Reviving Ottoman Ambitions

International Military Installations in the Middle East are Growing

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Iranian Tanker Released from Gibraltar, but Sanctions Draw a Growing Toll

A Weekly Political News Magazine

2

Issue 1762- August - 23/08/2019

What’s Got into Number 10 ?

Issue 1762- August - 23/08/2019

www.majalla.com

Reviving Ottoman Ambitions www.majalla.com

Editorial Throughout modern history, the Middle East has been a volatile region. The conflicts that affect one country very often find a way to spill over to neighboring countries. Even if said conflict remains within the borders of a country, regional and/or international actors will get involved to protect their various interests. One only has to look to the Syrian Civil War, which turned the country into a battlefield for Iran, Russia, and Turkey. The susceptibility of the region has persuaded some states to form security alliances, for instance, the GCC countries have recently grown closer amid the rising threats in the region particularly that coming from Iran. This week’s cover story

by Mohamed Abd El Qader Khalil focuses on the bilateral relations between Turkey and Qatar, the writer explores the strategic benefits both countries gain from their alliance and why their entente poses a threat to the region as a whole.

For the past 30 years, the Middle East has seen a massive increase in the number of military bases stationed within its territory. Before the Gulf war, only 3 foreign military bases were present in the region (three American, one Russian), but today there are at least 41 known installations throughout the Middle East, which now houses American, Russian, British, French and Chinese military bases.

Yasmine El-Geressi focuses this week on this massive increase of military installations as she analyzes why many foreign powers are adamant on maintaining some sort of stability in the region.

Joseph Braude reports on Gibraltar’s recent decision to release the Adrian Draya 1, which was captured with the help of British naval forces with the suspicion that it would violate EU sanctions on the Assad regime. Despite American opposition to the tanker’s release, Gibraltar decided to let the tanker sail on the Mediterranean, causing the US to warn Greece and other countries of allowing it to dock, lest they too would face sanctions.

Bryn Haworth writes on another Brexit piece, this time focusing on Dominic Cummings the mastermind behind the 2016 leave campaign.

Cummings has recently been appointed by Boris Johnson to become the special advisor to the government. This isn’t his first government role as he was previously an advisor to Michael Gove when he was education minister. Despite being the campaign director for Vote Leave, the writer emphasizes that Cummings does not fit the typical mold of Brexiters, for instance, he has a disdain for xenophobes and is convinced that leaving the EU would actually weaken groups such as UKIP as they would no longer have anything substantial to campaign on. The writer gives further evidence of how Cummings in many ways a black sheep among Leavers.

2

08

A Weekly Political News Magazine

www.majalla.com/eng

Editor-in-Chief

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

‫الوكيل اإلعالني‬ ،www.alkhaleejiah.com :‫موقع إلكتروني‬ hq@alkhaleejiah.com :‫بريد إلكتروني‬ + 9714 3 914440 :‫ دبي‬،920 000 417 : ‫من داخل اململكة‬ +44 207 404 6950 :‫ لندن‬+00764 537 331 :‫باريس‬ +966 11 441 1444 : ‫ومن مختلف الدول‬

- ‫ طريق مكة‬- ‫ حي املؤتمرات‬- ‫مرخص لها الرياض‬ ‫تقاطع التخصصى‬ +44 207 831 8181 :‫ لندن‬- 4419933 ‫ هاتف‬:‫الرياض‬

A Weekly Political News Magazine

26 Erdogan’s Way

Issue 1762- August - 23/08/2019

How Big Tech Can Fight White

32 Supremacist Terrorism

22 Syria Changed the Iranian Way of War

18 International Military Installations in the

Middle East are Growing

Analysis: #BoycottMulan in support of Hong

44 Kong Protests Tests Disney and Moviegoers

38

Lebanese Druze Leader Walid Jumblatt 3

23/08/19

50 Food Truck Craze

S

napshot

4

23/08/19

Swiss pianist and composer Alain Roche performs Chantier suspended in the air with his grand piano under a moving crane at dawn on August 2019 ,16 during the 20th "Jeux du Castrum", a multidisciplinary festival that takes place until August 2019 ,18 in Yverdon-les-Bains. (Getty)

5

23/08/19

S

napshot

6

23/08/19

This photo taken on August 2019 ,14 shows an employee working on a medical glove production line at a factory in Huaibei in China's eastern Anhui province. (Getty)

7

23/08/19

W

eekly news Revolutionary Guard. The tanker was captured last month with the help of the British navy, as it was suspected to be trying to override EU sanctions by trying to transfer oil to the Syrian regime. Despite a request from the US to not release the tanker, Gibraltar allowed the Iranian flagged Adrian Darya1- to leave its territories on Sunday.

Boris Johnson Goes on First EU Visit

As the Brexit deadline looms closer, the new Prime Minister has made his first visit to Germany and France this week. During the visit, both the French President and the German Chancellor expressed the importance of the Irish backstop, something Johnson said needed to be scrapped. Macron was more assertive toward Britain than his German counterpart, as he stated

that the deal May negotiated cannot be replaced. Meanwhile, Merkel somewhat gave a deadline to find a solution to the Irish backstop, as she declared that both the UK and EU can find a solution within 30 days.

Gibraltar Releases Iranian Tanker

Gibraltar, an autonomous British Trump and Danish Prime territory, released Adrian Darya1- a Minister Clash over Greenland tanker suspected to have links to Iran’s Earlier this week, President Donald Trump suggested that the US purchase Greenland, an autonomous Danish island, from Denmark. Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s Prime Minister denied that Greenland is for sale, which prompted Trump to cancel his visit to the country. Later this week, Denmark's prime minister has had a phone conversation with U.S. President Donald Trump, who earlier this week scrapped a visit to the country by saying Mette Frederiksen was "nasty" when she rejected his idea of buying Greenland as an absurdity.

The prime minister's office said Friday that the two spoke late Thursday, and Danish media reported that the call was "constructive."

8

16/08/19

Frederiksen's office says details of the discussion won't be released.

It is believed that it was first time the two spoke since Frederiksen, who repeatedly has said the U.S. remains one of Denmark's close allies, took office June 27.

Trump canceled a Sept. 3-2 trip to Denmark as part of a European tour.

Fires Breakout in Amazon Rainforest, Bolsonaro clashes with World Leaders

Parts of the Amazon rainforest were caught on fire this week. While the cause of the fires has not been confirmed, it is widely believed that scorched earth strategy used to clear farmland might be to blame. While the act is illegal, many farmers in Brazil are still guilty of burning forest land. Brazil’s leader Jair Bolsonaro has previously said that the rainforest was an obstacle towards his country’s economic development, and many world leaders have blamed him for not doing enough to stop deforestation activities.

Assad’s offensive will cause a “humanitarian crisis”. Turkey has supported some rebel factions in the northwestern Idlib region, while Russia and Iran back Assad.

In the phone call, Erdogan told Putin that the Syrian army attacks violated a ceasefire in Idlib and damaged efforts for a solution in Syria, the Turkish presidency said.

“The president stated that the regime’s ceasefire violations and attacks in Idlib

Assad Launches Offensive Attack on Rebel Forces in Idlib

The Assad regime launched an attack in northern Syria this week, as the regime’s army encircled rebel forces in Idlib. The attack prompted Turkish president Erdogan to call Vladimir Putin, as he the former claims that

9

16/08/19

are causing a big humanitarian crisis, that these attacks are damaging the solution process in Syria and pose a serious threat to our country’s national security,” it said.

The recent advances by Assad’s forces have put Turkish troops stationed in the region in the firing line and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, threatening Ankara’s hopes of preventing a fresh wave of refugees on its southern border.

C

over story

Reviving Ottoman Ambitions Why Turkey’s Second Military Base in Qatar is a Dangerous Development

by Mohamed Abd El Qader Khalil Turkish news outlets have recently reported that Turkey is in the midst of establishing a new military base in Qatar, which is allegedly set to begin operations next autumn. Thus far, neither Turkish

nor Qatari officials have confirmed such reports, but credible Turkish journalists such as Hande FÄąrat have given us reason to believe in the news pieces.

Firat recently went to Doha to visit the Turkish base already set there, the base is under the command of Tarek bin Ziad and has more than 5,000 troops stationed. The journalist claimed that the military

10

16/08/19

If such reports are true, then Qatar would be gaining full military protection from Turkey. Such developments are an extension of Qatar’s role as an “Ottoman mandate”.

unit aims to increase its geographic presence in Qatar, and that the new base has already been built and is ready to take in soldiers, she did not reveal how many troops would be stationed there to protect the interests of Turkey and its national security.

If such reports are true, then Qatar would be gaining full military protection from Turkey. Such developments are an extension of Qatar’s role as an “Ottoman mandate”, moreover back in 2017 the Turkish parliament approved of a secret military agreement between both states. While the contents of the agreement are classified, it is widely believed that it gave Turkish military freedom to navigate Qatari soil. Thus, it can safely be said that the Emir of Qatar has given his sovereignty over the country to the Turkish president.

Turkish expansion into Qatar should not come as a surprise given the latter’s fears of the US possibly

11

16/08/19

withdrawing from the Al Udeid Air Base and establishing an alternative base in a another Gulf country. As such, the pendulum that has shifted US interests away from Qatar has forced the Gulf state to act quickly.

Meanwhile, the US has been exerting immense pressure on Qatar’s regional allies, namely Iran.

In recent months, Iran has faced unprecedented US sanctions which aims to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear weapons program as well as stop its destructive region destabilizing foreign policy. A weakened Iran does not bode well with Doha because the Islamic Republic has historically helped Qatar to circumvent Gulf pressure to stop aiding terrorist groups and interfering in the affairs of other Arab states.

A Washington Institute article on Turkish-Qatari military relations has said that Ankara intends to have a long military presence in Qatar. This comes in accordance to their military agreement which states that if one country is attacked, the other country will help defend it. The article also indicated that a second military base will give Turkey greater strategic influence in the region. For one thing, it can provide Qatar with stronger military training and it can increase its arm sales revenue coming from the Gulf country. Moreover, Turkey will now have a greater naval presence which is necessary considering the rising tensions in the Arabian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. Turkey will now also be able to fulfill its ambitions of establishing naval presence in the Indian Sea, something it hasn’t done since the 1650s when the Ottoman Empire battled against the Portuguese Empire for control of that region, the Ottomans would subsequently lose that battle.

TURKISH NATIONALISM AND OTTOMAN NOSTALGIA Turkey’s current government has expressed its

C

over story

ambitions to go back to its Ottoman past. One narrative that has been floating around among Turkish nationalists is that the chaos and tensions ensuing in the Middle East is due to the fact that countries in the region have been shifting away from Turkish influence ever since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, a return of Turkish hegemony in the region would theoretically instil harmony between the countries in the Middle East. It is for this reason that Turkish nationalists believe that Turkey has the right to get involved in the internal affairs of regional neighbours; evidently such beliefs are based on historic nostalgia rather than real strategic policies.

To increase its influence in the region Turkey has allied itself with various countries which it could easily build bridges with, in this case Qatar. Turkey exploited Qatar’s foreign policy, which defies that of the rest of the GCC, to establish its first military base in June 2017. Turkey has now set its sights on Iraq and Syria, two countries which were instrumental in Ottoman hegemony in the region. Turkey’s aggression towards said countries should be noted, as its military recently crossed Syrian borders during the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Marj Dabiq.

Speaking of Syria, in January 2018, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a warning to “those who wish to establish a state in Northern Syria”, stating that doing so would create a “terrorist belt” that would pose a threat to Turkey’s National Pact which its parliament approved back in 1920.

Ruling forces in Turkey also stated that the country has the right to decide the destiny of various other states and cities such as Mosul, Aleppo, Kirkuk as

Experts in International Law have stated that the secret military agreement is a clear violation of Qatar’s sovereignty as it has been rendered to a vassal state to Turkey rather than an independent Emirate in the Arabian Gulf.

well as some regions within Greece and Bulgaria.

Turkey’s relations with Qatar have emboldened the former to commit hawkish acts on various parts of the region, such as Iraq. One Turkish government spokesman claimed that Ankara had the historical right to get involved in Baghdad’s affairs, and various international and bilateral treaties, particularly the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the 1926 Treaty of Ankara, gave them such a right.

Turkish officials have falsely tried to claim a long historical relationship with Qatar. For example, Ahmet Davutoğlu, the former Prime Minister of Turkey, has said that his countries relations with Qatar stem back to the Ottoman Era, and that both states only recently abandoned their friendship.

Moreover, Devlet Bahçeli, chairman of the Nationalist Movement Party, has gone as far as to

12

16/08/19

say that during the Ottoman age, the Qaim Maqam used to rule over Qatar.

Experts in International Law have stated that the secret military agreement is a clear violation of Qatar’s sovereignty as it has been rendered to a vassal state to Turkey rather than an independent Emirate in the Arabian Gulf. Furthermore, Devlet Bahçeli has indicated that the agreement has caused Turkey to make a triumphant military return in the Gulf after almost 100 years of absence in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The Swedish news website, Nordic Monitor, recently published some of the clauses contained in the military agreement; among them was one which indicated that Turkish soldiers stationed in Qatar would be immune from Qatari national law. In the event that a Turkish troop commits an unlawful act

13

16/08/19

then he would be tried by a Turkish tribunal under Turkish laws, this is just one example of Turkey violating Qatar’s sovereignty.

