Rouhani’s Fate is in the Hands of the Revolutionary Guards

Canada Confronts Cannabis

A Weekly Political News Magazine

LĂłpez Obrador and the Future of Mexican Democracy

Russia as It Is

Issue 1702 - June 29/06/2018

Rouhani’s Fate is in the Hands of the Revolutionary Guards www.majalla.com

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A plume of fresh ash is released as Mount Agung volcano erupts, in this image seen from the village of Tulamben in Karangasem Regency on Indonesia's resort island of Bali on July 2018 ,3. (Getty Images)

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Indian stuntman Vikas Dataniya releases flames from his mouth as he rehearses ahead of the annual Rath Yatra (Chariot Procession) of Lord Jagannath in Ahmedabad on July 2018 ,3. (Getty Images)

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Rouhani’s Fate is in the Hands of the Revolutionary Guards Ongoing Unrest May Overthrow the Iranian President

by Hanan Azizi Unrest erupted once again in Iran over the weekend with protests over water shortages turning quickly into anti-regime anger.

The Tehran market uprising or the Bazaar protests, and other protests in various areas including the Ahwaz towns - which have been fueled by water scarcity, low water quality and the spread of contaminated water -have been erupting throughout the country. These recent protests and uprisings have been raising questions about the performance of President Rouhani’s government and his fate as a president.

The complex and highly conservative structure of the Tehran Bazaar makes it the hub of conservatives and the spiritual leader of the Iranian economy. For the last four decades, regardless of major internal conflicts, the activity of traders and owners in the bazaar has not stopped. Neither Bani Sadr stepping down in June 1981 nor the Green Movement in June 2009 were able to shut down the Tehran marketplace.

The merchant class at the Tehran bazaar has also proved that it does not wish to change or overthrow the regime.

On 25th and 26th June, the Grand Bazaar witnessed a massive uprising unseen since the 1979 revolution. This shows that the Iranian regime has entered a new phase of unrest. The cycle of resentment and despair in improving economic and living conditions has widened and now includes parts of the wealthy upper class and the religiously committed class (traders in the bazaar) in Iran.

Criticism of the president has grown with Iran’s faltering economy. Deflation of the national currency and the failure of successive government policies to contain these crises have not only condemned the president, but the government bodies working closely with the Supreme Leader.

Slogans raised during the bazaar protests included “Leave Palestine alone and think of finding solutions to our problems” and “If the amount of fraud decreases, our problems will be solved”. The nature of such slogans considers the

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Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (L2-) shakes hands with Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani (R2-) as Revolutionary Guards' ground forces commander Mohammad Pakpour (R) looks on during the 21st Nationwide Assembly of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Commanders in Tehran, Iran on September ,15 2015. (Getty)

regime’s policies in the region and the widespread corruption in the governing bodies to be the main cause of the deteriorating economic conditions and environmental disasters. Amongst all the chaos, the Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, continues to be the main subject of criticism and is being attacked by public opinion more than ever.

The conservatives have even called on parliament to withdraw its confidence of Hassan Rouhani or for Rouhani to resign due to the current instabilities.

ARE CALLS FOR ROUHANI TO STEP DOWN A NEW PHENOMENON? A group of analysts and followers of Iranian affairs see that the militant forces, especially the Revolutionary Guards, have for long been trying to overthrow President Rouhani. The militant

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The Bazaar protest slogan said: “Leave Palestine alone and think of finding solutions to our problems” forces are seen to be trying to assume full power by bringing a conservative president instead of Rouhani.

“Al-Sadeq,” magazine, which is based in the Imam Sadeq University belonging to the conservatives, demanded during the massive protests in December 2017 for Rouhani to be removed from his post.

In March 2018, Ali Akbar Javanfekr, adviser to former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, tweeted demanding early presidential elections

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due to the dollar’s rise. Telegram activists have long deliberated unconfirmed news about the possibility of "Revolutionary Guards overturning Rouhani’s government".

Attacks on the President continued during the Bazaar protests on the hard-liners’ official media pages. Questions were raised on social media as to whether the Revolutionary Guards’ generals were actually moving towards a coup de tat.

It is clear that the Revolutionary Guards and the militants are trying to exploit the recurring crises and protests to their advantage and to wipe out Rouhani. For instance, Asadollah Badamchian, founder of the Islamic Coalition Party, asked the Iranian president to apologize to the people and hold early elections in a dialogue with a student agency on June 26. MP Amir Khcheste also said that a -10day deadline should be given to the Government to present its plans on confronting the economic war waged by enemies against Iran.

He added that if the government cannot persuade Parliament of its program then they will consider removing the president from office.

The public attacks on Rouhani reached the generals of the revolutionary Guards and the Supreme Leader’s close circle. General Yahya Rahim Safwa, Khamenei’s military adviser said on 24thJune: "it appears that the country can be better managed in the absence of the government."

Opening the country’s borders to foreign companies poses a great threat to the Revolutionary Guards, especially in large projects as it limits its economic influence

THE POSSIBILITY OF IMPEACHMENT Hard-line elements, backed up by the Supreme Leader, have for long been pushing against the Iranian President to tarnish him. The amount of criticism has however immensely declined, causing Rouhani to avoid public criticism of the authorities as well.

This “calm” however, between the President, the Supreme Leader’s conservatives and the Revolutionary Guards, does not imply that the dispute among both sides has come to an end.

REASONS BEHIND THE DISPUTE According to Iranian analysts, the main reason behind the dispute between the President and the hard-liners lies in the different scopes and interventions of each. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards adopt a military vision, while Rouhani’s priority is diplomatic.

The clash escalated after the Iran Nuclear Deal between Iran and the superpowers in July 2015.

To Rouhani’s government, Iran cannot withstand the challenges it is facing by relying on its own capabilities, but needs to open up to the world and start welcoming foreign investments.

Rouhani sees his country’s future prospering by resorting to diplomacy to deal with its problems, instead of the use of offensive and crisis-prone politics.

On the other hand, the Revolutionary Guards see this solution as reconciliation with the West.

It also opposes their military and revolutionary policies that are the basis of their establishment.

The conservative leaders fear that the normalisation of relations will put an end to the Islamic revolution and negate reasons for the existence of the revolutionary institutions. Iran opening its doors to foreign investment means limiting the Revolutionary Guards’ economic influence and is a serious threat to them as they are the country’s dominating power in the

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economic sector.

IS ROUHANI A THREAT OR A SAVIOUR? The calm among President Rouhani and the Supreme Leader does not necessarily indicate the end of the dispute.

There are fundamental differences between Rouhani in 2017 and in 2018. The president ignored all the promises he made such as free access to social networks, lifting the house arrest from Green Movement leaders, writing a charter on citizenship rights and political and social freedoms. Even the Nuclear Deal, his government’s biggest achievement, seems to have gone with the wind after the United States’ withdrawal.

Iranian observers believe that Rouhani has lost popularity but still has a mass base in the middle

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The Revolutionary Guards and the militants are exploiting the crises and the repeated protests in their favour and to oust Rouhani class and is still considered a reformist candidate.

Not to mention his previous experiences and responsibilities in the political, economic and military administration of the regime.

Amidst the unrest the erupting protests and the economic turmoil, could the head of the regime and the military leaders take the risk and the president’s impeachment? If so, then more severe waves of political and economic turmoil can be foreseen.

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Canada Confronts Cannabis Legalization Lessons From the United States

By Mark A. R. Kleiman On June 19, Canada’s Senate passed the Cannabis Act. Beginning on October 17, Canadians over the age of 18 will be permitted to carry up to 30 grams of marijuana in public and grow up to four plants at home. Cannabis retailers will be allowed to operate, subject to federal, provincial, and territorial regulations and taxation. Cannabis concentrates and edibles will be available about a year later.

That makes Canada only the second country, after Uruguay, to fully legalize marijuana. Supporters of the new law, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, claim that it will reduce underage drug use, eliminate illicit dealing, and lessen the harms of arrest and prosecution, while providing substantial tax revenue. How likely is it that Canada will achieve those objectives, and what are the risks of legalization?

Canadian officials can learn from both U.S. successes and U.S. mistakes as they try to design tax, regulatory, enforcement, and public health measures in order to reap the benefits of legal marijuana while managing the very real risks. There are now years of evidence from the United States—where states such as Colorado, Oregon, and Washington have replaced prohibition with regulation—about the impact of legal marijuana on markets, revenues, and public health. (In the United States, cannabis remains banned by federal law, thus preventing the creation of national-level legal producers.)

The experience of legalization in the United States shows that prices will be low. Low prices, combined with ease of access and aggressive marketing, create a threat to public health by stimulating “problem use.” Legal marijuana will eventually crowd out illegal marijuana, but enforcement measures against the illegal product are necessary in the short term. Tax revenues are likely to be modest, and the tax system under the Cannabis Act creates an unwanted incentive to increase potency.

WHY LEGAL CANNABIS IS CHEAP U.S. experience has shown that marijuana will be dirt cheap. Today, the illicit-market price of a gram of marijuana is 15$–10$ in the United States; it is somewhat lower in Canada. A gram generates about 15 hours of intoxication for users who haven’t built up a tolerance (although this is only a very rough estimate). At that price, marijuana is already a more cost-effective intoxicant than alcohol, and it will only get cheaper once it is legal.

In Colorado and Washington, shortages of licensed product initially drove the price of licit marijuana to nearly 30$ per gram. Growers, with visions of huge profits dancing in their heads, crowded into the business. But cannabis—even high-potency cannabis—is cheap to grow if you can do it openly, and competition relentlessly drives prices down

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toward production costs. The legal supply in those states quickly outran consumer demand, and prices dropped significantly. The current, aftertax price of a gram of legal marijuana in Colorado and Washington is 7$–6$, and bargain hunters can get a highly potent product for much less; one store in Seattle offers a weekly special of a quarter of an ounce (seven grams) for 15$.

The bottom is by no means in sight. Growers in Washington are trying, and often failing, to sell their cannabis to middlemen for 1$ per gram, and some are going out of business. Oregon, with a population of three million people, has an excess supply estimated at one million pounds of marijuana, and the average retail price in the state is about 5$ per gram.

Desperate growers are reportedly selling it for as little as 25 cents per gram to processors who convert it to a concentrate. In a few years, the price of a joint (or the equivalent in a concentrate) may well be measured in pennies.

CANNABIS USE DISORDER

A resident smokes a large marijuana joint during the 420 Day festival on the lawns of Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on Friday, April 2018 ,20.

(Getty Images)

Cheap marijuana creates a threat to public health. Casual use isn’t very sensitive to price: even when marijuana costs more, a once-a-week smoker might spend only 100$ per year, so his or her pattern of use won’t vary much as the price changes. Heavy use is a different story. A three-joint-a-day smoker—and there are millions of them in the United States—might spend 3,000$ or more on a year’s supply at prevailing illicit prices. At that price, cost becomes a limit on consumption, and lower prices lead to heavier use.

The existence of a large population of frequent users—people who report smoking marijuana 25 days or more in the course of a month—is a relatively recent phenomenon. A quarter century ago, there were fewer than one million daily or near-daily cannabis users in the United States; today, there are eight million, and they make up about one-third of those who used marijuana in the past month.

That increase started before the legalization process, and most of those daily or near-daily users are in states that haven’t fully legalized the drug. One likely reason for the increase in heavy use is the falling price of getting stoned, even illegally. The price of a gram of illicit marijuana didn’t change much over the period in question, but average potency, measured as the percentage of THC (the chemical in marijuana that produces the high) in the product, went from the mid-single digits in the 1980s to the midteens today, making frequent intoxication more affordable.

Daily marijuana use isn’t, by itself, a problem: a single puff at bedtime is no more harmful than a single glass of wine with dinner. But unlike alcohol use, where the overwhelming majority of drinking occasions involve low doses not intended to produce intoxication, marijuana use is geared toward getting high. That’s especially true for frequent users, who on average consume about three times as much cannabis per day of use as occasional users.

