BEIRUT — Donald Trump’s appointment of his son-in-law Jared Kushner as a senior adviser in the White House has kicked up several controversies that perfectly capture the tone and substance of the Trump triumph across the American political system. But they also tell us nothing about what actual policies President Trump will pursue once he is the incumbent. The Kushner appointment offers important insights into the political, substantive, ethical, and attitudinal dynamics that continue to shape American society’s coming to terms with the fact that it has elected a controversial and very successful showman as its president.

Four dimensions of the Kushner appointment are worth pondering, and the fact that he is Jewish is not one of them. People’s religion in the United States is their own business, but if faith becomes entangled with one’s political positions — especially if this happens in the White House — then a discussion is necessary. This is not yet the case with Jared Kushner, so his religion remains irrelevant for the moment. Skeptics of this view should recall how the public call to focus on Palestinian rights by the Jewish-American presidential candidate Bernie Sanders did not hurt his candidacy, and may even has helped cement his reputation for proposing ethical policies by the United States government.

The four dimensions of the Kushner appointment that are worthy of analysis are:

1) His age and public policy experience: It is highly unusual for a 35-year-old person with no experience in government or pubic policy issues to suddenly assume immense power as a trusted adviser to the president of the United States. This could be frivolous and dangerous, or it could end up being harmless, mostly offering the psychologically convoluted new president a soothing and calming presence. We may find out soon.

2) Possible ethical constraints due to his extensive business investments with domestic and foreign partners: This also applies to many of Trump’s cabinet and other appointments of wealthy men and women with very serious investments and personal/political ties at home and abroad. This is likely to be the easiest question mark about Kushner to resolve, given the many models that have been used in the United States to resolve conflict-of-interest concerns in recent years.

3) Whether his appointment runs counter to the anti-nepotism laws in the United States that came into being to prevent presidents from allowing family members to have undue influence on policy-making: This is likely to be a non-issue in the long run, as Trump can appoint Kushner as his golfing adviser or consultant, and what they discuss on the golf course is their own business.

4) Any involvement he may have had in his family’s providing funds for illegal Israeli settlements, which are a crime in international law according to the latest UN Security Council resolution: This is the most problematic aspect of the Kushner appointment, given the clear illegality and other problematic dimensions of Israeli settlements that have been regularly reaffirmed, including by the current American president and secretary of state. If Kushner proves to be an explicit supporter of Israeli settlements — a strong possibility, given his support for appointing the settlements-loving David Friedman as the next American ambassador to Israel — then Trump is going to have to reveal if his son-in-law’s views are only his son-in-law’s views, or reflect and shape official American policy in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian and Arab territories.

These issues are now already being actively discussed and analyzed in the Kushner and Trump families, among the new White Houses senior staff, and by many lawyers. They all reflect one common denominator: Everything Trump has done in the past 18 months since he started running for the U.S. presidency is designed to challenge the American political establishment and the Republican Party’s traditional way of doing business. This approach has brought him enough media attention, grass-roots support, and votes to win the presidency, despite his many proven deficiencies, contradictions, and vulgarities.

The Jared Kushner appointment is controversial and even shocking to many because of the issues mentioned above. But to Trump it is the epitome and the heart of what he and America are all about: It is just one more link in a chain of anti-establishmentarian defiance by the new president, who is the product of riding the waves of what the American establishment cherishes most — wild capitalism and unbridled, sometimes vulgar, entertainment.

How many more of these incidents will it take for Americans to wake up from their combined stupor and shock to realize that repeatedly expressing amazement, anger, and bewilderment at Trump’s appointments and behavior is pretty amateurish behavior. For the real problem, in fact, is not Trump the person, but rather the distorted condition of the American political system that has allowed him to reach the presidency through a democratic process.

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

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

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Released: 11 January 2017
Word Count: 795
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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, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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Short-term prediction is the most treacherous of activities. I normally try never to do it. Rather, I analyze what is going on in terms of the longue durée of its history and the probable consequences in the middle-run. I have decided nonetheless to make short-term predictions this time for one simple reason. It seems to me that everyone everywhere is focused for the moment on what will now happen in the short run. There seems to be no other subject of interest. Anxiety is at its maximum, and we need to deal with it.

Let me start by saying that I think 95% of the policies Donald Trump will pursue in his first year or so in office will be absolutely terrible, worse than we anticipated. This can be seen already in the appointments to major office that he has announced. At the same time, he will probably run into major trouble.

This contradictory result is the consequence of his political style. If we look back at how he has won the presidency of the United States, he did it against all odds with a certain deliberate rhetorical technique. On the one hand he has constantly made statements that responded to major fears of U.S. citizens by using coded language that the recipients interpreted as support for policies that they thought would alleviate their multiple pains. He did this most often either by brief tweets or in tightly-controlled public rallies.

