The Latest Brexit Crisis: A Tory Family Drama

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The Latest Brexit Crisis: A Tory Family Drama

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Pope Francis (L) watches as Egypt›s Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II releases a dove after a meeting with other religious leaders at the Pontifical Basilica of St Nicholas in Bari, in the Apulia region in southern Italy, on July 2018 ,7. Pope Francis on July 7 voiced concern that Christians will disappear from the Middle East amid ‹murderous indifference› as war rages on. He was addressing the leaders of almost all the Middle Eastern churches gathered in the Italian port city of Bari to pray for peace in the region. (Getty)

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Revellers run with Puerto de San Lorenzo›s fighting bulls during the second day of the San Fermin Running of the Bulls festival on July 2018 ,7 in Pamplona, Spain. The annual Fiesta de San Fermin, made famous by the 1926 novel of US writer Ernest Hemmingway entitled ‹The Sun Also Rises›, involves the daily running of the bulls through the historic heart of Pamplona to the bull ring. (Getty)

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The Latest Brexit Crisis: A Tory Family Drama

by Ronald J. Granieri* Ever since the British public voted to Brexit the European Union in 2016, the most important political debate has not been between the British and their European partners, or even between the ruling Conservative Party and the Labour opposition. The most intense conflict has been within the Conservative Party itself, as the Tories have tried to resolve their own inner conflict about Britain’s relationship to Europe and to the world.

The latest chapter in this family drama played out over this past weekend. Prime Minister Theresa May gathered her Cabinet at Chequers, the government’s official country estate to hash out

a concrete plan for negotiating Brexit. After more than a year of debate, with deadlines approaching for the fate of Britain’s relationship to Europe, May hoped to unite her team around a compromise plan that would allow Britain to strike a deal with the EU that maintained as many advantages as possible for both sides.

After announcing the deal, however, party unity lasted barely twelve hours. Sunday night, David Davis, the Cabinet minister in charge of the Department for Exiting the European Union, tendered his resignation, claiming that he could not support the deal after all because he did not “believe” in it and was "unpersuaded" that the government's negotiating approach "will not just lead to further demands for concessions" from Brussels. "The general direction of

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A model of Theresa May and Boris Johnson and other Conservative MP's is displayed as anti-Brexit and antiausterity activists take part in protests as the Conservative party annual conference gets underway at Manchester Central on October 2017 ,1 in Manchester, England.

(Getty)

policy,” he announced in his resignation letter, “will leave us in at best a weak negotiating position, and possibly an inescapable one." The next morning came even bigger news, as Foreign Minister Boris Johnson followed Davis and several junior ministers out the door. In his dramatic resignation letter, Johnson claimed he had to leave because the Brexit “dream” was “dying.” He agreed with Davis that the Chequers agreement was not only suspiciously soft, but that as an opening bid in negotiations, it was likely to lead to an even softer final agreement once the European negotiators were finished with it.

Johnson’s departure raised the political stakes considerably for May. As both the most senior Cabinet member and a long-rumored candidate for the Prime Ministry himself, Johnson’s decision to leave the government positions him to challenge May directly for leadership. Although May has since appointed replacements for the departing ministers, and has for the moment fended off possible no-confidence motions, her position within her party and thus her place at No. 10 Downing Street is as unstable as it has ever been.

How could an effort to reach consensus fail so spectacularly?

The reason is simple: the Tories have irreconcilable differences about Europe, and have had them throughout the postwar years. Although Tory idol Winston Churchill had endorsed the idea of a “United States of Europe” in 1946, his endorsement was based on the idea that the other states of Western Europe should unite, while Britain continued to play a global role as both an imperial power and the junior partner in a “Special Relationship” with the United States.

As those roles changed, British conservatives warmed to the idea of Europe. In 1961, Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, recognizing the reality of British economic ties to the continent and listening to the advice of American President John F. Kennedy, formally applied for British membership in the European Economic Community. Those negotiations foundered on French opposition and unresolved questions about Britain’s Commonwealth ties. Nevertheless, for the next decade, the Tories were the leading exponents of British membership in the EEC, which became complete in 1973 through the leadership of Prime Minister Edward Heath. At that point, it was Labour who opposed European integration, and in a 1975 referendum on EEC membership, Heath and the Tory leadership (including his eventual successor Margaret Thatcher) succeeded in convincing the British public to stay in.

By the time Thatcher herself became Prime Minister, however, the Tory relationship with Europe began to sour.

For a free market enthusiast and scourge of the welfare state like Thatcher, the European Community began to look too much like a Continental socialist organization. She thus became increasingly critical of its organization, even as she recognized the material advantages of British membership in the single market. She succeeded in negotiating a series of special exemptions for Britain, including a special annual rebate on part of Britain’s contributions to the EC

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Although May has appointed replacements for the departing ministers, and has for the moment fended off possible no-confidence motions, her position within her party and thus her place at No. 10 Downing Street is as unstable as it has ever been budget, and never suggested that Britain should leave the community, while also encouraging a steady drumbeat of criticism of the allegedly overweening ambitions of Brussels. That encouraged an increasingly bipolar attitude among Tories toward Europe, which weakened the party in Thatcher’s final years in office and led to outright (un-)civil war under her successor, John Major.

During over a decade in opposition, the Tories became increasingly identified with Euroskepticism, even as the party leadership recognized Britain’s membership in the European Union (as it eventually came to be known) brought significant benefits. Thus when the Tories returned to power under David Cameron in 2010, the new Prime Minister had to figure out how to develop a coherent policy on Europe. As a consistent if lukewarm believer in maintaining British membership, Cameron hoped that he could mollify the Euroskeptic in his party and keep them from joining the more militantly anti-European United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) by promising to hold a new “in or out” referendum.

As he had succeeded in doing by agreeing to a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, which resulted in a strong win for the status quo, Cameron hoped that simply holding the Brexit referendum would satisfy Euroskeptics, end the debate, and allow him to move on to other items on his political agenda. He did not expect to lose, but lose he did. In what political scientist Andrew Glencross calls Cameron’s “Great Miscalculation,” nearly fiftytwo-percent of voters chose Brexit. Although majorities favored remain in both Northern Ireland and Scotland, larger majorities in Wales and especially in England carried the day.

Even worse, for the future of the Tories as well as Britain, was that the referendum only deepened intra-party divisions. Although Cameron and May and other party leaders had campaigned (consistently but ineffectively) for Remain, other prominent Tories, especially Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, loudly proclaimed their support for Brexit. In doing so, they had the apparent advantage of consistency, as they could rely on Euroskeptic rhetoric going back decades within the Conservative party and its

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allied media outlets. But the deep differences would make governing extremely difficult.

In response, Cameron, who had promised that he would stay in office no matter the result, simply quit, tossing the hot potato to his former Home Secretary, Theresa May, who has been juggling it ever since. Gove and Johnson mutually blocked each other from No. 10, but both eventually entered the Cabinet.

May promised a “strong and stable” government, and announced that “Brexit means Brexit,” without being able to say for certain what that would be.

Although Brexiteers considered the referendum result as the definite will of the British people, it was never clear whether all those who voted for Brexit were voting for the same thing. The Leave campaign made a great many promises, from a windfall for the National Health Service to the re-assertion of Britain as a global power.

Voters were encouraged to assume that the British could escape all the things they did not like about the European union (such as free movement of people, further political integration, and the British contribution to the EU budget) while keeping all of the economic benefits of membership (from free trade within the bloc to the special role of the City of London in Europe’s financial dealing). Never terribly coherent or realistic from the start, these hopes collided quickly with reality once negotiations began.

Unsurprisingly, the European Union, which has an interest in discouraging departures in any event, has not been disposed to allow Britain to keep all of its advantages with no cost. Especially difficult have been questions surrounding the future border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (the one land crossing between the EU and the UK) and whether the UK can expect to benefit from free movement of goods and services while restricting the movement of people. Desultory negotiations led by David

How could an effort to reach consensus fail so spectacularly?

The Tories have irreconcilable differences about Europe, and have had them throughout the postwar years

Davis had brought a solution no nearer, while sniping between factions within the government has only increased.

Boris Johnson, who had flirted with Remain before stunning his frenemy David Cameron by becoming a leader of the Leave movement, summed up his Brexit strategy by saying Great Britain could “have our cake and eat it.” Honest if irresponsible, “cakeism,” has not satisfied anyone. It has been denounced as too soft by those Tories who simply think that Britain should get out of the EU completely and build its relationships with the world from scratch thereafter. Such advocates of a “hard Brexit” include not only the recently departed Mr. Davis but also prominent backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has become something of a rock star for British conservatives.

Denying that she supports “cakeism,” Theresa May’s favorite dessert is, rather, fudge. She has both announced that “Brexit means Brexit” while also hinting, with the support of her Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, at flexibility in negotiating the final deal with Brussels. So far, her offerings have not been very palatable for either side. From her first day in office to this week, May and her Cabinet have struggled to find consensus. A snap general election in 2017 weakened her further, as the Tories lost their majority and now depend on the votes of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.

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As with many compromises, the Chequers agreement left no one completely satisfied. Then came the resignations, and now it appears no one knows what Brexit means after all

British Prime Minister Theresa May takes a seat as she arrives for a bilateral meeting with European Council President Donald Tusk during an EU summit in Brussels on October 2017 ,20.

(Getty)

Facing increasing pressure from both internal critics and her European interlocutors about her apparent lack of a coherent plan, May intended to make the Chequers agreement the final basis for a softish Brexit, allowing Britain a status not unlike Norway—with access to the European markets, within some unspecified regulations, and freedom from EU political integration.

Such a deal would be inferior to Britain’s current EU membership (the UK would still have to pay for access to the market, as Norway does, but would no longer have any say in those regulations it would be expected to follow), but allowed the possibility of controlling immigration, thus satisfying a main Brexiteer demand.

A soft Brexit could also avoid undue friction along the Irish border.

As with many compromises, the Chequers agreement left no one completely satisfied. Then came the resignations, and now it appears no one knows what Brexit means after all.

May has moved quickly to replace her departing colleagues and has vowed to fight any effort to topple her, but her future remains murky. Political rivals are circling to decide what they can get.