The relations between both states go beyond establishing military bases. Doha recently purchased 50 percent of the shares of the Turkish armed vehicle manufacturing company BMC; in turn the company produced 1500 armed vehicles for the Qatari police and army in 2017. Turkey's ambassador to Qatar, Fikret Ozer, announced in February 2018 that his country would send permanent air and naval forces to Doha once the necessary infrastructure was completed, and a month later the two countries signed an agreement allowing Turkey to establish a naval base in northern Qatar. Strategic experts also travelled to Doha to protect the regime from external threats; even though these developments

C

over story

have permeated Qatar’s sovereignty the regime sees them as advantageous since it has one of the world’s smallest armies.

FINANCIAL ELEMENT OF THE RELATIONS For Turkey the relationship with Doha will not yield any significant political or military gains, rather this new alliance is seen as an economic opportunity from Ankara’s point of view. Rather Turkey can now alleviate many of its economic shortcomings such as high unemployment, widening trade imbalance, increasing inflation rates, and exacerbating external debt. Turkey now has a vast market in Doha for its military equipment, and Qatar in turn will invest in some of Turkey’s defense projects. Turkey is also one of the largest consumers of fossil fuel energy as it spends almost 60 billion dollars annually on oil and natural gas; as such it has now secured its energy needs for the coming years. Turkey is also seeking to build a gas pipeline from Doha to Ankara as part of the Nabucco project, which also aims to deliver Qatari gas to Europe.

Qatar’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry announced that the number of Turkish companies operating in Qatar with Qatari-Turkish capital amounted to about 242 companies; there are about 150 Turkish companies in Qatar operating with 100 percent Turkish capital. The Turkish embassy in Doha valued the investment of Turkish construction companies in Qatar to about 16 billion dollars,

This bilateral relationship will also have a negative impact toward the regional security and stability of the Arab Gulf considering the fact those Turkish forces will now be at a close geostrategic proximity to the other Gulf states.

moreover 60 Turkish companies of various sectors operate in Qatar and Doha is also the home to seven thousand Turkish expats working in different fields.

The embassy also stated that the volume of direct and indirect Qatari investment in Turkey amounted to 18 billion dollars, which includes investments from companies and institutions and investments from Qatari citizens.

REGIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF A SECOND TURKISH BASE IN QATAR Turkey’s second military base in Qatar means that both states will not change their foreign policies despite the regional and international pressure they might be facing. Both view their partnership as necessary for achieving their security ambitions and foreign policy which is based on supporting various political and religious groups as well as various

14

02/08/19

terrorist organizations. A recent article published in The Times revealed that the Al-Rayan Bank (a Qatari bank based in the UK), has been financing several Islamist organizations, one of which a charity group classified as a terrorist organization in the United States. Some legal sources have also indicated that a Qatari bank is responsible for transferring funds to Jihadist groups in Syria, and most of said groups are based in Idlib and they are politically, financially and militarily supported by Turkey.

The continued partnership of both states will have negative impacts for the wider region. The Eritrean government issued an official statement accusing Turkey and Qatar of sabotaging its peace efforts with Ethiopia. Other Arab and African countries have also complained of Turkish-Qatari sabotage efforts, namely Egypt, Libya and Nigeria.

This bilateral relationship will also have a negative

15

02/08/19

Turkey’s relations with Qatar have emboldened the former to commit hawkish acts on various parts of the region, such as Iraq. impact toward the regional security and stability of the Arab Gulf considering the fact those Turkish forces will now be at a close geostrategic proximity to the other Gulf states. The fact that both states also adopt political views that come at odds with the interests of the rest of the Arab Gulf is also a major concern for the rest of the region as whole.

P

olitics

Iranian Tanker Released from Gibraltar, but Sanctions Draw a Growing Toll US-Iran Tensions Continue to Rise

by Joseph Braude Gibraltar has released an Iranian oil tanker detained over a month ago, prompting American officials to issue a stern warning to Greece and others against allowing it to

berth in their ports lest they incur American sanctions.

Meanwhile, the ongoing burden of those sanctions has caused some in the Iranian political system to question the wisdom of seeking a nuclear accommodation with the West in the first place.

16

23/08/19

In an August 19 interview with NBC news, Ali Shamkhani, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and a close adviser to the Supreme Leader told American journalist Lester Holt that, in retrospect, Iran erred in signing the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal. unfortunate that that ship was released.” If Tehran turns a profit from the tanker's cargo, he added, the IRGC will have "more money, more wealth, more resources to continue their terror campaign." The State Department released a further statement warning Greece and all other nations against allowing the Adrian Darya to dock in their ports. “We have conveyed our strong position to the Greek government on the matter, as well as all ports in the Mediterranean that should be forewarned about facilitating this vessel,” the statement said. A State Department representative added that “any efforts to assist these tankers could be considered as providing material support to a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO),” which carries significant legal consequences.

GIBRALTAR RELEASES DETAINED OIL TANKER WHILE U.S. WARNS OF CONSEQUENCES On August 19, Gibraltar, a self-governing British territory, announced that it was releasing the Adrian Darya 1 (formerly known as Grace 1), a supertanker that had been detained 45 days earlier by the Royal Navy over British suspicions that it was violating European Union sanctions on Syria.

The previous day, officials in Gibraltar had rejected a U.S. request to seize the tanker, instead choosing to let the tanker reflag as an Iranian vessel and allow it -- and its 130$ million cargo -- to sail. According to those officials, the sanctions violations listed in the American warrant “would not constitute offenses had they occurred in Gibraltar,” and “there are no equivalent sanctions against Iran in Gibraltar, the UK or the rest of the EU.” American officials conveyed their displeasure with Gibraltar’s decision. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said it was “very

17

23/08/19

AMERICAN SANCTIONS CAUSE CONSTERNATION, REGRET IN IRAN The sanctions campaign has meanwhile inspired a wave of second guessing among the Iranian political hierarchy. In an August 19 interview with NBC news, Ali Shamkhani, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and a close adviser to the Supreme Leader told American journalist Lester Holt that, in retrospect, Iran erred in signing the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal. When Holt raised the possibility of the U.S. and Iran negotiating a new agreement, Shamkhani dismissed it, stating that "the sanctions campaign is not for negotiation, it's for making us surrender … [A]s long as this approach is taken by the United States, Iran will never ever seek negotiations."

For his part, U.S. President Donald Trump expressed skepticism about the Iranian position: “Iran would like to talk but they just don't know how to get there.” Iranians, the President noted are a “very proud people… But their economy is crashing, it's crashing.

Inflation is through the roof. They're doing really badly.”

P

olitics

International Military Installations in the Middle East are Growing

Why the Region Will Remain a Key Focus for International Military Planners for the Foreseeable Future 18

23/08/19

An increasing number of countries recognize Djibouti’s value as a base from which to project maritime power and launch counterterrorism operations.

British launched their first Gulf military base in Bahrain last year and made a multimilliondollar investment in modernization of the Duqm Port complex in Oman to accommodate the new U.K. Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers.

The U.K. also has a sizeable Royal Air Force (RAF) presence in the region, mainly in the UAE and Oman. The French presence in the Gulf is smaller than the U.K.’s but is still significant.

France opened its first military base in the Gulf in 2009, in Abu Dhabi in the UAE. This was the first foreign military installation built by the French in 50 years. Earlier this month Turkey announced that it will open a military base in Qatar near the Tariq Ibn Ziyad military base thus autumn.

Another important actor in Middle East security is the small East African country of Djibouti.

It sits on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which an estimated 4.8 million barrels of oil a day transited in 2016 (the most recent year for which U.S. Energy Administration data are available) and which is a choke point on the

by Yasmine El-Geressi route to the Suez Canal. An increasing number of countries recognize Djibouti’s value as a The Middle East has the highest concentration of base from which to project maritime power and international military installations in the world. launch counterterrorism operations. It is home There are at least 41 known facilities in the region to the U.S.’s only permanent military base in housing American, Russian, French, British and Africa, Camp Lemonnier, with its approximately Chinese forces. The US makes up the bulk of 4,000 personnel. In 2017, China chose Djibouti the international presence in the Middle East with as the location for its first permanent overseas an estimated 29 installations and others have been base, which can house 10,000 troops and which moving in. Before the Gulf war in 1990, there Chinese marines have used to stage live-fire were only four known international facilities in exercises featuring armored combat vehicles and the region; 3 American and 1 Russian. artillery. Saudi Arabia also announced in 2016 that it would build a base in Djibouti. France, Over the last decade, Russia has upgraded its Italy, Germany, and Japan already have presences two bases in Syria - Hmeymim and Tartus. The of varying strength there.

19

23/08/19

P

olitics

But the Middle East wasn’t always this crowded with great power bases. The US jumped from 3 to 29 installations in less than three decades.

Three specific points in time stand out that shaped US expansion in the Middle East. The first was 1979, when the US saw a need to establish a foothold in the region in response to the soviet expansion in Afghanistan and the Islamic revolution in Iran. The second was 1991 after America’s liberation of Kuwait. And the third was after 11/9 which led to the US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Department of Defense, at the height of U.S. combat operations in Iraq during the Second Gulf War, the U.S. presence included 165,000 service members and 505 bases.

The Middle East occupies a unique geographical and strategic position. Two-thirds of the world’s population lives within an eight-hour flight from the Gulf region, making it accessible from most of the globe. The Middle East also contains some of the world’s most critical maritime choke points. Approximately 90 percent of the world’s trade travels by sea, and some of the busiest and most important shipping lanes are located in the region. Tens of thousands of cargo ships travel through the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Suez Canal each year. Given the high volume of maritime traffic in the region, no U.S. military operation can be undertaken

According to the Department of Defense, at the height of U.S. combat operations in Iraq during the Second Gulf War, the U.S. presence included 165,000 service members and 505 bases.

without consideration of how these shipping lanes offer opportunity and risk to America and its allies.

The region has long been one of the most unstable regions in the world, and there are no present prospects for change in the near future.

This instability is the result of ongoing conflicts and tensions, and a variety of political tensions and divisions. For the foreseeable future, the Middle East region will remain a key focus for international military planners.

The aftermath of over eight years of war in Syria has changed the regional dynamics. Russian, Iranian, and Turkish interventions in Syria have greatly complicated the fighting there with all three countries seeing the region as a suitable

20

23/08/19

The US makes up the bulk of the international presence in the Middle East with an estimated 29 installations and others have been moving in. the crisis. Iran, Qatar, and Turkey also signed a land transportation pact in August 2017 which would help reduce the cost and transit period for the exchange of goods.

China’s inroads into the Gulf and wider Middle East remain primarily driven by its economic interests while maintaining a low diplomatic profile and eschewing a military footprint, and are occurring against the backdrop of intensifying global strategic competition with the United States. Beijing’s interests in the Middle East are both structural and strategic.

Strategically, together with Russia, China is taking advantage of the uncertainty produced by the shifting U.S. policies. They backed Iran's efforts to build regional ties and have called on Europe to accelerate its attempts to establish a special trade vehicle designed to bypass the Trump administration's sanctions. venue to implement its geostrategic plans, with Russia emerging out of the rubble of Syria as the major power-broker and military tactician.

Russian oilmen, arms dealers and financiers have been fanning out across the region, striking billions of dollars’ worth of deals, reviving old relationships and forging new ones from Libya to the Gulf.

The GCC crisis that began in June 2017 marked a pivotal moment in relations between Turkey and Qatar. Turkey not only sent food supplies to Qatar by plane, thus alleviating the blockade’s immediate impact, but also passed a law that authorized the government to deploy troops there. The closure of the Turkish military base in Qatar is one of the conditions the UAE and its allies put forward to resolve

21

23/08/19

Since US President Donald Trump's decision in May last year to unilaterally withdraw Washington from a landmark nuclear deal signed in 2015 tensions have risen between world powers and Iran. The US has reinstated sweeping sanctions against Tehran as part of a "maximum pressure" campaign aimed at forcing Iran to renegotiate the agreement. The narrow Strait of Hormuz between Oman and Iran has become a flashpoint between the US and Iran in recent months, with Washington accused Tehran in May of sabotaging tankers along the important trade route. Iran denied the allegations. The US military has since deployed additional forces, including an aircraft carrier and B52- bombers to the Middle East as tensions have mounted. Iran has warned that it would target US military bases across the region in the event of war.

P

olitics

Syria Changed the Iranian Way of War And What That Means for a Future Conflict With the United States 22

23/08/19

Many Iranians who opposed their own government cheered the anti-Assad protests that broke out in early 2011 and welcomed the prospect of Bashar al-Assad’s downfall. Officials in Tehran, by contrast, observed the situation in Syria with deep unease.

A child protester seen waving a free Syrian flag during an evening demonstration in Idlib City demanding freedom for protocol prisoners imprisoned by the Syrian regime. (Getty)

by Ariane M. Tabatabai In the spring of 2011, watching the groundswell of dissent that eventually came to be known as the Arab Spring. Iran had experienced a similar moment two years earlier, when millions of citizens protested what they saw as the fraudulent reelection of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But by 2011, Tehran had effectively crushed that movement. As a result, many Iranians watched the Arab Spring unfold with envy.

