"The One That Got Away" - How Bill Browder Still Keeps Putin Up at Night

How to Save U.S.-Turkish Relations

A Weekly Political News Magazine

How Washington Can Prevent Midterm Election Interference

Is a Storm Brewing in the Taiwan Strait?

Issue 1707 - August 03/08/2018

“The One That Got Away” How Bill Browder Still Keeps Putin Up at Night www.majalla.com

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Issue 1707 - August 03/08/2018

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n this photograph taken on July 2018 ,31, visitors walk along the 150 meter long Cau Vang 'Golden Bridge' in the Ba Na Hills near Danang. - Nestled in the forested hills of central Vietnam two giant concrete hands emerge from the trees, holding up a glimmering golden bridge crowded with gleeful visitors taking selfies at the country's latest eccentric tourist draw (Getty) 4

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“The One That Got Away” - How Bill Browder Still Keeps Putin Up at Night 8

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The events that led to the adoption of the Magnitsky Act in the US, Canada, and Europe, serve as an illustration of just how far and deep the Putin regime is willing to go when it comes to silencing its critics and hoarding money events that led to the adoption of the Magnitsky Act in the US, Canada, and Europe, serve as an illustration of just how far and deep the Putin regime is willing to go when it comes to silencing its critics and hoarding money. It is also a story of astonishingly successful, yet fragile, international cooperation in support of human rights.

SERGEY MAGNITSKY’S MURDER Bill Browder, an American-born investor, founded and ran the largest investment firm in Russia, called Hermitage Capital Management. As Browder later wrote in his Politico story, he was very successful, but faced tremendous amount of corruption at the Russian companies in which his fund invested. As a result of these public complaints Browder wrote that, “President Vladimir Putin had me expelled from the country and declared a threat to national security. Eighteen months later in June 2007, my Moscow offices were raided by the police, and the documents they seized were used to fraudulently re-register the ownership of our investment holding companies as well as to create 1$ billion of fake tax liabilities. In December, the corrupt officials used their new ‘ownership’ of our companies and the fake liabilities to fraudulently reclaim 230$ million of taxes we paid in the previous year.” According to Browder, it was the largest tax rebate in the history of Russia.

William Browder, chief executive officer of Hermitage Capital Management, testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled ‹Oversight of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and Attempts to Influence U.S. Elections› in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, July 2017 ,27 in Washington, DC. (Getty)

by Maia Otarashvili* To say that the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki caused an international outrage would be an understatement. The fallout, primarily directed at President Trump, was so severe that the infamously crude-mannered president had to make a retraction a day later. Unfortunately, the hidden, and not so hidden, disturbing messages that came out of that meeting were all too abundant to be remediated by the replacement of a “would” with a “wouldn’t.” One such message, uttered very strategically by Mr. Putin at the press conference, merits extra attention as it tells a story of corruption, murder, and international espionage on the highest levels in Russia. The story of a wealthy US-born investor›s decade-long crusade against Putin is well known to most foreign policy pundits, but much less known publicly. The

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After the raids took place, Browder hired Sergey Magnitsky, a young Russian lawyer and auditor. In 2008, acting on behalf of Browder, Magnitsky untangled a dense web of 230$ million in tax fraud. His investigation led directly to the Kremlin and Putin’s inner circle of oligarchs. Magnitsky quickly became the target of investigations and police intimidation.

He was arrested without charges and beaten to death while in police custody. As Browder later recounted, “There was no plausible deniability to Sergey’s torture and murder. In his 358 days in detention, Sergei had written over 450 complaints documenting what had been done to him. We received copies of these complaints, and together they provided one of the most granular accounts of human rights abuse to come out of Russia in the last 35 years.”

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What came after that was a decade of one (very wealthy and angry) man’s fight for justice, on an international scale.

THE MAGNITSKY ACT In 2004, US President George W. Bush signed Proclamation 7750 to suspend entry “as immigrants or nonimmigrants of persons engaged in or benefiting from corruption.” As the proclamation states: “I have determined that it is in the interests of the United States to take action to restrict the international travel and to suspend the entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of certain persons who have committed, participated in, or are beneficiaries of corruption in the performance of public functions where that corruption has serious adverse effects on international activity of U.S. businesses, U.S. foreign assistance goals, the security of the United States against transnational crime and terrorism, or the stability of democratic institutions and nations.”

The Proclamation 7750 inspired Browder’s idea for the Magnitsky Act, a piece of legislation that could possibly avenge Magnitsky’s tragic death. The act would be operational within President Bush’s Proclamation 7750, so the individuals who had a part in his death, and who have engaged in such high-level corruption and human rights abuses would not be able to benefit from access to Western nations physically or financially.

Browder headed to the State Department and pleaded his case to the head of the Office of Russian Affairs: “This is the most well documented human rights abuse case since the end of the Soviet Union. It’s been independently recognized that a number of Russian officials were involved in Sergei’s death.” The meeting did not go in favor of enacting the 7750. After all, it was March

The Magnitsky Act and its impact are a reminder that supporting the victims of human rights abuses in Eastern Europe and elsewhere is a long-standing American tradition, and that it can be done well when its done with conviction

2010, and the promise of the Obama-led US-Russia “reset” had not yet proven itself a futile undertaking.

Soon after, Browder met with Kyle Parker, a Senate staffer at the US Helsinki Commission, a US government agency that promotes human rights, military security, and economic cooperation in 57 countries across Europe, Eurasia, and North America. With Parker’s help, and Senator Ben Cardin’s direct support, the Magnitsky story reached Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as the entire legislative branch of the US government, with a list of 60 Russian individuals who, according to Browder’s investigation, played a role in Magnitsky’s intimidation, arrest, torture, and death.

It took Browder nearly two years of relentless lobbying in Washington to get the Magnitsky Act passed. Finally, President Obama signed it into law on December 2012 ,14. The law bans Russian individuals who have been suspected in murder and serious human rights abuses from entering the United States and also freezes their US assets. The Magnitsky act not only sanctions the people directly involved in Magnitsky’s murder, but also all human rights violators in Russia.

But why do the Magnitsky sanctions matter to Putin? It turns out that they have really struck a nerve for the former KGB officer

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At the time of the adoption ban some 120,000 orphans in Russia were up for adoption, many of them with special needs. Three times as many lived in the foster care system. One could argue that this was more of a punishment of orphan Russian children, than that of the United States, but as recent commentary put it, it was “an example of tit-for-tat diplomatic warfare.”

The adoption ban, as dramatic as it was, did not stop the US government from implementing the sanctions. The steadily expanding list of targeted Russian individuals includes more than three dozen people so far. Moreover, soon after the signing of the US Magnitsky Act, European allies followed suit. Various EU bodies, as well as a number of individual EU states, including the UK, Holland, Estonia, Italy, and Poland, adopted similar sanctions. In October 2013, Canada joined that list. In the fall, the parliament of Moldova is set to vote on adopting Magnitskyrelated sanctions.

THE MAGNITSKY ACT AND THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

A picture taken on December 2012 ,7, shows snow clad grave of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky with his portrait on the tomb (C) at the Preobrazhenskoye cemetery in Moscow.

(Getty)

turned president. To stay in power for a long time, Putin has had to create a certain elite base in the Kremlin. “The Putin cronies,” as they are often referred to, or his group of ultra-wealthy supporters, are an important factor in keeping the regime stable, and propping up the president. In return, Putin guarantees the safety of their foreign bank accounts and vast wealth, much of which has been obtained through corrupt means. Providing this cover, or “krisha” as they often call it in Russia, is Putin’s main tool for garnering the necessary elite support to safely stay in power. When Western nations systematically start freezing and confiscating these assets, and denying visas so these individuals can no longer enjoy all that the prosperous Western countries have to offer (from London to New York to Miami and Los Angeles), the disgruntled elites in Russia will no longer see an incentive in supporting Putin. The Magnitsky sanctions were designed to hit Putin where it would have hurt most, and all of this took place well before the Ukraine-related sanctions or any of the other headline-making sanctions that have been put in place since.

In an act of retaliation in December 2012, Putin signed into law a ban on adoptions of Russian children by American citizens. This law blocked the departure of hundreds orphans in the midst of the adoption process from Russia. Until 2012 Russia was one of the main “suppliers” of adoptable children to the United States.

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The Magnitsky Act is a lot more than an Obama-era measure.

In December 2017, during his first year in office, President Trump signed the Global Magnitsky Act which, like the original Magnitsky Act, targets human rights abusers, in this case all over the world, by freezing their US assets and denying them US visas. Additionally, the Trump administration, whether reluctantly or not, has overseen a process of increasing and deepening further Russia sanctions. For example, in April 2018, the US government passed another round of sanctions imposed by the US on Putin’s top cronies. The new sanctions target seven of Russia’s richest men and 17 top government officials.

However, the Trump administration’s relationship with Russia is a lot more complex. For example, the fateful Trump Tower meeting between the Russian lawyer, Natalia Vesilnitskaya, and Trump campaign staff before the 2016 presidential election was reported to have been about the Russian child adoption ban. But adoption ban really means sanctions. Vesilnitskaya has been working for years on overturning the Magnitsky Act. While the details of this meeting are unknown, it is clear that Moscow has been seeking out various ways to get the Trump team to help Putin get to Browder. Jury is still out on whether the Trump team has agreed or collaborated.

But the real evidence of just how much Browder has gotten under Putin’s skin was put on display for the world to see at the postHelsinki summit press conference.

“So far, I can say the following. Things that are off the top of my head. We have an existing agreement between the United States

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of America and the Russian Federation, an existing treaty that dates back to 1999. The mutual assistance on criminal cases.” … … “This treaty has specific legal procedures we can offer. The appropriate commission headed by Special Attorney Mueller, he can use this treaty as a solid foundation and send a formal, official request to us so that we could interrogate, hold questioning of these individuals who he believes are privy to some crimes.” …

“We can actually permit representatives of the United States, including the members of this very commission headed by Mr. Mueller, we can let them into the country. They can be present at questioning.”

“In this case, there’s another condition. This kind of effort should be mutual one. Then we would expect that the Americans would reciprocate. They would question officials, including the officers of law enforcement and intelligence services of the United States whom we believe have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia. And we have to request the presence of our law enforcement.”

After the long lead-up, Putin finally got down to the specifics of what was really on his mind: “For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder in this particular case. Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over 1.5$ billion in Russia. They never paid any taxes. Neither in Russia nor in the United States. Yet, the money escapes the country. They were transferred to the United States. They sent huge amount of money, 400$ million as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Well, that’s their personal case. It might have been legal, the contribution itself. But the way the money was earned was illegal. We have solid reason to believe that some intelligence officers, guided these transactions. So we have an interest of questioning them. That could be a first step.

We can extend also it. Options abound. They all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.”

Unfortunately, what created a sense of unease was Mr. Trump’s reaction to this “offer.”

“So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that president Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. And what he did is an incredible offer. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer.”

While bi-partisan outrage ensued in the US, the White House Press Secretary told reporters two days after the summit that Putin had actually asked Donald Trump to let Russian officials question the former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul,

as well as other US individuals, many of whom are known Russia critics and avid Magnitsky Act advocates, including the congressional staffer, Kyle Parker. However, the US Senate quickly voted 0-98 for a nonbinding resolution opposing the «making available of current and former diplomats, officials, and members of the Armed Forces of the United States for questioning by the government of Vladimir Putin.»

On the other hand, it took the US President days to “consider the offer”, according to his Press Secretary, before declining Moscow’s request for access to the individuals in question.

