In the circles of family and friends in which I move, I don’t believe there is anyone who voted for Donald Trump. This is probably equally true of most middle-class professionals in the United States. Furthermore, a very large percentage of such people are obsessed with Trump and cannot wait until he ceases to be their president.

I am regularly asked to project for them how long he can survive in office. My standard answer is two days to eight years. This never satisfies those who pose the question. They cannot believe that this is a serious assessment. Those who pose the question see Trump as an “evil” person and find it difficult to believe that this view is not widely and increasingly shared by a majority of the population, even including those who voted for Trump.

For my questioners, it seems to be a question of ideology and/or morality. If others do not see this (at least yet), it must be because they are ill-informed or insufficiently-informed of what Trump believes and how he acts. They may draw from this two possible conclusions. The optimistic conclusion is that light will eventually shine on the benighted and Trump will be ousted. The pessimistic one is that nothing much can change the attitudes of most people and therefore the situation is hopeless.

I believe that this is a very wrong way to frame the issue. Trump is not an ideologue. To be sure he does have an agenda that he will pursue to the best of his ability. But the agenda is absolutely secondary to his top priority which is to remain the president of the United States, a position that he equates with being the most powerful individual in the world. He will do anything to remain in this post, including sacrificing any part of his agenda, temporarily or permanently.

He is extremely proud that he is the U.S. president. As he said to one reporter, he must be doing something right since he is the president and the reporter is not. He is validated by being in the post. He seeks praise from others and lavishes praise upon himself. He says he is the best president the United States has ever had and will probably ever have.

So, why do I say that Trump will remain in office two days to eight years? This is because he is not the only one who shares the priority of remaining in office. This priority is shared by almost all members of the U.S. Congress. There are at least two ways of removing a president, impeachment or invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment about incapacity to fulfill the tasks of president.

What would move those in Congress, and especially in the Republican Party, to seek to remove Trump from office? They would have to believe that for them to remain in office depends in large part on whether to leave Trump in office or remove him from office.

The choice is clear. What is not clear to them at this point is which option is better for them. So they waffle and will continue to waffle for a while yet. At the moment, they clearly see no advantage in supporting those persons (almost all Democrats) who are urging a process of removing Trump.

Assessing the relative advantage of the two options is not at all an easy task. It is in large part a reading of shifting public opinion, a notoriously hard thing to calculate. So they read the polls (but which ones?). They meet with voters in their district (but which ones?). They talk to financial contributors (but which ones?).

As with most relatively blocked situations, the blockage could open with one small entirely unexpected event that leads others suddenly to scramble and a momentary rush to get on board a transformed tide. That could happen two days from now or never happen while Trump completes two terms in office. It is unpredictable. It is not however about ideology or agenda. It is about remaining in office for the sake of being in office.

Copyright ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 June 2017
Word Count: 681
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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 dispute between Saudi Arabia/United Arab Emirates and Qatar has added major new developments and regional dynamics to existing dramatic situations across the Middle East — especially in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Palestine. Diving deep into any of these situations inevitably leads one to some of the others, confirming again and again the interconnections between the many actors and issues that have generated so much violence and uncertainty in the Arab region.

So it might be useful to step back from examining any one conflict and instead simply try to identify larger historical and political patterns that help us understand the players and the issues at stake. The latest dispute in particular, focused on Qatar and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), has generated a flurry of speculation about new alliances coming into being. The most popular one is a possible alliance between Qatar, Iran, Turkey, and Russia to face off against the Saudi-Emirati-led group of half a dozen countries that have lined up against Qatar. While nothing can be ruled out in the modern Middle East, this kind of instant alliance-formation seems more reflective of a Western tradition of toying with Arab lands and peoples like a handful of putty, rather than any serious analysis of realistic expectations.

We can, however, survey the region and identify notable new political dynamics and actors in the Arab World’s past several hundred years of colonial entanglements, state formation, and foreign military interventions. However the Qatar-GCC, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya situations are resolved, I suggest that we can see in them the beginning of a new era that has taken a quarter century to come into focus — since the end of the Cold War around 1990.

I see this as a new era because of several novel developments. One is the phenomenon of two very small and very young Arab states — Qatar and UAE — playing much bigger regional and global roles militarily and politically than their geography and demography would normally suggest. Another is the spectacle of several Arab energy-producing wealthy states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE ganging up against a third, Qatar, using siege tactics that cause havoc regionally and seek to bludgeon it into submission to their will — despite their having spent several decades trying to create a GCC regional block that values stability and security above all else. A third is the direct military, strategic, political, and economic involvement of two regional non-Arab powers — Turkey and Iran — in both participating in and trying to resolve the disputes. And a fourth is the role of the two big global powers — the United States and Russia — who promote a mediated resolution to the Qatar-GCC and Syria conflicts, but often also are vexingly imprecise on their bottom lines.

Two important things about these phenomena are that they all reached maximum impact and clarity in the last six years since the 2010-11 Arab uprisings, even though their roots sprouted during the post-Cold War years; and, they include within them a relatively clear scorecard of actors, identities, and ideologies that now battle in the open to define the Arab region, whether through the policies of the existing states or large non-state actors like Hizbollah and Hamas.