Daily intoxication is likely to be a problem. Of the eight million Americans who report daily or near-daily use, about half also report experiencing symptoms of cannabis use disorder (CUD), as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. These symptoms include using more cannabis, or using it more frequently, than is wanted or intended; trying to cut back and failing; discovering

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Whether the legal availability of cannabis is a benefit or a bane depends strongly on the norms that develop around its use that cannabis use interferes with other interests and responsibilities; and finding that it causes conflict with people the users care about. Cannabis accounts for about one-quarter as many cases of substance use disorder as alcohol, but it is ahead of any other drug. It is true that even a fairly severe and long-lasting bout of CUD isn’t likely to be as damaging as a bad opioid or alcohol habit. But that’s not much comfort to the people who find themselves with a cannabis problem, or to their families. And the myth that cannabis is not addictive dies hard, making cannabis users less aware of the risks they face.

All of that makes the falling price of cannabis a cause for concern. If the drug gets cheap enough and loses some of the stigma it still bears due to prohibition, it’s possible to imagine CUD becoming as common as alcohol use disorder.

USE BY MINORS One argument offered for legalization is that it will make it harder for juveniles to get marijuana, because legal stores, unlike drug dealers, will enforce age limits. That argument doesn’t hold water. Experience with alcohol shows that enforcing age limits is better than ignoring them, and cannabis stores should certainly face the loss of their licenses for selling to minors. But the alcohol experience also reveals that juveniles can readily find adults—relatives, friends, dating partners, acquaintances— who are willing to sell or give them the product they can’t buy for themselves.

Canada should thus expect adolescents to have easier access to marijuana after legalization than they do now. But at least in the United States, the big growth in use has been among adults: even in the states where cannabis is legal, use by minors remains below its peak in the late 1970s.

And when one weighs the harm from cannabis use against the harm of arrest and incarceration, it becomes clear that aggressive efforts to punish adults who give or sell marijuana to minors (or to punish the minors themselves) are likely to do more harm than good.

SUBSTITUTION Advocates of legalization have also argued that the availability of cheap, legal marijuana will reduce the abuse of other drugs, such as alcohol and opiates, because it will compete for users’ time and money. Since marijuana is safer than alcohol and most other drugs on almost every dimension, such a result would be a net social benefit.

Unfortunately, the evidence from the United States is mixed. On alcohol specifically, it is highly discouraging. A quarter century of rapidly declining cannabis prices and soaring heavy use hasn’t dented heavy drinking; absolute alcohol use per capita has been virtually constant.

Nor have the states with legal cannabis seen declines in their alcohol tax

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revenues or the number of drunk-driving crashes.

On the other hand, it now seems very likely (although not certain) that increased access to cannabis reduces opioid use and opioid overdose deaths, but it isn’t yet clear how big that effect is or how it works.

TAXING CANNABIS One implication of the strong probability of falling prices is that Canada’s current tax plan will neither prevent an increase in heavy use nor raise much money. The new law taxes cannabis at ten percent of its retail price or 1$ per gram, whichever is greater. If the Canadian market follows the U.S. pattern, most marijuana will sell for under 10$ per gram and thus will be taxed at just 1$ per gram. That would bring in less than 1$ billion per year in taxes, or about one-third of one percent of the Canadian federal government’s total annual revenue.

Taxing every gram at the same rate regardless of potency creates a tax incentive for selling more potent strains. Using high-potency cannabis increases both the risk of accidental overintoxication (which is funny until it happens to you) and the risk of developing CUD. High-THC cannabis also tends to be low in cannabidiol (CBD), which appears to act as a psychological buffer against the anxiety-inducing properties of THC. Marijuana with a high THC-to-CBD ratio increases the risk of dysphoria and panic.

In the United States, legalization advocates hoped that the licit market would favor less potent strains, but so far, the opposite has been the case. Daily or near-daily users—whose heavy use tends to make them pharmacologically tolerant to THC and who therefore need more potent material to feel the effects they seek—account for 85 percent or more of cannabis consumption. Legal stores, like illegal drug dealers, cater to their market, and they’ve learned that low-potency marijuana sells slowly.

The obvious solution is to tax on the basis of THC content, rather than either price or gross weight, and to make the tax high enough to keep the price of newly legal marijuana near the current price of illegal marijuana.

Ideally, the tax would start out low and stay low while the licit market gets established and the legal supply catches up with demand, and then it would rise (to about 50$ per gram of THC) to keep the after-tax price steady and thus prevent the further growth of heavy, problem use.

Taxation to keep prices high and regulation to restrict marketing are the two steps best calculated to limit the growth in problem use; what is called “drug abuse prevention education” has little efficacy in the face low prices, wide availability, and heavy promotion. It’s the liberal

The fact that most marijuana users consume the drug to get intoxicated is a product of social history, not pharmacology

version of “thoughts and prayers”—mostly a placeholder for an absent policy.

ORGANISING RETAIL CANNABIS SALES Because the minority of cannabis users who consume the drug almost every day account for the bulk of total sales, the legal cannabis industry won’t be able to support itself by selling primarily to responsible, casual users: by definition, they don’t use enough to be desirable customers.

Instead, the industry will be financially dependent on users who are chemically or psychologically dependent. Like sellers of alcohol, cannabis retailers will have strong incentives to promote problem use: “cannabis use disorder” names their key market segment.

Thus, a commercial, for-profit cannabis industry will not be a friend to public health.

A not-for-profit distribution system could be designed to provide convenient access for moderate use by adults without promoting problem use. The “cannabis clubs” in Spain—modestly sized consumer

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cooperatives that grow or buy cannabis on behalf of their members— have no owners or shareholders and therefore no pressure to maximize sales.

Some provinces in Canada, including Ontario, have chosen the other noncommercial alternative: making cannabis retailing a state monopoly, while leaving production in private hands. That approach, like the co-op one, keeps greedy entrepreneurs from taking financial advantage of the fact that some people lose control of their cannabis use. However, it doesn’t keep greedy revenue collectors from doing the same thing, as the U.S. state lotteries demonstrate.

The Liquor Control Board of Ontario—which will now also become the province’s cannabis outlet—is the largest alcohol retailer in the world, and among the most aggressive. If retailing is to be a state monopoly, control of that monopoly should reside in a department of public health, not in an agency pressured by its political masters to generate as much revenue as possible. No province or territory has yet decided to move in that direction.

MARKETING LIMITS AND NORMS OF CONTROLLED CONSUMPTION Whether the legal availability of cannabis is a benefit or a bane depends strongly on the norms that develop around its use. One simple step would be to define, and promote, a dose of THC equivalent to a “standard drink” (a can or bottle of beer, a glass of wine, or one shot of spirits), which would allow cannabis users, like drinkers, to measure their consumption just by counting.

And marketing—by public and private entities alike—should be rigidly limited to the distribution of factual information about product types, chemical composition, price, and location. No billboards, no music videos, no bikinis. It would also be valuable to promote norms of moderation, if possible. The fact that most marijuana users consume the drug to get intoxicated is a product of social history, not pharmacology.

The extent to which people drink for the purpose of getting drunk varies enormously from culture to culture: the “Mediterranean alcoholdrinking pattern”—drinking mostly wine and with meals, as opposed to the “Nordic pattern” of drinking beer or spirits apart from meals— A man wears a produces lots of drinking but relatively little intoxication, health damage, Canadian maple or violence. leaf flag with marijuana leaf Perhaps the most dangerous mode of cannabis consumption is “dabbing”: during the annual dropping a piece of solid cannabis concentrate (“wax,” or “shatter”) 20/4 rally on onto red-hot metal to flash-vaporize it and breathe it all in at once. The Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, consequent rapid onset of extreme intoxication can cause a user to pass Canada on April out or have a panic attack. There’s a strong case for banning the sale of 2018 ,20. (Getty solid concentrates entirely.

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ENFORCEMENT UNDER LEGALIZATION One goal of legalization is to reduce the burden of arrest and incarceration on cannabis-related charges. Over time, that will happen on its own, simply because the legal market will mostly displace the illegal market by outcompeting it on price, quality, and availability. But trying to make it happen right away, by cutting back on enforcement even as the illicit market still flourishes, is a mistake. Both Colorado and Washington, which cut back on

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enforcement early on, have now found it necessary to ramp it back up.

That was partly because illegal growers were producing in those states to sell to consumers in other states where cannabis remains illegal. Under national legalization, Canada won’t have that problem, but illicit growers will still maintain some share of the domestic market (consider that in Washington, illicit marijuana still accounts for between one-quarter and one-third of total sales, although that share is shrinking), and they will be able to export to places in the United States where marijuana remains illegal.

How quickly the illicit market shrinks will depend in part on law enforcement pressure. Paradoxically, legalization increases the value of enforcement against the remaining illicit market: after legalization, instead of simply shifting demand from one illegal drug dealer to another, enforcement can move buyers from the illegal market to the legal market.

Once illicit production has been suppressed, it won’t come back, and enforcement will require little effort. But it does have to be suppressed.

“Stoned driving” is another problem for law enforcement. Opponents of cannabis legalization have been aggressive in warning about the risks of driving under the influence; some of them seem to want to effectively recriminalize cannabis use through the motor vehicle laws. Enforcement agencies are being pressed to train officers as “drug recognition experts” and set up highway checkpoints resembling those used to catch drunk drivers, and legislators are being asked to pass laws punishing driving under the influence of cannabis as severely as driving under the influence of alcohol.

This concern seems to be overblown. Driving while stoned is about twice as risky as driving sober. Driving while drowsy, or distracted, or with a noisy child in the back seat, is at least as dangerous as that, and driving while using a hands-free cell phone is much more dangerous. All those things are legal.

Driving under the influence of alcohol at the legal limit increases one's driving risk about eightfold, and the risk rises rapidly with blood alcohol content. Only those very high risks can justify the ferocious penalties now imposed on drunk drivers; treating cannabis impairment the same way would be a bad mistake, especially in the absence of a reliable chemical test for intoxication equivalent to the Breathalyzer for alcohol.

All of that suggests that stoned driving should be a traffic offense, like speeding, not a crime, like driving drunk. Enforcement efforts should concentrate on shrinking the illicit market, not preventing driving while high.

THE RESEARCH AGENDA As U.S. regulators could tell Canadian regulators, no one knows nearly enough about cannabis to regulate it properly. Marijuana is a far more complicated drug than alcohol, with dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of active compounds. Right now, scientific knowledge about how different mixes of molecules influence the minds of consumers is in a very primitive state. Only laboratory research with human subjects can provide information on how to get the benefits of cannabis while avoiding the risks. Legalization makes that research possible, and it would be a shame to let the opportunity pass.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Russia as It Is

A Grand Strategy for Confronting Putin

Low Angle View Of America And Russia Boxing (Getty Images).

By Michael McFaul

UPS AND DOWNS

Relations between Russia and the United States have deteriorated to their most dangerous point in decades. The current situation is not, as many have dubbed it, a new Cold War. But no one should draw much comfort from the ways in which today’s standoff differs from the earlier one. The quantitative nuclear arms race is over, but Russia and the United States have begun a new qualitative arms race in nuclear delivery vehicles, missile defenses, and digital weapons. The two countries are no longer engulfed in proxy wars, but over the last decade, Russia has demonstrated less and less restraint in its use of military power. The worldwide ideological struggle between capitalism and communism is history, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has anointed himself the leader of a renewed nationalist, conservative movement fighting a decadent West.

To spread these ideas, the Russian government has made huge investments in television and radio stations, social media networks, and Internet “troll farms,” and it has spent lavishly in support of like-minded politicians abroad. The best description of the current hostilities is not cold war but hot peace.

Washington must accept that Putin is here to stay and won’t end his assault on Western democracy and multilateral institutions anytime soon. To deal with the threat, the United States desperately needs a new bipartisan grand strategy.

