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despite some real climate successes by the Chinese government, it’s not clear that authoritarian models offer a general solution. Restricting speech and freedom of information makes monitoring environmental conditions harder, and officials in such systems face their own bad short-term incentives.

we have yet to identify a moral equivalent of war that can supply a clear, visible foe against which to organize

there is no clear link between a challenge’s scale and willingness to cooperate—especially when the benefits and costs of policies fall unevenly, as they always will

communities where solar and wind projects will be sited often oppose such developments. In July, developers abandoned trying to turn a stretch of Nevada desert into what would have been the largest solar power array in the United States after opposition from a broad (and notably inter-ideological) coalition of residents, conservationists, bicyclists, and skydivers. As the project would have contributed up to one-tenth of Nevada’s electrical capacity, that single project’s failure threatens the state’s goal of achieving 50 percent reliance on renewable sources by 2030.

opposition to necessary climate policies extends beyond conservatives—and gets all the more tangled as you drill down into local issues. Even those who think globally don’t always act locally.

Making cities denser could substantially improve climate outcomes. Actually doing so will require American politicians to change zoning laws that make dense housing difficult or even illegal to build—a measure deeply unpopular with many homeowners, and especially the deeply unrepresentative set of citizens who show up to public hearings about new development.

Americans might support putting climate policies in packages with other policies, such as minimum wage increases, job guarantees, and affordable housing. Similarly, federal or state governments could preempt local governments and simply require policies enabling new housing (or just build housing themselves).

The incentives facing actors in the short run don’t align well with what’s needed for a fix in the long run

Many U.S. states and localities won’t even mandate vaccines—a simple solution for a well-defined problem. It’s hard to see how the much heavier lift of uprooting neighborhoods, curbing energy budgets, and sharing other costs will be borne by politicians responsive to an electorate more interested in the short term and immediate costs than in complex, long-term solutions.

Compared with the uncertainties and generational time scales for climate policies, the pandemic was easy mode—one that even came with the kind of technological quick fix (in the form of a vaccine) that’s unlikely to fix the climate.

Even the shock of an apocalypse isn’t the one weird trick needed to force action on catastrophic issues.

Kuwait is the GCC state with the most vibrant political life and democratic institutions. Opposition to a union from Kuwait is largely attributable to concerns about “collective security actions” that Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states could pursue to silence dissent and activism in Kuwait. Last month’s snap elections in Kuwait will bring in parliamentarians to the National Assembly from an opposition made up of liberals and Islamists whom other GCC states would not permit to hold any position of power in their own political systems. As many Kuwaitis take pride in their “half-democracy” and relative transparency and openness, the concept of a union has met its share of resistance in the country from voices across its political spectrum.

Doha has established ties with Islamist factions throughout the region and hosted many Muslim Brotherhood members — often done so at the expense of healthy relations with other GCC states. If other Arab Gulf countries such as the UAE, which designate the Muslim Brotherhood a “terrorist” group, and Qatar belong to a union, what will be the future of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and other prominent Islamist figures who live in Doha?

Emiratis view themselves as a rival of Saudi Arabia for a dominant role in the region’s financial landscape, Abu Dhabi would not lend its support to a Riyadh-based Gulf central bank. In the UAE, where the authorities are waging a crackdown on Islamists, there has long been a belief that the Muslim Brotherhood operates in the Emirates on behalf of Saudi Arabia and Qatar for the purpose of undermining the UAE’s national sovereignty and independence.

Oman’s interest in deepening ties with Iran in commercial, diplomatic, energy and security spheres is a major factor driving Omani opposition to a union

Given the Kuwaiti and Qatari royal families’ cordial relationship with their countries’ Shiites who are loyal to the Al Sabah (Kuwait) and Al Thani (Qatar) rulers, threats of an Iranian-inspired Shiite revolution or rebellion have not provoked substantial sectarian tension in Kuwait since the end of the first Gulf war, nor has it ever done so in Qatar at any point following Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s rise to power in 1979. This outlook fundamentally contrasts with Saudi Arabia’s and Bahrain’s outlook, which is based on an understanding of Iran being a predatory state committed to toppling the Al Sauds and Al Khalifas through a violent revolution. Manama and Riyadh’s shared view of the Islamic Republic as an existential threat has closely aligned the two kingdoms and led Bahrain to maintain its strong support for a de facto Saudi-led union.

the option of perhaps one day importing Iranian gas may receive greater consideration if they remain relatively independent from Saudi Arabia in the framework of a council (not union) and their economic ills increase their interest in importing more natural gas. Yet a union would erase any realistic Kuwaiti or Emirati plans for signing gas contracts with Iran

there are grave concerns in the GCC about the US’ long-term commitment as the council’s security guarantor

The conservative communities that organize their lives according to religious principles were often ostracized and suppressed by governments that upheld the state-secularist principles of the modern Turkish Republic. Conservative communities in Turkey have long since had their historic inability to openly express and develop religious sentiments, education and practices in public life, engraved on their lives, thanks to the constant government surveillance of a transgressive state power over religion since the beginning of the Republic in early 1920s

In general, the conservatives in Turkey are citizens loyal and submissive to state authority and respond to the call of nationalism. Their strong identification with the state and its nation is another reason why they have rarely staged illegal, anti-government political mobilizations in the Republic’s history. Erdogan’s administration, despite allegations of corruption and manipulation, still claims to be Islamist. He is also the embodiment of power and authority which prompts his constituency’s historical reflex of obedience to the state, this time one that they can largely identify with

Erdogan is a populist leader, extremely talented in connecting with his constituency and invoking their collective memories of social adversity and cultural victimhood. His ability to translate collective symbols, from headscarves to Israel, into political support is the key to his leadership. He is convincing because of his close familiarity with their ideals and vulnerabilities.