Syria, in particular, captured their imagination. Under the Assad family’s rule, Syria had been a crucial ally to the Islamic Republic and the country’s only

23

23/08/19

real Arab partner. For that reason, many Iranians who opposed their own government cheered the anti-Assad protests that broke out in early 2011 and welcomed the prospect of Bashar al-Assad’s downfall. Officials in Tehran, by contrast, observed the situation in Syria with deep unease. Fearful that the friendly regime in Damascus would collapse, they committed significant resources to shoring up Assad, deepening Iran’s involvement as the uprising in Syria morphed into a vicious civil war.

To date, Tehran has spent an estimated 15$ billion propping up Assad—even as the Iranian economy has crumbled under sanctions for the better part of the war. Additionally, the Islamic Republic is thought to have sent some 10,000 operatives, including combat troops, to Syria between 2011 and 2014. This number omits non-Iranian forces backed by Tehran, which The Wall Street Journal put at 130,000 in 2014. And

by Tehran’s own admission, at least 2,100 Iranians had died in the conflict by 2017, including a number of high-ranking military commanders. Today, even as the war winds down, Iranian body bags continue to return home.

Iran’s costly intervention has been crucial to Assad’s survival. It has also profoundly affected Iran itself: the experience of fighting in Syria has changed the Iranian way of war, shifting Iranian tactics and forcing the country’s military to gain new capabilities, especially when it comes to cooperating with foreign militaries and training non-Iranian proxy forces.

These changes won’t be confined to Syria. As tensions rise between Washington and Tehran, the United States and its partners will begin to feel the effects of Iran’s military transformation.

To get a sense of the playbook that Tehran might consult in any future conflict with the United States, Washington should pay close attention to what the

P

olitics

Iranians have learned in Syria.

THE ROAD TO INTERVENTIONISM Since the start of the twentieth century, Iran has seldom deployed troops outside its borders. In –1973 74, Shah Mohammad Reza sent several thousand soldiers and advisers to Oman to help Sultan Qaboos bin Said crush a rebellion. Later, under the newly established Islamic Republic, Iran fought an eightyear war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in which hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers lost their lives but neither side could convincingly claim victory. Following the Iran-Iraq War, which ended in 1988, Tehran limited the scope of its foreign interventions to assistance and advice. The country lacked significant conventional military capabilities and sought plausible deniability whenever its actions could be construed as illegitimate or out-of-bounds.

At times, Iran launched airstrikes against nonstate actors outside its borders. Throughout the 1990s, for instance, the country targeted separatist Kurds and the Mujahideen-e Khalq, an opposition group that the Iranian leadership designated a terrorist organization.

For the most part, however, Iran involved itself in foreign countries by training, equipping, and sharing intelligence with proxy forces—most notably, Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon.

When unrest began in Syria in the spring of 2011, Tehran followed its usual playbook. It sent technology, equipment, and weapons, as well as advisers who could draw on their own experience in crushing antiregime protesters at home. But as Syria descended into all-out civil war, what Tehran had hoped would be a quick and relatively low-cost mission to stabilize

Iranian forces and their proxies have coordinated not only with the Assad regime but also with the Russian government, which began providing air support to the Syrian and Iranian effort in 2015.

the Syrian government turned into a quagmire—one that would force Iranian leaders and military planners to adapt if they wanted to prevent Assad from being replaced by a hostile regime.

In 2013, as opposition forces gained momentum and Western powers called for Assad to step down, the dictator unleashed chemical weapons and committed atrocities to strengthen his grip on power. In the wake of these attacks, Tehran began deploying its own combat troops to Syria as part of a more open and assertive approach. In addition to the paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which Tehran normally dispatches to conduct its covert missions, the country deployed members of its conventional military as well as volunteer militias known as the Basij. At the same time, a number of Iran’s traditional nonstate partners, particularly Hezbollah and some Iraqi Shiite militias, also sent forces to Syria.

To augment these forces, Tehran recruited and deployed new militias composed of Pakistani and Afghan Shiites, some of whom were promised compensation and residency in Iran in exchange

24

23/08/19

Iran's First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri (L) and Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev during a meeting. (Getty)

another important development. Tehran and Moscow have a historically fraught relationship, one built on cooperation against a backdrop of tension and distrust. The war in Syria has not erased the mutual suspicion, but it has provided a sterling example of what cooperation can achieve when Iranian and Russian interests are aligned. Russian air support, closely coordinated with the IRGC and its network of foreign proxies, has been critical to the success of Iranian operations—and to keeping Assad in power.

SYRIA'S IMPACT

for joining the fight. (Iran also reportedly coerced Afghan refugees living within its borders to join these new groups.) IRGC commanders often visited the militias on the Syrian frontlines, helping to ensure direct channels of communication with and control over the fighters as they battled in support of the Assad government.

Just as important, Tehran stopped trying to hide its involvement in Syria. After initially denying its covert operations there, as it typically does, Tehran began publicizing its role in the conflict. By 2016, IRGC social media platforms and state news outlets were broadcasting videos of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani visiting the battlefront, shaking hands with and embracing foreign fighters. When massive floods hit several regions in Iran in the spring of 2019, the foreign fighters were brought in from Syria to help with flood relief efforts—actions that were also publicized by IRGC outlets and social media.

Iranian forces and their proxies have coordinated not only with the Assad regime but also with the Russian government, which began providing air support to the Syrian and Iranian effort in 2015. This marked

25

23/08/19

The war in Syria marked the first time since the end of the Iran-Iraq War that Iranian forces have been exposed to real combat outside of Iran’s borders.

The experience has had a profound effect on Iranian military thinking, forcing Tehran to update its military doctrines and procedures, increase its cohesion, and enhance its ability to conduct joint operations with foreign militaries. The evolution of Iran’s approach to warfare could have real consequences for the United States and its armed forces: whether directly or through proxies, the two countries are likely to continue to clash for the foreseeable future. Iranian and Iran-backed forces now operate in proximity to the U.S. military and its partners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and the Arabian Gulf.

Iran’s conventional capabilities are still no match for those of the United States. What is more, the Islamic Republic still doesn’t possess nuclear weapons.

Instead, the greatest threat the United States faces from Iran lies in its hybrid warfare capabilities, which Tehran has honed over the last four decades and perfected in Syria. The Islamic Republic now boasts new recruitment capabilities and an expanded network of proxies, an amplified media repertoire, and a sharpened capacity to coordinate with conventionally armed allies such as Russia.

In a possible sign of deepening ties to Russia, the two countries signed a military cooperation agreement earlier this month. The details haven’t been made public, but the pact appears to entail a significant naval component. As the United States seeks to counter increased Iranian activity in the Arabian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz against a backdrop of rising tensions, it would do well to consider what Tehran has learned in Syria. Propping up Assad has changed the Iranian way of war, although it’s not clear that anyone in Washington has noticed.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

Erdogan’s Way The Rise and Rule of Turkey’s Islamist Shapeshifter

by Kaya Genc Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the most baffling politician to emerge in the -96year history of Turkey. He is polarizing and popular, autocratic and fatherly, calculating and listless. Erdogan’s ideology shifts every few years, and he appears to make up his road map as he goes along. He is short-tempered: he grabs cigarette packs from citizens to try to force them into quitting, scolds reporters who ask tough questions, and once walked off the stage after an angry exchange with the Israeli president at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But he can also be extremely

patient. It has taken him 16 years to forge what he calls “the new Turkey,” an economically self-reliant country with a marginalized opposition and a subservient press.

This mix of anger and calm has made Erdogan increasingly successful at the ballot box. He became prime minister in 2003 after his party won 34 percent of the vote, and by 2011, its share had risen to just shy of 50 percent. In 2014, when he ran for president in order to centralize his authority, more than half of Turks who cast a ballot voted for him. They did so again in 2018, by which time they had also voted to do away with the post of prime minister altogether.

26

23/08/19

Erdogan has converted his popular mandate into power and used that power to remake Turkey’s relations with the rest of the world. He has expanded Turkish influence in Syria and northern Iraq and tilted Turkey—a NATO member—toward China, Iran, and Russia. His use of power has also generated dissent among feminists, leftists, and the secular middle class.

Under Erdogan’s watch, Turkey has become the world’s largest prison for journalists. Filmmakers, novelists, photographers, and scholars are also among the imprisoned.

In the wake of a financial crisis earlier this year, candidates who were aligned with Erdogan lost support in local elections. But even as his party’s allure diminishes, Erdogan may win a third presidential term in 2023. If that happens, and Erdogan leaves office in 2028, he will go down in history as Turkey’s secondlongest-serving president, a year shy of Kemal Ataturk’s rule.

Ataturk, “father of the Turks,” was an Ottoman general who abolished the caliphate in 1924 and modernized Turkey by force over the 1930s. Under his single-party regime, Ataturk forged a modern nation-state from the ashes of a collapsed empire, built a modern bureaucracy, supported the creation of a Turkish bourgeoisie, and convinced a Muslim nation to allow Western modernity into their lives. Erdogan initially criticized Ataturk’s centralized remaking of Turkey, blaming him for his highhanded style of rule. But since 2008, when Erdogan started having to balance various factions of the bureaucracy, and even more so after 2013, when Turks took to the public squares to protest his policies, Erdogan has adopted strikingly similar methods.

Ironically, the politician he first sought to distance himself from is the one he has come to resemble the most.

YOUNG TURK Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (not seen) at the Great Hall of the People on July ,2 2019 in Beijing, China.

(Getty)

Erdogan was born in 16 ,1954 years after Ataturk’s death, in Kasimpasa, a rough Istanbul neighborhood of open sewers and muddy streets, famed for its firefighters, pickpockets, and Romani musicians. The son of a ferry captain, Erdogan made pocket money by selling Turkish bagels when he wasn’t studying at a religious school. On his way home, as dusk fell in Istanbul, he would use the deck of a cargo ship anchored in the Golden Horn to practice reciting the Koran, earning plaudits for his oratory. But Erdogan also played soccer, dreamed of a career in sports, and rebelled against patriarchy: his fellow Islamists did not approve of his athletic shorts, and his father asked him to land a proper job.

Erdogan was 15 years old when, in 1969, the leading Islamist politician in Turkish history, Necmettin Erbakan, published the manifesto Millî Görüs (National Vision). Erbakan called on Turkey to sever ties with the European Economic Community (the precursor of the EU) and align with pan-Islamist leaders in Bangladesh and Pakistan and across the rest of the Muslim world. From the moment a teenage Erdogan joined the youth branch of Erbakan’s National Salvation Party, his political instincts were shaped by this mindset. Erbakan’s movement supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviets and Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran.

27

23/08/19

Under Erdogan’s watch, Turkey has become the world’s largest prison for journalists. Filmmakers, novelists, photographers, and scholars are also among the imprisoned.

At political rallies, party leaders condemned what they termed “the West’s crusader mentality” and described the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as its modern incarnations. Erdogan and his ilk opposed the absence of Islamic references in the public domain: in their view, the secular government did not deserve respect as long as it did not respect Islam.

In 1985, Erdogan had a chance to prove his organizational skills to Islamist elders when he arranged a boxing match occasioned by the visit of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of a CIA-backed mujahideen group, who was in Turkey to celebrate Erbakan’s return to politics five years after being banished from political life. Erdogan also aligned himself with the Naqshbandi Sufi order in Istanbul, an influential movement that provided the religious connections that would aid his rise to power. In those years, Istanbul’s city government had hired Erdogan as a player on its soccer team, but the team’s ban on Islamic beards forced him to resign. After completing his mandatory year of military service, Erdogan worked as an administrator at a sausage factory; soon, Islamists invited him to work full time for Erbakan’s party— now rebranded as the Welfare Party after previous incarnations were banned—and there he raised funds from members to pay his wages. As the party’s provincial head in Istanbul, Erdogan delivered speeches against “the evil new world order,” protested the Gulf War, and defended the cause of Islamic rebel groups in the Algerian civil war.

Erdogan distinguished himself from other Islamists through his calculated pragmatism, ushering in a tectonic shift in Turkish politics over the 1990s. “We don’t need bearded men who are good Koran reciters; we need people who do their job properly,” Erdogan would later say. As part of this drive, Erdogan established a network of volunteers who could put tens of thousands of party posters on walls in a few hours and distribute handouts to voters during morning commutes. These were his “nerve ends,” he said, capable of sending signals from the Welfare Party’s administration to voters. Erdogan also used another analogy to describe his organization: a “brick wall,” carefully laid and difficult to break.

These grass-roots efforts paid off in 1994, when Erdogan was elected Istanbul’s mayor. He made public transportation free of charge during Islamic holidays, banned alcohol in municipal facilities, and lifted employment restrictions on women who

P

olitics

wore headscarves. When a reporter asked him to explain his success, he replied, “I am Istanbul’s imam.” Erdogan’s bravado alarmed secularists and generals, and his rising career was soon endangered: in 1998, Turkey’s highest court shut down the Welfare Party, and after a fiery speech at a rally, Erdogan was charged with inciting hatred and sentenced to ten months in prison. The legal stain, which the judiciary planned as a way to terminate his career, maximized Erdogan’s popularity, since pious Turks now viewed him as their voice, which the state wanted to silence. By the time he left prison, Erdogan was ready to take the path to power.