At the same time, he was always vague about the precise policies he would pursue. His statements were almost always followed by interpretations by major followers, and quite often these were differing, even opposing, interpretations. In effect, he took the credit for the strong statements and he left the discredit for the precise policies to others. It was a magnificently effective technique. It got him where he is and it seems clear that he intends to continue this technique once in office.

There has been a second element in his political style. He tolerated anyone’s interpretation as long as it constituted an endorsement of his leadership. If he sensed any hesitation about endorsing him personally, he has been quick to wreak vengeance by attacking publicly the offender. He required absolute fealty, and insisted it be displayed. He accepted penitent remorse but not ambiguity about his person.

It seems that he believes the same technique will serve him well in the rest of the world: strong rhetoric, ambiguous interpretations by his varied panoply of major followers, and in the end rather unpredictable actual policies.

He seems to think that there are only two countries other than the United States that matter in the world today – Russia and China. As both Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger have pointed out, he is using the Nixon technique in reverse. Nixon made a deal with China in order to weaken Russia. Trump is making a deal with Russia in order to weaken China. This policy seemed to work for Nixon. Will it work for Trump? I don’t think so, because the world of 2017 is quite different from the world of 1973.

So let us look at what the difficulties ahead are for Trump. At home, his greatest difficulty is undoubtedly with the Republicans in Congress, particularly those in the House of Representatives. Their agenda is not the same as that of Donald Trump. For example, they wish to destroy Medicare. Indeed they wish to repeal all social legislation of the last century. Trump knows that this could bring a revolt of his actual electoral base, who want social welfare at the same time that they want a deeply protectionist government and xenophobic rhetoric.

Trump is counting on intimidating Congress and making them toe his line. Maybe he can. But then the contradictions between his pro-wealthy agenda and his partial maintenance of the welfare state will become blatant. Or Congress will prevail over Trump. And he will find that intolerable. What he would do about it is anyone’s guess. He doesn’t know himself since he doesn’t face up to this kind of difficult situation until he has to.

The same thing is true in the geopolitics of the world-system. Neither Russia nor China is ready to back down in the least from their present policies. Why should they? These policies have been working for them. Russia is once again a major power in the Middle East and in the whole of the ex-Soviet world. China is slowly but surely asserting a dominant position in Northeast and Southeast Asia, and increasing its role in the rest of the world.

No doubt both Russia and China run into difficulties from time to time and both of them are ready to make timely concessions to others but not more than that. So Trump is going to find that he is not the alpha dog internationally to whom everyone must give obeisance. And then what?

What he might do once his threats are ignored is again anyone’s guess. What everyone fears is that he will act precipitately with the military tools at his disposition. Will he? Or will he be restrained by his immediate inner group? No one can be sure. We can all just hope.

So there it is. In my view it is not a pretty picture but not a hopeless one. If somehow we reach in the coming year an interim stability within the United States and within the world-system as a whole, then the middle-run takes over analytically. And there the story, while still grim, has at least better prospects for those of us who want a better world than that which we presently have.

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 January 2017
Word Count: 941
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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, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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Cairo — When a little-known group called Hasm (Arabic for “decisiveness”) claimed responsibility for the killing of six Egyptian policemen with a bomb outside a Cairo mosque, it highlighted the complex battle authorities face fighting the terrorism threat posed by numerous emerging groups.

In addition to that December bombing, Hasm claimed responsibility for killing three policemen and had attempted to kill several important figures, including Ali Gomaa, Egypt’s former grand mufti. Gomaa is an outspoken critic of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Before Hasm surfaced, six other groups had emerged, targeting policemen, army personnel, judges and supporters of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

One of the groups, Lewa al-Thawra (Arabic for “Revolution’s Flag”), said it was responsible for the assassination of army Lieutenant-General Adel Rajaaie in October outside his eastern Cairo home. Rajaaie had overseen the demolition of a network of smuggling tunnels between Egypt’s Sinai peninsula and the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

“The impression you get after analysing the discourse, the operations and the targets of all these groups is that they are about the same thing, even as they have different names,” said security expert Khaled Okasha.

Agnad Masr (Egypt’s Soldiers), al-Maglis al-Thawri (Revolutionary Council) and Kataeb Helwan (Helwan Brigades) also have carried out operations against police and army personnel.

Security experts view these new groups, apart from the Islamic State (ISIS) in Sinai, as the most serious security threats facing Sisi’s government.

“One reason these groups are dangerous is that they are able to infiltrate into Cairo and hit at the heart of Egypt’s security establishment, which should be protecting the public against them,” said Nabil Naeem, a former jihadist. “The impression they want to give everybody is that the security establishment itself is not immune from their attacks.”

As ISIS does, the groups usually issue online statements mentioning details of operations they have just performed and aliases of the people who carried them out while vowing to maintain their war against Sisi, his supporters, police and the army.