Perhaps this clarifies the major forces at work that now compete for the soul, spirit, and sovereignty of the Arab region and its many smaller components. I would list the following as the players to watch in this respect: Foreign big powers (U.S., Russia, for now), regional non-Arab powers (Iran, Turkey, for now), Arabism even in its faded state, Islamism even in its subjugated state, oil-anchored materialistic patriarchy (the energy producers and their dependents, like Egypt), and remnants of former socialist-nationalist-military states in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and other places.

These actors and a few other smaller ones now wage battle in the open to shape the identities and policies of the existing Arab countries. It is unlikely that any one or two will achieve full victory and dominate the region, as imperial powers did in history. More likely is that most of them will coexist in uneasy truces, as the region gets back to a developmental phase in a no-war context that can resume the socio-economic growth needed to respond to people’s basic needs and thus achieve lasting security and stability.

The most striking thing about this situation is that the ordinary Arab citizen is not among the powerful forces battling it out for the soul and sovereignty of the Arab region, which has been the case for centuries, unfortunately. One day, who knows when, the final battle of the modern Arab era will take place and witness the will of the citizenry struggle to achieve supremacy over the stultifying power of autocratic local elites and foreign powers that have subjugated hundreds of millions of men, women and children for hundreds of years. The Arab uprisings of 2010-11 hinted at that eventuality; but they were quickly put down by local and foreign forces of autocracy and control that have stepped out into the open more clearly this week in the Qatar-GCC crisis.

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: 14 June 2017
Word Count: 845
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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 — I have followed closely, and read dozens of Arab and international analyses about, the new tensions generated by the Saudi Arabian-led pressures on Qatar, including cutting diplomatic ties and isolating Qatar by curtailing its use of vital air, sea and land transport routes. Not surprisingly, the media sphere is flooded with analyses that speculate about half a dozen possible motives for the moves to pressure Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Bahrain and a few other smaller states.

Speculation in such cases always replaces hard facts in discussing policy moves by Arab governments that remain secretive and unaccountable. So let me add my own thoughts on what has motivated these harsh moves against Qatar, though I focus more on broad, proven, political values rather than speculative, specific policy aims linked to issues like ties to Iran, press freedoms, strategic military ties to the United States, or support for Islamist groups in the Arab world like the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas.

This looks to me like a desperate Saudi-led move by a group of leading Arab autocrats to maintain their grip on the region, and to complete the counter-revolution against the 2011 Arab uprisings that saw tens of millions of ordinary Arab men and women demonstrate for more freedom, rights, justice, and dignity in their lives. Citizens’ freedom, rights, justice, and dignity seem to be the threats that frighten Saudi and other Arab autocrats, and these must be minimized at any cost, it seems.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and others now pressuring Qatar have worked overtime in the past six years to maintain the traditional political status quo in the Arab region. This status quo comprises handfuls of old men and their sons, soldiers, and supportive foreign powers that maintain an iron grip on political power and everything that emanates from that, like media freedoms, civil society activism, quality education, and genuine accountability and meritocracy.

Saudi Arabia and its few partners now using siege tactics against Qatar seem to have complaints against several Qatari policies, which you can read about in any of the hundreds of analytical speculative articles widely available in the global media. Yet none of these Qatari activities that may have triggered the Saudi-led siege actually or seriously hurt Saudi Arabia in any tangible way — and they certainly do not impact Egypt and others in the siege party. Having working relations with Iran or Hamas, and promoting a relatively free and open media constellation in Qatar and abroad, are political irritants at most, rather than genuine security threats.

The “threats” the Saudis and Emiratis feel are neither tangible nor dangerous in any credible way; rather, they are symptoms of an independent policy by a fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member that Saudi Arabia cannot easily accept. The leadership in Riyadh has used similar tactics before, such as in its use of financial pressures against Lebanon a few years ago and other instances against fellow Arab governments, but it has always failed in these tactics. It has also tried using direct military force in Yemen, with active UAE participation, and that approach has also failed. It has tried supplying money and weapons to anti-regime rebels in Syria, and that policy has also failed. It has tried combinations of these and other tactics to contain Iran’s spreading strategic ties across the Arab region, and that has also failed. It has also spent many millions of dollars to influence the mainstream media in the West and across the Arab world, but that policy has also largely failed; for Saudi policies and some of its domestic practices are widely criticized in the global media — except by those who benefit financially from Saudi funds.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt in particular have employed draconian tactics to muzzle any independent media across the Arab world, and Qatar in this respect is a prime target for their ire. They cannot accept that independent thinkers, reporters, and analysts express their thoughts in public in a manner that deviates from the Saudi-defined policy of maintaining the autocratic status quo that has defined (and ravaged) the Arab region during the past half century or so.

Qatar’s crime in Saudi eyes is simply its insubordination and its refusal to accept the Saudi approach to maintaining stability in the Arab region through the use of guns and money to silence any critics. Qatar is particularly vulnerable to the siege tactics now being used against it, given its geographic position on a small peninsula attached to Saudi Arabia along its lone land border. It probably cannot long maintain its independent policies if the siege against it is maintained. How it responds to the pressures it now suffers will become clear in the coming weeks.

What is already evident, though, and quite depressing, is the determination of some Saudi-led Arab countries to squeeze Qatar in this manner, as a sign of their willingness to use economic and military warfare, starvation tactics, and other means to keep the Arab world in the dilapidated condition of incompetent governance, corruption, pauperization, polarization, civil wars, fragmentation, and other dire conditions that emanate directly from non-stop autocracy as the reigning paradigm of modern Arab governance. This is the real security threat to the Arab people and societies, even though the political space to express such views across the Arab region and abroad continues to narrow.