It was then that Erdogan moved from local to national politics, defying the ban on his political activities and leading a breakaway group from Erbakan’s party. (He explained the rift with his mentor by repeating a maxim attributed to Aristotle, “Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend.”) The vehicle for Erdogan’s ambitions was the Justice and Development Party—known by its Turkish abbreviation, AKP—which he formed in 2001. At a press conference announcing the new party, Erdogan listed democratization and pluralism as its ideological cornerstones.

His movement, he claimed, was based on power sharing: “A cadre will run the party, and decisions won’t be taken under the shadow of one leader.” He described his own role as an “orchestra chief,” proclaiming that the “age of me-centered politics is over.” Erdogan founded the AKP with two other veterans of the Welfare Party, Abdullah Gul and Bulent Arinc, and the troika had charisma, support from Turkey’s Anatolian heartland, and a novel idea: that European integration and the protections of religious freedom offered by the EU were good for the pious and that democratization was in the interest of conservative Turks.

“We used to see the Turkish state as a leviathan that oppressed the religious and the poor,” Arinc recalled. “Now, the EU negotiation process convinced us the Turkish state can be democratized.”

Erdogan also noted that because of the undemocratic nature of the Turkish establishment, his “conservative democratic” party could be considered “antiestablishment” without calling itself

The Davutoglu doctrine allowed Erdogan to reinvent himself as a global Islamic leader, someone who could improve the lot of Muslims not only in Turkey but elsewhere, too. “

an Islamist party, reaping the benefits of outsider status while maintaining wide appeal. It would become a winning formula for years to come.

The AKP won Turkey’s 2002 elections with 34 percent of the vote; the runner-up received 19 percent. Earlier conservative parties had also won landslides—the Democrat Party in 1950, Justice in 1965, and Motherland in 1983—but the leaders of those movements fared poorly once in power. Turkish generals hanged one on the gallows, ousted another in a coup, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to keep the third away from power. Erdogan was determined to avoid a similar fate. In 2004, he pledged to curtail the military’s long-standing dominance of politics and demote the chief of the Turkish general staff, once a demigod, to a public servant. These promises won him support from liberals. But Turkey’s military tutelage wasn’t replaced by democracy; rather, as the scholars Simon Waldman and Emre Caliskan have written, it gave way over the 2010s to “AKP patrimony.” “Instead of consensus politics and pluralism,” they point out, “the Erdogan years . . . have often been highly divisive and autocratic in style.”

Around this time, Erdogan parted ways with liberals and started making moves toward establishing a presidential system, which would present fewer obstacles to his exercise of power.

OUTSOURCING THE STATE Erdogan, who is six feet tall, walks with a confident stride: his right shoulder faces forward, while the left shoulder waits in the back.

The walk, known as “the Kasimpasali march,” after his boyhood neighborhood, sums up the man. Following his imprisonment,

28

23/08/19

Recep Tayyip Erdogan during his tenure as Istanbul mayor. (Getty)

Erdogan resisted pleas to become a Turkish Nelson Mandela and instead cultivated the image of a külhanbeyi, a roughneck who prowled the streets of Istanbul during the Ottoman period.

By evoking that figure, he was able to emphasize his humble beginnings and consolidate his pious base, the disenfranchised Islamists who supported him not for his perceived reformism but for the conservative values he had defended early in his career.

“In the heart of every Turkish citizen lies the desire to become president,” Suleyman Demirel, a poor shepherd boy who fulfilled that desire in 1993, once said. Erdogan’s rise, like Demirel’s, is an inspiring example of upward mobility. Yet as with most good coming-of-age stories, the hero in Erdogan’s bildungsroman has another character trait: vulnerability. In the tradition of wronged conservative politicians before him, Erdogan has presented himself as a precarious leader who needs to be defended. In 2006, when he fainted inside his car after his blood pressure fell, panicked advisers rushed out for help before the armored Mercedes automatically locked its doors. Guards had to break the windshield with hammers to rescue him. The episode only added to the myth of a wronged man, betrayed by those closest to him.

Yet Erdogan has also changed his self-presentation over time, from anti-Western Islamist to conservative democrat. As the Turkish journalist Rusen Cakir has written, Erdogan, when he moved from local to national politics in the late 1990s, “wasn’t comfortable with the ‘liberal’ moniker, which he considered a swearword,” but because he had been marginalized by the old guard, liberals thought of him as a bridge between the establishment and “the organizational power and dynamic voting-base of Islamists.” To realize its vision of an Islamist

29

23/08/19

movement compatible with the global order, the AKP joined the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe, a Europewide political party aimed at reforming, rather than rejecting, the EU. Back home, the AKP developed a strategy of forming alliances to control the Turkish state. In exercising his power, Erdogan worked with both competent bureaucrats and Islamists with political aspirations but little technical know-how. “Other parties have voters,” his teacher Erbakan famously said. “We have believers.” The challenge for Erdogan was to retain the believers even as he pushed for market reforms and accession to the EU. But therein lay a problem. Erdogan had no cadres to fill the state bureauc¬racy. Competent functionaries mostly belonged to other political camps. Although the Islamist bureaucrats tended to be skilled at providing public health and transportation services, they showed little interest in education, policing, or intelligence work.

And so Erdogan resurrected the Ottoman tradition of indirect rule. He outsourced different components of the state—the judiciary, the police force, and the military—to different power players. Between 2003 and 2013, the old-school bureaucrats who opposed the AKP’s globalist agenda were replaced in the Foreign Ministry and the judiciary by ambitious new cadres. Most had backgrounds in the network of religious schools run by Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher who has lived in exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, after being accused of seeking to undermine Turkey’s secular order. Gulenists also infiltrated the police and the military.

But outsourcing power came with the price of losing control.

Like Ottoman sultans, omnipotent in their palaces but ruling at the mercy of local feudal lords, Erdogan saw his decentralized authority become open to usurpation. In the military, secular, nationalist generals resigned in protest of the Gulenist takeover of the civil administration. Those who didn’t quit were purged in massive court cases in 2008 and 2010; some received life sentences. In the judiciary, newly appointed prosecutors and judges who supported the purge were promoted around 2010 and 2012. The press approved: one liberal paper, since bankrupted, compared the prosecutions to the Nuremberg trials. But nationalist Turks were angry, and the AKP lost their votes in Anatolia. To regain control, Erdogan broke with the Gulenists, cutting his support for their educational institutions and purging its members from the bureaucracy.

In foreign policy, another field in which his cadres lacked expertise, Erdogan handed the reins to Ahmet Davutoglu, a scholar of international relations often described as “the Turkish Henry Kissinger,” and named him foreign minister in 2009. The AKP foreign ministers who preceded Davutoglu had preserved Turkey’s Western-focused foreign policy doctrine. As a member of NATO, a U.S. ally, and a candidate for EU membership since 1999, Turkey had kept its distance from China, Iran, and Russia. Now, the bespectacled, soft-spoken professor proposed a different route. Turkey was the inheritor of the Ottoman caliphate, Davutoglu wrote, and it needed to move from a “wing state” of the West to a “pivot state.” Taking advantage of its location at the intersection of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Middle East, and

P

olitics

Europe, it was poised to lead Islamic nations.

Erdogan relished these grandiose ambitions, and as the Arab Spring unfolded, Turkey set its sights on Syria, where it hoped for a regime change instigated by the Free Syrian Army, and on Egypt, where it placed all its chips on the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Davutoglu doctrine allowed Erdogan to reinvent himself as a global Islamic leader, someone who could improve the lot of Muslims not only in Turkey but elsewhere, too. “Believe me, Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul,” he said after winning a third term as prime minister in 2011. “Beirut won as much as Izmir. Damascus won as much as Ankara. Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, the West Bank, Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbakir.”

Two events shattered those dreams. The first was the unraveling of Erdogan’s foreign policy in the Middle East. In Egypt, President Mohamed Morsi and other leaders in the Muslim Brotherhood refused Erdogan’s call to look to secular Turkey as a “model democracy,” and after the 2013 Egyptian Revolution, Erdogan’s hopes for a secular version of the Muslim Brotherhood across the region began to look fantastic. In Syria, the Kurds formed a breakaway region in the country’s north, leading Kurds in Turkey, who had long been seeking a separate state, to pull out of the ongoing peace process with the central government.

The second event was a domestic uprising. In 2013, millions of leftists and environmentalists marched in Istanbul’s Gezi Park and in city squares across Turkey. It was then that Erdogan, having lost support from the Gulenists, the Kurds, and the liberals, turned to Turkish nationalists to remain in power. He now spoke admiringly of Ataturk and his politics, described his own critics as “rabble-rousers,” and claimed that Turkey was under siege by the West.

The Gezi protests and Ankara’s isolation in the Middle East unsettled the leader who, as the scholar Soner Cagaptay writes in Erdogan’s Empire, “had been a master of reading the global

The failed putsch gave Erdogan a further excuse to centralize power.

Announcing a state of emergency, Erdogan suspended the European Convention on Human Rights, detained tens of thousands of civil servants and closed more than 100 media outlets.

zeitgeist and responding to it with a public relations executive’s craftiness.” In 2014, Davutoglu became prime minister, but soon, his warm relations with the leaders of other European states angered Erdogan, who now considered him a challenger to his authority. In May 2016, Erdogan forced him to resign and replaced him with a low-profile placeholder. Even as the presidential palace moved to the center of Turkish politics, however, Erdogan struggled for control. Less than two months after Davutoglu’s ouster, disgruntled Gulenist cadres in the military staged a failed coup, in which 250 people were killed. As fighter jets bombed the parliament, Erdogan appeared on CNN Turk via FaceTime and asked Turks to defend democracy by fighting off soldiers in public squares.

The failed putsch gave Erdogan a further excuse to centralize power. Announcing a state of emergency, Erdogan suspended the European Convention on Human Rights, detained tens of thousands of civil servants, closed more than 100 media outlets, and canceled the passports of 50,000 Turks suspected of having links to Gulenists to prevent them from leaving the country. It was in this atmosphere of chaos and fear that Turks voted in a 2017 referendum to adopt a presidential system of government.

Only Erdogan could will Turkey back into order during this “new war of independence,” he argued; some opposition parties, he claimed, were allied with the enemy. Such polarizing rhetoric seemed anachronistic a century after World War I, but as a political strategy, it worked, allowing Erdogan’s vote to reach 53 percent in the 2018 presidential election. Again, however, Erdogan was at the mercy of another political movement, this time not the Gulenists but the far-right Nationalist Movement Party, with which he formed a coalition government. In doing so,

30

23/08/19

Istanbul's courthouse is surrounded by police fences during the trial of Erol Onderoglu, the representative of Reporters Without Borders, on July ,17 2019. (Getty)

Erdogan worried fellow Islamists by handing key positions in the bureauc¬racy to their main right-wing rival.

RESENTMENT ON THE RISE Akif Beki, a tall, sleekly dressed political operative with moviestar looks, was Erdogan’s chief adviser and spokesperson from 2005 to 2009. Today, he speaks critically about his former boss and his team. “The feedback mechanisms of AKP’s first years no longer work,” Beki told me earlier this year. “The party’s old sensitivities disappeared. Instead of conducting dialogue with voters, the AKP insists on a one-way propaganda monologue.

Instead of facing problems, it conceals them.”

Disgruntled former allies such as Beki are pebbles in Erdogan’s shoe. Erdogan can afford to ignore communists and environmentalists, who garner little support at the ballot box, but disillusioned Islamists, who have talked about forming a new party, pose a challenge to the AKP’s reign. Recently, two of the three founding members of the AKP raised their voices against Erdogan’s strongman politics: Arinc strongly denounced the polarizing tone of the party, and Gul came close to running as the opposition candidate in the 2018 election. Davutoglu, for his part, published a manifesto opposing the presidential system on Facebook.

The alarming state of Turkey’s economy is a more threatening problem. Last year, the Turkish lira lost 28 percent of its value, and this year, food prices have increased by 30 percent. From July 2018 to July 2019, the unemployment rate rose by four percent, swelling the ranks of unemployed Turks from 3.2 million to 4.5 million. Further aggravating Turks has been the rise in the

31

23/08/19

number of Syrian refugees making their home in Turkey (more than 3.6 million of them, as of June 2019). It was thus little surprise that in local elections held in March and June, the AKP saw its share of the vote fall dramatically in numerous cities, including the capital, Ankara.

In spite of these cracks, the “brick wall” Erdogan has patiently built remains intact. The AKP has around 11 million party members, ten times as many as the Republican People’s Party, the party Ataturk founded in 1923. Aligning with the AKP today opens up career opportunities for Turks from different social classes, much as aligning with Ataturk’s party did in the 1930s.

Recently, as if to assist future biographers, Erdogan periodized his reign. In a television interview, he named his Islamist years, in the Welfare Party and as mayor of Istanbul, as an “apprenticeship.”

His time as a reformist prime minister was his “journeymanship.”

