Congressman Ed Royce: It’s time to cut off Iran’s access to the U.S. dollar

A World Without Borders

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There Is No Alternative

Issue 1635 - March 13/03/2017

Congressman Ed Royce: It’s time to cut off Iran’s access to the U.S. dollar

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Dov Zakheim: Cut a deal with Russia to weaken Iran

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

Issue 1635 - March 13/03/2017

Dov Zakheim: Cut a deal with Russia 08 to weaken Iran

There Is No Alternative

A World Without Borders

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Congressman Ed Royce: It’s time to cut off Iran’s access to the U.S. dollar

Chairman of the U.S House Committee on Foreign Affairs: We must restore American leadership and build closer ties with our regional allies

Washington - Mostafa EL-Dessouki California Republican Congressman Ed Royce has been Chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs since 2013. He emerged as one of the most prominent critics

There’s no sign of Russia reassessing its relationship with Iran. in Congress of the Obama Administration’s negotiations with Iran. After the agreement had been signed, he advocated new forms of financial and other pressure on Iran. With respect to the struggle against ISIS, he has been a voice of

conscience, helping to draw international attention to the suffering of Christian, Yazidi, and other minority victims of the organization’s brutality.

In his exclusive interview with Majalla, Royce discussed next steps for American policy toward Iran, provided a readout on Russia’s role in the Middle East, and spoke to the need for a reinvigoration of American engagement in the Middle East.

Q: In light of Iran’s continued destabilizing activity in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere since the nuclear deal, how in your view can the country be induced to change its foreign policies and end its sponsorship of terrorism?

A: Iran’s aggressive and hostile acts pose serious threats to the Middle East, as well as the U.S. The previous U.S. administration unwisely took pressure off of the regime by agreeing to lift

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Representative Ed Royce, a Republican from California and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, listens during a hearing with Retired General John Allen, the special presidential envoy for the global coalition against Islamic State, not pictured, in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, March 2015.

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sanctions as part of the nuclear deal. That led the regime to become even more belligerent, now with billions more in its coffers. Only by ratcheting up the pressure on Tehran can we limit its aggression.

Q: You have made the case for new financial pressures on Iran to stop funding terror groups using the billions in unfrozen assets. At the dawn of a new administration, what is the future of your proposed strategy?

King Abdullah II of Jordan (L) shakes hands with House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) before meeting with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Capitol Hill on December 2014 ,2 in Washington, DC. (Getty)

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A: In the past, we’ve seen that the radical regime in Tehran responds when its bottom line is hurt. We should squeeze the regime by rigorously enforcing existing sanctions. We should also cut off Iran’s access to the U.S. Dollar, which would severely limit its ability to conduct transactions.

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I welcomed the president’s decision last month to sanction 25 Iranian entities. Those sanctions were long overdue, and I look forward to working with the administration to further crack down on Iran’s illicit and destabilizing activities.

Q: President Trump has repeatedly called for a tougher line on Iran, but also closer ties with Russia. Given the alliance between the two powers in the Middle East, what options do you see for striking a prudent balance between the two goals?

Only by ratcheting up the pressure on Tehran can we limit its aggression.

A: U.S. policy in the Middle East must be cleareyed. We’ve seen past presidents attempt to reach out to Vladimir Putin, but none have succeeded.

That’s because Putin’s interests are at odds with America’s interests. If Russia were to reassess its support of Iran, that would be encouraging, but nothing suggests that is in the cards. Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism and through its proxies in Hezbollah, Hamas, and elsewhere, it has caused the deaths of thousands of innocents.

Any notion that the U.S. and Iran can work together to defeat terrorism is foolish.

preventing Soleimani’s travel. Member states must live up to their responsibilities and prevent this terrorist from crossing their borders.

Q: We would be grateful for your overall assessment of prospects for positive and effective policies toward the Middle East under the Q: We note that IRGC Major General and Trump Administration — in terms of degrees of Qods Force commander Qassem Soleimani has optimism or the opposite — and any markers of surfaced in high-level meetings outside Iran, in success you’ll be watching for. violation of an explicit U.N. travel ban that has not been rescinded. Why has the U.S. not taken A: Unfortunately, America’s standing on the world action in response? What options are available, stage was hurt by the previous administration’s and do you see them being pursued? reluctance to lead. Our enemies were emboldened, and our allies were left questioning our resolve. We can A: General Soleimani, as head of the Quds reverse these trends by restoring American leadership Force, is responsible for the deaths of hundreds and building closer ties with our regional allies. The of Americans and many others. U.N. member Trump administration certainly understands the need states are obligated to enforce the U.N. sanctions for success in our campaign against ISIS.

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Committee Chairman Rep. Ed Royce (C) R-CA and US Secretary of State John Kerry (R) arrive for a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Capitol Hill February 2015 in Washington, DC. (Getty)

Tom Udall, Prince Charles, Prince of Wales and Ed Royce speak as the prince is presented with the ICCF Teddy Roosevelt International Conservation Award at the Andrew Mellon Hall in Washington, DC. (Getty)

UN member states must enforce the sanctions that block Qasem Soleimani from traveling.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (R) shakes hands with Rep. Ed Royce, a California Republican who chairs the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, ahead of their talks at the prime minister›s office in Tokyo on Feb. 2014 (Getty)

Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Congressman Ed Royce, R-CA, shakes hands with Bill Gates(R),CoChair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on December 2013. (Getty)

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Dov Zakheim: Cut a deal with Russia to weaken Iran Washington - Mostafa EL-Dessouki Fusing scholarship, business acumen, and sharp political strategic thinking, Dov Zakheim ranks among the most capable veterans of the American defense establishment.