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: 06 June 2017
Word Count: 893
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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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NEW YORK — In New York City last Saturday-Sunday, I followed President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia while simultaneously scanning assorted Saturday and Sunday cartoon shows on television — and at times it was very difficult to tell the difference between the two. The American president’s proven capacity to live in a make-believe world of distinctly good and bad guys reached another peak, which portends rough days ahead for the people of the Middle East.

Trump swallowed whole the Saudi (and Israeli) view that Iran is a major menace to the region and it must be fought relentlessly. In fact, the Saudis have been trying to fight Iran politically in half a dozen places around the Middle East, and largely have failed. Iran’s allies have beaten Saudi Arabia’s allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, and other lands, either politically or militarily. It is no wonder that Saudi Arabia — with its proven weak statecraft across the Middle East — has pulled out all the stops in enticing the Trump administration to side with it against Iran and rescue it from a predicament of its own making.

For Trump now to wage fierce political battle against Iran puts the United States in a situation where to a large extent it is fighting an imaginary enemy, on the basis of exaggerated or false threats, using tactics and strategy that have both proven ineffective in the past. Rarely has an American president moved so quickly to verify his total ineptitude in grasping the realities of the Middle East, and to craft a policy response whose nature and magnitude bring together degrees of political immaturity that only make the United States a laughing stock globally.

The economic gains for the American economy from the agreements with Saudi Arabia will be significant, if they are all implemented over the coming decade. That seems to have been the main motivation from the American side. Yet the political stresses and likely new forms of conflict and sectarian tensions we can expect across much of the Middle East will only amplify the foundation of failed policies that the U.S.-Saudi combine has just relaunched in a new format. Aggressive American militarism combined with Arab arms and money in the pursuit of political stability is the policy of delusional politicians, not sensible statesmen and women.

The emphasis on U.S. strategic cooperation with Arab conservative governments in order to fight Iran and the separate threat of Islamic State (ISIS) will not succeed, because it has been tried and has not succeeded in the past. Yemen, Syria, and ISIS are the three main reasons to believe this. It is hard to think of a more lopsided military equation than the power of Saudi, Emirati, American, British and other military capabilities against the much weaker Yemenis forces they attacked over two years ago — and still have not vanquished. Syria shows that political determination — even by cruel dictators and their powerful allies — can withstand for years the military assaults of rebels funded and armed by American, Saudi, and other countries. The consequences of a destroyed Syria, with its multiple militant jihadi armed movements, have revealed themselves in recent years, to the chagrin and new threats felt by many countries.

The ISIS threat is the most frightening example of why a U.S.-Saudi military alliance, or even the more hare-brained wider Arab-Islamic-American alliance Trump speaks of, will not easily remove the threat of ISIS, Al-Qaeda or other smaller movements like them. The sorry tale of ISIS in the Arab world has three main elements that Trump and his advisers clearly ignored, as they seem to ignore most realities in the Middle East.

The first was the birth of ISIS from deep within the belly of Arab societies during the past few decades, especially given that most of the key leaders of ISIS (and Al-Qaeda and other such militant movements) were radicalized in part in Arab jails, in countries the U.S. supported strongly. The second phase was the birth and launch of the Islamic State in mid-2014 in Syria and Iraq. The Arab countries were immobilized by this, and were totally unable or unwilling to push back ISIS. They had to rely on American and other foreign militaries to halt ISIS’ expansion. The battle to defeat ISIS militarily only gained momentum when several non-Arab armies came to the rescue, including American, British, Kurdish, Turkish, Iranian, Russian, and Lebanese Hezbollah forces. The Iraqi armed forces finally showed their capabilities in the past year, but only with considerable and direct U.S. assistance.

The third phase of the Arabs’ encounter with ISIS is now taking shape before our eyes, in the form of a grandiose alliance of Arab, Islamic and Western armies that will work together to rid us of evil. This is a worthy and necessary goal. It remains unclear, though, how such forces that helped give birth to ISIS, and then could not defend their own countries when ISIS expanded in their midst, will be able to do a better job, in view of one critical elephant in the room that all the gatherings of these parties continue to ignore: The underlying conditions of economic disparities, social stress, political autocracy, civil and regional wars, ravaged environments, and corruption that plague most of the Arab countries involved will always generate more new disgruntled and desperate militants than any high-tech weapons can kill.

In the imaginary world of weekend television cartoons, the moral dilemmas facing the protagonists always end well. In the real world of American strategic relations with assorted Arab and Islamic countries and Israel, the moral dilemmas have no place in the script. Only repeating the same script with a larger cast of characters, while wars, terror, and refugee flows continue apace, strikes me as the epitome of foolhardy and irresponsible leadership.

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: 23 May 2017
Word Count: 962
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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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NEW YORK — My last week in the United States following the run-up to U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit later this week to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Vatican has only confirmed that the erratic, impulsive nature of Trump’s domestic policy-making also seems to apply to his Middle East policies. As far as one can tell from many press accounts that are all based on discussions with Washington and New York insiders, Trump lacks decisively clear Middle East ‘policies’ right now, and has only attitudes towards major issues in the region — and these attitudes could change any day, and change again a few days later.

