There is No Substitute to the American-Led World Order

The London Bridge Terror Attack Blame Game Erupts

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There is No Substitute to the American-Led World Order www.majalla.com

Editorial

A Weekly Political News Magazine

This past week marked the 70th anniversary of the formation of NATO. To mark the occasion all 29 NATO members met at a summit in the UK. While this was meant to commemorate the alliance, divisions and petty arguments between world leaders sullied the occasion. Ever since the end of the Second World War, the US has acted as a leader on the world stage, but the isolationist attitude of President Trump has diminished the US’s role. Moreover, questionable decisions made by the Bush Jr., Obama and current Trump administration with regards to the Middle East have left dangerous power vacuums in the region and raised further question marks on America’s position as the global leader.

This week’s cover story by Dennis Ross covers this issue of American global leadership and the direction future administrations need to make to preserve the US’s position and prevent the mistakes made by past two administrations and current Trump administration.

Continuing on the NATO summit, Yasmine El-Geressi gives an overview of the events and the clashes that took place in London this week. The Summit had already started off on the wrong foot, as French President Macron’s recent comments calling the alliance “brain dead” had offended US President Trump, who has been striving to make other members contribute more monetary funding into the organization.

Furthermore, disagreements regarding issues like Turkey’s offences in Northern Syria only made the atmosphere more toxic for the leaders. The final straw came when Trump decided to fly home early after a video surfaced showing the Canadian, French and British leader seemingly mocking Trump behind his back. Simply put, the summit started with divisions and ended with divisions.

In the run up to the Brexit election, the UK has been struck by another terrorist attack last week which resulted in the deaths of two people.

The terrorist, Usman Khan, had previously been sentenced for being part of an Al-Qaeda based terrorist organisation planning an attack on the London stock exchange. A policy introduced by Gordon Brown’s Labour government allowed Khan to serve a shorter sentence and be released early. As a result, Johnson has used this attack as campaign fodder, blaming the previous Labour government and vowed to make Britain safer. Yasmine El-Geressi writes on this recent attack and how politicians, particularly Johnson, have used it to bolster their election campaigns.

We invite you to read these articles and more on our website eng. majalla.com. As always, we welcome and value our reader’s feedback and we invite you to take the opportunity to leave your comments on our website.

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

14 NATO’s Anniversary Summit Highlights Internal Fragmentation

Issue 1777- December- 06/12/2019

22 The Oligarchs Who Lost Ukraine and Won Washington

08 Iraqi Prime Minister Resigns

26 A Way Out of Spain’s Catalan Crisis

30 Troubles on the Mekong

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This Is Your Brain on Terrorism 3

46 Boost your activity level in small bites 06/12/19

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Pro-democracy protesters hold posters of US President Donald Trump during a Thanksgiving Day rally at Edinburgh Place on November 2019 ,28 in Hong Kong, China.

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A riot police truck fires water to a demonstrator during a national strike called by trade unions on November 2019 ,26 in Santiago, Chile. (Getty) 7

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eekly news and reducing forces, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said. Esper’s remarks in an interview with Reuters could signal the end of a period of turbulence and uncertainty surrounding the U.S. military presence in Syria after President Donald Trump’s initial withdrawal order in October. Since then, troop levels in Syria have fallen about 40 percent from around 1,000.

Esper stressed he retained the ability to move in and out smaller numbers of forces as needed into Syria. But he suggested the number of

U.S. Says Iran May Have Killed in Recent Protests 1,000 More Than

Iranian security forces may have killed more than 1,000 people since protests over gasoline price hikes began in mid-November, U.S. Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook said on Thursday.“As the truth is trickling out of Iran, it appears the regime could have murdered over a thousand Iranian citizens since the protests began,” Hook told reporters at a briefing at the State Department. He added that “many thousands of Iranians” had also been wounded and at least 7,000 detained in Iran’s prisons. The unrest, which began on Nov. 15 after the government abruptly raised fuel prices by as much as %300, spread to more than 100 cities and towns and turned political as young and working-class protesters demanded clerical leaders step down.

to nominate a new prime minister,” a statement from parliament’s media office said.Lawmakers said Abdul Mahdi’s government, including the prime minister himself, would stay on in a caretaker capacity until a new government is chosen. Under the constitution, President Barham Salih is expected to ask the largest bloc in parliament to nominate a new prime minister to form a government, a move expected to trigger weeks of political wrangling.

U.S. Military Completes Pullback from Northeast Syria

The United States has completed its military pullback in northeastern Syria, settling into a more stable posture of about 600 troops in the rest of the country after repositioning

troops will fluctuate around the -600level for the foreseeable future. Esper also didn’t rule out being able to reduce U.S. troop levels in Syria further if European allies contributed to the Syria mission.

OPEC and Allies Prepare to Deepen Oil Output Cuts

OPEC and its allies led by Russia on Thursday were moving closer to agreeing one of the deepest output cuts this decade to support crude prices and prevent a glut, sources from OPEC and its allied producers said. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) meets on Thursday in Vienna and with Russia and others, a grouping known as OPEC+, on Friday. Three OPEC+ sources told Reuters on Thursday the group would discuss increasing current cuts of 1.2 million barrels per day by more than 400,000 bpd.

The current cuts expire in March and OPEC+

Iraqi Prime Minister Resigns

Iraq’s parliament voted on Sunday to accept the resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi after weeks of violent anti-government protests that have rocked the country. Abdul Mahdi’s decision to quit on Friday came after a call by Iraq’s top Shi’ite Muslim cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani for parliament to consider withdrawing its support for Abdul Mahdi’s government to stem the violence. “The Iraqi parliament will ask the president of state

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sources and delegates have said the new deal could be extended either to June or until the end of 2020. Some sources and OPEC watchers have suggested the overall cut could be closer to 2.0-1.8 million bpd with new cuts and a push for better compliance with targets.

of the public acrimony that had preceded their summit. Diplomats said the “brain-death” debate was key to avoiding a bust-up, possibly spurring Trump to take a more positive view of the alliance than he has in the past.

People March 500,000 More Than Against Macron as Strikes Grip France

Democrats Accuse Trump of Abusing More than 500,000 people have marched in

cities across France as railway workers, teachers and hospital staff held one of the biggest public sector strikes in decades against Emmanuel Macron’s plans to overhaul the pension system.

NATO Avoids a Car Crash Summit

It was shaping up for a repeat of NATO’s disastrous summit of July 2018, when U.S. President Donald Trump unleashed a tirade against European allies and threatened to pull America out of the transatlantic military alliance forged after World War Two. French President Emmanuel Macron had stunned other leaders in the run-up to Wednesday’s meeting in a country estate on the outskirts of London by declaring that NATO was “experiencing brain death”, a comment Trump branded “very, very nasty”. But at their three-hour session, the leaders agreed to appoint a group of experts to conduct a strategic review over two years to prepare the Western alliance for the future - and as they headed home there was little evidence

page report, Democrats leading the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee leveled allegations of sweeping abuse of power by Trump, saying he used U.S. military aid and the prospect of a White House visit to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to undertake investigations that would benefit Trump politically. Republican Trump, who will stand for re-election in November 2020, denies any wrongdoing and calls the inquiry a hoax.

Power, Obstructing Congress› Impeachment Probe

U.S. President Donald Trump solicited foreign interference to boost his re-election chances, undermined national security and ordered an “unprecedented” campaign to obstruct Congress, Democrats said on Tuesday in a report that lawmakers will use as the basis of any formal impeachment charges. In the -300

Police fired tear gas at protesters in the centre of Paris on Thursday and public transport ground to a near halt. The strike pits Macron, a -41year-old former investment banker who came to power in 2017 on a promise to open up France’s highly regulated economy, against powerful trade unions who say he is set on dismantling worker protections. The outcome depends on who blinks first - the unions who risk losing public support if the disruption goes on for too long, or the government which fears voters could side with the unions and blame officials for the standoff.

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over story

There is No Substitute to the American-Led World Order US Disengagement Produces Vacuums that are Filled by the Worst Forces

by Dennis Ross Donald Trump is not an internationalist. He engages with the world but dislikes international institutions.

His speeches to the UN don’t extol the virtues of the organization, they emphasize his world view: everyone pursues their own national interest, and because war is not in anyone’s interest, peace can prevail.

If only the world worked that way. Unfortunately, there are conflicts borne of differing interests and values—and there are states and non-state actors who reject the rights of others. Does Russia accept Ukraine’s right to reform itself and associate with Europe? Does Hezbollah accept Israel’s right to exist? Do the Iranians believe that they have a right to dominate the Middle East?