But it is his years in the presidency that, in Erdogan’s view, deserve the privileged title of “mastership.” Now 65, Erdogan rules with little separation of powers; that was inevitable, he believes, after the very public betrayal of former allies. In the presidential palace, plasma screens track which news stories are most widely read in the country, requiring specialists to rapidly address the snowballing problems that people care about, but a few dozen officers are hardly sufficient for a nation of 82 million. For almost a century, elected ministers tackled the concerns of their constituents; today, appointed members of boards specializing in education, culture, and technology have been made responsible for developing policy. A corporatist economy and a culture of favoritism in politics, the media, and the public sector are on the rise. Majoritarianism increasingly defines domestic politics. In the AKP’s view, these tactics of control are necessary to keep a multiethnic and polarized country in order. But they in fact deepen the systemic failings of Turkish democracy: the weakness of institutions, the lack of press scrutiny, and the ruthless pace of cultural shifts over the past century. Instead of solving these problems, the AKP has chosen to be victimized by them.

Despite such challenges, Turkey’s civil society remains strong.

Turkey has 52 million active social media users. In recent years, initiatives focusing on the security of ballot counting, fact checking in the media, and violence against women have gained traction. As the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has noted, “Once a country gets too rich and complex, the leader may think himself to be too powerful, but individuals also feel powerful.” Erdogan’s great challenge over the next decade, as individualism grows in Turkey and Islamophobic populism rises in Europe, will be to convince voters that his mixture of anger and patience is still a model to follow, that his formation story can continue to inspire, and that only his unassailable ability can steer Turkey to safety.

Erdogan will no doubt do everything in his power to succeed at this daunting task.

This article was originally published in the September/October 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine and on ForeignAffairs.com.

P

olitics

How Big Tech Can Fight White Supremacist Terrorism It Has the Tools - It Just Needs to Use Them

by Daniel Byman and Christopher Meserole On the morning of August 3, Patrick Crusius uploaded a -2,300word manifesto to 8chan, an online forum popular with white nationalists. Within seconds, byte-sized packets

bearing the anti-immigrant screed would cross borders the world over, wending their way from El Paso, Texas, to the Philippines, where 8chan is based. News of what Crusius did next would travel even wider. Armed with an AK47-, the recent college dropout stormed a Walmart not far from

32

23/08/19

the Mexican border, killing 22 and wounding as many more. His self-professed goal: to kill as many Mexicans as possible.

The carnage in El Paso, coupled with a separate mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, that night, prompted renewed debate over how to respond to online hate. As political pressure mounted, U.S.President Donald Trump borrowed a page from the Obama playbook and convened a “tech summit” on extremism. On August 9, White House officials hosted representatives from major technology companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and others—and discussed potential ways of disrupting extremist recruitment and coordination online.

The summit will likely be remembered as yet another missed opportunity. Trump’s administration may be more willing than Obama’s to challenge the technology sector, but it has opted to fight the wrong battle, and its efforts risk making the problem worse. Consider the administration’s reported plan to grant the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broad new authority to regulate social media companies. The authority would not help the FCC force technology companies to more aggressively police their platforms for extremist accounts and content. Rather, the FCC, by virtue of an executive order called Protecting Americans from Online Censorship, would seek to ensure that social media companies aren’t “biased” against conservatives. With Trump’s rhetoric and language often indistinguishable from that of avowed white nationalists, such a measure would make it more difficult for technology companies to counter extremism online.

People gather at a makeshift memorial honoring victims outside Walmart August 2019 ,15 in El Paso, Texas. (Getty)

As the Trump administration dithers, the threat only continues to grow. The horrific attack in El Paso was the latest performance of a troublesome new script, one in which white nationalists, radicalized online, post their fealty to the movement before carrying out a kind of gamified violence designed to be quickly celebrated and shared on the Internet before being repeated anew. The script was written in Norway, where in 2011 Anders Breivik posted a massive manifesto before killing 77 people, primarily youths at a summer camp for a left-leaning political party.

Earlier this year, Brenton Tarrant published his manifesto on 8chan before gunning down 51 worshippers at a mosque and Islamic Center in Christchurch, New Zealand.

In a horrific twist, Tarrant broadcast video of the attack in real time on Facebook Live. Despite Facebook’s efforts to block the video, it spread like wildfire—it was uploaded, often in modified form, over a million times on Facebook and countless more on sites such as 8chan and Reddit.

In terms of its global reach and lethality, white nationalist terrorism has grown increasingly reminiscent of the jihadi movement. It has also, like the jihadi movement, used the Internet and social media to recruit and radicalize members, disseminate propaganda, and broadcast images

33

23/08/19

From a technical and moral point of view, however, white supremacist content is no different from jihadi content—if social media companies can block one, they can block the other. So far, they have avoided doing so because they fear blowback from conservatives. and video of its violence. What can tech companies—and governments—do to stop it?

TREAT WHITE NATIONALISM LIKE JIHADISM Balancing the right to free expression online with the need to monitor and disrupt extremist use of the Internet is by no means a uniquely American problem. In the aftermath of the Christchurch attack, for example, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern worked with France and other major technology companies to launch the Christchurch Call in May. Building on the digital counterextremism efforts of the EU and other bodies (including the Aqaba Process, launched by Jordan in 2015), the Christchurch Call brought tech companies and governments together to commit to “eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.”

The Christchurch Call was an admirable start, but, like the Aqaba Process, it is long on good intentions and short on specifics. Thankfully, there are concrete steps that technology companies can take to curb the spread of online hate.

The first step should be to treat all hateful ideologies the same. Until very recently, Facebook and other social media companies have focused far more on jihadi content than on white nationalist and other forms of far-right content. This is largely a legacy of the struggle against ISIS. When the group emerged in 2014, Facebook and other companies tried to preemptively block ISIS content and remove users associated with it and other international terrorist groups.

At the same time, they wanted to reassure constituencies dedicated to free speech. They were able to strike this balance because the U.S. government had officially designated ISIS as a terrorist group, giving the companies

P

olitics

a legal rationale for restricting ISIS-related content. The U.S. government does not similarly designate domestic terrorist groups.

From a technical and moral point of view, however, white supremacist content is no different from jihadi content—if social media companies can block one, they can block the other. So far, they have avoided doing so because they fear blowback from conservatives. As extremism expert J. M. Berger notes, “Cracking down on white nationalists will … involve removing a lot of people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters, and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly seize on this to complain they are being persecuted.”

Yet such crackdowns work. By taking down individual jihadi accounts, identifying and blocking common types of jihadi propaganda, and cooperating with law enforcement, companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have reduced jihadi groups’ online presence. They can do the same to white nationalists. These efforts are not required by law, and especially in the United States, civil libertarians might join racists in opposing them. But the tech firms are private companies and can legally remove hateful content from their platforms without falling afoul of the First Amendment.

Second, tech companies should begin hiring more—and more highly trained—content moderators. Although

In 2017, Google, Facebook, and other major companies created the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.

In part, the rationale behind the forum was to share information on suspected terrorist activity and prevent dangerous content from migrating across platforms.

companies such as Facebook and Google increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to flag problematic content, they also employ thousands of contactors to review those decisions. Facebook alone employs more than 200 terrorism analysts in-house and contracts with over 15,000 content moderators worldwide. This number, however, is not commensurate with the scale of the problem—there are well over two billion Facebook users. In Myanmar, for example, Facebook has struggled to moderate violent content in part because it has too few moderators who speak Burmese.

The quality of content moderators is even more important than their quantity. Effective moderation requires the ability to distinguish between terrorist content and legitimate forms of political speech. This, in turn, requires a large team of analysts with both an in-depth knowledge of terrorism and a wide array of local and regional expertise who can set globally consistent policies. And these moderators must have the language, cultural, and analytical skills necessary to apply those policies quickly and accurately around the world. Attracting moderators with the right qualifications means that companies will have to not only pay them better but also provide them

34

23/08/19

: An armed police officer looks on as members of the Muslim community arrive for the iftar, the evening meal, at Al Noor mosque on May 2019 ,11 in Christchurch, New Zealand. (Getty)

whether to block specific groups and individuals, too.

DON'T LET THE PROBLEM FESTER We can’t know if technology companies are getting the balance right if we don’t know what they’re doing, so improving transparency and publicizing metrics for content regulation is another important step. Facebook claims that it is doing its best to counter extremist content, but this claim is difficult to evaluate without comprehensive data—and Facebook is one of the better companies in terms of reporting. In addition to reporting the number of accounts taken down or the amount of content blocked, major companies should list the number of user-flagged content problems and how long it takes them to respond. They should also report their false-positive rate: if Facebook takes down millions of videos, what percentage of those were actually legitimate content (for instance, a news organization that uses a clip of the El Paso manifesto or the Christchurch video)?

Such reporting would help ensure that companies do not overreact to hateful content, allowing better judgments as to when legitimate speech might be suppressed, which methods of tagging content are most effective, and whether AI algorithms are effective.

with more prestige and respect than they currently receive.

Tech companies must also improve information sharing across platforms. Most small and early-stage companies lack the resources to invest in counterterrorism expertise and therefore struggle to identify extremist groups and content on their platforms. In 2017, Google, Facebook, and other major companies created the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. In part, the rationale behind the forum was to share information on suspected terrorist activity and prevent dangerous content from migrating across platforms. After the New Zealand attacks, for example, Facebook “hashed” the original video, essentially giving it a digital fingerprint that allowed Facebook and other companies to more easily identify it. Earlier this month, the company also open-sourced an algorithm that smaller companies and organizations can use to identify terrorist imagery.

These steps are welcome, but more could be done. Most obviously, Facebook and others could publish the full list of extremist organizations and individuals that are banned from their platforms, along with brief explanations for each decision. Such a move would make it far easier for smaller companies without in-house terrorism expertise to assess

35

23/08/19

Finally, although calls to ban live-streaming and other media formats are unrealistic, Facebook and other companies can put limits on them in ways that do not impede their core function. In the aftermath of the Christchurch shooting, for instance, Facebook instituted a “one-strike” policy that prevents users who engage with terrorist content in specific ways—for example, by sharing a statement from a terrorist group without adding any context—from using Facebook Live. Likewise, in a bid to cut down on disinformation and extremist propaganda in India, Facebook has placed limits on the number of people users can forward messages to on WhatsApp. Restrictions like these do not meaningfully compromise the free expression of most Facebook users, yet they also make it significantly harder to broadcast and share terrorist attacks in real time. Other social networks and file-sharing services should follow suit.

Reforms such as these will not be a panacea. Yet without them the problem will only grow. At the time of the White House summit last Friday, Crusius was the last known white nationalist to follow Tarrant’s model. By the next evening he no longer was. On Saturday, a young Norwegian man uploaded his own anti-immigrant message to 8chan, praising Tarrant and Crusius by name. Later that night, he entered a mosque outside Oslo armed with a handgun and two “shotgun-like weapons” and opened fire.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

2

Issue 1762- August - 23/08/2019

What’s Got into Number 10 ? www.majalla.com

Po

rt

ra

it

Lebanese Druze Leader Walid Jumblatt A Man Who Lived Through War but Pursues Peace

by Moncef al-Mazghany 1. A Wonderful Birthday Gift

Walid Jumblatt was born to Kemal Jumblatt and Mai Shkeeb Arslan on August 1949 ,7 in the Chouf district of Lebanon. Walid turned out to be a wonderful birthday gift as his birth coincided with his mother’s 21st birthday.

2. Diverse Familial Background

Walid grew up in a household teeming with diverse talents and careers. His mother Mai was passionate about art, culture and music and she was also an educated woman who attended the Lycee school and continued her education in France. His maternal grandfather was political reformist and anti-colonial writer Chakib Arslan. His father Kemal was a political leader and founder of the Progressive Socialist Party, and he remained its leader until his murder in 1977 during the Lebanese Civil War. 3. Marriage and Children

In 1981, he married Gervette Jumblatt, a Jordanian- Circassian woman and together they had three children, Taymor (born in 1981), Aslan (born in 1983) and Dalia (born in 1986). He eventually divorced Gervette and is

currently married to Nora El Sharbaty, the daughter of former Syrian Defence Minister Ahmed El Sharbaty, who now goes by Nora Jumblatt.

4. Education and Early Career

Jumblatt obtained a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the American University of Beirut in 1973. Jumblatt then studied history at the Aley National University. He then went on to write for the Al Nahar newspaper for a year where he wrote many political and economic articles. Then between 1979 and 1980 he worked for the pro-Progressive Socialist Party’s “Al Anba’a” newspaper.

5.

Going Into the Family Business On April 1977 ,29, Wallid was elected to succeed his late father as the new leader of the Progressive Socialist Party and he has remained at this post to this day.

as the vice chairman of the Lebanese Democratic Party, both Druze men soon started competing for support from their community. Soon enough allies close to both men started competing for major political posts within the Lebanese government.

8. Qabrshmoun Incident

On June 2019 ,30 Minister of State for Displaced Affairs Saleh al-Gharib (a close ally of Talal Arslan) and his entourage were attacked at the Qabrshmoun near Mount Lebanon. Two of Gharib’s aides were shot and killed, but the minister survived the attack. The attackers were suspected to be Jumblatt loyalists, but the Druze leader denied any involvement. Eventually, both Arslan and Jumblatt attended a reconciliatory meeting at the presidential Baabda Palace, where both men ended their 6. Cedar Revolution Against Syrian potential feud.