Moreover, Erdogan’s campaign displayed remarkably effective political management, creating a cloud of victimhood amidst ongoing scandals and allegations. Erdogan emerged as a victim of historically embedded coup attempts and “international” conspiracies, evoking this shared sense of victimhood, marginalization and ostracization with his public.

Turkish state-secularists often express their disdain for Islamists, stating that the latter has a secret agenda to destroy the secular Republic and establish an Islamic one. It is now evident that this Islamist government may indeed be destroying the organization of the Republic, not with an Islamist agenda but with expansive corruption and clientalism.  Turkey’s state and democracy can only be salvaged if a consistent and unyielding opposition contests the government’s actions while prudently allaying people’s deep-rooted anxieties of marginalization.

What began as a humanitarian project has turned into an insidious form of conversion and riot control which has had many casualties. It has been profoundly anti-democratic in many cases, including in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. From the ground, for many of its recipients, the various iterations of this liberal peace project have taken on a colonial appearance. It has become illiberal

local actors are reframing what they require from a viable, just, and durable peace, often quietly and in the margins, drawing on the liberal peace as well as their own customs and interests.

Talk of ‘human security’, ‘responsibility to protect’, ‘do no harm doctrines’ and ‘local ownership’ seems very empty from the perspective of most of the peoples these concepts have been visited upon. This in turn has often elicited from subject communities a 'post-colonial response', criticising peace interventions as self-interested, imperialistic, orientalist, and focusing on the interveners' interests rather than local interests. A local (transnational and transversal) attempt is under way to reclaim political agency and autonomy from the new post-Cold War 'civilising mission', which has over the last twenty years, shown itself unable to provide for basic needs, rights, security (state or human) at levels local actors expect, or to respect or understand local differences and non-liberal, and even non-state patterns of politics. Non-liberal and non-western forms of politics, economics, society, and custom, are clamouring for discursive and material space in many post-conflict zones, with mixed implications for sustainability and for the purpose of achieving a normatively (to liberals at least) and contextually acceptable, locally sustainable peace.

In some cases, as in Kosovo and Timor Leste this has led to a modified form of state emerging, heavily influenced by both liberal norms and local customs, practices, identities, and national agendas. Very difficult issues arise here for 'international planners' of peace and world order, not least in how they respond to such confrontations between very different political systems, customs, and agendas. But, it is also the case that synergies may arise, where these are sensitively handled and properly understood.

peace requires well-being via human needs stemming from rights defined by their contexts, (where context may mean local, customary, state, market, regional or international, not merely the 'local' it is often taken to mean). These contexts are of course connected to the ambit of liberal state and international institutions, but they are not defined by them. As a result, millions of people around the world do not have adequate rights or needs provision, nor proper access to representation, despite the best intentions of liberal peacebuilders.

To achieve this the ethically and methodologically dubious privatisation of security and peacebuilding and its connection to neoliberal marketisation strategies in the context of a classically sovereign state should be abandoned. The privatisation of peacebuilding means that no accountability is possible until after a specific development project has failed, and only then by refusing funding often to those who need it most. Such strategies have attracted to this sector a dangerous fringe of arrogant bureaucrats, 'ambulance chasers' and 'cowboys' rather than imbuing peacebuilding with the dynamics of grounded reconciliation.

democracy is rarely resisted other than by the most extreme of actors, but it is often criticized for being distant in outcome to local communities.

At the moment the impulse appears to be to illiberalise, to postpone democracy, to open markets further, and to depoliticise because a lack of local agency is seen to be the cause of these failures, rather than faulty international analytic and policy approaches and mistaken idealism.

When this sense of novelty becomes widespread, it can erase aspects of prior patterns of interaction, catching everybody by surprise. That is what happened during the Iranian Revolution. It happened again during the “Arab Spring” uprisings of 2011.

These momentous breaks from routine mark the limits of social-scientific knowledge. They stubbornly resist domestication in social-scientific models. What remains, I have proposed, is to study the experience of wildness. What does it feel like to live through such moments, to participate or avoid participation, to make history?

The Good Friday process also marked the last time that a U.S. administration would engage with Ireland as a modern country—as something more than a photo opportunity to impress clover-wearing, Riverdancing, green Guinness-drinking voters back home

failing to correct American misperceptions about Ireland helps Dublin tremendously – which gives the Irish good reason to keep up the tradition of putting on the poor mouth. If Americans treat Ireland as a poor country—and not as one that has a GDP per capita of $84,000, compared with the United States’ $62,500—that helps Irish diplomats lobby for special treatment. (Fair warning: The small size of Ireland’s population and its role in global finance make these comparisons difficult—but under just about any comparison, Ireland is fairly well ensconced in the high-income group and has the fourth-highest ranking on the United Nations Human Development Index, well above the United States.)

