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The memo recognizes that support for U.S. positions at the U.N. is not the only condition for aid, and that in many cases it must be “disregarded in favor of US security or economic needs.” Some of the largest recipients of U.S. aid, including Iraq, which votes against the U.S. 60 percent of the time, and Egypt, which “often has a more antagonistic approach to the United States in the U.N. than Russia, China and Venezuela,” would likely be spared, according to the memo.

The document primarily targets development programs, including infrastructure, education, and energy projects, even though those kinds of overseas assistance programs are often explicitly designed to advance U.S. foreign-policy interests. Development and education investments help curb radicalism, while energy and development assistance boosts economic growth and stability, lowering the chance for conflict.

Bolton recalled that former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker said that Yemen’s 1990 vote against the authorization of force against the then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would be the most expensive vote they ever cast. “And we did cut their foreign aid,” Bolton said. “And there needs to be more of that.”

“The goodwill that the U.S. has in the world has largely been the result of the perception of international good citizenship,”

Beijing’s opposition to U.S. coalition building and expansion of military cooperation with Indo-Pacific countries. Overall, Beijing’s instinct is to understand the Ukraine crisis largely through the lens of its confrontation with Washington.

Beijing will want to ensure its position is not overly exposed to Western criticism and to safeguard its moral standing in the eyes of developing countries

Khan returned home with little to show from the trip, the first by a Pakistani prime minister in over two decades. He signed no agreements or memoranda of understanding with his Russian counterpart. Widening Western sanctions on Russia have also sunk Pakistani hopes of energy cooperation with Moscow, casting particular doubt on the fate of a proposed multi-billion-dollar gas pipeline project.

“military-technical cooperation”, which has resulted in more than 60 per cent of India’s arms and defence systems being of Russian origin

India also depends on Russia to counterbalance China, which has become its primary security and foreign policy concern, especially given its unresolved border tensions with Beijing. With Pakistan, India’s main rival, already close to China and cosying up to Russia, India’s worst fear is that China, Pakistan and Russia will come together

Relations with Washington are already strained largely because of Islamabad’s seemingly unconditional support for the Afghan Taliban. To give his government diplomatic space, Khan has sought to forge closer ties with Moscow. Those efforts could not have come at a less opportune time.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, India immediately came under the spotlight as at once a consequential friend of Moscow and a country traditionally keen to portray itself as the world’s largest democracy and a champion of peace. The U.S. and European countries pressured India not to side with Moscow and the Ukrainian ambassador in New Delhi pleaded for India to halt its political support for Russia. Yet under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has responded to the invasion with the blunt realism of a rising, aspirational power that does not want to get caught between Russia and what Modi calls the “NATO group”. India chose the well-trodden non-alignment path and hid behind diplomatic language with a not-so-subtle tilt toward Russia.

concerned that the fallout from the war could lead Putin to increase arms sales to anti-Western proxies along its borders, chiefly Syria and Hizbollah in Lebanon, or step up electronic measures to disrupt NATO operations in the Mediterranean Sea, affecting Israel’s own navigation systems. Thus far, Russia has assured Israel that it will continue coordination on Syria, though reiterating that it does not recognise Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 and later annexed

The Gulf Arab countries have so far adopted an ambiguous position on the Russian aggression in Ukraine. As close U.S. partners that also have increasing ties to Russia, they sit between a rock and a hard place, unwilling to openly antagonise either side. They have landed in this conundrum because of what they perceive as a growing U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East. In response, they embarked on an effort to diversify their security relations, moving away from sole reliance on Washington. Russia is one of these new partners.

No Gulf power wants to give the impression of siding with the Kremlin, for fear of aggravating the U.S. – their primary security guarantor. But as international support for Ukraine and anger at those seen to support (or at least not publicly oppose) Russia grows, the damage may already have been done: the U.S. and its European allies were appalled at the Gulf states’ reticence to get in line with immediate condemnations of the Russian invasion

despite Iran’s own experience of losing large swaths of territory to Czarist Russia in the nineteenth century and facing Soviet occupation during and immediately after World War II, the Islamic Republic today can claim few major allies beyond Russia. Tehran sees few upsides in breaking ranks with Moscow. In comparison to the possible results of provoking the Kremlin with anything less than fulsome support, the diplomatic opprobrium it may receive from the U.S. and Europe is of little consequence.

Israel has substantive relations with both Russia and Ukraine: Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has spoken to both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy since the war began, and has offered to act as mediator; Israel sees itself as, in effect, sharing a border with Russia to its north east in Syria, relying on Putin’s continued tacit approval of its airstrikes on Iranian targets there; large Jewish and Israeli populations reside in both Russia and Ukraine and over 1.5 million Russian and Ukrainian expatriates live in Israel; and Israel is a major U.S. ally and beneficiary that identifies with the Western “liberal democratic order”.

Israel has offered humanitarian aid to Ukraine but has refused to sell it arms or provide it with military assistance.

African leaders and elites generally oppose sanctions, seeing them as blunt tools that tend to punish the general population more than national leaders. In the meantime, African officials are concerned that the war will have a deleterious impact on the continent’s economies and food security, both by driving up energy prices and by restricting grain supplies from Russia and Ukraine (a particular concern after a period of poor rainfall and weak harvests in parts of the continent). These shocks are liable to be severe in African countries that are still only beginning to recover from the downturn prompted by COVID-19, although oil producers such as Nigeria, Congo and Equatorial Guinea may benefit from a hike in energy prices.

President Zelenskyy is the only elected Jewish head of state outside Israel. He lost family in the Holocaust. As such, Israel’s silence on Putin’s antisemitic rhetoric, such as his claim to be “denazifying” Ukraine with the invasion, is noteworthy. That said, Israel has some track record – vis-à-vis Hungary and Poland, for example – of placing what its leaders view as national security or foreign relations concerns above taking a strong stand against antisemitism.

In contrast to Russia, with which Pakistan’s commerce is miniscule, the U.S. and EU states are its main trading partners. The war in Ukraine could further undermine Pakistan’s economy. The rise in global fuel prices is already fuelling record-high inflation and putting food security at risk, since before the invasion Ukraine provided Pakistan with more than 39 per cent of its wheat imports. With a trade deficit estimated by one analyst at around $40 billion, Islamabad’s reliance on external sources of funding will inevitably grow. A Russia under heavy sanctions will be in no position to assist. In such a scenario, Pakistan’s powerful military, which Khan depends on for his own political survival, could question his foreign posture.

Since 2014, Turkish defence companies have been increasingly engaged in Ukraine, and in 2019 they sold the country drones that Ukrainians see as significant in slowing the Russian advance.

On 27 February, Ankara announced that it would block warships from Russia and other littoral states from entering the Black Sea via the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits as long as the war continues, in line with the Montreux Convention (though Russian vessels normally based in Black Sea ports are exempt from the restriction, under the convention’s terms). But it also requested other states, implicitly including NATO members, to avoid sending their ships through the straits, in an apparent effort to limit the risks of escalation and maintain a balanced approach to the conflict.