Sameh Eid, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, said junior Brotherhood enthusiasts formed the groups to take revenge on Sisi, his security establishment and his backers soon after Muhammad Morsi’s overthrow as president in 2013. Morsi was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

“All the operatives of these groups are Brotherhood members,” Eid said. “They adopt different names only to give the impression that they are many and to distract the attention of security agencies.”

The Brotherhood usually denies links to the groups, saying its opposition to Sisi is peaceful.

Eid claimed, however, the Brotherhood was in full control, giving the groups money to buy arms and explosives and masterminding their operations.

Islamist analyst Kamal Habib disagreed, saying that, while most of the members of these militant groups have been part of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist organisation cannot be in control or blamed for their actions.

“How can an organisation almost totally devastated be in full control of all these different groups?” Habib asked. “Some political forces are feeling that the way to peaceful change is blocked, which is why they are resorting to violence. You should not exclude this as you analyse the current situation.”

Hassan Abdel Zaher is a Cairo-based contributor to The Arab Weekly.

Copyright ©2016 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 December 2016
Word Count: 525
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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, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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NEW YORK — Last week’s United Nations Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian land as contrary to international law and an obstacle to peace, i.e., a criminal and unacceptable action, was an important, even historic, vote, for many reasons, and with many consequences. It transformed a long-held global consensus against Israel’s settlement-criminality into a functional legal foundation on which the world can decide to take further actions.

Condemning Zionist colonies and settlements on stolen Arab land has been the clear position of virtually all the countries of the world, including the United States, for decades. Giving this position the force of law via a UN Security Council resolution is new and meaningful. It allows Palestinians and people across the entire world who oppose Zionism’s expansionist enterprise to take further practical, political, peaceful, and legitimate actions to stop this criminal behavior — in the same way that the world acted politically to counter South African Apartheid or terrorism today.

Palestinians committed to a negotiated peace with Israel — a disillusioned majority — can now explore mass political mobilization on a global level that would exert pressure on Israel to stop and then reverse the settlements process. Israel’s hysterical and arrogant response to the UN resolution — parroted by its increasingly isolated political agents and proxies in the American political system — are so extreme that we should not expect sanctions, boycotts, and other unilateral actions against Israel to move us towards a permanent negotiated peace agreement.

The absolute support in the United States and globally for the basic security of Israel within its pre-June 1967 borders gives Israel the option to oppose any move against it by claiming that the existence of Jews themselves is being threatened by hostile actions against the “Jewish state.” Yet the importance of the UN resolution is precisely that it clarifies, and anchors in law, the explicit distinction between the inviolability of the Israeli state within its pre-1967 land, and the corrosive, criminal actions of that state in expanding its territorial base and its Apartheid-like controls of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Palestinians and other peace-loving people must now pursue much more serious diplomatic initiatives for a permanent, comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement than has been the case in the past 50 years. The UN resolution provides that public and legal space in which to shape political actions by states and popular mobilizations that reaffirm support for the pre-1967 state of Israel, but reject and vow to fight vigorously and reverse the colonization legacy of the settlements enterprise.

The deeper significant factor here is that popular sentiments in the United States and other Western countries now increasingly favor a balanced approach to Israeli-Palestinian rights, and reject — often with clear majorities — the worn-out Zionist and Israeli arguments in defense of their colonial and racist-like policies on the Palestinians. American Jews in particular are sensitive to the need for a firm but balanced approach to resolving the Palestine-Israel and wider Arab-Israeli conflicts; this is both for their focus on justice as a central Jewish ethic, and because Israel’s continued defiance of the global consensus on Palestinian rights will only stoke new waves of anti-Semitism that will hurt Jews around the world.

Political, diplomatic, and legal actions against Israeli colonization will now slowly escalate around the world. This will continue the dominant international trend of the past decade that has seen churches, labor unions, student groups, professional associations, commercial companies, and some governments restrict their dealings with Israeli entities that are directly linked to settlements. Many Israeli leaders and their equally wild American political parrots will scream about new Nazis and reinvigorated anti-Semitism by people who hate Jews only because they’re Jews; the world will respond calmly that it wants to protect the state of Israel that was created as a homeland for the Jews who wish to live there, but it also wants to end the illegal, intolerable colonization of Arab lands that is an enduring and active remnant of 19th Century European colonialism.

The legal base for political action that the UN resolution offers is matched in importance by the resolution’s signal that Zionist huffing and puffing, including threats and reprimands, are no longer credible anywhere in the world — except for a small, narrowing, and steadily discredited circle of Washington institutes, congressmen and women, and political extremists who stand outside the explicit global consensus.

It is important now to shift the center of gravity of current actions and reactions — away from more hysteria and curses, and towards constructive diplomacy that would penetrate the key underlying issue that remains at the core of this conflict: how Palestinians and Israelis can share the land they both covet, with equal and simultaneous national rights for both.