Ireland’s historic cultural transformation—ending the ban on abortion and greatly easing divorce—is in many ways symbolized by Varadkar himself. The youngest premier in the republic’s history, Varadkar is also half-Indian by descent and is partnered with another man, Matthew Barrett. Varadkar has apparently found it is either morally necessary or politically expedient—or both—to push back against traditionalist American politicians. In March of this year, Varadkar and Barrett breakfasted with Vice President Mike Pence and his family, where the Irish leader pointedly called out discrimination against sexual minorities. That’s a far different relationship than Kennedy or Obama ever had with an Irish leader. And Varadkar’s frostiness toward Pence mirrors the gap between Ireland’s current progressive image and the largely older, conservative, and white-identifying traditional Irish American constituency.

The threat of a hard Brexit and the reimposition of a hard border between the republic and the North jeopardize both political and economic stability.

In the absence of any major U.S. strategic interest in Ireland (which isn’t even a member of NATO), the greatest Irish leverage in Washington comes from fraying ties of family and identity. But that is far from the level of sustained influence and power that earlier generations wielded

U.S. investment and tourism are welcome, of course, but the focus of Irish diplomacy is squarely on Brussels

Martin O’Malley was mocked for suggesting that a climate-change-intensified drought in the Levant—the worst drought in 900 years—helped incite the Syrian Civil War, thus kickstarting the Islamic State. The evidence tentatively supports him. Since the outbreak of the conflict, some scholars have recognized that this drought pushed once-prosperous farmers into Syria’s cities. Many became unemployed and destitute, aggravating internal divisions in the run-up to the war

Scheffran underlined these climate connections but declined to emphasize them. “The Syrian War has so many complex interrelated issues—and most of them are political and economic—that the drought is just one contributing factor to the instability in the region,”

it’s all about the exogenous shock. We were all interested in, to what extent does a big event like a flooding or a drought undermine society, or trigger a conflict outbreak?

Heatwaves, droughts, and other climate-related exogenous shocks do correlate to conflict outbreak—but only in countries primed for conflict by ethnic division. In the 30-year period, nearly a quarter of all ethnic-fueled armed conflict coincided with a climate-related calamity. By contrast, in the set of all countries, war only correlated to climatic disaster about 9 percent of the time

climate disaster will not cause a war, but it can influence whether one begins

Models predict that northern Africa and the Levant, both already drought-prone, will dry out significantly over the course of the century. On the phone, Schleussner also cited southern Africa and south-central Asia as regions to watch. (It’s no coincidence that some of the largest, longest wars this century have occurred in those places.)

the U.S. Department of Defense already considers global warming a “threat multiplier” for national security. It expects hotter temperatures and acidified oceans to destabilize governments and worsen infectious pandemics

“I wouldn’t say that there would be a mass migration to Europe, but I would expect to see a large number of people being displaced within Africa,”

There is literally, in legal parlance, no such thing as an environmental refugee,” says Edward Carr. “To meet the international standard for refugee, a changing environment is not a forcing. It doesn’t count.”

When would you attribute the decision to move to changes in the climate? Does a place have to be dry for five years? For 10 years? Does someone have to have three children die, and then they decide to move?

Climate change could push Western politics toward demagoguery and authoritarianism in two ways, then. First, it could devastate agricultural yields and raise food prices; destroy coastal real estate and wash away family wealth; transform old commodities into luxury goods. Second, it could create a wave of migration—likely from conflict, but possibly from environmental ruination—that stresses international reception systems and risks fomenting regional resource disputes.

it could erode people’s sense of security, pushing them toward authoritarianism

Like the CEO in the 1950s who predicted that America would see flying cars and three-day workweeks by the year 1999, I’ve assumed that every ongoing trend line can be extrapolated out indefinitely. They can’t. The actual future will be far stranger.

climate change must be mitigated with all deliberate speed. But he also suggests certain cultural mechanisms. Some Americans may favor more restrictive immigration policies, but—in order to withstand against future waves of mass migration (and humanely deal with the victims of climate change)—racist fears must be unhooked from immigration restrictionism. In other words, as a matter of survival against future authoritarians, white supremacy must be rejected and defeated.

Improving the United States’s immune response to authoritarian leadership—a response that could be repeatedly tested in the century to come—can follow from weaving its civic fabric ever tighter. I don’t know what this will look like, exactly, for every person. But here are some places to start: Volunteer. Run for local or state office. Give to charity (whether due to religion or effective altruism). Organize at work. Join a church or a community choir or the local library staff. Make your hometown a better place for refugees to settle. Raise a child well.

climate realists have always split their work between mitigation—that is, trying to keep the climate from getting worse—and adaptation—trying to protect what we already have

Past presidents have traditionally kept a ratio of about two-thirds career diplomats to one-third political appointees as ambassadors

Political appointees have traditionally been sent to developed countries in Europe and cushier posts, such as Luxembourg, the Bahamas, or Portugal

Trump has veered away from the tradition: 45 percent of the ambassadors he has appointed are political appointees, some of whom are deep-pocketed campaign donors or in other circles close to the president with controversial backgrounds and no prior diplomatic experience.

