The idea of holding the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea seemed destined to fail. The interests of three key actors – the United States, South Korea, and North Korea — were so different that it seemed impossible to find working compromises between them.

And yet it was an unexpected relative success. Diplomacy won out. This was very largely due to the remarkable and unsuspected diplomatic skills of one person: President Moon Jae-in of South Korea. Let us review the issues about which there was deep disagreement, and spell out the positions of the three governments as of the beginning of the year 2018.

U.S. President Trump did not want North Korea even to attend the Olympics. He was intent on finding ways to punish North Korea for defying various United Nations resolutions. He insisted that North Korea renounce the use of nuclear weapons and destroy those that they already had. He intended to engage in military maneuvers that would impress the North Korean regime with the folly of resisting the U.S. demands. He was opposed to any diplomatic discussions with the North Korean regime until they agreed in principle to these demands.

The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, rejected firmly any idea of denuclearization. He said he would be willing to meet with President Trump only if the meeting were without preconditions and if the United States would cease its aggressive actions against North Korea, such as military maneuvers. He also said that these matters could only be discussed in a one-to-one meeting of North Korea and the United States. He specifically rejected any alternative group as a meeting partner such as the so-called Group of Six (the five members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany). He also refused the presence of South Korea at the meeting.

In this dangerous situation of total blockage, President Moon sought to find space for a third position. He wanted to reassure the United States that South Korea still valued, above all, its alliance with the United States. He also wished to persuade North Korea to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula.

The first achievement of South Korea’s president was to obtain the consent of North Korea to participate in the Olympics. He also obtained North Korea’s support to have a joint presence of their teams under one flag. In one sport a single joint team was created.

President Moon sought to assure the United States that he wished to maintain the same high level of alliance that had been functioning for a long time. However, he suggested postponing the maneuvers until after the Olympics. Reluctantly, the United States agreed.

President Moon then sought to get North Korea to impose a temporary truce in rocket launchings until after the Olympics. North Korea tacitly agreed. Presumably, this opened the way to high-level participants on both sides. Each country attended the opening sessions with a top official, plus a woman close to the leader.

In the case of North Korea, it was the nominal head of state, Kim Yong chol, as chair of the North Korean delegation plus Kim Yo-jong, sister and confidant of North Korea’s leader. She arrived with an invitation to President Moon to visit North Korea. In the U.S. case, it was Vice-President Pence and Ivanka Trump, daughter and confidant of President Trump.

Although the United States was against meetings with North Koreans, a private channel was used to arrange a meeting between Vice-President Pence and the North Koreans. However, in order to appease U.S. supporters of President Trump, Vice-President Pence delivered a public denunciation of the North Korean regime. The North Korean response to this public slap was to cancel the meeting with Pence at the very last minute.

Nonetheless, both the North Korean and U.S. representatives attended the closing session. They studiously avoided any contact with each other, but they also avoided mutual denunciations.

How can we interpret what happened? The North Korean regime made some quiet concessions, which were in reality temporary. Nevertheless, they did make them. Trump made some bigger concessions, which were also in reality temporary. President Moon obtained the credit, both within South Korea and elsewhere, of creating this truce for peace. Even some of South Korea’s conservatives saw some value in what had been achieved.

At the closing session, the North Koreans stated that relations between North and South Korea should “improve together.” Will they now? And will there now be another U.S.-North Korea official meeting? Nothing is less sure. But the tail wind is with President Moon, who thereby is unquestionably the great victor of the Olympics negotiations. He bent the North Korean regime and he outwitted the U.S. regime. Not bad, by any definition.

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: 01 March 2018
Word Count: 781
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The most fluid arena in the modern world-system, which is in structural crisis, is arguably the geopolitical arena. No country comes even near to dominating this arena. The last hegemonic power, the United States, has long acted like a helpless giant. It is able to destroy but not to control the situation. It still proclaims rules that others are expected to follow, but it can be and is ignored.

There is now a long list of countries that act as they deem fit despite pressures from other countries to perform in specified ways. A look around the globe will readily confirm the inability of the United States to get its way.

The two countries other than the United States that have the strongest military power are Russia and China. Once, they had to move carefully to avoid the reprimand of the United States. The cold-war rhetoric described two competing geopolitical camps. Reality was different. The rhetoric simply masked the relative effectiveness of U.S. hegemony.

Now it is virtually the other way around. The United States has to move carefully vis-à-vis Russia and China to avoid losing all ability to obtain their co-operation on the geopolitical priorities of the United States.

Look next at the so-called strongest allies of the United States. We can quibble about which one is the “closest” ally, or had been for a long while. Take your pick between Great Britain and Israel or even, some would say, Saudi Arabia. Or make a list of erstwhile reliable partners of the United States, such as Japan and South Korea, Canada, Brazil, and Germany. Call them “number two’s.”

Now look at the behavior of all these countries in the last twenty years. I say “twenty” because the new reality predates the regime of Donald Trump, although he has undoubtedly worsened the ability of the United States to get its way.