Some fear, for instance, that Russia and its Syrian regime ally will ratchet up pressure on Idlib, the rebel-held enclave in Syria’s north west, forcing large numbers of refugees into Turkey, from where they might try to proceed to Europe. This worry persists though it is unclear that Russia would want to heat up the Syrian front while facing resilient Ukrainian resistance.

A prolonged war will only exacerbate Turkey’s security and economic concerns, and if Russia consolidates control of Ukraine’s coastline, it will also deal a significant blow to Turkey in terms of the naval balance of power in the Black Sea. It is likely that Turkey will draw closer to NATO as a result of this war, and less likely that Turkey will buy a second batch of S-400 surface-to-air missiles from Russia

Kenya, currently a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, has taken a more strident stance in opposition to Russia’s invasion than most non-NATO members of the Council. This position springs in part from the country’s history. Nairobi was one of the strongest supporters of a founding principle of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) prescribing respect for territorial integrity and the inviolability of member states’ colonial-era borders.

As in many African countries, a deep current of public opinion is critical of Western behaviour in the post-Cold War era, emphasising the disastrous interventions in Iraq and Libya, as well as the double standards that many Kenyans perceive in Washington’s democracy promotion on the continent.

What Nairobi saw as Washington’s endorsement of the 2013 coup in Egypt particularly rankled Kenyan authorities, who took an especially vocal public position against that putsch

Kenya will also push for the strengthening of multilateralism in Africa to confront what many expect to be difficult days ahead in the international arena. “We are entering an age of global disorder”, Peter Kagwanja, a political scientist and adviser to successive Kenyan presidents, told Crisis Group. “The African Union must band together or we will all hang separately”.

longstanding solidarity between South Africa and Russia. In the Soviet era, Moscow offered South Africans support in the anti-apartheid struggle and actively backed liberation movements across southern Africa.

Although just over half of African states backed the UN General Assembly resolution on Ukraine, many governments in the region have responded to the war with caution. Few have voiced open support for Russia, with the exception of Eritrea. But many have avoided taking strong public positions on the crisis, and some have explicitly declared themselves neutral.

Ghana, which joined the UN Security Council in January, has consistently backed the government in Kyiv. The West African bloc, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), released a statement condemning Russia’s actions. Nonetheless, not all ECOWAS members voted for the General Assembly resolution. Mali, which has drawn closer to Russia as France pulled its military forces out of the country, abstained. Burkina Faso did not vote, perhaps reflecting the fact that Russia watered down a Security Council statement condemning the January coup in Ouagadougou.

Russia has many friends in Africa due in part to the Soviet Union’s support for liberation movements during the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles. Many also appreciated Moscow’s strident opposition to the more recent disastrous Western interventions in Iraq and Libya. Furthermore, a number of African leaders studied in the Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc countries and Moscow has done a good job of maintaining these ties over the years. Numerous African security figures also received their training in Russia.

The Ukraine conflict is a major problem for Turkey. It threatens not only to damage Ankara’s relations with Moscow, but also to hurt the Turkish economy, pushing up energy costs and stopping Russian and Ukrainian tourists from visiting Turkey. Some analysts estimate that a decline in tourism could mean up to $6 billion in lost revenue.

Since the invasion began, Bolsonaro’s affinities with Moscow have exposed the divisions within his hard-right government. From the outset, Brazil’s foreign ministry has vowed to maintain a position of neutrality, urging a diplomatic solution. But a day after the invasion, Hamilton Mourão, the vice president and a retired army general, said “there must be a real use of force to support Ukraine”, arguing that “if the Western countries let Ukraine fall, then it will be Bulgaria, then the Baltic states and so on”, drawing an analogy to the conquests of Nazi Germany. Hours later, Bolsonaro said only he could speak about the crisis, declaring that Mourão had no authority to comment on the issue.

Calls for neutrality nevertheless enjoy traction in Brazil. Within the government, there is concern that Western sanctions against Moscow will harm the economy, in particular its agricultural sector, which relies heavily on imports of Russian-made fertilisers. Brazil’s soya production, one of the country’s main sources of income, would suffer considerably from a sanctioned Russia.

Mexico depends on the U.S for its natural gas supply, and the prospect of rising prices is spurring the government to consider other means of generating electricity

Relations between Russia and Venezuela flourished under the late president, Hugo Chávez, who set the relationship with Washington on an antagonistic course. Under Maduro, Venezuela’s links to Russia have intensified, especially through the provision of technical military assistance as well as diplomatic backing from Moscow after Maduro faced a major challenge from the U.S.-linked opposition in early 2019.

Much of the global economy is operating free of artificial enhancements. Lower-skilled workers confront bleak opportunities and intense competition, especially in the United States. Even as recent data shows middle-class Americans are finally starting to share in the gains from the recovery, incomes for many remain below where they were a decade ago

technological disruption and economic upheaval are now at work in an era of scarcity

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression has left banks from Europe to the United States reluctant to lend. Real estate bonanzas from Spain to Southern California gave way to a disastrous wave of foreclosures, eliminating construction jobs. China’s slowdown has diminished its appetite for raw materials, sowing unemployment from the iron ore mines of Brazil to the coal pits of Indonesia.

Trade did not cause the breakdown in economic growth. Indeed, trade has helped generate what growth remains. But the pervasive stagnation has left little cover for those set back by globalization.

China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 unleashed a far larger shock, but a construction boom absorbed many laid-off workers.

“We do need to have these trade agreements,” Mr. Bown said, “but we do need to be cognizant that there are going to be losers and we need to have policies to address them.”

Corporations that used China to cut costs raised their value, enriching executives and ordinary investors. Today’s Headlines Wake up each morning to the day’s top news, analysis and opinion delivered to your inbox. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. Sign Up Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. You are already subscribed to this email. View all New York Times newsletters. See Sample Manage Email Preferences Not you? Privacy Policy The casualties of China’s exports are far fewer, but they are concentrated. The rugged country of western North Carolina suffered mass unemployment as Chinese-made wooden furniture put local plants out of business. So did glassmakers in Toledo, Ohio, and auto parts manufacturers across the Midwest.

Even among those who support trade, doubts are growing about its ability to deliver on crucial promises. A 2014 Pew Research Center survey of people in 44 countries found that only 45 percent of respondents believed trade raises wages. Only 26 percent believed that trade lowers prices.

Workers employed in major export industries earn higher wages than those in domestically focused sectors.Americans saw their choice of products expand by one-third in recent decades, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found. Trade is how raspberries appear on store shelves in the dead of winter.

In the fallout, the United States maintained limits on unemployment benefits, leaving American workers vulnerable to plummeting fortunes. Social welfare systems have limited the toll in Europe, but economic growth has been weak, so jobs are scarce.

automation has grown in sophistication and reach. Between 2000 and 2010, the United States lost some 5.6 million manufacturing jobs, by the government’s calculation. Only 13 percent of those job losses can be explained by trade, according to an analysis by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana. The rest were casualties of automation or the result of tweaks to factory operations that enabled more production with less labor.

if robots are a more significant threat to paychecks, they are also harder to blame than hordes of low-wage workers in overseas factories.“We have a public policy toward trade,” said Douglas A. Irwin, an economist at Dartmouth College. “We don’t have a public policy on automation.”

