Europe's Test

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1795- April - 10/04/2020

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Editorial

A Weekly Political News Magazine

www.majalla.com/eng As one of the epicentres of the Coronavirus pandemic, the European continent has been majorly affected both in terms of human health and economic health. As most EU countries are under lockdown; the economies within these states have stagnated. Furthermore, most governments are now putting most of their resources on the health sector while at the same time stimulus packages for economic recovery have been lacking. Naturally, there are countries that have fared better than others, for instance Italy and Spain which are the hardest hit with the virus are facing bigger economic challenges than Germany. This week’s first cover story by Ali El Shamy focuses on the lack of coordination in the EU in tackling the coronavirus and how the newly announced stimulus plan will benefit those countries hit hard with the virus.

Early on during the crisis, the Johnson government in the UK decided to pursue a policy of “herd immunity” rather than lockdown to counter the coronavirus. The policy was abandoned days later in favour of a lockdown, but that didn’t stop the virus from spreading all over the country. Right now, the government is facing criticism of not conducting enough tests. Although the government did promise that it would be doing 100,000 tests a day by the end of April that seems unlikely due to the fact that it is struggling to do just 15,000 tests a day now. Yasmine El-Geressi writes the second cover story, which focuses on the government’s current shortcomings, and why it’s earlier policy of pursuing herd immunity might have set it weeks behind in preparation for the outbreak.

As the Coronavirus is spreading Iran, some voices in Washington have called for sanctions to be lifted. Most of those who are calling for sanctions to be lifted are Democrats coming from the progressive wing of the party, among them are Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

However, Republicans in Washington are not changing their stance toward Iran citing that the regime wants sanctions to be lifted so it can have more money for itself rather than providing aid to its people. Joseph Braude writes on this current divide in Washington and how those for and against lifting sanctions are presenting their arguments.

The Iranian regime is hiding the real number of Coronavirus cases it has.

Furthermore, it seems that its proxies, Iraq and Hezbollah Lebanon are doing the same. In spite of this current health crisis, the regime is still pursuing its goal of regional control, as Iran-backed militias in Iraq are still attacking US bases. Hanin Ghaddar writes on Iran’s regional pursuits and how sanctions have made it struggle in its goals. She also writes on how Iran might not be able to avert future protests in Lebanon and Iraq, which might be directed towards Iran’s mishandling of the crisis.

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Editor-in-Chief

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

22 China’s Coming Upheaval

Issue 1795- April - 10/04/2020

Fuels Calls for Sanctions 18 Coronavirus Relief on Iran, Opponents Hold Sway

20 Iran’s Dark Post-Coronavirus Scenarios

UK Labour Party Gets New Leader as

32 Coronavirus Sparks Calls for National Unity

28 When the Pandemic Hits the Most Vulnerable

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Queen Elizabeth II: The Monarch Who Has Tirelessly Supported the Nation For the Past 80 Years 3

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These Stretches Before You Get 46 Try Out of Bed

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A South Korean woman wears a mask while reading a book at Jogyesa Temple as South Koreans take measures to protect themselves against the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) on April 03, 2020 in Seoul, South Korea. - Getty

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A medical staff watches from a platform of the Gare d’Austerlitz train station on April 1, 2020 in Paris through the window of a medicalised TGV high-speed trains before its departure to evacuate patients infected with the COVID-19 from Paris’ region hospitals to other hospitals in the western France Brittany region where the outbreak has been limited so far. - Getty

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the ICU as a precaution should he require ventilation to aid his recovery. Downing Street said Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab would “deputise where necessary” while the Prime Minister was in intensive care with Covid-19. Downing street confirmed on Thursday that Johnson had been moved out of ICU. The news came after Raab told the country “we are not done yet” as the coronavirus lockdown continues for at least another week.

People of Wuhan Allowed to Leave After Lockdown

The Latest Developments in the Global Coronavirus Outbreak The total number of coronavirus cases across the world has reached at least 1,502,618, according to Johns Hopkins University, which has tracked the spread of the virus during the pandemic. The US has the highest number of cases, around 440,000. UK Covid-19 death toll rises to 7,978. Some 243,421 people in the UK have now been tested for Covid-19. The US recorded the most coronavirus deaths in a single day with more than 1,800 fatalities reported on Tuesday. It brings the total number of deaths in the country to nearly 13,000. More than 6.6 million Americans lost their jobs last week, taking the total of job losses to 16m in the last three weeks

The months-long lockdown in the city of Wuhan in China’s Hubei province - where as the coronavirus pandemic brings the US economy to a standstill. The number of people killed by the coronavirus in Spain passed 15,000, but the daily death toll fell to 683 after two consecutive days of figures over 740. Italy’s coronavirus curve has been flattening but is yet to show signs of a definitive decrease as deaths rose by 610 on Thursday, 68 more than Wednesday.

PM Boris Johnson Moved to Intensive Care After Being Admitted to Hospital with Coronavirus Prime Minister Boris Johnson has admitted to intensive care with coronavirus symptoms after this condition worsened over Monday afternoon. He has been moved to

the coronavirus pandemic started - was lifted on Wednesday. Anyone who has a “green” code on a widely used smartphone health app is now allowed to leave, for the first time since 23 January. Train, road and rail connections have now been reestablished. It comes after China reported no deaths on Tuesday, the first time since it began publishing figures. To contain the spread in Wuhan, authorities imposed unprecedented restrictions on travel and ordered the closure of most businesses in the bustling metropolis, which is home to 11 million people.

Saudi-led Ceasefire in Yemen Begins, Lifting Hopes for Peace A nationwide ceasefire in response to the global coronavirus outbreak went into effect in Yemen on Thursday, raising hope for an end to the five-year-old war that has pushed millions to the brink of famine.

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A Saudi-led coalition fighting Yemen’s Houthi movement said it would halt military operations from 0900 GMT for two weeks in support of United Nations efforts to end the conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people. The Iran-aligned Houthi movement, which controls the capital Sanaa and most big urban centres, has yet to announce whether it will follow suit in what would be the first major breakthrough in peace efforts since late 2018. The coalition said its move is intended to facilitate talks sponsored by U.N. envoy Martin Griffiths for a permanent truce, motivated in part to avoid a potential outbreak of the new coronavirus, though no cases have been reported in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia, Russia and Other OPEC+ Countries Agree on Deal to Cut Oil Output OPEC and allied oil producers, a group

known as OPEC+, agreed on Thursday to cut output by 10 million barrels per day (bpd) in May and June to help prop up prices battered the coranavirus crisis, the group said in a statement.mIt said the cuts would be eased between July and December to 8 million bpd and the reductions would then be relaxed further to 6 million barrels between January 2021 to April 2022. OPEC+ said it would hold another video conference meeting on June 10, to assess the market.

Barham Salih, state television reported, shortly after the previous designated prime minister, Adnan al-Zurfi, announced he was withdrawing having failed to secure enough support to pass a government. Iraq, exhausted by decades of sanctions, war and political corruption now faces economic ruin, social unrest and a growing outbreak of the new coronavirus, all of which it must face with only a caretaker cabinet.

Iraq Names its Third Prime Minister in 10 Weeks Iraq’s president named intelligence chief Mustafa al-Kadhimi as prime ministerdesignate on Thursday, the third person tapped to lead the country in just 10 weeks as it struggles to replace a government that fell last year after months of deadly protests. Kadhimi was nominated by President

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Pakistan Shoots Down Indian Drone as Kashmir Tensions Rise Pakistan’s army said Thursday it had shot down a small Indian surveillance drone in Kashmir, as tensions rose over continued cross-border shelling in the disputed territory.

According to a statement from the army media wing, the Indian quadcopter — about the same size as a commercially available hobby drone — had crossed 600 meters (650 yards) over the de facto border known as the Line of Control (LoC). The incident came as Pakistan and India accuse each other of violating cease-fire terms at the LoC, with sporadic shelling reported from both sides.

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The Coronavirus and EU Divisions?

How the EU Failed to Form a Coordinated Policy to Fight the Pandemic 10

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The Coronavirus pandemic also showed that the EU lacks the coordination it prides itself with, as each individual state seemed to pursue its own policies. pared for the crisis than others. For instance, Spain and Italy (which were among the first EU countries where the virus quickly spread) lacked the ICU units and testing capabilities to save as many lives as they could have. Furthermore, while no longer a member of the EU, the UK’s slow response to the crisis put it on a similar path to Italy and Spain. Meanwhile, Germany was much better prepared for the crisis and successfully implemented a policy of a quick lockdown and wide mass testing, as such the healthcare system over there is not being too overwhelmed and the number of deaths have remained low in comparison to the number of cases who tested positive for the virus.

French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire (L) attends an EU finance ministers meeting by videoconference, at the minister›s office in Paris on april 9, 2020, on the twenty-fourth day of a strict lockdown aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19, the novel )coronavirus. (Getty

by Ali El Shamy Back in February of this year, Health ministers from the EU 27 held a summit where they discussed the Coronavirus outbreak. German health minister, Jens Spahn, had praised the EU member states’ efforts in containing the virus, but he warned “it could get worse before it gets better.” Two months later, Europe sees itself as one of the epicentres of the pandemic as almost 700,000 people in the EU/EEA/UK have contracted the virus while 64,000 people have sadly lost their lives to the virus. The five worst hit countries in Europe (in chronological order) are Spain, Italy, Germany, France and the UK, which all make up around 560,000 of the 700,000 cases. While these countries have high numbers of infection, some were better pre-

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Ever since the 2009 Eurozone debt crisis, it became clear that not all EU and Eurozone member states were reaping the benefits from the European project. Since then the once quiet Eurosceptic politicians and parties were gaining traction and volume. Now as some countries found themselves embroiled in disaster, the EU could not provide the aid necessary to help them counter the crisis. The Coronavirus pandemic also showed that the EU lacks the coordination it prides itself with, as each individual state seemed to pursue its own policies. While EU finance ministers have only recently agreed to a stimulus plan to help the EU economies worst affected by the pandemic, the crisis once again exposed the divisions within the EU.

COMPLACENCY OVER THE CORONAVIRUS Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte faced a major hurdle with regards to the pandemic. For weeks, Italy was the epicentre of the outbreak in Europe, in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading Italy banned flights to and from China in late January. However, this proved to be futile since the freedom of movement within Europe was allowing the virus to spread

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further. While evidence did show that maintaining freedom of movement was risky due to how quick the virus spreads, during the early weeks of the outbreak the EU maintained that it would not cease free movement within the Schengen area.

In one article published by Politico, Janez Lenarčič EU’s commissioner for crisis management admitted that the organisation was complacent in the face of the looming pandemic. She also stated that previous experiences, such as the 2003 SARS outbreak and the 2014 Ebola outbreak, were not as severe as this current pandemic. Furthermore, these outbreaks certainly didn’t hit the EU hard, as such many within the EU thought that they would not be as badly affected as Asia.

BICKERING BETWEEN PARTNERS This week finance minister from the EU 27 held a 16 hour video conference trying to agree on a stimulus package. The first round of talks ended in a stalemate as two main opposition blocs emerged during the talks. One bloc was led by Italy and consisted mainly of southern states, which were the worst hit during the crisis. This bloc wanted the EU to share the costs of recovery, and more important loosen conditions for loans. But the other bloc, consisting of Germany, Austria and the Netherlands feared that such measures This divide has mirrored the Eurozone debt crisis that would lead to weak economic policies within the Eu- plagued the EU more than a decade ago, many of the ropean south. countries that suffered from this crisis such as Greece and Italy have still not fully recovered from it.

If the EU does not come up with a coordinated policy that will aid the countries that have suffered the most, then deeper divisions might form with the organization.

Despite this early setback, some renewed hope seems to be on the horizon, as the EU 27 seemed to have agreed to a compromise. On April 9, the EU announced a 500 billion euro stimulus plan, which would consist of two main mechanisms. First and foremost, 240 billion euros would go to the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), these funds would be provided as cheap credit for the worst economically affected countries, which again would be Italy and Spain. Secondly, the European Investment Bank would increase loans to corporations around the EU so that workers’ wages wouldn’t have to be cut. How-

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Sant›Orsola Hospital›s team, in partnership with Ferrero, distribute chocolate eggs for Easter to all employees including doctors, nurses and medical guards on April 2020 ,10 in Bologna, Italy. (getty)

ever, there was no mention of the shared EU debt, which would benefit countries like Spain, Italy and France, but was opposed by regional leaders such as Germany.

