he do this? The answer is so simple it begs being silly. He is doing it because there is nothing else that he can do that he can use to validate a claim that he matters.

He has flown off in utter secrecy to visit U.S. troops in Iraq. He says he is withdrawing U.S. troops totally from Syria and partially from Afghanistan. We shall have to see if he actually does this. Or whether, like the three previous U.S. presidents, he reneges.

But no matter for the present. In the present he is asserting that he matters. To be sure, he still is the president of the United States. He has certain powers that he can use. This is precisely what frightens people all around the world.

So, he offers the world a bargain: “Say that Trump matters even if you don’t believe it and I’ll retreat once again.” Consider what a futile game this is in fact. But no matter to mr. trump, who only wants to ensure his re-election in 2020.

Hurrah for dangerous games!

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 January 2019
Word Count: 349
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WASHINGTON – The government of US President Donald Trump fell into chaos as another top administration official resigned over Syria, large parts of the federal government closed and the US stock market suffered its worst weekly losses in a decade.

The cascade of shocking events put Trump further on the defensive over his controversial policies and exasperated his own allies in the Republican Party. Financial experts warned that the US economy might fall into a recession for the first time in 10 years, and diplomats feared that the US was alienating allies throughout the Middle East including its closest ally, Israel.

“We’re pretty much flying here without an instruction book,” Senator Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, told CNN.

The latest fallout from Trump’s surprise decision to withdraw US troops from Syria came on December 22 with the resignation of Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. McGurk held a key role in the US State Department as leader of the coalition of 79 nations that the US brought together in 2014 to defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

McGurk did not announce or comment on his resignation, unlike Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who released a scathing eight-paragraph letter denouncing Trump’s decision in Syria when he announced his resignation December 20. But the New York Times published an email that McGurk sent to his colleagues explaining that he was quitting because of Trump’s latest move in Syria.

“The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy that was articulated to us,” McGurk wrote. “It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered. I worked this week to help manage some of the fallout but — as many of you heard in my meetings and phone calls — I ultimately concluded that I could not carry out these new instructions and maintain my integrity.”

McGurk had been scheduled to leave his position in mid-February to take a job at Stanford University in California. But by deciding to leave early – his resignation is effective December 31 – McGurk brought another round of warnings from Washington diplomats.

“His departure further eliminates experience, judgment & great knowledge from USG [the US government],” Jonathan Weiner, former US special envoy for Libya and current scholar at the Middle East Institute, wrote on Twitter.

Trump tried to downplay McGurk’s resignation, writing on Twitter hours after the news broke:

“Brett McGurk, who I do not know, was appointed by President [Barack] Obama in 2015. Was supposed to leave in February but he just resigned prior to leaving. Grandstander? The Fake News is making such a big deal about this nothing event!”

Several former top US officials blasted Trump for asserting that he doesn’t know McGurk while also pointing out that he worked for President George W. Bush, a Republican.

“The fact that you say you don’t know Brett McGurk speaks volumes about your commitment to fighting ISIS,” Susan Rice, the White House national-security adviser under Obama, wrote on Twitter. “Why don’t you know the man who has done more than any civilian to degrade ISIS? I can assure you Barack Obama knows him well.”

Ben Rhodes, who was Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, wrote on Twitter: “In addition to the fact that Brett McGurk did more than any person to build the coalition that fought ISIS, the fact that you [Trump] don’t even know who your counter ISIS coordinator is proves you are an incompetent, dangerous and narcissistic fraud.”

As much of the United States began vacations in anticipation of Christmas Day on December 25, the US Congress and Trump remained deadlocked over a federal budget for 2019. When the two sides failed to reach an agreement by the end of the day on December 21, the federal government ran out of money, forcing the closure of several major departments including the Department of Homeland Security. Essential employees such as border agents will continue working.

Trump is demanding $5 billion to build a wall along the 2,000-mile border between the US and Mexico, but Democrats in Congress are offering much less money – roughly $1.5 billion. The amount of money in dispute is trivial in the context of a $4 trillion federal budget. But it has become a politically symbolic fight over Trump’s effort to crack down on illegal immigration and Democratic efforts to promote a more tolerant policy

But the partial government closure symbolized the dysfunction in Washington. “The shutdown is a symptom of the fact that our government is simply not functioning to make policy in an orderly, sensible way,” Alice Rivlin, a former White House budget director, told the Washington Post.