His career in government under the Reagan Administration and continued into the George W. Bush years, during which he served as Undersecretary of Defense under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Comptroller of the Pentagon. Along the way, he taught at Colombia College, Trinity College, the National War College, and Yeshiva University. He also served as CEO of SPC International, a hi-tech analytical firm, for over a decade. With trademark candor, he reflected on the Bush Administration’s problems charting an effective course for the reconstruction of Afghanistan in his 2011 book, A Vulcan›s Tale.

Majalla caught up with Mr. Zakheim for an interview while he was in the midst of a whirling week of travel.

Q: At the dawn of a new White House, kindly rank the two highest priorities which you›d like to see addressed by American policy toward the Middle East.

A: I think the most important thing is resolving the Syrian mess. In my view, that does require an understanding with Russians of some kind. It seems to me that, you should actually talk to everybody with the exception of the Iranians.

I think you can reach some understanding with the Russians.

The Iranians would have to get out of Syria, as would Hezbollah. I don’t think the Russians would necessarily object to that if their relationship with the Alawites was allowed to remain and if they could keep their bases.

So number one is finding some vehicle for stabilizing Syria, peace for refugees to come home, and pushing Hezbollah

out, because to Jordan and others it’s a danger to the entire region. The stronger Iran is, the more the region is threatened, the Gulf states and Jordan in particular.

To that extent I think the U.S. could play a positive role, if trump’s relationship with Putin remains as solid as it currently appears to be.

Number two is ensuring that Iran itself doesn’t use the money it has already received to destabilize the region — and in particular, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, and Yemen. Iranians don’t necessarily send their own troops, but they send money to others to go around causing mayhem, and somehow that needs to be limited.

Q: Do you foresee an end to the Iranian nuclear deal in its present form?

A: I don’t think we’ll walk away from the nuclear deal, but Iran might — if we reimpose sanctions, which I think we should. If we do so for human rights and terrorism reasons, it would be welcomed in the Arab world and in Israel. We can impose some sanctions on our own — and maybe, if Mr. Trump can convince Mr. Putin, some with the Russians, and with Britain maybe as well.

Q: You suggested an accommodation with Russia and the Alawites in Syria. In that event, what would the political map of Syria look like?

A: Syria’s future borders are not for me or anyone else to predict. Clearly the Alawites would have to be in charge of their own part of Syria. Whether they have literally the strength, personnel, and firepower to reassert control over the whole country is an issue. I don’t know whether that’s the case. Clearly some kind of modus vivendi between those who support the government and those who oppose it

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US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (L) listens to Dr. Dov Zakheim (R), comptroller for the Department of Defense, as he testifies before the Senate Committee on Appropriations May 2002 on Capitol Hill.

The committee hearing was on homeland security funding and the legislation for the fiscal year 2002 supplemental appropriations bill.

(Getty)

may be necessary. Whether you can have a more inclusive government, I wouldn’t be willing to predict.

With respect to the Kurdish side, the problem is that the PKK are considered terrorists by the Turks. The other minority peoples are Christians, who have traditionally worked with Assad. On the Sunni side it’s hard to know.

There are so many different groups. We have to weaken Jabhat al-Nusra and any ISIS influence, and then see who’s left standing. It’s not clear to me who exactly represents the Sunnis — especially the “Bazaris,” who only want stability.

If prying Russians from Iran fails, you have an ongoing civil war, and tensions between the U.S. and Russia. Can Russia defeat the rebels as opposed to containing them? I don’t know. You have a much stronger Iran, and an ongoing civil war could push Iranians and Russians close together. The outcomes would not be good.

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To find political leadership in Syria, defeat ISIS and Jabhat alNusra then see who's left standing Q: To gain advantages from Putin in Syria, would that entail concessions to Putin elsewhere — in the Baltics, for example?

A: I think there probably will be somewhere. If we consider accommodating the Russians, we need first to determine what it is we want. Some things we clearly want — for example, that Russia back off any of our NATO allies,

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meaning that there should be no military or any other kind of harassment — including attempting to corrupt elections.

Clearly there is a case to make to accommodate the Russians on Syria. They want a commitment from us not to back Georgia and NATO. We need to define exactly what we want before sitting down with them.

Q: Opposition to President Trump at home appears to be very strong. Will domestic polarization in some way limit the president›s ability to develop and implement coherent foreign policies?

When it comes to foreign policy, any administration has a lot more leeway than it does domestically, and domestic pressure had no real impact at all on Mr. Obama. The last time domestic pressure really made a difference was the Vietnam war, and I don’t see that you get the same kind of emotion when people aren’t being drafted to the military. Even many demonstrations don’t prevent the President from conducting foreign policy. What does affect his freedom of action is when policy is implemented by dollars. Congress then plays a major role. But on the whole I don’t see domestic pressure making a difference. To the extent there is relief for Syrian refugees inside Syria, they will return home, and ease the pressure on Europe. When Afghanistan was pacified in 02‘-2001, two million refugees came home. People will go home. They want to go home.

Q: Do you see conditions emerging that would enable a regional peace settlement with Israel?