Although she has not united her government, May appears to have briefly united her critics. Remainers across Britain have greeted the news of the resignations with barely disguised

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glee, claiming that could be the start of a reconfiguration of British policy, if not a reversal of the Brexit decision altogether. Hard-line Brexiteers, however, have also cheered the resignations, for quite the opposite reason. They hope they signal the beginning of a formal rebellion within the Tory ranks. In the absence of any last-minute compromises, Hard Brexit, intentional or not, now appears to be the most likely result.

A key figure in the days to come will be Environment Secretary Michael Gove. A partner and rival with Johnson in advocating Brexit, Gove has so far chosen to stay within the government, calling himself a “realist” and urging his colleague to back the Chequers plan. Gove is playing a careful game, relying on his Brexiteer credentials to give him credibility as a possible successor to Theresa May, while avoiding the appearance of disloyalty.

All of this, of course, leads to the question of whether anyone in the Conservative Party really wants to push a no-confidence vote and risk new general election. It is hard to see that as an attractive option, both because it would create further uncertainty in Brexit negotiations and because polls suggest the Tories and the DUP could lose their majority altogether. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has promised to carry Brexit through, would be happy to take over, and destroy the Thatcherite dreams of many Hard Brexiteers. May has already used that threat in her effort to discipline her party colleagues.

How long she will be able to hold off her rivals remains to be seen.

With this week’s NATO summit and the impending visit of President Donald Trump, Theresa May hoped that the Chequers Conference would forge peace within her political family to provide a strong foundation for British foreign relations. As in many a British novel, however, family intrigues and resentments run deep and haunt the present.

Theresa May entered Chequers with great expectations, but now she, her party, and her government face hard times ahead. *Ronald J. Granieri is Executive Director of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West, editor of FPRI’s The American Review of Books, Blogs, and Bull, and host of Geopolitics with Granieri, a monthly discussion program at FPRI.

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The US is Determined to Confront Iran And Rouhani Seems to be Changing his Stance

by Hussein Abdul Hussein While many regional observers watched closely as US President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, few paid attention to the details of the memorandum. The fourth section of the memo, in which the US President ordered the federal departments and agencies to reinstate the sanctions imposed on Iran before the nuclear deal, was titled "Preparing for Regional Contingencies.”

“The Secretary of Defense and heads of any other relevant agencies shall prepare to meet, swiftly and decisively, all possible modes of Iranian aggression against the United States, our allies, and our partners,” the memo stated.

“The Department of Defense shall ensure that the United States develops and retains the means to stop Iran from developing or acquiring a nuclear weapon and related delivery systems,” it added.

Following Trump's instructions to the Department of Defense to prepare for the possibility of a

military confrontation between the United States and Iran, US delegations visited allied capitals in the Gulf and the Middle East and held high-level meetings to prepare scenarios for any possible confrontation with the Iranians and to make the necessary arrangements to deal with these different scenarios.

In other words, the US military leadership have made sure that the option of a military confrontation against Iran is available if the US president decides to use it.

Since then, a number of developments have pushed the United States and Iran closer to war than to reaching a diplomatic solution.

On July 16, Trump will meet with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the Helsinki Summit, where the US President will offer a series of concessions to Russia, including overlooking Russia’s annexation of the Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and the re-admission of Russia to the Group of Eight, G8, of which it was suspended

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Austrian President Alexander van der Bellen (not pictured) and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani give a joint press statement at Hofburg Palace on July 2018 ,4 in Vienna, Austria. (Getty)

from following the Crimean crisis.

Trump will also confirm the US position in Syria, which goes in line with Russia's control over Syria, provided that Russian control is exclusive and free of any involvement from Iran and its militias.

Trump’s only request will be for Russia to join the United States in Washington's campaign against the Iranian regime, with the aim of destabilizing and possibly toppling it.

Attorney to President Trump and former mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani told a group of the opposition Iranian movement “The People's Mujahedin Organization of Iran� (PMOI) that he expected the Iranian regime to collapse within a year.

Iran, meanwhile, sought to ease the consequences of the planned return of US economic sanctions.

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Iran's attacks on energy carriers, which could raise the prices of oil and other goods to hurt US consumers, make military action against Iran justified in US public opinion However, before Hassan Rouhani arrived in Europe to begin a tour aimed at convincing leaders to ignore US sanctions, an Iranian diplomat was reported to have attempted to blow up a France-based Iranian opposition group.

This move has angered the Europeans and provided an opportunity for Americans to remind their transatlantic allies that Iran is a "state sponsor of terrorism," with or without a nuclear

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deal, and that it is in the interest of America and Europe to veto the agreement and engage in a serious and harsh confrontation that would lead to the overthrow of the Iranian regime.

Rouhani may have acknowledged the difficulty of his task when the alleged diplomat was exposed.

He therefore threatened the West, warning that if the United States succeeds in achieving its goal of imposing a complete halt on Iran's oil exports, Tehran will not remain silent and will close the waterways through which energy carriers pass through the straits of Hormuz and Bab el Mandeb.

The United States has been waiting for an opportunity of this kind. Since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been ongoing on since 2001, the US is still opposed to war.

Yet, Iran's attacks on energy carriers, which could raise the prices of oil and other goods to hurt US consumers, make military action against Iran justified in US public opinion.

It also seems that Iran's response to any US military strike will come in the form of an attack by pro-Iranian militias across the region, mainly from Syria towards Israel and from Yemen towards Saudi Arabia, according to Western intelligence estimates.

The Americans also expect the pro-Iranian

Rouhani's latest plan indicates that Iran will be patient with the expected US sanctions, without military responses, and will wait for the end of Trump's term

militias to launch attacks against their troops in Iraq and Syria.

But these militias, which can fight long-term wars of attrition, do not seem to be able to inflict much damage in a short confrontation unless Iran instructs Hezbollah to launch rocket attacks from Lebanon against Israel.

However, a scenario of this kind is ruled out because of the damage Israel would likely do to the entire state of Lebanon in retaliation for any attack the party might launch from Lebanese territories.

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Maryam Rajavi, leader of the People's Mujahedin of Iran walks by a wreath during the meeting 'Free Iran 2018 - the Alternative', organised by the People's Mujahedin of Iran in Villepinte, near Paris on June 2018 ,30.

(Getty)

Iran's calculations appear to be similar to those of the West. In case of a direct military confrontation, the United States could inflict damage on Iran, including its infrastructure, the headquarters of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the government, and the army in an unprecedented manner.

These calculations may have prompted Iranian officials to issue explanations, which were a retreat from Rouhani’s threats to close waterways.

Since the revolution in 1979, the Islamic regime has never faced an American administration with such determination to confront Iran. The

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Americans have always faced Iran indirectly and have tried to conciliate with them in order to restore the friendship between the two countries from time to time.

But Trump's ruthless antagonism against Iran seems to have prompted Rouhani to adjust his style, causing Iran to be confused on how to deal with the imminent danger. Rouhani's latest plan indicates that Iran will be patient with the expected US sanctions, without military responses, and will wait for the end of Trump's term. Yet, Trump may not wait for the end of his term without imposing a change in Tehran.

How Diplomacy With North Korea Can Work A Narrow Focus on Denuclearization Is the Wrong Strategy

By Philip Zelikow At the end of last week, the next phase of U.S.–North Korean diplomacy got off to a rocky start in Pyongyang. Following a set of talks with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the North Korean Foreign Ministry criticized Washington’s “unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearization.” Pompeo maintains that the meetings were “productive.” Pompeo was right, in the sense that the talks again showed why too narrow a focus on denuclearization has been and continues to be a recipe for failure.

A one-track devotion to ending the nuclear program will force all other important issues to queue up behind it. As pressure mounts to resolve the lead issue, the whole diplomatic process could stall or even fail, leading to crisis once again. In contrast,

a broader process would actually do more to ease progress on denuclearization, as well as multiple other fronts.

THE NEXT STAGE The recent crisis created by North Korea’s continuing nuclear and missile tests was quite dangerous. It now appears that around the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018, the North Korean government decided to suspend its test program and make a big shift to concentrate instead on reform of the North Korean state and economy. Despite the flood of commentary, outsiders have very little evidence about when and why Pyongyang made this decision.

Although South Korean diplomacy and the inter-Korean summits

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And it is useful to remember that Iran and North Korea have at times worked together make it harder for North Korea to resume nuclear and/or missile tests, while building support for action if North Korea wrecks a real peace process.

Absent a war, it may not be possible to force a rollback of the existing North Korean nuclear and missile program as rapidly as possible, by any means necessary. The United States has already shown itself willing to tolerate, for a time, a North Korean program that has gone this far, but not further. Also, at a time when the United States is escalating its confrontations with both Iran and China, a coercive rollback objective seems unwise. And it is useful to remember that Iran and North Korea have at times worked together. It is not in the U.S. interest to drive them now into a more intimate military embrace.

So back, then, to the challenge of crafting a diplomatic strategy that can sustain at least some progress. The best approach to realize these objectives is to build an ambitious, broad peace process during 2018 and get it under way in 2019.

WHY BROADER IS BETTER Right now, the default mode of Korean diplomacy is triangular.

On one side of the triangle is U.S. bilateral work with North Korea, mainly on denuclearization. On another side is South Korean bilateral work with North Korea, on a still undefined peace regime. The base of the triangle would be a hope that the United States and South Korea could coordinate their progress.

Unfortunately, this setup is unlikely to work. The limiting factor is likely to be the U.S. progress on denuclearization, the usual source of breakdown in the past.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (L) speaks during a meeting with North Korea's director of the United Front Department, Kim Yong Chol (R) at the Park Hwa Guest House in Pyongyang on July 2018 ,6.

(Getty Images)

certainly mattered, it is hard to know whether the U.S.–North Korean summit and the related concessions were necessary to get the suspension of the North Korean tests. But with the crisis temporarily defused, what matters now is to construct a diplomatic strategy for the next phase.

The strategy should assume that the North Korean government is itself uncertain about what comes next. And as the just-concluded talks in Pyongyang illustrated, the strategy should not assume that North Korean denuclearization will or can occur rapidly.