China’s relentless development was turning farmland into factories, accelerated by a landmark in the history of trade: the country’s inclusion in the World Trade Organization.The W.T.O. was born out of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a compact forged in 1947 that lowered barriers to international commerce in an effort to prevent a repeat of global hostilities.In the first four decades, tariffs on manufactured wares plunged from about 35 percent to nearly 6 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. By 2000, the volume of trade among members had swelled to 25 times that of a half-century earlier.

Mexico — home to about 123 million people — was not big enough to refashion the terms of trade. When China joined the W.T.O. in 2001, that added a country of 1.3 billion people to the global trading system

The anti-trade backlash, building for years, has become explosive because the global economy has arrived at a sobering period of reckoning. Years of investment manias and financial machinations that juiced the job market have lost potency, exposing longstanding downsides of trade that had previously been masked by illusive prosperity.

Chinese imports eliminated nearly one million American manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2011. Add in suppliers and other related industries, and the total job losses reach 2.4 million.

Mr. Trump vows to slap punitive tariffs on Chinese goods. But that would very likely just shift production to other low-wage countries like Vietnam and Mexico. It would not turn the lights on at shuttered textile plants in the Carolinas. (Even if it did, robots would probably capture most of the jobs.)

Trade Adjustment Assistance, a government program started in 1962 and expanded significantly a dozen years later, is supposed to support workers whose jobs are casualties of overseas competition. The program pays for job training.But Mr. Simmons rolls his eyes at mention of the program. Training has almost become a joke. Skills often do not translate from old jobs to new. Many workers just draw a check while they attend training and then remain jobless.

European workers have fared better. In wealthier countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, unemployment benefits, housing subsidies and government-provided health care are far more generous than in the United States.In the five years after a job loss, an American family of four that is eligible for housing assistance receives average benefits equal to 25 percent of the unemployed person’s previous wages, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. For a similar family in the Netherlands, benefits reach 70 percent.

Yet in Europe, too, the impacts of trade have been uneven, in part because of the quirks of the European Union. Trade deals are cut by Brussels, setting the terms for the 28 member nations. Social programs are left to national governments.

In China, farmers whose land has been turned into factories are making more steel than the world needs. Advertisement Continue reading the main story In America, idled steel workers are contemplating how to live off the land.

a provision that would enable multinational companies to sue governments for compensation when regulations dent their profits.Esso, a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil, the American petroleum company, has operations in the Netherlands. Suppose the government went ahead with plans to limit drilling to protect the environment?“They could sue the Dutch state,” he fumed. “We are not so sure in the Netherlands whether we want to give the multinationals so much power. We are a trading country, but it’s not always that trade should prevail against quality of life.”

the longshoremen fret about robots

Now, many longshoremen sit in glass-fronted offices set back from the docks, controlling robotic arms via computer terminals.

The robots will win in the end, because robots never strike. Robots improve with time.

Trade deals, immigrant labor, automation: As Mr. Arkenbout sees it, these are all just instruments wielded in pursuit of the same goal — paying him less so corporations can keep more.“When they don’t need me anymore,” he said, “I’m nothing.”

The seizure of Crimea has allowed Russia to use long-range, land-based anti-air and anti-ship systems

While the Black Sea Fleet assists with the defense of southern maritime approaches to Russia, it also allows Moscow to use the Black Sea as a jumping off point into the eastern and central Mediterranean. From Moscow’s perspective, these activities enable its diplomacy and power projection into areas where Russia previously had limited influence, and they retard what Russia believes are U.S. and NATO efforts to destabilize its partners in places like Syria.

the potential for Russian electronic warfare in the Black Sea has also increased. In June 2016, a massive GPS spoofing event took place in the eastern Black Sea (in October and November 2018, Russia reportedly jammed GPS signals during NATO’s Operation Trident Juncture exercise in the Norwegian Sea)

An equally important military consequence of the seizure of Crimea is that Russian over-the-horizon sensor systems are able to cover nearly all of the Black Sea. When Russian surface-to-air missiles began streaming into Crimea in 2014 and 2015, air defense radars, including long-range early warning, target acquisition, and target engagement radars, began proliferating as well. “There are air defense systems on every cape here,” one Crimean villager told a Reuters reporter in 2016

This “counter-navy,” rather than the Black Sea Fleet naval forces themselves, is the backbone of the maritime challenge in the Black Sea basin. The combination of Crimea-based, active, and passive mobile, long-range, over-the-horizon radars allows for excellent air and surface situational awareness. The anti-air and anti-surface missile batteries are among the most advanced on Earth, and their mobility makes them extremely difficult to target and destroy. Because they are land-based, they can also operate on interior lines of communication and are more readily resupplied than are ships at sea. Further, the presence of several dozen tactical fixed-wing strike and fighter aircraft particularly augments Russia’s anti-surface firepower in the Black Sea. In short, compared to surface warships and submarines, these systems offer excellent detection capabilities, a comparatively similar amount of punch, and a higher degree of survivability for a fraction of the cost. On their own, they are a significant sea denial challenge, but when coupled with the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s recently improved capabilities, they tip the regional military balance firmly in Moscow’s favor

the Black Sea Fleet and Caspian Flotilla have demonstrated Russia’s new proficiency with long-range land-attack cruise missiles, a capability that was once monopolized by the United States and which Russian military strategists place huge value on

One effect of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea was a significant extension of its 200-mile exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea, and Russia now shares a de facto maritime border with NATO in the region. This left Moscow’s maritime neighbors in NATO uneasy

While Moscow has seen some success in its efforts to create daylight between Ankara and NATO, Turkey has apparently not, at least officially, abandoned the goal of containing Russia in the region

Russia’s seizure and re-militarization of Crimea has resulted in a reemerging security dilemma in Moscow vis-à-vis NATO nations in the Black Sea. Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria, despite widespread overt and covert Russian influence campaigns, recognize that they require a modernized force to counter Moscow and are fitfully attempting to pull the balance closer to their favor. Nevertheless, in the short term, given the emplacement of Russia’s impressive “counter-naval” force in Crimea, regional navies will remain heavily dependent on their NATO allies, particularly the United States, for military assistance

issues such as securing electricity grids around the world against cyberattacks, since a decarbonized world will depend even more on electrical power as many additional sectors—such as buildings, cars, and trucks—are electrified

access to rare earths and other critical minerals such as lithium and cobalt will be even more important as raw materials for batteries, solar panels, and other renewable energy technologies.

defense leaders should work with their counterparts in other governments and within international institutions, such in the United Nations Security Council and NATO, to integrate climate change into their security agendas. Defense planning must increasingly consider the impacts of climate change, such as the threats of extreme weather to military installations, the stresses increased disaster assistance may pose to military readiness, and the risks food or water scarcity may pose to security in fragile states

From the standpoint of foreign policy, stronger domestic action can also lay the groundwork for cooperation instead of conflict with the European Union, which is planning to impose carbon border tariffs on imports from countries taking inadequate climate actions.