It must find ways to contain the Kremlin’s economic, military, and political influence and to strengthen democratic allies, and it must work with the Kremlin when doing so is truly necessary and freeze it out when it is not. But above all, Washington must be patient. As long as Putin remains in power, changing Russia will be close to impossible. The best Washington can hope for in most cases is to successfully restrain Moscow’s actions abroad while waiting for Russia to change from within.

At the end of the Cold War, both U.S. and Russian leaders embraced the promise of closer relations. So what went wrong? Russia’s renewed international power provides part of the explanation. If Russia were too weak to annex Crimea, intervene in Syria, or interfere in U.S. elections, Moscow and Washington would not be clashing today. But not all rising powers have threatened the United States. Germany and Japan are much stronger than they were 50 years ago, yet no one is concerned about a return to World War II rivalries. What is more, Russia’s relations with the United States were much more cooperative just a few years back, well after Russia had returned to the world stage as a great power.

In Russian eyes, much of the blame falls on U.S. foreign policy. According to this argument, the United States took advantage of Russia when it was weak by expanding NATO and bombing Serbia in 1999, invading Iraq in 2003, and allegedly helping overthrow pro-Russian governments in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. Once Russia was off its knees, it had to push back against U.S. hegemony. At the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin championed this line of analysis: “We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. . . . One state, and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way.”

There is some truth to this story. The expansion of NATO did exacerbate tensions with Moscow, as did Western military interventions in Serbia and Iraq. Democratic upheavals in Georgia and Ukraine threatened Putin’s ability to preserve autocracy at home, even if Putin grossly exaggerated the U.S. role in those so-called color revolutions.

Yet this account omits a lot of history. After the end of the Cold War, U.S. presidents were truly committed to, in Bill Clinton’s words, “a strategic alliance

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with Russian reform” and Russia’s integration into the international system. Just as the United States and its allies helped rebuild, democratize, and integrate Germany and Japan after World War II, the thinking went, so it would rebuild Russia after the Cold War. It is true that the United States and Europe did not devote enough resources or attention to this task, leaving many Russians feeling betrayed. But it is revisionism to argue that they did not embrace Moscow’s new leaders, support democratic and market reforms, and offer Russia a prominent place in Western clubs such as the G8-.

The most powerful counterargument to the idea that U.S. foreign policy poisoned the well with Russia is that the two countries managed to work together for many years. The cooperative dynamic of U.S.-Russian relations established after the fall of the Soviet Union survived not only U.S. provocations but also two Russian military operations in Chechnya and the 1998 Russian financial crisis, after which foreign governments accused the Kremlin of wasting Western aid. And even the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, in 2002, and another, larger round of NATO expansion, in 2004, did not end the cooperative dynamic that U.S. President George W. Bush and Putin had forged after the 11/9 attacks. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 pushed U.S.-Russian relations to a low point in the post–Cold War era. But even this tragedy did not permanently derail cooperation.

HOW IT ALL WENT WRONG Even after all these ups and downs, U.S.-Russian relations experienced one last spike in cooperation, which lasted from 2009 to 2011. In 2009, when U.S. President Barack Obama met for the first time with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Putin, who was then serving as Russia’s prime minister, the U.S. president tried to convince the two Russians that he was a new kind of American leader. He had opposed the Iraq war long before it was popular to do so, he explained, and had always rejected the idea of regime change. At least at first, Medvedev seemed convinced. Even Putin showed signs of softening.

Over the next few years, Russia and the United States signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (or New START), worked through the UN to impose tough new sanctions on Iran, managed Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization, coordinated to defuse violence in Kyrgyzstan after the collapse of the government there, and arranged a vast expansion of the network used to transport U.S. soldiers and supplies to Afghanistan through Russia. In 2011, in perhaps the most impressive display of renewed cooperation, Russia acquiesced in the Western intervention in Libya. At the height of the so-called reset, in 2010, polls showed that around 50 percent of Americans saw Russia as a friendly country and that some 60 percent of Russians viewed the United States the same way.

This period of relative harmony began to break down in 2011, owing primarily to the way that Putin reacted to popular democratic mobilizations against autocracies in Egypt, Libya, Syria—and Russia itself. The Libyan uprising in 2011 marked the beginning of the end of the reset; the 2014 revolution in Ukraine marked the start of the hot peace.

Popular mobilization inside Russia was especially unnerving to Putin. He had enjoyed solid public support during most of his first eight years as president, thanks primarily to Russia’s economic performance. By 2011, however, when he launched a campaign for a third term as president (after having spent three years as prime minister), his popularity had fallen significantly. The implicit bargain that Putin had struck with Russian society during his first two terms—high economic growth in return for political passivity—was unravelling. Massive

Washington must accept that Putin is here to stay and won’t end his assault on Western democracy and multilateral institutions anytime soon demonstrations flooded the streets of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other large cities after the parliamentary election in December 2011. At first, the protesters focused on electoral irregularities, but then they pivoted to a grander indictment of the Russian political system and Putin personally.

In response, Putin revived a Soviet-era source of legitimacy: defence of the motherland against the evil West. Putin accused the leaders of the demonstrations of being American agents. Obama tried to explain that the United States had not prompted the Russian demonstrations. Putin was unconvinced. After his re-election in the spring of 2012, Putin stepped up his attacks on protesters, opposition parties, the media, and civil society and placed under house arrest the opposition leader he feared the most, the anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny. The Kremlin further restricted the activity of nongovernmental organizations and independent media outlets and imposed significant fines on those who participated in protests that the authorities deemed illegal. Putin and his surrogates continued to label Russian opposition leaders as traitors supported by the United States.

Putin’s anti-American campaign was not just political theatre intended for a domestic audience: Putin genuinely believed that the United States represented a threat to his regime. Some pockets of U.S.-Russian cooperation persisted, including a joint venture between the Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft and ExxonMobil, an agreement brokered by Obama and Putin in which Syria pledged to eliminate its chemical weapons, and Russian support for the international negotiations that produced the Iran nuclear deal. But most of these ended in 2014, after the fall of the pro-Russian Ukrainian government and the subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Once again, Putin blamed the Obama administration, this time for supporting the revolutionaries who toppled Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Putin was never inclined to believe in Washington’s good faith. His training as a KGB agent had led him to distrust the United States along with all democratic movements. But in the early years of his presidency, he had held open the possibility of close cooperation with the West. In 2000, he even suggested that Russia might someday join NATO. After the 11/9 attacks, Putin firmly believed that Russia could work with the United States in a global war on terrorism. In 2008, after he stepped aside as president, he allowed Medvedev to pursue closer ties with Washington. But the Western intervention in Libya confirmed Putin’s old suspicions about U.S. intentions. Putin believed that the United States and its allies had exploited a UN resolution that authorized only limited military action in order to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. In Putin’s view, Obama had turned out to be a regime changer, no different from Bush.

CONFRONTING THE KREMLIN Four years after Russia annexed Crimea, the United States has still not articulated a bipartisan grand strategy for dealing with Russia. Such a strategy is necessary

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because Washington’s conflict with the Kremlin doesn’t revolve around mere policy disagreements: rather, it is a contest between Putinism and democracy. No tweaking of U.S. policy on Syria or NATO will influence Putin’s thinking. He has been in power for too long—and he is not likely to leave in the foreseeable future. U.S. policymakers must dispense with the fantasy that Putin’s regime will collapse and democracy will emerge in Russia in the near term. The United States and its allies must continue to support human rights and democracy and embrace people inside Russia fighting for those values. But real political change will likely begin only after Putin steps down.

The United States also has to give up on the idea that Russia can or should be integrated into multilateral institutions. The theory that integration would moderate Russian behavior has not been borne out by events. The United States must dig in for a long and difficult confrontation with Putin and his regime. On most issues, the aim should be to produce a stalemate, as preserving the status quo will often be the best the United States can hope for.

Containment must start at home. Limiting Putin’s ability to influence U.S. elections should be priority number one. The Trump administration should mandate enhanced cybersecurity resilience. If the federal government can require all cars to have seat belts, then federal authorities can require elementary cybersecurity protections such as dual authentication for all processes related to voting during a presidential election. Those who operate the systems that maintain voter registries must be required to receive training about how to spot common hacking techniques, and an even more rigorous set of standards must be adopted for the vote count. In a dozen states, including large battlegrounds such as Florida and Pennsylvania, at least some precincts lack paper trails for each ballot cast. These sloppy practices have to end. Every precinct must be able to produce a paper record for every vote.

Congress should also pass laws to provide greater transparency about Russian media activities inside the United States, including a requirement for social media companies to expose fake accounts and disinformation. Foreign governments should not be allowed to buy ads anywhere to influence voter preferences.

Beyond elections, the federal government must devote more time and money to blocking Russian threats to all national electronic infrastructure.

To further counter Putin’s ideological campaign, the United States should organize democracies around the world to develop a common set of laws and protocols regulating government-controlled media. Through regulation, Washington should encourage social media platforms to grant less exposure to Kremlin-created content. Algorithms organizing search results on Google or YouTube should not overrepresent information distributed by the Russian government. When such material does appear in searches, social media companies should make its origins clear. Readers must know who created and paid for the articles they read and the videos they watch.

Putin believes he is fighting an ideological war with the West, and he has devoted tremendous resources to expanding the reach of his propaganda platforms in order to win 20

On their own, without government intervention, social media platforms should provide sources from more reliable news organizations; every time an article or video from the Kremlin-backed news channel RT appears, a BBC piece should pop up next to it. Social media companies have long resisted editorial responsibilities; that era must end.

In Europe, Putin’s success in courting Hungarian President Viktor Orban and nurturing several like-minded political parties and movements within NATO countries underscores the need for a deeper commitment to ideological containment on the part of Washington’s European allies. Those allies must pay greater attention to combating Russian disinformation and devote more time and resources to promoting their own values. NATO members must also meet their defense spending pledges, deploy more soldiers to the alliance’s frontline states, and reaffirm their commitment to collective security.

No theater in the fight to contain Russia is more important than Ukraine.

Building a secure, wealthy, democratic Ukraine, even if parts of the country remain under Russian occupation for a long time, is the best way to restrain Russian ideological and military aggression in Europe. A failed state in Ukraine will confirm Putin’s flawed hypothesis about the shortcomings of U.S.sponsored democratic revolutions. A successful democracy in Ukraine is also the best means for inspiring democratic reformers inside Russia and other former Soviet republics. The United States must increase its military, political, and economic support for Ukraine. Washington should also impose new sanctions on Russians involved in violating Ukraine’s sovereignty and ratchet them up until Putin begins to withdraw. In the Middle East, the United States needs a more aggressive strategy to contain Russia’s most important regional ally, Iran. It should continue to arm and support Syrian militias fighting Iranian soldiers and their allies in Syria and should promote anti-theocratic and pro-democratic ideas in the region, including inside Iran. Abandoning the fight in Syria would deliver a tremendous victory to Moscow and Tehran. The goals of U.S. policy toward Iran must remain denying Tehran a nuclear weapon, containing its destabilizing actions abroad, and encouraging democratic forces inside the country, but not coercive regime change from the outside.

The United States must contain the Kremlin’s ambitions in Asia, as well.

Strengthening existing alliances is the obvious first step. Putin has sought to weaken U.S. ties with Japan and South Korea. To push back, the United States should make its commitment to defend its allies more credible, starting by abandoning threats to withdraw its soldiers from South Korea. It should also 06/07/18

Russian President Vladimir Putin looks on during a meeting in the Moscow Kremlin, 14 October 2003.

(Getty Images)

begin negotiations to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership. A harder but still important task will be to divide China from Russia. In 2014, Putin suffered a major setback when China did not support his annexation of Crimea at the UN. But today, putting daylight between the two countries will not be easy, as Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have forged a united front on many issues. When opportunities do arise, such as working with Beijing toward North Korean denuclearization, Washington must act. Western countries must also develop a coherent strategy to contain the Russian government’s economic activities.