This situation, and the White House’s clumsy way of handling of the clever, yet transparently ill-intended, Russian maneuver has raised many questions. Was Mr. Trump unaware of the magnitude of the Magnitsky Act? Was he naive enough to think that handing over a former American diplomat or any other US official to a murderous autocratic regime for “questioning” was even a possibility? After all, he himself signed the Global Magnitsky Act, and has on many occasions said that he is much tougher on Russia than President Obama ever was. Does this

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Russian opposition leaders (first row) Boris Nemtsov (2L), Vladimir Ryzhkov (2R) and Mikhail Kasyanov (1R) attend an opposition rally on January 2013 ,13 on the Boulevard Ring in the center of Moscow against a Kremlin law that banned US adoptions of Russian orphans. (Getty)

mean that Mr. Trump was fully informed going into his private meeting with Mr. Putin, but still chose to call Putin’s clearly cynical, if not dangerous offer on “exchanging intelligence” an “incredible offer”?

Another important question concerns the fate of Mr. Browder himself. The avid Kremlin critic is front and center on Putin’s radar, yet he has managed to grow his mission by leaps and bounds while also staying safe. So many of his friends and supporters have become victims of Russia’s manipulation of the Interpol or have been assassinated. Is Browder safe? He says Putin wants him dead but he isn’t hiding from the fame and attention he has garnered over the years. He frequently appears on CNN, FOX, and other major media outlets. He has managed to garner bipartisan consensus in America in support of human rights. He has also managed to do the same in Europe and Canada. Thanks to his crusade, one man’s death has become the symbol of a greater cause. Can the same be said for the thousands of Ukrainians and Georgians who have been killed in the various 21st century wars waged by Russia in their countries?

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Will the US continue to stand its ground against Putin’s policies as Georgia prepares for its month of national mourning in August at the 10th anniversary of Russian invasion, or as Ukraine enters its fifth year of civil war in Donbas? The Magnitsky Act and its impact are a reminder that supporting the victims of human rights abuses in Eastern Europe and elsewhere is a long-standing American tradition, and that it can be done well when its done with conviction.

Browder’s 2015 book, Red Notice, documents the story of Sergei Magnitsky and Browder’s own journey seeking justice for the young lawyer’s death. *Maia Otarashvili is a Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI).

She is co-editor of FPRI’s 2017 volume Does Democracy Matter? The United States and Global Democracy Support. Her research interests include the geopolitics of the Black Sea-Caucasus region, the postCommunist CEEE countries, EU’s eastern enlargement policies, and Russian foreign policy.

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Is a Storm Brewing in the Taiwan Strait?

Tensions Are Rising Between Beijing and Taipei

By Michael Mazza On June 24, in her first interview with Western media in well over a year, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen called on the international community to “work together to reaffirm our values of democracy and freedom in order to constrain China and also minimize the expansion of their hegemonic influence.” These are remarkably strong words for a president of the Republic of China (Taiwan)—even for Tsai, a member of the notionally

independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

Since Tsai was elected in 2016, she has remained committed to the status quo in cross-strait relations, despite what she called in her interview “immense pressure” from Beijing. This means maintaining de facto rather than de jure independence for Taiwan, conducting cross-strait affairs in accordance with the ROC constitution and extant legislation, and respecting

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The nearly 70 years since the initial split between the two governments has been characterized by varying degrees of animosity. government was still in office. In the 35 months since Tsai’s victory, Beijing has cut off official communications across the strait, stolen Taipei’s diplomatic allies, used economic leverage to punish Taiwan, ensured Taiwan’s exclusion from international forums, and increased the pace and scope of military exercises in the waters surrounding the island. Xi shows no signs of letting up anytime soon.

Xi’s pressure campaign, however, should not be read simply as a sign of displeasure with the current DPP government. Although the DPP has in the past considered moves toward formal independence, so far the government has not openly threatened the crossstrait relationship. On the contrary, it has eschewed talk of independence and even offered the occasional olive branch to Beijing. The real reasons for Xi’s concern run deeper than any one government or party. Support for unification is plummeting among the population of Taiwan at the same time that Xi is making unification a more important component of his vision for the future of China—his so-called China Dream. Tsai’s recent foreboding remarks suggest that she sees what many in the West are failing to recognize: the relationship between Taipei and Beijing is becoming untenable, and trouble is brewing in the Taiwan Strait.

FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen inspects a military exercise at Penghu Islands on May 2017 ,25 in Penghu, Taiwan.

(Getty Images)

previously negotiated cross-strait agreements.

Beijing, on the other hand, has intensified its efforts to unify Taiwan and mainland China under Beijing’s “one China” principle. In response to the 2016 election in Taiwan—in which the DPP gained simultaneous control of the executive and legislative branches for the first time—Chinese President Xi Jinping immediately launched a pressure campaign on the island, beginning even while the relatively China-friendly Ma Ying-jeou

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The nearly 70 years since the initial split between the two governments has been characterized by varying degrees of animosity. But in recent decades, Beijing’s approach to pushing Taiwan toward unification has not always been as outwardly aggressive as it is today.

During Ma Ying-jeou’s presidency, from 2009 to 2016, China’s strategy was to increase Taiwan’s economic dependence on the mainland, thus, in its thinking, making unification inevitable. But to the frustration of Hu Jintao, the president of China from 2003 to 2013, and now Xi, the people of Taiwan considered more than just their pocketbooks when it came to defining the nature of their relationship with China.

The signature achievement in the cross-strait rapprochement of the Ma era was the Economic

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Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), essentially a cross-strait free trade agreement. The ECFA did not have the positive economic impact that many economists anticipated, but even a wildly successful free trade agreement would not necessarily have increased Taiwanese support for unification. Many Taiwanese at the time, especially younger citizens, were wary of tightening cross-strait ties. For them, Beijing had always been essentially a foreign power with malign designs on the island, and they questioned whether rapprochement was in their interests. During Ma’s second term, in 2014, student and civil society groups occupied the Legislative Yuan to halt the passage of the Cross-Strait Service Trade agreement, a treaty aimed at liberalizing trade in services between the mainland and the island. More than 100,000 people took to the streets in Taipei to support the occupiers’ demands. Later that year, the DPP made significant electoral gains in local polls, and in 2016, it achieved unified control of the central government.

The success of the independence-minded DPP occurred in the context of a long-term trend that should be worrying for Beijing, but that it has proved incapable of controlling: over the past three decades, the percent of the population in Taiwan that identifies as Chinese has plummeted as Taiwanese identification has surged.

In 46.4 ,1992 percent of those surveyed by the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University reported that they identified as “both Taiwanese and Chinese”; 25.5 percent identified as Chinese; and 17.6 percent identified as Taiwanese. In December 2017, dual identification had fallen to 37.3 percent and Chinese identification to 3.8 percent. Taiwanese identification, on the other hand, had risen to 55.3 percent of respondents.

Interestingly, the percentage of respondents identifying as solely Taiwanese peaked at 60.6 percent in 2014, during Ma’s second term, while Taipei and Beijing had a closer relationship than is typical. During the same period, support for eventual independence grew, as

China and Taiwan are looking more and more like an unstoppable force and an immovable object, separated by only 100 miles of open water

did support for maintaining the status quo indefinitely.

Support for eventual unification and for near-term unification have both decreased since the survey was first conducted in 1994. Put simply, distance did not make Taiwan’s heart grow fonder, but familiarity apparently did breed contempt.

TAIWAN’S PLACE IN THE CHINA DREAM All of this spells trouble for China’s goal of unification.

In fact, since Taiwan’s first direct presidential election in 1996, China has failed to make any progress toward this goal. The past 20 years of cross-strait relations, together with decreasing support for unification in Taiwan, suggest that at this point un-coerced unification is simply not in the cards.

But rather than accepting this reality and attempting to shift focus away from the island, Xi has made unification an important component of his China Dream. He began talking about the “great renewal of the Chinese nation”—which, for him, requires formal unification with Taiwan—during a speech he gave in 2012 as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

Of course, perhaps even more pivotal to the China Dream than territorial expansion is guaranteeing the economic well-being of Chinese citizens. Last fall, at the 19th Party Congress, Xi asserted that by midcentury

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primary goals. First, China hopes to isolate Taiwan on the international stage and advance its one-China narrative, with the aim of decreasing foreign interest in Taiwan’s plight and discouraging intervention on its behalf. Second, Beijing seeks to convince Taiwan’s people that the island’s continued existence as a de facto independent state is a lost cause, and that they lack both the means and the allies that would be necessary to resist unification. Finally, China strives to normalize its military operations in Taiwan’s vicinity, all the while wearing down the island’s own military assets by forcing them to constantly react to Chinese military activities.

To be sure, China still prefers to achieve unification nonviolently (although such unification would of course still be coerced). But the possibility of Beijing turning to violence cannot be ruled out—in fact, it is currently seeking to create the conditions in which the use of force against Taiwan would be a more viable option.

ROUGH SEAS AHEAD

Chinese President Xi Jinping and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (not in picture) deliver speech at the opening ceremony of South Africa-China Scientists High Level Dialogue between the two countries' scientists on July ,24 2018 in Pretoria, South Africa. (Getty Images)

the CPC would “develop China into a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.” But as policy experts Derek Scissors and Dan Blumenthal have argued, the Chinese economy may be entering a period of stagnation. “Absent powerful pro-market reform that is nowhere in sight,” they posit, “true economic growth will halt by the end of this decade, no matter what the government claims.”

If Xi turns out to be unable to deliver on his promises of economic prosperity for all Chinese people, as may well be the case, the other components of the China Dream will become more important. Unsurprisingly, he spoke about Taiwan in strident terms at the Party Congress. In what was reportedly one of the speech’s biggest applause lines, Xi affirmed his commitment to “safeguarding China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” “We have the resolve, the confidence, and the ability to defeat separatists’ attempts for ‘Taiwan independence’ in any form,” he declared. “We will never allow anyone, any organization, or any political party, at any time or in any form, to separate any part of Chinese territory from China!”

Beijing’s coveting of Taiwan is not new, but under Xi its aim has grown steadier. Broadly speaking, Xi’s pressure campaign against Tsai’s government has three

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In 2013, Xi told Vincent Siew, a former vice president of Taiwan, that “the issue of the political divide that exists between the two sides must step by step reach a final resolution, and it cannot be passed on from generation to generation.” But Taiwan’s leaders have reason to worry about the freedom of future generations should China get its way.

Xi is clearly eager to make measurable progress toward unification, but that is proving difficult to do without a willing partner across the strait. Even if the nominally pro-unification Kuomintang (KMT) were to take back the presidency in 2020, it still might not cooperate with his agenda. Like the DPP, the KMT is shaped by larger societal trends. Given the direction in which public opinion is moving in Taiwan, in coming years it is more likely that the KMT will move closer to the DPP on China than vice versa.

China and Taiwan are looking more and more like an unstoppable force and an immovable object, separated by only 100 miles of open water. Taipei has proved itself a responsible actor in East Asia and will seek to avert a potentially cataclysmic collision, as long as doing so does not require submitting to Beijing. Whether Beijing will accept anything less than submission, however, is not at all clear. If Xi finds he cannot deliver on his promise of a better life for all Chinese, he may welcome a confrontation with Taipei. The Taiwan Strait is already known for its strong winds and choppy waters—but rougher seas lie ahead.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

How Washington Can Prevent Midterm Election Interference Information Sharing With Silicon Valley Is Crucial 18

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The result is a government that’s very good at ingesting information, but very bad-and very slow-at sharing it attack before the 2018 midterm elections. Faced with mounting evidence of continued Russian efforts “to undermine America’s democracy,” in the words of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, the administration needs to take concrete steps to prevent further foreign interference. For a moment last month, it looked as though this were starting to happen: reports emerged that the U.S. government had met with eight leading technology companies to discuss how to safeguard the upcoming midterm elections. It was an encouraging sign that the administration seemed to be taking the threat to the United States seriously and recognizing the critical role of the private sector in protecting the integrity of the electoral process.

