JHU POLITIK
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OCTOBER 12, 2015
VOLUME XVIII, ISSUE VII
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JHU POLITIK EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Christine Server & Juliana Vigorito MANAGING EDITOR Mira Haqqani
HEAD WRITER Evan Harary
ASSISTANT EDITORS Dylan Etzel Preston Ge Shrenik Jain Sathvik Namburar
POLICY DESK EDITOR Arpan Ghosh
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Diana Lee
MARYLAND EDITOR David Hamburger
COPY EDITOR Zachary Schlosberg WEBMASTER Sasha Cea-Loveless MARKETING & PUBLICITY Chiara Wright
CAMPUS EDITOR Christina Selby
STAFF WRITERS Olga Baranoff Dylan Cowit Rosellen Grant George Gulino Corey Payne
FACULTY ADVISOR Charlotte O’Donnell
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• October 5, 2015 • Volume XVIII, Issue VI
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
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Hosting Dershowitz Disrespects Survivors of Sexual Assault Miranda Bachman ’18 Form Letter to Send to Your Congressperson Zachary Schlosberg ’16 The Boon and Bane of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Linh Tran ’19 Seeing Humanity, Beyond Black and White Caroline Lupetini ’19 The Growing Wave of African Islamist Violence Dylan Etzel ’17 Interview with Paul Saunders, U.S.-Russia Policy Expert Dimitri Simes ’19
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Hosting Dershowitz Disrespects Survivors of Sexual Assault by Miranda Bachman ’18, Contributing Writer This article was authored in collaboration with the following student groups: Hopkins Feminists, Sexual Assault Resource Unit (SARU), Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance (DSAGA), and Voice for Choice.
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s the authors of the petition to protest Alan Dershowitz’s presence on campus, we would like to clarify our arguments and respond to certain allegations regarding the validity of our claims. We strongly believe that Dershowitz has trivialized sexual assault and antagonized survivors of sexual assault in the course of his legal work, as well as in the process of defending himself against allegations that he himself repeatedly sexually assaulted a minor. Virginia Roberts is one of forty women who allege that they were recruited as minors and coerced into participating in financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring. Earlier this year, Roberts claimed that Dershowitz had sex with her six times beginning when she was sixteen. In response to these allegations, Dershowitz called Roberts a prostitute and questioned whether she was fit for motherhood at her current age of thirty-one while “going around selling her false stories of prostitution.” When asked if he had any concern about labeling Roberts a prostitute, Dershowitz replied, “She was not victimized…she made her own decisions in life.” Dershowitz’s response is a blatant example of victim blaming in order to avoid culpability. He calls Roberts, a survivor of innumerable sexual assaults, a prostitute, indicating that she somehow chose to be the victim of these heinous crimes. Sadly, Dershowitz’s characterization of Roberts as a prostitute is in no way out of character for him. Dershowitz was a part of Epstein’s defense team and used evidence of the victim’s wrongdoings to vindicate Epstein. He questioned the honesty of one of Epstein’s accusers by using the fact that she was a drama major in college to imply that she was lying. In this instance, Dershowitz used methods of questioning the accuser’s character and past to debase her allegations against Epstein—as if any of these factors were relevant to the fact that Epstein forced her into being a sex slave. Through such devious methods, Dershowitz illustrates a problem rampant in our society: that examining a survivor of sexual assault’s character and lifestyle choices can easily discredit him or her.