Thomas Frank is a correspondent in Washington.

Copyright ©2018 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 December 2018
Word Count: 776
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BOSTON — The announced abrupt U.S. withdrawal from Syria has sparked widespread speculation about what we might expect next, with most U.S.-based analysts emphasizing the “who wins and who loses” approach to their conclusions. This is understandable in a society whose foreign policy is heavily mercantile, self-centered, militaristic, and absolutist in its strategies and tactics, but it misleads the public that listens to such narrow views.

I am watching the American political mainstream analyze Syria and the region while I also closely follow my other love in the USA: college and professional sports. I am troubled to see identical approaches to Syria analyses and to discussions about what happens in the National Football League playoffs or college basketball rankings. When a leading player is injured or a powerful team slumps for a few weeks, the sports analysts suggest and explore endless possibilities about what might happen, and which teams will win or lose from the changed circumstances on the playing fields.

But Syria analysts diverge from the high-quality American sports coverage tradition in two critical ways: The sports analysts are experts who genuinely know their material, and also analyze events dispassionately. Syria analysts usually exhibit much less genuine expertise and far more ideological bias about the implications of the U.S. pullout. The American mainstream media and political tendency to discuss Syria like one covers college sports is among the destructive American deficiencies and foreign policy mistakes that have been repeated and aggravated over decades.

Anyone interested in anticipating Syria developments and their wider Levant/West Asia region should pay attention and grasp events in the same way that we analyze a four-way trade in professional baseball or basketball — one of the most exciting, sophisticated, and meaningful dimensions of American sports. Multi-team trades are deeply negotiated, attentive to the desires of several parties, and lead to a win-win situation that strengthens all the teams, according each one’s self-defined priorities.

Syria now is a rich landscape of power politics in which at least 13 big and small actors seek to strengthen their position and minimize their weaknesses — a 13-way potential confrontation that could also end up being a 13-way negotiated tradeoff that achieves the minimum needs of all, or most, parties.

The 13 parties I identify include the six most powerful ones (the U.S., Syria, Turkey, Iran, Russia, and Israel), and seven weaker ones (Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia, assorted Kurdish groups, and the Islamic State remnants), along with other interested parties like the United Arab Emirates, France, Qatar, Egypt, and Syrian and Iraqi tribal forces.

This constellation of actors has started to negotiate with one another to achieve their desired results — just as serious sports teams negotiate with three or four others simultaneously to fill in gaps in their rosters and trade away players who are not essential to their success.

This repeats the dynamic that defined the war in Syria during the past eight years, in a fracturing, evolving, Middle East: Power flows from a coalition that includes, typically, one or two foreign powers, Arab states/governments, non-Arab regional powers, and Arab and non-Arab non-state actors with clout. So the Russia-Syria-Iran-Hezbollah coalition triumphed in the very costly war in Syria, while the U.S.-Turkey-Saudi Arabia-Syrian rebels coalition essentially lost. Others in between (Israel, assorted Kurds, Islamic State, tribal groups, Jordan) gravitated to one side or the other as conditions demanded for their wellbeing. Other such coalitions are engaged in the Saudi-Emirati-led war against Yemen.

I assume that these 13 parties will not deliberately choose to start new wars in this exhausted region, but instead will try non-violently to emerge from today’s transforming era in solid and safe condition. All parties will define the minimum needs that they will seek to achieve through a combination of secret talks, saber-rattling, open bilateral diplomacy, and endless multi-lateral consultations.

Will Russia-Turkey-Iran and allies be the dominant power that calls the shots? Will a new combine of Russia-Israel-Saudi Arabia emerge, or one that sees Israel-Russia-Turkey working more closely together? What of the Turkey-Qatar-Iran group that is becoming a regional player in some arenas? Will the Kurds find protection and an autonomous but normal life as part of a reconstituted Syrian state, which will assuage Turkish fears of a strong, state-like Kurdish entity? And what of the Syrian state itself, and its configuration and interests?

If you have ever been impressed by the central bazaars in the capitals of Turkey, Iran, and Syria, you should now pay attention to the political haggling, bluffing, table-banging, raised eyebrows, threats, walk-outs, sweet talk, feigned disinterest, serial tea offerings, troop redeployments, and other essential elements of the negotiations that will now take place in and around Syria. This will likely result in no absolute winners and losers, but rather might formalize power relations that were created since 2011 by actors who understand the nuances and pragmatic negotiating positions needed to survive, in the first instance, and then to thrive in the longer run.

