Gebran Bassil's Sanctions Blow Hezbollah's National Cover

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1827- November- 20/11/2020

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Editorial

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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In a surprising, albeit overdue move, the US Department of Treasury sanctioned earlier this month Gebran Bassil – Lebanon’s former foreign minister and the son-inlaw of President Michel Aoun - for his role in endemic corruption as well as his support for Hezbollah, senior government officials stated. In this week’s cover story, Hanin Ghaddar writes that this spells very bad news for Hezbollah. With the Lebanese people seeing Hezbollah as the authority – instead of a resistance movement – these sanctions also open the door wide for Hezbollah’s allies to try to jump ship, before their turn comes, and without its allies, Hezbollah will lose its power within state institutions, she argues.

Despite a series of ongoing legal challenges in certain battleground states, the reality of Vice President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 elections has long been settled in the minds of most Washington observers. Now all eyes are turning towards Biden’s first round of appointments, mindful that the main policy architecture of his administration could be set early on. In his weekly column, Joseph Braude writes that the Initial signs suggest at least a partial return to the policies of the second Obama administration.

US President Donald Trump will cut his country’s military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon announced this week. Acting defence secretary Christopher Miller said the number of US soldiers in Afghanistan will fall from 4,500 to 2,500 by the time Trump leaves office early next year, stopping short of a threatened full withdrawal from America’s longest war after fierce opposition from allies at home and abroad. The number of troops in Iraq will be reduced from around 3,000 to 2,500. This is expected to be completed just five days before Joe Biden takes over as president on 20 January.

In this issue we discuss what a US withdrawal means for America’s diplomatic pact with the Taliban and the questions that have been raised about which troops to withdraw and its impact on the US mission.

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Editor-in-Chief

Ghassan Charbel Editorial secretary Mostafa El-Dessouki HH Saudi Research and Marketing (UK) Ltd 10th Floor Building 7 Chiswick Business Park 566 Chiswick High Road London W4 5YG Tel : +44 207 831 8181 Fax: +44 207 831 2310

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

The 2020 Election Did Not Kill

26 Off Identity Politics

Issue 1827- November- 20/11/2020

28 Biden Shouldn’t Toss All of

Trump’s Foreign Policies

The Crown Takes the Shine 46 Off Queen Elizabeth’s Reign 3

20/11/20

Can’t Blame 20 Europe Donald Trump Anymore

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Military AI: In Deep Learning We Trust

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What We Miss When We’re Masked

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Time to Try Intermittent Fasting?

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napshot

People look at ancient sarcophagi on display, discovered in a vast necropolis in Saqqara, Giza, Egypt, Saturday, Nov. 14, 2020. Egyptian antiquities officials on Saturday announced the discovery of at least 100 ancient coffins, some with mummies inside, and around 40 gilded statues south of Cairo. /AP

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Spectators watch as a young Palestinian rides his jeep up a sandy hill during a weekly show in the Al-Zahra area near Gaza City, on November 13, 2020.

- Every Friday, in the late afternoon, hundreds of young Palestinians gather to watch as amateur autobile and motorcycle riders attempt to climb a sandy hill just outside Gaza City. As soon as the sun sets, the cacophony of the vehicles stops before an anti-coronavirus curfew comes into effect in the Gaza Strip. /AFP

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eekly news

Moderna Vaccine Success Gives World More Hope Moderna Inc’s MRNA.O experimental vaccine is 94.5% effective in preventing COVID-19 based on interim data from a late-stage trial, the company said on Monday, becoming the second U.S. drugmaker to report results that far exceed expectations. Together with Pfizer Inc’s PFE.N vaccine, which is also more than 90% effective, and pending more safety data and regulatory review, the United States could have two vaccines authorized for emergency use in December with as many as 60 million doses of vaccine available this year. The vaccines, both developed with new technology known as messenger RNA (mRNA), represent powerful tools to fight a pandemic that

administration. Palestinians accused Pompeo of helping Israel to cement its control over West Bank land that they seek for a state after he made a trip to the Shaar Binyamin winery near the settlement of Psagot, just north of Jerusalem. To Israel’s delight and Palestinian dismay, Pompeo in 2019 broke with decades of American foreign policy to announce that the U.S. under President Donald Trump no longer viewed Israel’s settlements as “inconsistent with international law”. Palestinians and much of the world regard the settlements as illegal under international law. Pompeo’s visit departed from past policy that had kept top U.S. officials away from settlements, which Palestinians view as obstacles to a viable future state. has infected 54 million people worldwide and killed 1.3 million. Unlike Pfizer’s vaccine, Moderna’s shot can be stored at normal fridge temperatures, which should make it easier to distribute, a critical factor as COVID-19 cases are soaring, hitting new records in the United States and pushing some European countries back into lockdowns.

Iran Admits Breach of Nuclear Deal Discovered by UN Inspectorate

Pompeo Visit West Bank Settlement, in Parting Gift to Israel’s Netanyahu Mike Pompeo on Thursday paid the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state to an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, in a parting show of solidarity with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by the outgoing Trump

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Iran has admitted a further breach of the 2015 nuclear deal by firing up advanced uranium-enriching centrifuges installed at its underground plant at Natanz. The finding was made by the UN nuclear weapons inspectorate, the International Atomic Energy Association, and confirmed by the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. Donald Trump last week considered but rejected a military strike on Natanz, south of Tehran and the country’s main uranium-enrichment site. But the latest move by Iran may be regarded by his administration as a provocation that changes his, or Israel’s, calculation of risk. The development comes weeks ahead of him standing down and being replaced by Joe Biden, who is committed to re-entering the nuclear deal struck under Barack Obama.

Biden after losing a Nov. 3 election. The department imposed sanctions on what it described as a key patronage network for Khamenei. It said it blacklisted the Bonyad Mostazafan, or the Foundation of the Oppressed, which is controlled by Khamenei, in a move also targeting 10 individuals and 50 subsidiaries of the foundation in sectors including energy, mining and financial services.

Israel, Bahrain Cement New Ties with Pledges of Embassies and Visas Bahrain and Israel said on Wednesday they would open embassies, establish online visa systems and launch weekly flights between the countries soon, in a broadened cooperation promoted by Washington as an economic boon and means of isolating Iran.

On the first official visit by Bahraini officials to Israel, the Gulf kingdom’s foreign minister, Abdullatif Al-Zayani, said a Sept. 15 deal normalising relations spelled “a warm peace that will deliver clear benefits to our peoples”. The United Arab Emirates, which has also normalised ties with Israel, sent a delegation last month that did not leave Ben Gurion Airport in what was described as a coronavirus precaution. The Bahraini envoys went on to Jerusalem, which Israel, with U.S. backing, considers its capital. Palestinians, who want East Jerusa-

lem for a state, have been outraged by the Arab countries’ engagement with Israel while their own goals are unmet.

Trump Poised to Settle for Partial Afghan Withdrawal

U.S. Imposes Sweeping Sanctions on Iran, Targets Khamenei-linked Foundation The United States on Wednesday imposed broad sanctions targeting Iran, blacklisting a foundation controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and taking aim at what Washington called Iran’s human rights abuses a year after a deadly crackdown on anti-government demonstrators.The sanctions announced by the U.S. Treasury Department, which also targeted Iran’s intelligence minister, are the latest action to reinforce the “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran pursued by President Donald Trump’s administration. They come little more than two months before Trump is due to hand over power to Joe

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President Donald Trump’s new Pentagon team has not yet signalled an imminent withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, raising expectations among U.S. officials and allies that Trump might settle for a partial reduction before leaving office. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the military was expecting formal orders in the coming days to go down to about 2,500 troops in Afghanistan by early next year from around 4,500 currently. A NATO official also cited expectations of a 1,500 to 2,000 troop decline. Trump fired his defense secretary, Mark Esper, and appointed other top Pentagon officials last week after longstanding concerns that his priorities were not being dealt with urgently enough at the Defense Department. They included ending the 19-year-old Afghan engagement

by Christmas, an ambitious target that opponents of the country’s longest war welcomed but which Trump’s critics warned could be reckless given ongoing militant violence plaguing Afghanistan.

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Gebran Bassil’s Sanctions Blow Hezbollah’s National Cover Without its Allies, Hezbollah Loses its Power Within State Institutions

by Hanin Ghaddar In a surprising, albeit overdue move, the US Department of Treasury sanctioned earlier this month Gebran Bassil – Lebanon’s former foreign

minister and the son-in-law of President Michel Aoun - for his role in endemic corruption as well as his support for Hezbollah, senior government officials stated. “He represents everything wrong with the broken Lebanese system,” a senior

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government official told reporters. The sanctions came under corruption-related sections in the Magnitsky Act. A statement from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Bassil had been “involved in approving several projects that would have steered Lebanese government funds to individuals close to him through a group of front companies.”

Asked if the decision could be undone, another official said any individual who is designated may challenge. “But there is no mistake here. It is not typical for these types of designations to be undone,” the official said.

The official also noted that if Bassil were to change his behavior and support for corruption in Lebanon, “it’s certainly something the [US] government will consider.”