?WHAT HAPPENS NEXT While reports have indicated that the number of new cases of Coronavirus has started to fall in Italy and Spain, the crisis is far from over. However, it seems now that the lockdown measures implemented by most EU countries are working for the time being. The great struggle in the near future will be the upcoming recessions that many countries in Europe will face due to this current economic stagnation. If the EU does not come up with a coordinated policy that will aid the countries that have suffered the most,

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Janez Lenarčič, the EU’s commissioner for crisis management, admitted that the organisation was complacent in the face of the looming pandemic. then deeper divisions might form with the organization. Nevertheless, for the time being most EU governments will be focused on decreasing the number of new Coronavirus cases, and preventing a resurge when the time comes for the loosening of lockdown restrictions.

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Why is the UK Behind on Coronavirus Testing?

The Government is Struggling to Catch Up After Wasting Precious Time Pursuing the Discredited ‘Herd Immunity’ Strategy 14

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While Britain is struggling to carry out 15,000 tests a day up from only 1,500 at the start of the crisis — Germany has been recording tests of some 50,000 a day.

by August, with a peak of nearly 3,000 a day, based on a steep climb in daily deaths early in the outbreak.

While the newly released data is disputed by scientists whose modelling of the likely shape of the UK epidemic is relied on by the government, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing mounting criticism over the government’s failure to put in a place an adequate testing regime to manage the crisis. Johnson’s dramatic hospitalisation on Sunday night, followed by a move into an intensive care unit on Monday, has added to the air of crisis hanging over Britain’s attempt to control the virus while screening fewer people than other nations at a similar stage of the epidemic.

A nurse takes a swab at a Covid19Drive-Through testing station for NHS staff on March ,30 2020 in Chessington, United Kingdom.

The Coronavirus (COVID19-) pandemic has spread to many countries across the world, claiming over 30,000 lives and infecting hundreds of thousands more. (Getty)

Responding the pressure, the UK said on Wednesday it aimed to roll-out millions of coronavirus tests in months. The move came after England’s Chief Medical Officer conceded

by Yasmine El-Geressi on Tuesday that there were lessons to learn from On Wednesday, more than 900 people were Germany and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab reported to have died from coronavirus in UK testing said there was “more work to do” on hospitals in a day for the first time. The jump testing. in deaths is the biggest daily increase since the outbreak began, and is higher than Italy’s worst While Britain is struggling to carry out 15,000 day when 919 people died. World-leading tests a day — up from only 1,500 at the start of disease data analysts project that the UK will the crisis — Germany has been recording tests become the country worst hit by the coronavirus of some 50,000 a day. Testing was also used pandemic in Europe, accounting for more than aggressively in countries like South Korea and 40 percent of total deaths across the continent. Singapore to establish whether someone may The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation be infectious to others and to screen essential (IHME) in Seattle predicted in a report released workers who may have only mild coronavirus this week that 66,000 UK deaths from Covid19- symptoms, or who are asymptomatic. Even America, which under Donald Trump has been

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slow to accept the impact of the disease, is now testing more people per capita than the UK. The need to test everyone with symptoms, track their contacts and isolate and test those people in turn was even a critical part of the strategy to eliminate the previous viruses such as Ebola, Sars, Mers.

There are several reasons the government has failed to increase the number of tests. The testing kits have to be purchased in a global marketplace where demand has now exceeded supply. But many also believe that the government’s initial controversial “herd immunity” strategy, which put mass testing as a secondary concern, cost them precious time.

In March, it was claimed that the British government was hoping to reduce the impact of the virus by allowing it to “pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity”. The UK’s Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance said on March 12: “It’s not possible to stop everyone getting it and also it’s not desirable because you want some immunity in the population to protect ourselves in future.”

The official view was that mass infection was inevitable with projections of 40 million people

The official view was that mass infection was inevitable with projections of 40 million people contracting the disease. The UK therefore gave little attention to testing, isolation and quarantine, unlike other countries including South Korea and Germany.

contracting the disease. The UK therefore gave little attention to testing, isolation and quarantine – basic public health interventions – unlike other countries including South Korea and Germany.

But on March 16, the government abruptly changed tack when warned by scientists at Imperial College that its “mitigate” strategy could lead to 250,000 deaths and see the NHS overwhelmed. Anthony Costello, a UK paediatrician and former director of the WHO, also fiercely criticised the decision to stop tests.

“For me and the WHO people I have spoken to, this is absolutely the wrong policy,” he said.

“The basic public health approach is playing second fiddle to mathematical modelling.”

For now, the testing is crucial for controlling

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Britain›s Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures during a visit to the Mologic Laboratory in the Bedford technology Park, north of London on March ,6 2020. (Getty)

UK’s -100,000a-day target has been thrown into doubt in recent days by the fact the government previously ordered millions of faulty antibody tests from China and other countries millions reagents, which are needed to perform the tests, for the delay in ramping up testing.

Moreover, the UK’s -100,000a-day target has been thrown into doubt in recent days by the fact the government previously ordered millions of antibody tests from China and other countries millions to determine whether people have contracted the virus in the past and therefore may have immunity – which were proven to be ineffective and had to be thrown away. These tests are thought to be key in letting those who have already been through the virus return to work and begin to ease the country›s lockdown. the spread of the virus. The World Health Organization director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has a simple message to countries on how to deal with the coronavirus outbreak in March: ‹Test, test, test.› He urged countries to test more suspected cases, warning that they ‹cannot fight a fire blindfolded›.

But the UK is currently competing with every other nation to obtain the kits it needs and its initial herd immunity strategy has pushed it the back of the queue. Other obstacles to adequate testing include Britain’s centralised state-funded health system, which is poor at rapidly boosting testing capacity.

All coronavirus tests were initially processed at a single Public Health England laboratory, though several other public labs are now also handling the tests. British officials also blame shortages of swabs to take samples and of chemicals known as

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Still, the government is confident that it will meet its target. Government testing adviser John Newton said the 100,000 daily test target was feasible, and that 20,000 National Health Service workers had now been tested. «Testing capacity now is not what we would like, but it is by no means inconsiderable in terms of what we need,» Newton told a committee of members of parliament on Wednesday. «We do anticipate that the need will increase dramatically, and therefore we want to get as much testing in place as possible.»

The government also said a business consortium had launched plans to develop millions of the DIY finger prick testing kits to distribute to homes across the country. The UK has asked UK businesses to join in a “national effort” to make the testing kits, similar to what was done for ventilators. But Newton said he did not expect such tests to be widely available by the end of April.

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Coronavirus Fuels Calls for Sanctions Relief on Iran, Opponents Hold Sway Prominent Voices Note that Sanctions Do Not Restrict Medical Supplies or Humanitarian Aid

by Joseph Braude As coronavirus continues to spread across the globe, the ramifications of its outbreak in the Middle East have begun to stir a policy debate in Washington. Many voices, particularly those traditionally supportive of detente with Tehran, have begun to call for sanctions relief on Iran in the name of enabling that nation to better cope with the coronavirus pandemic. Such arguments have so far had lit-

tle purchase with the U.S. administration, which hold that Iran’s leadership is using the disease as a cover for profiteering and continuing to fund its regional project.

IRAN: A DEBATE ON SANCTIONS RELIEF As Tehran watchers know well, Iranian officials lost little time in incorporating coronavirus into their case for sanc-

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In the public debate, numerous prominent voices also noted that the existing sanctions regime preserves channels for medical supplies, contrary to the claims of Zarif and others. because our sanctions are limiting humanitarian aid during coronavirus. We need to ease them to ensure that aid gets through.”

OPPONENTS OF SANCTIONS RELIEF HOLD SWAY

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani speaks on the coronavirus pandemic beside First Vice President of Iran, Eshaq Jahangiri (L) during a cabinet meeting in Tehran, Iran on April ,1 2020. Rouhani stated “Coronavirus pandemic offers U.S a historical opportunity to lift the sanctions”. (Getty)

tions relief. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif recently argued in a video statement — donning a surgical mask and blue latex gloves — “We had always said the sanctions are unjust, but coronavirus revealed this injustice to the world.”

He called the sanctions “economic terrorism.”

For his part, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted on March 31, “Coronavirus has killed 2,600 in Iran, but U.S. sanctions are obstructing medicine and aid from getting in. [To Secretary Pompeo] and [Secretary Mnuchin]: Pandemics know no borders. Let us put aside our countries’ disputes and lift sanctions to reduce human suffering.”

Though Sanders’ bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination appears to have waned, he continues to set the tone for policy in the more progressive reaches of the Democratic party. Within a week, several other leading Democrats adopted a similar line. Two days after Sanders called for lifting Sanctions, Senator Ed Markey announced his support, tweeting, “I’m joining @RepAOC and @SenSanders to demand the Trump administration make practical changes to its sanctions on Iran and other countries to give them a fighting chance against our shared invisible enemy: coronavirus.” Roughly a week later, Senator Chris Murphy joined in, declaring, “there’s no denying Iran is a bad actor, but innocent civilians are dying there in part

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To date, these arguments have made little impact upon decision-making circles in the American administration.

Secretary Pompeo has remained steadfast, noting that “the regime’s concerted effort to lift U.S. sanctions isn’t about fighting the pandemic. It’s about cash for the regime’s leaders.” Similarly, in the U.S. Senate, Republican Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee countered that “those demanding sanctions relief for Iran & Venezuela are parroting propaganda pushed by authoritarian regimes. Current sanctions do not bar humanitarian aid. [Khamenei] & [Maduro] don’t care about the survival of their citizens. They care about the survival of their regimes.”

In the public debate, numerous prominent voices also noted that the existing sanctions regime preserves channels for medical supplies, contrary to the claims of Zarif and others. Mark Dubowitz counters: “U.S. sanctions on Iran have always provided an exception for humanitarian aid. A recent analysis of pharmaceutical trade between Europe and Iran shows little change between 2011 and 2019 despite periods of imposition, suspension, and return of sanctions.”

In pushing back on the voices calling for a suspension of the “Maximum Pressure” campaign, the administration has also received backing from an unlikely source: Saeed Namaki, the Iranian minister of health. In a recent interview, Namaki warned lawmakers that the main hindrance in combating the pandemic in Iran were subterrannean networks selling drugs on the black market, “hoarding medicines in warehouses, and distributing counterfeit drugs.”

As for sanctions, Namaki noted that Iran has “no major problem” procuring medicines from abroad.

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Iran’s Dark Post-Coronavirus Scenarios Tehran’s unabated drive for regional hegemony, combined with its botched coronavirus response, will result in a vicious backlash at home and next door

by Hanin Ghaddar In the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic that has paralyzed the world and shifted all states’ efforts inwards and towards the health of their own citizens, the Iranian regime seems to still be focused on its regional hegemony and anti- American rhetoric.

Instead of redeploying its resources – which are already depleted due to US sanctions and its regional military adventures – the Iranian regime decided to prioritize the IRGC’s mission and goals, mainly those of the Quds Force.

ANTI-US RHETORIC VS. ECONOMIC COLLAPSE During the peak of the Coronavirus crisis in Iraq, Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq have become more encouraged to attack US personnel and advance Tehran’s interests. US President Donald Trump tweeted last week that “Upon information and belief, Iran or its proxies are planning a sneak attack on U.S. troops and/or assets in Iraq. If this happens, Iran will pay a very heavy price.”

Tensions mounted after the IRGC Quds Force commander Brig.

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Two Iranian women are pictured wearing protective masks while riding a bus in the Iranian capital Tehran on March ,2 2020, following the COVID19- illness outbreak. (Getty)

Gen. Esmail Ghaani, who replaced Qassem Soleimani, made his first pubic visit to Iraq. According to reports, Ghaani’s visit was meant to consolidate the Shia militias and avert the establishment of a new Iraqi government headed by Adnan al-Zurufi.

Although the threats are rising and an attack on US troops seems imminent, they are not necessarily guaranteed to succeed – or pass without repercussions. The US has not retaliated to the killing of US personnel in the March 11 attack at Camp Taji; however, if Iran carried out another attack through its Iraqi militias, the US will most probably strike back.