A key objective for the next stage should be to sustain diplomatic momentum over the next year or so, 19-2018, to create an environment in which North Korean leaders might make the hard choices that go with the development they seek. Another is to

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A diplomacy focused on denuclearization has three basic weaknesses. First, the scale of effort needed for the difficult and dangerous work of North Korean denuclearization has always required the process to be broken down into different stages and steps, each of which takes time. One of the more careful recent efforts to map out a cooperative denuclearization process sketches out a ten-year timeline with massive U.S. and South Korean assistance for the needed work on site. Such a plan also implies a much broader easing of tensions going into its rollout.

Step-by-step denuclearization has been tried again and again. It has always failed. North Korea offers to give up something it does not really need, or is deceptive, in exchange for getting some short-term payoff that is too limited to have very great value.

Both sides usually end up dissatisfied, and the situation becomes even worse. Meanwhile, the real motivations behind the North

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Korean nuclear and ballistic missile programs are not really addressed.

Second, the denuclearization track necessarily puts the United States and North Korea at the center of the diplomacy. North Korea has usually preferred to treat the United States as its peer on the nuclear issue, with South Korea treated as an American puppet state. Nuclear-focused diplomacy thus reinforces Pyongyang’s preferred image and tends to sideline Seoul and the South Korean people.

Third, because this mode of diplomacy puts nuclear and missile issues and experts front and center, it tends to become detached from Korean realities and thus becomes politically sterile. As negotiations progress, the arcane technical points raised move further and further from core political issues and are not well understood by political leaders or the public.

For all these reasons, design for a broad peace process is more promising than one focused on denuclearization. The process most likely to work on the Korean Peninsula should be thought of as a multi-lane highway, not a one-lane toll road. Denuclearization is of course important, but there should be opportunities for all sides to discuss whatever issues they want to raise. In the diplomacy that ended the Cold War, for example, the strategic nuclear issues (in the form of the START talks) were not forgotten. They merely ran parallel as other negotiations worked on issues more primal to Europe’s future.

A SIX-TRACK PROPOSAL This broader approach could begin with a statement, perhaps negotiated for announcement toward the end of 2018, that hostilities on the peninsula have ended and that it is time to build a durable peace. To do so, the statement could map out an ambitious peace process to start work during 2019, along six tracks. This may seem like a lot. But it is worth recalling that, in the diplomacy that took place toward the end of the Cold War, the United States was negotiating on more than a dozen different tracks, simultaneously.

The first track should clarify the nature and future of inter-Korean

Neighbouring countries, most notably China, Japan, and Russia, take an understandable interest in the future of the Korean Peninsula

relations. The recent inter-Korean summit declaration envisioned an official end to the Korean War, but arriving at a satisfactory statement could be tricky. If the war is over, is the 1953 armistice agreement—which sets up the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and the Military Demarcation Line (MDL)—null and void?

An inter-Korean border could be either permanent or interim.

One possibility, based on European precedent, is to turn the MDL itself into an inter-Korean border, regarded as inviolable, subject only to peaceful adjustments agreed to by the parties concerned.

North and South Korea could also discuss their views on a future confederation or even unification process as part of the talks. The process for this track should be “two plus two.” As the two Koreas reach an agreement, it should be ratified by both the United States and China, who were signatories to the 1953 armistice.

The second track should focus on economic measures, most notably sanctions. A broader peace process should afford all parties more ways to gauge cumulative, total progress across the board as they decide whether or when to seek sanctions relief from the UN Security Council. Right now, the North Korean government appears to be considering a variety of reform ideas— from something resembling China’s gradual opening in the 1980s to Vietnam’s combination of economic opening and political repression to some sort of melding with South Korean industrial powerhouses. If it develops a program that is gradual, with experimental measures, then it would make sense for Washington and its allies to consider specific sanctions relief in stages as opposed to a general relief across the board. The process for this track could be “two plus UNSC,” since targeted sanctions relief

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many years to help South Koreans have a democracy. In the end, Washington should respect that democracy’s choice. At the end of the Cold War, when the issue was raised about foreign forces in Germany, the U.S. position was that the Germans themselves should decide the matter, freely.

Track five could focus on humanitarian and cultural issues. In creating new inter-Korean relations, South Koreans may wish to discuss concerns they have about human rights and the treatment of their fellow Koreans. These are topics that also concern the wider international community, including the fate of Japanese citizens who were kidnapped and brought to North Korea against their will.

The final track should focus on regional security issues.

Neighbouring countries, most notably China, Japan, and Russia, take an understandable interest in the future of the Korean Peninsula. There should be a venue for them to discuss this. This was one of the original reasons for creation of a six-party process, to include those three countries plus the United States in addition to the two Koreas.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (2nd R) greets North Korea's director of the United Front Department, Kim Yong Chol (2nd L) as they arrive for a meeting at the Park Hwa Guest House in Pyongyang on July 2018 ,6. (Getty Images)

would probably require a new UN Security Council resolution of some kind.

The third track should target nuclear security, including longrange ballistic missile issues, which are relatively familiar and obviously important. The process would involve the United States and North Korea. But there is a good case for including at least South Korea as well, since its assistance and expertise may be vital in actually implementing any agreement.

The fourth track can be devoted to general security. This includes the size and deployment of conventional armed forces on the peninsula, including shorter-range ballistic missile systems and other kinds of artillery. Ideas for how to approach negotiations could draw on the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty signed in 1990, a large-scale and reasonably successful precedent which defused the largest conventional military confrontation in the world.

This track would also cover chemical and biological weapons.

Here too there are existing institutions that could provide negotiators guidance, namely the Chemical Weapons Convention and its Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, as well as the Biological Weapons Convention.

North Korea may wish to raise the presence of U.S. forces on the peninsula in these talks. Washington and Seoul should not fear this; they can raise issues of their own. In deciding the future of its military presence, Washington should ultimately defer to Seoul. South Koreans and Americans fought and worked for

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This track could be convened once there is enough progress on the other tracks to present issues for discussion. At a public dialogue about peace negotiations held in South Korea in June 2018 between the author and South Korean professor and presidential adviser Chung-in Moon, Chinese diplomat Ning Fukui suggested that the six-party process could hold off until “later.” He was right.

THE POLITICAL POTENTIAL OF A PEACE PROCESS Washington and its allies should devote immediate attention in 2018 to creating an ambitious peace process to sustain momentum and prevent a slide back into crisis. Results from that process may not materialize until 2019 and beyond.

The broad approach does not assume that the parties are ready for great change, only that they are genuinely ready to consider it. The job of the diplomacy is to create a variety of opportunities for the Koreans to do that. This design puts the Koreans at the center of the action, while engaging the United States and other key countries in appropriate ways.

A broad peace process will cover issues that ordinary people can connect with and understand. North Korea has long asked for such negotiations and has agreed to them in principle. A peace process could electrify the political environment throughout the Korean Peninsula. No one can confidently predict how these dynamics will play out. But it is time to try an approach that offers fresh political energy and possibilities.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Letting Europe Go Its Own Way The Case for Strategic Autonomy 22

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(From L to R, first row) German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, U.S. President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May attend the opening ceremony at the 2018 NATO Summit at NATO headquarters on July 2018 ,11 in Brussels, Belgium. (Getty)

These strategic enablers are so expensive that no individual European state can afford them without compromising its basic war-fighting capabilities.

EU adopted a new Global Strategy that formally called for strategic autonomy—the ability to pursue its own interests without being constrained by other states. This went mostly unnoticed in Washington, as many EU documents do, but after the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, the divide between American and European priorities and interests has become more apparent.

In December 2017, amid rising anxieties about the Trump administration’s commitment to European security, the EU launched Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), which pools the defense efforts of 25 of the EU’s 28 member states. To the surprise of Brussels, however, the United States swiftly condemned the new initiative as a threat to NATO. This response elicited pushback from EU leaders, especially because it did not appear to be driven by genuine security concerns. If PESCO succeeds, it will improve, not damage, transatlantic security. When the members of the Atlantic alliance come together at the NATO summit in July, they should unite behind the need for a strong and autonomous EU.

BURDEN SHARING

By Sven Biscop The Trump administration seems to believe that allies are meant to pay and obey. When it comes to Europe, this may pose a problem. During the Cold War, what was good for the United States was good for Western Europe. But in a multipolar world in which multiple powers are competing and cooperating with each other, this is not always the case. In June 2016, the

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Despite what its critics have claimed, PESCO is the answer to the long-standing American demand for more burden-sharing in NATO. This is true precisely because it is an EU, rather than a NATO, initiative. At this point, even if all European NATO allies honoured the pledge to spend two percent of their GDP on defense (as they have promised to do by 2024) they would still be dependent on the United States for the deployment of their forces. The main gap between the European and American arsenals has to do with strategic enablers—tools and resources such as intelligence and surveillance, transport, and precisionguided munitions, which allow countries to project military force safely and swiftly. These strategic enablers are so expensive that no individual European

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state can afford them without compromising its basic war-fighting capabilities. Pooling defense efforts is the only way to overcome this problem. NATO doesn’t have a mechanism for doing this, but with PESCO, the EU now does. And because PESCO is an EU initiative, it will receive money from the EU budget.

This marks the first time that the union has funded defense research and capability projects.

The primary U.S. objection to PESCO is that it will negatively affect U.S. defense exports to Europe.

This is true: one of PESCO’s objectives is to preserve the autonomy of Europe’s defense industries. But if Washington truly wants the Europeans to step up, it cannot expect them to simply spend more money on American military equipment. For example, the EU wants to maintain the capacity to build drones, but if it doesn’t create a framework that pushes for big collaborative projects, that sort of defense industrial capacity could disappear. France and Germany, which initiated PESCO, also announced their intention to work together to build a sixth-generation European combat aircraft. Ultimately, the aim is that European countries will contract European companies to construct a single kind of combat aircraft or battle tank instead of a multitude of competing models. If they don't manage this, European companies will soon produce nothing at all. The market has become too small to afford producing three different European combat aircraft (as is the case today).

At the same time, there is a strong push to integrate military formations between countries. For example, the Dutch army in some areas now relies on German

Strategic autonomy is not just about enhancing military capabilities; Europe must also adopt clear foreign policy objectives

equipment or support units. The Belgian and French land forces are embarking on a similar project. If armies can work together on issues such as maintenance, logistics, and training, countries will save money, which they can then invest in other military projects.