Occupation

Shortly after the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Al Hariri, Wallid launched the Cedar revolution. He was also one of the prominent leaders of the 14 March Alliance which called for Lebanon’s independence and the end of Syrian occupation.

7. Rivalry with Talal Arslan

As Talal Arslan rose to prominence

38

23/08/19

9. A Man of Peace

Having lived through one of the most violent chapters of Lebanon’s history, Jumblatt knows to well how costly violent political clashes can become.

As such, Jumblatt has often tried to find peaceful solutions to most political disputes and maintain peace to the best of his abilities.

C

ulture

What’s Got into Number 10 ?

Why Dominic Cummings Isn’t All that he Seems

by Bryn Haworth AN APPARITION These are spooky times in a little grey house off Whitehall.

Here we are in high summer, which in England can mean anything from sweating in one’s bed to resorting to a hot water bottle, and yet everyone is talking about Halloween.

In the little house on Downing Street, a ghostly prime minister has at long last been exorcised, replaced by the very solid, dependably corporeal figure of Boris. A grateful nation need shudder no more at the sight of Mrs May’s dance of political death. Johnson comes with a reputation for being happy in his skin, not so much BoJo as mojo. He smiles and bounces about, Churchillian stoop notwithstanding, with all the amorous vigour of a man half his age. His eyes, perpetually on the qui vive for any possible conquest in range, glitter with the certain prospect of being able to cure the ailments of all womankind with a courtesy visit from the great doctor. As a previous Johnson might have said, when a man is tired of women, he is tired of his wife. With his young girlfriend in tow, Boris is living proof that power is an aphrodisiac, a larger than life embodiment of the Marxian principle that you’re only as old as the woman you feel.

Yet, oddly, no one is fooled. The new leader of the Liberal Democrats – a woman, no less – said the prime minister was ‘all words and no trousers.’ She probably meant to say ‘all mouth and no trousers’, but by subtly mis-speaking the old jibe she managed to hint at the new prime minister’s priapic reputation. Given the right reception, he would happily go naked into any chamber.

He is a shameless love rat, a serial breaker of hearts, the kind of charming upper-class cad Jo Swinson’s mother would have

warned her about. But that’s not the half of it. Lloyd George, the old Welsh wizard, was definitely a Liberal, yet no one imagines he wasted any of his time in Number 10 pining for the valleys.

Even an elder stateman like Sir John Major was, while he resided in Downing Street, naughtier than he oughta. The problem with Boris goes far deeper than his horizontal misdemeanours. In this permanently overcast Love Island we inhabit, no one gives a toss about the looseness of the premier’s morals.

The real scandal is that so few people were involved in electing Boris to the highest office in the land. Just over nine thousand in fact, or not quite as many as live in Nuneaton. He has no mandate, the people cry. It matters not how animated and physically real he is, how flushed with the vivacity of a personal bedroom farce which could yet outrun The Mousetrap, having no mandate is the political equivalent of incorporeality. More to the point, he has a tiny and ever-dwindling majority. Johnson is only phallic in the same way as a tall building resembles part of the male anatomy. He can look the part, by just standing there, but he has no actual power. Like the imperial phallocrat of the fable, his apparent grandeur is not real. He looks like a political apparition, and to make matters even spookier, his special adviser actually is one.

Cast your mind back, if you can bear, to the day that Boris, in all his deceptive corporeality, finally arrived on the doorstep of Number 10. Outside the famous shiny black door, just as this magazine predicted, he began by mumbling some high-sounding phrases, then turned his back to the lectern and delivered a faultless rendition of “Ah, sole mio!” through his lower stratum.

It was a moment of perfect carnival. He even, in a nod to ‘our European friends’, delivered it in his best Italian accent. It was his very own cheerful version of that wartime classic ‘Very well, alone’. How the nation cheered. Then, having promised several

40

23/08/19

David Low’s cartoons were never more topical than they are today

types of cake we could have and eat simultaneously, he rolled up his Churchillian sleeves and barrelled through the front door, exactly as Fate had decreed he would, more than ready for the great task ahead: sneaking through a no deal Brexit under the noses of a remainer parliament.

Once through the door, the Downing Street staff greeted him with a round of applause. The staff are there to assist him, as they assist all prime ministers, regardless of their political allegiances and however minuscule their majority.

There was also a photographer at hand to record the uplifting scene. But here I should let Ian Leslie, from The New Statesman, take up the breathless story: ‘…the cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill, plumply suited and pocket squared, greets the new prime minister. Johnson looks away from him, even as he shakes his hand. At the edge of the picture, leaning against a wall, is a wiry figure in T-shirt and combat trousers. At first you think it’s the IT guy, accidentally caught in shot. Look again and you see that it’s Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s de facto chief of staff, and scourge of the mandarins.’

And below is the photographic evidence that finally, after years of vain effort by psychics with all the best equipment and a dedicated indifference to losing sleep, an actual ghoul has been captured on film, and what’s more, in broad daylight.

41

23/08/19

Cummings is unusually creepy. In fact, he is on a level of creepy that actually makes Boris Johnson seem reassuringly droll and harmless.

You would not know, from the complacent smile on his face, that Sir Mark had any idea what was lurking in the corner. “He’s behind you!” It’s the ghost that only becomes visible when they develop the negatives, the weird creature who masterminded Brexit, the Mephistopheles to whom this new incumbent had to sell his soul for the privilege of stepping into the leopard-skin shoes of his deceased predecessor. There he is, in the corner, ready to pounce: the scourge of the mandarins. Now, finally, we have reached the bitter end of this whole Brexit saga. The man whose brain child it was, whose mind gave birth to it soon after his wife gave birth to their son – the origin, we are told, of the phrase ‘take back control’ was a manual for sleep-deprived parents – has taken back control from the flailing politicians. Let the machinations commence.

C

ulture

One would be forgiven for thinking the whole country (or maybe only just less than half of it) is spooked by Dominic Cummings. Ever since he was spotted in this unlikely context, fear has gripped (half) the land. Why is that, exactly?

Well, for a start he has never been elected, not even by as many people as reside in Nuneaton. In fact, not even by as many people as belong to Christchurch golf club – I mention Christchurch merely because it is the Tories’ safest seat. Cummings is a special adviser, commonly known in Westminster as a ‘spad.’ These spads have the ears of our tribunes and are unaccountable. But there have been many such advisers before, and none of them were elected either, so why the particular horror over this one?

Some of the horror is purely on the level of optics. Cummings is unusually creepy. In fact, he is on a level of creepy that actually makes Boris Johnson seem reassuringly droll and harmless. This is a spad who, by his own account, spent two years on his father’s farm, in a bunker, trying to understand the world. He displays scant regard for dress sense and speaks with a surly Durham accent.

But the real reason, the one that has the ability to give liberals the collywobbles, is simple: he was the mastermind behind the Vote Leave campaign. It was Cummings who came up with that fateful formula of Take Back Control, whether from a parenting guide or just from the dark recesses of his own evil imagination.

This is the poltergeist who first went bump in the night on the 23rd June 2016, and whose nocturnal mutterings have been disturbing the sleep of Europhiles ever since. He has a clairvoyant tendency, as if he has some unique, almost supernatural influence over events. He says things that resemble spine-chilling portents, such as: MPs have left it too late to stop a no-deal Brexit. The man’s so… ugh! Horripilation all round. Someone fetch a vicar.

In short, Cummings is the spectre that has been haunting Europe, and now, the saints preserve us, he’s even managed to infiltrate Number 10.

A BAD PRESS? Unsurprisingly, given Dominic Cummings’ indubitable influence over the country’s recent history, he has his detractors.

He has variously been called a Svengali (not very imaginative), a ‘crap Rasputin’ (probably as a way of needling him over his enthusiasm for all things Russian), Cromwell (the 1640s are very much in vogue), a ‘maverick populist’ (by Peter Kyle MP), Dom X (by Andrew Rawnsley, because he quoted Malcolm X in asserting that he would get us out ‘by any means necessary’), a ‘career psychopath’ (by David Cameron, whose career his campaign abruptly terminated), a ‘loopy individual’ (by Nick Clegg, with whom he did not agree) and Gollum (by me, after yet another bad night’s sleep).

The columnists, whose opinions we await so eagerly now that the world’s gone mad, have not been kind; nor have they always

been temperate. Here, for example, is Marina Hyde writing in the Guardian: ‘Every photo of Cummings going into Downing Street sees him shiftily meeting the camera’s gaze with the same defensive sneer you’d see on the proprietor of a holiday caravan park who has just been released on police bail after a fatal gas explosion thought to have been caused by poor maintenance’ (9 August, 2019).

Not one of her best. It’s almost as if the Dorothy Parker de nos jours was trying her hardest not to be witty, brevity being the soul of wit (with the obvious exception of Twitter), but then she had used up so much of her wit already on Boris who, at one point, having run out of zingers, she rather desperately referred to as ‘a discarded sofa.’

Or maybe she was slightly over-keen to outdo her rival, Tom Peck, the sketch writer for the Independent whose commentary she had so admired, even tweeting (with no wit, natch) to that effect. Peck had been more intemperate still. After explaining, in an extravagant flourish of inverted snobbery, that this supposedly anti-Establishment anti-hero had married into the aristocracy, he really went for the jugular: ‘Cummings is merely the latest in a long line of geniuses to run things for the Conservatives in 10 Downing Street. First there was Andy Coulson, whose genius took him to prison. Then there was Steve Hilton, whose genius took him to a life of Donald Trump fanboyism on Fox News. Then there was Craig Oliver, whose

42

23/08/19

genius took him to losing the referendum campaign. Then there was Nick Timothy, whose genius took him to tirelessly writing self-exculpating columns for the crime of accidentally detonating the full holy trinity: his career, his prime minister and his country’ (Tom Peck, The Independent, 7 August – my italics).

If sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, one may as well get hanged for a sheep as a mere lamb. I reckon that ‘merely’ must have been a tad more hurtful to its target than being accused of having too much wealth and status.

Aside from the snide remarks of the opinion writers, Cummings has had to cope with the inaccurate portrayal of his ideas by the great and the good. When Lord Adonis heard that the special adviser was interested in Otto von Bismarck, he fired off a disgruntled piece denouncing the Iron Chancellor and, by extension, the contemptible Gollum, who happily quotes the Prussian autocrat and doesn’t even mention Bismarck’s British contemporary, William Ewart Gladstone, the ‘People’s William’: ‘It is hard to conceive a more dangerous inspiration. Bismarck’s motto was “blood and iron.” He hated not just socialists and the French but liberalism and European co-operation on any basis of human rights and conciliation. He believed in master and inferior races, the inferior being all but the Prussians, and distrusted Germany’s churches for their ethics and alternative authority.

He disliked Britain as a hotbed of “parliamentaryism” and as an unreliable ally for reactionary conservatism. Cummings laps all

43

23/08/19

this up’ (The New European, 8 August).

This is the nub, then: while he ignores a famously great parliamentarian from his own country’s history, the despicable Cummings proposes to model his policy on that of an arch enemy of representative democracy: ‘Surprise, surprise, Cummings is already scheming to override parliament and this week “spat out his drink laughing” when it was suggested that parliament could force Johnson (and him) to resign if they attempt to force through no-deal.’

I suppose this anecdote is plausible. One imagines a choleric individual like Cummings has often had cause to spit out his drink laughing, or ‘cackling’ as Marina Hyde would say. People like that are invariably on the verge of laughing like a pantomime villain. It also fits perfectly with his professed hatred for elected representatives and his contempt of parliament (his refusal to attend a committee hearing, for instance) that he would be a fervent admirer of the nineteenth century leader of the Second Reich. Here he is having a go at his usual targets: ‘So far, the MPs have botched things on an epic scale, but it’s hard to break into the Westminster system — they rig the rules to stop competition. Vote Leave 1 needed Cameron’s help to hack the system. If you guys want to run with Adonis and create another wave, be careful what you wish for. ‘Unda fert nec regitur’ and Vote Leave 2 will ride that wave right at — and through — the gates of Parliament’ (from the blog).

Hacking the system, dreaming of riding a wave through the Houses of Parliament – could it be that Lord Adonis had got wind of this kind of attitude from the spectral adviser? Oh, and when he writes ‘Unda fert nec regitur’, by the way – rough translation: one can ride a wave, but not make it – he’s actually quoting one of the Iron Chancellor’s favourite tags.

Unfortunately, however, the convenient charge of heroworship just doesn’t survive contact with reality. Unless, of course, it counts as hero-worship to call your hero ‘diabolical’, or ‘a monster’, and to wish he’d come to a sticky end before he had the chance to do any more damage: ‘Bismarck was a monster and the world would have been better if one of the assassination attempts had succeeded, but he also understood fundamental questions better than others.

Those responsible for policy on China should study his advice.

They should also study summer 1914 and ponder how those responsible for war and peace still make these decisions in much the same way as then, while the crises are 1,000 times faster and a million times more potentially destructive’ (also from the blog).

I would respectfully suggest that Lord Adonis did not read the blog with the greatest scholarly application. At the very least, it would appear that he has got his knickers in a twist for nothing.