The fundamental problem with the Trump worldview

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Like the historic strain of American isolationism that he reflects— belligerent isolationism—Trump does not like alliances because they require obligation. insurgency, and a terrible sectarian war. The Obama Administration, fearing that any intervention in Syria would produce another Iraq, adopted a policy of avoidance and a vacuum resulted—and the forces that filled it produced half a million dead, millions of refugees flooding neighboring states and Europe, and the emergence of ISIS. Trump’s decision to exit northeast Syria has created a new vacuum that Russia, Iran, the Assad regime, and Turkey are filling—and already we are seeing Syrian Arab refugees forced to leave Turkey and resettle in a part of Syria that is unknown to them and that has little absorptive capacity. New dangers are certain to emerge.

President Obama declared that he got elected to get us out of Middle East wars, not into them. President Trump wants to end the “endless” wars. Both reflect an understandable sentiment of the American people: they want out of conflicts that prove so costly and only seem to make things worse. The Obama and Trump instincts on engagement could not be more different. Obama was an internationalist, believing that the US should shape the agenda internationally and mobilize others to pursue it. But he was also highly skeptical of the use of force (except for limited counter-terror purposes), saying that those who argued for the use of force and intervention did not understand the meaning of power in the 21st century.

For the Obama view to be right, others have to accept it internationally, and presently they don’t.

US President Donald Trump in the East Room of the White House October ,6 2017 in Washington, DC. (Getty)

is that it leads to no rules, no norms, and no limits.

It is every country for itself. It rationalizes US disengagement and withdrawal. Regrettably, when America disengages, it produces vacuums and those are typically filled by the worst forces. Consider the Middle East: the Bush Administration created a vacuum in Iraq when it removed Saddam Hussein without having a credible plan for who would fill the void—and the result was chaos, a Sunni

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Unlike Trump, Obama accepted America had responsibilities internationally—whether on climate change, pandemics, or terror—and he was determined to work with others to respond to these challenges. Trump seems only willing to work with others if it costs us nothing. Like the historic strain of American isolationism that he reflects—belligerent isolationism—Trump does not like alliances because they require obligation. Like Senator William Borah in the 1920’s and 1930’s, he finds alliances limiting;

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it is not just that allies don’t pay their fair share, it is that alliances both limit our freedom of action and require us to come to their defense. Recall Trump’s asking why we would want to come to the defense of Montenegro, a member of NATO. Democratic presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren extol the virtues of alliances, but also want to pull all US forces out of the Middle East. Will the British and French keep their forces there, exposed, if we have no presence in the region? If it is in our interests to have others help preserve stability and counter common threats, they need to be able to count on us. That does not mean keeping US forces in places mindlessly.

On the contrary, America’s leaders must weigh the implications of different choices. As a starting point, it is essential to know that there is a difference between putting small US forces on the ground to support local partners and leverage their presence to back diplomacy and intervening with tens of thousands of them to resolve distant conflicts or remake states. America’s leaders need a concept that guides our approach to the world and must be ready to explain it to the American people and the world. If they reject the Trump approach, they must be prepared to explain the US role in understandable, repeatable terms.

America, given its economic and military power, has broader responsibilities in the world, not to fight every battle or resolve every conflict, but to help preserve a world that is safer, healthier, cleaner, less conflict-ridden and where all can progress.

My suggestion would be the following and I believe that it would resonate both domestically here in the US and internationally: America, given its economic and military power, has broader responsibilities in the world, not to fight every battle or resolve every conflict, but to help preserve a world that is safer, healthier, cleaner, less conflict-ridden and where all can progress.

Such a world serves our interests, not just our values, because we cannot insulate ourselves from threats that do not respect borders: proliferation, terrorism, climate change, pandemics, economic melt-downs—and the factors that produce them.

We cannot reduce these dangers by ourselves, we

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Syrian men carrying babies make their way through the rubble of destroyed buildings following a reported air strike on the rebel-held Salihin neighbourhood of the northern city of Aleppo, on September 2016 ,11.

Air strikes have killed dozens in rebel-held parts of Syria as the opposition considers whether to join a US-Russia truce deal due to take effect on September 12. (Getty)

need to work with others. There is something else that we cannot do alone: prevent vacuums from forming. And yet we know if we don’t prevent them, sooner or later the forces that fill them will threaten us directly, only then we will have fewer options and the costs in confronting them will be greater. To prevent vacuums from emerging—to ensure we are not the world’s policeman—we need allies who will work with us and local partners who will fight for themselves. But if we berate our allies and betray those partners, we won’t have them. For example, ISIS forces were never going to be defeated only from the air. They had to be rooted out on the ground and it was the Kurdishled Syrian Democratic Forces who did the tough

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fighting on the ground, losing over 11,000 dead.

The US provided logistic and material support, intelligence, liaison, and air and artillery fire—and suffered very few casualties as a result. Here is a model for the future when dealing with threats that may appear distant but may soon come to our shores. To work, the US must also be reliable and trustworthy.

That is a common sense message. There is no substitute for America playing a leading role in the world—the consequences are clear when it does not.

Sooner or later, the US will return to the role it needs to play and that fits the American ethos. Will it be in 2021 or 2025? Time will tell.

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NATO’s Anniversary Summit Highlights Internal Fragmentation Secretary-General Talks Up Alliance Unity Despite Sharp Disagreements

by Yasmine El-Geressi President Donald Trump and 28 other heads of state and government travelled to the UK this week to celebrate NATO’s 70th anniversary alongside Prime Minister Boris Johnson. But while leaders attempted to make

a convincing show of unity, the meeting was instead marked by clashes and started and ended in acrimony.

Even the lead up to the summit was dominated by an array of fractious disagreements over Turkey’s offensive in Syria, uncertainty over US commitment to trans-Atlantic defence, and French President Emmanuel

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US President Donald Trump (R) and France›s President Emmanuel Macron react as they talk during their meeting at Winfield House, London on December 2019 ,3.

(Getty)

Macron’s declaration that the alliance is “brain dead,” a comment that prompted Trump to brand his remarks as “very disrespectful”, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to suggest that Macron himself is “brain dead.”

In recent weeks Macron has tried to shake up the agenda by demanding a review of alliance strategy, but Trump -- who arrived boasting that he had forced members to boost defence spending – struck back hard.

«I think that›s very insulting,» Trump said of Macron›s assertion last month that NATO is experiencing «brain death». Trump warned that “nobody needs NATO more than France,” adding that Macron’s comments were “very dangerous.”

Adding to the fragmented mood, tensions within the alliance were on show when the leaders of Canada, Britain, France and the Netherlands were caught on video at a Buckingham Palace reception on Tuesday evening apparently having a laugh about Donald Trump›s impromptu news conferences and disregard for the day›s scheduling. Canada›s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could be heard saying, «he was late because he takes a 40 minute press conference off the top.» Trump reacted furiously, calling Trudeau “twofaced”, claiming that the Canadian prime minister was upset at US demands for his government to up its defence budget. “I called him out on that, and I›m sure he wasn›t happy about it, but that›s the way it is,” said Trump, who also cancelled his post-summit press conference and cut short his attendance.

The White House and other NATO leaders disagree on my issues; not least Trump›s decision to support NATO member Turkey›s recent military operation in northeast Syria to drive out Kurdish militants that Ankara considers terrorists, the same militants that played a key role in the U.S.-led coalition’s fight against ISIS. On December 3, Erdogan demanded that NATO “recognize as terrorist organizations those we consider terrorist organizations” and threatened to block the Alliance’s plans to bolster the protection of the Baltic republics against Russia over the issue. Speaking at a news conference the following day, NATO secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg , said that allies remain divided over a push by Turkey to designate as terrorist organizations two Kurdish militias, the YPG and PYD. At a NATO Engages — London 2019 event, The BBC’s Lyse Doucet, who moderated the conversation with the former prime minister of Norway, pressed Stoltenberg about whether “NATO’s credibility has been dented by these very public rows about even your founding

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Even the lead up to the summit was dominated by an array of fractious disagreements over Turkey’s offensive in Syria, uncertainty over US commitment to trans-Atlantic defence, and French President Emmanuel Macron’s declaration that the alliance is “brain dead.” principle—all for one and one for all.” But Stoltenberg said that such disagreements are a part of the normal give and take of the Alliance rather than evidence of a breakdown.

“It would be strange if twenty-nine allies with different political parties, different history, different geography, always agreed on everything,” he said. “But the lesson we have learned from history is that despite these differences we have always been able to unite around our core policy to protect and defend each other.”

While the NATO secretary-general has admitted that disagreements are rife in the alliance – on funding, how best to tackle global terrorism, on how to engage with Russia – he wrapped up the summit by trying to talk up NATO unity, saying that the alliance «was the most successful in history because we›ve changed as the world has changed.» He pointed to members agreeing a new plan to defend the Baltic states and Poland as proof it can deliver.