Several noteworthy aspects of Trump’s Middle East attitudes seem to be clear, at least as of Tuesday this week:
• his apparent determination to try to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian and wider Arab-Israeli conflicts;
• his wish to explore the creation of an Arab-Israeli-American “Middle East NATO” alliance against Iran;
• his desire to forge normal Arab-Israeli ties across the region before resolving the Israel-Palestine core conflict;
• his continuing use of military force against Islamic State (ISIS), without addressing the underlying drivers of IS’s support;
• his happy friendships with Arab, Turkish, and Israeli autocrats, alongside his non-focus on human rights and rule-of-law issues in these countries;
• his enthusiasm for massive new weapons sales to Arab states, perhaps totaling over $300 billion by most reliable press accounts; and,
• a vague desire to promote Islamic-Christian-Jewish interfaith cooperation in the service of regional and global peace.

This is quite a list of decisive and ambitious goals. It would appear to be far beyond the analytical or implementational capabilities of the Trump administration, but it is impressive nevertheless. About half of it is sensible. The other half is delusional, and the entire package in almost every instance repeats the consistently failed policies of the past three American administrations under Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

The broad goals of these policies have all been tried before. Not only have they not succeeded in resolving conflicts or promoting stability and prosperity for the people of the region, they also have directly contributed to bringing the Middle East to the current dire conditions of violence, fragility, terrorism, and mass refugeehood.

More pro-Israeli policies, focus on war-making and bombs-dropping, bolstering autocratic and corrupt local regimes, ignoring international human rights standards, expanding income and rights disparities within Arab countries, hastening the dysfunction of incompetent Arab regimes that focus on elusive security and massive arms purchases before most other priorities, and heightening tensions between Arabs and Iranians have all pushed several hundred million Arabs into conditions of despair and even dehumanization. The consequence of this is what we have seen happen in the past decade or so:
• several countries collapsed in civil wars,
• others fragmented along sectarian lines,
• Russia, Iran, and Turkey have gained major footholds in the Arab region, and
• refugeehood, emigration, and terrorism have emerged as the fastest growing sectors in our societies.

The Trump administration has yet to attempt any seriously new approach to addressing the many issues involved in the current state of the Middle East — except perhaps to press ahead with support for Kurdish fighters in Syria that has created new tensions with Turkey. The Trump administration is at a disadvantage in all this because it draws on the views of either the same officials who implemented the failed policies of the past three decades, or novices whose knowledge of the Middle East barely exceeds their interaction with Middle Eastern golf courses and Israeli settlements.

This is not a happy picture, and it is complicated by a series of inner subtleties within each of these issues, such as whether the U.S. will move its embassy in Israel to occupied Jerusalem, or push Israel to stop expanding its colonial settlements and land theft from the Palestinians. Also unknown is the impact of the fact that two of Trump’s three main advisers on Israel-Palestine (his son-in-law and ambassador to Israel) are supporters of Israeli settlements that are clearly illegal under international law.

This week we learned of some uncertainties over whether or not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would accompany President Trump to the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site in a part of East Jerusalem that was occupied in 1967. Also unclear is whether the White House deliberately deleted a Trump tweet in which he had said it was an honor to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Trump’s attitude toward Iran roams across a wide spectrum, sometimes threatening new sanctions and at other times (like this week) promising to continue sanctions relief stipulated in the nuclear/sanctions agreement reached with Iran over a year ago.

The only conclusion I can draw is that we cannot and should not conclude anything about what Trump may try to do in the Middle East. His beloved deal-making prowess will be tested seriously, and we should all wish him well and hope for the best. What we can say now, however, based on the outlines of his apparent goals, is that all his goals are rehashed versions of past policy failures, Orientalist fantasies, a desire to enrich Arab elites at the expense of ordinary citizens, and a repeatedly proven, woeful American government inability to treat Arabs, Israelis, Iranians, and Turks as people who have equal rights that must be achieved simultaneously.

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: 16 May 2017
Word Count: 869
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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 period 1945 to the 1970s was one both of extremely high capital accumulation worldwide and the geopolitical hegemony of the United States. The geoculture was one in which centrist liberalism was at its acme as the governing ideology. Never did capitalism seem to be functioning as well. This was not to last.

The high level of capital accumulation, which particularly favored the institutions and people of the United States, reached the limits of its ability to guarantee the necessary quasi-monopoly of productive enterprises. The absence of a quasi-monopoly meant that capital accumulation everywhere began to stagnate and capitalists had to seek alternative modes of sustaining their income. The principal modes were to relocate productive enterprises to lower-cost zones and to engage in speculative transfer of existing capital, which we call financialization.

In 1945, the geopolitical quasi-monopoly of the United States was faced only with the challenge of the military power of the Soviet Union. In order to ensure its quasi-monopoly, the United States had to enter into a tacit but effective deal with the Soviet Union, nicknamed “Yalta.” This deal involved a division of world power, two-thirds to the United States and one-third to the Soviet Union. They mutually agreed not to challenge these boundaries, and not to interfere with each other’s economic operations within their sphere. They also entered into a “cold war,” whose function was not to overthrow the other (at least in a foreseeable future) but to maintain the unquestioned loyalty of their respective satellites. This quasi-monopoly also came to an end because of the growing challenge to its legitimacy from those who lost out by the status quo.