Trump has followed the tradition of past presidents—both Democrats and Republicans—by appointing people who bankrolled his presidential campaign and inauguration committee as ambassadors to foreign countries, even when they have no prior diplomatic experience.

Consider the democratic peace theory. The theory makes two key propositions: that democracies are less likely to go to war than are nondemocracies, and that democracies are less likely to go to war with each other. The historical record shows that democracies have actually not been less likely to fight wars—if you include their colonial conquests. Meanwhile, in regions such as the Middle East and North Africa, democratizing states have experienced more internal conflicts than their less-democratic peers. Yet leaders in the West have invoked democratic peace theory to justify invading and occupying less-democratic, and notably less-white, countries.

non-European nations did not voluntarily adopt European understandings of statehood and sovereignty

Europe, justified by Westphalia, divided the world between the modern, “civilized” states and conquered those which they did not think belonged in the international system

Western concepts are prioritized at the expense of their applicability in the world. Krishna called this “a systematic politics of forgetting, a willful amnesia, on the question of race.”

the Journal of Race Development—the first academic IR journal, established in 1910—advanced racist treatises, including on the inability of “native races” to develop states without colonialism. Nonetheless, the journal’s pages also included sharp critiques from W.E.B. Du Bois and other scholars who were critical of European mercantilism. In 1919, the journal was rebranded as the Journal of International Relations without substantive changes and, in 1922, its successor, Foreign Affairs, was born.

The mid-20th century brought about some shifts in IR thinking and in foreign policy. Black IR scholars, primarily working out of Howard University, developed a strong theoretical tradition that resists white-supremacist privileging of U.S. and European empires. Anti-colonial revolutions in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s further problematized the promise of empire built into realist frameworks and the idealism of paternalist cooperation integral to liberal thought.

Between 1945 and 1993, among the five major IR journals of the period—International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Review of International Studies, and World Politics—only one published an article with the word “race” in the title. Another four articles included “minorities” and 13 included “ethnicity.” Since then, mainstream IR has neglected race in theorizing, in historical explanation, and in prescription, and shuttled race (and gender) to the side as “other perspectives.”

those who teach IR must address race and racism in the field and acknowledge the usefulness of critical approaches. This means integrating scholarly works on race in undergraduate and graduate courses, and not as a segregated “week on race” at the end of the term

Introductory courses could also be organized around issues—for instance, interstate conflict, human rights, environmental politics—in order to create more points of entry for relevant scholarship and for nonwhite students

Chinese and Russian aggression against the democracies is likely to grow, the United States might critically weaken, and the EU seems firmly set on pursuing a middle path. Instead of worrying about looking back to the past, leaders in Ottawa, Canberra, and London should embrace the idea and propose a significant deepening of their foreign-policy coordination. This is most definitely not about “getting the band back together,” as one British Conservative member of Parliament greeted a trade talk announcement, but three middle powers building an anti-authoritarian group to resist great-power bullying in the 21st century.

A mini C-3 format would offer the best approach: a summit with follow-up that is both flexible and lightweight enough to get off the ground but with a permanent working group in foreign ministries advancing dossiers and initiatives. As the C-3 are all Commonwealth countries, summits could be timed to coincide with the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, where the leaders of Canada, Australia, and Britain regularly meet anyway.

Drawing both on Britain’s joint initiative with Canada to block Putin attending the G-7 and on Canada’s humiliating experience at the U.N., among this C-3’s first tasks should be to coordinate joint positions inside the U.N., G-7 and G-20. As far as major goals are concerned, this could include supporting any future attempts of Canada to win a seat on the U.N. Security Council and for Australia to formally join the G-7.

This is not about replacing working with the EU or the United States but creating a group for Canada, Australia, and Britain to jointly present tougher anti-authoritarian packages to big powers than had they tried to individually present them alone. The C-3, like the E-3 to the EU, would be complementary to existing Euro-Atlantic bodies.

deeper cooperation between Britain, Canada, and Australia has an image problem

imperial nostalgia or conservative culture politics

too anchored on ethnic fraternity

the idea needs to be decolonized

what about other middle powers? Why not include, say, Japan? This is where two critical principles of international politics come into play: Does your grouping have enough like-mindedness to be able to function and enough load-bearing capacity to get anything done? What Canada, Australia, and Britain are after is mutual geopolitical support; adding members that aren’t willing to offer that risks creating another talking shop like the Franco-German Alliance for Multilateralism. That group, which stretches from Chile to Kazakhstan, lacks the ability to agree on anything of substance—and the power to act on it.

there are simply not a lot of like-minded democracies to go around

Ottawa, Canberra, and London didn’t need each other in a U.S.-led world order or in a relatively benign world without authoritarian superpowers. But that system has decayed. Deep divisions, not just between the Europeans and Donald Trump, but with much of the U.S. national security establishment, are breaking up the old Washington-led ideological West. The common anti-authoritarian frame that once glued together Western foreign policy has come unstuck

In this world, the C-3 is a liberal international, not a nationalist, cause

In early June, the International Crisis Group did something its leaders said was a historic first: It issued a statement on an internal crisis in the United States. The ICG, an independent organization headquartered in Belgium, analyzes geopolitics with the goal of preventing conflict. It is known for issuing authoritative, deeply sourced reports on war-torn countries — say, how to end the brutal conflict in Yemen.