A: I think as long as there seems to be friction over the Palestinian issue, it limits the degree to which Arab governments can publicly open up to Israel. There’s always a possibility of some kind of more open cooperation on terrorism. But what the Israelis want is a relationship. They’re already cooperating regarding terrorism. The situation is going to be complicated for the U.S. administration — whether it’s the possible move of the American embassy to Jerusalem, or attitude toward the West Bank settlements, it puts the Arab countries into a difficult corner. If they’re more inclined to do more, they don’t want to give their own oppositions — funded and supported by the Iranians as well — any more excuses. That I think complicates their ability to move more quickly. I think they’d like to but I don’t think they feel they can.

Remember who’s the opposition and where’s it coming from. Iranians will exploit this like crazy. So there has to be movement on the Palestinian issue to generate more cooperation between the moderate Arabs and Israel.

Q: Turning more specifically to Saudi Arabia, we›re interested in your thoughts about “Vision 2030,” and other new initiatives by Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Dov Zakheim (L), US undersecretary of Defense is greeted

by Colonel Masahisa Sato, commander of Japanese troops in Samawa upon his arrival at the Dutch military base, where Japanese troops took up quaters, in Samawa, southern Iraq February 2004.

(Getty)

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U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (C), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers (R) and Comptroller Dov Zakheim (L) attend a hearing before the House Appropriations Committee›s Defense Subcommittee February, 2004 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (Getty)

An accommodation with Russia in Syria is important in seeking to drive Iran and its proxies out of the country Pentagon Comptroller Dov S. Zakheim and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld consult during the Senate Appropriations hearing on the President's fiscal year 2004 supplemental request for Iraq and Afghanistan.

(Getty)

A: Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s vision is a good vision, though implementation is always difficult. So I think that, Vision 2030 may or may not be implemented on the time table he would like. But I think there is a growing recognition that some change is necessary. Assuming that he’ll continue to have the support of the Saudis, he’s going to make important progressespecially if Saudi Arabia succeeds in its campaign to protect the legitimate government of Yemen.

Q: What forms of support do you think the United States can proffer, whether with respect to economic reforms, the war in Yemen, or other matters?

A: I don’t know how much more we can do to help him out.

We’re providing targeting support and so on. If they asked for economic advice, help with planning and so on, we’ve done that for other countries.

The one thing we can do is expand the sanctions on Iran. We can certainly make sure we don’t release any more funds to the Iranians. That I think is the primary lever we’ve got.

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Q: Some are skeptical of prospects for a reconstituted sanctions regime, because they doubt that Europeans will participate.

A: Whether or not the Europeans impose sanctions, if we impose third party sanctions, then the Europeans will have no choice. If we tell European companies that if they do any business with Iran they cannot do business in and with the United States, they will have little option but to comply with our sanctions. Whether or not the Europeans are with us is a lot less important than what we do ourselves.

Q: Turning to Egypt, do you see change or continuity in policies toward the country and its leadership under Trump?

A: It sounds like President Trump is much more sympathetic to President Sisi than Obama was, and that’s good.

Egyptians need to know we’re going to back them. They need economic support. Israelis are helping them out, but the United States can and should openly be supportive.

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A World Without Borders This endeavor is an extension of the liberal project that has animated the West since the Enlightenment

By Nathan Smith * Across the West today, a rising populist right is blaming established elites for letting in too many immigrants. The immigrants, the populists complain, lower wages, dilute the local culture, and pose a threat to national security. But even as anti-immigrant sentiment gains ground, a small but growing band of open borders advocates is reaching the opposite conclusion: Western elites aren’t letting in too many immigrants—they are letting in too few. These advocates, including the author, call for a regime of nearly complete freedom of migration worldwide, with rare exceptions for preventing terrorism or the spread of contagious disease. Borders would still exist in such a world, but as jurisdictional boundaries rather than as barriers to human movement. Ending migration controls in this way would increase liberty, reduce global poverty, and accelerate economic growth.

But more fundamentally, it would challenge the right of governments to regulate migration on the arbitrary grounds of sovereignty.

ANCIENT LIBERTIES The open borders position may sound new and radical, but it is simply a call for the return of lost liberties. When the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886, most of the world’s borders could be freely crossed without passports. Passport requirements had sometimes existed before and

were still in place in backward tsarist Russia, but the more liberal governments of advanced European nations regulated migration, as modern democracies regulate speech, only rather lightly and in exceptional cases, if at all. Comprehensive restrictions on international movement, which almost everyone today regards as a normal and necessary government function, are really an innovation of the twentieth century, which emerged as liberalism gave way to nationalism and socialism in the wake of World War I. Although the reasons for border control were often explicitly racist—such as the national origins quotas of the 1924 U.S. Immigration Act—the restrictions were also motivated by bona fide national security concerns, as well as a desire to protect native wages and welfare states from immigrant competition and foreign dependents.

More so than in the nineteenth century, open borders today would lead to an epic migration of peoples. Gallup has estimated that 640 million people worldwide want to emigrate from their current country of residence. Yet the true number could be much greater—economists such as John Kennan predict that in the absence of border controls, global labor markets would tend toward equilibrium, which in practice would mean the migration of several billion people to the West.

(In the short to medium run, the true number of immigrants would be closer to Gallup’s estimates, but over the long run that figure might reach into the billions, as stocks of immigrants and their

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A woman and three children walk on railway tracks connecting Greece with western Europe at the GreekMacedonian border near the Greek village of Idomeni. (Getty)

descendants accumulate in destination countries.)

The more efficient allocation of labor would result in global increases in productivity, leading the world economy to nearly double in size. This increased economic activity would, moreover, disproportionately benefit the world’s poorest people.