PESCO is still in its early stages, but if it is successful it will become the umbrella under which Europeans work to meet NATO targets and achieve European strategic autonomy. The United States should welcome this development because it will allow the Europeans to generate and move forces more quickly for NATO’s collective defense arrangements. In due course, it should also enable European countries to deal with issues on their periphery that do not meet NATO’s threshold for intervention. (They are doing already this in Mali.) If PESCO succeeds, Europe would no longer require as much U.S. support to guarantee its security. This would leave Washington free to focus

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Launching of the European defence cooperation structure with the creation of the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) mechanism and the European Defence Fund. Emmanuel Macron in front of mikes, facing the media. (Getty Images)

on its own priorities.

STRATEGIC AUTONOMY But the potential impact of PESCO goes far beyond the military domain. The ability to more credibly project power would bolster EU foreign policy overall.

In particular, it would strengthen the EU’s hand in pushing back against U.S. policies that go directly against European interests, and, indeed, against U.S. interests as well. Consider Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement. The EU overall, and France, Germany and the United Kingdom specifically, has already made it clear that Europe will not follow Washington’s lead in backing out of the deal. But it should take this a step farther and push back against the broader U.S. effort to support Saudi Arabia in its competition with Iran. The EU knows that forging

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a compromise between Riyadh and Tehran is better than choosing sides. (It articulated this principle in the Global Strategy.) At the moment, however, the EU doesn’t have an operational Middle East strategy of its own. The EU could also provide a necessary counterpart to current U.S. policy on issues such as the rise of China, relations with Russia, the global trade system, and climate change.

Strategic autonomy is not just about enhancing military capabilities; Europe must also adopt clear foreign policy objectives. And the more independence and influence the EU gains, the more it can help the United States avoid foreign policy decisions that increase the risk of conflict, harm the global economy, and ultimately prove detrimental for everybody.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Don't Get Out of Syria Assad's Victory Will Only Lead to More Chaos

By Jennifer Cafarella Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has not won his country’s civil war; rather, the war is entering a more dangerous phase. Forces fighting on his behalf have made important gains in recent years, capturing Syria’s second city, Aleppo, in 2016 and securing his capital, Damascus, in 2018. They are currently attacking the rebel stronghold in the southern provinces of Quneitra and Daraa, where the revolution began. Together, these victories have changed the trajectory of the war, weakening the moderate opposition and suggesting to many international observers that

the fight for Syria is all but over.

But although the regime’s advances are impressive on a map, they will not end the war. Assad is weaker than he seems. His rule depends on the backing of foreign patrons, such as Iran and Russia, and the exhaustion of states that once opposed him, such as Jordan. His decision to internationalize the war will lay the foundation for future wars, and his tactics of mass slaughter threaten to fuel a long-term, global jihadist insurgency that will keep combat raging in Syria for years to come.

The United States must accept that ignoring Syria will lead not to a clean victory for Assad that establishes a stable peace but

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But although the regime’s advances are impressive on a map, they will not end the war depended heavily on the support of Iran and Russia, which have combined to provide him with tens of thousands of ground troops, airpower, financial aid, and (in the case of Russia) diplomatic cover, without which his regime likely would have toppled.

Although these interventions have stabilized the Assad regime in the short term, they are redrawing the power map of the Middle East in a way that will lead to further instability.

The first problem is that Iran and Russia will now be able to use Syria as a springboard for their international aggression. Russia has reportedly already begun to use its Syrian air base to support the operations of Kremlin-backed mercenaries in the Central African Republic and Sudan. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ability to project force from Syria will aid his efforts to erode the NATO alliance and undermine the U.S.-led world order, allowing him to exploit the seams between the United States and its allies and partners. Iran, meanwhile, is establishing bases and creating Syrian proxies in order to open a second front against Israel in a future war. Israel will not tolerate this and could escalate to a ground operation in southern Syria to prevent it.

A Syrian man carries a wounded girl after war crafts belonging to Assad Regime carried out airstrikes in the de-escalation zone of Hamouriyah, in besieged Eastern Ghouta in Damascus, Syria on January ,09 2018. (Getty)

to more chaos down the road. To avoid that, the United States should invest now in building leverage for future decisive action by strengthening the military and governance capabilities of its partners on the ground, regaining the trust of Syria’s rebelling population, rebuilding rebel forces, and denying Assad the international legitimacy he so desperately craves. The United States still has options to constrain Assad and his backers—all it needs is the will to use them.

ASAAD’S INTERNATIONAL WAR IN SYRIA Assad’s victories in the recent stages of the Syrian war have

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A further problem is that Assad’s depopulation of rebel communities is destabilizing neighboring states and driving regional instability in a way that will prolong the war. Jordan is possibly on the brink of collapse owing to the unsustainable number of Syrian refugees it has absorbed and has closed its border to 59,000 Syrians that fled Assad’s latest offensive in mid2018-. These populations may now be forced to live under a regime they sought to escape, creating a ripe environment for terrorists to exploit. Refugee flows are also incentivizing Turkish escalation. Ankara’s 2016 invasion of northern Syria was meant in part to check the Kurds but had the additional goal of relieving Turkey’s refugee burden by force. Turkey is now resettling refugees in northern Syria and building a rebel proxy force to govern them. But by sustaining anti-regime forces and populations, it is likely to prolong the war.

Despite its support for rebel proxies, Turkey is pragmatically aligned in the short term with Assad and his backers to fight the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—the United States’ main partner in the fight against ISIS —because of its links to a Kurdish insurgency against the Turkish state. As the Syrian Kurds retaliate against Turkish forces and proxies in Syria and contemplate expanding their operations into Turkey, the Turkish-

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SDF war threatens to become a regional one. The United States has engaged Turkey to de-escalate this conflict but has taken no serious action to reform the SDF—for instance, by strengthening the Arab elements and constraining the Kurdish ones—in a way that might allow for a more conclusive deal. And after winning reelection last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is more dependent than ever on political support from Turkish nationalists, which could drive him to further escalation.

A U.S. retreat from eastern Syria, where it currently has some 2,000 troops, would create a vacuum that various belligerents would compete to fill. Assad and his backers, Turkey, and jihadist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS all hope to gain control of the areas that the U.S.-SDF alliance seized from ISIS. A U.S. withdrawal will only accelerate this conflict.

GLOBAL JIHAD In addition to the game of geopolitical chess now being played in eastern Syria, the region is a potential base for a resurgent al Qaeda and ISIS. Al Qaeda operated across eastern Syria before the rise of ISIS in 2014 and likely still has networks there. And ISIS, although weakened, is not defeated in Syria. It retains sleeper cells and forces in small pockets across the country, which continue to fight both Assad and the SDF. On June 22, ISIS claimed its first attack in its former capital, Raqqa, now held by the SDF, demonstrating its continued ability to inflict damage.

Assad’s gains on the battlefield will not end the jihadist insurgency, because it is Assad’s brutality that drives the insurgency.

His tactics—chemical weapons, mass executions, starvation, torture—have broken the will of many rebel communities but hardened the resolve of tens of thousands of jihadists who will continue to fight him for decades to come.

In all likelihood, al Qaeda will lead that insurgency. It has the most capable forces among all the remaining Syrian rebel groups in western Syria. Its suicide bombers are decisive in overcoming Assad regime defenses that other Syrian rebels cannot penetrate.

And while the group is building its Syrian fighting force, it is also recruiting foreign fighters in order to use Syria as a launch pad for future global attacks.

The SDF controls large portions of Syria’s oil resources, which the United States should continue to deny to the regime

Currently, al Qaeda’s forces are concentrated in northwestern Syria and remaining rebel-held areas of southern Syria, but the group likely retains capable networks in regime-held areas.

Periodic attacks against regime targets in the provinces of Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Latakia throughout 2017 and early 2018 have demonstrated that al Qaeda and linked groups can penetrate areas ostensibly under Assad’s control. Similar attacks will likely occur in Damascus and southern Syria after Assad’s gains this year. (ISIS, too, has claimed attacks in regimecontrolled areas.) Turkey, meanwhile, is allowing fighters with jihadist links into the areas it controls and ignoring the creation of an al Qaeda governance project in Idlib Province, on its borders in northwestern Syria.

A future in which Assad reimposes control and prevents jihadist threats to the West is a fantasy. He deliberately fueled the rise of both ISIS and al Qaeda in order to use them to hold the West hostage while he destroyed what threatened him most: the moderate rebels that wished to negotiate a peace.

His conquest of the areas of southern Syria held by formerly U.S.-backed rebels would eliminate the last true bastion of moderate resistance to his rule, removing Western options and neutralizing the international diplomatic process by eliminating the rebels willing to negotiate. The defeat of moderates does not win Assad the war, however. It paves the way for groups such as al Qaeda to redefine the nature of the Syrian fight from

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still has options. It can leverage the SDF against Assad and his backers and rebuild rebel capability over time.

The SDF controls large portions of Syria’s oil resources, which the United States should continue to deny to the regime. But the SDF is a problematic partner. Its Kurdish leaders are implementing a repressive form of governance to eliminate political competition in the areas it controls, and the group lacks the necessary resources and bureaucratic capabilities to govern the Syrian populations under its rule. If it is allowed to continue, the mismanagement of SDF-held areas threatens to fuel a resurgence of ISIS and the rise of an anti-SDF insurgency that could be exploited by al Qaeda. Washington should commit additional resources toward transforming the SDF into an effective governing structure and military force. The United States should condition its support of the SDF on good governance and take steps to hold the group accountable by, for instance, bringing human rights monitors into SDF-held areas to inspect internally displaced persons camps and prisons and by enabling locals to file complaints directly with the United States.

A child waves to US forces patrolling the roads surrounding the northern Syrian city of Manbij on March 2017 ,3.

(Getty Images)

The United States will also need to regain credibility with the Syrian population. Reforming the SDF and investing in the stabilization and recovery of areas under SDF control would help. So would helping refugees and internally displaced persons to return to areas under U.S. and SDF control. These steps can enable the United States to recruit rebel fighters from the returning populations, which will remain opposed to Assad’s continued rule.

a pro-democracy rebellion to a global jihad.

THE WILL TO ACT How, then, should the United States respond? The most effective approach remains to build moderate groups that are willing to reunify the country via a negotiated settlement. Assad’s military gains have not won him back the support of rebelling populations.