In language similar to how it might describe fragile foreign states, the ICG cast the “unrest” as a crisis that “put the nation’s political divides on full display.” And it chided the Trump administration for “incendiary, panicky rhetoric that suggests the U.S. is in armed conflict with its own people.”

“Over the long term, the nation will need to take steps to end the police’s brutality and militarization as well as structural racial inequality if it wants to avoid similar future crises,” the ICG said.

The ICG decided it saw a confluence of factors in America that it sees in far more troubled countries. One appeared to be growing militarization of the police. Another was the seeming politicization of the military. Also key: Some U.S. political leaders, including Trump, seem determined to exploit racial divisions instead of pushing for unity. The ICG is now debating whether to launch a program that focuses on U.S. domestic issues in a systematic way

past U.S. administrations, Republican and Democrat, all had credibility gaps when it came to promoting human rights while protecting U.S. interests. Obama, for instance, was criticized for authorizing drone strikes against militants that often killed civilians

“I think there’s a qualitative difference with this administration, for whom human rights seems to be treated purely as a transactional currency,”

In 2019, Freedom House released a special essay titled “The Struggle Comes Home: Attacks on Democracy in the United States.” The Washington-based NGO, which receives the bulk of its funding from the U.S. government, was established in 1941 to fight fascism. Its report, which ranks how free countries are using various indicators, described a decline in U.S. democracy that predated Trump and was fueled in part by political polarization. Freedom House warned, however, that Trump was accelerating it.

The international furor against the Trump administration was especially intense in mid-2018, as the U.S. was separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, then putting the children in detention camps. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights called the U.S. actions “unconscionable.”

“There is intense racism and law enforcement abuse of human rights in China, in Russia, in Brazil and a lot of other countries that the United Nations has a hard time mustering the will to condemn,” said Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a former senior human rights official under Obama. “But none of those countries is the indispensable nation. What human rights organizations and institutions are saying by focusing on the United States is something that they cannot explicitly admit, and that is that they believe in American exceptionalism. They understand that America falling short of its ideals has a far greater impact on the world than a Russia or a China doing what we all expect those authoritarian states to do.”

A top State Department official, Brian Hook, later wrote a memo to Tillerson arguing that the U.S. should use human rights as a weapon against adversaries, like Iran and China. But repressive allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, should get a pass, it said. “Allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies,” Hook wrote.

the memo appears to have laid out the policy approach the Trump administration has taken on human rights, even after Tillerson was fired in early 2018. His successor, Mike Pompeo, frequently weighs in on human rights but almost exclusively to bash governments hostile to the United States or, occasionally, ones with which the U.S. has limited strategic interest.

it sometimes goes to great lengths to protect abusive U.S partners, as it has done by pressing ahead with arms sales to Saudi Arabia despite its assassination of a writer for The Washington Post

“The current administration doesn’t think most of its supporters care about international violations of human rights broadly,”

Human rights leaders say there are two noteworthy bright spots in the Trump administration’s record. It has put significant resources into promoting international religious freedom — routinely speaking out on the topic, holding annual ministerial gatherings about it, and launching an international coalition of countries to promote the ideal. A few weeks ago, Trump issued an executive order instructing Pompeo to further integrate the promotion of religious freedom in U.S. diplomacy. The administration also has used a relatively new legal tool, the Global Magnitsky Act, to impose economic sanctions on numerous individuals implicated in human rights abuses abroad. The sanctions have fallen on people ranging from Myanmar military officials suspected in the mass slaughter of Rohingya Muslims to an allegedly abusive Pakistani police official.

Trump administration officials also say human rights activists are never satisfied, no matter who is in the White House. This is not an unfair argument: The groups routinely criticize even administrations most friendly to their cause. Bush was eviscerated over his handling of the war on terrorism, especially his decision to invade Iraq, even though he and his aides asserted that they were liberating and protecting people. Obama’s human rights legacy was declared “shaky.” For U.S. officials who must make choices between bad and worse options every day, the endless criticism is frustrating.

Pompeo’s disdain for the human rights community is one reason he created what’s known as the Commission on Unalienable Rights. The secretary asserts that activists keep trying to create categories of rights, and that “not everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right.”

Rights activists worry the panel will craft a “hierarchy” of rights that will undermine protections for women, LGBTQ people and others, while possibly elevating religious freedom above other rights

Privately, administration officials say they do a lot of excellent human rights work that doesn’t get attention. They note that Congress has kept up funding for much of that work, even though Trump has tried to slash that funding. They also argue that the Trump team’s objectives and priorities are clearer than those of past administrations, especially when distinguishing friend from foe. While Obama tried to engage Tehran and Havana, the Trump administration casts those regimes as irredeemable, and it’s willing to attack them on human rights to weaken them. On the other hand, while Obama kept Hungary’s leader at a distance, Trump has welcomed him to the White House. Critics may see that as another example of Trump liking dictators, but his aides say it is a way to limit Russian and Chinese influence in Eastern Europe.

“In comparison to the remainder of its human rights record, the Trump administration’s use of the Global Magnitsky sanctions has exceeded expectations,”

The religious freedom alliance, for instance, includes countries such as Hungary, whose government the U.S. is trying to court but which traffics in anti-Semitic rhetoric. The religious freedom push also dovetails with a priority of Trump’s evangelical supporters, who have long pushed for greater protection of Christian communities overseas.