Unfortunately, a closer look revealed a serious flaw in this otherwise promising engagement. The New York Times reported “a tense atmosphere in which the tech companies repeatedly pressed federal officials for information, only to be told—repeatedly—that no specific intelligence would be shared.” This tight-lipped approach was apparently one-sided. Although the tech companies were open about what kinds of disinformation they were monitoring on their platforms, “neither the F.B.I. nor the Department of Homeland Security was willing or able to share specific information about threats the tech companies should anticipate.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin speeches during his annual meeting with ambassadors, permanent representatives and other Foreign Affairs Ministry employees on July 2018 ,19 in Moscow, Russia. (Getty Images)

By Joshua A. Geltzer, Dipayan Ghosh When the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this month announced indictments of 12 Russian intelligence officials for hacking the Democratic Party’s and Hillary Clinton’s e-mails in 2016, President Donald Trump’s first reaction was to blame the administration of Barack Obama for not taking action against the interference. “Why didn’t they do something about it, especially when it was reported that President Obama was informed by the FBI in September, before the Election?” he tweeted.

Trump will have no one to blame but his own administration, however, in the event of another such

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Sadly, this type of impasse sounds all too familiar. Both authors served in the White House; one focused on counterterrorism, the other on technology policy. In our experience, getting the government to cooperate with the private sector so that the private sector could help the government was a critical agenda item—and a persistent uphill battle.

SHARING IS CARING The U.S. government is, as a general matter, not built to share intelligence on national security threats with nonstate entities. The relevant intelligence tends to be classified, even if it derives from an open source such as the Internet. Getting approval to share such information tends to be a painstakingly slow and tedious process that

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requires obtaining consent from many different parts of the government, from the intelligence community to law enforcement to the military, all of which have a greater incentive to deny the request than risk mistakenly sharing something sensitive.

The result is a government that’s very good at ingesting information, but very bad—and very slow—at sharing it. This is helpful for safeguarding the secrets that can be used to protect the United States and the sources and methods used to obtain them. But it’s decidedly unhelpful when the private sector, rather than the government, is on the frontlines of addressing key national security threats.

With great profits comes great responsibility. The leading U.S. technology companies owe it to the United States to help ensure that the foreign election interference the country suffered in 2016 doesn’t repeat itself in 2018 or beyond. (Indeed, one of us has set out a “checklist” of steps the tech sector should take to improve its readiness in this regard.) But recognizing the private sector’s responsibility doesn’t let the government off the hook. To the contrary, the private sector is best able to play a productive role in tackling national security challenges when informed by the government’s latest, best understanding of those challenges.

This is a lesson we’ve learned firsthand in the past decade in the area of cybersecurity. In response to an escalating series of data breaches in the years leading up to 2015, the U.S. government created a number of channels to share up-to-date information on cybersecurity threats with the private sector, with leadership from the White House, Justice Department (including the FBI), and Department of Homeland Security, among other parts of the federal government. These policy measures, the most critical of which included executive action undertaken by Obama and the passage of the Cybersecurity Act of 2015, established DHS as the hub for cyberthreat information

The government can even go one step further by declassifying at least portions of what it is learning through sensitive sources and methods so that this information can be shared with the private sector

sharing with the private sector. DHS, in turn, was charged with creating channels for real-time information sharing with the rest of the government. The department accordingly issued guidance to industry pursuant to the new law in 2016.

Now Washington needs to place the same priority on informing the private sector about what the government is seeing on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections— including new election interference trends and tactics and any pattern of activities across different channels that those who work at a single platform may not notice. Many of these activities are happening on the public Internet, so it shouldn’t be hard to share unclassified analyses of them. Doing so, in and of itself, would be a significant positive step forward.

The government can even go one step further by declassifying at least portions of what it is learning through sensitive sources and methods so that this information can be shared with the private sector.

This is perfectly feasible with the right priorities and institutional structure. To the private sector, it frequently

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do to make it happen.

COOPERATION IS KEY In the recent past, the U.S. government has shared key analyses of major challenges in areas such as cybersecurity and terrorism with relevant actors in the private sector.

This type of public-private cooperation often happens only after a major incident, when the government enlists companies’ perspectives and expertise, or vice versa. After the horrific December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, for instance, Obama dispatched to California much of his national security cabinet to discuss with tech sector leaders how to improve cooperation on counterterrorism.

President Donald Trump speaks during his Make America Great Again Rally at the Florida State Fair Grounds Expo Hall on July 2018 ,31 in Tampa, Florida. (Getty Images)

won’t matter exactly what sensitive technique or source the government used to learn something or how it did so.

What’s important is making the bottom line clear—for example, that a certain set of themes will be emphasized in foreign-driven messaging—so that officials at key technology companies can check the authenticity of accounts disseminating those themes. Such information sharing would let the private sector more effectively devote resources to combating malicious campaigns while allowing the government to keep sensitive sourcing behind the information classified.

Making these changes requires real commitment, including a mandate from leaders such as the director of national intelligence clearly establishing that declassifying and sharing this sort of information is a national priority.

Leadership at the White House or in the intelligence community should also create a clearly defined and empowered interagency group charged with pursuing that priority on an expedited timeline. Taking these steps could immediately help Silicon Valley defend against agents spreading nefarious content, including those who try to interfere in and subvert the U.S. political process—a big reward for the amount of work Washington would need to

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The threat of foreign interference in the U.S. election process is important enough to warrant similar cooperation. As the government’s increasingly proactive support to the private sector to address cybersecurity threats has shown, a leadership mandate and defined interagency team can, together, make the central conclusions of even sensitive information available to the private sector. But up to this point, Washington has not taken the necessary steps to guard against interference in the 2018 elections. The absence of leadership from the White House has been particularly glaring, especially after Trump decided to question whether Russian hackers even interfered in the 2016 elections while standing alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Even the FBI’s task force on election interference—hardly the robust interagency creation necessary to succeed—appears to be losing its key personnel. And although the Justice Department’s brand-new Cyber-Digital Task Force report rightly notes that “the Department can help social media providers” by sharing information about potential threats to election integrity, nowhere does the report indicate that the department is in fact already doing this.

It is striking to read that Facebook, not the government, had called the recent meeting—the first of its kind between tech companies and state agencies leading up to the midterms—a mere six months before the upcoming midterms. Let’s hope that a second meeting happens soon and that this time the government shows up prepared not only to learn but to share what it already knows.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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How to Save U.S. - Turkish Relations For the Sake of the Alliance, Erdogan Must Fold

By Amanda Sloat The tense relationship between the United States and Turkey is reaching an inflection point. As the Turkish government has taken an increasingly authoritarian turn and made questionable foreign policy choices in recent years, Washington has tried to exercise strategic patience and engage Turkish leadership to resolve differences between the two countries. But that patience is wearing thin, as Ankara has repeatedly failed to respond to Washington’s concerns—chief among them right now the imprisonment of Andrew Brunson, a Christian pastor from North Carolina, on specious terrorism charges. The handling of the Brunson case, which came to a head last week when he was moved to house arrest rather than released, will affect the future of bilateral ties. If negotiations fail, the United States may

feel compelled to shift its approach away from diplomacy and toward economic leverage. In this game of foreign policy poker, Turkey’s struggling economy may force President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to fold first.

The United States and Turkey have collected long lists of grievances against each other over the last few years. On one side, the Turkish government feels that the United States has failed to take seriously its security challenges. It has been frustrated with U.S. support for a faction of Syrian Kurds (People’s Protection Units, YPG) in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS). Given the group’s links to a domestic Kurdish terrorist organization (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK), Ankara’s primary goal in Syria has been preventing the YPG from creating an autonomous Kurdish region along the Turkish border, which it fears could lead to an independence bid or be used to stage attacks on Turkey.

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Ankara pressed the point by launching military action against YPG forces in January 2018, which diverted some fighters away from U.S.-led operations against remaining ISIS elements.

Many Turks remain hurt by the perceived failure of Western leaders to comprehend the trauma of the July 2016 coup attempt and to express immediate support for the country’s democratically elected leader. Despite opposition to Erdogan within the electorate, there was rare consensus across the political spectrum that a military overthrow was not the solution. There is further consternation that the accused mastermind, Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, is residing legally in Pennsylvania. Ankara has provided boxes of documents to the U.S. Justice Department in an attempt to prove his guilt. Washington has not found the evidence sufficiently compelling to persuade a federal judge of probable cause meriting extradition. In an effort to address this impasse, U.S. officials have held several technical meetings with their Turkish counterparts to discuss the evidence presented. They have also continued separate investigations, which predate the coup, into U.S.-based charter schools run by Gulen’s followers.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (L) meets with US President Donald Trump (R) as part of his bilateral meetings, at the Lotte New York Palace Hotel in New York, United States on September 2017 ,21. (Getty Images)

For its part, the United States has begun questioning whether Turkey is still a reliable ally. Americans are troubled by the Turkish government’s overzealous response to the attempted putsch: initial efforts to detain suspected coup plotters turned into a maximalist purge of affiliated Gulenists and a witchhunt against political opponents. A three-month state of emergency was imposed immediately following the coup, extended repeatedly, and only allowed to lapse in mid-July when parliament introduced anti-terrorism legislation that enshrines many emergency measures in Turkish law. Fluid definitions of terrorism under the state of emergency led to the imprisonment of several American citizens, as well as Turkish employees of two U.S. consulates, on baseless charges of links to the PKK and Gulen. Brunson’s case has provoked the loudest outcry in the United States and received high-level attention across the government. Turkish officials insist that the case is solely within the competence of the independent judiciary, but Erdogan’s remarks have suggested otherwise. He has engaged in hostage diplomacy, stating publicly last September that he would hand over one cleric in exchange for another: Brunson for Gulen.

The United States is also concerned about Ankara’s plans to purchase the S400- missile defense system from Russia. This system would not be interoperable with NATO and could compromise the security of F35- stealth fighter jets, which the United States is selling to Turkey as part of a European consortium. These plans have raised broader questions about whether Turkey is shifting its strategic orientation away from the alliance.

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE When Trump took office, Erdogan hoped he would rectify Obama-era grievances by taking steps such as extraditing Gulen

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The Turkish economy is even more vulnerable to external shocks now than it was then, making it an important potential leverage point for the United States and ceasing cooperation with the YPG. However, the new administration did not deviate significantly from existing U.S. policies on Turkey. (This is notwithstanding the improprieties of Michael Flynn, former Trump campaign adviser and briefly U.S. national security adviser, who was allegedly offered 15$ million by representatives of the Turkish government to return Gulen to Turkey, among other favors.)

Tensions spiked in the fall of 2017 when, in response to the arrests of its local staff, the U.S. embassy suspended nonimmigrant visa services. Turkey promptly took reciprocal action.

The United States lifted the suspension after Ankara assured it that no additional local employees were under investigation, staff would not be arrested for performing official duties, and advance notice would be given before any future arrests. But Ankara failed to release the jailed employees and even placed a third staffer under house arrest. The bilateral relationship faced additional strain in January 2018, when the Turkish military drove Russianbacked YPG fighters from the Afrin region of northwestern Syria.

Ankara’s threats to expand this operation 60 miles east to Manbij, where U.S.-backed YPG fighters and U.S. Special Forces were based, raised the worrying prospect of Turkish and American soldiers pointing guns at one another.