They do this by giving and taking, in discussions with their foes and allies. The critical three elements for success in such a dynamic are: knowing precisely your real national self-interest, what you must obtain, and what you can give away. The United States, almost uniquely in the world of culture and diplomacy, is alien to this ancient craft of political bazaar negotiations, because it has not defined its genuine national interests in the Middle East after the Cold War, and prefers the tools of threats, sanctions, wars, and other destructive, usually ineffective, unilateral action.

Washington is moving its troops out of Syria, but still has significant indirect influence if it wishes to use it. To do so, it must figure out how to engage in this great transcontinental negotiation over Syria that is already underway. Four-way sports trades are really complicated, but Americans mastered that skill decades ago. This is an opportunity for Washington to make the effort to apply this negotiating skill in global politics, so that it stops wasting trillions of dollars and its squandered cultural goodwill, leaving behind destroyed lands — the way it has done for decades in the Middle East and Asia.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 December 2018
Word Count: 1,017
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NEW YORK — The United States’ announcement that its troops will leave Syria as soon as possible marks one more important stage in the recent evolution of strategic and diplomatic moves across the Middle East — anchored in Syria, of course, as many such moves have been for most of the past century, and much of the last four millennia before that. This episode is worth pondering by those who wonder why and how things happen in the Middle East, and how foreign powers should interact with our societies, countries, and political power centers.

The short-term focus on the Trump administration’s incoherent and erratic conduct of foreign policy is deservedly a short-term issue. It will give people more reasons to fear a continuation of this administration and seek ways to end it or blunt its power, as the mid-term congressional elections have already done. The White House, Congress, and the Defense and State departments all seem to be saying or leaking slightly different things about why the U.S. is leaving Syria. This continues a legacy of inconsistent American behavior there during the past eight years of the uprising and war in the country. It badly cripples and makes fools of those American officials, especially the special envoy to Syria, Ambassador James Jeffrey, who have been saying for months that Washington will stay in Syria for as long as needed to drive out Iran — a patently ridiculous and unattainable policy for anyone who knows anything about anything east of the East River in New York City. Ambassador Jeffrey and others have served their country diligently for years, but end up deeply tarnished because of the wider incoherence of their elected masters in the White House. This makes it difficult for any American foreign service officers to try and do an honorable job, if their words cannot be believed, which is in fact often the case these days.

But this is a short-term problem reflecting the comic, mercantile, and sophomoric nature of the Trump administration. The deeper significance of the U.S pullout relates to the modern legacy of U.S. policy in the Middle East, which includes a truly monumental and frightening combination of at least the following dynamics: faulty analysis, cultural ignorance, political manipulation by domestic and foreign forces, over-reliance on military force, excessive protection of Arab and other Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes, inattention to powerful indigenous forces of identity, religion, nationalism, dignity, and other intangibles, creating, using, and abandoning allies of convenience in the region who often suffer terrible fates when the U.S. tires of them and leaves, an almost absolute ignoring of the wishes, rights, and concerns of the 750 million or so Muslim-majority citizens of Turkey, Iran and the Arab states (of whom 400 million are Arabs), a total misreading of the region’s widespread parallel respect for American values and disdain for America policies by ordinary citizens and elites alike, and chronic confusion about why ordinary men and women become violent and a few of them become terrorists.

This breathtaking legacy of ignorance, incompetence, and militarism allows President Trump to add to the long lexicon of American absurdities in the Middle East that he is pulling out the troops because “we have defeated ISIS” in Syria. He betrays the simultaneous and dangerous reality that he understands nothing about the real meaning of defeat, Syria, and ISIS. The truth is that ISIS and others like it emerge from stressed, fractured societies where tens of millions of desperate men and women grasp on to any group that promises them $150 a month, the dignity of resistance (as they see it) against what oppresses them, or salvation seated next to God. The conditions created by the list of policy misdeeds I mentioned above are the core creators of such terrorist movements, which will thrive where conditions remain troubling for ordinary families.