BASSIL’S PARADOXICAL REACTIONS

Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil address a press conference after a signing ceremony of a diplomatic cooperation agreement at the Trade Minstry in Budapest on November 2019 ,26.

(Getty)

Although Bassil’s initial response was defiance and blame, saying that “sanctions have not scared me,” and that he is not corrupt, his challenging of the US move turned into a completely different rhetoric a week later – hoping that the US would indeed reconsider if his behavior changes. In an interview with Al-Arabiya’s alHadath TV channel, Bassil said that his party – the Free Patriotic Movement - has problems with Hezbollah that could lead to a separation between the two, but that breaking the alliance remains an internal decision.

But the most significant part of the interview was when he discussed Hezbollah’s disarmament, saying “If the Americans give us any commitment that preserves Lebanon’s security and stability, so that we have a country with a military balance, then I will be ready to discuss with [Hezbollah] and persuade it to abandon its arms.” Bassil reiterated that he was not against peace with Israel.

But change in statements are not change in behavior, and all Bassil can do today is talk, defend himself, and say that he is ready to change his behavior. In fact, to overturn these sanction,

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With the Lebanese people seeing Hezbollah as the authority – instead of a resistance movement – these sanctions also open the door wide for Hezbollah’s allies to try to jump ship, before their turn comes.

Bassil will have to prove that he is not corrupt, and that the proof that the US Treasury has against him are false. This is going to be almost impossible to achieve, and his hopes that a Biden administration will just overturn the Trump administration sanctions – including his – are just wishful thinking. That’s the beauty of the Magnitsky Act.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME Despite the element of surprise, these sanctions did not come from a vacuum. The context and timing are very significant. Bassil is not only Hezbollah’s main Christian ally in Lebanon, he has been the target of the Lebanon’s street protests that erupted all over Lebanon in October 2019. All Lebanese – from all sects and regions – chanted against Bassil and pinpointed his corruption and misuse of state institutions and his positions at various ministries.

Therefore, these sanctions were considered good messaging to the Lebanese people who are still suffering from the worst financial crisis that ever hit Lebanon, and which has corruption at its roots.

Bassil has also covered for many of Hezbollah’s illicit activities in Lebanon and the region, including financial misconduct – such as smuggling – and acts of terrorism – such as Hezbollah’s regional military operations. His behavior in covering Hezbollah’s precision missiles operations in Lebanon, his advancing of Hezbollah’s agenda as a minister of foreign affairs, and his many acts of protecting Hezbollah within the Lebanese political and diplomatic arena.

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Bassil has always thought he was untouchable, because he is the head of a large Christian party in Lebanon, and also because he is the son of law of the president. Therefore, he had so far managed to play the game of protecting Hezbollah, while at the same time telling the US what it wants to hear – that he cannot face Hezbollah on his own and that their alliance is a mere strategic move to protect Lebanese Christians. However, this game that he played for almost two decades, has finally come to a halt when the US decided that enough is enough and that it is time for actions instead of words. And as expected, Bassil could only deliver words, never actions.

:POLITICAL REPERCUSSIONS Although the sanctions targeted Bassil personally, the political repercussions extend to Bassil’s father in law, President Michel Aoun, and Bassil’s own presidential ambitions and plans.

The former minister of foreign affairs thought that his alliance with Hezbollah will guarantee him the presidency, exactly as his father in law’s alliance with the terrorist group got him to Baabda palace.

These ambitions are now gone as it is going to be extremely difficult for Lebanon to have a USsanctioned president, unless Lebanon decided to completely isolate itself from the world and global financial system, an unlikely scenario considering the dire financial crisis hitting the country today.

On a more general level, these sanctions indicate bad news to his father in law, the president, as

It’s still too early to see how the wind blows and if it will push some of these allies to jump ship, but it is clear that it is a good first step in this direction.

well to the FPM party officials and members. As long as Bassil remains the head of the party, all of those under his leadership will be tainted, both inside Lebanon and internationally. But these sanctions are also a very clear message to all the corrupt political elite in Lebanon who still believe they are untouchable, mainly those who still think that supporting Hezbollah and Iran’s regional agenda will benefit them.

Hezbollah’s allies – from all sects – today realize that the US can use the Magnitsky Act to sanction any corrupt politician, whether they are Shia, Sunni or Christian. No one will be safe from it. This also means that the US – with this administration and the next one – will not turn the blind eye on corruption, and Lebanon will not be

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Gibran Bassil peaks with lawmaker Ziad Asswad, center, a member of his parliament bloc, at the presidential palace, in Baabda east of Beirut, Lebanon. (AP)

bailed out financially without serious reforms.

HEZBOLLA’S COVER TERMINATED This spells very bad news for Hezbollah. With the Lebanese people seeing Hezbollah as the authority – instead of a resistance movement – these sanctions also open the door wide for Hezbollah’s allies to try to jump ship, before their turn comes.

Hezbollah has been trying very hard for decades, and spending much of its resources and funding, to make sure that the group has a national cover – not only a Shiite one – and that Lebanese parties and people from all sects support its agenda and vision for Lebanon. Without its allies, Hezbollah

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not only loses this national cover; it also loses its power within state institutions. Without its allies, Hezbollah does not possess the parliamentarian and cabinet majority it needs to make decisions and advance its interests in Lebanon.

It’s still too early to see how the wind blows and if it will push some of these allies to jump ship, but it is clear that it is a good first step in this direction. If anything, Bassil’s recent maneuvering and attempt to distance itself from Hezbollah are sufficient indication of where these allies stand today.

Hanin Ghaddar is the Friedmann Fellow at The Washington Institute’s Geduld Program on Arab Politics, where she focuses on Shia politics

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All Eyes on Joe Biden’s Emerging Foreign Policy Initial Signs Suggest at Least a Partial Return to the Policies of the Second Obama Administration

by Joseph Braude

Vice President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 elections has long been settled in Despite a series of ongoing legal challenges the minds of most Washington observers. in certain battleground states, the reality of Now all eyes are turning towards Biden’s

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first round of appointments, mindful that the main policy architecture of his administration could be set early on.

Initial signs suggest at least a partial return to the policies of the second Obama administration.

RETRENCHMENT FROM CONFLICT, DETENTE WITH ALLIES During the campaign, Biden maintained a highly disciplined focus on President Trump’s record in handling the coronavirus, as well as on the latter’s personal manner and temperament. As a result, his policy commitments on international matters generally remained vague and open to a variety of interpretations. Nevertheless, the undertone of Biden’s foreign policy messaging was consistent throughout: a return to the Obama administration’s preference for retrenchment from protracted conflicts in the Middle East, and greater skepticism towards Washington’s traditional allies.

U.S President-elect Joe Biden speaks to the media at the Queen Theater after receiving a briefing from the transition COVID19advisory board on November 2020 ,09 in Wilmington, Delaware.

Mr. Biden spoke about his response to the COVID19- pandemic.

(Getty)

Biden’s foreign policy messaging was consistent throughout: a return to the Obama administration’s preference for retrenchment from protracted conflicts in the Middle East, and greater skepticism towards Washington’s traditional allies. perceived as enjoying excessively warm ties with President Trump. By way of example, Egyptian President Abd al-Fattah El-Sisi was told by a Biden tweet in July to expect “no more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator’.”

AUGURIES VAGUE AND MENACING

The strategic case for a calculated erosion of ties with Washington’s principal allies in the region has been a mainstay of progressive activism in the U.S. in recent years. But other influential voices are less sanguine of such an approach. Iran analyst Ray Takeyh believes that the recent flowering of Gulf-Israeli ties — and the relationships and policies that enabled them — would be discarded at Washington’s peril. Indeed, Takeyh believes that “more peace treaties While Biden himself has not yet weighed are possible unless Biden returns to former in authoritatively, in the view of one Biden President Barack Obama’s path of lecturing aide, the relationship with Riyadh is likely the House of Saud that it must share the to undergo a re-evaluation. “Our interests Middle East with the Islamists on the other are going down and our values are getting side of the Persian Gulf.” further apart,” he said. “Democrats feel there’s no going back to a previous era But Biden’s inclinations remain uncertain, of US-Saudi policy,” prominent analyst making most assumptions about his Mira Rapp-Hooper noted, referencing the foreign policy plans premature. As one traditional American-Saudi alliance around of his leading contenders for Secretary issues of commerce and defense. of State recently told Axios, “A Biden administration [will] engage the world not Indeed, Biden’s campaign featured as it was in 2009 or even 2017, when we criticism of Middle Eastern heads of state left office, but as it is.”

As Biden’s own website promised, “Biden will end the forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, which have cost us untold blood and treasure. As he has long argued, Biden will bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan and narrowly focus our mission on Al-Qaeda and ISIS. And he will end our support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.”

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What a US Withdrawal Means for Am Diplomatic Pact with the Taliban Questions have Arisen About Which Troops to Withdraw and the Impact on the US Mission Majalla - London US President Donald Trump will cut his country›s military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon announced this week. Acting defence secretary Christopher Miller said the number of US soldiers in Afghanistan will fall from 4,500 to 2,500 by the time Trump leaves office early next year, stopping short of a threatened full withdrawal from America’s longest war after fierce opposition from

allies at home and abroad. The number of troops in Iraq will be reduced from around 3,000 to 2,500. This is expected to be completed just five days before Joe Biden takes over as president on 20 January.

Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller on Tuesday confirmed that the Pentagon is following Trump’s orders and that the drawdown “is consistent with our established plans and strategic objectives, supported by the American

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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned on Monday that a premature withdrawal from Afghanistan could leave the country at risk of again becoming «a platform for international terrorists to plan and organise attacks on our homelands».

As the plans have yet to be hammered out in detail, questions have been raised about which troops to withdraw and the impact on a mission that ranges from advising and supporting Afghan forces to carrying out counter-terrorism strikes against al Qaeda and ISIS militants.

The top Senate Republican, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, cautioned against any major changes in U.S. defense or foreign policy in the next couple of months, including any precipitous troop drawdowns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

merica’s

“It is extremely important here in the next couple of months not to have any earthshaking changes in regard to defense or foreign policy,” McConnell, who opposed a pullout, told reporters House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress, said it was concerning that Trump’s withdrawal was being carried out without close coordination with NATO and that a hasty withdrawal risks making Afghanistan a platform for terrorism once again.

U.S. Army soldiers walk to their C17- cargo plane for departure May ,11 2013 at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan. U.S. soldiers and marines are part of the NATO troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, to be completed by the end of 2014. (Getty)

people, and does not equate to a change in US policy or objectives. Moreover, this decision by the president is based on continuous engagement with his national security Cabinet over the past several months.”

Miller’s comments, which were echoed by Trump›s national security adviser Robert O›Brien who said the drawdown had been the president›s policy «since he took office», adding: «By May, it is President Trump›s hope that (the troops) will all come home safely and in their entirety».

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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned on Monday that a premature withdrawal from Afghanistan could leave the country at risk of again becoming «a platform for international terrorists to plan and organise attacks on our homelands». “We now face a difficult decision. We have been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, and no Nato ally wants to stay any longer than necessary.

But at the same time, the price for leaving too soon or in an uncoordinated way could be very high,” he said.

NATO has fewer than 12,000 troops from dozens of nations in Afghanistan helping to train and advise the country’s national security forces. More than half are not US troops, but the -30nation alliance relies heavily on the

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US for transport, air support, logistics and other assistance. ?AN AL-QAEDA RESURGENCE US forces have been in Afghanistan since October 2001 and U.S. and Afghan officials are warning of troubling levels of violence by Taliban insurgents and persistent Taliban links to al Qaeda due to concerns that the Taliban is still involved in attacks on Afghan government soldiers.

Thousands of American and allied troops have died in fighting in Afghanistan since the September 11 attacks triggered the U.S. military intervention. Some U.S. military officials had been urging Trump to keep U.S. troop levels at around 4,500 for now.

Al-Qaeda›s strength and ability to strike the West has significantly diminished over the past decade, but its leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is believed to still be based in Afghanistan along with a number of other senior figures in the group.

According to the report issued to the U.N. Security Council, Al Qaeda, continues to operate in 12 provinces of Afghanistan, with 600-400 operatives and a training camp in the eastern part of the country. Relations between the Taliban, including its partners in the Haqqani network, and al Qaeda “remain close, based on friendship, a history of shared struggle, ideological sympathy and intermarriage,” the U.N. report said.

“The Taliban regularly consulted with al Qaeda during negotiations with the United States and offered guarantees that it would honor their historical ties,” said the report by the U.N. Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team.

The U.N. report suggests the Taliban have failed to keep their word on a provision seen as central to the U.S-Taliban

The U.N. report suggests the Taliban have failed to keep their word on a provision seen as central to the U.STaliban agreement signed on Feb. 29 in Doha.

agreement signed on Feb. 29 in Doha.

The deal both parties signed earlier this year said all US troops had to leave by May 2021, assuming conditions in the country are relatively peaceful and the Taliban has upheld its end of the deal, which includes engaging in peace talks with the Afghan government and not attacking international forces Edmund Fitton-Brown, co-ordinator of the UN›s ISIS, AlQaeda and Taliban Monitoring Team, told the BBC last month that the Taliban promised al-Qaeda in the run-up to the US agreement that the two groups would remain allies.

«The Taliban were talking regularly and at a high level with al-Qaeda and reassuring them that they would honour their historic ties,» Mr Fitton-Brown said. He said the

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A US black hawk helicopter flies over the site of a Taliban suicide attack in Kandahar on August 2017 ,2. (Getty)

relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban was «not substantively» changed by the deal struck with the US. «AlQaeda are heavily embedded with the Taliban and they do a good deal of military action and training action with the Taliban, and that has not changed,» he said.

done a reduction in violence, as they committed to do.”

Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Kabul, cautioned that “if we are pulling out faster than the withdrawal schedule, there’s no incentive for the Taliban to negotiate.”

Rick Olson, a former U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that 2,500 troops still give the United States some leverage in advancing peace efforts, but “it would have been better to have left them at 4,500.”

Violence has been rising throughout Afghanistan, with the Taliban attacking provincial capitals, in some case prompting U.S. airstrikes. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, head of the U.S. Central Command, called that violence the “greatest obstacle to moving forward with the peace process. The sheer volume of Taliban initiated attacks against the people of Afghanistan are not indicative of an organization that’s serious about peace,” McKenzie said in a podcast released this week.

“Zero would have been truly awful, while 2,500 is maybe okay, but it’s probably not very stable,” he said. “I would say 2,500 is probably stable as long as the U.S.-Taliban peace holds. But that may not happen because the Taliban have not

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Europe Can’t Blame Donald Trump Anymore The question for the Continent’s leaders now is whether they can agree on what they are collectively for, not just what they are against

by Tom McTague Donald Trump didn’t win, and neither did Trumpism. For the world beyond the United States, these

facts are of fundamental importance. Whatever happens in the coming weeks and months, most American allies—certainly in Europe—are thankful that he will soon be leaving the White House. And yet

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the result nevertheless sparked very little of the joy one might have expected from those who had come to loathe the U.S. president and his perceived threat to the transatlantic alliance.

Had Trump won, many in Europe would have thought that the “rules-based liberal order,” as it is now known and revered, was in real jeopardy.

That Europe’s own commitment to that order had been ambivalent at best before 2016, marked by resentment toward successive U.S. administrations, is largely ignored on this side of the Atlantic. Europe’s veneration of the old order was less a genuine desire for its restoration than a declaration of independence from Trump. But with Joe Biden soon to take over the White House, Europe has lost its unifying bogeyman. The question for the Continent’s leaders now is whether they can agree on what they are collectively for, not just what they are against.

In this photo provided by the German Government Press Office (BPA), German Chancellor Angela Merkel deliberates with US president Donald Trump on the sidelines of the official agenda on the second day of the G7 summit on June 2018 ,9 in Charlevoix, Canada.

(Getty)

In one sense, Biden’s victory returns a recognizable, reassuring figure to the Western throne—a restoration of the old dynastic order—a figure who will hear Europe’s petitions with respect and grace.

Yet in another sense, his success only reminds Europe of its own impotence, as France’s Europe minister, Clement Beaune, hinted in comments criticizing the neediness implicit in much of the elated commentary surrounding the election result. “Let’s not behave like children eagerly seeking American benevolence,” Beaune told the French broadcaster C News. “What’s important for Europeans is that they don’t expect their future to be determined by America.” (An uncomfortable reality for Beaune and other Europeans is that, despite the scale of Trump’s Electoral College and popular-vote defeat, had a few thousand votes gone a different way in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Nevada, then a man committed to a very different world order would once again be in charge.)

Trump’s defeat has thus removed the boot placed on the neck of the transatlantic alliance—with Biden in charge, there will be no question as to the American president’s commitment to NATO’s treasured Article 5, for example. But some regional officials I spoke with are concerned that without such a threat, the Continent may revert to a comfortable status quo, and pass up the opportunity to

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Trump’s defeat has thus removed the boot placed on the neck of the transatlantic alliance—with Biden in charge, there will be no question as to the American president’s commitment to NATO’s treasured Article 5, for example. reach a more equanimous settlement between the two halves of the Western alliance. Many European politicians, for example, have concluded that they should no longer subcontract the Continent’s basic security to a country that appears to be losing its appetite for imperial rule. Without Trump, will Europe be able to rouse itself to address the legitimate American grievances about European defense and security policies that have united U.S. administrations predating him? Equally, will the incoming Biden administration be creative enough to think beyond the old tenets of American foreign policy, in which moves toward European “autonomy” were seen as threats to the supremacy of NATO—and, by extension, the undisputed supremacy of the U.S.?

At the heart of these issues lies a question: Can Europe agree on a common vision for what it wants its relationship with the U.S. to be, beyond the preservation of an order that was already fraying?

Before the result of the election had even been called (but when Biden’s victory appeared secure), French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian publicly declared that the U.S. and the European Union needed a new settlement. “We will have to build a new transatlantic relationship, which will be a new partnership,” Le Drian said. In Germany, however, the government was not so sure. Writing in Politico, German Defense Minister Annegret KrampKarrenbauer argued that Europe should abandon “illusions” of strategic autonomy. This view was immediately countered by Germany’s Green Party spokesperson for EU affairs in the Bundestag, Fran-

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ziska Brantner, who criticized that stance as a “message of despair.”