The most significant obstacle to building a partnered rebel force remains the absence of U.S. will and commitment. Previous U.S. efforts to build rebel partners were doomed to fail because Washington attempted to prevent them from fighting Assad. A concerted U.S. effort to rebuild the fighting ability of moderate rebels without such constraints could fundamentally change the course of the war.

The United States should salvage forces from moderate groups in southern Syria, such as the First Army, that wish to continue fighting Assad. Under considerable military pressure, these groups have begun to surrender to the regime. Some will likely be relocated to Turkish-held areas of northern Syria, but those that stay may turn to supporting a future jihadist insurgency as their only way to resist. The United States should offer these rebels another option.

The south will likely fall to forces allied with the regime unless the United States acts immediately, but even if it does, Washington

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Finally, Washington should recognize the failure of the international diplomatic process and walk away. Doing so would block a renewed effort by Russia to hijack the diplomatic process by spurning the UN-backed talks while hosting its own efforts in Sochi, thus building goodwill with Syria’s rebelling population.

Washington will also need to reach a deal with Turkey that ends its war with the SDF and aligns Ankara with the United States against the Assad regime and its backers. The deal would likely entail concessions that allow acceptable Turkish-backed forces and proxies to help secure Arab-majority areas in eastern Syria currently under SDF control.

The steps outlined here would neither solve the Syrian war nor force Assad to negotiate. They would, however, provide the United States with leverage and begin a U.S. pivot toward engagement in Syria after the nominal defeat of ISIS. These steps are costly and difficult, but they reflect the best way forward in a vicious war that, far from drawing to a close, will morph into new—and potentially more deadly—conflicts.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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What if Mexico Stops Cooperating on Migration?

Why the U.S. Needs to Engage Constructively

By Andrew Selee Over the past few weeks, the U.S. government has gone into crisis mode in an attempt to stop the flow of migrants attempting to cross the country’s southern border illegally or to apply for asylum at border ports. The Department of Justice declared a “zero tolerance” policy that would subject anyone caught crossing the border

between ports of entry to criminal prosecution, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began separating children from their parents so that the latter could quickly go into criminal proceedings. After considerable public outcry, President Donald Trump ultimately suspended family separation in favor of a dubious plan of family detention, but he has continued to speak and tweet repeatedly about what he considers to

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be a border that is out of control.

What makes this sudden attention to the border so unusual is that there are now fewer people trying to cross illegally than at any time since the early 1970s, for two reasons. Not only has Mexico ceased to be the source of most migrants trying to cross the border but it has become a largely effective buffer against the newest migration flows from Central America.

With the election of the left-of-center nationalist Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the Mexican presidency, however, the status quo could soon change. López Obrador has made it clear that he does not want Mexican immigration policies to be merely an extension of U.S. enforcement policies, and continuing the current Trump administration practice of simply berating the Mexican government to do more to stem the flow of migrants will likely only make things worse. Going forward, Washington needs to work with Mexico to form a more cooperative and comprehensive migration strategy. Otherwise, the United States could find itself facing a much larger flow of undocumented immigrants at the southern border than it does today.

MEXICO AS A MIGRATION BUFFER Members of a caravan of Central Americans who spent weeks traveling across Mexico walk from Mexico to the U.S. side of the border to ask authorities for asylum on April ,29 2018 in Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico. (Getty)

Last year, there were fewer people apprehended at the border than at any time in 46 years, and even with a slight jump in apprehensions this year, the overall number still remains at historically low levels. Moreover, DHS estimates that today it successfully detains a far greater percentage of unauthorized border crossers than ever before, meaning that the real drop in crossing attempts is likely even greater than the apprehension numbers indicate.

There are two reasons for this dramatic decline in unauthorized crossings. The first is well known.

Mexicans once constituted almost all of the undocumented immigration flows, but today they make up less than half, and their numbers keep dropping year after year. This is because over the past two decades, average income in Mexico rose by about a third, years of schooling increased by half, and life expectancy increased by four years

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Some of Mexico’s enhanced immigration enforcement responds directly to concerns of the U.S. government as a result of better access to health care. These changes were hardly an economic miracle, but they were just enough to convince most people that it wasn’t worth making the dangerous journey northward. In addition, money that Mexican immigrants living in the United States sent back to their families and home communities also helped provide opportunities for the next generation so that they wouldn’t have to migrate.

The second reason so few people are attempting to cross the border is less well known. Over the past five years, migrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, three of the region’s poorest and most violent countries, have constituted the majority of unauthorized U.S. border crossers. Although some of these migrants make it to the U.S. border, an even larger number do not. Our calculations at the Migration Policy Institute suggest that the Mexican government has deported more people to Central America than the U.S. government since 2014, the year that the significant Central American migration flows started. Mexico itself is also increasingly becoming a country of asylum for Central Americans, receiving 8,656 applications last year from nationals of those three countries, up from 1,769 in 2014. And there is some evidence, though most of it still anecdotal, that increasing numbers of Central American migrants are staying in Mexico rather than trying to cross into the United States.

Some of Mexico’s enhanced immigration enforcement responds directly to concerns of the U.S. government. When the surge in Central American migration happened in 2014, Mexico implemented a Southern Border Strategy, which increased infrastructure and the number of immigration agents at the border with Guatemala.

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It was an effort that received some logistical and financial support from Washington. The U.S. government certainly put pressure on its Mexican counterpart to do this, but the Mexican government also had its own reasons for designing and implementing the strategy. One was undoubtedly the desire to take pressure off the border with the United States in order not to torpedo other areas of the bilateral relationship, including the potential for future U.S. immigration reform that could have benefited Mexican-born undocumented immigrants already in the United States.

At the same time, Mexico is now far more a country of transit and destination for immigrants from other countries than it is an immigrantsending nation. (Several other countries around the world, including Turkey and Morocco, have undergone a similar shift.) Central Americans have been the most visible group crossing through Mexico and occasionally staying, but the largest number of immigrants in Mexico actually come from the United States. There are now somewhere around a million U.S. citizens living in Mexico, if not more. Some them are the children of Mexicans who have returned to their parents’ home country, but many others have moved to Mexico to pursue either job opportunities or a comfortable retirement.

Between these two flows—the migrants coming northward from Central America and those coming southward from the United States—Mexico has been forced to come to terms with its own need to have a proactive immigration policy, around both

At the same time, Mexico is now far more a country of transit and destination for immigrants from other countries than it is an immigrant-sending nation

legal and undocumented immigration flows. This, in turn, has spurred internal debates on everything from visa policy to immigration enforcement, leading to a major new immigration law in 2011.

But until recently these debates largely happened out of public view, among a handful of political leaders, agencies within the Mexican government, and immigration advocates.

A NEW POLITICAL REALITY Now, both the style and substance of Mexico’s immigration strategy may be about to change.

The images of families being separated at the U.S.-Mexican border—almost all of them Central Americans, although there were a handful of Mexican families affected—came right as Mexico’s presidential campaign was in its final stretch. It pulled the country’s quiet backroom debate on immigration policy out of the shadows and into public discussion for the first time and forced all of the candidates to take public positions on what they would do about Central American migration flows if elected. On the campaign trail, López Obrador said that the Mexican government needs to show greater respect for the rights of migrants, to find ways of integrating those who

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who was determined to save the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and willing to entertain pragmatic deals across issue areas. The U.S. government even tried to get negotiations going with their Mexican counterparts on a “safe third country” agreement, which would require the Mexican government to be responsible for any migrants passing through its territory.

Bride Evelia Reyes and groom Brian Houston, living on different sides of the US-Mexico border, stand for a family portrait after getting married during a briefly reunited during the 'Opening the Door of Hope' event at the border fence gate in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico on November 2017 ,18.

(Getty)

stay in Mexico into productive sectors of the economy, and to invest in the economies and institutions of Central American countries so that people stop leaving.

Moreover, several Mexican migration policies are in dire need of reform. Although the country has slightly more generous asylum laws than the United States, it has been overwhelmed by applications, and its immigration enforcement system—from detention centers to deportation procedures—operates with limited transparency and oversight. Mexico was also the co-convener with the United States of the Alliance for Progress, an international effort to fund economic and justice reforms in Central America, but these efforts too seem to have faltered.

This leaves U.S. policymakers with a choice.

One option is to continue to criticize the Mexican government for not doing enough to stop Central American migrants on their way through Mexico before they reach the U.S. border and pressure it to do more. This has been the strategy of the Trump administration up until now, and it has had some limited success with the current Mexican government of President Enrique Peña Nieto,

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But this strategy seems far less likely to work with a López Obrador administration, which will have a more nationalist bent and which will face far more public scrutiny for how it treats Central American migrants. So the other option is try to engage the new government of Mexico in a joint strategy that looks at Central American migration flows more comprehensively. That would have to include a willingness from U.S. authorities to help the Mexican government develop its immigration system by expanding asylum capacity and further professionalizing immigration enforcement to meet international standards. It would also have to include efforts to create integration programs for those Central Americans who choose to stay in Mexico and a renewed effort with regional partners through the Alliance for Progress to help El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras develop their police and judicial institutions to rein in gang violence, as well as generate some measure of economic development.

The status quo, in which the U.S. and Mexican governments have moved in tandem to stem the flow of Central American migration primarily through enforcement policies, is unlikely to continue. The family separation policies implemented in the United States have awakened greater public debate on this issue in Mexico, and the new administration seems likely to have priorities other than those of its predecessors, in part responding to this public pressure. This does not mean that the Trump and the López Obrador administrations cannot find common cause on migration issues but, rather, that they will have to do so in a way that recognizes that enforcement, asylum protections, professionalization of immigration agencies, and efforts to address root causes are all part of the same package.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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The Trump-Putin Summit: What Washington’s Agenda Should Be

by Dennis Ross *

President Trump will soon meet with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. From the outset of his administration the president has indicated his desire for good relations with Russia, constantly saying and tweeting that they would be a good thing for America. Ironically, his senior officials, from the Secretary of State to the Director of National Intelligence, have portrayed Russia as an adversary; they have not pulled their punches about Russian meddling in our election-and the elections in Europe--and have emphasized the threat this poses to our national security. Not surprisingly, they have supported the sanctions Congress mandated on Russia for its meddling.