In addition, this period was also one in which the traditional antisystemic movements called the Old Left — Communists, Social-Democrats, and National Liberation Movements — came to state power in various regions of the world-system, something that had seemed highly improbable as late as 1945. One-third of the world was governed by Communist parties. One-third was governed by Social-Democratic parties (or their equivalent) in the pan-European zone (North America, western Europe, and Australasia). In this zone, power alternated between Social-Democratic parties that embraced the welfare state, and Conservative parties that also accepted the welfare state, only seeking to reduce its extent.

And in the last region, the so-called Third World, national liberation movements come to power by winning independence in most of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, and promoting popular regimes in already independent Latin America.

Given the strength of the dominant powers and especially the United States, it might seem anomalous that antisystemic movements came to power in this period. In fact, it was the opposite. In seeking to resist the revolutionary impact of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements, the United States favored concessions with the hope and expectation that they would bring to power “moderate” forces in these countries that would be willing to operate within accepted norms of interstate behavior. This expectation turned out to be correct.

The turning point was the world-revolution of 1968, whose dramatic if short-lived upsurge of 1966-1970 had two major results. One was the end of the very long dominance of centrist liberalism (1848-1968) as the only legitimate ideology in the geoculture. Instead, both radical leftist ideology and rightist conservative ideology regained their autonomy and centrist liberalism was reduced to being only one of three competing ideologies.

The second consequence was the worldwide challenge to the Old Left by movements everywhere that asserted that the Old Left was not antisystemic at all. Their coming to power had changed nothing of any importance, said the challengers. These movements were now seen as part of the system that had to be rejected in order that truly antisystemic movements take their place.

What happened then? In the beginning the newly-assertive Right seemed to win the day. Both U.S. President Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Thatcher proclaimed the end of previously dominant “developmentalism” and the advent of production oriented to world market sale. They said that “there is no alternative” (TINA). Given the decline of state income in most of the world, most governments sought loans, which they only received if they accepted the new terms of TINA. They were required to reduce drastically the size of governments and eliminate protectionism, while ending welfare state expenditures and accepting the supremacy of the market. This was called the Washington Consensus, and almost all governments complied with this major shift of focus.

Governments that didn’t comply fell from office, culminating in the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union. After some time in office, the compliant states discovered that the promised rise in real income of both governments and most workers did not occur. Instead, these compliant states were suffering from the austerity policies imposed upon them. There was a reaction to TINA, marked by the 1995 Zapatista uprising, the 1999 successful demonstrations against the attempt in Seattle to enact mandatory guarantees for so-called intellectual property rights, and the 2001 founding in Porto Alegre of the World Social Forum in opposition to the World Economic Forum, long-standing pillar of TINA.

As the Global Left regained strength, conservative forces needed to regroup. They shifted from exclusive emphasis on market economics, and launched their alternative socio-cultural face. They initially spent much energy on such issues as anti-abortion and insistence on exclusive heterosexual behavior. They used such themes to pull supporters into active politics. And then they turned to xenophobic anti-immigration, embracing the protectionism that the economic conservatives had specifically opposed.

However, supporters of expanded social rights for everyone and “multiculturalism” copied the new political tactics of the right and successfully legitimated over the last decade significant advances on socio-cultural issues. Women’s rights, first Gay rights and then Gay marriage, rights of “indigenous” peoples all became widely accepted.

So, where are we? The economic conservatives first won out and then lost strength. The succeeding socio-cultural conservatives first won out and then lost strength. Yet the Global Left seems nonetheless to flounder. This is because they have not yet been willing to accept that the struggle between the Global Left and the Global Right is a class struggle and that this should be made explicit.

In the ongoing structural crisis of the modern world-system, which began in the 1970s and will probably last another 20-40 years, the issue is not the reform of capitalism, but its successor system. If the Global Left is to win that battle, it must solidly ally the anti-austerity forces with the multicultural forces. Only recognizing that both groups represent the same bottom 80% of the world’s population makes it likely that they can win out. They need to struggle against the top 1% and seek to attract the other 19% to their side. That is exactly what one means by a class struggle.

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 ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 May 2017
Word Count: 1,127
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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 — Many people spend much time and energy these days analyzing the causes of the turbulent, often violent, and occasionally disintegrating conditions of many countries across the Arab region. Years ago and even occasionally today, Western and Arab scholars or analysts alike usually singled out one or two reasons for the problems of the Middle East and its Arab core societies.

Today, we know better than to blame one or two things for our difficult condition. Every Arab country is different, yet some broad trends have impacted the entire region. Here are five “ghosts” of widespread phenomena that still haunt us, as they also help us understand the messy state of the Arab region today.

1. The Ghost of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose invasion of Egypt in 1798 initiated over two centuries of continuing foreign military interference across the entire Arab region. That trend has reached a new peak in the past six years in Syria, where half a dozen major regional and global powers are actively at war with their own armies or by supplying local proxy forces. No region in the world could have withstood over two centuries of non-stop external military interference — with the political interference that accompanied it — that our region has experienced. Internal and regional wars, in a climate of very high Arab military spending, continue to propel countries back into dilapidated conditions every few decades.