academic dishonesty was unclear and offensive in any way. We want to make it clear that the charges we will be focusing on are entirely separate from Dershowitz’s political views. As groups concerned with the equality and safety of marginalized groups on campus, we care deeply about promoting a culture of respect toward individuals of all religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. In the past, Dershowitz has attempted to portray the allegations against him as anti-Semitic in order to silence those who condemn his actions. This implication is highly problematic for any individuals who identify as Jewish or as supporters of Israel but who do not support Dershowitz’s “values” of disrespecting survivors of sexual assault. Our society is conditioned to openly forgive abusers who are wealthy and influential. Those who blindly defend Dershowitz because of his successful career and argue that the accusations against him are lies are guilty of disregarding the fact that professors, teachers, and even religious leaders have violated vulnerable and under-age individuals in the past. We agree with those who are of the opinion that hosting a speaker with a unique perspective on the Middle East would be illuminating and educational for students. However, we cannot support someone who fits those criteria but who does not empathize with sexual assault survivors and propagates slut shaming and victim blaming. Inviting Dershowitz to speak undermines the values of our university, is detrimental to the health of our peer survivors on campus, and serves as an endorsement of a man who represents much that we are trying to change in our society. If the MSE Symposium wants to endorse a relevant voice on the Middle East conflict, there are many other noteworthy, successful individuals who could offer valuable insights to students and who do not perpetuate rape culture. No affiliate of the MSE Symposium was involved in the writing or editing of this article. ■
As the creators of this petition, we would like to clearly address the claims that anti-Semitism pervades our arguments. We recognize that the political nature of one of our sources raised a set of concerns unrelated to our central argument, and we have since removed that source from the petition. We also apologize if any of the text in the petition concerning Dershowitz’s
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• October 12, 2015 • Volume XVIII, Issue VII
Form Letter to Send to Your Congressperson by Zachary Schlosberg ’16, Copy Editor TO CONGRESSPERSON ___________,
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don’t really know how writing a letter to a congressperson works. I haven’t since elementary school, when we learned about the intertwining branches of our government and how they represent us, citizens of a nation we steadfastly pledged allegiance to every morning. We were told then if we wrote to our representatives, they would hear us, and we would affect change. Now I’m older and have learned many disappointing things about the world. I’ve learned that it isn’t the job of a congressperson to sit around all day reading letters and acting on them. I’ve learned that being a citizen means often not being heard. Still, I realized: why am I complaining about not being heard when I’ve never sincerely tried writing to an elected official? Many are convinced a letter won’t work, yet few among us have tried it. I’ve also learned that, as much as this world bursts with love, there exists startling hatred at the core of human existence. People will find a way to justify and act on this hatred, surrounding themselves with likeminded people and finding a readily available means to act. In today’s world, the Internet has engendered a crowd for every animosity and the United States government has provided a corresponding gun for each desired evil. In response to the latest evil, a mass shooting at a community college in Oregon, President Obama pronounced “we collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.” And so we are.
I know you don’t want it to be like this. How could you? How can we suffer this unceasing parade of death without something inside of us breaking? The good news: there are many small, sensible movements that can be made to curb gun violence that won’t take away the opposition’s “liberty.” It certainly won’t destroy the Second Amendment, which, as Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent of the 2008 Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller, is more accurately treated as an argument for gun control. “Until today,” Stevens wrote, “it has been understood that legislatures may regulate the use and misuse of firearms so long as they do not interfere with the preservation of a well-regulated militia.” The Heller decision gave us a new understanding of the Second Amendment, one that enshrines the right to keep and bear arms as an undeniable one. Yet the Court’s ruling still allows for gun control legislation. Congress could provide more resources to law enforcement and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and encourage research into the harmful