The gap between the president’s desire for good relations and the actual policies of his administration is striking: the administration has preserved sanctions adopted over Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and it has provided lethal equipment to Ukraine to counter-act Russia proxies and hybrid forces there.

So what should we expect in the summit?

No doubt the president will want to declare that he has forged a good personal relationship with Putin. For his part, Putin sees what Trump wants and is likely to use that as leverage to press for the end of sanctions. He will not want to look weak or desperate—in truth, he is neither—so Putin will say that Russia is strong and can live with the western sanctions but any real improvement in relations will depend on the lifting of

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all sanctions against Russia. Trump, who has already said that we should recognize Crimea as part of Russia and permit Russia’s return to a restored G8-, is unquestionably sympathetic toward such a posture. True, he will face pushback from Democrats and a limited number of Republicans, but Trump has repeatedly shown little concern about such opposition to him, especially because his political base simply accepts what he regards as important.

Still, the politics won’t make it easy to simply lift sanctions voted by the Republican-dominated Congress— and Trump should use that as leverage with Putin, essentially saying I want to do this but I will need something to be able to persuade Congress. The issue, therefore, is what does Trump want or feel he needs from Putin, and is Putin in any mood to give it.

For some time, there has been talk of a grand bargain with Russia. We end the sanctions over Crimea and recognize Russian interests in Ukraine, and in return, Russia acts to contain or limit Iran and its Shia militia proxies in Syria.

Any such Russian action to prevent the expansion and spread of Iranian and Shia militia presence would blunt Iran’s growing leverage in the region. It would signal that Iranian expansionism had come to an end. That is an important, even essential aim. However, leaving aside the morality of such a bargain or

trade-off, it is simply not going to happen.

From Putin’s standpoint, he already has Crimea, and believes that the EU, with the new governments in Italy and Austria, will lift the sanctions relatively soon anyway. As for Ukraine, he treats it much like other frozen conflicts in Georgia and Moldova— conflicts that allow him to maintain the ability to ratchet up or down pressures on the leaderships in each of these countries. He keeps Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova under constant stress, with the ability to make their circumstances far more difficult for each of them. Moreover, he seems to have adopted a variant of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s formula; for Brezhnev, once a country came into the Soviet sphere of control, there would be no reversibility tolerated. Putin, too, seems to believe that once he has incorporated a country or part of a country into Russia’s sphere of influence that cannot be reversed.

In other words, he will not pay for something he already has. Paradoxically, we do have leverage in Syria because Putin wants our roughly 2000 forces primarily in northeastern Syria to leave.

Unfortunately, every time President Trump speaks of getting out of Syria, he reduces our leverage on Putin to act differently in Syria. Until now, the Russians hint at a clash of interests with the Iranians but never do anything to reflect such a posture. On the contrary, they continue to give the Iranians freedom of action in Syria. (It is true that they also give the Israelis freedom of action against the Iranians in Syria, but that may simply be Putin’s way of creating a lever on both.)

In the summit, Trump could tell Putin he would like to have an understanding with the Russians on Syria.

But doubts it is possible because the Russians have not felt bound by any of the understandings we have struck with them on Syria until now, including the one embodied in their joint statement last November at the ASEAN conference—a joint statement that called for a ceasefire in southwest Syria and an expansion of the de-escalation zones. With the Russian bombing now having created 270,000 refugees in this area (and

along the Jordanian and Israeli borders), the president could say we feel the need to stay in Syria, back the Israelis as they hit Iranian and their proxy militias, and work out a set of understandings with Turkey to secure the area of northeastern Syria. Not an ideal outcome the president could say but one that is likely to blunt Iran’s expansion which we see as a threat to the region.

Putin might well respond by saying he does not control the Iranians and is simply helping the Assad regime take back its territory. The president’s response should be: fair enough, but then we feel obliged to keep our forces where they are so that with the Israelis and Turkey we can prevent Iran from building a landbridge through Syria. Yes, that will increase the risk of a broader Israeli-Iranian conflict that could put the Russia in the middle, but that is a Russian choice so long as it won’t act to contain the Iranians and simply backs Assad’s reassertion of control.

Such an exchange would probably give Putin an incentive to act differently in Syria and toward Iran. It might even give him an incentive to say to the president let’s work together implement UNSCR 2254—the resolution that called for a cessation of hostilities, unimpeded delivery of humanitarian materials, drafting of a new constitution in 6 months, and a political transition process of 18 months. In truth, the Russians allowed the Syrians and Iranians to prevent its implementation.

Putin’s behavior in Syria will not change unless he believes either the price for Russia will go up for being there or there is something else of value to be gained. Right now, the American posture offers neither prospect. The upcoming summit presents a possibility to change that. Time will tell whether it does. *American Middle East envoy Dennis Ross has served in the Administrations of Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, and is counselor and Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington.

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Two Saudi Youth Give Their Lives to Save American Children from Drowning

by Joseph Braude On June 29 in Wilbraham, a small town in the American state of Massachusetts, two Saudi college students gave their lives in an effort to save two children from drowning.

Theeb Alyami, 27, had been studying civil engineering at the University of Hartford. His friend Jaser Daham Alrakah, 25, had been doing the same at Western New England University in Springfield.

During an outing to the Chicopee River in Wilbraham, Alyami and Alrakah joined several other adults in diving into the water to rescue two children — in response to an urgent plea by their mother, who had not managed to save them.

Whereas the children made it safely to shore, Alyami and Alrakah were

carried away by the river’s strong current. A state police dive team and air-wing unit were called in to help find them. One was located that evening; the other, two days later.

(The river, while only 18 miles long, has a -721square-mile basin — the largest in Massachusetts.)

By all accounts, both were upstanding young men who befriended fellow students of diverse backgrounds and stayed in close touch with their loved ones back home.

“The young men drowned while courageously attempting to save children in distress," said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert. "Their heroism represents the very best of the international students who enrich communities across the United States. Theeb and Jaser were among the 52,000

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Saudi students studying in the United States who bring greater international understanding and diverse perspectives to U.S. campuses and communities, and to Saudi Arabia when they return home.”

University of Hartford President Greg Woodward said, ”We will mourn this terrible loss together. In the days ahead, we will work with Theeb's family to determine the most appropriate way to honor his memory.” According to an official statement from Western New England University about Alrakah, “By all accounts, he died coming to the aid of others.”

Washington-based Saudi government cultural attache Mohammed Al-Issa said the two youth “symbolize the spirit of

Theeb Al-Yami and Jaser Al-Rakah. (Social media)

loyalty and sacrifice.”

“Theeb and Jaser were among the 52,000 Saudi students studying in the United States who bring greater international understanding and diverse perspectives to U.S. campuses and communities, and to Saudi Arabia when they return home.”

Among thousands of reactions to the story on social media, one young twitterer had looked up the meaning of the young men’s Arabic names.

“One thing I find fascinating about this,” he wrote, “is the students were Theeb Alyami and Jaser Alrakah.

In Arabic Theeb means "wolf" and is often used as a compliment to someone who is good natured and strong willed whilst Jaser literally were brought to their final resting means ‘brave.’” place. The young men’s families On July 8, the bodies of Alyami and thanked Saudi king Salman bin Alrakah arrived by plane to Najran Abdelaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince Airport in Saudi Arabia, where they Mohammed bin Salman, and the

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State Department spokeswoman Saudi embassy in Washington for assisting and comforting them — adding, according to the Saudi Press Agency, that they were “proud of their martyred sons.”

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ulture

Parts of the Chateau de Pierrefonds in L' Oise, France date from the 14th Century. (TNS)

In these parts of France, the Great War will never be forgotten

By George Hobica The last time I saw the Picardie region of France was in 1978. I was visiting an old family friend, who suggested we take a road trip to see the chateaux and cathedrals that dot the landscape there and nearby in Champagne-Ardenne and Lorraine, all of which are an easy drive from Paris. Off we went in her Peugeot 504 and at some point I became lost (this was in the days before GPS obviously) and decided to make an illegal U-turn through a break in the median. "Georgie don't!" Nan cried. "The gendarmes are very strict! It could be a big fine." (She still calls me Georgie, but she's known me since I was 4 so she gets a pass).

Gendarmes? What gendarmes? "We haven't seen another car for miles," I assured her with the full confidence of youth. But soon after completing the maneuver, I noticed a vehicle lurking on the overpass ahead. You know where this is going.

"Perhaps they'll be lenient," Nan shrugged oracularly as I pulled over for the flashing blue lights. "They still remember here."

Remember? I had no idea what she meant; but before I had time to ask I was

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handing over my passport and Massachusetts drivers license.

Eventually I learned what Nan was alluding to: folks in these parts, which saw some of the most brutal fighting as the Great War reached its horrific climax in 1918, remember the thousands of young Americans, most no older than I was at the time of my traffic infraction, who sacrificed their lives in the trenches and in the fields nearby.

But my education was only completed this year on the 100th anniversary of the war's end in the autumn of 1918. This past Memorial Day weekend, I traveled throughout Picardie, Lorraine and Champagne, especially in their Oise, Aisne and Meuse departements, where a visitor can remember and learn thanks to dozens of ceremonies, monuments and museums memorializing the war and its aftermath.

Meuse, an area in eastern Lorraine, offers many opportunities to experience the war to end all wars. The recently renovated Verdun Memorial museum, built on a former battle site, exhibits over 2,000 World War I artifacts, along with absorbing audiovisual materials, on three levels. Nearby, I was fascinated by 13/07/18

the eerie Fort Vaux, a subterranean military labyrinth built in the late 1800s.

German troops captured the fort from the French soon after the start of the war and today it's partly a mausoleum, the final resting place of hundreds of Germans who died in an accidental munitions explosion underground. Their comrades had no choice but to entomb them where they died.

Also in Meuse, the somber Douaumont Ossuary contains the scattered remains of 130,000 unknown soldiers heaped into piles. Oddly, this funereal display is only visible if you crouch down to peek into the dimly lit basement through its small windows, a design decision I found puzzling. If these bones are meant to bear silent witness to the horrors of war, then why not allow visitors to experience them up close, in the same way the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., confronts visitors with piles of shoes that once belonged to victims of Nazi Germany's "final solution"?