Take the situation on the Korean peninsula. The United States wants North Korea to renounce nuclear weapons. This is a regularly repeated objective of the United States. This was true when Bush and Obama were president. It has continued to be true with Trump. The difference is the mode of seeking to achieve this objective. Previously, U.S. actions utilized a degree of diplomacy in addition to sanctions. This reflected the understanding that too many U.S. public threats were self-defeating. Trump believes the opposite. He sees the public threats as the basic weapon in his armory.

However, Trump has different days. On day one he menaces North Korea with devastation. But on day two he makes his primary target Japan and South Korea. Trump says they are providing insufficient financial support for the costs deriving from a continuing armed U.S. presence there. So, in the to and fro between the two U.S. positions, neither Japan nor South Korea have the sense that they are sure to be protected.

Japan and South Korea have dealt with their fears and uncertainty in opposite ways. The current Japanese regime seeks to secure U.S. guarantees by offering total public support of the (shifting) U.S. tactics. It hopes thereby to please the United States sufficiently that Japan will receive the guarantees it wants to have.

The current South Korean regime is using a quite different tactic. It is pursuing very openly closer diplomatic relations with North Korea, very much against U.S. wishes. It hopes thereby to please the North Korean regime sufficiently that North Korea will respond by agreeing not to escalate the conflict.

Whether either of these tactical approaches will stabilize the U.S. position is totally unsure. What is sure is that the United States is not in command. Both Japan and South Korea are quietly pursuing nuclear armaments to strengthen their position since they cannot know what the next day will bring on the U.S. front. The fluidity of the U.S. position weakens further U.S. power because of the reactions it generates.

Or take the even more knotty situation in the so-called Islamic world going from the Maghreb to Indonesia, and particularly in Syria. Each major power in the region (or dealing with the region) has a different prime “enemy” (or enemies). For Saudi Arabia and Israel, it is at the moment Iran. For Iran it is the United States. For Egypt it is the Muslim Brotherhood. For Turkey it is the Kurds. For the Iraqi regime, it is the Sunnis. For Italy, it is Al Qaeda, which is making it impossible to control the flow of migrants. And so on.

How about for the United States? Who knows? That is the nub of fear for everyone else. The United States seems at the moment to have two quite different priorities. On day one, it is North Korean acquiescence with U.S. imperatives. On day two it is ending U.S. involvement in the East Asian region, or at least reducing its financial outlays. As a result, it is increasingly ignored.

We could draw similar pictures for other regions or sub-regions of the world. The key lesson to draw is that the decline of the United States has not been followed by another hegemon. It has simply folded into the overall chaotic zigzagging, the fluidity of which we spoke.

This of course is the great danger. Nuclear accidents, or mistakes, or folly suddenly become what is on top of everyone’s mind, and especially that of the world’s armed forces. How to deal with this danger is the most meaningful short-term geopolitical debate.

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: 15 February 2018
Word Count: 907
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[REVISED: The following is the revised and corrected Feb 1, 2018 commentary.]

Politicians everywhere have hidden parts of their political and personal itinerary. Sometimes the exposing of such “secrets” causes disillusionment and/or reduced support of voters who had supported this person. What varies is the extent to which the politicians can keep such secrets obscure.

The recently elected president of France, Emmanuel Macron, has managed maintaining the obscurity better than most. It is therefore useful to try to answer the question of who he (really) is. For one thing, there is a lot of disagreement about the answer. This difference is not only one between supporters and antagonists but also within each of the two.

What do we know about his background? He studied at two of France’s elite institutions — Sciences Po and the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) — where he performed brilliantly.

Upon graduation, he served the government as an Inspecteur Générale des Finances. He then moved to the private sphere, obtaining a post as a banker at Rothschild & Cie. At the time, he was a member of the Socialist Party, about to govern France with François Hollande in 2009. This was the very moment that he changed his party affiliation to Independent.

When Manuel Valls, the leader of the most “centrist” faction of the Socialist Party, formed in 2016 his second, more conservative cabinet, he recruited Macron to be his Minister of Economy. Macron’s task was to implement a neoclassical turn in France’s governmental policies. Macron (and Valls) were only partially successful.

The presidential elections of 2017 were approaching. Valls sought the candidacy of the Socialist Party. Macron did not support him but instead created his own party structure. He named it En Marche!, which means “going forward” but also replicated Macron’s initials (EM).

Support for the Socialist Party had by then diminished severely, largely because of the acute unpopularity of François Hollande. The candidate of the other mainstream party, the center-right Les Républicains was François Fillon, who had surprisingly won his party’s nomination, using as his main argument his comparative moral rectitude.

The candidate of the far right National Front party, Marine LePen, had succeeded in making the party adopt more “respectable” positions at the cost of breaking publicly with Jean-Marie LePen, the founder of the party and her father.

It seemed at first that the two candidates who would survive the multi-candidacy first round were Fillon and LePen, which would turn the second dual-candidate round into a contest between the center-right and the far right. Such a choice was for many voters very unpalatable and unacceptable.

Suddenly all changed. Fillon himself became embroiled in a scandal, but refused to pull out in order to allow his party to name another candidate. This subsequent decline of support for Fillon allowed Macron to assert himself as the only candidate who could defeat Marine LePen in the second round.