The Trump administration has sought to improve relations through diplomatic engagement. During the same week in February 2018, the national security adviser, secretary of defense, and secretary of state all met with their Turkish counterparts. A lengthy conversation between former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Erdogan in Ankara led to the creation of several working groups to resolve bilateral irritants. One group has been quietly discussing judicial issues, including American political prisoners. It was later announced that prior to Tillerson’s visit the U.S. attorney’s office had dropped charges due to insufficient evidence against 11 of 15 presidential bodyguards indicted after brawling with protesters during Erdogan’s May 2017 visit to Washington.

Another group has focused on military issues. In order to dissuade Ankara from purchasing Russian S400-s, the Trump administration has improved the long-standing offer to sell Turkey the U.S.-made Patriot missile defense system by addressing the Turkish desire for more technology transfer and co-production capabilities. The two sides also developed a road

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map to address the continued presence of YPG forces in Manbij, Syria, which violated an Obama Administration promise that they would withdraw after eliminating ISIS fighters. Although Tillerson’s firing caused delays, his successor Mike Pompeo has continued these efforts.

In keeping with his admiration for strongmen leaders, Trump has refrained from criticizing Turkey’s democratic backsliding or imprisonment of its own citizens on dubious charges. He called Erdogan to congratulate him on winning a controversial constitutional referendum in April 2017 that created a highly centralized presidential system, and again to congratulate him on his re-election as president in June 2018. The one exception to Trump’s silence on rule of law issues has been the case of Andrew Brunson, which he and Vice President Mike Pence have raised repeatedly. Their advocacy seems driven in large part by the outcry of Christian evangelicals in the Republican base, as well as Pence’s shared Christian faith. Trump administration officials stress they are also working to resolve the cases of wrongfully imprisoned dual nationals and the Turkish employees of the consulates.

In the U.S. Congress, a growing litany of grievances against Turkey has heightened calls for punitive actions. Some members of Congress have introduced measures targeting the Turkish economy, Erdogan’s greatest domestic vulnerability.

But they have also exercised strategic patience, deferring to diplomatic solutions and playing bad cop alongside the Trump administration’s outreach. For example, Senators Jeanne Shaheen and James Paul Lankford co-sponsored visa bans on Turkish officials responsible for unlawfully detaining U.S. citizens. In March, the senators dropped the sanctions when the administration requested that they allow time for Tillerson’s new diplomatic effort. On June 29, Senators Shaheen and Lindsey Graham visited Turkey and told Erdogan directly their concerns and the consequences for failing to address them. Two weeks later, when Brunson remained imprisoned after a scheduled court hearing, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill that would restrict loans from international financial institutions to Turkey until it releases U.S. citizens. In addition, concerns about the S400- purchase prompted the inclusion of a provision in the National Defense Authorization bill that creates a way for the

The United States and Turkey have collected long lists of grievances against each other over the last few years

administration to remove Turkey from the F35- consortium and potentially to block the transfer of the aircraft.

When the Turkish government moved Brunson to house arrest on July 25, Washington viewed the gesture as too little too late.

The next day, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed the bill on loan restrictions, while Trump and Pence issued tweets calling for sanctions. Additional flashpoints are looming.

Implementation of the Manbij road map is still in the honeymoon phase, and challenging negotiations on governance and security arrangements lie ahead. If Turkey does purchase the S400-s, it could be liable to existing sanctions under the Countering America›s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) that prohibit transactions with Russian defense entities and possible removal from the F35- program. Pending actions by the Treasury Department could further hurt the Turkish economy. For example, Treasury may decide to fine state-owned Halkbank for fraud and conspiracy to violate Obama-era Iran sanctions, and impose new sanctions on countries that do not cease all imports of Iranian oil (which is difficult for Turkey given the lack of alternative suppliers).

ERDOGAN’S WEAK HAND Where do bilateral relations go from here? If Washington fails to reach a negotiated agreement with Ankara on the political prisoners, it will feel compelled to assume a tougher stance.

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the state of emergency, Berlin announced that it was relaxing its travel advice and lifting sanctions.

Russia, too, has achieved results in its relationship with Turkey using economic measures. After the Turkish military shot down a Russian jet that violated its airspace in November 2015, Moscow issued sanctions and travel restrictions that ultimately led to an apology from Erdogan the following summer.

Turkish National Defense Minister Hulusi Akar (R) receives Supreme Allied Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, U.S. Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti (L) in Ankara, Turkey on August 2018 ,1. (Getty Images)

At the same time, Turkey’s strategic geography, NATO membership, and centrality to several U.S. regional objectives make the relationship one worth preserving. As Russia and other U.S. rivals benefit from the rift with Turkey, it is ultimately not in the interest of the United States to turn away from its challenging ally. Any policy response to the current diplomatic crises should take care to prioritize the longer-term potential of the relationship.

The United States can take a page from Germany’s playbook; Germany experienced a similarly strained relationship with Turkey in recent years. Erdogan accused German authorities of “Nazi practices” after they blocked Turkish ministers from holding rallies targeting diaspora voters during the referendum campaign. The Turkish government refused to allow a Bundestag delegation to visit troops at a Turkish air base. It also arrested several German citizens on baseless charges. Berlin responded by implementing policies with economic costs while preserving lines of communication with Ankara, a strategy that has proved successful so far. It updated its travel advice to warn German nationals of the risk of arbitrary detention and its limited capacity to help; announced a review of German state guarantees for financing exports to Turkey and said it could no longer guarantee German corporate exports; and withdrew its support for nearterm upgrade of the EU-Turkey customs union. Following Turkey’s release of German political prisoners earlier this year (including journalist Deniz Yucel) and its recent decision to lift

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The Turkish economy is even more vulnerable to external shocks now than it was then, making it an important potential leverage point for the United States. In early July, inflation reached 15 percent, a nearly -15year high. The Turkish lira has lost a third of its value against the dollar since the start of emergency rule in July 2016 and dropped 20 percent since the beginning of this year.

Foreign policy developments have caused further fluctuations.

The Turkish economy has been sustained by cheap credit, which increases consumption and government spending. Many big holding companies are on the verge of bankruptcy, while banks would suffer from a series of defaults. There are structural weaknesses, including a current accounts deficit, external debt stock, and growing unemployment (averaging 11 percent, with youth unemployment at 25 percent). The unpredictable political environment—including deteriorating rule of law, weakened due process, and limited judicial independence—has scared off investors. The president’s new cabinet, which rewards loyalty over knowledge amid efforts to centralize power, lacks financial expertise, as evidenced by Erdogan’s appointment of his son-inlaw to manage the economic portfolio.

Given Turkey’s serious economic challenges, Erdogan has overplayed a weak hand with the United States. The American government has been quietly sitting on a straight flush amid a year of painstaking efforts to improve relations, offering diplomatic carrots rather than economic sticks. The movement of Brunson to house arrest, a half measure seemingly intended to appease the U.S. without upsetting his own base, was Erdogan’s attempt to make Washington fold. Trump’s tweets threatening sanctions signal his intent to double down on his own hand, backed by congressional support for strong measures. Both the U.S. administration and Congress have exhausted their strategic patience; they are now postured to change their approach and take steps intended to inflict economic pain on a NATO ally of 66 years. There is still time for a diplomatic solution if both sides return to quiet talks rather than angry rhetoric. If not, there is a real risk of ruptured relations, which could have a devastating effect on the Turkish economy, complicate the pursuit of U.S. objectives in the region, and embolden those who do not want to see Turkey facing west.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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The Liberal Order Is More Than a Myth But It Must Adapt to the New Balance of Power

By Rebecca Friedman Lissner, Mira Rapp-Hooper

a cherished system that has brought peace and stability to the world.

Eighteen months into U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, domestic and foreign policy analysts alike are in the midst of a bitter awakening: U.S. policy, whether social, economic, or international, may never be the same again. Among the most common refrains from the foreign policy cognoscenti is the warning that Trump has imperiled the liberal international order—the norms, rules, laws, and institutions that have supported U.S. power since 1945. The president’s vengeful unilateralism, we are told, is dismantling

In his recent Foreign Affairs article (“The Myth of the Liberal Order,” July/August 2018), Graham Allison provides a useful corrective to this baleful narrative, joining a chorus of contrarian foreign policy thinkers who decry the “myth of the liberal order.” Defenders of the myth, Allison argues, mistakenly credit the liberal order with 70 years of great power peace and misattribute the motivations behind U.S. overseas engagement. The post–World War II system led by the United States was never fully liberal, international, rules based, or orderly. At its core, it was driven by a struggle for

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For the United States to lead abroad, it must also confront the dysfunction that is hollowing out support for internationalism at home sole determinant of 70 years of geopolitics, but that does not warrant a wholesale dismissal of the concept as a matter of statecraft or scholarship. And although a restoration of the same liberal system propped up by an indispensable United States is a fantasy, U.S. grand strategy should not discard altogether the notion of international order, even if the world becomes more multipolar and the United States focuses on the defense of democracy at home.

MORE THAN A MYTH Critics of the liberal international order are right to draw attention to this often praised but rarely scrutinized concept.

Far from a single crystalline structure with ubiquitous reach, the post–World War II order emerged and evolved gradually over the course of the twentieth century. It was initially created as a largely Western project designed for postwar rehabilitation and flourished during the Cold War. It diffused into Asia, Africa, and Latin America following decolonization, cracked and listed during the economic stagnation of the 1970s, and claimed universalism only with its competitors’ demise in the 1990s. To obscure this often disjointed, -70plusyear evolution by appealing to some monolithic ideal does little justice to the liberal order’s complex history. Yet this labyrinthine trajectory does not obviate the notion of liberal order writ large, whether as an analytic construct or as a grand strategic goal.

Flags outside the United Nations (UN) Office as the fourth round of the intraSyrian talks begin in Geneva, Switzerland on February 2017 ,23.

(Getty Images)

global dominance between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was the balance of power between these two nuclear behemoths—and U.S. hegemony in more recent decades— that prevented another world war. For Allison, Trump’s disregard for liberal values may be worrisome, but rather than dreaming of a bygone era of unrivaled liberal hegemony, the United States should focus on rebuilding a robust democracy at home.

Although a welcome antidote to the many reverent paeans to the liberal international order and attendant calls for its pristine preservation, Allison’s critique does not fully rhyme with his conclusions. Liberal order may not have been the

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Granted, the phrase “liberal international order” has always been shorthand for U.S. global leadership—a structure sustained by American power in service of largely Western preferences. As the most powerful state in the system, the United States has disproportionately shaped its rules while reserving the right to periodically flout them. But acknowledging this relationship does not imply that the international liberal system order is purely a reflection of raw power. Even as the U.S.-Soviet Cold War rivalry emerged from bipolarity, the United States’ embrace of liberal internationalism guided its approach to international institutions and structured cooperation within the Western bloc. Unrivaled in the unipolar moment, U.S. grand strategy has been more remarkable for its restraint than its unfettered exercise of coercive power, despite a slew of regrettable excesses.

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Indeed, the concept of international order is relevant even in a hard power world precisely because it is not reducible to unilateral U.S. interests or to the global distribution of military and economic might. Rather, it emerged and endured through many states’ collective efforts. Where rules are institutionalized in organizations or legal regimes, they reflect painstaking diplomatic efforts to identify convergent interests and codify standards of state behavior. Where rules develop organically, in norms or customary law, they reflect decades of strategic interaction, during which repeated patterns of conflict and cooperation have generated predictability. By design, the U.S.-led liberal system incorporated such attributes. As a result, it offered both stability and considerable political, economic, and security gains to other states.

When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe, and other U.S. allies invoke the beleaguered liberal order today, it is because they want to preserve those advantages.

Far from dismissing the order as a mere euphemism for U.S. hegemony, they see their own national interests at stake in it.

They also recognize that those interests cannot be protected without a powerful—and committed—United States. Even China, the order’s most formidable challenger-in-waiting, finds value in selectively embracing its tenets.