He also rejected criticism from Macron that the military alliance is suffering from «brain death and dismissed complaints from Trump that member states are not boosting their NATO military budgets quickly enough and insisted that the organization is adapting to modern challenges. Trump has called it «obsolete.»

Trump defended Stoltenberg›s record of pushing allies for increased defence spending, but he reiterated his own long-standing complaints. “When I came in, I was angry at NATO, and now I›ve raised 130$ billion,” Trump said, referring to the sum Stoltenberg says Canada and European members since 2016 will have added to the defence budgets by next year.

“And yet you still have many delinquent – you know I call them delinquent when they›re not paid up in full,” Trump said.

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The London Bridge Terror Attack Blame Game Erupts Political Point Scoring Can Lead to Damaging Public Policies

by Yasmine El-Geressi The run-up to the past three major democratic events in the UK have been targeted by terrorists who saw it as an opportune time to act. One week before the June 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, Labour MP Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death by a far-right extremist. The 2017 general-election campaign, which was supposed to be dominated by Brexit, was disrupted by two terror attacks – the Manchester Area bombing and the knife attack on London Bridge - forcing security to the top of the agenda. In what is unlikely to be a coincidence, a terror attack took place in the vicinity during Britain’s current generalelection campaign. Two people were killed in London Bridge, this time by

a convicted terrorist, -28year-old Usman Khan who was released from jail on licence in 2018, half way through a -16year sentence. In the immediate aftermath of these attacks, political campaigning was suspended as a mark of respect, but it didn’t take long for the tragedies to enter the election and referendum debates and be used as tools for political posturing. And the politics of the latest tragedy appear fiercer than ever.

Khan, who had been living in Stafford, was prosecuted seven years ago, for being part of an al-Qaeda-inspired group that plotted to bomb the London Stock Exchange. He was ordered to serve an “indeterminate public protection sentence,” with a minimum of eight years. In 2012, the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences were abolished because they could keep low-risk offenders in jail for too long. In 2013, Khan’s prison term was amended to sixteen years, and, because

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Britain›s Prime Minister Boris Johnson (L) and opposition Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn take part in a vigil at the Guildhall in central London to pay tribute to the victims of the London Bridge terror attack on December ,2 2019. (Getty)

of a general sentencing policy introduced by Gordon Brown’s Labour government, in 2008, he was released in December 2018, halfway through his term. His conditions required him to meet with probation officers twice a week and wear an electronic tag.

He took part in the government’s “Disengagement Programme” run by Cambridge University’s criminology institute, the purpose of which is the rehabilitation of those who have been involved in terrorism.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson immediately established his narrative following the attack by blaming Labour and Jeremy Corbyn for the 2008 law that meant offenders serving extended sentences were no longer reviewed by the Parole Board but automatically released halfway through their term. “Give me a majority and I’ll keep you safe from terror” was the headline on an op-ed written by Johnson for Mail two days after the attack.

Appearing the same day on what The Independent called a “combative edition” of the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, the Prime Minister blamed a former “lefty” government for the sentencing policy that had led to the release of Usman Khan and vowed that if he were to win a majority, terrorists would no longer be eligible for early release. He also made the knee-jerk decision that all serious terror offenses should now carry a minimum sentence of fourteen years. But when he was challenged about what the Conservatives had done to change the law during their past 10 years in power, he repeatedly sought to distance the party. Like much of the past few weeks, the Conservative leader appears to have forgotten that his party has been in charge for a decade, campaigning on the slogan “Britain deserves better”.

One of Khan’s victims was Jack Merritt, 25, coordinator for Cambridge University’s Learning Together initiative, which brings together offenders and those in higher education “to study alongside each other.” In a powerful piece published in the Guardian, his father, Dave Merritt addressed Johnson’s response to the attack that took his son’s life, writing: “He [Jack] would be seething at his death, and his life, being used to perpetuate an agenda of hate that he gave his everything fighting against.”

He added that his son “would not wish his death to be used as the pretext for more draconian sentences or for detaining people unnecessarily.”

This increased the pressure on Johnson after he was widely criticised for appearing to blame Labour for the killings by criminal justice campaigners, experts and politicians, including by a member of his own party. Conservative MP Candidate Fay Jones said criticised Johnson on Wednesday for using the London Bridge terror attack as a “political exercise”.

Johnson has denied claims he was politicising the attack, saying he had campaigned against early release for some time, having previously raised the issue during his 2012 campaign to be mayor of London. «I feel, as everybody does, a huge amount of sympathy for the loss of Jack Merritt›s family, and indeed for all the relatives of Jack and Saskia, who perished at London Bridge,» he said. «But be in no doubt, I›ve campaigned against early release and against short sentences for many years.»

In the same way that Theresa May was held accountable for falling police numbers in the wake of terror attacks during the

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“All our experience shows us that policy decisions taken in the immediate aftermath of shocking events are likely to lead to unforeseen and unintended consequences” Director of the Prison Reform Trust 2017 election campaign, Johnson was also challenged over cuts to police numbers, probation services and the judicial system over the past decade, with Labour blaming budget cuts for “missed chances to intervene”. Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary, raised the issue of police cuts this week, she said: “This was an extreme event but what we can’t ignore is that over recent years we’ve seen increases in violent crime right across the country and at the same time since 2010 we’ve seen over 20,000 police officers cut from frontline services.”

Labour›s David Hanson, a former policing and counter-terrorism minister, said the police had struggled following a reduction in the number of officers and he had concerns about the probation service. «We need to have the 40 percent cut that was taken to the probation service put back in place because that›s one of the issues that›s led to the high risk on this particular case and others,» he said.

Former chair of the Parole Board, Nick Hardwick, said that cuts and the reorganisation of the criminal justice system have made it harder for it to keep the public safe. “«We›ve neglected the criminal justice system, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.»

Many experts have criticised politicians using the attack for political gain and cautioned against introducing kneejerk legislation. In a letter to The Times today 50 eminent criminologists from universities across the world have told politicians not to use the incident as an excuse to end early release or to increase sentences.

Echoing these sentiments, Andrew Neilson, director of campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “Much of the debate since has been distorted by the fact we are in the run-up to a general election.

“It is right that there should be a full investigation into what happened. Any such investigation should consider systemic issues and not simply sentencing policy or the decisions of individuals.

The answer does not lie in writing people off. The focus must be on safely fostering our human potential for change,” he wrote in a statement.

Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “All our experience shows us that policy decisions taken in the immediate aftermath of shocking events are likely to lead to unforeseen and unintended consequences. In criminal justice, those damaging consequences have sometimes lasted for many years, and done incalculable harm.”

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by Scott Atran In September 2014, when ISIS was at the height of its power, Director of U.S. National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that the United States had underestimated the terrorist group’s will to fight.

“We underestimated the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese and overestimated the will of the South Vietnamese,” he told The Washington Post. “In this case, we underestimated ISI[S] and overestimated the fighting capability of the Iraqi army … It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.”

Scholars and policymakers have long sought to determine what drives people to keep fighting when the chips are down, and, if need be, to give their lives to a cause. Traditional explanations, based on rational choice theory or focused on mental abnormalities, have largely failed to explain what motivates the members of extremist insurgent movements. But Clapper was wrong to suggest that the will to fight is imponderable. In fact, it is possible to predict who is willing to fight and die, based on a combination of cultural and psychosocial factors. Research on the human brain suggests that people fight when their sacred values—that is, the values that define their identity and therefore can’t be compromised—are under threat.

Social exclusion and political marginalization heightened the importance of sacred values—and even caused non-sacred values to mimic sacred ones—increasing people’s willingness to fight and die for those values. don’t seem to matter when sacred values are involved.

Most people hold sacred values but become aware of them only when the values come under threat. People see their sacred values as immutable. They find it easy to cooperate unconditionally with people who share them and just as easy to fall into conflict with those who don’t.

SACRED DUTY

To test the relationship between sacred values and violence, we interviewed and surveyed captured ISIS fighters as well as fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PPK), the Iraqi army, and Sunni Arab militias, among others, in 2015 and 2016.

We asked these fighters to identify their important values, and we rated the relative strength of those values by asking if the fighters would exchange them for material benefits. We treated an absolute refusal to contemplate a tradeoff as indicative of a sacred value.

We found that ISIS fighters and Kurdish fighters from the PKK, which the U.S. government considers a terrorist organization, were more likely to consider the cause they were fighting for (the caliphate, for ISIS, and a Kurdish homeland, for the PKK) sacred than were the soldiers from the Iraqi army or Sunni Arab militias.