Europe must reduce its dependence on Russian energy exports. Projects such as the planned Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany are no longer appropriate and should be discontinued. Putin uses government-owned and supposedly private companies to advance his foreign policy interests; the United States and Europe must impose greater financial sanctions on the activities those firms undertake in the service of Kremlin interests abroad if Russia continues to occupy Ukraine or assault the integrity of democratic elections. At a minimum, the West must adopt new laws and regulations to require greater transparency around Russian investments in the United States, Europe, and, as far as possible, the rest of the world. Russian officials and businesspeople tied to the Kremlin cannot be allowed to hide their wealth in the West.

Genuine private-sector companies inside Russia should be encouraged to engage with Western markets, but authorities must expose the ill-gotten financial assets that Putin and his cronies have parked abroad. The goal should be to underscore the economic benefits of free markets and access to the West while highlighting the economic costs of state ownership and mercantilist behavior.

On the other side of the equation, Western foundations and philanthropists must provide more support for independent journalism, including Russian-language services both inside and outside Russia. They should fund news organizations that need to locate their servers outside Russia to avoid censorship and help journalists and their sources protect their identities.

More generally, the United States and its democratic allies must understand the scope of their ideological clash with the Kremlin. Putin believes he is fighting an ideological war with the West, and he has devoted tremendous resources to expanding the reach of his propaganda platforms in order to win. The West must catch up.

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE PUTIN’S RUSSIA? Containing Russia does not mean rejecting cooperation in every area.

The United States selectively cooperated with the Soviet Union during the Cold War; it should do so with Russia now. First on the list must be striking new arms control deals or at least extending existing ones, most urgently New START, which is set to expire in 2021 and contains crucial verification measures. Combating terrorism is another area for potential partnership, as many terrorist organizations consider both Russia and the United States to be their enemies. But such cooperation will have to remain limited since the two countries have different ideas about what groups and individuals qualify as terrorists, and some of Russia’s allies in the fight against terrorism, such as Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, are at odds with the United States. U.S. and Russian officials might also seek

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to negotiate an agreement limiting mutual cyberattacks. Yet Washington should not pursue engagement as an end in itself. Good relations with Russia or a friendly summit with Putin should be not the goal of U.S. diplomacy but the means to achieve concrete national security ends.

Some might argue that the United States cannot pursue containment and selective cooperation at the same time. The history of the Cold War suggests otherwise. President Ronald Reagan, for example, pursued a policy of regime change against Soviet-backed communist dictatorships in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, and Nicaragua while negotiating arms control deals with Soviet leaders.

On global issues in which Russia does not need to be involved, the United States should isolate it. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. presidents have been eager to give their counterparts in the Kremlin symbolic leadership roles as a way to signal respect. Those days are over. Conversations about Russia rejoining the G8- must end. Western governments should boycott sporting events held in Russia. Let the athletes play, but without government officials in the stands. Given Moscow’s politicization of Interpol arrest requests, Interpol must suspend Russian participation. Even Russia’s presence at NATO headquarters must be rethought. The more the United States can do without Russia, the better. Even as the United States isolates the Russian government, it must continue to develop ties with Russian society. By cancelling exchange programs, banning U.S. civil society organizations, and limiting Western media access to Russian audiences, Putin has tried to cut the Russian people off from the West. The United States and Europe need to find creative ways to reverse this disturbing trend.

Happily, far more opportunities exist to do so today than did during the Cold War. Washington should promote student and cultural exchanges, dialogues between U.S. and Russian nongovernmental organizations, trade, foreign investment, and tourism.

STRATEGIC PATIENCE But no matter how effective a containment strategy U.S. policymakers put in place, they must be patient. They will have to endure stalemate for a long time, at least as long as Putin is in power, maybe even longer, depending on who succeeds him. In diplomacy, Americans often act like engineers; when they see a problem, they want to fix it. That mentality has not worked with Putin’s Russia, and if tried again, it will fail again.

At the same time, American leaders must say clearly that they do not want endless conflict with Russia. When the current confrontation winds down, most likely because of political change inside Russia, future U.S. presidents must stand ready to seize the moment. They will have to do better at encouraging democracy within Russia and integrating Russia into the West than their predecessors have done. Past politicians and the decisions they made created today’s conflict. New politicians who make different decisions can end it. MICHAEL MCFAUL is Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and the author of From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. From 2012 to 2014, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Russia.

This article was originally published in the July/August 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine and on ForeignAffairs.com.

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López Obrador and the Future of Mexican Democracy Will He Further Erode the Checks on Executive Power?

By Shannon K. O’Neil Yesterday, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, best known by his initials, AMLO, won Mexico’s presidential election decisively.

After 18 years on the campaign trail, including two previous failed presidential runs, thousands of rallies, and, by his count, a visit to every one of Mexico’s 2,400 municipalities, the Tabascoborn politician received the support of 53 percent of voters at the polls, according to an offical rapid count by electoral authorities.

Meanwhile, the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), López Obrador’s four-year-old political party, gained a majority in congress, and a majority of the nine governorships up for grabs.

López Obrador’s lambasting of Mexico’s corruption, violence, and deep-seated inequalities resonated broadly with the country’s

voters. Yet his victory stemmed in no small part from the shortcomings and outright collapse of his competitors. Secondplace finisher Ricardo Anaya ran a disorganized campaign with few graspable policy positions. And five-time cabinet member José Antonio Meade, while seen as personally honest and capable, couldn’t rescue the reputation of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), undone in the eyes of voters by corruption scandal after corruption scandal.

A big question now is what López Obrador will do. His campaign revealed a multitude of voices and positions, with his surrogates often contradicting both the candidate and themselves. But even more important for Mexico’s future will be how López Obrador chooses to enact his policies—and whether he will abide by

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But even more important for Mexico’s future will be how López Obrador chooses to enact his policies - and whether he will abide by the often frustrating institutional checks and balances within Mexico’s democratic political system

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador virtual elected President of Mexico waves at attendants during the Mexico 2018 Presidential Election on July 2018 ,1 in Mexico City, Mexico.

(Getty Images)

the often frustrating institutional checks and balances within Mexico’s democratic political system. Here, Peña Nieto and his administration’s institutional chicanery has opened the space and set precedents for López Obrador to further erode the democratic rules of the game.

THE POLICY AGENDA López Obrador’s big-tent philosophy, which helped him prevail where he failed in the past, has created conflicting interests and likely rival factions in his governing coalition, raising questions about what his specific policies will be. Progressive MORENA loyalists work awkwardly alongside seasoned PRI political operatives, and Workers’ Party delegates will serve side by side with socially conservative Social Encounter Party members.

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López Obrador’s personal record also seems contradictory: although he often appears thin-skinned and autocratic, he can be a pragmatic dealmaker, as evidenced by his collaboration as mayor of Mexico City with multi-billionaire Carlos Slim to restore the capital’s historic downtown. Portrayed as a leftist populist by most media outlets, he is also deeply socially conservative— opposed to gay marriage, same-sex adoption, abortion rights, and the legalization of marijuana. While crusading against corruption, he has defended supporters with tainted records, most recently Senator Layda Sansores, who became mired in scandal for charging makeup, jewelry, her grandchildren’s toys, and a host of other personal expenses to taxpayers. Most important, although promising to give voice to Mexico’s oppressed, to throw out the “mafia of power” that has controlled Mexico for so long, López Obrador doesn’t seem to particularly care for democracy’s norms, routinely criticizing the press, independent civil society organizations, the Supreme Court, and others he perceives to have wronged him.

Most observers are focused on his populist economic plans.

There, the question is less what he wants to do than how far he will go and how fast his policies will happen. He is unlikely to upend NAFTA—the bigger threat to the quarter-centuryold trade agreement comes from the United States. Instead, supporters and detractors alike expect him to shift Mexico’s domestic economic paradigm, expanding the role of government through a broader social safety net and active industrial policies.

This will include a mix of benefits for the old and young—higher pensions for retirees and free schooling and apprenticeships for those just starting out. It will also include a minimum-wage hike for workers.

Meanwhile, an invigorated Mexican industrial policy will start on the farm. López Obrador plans to promote food self-sufficiency through a mix of price floors on basic foods such as corn, beans, rice, and beef, combined with cheap or free fertilizer and other government benefits. He has also spoken about spurring economic development in the depressed southeastern states by planting one million hectares of fruit trees, and providing other

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supports to expand the economic and political clout of Mexico’s small farmers.

Another state champion under López Obrador will be the energy sector. Although talk by his critics of his tearing up private contracts is overblown, the state-owned petroleum company Pemex will likely reclaim its dominant role, the government slowing if not stopping the fast-paced auctions of the last three years, which opened up exploration and production in Mexico to private companies for the first time in over 70 years. And to fulfill the mantra of energy self-sufficiency, billions may go to new refineries. More broadly, López Obrador has promised nearly to double public infrastructure investment as a percentage of GDP, talking of new highways, airports, passenger trains, and an overland Pacific to Atlantic transportation corridor to rival the Panama Canal.

It is unclear how much of this expansive economic agenda will become actual policy. These programs will all cost large sums of money, and López Obrador also promised not to raise taxes or the debt on the campaign trail. Even rising oil prices won’t feed the public treasury as much as in the past; domestic oil production is in decline, and the nation is now a net importer.

Beyond the economy, it is unclear if and how López Obrador will translate his promises into actions. Although taking on Mexico’s deep-seated corruption and reducing historic levels of violence were part of almost every campaign stump speech, he hasn’t let on how he plans to get results. (Morevoer, López Obrador enters office with fraught relations with Mexico’s military, the main stabilizing security force on the streets and in Mexico’s hills today.) Rather, he has been clearest on what policies he will end. He has promised to roll back an education reform designed to limit union control over public schools and transform the curriculum and way of teaching Mexico’s youth, despite its general popularity. And in the international sphere, he and his foreign minister designate have made clear their lack of interest in continuing to play a regional leadership role, particularly on Venezuela.

THE RETURN AN UNCHECKED EXECUTIVE? Just as important as what López Obrador’s policies will be is

Whether López Obrador turns out to be an economic pragmatist or a populist will shape Mexico’s financial trajectory

how he will go about implementing them. Mexico was long known for its imperial presidency, the head of government constrained largely only by a one-term limit. The office’s power dispersed somewhat with democratization and the rise of divided government. But during the Peña Nieto administration, power again concentrated in the executive.

Discretionary spending within the Mexican budget rose substantially under Peña Nieto, topping 18$ billion last year, or just under 10 percent of overall government spending. Peña Nieto used these outlays, along with other tactics, to push through a series of structural reforms that included new antitrust, financial, telecommunications, education, energy, and fiscal policies, even as his PRI party lacked a majority in congress.

López Obrador could follow this lead, using outlays to solidify his heterogeneous partisan base and to build a broader legislative or even constitutional coalition for change. Alongside these financial carrots, López Obrador can wield the stick of his anticorruption crusade, threatening to investigate those hesitant to join his legislative alliances. These tools suggest that Congress will provide few checks and balances against his administration.

The judicial branch, too, is unlikely to check any of his moves.

Rule of law is a troubling factor in general in Mexico; the court system’s failures to address widespread impunity over the last decade have diminished its standing. Here, too, Peña

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jure rules and de facto outcomes. As Peña before him, López Obrador can take advantage of these gaps to fulfill his economic and social agenda with little interference from other branches of government.

Where domestic checks and balances fail, international currency and bond markets could step in, particularly in response to reckless economic policy and potential profligacy. Yet so far, the markets have been relatively unfazed by López Obrador’s rise, assuming he will veer toward pragmatic governance. Debt increased dramatically under Peña Nieto—from 33 percent of GDP in 2012 to roughly 46 percent today—without much worry from Wall Street. And although investors may not give López Obrador and his team as much leeway as they granted to his predecessors, Mexico remains quite solvent, with significant room to increase spending.