foreign policy must go beyond climate and energy diplomacy to make mainstream the consideration of climate change in all foreign-policy decisions. It may not always prevail when weighed against all other national security goals, but it is too important to be ignored.

the biggest shift from the current U.S. approach would be to take climate change considerations into the mainstream of all national-security and foreign-policy decision-making

Every ton of carbon dioxide contributes to climate change no matter where it is emitted, so an ambitious climate strategy cannot only be domestic—it must put the issue squarely at the center of U.S. foreign policy.

given both the urgency and global nature of climate change, the issue cannot be siloed into U.S. State Department or Energy Department offices and spheres of diplomacy. Many aspects of U.S. foreign policy will impact, and be impacted by, climate change. An effective foreign policy requires taking climate change directly into consideration—not just as a problem to resolve, but as an issue that can affect the success and failure of strategies in areas as varied as counterterrorism, migration, international economics, and maritime security.

a strategy for stability in Iraq will not be effective unless it considers the impacts of water scarcity and heat waves on the Iraqi people or the loss of Iraq’s oil revenue as climate policy gradually erodes oil demand. Similarly, the United States’ efforts to counter terrorism in North Africa may prove fruitless unless officials also consider climate impacts on desertification that make local populations vulnerable to terrorists’ promises

U.S. foreign policy has aimed for many years to rebuild Iraq’s struggling economy by helping the country to boost its oil output, and to address its chronic and politically destabilizing electricity shortages by increasing gas production as well. A climate-centered foreign policy would not only provide assistance to reduce flaring and use that gas within Iraq, but also explore opportunities to attract investment in renewable energy

in many cases there may not be a climate-friendly alternative approach. But foreign-policy makers won’t know whether the alternatives exist or not unless they ask the question

The National Environmental Policy Act requires that before major federal actions are taken, the relevant agency analyzes the effects on the environment and identifies reasonable alternatives that may mitigate those effects. A similar internal step in the foreign-policy making process—time permitting—would ensure that officials have full information about environmental consequences before they act. Several international financial institutions such as the World Bank have processes, albeit imperfect, to review the environmental impacts of their actions

Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

Today, we are told, the world economy functions as a meritocracy: countries that have strong institutions, good markets, and a steadfast work ethic become rich and successful, while countries that lack these things, or which are hobbled by corruption and bad governance, remain poor. This assumption underpins dominant perspectives in the field of international development (Sachs, 2005, Collier, 2007, Rostow, 1990, Moyo, 2010, Calderisi, 2007, Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012), and is reinforced by the rhetoric, common among neoclassical economists, that free-trade globalization has created an “even playing field”.

Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage. Prices are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or “value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by power imbalances in the global political economy. Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.

Historians have demonstrated that the rise of Western Europe depended in large part on natural resources and labour forcibly appropriated from the global South during the colonial period, on a vast scale. Spain extracted gold and silver from the Andes, Portugal extracted sugar from Brazil, France extracted fossil fuels, minerals and agricultural products from West Africa, Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo; and Britain extracted cotton, opium, grain, timber, tea and countless other commodities from its colonies around the world – all of which entailed the exploitation of Southern labour on coercive terms, including through mass enslavement and indenture. This pattern of appropriation was central to Europe’s industrial growth, and to financing the expansion and industrialization of European settler colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which went on to develop similarly imperialist orientations toward the South (e.g., Naoroji, 1902, Pomeranz, 2000, Beckert, 2015, Moore, 2015, Bhambra, 2017, Patnaik, 2018, Davis, 2002).

for every unit of embodied resources and labour that the South imports from the North they have to export many more units to pay for it, enabling the North to achieve a net appropriation through trade. This dynamic was theorized by Emmanuel (1972) and Amin (1978) as a process of “unequal exchange”.Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage. Prices are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or “value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by power imbalances in the global political economy. Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.

Following Dorninger et al. (2021), we use a “footprint” analysis of input–output data to quantify the physical scale of raw materials, land, energy and labour embodied in trade between the North and South, looking not only at traded goods themselves but also the upstream resources and labour that go into producing and transporting those goods, including the machines, factories, infrastructure, etc.

Grounding our analysis in the physical dimensions of unequal exchange is important for several reasons. First, these resources – raw materials, land, labour and energy – embody the productive potential that is required for meeting human needs (use-value) and for generating economic growth (exchange-value). Physical drain is therefore ultimately what drives global inequalities in terms of access to provisions, as well as in terms of GDP or income (see Hornborg, 2020). Second, this approach allows us to maintain sight of the ecological impacts of unequal exchange. We know that excess energy and material consumption in high-income nations, facilitated by appropriation from the rest of the world, is causing ecological breakdown on a global scale. Tracing flows of resources embodied in trade allows us to determine the extent to which Northern appropriation is responsible for ecological impacts in the South; i.e., ecological debt (Roberts and Parks, 2009, Warlenius et al., 2015, Hornborg and Martinez-Alier, 2016).

Due to the growing fragmentation of international commodity chains, monetary databases on bilateral gross trade flows have been criticised for not accurately depicting the monetary interdependencies between national economies (Johnson and Noguera, 2012), i.e., the amount of a countries’ value added that is induced by foreign final demand and international trade relations. Trade in Value Added (TiVA) indicators Johnson and Noguera, 2012, Timmer et al., 2014 are designed to take into account the complexity of the global economy. The TiVA concept is motivated by the fact that, in monetary terms, trade in intermediates accounts for approximately two-thirds of international trade. Imports (of intermediates) are used to produce exports and hence bilateral gross exports may include inputs (i.e., value added) from third party countries (Stehrer, 2012). TiVA reveals where (e.g., in which country or industry) and how (e.g. by capital or labour) value is added or captured in global commodity chains (Timmer et al., 2014).

TiVA, which is sometimes referred to as the “value footprint”, is the monetary counterpart of the MRIO-based environmental footprint because both indicators follow the same system boundaries, i.e., all supply chains between production and final consumption of two countries including all direct and indirect interlinkages. Moreover, in contrast to global bilateral monetary trade flows, TiVA is globally balanced, meaning that national exports and imports globally sum up to zero. This is an important feature of the TiVA indicator that facilitates more consistent and unambiguous assessments.

for every unit of embodied raw material equivalent that the South imports from the North, they have to export on average five units to “pay” for it

For land the average ratio is also 5:1, for energy it is 3:1, and for labour it is 13:1

Table 1. Resource drain from the South.ResourceNorth → South flows 2015South → North flows 2015Drain from South in 2015Cumulative drain from South 1990–2015Raw material equivalents [Gt]3.3715.3912.02254.40Embodied land [mn ha]527.421,349.01821.5932,987.23Embodied energy [EJ]21.5543.5121.06650.34Embodied labour [mn py-eq]31.11219.22188.125,956.62

in the year 2015 the North’s net appropriation from the South totalled 12 billion tons of raw materials, 822 million hectares of land, 21 exajoules of energy (equivalent to 3.4 billion barrels of oil), and 188 million person-years equivalents of labour (equivalent to 392 billion hours of work). By net appropriation we mean that these resources are not compensated in equivalent terms through trade; they are effectively transferred gratis. And this appropriation is not insignificant in scale; on the contrary, it comprises a large share (on average about a quarter) of the North’s total consumption.

significant consequences for the global South, in terms of lost use-value. This quantity of Southern raw materials, land, energy and labour could be used to provision for human needs and develop sovereign industrial capacity in the South, but instead it is mobilized around servicing consumption in the global North.