Moreover, the ISIS and Kurdish fighters expressed a greater willingness to fight than the other militants did. Some even said they would leave their families in harm’s way in order to defend their sacred causes—an excruciating sacrifice that we observed some of them make during the course of the study.

Despite what the term suggests, sacred values are not necessarily those enshrined in holy books. They can stem from country, religion, family—any personal or collective value that defines identity. Previous research focusing on Native North American, Mayan, Palestinian, and Israeli populations indicates that sacred values are strongly resistant to negotiation. Costs, consequences, risks, and rewards—all the motivators on which classic economic and political theory rely—

For the ISIS and Kurdish fighters we interviewed, spiritual strength was more important than material strength, such as manpower or firepower. The fighters expressed willingness to march into battle knowing they were outgunned, because they believed in the sacredness of their cause. This calculus wasn’t rational but, rather, born of an ingrained sense of duty that resembled instinct. As one Kurdish fighter remarked of ISIS, “They are weak now because they have used

In a series of behavioral studies of frontline combatants in Iraq and brain imaging studies of self-identified extremists in Spain, research teams of which I am a part at Artis International, Oxford University, and other partner universities found that those most willing to make costly sacrifices, including fighting and dying, were motivated by sacred values and shunned deliberative reasoning. Even more consequential for policymakers working to prevent and counter radicalization, we found that social exclusion and political marginalization heightened the importance of sacred values—and even caused non-sacred values to mimic sacred ones—increasing people’s willingness to fight and die for those values.

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up their resources, but their fighters don’t retreat even if the battle is lost.”

SACRED, NOT SET IN STONE Having established a connection between sacred values and willingness to fight, we sought to determine if sacredness itself was ever malleable: Could a value be non-sacred one day and become sacred the next, or vice versa? Given the link between sacred values and violence, the ability to shift the boundaries of sacredness could be extremely useful. Previous studies had indicated that social exclusion intensifies extreme behavior and increases the risk of radicalization, so we designed a study to test if such exclusion could strengthen people’s attachment to sacred values or even cause them to assign sacredness to previously nonsacred values. It was a two-stage social experiment in which the participants—38 men living in Barcelona, Spain, who expressed willingness to perform violent acts associated with jihadism—agreed to answer questions, play a virtual ball game, and have their brains scanned.

In the first stage, we asked the participants about the sacredness of their values, again ranking these values according to how willing the participants were to trade them for material gain. The value propositions we ranked ranged from forbidding images of the Prophet Muhammad to preventing gay marriage to requiring women to wear the veil. While most of the participants considered forbidding images of the Prophet and preventing gay marriage to be sacred values, few of them felt the same way about requiring women to wear the veil.

In the second stage of the study, the participants played “Cyberball,” a virtual ball-tossing game, against other

Research on the human brain suggests that people fight when their sacred values—that is, the values that define their identity and therefore can’t be compromised— are under threat.

players with Spanish names. During the game, half of the study’s participants were abruptly excluded from passing the ball. After the game, all of the participants answered questions about their willingness to fight for the previously discussed values while their brains were scanned. When asked about sacred values, all participants showed greater activity of the left inferior frontal gyrus, an area of the brain associated with nonrational thinking. Included and excluded participants alike expressed greater willingness to die for sacred values, compared to non-sacred values, indicating that traditional cost-benefit analyses were not driving their reactions. When the participants were asked about non-sacred values, the scans revealed less rapid, more deliberative responses.

But clear differences emerged between the excluded group and the one that had been allowed to keep playing. When excluded participants were asked about sacred values, their levels of left inferior frontal gyrus activity surged even higher than those who had been allowed to continue playing. Even more strikingly, nonsacred values generated levels of left inferior frontal

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A member of the Iraqi forces walks past a mural bearing the logo of ISIS in Mosul, Iraq. (Getty

The best counterterrorism approach would be to prevent new and potentially dangerous values from becoming sacred in the first place. That would require combating the kind of widespread social exclusion that currently afflicts vulnerable populations. backfiring and increasing radicals’ commitment to sacred values.

Our research also helps to explain why attempts to change or replace violent ideologies have generally had little effect. Efforts that “emphasize facts over propaganda”—as the Belfer Center at Harvard University suggests—or prioritize “evidence-based and data-driven” arguments, as the U.S. State Department recommends, are unlikely to sway people’s thinking on values that tend to be immune to a rational or logical calculus.

gyrus activity similar to those generated by sacred values. Excluded participants also expressed greater willingness to fight and die for those values. In other words, social exclusion appeared to have caused nonsacred values to mimic sacred values, both in terms of brain activity and willingness to fight and die to protect them.

NO VALUES, NO PROBLEMS By demystifying the will to fight, our research should help prevent the United States from underestimating highly motivated insurgencies in the future. But the biggest practical implications of our findings concern efforts to prevent and counter radicalization. Most governments in Europe and North America have adopted policies grounded in rational-choice theory, deploying costs and penalties as means to dissuade radicals from acting on their values. But as our survey and brain imaging studies revealed, those motivated by sacred values are likely to resist rational cost-benefit analyses. Instead of preventing radicalism, “rational” policies might even be perceived as morally outrageous,

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Rather than challenging sacred values, those seeking to prevent or counter radicalization would be better off acknowledging these values while at the same time offering alternative interpretations of their meaning. Salafi preachers have had some success dissuading would-be suicide bombers this way, embedding the Quran’s arguments against violence into interpretations of how to defend Islam. This strategy requires deep engagement with actual social networks, not just in the realm of ideas. But if one person can be convinced to follow a less violent path in support of the group’s sacred values, others may follow.

But the best counterterrorism approach would be to prevent new and potentially dangerous values from becoming sacred in the first place. That, in turn, would require combating the kind of the widespread social exclusion that currently afflicts vulnerable populations in Europe and the United States. If would-be radicals of all stripes regard as sacred fewer tenets of their worldviews, they will have fewer things to fight and die for.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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The Oligarchs Who Lost Ukraine and Won Washington How Kremlin-Backed Authoritarians Sought to Profit From Trump’s Presidency

by Michael Carpenter A congressional impeachment inquiry seeks to determine whether U.S. President Donald Trump extorted a foreign leader, withholding a coveted White House meeting and U.S. military aid in order to promulgate a Russian-inspired conspiracy theory and smear his chief opponent in the 2020 election. The United States’ gravest constitutional crisis since Watergate is not just about preserving the integrity of U.S. democratic institutions from the president’s abuse of power, however. It is an episode

in a broader geopolitical struggle between the defenders of democracy and the forces of oligarchic authoritarianism, from Kyiv’s Maidan to Hong Kong’s Mong Kok. In this wider global conflict, Trump and his surrogates have consistently aligned themselves with the forces of oligarchic authoritarianism—in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and other countries, too. Nowhere is this clearer than in Ukraine.

That Ukraine is at the heart of the U.S. impeachment inquiry is no coincidence. The country is ground zero for the struggle

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between democratic rule of law and authoritarian oligarchy.

Halfway around the world from Washington’s halls of power, Ukraine sits along a civilizational and geopolitical fault line. To Ukraine’s west are the liberal democracies of Europe, governed by rule of law and democratic principles. To its east are Russia and its client states in Eurasia, almost all of which are corrupt oligarchies.

Competition between these two governance systems has twice erupted into violent conflict. Russia’s war against Georgia in 2008 and its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 were both efforts to protect the Kremlin’s sphere of oligarchic interests from democratic reformers who had come to power through revolutionary social movements. This same motivation underlies Russia’s covert war of influence in other parts of the world, from Moldova to Montenegro and from Syria to Venezuela. In this war on democratic movements and democratic principles, Russia’s biggest prize and chief adversary has always been the United States. Until now, however, Russia has always had to contend with bipartisan resolve to counter its efforts to subvert U.S. democratic institutions.

THE OLIGARCHS’ SPHERE OF INFLUENCE

Petro Poroshenko (C) attends the session of Parliament in Kyiv, Ukraine, October ,31 2019. (Getty)

An extraordinary political event led Russian Spetsnaz forces and military intelligence (GRU) officers to stealthily take control of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014. A month earlier, in February, Ukrainian citizens had risen up against President Viktor Yanukovych, a deeply reviled kleptocrat who had perpetrated such audacious acts of corruption—such as installing an ostrich zoo in his official residence—that not even his oligarch cronies could defend him any longer. The last straw came when Yanukovych’s security forces fired on and killed more than a hundred pro-democracy protesters on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, in mid-February 2014.

With blood on his hands, Yanukovych fled Kyiv in the dead of night and landed in Russia several days later.