It hardly needs stressing that Cummings can probably take all this criticism and a lot more in his stride. One of the things he must have been doing in the two years he spent in his father’s bunker, apart from studying how the world works, was developing a skin of exceptional thickness. Besides, he can give at least as good as he gets. He called David Cameron (also quoting Bismarck) ‘a sphinx without a riddle’, his chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, a ‘classic third-rate, suck-up-kick-down sycophant’ and Nick

C

ulture

Clegg, the deputy prime minister, a ‘revolting character’. As for Nigel Farage, don’t get him started.

To be fair to Lord Adonis, there are not many people alive today who have managed to read the entirety of Cummings’ musings. One or two may even have died in the attempt.

According to Jonathan Heawood (a survivor), the blog, taken with its attachments, ‘…has a higher word count than Ulysses. Like Ulysses, it is both focused and digressive, obsessive and uncontainable; all emphatic italics and BLOCK CAPS and (1) numbered points leading to (2) apocalyptic conclusions’ (The Guardian, 15 August 2019).

If it didn’t seem inappropriate for such a wiry-framed individual, one might accuse Cummings of ‘infobesity’.

However, unlike Ulysses, the inner stream of thoughts is never relieved by humour. At no point does Cummings, like Leopold Bloom before him, become fixated on the anatomical accuracy of a classical statue. Clearly, long years in your father’s bunker are not conducive to facetious digressions. Heawood, having slogged through a fair portion of this intractable material, arrives at the following conclusion: ‘To his detractors, Cummings is a monster. To his fans, he is a guru. On the evidence of the blog, he is neither. He is an extreme rationalist, who is prepared to share his ideas in the form of this sprawling work-in-progress.’

In fact, ‘work-in-progress’ was the way people used to refer to Joyce’s epic before they were allowed to read it. Thereafter, they called it a masterpiece. The same cannot be said of the blog.

A STAR IS BORN One other person who appears to have read the blog is James Graham, the playwright who did most to bring the character of the sinister spad to the general public’s attention. He proves his capacity for research in the early stages of the drama with references to Cummings’ key phrases. Oddly, none of these made any impact on me the first time round. The phrases washed over me like harmless gobbledygook, merely signifying the term ‘wonk’.

Yet, having dipped into the man’s stream of consciousness since, I now wonder how I could have missed ‘Odyssean education’, for example. ‘Branching histories’ are also there, on the gibbering lips of Benedict Cumberbatch.

The Cummings of the play is a fanatic. Convinced he is right about the desire of Britain to leave the European project, he nonetheless spurns the populists, is intolerant of the old campaigners and appears to prefer the sanctuary of a broom cupboard to normal human intercourse.

In fact, it took his wife, Mary Wakefield, to quash rumours that he was in the closet in the figurative sense, back in the days when he worked so closely with Michael Gove. His wife was philosophical: ‘Gay rumours follow like vapour trails in the wake of any

Unsavoury politics

star: in politics, sport, Hollywood, and I’ve never before paused for long enough to wonder if they’re nonsense. I’ve thought: no smoke without some romantic spark, and more often than not passed them on’ (Spectator, 19 November 2016).

Shame on you, Mary!

At the time, Gove had to rubbish the rumours strenuously in a public declaration. Now we have it from the one person in this world who should know, that his best pal Cummings is not gay. But the word ‘star’ is the real giveaway. By the time these words were written the stardust had already been sprinkled over her husband’s bald pate like glitter over a bauble, and she seems to have enjoyed the transformation. Her contentment with Cumberbatch’s performance is perhaps the ultimate accolade.

Writing in the Spectator last month, she described an evening in the summer of 2018 when the actor popped round for a dinner of ‘vegan pie’. She was relieved to find that he had not come to judge her husband (no mention of refugees then), but ‘to become him’.

“He looks so like him in the trailer,” she gushed. “His mannerisms are so perfect that it’s hard not to imagine he’s having Dom-ish thoughts.”

Now that is acting.

BLOGGING AGAINST ‘THE BLOB’ To return to Ian Leslie’s account of the man for a moment, here he is, still reflecting on that uncanny photograph of the ghoul in Downing Street: ‘The casual clothes signal that this is an alien to Whitehall who is determined to remain so. Cummings is enthralled by Silicon Valley. The T-shirt he is wearing advertises OpenAI, a company founded by Elon Musk. Its aim is to make AI (artificial intelligence) a creative force, instead of the destructive one some

44

23/08/19

Peter Capaldi playing Malcolm Tucker, the man who gave the world ‘omnishambles’

fear it will be. In political terms, the same question hovers over Cummings. He moves fast and breaks things. Can he build them too?’

You have to admire the level of scrutiny here. Look again at the photograph and marvel at the sort of man who can interpret T-shirts so authoritatively. But Leslie is that sort of man. So, the spad is a fan of that dreadful tech entrepreneur. Can things possibly get any worse?

Apparently, yes. Leslie adds, ‘there is a kind of naivety to Cummings.

He has a boyish reverence for mathematicians and physicists.’

At this juncture I would love to be able to say, as they do in the shampoo adverts: “And now, here comes the science bit.” But alas, this particular chimp brain is not really up to the task. I can however, see why Cummings might quote Carl Sagan when he considers the ‘…mismatch between a) the growing reach of technology and the fragility of our civilisation, and b) the quality of elite decision makers and their institutions’ capacity to cope with these technologies and fragilities. Carl Sagan called this mismatch ‘a combustible mixture of ignorance and power’. If this mismatch persists, if we continue to pursue ‘traditional politics’ in the context of contemporary civilisation, it will sooner or later blow up in our faces’ (the blog, his italics).

It didn’t take an eminent astronomer to point out this mismatch – who doesn’t rage once in a while at the idiocies of our decision makers?

There sometimes appears to be an inverse law between the collective wisdom of the species (as manifest in scientific discovery) and the conspicuous inanity of the powerful. Cummings has seen the inner workings of what he and Michael Gove used to call ‘the blob’ and has decided that, in order to change the world for the better, the blob must be resisted. Another word for blob might be ‘omnishambles’: ‘…in Whitehall: most of everybody’s day is spent just battling entropy – it is not pursuing priorities and building valuable things.

Priorities slip unless you remain dementedly focused and demented focus is an alien concept in Westminster’ (the blog, also his italics).

‘Demented focus’ is a telling phrase. The notorious testiness of the

45

man when confronted by politicians or bureaucrats derives from long experience of this kind of thing. However, ‘Contrary to the media story, I dislike confrontation and rows like most people, but I am very strongly motivated by doing things in a certain way and am not motivated by people in SW1 liking me. This is often confused with having a personality that likes fighting with people. One of the basic reasons so much in politics is mismanaged is that so often those responsible are more interested in social relations than in results and unlike in other more successful fields the incentives are not structured to control this instinct’ (the blog).

And again: ‘Delusions and vanity dominate “rationality” and “public service”.

Progress, when it comes, is driven by the error-correcting institutions of science and markets when political institutions limit the damage done by decision makers at the apex of centralised hierarchies’ (the blog).

And this: ‘Healthy and effective systems like our immune system and the English common law allow constant and rapid error-correction.

Unhealthy and ineffective systems like the EU and modern Whitehall departments block error-correction. They are extremely centralised and hierarchical, therefore information processing is blocked and problems are not solved. In politics, this often leads to disasters when more and more resources are devoted to reinforcing failure’ (the blog).

All this means it’s hardly surprising that one Tory special adviser told The Guardian Cummings was ‘absolutely running the show’ and was even more ruthless and difficult to work with than Theresa May’s former advisers, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill: “The level of terror is greater than Priti Patel would like to exert on the criminal classes. It is far, far scarier than under Nick Timothy. He is two Fionas plus a Nick rolled into one. It’s the worst of both worlds in one person” (The Guardian, 7 August 2019).

Cummings has never hidden his disdain for the workings of Whitehall and the Palace of Westminster. In 2014, after leaving the DfE, he told the Times: “Everyone thinks there’s some moment, like in a James Bond movie, where you open the door and that’s where the really good people are, but there is no door.” And yet the problem is not simply one of poorly-qualified individuals. It is an illusory conception of the world. As the Marxists used to say, for those who are lost in it, ideology is reality: ‘Traditional cultures, those that all humans lived in until quite recently and which still survive in pockets, don’t realise that they are living inside a particular perspective. They think that what they see is ‘reality’. It is, obviously, not their fault. It is not because they are stupid. It is a historical accident that they did/do not have access to mental models that help more accurate thinking about reality.

Westminster and the other political cultures dotted around the world are similar to these traditional cultures. They think they are living in “reality”. The MPs and pundits get up, read each other, tweet at each other, give speeches, send press releases, have dinner, attack, f**k or fight each other, do the same tomorrow and think “this is reality”.

Like traditional cultures they are wrong. They are living inside a particular perspective that enormously distorts reality’ (the blog).

It would be hard not to quote such stuff with approval. Maybe, you

23/08/19

C

ulture

think sometimes, he just needs a good editor.

A SPHINX WITH A RIDDLE? But what is this man’s political agenda? I ask since, oddly enough, in all the Ulysses-length ramblings of the ‘Odyssean’ educator, scarcely a word is breathed on the subject of his political aims. This is at least curious given the way that, ever since the referendum on membership of the European Union, Cummings has had a uniquely powerful influence over the country’s politics.

He claims to have no political affiliation. He even questions (someone else found this passage, not me, so I will have to take their word for it) that the world would be a better place if parties were banned. Yet there he is, at the heart of government for the second time, and at the service of very right-wing people with an agenda that includes lower taxes for the rich, the setting up of free ports in Britain, even a possible trade deal with the US that would threaten the National Health Service. A chap would have to be very naïve indeed not to notice the kind of company he was keeping. Besides, his wife writes for the Spectator. When he quoted Bismarck and described Cameron as a ‘sphinx without a riddle’, he might have been describing his own condition, the difference being that Cameron was genuinely conviction-free; the inscrutable Mr Cummings is probably just not letting on.

This was the mystery that made me seize on Ian Leslie’s article, promisingly entitled ‘What does Dominic Cummings want?’

That’s the whole problem, I thought, what the hell is he after?

Unfortunately, like Freud’s notoriously bewildered discussion of what women want, the essay fell well short of a definitive insight.

Here is Leslie’s conclusion: ‘Cummings isn’t a right-wing radical – he rails against private sector bonuses and despises Nigel Farage. Rather than being

Cummings has none of the raving lunacy of the extreme right, he despises the xenophobic populists, yet he has spearheaded the withdrawal of Britain from one bureaucracy (Europe’s), and is now doing battle with its homegrown bureaucrats, meantime handing power to swivel-eyed ultras in the process.

anti-government, he wants a different kind of government: faster, fitter, future-focused. He is now at the centre of power […] courtesy of a man who embodies everything he despises about politics. If he is at peace with that it’s probably because he sees an opportunity to set fire to the system that overpromotes people like Johnson’ (New Statesman, 31 July 2019).

It seemed utterly implausible that the most prominent outsider ever to infiltrate the bowels of Downing Street was an accident, yet I knew that Cummings had accused the Tories of having no interest in the poor, and just as little in maintaining the National Health Service. He didn’t bother to add that he thought differently, but that was easily inferred from his disapproving tone.

Immediately after the Leave campaign achieved their stunning victory, partly on the basis of a dubious figure on the side of a bus, Cummings approached Boris Johnson. He presumed he was addressing the next prime minister, and he insisted the pledge of money to the NHS must be honoured forthwith. Johnson reportedly smashed his fist on the table and said “Absolutely!”

It’s very obvious that Cummings is not a true populist in the mould of Farage or Banks. He never gives vent to socially conservative views. He detests nativism. He is not Islamophobic, nor is he homophobic. His declared phobias are for career politicians and their helpers. I would not be shocked to learn that every bad dream he ever had was populated by well-meaning men in pin stripes and bowler hats. He even has a low opinion of the people who the Tory party serve, i.e. the rich. Consider this reflection on the privileged classes: ‘Not only are richer people healthier (less likely to have heart attacks or suffer mood disorders), but they also produce less cortisol (suggesting lower stress levels; cf. studies suggest those at the top of hierarchies suffer less stress because they feel a greater sense of control), they are less attentive to pedestrians when driving, and less compassionate when watching videos of children suffering with cancer’ (the blog).

These do not sound like the sentiments of a man who prised his country out of its neighbouring continent in order to usher in an age of tax havens and unbridled rentier capitalism.

He depicts the rich as amoral hooligans. Also, notice, they already ‘feel a greater sense of control’ than us lesser mortals.

46

23/08/19

Just another harmless blogger (Peter Nicholls, Reuters)

Woody Guthrie with his ‘machine’

Do they really deserve more?

There are those who are willing to give Cummings the benefit of the doubt, who take him on his word when he claims a different agenda to the ‘bad boys of Brexit’. Here, for instance, is Sahil Handa: ‘If Cummings succeeds, it would send a message to countries across the continent: Don’t be afraid to be agree with populists in order to defeat them—and don’t hesitate to revolutionise your tired institutions along the way’ (Foreign Policy, 10 August).