Despite the potential gains, however, a common— and natural—reaction to the prospective migration of billions of people is to dismiss it as an absurd and intolerable outcome. This may be an irrational response, but that does not necessarily make it wrong. The conservative political theorist Edmund Burke shrewdly recognized, in his 1790 pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France, that supposedly irrational prejudice can be a force for good in politics, as it favors the accumulated wisdom of generations against a type of abstract thinking that is prone to dangerous naiveté. Yet complete deference to irrational prejudice would

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preclude rational reform and moral progress altogether. With that in mind, there are two compelling reasons why people should override their instinctive aversion to open borders and give the proposal rational consideration. First, open borders could plausibly ameliorate or even end world poverty, a result that it is worth taking risks to achieve. Second, immigration enforcement is an ugly business, separating families and leading to preventable deaths, but it is still not sufficiently effective to prevent large-scale undocumented immigration. It is wise to look for alternatives for the sake of the West’s own moral and legal integrity.

A MORAL QUESTION The issue of borders is as much a moral question as it is one of policy calculation. Assessing any given outcome requires deciding on an ethical framework by which to evaluate and compare

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alternatives. That is a question for moral philosophy. And today, the prevailing modern moral philosophies, such as those derived from the works of Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls, are all universalist and egalitarian—that is, they treat all human beings as having the same inherent value and moral nature, even if their concrete rights and duties vary owing to circumstance. These theories are inhospitable to those features of premodern ethical thought, such as prescriptive communal loyalties and the differentiation of people by race, sex, and other traits, that still seem to influence the thinking of most immigration critics. The theories thus tend to favor open borders.

This is the case regardless of which specific theory is chosen. Utilitarianism, for instance, attempts to maximize the total happiness, or “utility,” experienced by individuals, all of whom are valued equally. On the question of open borders, a utilitarian would argue that even if some Westerners might suffer, the utility gained by billions of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and other impoverished places

Ending migration would increase liberty, reduce global poverty, and accelerate economic growth easily outweighs the Westerners’ inconvenience.

Another popular moral theory, laid out by John Rawls in his 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, asks what kind of social order people would design if placed behind a “veil of ignorance”—that is, if they did not know what their own place in the social order would be. Open borders advocates argue that no one, from behind the veil of ignorance, would design a world in which they had an 80 percent chance of being born in a poor

country and trapped there, just so that if they turned out to be part of the lucky 20 percent born in rich countries, they would avoid having some awkward neighbors.

Immigration critics tend not to make counterarguments within these universalist frameworks but rather reject the frameworks altogether, arguing, for instance, that countries should privilege the interests of their citizens over foreigners. In his 2013 book, Exodus, Paul Collier, a leading development economist and another immigration critic, dismisses utilitarian universalist ethics as “the stuff of teenage dreams,” before suggesting that nations have something called “existence value,” such that the people of Mali should not be allowed to extinguish Mali through a universal exodus. Yet the strongest argument for migration restrictions is one that applies even if utilitarian universalism is accepted. For if open borders would somehow ruin the special something that makes the rich countries rich, the benefit to immigrants not only might be reduced but could be overwhelmed by the loss of global public goods, such as technological innovation and international law, that are largely supplied by developed countries.

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A migrant family walk along a razortopped fence to a registration camp after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border near the town of Gevgelija. (Getty)

be reason to oppose immigration, therefore, if a massive influx of immigrants from developing countries would dilute and damage the precious institutional heritage of the West, thus killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Evaluating whether it would do so requires making a distinction between productivity-enhancing institutions, such as sophisticated financial and

The issue of borders is as much a moral question as it is one of policy calculation That is, mass migration could make mankind as a whole worse off.

RISK AND REWARD It is difficult to say with any finality why some countries are rich and others are poor, meaning that it is also difficult to evaluate how mass migration might affect global well-being. Some explanations are more favorable to the prospect of open borders than others. If geography is the determining factor in comparative development, as the geographer Jared Diamond has argued, then letting people move from poorly endowed and unproductive places to more wealthy and productive ones may have little downside. If human capital is more important—if the people in rich countries are more productive for reasons of nature or nurture—then open borders will do little good, since migrants will bring their low productivity with them, but also little harm, since citizens of the rich West will retain their own high productivity and consequent high living standards. But probably the most influential explanation of the relative wealth and poverty of nations holds that successful development is the result of high-quality institutions. There would

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legal systems undergirded by a robust rule of law, and social safety-net institutions. The former enable the West to produce an abundance of goods and services, and the latter redistributes those goods and services to the relatively needy among Western populations. Although the distinction is not always clear-cut, some institutions, such as corporate finance law and intellectual property rights, are valued mainly because they foster wealth creation, while others, such as state-run health insurance or old-age pensions, are valued mainly because they alleviate poverty. The latter have good reason to exist even if they reduce GDP. It is these social safety-net institutions that, in a world with open borders, might have to go.

Without migration controls it would probably be impossible for Western governments to maintain social safety nets, in the sense of public programs guaranteeing a decent standard of living to all residents residing within a country’s territory. At current levels of benefits, a vast influx of immigrants would bankrupt the welfare state, as newcomers would not be able to pay enough in taxes to finance the benefits to which they would be entitled. (A possible solution might involve curtailing welfare programs, or

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at least their generosity to the foreign-born.) It follows that open borders would probably lead to a large increase in visible extreme poverty in the West. Yet impoverishment by Western standards looks like affluence to much of the world. And far from creating such poverty, open borders would actually be alleviating it. The new huddled masses, although worse off than the average Western natives, would be better off in their new countries than they were at home. The only difference would be that without borders, Westerners would see the poverty that today is kept comfortably out of sight.

migration, it also affords few if any examples of peaceful migration on the scale predicted by economic models of open borders. So caution is reasonable.