Europe’s splits over the transatlantic alliance run much deeper than a difference of opinion between (and within) France and Germany, the Continent’s biggest economies and de facto leaders. In parts of Eastern and Central Europe, notably Poland and Hungary, there has been open support for Trump and his agenda, while Slovenia’s prime minister, Janez Janša, tweeted congratulations to Trump after the president claimed he had won the election.

Indeed, when I asked European diplomats and officials about the future of the transatlantic alliance in the months leading up to the election, and in the days that followed it, what was most striking was how little agreement there was. Surely, I asked one EU official, European capitals would not accept a return to the status quo just because Trump was no longer going to be president? “It’s a hot topic,” this official replied, asking for anonymity to discuss such a sensitive issue. “But not just because of this election. The last four years have been enough of a wake-up call.” And yet, this official said, any move to develop European capacity in defense and security would be “complex to pull off,” because of internal divisions over how much to rock the boat with Washington. argy. After years of Trump, as well as the ongoing drama over Brexit, to say nothing of the EU’s There is another reason for Europe not wanting to own internal crises, whether over refugees, debts, or drastically alter the terms of the relationship: leth- the single currency, many desire a quiet life. Why choose this moment to start reimagining the very alliance Europe has spent the past four years worrying about?

The problem for Europe and America is that the relationship might not be broken, but it does need fixing. The question is whether it will take another Trump for anything to happen

Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador to Syria and diplomat at the United Nations who is now at the Institut Montaigne, a Paris-based think tank, told me that Europecould face another Trump (or, possibly, Trump himself) in four years time, so it should use the window of a Biden presidency to put the transatlantic relationship on a better footing.

Yet he also pointed to an array of challenges to that notion. For one, he said, as long as figures such as

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In this photo provided by the German Government Press Office (BPA) German Chancellor Angela Merkel (L) speaks with US Vice President Joe Biden at the start of their meeting at the Chancellery on February 2013 ,01 in in Berlin, Germany.

(Getty)

end of Merkel’s by-then-16-year chancellorship.

Whoever emerges as the conservative candidate to replace Merkel will have to address Berlin’s relationship with Beijing, with enormous ramifications for the rest of Europe and its alliance with the U.S., given that there is now an almost bipartisan consensus in Washington on China’s emergence as a strategic rival. In the crudest terms, is it sustainable for the U.S. to maintain a security alliance with a country or bloc which does not share its central security assessment that Beijing is a competitor, not a partner?

In Britain—which is no longer a member of the EU, but remains a NATO member and arguably the Continent’s most capable military power, alongside France—some feel that the EU, dependent as it is on reaching consensus internally before seeking a path forward, is structurally incapable of separating itself from the U.S. in any fundamental way.

“Bottom line is that [the] EU will never be able to be assertive if they have to get unanimity,” one former British cabinet minister told me, requesting anonymity to speak candidly. This former member of Theresa May’s government added that the more “acceptable” the U.S. president is to European eyes, the more the likes of Germany and the Baltic states will want to make the old alliance work rather than seek any major shift.

Kramp-Karrenbauer hold the upper hand in Berlin, Paris will “not make much headway” in its efforts to reorient the Western alliance. At the same time, in Germany, particularly in Angela Merkel’s conserative Chritstian Democrats, there remains concern that French policy is driven by anti-Americanism.

And, Duclos acknowledged, without some kind of endorsement from the U.S. itself, there would not be any progress toward greater European independence. “That was impossible with Trump,” he said, “and remains difficult with Biden, because the defense establishment in Washington is unable to have that kind of vision.”

There is also domestic political uncertainty in some of the Continent’s major capitals. Next year will see national elections in Germany and the

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Ultimately, any potential challenges posed by a Biden presidency pale in comparison to what a second Trump term would have meant for Europe.

Forced to confront the collapse of the transatlantic security guarantee, European states might well have sought to strike their own deals with Washington to protect their core national interests. This alone would have had the capacity to divide Europe far more than any prospective differences of opinion that exist over what to do now that Trump is leaving.

Nevertheless, with Trump on his way out, pushed into the shadows for at least the next four years, the pressure for any major reassessment of the Western alliance has eased. The problem for Europe and America is that the relationship might not be broken, but it does need fixing. The question is whether it will take another Trump for anything to happen

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The 2020 Election Did Not Kill Off Identity Politics Instead, the Strategy Was Reborn

by Khalilah L. Brown-Dean

phrase “identity politics” as a pejorative to denounce demands from underrepresented groups, but appeals Despite reports to the contrary, identity politics isn’t to group-based identities are central to how candidates dead — it’s been born again. Identity politics is both build support regardless of party affiliation. The latest an electoral strategy and a governing strategy designed presidential election hasn’t changed that. to protect power. Even as a newly emerging nation affirming its freedom from the British crown, the United Some people reject identity politics because they beStates restricted citizenship based on race, gender and lieve organizing around group interests promotes socireligious identity. Today many conservatives use the etal blame over personal responsibility. President Don-

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Even as Black Lives Matter bloomed into what may be the largest political movement in American history, the failure to indict officers in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor motivated voters to express either support or discontent at the ballot box. opportunity to reject these demands and reassure his base his priorities had not changed.

Amid a global COVID-19 pandemic that is disproportionately claiming the lives of Black and Indigenous Americans, demands for comprehensive policing reform stretched across the summer following the deaths of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Daniel Prude and others. Even as Black Lives Matter bloomed into what may be the largest political movement in American history, the failure in September to indict officers in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor motivated voters to express either support or discontent at the ballot box.

According to a Pew Research Center survey, about 60% of white Americans, 75% of Asian Americans, 86% of Black Americans and 77% of Latino respondents said they approved of the Black Lives Matter movement in June. By September, support had significantly dropped among white and Hispanic respondents while holding steady among Asian and Black populations. ald Trump capitalized on this tension by issuing an executive order in September purportedly meant to “combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating” by banning diversity training and withdrawing certain research grants and programs. In reality the order was a political strategy designed to counter claims that systemic racism is baked into the American fabric. As various corporations and sports teams affirmed their commitment to addressing issues of bias, the president seized on the

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The heated dog-whistle appeals from a number of conservative candidates surrounding “law and order” coupled with demands to “back the blue” at demonstrations across the country supporting the police solidified these identity-based divides while overlooking voters who see systemic change as a means to keep law enforcement and the public safe. Early Election Day exit polls show that more than 90% of people who see racial inequality as the major issue

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facing the U.S. voted for Joe Biden for president. By comparison, about 70% of voters who believe crime and violence are the major threats cast ballots for Donald Trump. The very juxtaposition of the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements reveals the deeply entrenched nature of identity politics in the U.S. Uprisings in Los Angeles as well as Portland, Oregon; Minneapolis; and Washington, D.C., among other cities, overlapped with heated debates over whether to remove monuments and rename buildings that served as tributes to the Confederacy. In Connecticut, incumbent U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro was accused by her opponent of abandoning her Italian heritage after she suggested a Christopher Columbus statue be replaced.

The attacks by her challenger, who is Jewish, led to a show of support from prominent members of the state’s Italian and Jewish communities and an unexpected endorsement from a local police union.

Two weeks ago in Rhode Island, 52% of voters decided it was finally time to remove the word “Plantation” from the state’s official name — State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations — after nearly 80% of voters had rejected a similar effort 10 years earlier.

Mississippi voters approved a new flag design that traded Confederate symbols for a magnolia flower and the words “In God We Trust” while overwhelmingly electing a U.S. senatorial candidate who publicly stated her willingness to attend a public lynching if invited by a supporter. Change always comes in fits and starts in American politics.

One hundred years after some women gained the right to vote, Kamala Harris emerged as the first woman of Black and Asian descent to run on a major party ticket. Even as 2020 produced the largest and most diverse cadre of women pursuing elected office, the president’s direct appeals to suburban housewives rested on old tropes related to race, gender and class by stoking fears of declining home values and increased crime targeting defenseless women.

Early Election Day exit polls show that more than %90 of people who see racial inequality as the major issue facing the U.S. voted for Joe Biden for president.

Fifty-five years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — and seven years after it was gutted

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A man holds a placard that reads “Count Every Note” while demonstrating across the street from supporters of President Donald Trump outside of where votes are still being counted, six days after the general election on Nov. 9, 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. )(Getty

by the Supreme Court — the U.S. saw unprecedented voter registration and turnout despite allegations of voter suppression in Texas and Florida. Many young people channeled their protests into voting and heeded the admonition by the late civil rights activist and late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) to “make good trouble.” And yet the images of angry residents descending upon election centers in Phoenix and Detroitearlier this month were eerily reminiscent of civil rights era fights over whose ballots should be counted.

In the coming days we’ll have a sharper sense of how these identity-based appeals translated into votes and what change will happen because of them. Not just

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at the presidential level, but across all levels of government. Republicans’ modest gains among white women, Latino voters, the LGBTQ+ population and Black men from 2016 to 2020 affirm the inherently intersectional nature of identity and the need to better understand the tremendous diversity that exists within communities.