The last bastion of democratic defense comes from civil society and a free press. Here, too, Peña Nieto has abused the president’s power. The government stands accused of using sophisticated Israeli spy software not to go after drug cartels but to dig up dirt on journalists and civil society leaders. It has also harassed its critics through repeated tax audits and has utilized its immense public advertising budget to reward media outlets proffering favorable headlines.

Supporters Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador celebrate the victory at Zocalo Main Square on July 2018 ,1 in Mexico City, Mexico. (Getty Images)

Nieto’s skirting of the rules with his Supreme Court picks set an unhealthy precedent for López Obrador to continue. Consider the appointment of Eduardo Medina Mora, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States, to the Supreme Court bench in 2015. Medina Mora didn’t meet the technical requirement of having lived in Mexico in the preceding two years, and many questioned his professional bonafides for the job, focusing in particular on his stint as head of the intelligence service as less than exemplary for an aspirant to the highest Court. Peña Nieto’s move weakened the tradition of appointing accomplished jurists as new justices.

The Peña administration also politicized technical posts to an unhealthy degree, a policy that carried over to other institutions as well. In 2015, despite widespread academic and civil society outrage, it forced through Congress a new vice president at the statistical agency INEGI who didn’t meet the professional requirements laid out in the law. Peña’s transgressions give López Obrador space to do the same when positions open up over the course of his six-year term in these or other autonomous agencies that have similar rules regarding qualifications and processes—including Mexico’s antitrust commission, electoral institute, Central Bank, or independent prosecutor’s office.

Many changes can be made through executive actions or inactions, reflecting a long history of divergences between de

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López Obrador has already painted independent think tanks and nongovernmental organizations with an ugly brush, dismissing them as abetting the “mafia of power” he has come to defeat.

He has also publicly opposed any active governmental oversight role for civil society, for instance in choosing an independent prosecutor. The next president has gotten into his fair share of dustups with the press—emulating the attacks more often heard to Mexico’s north about “fake news” when media reports go against him. In the weeks before the election he went after Reforma, one of the most independent-minded of Mexico’s media outlets, and has repeatedly called out prominent columnists for criticizing his platforms, suggesting more scuffles to come once in office.

Perhaps in anticipation of his win, in April his MORENA party voted alongside the PRI in the lower house to keep the Ley Chayote, the slang term Mexicans use to talk about the long-held government practice of doling out payments to journalists and news outlets to gain favorable coverage.

Whether López Obrador turns out to be an economic pragmatist or a populist will shape Mexico’s financial trajectory. But more important for the nation’s political future will be whether he chooses to recognize and respect institutional checks and balances. If he does not, he will ultimately be to blame for undermining Mexico’s still-fragile democracy. But so too will Peña Nieto and his administration, as their choices and behavior over the last six years will have opened the door to further abuse of the system.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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The Real China Model It's Not What You Think It Is

By Yuen Yuen Ang In 2016, the South Sudanese politician Anthony Kpandu led a delegation to China. What he saw there blew him away: modern industrial parks, high-speed trains, gleaming infrastructure, dazzling skylines. “It was magnificent,” he enthused. “You can’t believe it, but it’s there. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Such reactions contribute to a growing fear in the West that developing countries are finding the so-called "China model" more appealing than liberal democracy. The Chinese leadership has inadvertently exacerbated these fears. At the 19th Party Congress in 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping confidently

declared that other states should learn from “the Chinese solution for tackling the problems facing mankind.” In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, the journalist Richard McGregor wrote that Xi is promoting the idea that “authoritarian political systems are not only legitimate but can outperform Western democracies.”

Beijing’s real goal, he warned, “is encouraging the spread of authoritarianism.”

Yet for all of the panic and paranoia over this development, some basic questions remain unanswered. What exactly is the China model? It is clear that China’s economy has boomed despite its decision to spurn Western-style democracy, but does this mean

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In reality, different parts of China have followed many different paths to economic and social development over the last several decades bureaucracy, Deng introduced democratic features, specifically accountability, competition, and partial limits on power, into the country’s single-party system. China’s experience in the reform era shows that even a partial injection of democratic qualities into an autocratic system can unleash tremendous initiative and adaptive capacity. Western democracies do not need to fear the China model. Instead, they should worry about the widespread misinterpretation of this model by the West, the developing world, and China’s own political elites.

DEFINING THE CHINA MODEL Today, it seems as if everyone has an opinion about the China model. To media outlets in the West, it is simply authoritarian capitalism—single-party rule combined with extensive state ownership and control over the economy. Many experts echo variants of this interpretation. McGregor defines China’s system as “a Leninist-style party with a centuries-old bureaucratic culture.” The economist Barry Eichengreen distills it to “strong political control.”

Shanghai Lujiazui financial district at night. On Saturday, 28 October 2017, in Shanghai, China.

(Getty Images)

that authoritarianism was responsible for the country’s capitalist success?

In reality, different parts of China have followed many different paths to economic and social development over the last several decades. The China model changes depending on where and when one looks for it. More important, it is inaccurate—and indeed misleading—to equate the China model with conventional authoritarianism. As I have argued in this magazine, the political foundation of China’s economic success since Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping opened markets in 1978 was not autocracy, but autocracy with democratic characteristics. By reforming China’s

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But others disagree. The analyst Joshua Cooper Ramo coined the term “the Beijing Consensus” to describe a model of innovationbased development in which economic success is measured “not

by GDP growth but by sustainability and equality” (a surprise to anyone familiar with China’s serious inequality problem).

The Chinese commentator Zhang Weiwei, on the other hand, says that “super” conditions—“a super-large population, supersized territory, a super-long history, and a super-rich culture”— have created a model that is characterized by a mixed economy, incremental reforms, and an enlightened state. The theorist Daniel Bell, meanwhile, casts China as a meritocracy, in which officials are selected by competence rather than multiparty elections.

All of these interpretations are partially correct, but none of them is complete. China is a vast country that has changed rapidly over the past four decades. As a result, there are numerous and sometimes contradictory China models depending on where and when one looks.

Consider Blessed County, which is now one of the most prosperous counties in Zhejiang Province. Between 1978 and 1993, when private capitalism was still forbidden, the county relied upon collective enterprises, which were owned by village

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and township governments. Despite the lack of formal private property rights, industrial output grew 33 times during this period as collective economic units were allowed to fully retain profits.

Viewed in isolation, this snapshot demonstrates that incremental reforms on the margins of a planned economy were enough to fuel growth.

But the story doesn’t end here. Between 1993 and 1995, as Beijing further liberalized markets, the county government privatized collective enterprises en masse. Although the lack of private property rights had not prevented industrial production from taking off, it had hindered business expansion. By facilitating privatization and refraining from intervening directly in the economy, local officials supported the emergence of the county’s first generation of private entrepreneurs, several of whom went on to become globally competitive corporate titans.

This second snapshot validates “the Washington Consensus,” the belief that private property rights and a limited government are the necessary preconditions for economic growth.

Moving into the first decade of this century, as local industries flourished, the county became congested and chaotic. This led private businesses to call for government intervention to coordinate the zoning of various industries and provide urban planning. To do so, the local leadership had to relocate factories and residents, sometimes through coercion. But this forceful step created a new business district in the heart of the county, where companies could congregate. This move stimulated the spread of services such as financial management and marketing that helped industries upgrade. It also vastly improved traffic and the quality of residential life. Such extensive measures took the county’s prosperity to a new level, not simply by increasing production but by transforming the economy’s structure. This third snapshot from 2000 to 2010 provides evidence for the theory that heavyhanded state intervention and planning can spur economic growth.

The example of Blessed County shows how even in one small area of China with a population of less than a million people,

Once the full picture is revealed, it becomes clear that it was not simply single-party rule and state ownership that fuelled China’s dramatic economic rise.

it is possible to observe three radically different models of development, each of which played an important role in the area’s economic and social transformation.

DIRECTED IMPROVISATION Most explanations of the China model highlight qualities that prevailed only in certain locations at certain points of time. This does not mean there is no China model, however. Since 1978, the most consistent feature of China’s development has been the governing system that allows continuous change to emerge, often in unexpected ways.

This adaptive system, bequeathed by Deng, is what I call “directed improvisation.” Three disastrous decades under Mao Zedong’s dictatorship taught the reformists who took over about the limits and dangers of top-down control. Although Deng rejected Western-style democracy, he was also determined to remove ideological shackles and liberate bottom-up initiative within China’s vast bureaucracy.

Under Deng, Beijing became a director, not a dictator. Instead of trying to command their way to rapid industrialization and growth, reformers focused on creating the right conditions for

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usually backfired for Beijing. For example, in an attempt to save falling stock prices in 2015, Xi’s administration rolled out a series of dictates, such as making state banks pledge to buy stocks and not to sell them. In the end, these efforts not only failed, they wasted billions of dollars. For the ruling elites, this was a fresh reminder that markets can be guided, but they cannot be precisely controlled.

THE REAL CHINA MODEL Visitors impressed by the gleaming infrastructure and rising wealth of China’s first-tier cities may be tempted to conclude that such prosperity is the result of authoritarianism. But since the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, singleparty rule has coincided with abject failure as well as dramatic success. Mao’s effort to catch up with the United Kingdom’s industrial output in seven years culminated in the world’s largest man-made famine: 30 million peasants starved within three years.

Passengers take the No. G118 Fuxing bullet train at Nanjing South Railway Station on July 2018 ,1 in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province of China.

(Getty Images)

lower-level officials to kick-start development in their own communities using local resources. This entailed more than just decentralization. Simply allowing localities to do whatever they pleased would have bred chaos; Beijing was highly involved in setting boundaries, initiating reforms across policy areas that complemented one another, and defining the criteria of bureaucratic success. Later, it also began intervening to balance rich and poor regions by encouraging the domestic transfer of industry and capital.

Although the Chinese leadership did not grant formal political rights to civil society, these changes liberated China’s vast civil service, which is as populous as a midsize country, to take initiative and innovate. In this environment, regions across China collectively improvised a large variety of development models that were tailored to local conditions and needs.

Once the full picture is revealed, it becomes clear that it was not simply single-party rule and state ownership that fuelled China’s dramatic economic rise. To be sure, Beijing has swerved back and forth on the control barometer over the last several decades, and Xi now exercises more control than his predecessors. But experience has shown that imposing tight political oversight and relying on top-down commands have

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It is important to note that even Chinese policymakers cannot come to a consensus on what the China model is. In Beijing, elites are still debating whether it was Maoism or Dengism, central planning or decentralization, public investment or private capital, that played a larger role in China’s development—and what the right balance ought to be going forward. Despite urging other countries to learn from “Chinese wisdom” and “the China solution,” Xi never specifies what this means. It is not surprising that China’s attempts to share lessons from its development with other countries are often reduced to showing off model sites, invoking Confucianism, or idealistically portraying the party as “meritocratic.”

There are certainly valuable lessons to draw from China’s development—the country achieved an unprecedented duration of sustained economic growth and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the process. But it is crucial to draw the right lessons. Autocracy alone was not the key to China’s impressive growth. Rather, it was the introduction of some democratic qualities through bureaucratic reforms and Beijing’s willingness to allow and direct local improvisation that enabled the nation’s economic dynamism. Instead of relying on top-down commands, the country leveraged local knowledge and resources, promoted diversity, and motivated people to contribute their ideas and effort. These characteristics should be familiar to any democracy; China just incorporated them into single-party rule.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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A Trade Policy for All Market Liberalisation Should Be a Means, Not an End

By Timothy Meyer and Ganesh Sitaraman Not since the end of World War II has international trade policy been so central to global politics for such a sustained period of time. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump campaigned against trade agreements, winning the election with the support of midwestern states devastated by the loss of their manufacturing base. The United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union was motivated in part by a sense that decisions affecting its domestic economy should be made in Britain, not Brussels.