The widespread reaction in the region and the world will be that the U.S. is not a reliable ally, and can easily be driven out of foreign lands where it has sent its impressive military machine that is deployed by unimpressive, often ignorant, uncaring, and chaos-generating politicians. We will now all watch — once again — as Russia, China, Turkey, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and many others at local level take advantage of the vacuums and openings the U.S leaves behind in the wake of its politically misguided military deployments in the Middle East, in the wider context of a region deep in metamorphosis into new ideological and state configurations in large part because of the older legacy of such manipulations, interventions, and aggressions in the region by foreign powers, including Zionism/Israel in the past century.

At the same time the Arab authoritarian regimes will try to move closer to their traditional allies — the U.S., Israel, Iran, and others — to dampen the turbulence that will inevitably surface soon, as our region continues to suffer growing poverty and vulnerability (which now define two-thirds of our Arab population) amidst expanding inequalities and chronic disparities in basic human services and needs. This is not due to what the U.S. is doing in Syria today, to be sure. But it is a consequence of what the U.S., other powers, and virtually all local power elites have done in the region for the past century. To miss that connection is to make today’s violence a kindergarten exercise in the face of what we should expect in the near future if current trends continue, whether via foreign armies, adjacent colonizers of our lands, bone saw-wielding rulers, or just greedy ruling elites who expect their growing armies to keep them safe.

The impulsive Trump pullout from Syria — which is a logical move, because the U.S. never should have been there in the first place — is noteworthy because it reminds us of all the bad and destructive policies that Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Israelis, Russians, British, French and many others have practiced in our lands for so many decades, if not centuries and millennia. Watch what happens now as local, regional, and global forces jockey for influence and territory in Syria, while some of them return home on troop ships waving the embarrassing banners of ridiculous missions they never should have been sent to pursue. You will learn much from this, especially how Arab societies have become a global laboratory for imperial mismanagement, indigenous failed authoritarianism, and the two parties’ ongoing joint venture in garbage governance and denied humanism.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 December 2018
Word Count: 1,063
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As the 2020 U.S. elections begin to be the major front-page concern of the media, there is increasing speculation about what will be the form it takes. Could Trump really be impeached? Will the Democrats move still further left or rather move back to the center? How strong is Trump’s base, and how faithful?

As someone who has argued for a long time that the United States has been in a steady and irreversible decline, I am constantly asked: “Well then, why isn’t Trump crashing?” And if he is, will the crash become more visible? And if it does, will it be a sudden smash, or simply a steady downward slide?

The issue of visibility is seen differently from within the United States and in the rest of the world. Let us take each in turn. Trump in his tweets gives an ambiguous answer. On the one hand, the call for making America great again implies there has been some decline, albeit a reparable one. The repair is what Trump claims to be doing.

On the other hand, the polls and the innumerable analyses of the situation point to less U.S. confidence in the future than before, even among Trump’s core supporters. The fact that Trump spends so much time attacking “fake news” shows that he is worried about the lower level of U.S. confidence. He seems to be spending much energy seeking to persuade everyone that a lower level of confidence results from a misreading of the data.

Thus far, within the United States, Trump’s decline is a matter of public debate, between and within all political tendencies. Most people are still seeing what they prefer to see.

The picture is quite different outside the United States. For one thing, people are having to cope with declines of one sort or another in their own countries – in England because of Brexit, in France because of the return of a long tradition of uprisings, in Russia and India because of economic tightness, in China because of the increased resistance to their own outward thrusts. In fact, it is hard to find a country that is not fighting its own decline. They are therefore not impressed with an argument that the United States is different.

They are so impressed with the reality of U.S. decline that they feel they have to do something about it. They are fearful of a sudden dramatic collapse of the U.S. currency. They think this could lead to rash war decisions. And they worry also that a currency collapse would hurt them as much as it would hurt the United States.

All this points to a combined effort to make sure that a U.S. crash takes the form of a steady slide rather than an explosion. But steady slide there will be.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2018 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 December 2018
Word Count: 466
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BOSTON — This is a historic moment in relations between the United States and the Middle East, because we may be witnessing the beginning of the decline of that combination of forces that has been at once the most destructive and the most powerful in our modern history. I am speaking about the U.S.-Israel-Saudi Arabia close relationship that reached its apex, and saw its Israeli-Saudi Arabian dimension emerge into the public, in the past two years of the Donald Trump administration.