Yanukovych’s decision to flee Ukraine enraged Russian President Vladimir Putin, not because Putin had some special affection for Yanukovych—in fact, he looked down on him as a petty thug of limited intellect—but rather because Yanukovych’s abdication of power imperiled the oligarchic system of influence through which the Kremlin controlled Ukraine. In this tributary system, oligarchs were allowed to enrich themselves at public expense as long as they maintained fealty to the Kremlin. The Maidan revolution’s promise of democratic reforms and accountability threatened to wipe out this oligarchic system of patron-client ties and thus posed a real danger to Moscow’s influence in Ukraine.

The “little green men” that Putin deployed to eastern Ukraine were part of a coordinated Russian military response to Ukraine’s democratic revolution. Deeper inside Ukraine, the same corrupt oligarchs and officials who had pilfered public resources under the Yanukovych regime manned a second, civilian front. The organization that united these corrupt interests was the pro-

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Russia’s war against Georgia in 2008 and its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 were both efforts to protect the Kremlin’s sphere of oligarchic interests from democratic reformers who had come to power through revolutionary social movements.

Russian political machine known as the Party of Regions, which the political scientist Taras Kuzio has aptly described as a party of “crony oligarchs.”

During his campaign for president in the spring of 2014, Petro Poroshenko vowed to honor the sacrifices of the “Heavenly Hundred” (as the Maidan martyrs were known) by bringing about the “deoligarchization” of Ukraine and taking on these entrenched interests. Poroshenko was himself an oligarch and a founding member of the Party of Regions, but the international community gave him the benefit of the doubt. The months of Poroshenko’s presidency ticked by, and the promised deoligarchization never took place. Indeed, almost no one from the previous regime was held accountable. Poroshenko’s handpicked prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, not only failed to properly investigate high-profile cases of corruption but was personally implicated in a shakedown run by two subordinates who became known throughout Ukraine as the “diamond prosecutors,” because stashes of diamonds were found in their homes. Shakedowns by corrupt prosecutors had been routine under Yanukovych. Their recurrence under the Poroshenko administration worried many of Ukraine’s international supporters.

As a result of this backsliding, the international community insisted that concrete benchmarks be met before assistance could be disbursed to Ukraine. The demands included Shokin’s removal, the thorough reform of the Office of the Prosecutor General, and the establishment of dedicated anticorruption institutions free of political influence. Under coordinated pressure from Ukraine’s major donors—the United States, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund—Ukraine established independent, national bodies to prevent and root out corruption. It also empowered a special anticorruption prosecutor and set up dedicated anticorruption courts. Collectively, the reforms were potential game-changers. Precisely for this reason, they posed a direct threat to Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs and the officials who enabled and profited from their corruption.

THE TRUMP REVOLUTION As pro-democracy reformers struggled to defend their country

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against Russian aggression and simultaneously worked to reform Ukraine’s oligarchic system of self-dealing, on the other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump was mounting a highly unorthodox political campaign. In sharp contrast to other Republican primary candidates, Trump expressed a highly positive view of President Putin and repeatedly shrugged off concerns about the kleptocratic and authoritarian nature of Putin’s regime. Trump also jolted establishment Republicans just prior to the Republican National Convention in July 2016 by instructing surrogates to remove support for military aid to Ukraine from the official GOP platform.

In March 2016, Trump had made another unusual decision by hiring Paul Manafort as his campaign manager. Many establishment Republicans saw Manafort as having gone over to the “dark side” by working for corrupt authoritarians such as Yanukovych, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. Though Trump had plenty of connections of his own to Russia, Manafort brought new links to the Kremlin that went through the Party of Regions political machine.

Manafort’s ties included oligarchs such as Oleg Deripaska, whom the Treasury Department later sanctioned for having “represented the Russian government in other countries”; Dmytro Firtash, whom Republican Senator Roger Wicker described as “a direct agent of the Kremlin”; Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch and a leading industrialist in the Donbas; and Serhiy Lyovochkin, another Donbas oligarch who had served as the head of Yanukovych’s Presidential Administration and later the leader of the rebranded Party of Regions, known as Opposition Bloc. These were not just casual acquaintances: Manafort reportedly owed Deripaska 10$ million, had worked with Firtash on possibly redeveloping Manhattan’s Drake Hotel, and stayed

As pro-democracy reformers struggled to defend their country against Russian aggression and simultaneously worked to reform Ukraine’s oligarchic system of self-dealing, on the other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump was mounting a highly unorthodox political campaign.

in close touch with Akhmetov and Lyovochkin. Special Counsel Robert Mueller found, for example, that Manafort had tasked his business partner Konstantin Kilimnik—whom the FBI claimed had “ties to Russian intelligence”—with passing campaign polling data to both Akhmetov and Lyovochkin in 2016 for reasons that remain unexplained to this day.

In mid-August 2016, Manafort was suddenly forced to resign from the Trump campaign after it was revealed that he had received secret payments totaling 12.7$ million from the Party of Regions. The ties between the Party of Regions network of oligarchs in Ukraine and the Trump campaign persisted, however, after Manafort’s departure. Many of these oligarchs may have seen a Trump victory in 2016 as a way to get U.S. law enforcement off their backs and potentially even return to power in Ukraine. Lyovochkin and his fellow Party of Regions comrade Serhiy Kivalov were spotted reveling at Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Their dreams of a comeback seemed within reach.

TRUMP’S UKRAINIAN SURROGATES During Mueller’s investigation, the Trump administration struggled to fend off accusations of collusion with Russia, and Ukraine’s underworld of pro-Russian oligarchs and corrupt officials tried to discredit the investigation’s core premise: that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump. Just a few weeks after celebrating Trump’s inauguration in Washington, Lyovochkin penned an op-ed in U.S. News & World Report titled “Ukraine Can Win in the Trump Age,” where he sounded an optimistic note about the Trump presidency and put forth a conspiracy theory that not Russians but rather Ukrainians had interfered in the 2016 election and had done so on behalf of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This narrative, first articulated by Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sought to flip on its head the detailed evidence of Russian interference to support the Trump campaign, holding instead that anti-Trump Ukrainians had worked behind the scenes to smear Manafort and thereby tilt the vote in Clinton’s favor.

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Russia›s President Vladimir Putin (L) meets with Viktor Medvedchuk, chairman of the political council of Ukraine›s Opposition Platform - For Life party, on the sidelines of the 2019 Eastern Economic Forum on Russky Island. (Getty)

In the months that followed, the pro-Kremlin network in Ukraine began plotting a disinformation campaign against one of the most forceful supporters of Ukraine’s sovereignty and an ardent champion of its fight against corruption and Russian aggression: former Vice President Joe Biden (for whom the author served as a foreign policy adviser in 15–2014). A former Ukrainian military prosecutor named Konstantin Kulyk compiled a dossier of false allegations against Biden, claiming that Biden had improperly advocated for the removal of Viktor Shokin as prosecutor general. In fact, Biden had done so as part of a coordinated U.S. policy that was aligned with that of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Kulyk had interests of his own in the matter. He had come out of the notoriously corrupt Kharkiv Office for Combating Organized Crime, where cops and criminals were largely indistinguishable, and was appointed as a military prosecutor in part thanks to Viktor Shokin. In June 2016, Kulyk was indicted for illicit enrichment in what was then a major corruption scandal. He reportedly met with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in Paris and plied him with disinformation to advance the conspiracy theory that Shokin had been improperly fired at Biden’s urging.

At around the same time, Giuliani formed a business relationship with Gennady Kernes, the mayor of Kharkiv. According to Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian organized crime, Kernes had “recent gang ties” and was until 2014 a “stalwart” of the Yanukovych regime. Despite these dubious associations, Giuliani’s private company, Giuliani Security & Safety, signed a contract with the city of Kharkiv, and Giuliani even flew to Kharkiv on a private jet to consummate the deal with Kernes in 2017. A pro-Russian oligarch named Pavel Fuchs reportedly brokered that contract between Giuliani and Kernes. As a real estate developer in Russia, Fuchs had been engaged on the Trump Tower Moscow project prior to the 2016 election; in 2017, he hired Giuliani to work for the city of Kharkiv. In a subsequent interview, Fuchs asserted that he considered Giuliani to be a “lobbyist for Kharkiv.”

During his appearances on Fox News, Giuliani repeated almost verbatim the conspiracy-minded talking points of another former member of the Party of Regions and Kharkiv native, Andriy Derkach, illustrating the pathway by which pro-Russian disinformation traveled into the U.S. news media. Disgraced former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, a former head of the Party of Regions who had fled to Russia together with Yanukovych, also weighed in to support the claims against Biden that Giuliani and Trump promoted.