Yet it is also reasonable to ask how much coercion caution can justify. Enforcing today’s border regime requires separating families and imperiling people’s lives—a difficult thing to justify on the basis not of clear and present dangers but of speculative fears about longrun harms. A 2013 study by Human Impact Partners found that about 150,000 children are separated from one or both parents every year by U.S. deportation policies, and smaller numbers have been murdered as a direct and foreseeable consequence of deportation to countries where they had reason to fear violence. There is, moreover, a fundamental tension between the ideal of due process and the reality of immigration enforcement regimes that give officials enormous and arbitrary power over people’s lives. In the United States, immigration enforcement often clashes with the right of habeas corpus, since people who have committed no imprisonable There is no obvious reason, however, why offense can get stuck in indefinite detention. With the West’s wealth-fostering institutions could due process compromised, mistakes happen, and not operate as least as effectively amid much U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has larger and poorer populations as they do today. mistakenly deported thousands of U.S. citizens.

The United States during the Gilded Age and Such practices would be troubling even if they the United Kingdom during the Victorian era were the desperate expedients of a nation during had impoverished proletariats, but that did not wartime. prevent them from achieving rapid economic growth. On the contrary, economists and But as harsh as U.S. immigration enforcement economic historians such as Tyler Cowen, is, it does not prevent millions from coming, Robert Gordon, and Alexander Field have argued because the benefits of living in the United that the period from 1880 to 1940 was the zenith States are so great. If enforcement were still of technological progress, especially compared harsher, the incentive to come would be reduced with the relative stagnation of recent decades. Of but not eliminated, and human rights, including course, the proletariat of Victorian England was those of native-born citizens, would be violated British, and a foreign¬-born proletariat might even more severely. Many prefer amnesty as a conceivably be more destabilizing to wealth- solution: large majorities of Americans—a recent fostering institutions than a native one. And Gallup poll put the number at 65 percent—favor although history provides few if any examples granting a path to citizenship for undocumented of a country’s institutions being damaged, or immigrants. But amnesty gives foreigners a its productivity being reduced, by peaceful strong incentive to illegally migrate in the

It is reasonable to ask how much coercion caution can justify

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The refugees camp on the Greek-Macedonian border in Idomeni, Macedonia is allowing only restricted entry to refugees. At the border crossing in Idomeni a large camp with thousands of refugees has been established and new arrivals keep coming. (Getty)

for gentler policies toward today’s immigrants while naively assuming that effective border enforcement can be achieved in the future.

Open borders advocates, by contrast, can deplore the procedural injustices of immigration enforcement without inconsistency, for they oppose the goal of immigration enforcement as well as the harsh means by which it is achieved.

RICHER AND MORE FREE

hope of benefiting from the next amnesty. In the two decades after U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which gave amnesty to three million undocumented immigrants, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States swelled to 12 million. Taken together, amnesty and undocumented immigration threaten to create a slippery slope to open borders. Ironically, this scenario is most clearly seen by the anti-immigrant right, which fears it, and by open borders advocates, who welcome it; mainstream politicians, however, advocate

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Immigration restrictionists often argue that citizens of a nation have the democratic right to decide who enters their country and who does not. Open borders advocates also want a democratic form of government in which leaders are elected, but they want to limit the powers enjoyed by democratic governments, such as the right to restrict movement. Letting people choose the jurisdiction in which they live is at least as good a method as voting when it comes to implementing the principle of rule by consent of the governed. And even more important than democracy in this regard is freedom. These usually go together in today’s world, but not because democracy inherently favors freedom.

Individual rights such as free speech are, in a sense, undemocratic, for they mean that no matter how much the majority of people hate what someone says, they cannot silence him.

The concept of rights means that there are some things even democratic governments are forbidden to do.

Opening borders would expand the scope of freedom, strengthen respect for rights, and widen the realm of actions that governments, including democratic ones, are not allowed to take.

This endeavor is an extension of the liberal project that has animated the West since the Enlightenment. *NATHAN SMITH is an economist who has worked at the World Bank and the Cato Institute. He is the author of Principles of a Free Society. (This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.)

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There Is No Alternative

Why Germany’s Right-Wing Populists Are Losing Steam

By Michael Bröning In late January, the future looked bright for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

Frauke Petry, the party’s chief, had gathered Europe’s right-wing populists for a summit in the German city of Koblenz, where she appeared on stage with the other leaders of the continent’s populist revolt. To the cheering of

The AfD has undermined its own electability by exposing some of its internal contradictions to the public the crowd, French presidential candidate and National Front head Marine Le Pen declared that, in 2017, “the people of continental Europe will wake up.”

In Germany, voters do appear to be waking up—but not in the way that Le Pen envisioned.

The AfD has lost around one-third of its popular support since January, according to

recent polls. If elections were held today, the party would win between 8 and 11 percent of the vote—a steep decline from the 15 percent it registered last December, following a series of successes in regional elections in 2016. This rapid fall from favor stands in stark contrast to the surge in public support that right-wing populists are enjoying elsewhere in Europe, notably in France and the Netherlands. In the midst of a far-reaching populist revolt, Germany has emerged as an exception—at least for now.