Events in recent weeks and days signal that this collaboration is eroding and being discredited. This reflects both short term developments like the Yemen war and the Jamal Khashoggi assassination, and longer term transitions that have seen the power of pro-Israeli and pro-Saudi groups slowing or even retreating within American society and Washington politics.

The important historic angle to this is that the powerful U.S.-Saudi-Israeli combine has been the most destructive force in modern Middle Eastern history due to its three component elements of Western imperialism and militarism, Zionist colonialism and endless warfare, and Wahhabi social and political extremism. Few if any other local and foreign forces have had as much negative impact — on so many lands, for so many decades — during the modern Mideast era that started around World War One.

The United States is problematic because its political and military interventions in the Arab/Mideast region reflect that older Western, mostly European, legacy of colonial controls that brought our region into the 21st Century limping and shattered, due to two main legacies: direct and constant military interventions, with dozens of permanent bases, that eventually contributed to our broken states and stressed societies that cannot withstand permanent warfare; and, non-stop support for autocratic local regimes that prohibit the emergence of credible democracies or expression of the will and interests of the Arabs and other people.

Israel is problematic because its modern legacy of non-stop war between Zionism and Arabism since the early 20th Century has heavily contributed to the prevalence of Arab authoritarian states run by military men and their families, and mostly incompetently so. A century of Arab-Israeli wars has diverted the resources and capabilities of these Arab states, eroded numerous indigenous attempts at serious, genuine, national development, and hardened the Arab power elite’s autocratic ways that also prevented pluralism, participation, and accountability from ever taking root in our societies to the point today that Israeli companies sell technology to some Arab governments that allows them to spy on their own citizens and prevent any freedom of expression, and the Israeli prime minister intervenes in the White House to promote U.S support of the embattled Saudi crown prince.

Saudi Arabia is problematic because the extremist form of Wahhabi political philosophy it exported to Arab-Islamic societies has been both the foundational anchorage and continuing fuel that have helped midwife the birth of modern militant Islamist movements, some of which ultimately evolved on their own into terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and dozens of smaller ones — even though, it is critical to appreciate, the vast majority of Saudi men and women reject such criminal militancy.

Wahhabi-stoked extremism, predatory Israeli Zionism, and American imperial militarism each contributed in parallel, over many decades, to nipping in the bud any nationalist developmental movements across the Arab region, while actively or implicitly supporting the persistence of Arab authoritarian regimes.

The advent of President Trump and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman converged with several other recent dynamics: the interests of American Christian Zionists and pro-Israeli zealots that heavily influenced the White House, including through Trump’s son-in-law and Zionist settlements supporter Jared Kushner; the rightwards drift of Israeli politics under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and, the three countries’ shared desire to counter Iran’s influence in the region.

Yet this trilogy of mostly failed extremism now seems to have reached its peak, and is likely to be rolled back and perhaps even shattered. All three leaders have generated immense opposition to themselves and their policies, and may be charged with criminal actions or even evicted from office.

The U.S. Senate vote earlier this week to hold Mohammad bin Salman personally responsible for the assassination of Khashoggi and to demand the end of U.S. military assistance to the Saudi and Emirati war in Yemen represents a historic change. It shows the U.S. legislature playing a greater role in conducting foreign policy and checking Trump’s excesses, as they explicitly demand that Washington reduce its close links with the Saudi government until the truth of the Khashoggi killing is revealed and the assassins and their commanders held accountable. Mohammad bin Salman now faces real pushback from real power, which he has never faced before.

The tempering of U.S.-Saudi ties and the possible reduced role of Mohammad bin Salman will both weaken the ability of Netanyahu and his extremist zealots in Washington to keep promoting their aggressive, apartheid-like policies that have only generated tensions across the region. These three embattled leaderships may combine for one last, wild fling in the world of political extremism and brutality where they seem to live so comfortably — but they will also face a much more hardened opposition across the world, including in the halls of American power.