Identity politics is dynamic and contextual. The prospects of a divided government in Washington on the cusp of major redistricting efforts across the states enhance the need to view democracy as a battle over how we see ourselves, how we see others — and the power we have to reinforce those distinctions.

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Biden Shouldn’t Toss All of Trump’s Foreign Policies

From ending forever wars to pressing allies to shoulder more of their defense loads, the next president should pursue at least some of his predecessor’s goals

by Charles V. Peña The votes are in. After a fiercely contested election, Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States.

Because of their distaste for the current president, the

president-elect’s inner circle may press him to either throw out or do the opposite of Trump’s policies. But when it comes to foreign policy, Biden needs to resist this strong temptation. And the voice he listens to should be his own.

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Last January, Biden wrote in Foreign Affairs, “It is past time to end the forever wars, which cost the United States untold blood and treasure.” This echoed Trump’s own pledge to end endless wars. And late in his term, he ordered the withdrawal of thousands of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq–but there are still thousands of U.S. troops in both countries. As president, Biden has a chance to bring them home. He probably won’t bring them all home, but he has argued for a scaled-back, limited presence: “a few hundred Special Forcessoldiers and intelligence assets to support local partners against a common enemy.” More recently, Biden called for a maximum of 1,500 to 2,000 troops on the ground in the Middle East, adding that the military should not meddle in the political dynamics of the countries where they operate.

Moreover, since most Americans — Republicans and Democrats alike — favor military withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, Biden would be making good on his campaign pledge that he would “represent all of you whether you voted for me or against me.”

Vice President Joseph Biden speaks at a news conference at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on Tuesday, March, ,10 2009. (Getty)

A corollary to ending forever wars is to avoid new and unnecessary involvement in military conflicts. Biden may differ from Trump on specific policies and actions, but this should still be an overarching goal. For example, a Biden administration is likely to try to get Iran to return the terms and limits of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action–the nuclear deal rejected by the Trump administration–as a way to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Biden will likely make denuclearization the centerpiece of his foreign policy vis-à-vis North Korea. While some sort of deal might be a preferred outcome, he should heed his criticism of Trump and be careful to ensure that the pursuit of curbing Pyonyang’s nuclear ambitions doesn’t result in increasing the threat and risk of war.

Although critical of Trumpbeing a “good buddy” with Kim Jong Un, who Biden calls a “thug,” Biden would be willing to meet with the North Korean leader according to one of his key foreign policy advisors.

A second area where Biden and Trump agree on policy substance is NATO. Although Biden believes that “Trump has belittled, undermined, and in some cases abandoned U.S.allies and partners” and that the U.S. commitment to NATO is not transactional or built on coercion, he agrees that “Our allies should do their fair share.”

Citing “commitments the Obama-Biden administration negotiated to ensure that NATOmembers increase their defense spending,” a Biden-Harris administration needs

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Where there is some agreement that serves U.S. national security, he should be willing to risk criticism from his supporters, rise above the voices of hyperpartisanship, be true to his own words, and do what is in the national interest. to get our NATO allies to fulfill their commitments.

Biden believes that “[i]t falls on the United States to lead the way” and one of the hallmarks of leadership is getting those you lead to do what they’re supposed to do. And the reality is that our European allies are more than capable of meeting their pledge to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense. Currently, other than the U.S., nine countries meet that threshold: Norway (2.03 percent), France (2.11 percent), Lithuania(2.28 percent), Poland (2.30 percent), Latvia (2.32 percent), Estonia (2.38 percent), Romania (2.38 percent), the United Kingdom (2.43 percent), and Greece (2.58 percent). Noticeably absent are Germany ($3.86 trillion GDP) and Italy ($1.99 trillion GDP). Both are wealthy countries – the fourth and eighth largest economies in the world – that can afford to make the necessary investment. The combined GDP of NATO Europe is nearly on par with the U.S. – about $17.5 trillion vs. about $20 trillion. Yet the U.S. spends more than doubleon defense than our European NATO allies. Other than political will, there is no real reason that all European NATO countries cannot meet their obligation to spend 2 percent of their GDP for their own defense.

Perhaps a Biden administration that wants “to fortify our collective capabilities … by reinvesting in our treaty alliances” will adopt a similar approach (but not necessarily the same threshold) with other allies, such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea. Again, these are wealthy countries that don’t need to depend on the U.S. and can afford to shoulder more responsibility for their own defense.

There will be plenty where Biden differs dramatically from Trump, but where there is some agreement that serves U.S. national security, he should be willing to risk criticism from his supporters, rise above the voices of hyperpartisanship, be true to his own words, and do what is in the national interest.

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The Iranian Regime is Forcing Farmers to Slaughter their Livestock Tehran’s Economy is Collapsing Dramatically, Resulting in 80 percent of Iranians Living in Absolute Poverty

by Elie Fawaz “We cannot feed our livestock at all,” a member of the farmer’s union in Iran told Majalla. Videos circulating

on social media show Iranian farmers taking their dairy cows to the slaughterhouse one after another. Due to the high cost of animal feeds, farmers are closingdown their business. “If the situation doesn’t change in

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the next three months, all the livestock farms will go bankrupt,” he added.

Animal feeds, including barley, corn, and soybeans are scarce and expensive, making it very difficult for ranchers to carry on. So, why do has situation has become impossible for Iranian farmers?

There are many problems facing farmers and the industry as a whole in Iran, for example, there are animal feed and veterinary drugs that farmers cannot afford, and the price of meat and milk is incapable of coping with the devaluation of the Iranian currency which has greatly diminished farmers’ profits. But the most significant problems are the government policies that protect and favor the interests of the Iranian Revolutionary Corps Guards (IRCG) over anything else.

Rouhani’s government along with IRCG and the Shahid Foundation destroyed the livestock farming industry.

Today most of the country›s imports and exports are in the hands of the IRGC and Khamenei-affiliated foundations. Why? Because this a high source of income and one of the ways they can get their hands-on foreign exchange to finance government spending, and fund the military follies of the IRCG around the world.

A local woman feeds her sheeps in Qaleh Ganj County, Kerman Province, Iran. On December 2018 ,12.

(Getty)

Dr. Shayan Naderi, a researcher in the field of food security and agriculture, said on October 2020 ,25 that in recent months, 4.5 million tons of soybeans were imported into the country, which was supposed to reach farmers and poultry farmers with 4,200 Tomans.

But 3 million tons of it ended up to the black market.

Pooya Stone explained in a recent article that the “amount of imports has destroyed domestic products and caused the price of domestic products to fall.

After the prices of domestic products fall compared to foreign products, mafia bands, which are mainly affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), purchase the agricultural products produced by the farmers at a very low price and less than the production price from farmers. They buy it and export it to other countries at several times the price, pocketing a lot of money from it”.

The Iranian farmer told Majalla that “IRCG front companies import livestock feed subsidized by the state with every dollar worth only 4,200 Tomans and

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The system is irredeemable and the only change that can improve the lives of the Iranian people is that of the regime. then sell it in the open market to farmers eight times higher”.

“It is clear in that regard, that an unprecedented corruption operation is carried out by the IRGC and the Shahid Foundation, all of which are under the influence of the supreme leader Khamenei,” he added.

The farmer explained that the Kowsar Economic Organization, which is affiliated with the Shahid Foundation and was included in the US sanctions list in March 2020, has around 40 companies that trade with a variety of products from livestock and agriculture to electronics and healthcare industries. This economic organization imports about %30 of Iran›s soybeans and agricultural fodder.

“Another blow to farmers is the looting of their water by government agencies”, noted Pooya Stone, especially the Revolutionary Guards. “One of the major projects of the regime to plunder Iran’s agriculture is the construction of several dams by the Revolutionary Guards and diverting river water to the IRGC’s profitable projects.”

Many other aspects of the Iranian economy are collapsing dramatically which as a result has resulted in 80 percent of Iranians living under poverty. This is mainly due to the overinflated role Iran wants to play in the region by waging different wars in Syria or Yemen and by funding militias and operations around the world. The US sanctions have also had an impact on the country. Corruption has become endemic and the Iranian regime will never be able to fix the country even if the US sanctions are lifted. The system is irredeemable and the only change that can improve the lives of the Iranian people is that of the regime.

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Military AI: In Deep Learning We Trust?

The Pentagon has Ambitious Plans for Riding the AI Wave But Some of it Sounds Familiar

by Abhijnan Rej Perhaps no other technology animates the imagination of defense policymakers and analysts as much as artificial intelligence (AI), or

more precisely, a subfield of AI called machine learning. The Pentagon is no exception, with the Trump administration having pushed an AI agenda for the military, including through the creation of a Joint Artificial Intelligence

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AI for the military remains deeply alluring, but the Pentagon will still have to wait for a while before AI tech reaches the levels needed for significant operational gains while it takes baby steps in that will enable it to fully leverage it. and engagement even in asymmetric conflicts.

Center (JAIC) in 2018. But while military gains from AI technologies are substantial, the way policymakers involved in military AI hard sell its potential often gives observers pause.