Eight hundred and twenty-two million hectares of land, which is twice the size of India, would in theory be enough to provide nutritious food for up to 6 billion people, depending on land productivity and diet composition

material use is tightly linked to environmental pressures. It accounts for more than 90% of variation in environmental damage indicators (Steinmann et al., 2017), and more than 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress (International Resource Panel, 2019). Moreover, as Van der Voet et al. (2004) demonstrate, while impacts vary by material, and vary as technologies change, there is a coupling between aggregate mass flows and ecological impact. Net flows of material resources from South to North mean that much of the impact of material consumption in the North (43% of it, net of trade) is suffered in the South. The damage is offshored.

Industrial ecologists hold that global extraction and use of materials should not exceed 50 billion tons per year (Bringezu, 2015). In 2015, the global economy was using 87 billion tons per year, overshooting the boundary by 74% and driving ecological breakdown. This overshoot is due almost entirely to excess resource consumption in global North countries. The North consumed 26.71 tons of materials per capita in 2015, which is roughly four times over the sustainable threshold (6.80 tons per capita in 2015). Our results indicate that most of the North’s excess consumption (58% of it) is sustained by net appropriation from the global South; without this appropriation, material use in high-income nations would be much closer to the sustainable level.

In consumption-based terms, the North is responsible for 92% of carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary (350 ppm atmospheric concentration of CO2) (Hickel, 2020), while the consequences harm the South disproportionately, inflicting dramatic social and economic costs (Kikstra et al., 2021b, Srinivasan et al., 2008). The South suffers 82–92% of the costs of climate change, and 98–99% of the deaths associated with climate change (DARA, 2012)

Net appropriation of land means soil depletion, water depletion, and chemical runoff are offshored; net appropriation of energy means that the health impacts of particulate pollution are offshored; net appropriation of labour means that the negative social impacts of exploitation are offshored, etc (Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018). In the case of non-renewable resources there is also a problem of depletion: resources appropriated from the South are no longer available for future generations to use (Costanza and Daly, 1992, World Bank, 2018), which is particularly problematic given that under conditions of net appropriation economic losses are not offset by investments in capital stock (cf. Hartwick, 1977). Finally, the extractivism that underpins resource appropriation generates social dislocations and conflicts at resource frontiers (Martinez-Alier, 2021).

the value of resources and labour cannot be quantified in dollars, and there is no such thing as a “correct” price.

Prices under capitalism do not reflect value or utility in any objective way. Rather, they reflect, among other things, the (im)balance of power between market agents (capital and labour, core and periphery, lead firms and their suppliers, etc); in other words, they are a political artefact

While prices by definition do not reflect value, they do allow us to compare the scale of drain to prevailing monetary representations of production and income in the world economy.

Fig. 2 shows that drain from the South in 2015 amounted to $14.1 trillion when measured in terms of raw material equivalents, $5.1 trillion when measured in terms of land, $3.6 trillion when measured in terms of energy and $20.3 trillion when measured in terms of labour.

Over the period 1990–2015, the drain sums to $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This represents a significant “windfall” for the North, similar to the windfall that was derived from colonial forms of appropriation; i.e., goods that did not have to be produced on the domestic landmass or with domestic labour, and did not have to be bought on the domestic market, or paid for with exports (see Pomeranz, 2000, Patnaik, 2018). While previous studies have shown that the price distortion factor increased dramatically during the structural adjustment period in the 1980’s (Hickel et al., 2021), our data confirms that since the early- to mid-1990’s it has tended to decline slightly. This means that the increase in drain during the period 1990–2007, prior to the global financial crisis, was driven primarily by an increase in the volume of international trade rather than by an increase in price distortion.

Table 3 shows that, over the 1990–2015 period, resources appropriated from the South have been worth on average roughly a quarter of Northern GDP.

the North’s reliance on appropriation from the South has generally increased over the period (despite a significant drop after the global financial crisis), whereas the South’s losses as a share of total economic activity have generally decreased, particularly since 2003, due to an increase in South-South trading and higher domestic GDP creation or capture within the South, both driven largely by China

Aid flows create the powerful impression that rich countries give benevolently to poorer countries. But the data on drain through unequal exchange raises significant questions about this narrative.

net appropriation by DAC countries through unequal exchange from 1990 to 2015 outstripped their aid disbursements over the same period by a factor of almost 80

for every dollar of aid that donors give, they appropriate resources worth 80 dollars through unequal exchange. From the perspective of aid recipients, for every dollar they receive in aid they lose resources worth 30 dollars through drain

The dominant narrative of international development holds that poor countries are poor because of their own internal failings and are therefore in need of assistance. But the empirical evidence on unequal exchange demonstrates that poor countries are poor in large part because they are exploited within the global economy and are therefore in need of justice. These results indicate that combating the deleterious effects of unequal exchange by making the global economy fairer and more equitable would be much more effective, in terms of development, than charity.

In an equitable world, the resource trade deficit that the North sustains in relation to the South would be financed with a parallel monetary trade deficit. But in reality, the monetary trade deficit is very small, equivalent to only about 1% of global trade revenues, and fluctuates between North and South. In effect, this means that the North achieves its large net appropriation of resources and labour from the South gratis.

The question of sectoral disparities has been moot since the 1980s, however, as industrial production has shifted overwhelmingly to the South. The majority of Southern exports (70%) consist of manufactured goods (data from UNCTAD; see Smith, 2016). Of all the manufactured goods that the USA imports, 60% are produced in developing countries. For Japan it is 70%. We can see this pattern reflected also in the industrial workforce. As of 2010, at least 79% of the world’s industrial workers live in the South (data from the ILO; see Smith, 2016). This shift is due in large part to the rise of global commodity chains, which now constitute 70% of international trade. Between 1995 and 2013, there has been an increase of 157 million jobs related to global commodity chains, and an estimated 116 million of them are concentrated in the South, predominantly in the export manufacturing sector (ILO, 2015). In other words, during the period we analyse in this paper (1990–2015), the South has contributed the majority of the world’s industrial production, including high-technology production such as computers and cars. And yet price inequalities remain entrenched.

if Northern states or firms leverage monopoly power within global commodity chains to depress the prices of imports and increase the prices of final products, their labour “productivity” appears to improve, and that of their counterparts declines, even if the underlying production process remains unchanged. Indeed, empirical evidence indicates that real productivity differences between workers are minimal, and cannot explain wage inequalities (Hunter et al., 1990).

wage inequalities exist not because Southern workers are less productive but because they are more intensively exploited, and often subject to rigid systems of labour control and discipline designed to maximize extraction (Suwandi et al., 2019). Indeed, this is a major reason why Northern firms offshore production to the South in the first place: because labour is cheaper per unit of physical output (Goldman, 2012).