This trilateral Middle East wrecking machine probably has seen its best days behind it, for which we thank all those Arabs, Americans, Israelis and others who resisted these purveyors of destruction, and whoever else on earth or in the heavens had a hand in this. One also hopes this means the proven natural decency, moderation, and pragmatism of most American, Saudi, and Israeli people would emerge once more, and help shape policies for peace, justice, and co-existence, rather than for perpetual fear, hatred, war, and fanaticism. But being thankful for changes underway is not enough; we must all continue to work to make sure that this shift away from collective fanaticism, and towards rule of law and humanism, persists.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 December 2018
Word Count: 982
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CIA leaks spark new era in Khashoggi case 

by Rami G. Khouri

BOSTON — The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s leaks to several American news organizations this weekend that it believes with “high confidence” that Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi has triggered a series of fascinating political contests and confrontations that may profoundly impact several decision-decision-making spheres in Washington, within Saudi Arabia, and between the United States and foreign countries. We enter uncharted terrain here with potentially tumultuous results, largely because of the unprecedented, unpredictable, and mostly uninformed, uncaring, and dangerous nature of the Trump presidency and the rule of Mohammad Bin Salman.

Never in modern history has the effective ruler of the Arab region’s biggest power and the president of the world’s most powerful country both been publicly challenged by the CIA, which essentially calls them both liars, and the crown prince a murderer. So we now witness several important, often unprecedented, confrontations that will play themselves out in the coming weeks or months, due to the CIA’s “high confidence” conclusion, the serial incompetence of the Saudis in covering up the assassination they organized and executed, and President Donald Trump’s apparent desire to protect the Saudi crown prince from responsibility.

Several critical contestations underway include at least the following, with others that might appear soon:

1. The CIA vs. the United States president. We saw a few weeks ago the initial signs of this tension when the CIA director flew to Turkey to examine for herself the evidence of the Turkish government and others that seemed to tie the Saudi government, in the form of the Crown Prince’s office, with the death squad killing of Khashoggi. The CIA’s “high confidence” in the assessment is important because it indicates that the agency has its own sources of first-hand evidence. So we can be quite certain that the crown prince was involved in the killing.

The CIA leaking its assessment to major U.S. media is an unusual challenge to the president and his authority to conduct foreign policy — not the direct conduct of foreign policy itself, but the creation of a public opinion environment around how the U.S. should handle the accusations and evidence against the Saudi leader.

2. The U.S. Congress vs. the U.S. president. Some senators in the Congress had already started to initiate legislation on arms sales to Bahrain and military assistance to Saudi Arabia, due to those countries internal human rights gross misconduct or their involvement in the war in Yemen. Some congresspeople have started publicly agreeing with the CIA, while demanding that the Saudis find a way to replace their crown prince with someone more responsible and less erratic and dangerous, in the worlds of some senior senators. So we will now witness a dramatic contest to see who really makes foreign policy — as the CIA, the president, and the Congress all publicly lay out their positions on how to respond to the culpability of the Saudi crown prince.

3. President Trump vs. the Republican Party. President Trump has largely been able to maintain the Republicans in Congress on his side. This is changing suddenly with the CIA assessment, as some Republican leaders, like Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, openly say they will refuse to deal with the Saudi crown prince, at a time when the president repeatedly says the Saudis are important allies and major sources of income for the U.S., and that the evidence against the crown prince is not clear yet.

4. The U.S. vs. its major Western allies. The major European allies have all made public statements that reject the Trump position and demand a thorough investigation of the Khashoggi murder. If Trump rejects the CIA verdict and growing congressional opposition to his position, and continues to shield Saudis who seem to be complicit in the murder, we may see a novel situation where the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel are isolated from the rest of the world (the Israelis are in this trio of rogues because their prime minister asked Trump to take it easy on the crown prince because of the importance of the Saudis to Israeli interests).

It will take some time — months, I estimate — before these contests play themselves out and the final official American position on the murder is defined, and it becomes clear if the crown prince stays as he is now, gets his wings clipped, or is quietly removed by a decision of the king and the royal family council that was established by the late King Abdullah to determine the royal succession.

The matter grows bigger by the day, and will not quietly go away, no matter how much Trump, or his son-in-law and friend of the crown prince Jared Kushner, would like that to happen. This is because of three factors:

a) the barbaric nature of the planned killing, body dismemberment, and dissolution in acid is so extreme that it cannot be overlooked as just another routine crime by another violent Middle Eastern government;

b) the repeated lying and succession of ridiculous stories the Saudi government provided to cover up the crime reveal it to be both hapless amateurs as well as cold-blooded killers; and,

c) this is the opening that gave the world, especially officials and media in the U.S., the opening they needed to truthfully assess and politically push back against the destructive track record of the crown prince in domestic, regional, and international affairs, and to speak out against it.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 November 2018

Word Count: 906

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