I sure hope that clever and sincere mediators in the Middle East and abroad are quietly working to craft a new diplomatic initiative that would allow this historic moment to propel us all onto a path that addresses the legitimate rights and needs of Palestinians and Israelis, on the foundation of international law and morality that the UN Security Council has just reaffirmed. Zionist hysteria, unanchored Palestinian pleas for justice, and many decades of American-Israeli-defined fantasy diplomacy will achieve nothing, as the past 50 years have shown. Seeking security, statehood, and justice for all concerned peoples in this conflict must not repeat the mistakes of the past once again. The UN Security Council was the first to signal that we needed to break with the serial failures of recent legacies. Others should follow in the same spirit of courage, law-anchored precision, and a profound moral and political commitment to the equal rights of all the parties involved. That would be a fitting end to those nagging colonial practices, including colonies and settlements, which have haunted and ravaged us since the 1890s.

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 December 2016
Word Count: 963
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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, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BOSTON — The centuries turn over, the big players evolve, the local battlefields change, but the results remain the same: When external military powers intervene in the Middle East to secure their national interests, the result is inevitably local chaos that also generates retaliations and terrorism against those same foreign powers. Turkey and Russia are the latest states to experience this, clearly ignoring the lesson of their own imperial past.

The military power and its dominant national or religious identity are irrelevant; this universal pattern of history and human behavior applies whether the external power’s population is mostly Christian (Russia, United States), Muslim (Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia), Jewish (Israel), or any combination of these. The United Kingdom and France a hundred years ago, the United States in the past 60 years, Russia, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey today, and others all blindly assume they are impervious to any kind of reactions from the societies they penetrate militarily, and subsequently ravage politically, and often dismember as coherent states.

This critical dynamic is as old as human history itself, and is replayed with the repercussions of events in Syria and Iraq. So this would be a good moment for president-elect Donald Trump and his band of warriors to ponder the implications of mainly using more military force to rid the world of the scourge of terrorism from the Middle East. Perhaps a Trump administration will be able to re-think this approach more effectively than its predecessors, because of the many ex-generals in Trump’s entourage who have actually fought wars and maybe understand two critical facts that the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations ignored.

The first fact is that military power cannot be the primary instrument of foreign policy, even when addressing security threats such as terrorism. We also learn this from decades of experiences of the United States, Israel, and Turkey, who have used massive military force against their political foes, but continue to face resistance and terrorism, in some cases on a widening scale. Foreign powers have never found the formula for how to prevail by using military force against foreign societies whose ordinary people seek to live in security and dignity at home, such as in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Algeria, and many others.

The second fact is that military force used brutally and constantly generates its own new problems of insecurity, resentment, chaos, ungovernable spaces, and mass demographic displacement and desperation in the countries in question, which in turn spawn new forms of resistance and terror. These often manifest themselves well beyond the borders of the lands that foreign armies have invaded or penetrated. Most of the perpetrators call their acts resistance; the rest of the world calls them terrorism. If we do not grasp the relationships between these two realities then we will only suffer this problem for decades to come.

It is important to note that I do not condone or excuse the acts of terror we see in Syria, Iraq, Ankara, Berlin, Zurich, Brussels, Paris, and dozens of other cities. I am not judging terror and indiscriminate violence against civilians, because decent human beings can only respond to such crimes with severe revulsion and condemnation, and apply appropriate, legitimate, and effective responses to reduce or end terror threats. So why do terror and terrorists keep expanding all around us?

Deep, honest analysis of the links among foreign military interventions in the Middle East, sustained autocratic and often incompetent local regimes, and greater terror waves emanating from our region remains largely absent from the mainstream Western and Middle Eastern media and political spheres, with only occasional exceptions. A more accurate analysis would show that all our condemnations of terror seem only to coincide with expanding acts of increasingly brutal terror in more and more countries around the world. Good morning? It is high time to hear a more sensible explanation of this dilemma from mainstream media and political circles than the largely nonsensical, self-serving, imperial, and fiercely un-self-critical discussions of terror that dominate most Western and Middle Eastern societies.

Here’s another reason to wake up and ask why most of what we hear about the causes of terror make little sense, in view of terror’s expanding terrain and targets: Many of the recent acts in Europe and the United States seem to have been perpetrated by local individuals who became incensed by events abroad and at home, and once they became radicalized they carried out attacks such as those in Ankara and Berlin this week. This trend is likely to continue and expand.

The assassination of the Russian ambassador in Turkey follows many other recent attacks against American, French, Israeli, Jordanian, Iranian, Saudi Arabian, Turkish, German, and other targets. It seems that no country is immune. Why is it that all the smart people in the world lack the political honesty to figure this one out, but never seem to run out of enthusiasm for condemning the barbarism and criminality of the terror that they cannot seem to slow down? Maybe Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran who are now part of this ugly cycle can offer us better insights that the United States, Israel, U.K., France and other traditional military actors in the Middle East have failed to do?