the terminology of “value-added” is a misnomer. In international trade, TiVA does not tell us who adds more value but rather who has more power to command prices. And in the case of global commodity chains, TiVA does not indicate where value is produced but rather where it is captured (Smith, 2016).

our analysis reveals that value in global commodity chains is disproportionately produced by the South, but disproportionately captured by the North (as GDP). Value captured in this manner is misleadingly attributed to Northern economic activities

rich countries are able to maintain price inequalities simply by virtue of being rich. This finding supports longstanding claims by political economists that, all else being equal, price inequalities are an artefact of power. Just as in a national economy wage rates are an artefact of the relative bargaining power of labour vis-à-vis capital, so too in international trade prices are an artefact of the relative bargaining power of national economies and corporate actors vis-à-vis their trading partners and suppliers. Countries that grew rich during the colonial period are now able to leverage their economic dominance to depress the costs of labour and resources extracted from the South. In other words, the North “finances” net appropriation from the South not with money, but rather by maintaining the prices of Southern resources and labour below the global average level.

Patents play a key role here: 97% of all patents are held by corporations in high-income countries (Chang, 2008:141)

In some cases, patents involve forcing people in the South to pay for access to resources they might otherwise have obtained much more affordably, or even for free (Shiva, 2001, Shiva, 2016).

In the World Bank and the IMF, Northern states hold a majority of votes (and the US holds a veto), thus giving them control over key economic policy decisions. In the World Trade Organization (which controls tariffs, subsidies, and patents), bargaining power is determined by market size, enabling high-income nations to set trade rules in their own interests.

ubsidized agricultural exports from the North undermine subsistence economies in the South and contribute to dispossession and unemployment, placing downward pressure on wages. Militarized borders preclude easy migration from South to North, thus preventing wage convergence. Moreover, structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and IMF since the 1980s have cut public sector salaries and employment, rolled back labour rights, curtailed unions, and gutted environmental regulations (Khor, 1995, Petras and Veltmeyer, 2002).

SAPs, bilateral free trade agreements, and the World Trade Organization have forced global South governments to remove tariffs, subsidies and other protections for infant industries. This prevents governments from attempting import substitution, which would improve their export prices and drive Northern prices down. Tax evasion and illicit financial flows out of the South (which total more than $1 trillion per year) drain resources that might otherwise be reinvested domestically, or which governments might otherwise use to build national industries. This problem is compounded by external debt service obligations, which drain government revenue and require obeisance to economic policies dictated by creditors (Hickel, 2017). In addition, structural dependence on foreign investors and access to Northern markets forces Southern governments and firms to compete with one another by cutting wages and resource prices in a race to the bottom.

structural power imbalances in the world economy ensure that labour and resources in the South remain cheap and accessible to international capital, while Northern exports enjoy comparatively higher prices

Cheap labour and raw materials in the global South are not “naturally” cheap, as if their cheapness was written in the stars. They are actively cheapened

the analysis obscures class and geographic inequalities within countries and regions, which are significant when it comes to labour prices as well as resource consumption. The high levels of resource consumption that characterize Northern economies are driven disproportionately by rich individuals and affluent areas, as well as by corporations that control supply chains, and enabled by internal patterns of exploitation and unequal exchange in addition to drain through trade (Harvey, 2005). For example, there are marginalized regions of the United States that serve as an “internal periphery” (Wishart, 2014). It would also be useful to explore the gender dynamics of unequal exchange within countries. These questions cannot be answered with our data, however.

This research confirms that the “advanced economies” of the global North rely on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through induced price differentials in international trade. By combining insights from the classical literature on unequal exchange with contemporary insights about global commodity chains and new methods for quantifying the physical scale of embodied resource transfers, we are able to develop a novel approach to estimating the scale and value of resource drain from the global South. Our results show that, when measured in Northern prices, the drain amounted to $10.8 trillion in 2015, and $242 trillion over the period from 1990 to 2015 – a significant windfall for the North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. Meanwhile, the South’s losses through unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30.

support contemporary demands for reparations for ecological debt, as articulated by environmental justice movements and by the G77

True repair requires permanently ending the unequal distribution of environmental goods and burdens between the global North and global South, restoring damaged ecosystems, and shifting to a regenerative economic system.

It is clear that official development assistance is not a meaningful solution to global poverty and inequality; nor is the claim that global South countries need more economic liberalisation and export-oriented market integration. The core problem is that low- and middle-income countries are integrated into the global economy on fundamentally unequal terms. Rectifying this problem is critical to ensuring that global South countries have the financial, physical and human resources they need to improve social outcomes.

democratize the institutions of global economic governance, such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, so that global South countries have more control over trade and finance policy.

end the North’s use of unfair subsidies for agricultural exports, and remove structural adjustment conditions on international finance, which would help mitigate downward pressure on wages and resource prices in the South while at the same time enabling Southern countries to build sovereign industrial capacity

a global living wage system, and a global system of environmental regulations, would effectively put a floor on labour and resource prices

Reducing North-South price differentials would in turn reduce the scale of the North’s net resource appropriation from the South (in other words, it would reduce ecologically unequal exchange), thus reducing excess consumption in the North and the ecological impacts that it inflicts on the South.

Structural transformation will only be achieved through political struggle from below, including by the anti-colonial and environmental justice movements that continue to fight against imperialism today

Niger has been a base of international military operations for years as Islamic extremists have greatly expanded their reach in the Sahel. Those include Boko Haram in neighboring Nigeria and Chad, but the more immediate threat comes from growing activity in Niger’s border areas with Mali and Burkina Faso from the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara and the al-Qaida affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, known as JNIM.

Mali’s military junta last month ordered the 15,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping mission to leave, claiming they had failed in their mission. However, Wagner forces remain there, accused by watchdogs of human rights atrocities.

The United States in early 2021 said it had provided Niger with more than $500 million in military assistance and training programs since 2012, one of the largest such support programs in sub-Saharan Africa. The European Union earlier this year launched a 27 million-euro ($30 million) military training mission in Niger.

The U.S. has operated drones out of a base it constructed in Niger’s remote north as part of counterterrorism efforts in the vast Sahel. The fate of that base and other U.S. operational sites in the country after this week’s coup isn’t immediately known.

West Africa’s Sahel region has become one of the world’s deadliest regions for extremism. West Africa recorded over 1,800 extremist attacks in the first six months of this year, resulting in nearly 4,600 deaths, a top regional official told the United Nations Security Council this week.

Niger is one of the world’s poorest countries, struggling with climate change along with migrants from across West Africa trying to make their way across the Sahara en route toward Europe. It has received millions of euros of investment from the EU in its efforts to curb migration via smugglers.