Under intense outside pressure, the administration imposed Magnitsky sanctions on more than a dozen Saudis for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi; but it spared the man the U.S. intelligence community considers responsible for the killing, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Trump has defended

The dire situation of Uighur Muslims in China illustrates how both the Magnitsky effort and the religious freedom effort have collided with Trump’s own priorities.

In recent years, the Chinese government has detained more than a million Uighur Muslims, putting them in camps from which ugly reports of abuse have emerged. China claims it is “reeducating” the Uighurs to stamp out terrorist thinking in the population. Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Congress are furious over the detention of the Uighurs.

Pompeo, meanwhile, has raised the Uighurs as an example of why the U.S. must promote religious freedom. But Trump has been unwilling to use the Magnitsky sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the mistreatment of the Uighurs. He told Axios he doesn't want to impose the penalties because it might derail trade talks with Beijing, the success of which he sees as critical to his reelection

Trump’s diatribes against journalists — and his claims that many legitimate media outlets are “fake news” — are believed to have inspired some countries to impose tougher laws curtailing press freedoms.

When the State Department spokesperson recently tweeted out criticism of Beijing’s treatment of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, a Chinese official tweeted back at her with some of Floyd’s last words: “I can’t breathe.”

In 2018, a U.N. envoy, Philip Alston, unveiled the findings of an investigation into poverty in the United States. Alston has said he was initially invited to study the topic under the Obama administration, but that the Trump administration — under Tillerson — had reextended the invite. Alston’s report minced few words. The United States, he reported, was home to tens of millions of people in poverty, and that was likely to be exacerbated by Trump’s economic policies.

Nikki Haley, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, fought back. She called Alston’s work “misleading and politically motivated,” insisted that the Trump administration’s plans would lift people out of poverty, and argued that the U.N. should focus on poverty in less-developed countries.

The council instead requested a broader, more generic U.N. report on systemic racism and police brutality against Black people and also asked for information on how various governments worldwide deal with anti-racism protests. The resolution did, however, mention the Floyd death and the report is expected to cover the United States, among other countries.

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.

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

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”.

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

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

Bashar al-Assad does not intend to step down from power, and he will use any means at his disposal to prevent that from happening

Five years ago, Syria was a local problem; today it is an international one. U.S. indecision, risk aversion, a total divergence between rhetoric and policy, and a failure to uphold clearly stated “red lines” have all combined into what can best be described as a cold-hearted, hypocritical approach. At worst, Washington has indirectly abetted the wholesale destruction of a nation-state, in direct contradiction to its fundamental national security interests and its most tightly held values.

U.S. commitment remained negligible when compared with our often uncoordinated regional allies, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. It seems U.S. officials wanted Assad out but wanted others — whom administration officials would say in private they did not trust — to do it for them

The result? Nearly half a million people dead, more than 1 million people living under siege, and 11 million people displaced. Catastrophic refugee flows have led to an anti-immigrant backlash in Europe and the rise of far-right politics while Syria is now home to perhaps the greatest concentration of jihadi militants in any single country ever

Jabhat Fateh al-Sham — formerly the Nusra Front — the most capable, politically savvy, and militarily powerful al Qaeda movement in history. Al Qaeda’s central leadership has also revitalized itself inside Syria, with the international terrorist organization’s newly named deputy leader almost certainly residing in the country. The correlation is simple: U.S. shortcomings equal al Qaeda’s success in Syria.

most Syrians living in opposition areas now view al Qaeda as a more trustworthy and capable protector of their lives than the United States. If there were ever a sign of policy failure, this would be it.

there will be no purely military solution to Syria’s conflict — a negotiated settlement is the only feasible path toward stability. However, Assad will never treat a political process with any level of seriousness until placed under meaningful pressure, which the United States has thus far done everything in its power not to do.

Opposition to partition is arguably the single issue that unites communities supportive of and opposed to Assad

combating al Qaeda in Syria cannot be done solely with bullets and bombs. Defeating it is instead an issue of providing a more attractive and sustainable alternative to the jihadi group’s narrative. Given its successful efforts to embed within the opposition and build popular acceptance as a military (not a political) ally, al Qaeda does not represent a conventional counterterrorist problem

If Assad remains in place indefinitely and the conflict continues or worsens, the Islamic State will undoubtedly live to fight another day

Civilian protection should remain the core focus of any broad-based strategy, but it must be backed up by real and discernible consequences for violators

Skeptics of a more assertive approach to the Syrian crisis can deride their critics as much as they want — but one would hope that after five years of failures, they would at least admit that they have got something wrong

Digby's superb commentary on this point yesterday: My personal feeling is that any allegedly democratic government that is so hubristic that it will lie blatantly to the entire world in order to invade a country it has long wanted to invade probably needs a self-correcting mechanism. There are times when it's necessary that the powerful be shown that there are checks on its behavior, particularly when the systems normally designed to do that are breaking down. Now is one of those times. . . . .As for the substance of the revelations, I don't know what the results will be. But in the world of diplomacy, embarrassment is meaningful and I'm not sure that it's a bad thing for all these people to be embarrassed right now.  Puncturing a certain kind of self-importance --- especially national self-importance --- may be the most worthwhile thing they do. A little humility is long overdue.