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 December 2016
Word Count: 874
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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, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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The era of Dealocracy will begin on January 20 when Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. People searching for precedents for Trump’s sudden rise have suggested prototypes from Andrew Jackson and Huey Long to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Eighteenth century England may offer better models, however. Mining and steel magnates at home, and the merchant adventurers like the “factors” of the British East India Company abroad, shaped the country and contributed more to its prosperity than a whole series of monarchs and prime ministers. Assuming one is willing to forget the misery of the poor at home and the enslaved, indentured, and brutalized workers abroad.

In 1987, The Art of the Deal, Donald J. Trump’s inaugural venture in self-invention, hit the bookstores. Its credited co-author, journalist Tony Schwartz, claimed he wrote the text by himself, but the million-or-so readers understood it as Trump’s autobiography and philosophy.

The book’s 11-step credo offers a model of Trump’s campaign strategy and coming administration:

Think big = “Make America great again.”

Protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself = Reverse course if the heat gets too great.

Maximize your options = Say and do whatever strikes you as opportune.

Know your market = Read your domestic and foreign constituencies accurately.

Use your leverage = Bully, cajole, bribe, and pander to your supporters at home and abroad.

Enhance your location = Invest in every part of the country and the globe.

Get the word out = Tweet often and sensationally.

Fight back = Let no slight go unpunished.

Deliver the goods = [Try to] fulfill campaign promises.

Contain the costs = Spend as little government money as you can.

Have fun = Does anyone believe that Trump is not having fun?

This list can usefully be applied to the British East India Company and other private merchant enterprises of the eighteenth century. But it fits poorly with more recent American notions of government. President Calvin Coolidge said in 1925:

“The chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these the moving impulses of our life.”

But that was before Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Today, a single-minded focus on business, on “the deal,” threatens almost a century of domestic social progress.

The business of the Trump administration, however, will not be rooted in that progress. Judging from the president-elect’s words and appointments, it will be rooted in world-wide deal-making. This is where it departs from the 18th century precedent.

The European merchant companies were governments unto themselves, particularly in territories where their “factors” — traders, soldiers, and administrators—turned areas of business enterprise into colonies, and then, when they became too costly, bequeathed the colonies to their home governments.

Today’s merchant companies are transnational, and their investors aggressively focus on realizing profits. They seek no colonies and deploy no armies, but they deeply believe that “the business of the American people is business.” As his cabinet appointments of CEOs and billionaire investors indicate, Donald Trump will carry this credo into the White House.

When a factory is saved from relocation to Mexico, the president will claim credit. When education, health, housing, and welfare face cutbacks because they do not contribute to the bottom line, the president will distract the citizenry by pointing to his successful deals.

Other presidents may have dreamed of having such latitude, but reality has always caught up with them. Will reality overturn Trump’s vision?

Most critics look to foreign affairs for hints of cataclysm. International relations theorists — has anyone in Trump’s cabinet read them? — agonize about China, North Korea, Syria, Palestine, Iran, human rights, NATO, refugees, and immigrants.

But international relations theory is rooted in the now-ended two centuries of ideological struggles for hearts, minds, and territory that extended from Napoleon to the fall of the Soviet Union. The merchant companies of the eighteenth century cared about profits and did whatever they needed to do to ensure them. This included military conquest, brutalization of colonial subjects, and neglect of their welfare.

Trumpian Dealocracy may not be so callous, but it will surely put American advantage ahead of such traditional foreign policy goals as democracy, loyalty to allies, and strengthening of human rights. In the name of containing costs, it will also avoid military commitments abroad.

One should not be surprised if Dealocracy boosts the American economy. Nor should one assume that other billionaires will not see Dealocracy as the crowning achievement of their own business and investing careers. Liberals and progressives believe ardently that Trump’s rise to the presidency is a freakish anomaly that will assuredly be reversed, better sooner than later. But it is also possible that Dealocracy will be with us long enough for the New Deal to read like ancient history.

On the other hand, the two greatest figures in the East India Company, Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, were, respectively, investigated for corruption and impeached.

Richard W. Bulliet is Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University.

Copyright ©2016 Richard Bulliet — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 December 2016
Word Count: 856
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Every country has mixed feelings about its future, but some are more self-confident than others. At the present moment, there are very few countries in which self-doubt does not seem greater than self-confidence. This seems to me true of the United States, both western and eastern Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and most of Africa and Latin America. The biggest exception to this global worry and pessimism is China.

China tells itself that it is performing better in the world-economy than just about anyone else. To be sure, it seems to be performing less well today than a few years ago, but so is the rest of the world, and it is still doing better than the others.