And if the US strikes back, Iran might not be able to deal with further losses. At least 3,739 people in Iran have died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. But Iranian opposition groups say the real number is much higher and claim the government has not been honest about the death toll, which could be over 18,000 to date, and half a million Iranians infected. There are also doubts that the peak of infections in Iran is still yet to come and that all talks by officials of containing the virus in forty days is inaccurate.

The Coronavirus pandemic has worsened Iran’s already fragile economy. Since the US imposed sanctions on Iran, Iran’s oil exports have dropped to below $10 billion per year, and its annual budget was reduced by about 40 percent. Meanwhile at home, Iranian officials vowed to “never” seek help from the U.S. in the fight against the coronavirus. “Iran has never asked and will not ask America to help Tehran in its fight against the outbreak,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Abbas Mousavi said during a press conference.

But statements are one thing, and reality is something else. The regime – while making statements and threats against the US and its interests, has also asked for help from the international community, which the US is a major part of. For the first time since 1979, Iran has asked the International Monetary Fund for an emergency loan. If this means anything, it is that Iran’s economy can no longer hold until this crisis is over. Iran needs all the help it could get and maintain its regional operations could be problematic to receiving any financial help.

The projection of how this is developing could mean that Iran post-corona might be facing dire economic circumstances, increased levels of poverty and unemployment, and further isolation by the international community. A realistic repercussion is a strong return of the streets protests and additional deterioration of the regime and its pillars. Even if this was an opportunity for the IRGC to take over, it will be derailed by economy and the backlash from the region, mainly where it operates.

A REGIONAL BACKLASH Iran proved to the world – and mainly to the people in the region – that it has failed to contain and fight the coronavirus. It will take time, but this is not going to pass without a reaction. According to an article published recently by The Guardian, “Health and other officials focused on Lebanon, Iraq and Syria fear the numbers of

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For the first time since 1979, Iran has asked the International Monetary Fund for an emergency loan. If this means anything, it is that Iran’s economy can no longer hold until this crisis is over. people infected with coronavirus far exceed the official figures disclosed by all three governments, and claim non-state actors are quarantining entire communities of patients in areas outside state control.”

Hezbollah in Lebanon are still trying to hide the real numbers of those infected within the Shia community. In Iraq, the Communications & Media Commission has banned the Reuters news agency from operating for three months for reporting that the number of covid-19 cases in Iraq is much higher than officially reported.

This only means that Iraq is trying to hide the real numbers.

Same goes to Syria and other countries that Iran has access to or is trying to have access to. First Iran brought instability, then economic collapse – see Iraq and Lebanon – and now the coronavirus. And no matter how hard they and their proxies try to hide the negative impact of Iran on these countries and communities, there is nothing left for Iran to hide behind. The resistance narrative have failed and collapsed under the Israeli strikes on Hezbollah’s and Iran’s military positions in Syria. The services and jobs that used to offer alternatives to the Shia communities in Lebanon and elsewhere are now diminishing under US sanctions.

Iran will be left with countries and communities that are struggling financially and are fated to collapse. The most possible scenario is that protests in Lebanon and Iraq will come back – but in a bigger and more vicious wave. It’ll be wide scale protests with people who have nothing left to lose, and with Iran and its proxies as a clear target.

In the first wave of protests, Iran and its proxies managed to avert the anti-Iran rhetoric and direct it against banks in Lebanon and US presence in Iraq. It attempted – and almost succeeded - in dividing the street and the protestors. However, the coronavirus crisis has changed things and Iran can no longer hide behind official numbers. When the smoke clears, and the real numbers start to emerge, it will be obvious that the Iranian regime was responsible for spreading the Coronavirus to Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, to say the least. This is not going to be an easy reality to deal with, and the protests will not stop until Iran is held accountable, or at least make it up to the people. But resources are scarce and the people have nothing left to lose.

Hanin Ghaddar is the inaugural Friedmann Visiting Fellow at The Washington Institute’s Geduld Program on Arab Politics, where she focuses on Shia politics throughout the Levant. She tweets @haningdr

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China’s Coming Upheaval Competition, the Coronavirus, and the Weakness of Xi Jinping

by Minxin Pei Over the past few years, the United States’ approach to China has taken a hard-line turn, with the balance between cooperation and competition in the U.S.-Chinese relationship tilting sharply toward the latter. Most American policymakers and commentators consider this confrontational new strategy a response to China’s growing assertiveness, embodied especially in the controversial figure of Chinese President Xi Jinping. But ultimately, this ongoing tension—particularly with the added pressures of the new coronavirus outbreak and an economic downturn—is likely to expose the brittleness and insecurity that lie beneath the surface of Xi’s, and Beijing’s, assertions of solidity and strength.

The United States has limited means of influencing China’s closed political system, but the diplomatic, economic, and military pressure that Washington can bring to bear on Beijing will put Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) he leads under enormous strain. Indeed, a prolonged period of strategic confrontation with the United States, such as the one China is currently experiencing, will create conditions that are conducive to dramatic changes.

As tension between the United States and China has grown, there has been vociferous debate about the similarities and, perhaps more important, the differences between U.S.-Chinese competition now and U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War. Whatever the limitations of the analogy, Chinese leaders have

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Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks at the podium during the unveiling of the Communist Party’s new Politburo Standing Committee at the Great Hall of the People on October 2017 ,25 in Beijing, China. (Getty)

put considerable thought into the lessons of the Cold War and of the Soviet collapse. Ironically, Beijing may nevertheless be repeating some of the most consequential mistakes of the Soviet regime.

During the multidecade competition of the Cold War, the rigidity of the Soviet regime and its leaders proved to be the United States’ most valuable asset. The Kremlin doubled down on failed strategies—sticking with a moribund economic system, continuing a ruinous arms race, and maintaining an unaffordable global empire—rather than accept the losses that thoroughgoing reforms might have entailed. Chinese leaders are similarly constrained by the rigidities of their own system and therefore limited in their ability to correct policy mistakes. In 2018, Xi decided to abolish presidential term limits, signaling his intention to stay in power indefinitely. He has indulged in heavy-handed purges, ousting prominent party officials under the guise of an anticorruption drive. What is more, Xi has suppressed protests in Hong Kong, arrested hundreds of human rights lawyers and activists, and imposed the tightest media censorship of the postMao era. His government has constructed “reeducation” camps in Xinjiang, where it has incarcerated more than a million Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. And it has centralized economic and political decision-making, pouring government resources into state-owned enterprises and honing its surveillance technologies. Yet all together, these measures have made the CCP weaker: the growth of state-owned enterprises distorts the economy, and surveillance fuels resistance. The spread of the novel coronavirus has only deepened the Chinese people’s dissatisfaction with their government.

The economic tensions and political critiques stemming from U.S.-Chinese competition may ultimately prove to be the straws that broke this camel’s back. If Xi continues on this trajectory, eroding the foundations of China’s economic and political power and monopolizing responsibility and control, he will expose the CCP to cataclysmic change.

A PAPER TIGER Since taking power in 2012, Xi has replaced collective leadership with strongman rule. Before Xi, the regime consistently displayed a high degree of ideological flexibility and political pragmatism. It avoided errors by relying on a consensus-based decision-making process that incorporated views from rival factions and accommodated their dueling interests. The CCP also avoided conflicts abroad by staying out of contentious disputes, such as those in the Middle East, and refraining from activities that could encroach on the United States’ vital national interests.

At home, China’s ruling elites maintained peace by sharing the spoils of governance. Such a regime was by no means perfect.

Corruption was pervasive, and the government often delayed critical decisions and missed valuable opportunities. But the regime that preceded Xi’s centralization had one distinct advantage: a built-in propensity for pragmatism and caution.

In the last seven years, that system has been dismantled and

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The United States has limited means of influencing China’s closed political system, but the diplomatic, economic, and military pressure that Washington can bring to bear on Beijing will put Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) he leads under enormous strain. replaced by a qualitatively different regime—one marked by a high degree of ideological rigidity, punitive policies toward ethnic minorities and political dissenters at home, and an impulsive foreign policy embodied by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a trillion-dollar infrastructure program with dubious economic potential that has aroused intense suspicion in the West. The centralization of power under Xi has created new fragilities and has exposed the party to greater risks. If the upside of strongman rule is the ability to make difficult decisions quickly, the downside is that it greatly raises the odds of making costly blunders. The consensus-based decision-making of the earlier era might have been slow and inefficient, but it prevented radical or risky ideas from becoming policy.

Under Xi, correcting policy mistakes has proved to be difficult, since reversing decisions made personally by the strongman would undercut his image of infallibility. (It is easier politically to reverse bad decisions made under collective leadership, because a group, not an individual, takes the blame.) Xi’s demand for loyalty has also stifled debate and deterred dissent within the CCP. For these reasons, the party lacks the flexibility needed to avoid and reverse future missteps in its confrontation with the United States. The result is likely to be growing disunity within the regime. Some party leaders will no doubt recognize the risks and grow increasingly alarmed that Xi has needlessly endangered the party’s standing. The damage to Xi’s authority caused by further missteps would also embolden his rivals, especially Premier Li Keqiang and the Politburo members Wang Yang and Hu Chunhua, all of whom have close ties to former President Hu Jintao. Of course, it is nearly impossible to remove a strongman in a one-party regime because of his tight control over the military and the security forces. But creeping discord would at the very least feed Xi’s insecurity and paranoia, further eroding his ability to chart a steady course.

A strongman who has suffered setbacks—as Mao Zedong did after the Great Leap Forward, a modernization program that centralized food production, leading to some 30 million deaths by famine in the early 1960s—naturally fears that his rivals will seize the opportunity to conspire against him. To preempt such threats, the strongman typically resorts to purges, which Mao did

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four years after the end of the Great Leap Forward by launching the Cultural Revolution, a movement intended to eliminate “bourgeois elements” in society and in the government. In the years ahead, Xi may come to rely on purges more than he already does, further heightening tensions and distrust among the ruling elites.

LEAN TIMES AHEAD A key component of Washington’s strategic confrontation with Beijing is economic “decoupling,” a significant reduction of the extensive commercial ties that the United States and China have built over the last four decades. Those advocating decoupling— such as U.S. President Donald Trump, who launched a trade war with China in 2018—believe that by cutting China off from the United States’ vast market and sophisticated technology, Washington can greatly reduce the potential growth of China’s power.

In spite of the truce in the trade war following the interim deal that Trump struck with Xi in January 2020, U.S.-Chinese economic decoupling is almost certain to continue in the coming years regardless of who is in the White House, because reducing the United States’ economic dependence on China and constraining the growth of China’s power are now bipartisan aims.

Since the Chinese economy today is less dependent on exports as an engine of growth—exports in 2018 accounted for 19.5 percent of GDP, down from 32.6 percent in 2008—decoupling may not depress China’s economic growth as much as its proponents have hoped. But it will certainly have a net negative impact on the Chinese economy, one that may be amplified by the country’s domestic economic slowdown, which is itself the product of a ballooning debt, the exhaustion of investment-driven growth, and a rapidly aging population. The slowdown may be further exacerbated by Beijing’s attempt to shore up near-term growth with unsustainable policies, such as increased bank lending and investment in wasteful infrastructure projects.

As the economy weakens, the CCP may have to contend with

The CCP also avoided conflicts abroad by staying out of contentious disputes, such as those in the Middle East, and refraining from activities that could encroach on the United States’ vital national interests.

the erosion of popular support resulting from a falling or stagnant standard of living. In the post-Mao era, the CCP has relied heavily on economic overperformance to sustain its legitimacy.

Indeed, the generations born after the Cultural Revolution have experienced steadily rising living standards. A prolonged period of mediocre economic performance—say, a few years in which the growth rate hovers around three or four percent, the historical mean for developing countries—could severely reduce the level of popular support for the CCP, as ordinary Chinese grapple with rising unemployment and an inadequate social safety net.

In such an adverse economic environment, signs of social unrest, such as riots, mass protests, and strikes, will become more common. The deepest threat to the regime’s stability will come from the Chinese middle class. Well-educated and ambitious college graduates will find it difficult to obtain desirable jobs in the coming years because of China’s anemic economic performance.