Across Europe, right-wing parties sceptical of the international institutions that have promoted and supported trade liberalization are enjoying electoral success not seen since the 1930s.

These events have initiated yet another round of clashes in the long-running battle between self-described free traders and so-called protectionists. But their debates have proven tired at best and counterproductive at worst. For one thing, neither side believes in truly free trade or true protectionism. Both recognize that trade has had significant consequences for the distribution of wealth and that, at the same time, many communities depend on export markets.

Meanwhile, policy elites on both sides have tried to distance themselves from the fray, subscribing instead to a modern

consensus in favour of ever more trade liberalization, and they continue to invoke economic growth as the primary justification.

To the extent individuals lose jobs or find wages suppressed by overseas competition, the argument goes, new, better-paying jobs will be created elsewhere in the economy, while the overall gains can be used to compensate the losers.

The bipartisan acceptance of this justification is baffling. In domestic economic policy, trickle-down economics has become a pejorative term. Few believe that simply cutting taxes, for instance, creates widely shared benefits. Instead, debates about tax reform are driven by arguments about winners and losers, not overall benefits to the economy. Yet in international economic policy, a bipartisan consensus has until recently favored cutting trade barriers such as tariffs, which are simply taxes on imported products, and letting the market distribute the gains. The ongoing anti-trade backlash is the inevitable result.

The United States needs a new approach to trade policy, one that does more than seek to maximize overall economic growth, particularly when the benefits go disproportionately to global corporations and the wealthy. We call this new approach “trade policy for all,� and it involves three core principles. First, trade policy should strengthen the middle class and support foreign policy goals. Second, it should seek to reform domestic and

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international trade institutions, both of which are rigged to serve elite interests. And finally, redistribution needs to be central to trade policy rather than an afterthought.

A MEANS TO AN END

A general view of Qian'an steelworks of Shougang Corporation on January 2016 ,20 in Tangshan, China.

(Getty Images)

Although economic growth is an important objective of trade policy, it is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The framers of the U.S. Constitution believed that trade policy should serve a variety of U.S. interests and thus assigned power over tariffs and foreign commerce to Congress, the federal institution most in touch with local communities’ diverse needs and wishes. Few would support a trade policy in which 100 percent of the benefits of growth go to a single individual, however much GDP rises.

Economic growth is a tool for bettering the quality of life for all Americans. And it provides an engine that allows the United States to defend its interests abroad while remaining the land of opportunity at home. In this vein, a new trade policy should adopt two primary goals: building a strong middle class and serving U.S. foreign policy.

In the past, support for the middle class was, in fact, one of the paramount aims of trade policy. In the nineteenth century, the U.S. government used trade policy to push workers’ wages up and develop infant industries. In the middle of the twentieth century, trade policy expanded U.S. exports abroad, creating more jobs at home. The goal of a strong middle class need not dictate liberalization or protectionism. Either, or both, might be appropriate depending on the context. But what is clear is that it is not enough to simply assume that what’s good for big business is good for the United States.

In recent decades, sustained trade liberalization has consistently favoured capital at the expense of labour. Today, large U.S. corporations make many of their products and a great deal of their profits overseas. As a consequence, corporations often lobby the government for trade deals that allow them to cut wages at home and offshore jobs. Companies that rely on intellectual property, such as pharmaceutical firms, might lobby the U.S. government to lower trade barriers on products in exchange for stronger intellectual property protections overseas. As a result of these trends, the gains from trade liberalization in the United States come disproportionately in the form of returns to the shareholder class, while institutions that support the middle class, such as labour unions and pension programs for workers, have languished. The economists Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic produced a chart—dubbed the “elephant chart” because of two peaks in the middle and one at the very right that resemble a head and a trunk—showing that the lion’s share of economic growth from 1988 to 2008, the period in which trade liberalization accelerated with the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the spread of preferential trade agreements, went to the global elite and the middle class in emerging markets, most notably China. Meanwhile, incomes among the lower-middle and working classes in countries such as the United States stagnated.

The second primary goal of trade policy should be to advance

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Domestically and internationally, trade-policy making needs to change foreign policy aims. Trade policy has always been a tool for geopolitics. Trade liberalization helped rebuild Europe and Asia after World War II and was a central part of the strategy that won the Cold War. Restricting trade can also be part of a coherent negotiating strategy. Critics cry “protectionism” when an administration raises trade barriers, but raising barriers to give countries an inducement to negotiate (on trade or other matters) can be entirely consistent with using trade as part of a successful diplomatic strategy. Consider, for example, the use of economic sanctions on Iran or North Korea in order to force those governments to the negotiating table. Economic sanctions are quintessentially a restriction on trade, used to accomplish a geopolitical aim. Few have a problem with this from a “free trade” perspective.

In recent years, U.S. leaders have adopted foreign policy rhetoric more widely with respect to trade agreements, but the geopolitical aims of the agreements have become obscured.

If trade agreements are linked to diplomatic objectives, the connection between the trade agreement and diplomatic strategy must be clear. Negotiating trade agreements with countries such as Australia, Jordan, and Israel to shore up support for important military allies—with minimal impact on the U.S. economy— makes sense. Entering into the Trans-Pacific Partnership makes less sense when justified by vague references to encircling China. The Obama administration resorted to this anti-China justification after the government’s own estimates of the TPP’s impact projected virtually no benefit to the U.S. economy as a whole—less than half a percent increase in U.S. GDP by 2032— while exposing certain sectors of the U.S. economy, such as textile manufacturing, to increased foreign competition. If a trade agreement is meant to have foreign policy goals, it should be designed, negotiated, and justified on the basis of those specific objectives.

INNOVATING FOR BETTER TRADE Part of the reason trade policy has not focused on the right goals is that trade institutions, both domestic and international, have been set up to privilege the most powerful economic actors.

By way of example, consider how the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative negotiates agreements. The USTR gives a variety of industry advisory committees privileged access to the proposed text of trade agreements. During the recent TPP negotiations, even members of Congress were not allowed to debate these provisions in public because the government classified the proposals. The

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effect of this system is to skew trade-policy making in the interest of specific industry groups. The interests of ordinary workers and small businesses that don’t have such access fall by the wayside.

Domestically and internationally, trade-policy making needs to change. The USTR’s process must become more transparent and more responsive to the interests of ordinary Americans. The U.S. International Trade Commission, which already estimates the effects of U.S. trade agreements on the national economy and specific sectors, should also be required to perform impact assessments on a geographic basis to provide a sense of how individual communities and states will fare.

More broadly, foreign- and trade-policy makers need to understand that playing hardball with and within international institutions does not mean abandoning international cooperation—and that it may be essential to reform. Liberals often conflate how the United States engages with international institutions with the substantive policy outcomes that the United States pursues. But making changes to the international system may require the United States to exercise legally negotiated rights, such as to block appointments to the WTO’s appellate body. The United States remains the largest economy in the world and hence the country most able to use such rights to pressure institutions to change. One might, of course, object to the underlying policies that a particular administration pursues with these tactics, but the tactics themselves are built into the law.

This more aggressive approach is especially important when institutions lack the capacity to deal with today’s problems.

WTO rules were negotiated before China was a member, and those who negotiated China’s accession to the WTO assumed that it would transition into something close to a Westernstyle market economy. That has not happened. The result is a multilateral trading institution that is ill-equipped to deal with the scale of Chinese government intervention. U.S. tech companies are regularly forced into technology transfer practices as the price of doing business in China. The Chinese government heavily subsidizes industry, including technologically innovative industries such as renewable energy, in ways that are difficult to counter through WTO rules. Although this has been good for

A commitment to redistribution and the protection of values other than simply economic growth should be embedded in trade agreements themselves.

consumers, it has hurt the ability of the United States to develop the kinds of high-tech manufacturing jobs that could replace the manufacturing jobs it has lost.

These tensions cannot be resolved through polite sparring. The United States and Europe withdrew from the original General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade when they acceded to the WTO—part of a strong-arm move to get other countries to agree to the dramatic expansion of trade rules to include disciplines on services and intellectual property. A similar willingness to remake institutions through tough, innovative negotiations is the only way to achieve a trade policy that works for all Americans.

THE TWO-STEP SHAM For years, proponents of trade liberalization have argued that trade policy should follow a two-step process. First, barriers to trade should be reduced to boost economic growth. Second, if the market does not distribute those gains fairly, Congress should use tax-and-transfer schemes to share the gains. As a matter of economic policy, broad-based tax-and-transfer schemes are thought to distort market choices less than trade barriers. As a matter of politics, this two-step process has brought consensus among policy elites that the United States should cut trade barriers and defer disagreements about distributional politics to other policy arenas.

This trade two-step is a sham. Trade contributes to serious distributional problems, and the political process has never adequately compensated the losers from trade. First, markets do not allocate the gains from trade evenly or fairly. As the

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economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson have recently shown, liberalization has led to severe job losses and wage suppression in U.S. communities exposed to competition from Chinese imports produced with low-cost labour. Despite the trade consensus that workers will adjust or be made whole, Autor, Dorn, and Hanson found that even a decade after what they term the “China shock,” these communities had not bounced back. To be sure, trade liberalization might also create new jobs elsewhere in the economy. But a computer programming job in Arizona does not help an unemployed autoworker in Michigan.

In a country that spans a continent and an economy that is the world’s largest, localized effects do not come out in the wash.

Congress has done little to make these hurting communities whole. In 1962, it created the Trade Adjustment Assistance program to retrain and help relocate displaced workers. But the TAA has never enjoyed the funding or political support to make it an effective program. Instead, it has been a political football, with its funding repeatedly cut and even allowed to lapse, only to be renewed for a few brief years whenever Congress needs to muster support to approve a new trade agreement. Already by 1974, labour unions declared that the TAA was “burial insurance,” and a 2012 report prepared for the Labour Department condemned the program as ineffective.

People work in a steel factory on November 2016 ,8 in Linfen, Shanxi Province of China. ( Getty Images)

The TAA’s failure caused trade liberalization’s proponents to cast about for other policy tools to mitigate harm. The Clinton administration hit on the idea of including chapters in U.S. trade agreements requiring U.S. trading partners to uphold labour and environmental standards. U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both used improvements to these chapters to pacify critics. But these chapters too have failed. Little if any evidence exists that these provisions have slowed the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to countries with lax labour and environmental standards. The political will and legal ability to enforce them have also been lacking. The United States has lost the only trade case that it has brought under these chapters (against Guatemala).

The solution is to commit to redistribution within trade policy—that is, trade agreements themselves need to address the distribution of gains among winners and losers, rather than leaving that to a separate tax-and-transfer process. We can think of at least three ways to incorporate distribution into trade-policy making. First, domestic trade laws have long protected notions of “fair trade.” U.S. companies competing with foreign companies that are subsidized by their government or sell their products in the United States at unfairly low prices (a practice called “dumping”) can petition the government to raise tariffs on the foreign products. Currently, these so-called trade remedy laws focus on economic factors in assessing whether competition is unfair. But trade remedy laws could be amended to allow labor groups, for instance, to petition the government to raise tariffs on goods produced in countries with excessively low wages. Indeed, the European Union has already amended its trade remedy laws to consider more than purely economic factors.

Second, a commitment to redistribution and the protection of

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values other than simply economic growth should be embedded in trade agreements themselves. Trade agreements usually contain rules constraining how nations conduct investigations into trade remedies. Such rules should be amended to permit “social dumping” inquiries such as those described above. Trade agreements could also take a development approach even within developed countries. The TPP (now the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP) contains a development chapter that encourages states to invest in infrastructure and education programs and to take other measures that promote “inclusive economic growth including a more broad-based distribution of the benefits of economic growth.”