China also tells itself that it is growing stronger all the time in its geopolitical position — first of all in East and Southeast Asia and now secondly in much of the rest of the world. It seems to be contemptuous of U.S. claims of a new position in Asia to which it says it is giving priority. To be sure, they do worry about the degree of self-control of the U.S. giant, especially now that the unpredictable Donald Trump is coming to power. But again China seems to think it can handle, even tame, what it considers to be U.S. arrogance.

The question is how realistic is this self-assessment of China? There are two premises embedded in China’s self-confidence, whose validity need to be investigated. The first is that countries, or rather the governments of states, can actually control what is happening to them in the world-economy. The second is that countries can effectively contain popular discontent, whether by suppression or by limited concessions to demands. If this was ever even partially true in the modern world-system, these assertions have become very dubious in the structural crisis of the world capitalist system in which we find ourselves today.

When we look at the first premise, the ability of countries to control what happens to them in the ongoing life of the modern world-system, the greatest evidence that this proposition is dubious is what has been happening in the last few years in China itself. Surely no state has worked as hard as China to guarantee its continued high performance. China has not left its activities to the workings of the “market.” China’s government has constantly intervened in economic activity within China. Indeed, it has virtually dictated what is to be done and how it is to be done. Yet, despite all that the government has done, China has been encountering of late worrisome setbacks. The government has been preoccupied with these setbacks, but the best it has been able to do has been to moderate them, not prevent them. I do not denigrate the actions of the Chinese government. I merely insist on noticing the limits of their efficacy.

If we look at the geopolitical arena, China has counted on being able to insist that other states recognize and implement its “one China” policy. Considering what the global situation was fifty years ago, China has done exceptionally well in this regard. Nonetheless, recently Taiwan seems to be regaining some ground in its struggle for autonomy. Perhaps this is a momentary illusion, but perhaps not.

The second premise is seeming even more dubious these days. Popular uprisings against regimes because of their harshness or the corruption they have fomented is not new. But they seem more frequent, more sudden, and even more successful than in the past. A good example is right next door to China — in South Korea. There President Park Geun-hye has catapulted downward in public favor seemingly from one day to the next. She has been impeached despite her impressive electoral victory and her control of the state’s administrative machinery.

A look at these popular uprisings shows that, while they often succeed in overthrowing the regime in power, they do not appear to create a lasting new regime. But this observation would be of very limited comfort to any regime, and certainly not to the present regime in China.

It is not that the Chinese government, and its interlocked partner, the Chinese Communist Party, are unaware of these arguments. Far from it! But they believe that they can and will overcome the obstacles and emerge over the next ten to twenty years as the dominant economic structure in the world. And, given this, they expect that they will prevail geopolitically over others, and in particular over the United States.

No one can be sure how this geopolitical rivalry will play out. I do counsel skepticism about the two premises of China’s self-confidence. I return, as I always do, to viewing the current world situation as part of a rivalry between two groups that are contending not about how to manage the current world-system or prevail in it, but rather about what should replace a capitalist system that is no longer viable, either for its super-elites or for its large oppressed classes and peoples.

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 ©2016 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 December 2016
Word Count: 833
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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, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The fall of Aleppo to the coalition of Syrian-Iranian-Russian-Hezbollah forces this week is likely to be a symbolic and historical turning point amidst different eras. How events play themselves out will be determined in the same way as events in Syria have been determined: by the extent of the will or reluctance of individual men and women in power to use force to achieve their strategic aims.

Yet, as is usually the case in this situation in the Middle East, it is impossible to predict what happens next, or how different powers will behave. This is because of an ever-changing kaleidoscope of personalities, state interests, short-term alliances, and surprise indigenous developments like the sudden birth of the Islamic State two and a half years ago. Consequently, it is best to refrain from either the pomposity of giving advice to governments to act in this way or that, or the fortune-teller’s speculation of what we should expect to happen down the road.

We can, however, recall how many different countries and non-state actors behaved in the past decade or so, and reach conclusions about what the fall of Aleppo teaches us about our ways as men and women of the world in our era that simultaneously globalizes and pulverizes its own children.

Perhaps the first conclusion is that the post-Cold War era is finally over for real. The global dominance of the American-led Western system of life, governance, and international reach seems to have run into a serious obstacle in Syria during the past six years, after two decades of the U.S broadly doing whatever it deemed to be in its interest around the world. The deep irony in this is that hundreds of millions of people around the world are keen to go live in the United States and other Western societies, rather than in Russia, Iran, or Syria. So the battle underway is not for hearts and minds, it is for sheer will in the exercise of power, especially military force against hapless civilians.

The end of the post-Cold War era will usher in something new that we cannot possibly predict now. That will depend on the policy decisions of big powers like Russia and China, regional powers like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Iran, and local powers like Hezbollah, assorted Kurdish groups, and other such forces that have real clout in the region, especially because they tend to have a greater will to fight than others.