public health effects of gun violence. It could be possible to implement universal background checks for all gun purchases and ban military-style assault weapons and magazines that fire more than 10 rounds. The good news is that there are steps we can take. The bad news is that those who claim to represent us and seek our votes - politicians, public figures, presidential candidates - too often deny the humanity of gun violence victims in favor of some cherished scrap of liberty. After the Oregon massacre, Ben Carson wrote on Facebook, “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” He has since said that the Jews would have fared better during the Holocaust had they been armed. Jeb Bush’s reaction displayed an equal disregard for human life: “look, stuff happens.” I hope Bush would feel comfortable telling that to the family of the eight-year-old girl shot last week by an eleven-year-old boy because she did not let him see her puppy. While gun control is not a solution to social problems, it is a solution to the accessibility of killing instruments for those intent on acting upon their hatred. While gun control will regulate the right to bear arms, it will not limit it for those hoping to use their guns legitimately. Furthermore, gun control works effectively in every other developed nation that has implemented it. But I don’t have to tell you this. You’ve read these facts over and over again, listened to the same heartbreak in the wake of every mass shooting that passes in front of our screens on a seemingly weekly basis. There was another college campus shooting between when I started writing this article and when I finished, at Northern Arizona University. When can we put an end to these tragedies? What’s stopping us? The world disappoints us enough. Let’s not disappoint one another. We have to live here, together. Let’s work to keep everyone safe from harm. I must ask you to hear me. I will not stop writing. The cold disregard of the political system must not stop us. There are steps we can take, but they must be taken together. Please try; please act. In the future, we will be held accountable for every gun death we could have prevented and didn’t. And we will find that, in the vast wilderness of humanity, the embers of our individual liberty do not keep us as warm as we thought they would. Thousands, millions, will thank your efforts. Signed, ___________________
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The Boon and Bane of the Trans-Pacific Partnership
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by Linh Tran ’19, Contributing Writer
ast week, the United States and eleven other nations finalized the draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which will be submitted to the nation’s governments for approval. TPP is the most ambitious economic pact since the North American Free Trade Agreement. The result of ten years of tireless negotiations, the accord has the potential to transform the American economy, allowing it to penetrate the burgeoning Asian market while gaining benefits from the human resources of cheap labor. The biggest winners here are multinational conglomerates. TPP stimulates the export of manufacturing jobs, limits competition, and raises prices for high-value products while eliminating or reducing tariffs and quotas on cheaper goods. The Pacific free trade zone will remove any hindrance to booming global economic exchange in the region, namely e-commerce, financial services, and cross-border Internet communications. The U.S. is also seizing this opportunity to impose expectations of better labor protections, uniform environmental standards, and intellectual property rights on its trading partners. Nevertheless, there exists skepticism among nations who will have to adjust to the trade pact. Australia worries that the data flows will violate its privacy laws, while Vietnam worries about the TPP’s potential impact on its Communist rule. TPP will contribute to less preferential treatment for state-owned businesses and potential damage to domestic industries, meaning that the ramifications of uniform international rules produce risky trade-offs for some signatories. However, the economic fluidity among the signatories, who together hold 40% of the global GDP and one-third of world trade, has tipped the scales toward a unanimous agreement. Though hailed as a “boon for all nations involved,” a bulwark against China’s expansionism, and “a standard-setter for global commerce,” the pact remains divisive. President Obama has faced opposition from both the left and the right, especially considering the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1993 continues to draw criticism from American workers. U.S. companies might enjoy the surge in exports, but changes in labor mobility also place U.S. workers in competition with foreign ones. Despite the positive labor market effects of the economic recovery, the United States still bears a $50 million dollar trade deficit annually. Republicans worry that like NAFTA, which displaced 700,000 American jobs, TPP will send more jobs to low-wage destinations such as Vietnam and Malaysia.