Macron presented his party as neither left nor right, breaking with the left-right pattern that had prevailed for a century in both elections and governing. It worked. On the first round, Macron obtained 24% of the vote and LePen 21 percent. On the second round with only two candidates, Macron won with 65% of the vote.

In his campaign, Macron used one other major argument derived from the traditions of the Socialist Party. The socialists had always been the prime defender of laicité (somewhat equivalent to secularism) against the traditions of the Right parties, whose base was strongly constituted by Catholic voters. Macron attacked first Fillon and then LePen as seeking to enact socially conservative positions on questions such as abortion, gay rights, et cetera.

As soon as he assumed office however, Macron sought to attract major politicians from the two mainstream parties as well as ecologists and self-defined centrists. He clearly hoped this would destroy the future prospects of the two mainstream parties and consolidate his own and his party’s dominance of French politics for decades to come.

Now that he is entering the second year of his regime, what can we say about who he is? He is undoubtedly a person of the Right on all economic matters. He has been the first politician able to enact major revisions to France’s welfare state structures. When Hollande tried a much milder version of such reforms, half of France was in the street, and the proposals were partially withdrawn. When Macron did it, no such reaction occurred. In particular, the trade unions were unable to mobilize their members against Macron as they had against Hollande.

Macron has shown that he is extremely ambitious on a world scale as well. While Hollande was unable to maintain France’s position as an equal ally of the France-Germany controlling duo of European politics, Macron has moved into the void created by Germany’s now much weaker position. Nor has he stopped there. He has challenged the hegemonic pretensions of the United States without embracing an openly anti-American stance.

Nonetheless, he has sought to make France a significant actor in the Pacific arena, in Africa and the Middle East, and even in Latin America. It seems that what he is offering is a more palatable version of U.S. world policies rather than offering something more progressive.

As for social issues, Macron has shown himself to be quite prudent. Yes, he supports the causes favored by the Left but he is careful not to go too far too fast. He does not wish to arouse Catholic voters to engage in massive street protests.

The bottom line for me is that France now has the shrewdest, most efficacious Right politician in power in modern history. One can think of others who wanted to create a similar package of policies but they were not able to put together the coalition that permitted it. No doubt, Macron was helped by the chaotic state of the world-system. But it should be recognized how effectively he has implemented his conservative objectives.

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: 10 February 2018
Word Count: 977
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — For most of the past two centuries, Egypt has been the epicenter, litmus test, proving ground, and mother of cultural and political trends across the Arab region — so we should all be worried by the events of the past month that systematically throttled, indicted, intimated, detained, and otherwise politically eliminated potential serious candidates to oppose Field Marshal-President Abdelfattah Sisi in this year’s presidential election.

We should worry because the brand of top-heavy, security- and military-anchored manipulation and monopolization of power across society in Egypt continues to slowly spread to most other Arab countries. The pre-fixed outcomes of presidential elections or parliamentary division-of-seats in favor of the ruling power elite is not only troubling because it robs society of the potential to address the many challenges it faces in virtually all fields of life; and I mean all fields of life, including education, employment, water, health care, air quality, food security, corruption, human rights denials, poverty, weak social safety nets, labor informality, disparities, lack of political participation or accountability, haphazard mega-urban sprawl, and other critical dimensions of life that are in bad shape, and continue to deteriorate for the most part, across most of the Arab region.

Egypt’s heavy-handed elimination of all serious presidential contenders is also troubling because it takes to a new height of vindictive brutality the rot and the core weakness that degrade and dehumanize hundreds of millions of ordinary Arab men and women who often find themselves naked, blindfolded, handcuffed, and invisible in front of their political authorities. Hundreds of millions among the 400 million Arabs today have seen their political, social, economic, and cultural rights systematically crushed by selfish elites who have followed a predictable script that was initiated in Egypt by the armed forces coup in the 1950s, and now spreads throughout our troubled region: They seize power by force; create and manipulate the levers of influence and control in society; buy off small numbers of people who are brought into the circle of power through crony capitalism patronage; develop mass mind-control indoctrination and propaganda mechanisms that tell every citizen what he or she is allowed to read, hear, say, and think; and, offer hero-worship and sycophantic promises that play on the yearnings for salvation, a savior, and a few loafs of bread for their children every night among the disheveled, desperate skeletons of their once proud citizens.

Egypt is important to watch because it remains the heart and wellspring of this autocratic and destructive trend across our region — though it is important to note the many other fine qualities of the Egyptian people that refuse to die, because they permeate those dimensions of the indestructible humanity, wisdom, and joy of Egypt that do persist below the surface of the power bludgeons.

The presidential “election” is the latest example of how the power control process operates. If anyone is interested in understanding how the Egyptian state has managed its autocratic system for the past 65 years, I recommend strongly a powerful book that has just been published by a respected scholar who has studied Egypt for many decades. It is the book entitled simply Egypt, by Robert Springborg (2018, 245 pp., Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA, USA). It traces in great detail and much clarity the traditions and mechanics of the “deep state” that has defined modern Egypt, including chapters on the presidency, the armed forces and security agencies, the parliament, civil society, and the “rocky road ahead.” I recommend it strongly to any reader who wants to understand the autocratic trends that continue to proliferate across our region.