Such a chapter could easily impose firm obligations on countries to monitor and address domestic inequality resulting from trade liberalization. Such commitments could be subject to reporting requirements, as human rights obligations currently are, and a failure to take steps to address trade-induced economic harms could give rise to an international trade case, just as a failure to comply with rules on economic liberalization does.

Third, tax-and-transfer schemes could be embedded directly into trade agreements. If the theory is that the winners could compensate the losers, then that commitment to compensation should be made up front, in trade agreements themselves. For example, a small financial transaction tax in regional trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement could provide a large pot of money to fund programs—including infrastructure programs and education as well as the more traditional job retraining and relocation—that would help hurting communities. Trade implementation legislation could also require that sectors expected to be big winners from trade agreements pay a tax to support the losers from trade.

These proposals will not be popular with large segments of the trade community, who worry about weighing down the institutions and politics of trade with issues they do not consider to be “core” to trade. But these distributional concerns already burden trade policy. The question is not whether to address distribution but how to do it. Given the history of failed promises to the losers from trade liberalization, the distributional issues of trade must be addressed within trade policy itself.

More than a century ago, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt commented that “the American public does not wish to see the tariff so arranged as to benefit primarily a few wealthy men.”

This sentiment has never changed. After years of tired debates over free trade and protectionism, it is time for a new approach.

Trade policy should make all Americans better off, not just a few. If we start with the principles that the goals of trade are to build a strong middle class and advance foreign policy aims, that we need to redistribute within trade, and that our policymaking institutions need serious reform, we can build a new U.S. trade policy—one that works for everyone.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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In today's divisive politica climate, pop artists are shap the new sound of protest mu

By Mikael Wood One of the most effective protest songs of 2018 doesn't mention Donald Trump by name.

It doesn't push back directly against one of his controversial policies, nor does it question the means by which he was elected president. It doesn't refer to government at all, really, unless you count an image of Uncle Sam kissing a man.

The song is "Americans," the final track on Janelle Monae's album "Dirty Computer," and what it does is argue that the promise of this country is still something to get excited about _ and still something to fight for.

A year and a half into a presidency viewed by many as the most alienating in decades, the sound of resistance has as much to do with inclusion

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It's far from the only protest song to deploy that method at a moment when the battle for hearts and minds is happening here at home old black woman from Kansas City, Kan. For her, the American dream is one of acceptance, of not having to adapt to someone else's specifications to live.

That dream once radiated outward, a beacon for people from less open-minded places. But Monae describes the dream in the context of an internal struggle: "Don't try to take my country," she warns, coming as close as she ever does to naming Trump (and his followers), "I will defend my land."

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Remember who we used to be, the song demands _ or who we used to believe we were.

"I'm not crazy, baby," Monae assures us, "I'm American."

It's far from the only protest song to deploy that method at a moment when the battle for hearts and minds is happening here at home.

Beyonce and Jay-Z perform together holding hands on stage during the 'On the Run II' Tour at Hampden Park on June 2018 ,9 in Glasgow, Scotland. (Getty Images)

as with strict opposition. It's about opening arms rather than folding them _ an idea of yes more than a firm stance of no.

The genius of "Americans" is in its irresistibility.

A propulsive neo-new-wave jam overlaid with stately church organ, the tune draws the listener into Monae's vision; it seduces even as it confronts.

"Love me for who I am," sings Monae, a -32year-

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The music _ by acts like Monae, Beyonce, Luis Fonsi and Childish Gambino (who echoes Monae's language in his viral hit "This Is America") _ is slick, even commercially minded in a way we haven't always associated with protest art; it rarely makes embracing a progressive cause _ be it the loosening of traditional gender roles, the struggle against police violence or the recognition of those pushed to the margins of American life _ feel like a chore.

And why would it? Trump swept to power as an experienced entertainer using his natural charisma to sell a radical message that some, at least, would have been unlikely to buy from someone less skilled.

For all the criticism he's earned for demonizing certain groups, the president's real talent might be

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the way he makes his supporters feel seen.

So, of course, those in the resistance are equally determined to establish a sense of community.

And of course they're relying on the flash and exuberance of great pop to do it.

That represents a shift from some previous eras, in which protest music often took a harder, more rough-edged form _ think of the weedy-voiced folkies of the 1960s or the shouty hardcore bands of the 1980s. For those artists, finesse was something to strip away to uncover (and to project) real truth.

And it's still seen that way by some. Last fall Eminem made waves with a raw, unaccompanied rap called "The Storm" in which he laid into Trump with his voice as his only tool.

Fiona Apple created a similarly primal chant, inspired by the president's "Access Hollywood" boast about groping women, for the 2017 Women's March in Washington: "We don't want your tiny hands/ Anywhere near our underpants."

But songs increasingly are using catchy melodies and danceable grooves to imagine a better, more equitable world or to present this world in the kind of positive light that Trump seems wilfully to withhold.

Listen to the loving recognition of Spanish-

But songs increasingly are using catchy melodies and danceable grooves to imagine a better, more equitable world or to present this world in the kind of positive light that Trump seems wilfully to withhold

speaking people in Fonsi and Daddy Yankee's "Despacito," which spent 16 weeks at No.1 amid the president's fearmongering about immigration.

Do the same with "Havana" by Camila Cabello, who recently told me that her success with the slinky bilingual love song is her "rebellion-slashprotest against the anti-immigrant sentiment that's going on."

"All of a sudden, it's not this outlier," she said of Latin music in the U.S. "It's just normal."

Perhaps the most powerful example of this resistance-through-representation is Beyonce and Jay-Z's new "Everything Is Love" album, which the superstar couple released without notice a few weeks ago. As on her "Lemonade" and his "4:44," the record ponders a marital crisis against the backdrop of their status as two of the most famous (and richest) musicians on earth.

By proudly emphasizing their blackness, though as in a music video for one unprintably titled track that has them posing next to the largely white images that fill the Louvre _ Beyonce and Jay-Z are also making space for the consideration of African American achievement.

They're inviting others to see themselves in their success, and making that only easier to do with the aesthetic allure of a song like the warmly sensual "Heard About Us." Heed the last word in that title, which so many protest musicians have used as a mere rhetorical position from which to attack "them."

Yet Beyonce and Jay-Z don't bother much with drawing an enemy. They know who they're up against, and so does the listener.

For these un-crazy Americans (to use Monae's phrase), the thing worth exploring is "us."

This was originally published by The Los Angeles Times.

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Janelle Monae attends the 60th Annual Grammy Awards on January ,28 2018, at Madison Square Garden in New York. (TNS)

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Can humans reach even older age? We haven't maxed out yet, some scientists say 38

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For the lucky humans who made it all the way out to 105, that annual increase in the probability of death seemed to stop steady at roughly 50-50.

Perhaps it's "nothing to blow a trumpet about," said University of California, Berkeley demographer Kenneth Wachter. But at least the mortality rate levels off, the data suggest.

Wachter and colleagues from universities in Italy and Germany published their findings in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

For humankind in general, these findings hint at an intriguing, if largely theoretical, prospect: that the maximum possible human lifespan _ essentially, the species' design limit _ has not yet been reached. It may even be extended by means as yet undiscovered.

If the "oldest old" tell us how long we could live, then many centenarians could, in principle, get even older.

And maybe older still with the right elixir.

"This data suggest our genetic heritage is permissive," Wachter said. "Our bodies are not put together so that at some point, everything goes wrong."

Researchers hint at an intriguing, if largely theoretical, prospect: that the maximum possible human lifespan -- essentially, the species' design limit -- has not yet been reached. (TNS)

Indeed, he said, there's reason to believe that some humans could beat the current longevity record of 122, which was set in 1997 by Jeanne Louise Calment of France.

By Melissa Healy

On the day that one becomes an octogenarian, nature The new research contributes to a debate that has bestows a mathematical birthday gift: a gradual preoccupied poets and philosophers for as long as they reprieve from the relentlessly increasing likelihood have set pen to paper. For instance, the historian Gaius that he or she will die in the coming year.

Plinius Secundus, better known as Pliny the Elder, maintained a running tally of long-lived persons and That gift may come as small comfort against the pondered the significance of their longevity. growing creakiness of joints and the still-mounting probability that the end is nigh. But an analysis of Scientists have been in the fray since at least close to 4,000 very long-lived Italians suggests that 1825. That's when the British mathematician and the rise in the risk of imminent death continues to slow actuary Benjamin Gompertz published the first until the age of 105. After that, researchers estimate, models of human mortality and asked when, and the chance of making it to see another birthday holds

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whether, we must die.

In the new study, the international team of demographers and statisticians took advantage of the proliferation of people who live well past their 100th birthday. By calculating and analysing the death rates of 3,836 well-documented cases of Italians who lived to 105 or beyond and combining them with existing data on mortality rates, the researchers created a model that reveals the statistical likelihood of death in every year of the human lifespan from 65 to 105.

Established demographic data show that after 65, people grow more likely to die with every passing year. And the math is unforgiving: Each year after 65, the probability of death rises at a pace that's double what it was the previous year.

But when the researchers added the 3,836 long-lived Italians to the earlier data, they saw that this doubling held up only until the average human's 80th birthday.

After that, the rate of increase began to slow.

For the lucky humans who made it all the way out to 105, that annual increase in the probability of death seemed to stop.

The authors also showed that the annual mortality rate in those aged over 105 declined slightly with each successive birth year, such that those born more recently tended to live longer. continuing to increase over time and that a limit, if any, has not been reached," wrote the team, which This pattern "strongly suggests that longevity is included demographer James W. Vaupel of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany.

"Human bodies are not intended for long-term use, and when we do manage to get them to operate past a century, plenty of age-related diseases accumulate," Olshansky said

"Our results contribute to a recently rekindled debate about the existence of a fixed maximum life span for humans," they added. In any event, it raises "doubt that any limit is as yet in view."

To University of Illinois epidemiologist S. Jay Olshansky, the evidence for the counter-argument _ that there is a strict limit to the maximum human lifespan and we have reached it already _ is right there in the new Italian data.

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This should be abundantly clear to anyone who has ever been around senior citizens, he noted. "Human bodies are not intended for long-term use, and when we do manage to get them to operate past a century, plenty of age-related diseases accumulate," Olshansky said.

Geneticist Jan Vijg of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York believes he has seen the limit of the human lifespan, and said it ceased its upward trajectory in the 1990s with the death of Calment.

(The Frenchwoman ascribed her longevity to the fact that she didn't worry much and had a diet rich in olive oil, port wine and chocolate, which she consumed at a rate of more than 2 pounds a week.)

For a study published in 2016 in the journal Nature, Vijg and his colleagues calculated that if scientists could cobble together 10,000 people who had reached the age of 110 _ a big if _ only one of them would be expected to live beyond 125.

Vijg, who was not involved in the new study, praised the authors' ability to generate a new and welldocumented database of very long-lived individuals.

But "their data does not substantiate the claim" that the maximum limit to human lifespan goes out much further than it has already, he said.

"There is a ceiling. At the end of the day there is a "The conclusion that they've come to, which is that ceiling," says Vijg. there is no upper limit to life, is unreasonable," said Olshansky, who was not involved in the new research. Vijg says he is "amazed" at the vigor of the scientific By the time people reach these extreme ages, at least debate around an issue that is so distant from the reality half disappear every year. And since there are so few of ordinary mortals. The outer limit of the human of them to begin with, this harsh reality "tells us the lifespan is an "intriguing scientific debate," he said.

But improving the average lifespan of all humans _ by real story," he said. extending gains in nutrition, creating new medicines "If 100 people survive to age 110 out of billions _ and addressing the causes of infectious diseases _ is a which is exactly what has happened _ what difference better way to spend one's energy, he adds. does it make if it's 50 or 60 that die before their next birthday?" he said. It's just not persuasive to use such a "There is lots of opportunity here, no doubt," Vijg said. small difference, drawn from such a tiny population of "We can improve quality of life more and maybe give humans, to conclude anything about the longevity of more people more life." humans in general. Statistically speaking, he said, "the tail of the survival distribution does not wag the dog." This was originally published by The Los Angeles Times.