2. The Ghosts of Theodore Hertzl and Arthur James Balfour, two men whose actions capture the genesis of the century-long conflict between Zionism and Arabism. This continuing conflict has incalculably set back the Arab quest for development, rights, and stability in many ways, including by retarding Arab national development in favor of military needs, allowing military regimes to assume power, and delaying the development of civilian-led pluralistic democracies. This conflict emerged simultaneously with the Arab quest for independence and sovereignty a century ago, and thus the Zionism-Arabism battle between Israelis and Palestinians has been seen by many Arabs as a much wider and older contest between the forces of foreign domination and indigenous liberation and sovereignty. It is no surprise that the Palestine cause resonates with people across the Arab world and beyond.

3. The Ghost of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Ottoman soldier who became the father of modern Turkey and a model of the secular nation-state in the Middle East. That secular nation-state model has not worked very well in much of our Arab region, because it has never fully provided citizens with the material and emotional services that they expect from their state. Most Arab states either perch precariously on the edges of fragmentation and civil war, or persist because authoritarian governments hold things together by force, and lack of citizen political rights.

4. The Ghost of Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose 1952 revolution in Egypt ushered in the catastrophic modern legacy of military officers forcibly taking command of civilian governments. These military governments that seized power through coups across many Arab states — Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Somalia, and others — have turned these countries into hollowed wrecks that are now the world’s greatest source of terrorists and refugees.

5. The Ghosts of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, whose unbridled free market capitalism in the early 1980s triggered a brand of economic globalization that valued financial mobility and profits above the rights of workers and well-being of citizens. This global wave quickly dominated policy-making in most Arab countries, whose authoritarian governments never developed a serious, diversified, and productive economic base and thus could not resist the demands of global powers that they liberalize Arab economies for the benefit of global capital. The result is visible today in many Arab economies that cannot meet their citizens’ basic needs, and desperately depend on cash hand-outs from friends and international financial institutions. In the meantime, their own citizens suffer from deteriorating educational sectors and labor markets dominated by informality, poverty, and widening disparities.

Many other trends of course shaped our region in the past two centuries, such as the impact of oil, very high population growth rates, and environmental stresses. But these five ghosts that personify wider trends strike me as capturing the most important factors that explain why our region today is so violent and unstable. It is also impossible to separate these elements from each other; they form an interlocking system of domestic, regional, and global forces that together have made it impossible for any Arab country to break through from the constraints of 19th and early 20th Century colonial domination to the promise of modern, stable, productive statehood that is also genuinely sovereign.

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: 09 May 2017
Word Count: 766
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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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DOHA — I was in Doha, Qatar, Monday evening when Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, issued a new policy statement that amended some of the long-standing hardline positions on Israel in its charter. The next day I also took part in a public panel discussion on where we were on the one state/two state options to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The audience and participants expressed the same range of views that are prevalent among the general Arab and Palestinian publics: satisfaction with Hamas’ more realistic views on coexistence with Israel in two adjacent states with equal rights, but mixed with concerns that Hamas was traveling down the same fruitless path of conceding Israel’s demands without getting anything in return, as Fateh and its leaders Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas have done for decades.

Hamas’ new positions would seem to augur well for a peaceful, negotiated resolution of this long-running conflict. Its acceptance of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem — now occupied, colonized, or under siege by Israel — should allow it and Fateh to join with a handful of smaller political groups to rebuild a Palestinian national consensus on how to negotiate permanent peace with Israel.

That is unlikely to happen in the near future, given Israel’s refusal to deal rationally with any combination of Palestinians it negotiates with. The past 24 years since the Oslo agreements were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) have included countless rounds of direct and indirect negotiations. At some points Israel negotiated with a Palestinian unified delegation that was supported by Hamas in the Palestinian government of national unity. Yet even then no progress was made, because Israel made it very clear, under both Labor and Likud leaderships, that its priorities included expanding Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and maintaining full security control of the Palestinian regions.

Hamas’ approach differed from Fateh’s, and included armed resistance that resulted in several wars and savage, disproportionate, Israeli attacks against much of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. The vastly superior Israeli military has repeatedly attacked Gaza and killed Palestinian leaders and civilians, while Hamas and some other smaller groups launch relatively small, crude rockets that only occasionally cause death or damage in Israel. The result of this legacy over many decades has been massive suffering among Palestinians, without any real political gains in the battle with Israel. Neither Fateh’s nor Hamas’ strategy has worked very well at all.

Hamas’ softening of its position that now accepts a West Bank-Gaza-Jerusalem state for the Palestinians does not include formal recognition of Israel. The Fateh-led Palestinian majority has recognized Israel several times already, and received virtually nothing in return. So the bottom line is that Hamas’ statement this week signals a more pragmatic willingness to negotiate a two-state peace agreement with Israel based on an end to Israeli colonial expansion — but it will only take this willingness to its logical conclusion of a permanent peace with mutual recognition when Israel in turn signals its willingness to accept minimum Palestinian demands.

Israel has not offered any such signals, and remains defiant of the international consensus of the UN Security Council that its colonial settlements must end and it must share Jerusalem. It is not possible to see Hamas going any further to meet Israel halfway and resolve this conflict peacefully, if the Israelis in turn continue to demand from Hamas conditions that Israel itself is not willing to make simultaneously. These include recognizing permanent borders, ending the use of military force and resistance, and other issues related to refugees, security, and demography.