As their standard of living stalls, middle-class Chinese may turn against the party. This won’t be obvious at first: the Chinese middle class has traditionally shied away from politics. But even if members of the middle class do not participate in anti-regime protests, they may well express their discontent indirectly, in demonstrations over such issues as environmental protection, public health, education, and food safety. The Chinese middle class could also vote with its feet by emigrating abroad in large numbers.

An economic slowdown would also disrupt the CCP’s patronage structure, the perks and favors that the government provides to cronies and collaborators. In the recent past, a booming economy provided the government with abundant revenue—total revenue in absolute terms tripled between 2008 and 2018—providing the resources the CCP needed to secure the loyalty of midlevel apparatchiks, senior provincial leaders, and the managers of stateowned enterprises. As the Chinese economic miracle falters, the party will find it harder to provide the privileges and material comforts that such officials have come to expect. Party elites will also need to compete harder among themselves to get approval

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People raise their hands as they attend a flash mob concert in a shopping mall in Kowloon Tong district of Hong Kong on September 2019 ,18.

(Getty)

and funding for their pet projects. Dissatisfaction among the elites may spiral if Xi’s prized priorities, such as the BRI, continue to receive preferential treatment and everyone else must economize.

Finally, in the event of a dramatic slowdown, the Chinese government will most likely find itself confronting greater resistance in the country’s restive periphery, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang, which contain China’s most vocal ethnic minorities, and in Hong Kong, which was British territory until 1997 and retains a different system of governance with far more civil liberties. To be sure, escalating tensions in China’s periphery will not bring the CCP down. But they can be costly distractions. Should the party resort to overly harsh responses to assert its control, as is likely to be the case, the country will incur international criticism and harsh new sanctions. The escalation of human rights violations in China would also help push Europe closer to the United States, thus facilitating the formation of a broad anti-China coalition, which Beijing has been desperately trying to prevent.

Although middle-class discontent, ethnic resistance, and prodemocracy protests won’t force Xi out of power, such pervasive malaise would undoubtedly further erode his authority and cast doubts on his capacity to govern effectively. Economic weakness and elite demoralization could then push Beijing over the edge, leading the CCP toward calamity.

BEATING THE DRUMS OF NATIONALISM In theory, the CCP should be capable of avoiding or mitigating the damage from an economic slowdown. An effective strategy would incorporate some of the valuable lessons Xi’s predecessors learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moscow continued to provide significant aid to Cuba, Vietnam, and several vassal states in Eastern Europe well into the Soviet Union’s twilight years. The regime also pursued a costly military intervention in Afghanistan and funded proxies in Angola and Southeast Asia.

To avoid those kinds of mistakes, Beijing should prioritize the conservation of its limited financial resources to sustain the open-

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ended great-power conflict. In particular, China should retrench from its expansionist projects, above all the BRI, and other foreign assistance programs, such as the grants and concessional loans it has provided to Cambodia, Cuba, Venezuela, and several developing countries in Africa. Beijing might incur considerable short-term costs—namely, the loss of prestige and goodwill— but over the long term, China would avoid the perils of imperial overreach and preserve enough funds to recapitalize its banking system, which has been exhausted by excessive lending in the last decade.

Beijing should also build stronger ties with U.S. allies to prevent Washington from recruiting them into a broad anti-China coalition. To do so, the regime will have to offer enormous economic, diplomatic, military, and political concessions, such as opening the Chinese market to Japan, South Korea, and Europe; ensuring the protection of intellectual property; making significant improvements in human rights; and abandoning certain territorial claims. Xi’s government has already taken steps to repair ties with Japan. But to truly court U.S. allies and avert a slowdown, either Xi or his successors will need to go further, undertaking market-oriented reforms to offset the economic losses caused by decoupling. The large-scale privatization of state-owned enterprises is a good place to start. These inefficient behemoths control nearly $30 trillion in assets and consume roughly 80 percent of the country’s available bank credit, but they contribute only between 23 and 28 percent of GDP. The efficiency gains that would be unleashed by reining in the state’s direct role in the economy would be more than enough to compensate for the loss of the U.S. market. The economist Nicholas Lardy has estimated that genuine economic reforms, in particular those targeting state-owned enterprises, could boost China’s annual GDP growth by as much as two percentage points in the coming decade.

Unfortunately, Xi is unlikely to embrace this strategy. After all, it runs against his deeply held ideological views. Most of China’s recent foreign and security policy initiatives bear his personal imprint. Curtailing or abandoning them would be seen as an admission of failure. As a result, the CCP might be limited to tactical adjustments: promoting public-private partnerships in the economy, deregulating certain sectors, or reducing government spending. Such steps would represent an improvement but would probably neither raise sufficient revenue nor appeal strongly enough to U.S. allies to decisively alter the course of the U.S.Chinese confrontation.

Instead, Xi will probably beat the drums of Chinese nationalism to counter the United States. Ever since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests—which shook the party to its core and resulted in a government crackdown on dissent—the CCP has ceaselessly exploited nationalist sentiment to shore up its legitimacy. In the event of decoupling and an economic slowdown, the party will likely ramp up those efforts. This should not be hard at first: most Chinese are convinced that the United States started the current conflict to thwart China’s rise. But ironically, fanning the flames of nationalism could eventually make it harder for the party to switch to a more flexible strategy, since taking a vigorous antiAmerican stance will lock in conflict and constrain Beijing’s

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policy options.

The party would then have to turn to social control and political repression. Thanks to its vast and effective security apparatus, the party should have little difficulty suppressing internal challenges to its authority. But repression would be costly. Faced with rising unrest fueled by economic stagnation, the party would have to devote substantial resources to stability, largely at the expense of other priorities. Strict social control would also likely alienate some elites, such as private entrepreneurs and high-profile academics and writers. Escalating repression could generate greater resistance in China’s periphery—Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong—and elicit international criticism, especially from the European countries that China needs to court.

AFTER THE DELUGE The CCP is still far from dead. Short of China’s losing a direct military conflict with the United States, the party can conceivably hang on to power. That said, a regime beset by economic stagnation and rising social unrest at home and great-power competition abroad is inherently brittle. The CCP will probably unravel by fits and starts. The rot would set in slowly but then spread quickly.

It is possible, but unlikely, that mounting dissatisfaction within the regime could motivate senior members to organize a palace coup to replace Xi. The party, however, has adopted sophisticated coup-proofing techniques: the General Office of the Central Committee monitors communication among members of the committee, the only body that could conceivably remove Xi. What is more, Xi’s loyalists dominate the membership of the Politburo and the Central Committee, and the military is firmly under his control. Under such circumstances, a conspiracy against the top leader would be exceedingly difficult to pull off.

Another possible scenario is a crisis that creates a split among China’s top elites, which in turn paralyzes the regime’s fearsome repressive apparatus. Such an event could be precipitated by mass protests that the security forces are unable to contain. As with the Tiananmen protests, divisions could emerge among top leaders

The deepest threat to the regime’s stability will come from the Chinese middle class. Well-educated and ambitious college graduates will find it difficult to obtain desirable jobs in the coming years because of China’s anemic economic performance.

over how to deal with the protesters, thus allowing the movement to gain momentum and attract broad-based support nationwide.

But this scenario, although tantalizing, is unlikely to materialize, since the party has invested heavily in surveillance and information control and has developed effective methods to suppress mass protests.

The scenario that would entail the greatest likelihood of radical change is a succession struggle that would occur if Xi were to pass away or resign owing to infirmity. Typically, the fight for power that follows the end of strongman rule produces a weak interim leader: consider Soviet Premier Georgy Malenkov, who followed Stalin, or CCP Chair Hua Guofeng, who followed Mao. Such leaders are often pushed out by a stronger contender with a transformative vision: think Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and Deng Xiaoping in China. Given this new leader’s need to assert his authority and offer a different, more appealing agenda, it is unlikely that Xi’s hard authoritarianism would survive the end of his rule.

That would leave the new leader with only two options. He could return to the survival strategy that the party had before Xi by restoring collective leadership and a risk-averse foreign policy. But he might find this to be a hard sell, as the party and all its previous survival strategies might have been discredited by this point. So he might instead opt for more radical reforms to save the party.

Although stopping short of liberal democracy, he would, in this case, roll back repression, relax social control, and accelerate economic reform, just as the Soviet Union did between 1985 and its collapse in 1991. Such a course of action might be more attractive to a party elite traumatized by two decades of strongman rule; it might also resonate with Chinese youth yearning for a new direction.

If reformers gained the upper hand and embarked on such a path, the most critical issue would be whether they could avoid “the Tocqueville paradox,” named after the political theorist Alexis

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This photo taken on June 2019 ,5 shows Uigher men arriving before Eid al-Fitr prayers, marking the end of Ramadan, outside the Id Kah mosque in Kashgar, in China’s western Xinjiang region. (Getty)

de Tocqueville, who observed that the reforms that a weakened dictatorship pursues have a tendency to trigger a revolution that eventually topples the reformist dictatorship itself.

Moderate reforms might be more effective in China than they were in the Soviet Union, however, because a new Chinese leader would not have to deal with a collapsing external empire, as the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, did in Eastern Europe.

Nor would a new leader face national disintegration, as the Soviet Union did in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when all 15 Soviet republics bolted from the center, because non-Chinese ethnic minorities make up less than ten percent of China’s population. They may cause serious problems in Tibet and Xinjiang, but otherwise, ethnic minorities pose no real threat to China’s territorial integrity.

Whatever the outcome after Xi’s political exit, the CCP will likely undergo dramatic changes. In the best-case scenario, the party may succeed in transforming itself into a “kinder, gentler” regime, one that endorses economic and political reforms and seeks a geopolitical reconciliation with the United States. By the end, the CCP could be unrecognizable. In the worst-case scenario, deep institutional rot, inept leadership, and the mobilization of anti-regime movements could very well cause a hard landing.

Should that happen, it would be one of history’s greatest ironies.

Despite the lessons the CCP has learned from the Soviet implosion and the steps it has taken since 1991 to avoid the same fate, the end of one-party rule in China could follow an eerily similar script.

THE SICK MAN OF EAST ASIA Such a scenario will likely be dismissed as pure fantasy by those who believe in the durability and resilience of CCP rule. But the Chinese party-state’s botched initial response to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus and the subsequent eruption of public

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outrage should make them think again. The worst public health crisis in the history of the People’s Republic of China has revealed a number of significant weaknesses. The regime’s capacity to collect, process, and act on critical information is much less impressive than most would have anticipated. Considering the enormous investments in disease control and prevention that China has made since the SARS outbreak in 2002–3 and the implementation of laws on emergency management in 2007, it has been staggering to see how thoroughly the Chinese government initially mishandled the new coronavirus epidemic. Local authorities in Wuhan—the epicenter of the outbreak—concealed critical information from the public even after medical professionals sounded the alarm, just as Jiang Yanyong, a veteran army doctor, did in 2003 about SARS. Although they received reports from Wuhan about the spread of the virus in early January, most members of the senior leadership did not take any serious action for two weeks.

The crisis has also revealed the fragility of Xi’s strongman rule.

One likely reason that Beijing failed to take aggressive action to contain the outbreak early on was that few crucial decisions can be made without Xi’s direct approval, and he faces heavy demands on his limited time and attention. A strongman who monopolizes decision-making can also be politically vulnerable during such a crisis. A series of decisions Xi made after the Wuhan lockdown began—such as sending Li, the premier, to the epicenter of the virus instead of going himself and remaining unseen in public for nearly two weeks—undermined his image as a decisive leader at precisely the moment the system seemed to be rudderless. He reasserted control only weeks after the crisis began—by firing the party chiefs in charge of the city and the province where the outbreak started and imposing tight censorship rules on the press and social media.

But the brief window during which Chinese social media and even the official press erupted in outrage revealed just how tenuous the CCP’s control over information has become and highlighted the latent power of Chinese civil society. For unknown reasons, China’s censorship system performed poorly for about two weeks after the lockdown in Wuhan was announced. During that period, people were able to learn how the government had muzzled medical professionals who had tried to warn the public. Criticism of the government reached a peak when Li Wenliang—a doctor who in late December was among the first to warn Chinese authorities about the danger of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and who was subsequently interrogated and silenced by local police—died of the illness on February 7, showing that the CCP could lose public support quickly in a crisis situation.

The events of the past few months have shown that CCP rule is far more brittle than many believed. This bolsters the case for a U.S. strategy of sustained pressure to induce political change.