The Armistice Memorial Museum near Compiegne commemorating the end of fighting on Nov. 1918 ,11, is worth a look if you're in the area; it exhibits a replica of the private train carriage where Marshall Petain, et al. signed the Armistice (the original was destroyed by German troops in the Second World War). In Lorraine, the Romagne 18-14 Museum, conceived by local resident Jean-Paul de Vries, who has spent a lifetime gathering war relics found on and beneath nearby battlefields, now displays his collection. This detritus evokes the hell soldiers went through in the trenches.

Then there are the remains of obliterated villages, and the fields once planted with wheat but now densely forested, since the ground, riddled with trenches and scarred by craters, is still too toxic for agriculture.

I also visited the surreal cemeteries, rows and rows and rows of white crosses mingled with Stars of David and Muslim crescents, the electric-green, welltrimmed grass, the miniature red-white-and-blue U.S. and French flags fluttering at each grave. No photograph prepares you for experiencing them in person.

On Memorial Day 2018, as they do every year, American and French soldiers, dignitaries and thousands of grateful or curious citizens from near and far, remembered the 2,289 soldiers buried at the -43acre Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Chateau-Thierry, where a decisive battle began 100 years ago.

Although I know no one who has fought in a war, much less died fighting one, the speeches, delivered by dignitaries and soldiers from the U.S., French and German forces, aroused emotions I didn't know I had. I tried to fight back tears, which only made the lump in my throat bigger. Others were crying, too, so I just let go. I knew no one buried here. Was it the ages of the dead? Many had just emerged from boyhood. Or was it their sheer number?

This was the first year that German army units were invited to attend the event although only the French and American units marched onto the field accompanied by military bands. When it came time for the national anthems to be played, the Marine band performed the Star Spangled Banner and then quickly followed with the German anthem. Even with the passing of a hundred years, it might have seemed indelicate for the German army to march onto French soil playing its own anthem, so a compromise was reached.

There will be other events commemorating the war throughout 2018. On the evening of Sept. 23 over 14,000 candles will be lit on the same number of gravestones at the Meuse-Argonne cemetery (the largest military cemetery in Europe) near Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, in remembrance of all fallen American soldiers.

On Nov. 11, Veterans Day will take on special meaning since it will mark the 100th anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended fighting (Veterans Day was originally called Armistice Day in the U.S.).

So yes, this part of France contains some somber reminders of the horrors of war; and yet, the monuments and museums dedicated to the war exist side by

side with the same chateaux and cathedrals and Champagne cellars that Nan and I went in search of 40 years ago. Champagne Pannier, founded in 1899, still offers tours of their medieval cellars, originally dug out in the 12th century to "harvest" limestone, as does Champagne Taittinger near Reims, a city famous for its beautiful cathedral where many French monarchs have been crowned (bring a sweater when visiting these cellars, you'll be far below ground and it's chilly even in summer). And yes, that's a lighthouse in the middle of the vineyards. Le Phare de Verzenay en Champagne is a museum about, what else, Champagne, that also offers tastings from 16 vintners (over 60 different types) and sells bottles at the same price offered at the caves, so it's an easy way to sample many options in one place.

In L'Oise, the opulent Compiegne Palace, a royal residence built in the 18th century, has been beautifully restored. The Chateau de Chantilly, parts of which date from the 16th century, is worth a trip in itself (both earn the Michelin Green Guide's highest three-star rating, "worth the voyage"). Also in L'Oise, the unabashedly photogenic Chateau de Pierrefonds might have been designed by Walt Disney (it does resemble Cinderella's Castle). Begun in the 14th century, it was partially destroyed in 1617, bought by Napoleon for a pittance in 1810, In Reims, France, Taittinger Champagne offers tours of its vast cellars dug deep underground into limestone quarries. (TNS)

and renovated by Napoleon III in the 1850s in high neo-medieval style, which perhaps explains why architectural purists scoff while cinematographers love to put it in the movies.

When it's time for something more lighthearted, take a guided tour of the Dragees Braquier factory, founded in 1783. Here you'll see how these famous scrumptious Italian almonds are covered with a sugar shell and painted in festive colors (this is where M&M's got the idea from). The bright green ones filled with a liqueur made from mirabelle plums, native to the Lorraine region, are addictive. At the end of your tour you can eat as many as you like.

If you're wondering about Nan's prophesy, it proved accurate. "Americain," one gendarme informed the other as he handed me back my passport and license _ actually, he tossed them into my lap _ and drove off. I wasn't sure if this was a compliment or an insult or something else entirely but Nan knew exactly what had happened. "I'm sure his parents or grandparents told him how America saved France during the first war." Collective memory of my compatriots' sacrifice in the Great War, Nan concluded, had spared me a hefty ticket or worse.

This was originally published by TNS.

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H

ealth

The New Networking Growing Your Real-life Social Network is Important for Health 40

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And that can lead to isolation and loneliness unless you maintain or rebuild your network,” says Dr. Joel Salinas, a neurologist who specializes in behavioural neurology and neuropsychiatry at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

ISOLATION AND LONLINESS Many studies have linked isolation (being cut off from social contact) with a greater chance of having a heart attack or a stroke. A study published online March 2018 ,27, by Heart suggested that isolation was independently associated with a %25 to %32 increased risk of death among people followed for seven years who had already had a heart attack or stroke.

Loneliness (feeling sad because of a lack of social contact) also jeopardizes health. “One in six older adults reports feeling lonely much of the time over the course of a week. The effects can be worse than that of obesity or smoking,” Dr. Salinas says.

Research suggests loneliness puts you at risk for a faster rate of decline in thinking skills compared with people who aren’t lonely, an increased risk for losing the ability to perform the tasks of daily living, and greater risk for early death.

SOCIAL MEDICINE Staving off isolation and loneliness becomes a crucial health strategy. “It’s as important as taking medication, exercising, or eating a healthy diet,” Dr. Salinas says.

Women friends discussing book club book at restaurant table (Getty Images).

Harvard Health When we’re young, networking can be an important strategy to get ahead in business.

Making new acquaintances and building relationships can lead to career opportunities. But later in life, networking takes on new significance: you may need it to stay connected socially. “Your social network shrinks. Your children leave home, you’re no longer at work, or you’ve moved away.

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Don’t just look to your family for socialization.

“About once a month you need to be in touch with others outside the core group of your spouse and children. That’s where we see the most health benefits,” Dr. Salinas says.

He advises that you diversify your “social portfolio” by filling it with people who reflect your interests. For example, you may need one person to talk to about shared creative activities

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ealth

like painting, reading, or gardening; another to be available to listen when you’re in need of companionship or emotional support; and another to talk to about intellectually stimulating subjects, such as politics, history, science, or anything you find fascinating.

BUILDING YOUR NETWORK You may naturally be good at making friends. If not, remember that expanding your social circle is similar to networking for business: it takes work to find and nurture relationships. “You have to reach out and be friendly first. When you share an activity, that’s how bonds develop,” Dr. Salinas points out.

CONSIDER SOME OF THE FOLLOWING IDEAS TO GET STARTED Make friends with your neighbors. According to a Pew Research Center report, most Americans don’t even know their neighbors’ names. But neighbors are folks right next door who may offer conversation, share some of your interests, or be there if you need help. Take advantage of the proximity: say hello and chat with a neighbor walking a dog, attend a community association meeting, or just knock on a door and introduce yourself.

Volunteer for a political organization. It’s a big year for elections, and political parties and candidates are always looking for helpers to make phone calls or prepare mailing materials.

Join an adult sports league. If you’re physically cleared to play a sport, call your parks and recreation department to find out about softball, basketball, tennis, or other leagues in your area designed for older athletes.

Get a part-time job. Last month we reported that

working later in life is associated with many health benefits, and socialization is an important one.

Mentor young people. High schools are often looking for volunteers with life experience to guide students. So are nonprofit organizations such as the national group Big Brothers Big Sisters (www.bbbs.org) and the Florida group Take Stock in Children (www.takestockinchildren.org).

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Group of young people having a party, telling jokes, having a good time, celebrating, in a private home (Getty Images).

Join a club that interests you. It could be the local jazz club, cinema society, or model airplane group. “Members will already share your passions and speak your lingo,” points out Dr. Salinas.

“That could be comforting.”

Take a class. Sign up for continuing education at a local college. Ask a few classmates to join you for an independent study group after class.

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A FEW MORE TIPS “Remember that not every interaction may be a good fit. But your options to meet people are endless: join a choir, an art class, a fitness club, a board game group. Or just ask an acquaintance to meet for coffee,” Dr. Salinas says. Investing in your social network now will offer a big payoff today and help you avoid deficits in the future.

T

echnology

How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order The Coming Competition Between Digital Authoritarianism and Liberal Democracy

By Nicholas Wright The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with possibly disastrous consequences. The other is the worry that a new industrial revolution will allow machines to disrupt and replace humans in every—or almost every—area of society, from transport to the military to healthcare.

There is also a third way in which AI promises to reshape the world. By allowing governments to monitor, understand, and control their citizens far more closely than ever before, AI will offer authoritarian countries a plausible alternative to liberal democracy, the first since the end of the Cold War. That will spark renewed international competition between social systems.

For decades, most political theorists have believed that liberal democracy offers the only path to sustained economic success.

Either governments could repress their people and remain poor

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or liberate them and reap the economic benefits. Some repressive countries managed to grow their economies for a time, but in the long run authoritarianism always meant stagnation. AI promises to upend that dichotomy. It offers a plausible way for big, economically advanced countries to make their citizens rich while maintaining control over them.

Some countries are already moving in this direction. China has begun to construct a digital authoritarian state by using surveillance and machine learning tools to control restive populations, and by creating what it calls a “social credit system.”

Several like-minded countries have begun to buy or emulate Chinese systems. Just as competition between liberal democratic, fascist, and communist social systems defined much of the twentieth century, so the struggle between liberal democracy and digital authoritarianism is set to define the twenty-first.