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On the other side, Democrats and progressive groups are concerned about the lack of clear enforcement for labor and environmental safeguards, as well as protecting domestic investors from foreign forces. Most low-wage countries are plagued with deeply rooted unfair labor practices and human rights problems, so opponents of TPP fear that outsourcing and offshoring will stifle rather than enhance regulations. Moreover, TPP might further increase income inequality in the United States by promoting cheap goods and cheap labor from low-wage countries. Aligning herself with the labor unions and many vehement Democratic opponents, Hillary Clinton argues that the stakes are too high. Joe Biden promises to help Obama gain Congressional approval, but also agrees that the final pact must address the perils of globalization, specifically its impact on workers and the environment. In fact, as a global “field leveler,” the TPP has many chapters devoted to the protection of workers and environmental safeguards. Recently, the Senate has given President Obama “fast-track” trade authority, which allows him to present the TPP for a straight up-down vote, without amendments. If TPP achieves ratification from Congress, President Obama will cement his legacy on trade policy. The hope is that TPP will help revitalize global trade, which has slowed due to low confidence in most economies. Moreover, written as “open-architecture”, TPP will increasingly allow more Asian nations, including China, to participate, and will serve as the blueprint for future economic deals such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Trade will deliver mutual benefits. The U.S. will gain access to the Asian market and Asian allies, while Asian countries can gain independence from China. For all the expectations, we can only wait and see if TPP will pass and carry the weight of its promise. ■
• October 12, 2015 • Volume XVIII, Issue VII
Seeing Humanity, Beyond Black and White
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by Caroline Lupetini ’19, Contributing Writer
altimore native, Hopkins School of Education graduate, and writer Dwight Watkins spoke at Shriver Hall on Wednesday as part of the Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium, giving a presentation entitled “Baltimore Uprising: The People’s Perspective.” Though partially promotional for his newly-published collection of essays, The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America, the presentation covered a larger theme of understanding the “shared sense of outrage” of African American Baltimoreans in recent months. This sentiment has been a major component of the movement around the death of Freddie Gray and other black individuals at the hands of the police. Watkins covered a wide array of topics in his speech, reading three individual essays from his book and speaking candidly to the crowd. He began with a brief and lighthearted introduction that segued into the first essay, which focused on peacefully protesting the deaths of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and so many others. This was the most poignant part of his presentation; Watkins and the audience alike were filled with somber emotion. Watkins shared his philosophy on understanding the particular pain of these deaths: they were all human. “We always miss those elements of humanity,” he said, “we all deserve to be respected.” To make his point, Watkins gave the example of the near-universal love of ice cream. Despite cultural differences, we all share some base commonalities as humans. I understood immediately what he meant by his ice cream comment: MSE members, myself included, had the pleasure of going out to dinner with Watkins before his speech. We discussed, of all things, LeBron James. It made me realize that Watkins – the masterful writer, educator, and speaker – is a regular human being. It is the acknowledgement of humanity in Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and the others that many talking heads miss when discussing their deaths. It is easy to dismiss a young African American man killed by police as a thug. Watkins sees overcoming this ignorance of humanity as the first step to understanding the anger within the black community.
was educating the public of a justifiably enraging concept that threatens the black community. His third essay discussed his experience with traditional, unhealthy soul food. More specifically, how this deep-fried culture probably kills more African Americans than guns. Though this anecdote was less obviously relevant to the uprising in April than the other two essays Watkins shared, it made the essential point that this tradition of poor eating dates back to slavery, and remains a conflict that the black community must wrestle within itself. Watkins posed a question he was once asked: how does a white woman from Utah with an iPhone protest violence against blacks in a meaningful way? Bringing publicity to a problem is one of the most important parts of solving it. Watkins sees this as one of the biggest problems with gentrification: people just don’t know it is happening or understand the effect it has on local communities. To me, the most important part of Watkins’ speech was that of the good that came out of the uprising and how best to get involved. His biggest theme of the evening was one that hopefully spoke to the large number of students in the audience – to figure out what you can do best, master it, and use that thing for a meaningful purpose. For Watkins, it is education and literacy. He is working to inspire young people to love reading and learning. The Hopkins student body may be nearly half white, myself included, but we can be powerful partners if our privilege is used responsibly. Our voices should be heard in the role of an ally: positively contributing to the conversation but speaking no louder than the voices of the marginalized. ■