All countries — especially G20 countries — that have submitted “updated” NDCs that were no more ambitious than their previous commitments, and countries that have not yet communicated new or updated NDCs at all, should update their NDCs and long-term strategies in a credible, ambitious manner

developed countries must lead on climate ambition — they are the laggards in living up to their climate promises despite their overwhelming contribution to the climate crisis

After COP26, it was noted “with deep regret” the failure of developed countries to meet the $100 billion goal they originally promised to achieve by 2020, feeding into the credibility gap and hamstringing the ability of developing countries to plan further climate action.

clear finance targets for mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage finance

$600 billion in climate finance from 2020-2025

The urgency for enhanced adaptation action is underscored by the IPCC Working Group II report, mentioned previously,  which finds that every tenth of a degree of additional warming will escalate threats to people, species and ecosystems. Yet many communities still lack the resources required to manage today’s climate change impacts, let alone worse impacts in the future.

countries must also prepare their National Adaptation Plans and Adaptation Communications

developed countries need to provide grant-based funding to finance adaptation plans, especially through the Adaptation Fund and other entities of the Financial Mechanism established under the UNFCCC.

despite an urgent plea from climate-vulnerable countries, the proposal for a new loss and damage financing facility was  rejected by developed nations. Instead, at COP26, countries established the Glasgow Dialogue to discuss possible arrangements for loss and damage funding, with the first discussion to be held in June 2022.

even the most effective adaptation measures cannot prevent all losses and damages, which are a present-day reality for vulnerable people in certain regions

Countries also made progress at COP26 on the operationalization and funding of the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage (SNLD), which aims to provide developing countries with technical assistance on how to address loss and damage in a robust and effective manner. Sufficient financing for the SNLD is crucial to ensure technical support for developing countries and to create a new method in encouraging technical assistance that is country-owned and emphasizes local expertise.

The first Global Stocktake process must be done in a way that is inclusive, raises awareness, ensures the meaningful participation of Global South organizations, and paves the way for a comprehensive outcome that promotes increased NDC ambition and is centered around equity. Additionally, the UN Secretary General should hold countries and non-state actors accountable to develop a robust accountability system for commitments made outside of the UNFCCC process.

Shortly after COP27, we will be more than a quarter of the way through the decisive decade — what will the world have to show for it? Now is the time for solidarity and ambitious, real, on-the-ground action and support that will deliver justice for vulnerable countries and communities. While realizing countries’ differentiated responsibilities and capacities, the world needs to be all in, all together on climate.

Kim Jong Il paid no attention to the public aspect of ruling, whereas his son's visibility and embrace of popular culture appears to be aimed at convincing North Koreans that changes may actually occur under him

Authoritarian rulers don't long survive if they're truly out of touch with reality. They need to read palace politics, reward friends and punish enemies, and manage competing interests that are vying for power. Kim Jong Il lasted from 1994 until his death in December 2011 without any obvious internal challenge to his rule, a mark of his political acumen and mastery of factional politics. Although Kim Jong Un is inexperienced, he has held power for over a year and appears to have the acquiescence -- for now -- of the most powerful actors in Pyongyang.

Kim faces just as many risks if he meaningfully reforms domestic, economic, or social policy. Even within a totalitarian dictatorship, there are different factions, coalitions, and bureaucratic interests that will be injured by any change in the status quo. Economic reforms, for example, may ultimately help the country but will risk chaos in the markets, weaken powerful stakeholders within the vast bureaucracy, and potentially unleash rising expectations from the general public.

five bad decisions North Korea has made in the management of its economy. First, in the aftermath of the Korean War, Kim Jong Un's grandfather -- President Kim Il Sung -- focused exclusively on heavy industry development and the military while expecting the country to be self-sufficient in agriculture. In a country that only has 20 percent arable land, that was a huge mistake. Second, rather than seek technologies and innovations like the Green Revolution that helped nations like India make enormous gains in agricultural productivity in the 1960s and 1970s, the North tried to substitute longer work hours and revolutionary zeal. Given the broken infrastructure, this was like squeezing blood from a stone. Third, rather than trade with the outside world, the North went deeply into debt in the 1970s, borrowing and then defaulting on hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from European countries, which forever lost them lines of credit with any country or international financial institution. Fourth, in the 1980s and 1990s, the North undertook extremely wasteful mega-projects, building stadiums, hydropower projects, and tideland reclamation projects -- most of which failed or were never completed. Finally, after the Chinese and Soviets stopping giving aid to the North at the end of the Cold War, Pyongyang relied on humanitarian assistance as a form of income, instead of trying to fix their economy.

North Korea is one of the only countries in the world to have suffered a famine after industrialization

China has more influence over North Korea than any other country, but less influence than outsiders think. Beijing-Pyongyang relations haven't been warm ever since China normalized relations with South Korea over 20 years ago, and both sides resent the other. But Beijing has few options. Completely isolating Pyongyang and withdrawing economic and political support could lead to regime collapse, sending a flood of North Korean refugees across the border, and potentially drawing all the surrounding countries into conflict with each other -- which could see the devastating use of nuclear weapons. And China fears that any conflict, or a collapse, could put South Korean or even U.S. troops on its eastern border. As a result, Beijing -- much like Washington -- is faced with the choices of rhetorical pressure, quiet diplomacy, and mild sanctions. As long as China continues to value stability on the peninsula more than it worries about a few nuclear weapons, it will not fundamentally change its policy towards its unruly neighbor.

He may be a character from history’s funhouse, sent to remind us that contingency’s reign is great, but his origins are to be found in the conjoined histories of the West and the rest. More recently, Gaddafi’s border police and coast guard, trained and assisted by the EU, have been greatly valued by the ‘good Europeans’ for helping keep out the Africans. Liberal war’s last service is to locate the source of violence in the natives, on the backward peoples of the non-European world, not on the Westerners who exploit, invade, occupy and bomb. If we go by official rhetoric, the problem in Iraq and Afghanistan apparently has to do with religious and ethnic prejudice among the peoples there, who irrationally keep killing one another as well as Western soldiers kindly sent to modernise them. The great cost of liberal war is clarity.

War is not a morality tale, but a violent mutual embrace. Serious thinking begins with acceptance that we in the West are now combatants, and ethical responsibility requires seeing beyond the seductions of liberalism.

“Human beings can never get rid of the interference of hormones or glucose.”

“It would not even consider the moral factors that conflict with strategic goals,”

“If one side of the strategic game has artificial intelligence technology, and the other side does not, then this kind of strategic game is almost a one-way, transparent confrontation,” he said. “The actors lacking the assistance of AI will be at an absolute disadvantage in many aspects such as risk judgment, strategy selection, decision making and execution efficiency, and decision-making reliability,” he said.

“The entire strategic game structure will be completely out of balance.”

“AI can think many steps ahead of a human. It can think deeply in many possible scenarios and come up with the best strategy,”

A US Department of State spokesman said the agency had “many technological tools” to help it make decisions. There was, however, no specific information on AI that could be shared with the public,

The system, also known as geopolitical environment simulation and prediction platform, was used to vet “nearly all foreign investment projects” in recent years

One challenge to the development of AI policymaker is data sharing among Chinese government agencies. The foreign ministry, for instance, had been unable to get some data sets it needed because of administrative barriers

China is aggressively pushing AI into many sectors. The government is building a nationwide surveillance system capable of identifying any citizen by face within seconds. Research is also under way to introduce AI in nuclear submarines to help commanders making faster, more accurate decision in battle.