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The Back Door To The VIP Room Do You Feel Deserving Of Success and Happiness?

by Samantha Morris* Have you ever stepped into the VIP room and yet underneath you’ve felt undeserving of your success and happiness? Perhaps you may feel crippled by the fear that, despite your success, achievements and efforts, you have been lucky, and you will be found out to be fraud?

If you feel like this, you’re not alone! Imposter

Syndrome (as it is known) is a common experience, yet one that evokes a huge amount of shame. Ella Fitzgerald once shared her feelings that her success was entirely owed to the composers who wrote the songs! Yet, contrary to her own beliefs (or lack of self-confidence) she was and still is one of the greatest female singers of our time! Kate Winslet openly shared her fears of not being good enough prior to filming or photo shoots. Whilst the author Maya Angelou

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Imposter Syndrome (as it is known) is a common experience, yet one that evokes a huge amount of shame Yet why should you be taken hostage by imposter syndrome? Here are 10 top tips to begin to acknowledge and celebrate your worth and to kick fear and imposter syndrome in the pants!

1. DON’T LET YOUR PAST DICTATE YOUR FUTURE Our past present and future experiences create memories, feelings patterns and stories, which shape how we respond to situations and are replayed unconsciously and consciously throughout different situations. Yet, whilst these stories may feel familiar and safe, they can also be controlling, intrusive and misleading. Honestly ask yourself, how true is it that you are not deserving of your success and happiness? When have you succeeded before and how can you do it again? What is preventing you from fully embracing your efforts and achievements?

2. YOU ARE NOT ALONE!

Illustration of a four way intersection leading to either success or failure.

(Getty Images)

was crippled with fear that it was luck that she had written such incredible books and that each time she would be found out to be a fraud.

Often we are taught that our shadows are the demons, and yet more often than not it’s the power of our true potential and light, which so often terrifies us.

As a safety net, we may feel the urge to return to the safety of self-sabotaging, listening to our limiting beliefs or allowing our past experiences and stories to dictate our future.

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Take comfort from the fact that everyone (and I mean everyone) experiences imposter syndrome at some point in his or her life. From the public figure on our screens, stages or newspapers who appears to be seemingly confident but behind closed doors it’s a very different story. To a top professional who has to successfully lead by example, and yet underneath is terrified that they are not good enough. To the new mother who doubts her natural ability to successfully nurture her baby.

3. CALL ITS BLUFF Whilst it’s difficult to openly acknowledge your vulnerability, it can be a relief and empowering.

Talk about your experiences to someone you trust.

By naming it and talking about it, you will be able to view it from different perspectives, to call its

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bluff and to ultimately disempower the hold it has over you.

4. ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS Acknowledge and embrace the fact that you have had a significant role, which has led or is leading to your success and happiness. If you don’t yet believe yourself, why not ask your friends and family to write down all the qualities they love about you in a ‘thumbs up’ book. This will provide written evidence from others to counteract your negative voice every time it appears. Otherwise, why not seek an honest perspective from someone you trust and admire.

5. TURN THE SPOTLIGHT AWAY FROM YOURSELF Imposter Syndrome is driven by our own fears and expectations of feeling judged. So why not turn the spotlight away from yourself and ask yourself what value am I giving to others? By turning your attention away from yourself you will feel relieved of the intense pressure you are placing upon yourself and you will instead focus your attention to the task at hand.

6. MAKE FRIENDS WITH FAILURE Socially and culturally we don’t reward failure, but we do reward success and a job well done!

However, the pressure to be perfect and to be seen to be on top of your game 100 % of the time can be experienced as detrimental to your short and longterm confidence, health and wellbeing. More often that not, striving for perfection prevents and stunts

More often that not, striving for perfection prevents and stunts progress and your true inner voice and potential

progress and your true inner voice and potential.

In order to tackle this, you need to begin to make friends with failure. Have you ever heard the saying ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer?’

Well this is the time to embrace failure and to make it your friend! Acknowledge and understand your own story and how you respond to failure. Then once you’ve called it truths, you can move forwards knowing that failure doesn’t have to shut doors, but instead it can open them.

7. DON’T BE THE BEST SECRET KEEPER Often when we feel low in confidence and we doubt

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look to you for the right advice, knowledge, skills and answers. Yet, the fear of not being able to perform to the best of your ability may feel crippling, as you fear being judged or ‘found out’. Take the pressure of yourself by acknowledging your achievements and skills, but also acknowledge that you are also only a human being too. Be authentic with yourself and others.

By occasionally showing and sharing that you don’t always have all the answers and you can’t achieve perfection all of the time, you are taking the pressure of yourself, whilst still being a great role model!

9. WHY TRY TO FIT IN WHEN YOU WERE BORN TO STAND OUT? You are unique and you add value to the world by being yourself. So why worry about what other people think? And yet whilst it’s true to some extent that we need to meet people’s expectations, they shouldn’t overwhelm you or your values. However, if you find yourself crippled with fear of being judged, perhaps it’s time to review whether you’re pleasing yourself or others? And if it’s the latter, what would help you to reconnect to your values?

When you connect with your true values, you show up as yourself (warts and all!) and from there you will naturally attract the right situations and tribe towards you.

10. THE REAL TRUTH: NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE DOING %100 OF THE TIME Chessboard on a table (checkmate), illuminated by the light of the Sun outdoors. (Getty Images)

ourselves, we can feel the need to either hide away or to not fully show up as ourselves.

However, if this is you, consider how you’ll not only be doing yourself an injustice by missing great opportunities but how other people will also be cheated out of experiencing the value you can bring to their lives! We all add value whether it’s big or small and we have a responsibility to share this.

8. FREE YOURSELF FROM THE PRESSURES OF EXPECTATION It’s a tough being a role model or expert! People

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The reality is that whilst people may seem confident, in control and unfaltering, they are not always like this! We are all learning, we all fail, we all struggle and we all succeed.

However, if you can learn to understand and embrace your own strengths and vulnerabilities in order to change your tactic and ride the waves of life, you will truly begin to free yourself from shame and fear in order to acknowledge and embrace all that you deserve! *Samantha Morris is a Certified and Qualified Life Coach and an Integrative Art Psychotherapist.

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From the players to the Pimm's, a visit to Wimbledon is a winning experience

By Ed Sherman* When I walked onto the grounds of Wimbledon for the first time, I immediately thought of another place: Augusta National.

It was the green. I was struck by the familiar shade that permeates both facilities. Wimbledon green isn't

exactly the same as Augusta National green, but it is close enough to signify the tie between these two iconic venues.

What Augusta National is to golf, Wimbledon is to tennis. Indeed, upon entering the gates of Wimbledon, I felt a similar sensation to what I'd felt on my initial trip to the fabled golf course in 1997 to cover the

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There is a powerful sense of history in watching a match on the grass court where the greats recorded their biggest victories '80s hooked me on Wimbledon. It had been a bucketlist item for me ever since.

It took a few years, but I finally made it to the All England Lawn Tennis Club, aka Wimbledon, last summer. The venue is about eight miles southwest of central London. We took a -45minute ride on the Tube and walked 20 minutes to the facility (taking public transportation is highly recommended). All in all, getting there was fairly painless.

We went on a Thursday during the first week of the two-week tournament, which is July 15-2 this year. It is a good time to go if you are interested in a seeing a high volume of tennis with plenty of players still in the field. There is considerable action with second-round matches taking place on the many courts that comprise the Wimbledon complex.

In fact, there are several courts that allow you to get really close with limited ground-level seating and standing options. Naturally, the big-name players aren't going to be playing there, but being just a few feet away provides a wonderful perspective on the immense talents of these world-class players. You can feel the power of their games, not to mention the intensity required to advance in such an elite tournament.

Roger Federer of Switzerland waves after victory against Sam Querrery of the USA on July 2015 ,2 on day four of the Wimbleon Championship in London. (TNS)

Masters for the Chicago Tribune.

There is that unmistakable sense of awe and reverence.

You just know you are at that sport's epicenter, a truly special place.

Of course, Centre Court is the ultimate destination at Wimbledon. From the outside, Centre Court looks much bigger than I had imagined. The scale is enhanced by a retractable roof installed to deal with England's unpredictable weather.

I can't say I am a huge tennis fan, but the battles between John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg in the early

However, once inside, Centre Court feels smaller than the listed capacity of nearly 15,000 seats. It actually

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seems somewhat intimate. There is a powerful sense of history in watching a match on the grass court where the greats recorded their biggest victories. It's like pointing to home plate at Wrigley Field and saying that is where Babe Ruth "called his shot" in the 1932 World Series. There aren't many places like that anymore in sports.

Alas, there was no royalty in the -74seat Royal Box on this day, but we were thrilled to see Roger Federer in a second-round match. Arguably the greatest ever, Federer, who would go on to win his record eighth Wimbledon title, thoroughly dissected Serbian Dusan Lajovic. Seeing Federer up close makes you truly appreciate his trademark precision _ an ability to place the ball anywhere on the court. It proved to be our chance to see history at Centre Court.

It also was interesting to note that while the fans were pulling for Federer, they also gave Lajovic his due on good shots. Above everything else, there is a respect for seeing exceptional tennis at Wimbledon.

Fortunately, we were able to use a connection to purchase tickets for our day at Wimbledon. As you would expect, it is difficult to gain access to the grounds during the Grand Slam. But it's more doable than getting a spot at the Masters at Augusta National, where it pretty much takes shelling out a few thousand dollars to a scalper if you don't know somebody.

Ticketmaster sells a limited number of tickets online the day before play, but they sell out in minutes. Hospitality packages that include overnight accommodations and tickets are offered by Wimbledon Experience. As you would expect, these packages can be pricey. Expect to spend a minimum of 1,000$ for a package that includes a Centre Court seat.

Above everything else, there is a respect for seeing exceptional tennis at Wimbledon

You can also buy Wimbledon tickets via a lottery held months before the tournament, which is how most Centre Court, No. 1 Court and No. 2 Court tickets are sold. You'll need some substantial luck since demand is quite high. (The lottery for this year's Championships opened Sept. 1 and closed Dec. 31.)

If you have a lot of patience, another way to potentially land tickets is to engage in Britain's unofficial sport of queuing, or lining up. Each day, Wimbledon allots for public sale a few hundred premium-play tickets for Centre Court (except the last four days), No. 1 Court and No. 2 Court on a first-come, first-served basis.

Many hopefuls arrive the evening before to pitch tents near the club and camp overnight to boost their odds of getting in.

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Roger Federer of Switzerland competes against the USA's Sam Querrery on July 2015 ,2, during the Wimbleon Championship in London. (TNS)

Also, several thousand grounds passes are available each day, allowing use of unreserved seating and standing room on Courts No. 18-3. For those passes, it's recommended to arrive a few hours before the grounds open at 10:30 a.m.

Keep in mind that if you aren't in London during tournament weeks, you still can get a feel for Wimbledon. Again, this is different from Augusta National, which only opens its doors to the public one week a year, during the Masters.

Wimbledon has a nice museum in the club that includes a virtual-reality experience. There also is a -90minute tour of the grounds that lets you walk through the same doors as the players for a

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match on Centre Court.

Tradition abounds at Wimbledon, even down to the food. We had the signature strawberries and cream, made up of 10 strawberries ... and cream. Good, but hardly spectacular.

We indulged a bit more on another Wimbledon staple: a cup of Pimm's, an herbal English liqueur mixed with lemonade and refreshing fruit. It sounds harmless, but be careful; Pimm's can pack quite a punch. Drink one too many, and it's game, set, match. *Ed Sherman is a freelance writer.

This was originally published by The Chicago Tribune.