Given this reality, Palestinians nevertheless should work to reconstitute and relegitimize the PLO as their single national leadership, keep challenging Israel to negotiate on equal terms, and, most importantly, keep mobilizing international support through political action that aims at global public opinion as well as governments. Worldwide expressions of support for Palestinian rights continue to grow, but they have no impact yet on the ground because Israel maintains a significant military edge, and nobody in the world is prepared to use any political or other force to make it comply with the global consensus on the illegality of Zionist colonial expansion through settlements and land annexations.

Israel-Palestine keeps rising and dropping on the priority list of conflicts that capture world attention, and in the past few years it has been low priority. The massive hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners and Hamas’ revised political positions are two new elements that could prod a reconciliation among the main Palestinian political factions, a revival of the PLO, and a newly energized global diplomatic push for a peaceful resolution of the conflict with Israel. This is the right thing to do — but it has been tried many times before, and always floundered on Israel’s absolute refusal to comply with international law. So all eyes should now be on Israel to see if it can come up with even partial gestures of serious peace-making, as Hamas has just done.

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: 02 May 2017
Word Count: 831
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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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There will be parliamentary elections on June 11 and 18. The winner of the presidential election hopes to obtain a parliament with more of their supporters. This means there will be local and regional electoral battles all over France. Those with party structures throughout the country can be expected to do better. Here is Macron’s real weakness. He has no party. However, whether Macron or LePen is the winner, the new parliament will be scattered, and political compromises will be the order of the day.

This has been a wild fluctuating campaign, in which the first round’s outcome seemed almost impossible to predict. The principal reason was the enormous number of persons who were unsure how they would vote. There were persons, many persons, who were not sure as they entered the poll booth whom they would choose.

Let us review the ups and downs. At the start of the campaign, most people anticipated that the two traditional center-right and center-left parties, Les Républicains (LR) and Le Parti Socialiste (PS) would choose respectively Alain Juppé and Manuel Valls. But they were both surprisingly eliminated in the Right and Left primaries.

Instead, the LR chose a further right candidate, François Fillon, and the PS chose a further left candidate, Benoit Hamon. The splits in the two traditional parties seemed to strengthen the hand of the far-right FN candidate. The polls showed at first a three-way voter split that left the situation unclear.

At this point, Macron sought support as a candidate neither left nor right nor even centrist. He presented himself as the one who could stop LePen, support Europe, and promote a multicultural policy. His stock began to rise steadily but so did that of Fillon. It was the PS that seemed most grievously wounded.

Suddenly, scandals engulfed Fillon, accused of dubious self-enrichment. LePen also was accused of misappropriating funds to fund her party. Fillon’s support began to sink significantly. Le Pen’s support seemed to stagnate.

Meanwhile, on the left, there was a different drama. Hamon of the PS was competing with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the far-left La France Insoumise (Unbowed France) to corral left votes so that they could seriously challenge both Macron and LePen as different versions of the right. Mélenchon began to win out, eclipsing Hamon. Hamon was simultaneously weakened by desertions of the right wing of the PS to Macron, who was far closer to their own views on both internal and external issues.

Fillon now fought back. Essentially he admitted guilt and then argued that LR voters had to support him anyway or find themselves without a candidate. He succeeded in rallying support and rose again. With the return of Fillon and the rise of Mélenchon, the week or so before the first round of the presidential elections, the polls showed a four-way split between Macron, LePen, Fillon, and Mélenchon.

They were all close enough to each other so that the outcome was essentially unpredictable. One now has to add in the other candidates. Hamon remained on the ballot with about 5% of the predicted vote. Philippe Poutou of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) had about 2 percent. They both pledged to support Mélenchon on the second round (but not the first). There was a far-right candidate who was also strongly anti-LePen, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan. He said he was opposed to her as a Gaullist. His party Debout La France (Stand-up, France) seemed to be in the vicinity of 4-5 percent.

In the last week before the first round, as it seemed quite probable that LePen would be in the second round, everyone else spent their energy attacking each other in order to be the second person on the second-round ballot. Macron’s claim that he should benefit from the vote utile (the useful vote) paid off and he came in first on the first round. He was the victor of the anyone but LePen vote.

The very first poll after the elections showed him winning the second round with 61% of the vote. This suggests that Mélenchon probably could have beaten LePen as well, if by a smaller margin. Now we are into the question of who will switch votes where and who will simply abstain.

The LR voters are largely turning towards Macron, encouraged by the leaders of all the factions. Hamon and Poutou voters seem to be choosing Macron, but in smaller percentages. Mélenchon voters have been urged not to vote for LePen but Mélenchon has refused to choose between a Macron vote and abstentions, which will probably be significantly large. These voters are facing the same kind of disappointment and anger as Bernie Sanders voters did in facing the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

In this interval, LePen has been suddenly strengthened by an announced deal between her and Dupont-Aignan, in which he has been promised the Prime Minister’s post if LePen wins the presidency. Once more, the quest for political power is taking priority over ideology.

Whoever wins the second round will probably call for new elections, in order to obtain a parliament with more of their supporters. This means there will be local and regional electoral battles all over France. Those with party structures throughout the country can be expected to do better. Here is Macron’s real weakness. He has no party. However, whether Macron or LePen is the winner, the new parliament will be scattered, and political compromises will be the order of the day.