PETRYFIED Three structural dynamics have fueled the AfD’s crisis, and each promises to be influential beyond the immediate future. The first is the German government’s assumption of tougher migration policies. The political steps that Berlin has taken since July 2015 have been controversial, but they have also significantly reduced the number of refugees arriving in Germany. The refugee deal with Turkey and Berlin’s attempts to conclude similar agreements with North African countries such as Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia have effectively robbed the AfD of what was once one of the party’s unique selling points: its promise to

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Geert Wilders (Dutch PVV), Frauke Petry (AfD) and Marine Le Pen (French Front National) speak to the media during a conference of European right-wing parties on January 2017 in Koblenz, Germany. In an event hosted by the Europe of Nations and Freedom political group of the European Parliament, leading members of the Front National of France, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Lega Nord of Italy, the Austria Freedom Party and the PVV party of the Netherlands are meeting for a one-day conference.

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reduce migrant and refugee inflows. At least for now, Berlin’s measures have largely defused what was long predicted to be the determining factor in the federal elections in September.

including left- and right-wing populists who regard him as an alternative to the AfD, the Greens, and the far-left Die Linke. By doing

Next, the rise of Martin Schulz as the Social Democratic Party’s candidate for the chancellorship has reintroduced the possibility of change to Germany’s dormant political center, sapping the AfD of some of its support. A former president of the European Parliament, Schulz has electrified the SPD’s base by branding himself as a quintessential pro-European. Schulz has used his pedigree as a political outsider—he has never held elected office in Germany at the national level—to attract dissatisfied and disenfranchised voters,

The AfD has lost around one-third of its popular support since January

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so, he has managed to level the playing field with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and has even pulled ahead of her in several national polls, in a remarkably rapid surge.

Finally, the AfD has undermined its own

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electability by exposing some of its internal contradictions to the public. Since the party’s founding in 2013, it has attempted to balance carefully scripted political provocations with attempts to uphold the appearance of conservative respectability. This approach has been central to the party’s appeal, attracting center-right voters unhappy with the status quo but reluctant to embrace extremist positions.

The rise of Martin Schulz as the SDP’s candidate for the chancellorship has reintroduced the possibility of change to Germany’s dormant political center In recent months, however, this strategic ambiguity has crumbled. At an AfD meeting in mid-January, Björn Höcke, a former history teacher and one of the party’s regional leaders, caused an uproar by challenging what he described as Germany’s “shameful” approach to its Nazi-era past. “We need nothing less than a -180degree change of course in our political approach to history,” Höcke said. His comments laid an axe to a foundational consensus in German politics, called into question the party’s compatibility with a cornerstone of Germany’s postwar identity, and alienated some of the AfD’s more centrist supporters. Even Petry felt compelled to rebuke Höcke’s remarks; she is now struggling to push him out of the party.

But Germany’s relationship with its past is hardly the only issue that separates the AfD from the majority of voters. Equally divisive is the party’s economic outlook. Other European right-wing populist parties have won the bluecollar vote by embracing redistributive policies.

This has not happened in Germany: the AfD still wears the neoliberal robes it donned at its founding during the height of the eurozone

crisis. Whereas France’s National Front has attracted the working class with promises to lower the retirement age or to increase the minimum wage, the AfD has called for abolishing inheritance and net wealth taxes and for reintroducing bank secrecy, or rules that allow banks to shield information about their clients from the government. Those are hardly positions that win over average Germans.

SOVEREIGN IS HE DEFINED BY EXCEPTION? The AfD’s recent decline should remind Europe’s political establishment that addressing the root causes of voters’ concerns is the single best antidote to populist anger. Germany’s

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European Parliament President Martin Schulz gestures during the International Charlemange Prize Of Aachen 2015 (Der Internationale Karlspreis zu Aachen) on May ,14 2015 in Aachen, Germany.

The International Charlemagne Prize, one of the most prestigious European prizes, is awarded once a year since 1950 by the city of Aachen to people for distinguished service on behalf of European unification.

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efforts to regain control of migration flows without relinquishing its humanitarian principles—as demonstrated by Berlin’s commitment to use its G–20 presidency to promote economic development in Africa—is a case in point. The party’s fall from favor has also demonstrated the importance of creating real choices in the political mainstream.

Offering a viable political alternative to the status quo, as Schulz has, can defuse the antiestablishment appeal of populists. Politicians elsewhere in Europe should take note.

Whether the AfD’s apparent collapse will continue is unclear. The refugee deal with Turkey could come apart if tensions between Ankara and Berlin continue to rise; Schulz’s

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appeal to disaffected voters could hit a ceiling; or the Greek economic crisis could reemerge, dividing voters over Berlin’s response. Such events would certainly throw a lifeline to the party.

On the other hand, or further right-wing successes in Europe could undermine the AfD: although right-wing triumphs abroad would galvanize the party’s core supporters, they would also encourage an even stronger democratic backlash. Against the backdrop of Europe’s populist surge, it would be striking if the country most blemished by extremist fury in the twentieth century were to prove most resistant to its temptations in the twenty first. *This article was originally published in Foreign Affairs

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Baghdad ‫ ـ‬A City in Verse

by Joseph Braude * Iraq’s 1,251 year-old capital was built by a Muslim empire that held the torch of civilization in the eighth and ninth centuries of the Common Era. In the thirteenth century it was sacked by Mongol invaders who, according to legend, made the river Tigris flow red with blood and blue with the ink of books from the city’s great libraries. It was resurrected in the twentieth century by modern state builders who made it a capital of tolerance, prosperity, and Arab nationalism—only to be ruined again by a dictator and his wars and further destabilized by American occupation. A vigorous yet densely complex poetic tradition has traced popular memories of this tumultuous history, and a small portion of that literature can be found in Baghdad: The City in Verse, a sleek and informative volume edited by Reuven Snir, a professor of Arabic literature and dean of hu-manities at the University of Haifa. The book presents roughly two hundred poems about the city—mainly authored by Baghdadis from a range of historical periods—in chronological order, beginning with “Stars Whirling in the Dark,” by Muti‘ ibn Iyas (785–704), and ending with “Bagh-dad,” by Manal al-Shaykh (who was born in 1971). For context, Snir also provides a substantial introduction that weaves the poets’ voices into his own buoyant narration of Baghdad through time.