The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America's unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it. As Scott Shane, the New York Times' national security reporter, puts it: "American taxpayers, American citizens pay for all these diplomatic operations overseas and you know, it is not a bad thing when Americans actually have a better understanding of those negotiations".  Mr Shane goes on to suggest that "Perhaps if we had had more information on these secret internal deliberations of governments prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, we would have had a better understanding of the quality of the evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."

I'm glad to see that the quality of discussion over possible US efforts to stymie Iran's nuclear ambitions has already become more sophisticated and, well, better-informed due to the information provided by WikiLeaks.

If secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy, it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents. I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee. Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy.

FAIR documents how severely and blatantly the New York Times reporting distorted some of these documents in order (as always) to demonize Iran and the "threat" it poses.

It says, in effect, all options – deal, no deal, rethink – remain open, but you have three weeks to choose.

Backed by the Dutch, Irish and others, Merkel also felt it would be a terrible idea for the EU’s future relationship with Britain to begin with the UK crashing out. “We will do everything we can to ensure this does not happen,”

“No deal would be bad news for all economically, even if it would be far worse for Britain than the 27,” a Dutch official said. “But politically it would be terrible. We had to find a way that left all options open for London – that basically ensured that no deal, if it happens, is Britain’s responsibility.”

the EU27 wanted to move on because, quite simply, it has other things to deal with. Last week’s summit was once again hijacked by Brexit, which delayed a session on relations with China. Tensions with Russia, internal strains with the bloc’s nationalist governments, trade and security in the age of Trump, climate change, a slowing economy – all are more deserving of attention than Brexit.

Despite their exasperation with Brexit Britain, the EU27 recognise that the liberal postwar order now faces unprecedented challenges, and that no one in the bloc will be well served by a bitter divorce and a resentful, badly weakened UK. So a path to a reconsidered, potentially softer Brexit, entailing a relaxation of May’s red lines, should remain on the table for a little while yet.

Although Foundation drew its direct inspiration from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, history is replete with examples of seemingly powerful empires run by weak, divided elites and picked apart by outside powers

Trump’s administration is openly bought by foreign governments via his international network of hotels and resorts, including the one located directly between the White House and the U.S. Capitol, where a Saudi-funded lobbyist rented 500 rooms in the month after the 2016 election. His political party, which still controls the Senate and increasingly dominates the judiciary, has no interest in holding him accountable for any of this. And of course there’s the small matter of Russian interference in the 2016 election; as the limited information known so far from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report confirms, Trump and the Republicans were at the very least the passive and willing beneficiaries of efforts by a foreign power to influence the election outcome.

the influence of outside money in Washington has become routine over the past generation. From the pervasive influence of the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf monarchies over think tanks and media organizations to virtually the entire U.S. government kowtowing before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to China’s warm relationship with the Chamber of Commerce and with the heads of some of the most powerful U.S. companies to the funneling of foreign money through the real estate industries of the country’s largest and wealthiest cities—the U.S. government is for sale.

The complete deregulation of campaign finance and the subsequent legalization of corruption in Washington, on a scale unheard of in other developed countries, have resulted in a capital where the distinction between foreign and domestic monied interests is harder and harder to parse. The U.S. government, in other words, does not exist to serve the interests of Americans through either its foreign or its domestic policies; rather, it exists to perpetuate the interests of the globalized oligarchy.

While Rhodes and Obama also faced pressure from within the Washington establishment, they found their agenda for the Middle East repeatedly hijacked by foreign allies—the same governments that also lobbied, with varying success, for U.S. military operations from Syria to Yemen. American power, however mighty, means nothing if it’s being used for the ends of the highest bidders

what we’re seeing is neither a considered, responsible withdrawal from empire in order to invest in urgent needs at home nor a revolt against empire by the world’s wretched. Rather, it’s a drawn-out, decadent collapse recognizable to any student of Rome or Constantinople. America is the sick man of the 21st century, and anyone who has watched its president bumble through a gathering of bemused, pitying world leaders knows it.

the Trump administration has stopped at nothing to push the argument that job creation is justification enough for supporting weapons manufacturers to the hilt. Even before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, he was already insisting that military spending was a great jobs creator. He’s only doubled down on this assertion during his presidency. Recently, overriding congressional objections, he even declared a national “emergency” to force through part of an arms sale to Saudi Arabia that he had once claimed would create more than a million jobs. While this claim has been thoroughly debunked, the most essential part of his argument — that more money flowing to defense contractors will create significant numbers of new jobs — is considered truth personified by many in the defense industry

In addition to the reductions at Lockheed, Boeing slashed 21,400 jobs and Raytheon cut 800 employees from its payroll. Only General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman added jobs — 13,400 and 16,900 employees, respectively — making that total figure look modestly better. However, even those “gains” can’t qualify as job creation in the normal sense, since they resulted almost entirely from the fact that each of those companies bought another Pentagon contractor and added its employees to its own payroll