If LePen wins, how much of her program will she be able to implement? We have seen with Trump the difference between campaign rhetoric and promises and the capacity to implement a program. Because of the powers of the French president, LePen would no doubt do better than Trump, but how much better?

If Macron wins, his capacity to rule may be even less. In particular, how much of his neoliberal austerity will he be able to put into practice? I suspect not too much at all. If Resist seems strong in the United States, wait until a resistance movement plays out on the French scene, a country with a long tradition of such movements.

Does it sound as if I’m saying that it makes less difference than everyone is predicting who wins the second round? I do think it will make some difference, but not all that much. A Mélenchon government or even a Hamon government would have signaled real change. In France, as in the United States and many other countries, real change may be coming, but it will require some more years of struggle for that.

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 ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 May 2017
Word Count: 1,098
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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— It is bizarre but telling of the modern Arab world that one of the most important meetings that could shape the future condition of hundreds of millions of Arabs and others in this region — the two-day Egyptian-Saudi Arabian summit in Riyadh — has received virtually no serious regional or global media coverage, and mostly only fawning opinion articles in the Arab media. This is unfortunate, but not unusual; it reflects the modern Arab tradition of national political leaders discussing fateful issues without any serious public discussions or inputs from their own citizens.

This tradition is one of the consistent underlying weaknesses in Arab governance systems that have brought us to the dilapidated condition we suffer today in many countries. When citizens have little or no say in how their governments function, their governments tend not to function very efficiently or equitably. That’s why hundreds of small rebellions, strikes, peaceful protests, and work stoppages take place every day now in countries like Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Morocco, and others where power structures remain firmly in the grip of a small elite that is not held accountable in any meaningful manner.

The Egyptian-Saudi relationship has been and remains potentially pivotal for the well-being of the Arab world. We can probably trace the beginning of the modern stagnation and episodic decline of many Arab lands to the 1962-70 civil war in Yemen, where the Saudis and Egyptians supported the two main warring parties. Egypt lost about 26,000 troops in its reckless adventure, which set the stage for its poor performance in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt used to be, and can regain their roles as, the two epicenters of modern Arab power in key fields — notably culture, religion, politics, and economy. Were they to cooperate and work closely together for their bilateral interests — anchored in mechanisms that reflect their own citizens’ values, aspirations, and rights — they could drive a sustained revival of the Arab region like Japan, China, and Korea powered the development of East Asia in the past half century.

But Egypt and Saudi Arabia now pass through trying moments in their national development, for different reasons that in both cases relate to top-heavy decision-making, lack of citizen participation and accountability, exaggerated military reliance, and unsustainable, often unproductive, development policies. They both face internal security threats from Islamic State (ISIS), Al-Qaeda and other such extremist groups.

Saudi Arabia is bogged down in the unfortunate and immature decision to make war in Yemen three years ago, which will preoccupy it politically and drain it financially for decades to come. Egypt grapples unsuccessfully with the continuing opposition it faces from ISIS and other extremists, along with nonviolent expressions of political views from ordinary men and women, of whom some 40,000 or so have been jailed. The tragedy of both countries is that, like most Arab governments, many of their problems are a result of their own past policies. They also fail to see that continuing on the same track will only make their problems worse, rather than resolving them.

So now they both realize that they need each other, and seek a way to work together more efficiently for their common good. Indeed, they could create a formidable force by combining Egypt’s human, military, cultural, and market potential with Saudi Arabia’s massive financial and energy resources and the respect it still enjoys in some Arab quarters for both its religious guardianship and its history of assisting other countries. Such a combination would once again allow the Arab world to take a seat at the table where non-Arab powers (namely the United States, Israel, Turkey, Iran, and Russia) have managed the regional security architecture for several decades now.

The two leaderships have recently embarked on a series of bilateral summits and other meetings to chart a new path forward, with bilateral investments, military cooperation, and other symbolic or practical steps that could address their separate weaknesses and bolster their potential to work together in the region. They both speak of creating a force of tens of thousands of troops from Arab and Islamic countries that would work to stabilize the region; this would be in everybody’s interests and should be studied very seriously, if it genuinely reflects the expressed will of Arab citizens, rather than the private discussions of isolated elites, defense contractors, and foreign consultants.

This raises a delicate question that deserves serious thought: Will relying more on joint military action achieve greater security on its own, without political, social, educational, and economic reforms? Or was an over-reliance on military security one of the reasons why so many Arab states, including these two, have faced vicious terror movements that are all the more troubling because they emerged from within their own societies? Egypt and Saudi Arabia have made enormous, constructive contributions to the development of the Arab world throughout the past century, but handfuls of their own nationals played pivotal roles in the birth and expansion of Al-Qaeda and other such extremist groups. How do we explain this?

It is healthier for all that Egypt and Saudi Arabia work together for the common good, rather than compete with or fight one another to claim the mantle of Arab leadership that is now a historical memory. They could generate enormous new energy and power to drive a human and socio-economic renaissance of the Arab region, based primarily on the human talent and economic resources they enjoy; or, they could spend tens of billions of dollars more on perpetuating their policies of recent decades, that have not provided the genuine security they seek and deserve.

How they proceed could have fateful consequences for the entire region, given their weight and impact. Let us hope they proceed more constructively to seek security and sustainable, equitable development by freeing and tapping their human and cultural talents, more than any other single factor.

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: 25 April 2017
Word Count: 976
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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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