Washington should stay the course; its chances of success are only getting better and better.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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When the Pandemic Hits the Most Vulnerable Developing Countries Are Hurtling Toward Coronavirus Catastrophe

by Robert Malley, Richard Malley Imagine if virtually everything about the United States’ ongoing response to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, goes wrong. That test kit shortages persist for

months. That the country utterly fails to bolster the capacity of the hospitals and intensive care units and expand the supply of protective facemasks, gloves, and ventilators. That an already stretched health system proves incapable of tracing, isolation, and quarantine. That ordinary citizens fail to separate them-

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As of now, it is unclear to what extent the disease has spread to less developed countries, as these do not currently test sufficiently, if at all, for the presence of the virus.

BRACING FOR IMPACT As of now, it is unclear to what extent the disease has spread to less developed countries, as these do not currently test sufficiently, if at all, for the presence of the virus. Perhaps many of them will be spared a major outbreak, although there is yet no sound scientific rationale for why that might happen. The virus could be highly seasonal and less transmissible in more humid, warmer climates, but so far there is little evidence to support this. Seasonality is a characteristic of well-established viruses, to which people have had opportunity to develop at least partial immunity. This is because in a setting where the population is already somewhat immune, changes in temperature and humidity are far more likely to affect the ability of a virus to spread. But in the case of the new coronavirus, such partial immunity is still lacking entirely. Singapore, despite its consistently warmer and more humid climate, was one of the first countries affected. Any impact weather might have on the coronavirus likely would be modest at best, delaying catastrophe rather than preventing it.

Indian migrant workers and labourers along with their families stuck in the national capital, with and without protective masks crowd to board buses to return to their native villages, as nationwide lockdown continues over the highly contagious coronavirus (COVID19-) on March 2020 ,29 in Ghaziabad, on the outskirts New Delhi, India. (Getty)

selves from one another and most businesses stay open.

Now, imagine all of that, only several orders of magnitude worse. For any number of developing countries, such a scenario is not a matter of speculation. It’s a likely future, if not an imminent reality.

The novel coronavirus pandemic began mainly in developed countries theoretically better equipped to deal with its repercussions—whether China, South Korea, Singapore, or Italy. Although they, too, are struggling to cope, these nations enjoy relative affluence, strong institutions and political systems, and fairly effective medical systems by global standards. Were anything approximating what has hit those nations to afflict poorer or conflict-ridden ones, the effect could be crushing. That moment, unfortunately, may not be too far off: India, Pakistan, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Nigeria, and South Africa each have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of cases. And as the experience of several current COVID-19 hot spots has shown, only a narrow gap can separate trickle from flood.

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Known COVID-19 risk factors, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, or hypertension, are more prevalent in highincome countries. Older populations are also more likely to suffer the disease’s worst consequences, whereas many developing countries skew toward the younger. Together, these facts could mean that the virus will hit lower-income countries less harshly. Again, however, any possible benefit would be slight: obesity and cardiovascular disease are still prevalent in poorer countries, whose populations also have to contend with a number of other health issues and environmental conditions that exacerbate the virus’s lethality, from chronic malnutrition to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, smoking, and poor air quality.

And even the young are at some risk: COVID-19 can be lethal in individuals in their twenties, especially where urgent medical care is lacking.

The bottom line is that COVID-19 will almost certainly strike developing countries. The current low numbers are due either to a lack of detection or to the time lag between when the virus first spreads and when it begins to manifest. When it does strike, it will do so with a vengeance, as these countries bundle together all the most potent risk factors. Their basic health in-

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frastructure is inadequate. They often lack clean running water. They also have high population densities and family cohabitation structures that will impede physical distancing. And when workers depend entirely on their paycheck to survive and the government cannot afford to cover the difference, the cost of shutting down businesses becomes unimaginable. As Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed pointed out in the Financial Times, even a short interruption in planting or harvesting could have devastating consequences on his country’s food supply. All of this will inevitably be compounded by the dramatic global economic slowdown that awaits and which will hit fragile states the hardest, further damaging their resilience.

In short, the countries least able to impose physical distancing and perform contact tracing also tend to have the most overstretched health-care systems and the most precarious economies. A major COVID-19 outbreak in any of them could lead to an almost unfathomable number of dead. Estimates in the United States suggest that roughly five to ten percent of COVID-19 patients require hospitalization in intensive care units (ICUs). In most poorer countries, acute shortages of ICU beds occur even under normal conditions. The United States has roughly 33 ICU beds per 100,000 people. That number drops to around two in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In sub-Saharan Africa, the situation is even more dire: Zambia has 0.6 ICU beds per 100,000; The Gambia has 0.4; and Uganda has 0.1. If the pandemic hits these countries or any others like them, they will almost certainly face a sudden surge of cases that will overwhelm their health-care systems. As a result, the fatality rate from COVID-19—which in wealthier nations is currently estimated to be between 0.25 and three percent—could be much higher in poorer countries. Because overstretched hospitals will not be able to care for people with other potentially treatable medical conditions, the overall mortality rate will be higher still.

Do the math: if nothing changes, the prospect of millions of deaths is far from unrealistic.

In short, the countries least able to impose physical distancing and perform contact tracing also tend to have the most overstretched health-care systems and the most precarious economies.

NEXT STEPS What should be done? Governments in developing countries should, of course, do their best to impose physical distancing, enhance their capabilities for testing and contact tracing, isolate their most vulnerable citizens, and shift their budgetary priorities to public health. But in many places, these interventions will be hard to implement, and they go only so far. Ultimately, much of the response will have to come from the outside—from wealthier states, international financial institutions, and the global health community.

The first step is to take the full measure of the impending crisis, rather than simply hoping for the best just because the worst has not yet materialized. Some immediate steps would help: International organizations or individual states should urgently provide funds so that developing countries can produce or buy medical supplies. Budgetary support and debt relief could free up other resources. The UN has already issued a $2 billion appeal to combat the pandemic. It’s a start, but one that barely scratches the surface of need.

Whatever funds are made available should be spent wisely.

Ramping up supplies of personal protective equipment to shield health-care workers makes perfect sense. By contrast,

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A passenger’s body temperature is being tested at the gate of entry upon arrival at the Murtala International Airport in Lagos, on March ,2 2020. (Getty)

Even outside the medical realm, spillover effects are likely. Many developing countries could suffer massive death tolls, economic meltdowns, and skyrocketing unemployment and poverty. not dealt with as an afterthought. Once the threat posed by COVID-19 has eventually died down, developing countries will once again need massive assistance—this time to help rebuild their economies and make sure they are better prepared for the next pandemic.

SPILLOVER EFFECTS Paying attention to the plight of poorer nations will no doubt be a difficult sell at a time when all countries, rich and poor alike, are facing the pandemic and the economic destruction that lies in its wake. Public opinions will resist spending resources abroad when so much is needed at home.

trying to substantially enhance existing ICU capabilities—by providing respirators, for example—would probably be misguided. Given the magnitude of the challenge, the priority should be to ensure that poorer countries can identify infected individuals and the people who were in contact with them and ensure that those with relatively mild symptoms can be diagnosed in testing centers or, ideally, at home rather than seek hospital care. That strategy is the best way to alleviate pressure on already strained health systems and save lives. To implement it, biotechnology companies, nonprofits, and international health organizations must join forces to develop and distribute low-cost testing tools.

Further down the road, if researchers manage to repurpose or develop a drug that can reduce the disease’s severity and make it less lethal, wealthier states should go against type: instead of prioritizing their own citizenry, they ought to simultaneously supply lower- and middle-income nations. The same goes for any future vaccine, which under a best-case scenario will be available 12 to 18 months from now. Because physical distancing and quarantine—the only alternative measures that currently exist to control the virus—are more difficult to implement in most poorer countries, global access to any effective therapeutic or vaccine should be considered a priority,

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But if humanitarian considerations won’t suffice to make the case, more practical ones should. A pandemic that knows no borders will have ramifications that ignore them, too. However effective border closures may be, they will never fully contain the virus—there inevitably will be seepage, allowing the virus to return to areas where it had been eradicated. Vanquishing COVID-19 only in some places will remain a short-lived success if the disease is not vanquished everywhere.

Even outside the medical realm, spillover effects are likely.

Many developing countries could suffer massive death tolls, economic meltdowns, and skyrocketing unemployment and poverty. The resulting social upheaval could take many forms, from violent intrastate conflict to massive refugee flows, a growth in organized crime, or terrorist groups taking advantage of the spreading chaos—each of which could eventually affect Europe and the United States.

A crisis of epic proportions could lie ahead or perhaps is already smoldering, unseen but no less potent. For wealthier nations, helping the developing world weather both the immediate impact of COVID-19 and its longer-term costs is not simply an act of humanitarian altruism. It is a self-serving and urgent necessity.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com

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UK Labour Party Gets New Leader as Coronavirus Sparks Calls for National Unity The Pandemic Has Made British politics - and Kier Starmer’s New Job - Far Less Predictable and Far More Challenging 32

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The new leader will now have to work hard to become a much more visible player in the conversation and his approach to the pandemic could define his leadership for the long term. cording to analysts. “Unlike Mr. Johnson, he is detail-oriented and forensic in his approach. He lacks Mr. Johnson’s charisma, which would normally be a weakness but could work to his advantage during a crisis,” wrote The New York Times.

Starmer’s supporters also believe his background makes him an ideal leader at a time of national crisis. Angela Eagle, the MP for Wallasey and a former minister, told The Guardian this was a moment made for a serious politician such as Starmer. “There are pivot points in history where leaders can remake the political weather and set the agenda. This is one of them. And I think Keir has the personal and moral authority and a strategic vision to rise to the occasion,” she said.

Sir Keir Starmer speaks during a Labour leadership rally at the Neon on February 2020 ,19 in Newport, Wales. (Getty)

by Yasmine El-Geressi Sir Keir Starmer was elected by Labour Party members on Saturday to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as opposition leader following the party’s worst election performance since the 1930s back in December. Starmer, 57, won comfortably in the first round of voting, with 56.2 percent. While the contest gained little coverage as the country battles to contain the coronavirus, his landslide victory is an important moment for British politics. It means that he has a strong mandate when it comes to his leadership and holding the government to account. But the political world has changed in the last few weeks. In the midst of the worst peacetime emergency the nation has faced in living memory, the coronavirus has made British politics — and Starmer’s new job as leader of the opposition — far less predictable and, of course, far more challenging.

A former public prosecutor and human rights lawyer and having shown he is fast on his feet in debates in the House of Commons, Starmer is well qualified for this role, ac-

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But just as the leadership election flew under the media radar, Starmer too risks being eclipsed by the coronavirus crisis like all other news. Johnson has also been commanding the headlines, particularly since he went into isolation with a fever after catching the virus, then was admitted to hospital after his condition worsened. The new leader will now have to work hard to become a much more visible player in the conversation over the UK government’s response to coronavirus, and his approach to the pandemic could define his leadership for the long term.

Starmer, who joined Parliament in 2015, and gained a lot of attention during the Brexit debate, serving as Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary and helping to temper Corbyn’s approach to Brexit, has arrived in the post just as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government is coming under fire for the low rate of testing for the virus compared to other European countries and for the failure to supply personal protective equipment for frontline medical workers.

Karmer pledged in his victory statement to “engage constructively” with the Prime Minister - who has just invited all opposition leaders to work together with him – while “not scoring party political points or making impossible demands” and would have “the courage to support” John-

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son when appropriate but not back away when the government fails.

Starmer argued the virus has made it more evident than ever why the policies Labour promotes are in the best interest of the country, saying the UK could not go back to “business as usual” as the crisis passes — and that Covid-19 had exposed the “fragility in our society” that demands a better vision for the country, and for change within the party as well.

A few days later he also criticised ministers for being too slow at explaining why the UK is so behind on testing, adding that the focus must now be on making sure the Conservatives’ promise to deliver 100,000 tests a day by the end of April is delivered.

Writing in The Sunday Times, Sir Keir said: “The Labour Party I lead will do its bit to offer solutions. But we will also speak for those who have been ignored; and where we see mistakes we are under a duty to expose them to ensure that they are rectified as soon as possible. And let’s be honest, serious mistakes have been made.”