But perhaps no Party of Regions figure has a bigger stake in Trump’s fortunes than Dmytro Firtash. According to a 2014 Reuters investigative report, Firtash’s multibillion-dollar fortune “was built on remarkable sweetheart deals brokered by associates of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.” In 2013, however, Firtash was indicted in the Northern District of Illinois on bribery charges. He is currently in Vienna awaiting extradition to the United States. As part of a last-ditch effort to avoid extradition, Firtash asked Shokin, the corrupt former prosecutor general,

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to file an affidavit claiming that Firtash, like Shokin, had been unfairly singled out by the Obama-Biden administration. Firtash retained the husband-and-wife legal team of Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing, who reportedly have ties to both Giuliani and Trump.

THE SUBVERSION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY President Trump’s attempts to coerce Ukraine into furthering his domestic political agenda are inextricably linked to the revanche of pro-Russian forces inside Ukraine. Those forces seek to curry favor with Trump’s inner circle. The same machine-style tactics that the Party of Regions honed for close to two decades in Ukraine—enlisting corrupt prosecutors to press politically motivated charges, bribing officials, offering sweetheart deals to political allies—have surfaced repeatedly in this network’s outreach to Trump and his surrogates.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry, for example, recommended a donor to his 2010 gubernatorial campaign as an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the person was rewarded with a lucrative Ukrainian oil and gas contract. Giuliani’s private security company signed major deals with the mayors of Kyiv and Kharkiv while Giuliani was engaged on Trump’s behalf. And of course Giuliani’s associates Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas tried to use their connections to the White House to secure sweetheart deals in Ukraine’s energy sector, all while working to spread falsehoods about Biden and the 2016 election.

The country that profits most from these corrupt ties is Russia, which has relied on the Party of Regions for decades as a lever of influence in Ukraine. In 2014, the Kremlin was caught by surprise when Ukrainians rose up against this oligarchic system. Putin has been fighting back ever since. Despite Putin’s war and the vast amounts of dark money Russia has spent to co-opt politicians, Ukraine has thus far resisted subversion. Tragically, the United States has proven more vulnerable.

The president’s abuse of office for personal, political ends has done enough damage to the democratic institutions and political culture of the United States. But by aligning himself with the forces of corrupt oligarchy—whose ultimate patron in Ukraine is the Kremlin—Trump has upended a bipartisan U.S. foreign policy tradition of support for democratic rule of law.

The days when the United States stood for what was right and honorable—fighting corruption, supporting the rule of law, encouraging democratic movements—have come to an end.

They do so just as millions of anticorruption demonstrators take to the streets of Moscow, Prague, Bratislava, Beirut, Tbilisi, Jakarta, and many other cities to protest oligarchic regimes that stifle their democratic aspirations. Restoring the integrity of U.S. democratic institutions will require not only cleaning our own house but redoubling our commitment to democracy in this larger global struggle.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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A Way Out of Spain’s Catalan Crisis And Why Madrid Is Unlikely to Take It

by Laia Balcells

its differences with the central government.

On October 14, Spain’s Supreme Court sentenced Little, in other words, has changed in the two years Madrid declared the referendum illegal several leaders of the Catalonian separatist since movement to lengthy prison terms for their role and temporarily dissolved Catalonia’s regional in organizing a controversial independence government. Until recently, Prime Minister Pedro referendum two years ago. What followed Sánchez and his center-left Spanish Socialist seemed, in some ways, like a tragic replay of Workers’ Party (PSOE) ruled out any and all the failed 2017 secession bid: protests erupted dialogue with the pro-independence Catalan in Barcelona, some descending into vandalism; leaders. After an election in early November, riot police manhandled peaceful protesters; and Sánchez moderated his stance somewhat—a Catalonia was left without a clear path to resolving concession to the far-left party Podemos and

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Little, in other words, has changed in the two years since Madrid declared the referendum illegal and temporarily dissolved Catalonia’s regional government. reach back several centuries. Compared with neighboring states such as France, the Spanish nation-building project was unusually weak, in part because the state spent its resources less on the building blocks of a common national identity, such as mass schooling, and more on maintaining a financially ruinous empire abroad. That historical weakness shapes Spanish national consciousness to this day. It is evident in the country’s deep distrust of subnational diversity and the widely held belief that distinct national identities threaten rather than complement the Spanish state. Elites in Madrid view any serious challenge to national unity—even demands for self-determination in a democratic referendum—as nothing short of treason. In their eyes, secessionist claims are by definition illegitimate and pro-independence leaders can never be valid interlocutors.

Police officers and Catalan regional police «Mossos D’Esquadra» officers stand guard at the entrance of the Barcelona Sants railway station, as demonstrators gather with a Catalan pro-independence «Estelada» flag during a protest called by local Republic Defence Committees (CDR) on November 16, 2019 in Barcelona. Getty

ROOTS OF A RIFT

Yet more recent history weighs heavily on Madrid’s mind, too—above all the fight against the Basque terrorist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA. From its founding in 1959 until a ceasefire in 2011, ETA fought for the creation of an independent Basque state, carrying out hundreds of attacks and killing over 800 people. The strategy had some public support among the Basques while Spain was still under the rule of dictator Francisco Franco. But this support progressively faded after the country’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s, especially as ETA’s deadly attacks became more indiscriminate.

The Spanish government, meanwhile, made several attempts at negotiation with the terrorists and granted Basque nationalists significant concessions (including fiscal autonomy for the region).

The roots of Madrid’s inflexible position

But the central state also responded to ETA’s

to pro-independence members of the Spanish parliament whose support he needs to form a workable left-wing government. As a result, dialogue with pro-independence political parties is becoming more of a possibility. But for reasons both historical and strategic, Madrid will be hardpressed to agree to any meaningful compromise, and the crisis is likely to continue.

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terrorism—and to the frequent rioting in various Basque cities—with a decidedly heavy hand. For example, from 1983 to 1987, officials in successive PSOE governments covertly established and funded death squads that targeted suspected ETA members.

In 2003, Spain’s Supreme Court banned the Basque nationalist party Batasuna for its ties to ETA. (Batasuna was widely considered the political arm of the terrorist group.) Courts also declared several other Basque nationalist organizations illegal on grounds of collaboration with ETA. These judicial actions, which arguably limited the Basques’ freedoms of expression and of assembly, together with counterterrorist policies such as police raids and arrests, likely played a role in demobilizing radical Basque nationalists and contributed to ETA’s cessation of hostilities in 2011. (The group formally disbanded in 2018.)

Catalan secessionism has been overwhelmingly peaceful, in sharp contrast to the violence unleashed by ETA. But Spanish political and social elites, including influential party leaders, tend to view the two as similar. (To wit: Pablo Casado, head of the center-right People’s Party, stated earlier this year that the agenda of Catalan nationalists was “the agenda of ETA.”) And because steadfast repression eventually made the “Basque problem” go away, leaders in Madrid likely believe that same approach can be deployed to similar effect in Catalonia.

electorally, whereas hard-line approaches do: the Catalan crisis has been wind in the sails for staunch Spanish nationalists in the upstart far-right party Vox. In contrast, those that advocate for middleground solutions and de-escalation, such as the far-left party Podemos, have been losing support.

Other parties have taken note and have rushed to outbid one another in their hostility to the cause of Catalan self-determination. That politicians have Party politics has compounded the problem. been in permanent campaign mode—the result of Leniency toward Catalonia does not pay off chronic political gridlock in Madrid, which has led the country to hold four elections in as many years—has only made matters worse. Similar outbidding dynamics have driven polarization in Catalonia, where any attempt to negotiate is met with fierce opposition by nationalist hardliners, who believe there is nothing left to discuss with Madrid.

Party politics has compounded the problem. Leniency toward Catalonia does not pay off electorally, whereas hard-line approaches do.

A DIFFERENT PATH But there is little evidence to date that Madrid’s maximalist strategy is working. Leaders in Madrid seem to expect the separatist

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President Quim Torra accompanied by his wife Carola Miró and lawyers before entering to testifying to the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia.

Getty

True healing would likely require an even more radical step: an officially sanctioned, binding independence referendum. also require Catalan nationalists to pledge not to use the region’s increased autonomy to pursue the goal of independence—a hard pill for separatists to swallow.

movement to deflate, but a significant number of Catalans—41.9 percent, according to an October poll taken before the Supreme Court verdict—remain determined in their demand for independence.