The Egyptian government’s elimination of the presidential candidacies of Ahmed Shafiq, Sami Anan, Khaled Ali, and Mohammad Anwar Sadat was no surprise, given the total power-control track record of the Sisi regime since it eliminated Egypt’s first ever legitimately elected president in 2013. The surprise is that in the wake of the crushing of the 2010-11 Arab uprisings by Arab security states and their foreign supporters in the east and west alike, so many other Arab countries have followed the Egyptian model that openly wields brute force to crush any opposition along with any mere expressions of differing views and any serious exercise of freedom of expression and a pluralistic media.

So half a dozen other Arab governments increasingly apply harsh new restrictions on citizens’ ability to express themselves in the public realm, even on social media. This criminalization of political expression and free speech is the latest wave of public policy barbarism that radiates across Arab frontiers. Many Arab governments find themselves, like Egypt, frantically seeking to contain the anger and humiliation of their own citizens. Those citizens in most cases simply want to express their views, share peacefully in discussing or shaping policies that impact their lives, and in most cases find a way to be able to feed their children and allow them to gain meaningful employment in economies that are massively controlled by small power elites.

Arab citizens in their hundreds of millions are being politically, socially, and economically castrated at birth, and they grow up learning that they have no voice, no power, no rights, perhaps even no value as human beings. The bottom line of this ugly dynamic remains, to my mind, freedom of expression. It is becoming increasingly difficult or dangerous merely to express one’s thoughts in public in many Arab countries. Yet small groups of human rights activists and courageous, patriotic individuals continue to speak out, because they understand that only if all Arabs have the opportunity to participate in their public life and policies can their societies have any chance of addressing the many severe challenges they already face today in all fields of life.

In our lingering post-colonial world, it is noteworthy therefore to see the Washington Post in an editorial this week comment rightly on the severe jail sentences handed down to two Saudi men who tried to establish a small human rights organization on-line and even heeded the government’s demand to close it. The Post Editorial Board said, commenting on the contrast with the liberal, futuristic picture of the country its officials presented at the Davos global gathering: “But the old Saudi Arabia was still evident back at home. On Thursday, two human rights activists, Mohammed al-Otaibi and Abdullah al-Attawi, were sentenced to 14 and seven years in prison, respectively, for briefly founding a human rights organization about five years ago. No matter that they heeded the government’s demands to close it; the prosecution painted such things as publishing human rights reports, disseminating information to the news media and retweeting posts on Twitter as criminal acts…The twinkling promises for overseas investors at Davos cannot mask the fact that Saudi Arabia is still what it was five years ago — a dungeon for those who dare speak out.”

This is harsh stuff, yes. But it pales in comparison to what I have witnessed all around me in recent decades as I move around the Arab world: several hundred million Arab men and women whose minds and self-respect shrivel before our eyes with every new move to knock them down, shut their mouths, close their minds, and have them only obsequiously obey or else, moves ordered and implemented by small groups of ruling men with guns who are addicted to power but cannot use it equitably for their people’s benefit.

The slow, painful hollowing and effective dehumanization of Arab societies deprives them of the dynamism of their greatest resource — the ability of their men, women, and youth to participate in the mechanisms, decisions, assessments, and development of their own societies. Lands where humans and citizens are transformed into docile beasts of burden are troubled lands. When the Washington Posteditorial board recognizes and says this, it probably means there is something there to explore.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a 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: 30 January 2018
Word Count: 1,300
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — The start of another calendar year brings with it the opportunity to look back and look ahead to try to understand the trends that define our Arab region. I have spent the last year steadily researching what I call in shorthand the 4 Ds that define the underlying trends that have slowly brought our region to its fractured and often traumatized state today: state dysfunction, socio-economic disparity, citizen political disempowerment, and individual and collective human despair.

This gruesome quartet of forces has continuously gnawed away at the former “stability” of Arab countries and societies for the past four decades, generating insurmountable obstacles to state integrity that has resulted in six war-ravaged countries and others where internal stresses seem to portend permanent draconian, security-first, responses by political elites that refuse to share power inclusively.

The rot gained wide traction since the 1970s, but the past decade indicates that we should not expect any quick improvements in the region. This decade has included continuing mass desperation, spontaneous uprisings, a few civil wars, much government counter-repression, and foreign military interventions everywhere you look. In fact, Arab and other Middle Eastern countries now join the trend of foreign militarism, with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran leading the way in making war or establishing military bases in nearby countries.

I initially sought to understand the underlying reasons for our Arab region’s continuing slide into incoherent statehood and ravaged citizenship by exploring what drove otherwise ordinary young men and some women to support, like, or join the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) – perhaps as many as 50 or 60 million Arabs, according to some pollsters and analysts.

My initial research led me to the frightening conclusion about our Arab region suffering the grotesque realities of the 4 D’s mentioned above. I explored this in more depth by in two ways: the obvious signs that are visible to anyone like myself who travels around the region and interacts with both ordinary citizens and members of the power elites, and the findings of credible empirical research by Arab and international scholars who explore broad trends across the entire region.