The fabled “round city” of the eighth and ninth centuries—the Islamic Abbasid empire’s political and commercial capital— was also one of history’s great intellectual hubs: The caliph AlMa’mun amassed the largest repository of books in the world, and endowed a multigenerational transla-tion movement to preserve seminal ancient texts of science, philosophy, mathematics, and many other fields. The caliph’s institute of higher learning, Dar al-Hikma (the “House of Wis-dom”), also sponsored scholars who built on these texts to innovate new disciplines, most notably algebra. Snir’s selections from this period reflect the city’s luxuriance—a place where “breeze reviv[es] the sick, / blowing between sweet basil branches,” in the words of ninth-century poet Mansur al-Namari, who is still taught in Iraqi schools today.

But the book also pro-vides a platform to the underclass, through poems of disaffection that challenge the seamless narrative of a resplendent city. “Baghdad’s residents have no pity for the needy, / no remedy for the gloomy,” writes an anonymous poet.

“Mean as they are, amazingly so,” says another, “for goodness sake, why have they been allowed such a paradise?”

By letting in outcast voices such as these, Snir helps puncture

a variety of present-day assump-tions about Baghdad and the broader Muslim region. That Baghdad was and remains a capital of Islam is borne out by the history Snir highlights: Today’s four schools of Sunni Islamic law were canonized in the medieval city, and a large community of political dissidents known as shi’at Ali (the partisans of Ali) crystallized into Islam’s minority sect there.

Other aspects of Baghdad’s history to which the poems draw attention may be just as surprising to some Iraqis as they are to Western readers. Baghdad’s once vast Jewish community, for ex-ample, has been written out of Iraqi textbooks for more than three generations. Snir was born in Israel to two Baghdadi Jewish émigrés who, along with nearly 125,000 other Jewish natives of the country, were forced to leave Iraq in 1951. The community’s continuous presence in the lands of Iraq dates back more than 2,600 years, well before the founding of Baghdad in 762 CE, to the exile of Israelites to Babylon after the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Snir cites Ottoman and British statistics from the early twentieth century finding Baghdad’s Jews to make up more than 30 percent of the population, and he describes their thorough integration into the local commerce, politics, and culture. The book includes several poems by Jewish writers, barely known to Iraqi Muslims today, that reflect their love for and identification with Iraq, as well as the pain of falling prey to its tyrants: “My adherence to Moses’s creed / diminished not my love for Muhammad’s nation,” writes twentieth-century poet Anwar Sha’ul. Iraqi-Israeli poet Ronny Someck bitterly describes his experience of the Iraqi Scudmissile attacks on Tel Aviv during the 1991 Gulf War: “Oh Tigris, Oh Euphrates—pet snakes in the first map of my life, / How did you shed your skin and become vipers?”

Iraqi nationalist narratives tend to say little about the five hundred years between Baghdad’s first “golden centuries” and modern times—except that they were a period of darkness marked by the Mongols’ destructive invasion of 1258 and Tamerlane’s conquest in 1401. Snir’s introduction does not attempt to fill in the period’s many gaps, and the compilation contains no poems written between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. But Mongols appear repeatedly in poems from the modern period—often as a metaphor for more recent foreign invaders as well as do-mestic tyrants. “Poetry Presses Her Lips to Baghdad’s Breast,” a poem about life under military dictatorship, compares the Baghdad of

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es-tranged from the Iraqi capital. For Kuwaiti nationalists like al-Sabah, Baghdad itself is an invad-er.

In modern times, violent conflict between Iraq and its neighbors has placed political impositions on the national discourse that distort Iraqi historical memory and contribute to the difficulty of establishing a Baghdadi literary canon. In the course of ten years of fighting with Iran, the Iraqi state sought to erase the historical role of Persians from Iraqi books and public discussions—much the way the Jewish history of Iraq had been wiped clean two generations earlier. In doing so, it denied Baghdadis an understanding of the essential role Persians—and Persian-Arab convivencia—played in constructing their city’s “golden age.” In fact, the bureaucratic founda-tions of the early Abbasid state were the vestiges of the Sassanian Persian empire that it sup-planted. Many of the most prominent scholars in the fabled medieval “House of Wisdom” were Persian—including the pioneer of algebra, al-Biruni, and the medical scientist Avicenna. Snir’s introduction omits all of this.

Nor do we learn that the Baghdadi poetry of the period that is the heart of Snir’s book—the eighth and ninth centuries—was part and parcel of the syncretistic creative environment that flourished between the two cultures: Ninth-century poets Ishaq al-Khuraymi and Tahir ibn al-Husayn al-Khuza‘i, each translated in the compilation, used both lan-guages and hailed originally not from Baghdad but from the ethnically Persian province of Khorasan, now a part of Afghanistan.

1258 with that of 1969: “The first, the Mongols de-stroyed; the second, / her children do the same.”