THE COMING ENTROPY? The liberal international order is a useful frame for understanding the contours and endurance of U.S. grand strategy over the past 70 years, but it will not persist immutably for another seven decades. Never having achieved the universal acceptance to which post–Cold War triumphalists aspired, the present order is threatened by adverse shifts in the balance of power: China is revisionist in its ascent, and Russia is revanchist in its decline.

Global influence is shifting eastward, pushing the United States and Europe into second place.

The liberal international order is a useful frame for understanding the contours and endurance of U.S. grand strategy over the past 70 years, but it will not persist immutably for another seven decades

The formal and informal arrangements that govern interstate interaction—which is to say, the international order—must adapt to this new reality if it is to avoid abject decay. But changing power balances alone do not make the order’s demise a foregone conclusion. For the next several decades, the United States will still remain the world’s most powerful state in military, economic, and diplomatic terms. No other country will have the same capacity to shape international order, even as Washington will wield its authority on fundamentally different terms. Put differently, the twilight of the unipolar moment is not the same as the end of U.S. global leadership or preeminence. Given this, how the United States adapts its grand strategy to domestic turmoil and considerable flux abroad will matter a great deal for the future of global order.

Other states, chief among them China, will cement their own power in regional and global rules and institutions. This trend is well under way, and some aspects of it are nonthreatening, such as when Beijing requests a greater voting share at the International Monetary Fund. Elsewhere, however, Beijing is fashioning new institutions governed by rules that are decidedly illiberal, as with its Belt and Road Initiative. It would be a grave mistake for the United States to abandon the idea of international order as an empty grand strategic ambition and settle for regional influence over its own neighbourhood. Spheres of influence are a form of balance-

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on Trump’s heterodox administration and anticipating his eventual exit. In some ways, Trump’s policies are merely a modern projection of old impulses, most notably the deep unilateralism of the Jacksonian school of foreign policy.

Trump’s contemporary version, however, rests on populist and nativist impulses activated in part by socioeconomic dislocation that will only intensify. Automation and the changing nature of work, inequality, political and media polarization, and demographic changes are likely to intersect with an increasingly turbulent international environment, making it more difficult still to articulate a coherent foreign policy built around age-old liberal values and institutions.

These domestic undercurrents must be faced squarely—not only for the sake of restoring a sustainable U.S. social compact but in order to build a consensus on the United States’ role in the world.

NEW ORDER

US President Donald Trump (4th L) and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (not seen) hold an inter-delegation meeting at Akasaka Palace in Tokyo, Japan on November 2017 ,6. (Getty Images)

of-power order but have historically been a fundamentally less stable one and would certainly degrade U.S. security and prosperity.

Instead of letting rivals carve out spheres of influence, the United States needs a novel grand strategic vision that rejects both radical retreat and creativity-numbing nostalgia.

Any new approach must account for rapidly shifting power relations and technological change. It should also reflect more critically on the universalist ambitions of post–Cold War U.S. grand strategy and may require a greater tolerance for regime diversity than liberal triumphalists could have possibly imagined at the apex of U.S. power.

For the United States to lead abroad, it must also confront the dysfunction that is hollowing out support for internationalism at home. As we have argued, and as Allison rightly points out, Trump may be more avatar than architect of the United States’ domestic unraveling. To be sure, Trump’s transactional and visceral approach to foreign policy is itself wreaking havoc on the predictability underlying the postwar order and will require global recompense of epochal proportions from any new leader. But we cannot assess the extent or endurance of his destructiveness just 18 months into his term.

What we do know is that Trump’s victory was not an isolated political shock—a fact that many analysts miss by fixating

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Less than halfway through Trump’s first term, the U.S. foreign policy establishment, cut off from the levers of power, watches on in a state of shock as the country stumbles from one international indignity to another. But the domestic and international forces that carried Trump to power will accelerate with his presidency and outlast his tenure. The United States, in other words, is only just commencing a strategic reckoning, the likes of which it has not undertaken since the years immediately following World War II. In the new strategic environment, the old liberal order built on unrivaled U.S. power will no doubt prove obsolete and untenable. But that should not imply giving up on the system altogether—particularly since it has advanced U.S. interests at a lower cost than any known alternative. As in previous eras, the United States’ global power position will condition, but not predetermine, Washington’s strategic choices.

In this process of reorientation, domestic renewal and international restoration are not, as Allison suggests, mutually exclusive. In fact, they are complements, and any serious reevaluation of U.S. strategy must address them simultaneously.

The liberal international order may be less foundational than often argued, but it serves more than just narrative purposes.

In its hour of duress, a new vision for U.S. strategy must assess threats and advantages at home and abroad and adapt the institutions that have been the foundation of American power. If successful, the United States will navigate an epoch of disruptive change, both domestic and international, in a manner that is peaceful and redounds to U.S. interests. It is a formidable task to be sure, but this moment demands no less.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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The People's Authoritarian How Russian Society Created Putin

by Michael Kimmage Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation. Serhii Plokhy. Basic Books, 432 .2017pp. The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past.

Shaun Walker. Oxford University Press, 288 .2018pp. The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Masha Gessen. Riverhead Books, 528 .2017pp.

In 1839, the French aristocrat Astolphe Louis Léonor, better known as the Marquis de Custine, traveled to Russia to understand “the empire of the Czar.” Competing with his compatriot Alexis de Tocqueville’s study of American democracy, Custine produced a travelogue that was also an analysis of “eternal Russia.” Russians excelled at submission, Custine believed. Dissidents were dispatched to Siberia, “that indispensable auxiliary of Muscovite civilization.” Despotism at home kindled the desire for empire abroad. “The idea of conquest,” Custine wrote, “forms the secret aspiration of Russia.”

More than anything, Custine was overwhelmed by the artificiality of imperial Russia. “The Russians have everything in name, and nothing in reality,” he wrote. He called its princes “false and crafty” and deemed the country “better served with spies than any other in the world.” A conservative, Custine began his trip as an advocate for a French-Russian alliance, a union of Christian autocrats. His trip changed his mind about which major power France should befriend: “Everything which tends to hasten the perfect agreement of French and German policy is beneficent.”

Many of Custine’s conclusions would not seem out of place in American or European analyses of contemporary Russia. Current EU policy toward Moscow, based on the French-German alliance that Custine advocated, presumes precisely the Russian duplicity and danger that he described.

Serhii Plokhy, Shaun Walker, and Masha Gessen, the authors of

three recent books on Russia, walk, perhaps unconsciously, in Custine’s footsteps.They rely on history and direct observation to explain eternal Russia and to chart the enigmas of its statehood, its foreign policy, and its president, Vladimir Putin. They explore Putin’s recipe for despotism: conjuring a glorious Russian past from the rubble of Soviet and prerevolutionary history, presenting himself as the apogee of this past, and exerting his power as a strong ruler blessed by fate.

Yet all three books, stimulating and insightful as they are, bypass the problem that has most vexed Western policy since 2014. The psychology of Putin, the ideology of his regime, and the machinery of the Russian state and military have received exhaustive attention in the West. The Russian people, however, remain poorly understood. Like many Western analysts (and like Custine before them), Plokhy, Walker, and Gessen lean on the motif of Russia as a place where nothing is real, a Potemkin village built on ancient myths and postmodern memes where the nation must be willed into being by the state. In their portraits, Russia is defined by the state’s grip on society. What they miss is that society itself has a grip on the state. In Russia’s future, this embrace will prove the decisive factor.

PARADISE LOST In Lost Kingdom, Plokhy examines how Russia built an empire through ideological artifice. In the early modern era, Russia needed to justify its westward expansion, so it invented a “myth of origins” that claimed Moscow as an heir to Kievan Rus, a mystical Slavic and Orthodox Christian federation, and designated the city the third Rome, after Rome itself and Constantinople. This lost kingdom of Rus coincided roughly with modern Belarus, eastern Ukraine, and Russia west of the Urals. In the eighteenth century, when Catherine the Great’s empire spread into Poland, this myth evolved into a policy of enforced uniformity. Ethnic Belorussians, Russians, and Ukrainians were all labeled one people, with a common

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President Putin at the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow, May 2018.

(Reuters)

Orthodox religion and a single history.

The revival of Rus was a lost cause from the outset, Plokhy argues.

Although Russian Slavophiles were willing to accommodate Belorussian and Ukrainian national feeling, the makers of Russian foreign policy were not. Their pursuit of a homogeneous empire imposed a choice on Belorussians and Ukrainians: become Russian or embrace an independent Belorussian or Ukrainian identity. As “the most egalitarian and democratic of the Slavs,” Plokhy writes, Ukrainians were open to a partnership with Russia but not to Russian domination. The imperial push for homogeneity fueled Ukrainian nationalism—until World War I intervened.

After the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the tsarist dynasty and ended the Russia empire in 1917, Vladimir Lenin concluded that the greatest threat to the unity of the new Soviet state was Russian chauvinism. He proposed transferring power from Moscow to newly established Soviet republics on the former empire’s periphery, seeking a “voluntary union of peoples” to accommodate non-Russian national sentiment. When Lenin died, in 1924, his successor, Joseph Stalin, adopted this model in theory. But in practice, he incorporated Russian chauvinism into the new Soviet empire, a confederation on paper but not in fact. By the 1980s, the language and culture of the entire Soviet Union were on their way to Russification. Yet Lenin’s vision did have lasting effects. Because the Soviet Union was not a single

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Russian state and because it was not a Russian empire in name, Russians had to create an identity “separate from the imperial one,” Plokhy writes. “Almost by default, Lenin became the father of the modern Russian nation.”

This unstable arrangement ended with the breakup of the Soviet Union, which led to the full independence of Belarus and Ukraine. For Russians, the existence of a Ukrainian nation was uncomfortable evidence that their lost kingdom was truly lost.

Russia cannot be an empire without Ukraine. That is why, Plokhy suggests, Putin seized Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014 after protests toppled a Ukrainian government that had leaned toward Russia. Plokhy does not think Russia will stop there. In his view, Moscow’s imperial instinct presages further conflict and “threatens the stability of the whole East European region.”

Walker, a journalist for The Guardian, offers a similar diagnosis of Russian imperialism in The Long Hangover. The Soviet collapse traumatized the Russian people, he writes, and rather than heal the trauma, Putin and his government “exploited it, using fear of political unrest to quash opposition, equating ‘patriotism’ with support for Putin, and using a simplified narrative of the Second World War to imply Russia must unite once again against a foreign threat.”

Walker details several of the paths not taken toward a Russia that

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might have been more accommodating of Western liberalism.

One was Russia’s failure to undertake a full-scale reckoning with the crimes of the Stalin era. Putin’s government has worked to expunge from public memory the gulag, Stalin’s Great Terror, and the complicity of ordinary Russians in the killing. It has also avoided taking responsibility for the Soviet Union’s other crimes, such as the mass deportation of Crimean Tatars during World War II or the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.

Unable to deal with its actual past, the state has turned to celebratory myth. In 2005, the state-run news agency RIA Novosti created and popularized an orange and black Saint George’s ribbon, based on imperial Russia’s highest military decoration and intended to commemorate the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II. In 2008, the government revived Sovietstyle military parades, featuring heavy weapons. Walker fears that Russia has dealt with its post-Soviet hangover by drinking from the cup of Soviet nostalgia.

That theory leads him to an explanation for the war in Ukraine that is at odds with Plokhy’s. Where Plokhy stresses the romance of empire and eastern Slavic unity, Walker puts “the Kremlin’s cynicism” in the foreground. Having reintroduced the Russian people to the idea that victories abroad were central to Russia’s cohesion, Putin could not limit himself to Stalin’s victory in World War II. He needed a triumph of his own. With the annexation of Crimea, Putin got his wish.