Speaking virtually at a think tank event on November 6, JAIC’s director Lieutenant General Michael Groen compared the military risks the United States faces today to 1914, when World War I broke out, marking the beginning of industrialized warfare. Breaking Defense quotes Groen as saying that “the Information Age equivalent of… lancers riding into machine guns” is using traditional command and control (C2) systems against an adversary equipped with AI. Groen, a Marine Corps intelligence officer whose tours of duty included Iraq and who became JAIC head on October 1, also pointed out the inefficiency of current processes integrating intelligence to kinetic action, in terms of a persistent lag between collation and analysis

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To be sure, the basic thrust of Groen’s assertion is valid and well taken; the problem, however, is that this is not the first time United States military seeks to ride the information revolution wave. As Eli Berman, Joseph Felter, and Jacob Shapiro argued in their programmatic 2018 book “Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict,” big data analysis stands to vastly improve the position of the superior force in an asymmetric conflict – of the kind the United States found itself in in Iraq and Afghanistan – where information (in form of civilian tips, data about social and economic environments, and other intelligence) is the often the determining variable in deciding the outcome of a counterinsurgency action, kinetic as well as non-kinetic.

And indeed, as Berman, Felter, and Shaprio write, the U.S. counterinsurgency campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan involved keeping records of “significant activity” involving U.S. forces, “including details such as time and place of insurgent attacks, type of attacks, and select outcomes,” in extremely granular details leading to the SIGACT-III database. In Afghanistan, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a project, Nexus 7, that used data from a variety of sources – including commercial satellite imagery – in order to support International Security Assistance Force decision making, they write.

But, the real focus of Groen’s remarks at the Center

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for Strategic and International Studies event was conflict between near-peer militaries. Here, the thrust of AI use is – as the BreakingDefense piece also notes – to speed up observe-orientdecide-act (OODA) loops. The father of the concept, U.S. Air Force’s John Boyd, imagined all warfare as a clash of competing OODA loops, and where the key operational and tactical objective becomes disrupting the adversary’s OODA loop while speeding up one’s own. As I have described this elsewhere: Modern militaries seek this advantage by gathering as much information as it is possible about the enemy’s forces and disposition, through space-based satellites, electronic and acoustic sensors and, increasingly, unmanned drones. Put simply, the basic idea is to have a rich ‘information web’ in the form of battlefield networks which links war fighters with machines that help identify their targets ahead. A good network — mediated by fast communication channels — shrinks time as it were, by bringing future enemy action closer.

This, of course, is not a new idea, forming as it does the basis of the network-centric “Revolution in Military Affairs” that came into vogue in the run up to, and after, the first Gulf War in 1991.

Where AI can play a major role – assuming the U.S. can resolve numerous ethical, legal, and political challenges involved in implementing the idea – is that with it comes the possibility of automating the entire kill chain – beginning with

While military gains from AI technologies are substantial, the way policymakers involved in military AI hard sell its potential often gives observers pause.

appropriate aggregation and real-time analysis of data from the battlefield sensors for target acquisition to seamless relaying this information to weapons systems for engagement (“shooters”) that then act on the basis of that input on their own – taking the human out of picture in the OODA loop entirely (to use Paul Scharre’s formulation).

The Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) project seeks to integrate multiple sensor inputs for rapid execution of joint operations (“data fusion”). But as Michael Klare wrote in Arms Control Today in April, “Over time, however, the JADC2 project is expected to incorporate AI-enabled decision-support systems, or algorithms intended to narrow down

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possible responses to enemy moves and advise those commanders on the optimal choice.” But this falls short of complete automation of the OODA loop, with the decision to engage a target ultimately falling on a human commander.

Nevertheless, significant technical challenges remain, which brings me back to Groen’s ambitious assertions. Just to mention two of them: First, deep learning based automated target recognition (ATR) using synthetic aperture radar imagery – a key class of images available to the military, which can be obtained independent of weather conditions, unlike optical satellite images – very much remains a work in progress.

Second, even in the domain of asymmetric warfare and counterinsurgency, letting an AI

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system integrate multiple streams of enemy intelligence – including intercepts that would need real-time translation – is a challenge; for example, while deep learning based machine translation that accurately preserves semantics has improved dramatically over the years, it still remains at the level of a proof of concept.

At the end, AI for the military remains deeply alluring, but the Pentagon will still have to wait for a while before AI tech reaches the levels needed for significant operational gains while it takes baby steps in that will enable it to fully leverage it. For example, before the JADC2 can really get serious about AI C2, it must fix pesky issues around data standardization across all services.

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What We Miss When We’re Masked There’s a reason people say “It’s so good to see your face!” and not “It’s so good to see your elbows!”

by Mary Laura Philpott A few months into the coronavirus pandemic, I started seeing a new physical therapist for my cranky back.

His name is Matt. Matt wears khaki pants and favors

quasi-athletic, cushioned loafers. He loves football.

His grandfather was an accomplished cellist. He and his wife have a new baby daughter, and their toddler, a spirited girl with red hair just like her dad’s, is having a little trouble adjusting to the new member of their

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family, but they’re all hanging in there. I can tell you all this, but I might not be able to pick Matt’s face out of a photo lineup, because I’ve never seen more than his eyes and forehead. He probably wouldn’t recognize a picture of me either; we’ve both been masked for the entirety of our acquaintance.

With the exception of my immediate family, when I see people these days, I see only the slice of face between their hairline and the bridge of their nose. I miss seeing people’s faces. Their whole faces. I miss seeing mouths twisted sideways in indecision, teeth bared in silly grins, upper lips curled in confusion, pouting lower lips, wrinkled noses, clenched jaws, all of it.

Many socially distanced citizens the world over now understand the concept of skin hunger, the mental and physical malaise that comes from going too long without being touched. Personally, I’m not experiencing that kind of sensory deprivation. In addition to getting manhandled at physical therapy every week, I get plenty of incidental touch during a typical day living with my husband, two children, and two dogs. As I’m typing on this -75degree Tennessee afternoon, a hot beagle lies wedged between my lower back and my chair cushion, snoring.

A woman in a face mask walks by a sign posted on a boarded up restaurant in San Francisco, California on April, 2020 ,1, during the novel coronavirus outbreak.

(Getty)

But what about face hunger? English has a word for something similar: Pareidolia means seeing familiar shapes in unfamiliar objects, including seeing faces where none exist. That’s what happens when you look at a cloud and see a cherub-cheeked smile, or when you spy Jesus in your toast. It’s why I imagine my car’s front grill and headlights are grinning at me.

Our brains interpret lines, curves, and shadows as faces so often because they’re constantly scanning for meaning, and faces mean a lot to us humans.

Masked life feels strange, and not just because of the constant low-grade smothering sensation. Every few weeks, I pop into the local bookstore to sign orders of my books. The staff members are my friends—I used to work there, in fact—and I know their faces well. Since the spring, our visits have been different.

I stand at a table across the room from them—all of us wearing masks—wielding my Sharpie and stacking my books myself instead of passing them to a bookseller.

I enjoy catching up on the employees’ lives and how business is going, muffled as our exchanges may be, but on my most recent visit it occurred to me how bizarre it is that I haven’t seen the bottom half of any of their faces since March. I never realized how much I would miss seeing people’s mouths move when they speak, how much I took it for granted before.

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But my longing for faces makes me greet my own with extra interest and kindness. It feels good to see and be seen in return—always, but especially when separated from the rest of humanity.

Research has shown that a lack of face-to-face social contact can increase your risk of depression. By this point in the year, my family normally would have taken several overnight trips to see my parents, who are in their 70s and live one state over, in Georgia.

While I know our choice to stay away protects them, I also miss them terribly and worry about how long they’ve gone without seeing family. Over the summer, we got in the car and drove six hours just to stand on their front porch and catch up with them from two arms’ lengths away. While I loved our masks for keeping us all safe and allowing my parents and their grandkids to have a conversation in the same place, I also wanted to rip off those barriers to my loved ones’ faces.

Seeing family and friends’ faces virtually on FaceTime is far better than nothing, but I’d rather see their living, breathing faces in real time. Like a lot of people, I have a case of screen fatigue. My eyes are tired of two-dimensional digital approximations of people, and Zoom meetings often feel like group staring contests. Paradoxically, the technology that purports to bring us closer also flattens our likenesses and drains them of life.

There’s a reason people say “It’s so good to see your face!” and not “It’s so good to see your elbows!”

As poets had been writing about for centuries before Charles Darwin wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, faces showcase our feelings and personalities. If you’ve grown up in a culture where faces go uncovered in public, suddenly covering them can pose a challenge to reading people.

While my kids’ school did open back up for modified in-person classes, all students and staff wear masks on campus, which means that my daughter, a brandnew ninth grader, has been learning the faces of new

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friends by their eyes alone. I remember how she learned my face as a baby, staring up at me while she nursed, occasionally lifting an arm and hooking her tiny fingers onto my chin, and I wonder how her first impressions of her schoolmates—and theirs of her—might be affected by receiving less than a full face of input.