An apparent mistake in the compilation, also in its pages covering the modern period, speaks to a larger problem related to the impact of tyranny on historical memory. The book includes a translation of the 1999 poem “Hulagu” (the name of the Mongol conqueror): “Oh Hulagu of the present time, / Remove from me the sword of oppression.” Its author, Su‘ad al-Sabah, is in fact neither Baghdadi nor Iraqi, as her presence in the compilation implies. She is a Kuwaiti national who, during the Iran-Iraq War, visited Iraq and praised Saddam in verse for defending the “east-ern flank of Arabism” from “Persian” invaders, only to reverse her opinion of the Iraqi dictator upon his invasion of her country in 1990. By the time she wrote “Hulagu,” she had been

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Baghdad’s ethnic, religious, and historical complexities make it difficult to translate the city’s po-ems without providing layers of context. The challenge is compounded by the fact that traditional forms of all Arabic poetry are valued partly for their grammatical and syntactical calisthenics, unique to the language and difficult to render. Add to this the problem of selective memory: As evidenced by the obscurity of Baghdadi Jewish culture in Iraq today, awareness of particular poems is often a function of their propagation or repression by a tyrant to serve a sectarian or ideological goal. Thus the choice of material to translate can raise political and even moral ques-tions.

On the whole, Baghdad: The City in Verse meets these challenges admirably in providing a deeply affecting compilation to illuminate, for English readers, the Iraqi capital’s rich and endur-ing legacy. Many Americans whose limited view of the city was largely informed by the US-led invasion have now lost interest in the plight of Iraq. Snir brings to life the city of his love—an “aria of bracelets and jewels, / . . . treasure of lights and perfumes.” In doing so, he offers a cor-rective to warped perceptions of Baghdad and a reasoned hope for a better future inspired by its resplendent past. * Joseph Braude is an author, broadcaster and Middle East specialist, and advisor to the Al-Mesbar Centre for Studies and Research.

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Moroccan-French Artist Crosses Borders and Challenges Identity in London Exhibition Majalla - London The west London Lisson Gallery is very minimalistic. Its open spaces, neon lighting and black and white walls were designed like that for a reason. Such interior acts as plain canvas for art installations to stand out.

This time, the artist behind the exhibition currently being displayed in the gallery is a solo act, her first major attempt in the United Kingdom. Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili, based between Berlin, Oslo and Paris, transforms the space into a powerful exploration of migration and displacement, both literally and conceptually. She manages to illustrate that through the different mediums of photography, prints, film, video and installations.

The underlying theme presented in three installations within the exhibition, although expresses hardship and suffering, exudes power and strength as she lays bare social conceptualizations of borders, challenging the notions of identity and nationhood.

Foreign Office First premiering in February 2015 at Palais de Tokyo, Foreign Office is an artistic display that looks into ideas of solidarity and cosmopolitanism.

A digital film and an “Archipelago” of photographs together provide a dual experience, a combination that documents resistance movements of the past and their affect on the “now”.

The installation takes the viewer back to the city of Algeria in the 60s where it was a hub for resistance groups including the African National Congress and Black Panthers and activists for Palestine. Different causes, but all rooted in resistance against occupation, colonialism, and injustice.

The film shows two young Algerians, a male and a female, trying to rewrite this history, while the accompanying series of photographs document the deserted places that were home to these political movements.

The Archipelago silkscreen acts as a medium between the narrators and the ghostly locations. It also acts as an indicator of all the traces of resistance unreadable today.

Foreign Office starts from a point of cosmopolitanism and internationalism in the present, and invites the viewer to trace back to history in a somewhat nostalgic, utopic manner. Such recollection at times breaks into revisionism and dystopia as once a hub for resistance, those places are now ghostly and empty. One might even wonder if the cause has been accomplished, or forgotten…

Mapping Journey Khalili chose 8 single channel video screenings for her second installation mapping journeys between 2008 and 2011 of 8 different individuals forced to leave their homeland and cross borders illegally to seek refuge. Each video represents the route an individual had to take. A narration, a marker pen and navigation lines drawn on a

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The minimalist architecture of Lisson Gallery acts as a plain canvas for Khalili's installations (Photo by James Hanna)

map together create a powerful imagination of the struggle of fleeing, and the hardship of refuge.

Seven of the videos represent journeys across continents, but journey three is one representing borders between two contested areas divided artificially, Palestine. Refugees in this installation become cartographers mapping their actual journey and explaining injustices and exclusions. Their identity created by the journey across borders stands out to challenge notions of nationhood and “home”.

Constellation Series In her “grand finale”, Khalili chose 8 silkscreens for her installation the constellation series. She moves on from land to the sky, from pit-stops to stars; from maps to constellations. She lays out the journeys of those eight people and each stop represents a star, as the voyage becomes a constellation set on a royal blue canvas, and not a black one. Perhaps the blue might represent hope, or was just an artistic choice.

The final installation is an embodiment of their resistance

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to containment as they “shoot for the stars”, and their journeys, even though crossing borders illegally, become fluid records travelling through time and space.

Behind the Art Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-French artist. Born in Casablanca, Morocco. She studied Film at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Visual Arts at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy, France.

The artist currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Oslo, Norway.

In her different projects, she employs multimedia and works with film, video, installation, photography and prints.

Khalili’s practice articulates language, subjectivity, orality and geographical explorations. Each of her projects investigates strategies and discourses of resistance as elaborated, developed and narrated by individuals, often members of political minorities. The exhibition is on till the 18th of March.