He also promised “strong, effective and responsible” opposition. The Conservatives have an overwhelming majority, so Labour doesn’t have much power, but if Starmer succeeds, that’s not just good news for the party, it’s to the benefit of the country.

NATIONAL UNITY As the government takes unprecedented powers to im-

Many are calling for Starmer to be invited into a “Covid19- War Cabinet” to ensure the public can have total confidence in the Government’s strategy and that the response to the unprecedented national emergency is genuinely national.

plement its much-needed emergency strategy, many are calling for the leader of the opposition to be invited into a “Covid-19 War Cabinet” to ensure the public can have total confidence in the Government’s strategy and that the response to the unprecedented national emergency is genuinely national in a time when trust in all politicians is low.

On Wednesday night, the Labour leader was asked whether he would consider entering the Government. He suggested he was against the idea, promising instead to be a “constructive Opposition”. He pointed to the Prime Minister’s promise to provide regular briefings to Opposition parties,

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NHS staff from Dorset County Hospital applaud at the entrance of the Emergency Department on April 2020 ,02 in Dorchester, United Kingdom. (Getty)

adding: “Those are the arrangements in place. I do think there’s a proper role for scrutiny here.”

“I do think we should have ramped up the testing much, much more quickly, and I think that there are things to learn from Germany as a result of that,” Starmer said.

“But at the moment,” he added, “I don’t think the public want to hear the leader of the Labour Party in opposition simply quipping about what should have been done.”

This came after a YouGov poll found that two thirds of the public would support a national unity Government with

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Labour MPs entering the Cabinet. Supporters of all parties back the idea of a new leadership team which would see Keir Starmer temporarily team up with Boris Johnson’s ministers during the coronavirus crisis.

A Conservative MP also wrote this week that the country needs Labour’s leader in the cabinet to tackle coronavirus in the UK democratically. “Without the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition shoulder to shoulder,” George Freeman said, “the sheer scale of this crisis risks undermining rather than strengthening public confidence in our emergency response and in our democracy.”

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Is This the Beginning of the End of China’s Industrial Empire?

by: Elie Fawaz

Everyday the news reports on faulty medical equipment coming from China. Spain received 650 thousand ventilators from China that didn’t work, while Turkey and the Netherlands also received thousands of Coronavirus testing kits from China, all of which were unfit for widespread use.

Furthermore, there is a media blackout with regards to the number of Coronavirus cases in China, and the true number of victims in Wuhan. While official figures state that 2,500 people have died in Wuhan, there are unofficial figures based on families who received ashes of their cremated relatives, which raise the number of dead to over 40 thousand.

It is also being said that Boris Johnson’s government is not happy with China, the former accusing the latter of spreading false information and lying about its real number of Coronavirus victims. This could well lead to the UK abandoning it’s 5G deal with Huawei.

China›s decision of not being transparent about the Coronavirus is what led to this global pandemic. Additionally, China’s actions have harmed it’s own economy as well as the global economy. Understandably, the world is now rethinking the current economic order which has placed China as one of its powerhouses and the current political order which sees China as a rising power.

As it stands, China produces 24 per cent of the world’s material needs, this is a massive rise in economic power considering the fact that it only produced 11 per cent of the world’s needs in 2005. This rapid industrialisation has happened because of the Chinese government›s policy of subsidizing it’s industrial sector, and the abundance of cheap labour that no Western state can compete with. It is for this reason that many big corporations have outsourced their factories to China. This was a win-win situation for both sides, China was happy with the extra industry it was gaining which was helping it in its quest towards becoming an industrial empire that could challenge the US›s global leadership. Meanwhile, corporations could provide goods at competitive prices which drove consumers to consume more, thus resulting in more profits.

With the advent of the Coronavirus, the entire globe has gone on lockdown, factories have stopped working and thus supply and demand for goods has ceased. This pandemic has posed a grave danger to global economic security, and the economic security of the West in particular. This has made governments question the status quo of keeping China as the global for the world’s industry and needs. Consumers too have started questioning their insatiable demand for goods. The outbreak has also exposed the fragility of the healthcare systems of several EU member states, as such many European citizens will start to hold their governments accountable for this. Many Europeans will also question the benefits of being part of the EU considering that it has been unable to assist the members most affected by the pandemic, especially Italy and Spain. This could strengthen political parties calling for a secession from the EU, putting more pressure on the bureaucratic organisation.

More importantly, people around the world will now question whether or not globalization and more open trade for cheaper goods is worth it. People have already started questioning their lifestyles teeming with excessive consumption and spending. This has led to analysts stating that a new economic/industrial world order might emerge. This new order will be pushed by feelings of nationalism, therefore big corporations will be called to relocate their factories back home and invest in their own national labour, even if it does drive prices up.

China’s decision to hide the truth about the Wuhan outbreak, has also made people question the competence of the Maoist dictatorship which does not take freedom and human rights into consideration.

It is this regime which is trying to control the world through its economic ventures. Recently, China established it’s first international military base in Djibouti in order to protect one of its largest sources of raw materials. In 2016, it starting building a railroad that connects Addis Ababa and Djibouti, which is intended to move goods to and from the Port of Djibouti and China.

China’s vision for global hegemony is now at risk because of the Coronavirus pandemic. Will the Coronavirus spell of China’s quest for power through industry? No one has a certain answer for that, but what we do know is that the coming stages will present huge developments and changes in a number of facets.

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1795- April - 10/04/2020

The Grand Illusion of the American Dream www.majalla.com

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Queen Elizabeth II: The Monarch Who Has Tirelessly Supported the Nation For the Past 80 Years

by Majalla-London The House of Windsor Queen Elizabeth II is the current monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as well as the current Head of State of 16 Commonwealth realms. Her majesty is also the current Head of the House of Windsor, the reigning royal house of the UK. The House of Windsor was founded in 1917 by her grandfather King George V after he changed the house›s name from SaxeCoburg and Gotha due to the anti-German sentiment that was present in Britain during World War I. The Queen was born on April 1926 ,21 as the first child of Albert Frederick Arthur George and Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon who were then the Duke and Duchess of York, respectively. Prince Albert was the second child of King George V and was second in line to the throne after his elder brother Prince Edward. As such, few expected Princess Elizabeth to become Queen. When King George V passed away in 1936, Prince Edward became King Edward VIII and as he had no children of his own, Prince Albert became first in line for the throne while Princess Elizabeth became second in line. Less than a year passed, and Edward VIII abdicated the throne, therefore Prince Albert was crowned as the new monarch and he ascended the throne as King George VI with his daughter Princess Elizabeth becoming first in line to the throne.

Early Life and Education

Princess Elizabeth and her younger sister Princess Margaret were educated at home. The sisters had a governess who gave them lessons on history, literature, language and literature. Princess Elizabeth would also learn French from a number of governesses who were well versed in the language.

The princess would then join the 1st Buckingham Palace Company as a Girl Guide which enabled he to meet and interact with girls her own age.

However, the breakout of the Second World War in 1939 would dramatically change the life of the princess as well as the lives of all other children in Britain and around the world.

Princess Elizabeth›s Part in the War Effort During the war, King George VI considered transferring his daughters to Canada in order to escape the dangers of German aerial bombing.

However, their mother Elizabeth refused and the family stuck together as a unit in Britain. Instead the princesses were moved to and from several castles in the country, before finally settling at Windsor Castle where they stayed throughout the remainder of the war. Princess Elizabeth played her part to support the war effort in several ways, she would perform pantomimes to help the Queen’s Wool Fund and she made her first radio broadcast at age 14 in 1940 where she addressed the evacuated city children of Britain via the BBC’S Children’s Hour. In 1945, she became an honorary second subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service where she trained as a driver and mechanic.

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Courtship and a Royal Love Story Princess Elizabeth first met Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark at a royal wedding in 1934. The pair met again in 1939 and starting to exchange letters, thus a romance blossomed between Elizabeth and Phillip. Prince Philip had joined the British Royal Navy in 1939 and would serve in the Pacific and Mediterranean fleets during World War II. Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would become engaged after the war in 1947. Prince Philip would then abdicate his Greek and Danish royal titles and become a British subject so that he could marry Princess Elizabeth. They were then married on 20 November 1947, and shortly before the wedding Phillip was named the Duke of Edinburgh. Together Elizabeth and Phillip had four children, Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward.

The First Televised Coronation On February 1952 ,6 King George VI passed away.

Princess Elizabeth would then ascend the throne shortly after, and from here on out she became Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Elizabeth II would have a formal coronation on June 1953 ,2 at Westminster Abbey, what made this event special was the fact that it was the first ever televised coronation of a British monarch.

An estimated 27 million viewers watched the ceremony on TV in Britain. Furthermore, the coronation was also the first major world event to be broadcast worldwide, as an estimated 277

million viewers around the world watched the processions.

Popularity of the Queen and the Royal Family Queen Elizabeth II is one of the most popular figures among all parts of the British public. Even when people started thinking that the Queen and the royal family were waning in popularity at the turn of the new century, several polls disproved such sentiments. For instance, in a 2012 Ipsos Morin poll showed that the Queen had an approval rating of 90 per cent.

One Queen, Fifteen Prime Ministers During her 68 years as Queen, Elizabeth II met with 15 prime ministers, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and finally incumbent Head of Government Boris Johnson.

A Leader Who Has Witnessed Our Best of Times and Our Worst of Times Queen Elizabeth II has lived through some of the darkest days in Britain’s history, namely the Second World War. While most of her time as Queen has been a time of relative peace, there were dark days where she stood firm in support of Britons. Now as the world is trying to deal with the Coronavirus pandemic, her majesty has given a rare televised address where she thanked all the essential workers who selflessly go outside to do their jobs and she also thanked those who are staying at home to slow the spread of the virus. She alluded to her first radio address in 1940, and stated that although it was difficult for the children and their families to be separated from each other, deep down they understood that they were doing the right thing. Similarly we are all doing the right thing by staying separated from our loved ones. Nevertheless, she assured us that we would win the fight against the virus and that “We will be with our friends again, will be with our families again, we will meet again�.

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Of Cannibals: Part Four

The Grand Illusion of the American Dream

by Bryn Haworth Davi Kopenawa is the genuine article, a shaman whose dreamworld is attuned to the wonders of the Amazon rainforest. What can he tell us about the damage we are doing to the world?

offering a respite from toil. She was more like an argument for idleness as a way of life. Hammocks, like floating beds, are the closest an earthbound human can get to levitating.

Gravity, money, stress and the necessity of work, death, along with more esoteric concerns like original sin, these stand on one side, pointing accusatory fingers, while the hammock swings idly on the other, casually flipping the bird.

Over a decade later, I still remember an idyllic scene I once glimpsed from the window of a bus. At the time, I was hurtling towards the Pacific. It was a bright mid-afternoon, and already we had left the chill of the Andes far behind and were crossing a tropical landscape towards Ecuador’s sizzling coast. I had long since fallen into a sort of trance.

There was little to arrest the eye.

Suddenly, in the midst of this dreamlike boredom, I was ambushed by desire. A few yards from the side of the road, I saw a girl in a hammock. Beneath her some chickens were pecking in the dust. The hammock must have been slung from the trunks of trees; I didn’t lose time analysing the picture. All I noticed were the chickens, the hammock and the girl, and my desire, which was aroused in an instant, latched onto these three elements.

The girl wasn’t just relaxing on a sunny afternoon, it seemed to me. Unlike the ads for luxury cruises, she wasn’t

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Davi Kopenawa

The Yanomami people live in collective houses filled with hammocks

The girl’s composure, along with that of the chickens and, most defiantly, the hammock she was swinging in, seemed to mock activity of any kind and scorn the Protestant work ethic. The sheer languor of the scene was capable of retarding the haste of the coach as we sped by, albeit briefly, as if it had extended time and bent it back on itself. Proust would have devoted an entire book to the phenomenon, while Einstein would have explained the effect mathematically, yet when you see relativity actualised like that, you don’t rush to explain or even to celebrate what’s in front of you; instead, it catches at your soul, throwing you into a state of mourning. I would never be able to join her, there, in that halo of ease.