Too often for comfort, the findings from my feet and my footnotes point out half a dozen trends that should cause grave concern across our region:

a) Conditions for many or most people have deteriorated in almost every important sector of life (water, education, employment, nutrition, poverty, environment, freedom of expression, political participation and accountability, socio-economic disparities, and a dozen others.)

b) All these dimensions of life link with one another to create an almost insurmountable cycle of obstacles to an individual achieving a better life, because deterioration in one dimension of life automatically triggers similar declines in other sectors; this reverses what happened to ordinary families across the Arab world in 1920-1970, when every generation saw its wellbeing improve.

c) Conditions in all these sectors have continued to deteriorate for the most part in the past decade since the 2010-11 uprisings’ explosion of mass popular despair sent the strongest signal of the past century of the unsustainable nature of current Arab statehood. The massive red flag of the uprisings has been ignored, so underlying conditions continue to worsen, generating new pressures that build up with unpredictable consequences.

d) The accumulated stresses in many sectors have reached a point where it is more and more difficult to stop or slow down the deteriorations and try to improve conditions. Many countries with their mediocre governance systems continue the same damaging policies just to stay in place – like over-pumping groundwater, passing on failing students to the next class, misdirecting subsidies in sectors that inhibit real and sustained economic growth or employment, ignoring the spontaneous explosion in unplanned urbanism, criminalizing free expression on social media, and refusing to allow ordinary citizens to participate in the challenges and thrills of designing state policies that actually respond to people’s needs, rather than the elite’s further enrichment.

e) This cycle of regression has led to severe splintering of Arab states’ populations, on the basis of ethnicity, sectarianism, wealth, and power. As the Arab region’s people fracture into smaller units, many of them also militarize, and seek foreign patrons and protectors. This causes massive new problems for the reconstitution of integrated and healthy states — a challenge that is exacerbated by the underlying socio-economic stresses and disparities mentioned above that continue to deteriorate.

f) All of this, serious and threatening as it is, madly seems to be ignored by both our governing power elites and the leading international powers that support them, whether regional powers like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, and Turkey, or global powers like the United States, Russia, U.K, France and others.

The cumulative consequences of these internal trends within many Arab countries strike me as the most serious threat that we confront (alongside the continued dual challenges of Zionist-Israeli colonialism and non-stop international military interventions). So for the coming months or more, I will ignore Donald Trump, Mohammad bin Salman, northern Syria, Aden, Benghazi, Egyptian jails, and other issues that preoccupy most Middle East watchers. Instead, in these weekly columns I will report on and analyze studies on the issues that I believe form the basis for the Arab region’s continuing deterioration, militarization, pauperization, polarization, and fragmentation. These will include trends in poverty, education, employment, pollution, water equity, housing, corruption, democratization, the rule of law, and disparities in many life dimensions.

Most of these developments are widely ignored by the Arab and international media. Their impact, however, determines the wellbeing of most of the 400 million citizens in Arab countries, who know that they deserve more than the current dysfunction, disparity, disempowerment, and despair that many of them experience in their everyday lives. These issues also ultimately will determine if the violence, cruelty, suffering, and collapse of the past decade are the high-water mark that finally pushes us to repair our dysfunctions — or are just a hint of the much greater disruption, mass suffering, and state collapse that we can expect ahead.
Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

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

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Released: 23 January 2018
Word Count: 1,004
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — The crushing irony for Palestinians today is that their cause remains widely supported by over 120 governments and billions of ordinary men and women around the world, yet the Palestinian leadership is a case study in hapless incompetence that verges on national shame. This was confirmed again this week as the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) issued a policy statement after days of deliberations that is a sad example of meaningless clichés uttered by aging men whose track record of political achievement is empty — and astoundingly so, in view of the massive and sustained support around the world for Palestinian national rights.

The Central Council is supposed to fill the gap between the National Council (parliament-in-exile) that represents all Palestinians around the world, and the Executive Committee that represents the major Palestinian political factions and functions like a government cabinet, headed by the president. In fact, these three organs of government and the presidency are all moribund institutions that have neither impact nor legitimacy, for the leadership has lost touch with the ordinary Palestinians whom it is supposed to represent and serve.

So it is no surprise that after another fiery but hollow speech by President Mahmoud Abbas, the Central Council has decided to “suspend” its recognition of Israel, end security cooperation with Israel, effectively nullify the 2003 Oslo accords, and call on the world to work for the creation of a Palestinian state and end Israel’s colonization policies. These meaningless words by a powerless leadership will have no impact on anything.

It is hard to know what else to say or do in the face of such a failed leadership of a noble Palestinian people that continues to struggle, mostly nonviolently, for their peaceful statehood and end to refugeehood and exile, alongside an Israeli state that would acknowledge those rights for Palestinians. But we must do something, because simply continuing with the same inept leadership that has excluded the vast majority of Palestinians from participating in their national decision-making only guarantees that daily life conditions and future prospects for those millions of Palestinians will only worsen with every passing month — and for those in refugee camps or under Israeli siege in Gaza, it is hard to imagine how life could get any more difficult.

The Palestinians cannot force major changes in the policies of the Israeli government that continues with the same colonial, Apartheid-like policies that have defined Zionism since the 1947-48 creation of Israel and the dismemberment, disenfranchisement, and dispersal of the Palestinians. But 1.5 million Palestinians of 1948 have become nine million or so today, and they do have the power to do one thing, whether they live in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, as Israeli citizens inside Israel, or throughout the diaspora around the region and the world.