According to Handa, Cummings has even proposed ‘that a negative income tax along the lines of a universal basic income could help counter the wage stagnation that is likely to be prolonged by developments in artificial intelligence’.

His overarching aim, however, is to foster ‘healthy nationalism in the face of populist discontent.’

Could it be that Cummings really is naïve and that he has managed, against his own good advice, to fool himself that the Conservative party is the necessary vehicle for progress? Robert Trivers, who the blog refers to as ‘one of the most influential evolutionary thinkers of the last fifty years’, would quite possibly see Cummings as a classic case: ‘Trivers described how evolutionary dynamics can favour not just deception but self-deception: conflict for resources is ubiquitous; deception helps win; a classic evolutionary ‘arms race’ encourages both deception detection and ever-better deception; perhaps humans evolved to deceive themselves because this fools others’ detection systems (for example, self-deception suppresses normal clues we display

47

23/08/19

when lying)’ (the blog).

If the relationship between self-deception and lying is this neat, Cummings must be a very highly-evolved creature, lying to himself the better to persuade us that he’s not lying. He has none of the raving lunacy of the extreme right, he despises the xenophobic populists, yet he has spearheaded the withdrawal of Britain from one bureaucracy (Europe’s), and is now doing battle with its homegrown bureaucrats, meantime handing power to swivel-eyed ultras in the process. For what, exactly? His blog gives us some clues: ‘The EU suffers a combination of huge debts, mass unemployment, a rapidly ageing population combined with unsustainable pension obligations, and an anti-entrepreneurial and anti-technology culture. It has created a euro that damages prosperity, undermines democracy, and encourages extremism’ (the blog).

The aims, then, are as follows: - first, to minimise Britain’s exposure to the problems caused by the EU; - second, to prod the Europeans into restricting free movement, which only encourages the growth of nativism; - third, to spark a rewiring of UK government and a new focus on science and education, and - fourth, eventually, to build new institutions for international cooperation against future disasters.

The fact that none of this sounds anything like the arch disrupter of the public imagination just shows you how wrong the public imagination can be. Either that, or we are witnessing the most evolved instance of self-deception known to science.

It was at the Nudgestock conference in Folkestone, a year after the referendum, that Cummings verbalised the very same aims that appear in his blog. An audience member asked him whether he felt guilty for what he had done. “Absolutely not,” he replied.

“For me … the worst-case scenario for Europe is a return to 1930s-style protectionism and extremism. And to me the EU project, the Eurozone project, are driving the growth of extremism. The single most important reason, really, for why I wanted to get out of the EU is I think that it will drain the poison of a lot of political debates … UKIP and Nigel Farage would be finished. Once there’s democratic control of immigration policy, immigration will go back to being a second- or third-order issue.”

Fast forward to a history class in the year 2070: And so, children, the poison was drained, the man of destiny was vindicated, a continent was saved from the horror of bad nationalism and they all lived happily ever after.

Or, to rephrase Woody Guthrie, these machinations kill fascists…

It may be a measure of just how well Dominic Cummings has managed to deceive himself that, in every practical sense, he has become better at lying than his political masters. Quite a feat.

I’m not so sure, though. Repeatedly, throughout the blog, he reminds us of the dangers of fooling ourselves. He seems to have picked up the tip from Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist: “The most important thing is not to fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

C

ulture

Analysis: #BoycottMulan in support of Hong Kong Protests Tests Disney and Moviegoers How Mulan’s Lead has Put Disney in a Hard Place

by Michael Ordoña The star of an upcoming Disney blockbuster has ignited a fight that few could have wanted.

Liu Yifei, the lead in Disney’s upcoming “Mulan” live-action remake, used social media to take the side of Hong Kong police in the midst of pro-democracy protests that have sparked accusations of police brutality.

Unrest escalated after a June 9 march, with participants estimated over 1 million, in response to a proposed law that would have given mainland China more power over Hong Kong residents. Amnesty International and other groups have released statements condemning the official use of force: “In the footage Amnesty has verified, police officers appear out of control, placing peaceful protesters who posed no threat in danger of serious injury.”

The Chinese American Liu (aka Crystal Liu) posted her support for the Hong Kong police on

the Chinese site Weibo. She began by sharing an image from the state-run People’s Daily, repeating the now-viral words of Fu Guohao, a reporter for the Communist Party-run Global Times. In the viral video, Fu is accosted by antigovernment protesters: “I support the Hong Kong police. You can beat me up now.”

Liu added another post, in which she ended all doubt of her position: “I also support the Hong Kong police,” buttressed by emojis such as hearts and flexing arms.

By 2 p.m. Eastern Friday, there were more than 65,000 tweets hashtagged “#BoycottMulan.”

For those embroiled in the actual struggle in Hong Kong, the stakes couldn’t be higher, sometimes coming down to life and death. For those on the cinematic side, there’s a lot on the table as well.

Disney’s live-action remakes have been wildly successful, with four topping the -1$billion

48

23/09/19

Actress Liu Yifei attends China Gold promotional event on July 2018 ,4 in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province of China.

(Getty)

mark in grosses, despite mostly unenthusiastic reviews, and another, “The Jungle Book,” just below 1$ billion and earning widespread acclaim. “Mulan” is reported to have a budget in the -300$million range. It couldn’t be a shareholder’s dream to see #BoycottMulan and calls to recast its lead — a Chinese superstar — trending.

Recasting Liu seems unlikely; the film wrapped production in November 2018. That leaves Disney in a dicey situation, considering its courting of the Chinese market, where its films have grossed billions. Eight Disney movies have earned more than 1.18 billion yuan (168$ million) each, placing them among the country’s top 50 all-time grossers. Their aggregate boxoffice total in China is in excess of 2$ billion.

Disney’s “Doctor Strange” screenwriter C. Robert Cargill, in defending the change of the Marvel character The Ancient One from a Tibetan man in the comics to a white woman in the film (played by Tilda Swinton), said on the

49

23/09/19

The Chinese American Liu (aka Crystal Liu) posted her support for the Hong Kong police on the Chinese site Weibo.

Double Toasted podcast, “If you acknowledge that Tibet is a place, and that he is Tibetan, you risk alienating 1 billion people who think that that’s bull and risk the Chinese government going, ‘Hey, you know, one of the biggest filmwatching countries in the world? We’re not going to show your movie because you decided to get political….’ ” Cargill’s response expresses a real problem that a number of major Western acts have faced.

Bjork, Bon Jovi, Lady Gaga and Maroon 5 are among the performers banned in China for

C

ulture

meeting with the Dalai Lama or supporting Tibetan independence.

Calls to Disney for an official statement went unanswered at the time of this writing.

Asian and Asian American representation on screen has long been a battleground, with major gains in recent years. “Crazy Rich Asians” is the first all Asian American-cast film to break 100$ million domestically (238.5$ million worldwide). And Asian men have been showing up in unprecedented numbers as love interests in American films. Even the world-dominating Marvel Cinematic Universe, after years of whitewashing controversies in which Asian characters were recast with white actors, as in “Doctor Strange,” is poised to topline a franchise with an Asian actor for the first time (“ShangChi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”). To support the boycotting of a Disney blockbuster that retells a Chinese legend, remakes a beloved animated film and stars an Asian cast with an Asian female lead, is a double-edged sword.

For the performers themselves, speaking out against the mainland government can prove

Recasting Liu seems unlikely; the film wrapped production in November 2018. That leaves Disney in a dicey situation, considering its courting of the Chinese market, where its films have grossed billions.

devastating to careers. Those voicing views in opposition to Beijing’s policies often face the erasure of their presence in a market of nearly 1.4 billion people. Chinese artists routinely speak in support of the government, under perceived pressure to do so. Entertainers such as Hong Kong actress Charmaine Sheh and -16year-old Taiwanese singer Chou Tzu-yu have publicly atoned for dissident words and actions, often with apologies such as Chou’s “There is only one China.”

50

23/09/19

Police fire tear gas to clear pro-Democracy protesters during a demonstration on Hungry Ghost Festival day in the Sham Shui Po district on August 2019 ,14 in Hong Kong, China. (Getty)

Others, such as iconic actor Chow Yun-Fat, have taken pro-democracy stands anyway. Singer Denise Ho supported pro-democracy protests in 2014 (the “Umbrella Movement”), joining in the protests herself, and has been blacklisted in China. She has continued her activism anyway, telling the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva last week that “China is preventing our democracy at all costs.”

Other major stars in “Mulan,” such as Gong Li

51

23/09/19

and martial-arts icons Jet Li and Donnie Yen, have remained silent on the protests.

When martial-arts legend Jackie Chan made statements calling the events “sad and depressing,” hoping Hong Kong could “return to peace soon,” but also saying he wanted to “express the most basic principles of patriotism as a Hong Kong citizen and a Chinese. I am a national flag guard,” he sparked a sharp response from pro-democracy advocates.

H

ealth

Food Truck Craze Trendy Eats, but are They Safe?

by Harvard Health Letter Pay attention to healthy ingredients, inspection documents, and online reviews.

innovative gourmet food to busy streets and crowded parking lots, with diverse menus that attract hordes of hungry customers and discerning foodies.

Food trucks — once the catering staples of But as popular as food trucks are — nationally, a construction sites — are no longer just about billion-dollar industry that defines the landscape convenience. These rolling kitchens bring in places like Los Angeles; Miami; Austin, Tex.; and Portland, Ore. — they still serve restaurant

52

23/08/19

Food trucks are small businesses, and are not typically required to post the ingredients in their dishes. sausages, Persian lamb kabobs, and gourmet American burgers.

The fun is discovering the creative food combinations by chefs who continually push the culinary envelope. You may come across collard green quesadillas; crispy lasagna with chicken, rice, and tzatziki (cucumber-yogurt) sauce; bacon, date, and goat cheese empanadas (Latin American pastries); fried chicken and mashed potatoes served in spicy waffle cones; grass-fed beef on brioche with Chinese seasoning; or marinated beets with quinoa, kale, brown rice, charred green beans, hazelnuts, and creamy miso dressing. You may even discover a grilled cheese dessert sandwich with ricotta and chocolate sauce .

DIETRY RISKS

Some food trucks focus on healthy dishes.

“We’re seeing more trucks geared toward foods that are vegan [plant-only] or gluten-free,” notes registered dietitian Kathy McManus, director of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

People at the Garlic Festival, an annual folk festival at Koonya on the Tasman Peninsula.

(Getty)

fare, which is typically loaded with saturated fat, salt, refined carbo¬hydrates, sugar, and calories.

WHAT’S ON THE MENU You can find every cuisine imaginable in the world of food trucks, including Korean barbecue tacos, Chinese dim sum (savory dumplings), Cuban sandwiches, French crepes, Greek

53

23/08/19

But it’s more common to find comfort food.

“Those foods are often fried or made with lots of butter and salt. And they’re low in ingredients we need for good health — vegetables, whole grains, fruit, and fiber,” McManus says.

The big concerns are these: Sodium. Eating a high-salt diet can increase the risk for a heart attack or a stroke in some people and negate the effects of many medications to treat high blood pressure, such as diuretics. The American Heart Association recommends no

H

ealth

more than 2,300 milligrams (mg) of sodium per day, with an ideal limit of 1,500 mg per day for most adults.

Saturated fat. Consuming lots of saturated fat promotes the production of LDL (bad) cholesterol, which can accumulate in your arteries and increase your risk for heart disease and stroke. McManus advises limiting saturated fat to less than 15 grams per day.

Sugar. A flood of sugar — whether it’s from added sugar or refined carbohydrates—can spike your blood sugar, make you hungrier later, and add pounds to your waistline. The American Heart Association recommends no more than 24 grams of added sugar per day for women and 36 grams for men.

OTHER ISSUES Food trucks are small businesses, and are not typically required to post the ingredients in their dishes (regulations vary from city to city).

“You’re probably not going to find a nutritional analysis on the foods they serve, and you won’t know from a nutrition standpoint what you’re eating,” McManus warns. That’s especially concerning if you’re on a restricted diet or have food allergies.

Another issue is cleanliness.

Food trucks are regulated and must pass health inspections. But inspections might occur just once a year; it depends on the location and local laws.

Another issue: cleanliness. Food trucks are regulated and must pass health inspections.

But inspections might occur just once a year; it depends on the location and local laws. Plus, there’s no way to know how often a food truck kitchen is cleaned (is it hosed off and sanitized nightly?) or whether food truck operators are trained in proper food safety and handling. A lack of cleanliness or food training may put you at risk for foodborne illness.

54

23/08/19

Female food truck worker serving sandwiches to customer.

(Getty)

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO

there’s a crowd).

Keep an eye out for notices such as health inspection documents that are sometimes posted in a food truck window. Some places, like New York City, now grade food trucks and issue stickers with letter grades of A, B, or C.

Another resource: online reviews. Just search for the word “review” along with the name of the food truck and your city. When you’re ready to order, keep healthy ingredients in mind. “If it has processed meat or it’s fried, buttery, creamy, salty, or sugary, don’t make it a steady diet,” McManus says. “But once in a while, it might be okay to try it and explore new types of foods.”

If you want to know how often a truck’s kitchen is cleaned or the ingredients used in the food, ask the operators (although that may be tough when

55

23/08/19