Admittedly, on a less metaphysical level, I fancied her. It was no coincidence that this glimpse of paradise occurred in the middle of an extended period of enforced celibacy, though fortunately for me the term ‘incel’ was yet to be invented and no one was insinuating that I could not be trusted near women. I lived peaceably with several at the time. Men may be beasts, but this one was reared in captivity. Besides, there was a far deeper level to my sadness than the fatberg of wasted sexual instincts clogging up the subterranean passages of my psyche (it had been a long time). The sadness was not only personal, like the effect of tea and madeleine cake on Marcel. This scene was prelapsarian – for a few seconds, a humble portion of Ecuadorian soil had reverted to Eden – so I’m talking about a sense of loss on the scale of the entire species.

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Kopenawa’s tribe resides in a big communal house in the forests of northern Brazil, near the border with Venezuela. Sleeping in hammocks slung from the roof, they have managed to preserve the habits of millennia that existed long before Columbus.

This much, then, by way of preamble to a meditation on the hammock. I don’t recall whether Bertrand Russell said anything about hammocks, but if not, then his essay on idleness should be supplemented by a long footnote on the subject, and this is the man to provide it.

At well over four hundred pages, The Falling Sky by Davi Kopenawa certainly qualifies as that footnote. It never explicitly singles out the hammock as a symbol, but many of the book’s remarkable events take place there. Unlike the one in Ecuador, this hammock is suspended from a ceiling, but it is also, belonging as it does to a shaman, suspended

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from every tree in the forest. Remove the forest and the shaman, along with the sky itself, would promptly fall: ‘…the sun […] who is also a jaguar being, will angrily come down towards the earth and devour the humans like they were smoked monkeys.’

Smoke is the serpent in this paradise. What Kopenawa calls ‘epidemic smoke’ could easily rise and choke the sky’s chest. If the shamans die, the orphaned spirits will cut up the sky in fury. Then the sky will collapse, because there are no longer any shamans to hold it up.

There are times when the cosmology is as dense as one imagines the forest itself to be, but the underlying anxiety is palpable. In fact, this whole miraculous, poetical book is ‘vexed to nightmare’ not by the rocking of Yeats’s cradle, but by the swinging of an insecure hammock and the ever-present fear of falling. Maybe ordinary, less sensitive members of the tribe are able to sleep soundly, but Kopenawa is the kind of man Yeats would have no trouble identifying with. After all, the Irishman had a lifelong fascination with the occult. Like the shaman, he communed with the spirit world and sensed the onset of the apocalypse.

Kopenawa’s tribe resides in a big communal house in the forests of northern Brazil, near the border with Venezuela.

Sleeping in hammocks slung from the roof, they have managed to preserve the habits of millennia that existed long before Columbus. Hammocks are an essential part of that lifestyle. When a woman decides to take a husband, she ties her hammock from the roof next to his. When a shaman succeeds in attracting the ‘xapiri’ [pronounced shapiri] or spirits down to dance for him, they take up residence in spirit houses where they sleep, naturally enough, in hammocks.

As a child, Kopenawa had great difficulty sleeping. He would toss and turn, frightened of the intimations from the spirit world. It was only as he grew that he began to realise these were attempts by that world to communicate with him.

It was his father-in-law, a great shaman, who first blew the powder of the yakoana plant into his nose that would enable Kopenawa, after great struggle and even terror, to become accustomed to the company of spirits, to become ‘other’ and ‘like a ghost’ in order to cease living like ordinary mortals and make a journey (or his image, at least) to the chest of the sky, far above the forest. Eventually he was able to attract spirits down to sing and dance for him, but not without going through severe privations.

The shaman has to renounce sex, for example. Spirits dislike the smell of penis, apparently. This comes as no surprise. After all, there had to be some good explanation for the fragrant Gwyneth Paltrow’s reluctance to extend her range into the next available genitals. More precisely, there

must be no ‘eating of vulva’ as the translator puts it, in what is really the closest to a description of cannibalism the book has to offer. There’s a lot of this vulva-eating going on, but not if you’re an aspiring shaman.

The novice must also forgo meat. If he hunts game, such as tapirs, he has to wear the correct adornments and stalk his quarry with infinite patience, but for all his exertions he must never eat the animals he manages to kill.

Given these privations, it’s hardly surprising that the youthful Davi Kopenawa was fit for little more than lying in his hammock for days on end, getting physically weaker and closer to the spirit state. He dreamt a lot. At last, the reward for his self-control was the uncanny beauty of the spirits who sought him out in their droves. These spirits were ancestral. They moved balletically, sang like sirens and were so perfect that even their farts smelt sweet. Word to the wise, Gwyneth. They were the emanations of the forest and of its creator, Omama, and ordinary tribesmen just didn’t know what they were missing.

Without leaving his hammock, Davi was then able to travel to the back of the sky and meet the ghosts of his ancestors there. He was taught by his xapiri the ways of curing people’s ailments. With time he could attract great numbers of spirits into his spirit house, and, unsurprisingly, he had no desire for material possessions. His mind was on higher things.

The book contains long meditations on the ethereal realm of the forest and on the only root of virtue in men: boundless generosity. Most of the members of the tribe make haste to give stuff away the moment they acquire it. Like two friends bickering over who pays the bill, people strive to outdo each other in their munificence. A good man dies without a stick

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A tapir in full gallop

Davi Kopenawa at Avebury in England, among the standing stones

of furniture to his name, having successfully disposed of everything along the way, and is mourned by the entire tribe for weeks on end. It’s easy to detect the echoes here of the noble cannibals described by Montaigne.

Stepping out from the rhythm and the mores of life in the forest is, therefore, as one might expect, a huge shock, and no one can accuse Kopenawa of half measures. When he ventures beyond Brazil, it is to frenzied megapolises where he sees the destitution in which many of the inhabitants are forced to live. Here, for instance, is his account of New York: ‘…while the houses in the centre of the city are tall and beautiful, those on its edges are in ruins. The people there have no food and their clothes are dirty and torn. They looked at me with sad eyes. These white men are greedy and do not take care of those among them who have nothing.

How can they think they are so smart? They do not want to know anything about these needy people. They reject them, and let them suffer alone. They are happy to keep their distance and call them “the poor”. They even take their crumbling houses from them and force them to camp outside in the rain with their children. It scared me to see such a thing.’

One thinks here of the cannibal of five hundred years ago, astonished at the appalling treatment of our ‘necessitous halves’ (see Of Cannibals, Part Two): ‘Their cities are full of big houses and innumerable possessions, but their elders never give them to anyone. If they were really great men, should they not tell themselves that it would be wise to distribute them all before they make so many more? Do we ever hear the white people say: “Take

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all the machetes and pots that you see?” We people of the forest possess few things and we are satisfied.’

The sharing of goods in the Brazilian forests before the Portuguese arrived, and a contemporary’s disgust at the very notion of ‘the poor,’ show that things have not altered substantially.

The language of this book is so plaintive and guileless, I couldn’t help thinking of William Blake. At first it seemed like a far-fetched analogy, but then I remembered the film ‘Dead Man’ in which a native American mistakes Johnny Depp for the great poet. Perhaps a genuine ‘savage’ had indeed roamed the chartered streets near where the chartered Thames does flow. It’s certainly true, given the Englishman’s intimacy with the spirit world, that he was some kind of homegrown shaman.

Kopenawa’s attitude to war is equally reminiscent the old mystic poet, who once expelled a belligerent soldier from his garden. His perceived lack of patriotism in a time of war got Blake into trouble with the authorities. Montaigne’s cannibals also come to mind, with their emphasis on valour and lack of interest in the spoils: ‘We do not fight with the same hardness as they do. If one of our people is killed by arrows or sorcery blowpipes, we only respond by trying to kill the enemy who ate him.

This is different from the wars with which the white people mistreat each other. They fight in great numbers. They even kill their women and children. They simply make the wars for bad talk, to grab new land for minerals, to tear minerals out of the land.’

This is heartfelt, as the Yanomami are threatened by the depredations of gold miners, ripping holes in the ground,

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poisoning the rivers with mercury and felling trees to construct their roads.

Like Blake, the shaman’s ultimate aim is to expel men of violence from the garden. Kopenawa consistently associates white people with an inability to dream. The hammock thus becomes a potent image of what we stand to lose, forever, when there are no trees left to hang one from and no dreams worth the name. Of course, there will still be dreamers, just as there will still be trees – even in the streets of Sheffield, if the local council can be persuaded to keep their hands off them – but the forests where the trees constitute the greatest, most diverse biosphere on the planet will be gone, and with them the lifestyle of the tribes who lived there. The world’s soul will be the smaller for it. At this strange and ominous juncture in the geological era known as the Anthropocene, we can still pay heed to the poetic words of a shaman who was born in the forest half a century ago and who has visited the world outside, constantly alert to the poor mental health of its inhabitants:

you for money for everything, even to drink and urinate.

Everywhere you go you find a multitude of people rushing, although you do not know why. Whenever I stay there too long, I become restless and cannot dream.’

One night in Paris, he sees:

‘…their thought is short and obscure. It does not succeed in spreading and rising because they prefer to ignore death.

They are prey to dizziness […] The white people, they do not dream as far as we do. They sleep a lot but only dream of themselves. Their thought remains blocked, and they slumber like tapirs or turtles.’

Has anyone ever been so disappointed by the Eiffel Tower?

There is only one refuge after the confusion and dizziness of his excursions into the white people’s land.

The dreams fall short, like exhausted birds. No one dreams with ambition or scope. Again: ‘I can never think calmly in the city. People constantly ask

‘a kind of house, very tall and pointy, made of metal like a large antenna covered in vines of sparkling light.’

He takes it to be a spirit tower at first, but is swiftly disabused: ‘As I looked at it, I told myself: “these outsiders do not know the spirits’ words, but they imitated their houses without even realising it!” It baffled me. Yet despite the resemblance, the light from this house of iron seemed lifeless. It was without resonance. If it were alive like a real spirit house, the vibrant songs of its occupants would unceasingly burst out of it.’

‘I was happy to come back to my hammock […] Yet I had barely settled into it when I was seized by a violent dizzy spell […] I could only keep my eyes set ahead of me, staring like a ghost. Flying to this distant spirits’ land had made me become other, and if the shaman elders […] had not protected me again I might have died of it!’

In his absence, his spirits have been starving, dependent as they are on the powder from the yakoana plant for sustenance, so he consumes it ‘day after day.’ Without the food they would complain, especially the younger ones, and if their ‘father’ disappeared altogether, they would depart.

‘Under no circumstances can we leave them abandoned in their hammocks.’ Dreaming is a sacred duty. It is a measure of the extent to which the philosophy of the hammock is diametrically opposed to the bustle and industry of forlorn Westerners: ‘The lives of white people who hurry like ants seem sad to me. They are always impatient and anxious. They barely sleep, and run all day in a daze. They live without joy and busy themselves with acquiring new merchandise, their minds empty. Once their hair is white, they disappear and the work – which never dies – survives them without end.

Then their children continue to do the same thing.’

Women and children in the forest of the Yanomami

This perpetual work sounds remarkably like another dream we’ve heard so much about, possibly the most tarnished

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But this palatable formulation of the American Dream, as prosperity for every law-abiding, hardworking American, has become increasingly improbable. George Carlin famously observed it was called a ‘dream’ because you’d have to be asleep to believe it.

Cindy Sherman as rich woman

cliché on the planet. It’s certainly up there with ‘trickledown economics’ and Disneyland for sheer triteness, but more of that in a second.

Work is spuriously eternal for the Amazonian shaman.

His own people have to die, largely because Omama was unable to make them immortal, but also as a result of the ‘cannibalism’ of infectious diseases whose ‘hammocks are made of human skin.’ Yet the forest lives forever. In the land of the white people, individuals also come and go, but work is immortal. From the point of view of the hammock, this apotheosis of work is unutterably bleak and counterproductive. Ordinary tribesmen (not everyone can be a shaman) ‘dream of their children, their garden, visitors to their home, or their wife’s vulva.’ White men have even grown indifferent to that.

‘White people are greedy and make people suffer at work, to extend their cities and accumulate merchandise there. This merchandise is like a fiancée to them. They are really in love with it. They go to sleep thinking about it like we doze off with the nostalgia of a beautiful woman. They dream of their car, their house, their money.’

And they say romance is dead. Elsewhere he claims ‘They sleep without dreams like axes abandoned on the floor of a house.’ Whether they dream or not, these people, most of whom have never been near a hammock, are oblivious to spirits altogether. Could this be the American Dream, the one that has loosed upon the world an epidemic of consumerism?