Our brains are wired to detect faces. I suspect that’s why I have unexpectedly come to love the magnifying mirror in my bathroom, an “amenity” I swore until recently I would never own. But after four decades of reliable eyesight, my perfect vision evaporated. My friends had warned me that middle age would bring farsightedness, but I had no idea it could happen seemingly overnight. One day, I could read the tiniest text in any book just fine; the next, I couldn’t decipher the ingredients in a recipe or the instructions on a pill bottle. For weeks, I tried to train my eyes to do more with less. Then I learned the hard way that the tube of zit cream and the travel-size tube of zesty mint toothpaste are the same size and shape. I finally caved.

I bought a pair of fuchsia-framed reading glasses at the drugstore, and I installed a makeup mirror on a stainless-steel arm over my bathroom sink.

I used to consider magnifying mirrors the height of narcissism, for selfie addicts hooked on micromanaging their complexion. Now I realize that using one feels nothing like snapping a self-portrait.

No one’s watching me, for one thing. When I look at my face up close, I am neither admiring nor judging myself. I am observing myself, in a sort of intimate, visual conversation. I notice how my reflection has changed since I last looked at it. I can see broken capillaries I didn’t know were there before, a spray of

We need to lay eyes on one another just like we need to lay hands on one another. Being unable to do so creates a particular kind of yearning, even grief.

pink stars across my cheek. I have two new freckles at the edge of my mouth, disrupting the line where my lip fades into my skin. Having not observed my countenance this closely in, well, forever, I am meeting it as if it were the face of a new friend. At a time when we have lost the ability to get close to our friends, there’s something oddly comforting about at least being able to get close to ourselves. The mirror serves as a kind of crutch.

I didn’t time my blurry vision to coincide with our

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In this combination of nine separate images shot over the last few weeks people wearing home-made protective face masks are seen in Berlin, Leipzig and Bitterfeld during the novel coronavirus crisis on April 2020 ,22 in Unspecified, Germany.

(Getty)

current era of face deprivation. It just happened that way. But my longing for faces makes me greet my own with extra interest and kindness. It feels good to see and be seen in return—always, but especially when separated from the rest of humanity. We need to lay eyes on one another just like we need to lay hands on one another. Being unable to do so creates a particular kind of yearning, even grief. Say what you will about the ending of Cast Away; to me, the saddest scene in the movie comes when Wilson the volleyball floats away, leaving Tom Hanks sobbing for his friend

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with the face made from a handprint.

Who knows when it will be safe to bare all our facial features to the world again? Until then, I continue to look more closely at not just my own face but other people’s faces, even masked. From six feet away, I zero in on what the mask doesn’t cover—the color of eyelashes, the curve of earlobes. I see details, pores, tiny pulsing movements, all telegraphing the truth that we are each so strong, so delicate, so singular. You can see it if you really look: We are all so alive.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1827- November- 20/11/2020

Next WH Chief of Staff Ronald Klain: Veteran adviser and Obama’s Ebola Tsar www.majalla.com

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Time to Try Intermittent Fasting ?

A diet that focuses mainly on when (not what) you eat may be a good way to shed pounds and improve your cardiovascular health 42

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With intermittent fasting, people tend to lose weight fairly slowly about a half a pound to 1 pound per week. But when it comes to losing weight, slow and steady is more successful and sustainable over the long term.

Rimm, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Short-term studies suggest that people stick to intermittent fasting diets as well as or better than they do to other diets. And according to a 2019 review article in the journal Nutrients, intermittent fasting promotes weight loss and may reduce risk factors linked to heart disease, including diabetes, high blood pressure, unhealthy blood lipid levels, and inflammation.

«However, we don›t have much evidence about how well this diet works over the long term,» says Dr. Rimm, noting that there are just two long-term studies of intermittent fasting, each lasting a year. Nor are there large populations of people who›ve followed this eating pattern for years. That›s in contrast to two other diets linked to a healthy heart and healthy body size -- the Mediterranean diet and a vegetarian diet.

Harvard Health Anyone who›s tried different weight-loss diets is probably familiar with their pitfalls. Low-calorie diets often leave you tired, hungry, and cranky.

Low-carb or «keto» diets can cause cravings and constipation. Low-fat diets are also tough to follow and, contrary to popular belief, they do not seem to prevent cardiovascular disease.

Another diet trend, intermittent fasting, takes a different approach. Rather than limiting what you eat, this diet limits when you eat (see «What is intermittent fasting?»). For some people, that change may be easier to manage, says Dr. Eric

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WHAT IS INTERMITTENT FASTING Intermittent fasting restricts when or how much you eat -- and sometimes both. One variation, time-restricted eating, involves eating only during a certain time window, usually eight hours, over a single day. For example, you would eat only during the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and then fast during the other 16 hours.

The other approaches, alternate-day and wholeday fasting, actually don›t involve strict fasting.

Instead, you choose two or more days during

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the week when you cut way back on the food you eat, limiting yourself to just 400 to 600 calories per day. On the other days of the week, you follow your normal eating pattern. In one popular version, the 5:2 diet, you eat normally for five days, then restrict your calories on two non-consecutive days. With alternate-day fasting, you eat a calorie-restricted diet every other day.

AN EVOLUTIONARY ADVANTAGE Still, people who are overweight or obese might want to give intermittent fasting a try. In addition to its apparent heart-related benefits, this diet has some unique aspects that might explain its success, says Dr. Rimm. First, the strategy makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

As early humans evolved, food supplies were alternately abundant and scarce. We also evolved in sync with the natural day-night cycle. So our metabolism adapted to function best with periods of hunger and eating during the day and sleeping at night. Many studies show that nighttime eating is closely linked to weight gain and diabetes, and one even found a higher risk of heart attack among men who snacked in the middle of the night compared with those who didn›t.

Second, intermittent fasting highlights some of the positive aspects of other diet strategies while avoiding their downsides. «People who try whole or alternate-day fasting quickly realize how many calories are in certain foods. That helps them choose foods that are more filling but lower in calories,» says Dr. Rimm. But because they›re not constantly counting calories and feeling deprived every day, the diet is easier to maintain.

BURNING STORED FAT Periodic fasting triggers the same fat-burning process that occurs during a low-carbohydrate

or keto diet. Keto is short for ketosis, the metabolic process that kicks in when your body runs out of glucose (its preferred energy source) and starts burning stored fat. Your body may go into ketosis after just 12 hours of not eating, which many people do overnight before they «break fast» with a morning meal. (A midnight snack obviously sabotages this process.) A keto diet keeps you in ketosis for much longer time periods because you avoid carbohydrates, which supply glucose. Instead, fat becomes the preferred fuel source.

But some nutrition experts worry that keto diets -- which typically include hefty amounts of meat and eggs -- may be hard on the heart. Intermittent fasting is likely a healthier option, especially if you eat a balanced diet that includes whole grains, nuts, legumes, fruits, and vegetables, which are rich in nutrients known to lower heart disease risk.

However, intermittent fasting diets typically don›t

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Many studies show that nighttime eating is closely linked to weight gain and diabetes, and one even found a higher risk of heart attack among men who snacked in the middle of the night compared with those who didn›t. specify what foods you should eat. «As a nutritional epidemiologist, that makes me a little uncomfortable,» Dr. Rimm admits. Eating burgers and French fries five days a week and a single breakfast sandwich on your low-calorie day wouldn›t be healthy, he says. But with any diet, it›s often a good idea to ease into the changes. You could start by trying a 5:2 diet or time-restricted eating. Once you start losing weight, you can gradually introduce more healthy foods, he suggests.

Don›t expect fast results, however. With intermittent fasting, people tend to lose weight fairly slowly -- about a half a pound to 1 pound per week. But when it comes to losing weight, slow and steady is more successful and sustainable over the long term.

BEFORE YOY TRY INTERMITTENT FASTING If you want to give intermittent fasting a try, make sure to discuss it with your doctor first, says Dr. Rimm. Skipping meals and severely limiting calories can be dangerous for people with certain conditions, such as diabetes. Some people who take medications for blood pressure or heart disease also may be more prone to imbalances of sodium, potassium, and other minerals during longerthan-normal periods of fasting.

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The Crown Takes the Shine Off Queen Elizabeth’s Reign

In its fourth season, the Netflix drama is sharper than ever as it paints a portrait of an out-of-touch ruler caught off guard by change 46

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by Shirley Li Early in its fourth season, The Crown finds Britain at a low. It’s 1982, and the so-called Winter of Discontent still lingers over the country as unemployment numbers soar and a war brews in the Falklands. But inside Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth II (played by Olivia Colman) has a more personal catastrophe on her mind: She’s not sure which of her four children is her favorite.

Instead of seeing Diana as a luminous young woman who is changing the British people’s (and the world’s) impression of the royal family, Elizabeth sees her as an outsider who must either bend or break to the family’s will.

And so Her Majesty invites each of them to lunch, hoping one will impress her more than the others.

It’s a frivolous but revealing endeavor—the four meetings show the gaping emotional distance between Elizabeth and her royal progeny, who all look stunned to be spending time alone with “mummy.” Edward (Angus Imrie) immediately inquires after his Civil List money, as if she were a bank teller. Andrew (Tom Byrne) boasts of a young “actress” he met, a tawdry subject that shocks the sovereign. Charles (Josh O’Connor) and Anne (Erin Doherty) rue their marriages, talking over her advice. Colman plays Elizabeth with a dignified embarrassment, forcing smiles through her obvious disappointment. Later, she vents her frustrations to Philip (Tobias Menzies), who tells her not to fret—their children are all adults, and she needs to concentrate on being a mother to a nation. Still, the damage has been done. Philip reveals that all of their children had been “perplexed” by their lunches, and Elizabeth is convinced they’re lost. In the meantime, the country remains in decline.