Watkins read another essay about gentrification – the redevelopment of urban communities – within Baltimore. He said he doesn’t know his city anymore, and doesn’t even know if he still loves it. Putting it in perspective, Watkins asked: can you go back to the places where your childhood memories were made? Watkins cannot, and it is due to gentrification, through which faceless developers “bulldoze black culture.” He was not visibly angry about gentrification, but understandably disturbed, and eager to teach the audience that this phenomenon is happening all around us. Again, his modus operandi in this
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The Growing Wave of African Islamist Violence
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by Dylan Etzel ’17, Assistant Editor
ast week’s attack by supporters of Burkinabé coup d’etat leader Gilbert Diendéré near the border of Mali and Burkina Faso demonstrated the variety of Islamist terror threats on the African continent. Burkina Faso is preparing to hold elections after protests ousted President Compaoré a year ago, ending a twenty-seven year long rule. Taking advantage of the subsequent power vacuum, General Diendéré orchestrated the recent, unsuccessful coup, but clearly his subordinates remain active. Likewise, Mali has experienced mass violence at the hands of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). These attacks, along with those in Tunisia, have demonstrated the downside of ousting authoritarian leaders: without authoritarian governments, terrorism proves much more difficult to hinder. The upcoming elections in Burkina Faso are directly threatened by the strength of militant Islamists in the Maghreb region. The unsuccessful coup drew attention to the threat posed by jihadists who aided Diendéré’s putschists. Though the crisis was averted, the underlying problem was not solved; the lack of consolidated power and governmental action in Burkina Faso has allowed extremism to gain hold. Mali’s fluid borders have exacerbated the issue, as many of the militants come from Mali or other African countries. Even if the elections take place without significant difficulty, any new government will face countless challenges from potential insurgents. Mali’s inability to solve its terrorist issues has further complicated one source of the problem. The 2012 Malian coup forced the exit of Touré, who had failed to sufficiently address terror, but jihadist attacks have since spread since from the north through the rest of the country. Extremists imposed Sharia law in their controlled areas in late 2012, leading to France’s 2013 military intervention on behalf of the weak Malian government. Yet on August 4th, 2015, AQIM killed eleven soldiers at a camp in the Timbuktu region, only a month after six UN peacekeepers from Burkina Faso were killed. In response, the government and loyalist militias agreed to peace with the Malian secular rebel alliance, but their accord has fostered little security. Peace between warring factions does not imply consolidated strength. Lack of integration will only strengthen the relatively unified front of armed extremists.
as well as the Sousse beach gun violence this past Ramadan, show the leverage insurgents aligned with the Islamic State have in Tunisia. Ben Ali may have bribed, laundered money, and harassed the Tunisian people with the police force, but for the most part, he kept violent extremism at bay. This past week, The Quartet, a group of four civil society organizations that secured democracy for Tunisia, won the Nobel Prize. However, their efforts have been diluted by the Islamic State’s insurgency and recruiting power inside the country. The Quartet managed to strike a delicate balance between the popularity of political Islam and the liberalism of the more secular parties. Insurgents have an easy task: upset that delicate balance and tip the scales. Though violent extremism has flared up recently, it existed before the fall of autocratic rulers in the Maghreb. Extremist attacks were common in the days of Compaoré and Ben Ali, but these two rulers were able to put them down with relative ease. The popularity of extremists derives from myriad sources; not only were the former regimes repressive and brutal, but AQIM and other groups also identify themselves as a response to neo-colonialism and Western imperialism. The fact that Mali required France’s aid in 2013 could only have bolstered the fervor of AQIM and other insurgent groups. Therefore, the North African governments face a problem they may be too weak to handle presently. Democratic elections are important for the liberty of a people, but they may not be worth the sacrifice of those peoples’ security that was efficiently provided by the former authoritarian regimes. Foreign intervention can only galvanize the extremists; this is an issue that requires a domestic solution, a leader of a unified front with designs for gradual liberalization. ■
The 2011 protests In Tunisia – part of the larger ‘Arab Spring’ – helped remove President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the country’s ruler of twenty-three years. In the wake of civil unrest throughout the region, however, jihadists have made numerous headlines. The March attacks on the Bardo National Museum,