I may be unconventional in this, but if my own dream

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world was how Kopenawa describes it, sheer boredom would wake me up. I would actually be too bored to sleep.

Anyone whose oneiric life was that dull may as well renounce dreaming altogether and opt for concussion. Given that dreaming is a licence to have and to do whatever you please, one is bound to ask what self-respecting dreamer would have come up with such a humdrum dream in the first place?

Well, we all know the story. Immigrants fled the Old World to embrace the opportunity the dream offered them.

They were impoverished, for the most part, arriving on coffin ships with few possessions, from backwaters of grinding poverty where there was no opportunity for hardworking people to prosper. By this account, the dream was not shameless propaganda used to bamboozle the masses into working for ‘the man.’ It was the antidote to poverty and injustice. Only an unamerican ‘libtard’ would assert that it was also the product of an impoverished imagination.

With origins like this, it is no surprise the dream promises a variety of goodies, whether it’s possessions the dreamer is after, or success, though it’s unclear what success would be, exactly, if it didn’t include possessions. And, thereafter, still more possessions, multiplied to infinity. In the words of John Cooper Clarke (a drug-addled shaman if ever there was one), ‘Too much is not enough now, let’s not be naive.’

But this palatable formulation of the American Dream, as prosperity for every law-abiding, hard-working American, has become increasingly improbable. George Carlin famously observed it was called a ‘dream’ because you’d have to be asleep to believe it. Based on unbridled competition, the dream dictates that for every winner there have to be losers. This means that the dream of wealth one day trickling down to the poor is a category error. Peak dream will be achieved when two billionaires battle it out for the presidency, one of them representing the realistic aspirations of the poor – good luck with that! – and the other their false consciousness. For the sake of maintaining

a shred of decorum in public life, we can only hope that neither of these billionaires invokes the American Dream in their speeches. Implicitly, however, they unavoidably will.

The dream can only be fulfilled if the fabulously poor consent to be the flipside of the fabulously wealthy. They have to be equally helpless fetishists who covet stuff and never have a dream worthy of the name in their entire earthbound existence. Thus, the person with nothing who, despite the unlikelihood that they will ever have anything, dreams of possessing everything, stays motivated. Why make do with the big illusion that you can one day be comfortably off, when you can have the even bigger illusion that you can be fabulously wealthy? Dream big or don’t dream at all. This happens routinely on Instagram. Oneiric penury is every American’s birth right. By the end of the process, the uninhibited vulgarity of the rich will have been redistributed across an entire society and they’ll all look about as cheerful as a recent self-portrait by Cindy Sherman.

Kopenawa on Western lifestyles: ‘The lives of white people who hurry like ants seem sad to me. They are always impatient and anxious. They barely sleep, and run all day in a daze. They live without joy and busy themselves with acquiring new merchandise, their minds empty.’

Of course, another dream has always been possible, though it was pretty much extirpated by the rampant ethics of Protestant white men. When Henry David Thoreau chose spartan simplicity and communing with nature over patriotic, Godfearing wealth creation, he was really living the Unamerican Dream. It was very transcendental, and for most of his contemporaries the novelty of bucolic selfisolation would have begun to pall after the first half hour.

Americans would find his lifestyle a lot easier these days, however. As long as the hut had a signal, they could keep up with their friends on Snapchat and get limitless quantities of merch from Amazon.

While the American Dream is about to fulfil its manifest destiny in the north, in Brazil it is still a work in progress.

It must be dispiriting to see so much wilderness yet to be tamed, so many layabouts still powdering their noses without paying a cent for the privilege and making like they own the place, but where there’s a will.

As long ago as 1998, Jair Bolsonaro declared it was a shame the Brazilian cavalry hadn’t been as efficient as the (North) Americans “who exterminated the Indians.” Twenty years on, he is the head of state, which explains why Raoni Metuktire, a venerated leader of the indigenous tribes, has returned to the fray at the grand old age of ninety. “I have seen many presidents come and go,” he says, “but none spoke so badly of indigenous people or threatened us and the forest like this. Since he [Bolsonaro] became president, he has been the worst for us.”

Nobody swinging in their hammock, however spiritually attuned they might be, is safe from what’s coming. Gold mining, tree felling, road building, dam construction, cattle grazing – there are so many wonderfully efficient ways of fulfilling the American Dream, at the expense, as ever, of the Amerindian one.

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Raoni Metuktire

H

ealth

Try These Stretches Before You Get Out of Bed Prepare Your Muscles and Joints for a Full day of Functioning

by Harvard Health Letter

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It›s hard to jump out of bed for a great day when your muscles are stiff and your joints creaky. But you can change that by warming up and stretching before your feet ever touch the floor.

«Stretching before getting out of bed can help wake up the body and improve the circulation. It can also turn on the parasympathetic system - the ‹rest and digest› system - which puts us in a more relaxed state right when we get out of bed, helping set the tone for a calm morning and day,» says Dr. Beth Frates, who directs wellness programming for the Stroke Research and

Recovery Institute at Harvard-affiliated Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.

Theoretically, stretching before getting out of bed may also help prevent falls. «By focusing on your legs and arms, you may be more careful and mindful when you put your feet on the ground,» Dr. Frates says.

?HOW SHOULD YOU START Normally before you stretch, you should warm up your muscles; that gets blood flowing to them so they›re more pliable.

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But Dr. Frates says the muscles are already on the warmer side when you›ve been in bed all night. All it takes to prepare for stretches in bed, then, is a few minutes of flexing the joints before you stretch. (Tip: Remove your blanket and sheets before stretching, to give yourself a little more room.)

While you›re still lying down, flex your lower limbs: put your knees and feet in the air; with your knees in the air, raise and lower your feet; roll your ankles and move them back and forth.

Next, sit up in bed. Slowly look left and then right. Roll your shoulders a few times; work your elbows by holding both arms in front of you and doing biceps curls; flex your wrists up and down; open and close your hands several times.

Now you›re ready to start stretching. Try the stretches we›ve

It›s hard to jump out of bed for a great day when your muscles are stiff and your joints creaky. But you can change that by warming up and stretching before your feet ever touch the floor.

SINGLE KNEE PULL Lie on your back with your legs extended. Bend your left knee.

Grasp the back of your left thigh and pull your knee toward your chest. Flex your right foot and press the thigh and calf of that leg down toward the bed to feel a stretch in the front of your right hip and top of your right thigh. Return to the starting position and repeat with the other leg.

SIDE-LYING QUADRICEPS STRETCH Lie on your right side with your legs stacked and extended.

Rest your right arm under your head. Bend your left knee and bring your heel toward your left buttock, reaching back with your left hand to grasp your foot. Feel the stretch in the front of your thigh and hip. Turn onto your left side and repeat the exercise.

HAMSTRING STRETCH WITH RESISTANCE BAND laid out for you on these pages (in any order you like). Some require a towel or resistance band, which you can keep next to your bed.

«Hold each stretch for 30 to 60 seconds if possible,» Dr. Frates advises. «And don›t bounce, which can damage the muscles.»

When you finish stretching, you›ll probably feel better.

«Stretching can release the body›s ‹feel good› chemicals, lubricate the joints, and help you maintain your range of motion,» Dr. Frates says. And that makes the wake-up stretching routine a prescription for a full day of better functioning.

For more stretching, including additional exercises, check out the Harvard Special Health Report Stretching (www.health. harvard.edu/str).

Lie on your back with your left leg extended. Bend your right knee and place the strap around your right foot. Hold the strap with both hands. Flex your right foot and lift it toward the ceiling, straightening the leg as much as possible. Pull the strap to feel the muscle stretch. Repeat on the other side.

FULL-BODY STRETCH WITH RESISTANCE BAND

COBRA

Lie on your back with both legs extended. Hold the band shoulder-distance apart with both hands by your hips. Lift the strap up toward the ceiling, over your head and down toward the bed behind you.

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CHILD›S POSE Position yourself on all fours, knees hip-width apart, big toes touching, and head and neck in neutral alignment. Slowly drop your buttocks back toward your heels as you extend your hands in front of you and rest your forehead on the bed. Feel the stretch down your arms, shoulders, and back.

Lie facedown with your legs extended and toes pointed. Place your hands just below your shoulders, palms down, and press your palms against the bed to slowly lift your head, shoulders, and chest. Feel the stretch down the front of your torso and across your chest.

o

pinion

Abdul Halim Khaddam is Dead, Never Formally Apologised to the Syrian People Despite His Defection from the Assad Regime

by Alia Mansour

Abdul Halim Khaddam died in his Parisian home fifteen years after fleeing Syria and defecting from the Assad regime. Khaddam played a significant role in ensuring the transition of power from Hafiz Al Assad to his son Bashar Al Assad. In spite of the hope that the Damascus Spring instilled in 2001, the Assad regime soon killed that hope by imprisoning those who opposed the Assad dynasty, and murdering those who called for political reform. Khaddam was one of Hafiz Al Assad’s most prominent Sunni arms in imposing his rule, and those who knew him said that he was among the Assad cabinet’s cruellest members.

Those who oppose the Assad regime despised Khaddam for his role in consolidating the family into power, and throughout his years in exile he never once apologised to the Syrian people for how he shaped modern Syrian history, and during one of his TV appearances he went as far as to state that he never made a mistake during his political career. Nevertheless, the story of Khaddam’s political journey is one filled with atrocities and repeated usurpations.

He was the governor of Quneitra during the 1967 War, and as governor he was the one who officially announced Israel’s annexation of the governorate on June 5, 1967. The announcement was made before Israel actually annexed the governorate, but his friend Hafiz Al Assad, who was then the Defence Minister, asked him to make the announcement. Shortly after the announcement, Assad ordered Syrian forces stationed near the Sea of Galilee to withdraw, something that would lead to many of said soldiers to be killed and left Quneitra susceptible for annexation. Moreover, Khaddam left the city in a taxi rather than his official vehicle was left parked outside the governorate building. Thus, Israeli forces annexed the abandoned governorate shortly afterwards.

After Hafiz Al Assad’s coup in 1970, he gave his friend Khaddam the post of Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Khaddam was in turn one of the spearheads that consolidated Assad’s power over Syria. As a diplomat he also worked to polish the regime’s international image after the 1982 Hama massacre.

He became the Vice President of Syria in 1984, as well as one of Hafiz Al Assad’s closest associates. Additionally, he was Assad’s special envoy to Lebanon a post which he remained in from 1975 to 1998. Bashar Al Assad would become the envoy to Lebanon in 1998 four years after he returned from London upon the death of his elder brother in 1994.

Abdul Halim Khaddam and his offspring are also guilty of transporting toxic nuclear waste into Syria and burying it in the Syrian Desert. The reason why this incident wasn’t investigated is because it was done under the knowledge and blessings of Hafiz Al Assad. While Khaddam gained monetary rewards for this crime, Assad gained a political award. At the time, the Assad regime was not on good terms with Palestinian authorities, however by getting rid of the nuclear waste, the regime was able to build bridges with Italian intelligence, which at the time had good relations with both the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) headed by George Habash.

After the death of Hafiz Al Assad, Khaddam became the president of Syria for 40 days where he ensured that the line of succession presented in Hafiz’s final constitutional amendment is honoured thereby paving the way for Bashar Al Assad to succeed his father. He then became Bashar’s vice president, but little by little he started losing political importance and his power in the cabinet diminished. He then resigned from his post in 2005 during a Baath Party conference, but he remained a member of Baath Central Command. He then fled to Lebanon and from there he fled once again to his final exile destination Paris. During his exile he gave many televised interviews where he spoke about his defection from the Assad regime, which he accused of assassinating Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik El Hariri. He also expresses his loyalty to Hafiz Al Assad while simultaneously expressing disdain for his son Bashar.

In 2006, Khaddam formed an opposition party called National Salvation Front in Syria with several members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was a strange development considering the fact that he spent a good chunk of his political career opposing the Muslim Brotherhood. Nevertheless, members of the MB left the party in 2009, making this latest political venture short-lived. Despite his defection from the regime, Khaddam never formally apologised for the torture he inflicted on the Syrian people, and the fact that he helped facilitate Bashar Al Assad into power.

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