They can and must re-legitimize their national leadership into a single movement that listens to all their views, represents them legitimately, reaches policy decisions on the basis of serious consultations and consensus that allows Palestinians to speak in a single voice, and engages diplomatically around the world with the full support of all Palestinians.

None of these dynamics exists today, which is why the current leadership of the PLO under Mahmoud Abbas is not taken seriously in the region or internationally — least of all by the majority of Palestinians themselves, who have looked elsewhere for leadership in the years since the Oslo process proved to be a failure and Yasser Arafat started to lose his credibility. The leaderless condition of the Palestinian people today is reflected in how the three most dramatic examples of pubic political action in recent years have occurred without any meaningful input from the PLO, or from the Palestinian Authority (PA) which administers limited services and regions in the West Bank and Gaza where Israel gives it permission to do so.

Those three examples are: the current campaign around the world to support Ahed Tamimi, the 16-year-old girl from a West Bank village who is detained in an Israeli jail pending a possible military court trial, because she resisted Israeli occupation and slapped an Israeli soldier; the weeks of spontaneous popular protest last summer in Arab East Jerusalem, when tens of thousands of Palestinians there defended their holy sites at the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount, for Israelis); and, the ongoing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement by civil society to pressure Israel to stop its mistreatment and human rights denials of Palestinians in the three arenas of occupied Palestine, the state of Israel, and the disapora.

Hamas’ challenge to the PLO leadership in Gaza is another sign of the PLO’s delinquency in protecting, representing, or leading the Palestinians. It is difficult now to create a whole new national leadership, given the fragmented nature of the Palestinian community. Yet the cohesion that all Palestinians feel, wherever they live, also makes it feasible to at least start consultations amongst themselves to find a way out of the current nightmare by giving fresh blood and new life and legitimacy to existing PLO organs.

There is no reason why we should suffer this ghastly fate of being plagued by a colonial Zionist Israeli state that steadily eats up our land, ignored by a mostly caring world that is otherwise preoccupied by more pressing issues, and abandoned by a Palestinian leadership that has become powerless, dependent on donors, docile, a purveyor of empty clichés, and largely incoherent. Such situations might lull some observers to see the end of the Palestine issue, while a more likely conclusion would be that this low point will mark the start of a process of re-birth for the nine million Palestinians who have never stopped struggling and working for their national rights since the 1930s. They are certainly not going to stop now, regardless of the poor quality of their current leaders.

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

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

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Released: 16 January 2018
Word Count: 974
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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The New York Times has been suggesting that major bondholders — both national and private banks — are discreetly reducing their bond holdings, out of a fear of nominal inflation. How discreet can it be if it is discussed in The New York Times?

Everyone is hoping that no one panics and sells too rapidly. And if someone does that they do it one mega-instant after my discreet withdrawals. Of course, no one wants to withdraw too soon — and not too late. So, when one arrives at a pre-panic moment, no one can be sure, which more or less guarantees the sudden collapse of the bond market.

We know we’re in a pre-panic moment when we are discussing it. But why now and not before? Because so much paper money has been earned in runaway market profits based on no real increase in surplus-value that the market has caught up with the bond market, and therefore one discreetly withdraws from the bond market.

In addition, the paid workers seek higher wages, everywhere. So many workers have been forced out of the labor market that there is now a labor-available shortage. And this makes bonds still a safe haven. Confusion, confusion!

Everyone becomes more protective — of self, of country. And it is self-reinforcing. Even countries using strong anti-protectionist rhetoric like Canada practice it nonetheless or suffer internal political loss.

All this is what happens in a structural crisis of he world-system, in which wild swings of everything is the reality. Pre-panics are one of these wild swings.

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: 15 January 2018
Word Count: 290
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — Of the many fascinating reports in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury book on the Donald Trump White House, perhaps most troubling for Americans and for the world were the new insights into how the United States today shapes its Middle East policies. After spending the last three months in the U.S. and interacting with numerous people and organizations that deal with Mideast issues, I see several problem categories in Trump’s Mideast actions.

The key ones are: the adolescent and personalized nature of how pivotal officials engage with Middle Eastern leaders, based on personal chemistry more than studied national strategic realities; Washington’s working to change Arab leaderships like trading Monopoly properties; the massive sway that extremist, pro-ultranationalist Zionist American donors have in the White House; the disdain that Trump and his associates seem to feel for Arab leaders and countries; the exaggerated and dominant fears of Iran that shape U.S. policies; and, the presumptuous, mostly ignorance-based and unilateral decisions on critical issues such as the status of Jerusalem.

The quotes in the book are not a comprehensive overview of U.S. policy-making in the region or the world, to be sure, but the consistency and tone of the sentiments expressed by White House officials — especially former chief strategist and American White-ultranationalist Steve Bannon — reflect a manner of decision-making in the most powerful office in the world that should frighten us all. (The key quotes in the book are in this report by Middle East Eye: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-president-donald-trump-middle-east-what-we-learned-from-michael-wolff-book-fire-and-fury-1505120232).