DIGITAL AUTHORITARIANISM

Chinese soldiers in riot gear secure the area outside the Id Kah Mosque, after Imam Jumwe Tahir was killed by assailants following early morning prayers on July ,30 2014 in old Kashgar, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China. (Getty Images)

New technologies will enable high levels of social control at a reasonable cost. Governments will be able selectively censor topics and behaviors to allow information for economically productive activities to flow freely, while curbing political discussions that might damage the regime. China’s so-called Great Firewall provides an early demonstration of this kind of selective censorship.

As well as retroactively censoring speech, AI and big data will allow predictive control of potential dissenters. This will resemble Amazon or Google’s consumer targeting but will be much more effective, as authoritarian governments will be able to draw on data in ways that are not allowed in liberal democracies. Amazon and Google have access only to data from some accounts and devices; an AI designed for social control will draw data from the multiplicity of devices someone interacts with during their daily life. And even more important, authoritarian regimes will have no compunction about combining such data with information from tax returns, medical records, criminal records, sexual-health clinics, bank statements, genetic screenings, physical information (such as location, biometrics, and CCTV monitoring using facial recognition software), and information gleaned from family and friends. AI is as good as the data it has access to. Unfortunately, the quantity and quality of data available to governments on every citizen will prove excellent for training AI systems.

Even the mere existence of this kind of predictive control will help authoritarians. Self-censorship was perhaps the East German Stasi’s most important disciplinary mechanism. AI will make the tactic dramatically more effective. People will know that the omnipresent monitoring of their physical and digital activities will be used to predict undesired behavior, even actions they are merely contemplating. From a technical perspective, such predictions are no different from using AI health-care systems to predict diseases in seemingly healthy people before their symptoms show.

In order to prevent the system from making negative predictions, many people will begin to mimic the behaviors of a “responsible”

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For decades, most political theorists have believed that liberal democracy offers the only path to sustained economic success. member of society. These may be as subtle as how long one’s eyes look at different elements on a phone screen. This will improve social control not only by forcing people to act in certain ways, but also by changing the way they think. A central finding in the cognitive science of influence is that making people perform behaviors can change their attitudes and lead to self-reinforcing habits. Making people expound a position makes them more likely to support it, a technique used by the Chinese on U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean War. Salespeople know that getting a potential customer to perform small behaviors can change attitudes to later, bigger requests. More than 60 years of laboratory and fieldwork have shown humans’ remarkable capacity to rationalize their behaviors.

As well as more effective control, AI also promises better central economic planning. As Jack Ma, the founder of the Chinese tech titan Alibaba, argues, with enough information, central authorities can direct the economy by planning and predicting market forces.

Rather than slow, inflexible, one-size-fits-all plans, AI promises rapid and detailed responses to customers’ needs.

There’s no guarantee that this kind of digital authoritarianism will work in the long run, but it may not need to, as long as it is a plausible model for which some countries can aim. That will be enough to spark a new ideological competition. If governments start to see digital authoritarianism as a viable alternative to liberal democracy, they will feel no pressure to liberalize. Even if the model fails in the end, attempts to implement it could last for a long time. Communist and fascist models collapsed only after thorough attempts to implement them failed in the real world.

CREATING AND EXPORTING AN ALL-SEEING STATE No matter how useful a system of social control might prove to a regime, building one would not be easy. Big IT projects are notoriously hard to pull off. They require high levels of coordination, generous funding, and plenty of expertise. For a sense of whether such a system is feasible, it’s worth looking to China, the most important non-Western country that might build one.

China has proved that it can deliver huge, society-spanning IT projects, such as the Great Firewall. It also has the funding to build major new systems. Last year, the country’s internal security budget was at least 196$ billion, a 12 percent increase from 2016. Much of the jump was probably driven by the need for new big data platforms. China also has expertise in AI. Chinese

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echnology

companies are global leaders in AI research and Chinese software engineers often beat their American counterparts in international competitions. Finally, technologies, such as smartphones, that are already widespread can form the backbone of a personal monitoring system. Smartphone ownership rates in China are nearing those in the West and in some areas, such as mobile payments, China is the world leader.

China is already building the core components of a digital authoritarian system. The Great Firewall is sophisticated and well established, and it has tightened over the past year. Freedom House, a think tank, rates China the world’s worst abuser of Internet freedom. China is implementing extensive surveillance in the physical world, as well. In 2014, it announced a social credit scheme, which will compute an integrated grade that reflects the quality of every citizen’s conduct, as understood by the government. The development of China’s surveillance state has gone furthest in Xinjiang Province, where it is being used to monitor and control the Muslim Uighur population. Those whom the system deems unsafe are shut out of everyday life; many are even sent to re-education centres. If Beijing wants, it could roll out the system nationwide.

To be sure, ability is not the same as intention. But China seems to be moving toward authoritarianism and away from any suggestion of liberalization. The government clearly believes that AI and big data will do much to enable this new direction.

China’s 2017 AI Development Plan describes how the ability to predict and “grasp group cognition” means “AI brings new opportunities for social construction.”

Digital authoritarianism is not confined to China. Beijing is exporting its model.The Great Firewall approach to the Internet has spread to Thailand and Vietnam. According to news reports, Chinese experts have provided support for government censors in Sri Lankaand supplied surveillance or censorship equipment to Ethiopia, Iran, Russia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Earlier this year, the Chinese AI firm Yitu sold “wearable cameras with artificial intelligence-powered facial-recognition technology” to Malaysian law enforcement.

More broadly, China and Russia have pushed back against the U.S. conception of a free, borderless, and global Internet. China uses its diplomatic and market power to influence global technical standards and normalize the idea that domestic governments should control the Internet in ways that sharply limit individual freedom. After reportedly heated competition for influence

The West can do very little to change the trajectory of a country as capable and confident as China.

over a new forum that will set international standards for AI, the United States secured the secretariat, which helps guide the group’s decisions, while Beijing hosted its first meeting, this April, and Wael Diab, a senior director at Huawei, secured the chairmanship of the committee. To the governments that employ them, these measures may seem defensive—necessary to ensure domestic control—but other governments may perceive them as tantamount to attacks on their way of life.

THE DEMOCRATIC RESPONSE The rise of an authoritarian technological model of governance could, perhaps counterintuitively, rejuvenate liberal democracies.

How liberal democracies respond to AI’s challenges and opportunities depends partly on how they deal with them internally and partly on how they deal with the authoritarian alternative externally. In both cases, grounds exist for guarded optimism.

Internally, although established democracies will need to make concerted efforts to manage the rise of new technologies, the challenges aren’t obviously greater than those democracies have overcome before. One big reason for optimism is path dependence. Countries with strong traditions of individual liberty will likely go in one direction with new technology; those without them will likely go another. Strong forces within U.S. society have long pushed back against domestic government mass surveillance programs, albeit with variable success. In the early years of this century, for example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency began to construct “Total Information Awareness” domestic surveillance systems to bring together

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The external challenge of a new authoritarian competitor may perhaps strengthen liberal democracies. The human tendency to frame competition in us versus them terms may lead Western countries to define their attitudes to censorship and surveillance at least partly in opposition to the new competition. Most people find the nitty-gritty of data policy boring and pay little attention to the risks of surveillance. But when these issues underpin a dystopian regime in the real world they will prove neither boring nor abstract. Governments and technology firms in liberal democracies will have to explain how they are different.

LESSONS FOR THE WEST

Officers and soldiers of the public security and frontier forces operate the unmanned aerial vehicle ahead of a pep rally for the anti-terrorism and maintaining stability at People\'s Square on February ,17 2017 in Kashgar, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. (Getty Images)

medical, financial, physical and other data. Opposition from media and civil liberties groups led Congress to defund the program, although it left some workarounds hidden from the public at the time. Most citizens in liberal democracies acknowledge the need for espionage abroad and domestic counterterrorism surveillance, but powerful checks and balances constrain the state’s security apparatus. Those checks and balances are under attack today and need fortification, but this will be more a repeat of past efforts than a fundamentally new challenge.

In the West, governments are not the only ones to pose a threat to individual freedoms. Oligopolistic technology companies are concentrating power by gobbling up competitors and lobbying governments to enact favourable regulations. Yet societies have overcome this challenge before, after past technological revolutions. Think of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s trust-busting, AT&T’s breakup in the 1980s, and the limits that regulators put on Microsoft during the Internet’s rise in the 1990s.

Digital giants are also hurting media diversity and support for public interest content as well as creating a Wild West in political advertising. But previously radical new technologies, such as radio and television posed similar problems and societies rose to the challenge. In the end, regulation will likely catch up with the new definitions of “media” and “publisher” created by the Internet. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg resisted labeling political advertising in the same way as is required on television, until political pressure forced his hand last year.

Liberal democracies are unlikely to be won over to digital authoritarianism. Recent polling suggests that a declining proportion in Western societies view democracy as “essential,” but this is a long way from a genuine weakening of Western democracy.

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The West can do very little to change the trajectory of a country as capable and confident as China. Digital authoritarian states will likely be around for a while. To compete with them, liberal democracies will need clear strategies. First, governments and societies should rigorously limit domestic surveillance and manipulation. Technology giants should be broken up and regulated. Governments need to ensure a diverse, healthy media environment, for instance by ensuring that overmighty gatekeepers such as Facebook do not reduce media plurality; funding public service broadcasting; and updating the regulations covering political advertising to fit the online world. They should enact laws preventing technology firms from exploiting other sources of personal data, such as medical records, on their customers and should radically curtail data collection from across the multiplicity of platforms with which people come into contact. Even governments should be banned from using such data except in a few circumstances, such as counterterrorism operations.

Second, Western countries should work to influence how states that are neither solidly democratic nor solidly authoritarian implement AI and big data systems. They should provide aid to develop states’ physical and regulatory infrastructure and use the access provided by that aid to prevent governments from using joined-up data. They should promote international norms that respect individual privacy as well as state sovereignty. And they should demarcate the use of AI and metadata for legitimate national security purposes from its use in suppressing human rights.

Finally, Western countries must prepare to push back against the digital authoritarian heartland. Vast AI systems will prove vulnerable to disruption, although as regimes come to rely ever more on them for security, governments will have to take care that tit-for-tat cycles of retribution don’t spiral out of control. Systems that selectively censor communications will enable economic creativity but will also inevitably reveal the outside world. Winning the contest with digital authoritarian governments will not be impossible—as long as liberal democracies can summon the necessary political will to join the struggle.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.