Also left behind us in a flurry of dust, blood, drones, and anguished social media messages is the concept of “the international community,” and a set or norms developed over the past century that sought to bring order and justice to the world. Aleppo and its people — along with tens of millions of other Syrians and vulnerable, bludgeoned citizens across many Arab countries — repeatedly but futilely asked the “international community” to protect them from the brutality of their own or neighboring governments, or distant drone operators, or wholesale aerial bombardments of urban neighborhoods, or sieges in urban areas in Syria, Gaza, Yemen, and elsewhere.

United Nations officials and sincere executives of global non-governmental humanitarian organizations added their voices to the dying citizens’ pleas for protection. When that failed, desperate men, women, and children asked only for some mercy, like a fast death. But protection and mercy were not to happen for the most part, except for pro-Syrian government citizens who enjoyed the protection of Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah forces who came to their aid.

We must equally see as dead and gone the idea of an official Arab order which once tried to assert itself through the Arab League. Arabism has been a very real popular sentiment for the past century, but it has not provided a credible foundation for statehood and governance. The Arab order has vanished also because many — not all — Arab states have proven themselves to be some combination of untenable, illogical, illegitimate, inefficacious, non-viable, or simply corrupt and amateurish.

Maybe this is the fate of the whims of European colonial officers and drunkards; maybe it is the consequence of cruel and incompetent Arab leaders seizing power for their own benefit, and never letting it go; and maybe it is inevitably what happens when a conflict in Palestine is allowed to linger for nearly a century, global powers in that same period sending in their troops to pursue their interests at will, and energy resources proving to be a bigger priority for the world than any human concept, need, or right.

As the global, regional, and local structures that shaped our region for the past century all continue to disappear in critical pivots of the Arab World — Syria and Aleppo are the latest — we will have to wait some time until a new constellation of forces emerges from within the region that can rid us forever of drunken colonial officers and indigenous dictators, and find that evasive road to justice, order, and stability for the 400 million citizens of the Arab world whose worldly anchors and foundations have all be shaken badly.

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 December 2016
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, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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The Iranian Revolution created the Islamic Republic of Iran, but that republic was transformed by the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. Without this combination of two national traumas, today’s Iran would be little different from today’s Pakistan.

Under the Shah’s rule, Iran resembled Pakistan. A privileged and educated elite conversant in Western languages dominated the government while the masses lived meager lives in thousands of villages that provided minimal access to education, health care, electricity, and transportation. Members of this privileged class rarely visited a village and treated poor villagers and servants with disdain. Senior military officers were personally vetted by the Shah and were part of the elite. Women outpaced men only in illiteracy.

The revolution’s greatest success was the systematic extension of education and social services to every part of the Iranian countryside. Its greatest initial failure was its attempt to instill religiosity into every aspect of Iranian life. This failure not only generated dislike of the clergy among many segments of the population, but it undermined every effort to normalize Iran as part of the international community.

Many foreign governments looked upon the war that began with Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran in 1980 as a conflict that would sap the strength of two disreputable regimes. Who won? Who lost? In the long run, Saddam’s nationalist dictatorship would fall amidst the shock and awe of American invasion fifteen years after the war ended.

But what of Iran? Eighteen years after the war’s conclusion, the Islamic Republic is seen by many as an ambitious hegemonic power in the Middle East. It has not fallen apart internally, it has remained largely free of the terrorist scourge, it has carried out a series of credible elections, and it has negotiated a much-needed pause in its nuclear program.

Americans who visit Iran today enjoy touring historical monuments and are impressed by visible evidence of the country’s modernity. They take little notice, however, of the photographs of war martyrs that adorn light posts along the main streets of Iranian towns and cities.

From the outset of what the Islamic Republic terms “The Imposed War,” the country’s battlefield losses were publicly acknowledged and memorialized, while Saddam’s regime tried to conceal its own losses. The war brought Iranians together in a way that was unique in the country’s history. Patriotic pride, identity, and solidarity overtook and surpassed religiosity as the hallmarks of national character.

Compare this with World War II. In 1962, eighteen years after that war’s end, Americans seldom mentioned their war dead. Painful memories were repressed. Prosperity was abroad in the land, and the challenge of the student counterculture was just beginning. How different from the Civil War, Americans to this day remember and lament.

Russians, on the other hand, remained immersed in their memories of “The Great Patriotic War” and the tragic losses they sustained. For all his dictatorial ways, Stalin was remembered as the man who absorbed the worst the Germans could throw at his country, and prevailed. Veterans proudly show off their medals down to the present day.

Besides bolstering Iran’s national identity, the war with Iraq produced an equivalent to America’s G.I. Bill for educating returning veterans. Where the U.S. legislation benefited uniformed servicemen and women, the less formal Iranian system established university admission quotas for members of “martyr families.” This played a major role in channeling the sisters, wives, and mothers of slain soldiers into higher education, thus contributing to a majority of Iranian university students today being female.