“AI can help us get more prepared for unexpected events. It can help find a scientific, rigorous solution within a short time.

many people in Lebanon blame the refugees for our problems – especially economic problems

I began taking part in an EU MADAD trust fund “Youth Resolve” project close to my home. It was run by UK aid agency CAFOD and Caritas Lebanon. Its main objective is to bring Syrian and Lebanese youth together.

We have been able to change some of the perspectives on both sides – among Lebanese people and refugees – and it inspired me to do more. People around me have started to understand that the Syrians did not come here by choice; they were forced to come here, and if they could go home, most of them would. These are all steps on the path to equal treatment.

We will be the ones raising the next generation, and we don’t need to do that based on opinions from another time. In the future, I hope to create a youth council back in Lebanon, where young people can share their views and be represented.

The revisions could force State officials to miss the statutory deadline of Feb. 25 to release the report.

the late request is evidence of ongoing managerial problems at State, where many top positions remain unfilled and a small group of aides to Tillerson have centralized power while slowing decision-making. The human rights bureau is one of several still lacking an assistant secretary more than a year into Tillerson’s tenure

The human rights bureau also has been directed to cut back a broader section in the various country reports generally called “discrimination, societal abuses and trafficking in persons.” Along with women’s reproductive rights, that section touches on topics such as anti-Semitism or pressures on the gay and lesbian community. It also includes discrimination that's not necessarily government-sponsored.

Last year, Tillerson broke with tradition and chose not to personally unveil his department’s human rights report — dismaying activists and lawmakers, including Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who believe human rights should be a pillar of U.S. foreign policy.

with the United States only starting to grapple with climate-induced retreat, the notion that it will bring about a unique set of mental health issues is barely on the map

"we have not turned adaptation (to climate change) into a trauma-informed field"

The new and growing category of professionals whose work involves planning for and dealing with worsening natural disasters as a result of climate change will face their own trauma

About 80% of Americans who assist climate-vulnerable coastal and urban communities in dealing with growing threats say they have experienced burnout in their work

The underlying assumption behind all of these policies is that U.S. pressure—you know, what Pompeo likes to call “swagger”—will eventually force acknowledged adversaries to do whatever it is the United States demands of them, and that other states won’t find ways to evade, obstruct, divert, dilute, hedge, hinder, or otherwise negate what Washington is trying to do. It assumes we are still dwelling in the unipolar moment and that all that matters is the will to use the power at America’s disposal.

this approach denies that there are any real trade-offs between any of these objectives

it is not hard to understand why hawks think they can get away with this approach to foreign policy, at least in the short term. Despite many recent missteps, the United States is still very powerful. Its active assistance is still something that some other states want, and its “focused enmity” is something no state can completely ignore. The United States is still a vast and valuable market, the dollar remains the world’s main reserve currency, and the ability to cut other states or financial institutions off from the infrastructure of global finance gives Washington unusual leverage. Many U.S. allies are accustomed to deferring to Washington and are understandably reluctant to do anything that might encourage the United States to withdraw support. Trump and company can also count on the support of authoritarian soul mates in the European right (including the present rulers in Poland and Hungary), as well as America’s morally compromised allies in the Middle East

there are even more potent reasons why this bullying approach has produced no major foreign-policy successes so far and is unlikely to yield significant success in the future. First of all, even much weaker states are loath to succumb to blackmail, for one very good reason: Once you’ve shown you can be coerced, there may be no end to subsequent demands. Moreover, when the United States insists on complete capitulation (i.e., by calling for total North Korean disarmament or regime change in Iran), it gives the target state zero incentive to comply. And given Trump’s amply demonstrated dishonesty and fickle approach to diplomacy, why would any foreign leader believe any assurances he (or Pompeo) might give? Put all this together, and you have a perfect recipe for “no deal.”

Should Iran eventually restart its nuclear weapons program—which has been in abeyance for more than a decade—the rest of the world is not going to suddenly line up behind the United States and support more forceful action. Why? Because everyone knows that it was the United States—not Iran—that killed the deal, and there won’t be a ton of sympathy for America when it starts bleating about Iran’s response. America’s Middle East clients will no doubt be happy if Washington decides to fight another war on their behalf, but don’t count on a lot of help from them or from anyone else

other states are starting to develop workarounds designed to limit U.S. leverage, most notably by designing financial arrangements outside the network of institutions that Washington has been using to coerce allies and adversaries into compliance. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman recently wrote in FP, “instead of leading states and businesses to minimize contact with the targets of U.S. sanctions,”  the Trump administration’s strong-arm tactics “may lead states and businesses to minimize their contact with the U.S.-led global financial system and to start to construct their own workarounds. Over time, those workarounds might even begin to accumulate into an effective alternative system.”

being a bully encourages adversaries to join forces out of their own self-interest, while giving potential allies more reason to keep their distance. It is no accident that Russia and China continue to move closer together—even though they are not natural allies, and a smarter U.S. approach could give Moscow reasons to distance itself from Beijing—and America’s same bullying impulses are going to push states like Iran even closer to them. Bolton and those of his ilk will probably come up with some trite new moniker for this group—“Axis of Evil” and “Troika of Tyranny” are taken, so perhaps “Triad of Troublemakers” or “Coalition of Chaos”—ignoring the fact that their own policies have helped push these powers together.

a real-world test of two competing visions of contemporary geopolitics. One version sees U.S. power as essentially undiminished and believes that a combination of material capabilities, favorable geography, and entrenched institutional capabilities will allow it to pursue an ambitious and revisionist foreign policy at little cost and with a high probability of success. The second version—to which I subscribe—sees the United States as very powerful and in a privileged position (for various reasons) but also believes there are limits to U.S. power and that it is necessary to set priorities, minimize trade-offs when possible, and collaborate with others on many issues. It also assumes that others cannot be browbeaten into abject capitulation and that effective and durable international agreements require a degree of mutual compromise, even with adversaries

The refugee cap was whittled down to 45,000 for 2018 and 30,000 for 2019, over the objections of senior officials in the Department of Defense, who view the program as crucial to rewarding and building allies in U.S. military campaigns oversees.

there are nearly 71 million displaced people around the world, many of them refugees who have been waiting years in limbo for a chance at resettlement

refugee arrivals, which had been temporarily suspended pending the release of the new resettlement numbers, should resume on October 22. While a short suspension is typical, the weeks-long halt has left many refugees who had already booked their flights stranded.

The President’s companion executive order also potentially limits the places where those that are accepted can be resettled. In the order, he said refugees should only be placed where state and local governments agree to receive them.

The administration said refugee resettlement was a drain on government resources but immigration experts said new arrivals, who come with a legal status, often quickly fill jobs and contribute to local tax revenues.

Mark Hetfield, chief executive of Jewish non-profit refugee assistance organization HIAS said the executive order was an attempt by Trump to “allow governors and mayors to imitate his own refugee ban, state by state and town by town.”