Hollow triumphs are no less a theme in Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History. Her book is both a sweeping attempt to capture the last 40 years of Russian history and a personal reckoning.

Gessen was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States as a teenager. She returned after the collapse of the Soviet Union eager to cover her country of origin’s “embrace of freedom and its journey toward democracy.” Once there, she encountered a less heartening story: “Russia’s reversion to type on the world stage.” The book, which follows the lives of seven Russians, recounts a battle of ideas. Most of her subjects are agents of progress striving not just for democracy but also for a modern Russian culture enlightened by the social sciences.

Soviet society “had been forbidden to know itself,” Gessen maintains. A few cracks in the mass ignorance began to appear during glasnost and perestroika, the period of limited reform and opening that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev inaugurated in the 1980s. At their best, Gorbachev and other reformers sought “to restore thought and knowledge to the land,” Gessen writes.

In the 1990s, the children of these reformers brought polling, sociology, psychology, and LGBT studies to Russia. Their aim was to transform Homo sovieticus—whose psyche was

hemmed in by “obedience, conformity, and subservience”— into the autonomous, informed, and self-aware citizen of a true democracy.

On the other side were reactionaries such as the philosopher Alexander Dugin, the only Putin supporter among Gessen’s subjects. Inspired by Eurasianist thinkers such as the ethnographer Lev Gumilyov, who trumpeted the “essential nature of ethnic groups,” Dugin foresees a unique destiny for the Russian people.

For Dugin, a defining feature of Russia is its absolute separation from the West. He has argued for a martial foreign policy conducted along civilizational lines. In 2012, he predicted that Putin would fall if, in Gessen’s words, he “continued to ignore the importance of ideas and history.” Technocratic stewardship of the economy was not enough. Putin needed to show Russia’s strength and to compensate for past humiliations.

By 2014, a version of Homo sovieticus had returned. The Russian state had restored the authoritarian Soviet institutions. Putin had dispensed with President Boris Yeltsin’s concept of “national penitence” for the sins of Soviet communism. Putin skillfully exploited divisions within Russia by championing “traditional values,” including an official aversion to homosexuality, and by stylizing the state as the safeguard against Western decadence.

Ideology was ascendant. The social sciences were cast as an

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Supporters of Putin wave flags featuring Putin's portrait as thousands celebrate Putin's victory at the presidential election in Moscow March ,4 2012. (Getty)

In the eyes of the West, Russia should be rapidly distancing itself from its traumatic twentieth-century history.

But Russians want a Russian leader who, like Putin, works with, rather than against, the past graveyard,” the capital of a country impervious to the marvels of liberal civilization, a country “seized by the death drive.”

obstacle to conformity. “Russia,” Gessen concludes, “had a mafia state ruling over a totalitarian society.”

THE NATURE OF THE REGIME Both Plokhy and Gessen suggest that the Russian state is moving toward fascism. After the annexation of Crimea, Putin argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union had left Russians a “divided” people. He declared that Russia “could not abandon Crimea and its residents” to live under the new pro-EU Ukrainian government.

For Gessen, this rhetoric “recalled Hitler’s Sudetenland speech directly.” Plokhy refers to a “Crimean Anschluss.” Plokhy, Walker, and Gessen all agree that Putin depends on militarism to retain power. Well before 2014, the state had distorted history to stigmatize the West, valorize Russia’s wars, and thereby compel the loyalty of the Russian people. The war in Ukraine is merely the kinetic version of this political project.

Plokhy, Walker, and Gessen are haunted by the modern, selfcritical, conciliatory polity that Russia failed to become after 1991. Plokhy can only urge “Russian elites to . . . adjust Russia’s own identity to the demands of the post-imperial world” and to abandon the awkward anachronisms of Russian foreign policy.

Gessen finishes her book with an absurdly macabre portrait of Moscow in 2016, a city with “the geometry and texture of a

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But fascism, totalitarianism, and “the death drive” are misleading descriptions of contemporary Russia. They mask the uncoerced, or popular, foundation of the post-Soviet Russian state and, indeed, of Putin’s government. One pillar is the Russian history not identical to imperial conquest. Missing for the most part from these books is the enthusiasm among Russians for their individual and communal pasts, for the history that is not pathological (at least not in Russian eyes), for the lived experience of their extended families. Many Russians love the Russia they have inherited from the Soviet and immediate post-Soviet periods, with its language, literature, landscapes, music, popular culture, jokes, and food.

The very disruptions of recent Russian history have heightened an emotional connection to the past that neither the West nor the westernization of Russia can supply. In the eyes of the West, Russia should be rapidly distancing itself from its traumatic twentieth-century history. To many Russians, that would be tantamount to amputation. They want a Russian leader who, like Putin, works with, rather than against, the past.

PUTIN’S POPULARITY The degree of Putin’s genuine popularity is unknowable. His reelection earlier this year was more a display of apathy than ardor. All polling and electoral data in Russia are suspect, but Putin clearly dominates the political culture. He has delivered the stability that many Russians craved before his presidency, although, as Dugin realized in 2012, stability is boring. Still, although nationalist ideology can be exhilarating, Russians are skilled at decoding propaganda, another legacy of their Soviet past. The government’s success in manufacturing the nation’s obedience may be much more superficial than Putin would like.

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For now, Putin’s system works because it meets Russian culture halfway. Society is fostering some of the tendencies for which the government takes credit, such as the assertion of Russian pride and the refusal to serve as a student of the West. Gessen writes of an early Soviet Union in which “the expression and cultivation of a Russian national identity were strongly discouraged.” A century later, Russian society is expressing and cultivating a national identity that would exist with or without Putin. That identity has created Putin more than he has created it.

A major weakness of both Walker’s and Gessen’s books is their subordination of culture to politics. Under Putin, Russian culture has been repressed and made into propaganda, but by the standards of Russian history, it has been relatively free and unpoliticized. It cannot be reduced to positions for or against the Kremlin. The theaters of Moscow and St. Petersburg have a vitality that has nothing to do with politics. Leviathan, a 2014 film that criticizes Putin’s system of government and the Russian Orthodox Church, was funded in part by the Russian Ministry of Culture. High-quality Russian television shows, such as Fartsa (a Russian Mad Men of sorts), examine the Soviet past with originality and nuance.

The complications of this culture show up in the idiosyncrasies of Russian politics: the opposition stalwart Alexei Navalny appears to believe that Crimea belongs to Russia, Russian Communists chastise the post-Soviet state for abetting inequality, and many nationalists loathe Putin for not going far enough in Ukraine.

These stances reflect the ambiguities and contradictions of the Russian population.

distinctiveness of Russian culture more than their parents or grandparents ever did. At the same time, Russians young and old know that beyond providing stability, a degree of prosperity, military might, and a startling redesign of a few showcase cities, Putin has done little to modernize Russia. No amount of television programming or high-profile sports events can hide the effects of bad governance or the reality of strongman rule.

Dugin and the Western-oriented opposition figures Gessen describes occupy extremes on a wide spectrum. Most Russians are aware of the horrific corruption of their leaders yet see their country as separate from western Europe and the United States.

It is quite possible that Russians born after 1991, few of whom are followers of either Dugin or the opposition, believe in the

The deepest source of Putin’s popularity comes from his foreign policy. As Gessen notes, polls showed that 88 percent of Russians supported the annexation of Crimea immediately after it took place, although, as she says, that is a questionable number. Popular feelings of victimhood and imperial longing help justify military action abroad, but so does sheer defiance of the West, the element of Russian life most confounding to Western observers. That defiance has its roots in the collapse of the Soviet Union and in the Cold War. But elements of it show up as far back as the nineteenth century—in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, for example, which commemorated, 68 years later, Russia’s victory over Napoleon’s invading army. Today, many Russians share an image of the West, and especially of its foreign policy, as aggressive, hypocritical, triumphalist, and condescending.

The Russian population will tolerate major sacrifices for the sake of prevailing in a confrontation with the West

NATO’s expansion in the 1990s and the first decade of this century bolstered this image in Russia. The alliance has always

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The deepest source of Putin’s popularity comes from his foreign policy. Polls showed that 88 percent of Russians supported the annexation of Crimea immediately after it took place. what is possible. Hopes of a democratic friendship between Russia and the West are dead, and in a contested relationship, Russia will prove a formidable adversary. The Russian population will tolerate major sacrifices for the sake of prevailing in a confrontation with the West. Russians are in no rush to adjust their identity to the demands of the postimperial world. threatened Russian pride more than Russian security, and Putin is a virtuoso at appealing to wounded pride. He has cheerfully defied the West in Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine, earning the support of many, perhaps even most, Russians because he does not back down, as Gorbachev and Yeltsin did before him. Since 2014, Putin has held his own, militarily and economically. Although he cannot remain president forever, his adversarial foreign policy will outlast him.

LIVING WITH RUSSIA Western policymakers must take better account of popular Russian attitudes. So far, diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine have failed because the West has little leverage over Russia. The tool it has chosen—economic sanctions—has only whetted the popular Russian appetite for defying the West. Plokhy refers to “the crippling effect of the economic sanctions.” But each year since 2014, Russian foreign policy has grown more recalcitrant, more anti-Western, and more ambitious. Western countries have sometimes aspired to turn Russia into a responsible stakeholder in the international order. At other times, they have tried to isolate Russia and prevent it from using force outside its borders. They have not been able to achieve either goal.

Even when power does change hands in Moscow, Western policy must rest on sober expectations of what is likely and

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Western powers, then, should confront Moscow only on issues on which their own will is strong, such as cyberwarfare, election interference, and the integrity of NATO. They should not attempt to deter Russia with false displays of strength, because Russian politicians pay a heavy domestic price for backing down and will do so only as a last resort. In Syria and Ukraine, Moscow has not been shy about calling Western bluffs. When Western countries do decide to challenge Russia, they should take bold steps, present clear ultimatums, and be willing to back up any threats with their superior resources.

At the same time, the West should pursue extensive cultural and diplomatic contacts with Russia, just as it did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. When and if Russia westernizes, it will be on Russian terms. So without expecting Russia to be yet another European country, Western governments and societies should break down the divisions between Russia and the West by emphasizing common ground and by offering an image of Western life that defies the caricatures that are prevalent in official Russian media. There will be no easy breakthroughs. There may be only irritation and stalemate. Still, it would be wise to balance sanctions, military buildups, and pointed rhetoric with a sincere message to the Russian people that, although Western powers are ready for anything, they would prefer peace to permanent conflict.

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Creating A Successful Mindset For Change What Comes To Your Mind When You Think Of Change?

by Samantha Morris*

may even feel mixed emotions?

Perhaps you think of the context of change? Are you currently experiencing political, social, cultural or religious changes? Or perhaps you are experiencing different directions within your professional and public life, personal lifestyle or relationships?

If we look around us, we know that change is inevitable and happens every second of every day. The leaves off the trees fall and are renewed each year, day turns to night and night into day, the weather can change within a matter of minutes, and before you know it we’ve reached the middle of the year! Of course these are all natural occurrences and things outside of our control.

When you think of your past current or future situation to change, does it evoke excitement and curiosity within you?

Or do you feel unsettled, doubtful and fearful? Perhaps you

Yet interestingly, when we do have the potential power

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ACCEPT THAT CHANGE IS INEVITABLE Whether you like it or not, change is inevitable and it’s happening every second of every day whether we’re aware of it or not.

The very essence of life stimulates death, change and rebirth. When you choose to accept change and the flow of life as inevitable you will begin to feel less fearful, less attacked and more open to learning how change can work for you!