But in its sharp and splashy fourth season, the show finally criticizes Elizabeth for her ignorance, characterizing her as a ruler whose stubborn devotion to tradition makes her and her family out-of-touch fools caught off guard by change. Yes, fools: Throughout Season 4, The Crown ridicules the royals, mocking their entitlement. During her first audience with Britain’s new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson), Elizabeth skips past policy updates and instead reads Thatcher her list of guesses for the cabinet, delighting in the exercise as if governing were a game. Before a public engagement at Buckingham Palace, Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) demands that the royals have “no actual conversations” with their subjects. The entire family invites Thatcher on a trip to the countryside to play drinking games and hunt bucks while the country suffers through a recession.

When it comes to the Queen, The Crown tends to forgive easily. Across the Netflix drama’s first three seasons—blanketed in a warm nostalgia and postwar idyll—The Crown argued that her flaws made her only more sympathetic, that she faced unknowable pressure as a monarch and the head of an esteemed institution. The writer and executive producer Peter Morgan treated the drama’s first two seasons as a character study of a young woman struggling with immense, but fragile, power. Its third installment held her at arm’s length, turning her into a supporting character to Philip and Charles, while still emphasizing the burden of her role.

Perhaps, four seasons in, Morgan realized that the last thing anyone wanted to watch going into the more tabloid-gossip-laden eras of the royals’ history was a recap of them reveling in their wealth.

Or perhaps with its story headed toward scandal and tragedy, The Crown needed to stop treating the Queen as a faultless heroine. Whatever the case may be, the show suggests that by the ’80s, the royals, as led by Elizabeth, had become caught in an existential crisis: They believed that their duty meant staying visible, not accessible. They took their subjects for granted, and assumed that the family’s relevance was a given. Yet their lifestyle couldn’t be further from that of their people: In one

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episode, for example, Elizabeth learns of the human cost and psychological damage of the country’s economic challenges only after a disgruntled, unemployed man infiltrates Buckingham Palace to speak directly with her in her bedroom. The Crown observes that the royals’ failures can more often than not be self-inflicted—and in doing so, the show produces its most thrilling and biting season yet.

The drama is, of course, only getting started.

Season 4 introduces Diana (Emma Corrin)— arguably the series’s most anticipated figure— whose depiction helps the show not only uncover new insights into Elizabeth’s character, but also lay the groundwork for an even more cutting Season 5. Morgan had tackled the subject of the Queen and the “people’s princess” before, with the film The Queen, but the 2006 drama covers the aftermath of Diana’s death, sympathizing with Elizabeth as she learns to change her perspective on public opinion. In this season, he’s less generous with the Queen, showing how her rigid adherence to duty contributed as much to Charles and Diana’s crumbling marriage as the young couple’s affairs and incompatibility did. Elizabeth’s determination and perseverance helped her marriage with Philip thrive; those same traits pushed Charles too far, forcing him to move too quickly with a woman he barely knew. While Elizabeth’s stoicism and stiff upper lip helped her develop a rapport with world leaders, those same qualities translated into coldness toward Diana, who was

The Crown isn’t so critical that it diminishes the Queen; rather, it shows how the same forces that can help a figure like her succeed professionally can produce blind spots personally.

only 19 when she became engaged to Charles, struggling with her place in the pecking order, battling her eating disorder, and yearning for the Windsors’ approval.

The Crown isn’t so critical that it diminishes the Queen; rather, it shows how the same forces that can help a figure like her succeed professionally can produce blind spots personally. Instead of seeing Diana as a luminous young woman who is changing the British people’s (and the world’s) impression of the royal family, Elizabeth sees her as an outsider who must either bend or break to the family’s will. The Queen

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Some women are born to greatness, some woman achieve greatness and some women have greatness thrust upon her. (Des Willie / )Netflix

can advise and even chastise Thatcher during their weekly meetings, but does everything she can to avoid talking to her daughter-in-law. She can charm the leaders of the Commonwealth at a global summit, but cannot take her children to lunch without scaring them. She can “meet normal people all the time,” as she puts it to the intruder who makes it into her bedroom, yet she has no idea what he means when he tells her of his poverty. The Crown spent years unraveling the story of the human underneath the regalia.

This year, it finally interrogates the effect of the formidable power and influence Elizabeth has amassed, foreshadowing the royals’ difficult

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journey into modernity.

Toward the end of the season, Philip—one of Diana’s few allies in the family—tries to comfort the princess after her latest failed attempt to speak to the Queen. Like Diana, he’d entered the family reluctant to assimilate. And also like Diana, he’d been intimidated by their customs. He advises her to think of Elizabeth as the fuel of the family, a force that everyone must not only accept but help maintain and serve by setting their personal woes aside. He compares her to, of all things, oxygen.

But maybe that oxygen, The Crown argues, suffocates more than it sustains.

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Next WH Chief of Staff Ronald Klain: Veteran adviser and Obama’s Ebola Tsar Majalla – London President-elect Joe Biden announced Wednesday that a former vice presidential chief of staff and Obama-era Ebola outbreak response chief will serve as the incoming White House chief of staff. Ronald Klain, 59, will be the presidentelect’s closest formal adviser and wrangler of executive priorities once the Biden administration takes office Jan. 20, 2021.

“Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together, including as we rescued the American economy from one of the worst downturns in our history in 2009 and later overcame a daunting public health emergency in 2014,” the president-elect said in a statement, NPR reported.

Born into a Jewish household in Indianapolis, Klain is married to Monica Medina — a U.S. Army veteran who has served in senior government and academic positions. The couple have three adult children. Medina was a principal deputy undersecretary and general counsel at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and, at one time, oversaw the U.S. Department of Justice’s environmental division as a deputy associate attorney general.

After graduating from Georgetown University in 1983 and a brief stint as a Senate campaign manager, Klain went on to Harvard Law School

where he was the editor of the Harvard Law Review.

In 1992, he started serving a debate coach for Democratic presidential candidates and joined the campaign of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who went on to become the 42nd U.S. president and 45th U.S. vice president, respectively. He became chief of staff and counselor to 78th U.S. attorney general Janet Reno in 1994 and chief of staff to Gore in 1995. Also in 1995, South Dakota senator Tom Daschle appointed him as the Senate Democratic Leadership Committee’s staff director.

In August 1999, Gore’s campaign chairman Tony Coelho ousted him. In October 1999, he joined the O’Melveny & Myer law firm’s office in Washington, D.C. In 2005, he left his partnership at the law firm to become the executive vice president and general counsel of Revolution LLC, a technology venture capital firm launched by AOL co-founder Steve Case.

In 2000, he returned to Gore’s campaign as general counsel of his recount committee.

His role as chief of staff to Gore, who retracted his initial concession in the disputed White House election of 2000, was turned into the HBO drama Recount. “The plural of chad is chad?” Klain, played by Spacey, asks at one point in the film, referring to the fragments of

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punched ballots that became critical to the tally in Florida. Gore’s Republican opponent, George W Bush, was ultimately declared the winner.

Klain often tweets about the episode, only last year posting: “People frequently tell me that I should ‘get over’ the 2000 election and the recount. I haven’t, and I don’t think I ever will.”

After his work on the Gore campaign, Klain worked as a high-powered Washington lobbyist for a mortgage giant and a drugmaker that was under congressional investigation.

Klain served as chief of staff to Biden from 2009 to 2011, the first few years of Biden’s tenure as vice-president in the Obama White House. In 2014, Klain was appointed by President Barack Obama to lead the White House’s domestic and international Ebola outbreak response, experience that will be needed as President-elect Biden plans a more aggressive response by his administration to the global coronavirus pandemic.

“I chose Ron for a reason: I have known him to be nothing less than an effective, dedicated and tireless manager and leader,” Obama said in early 2015 after Klain’s tenure as Ebola czar, as reported by The Hoya — Georgetown University’s student newspaper. “And those traits have been on full display since October, as Ron has helped marshal our whole-of-government

approach to tackle Ebola at the source in West Africa and to fortify our preparedness here at home.”

Since leaving the Obama administration, Klain has worked as an external adviser to the Skoll Foundation Global Threats Fund and is Executive Vice President and General Counsel at the investment firm Revolution LLC.

He fell out with the now-president-elect five years ago after throwing in his lot with Mrs Clinton’s campaign when Biden, then-US vice-president, still hoped to compete for the party nomination. “It’s been a little hard for me to play such a role in the Biden demise,” Klain wrote of the man he had served as chief of staff in an email to Clinton presidential campaign chairman John Podesta

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in October 2015. “I am definitely dead to them - but I’m glad to be on Team HRC,” he added, using Mrs Clinton’s initials. The message was disclosed by Wikileaks following a hack and Klain refused to comment on the controversy in August when it was reported by news outlet, Politico. Klain has since worked his way back into Biden’s good books.