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Interview with Paul Saunders, U.S.-Russia Policy Expert by Dimitri Simes ’19, Contributing Writer Paul Saunders is Executive Director of the Center for the National Interest and directs its U.S.-Russia Relations Program. Politik: What does Putin hope to accomplish through military intervention in Syria ? PS: The origins are that the Russian government was increasingly concerned really over the course of the last few months that the Assad government in Syria might fall, and that could lead to a situation in which the extremists rapidly consolidated power in Syria, and that extremists that are fighting in Syria who are of Russian Federation origin, and there might be 2400 of those, might return to Russia. That could create a very significant internal security and terrorism problem for Russia. So I think from President Putin’s perspective, what he is trying to do is to shore up the Syrian government to prevent it from collapsing. As he said, in a curious echo of what former President George W. Bush said in 2007, that he would rather fight the extremists in Syria than fight them at home, in Russia. Politik: Many have warned that Russia may get bogged down in this conflict the same way it got bogged down in Afghanistan during the 1980s. What is the likelihood of that happening? PS: I would say it’s certainly possible; it really depends on how the conflict evolves and how Russia’s role in it evolves. Russian officials have talked, at least initially, about it being a temporary operation in support of the Syrian Army offensive, so I think one question is whether the offensive by the Syrian Army is successful or not. If it is successful, and the Assad forces get some breathing space, are there new frontlines that stabilize further away from Damascus and then Russia doesn’t need to play such an active role or can declare victory, and withdraws or reduces its presence? Or alternatively, does that Syrian offensive not succeed, or there are perhaps significant Russian casualties? Then, the Russian government faces some decisions about whether or not they should escalate their involvement to try and have a better chance at success. It’s certainly easy to visualize in that situation how Russia could become bogged down. Politik: Will we see greater unrest in Russia’s predominantly Muslim regions as a result of its military actions in Syria? PS: Well, I think that’s an unknowable question. We’ll have to see how things play out over the next weeks and months, but it is certainly a very serious threat. We have already seen
in the past, Islamist groups in Russia declaring their loyalty to the Islamic State. We have seen, actually just today I think, a group of Saudi clerics denouncing the Russian intervention. And I expect over time, particularly if there is video or other materials that come out on the Internet, it’s very likely there will be a backlash against Russia among certain groups. The Russian government obviously has through great effort and expense, and no small amount of violence, mostly pacified Chechnya. Russian officials may feel that they have that situation under control and they know what to do if they see a rift, but it certainly looks .to me like a situation that could become quite dangerous. Politik: What is the implication of Russia’s intervention for regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Turkey? How will they respond? PS: Obviously, Russia just spent the last few months actually trying to cultivate many of those governments, and to try and get them on board with its own view of the conflict and how it should be fought, particularly with the Russian view that it is necessary to support Assad because only the Assad government has a significant military force on the ground that would be in a position to defeat ISIS and other extremist forces. Saudi and Turkish leaders are, like the U.S., much more skeptical of Assad, and they didn’t really line up behind that Russian vision of the conflict or how it should be fought. So Russia has now decided to go off basically in its own direction together with the government of Syria, trying either to bring about or facilitate an Assad victory, which I think is unlikely given the level of Russian involvement, or more likely, trying to stabilize the situation a little bit on the battlefield and create a climate in which it is more likely that there can be a negotiated settlement that includes the Assad government. I expect that’s their real objective. Turkey and Saudi Arabia and other regional players I don’t think are anymore excited about that now than they were in the past. So I expect that they’re going to be pretty concerned about what Russia is doing. They are not really in a position to respond to it directly, I expect many of them would be looking to the United States. Certainly Turkey is a NATO ally and Saudi Arabia is an important ally in its own right, but what the U.S. can do to affect the outcome of the war…