Consider inviting more flow into your life by being mindful and starting to notice how things change each day. Perhaps start with noticing the weather and the changing colours of the seasons. For me, I always notice the same blossom tree and how it both sheds and grows its blossom every year.

BE PREPARED TO RIDE THE WAVES I’m not going to lie to you change will either be experienced as a positive or negative experience (depending on your experiences, beliefs and needs) However, if you begin to change your approach, mindset and tactic to ride the waves, you will begin to experience the rich ebb and flow and the possibilities of life rather than simply remaining safe, yet cut off on the shoreline.

CREATE A FLEXIBLE OPEN MINDSET NOT A FIXED MINDSET Obviously everyone is entitled to choose whether they embrace change or not and you cannot force people to adopt a new direction if they are resistant to do so.

Woman looking at diverging footprints (Getty Images).

to possibly control a situation, we choose to either embrace or resist change. Most of this comes down to the need to survive, to maintain control and power, and to stay in firm contact with safety and what we have always known.

Yet change evokes images of the unknown, the new and possibly the likelihood that with change comes a possibility that we may feel either in or out of control. However, whatever change evokes for you, there is one undeniable old-aged truth: change is inevitable and a constant.

10 top tips for Creating A Successful Mindset For Change

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However, although you cannot control other people, you do have control over your own future. Ask yourself ‘what will I gain or risk by embracing change or not?’ Then ask yourself ‘is this my own view? Or someone else’s experiences and beliefs which have influenced me?’ Then be honest and ask yourself on a scale of 1( 10-1 being the least likely and 10 being highly likely) ‘how willing am I to begin to embrace change?’ and ‘will it support me to grow and develop?’

It’s also important to bear in mind that what you once believed in or wanted, may not be what’s best for you now.

Therefore, it’s important to check-in with yourself, your changing circumstances and your needs every so often. A good tool is to create a changing photo timeline of yourself and your goals. This will help you to see what you once wanted may have evolved or may have changed.

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IDENTIFY THE ROOT CAUSES OF YOUR RESISTANCE In order to fully understand and successfully embrace sustainable change, you first need to acknowledge your root resistance to change. Be honest and ask yourself why are you resistant to change? What are your past and current experiences of change? Were you told to be fearful, wary or resistant to change? Were they positive or negative experiences? Are you fearful of the unknown?

Once you’ve understood and identified the root cause of your resistance you can cut the root clean and you can choose to live with more awareness, possibilities and freedom.

BE AN OPPORTUNIST! Instead of feeling pessimistic, why not begin to ask how can this change work for you? How many people do you know in histories who have taken action steps to find and experience fulfillment and success even when the chips have been low?

Get in touch with your inner opportunist and ask how can you embrace change to make it work for you?’

REMAIN TRUE TO YOUR VALUES Remember not everyone will support your views, choices and actions. However, it’s integral to remember that whilst these people may or may not be important to you, ultimately you are your own soul mate for the entirety of your life.

Bearing this in mind, it’s important to ask if you’re going to be truly happy by not being open to change, sticking to the safe path and following what you’ve always known? Or will you feel more fulfilled, positively stretched, energized and alive by at least being open to change?

OPEN CONVERSATIONS CAN LEAD TO CHANGE Start by engaging in conversations with other people without judgment and assumptions. Learn to understand, listen and acknowledge other people’s experiences. Whilst you may or may not choose to follow these people, the conversations and awareness will prepare the foundation for your responses and choices. A good tip is to try to talk to someone once a day who you do not know, or you haven’t engaged in conversation with.

“DO ONE THING A DAY WHICH SCARES YOU» Change doesn’t need to be big and doesn’t have to happen all at once to make an impact. In fact, if you start to make smaller changes simply in your approach to daily routines you will begin to build the foundations for solid sustainable success and change, rather than short-lived bursts of energy.

Try doing one small or larger thing a day, which scares you. By stretching yourself beyond your comfort zones you will begin to feel more confident and begin to build a solid foundation for embracing change more easily.

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The word CAN›T, with the ‹T cut off to spell CAN (Getty Images).

MINDED PEOPLE

VALUE YOUR PERSONAL GROWTH

When you are open to new directions and change, it’s no secret that anyone who is negative can naturally sap your energy, confidence and motivation. However, although it’s unlikely you will be able to drown out their voice, you do have the power to choose whether you listen to them or not.

With change comes the possibility for growth and development. So if you’re not open to change and development perhaps it’s time to ask how much you value your own future and personal growth?

Therefore, it’s really important to surround yourself with positive like-minded people who will support your way of life and vice - versa.

Consider where these people with similar values may hang out? Start by looking to join new hobbies, a new job or career opportunity, a new neighborhood or a new social or professional group.

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Keep a journal of all the smaller or larger experiences where you’ve successfully been open to or embraced change. Then ask yourself what worked or didn’t work? And how has it helped you to stretch beyond your comfort zones and to grow and develop? *Samantha Morris is a Certified and Qualified Life Coach and an Integrative Art Psychotherapist.

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Scientists report cancer - killing potential of Zika virus in early study

By Naseem S. Miller ORLANDO, Fla. _ Dr. Kenneth Alexander was driving home one day last year when he thought of the idea: What if the Zika virus could be used to kill a childhood cancer called neuroblastoma?

The Zika outbreak was in its third year and scientists had learned that the virus damages the nervous systems of unborn babies by destroying the developing nerve cells.

Those developing nerve cells also make up neuroblastomas.

So, Alexander, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Nemours Children›s Hospital, started brainstorming with a surgeon colleague and brought on board Dr. Griffith Parks, a University of Central Florida scientist who has been studying Zika.

After nearly year of research, the team published the preliminary results of their first study, showing that neuroblastoma cells that were exposed to the Zika virus in the laboratory died 10 days after being infected, making the virus a potential treatment for the cancer.

The team›s findings have been published in PLOS One. «This is like all good ideas. It›s early and there may be a fly in the ointment,» Alexander said in an interview Wednesday. «But at this point things are looking

promising. The path ahead is there and we hope to get lots of other people interested in this research.»

Neuroblastoma is the cancer of nerve cells that reside outside of the brain. It›s the second most common types of childhood cancer and has a disproportionately high mortality rate compared to other childhood cancers. It mostly affects infants and children under age 5.

Treatment usually involves surgery, chemotherapy or radiation, or a combination in high-risk cases. In some cases, none of the treatments work.

«There›s a lot of research on neuroblastoma, but we wanted to take a different approach (to finding a treatment),» said study co-author Dr. Tamarah Westmoreland, a pediatric general and thoracic surgeon at Nemours. «I think Zika is holding great promise. In looking at these results, we think it can be used (along with) current therapies. However, we›re very early in this research.»

The Orlando team isn›t the first to look at cancerkilling potential of Zika.

Several groups, including one in the U.S. and one in Brazil, have shown in preliminary studies that Zika infection killed glioblastoma cells in the adult brain, potentially opening new doors for treating this aggressive and common type of brain cancer.

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Study co-author Dr. Tamarah Westmoreland is a pediatric general and thoracic surgeon at Nemours Children›s Hospital. (Nemours Children›s Hospital)

we can kill them as well.»

Scientists don›t fully know how the virus enters and destroys the cells. There may be proteins in addition to CD24 that make a cell susceptible to Zika.

«But at least we›ve gotten part of the story,» said Alexander.

This is not the first time a virus has been used to treat cancer, the history of which dates back to the 1940s.

More recently, a modified form of herpes virus has been used to treat melanoma.

Alexander said that, based on his team›s preliminary findings, the Zika virus won›t have to be modified from its natural form, because fully grown nerve cells are immune to the virus.

«We›ve got this fortuitous situation, where the virus can make a subset of people really sick. But for the majority of us, it›s a non-serious infection,» he said.

Most children and adults who are infected with the virus don›t develop any symptoms or have a mild coldlike reaction.

Dr. Kenneth Alexander is the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Nemours Children›s Hospital.

(Nemours Children›s Hospital)

Another Brazilian group reported in June that a Zika virus strain killed aggressive cancerous tumors of the central nervous system.

Alexander said what›s unique about his team›s research is identification of a surface protein called CD24.

The protein makes cancer cells susceptible to being killed by the Zika virus. Cancer cells that didn›t have the CD24 protein didn›t respond to Zika, Alexander›s team found in their laboratory research.

«So with these findings, we can ask what other cancers express CD24,» said Alexander. «Now we›re beginning to look at other cancer cells that express CD24 to see if

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Alexander said the potential therapy could be an injection, much like how mosquitoes infect humans. Or an injection to the site of an excised tumor to prevent the return of the cancer.

The team is now taking the research out of Petri dishes and into rodents.

Alexander and Parks, interim associate dean of research and director of Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences, are also planning to study how the CD24 interacts with the Zika virus.

Parks deferred an interview request to Alexander .

This was originally published by Orlando Sentinel.

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Climate Extremes and Global Health New Ways to Make Progress

by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, Partha Dasgupta, Joachim von Braun, David G. Victor The last few years have brought a string of terrible news about the global climate. Politically, the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change is stalling. The United States has announced that it will abandon the pact, and no other country has stepped up to fill the vacuum. Emissions rose 1.4 percent last year and no major industrialized country is on track to meet the emission control

pledges it made in Paris, which means that the world is way off track to meeting the target of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures.

Scientifically, the news is even grimmer. New research in climate science indicates that extreme events, such as heat waves, the collapse of major ice sheets, and mass extinctions, are becoming dramatically more probable. And the evidence is mounting that climate change will have an extreme impact on human health into the near future.

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New research suggests that even cutting emissions to zero won’t be enough to stop climate change. It will also be necessary to remove the roughly one trillion tons of carbon dioxide that are already in the atmosphere. economies. In fact, the wealthiest one billion people around the world (living in both rich and poor nations) are responsible for more than 50 percent of the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

But new studies show that the rich are far more exposed than anyone realized—especially to deadly heat. In the past, efforts to build political support to combat climate change centered on abstract arguments about the slow buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These concerns rarely had much political impact because most societies put a heavier weight on tangible near-term priorities than cumulative effects whose consequences will be felt mostly in other countries. But today there is an opportunity to shift the politics around climate change because scientists can now make a strong case that no one is exempt from the extreme and immediate risks posed by a warming world.

THE NEW SCIENCE OF DISASTER For decades, most of the scientific research around global climate change has focused on showing that humans are to blame.

Scientifically, that mission was achieved long ago, but politically, those facts haven’t yet had much of an impact.

An airplane makes a fire retardant drop on a large hill-top home that had caught fire near Cal State San Marcos as crews battle a large wildfire threatening homes Wednesday, May 2014 ,14 in San Marcos, California.

(Getty)

These two strands of bad news offer a road map for doing better: the new scientific research on climate change, with its terrifying insights into what humans are doing to the environment, could help activists and political leaders build the political momentum for deep and costly cuts in emissions. Until now, most of the research about the impact of climate change has confirmed the maxim that the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky outlined decades ago: “richer is safer.” Scientists believed that because wealthier societies had the resources to adapt to a warmer world, poor countries would suffer more. This presented a political problem because most emissions come from rich or emerging

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The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising by about three parts per million (ppm) almost every year. During much of the early political debate around climate change in the 1990s, many scientists thought that about 350 ppm or perhaps 400 ppm was a red line that shouldn’t be crossed. Today the concentration of carbon dioxide stands at 410 ppm, and it is only increasing. With higher concentrations have come higher temperatures. Since the 1900s the planet has warmed a bit more than one degree Celsius; most of that warming has occurred since 1980. The last decade of measurement—2007 to 2017—has been the hottest. The oceans are heating up as well—a fact that is now well documented thanks to thousands of autonomous submarine robots that cruise the planet’s oceans taking measurements.