One could imagine a Spanish government that took a radically different path—one that sought a way out of the current deadlock through negotiation and compromise. According to another recent poll, 45.7 percent of Catalans would be happy with a devolution agreement that granted the region greater powers of self-government. Satisfying such a large proportion of Catalans would likely shrink support for secession by a significant margin. But even if leaders in Madrid had the political will to pursue this outcome—which they do not—selling the agreement to a distrustful Catalan public would be a tall order: under Spain’s current constitutional architecture, the central government can reclaim its devolved powers at any time, leaving the Catalans without any guarantee that Madrid would keep its promises down the road. Any devolution agreement would

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True healing would likely require an even more radical step: an officially sanctioned, binding independence referendum. Catalans are divided on the question of independence, but polls consistently show they are united in their desire for a fair vote to decide the future of the region.

Allowing a binding referendum would mean risking secession and all the complications that this would entail. But a process of open deliberation in which citizens could freely express their preferences would likely give Catalans a sense of political empowerment, no matter the outcome.

In addition to a vote, lasting peace would require some sort of amnesty for the politicians and activists imprisoned for organizing the 2017 referendum, as well as those prosecuted but living in exile. These prisoners have inevitably become political martyrs for the Catalan nationalist movement, and their continued incarceration is fueling further mobilization and radicalization.

That Madrid has continued to arrest and prosecute protesters and activists has only added fuel to the fire.

Yet as long as no major Spanish political party has an incentive to seek compromise, Madrid is unlikely to change tack. A courageous leader might decide that seeking a way past the impasse is worth getting punished by voters down the line.

But this kind of leadership has yet to emerge, and in its absence, de-escalation in Catalonia remains a distant dream.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Troubles on the Mekong How Climate Change, Dams, and Geopolitics Threaten a River’s Future

by Sam Geall On October 29, Laos unveiled a new dam in the country’s north. The -1.3gigawatt Xayaburi dam sits on the Mekong River, which flows the length of the country. Laos plans to build nearly a hundred like it by 2020—many with direct funding and support from China—in a bid to become “the battery of Asia,” exporting two-thirds of the energy it will generate from hydropower. But the dams threaten to choke an already encumbered river. As the Xayaburi dam started operating, water levels in the Mekong sank to 1.5 meters, the lowest level in a century. Reports emerged from neighboring Thailand of sandbars jutting into the waterway and channels running dry.

The Mekong River is an essential artery in Southeast Asia. Conditions that affect its waters carry outward to the region as a whole, and Lao dams are only one

of the factors now pressing on the river’s ecosystem.

The Mekong flows through six nations, from the Tibetan plateau to the South China Sea, and it is the most productive inland fishery in the world, valued at 17$ billion a year. Around 60 million people live in the Mekong basin, and 80 percent of them depend on the river for their food or livelihoods.

Climate change already poses a major and growing threat to life and livelihoods on the river. According to some studies, two-thirds of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the Mekong could disappear by the end of the century. Scientists have warned that the shifting path of tropical cyclones is changing the Mekong basin irreversibly: with disturbed patterns of rainfall, the region is more prone to drought. Changing climate patterns exacerbate other problems on the river, such as sediment loss, increased salinity, and the erosion of riverbanks.

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With major dams popping up in the coming years, these communities are likely to face further hardship: water levels will grow erratic, subject to sudden floods, and river ecosystems will sustain serious damage. to protect their livelihoods and to safeguard the river from ruin.

CHINA LOOKS TO THE MEKONG Since 1995, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam have cooperated in managing the river and its resources through an intergovernmental organization called the Mekong River Commission. At least in their rhetoric, member states of the MRC have embraced the principle of managing the Mekong in the best interests of the region and its ecological sustainability. In 2010, the MRC urged a ten-year moratorium on large hydropower dams on the river.

This screengrab from an aerial video taken on October 2019 ,28 shows the Mekong river in Sungkom district in Nong Khai province, more than 300km from the Xayaburi dam.

(Getty)

Aggressive infrastructure development on the Mekong will worsen the effects of climate change.

But China has many such projects in mind. Within its own borders, China has already built at least ten large dams on the main trunk of the river. Those dams have begun to negatively affect fisheries, riverbank gardens, and farms downstream. Now Beijing is helping to accelerate dam construction down the river in Laos and Cambodia, making the Mekong a major arena for the projection of Chinese interests in Southeast Asia.

The communities that depend on the Mekong find themselves at the nexus of seemingly implacable forces: the consequences of climate change, the geopolitical ambitions of China, and the indifference of their governments. Against immense odds, residents of the Mekong basin are developing ways

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But the MRC has no power to enforce its own recommendations. Laos, which is poorer than its neighbors, has sought to jump-start development by attracting investment, principally from China. The country’s ramped-up dam construction is part of an enormous Chinese-backed hydropower expansion.

In 2015, China established a rival institution to the MRC that has already effectively eclipsed it.

The Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Framework (LMC), aptly described by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi as not a “talk shop, but a down-to-earth bulldozer,” has a remit that goes well beyond the river. It dovetails with China’s ambitious global infrastructure project known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Beijing’s investment in the region further reflects a desire to create new transit routes that reduce China’s dependence on a single shipping chokepoint—the Strait of Malacca, patrolled and policed by the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet—for much of its oil imports.

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As an investor and a creditor, China exerts considerable political and economic control over countries on the Mekong River. International organizations warn that Laos is at high risk of debt distress thanks to its borrowing from China, with its share of public debt forecast to reach 70 percent of GDP. Each year, the LMC leaders’ summit produces significant spending pledges: China promised 12$ billion in loans and grants in 2018. Signature projects include a China–Laos high-speed railway that will connect Kunming in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province to Singapore. China also supports the construction of special economic zones, such as Sihanoukville in Cambodia and Savan-Seno in Laos, which many locals derisively view as vice-ridden Chinese enclaves.

States along the river look to rival and regional powers as a hedge against rising Chinese influence. Countries as disparate as Japan, India, Thailand, Australia, and the United States have set at least 13 competing initiatives into motion in the Mekong basin. These aim to support regional economic integration and, increasingly, to set up projects that uphold higher international standards for infrastructure building.

But so far, they pale in comparison with the scale and speed of China’s expansion down the Mekong.

ON THEIR OWN Those who live in the Mekong River basin are

The Mekong River is an essential artery in Southeast Asia. Conditions that affect its waters carry outward to the region as a whole, and Lao dams are only one of the factors now pressing on the river’s ecosystem.

already suffering one of the worst droughts in a century. With major dams popping up in the coming years, these communities are likely to face further hardship: water levels will grow erratic, subject to sudden floods, and river ecosystems will sustain serious damage. But those residents who take up the defense of the environment do so at the risk of facing government hostility.

Southeast Asian states have a history of stigmatizing and criminalizing environmental activism. Last year, a section of the partly built Xe Pian Xe Namnoy dam in Laos collapsed, leading to severe flooding in several villages that killed scores of people. The Lao government responded by cracking down on reporters. That same year, in Vietnam, a chemical spill killed enormous numbers of fish, leading fishermen to protest. A Vietnamese court sentenced blogger Hoang Duc Binh to 14 years in prison for live-streaming their action. In northeastern Cambodia, soldiers killed three “forest defenders”—a conservation worker, a forest ranger, and a military police officer—in 2018 in apparent retaliation for

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A man sits in a fishing boat while travelling along the Mekong River at Sangkhom district, in the northeastern Thai province of Nong Khai, with Laos seen on left, on October 2019 ,31. (Getty)

resources. Residents said that the Thai government and the developers had neither consulted communities nor conducted environmental assessments prior to setting up the zone and welcoming potential Chinese investors.

A better future for the Mekong basin might lie in energy sources other than hydropower. In Thailand, for example, an innovative block-chain-enabled realtime peer-to-peer trading scheme has demonstrated the potential for solar power producers to trade excess energy across the grid, helping to lower energy costs and maximize the use of renewable energy. In Myanmar, solar photovoltaic microgrids are helping to expand clean energy access and economic opportunity for the poor. Such underthe-radar initiatives—led by an unruly coalition of actors, from riverine activists opposed to large dams to development agencies and private enterprises— offer alternatives to large, centralized power projects. Modern energy systems in the region can be decarbonized and decentralized.

the seizure of equipment owned by illegal loggers, who smuggle wood into Vietnam in collusion with security forces.

On the banks of the Mekong in northern Thailand last autumn, one activist told me she had lost all hope that the river would be saved. She and fellow residents were already seeing parts of the river damaged irreparably from blasting and dredging for commercial shipping; villagers watched as unexpected water releases from Chinese dams washed away their seasonal riverbank gardens.

Instead, her struggle had become one for dignity: “to tell my grandchildren I fought for their future.”