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I think the administration already thinks that we have limited options and what we can do to discourage Russia from pursuing the course it’s on is probably even more limited. So, I expect the regional powers are not going to be happy at all, but they have relatively limited options at this point, other than actually trying to support some of the forces Russia is attacking. If that happens, it could become a very dangerous situation for everyone. Politik: How should the United States react to this? PS: Let me go back to the last question to tack on a couple sentences of explanation. The Russian air strikes have so far been relatively effective mainly because the areas in which they are taking place are not really areas where there have been a lot of other air operations, and the people who they’re targeting on the ground haven’t yet employed any anti-aircraft missiles. If somebody decides to provide anti-aircraft missiles to those people, and that is certainly within the capability of a number of governments and nonstate actors, that could become a very costly situation for Russia. It certainly could make the air strikes far less effective. When you have 30 aircrafts on the ground in Syria, the loss of one or two individual aircrafts really starts to make a difference because you have to have a really complicated schedule of operations where there are some planes in the air and there others being prepared, there others that have just come back, others undergoing maintenance. So when you take some out of the system, it could potentially have a disproportionate impact. Not to mention the potential symbolic impact of one of those planes being shot down and the pilot being killed or captured. In terms of United States and what it should do, it’s a very difficult situation for the United States, and it’s a difficult situation in part because it’s a complicated civil war, but it’s also a very difficult situation because our own policy is really hamstrung. It’s hamstrung ultimately in two respects simultaneously. On one hand, we are not playing a very active military role in the conflict, and that is something that clearly reflects the President’s preferences, but I think also the preferences of the majority of the American people. At the same time, if you are the United States and you are not going to play a major military role and you want to see some resolution to that conflict so that people don’t continue to be killed and displaced, then the principal alternative would be to have some kind of diplomatic solution. This is extremely difficult to pursue when the President has said that Assad has to go because if you are President Assad, there aren’t really strong incentives to agree to any kind of negotiation that has a guaranteed endpoint of your departure from power. So we’re in a situation in which our policy is rejecting the two main options for dealing with the situation. We’ve tried, instead of pursuing one of those two options, to come up with this middle option of arming and training the opposition, but we’ve gone about it in a way that almost guarantees that it can’t succeed. The reason for that, I would argue, is twofold: it reflects failure on our part to understand our own power and how to use it, but
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it also a failure to understand what motivates people fighting in the conflict. In a situation where it’s clear to everyone that the United States doesn’t want to get involved and is trying to do very little, and again that clearly reflects what most Americans want and I’m not sure myself that it would make sense for the United States to have a direct military role in that conflict, but in that kind of situation, what is the incentive for someone in Syria to say to himself or herself, “ I want to be an American client, I want to line up with the United States and to secure American support for my group.” There’s not a strong incentive to do that because it should be relatively clear by now, after four years, that the opportunities to get what you really want out of the United States are actually pretty limited. On top of that, we’ve created this system of vetting people, and I’m not saying it’s inappropriate to vet people, we don’t want to be arming the wrong people, but when you overlay that structure on top of an already limited field of people who are looking for American help, then I think it dramatically further reduces the number of Syrian moderates, if you want to call them that, who you can put on the battlefield. It makes the approach of trying to arm the opposition, at least in my mind, much less likely to succeed. If you look back at the experience of the Cold War, when we were actively engaged in a lot of civil wars and other kinds of conflicts trying to prevent the global spread of communism, we were much less discriminating in deciding who to arm and support. In some respects, that allowed us to be more successful because we were able to have more people on “our side” in these conflicts. But in other cases, it clearly had long-term very damaging consequences, like in the case of Afghanistan, where we armed the Mujahideen fighters that became the core of AlQaeda. These are really difficult dilemmas for policy makers, and I wouldn’t want to minimize that. At the same time, we have created, for various understandable reasons, a policy that is doomed to fail. ■
• October 12, 2015 • Volume XVIII, Issue VII
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JHU Politik, founded in 2008, is a weekly publication of political opinion pieces. We proudly seek to provide the Johns Hopkins community with student voices and perspectives about important issues of our time. Rather than hide within a cloistered academic bubble, we know we must critically engage with the world that surrounds us. That, we believe, is at the heart of what it means to be learning. We are lucky to be situated in the city of Baltimore, a city with a rich history and an ever-changing politics. We aim to look at the politics of the Homewood campus, the city of Baltimore, the domestic landscape of the United States, and the international community . While we publish the Politik weekly, we work simultaneously on our special issues which come out once per semester. These magazines confront a single topic from multiple angles. We have run issues covering topics like the political nature of research, the Arab Spring, and our city Baltimore.
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