Pentagon spending was actually higher in 2018 than in 2012

From 2012 to 2018, overall employment at Lockheed actually fell from 120,000 to 105,000, according to the firm’s filings with the SEC and the company itself reported a slightly larger reduction of 16,350 jobs in the U.S. In other words, in the last six years Lockheed dramatically reduced its U.S. workforce, even as it hired more employees abroad and received more taxpayer dollars

where is all that additional taxpayer money actually going, if not job creation? At least part of the answer is contractor profits and soaring CEO salaries. In those six years, Lockheed’s stock price rose from $82 at the beginning of 2012 to $305 at the end of 2018, a nearly four-fold increase. In 2018, the company also reported a 9% ($590 million) rise in its profits, the best in the industry. And in those same years, the salary of its CEO increased by $1.4 million

From 2012 to 2018, the unemployment rate in the U.S. plummeted from roughly 8% to 4%, with more than 13 million new jobs added to the economy. Yet, in those same years, three of the five top defense contractors slashed jobs. In 2018, the Pentagon committed approximately $118 billion in federal money to those firms, including Lockheed — nearly half of all the money it spent on contractors. This was almost $12 billion more than they had received in 2012. Yet, cumulatively, those companies lost jobs and now employ a total of 6,900 fewer employees than they did in 2012, according to their SEC filings.

In 2012, concerned that those caps on defense spending would cut into their bottom lines, the five top contractors went on the political offensive, making future jobs their weapon of choice. After the Budget Control Act passed, the Aerospace Industries Association — the leading trade group of the weapons-makers — warned that more than one million jobs would be at risk if Pentagon spending were cut significantly. To emphasize the point, Lockheed sent layoff notices to 123,000 employees just before the BCA was implemented and only days before the 2012 election. Those layoffs never actually happened, but the fear of lost jobs would prove real indeed and would last.

“the aerospace and defense (A&D) sector scored record revenues and profits in 2018” with an “operating profit of $81 billion, surpassing the previous record set in 2017.” According to the report, Pentagon contractors were at the forefront of these profit gains. For example, Lockheed’s profit improvement was $590 million, followed closely by General Dynamics at $562 million. As employment shrank, CEO salaries at some of these firms only grew. In addition to compensation for Lockheed’s CEO jumping from $4.2 million in 2012 to $5.6 million in 2018, compensation for the CEO of General Dynamics increased from $6.9 million in 2012 to a whopping $20.7 million in 2018.

weapons-making outfits spend more than $100 million on lobbying yearly, donate tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of members of Congress every election season, and give millions to think tanks annually

research has repeatedly shown that, even with this supposed “multiplier effect,” defense spending produces fewer jobs than just about anything else the government puts our money into. In fact, it’s about 50% less effective at creating jobs than if taxpayers were simply allowed to keep their money and use it as they wished

As Brown University’s Costs of War project has reported, “$1 billion in military spending creates approximately 11,200 jobs, compared with 26,700 in education, 16,800 in clean energy, and 17,200 in health care.”

not only are the green energy and education areas vital to the future of the country, they are also genuine job-creating machines. Yet, the government gives more taxpayer dollars to the defense industry than all these other government functions combined.

Reports from the industry’s own trade association show that it has been shedding jobs. According to an Aerospace Industries Association analysis, it supported approximately 300,000 fewer jobs in 2018 than it had reported supporting just three years earlier

add to their army of lobbyists, their treasure trove of campaign contributions, and those think tanks on the take, the famed revolving door that sends retired government officials into the world of the weapons makers and those working for them to Washington

since 2008, as the Project On Government Oversight’s Mandy Smithberger found, “at least 380 high-ranking Department of Defense officials and military officers shifted into the private sector to become lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for defense contractors.” 

the vast sums Americans have spent trying to nation-build, spread democracy, or defeat all “terrorists of global reach” inevitably left fewer resources available to help Americans at home (including the veterans of the country’s protracted wars)

the over $6 trillion spent on what Bush dubbed the “war on terror”—including the money spent on unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—could surely have been spent helping Americans live more comfortable and secure lives at home (or merely left in taxpayers’ pockets). Add to the list the decisions to promote rapid globalization and financial deregulation, which did significant harm to some sectors of the economy and led to the 2008 financial crisis, and you begin to see why confidence in the elite has taken a hit.

running an ambitious and highly interventionist foreign policy—and, in particular, one that tries to manipulate, manage, and ultimately shape the internal politics of foreign countries—requires a lot of deception. To sustain public support for it, elites have to spend a lot of time inflating threats, exaggerating benefits, acting in secret, and manipulating what the public is told

the architects of failure are rarely, if ever, held accountable

Once back in office, they are free to repeat their previous mistakes, backed by a chorus of pundits whose recommendations never change no matter how often they’ve failed.

The United States set out to remake the world in its image, and when some parts of that world pushed back, it reacted the way that most societies do when they are attacked. Americans got scared, lashed out even more, stopped thinking clearly and strategically, and looked around for someone to blame

the Republican Party’s decision to pin its political future on gerrymandering, voter suppression, and mobilizing a shrinking base and not on trying to appeal to the median voter is surely part of the problem, too, along with the twisted soul of Trump himself

Endless campaigns abroad unleash a host of political forces—militarism, secrecy, enhanced executive authority, xenophobia, faux patriotism, demagoguery, etc.—all of them contrary to the civic virtues on which a healthy democracy depends