The bottom line for me is that major decisions on existential issues that impact the lives of 600 million people in the wider Middle East are being made largely on the basis of policy preferences among the Israeli and Saudi Arabian leaderships, and intermediated by mostly ignorant, and often very young and inexperienced American officials like Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The revelation that President Trump’s White House last year managed Middle Eastern issues mainly through the Israeli, Saudi Arabian, and Egyptian leaderships, with an overarching desire to push back Iranian influence in the region, helps explain why the United States finds itself in confusing situations across the Middle East. It has mainly crisis-managed relations through the lens of security and militarism, and often with mixed successes.

The main problem with the Israeli-Saudi-Egyptian combine as Washington’s preferred entry point into the Middle East is that these four counties’ leaders appear to be totally blind to the conditions, rights, sentiments, and aspirations of the 400 million people in Arab countries, and the other 200 million Middle Easterners in surrounding states. These four states’ steadfast attempts to maintain “security and stability” by using massive military and police force — alongside stringent limits on citizen political, social, and economic rights — has achieved exactly the opposite of what was desired.

Never before has the Arab region been so fractured, violent, volatile, and vulnerable to the whims of desperate citizens, powerful autocrats, renegade militants, durable terrorists, and predatory foreign militaries. And for good measure, Iran’s influence in the region continues to expand in places, as does that of Turkey and Russia, making a mockery of the American approach to Middle Eastern issues. U.S.-backed Israeli, Saudi Arabian, and Egyptian policies in the region are among the leading causes of the tensions and conflicts that plague us all, but they are not solely to blame, due to many other problematic policies by Arab, Iranian, Turkish, Russian, British, and other countries.

Last month’s decision by Washington to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital captures in one fell swoop everything that is wrong and destructive about the Trump approach. It ignores existing international law and UN resolutions that reflect a powerful global consensus; it totally dismisses the sentiments of the hundreds of millions of Muslims and Christians in the Middle East who see Arab East Jerusalem as the rightful capital of a future Palestinian state living alongside Israel; and, it makes this decision unilaterally, and mainly on the basis of domestic political commitments to rightwing pro-Zionist lobbies and political donors like Sheldon Adelson, who has pushed hard for this move.

I thought the most striking revelation in the book was the quote by Steve Bannon that Jordan should take control of the West Bank and Egypt of the Gaza Strip, saying the U.S. should “let them deal with it — or sink trying.”

Such disdain towards two long-standing Arab allies of the U.S. like Jordan and Egypt should be a red flag to all leaders in the region who might want to rely on the U.S. as a consistent partner. It is more apparent now that the Trump governance system in the U.S. is likely to please pro-Israeli American political donors more than it would consider the interests of its other friends and allies, or the dictates of international law and UN resolutions. This is a sure recipe for greater strife and suffering in the Middle East, which can only spread dangerously to other parts of the world.

It should also be a warning sign to Arab leaders that they should wake up and figure out how to regain and exercise their own sovereignty, in order to ensure the well-being of their own citizens. Otherwise, they will wake up one day and realize that they have become little more than properties on a Monopoly board that adolescent airheads in the White House buy, sell, and discard at the whim of wild men in the U.S. waving campaign donation checks.

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

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

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Released: 09 January 2018
Word Count: 901
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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I was going to write either about the elections in Catalonia, or about debates in Australia on what they should do as a result of U.S.-Chinese rivalries in southeast Asia. I consider both topics of compelling importance for the immediate future of our capitalist world-system. But what everyone wants to discuss, it seems, is Mr. Trump — what will he say next, and does it matter?

The question people are asking, friends and foes, is “Can he last?” I didn’t used to think so, but now I do, and here’s why. What is it we know about the present situation? Trump is vastly unpopular and his poll ratings, already extremely low, may well go even lower soon.

Trump claims that the low poll ratings are fake news. And he even seems to believe this himself. Trump acts to satisfy his ego. He measures his success by his ability to stay in office now, win re-election in 2020, and stay in office until 2024.

This is what I think are his tactics. First, he wants to stay in the news constantly, even if the news is negative news. Notice that this commentary shows that he has accomplished that with me. One of the few perceptive things Trump has said is that many newspaper outlets themselves survive because they speak of him. Otherwise, Trump says, many of them would go bankrupt.

Staying in the news is however not enough. Trump must continue to polarize ever more the U.S. and world public opinion arenas. The more polarized U.S. residents and voters are the safer he is. He is threatened by a possible finding by a grand jury that he solicited and received Russian assistance in his election in 2016. He denies this of course. But his minions also attack viciously whoever purports to give evidence that he has done something illegal. Never admit even the least little thing is their motto. Do anything one needs to do in order to deny the credibility of critics.

Could Trump be impeached? As time goes on, it seems more and more unlikely. And even if the House of Representatives were to vote by majority for impeachment, this merely sends the issue to the U.S. Senate . There it requires a two-thirds vote to convict. Could he be denied a Republican candidacy in 2020? This seems even more implausible, as Trump would run as an independent and this would almost certainly guarantee a Democratic victory.