In sum, the revolution exiled or retired most of the civilian and military elite, delivered social services to the masses, and established a regular and participatory governing system, albeit one that falls short of an ideal democracy. The downside? All this was done in the name of Islam, which raises the hackles of opponents inside and outside the country.

The war galvanized and unified the population behind an unprecedented patriotism, created a deep and lasting memory of the sacrifices made by the military, and incidentally helped stimulate an increase in female higher education. The downside? The Revolutionary Guard Corps acquired power and privilege.

Iran today is thus the product of two convulsive events and is much stronger and more unified that it would have been without either of them.

Richard W. Bulliet is Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University.

Copyright ©2016 Richard Bulliet — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 December 2016
Word Count: 709
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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, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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NEW YORK — One of the great battles underway now in the United States is between people of different ideological stripes who seek to write President Barack Obama’s legacy before he leaves office. This is mostly meaningless political entertainment that continues in another form the profound policy disagreements and character attacks that defined the recent presidential campaign. Yet one important episode that just occurred strikes me as worth analyzing in greater depth, because it was Obama himself who made a speech this week in which he sought to defend his anti-terror strategy as a success.

The facts suggest otherwise, and Americans and their friends around the world should decisively hold the United States accountable for the way it has pursued its anti-terror goals — because of the immense impact these policies have had and will continue to have for many years in cases like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Obama’s main point in his address to troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, was that he made the right decision in scaling back huge American military engagements around the world in favor of more targeted special operations and developing a “network of partners” to fight the terrorists. He said the terror threat remains real and dangerous, but that today’s extremists, unlike communists and fascists, do not threaten the world order.

He thanks the troops for their role in “breaking the back” of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq, noting these people “are thugs and murderers who should be treated that way. He added that the United States’ “smart strategy that can be sustained” had successfully prevented another major terror attack on its soil since Sept. 11, 2001.

Like most politicians, Obama here speaks both sense and nonsense at the same time. He is correct to note that no major terror attack has occurred in the United States for the past 15 years, but he ventures into the world of make-believe and wishful thinking when he says that his strategy of destroying terror installations and leaders by building a network of allies can be sustained as a long-term successful strategy.

The most important point is that his focus on destroying the actual terrorists and their networks and facilities is important and legitimate, but this will not rid the world of the terror threat in the years ahead. The United States’ use of military power against terrorists has been decisive and impressive since the fight against them was launched in the 1990s by President Clinton; yet even more striking has been the virtually total refusal or inability of the United States (and its network of Arab and Asian allies) to identify and seek to redress the underlying causes that allowed so many terror groups to emerge in the past quarter century or so.

The fight against Al-Qaeda is most instructive here, because the United States has a longer experience in this battle than it does against ISIS (which in any case emerged from within Al-Qaeda, showing the weaknesses of the American strategy to fight terror). The United S.tates under the past three presidents (Clinton, Bush and Obama) has used immense military force against Al-Qaeda for nearly two decades, using the same strategy that Obama boasts of today. Yet we find today that Al-Qaeda has expanded in those past 20 years, has been deeply involved in the fighting in Syria, and on the way it spawned the group in Iraq that later became ISIS.

Similarly, the United States has been fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for decades, only to find today that the Taliban have resumed expanding their significant control of territory in the country, while some 12,000 American and other troops continue to fight there.

The second critical flaw in the U.S. strategy is that its “allies” in the Arab-Asian region where terror is most troubling are mostly autocratic governments whose policies of socio-economic mismanagement and denying their citizens any serious political rights have proven to be a major reason for the birth and expansion of terror movements.

Obama is correct to note that no terrorists have succeeded in attacking the United States again after 9/11, and that is a credit to the diligent police and intelligence work of U.S. government agencies and their foreign partners. Yet the situation across the Middle East and parts of South Asia and Africa are exactly the opposite: There the continuously growing frustrations, indignities, and dehumanizations of ordinary citizens combine with the organizational work of small groups of militants to spread the presence and impact of terror groups across many lands, including recently in Europe.

All the underlying deficiencies in people’s lives and government services that initially spawned these terror groups have continued to worsen in recent years — including jobs, income, health and education services, basic security, and credible opportunities for political participation and accountability. The United States and other foreign powers have continued to support the autocratic Arab-Asian regimes that have brought about this calamity.

This is a bitter legacy for the past three American administrations and for all their international partners in inhuman, uncaring policies that have wrecked the lives and futures of hundreds of millions of people. It is precisely the opposite of a successful strategy; it is a deeply flawed and counter-productive strategy, beyond preventing an attack on U.S. soil; the departing American president who has done so many other good things should not make foolish statements as he just did because of his impulses as a politician still battling his wild-eyed Republican opponents.

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2016 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 December 2016
Word Count: 912
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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, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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