HOPEFUL ENERGIES On the banks of the Mekong near Chiang Khong in northern Thailand, I visited the site of a proposed special economic zone—now scrapped after a local outcry. If built, the development would have destroyed a wetland area still used as a communally managed source of fish, bamboo, and other natural

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One study, commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund, found that by 100 ,2050 percent of the Mekong basin’s power supply could be generated by renewable and sustainable energy technologies— such as wind, solar, biogas, geothermal, and biomass.

The plan does not include large-scale hydropower dams.

China has the experience and the resources to support such a future. Beijing has cultivated solar power domestically and has used renewable energy to help alleviate poverty within its own borders. A government initiative supports the installation of rooftop solar energy systems in the poorest villages and counties across China, allowing residents to generate electricity for their own use and make money by selling surplus energy back to the grid. Mekong communities, with the help of their governments, could encourage China and other foreign investors to see the economic opportunity in more sustainable energy projects in the region. Such an outcome might bring hope to the river’s communities and a brighter future for the rich ecologies upon which they depend.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1777- December- 06/12/2019

Taylor Swift: America’s Unbeatable Pop Sweetheart www.majalla.com

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Boost your activity level in small bites Incorporating Brief Spurts of High-Intensity Physical Activity Throughout Your Day Can Help You Move to the Next Fitness Level

by Harvard Women›s Health Watch If you›re not very active but looking to move more, a new strategy might help you get going.

Called high-intensity incidental physical activity, or HIIPA for short, it›s a new take on highintensity interval training (HIIT) -- only you

might find yourself vigorously pushing a vacuum instead of going for a run.

HIIPA (not to be confused with the HIPAA health care privacy rule) is a term coined in an editorial published online Sept. 3 by the British Journal of Sports Medicine. It borrows from the idea

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While it remains to be seen whether adding intense bouts of more general types of physical activity through HIIPA will produce any of the same health benefits as interval training, it does provide a way to increase overall movement raises your heart rate counts -- walking up a flight of stairs instead of taking the elevator, carrying in a load of groceries, or doing some heavy cleaning around the house. The editorial›s authors, a team of international experts, say the goal is to perform an activity that gets you a little out of breath.

Incidental physical activity can last for as little as a few seconds (the amount of time you take to go up the stairs) to a few hours (like when you›re doing yardwork). Activity intervals should be worked in at least three times throughout your day (preferably more).

CHANGING IDEAS ABOUT ACTIVITY

behind HIIT, which is a workout that alternates between high-intensity and low-intensity activity.

But instead of performing these high-intensity intervals during exercise, HIIPA encourages otherwise sedentary people to add a few moderately strenuous physical activities during the course of their regular day. Anything that

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This idea came about in the wake of the 2018 U.S. Physical Activity guidelines, which recognized for the first time that physical activity, done for any amount of time, helps to improve health, says Dr. Meagan Wasfy, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Previous guidelines said that activity had to be completed in -10minute blocks. HIIPA takes that concept of promoting any type of movement, for even short durations, and merges it with interval training, which has known benefits.

The goal is to help people who might otherwise not do any formal exercise at all to find a sustainable way to increase their daily movement and potentially boost their fitness. The ultimate goal should be to reach the recommended activity levels of at least 150 minutes per week of

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moderate intensity activity or 75 minutes a week of vigorous activity.

Staying active, staying healthy Performing regular physical activity can help you stay active as you age.

«If you want to live your longest and have a high quality of life, you›ll want to be able to maintain your functional fitness,» says Dr. Meagan Wasfy, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Incorporating bursts of more intense activity into your day during household activities can help you achieve that goal. «Think of it as training for daily life,» she says. You just need to exert more energy during your regular activities.

How can you do that? Start by identifying points in the course of your day when you can naturally boost your activity.

«Stairs are a good example. It takes a lot of effort to go up the stairs,» says Dr. Wasfy. So, if there is an opportunity to take the stairs, try to work it in. «Instead of picking the easier way to do something, try to do something that will require more physical effort,» she says.

While this approach can be beneficial for everyone, it›s an easy way for people who currently don›t

Called high-intensity incidental physical activity, or HIIPA for short, it›s a new take on high-intensity interval training (HIIT) -- only you might find yourself vigorously pushing a vacuum instead of going for a run.

move much to improve their fitness.

«Integrating this into your life does stand to have benefits,» says Dr. Wasfy. And over time, sedentary people might be able to use that increased activity level as a stepping-stone toward a regular exercise program, she says.

IMPROVING FITNESS IN LESS TIME HIIT, when performed safely and correctly, can promote more rapid fitness gains. Those short

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high-intensity bursts get your body accustomed to harder workouts, which builds your fitness over time. This exercise pattern has been shown to lower blood pressure and blood sugar, reduce cardiovascular risk factors, and help you maintain muscle and lose weight, particularly belly fat.

While it remains to be seen whether adding intense bouts of more general types of physical activity through HIIPA will produce any of the

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same health benefits as interval training, it does provide a way to increase overall movement, which experts already know is good for your health. For many people, getting enough exercise is an ongoing challenge. This strategy makes it easy to incorporate more activity into your day, without expending too much time.

«What matters most in the end is that you›re out there moving your body,» says Dr. Wasfy.

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Taylor Swift: America’s Unbeatable Pop Sweetheart Majalla - London Born in 1989 in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, Taylor swift is country singer turned pop diva and a platinum-selling music superstar.

Her grandmother had been a professional opera singer, and Swift soon followed in her footsteps, discovering her love for music as toddler. She began performing in her home town at the age of 10 at fairs and karaoke contests. She started writing songs at the age of 12, and this was the same time she started learning guitar. Taking her inspiration from country artists such as Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks, Swift’s material reflected her experiences of tween alienation. Her talent was evident and so was the support of her parents and so when she was 13, her family sold their Christmas tree farm and moved to Tennesse so that she could devote more time to co-writing songs and trying to land a recording contract in nearby Nashville.

A stellar performance at The Bluebird Café in 2005 in Nashville helped Swift get a contract with Scott Borchetta, then a DreamWorks Records executive. She released her first single, «Tim McGraw,» in 2006, which was an immediate success and became a Top 10 hit on the country charts. Now 16, Swift followed with self-titled debut album in October of that same year, which went on to sell more than 5 million copies. Swift won critical praise for her debut and was certified platinum in 2007, having sold more than one million copies in the US. In 2008, released

her next album, Fearless, which hit the top of both the country and pop charts and stayed there for 11 weeks. By the end of the year, Swift had become the highest-selling country artist of the year. Speak Now, delivered almost two years later entered the Guinness Book of World records and consolidated her success, moving Swift into the stratosphere of superstardom. Her popularity only increased over her next three albums -- Red (198 ,)2012 2014( 9), Reputation (2017) -- and found her moving assuredly into a pop realm, showing her fans that she wasn’t just a country artist.

With Red she entered the Guinness Book of World Records again for being the first female to have two million selling album openings.

And after the critically acclaimed album ‘1989’ she became the first female to have three consecutive albums selling over 1 million copies in their first week. In 2017, she released her «Look What You Made Me Do» as the lead single from her sixth album, Reputation. The song topped the charts in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Its music video had over 43.2 million views during its first day on YouTube, breaking the site›s record for the most-viewed music video in 24 hours.

Swift has won several of the most prestigious awards as a vocalist, which include 10 ‘Grammy Awards’, 23 ‘Billboard Music Awards’, 11 ‘Country Music Association Awards’, 8 ‘Academy of Country Music Awards’, 19 ‘American Music Awards’, 1 ‘Brit Award’ and an ‘Emmy Award’. In

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July this year, Swift was ranked at No. 1 on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list, pulling in pretax income of 185$ million over the past year, her biggest earnings total yet. Her estimated pay grew %131, after clocking in at 80$ million in 2018. Swift has become well known for her philanthropy and has generously supported many charities.

Along with the success came some headlines, first in the form of an infamous appearance at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards where her acceptance speech was interrupted by Kanye West, who protested that the award should have gone to Beyonce for what he called “one of the best videos of all time.” In 2016 Swift’s feud with West resumed after he released the single “Famous.” The song included a lyric in which Swift was referred to as a “bitch,” and she alleged that it was misogynistic. Swift’s controversies continued as she took part in a widely publicised civil trial in August 2017, after former radio host David Mueller sued the singer, her mother, and a promoter, claiming that Swift had falsely accused him of sexually groping her in 2013 during the taking of a photograph and thus destroyed his career.

Swift countersued him for alleged assault and battery, and a jury ruled in her favour in 2017, awarding her 1$ in damages as a symbolic gesture. Her romances with famous celebrities - none of which have been hidden from the spotlight - have also gained much media attention, most notably Taylor Lautner, John Mayer, Jake Gyllenhall, Harry Styles, Calvin Harris and Tom Hiddleston.