The voting outcome of an anti-Trump move would be the result of two factors. His so-called core of superloyalists would refuse to support any politicians who would try to oust Trump. At the same time, his “soft” supporters might also abstain from voting pro-Trump because of their discomfort with his “extreme” positions. The gainers would obviously be the Democrats. Some analysts therefore foresee a so-called wave election — Democratic victories across the board.

The threat of a Democratic sweep tends to reunite the Republicans and somewhat to divide the Democrats who are debating their own tactics. The crucial thing to remember is that Trump would never go quietly — Trump Thump! He will fight like a wounded tiger to the end. He will do anything however outrageous it be if it will aid his cause. This then is his personal strength. I myself do not think a Trump re-election would be so disastrous. I believe, as do many, that a President Pence would be even worse for progressive causes than a President Trump — just less thump.

In the rest of the world, Trump is powerless. However, this very fact makes him highly dangerous. As he moves from total ignorance of the world to understanding a little, he makes more and more mistakes. He thus loses more and more his ability — and consequently, that of any future U.S. president — to win any diplomatic advantage. But he is dangerous because he controls the launching of U.S. nuclear weapons with an irrepressible penchant to utter provocative threats, while not being ready really to carry them out.

We are, I’m afraid, stuck with Trump Thump. But that doesn’t at all mean that we are not able to win some victories for progressive causes. It is on what we can do and not on what Trump can do that we should be concentrating.

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: 01 January 2018
Word Count: 712
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BOSTON — Does it make any difference that the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) unanimously declared a few days ago that Arab East Jerusalem is the occupied capital of a Palestinian state, in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the imminent seat of the U.S. embassy there? Does this OIC declaration nullify the boast by Junior Moron Jared Kuschner, Donald Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law, that the United States brought together about the same number of Muslim-majority states in a coalition to fight terrorism and roll back Iran’s influence in the Middle East? Maybe, but it is hard to say now, in view of the evolving way that changes occur in the Middle East these days.

Two major trends are clear so far in how states and other actors behave. All the major powers in the Middle East (the US, Iran, Israel, Turkey, Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia, and Russia) patiently pursue policies that they feel will best serve their long-term national interests, and they do not hesitate to use military force and diplomatic brutality to achieve their aims (even if they fail sometimes, as the UAE-Saudi moves in Yemen and Qatar seem to be failing); all other governments and important non-state parties in the region are scrambling in search of short-term arrangements and alliances that will get them through the next year or two in decent shape, not hesitating to change alliances, policies, or allegiances when doing so helps them make it to 2020 in one piece. Predicting how governments will act these days is a hazardous business.

We should keep this in mind as we ask whether the Islamic world’s unanimous declaration on Arab East Jerusalem will have any impact on the ongoing conflict about the status of Jerusalem. The Trump Declaration comes 100 years after the 1917 Balfour Declaration by the United Kingdom that supported the establishment of a Jewish homeland in a land that was almost totally Palestinian-Arab owned and inhabited. The juxtaposition of these two declarations a century apart should alert us to the pivotal and historic moment we are experiencing now. Just as the Balfour Declaration spawned subsequent international legitimization of the creation of a Jewish-majority state in an Arab-majority land, this American announcement sets the stage for the fate of Jerusalem, and a big political battle to come over this issue.

It seems that virtually the entire world opposes the American decision on Jerusalem, except for the Trump team, the rightwing settler-based government in Israel, and their scattered supporters here and there. It seems to me that there is only one important question we need to focus on during the coming months: Will any of those countries that oppose the Trump Declaration take any tangible, impactful diplomatic, political, economic, or other actions to counter it? Street demonstrations in the Arab world and friendly states reflect genuine anger and opposition, but they have zero impact on the decisions of the U.S. or Israeli governments. Thousands of statements against the Trump Declaration have been made in the past week, and a few Palestinian and Arab parties have said they will refuse to meet with the visiting U.S. vice president when he tours the region soon. This expresses genuine anger and opposition, but it triggers no change in anyone’s policies.

Palestinians, Arabs, Turks, Europeans, Russians, Iranians, and others in the world who reject the U.S. move on Jerusalem as dangerous and illegitimate now stand face-to-face with the consequences of their historical inability to harness their assets and resources for effective diplomatic action on issues they view as important or even existential. There exists an extensive and accessible toolbox of instruments to use by those countries or political groups that support Palestinian rights in Jerusalem, especially in today’s globalized, media-connected world where every single human being can make his or her voice heard.

The OIC declaration is an important expression of… well, of a heartfelt declared position that is valuable rhetoric, but of nothing else that has any meaning or force. Jared Kuschner will not be impressed, which is probably why his father-in-law issued the Jerusalem statement in the first place. They and the Israeli government will watch closely now for any signs of actual tangible actions by any of the parties that oppose them, beyond symbolic boycotts and street protests.

We have seen in recent years how history changes and power relationships evolve in the Middle East when local and foreign parties use their military, economic, and soft power on the ground to achieve their aims. If such power is used to counter the U.S. Jerusalem decision, we are likely to see important changes ahead. If not, we are likely to see the Trump Declaration achieve the same results for Zionism, and against Arabism and Palestinian rights, that the Balfour Declaration ultimately achieved in the past century. Historical pivots are like that, and we should recognize them when they happen in our time.

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

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 December 2017
Word Count: 828
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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