In 2016, the scientifically cautious American Meteorological Association (AMS) declared that “we’re experiencing new weather, because we’ve made a new climate.”

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The old science of global climate change generated good talking points for the convinced. But only a small fraction of global emissions comes from places where the public is already mobilized, such as western Europe and the blue coastal and urban communities in the United States. Convincing the convinced won’t fix a global problem. That’s where the new science comes in.

Unlike in the past, scientists today have massive data sets that allow them to more conclusively assess the rising risk of extreme events that will have major consequences for human welfare. Despite attempts to turn the tide, such as with the Paris agreement, emissions are still increasing, which means that warming is on track to rise at least four degrees over the coming century. A warmer planet will be a more extreme planet.

Beyond 2050, as much as 44 percent of the planet’s land areas will be exposed to drying. This will lead to severe drought conditions throughout southern Europe, North America (mainly the eastern and southwestern United States and Mexico), much of southeast Asia, and most of the Amazon—affecting about 1.4 billion people. In the latitude bands between 30 degrees N and 30 degrees S the probability of multi-decadal drought will rise to 80 percent. There is also a heightened risk of more extreme rainfall, which, coupled with population growth, will expose an additional two billion people to floods.

WARMING IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH Although these scenarios, which are still decades in the future, haven’t inspired much serious policy action, scientists are also focusing on a more politically salient dimension of climate change: the immediate risk to human health. For a long time, scientists have known that health and climate change are linked because many of the pollutants that

Beyond 2050, there is a 50 percent probability that about half of the world’s population will be subject to mean temperatures in the summer that are hotter than the hottest summer on record

contribute to warming also damage human health. At the top of that list are fine particulates that emanate from burning fossil fuels (diesel fuel and coal) and biomass. Soot is a major cause of warming—a ton of diesel soot has the same warming effect as 2000 tons of carbon dioxide. Methane is another superpollutant that is also laden with health hazards: it causes warming directly while also increasing the amount of ozone near the planet’s surface where humans breathe and crops grow. Soot and ozone, along with sulfate and nitrate particles from fossil fuel combustion, are among the leading causes of ambient and indoor air pollution, which is today’s number one air pollution problem globally. According to the World Health Organization, seven million people every year die as a result of this kind of pollution, which causes lower respiratory infections, lung cancer, heart disease, strokes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. (By comparison, AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis kill less than half that number and car accidents are responsible for fewer

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India has launched the Air Quality Index to measure air quality across the nation that is home to some of the most polluted cities in the world. (AP)

than 1.5 million deaths per year.)

Awareness of these facts has already animated politicians from China to California to regulate soot and pollutants that are precursors to ozone. The more they learn, the more they do.

What’s new today is that efforts to control climate pollutants are no longer just piggybacking on concerns about human health. By linking together different disciplines and deploying large data sets, scientists have been able to show how climate change directly undermines human health. For example, experts have attributed to climate change catastrophes such as the 2003 heat wave in France that killed more than 10,000 people and the 2010 heat wave in Russia that killed an estimated 15,000, along with other major storms and droughts such as the parching that is devastating rural areas in Australia. The combination of heat and humidity is particularly lethal, and with warming both are expected to rise. The probability of extreme weather rose by a factor of ten or more between 2011 and 2015, the hottest five-

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year period on record. To make matters worse, diseases borne on insect vectors, such as chikungunya and dengue fever, seem likely to proliferate as the habitats of mosquitoes expand.

Those same models that scientists are using to find the fingerprints of climate change on human health suggest that the worst is yet to come. Beyond 2050, there is a 50 percent probability that about half of the world’s population will be subject to mean temperatures in the summer that are hotter than the hottest summer on record unless the world takes immediate and largescale action. In the most highly populated regions of the world, by the end of the century, there are 10 to 30 percent chances of heat waves greater than 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Moreover, heat and droughts threaten regions that produce much of the world’s food. Food prices are expected to raise 23 percent by 2030, making food markets more volatile, and under heat stress the nutritious content of food crops is declining. Extreme weather disasters also have negative impacts on mental health. When hot

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is over 130 degrees, whole societies can come unglued. Richer countries are not exempt from these effects.

Statistical science isn’t a crystal ball, and the fact that predictions about climate change are probabilistic rather than precise has long been used as an excuse for delaying action until all the facts are in.

But the new research on catastrophic events suggests that policy should follow exactly the opposite logic. There is some chance (around five percent) that warming over the coming century will be more than six degrees on average globally. Practically, this means that outcomes that were previously assumed to be unlikely worst-case scenarios could arrive more quickly than people think.

Those risks are no longer distant and abstract—in part because climate impacts are mounting quickly and in part because it takes time to alter the trajectories of emissions that cause warming.

Efforts to prevent this future must begin today. It is impossible to know for at least a couple of decades which warming track the planet is on—either the bad or the really bad. By the time things become clear, most of the warming will already be loaded into the system and much more difficult to reverse.

CHANGING THE GAME Every time there is a major research breakthrough, the scientific community thinks that society will listen and take action.

So far, that has not been the case because political behavior doesn't simply dance to the beat of scientific progress. This time can be different, but scientists and activists will need to think and work in different ways. New research presents an opportunity for scientists to make the case for deep emissions cuts in a manner that is both politically persuasive and grounded in robust science. For decades, climate change has been framed as a problem of justice—a crisis created by the rich that disproportionately harms the poor. That argument is not wrong, but the rich are hurting themselves, too. Massive fires in Sonoma and Napa, the richest wine-growing areas in the United States, may have a larger political impact than distant crises— just as heat waves in Japan and superfires in Europe are having a political impact there. To communicate these new findings, scientists also need to think about how they influence society.

In particular, they should build new partnerships with groups that shape how societies frame justice and morality, including religious institutions. Indeed, this essay emerges from efforts to rethink how a changing climate will affect human welfare and humanity’s relationship to creation that were spearheaded by Pope Francis in his Encyclical Laudato si’.

The ultimate goal of climate change scientists remains unchanged: deep cuts in emissions. This will require testing

and deploying new technologies—for example, schemes to capture and store greenhouse gas pollution and systems for massively integrating renewable power into the electric grid.

Nuclear power may also have a fresh role to play in making energy systems cleaner but it must first overcome adverse public and political opinion in many countries. Still, new research suggests that even cutting emissions to zero won’t be enough. It will also be necessary to remove the roughly one trillion tons of carbon dioxide that are already in the atmosphere. Avoiding emissions would help reduce warming in the distant future; removing emissions that have already accumulated would have a more immediate effect. Promising new ideas are emerging. But it is one thing to plug imaginary code into climate models that show that the problem can be solved; it is another to test and build these technologies at an industrial scale.

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A sign from wetter times warns people not to dive from a bridge over the Kern River, which had dried up by water diversion projects and little rain, on February 2014 ,4 in Bakersfield, California.

(Getty)

Every time there is a major research breakthrough, the scientific community thinks that society will listen and take action.

So far, that has not been the case. could have unintended consequences such as droughts in the tropics or the neglect of ocean acidification that occurs when carbon dioxide builds in the atmosphere. It also poses a nearimpossible governance challenge: who should be in charge of the planetary thermostat? For most climate scientists, those problems have been reason enough to treat geoengineering as taboo. But the scientific community needs to start taking this option seriously. The American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest professional body of geoscientists, has recently endorsed that position, although their blessing has not yet unlocked the necessary funding for research.

Finally, societies must start preparing for more frequent and more extreme weather events. This means hardening or abandoning coastal areas, developing crops that are resistant to droughts and extreme heat, building systems that can help farmers predict extreme weather, and finding new ways to conserve and reuse water. Much more work will also be needed to address the health consequences of extreme heat—some of which will require strengthening public health systems while also reorienting medical training and interventions.

In the long haul, deep decarbonization—the reduction of emissions of carbon dioxide and other warming gases nearly to zero—will be needed. But this will take decades. A crash program might get to net zero emissions around 2050, and even that would be exceptionally difficult. Technologies to remove hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, combined with aggressive programs to cut shorter-lived pollutants—such as soot, methane, and industrial gases—can succeed in preventing catastrophic changes.

If the planet proves to be highly sensitive to even small fluctuations in the climate, which new research suggests is more probable than previously thought, then it may be necessary to alter the energy balance of the climate directly. These schemes that involve manipulating the amount of sunlight that reaches and warms the planet, also known as geoengineering,

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Adaptation is rapidly becoming central to the reality of climate change. In a transformed climate, more than half of the population may be exposed to extreme heat waves and perhaps one-third to vector-borne diseases. Seeking alliance with faith leaders, health-care providers and other community leaders should be an integral part of the strategy on climate change. In particular, even when they do not share the same notion of God, faith leaders should act both together and separately in their own communities to preserve human dignity and our common home. It’s too late to quickly stop the consequences of the gases that are already building up. Many necessary steps are already long overdue. The silver lining in all of this, if there is one, is that a recognition of the nasty and brutish new normal may yet mobilize the political support needed to make a dent in global emissions.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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The Minister Who Went From Solving Housing Issues to Population Issues

Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Kamal Madbouly

By Maria Asaad Illustration by Ali Minadalou Madbouly, 52, has preserved his position as minister of housing and urban utilities since 2014. He served with two following prime ministers, including Ibrahim Mahlab until September 2015 and with Ismail from September 2015 until June 2018 ,5.

On June 5, Egypt’s Prime Minister Ismail submitted the resignation of his government only two days after President Sisi was officially sworn in as the head of state for a second term until 2022, according to presidential spokesperson, Bassam Rady.

Madbouly’s selection however wasn’t a surprise as he was Sisi’s first choice to lead the government last November when former Prime Minister Ismail had jetted off to Germany for a surgery. Ismail returned to his post later in January 2018.

The newly-named prime minister held several positions before joining the government, including being the regional director for Arab countries at the United Nations Human Settlements Program -Habitat- from November 2012 until February 2014.

From September 2009 until November 2011, Madbouly was the chairman of the General Authority for Urban Planning at the Ministry of Housing, Utilities and Urban Development; he also was the executive director of the Training and Urban Studies Institute at the Housing and Construction Research Center at the Ministry of Housing.

Madbouly got his masters and PhD from Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, in 1988 and 1997, respectively. During his tenure as housing minister, Madbouly succeeded to implement several national projects of social housing to help eliminate the slums in Egypt.

The “million housing units” was one of the major national projects that came into force after President Sisi took office, though the project was former Housing Minister Mohamed Fathy al-Baradei›s idea. For political and social reasons, the project, which was suggested by Baradie in 2011, stopped during the Muslim brotherhood era, and came into force again when Madbouly took office.

This project, of which several stages have already been completed, is considered to be the largest project specialized for Egyptians

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with low-income. More than 500 contracting companies are working on the project.

Besides providing low-income citizens with suitable housing units, this project provided about 750,000 direct job opportunities and another 2 million indirect opportunities. On December 2017, the Housing and Urban Utilities Ministry founded a specialized fund to maintain the project›s sustainability. It was announced that the social housing project will not end by finishing the 1 million housing units.

Regarding the elimination of slums, several projects have been recently implemented to accomplish that goal, including Tal Al Aqareb area in Sayeda Zeinab, Ahlina slums in Al Salam 1, Al Mahrousa 1, Al Salam slums, Manshiyet Nasser, El Asmarat District in Mokattam, and Maspero Triangle.

The Ministry of Housing estimated that 40 percent of Cairo›s population lives in informal settlements, while the Informal Settlements Development Fund (ISDF), now part of the new Ministry for Urban Development, estimates that 75 percent of urban areas throughout Egypt is unplanned and 1 percent is unsafe.

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