Sukarno, like many Indonesians, including the PKI, believed the creation of a Malaysian federation was unwarranted regional interference by the British to maintain their colonial dominance.

Like its US and Australian allies, Britain feared a communist Indonesia. The PKI had three million members and was close to Mao’s China. In Washington the fall of the Indonesia “domino” into the communist camp was seen as a greater threat than the potential loss of Vietnam.

Suharto, appointed supreme army commander on 14 October, used the rebellion to undermine and eventually overthrow Sukarno, and as what historian John Roosa has called a “pretext for mass murder”: the elimination of the PKI in a series of massacres across Indonesia that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

British intelligence agencies and propaganda specialists were complicit, carrying out covert operations to undermine Sukarno’s regime and eliminate the PKI by blaming them for the Untung coup.

Reddaway had served in the army during the second world war before joining the Foreign Office and playing a key role in the establishment of IRD. After the failed Untung coup he arrived to take charge of the British operation. His brief was simple. In an interview in 1996 with two of the authors, he said he’d been given a budget of £100,000 by the Foreign Office and was told “to do anything I could do to get rid of Sukarno”. Only now do we know what “anything” fully meant.

“No, we do not cry out for violence,” the IRD propagandists wrote, “but we demand in the name of all patriotic people that this communist cancer be cut out of the body of the state.” The PKI “is now a wounded snake”, they wrote: “Now is the time to kill it before it has a chance to recover.”

Detailed historical research has established that the mass killings of PKI party members and alleged supporters appear to have been triggered by local army commanders or the arrival of army special forces, about three weeks after the botched coup had been put down by Suharto.During that period the media in Indonesia was full of black propaganda against the PKI and its alleged atrocities, as the army whipped up popular anger against communists and legitimised what Roosa has described as its “already-planned moves against the PKI and President Sukarno”.

The newsletters were approved by IRD in London before dispatch. Copies sent to senior Foreign Office officials were destroyed after reading at IRD’s request.

“Anyone who was leftist was picked up. They were very systematic. They targeted all the leftist groups and not just PKI. People kept themselves to themselves and only talked in whispers.”

As the massacres progressed in the autumn of 1965, IRD’s unit in Singapore reassured their readers as to the necessity of the slaughter.In Newsletter 21 they wrote: “Unless we maintain a vigorous campaign to eradicate communism … the red menace will envelop us again.”The stakes were life and death. “We are fighting for our lives and the very existence of Indonesia and we must never forget that. THE CATS ARE WAITING TO POUNCE!”In Newsletter 23 Winchester Road’s propagandists praised “the fighting services and the police” for “doing an excellent job”. Sukarno, then trying to restrain the generals, was wrong: “Communism must be abolished in all its forms. The work started by the army must be carried on and intensified.” The authors finished by equating the PKI to Hitler and Genghis Khan.

What Gilchrist wanted and what became the unit’s mission was the production of black propaganda, apparently produced by patriotic Indonesian émigrés abroad, to stir Indonesian anti-communists into action.The influential targets of a propaganda newsletter, according to a declassified report by Wynne, would eventually include “as many personages in the hierarchy of government, army and civil service as we can find”.To disguise the British origin of the newsletter it was sent into Indonesia via Asian cities including Hong Kong, Tokyo and Manila.

In the 1996 interviews Reddaway boasted of manipulating the British and other global media to take an anti- Sukarno and PKI line but insisted IRD only passed on true facts and did not use black propaganda.As ever with IRD, Reddaway told us a partial truth. According to a memo he had written: “The bludgeon was surprisingly effective because we were able … to supply publicists with information which they could not find from other sources because of Sukarno’s censorship.”

“GCHQ could break and read Indonesian codes without difficulty. The government was among many third world countries using equipment supplied by Swiss-based company Crypto AG. For over 50 years, Crypto AG supplied secretly sabotaged cypher machines, with built-in back doors to which the CIA and GCHQ had keys.”

The newsletters remained the core work of Ed Wynne and his colleagues in Winchester Road. A key theme was to encourage their influential readers to support the army’s campaign against the communists. They urged Indonesian patriots: “The PKI and all it stands for must be eliminated for all time.”We now know that to do that they included sensationalised lies. On 5 November the pro-military Jakarta Daily Mail claimed that on the day of the Untung coup 100 women from PKI’s Gerwani women’s organisation had tortured one of the generals using razor blades and knives to slash his genitals before he was shot.The story of the torture and mutilation of the generals by the Gerwani women became part of the founding myth of Suharto’s regime, used to justify the destruction of the PKI. It was also, according to Roosa, a pretext for murder. A lie propagated by the Indonesian army, regurgitated and repurposed to incite IRD’s influential readers.

The IRD was deliberately silent on the massacres. One document from December 1965 says they should “do nothing to embarrass the generals” and the newsletter carefully itemises accounts of isolated incidents of PKI brutality but makes no explicit mention of the army’s killings.

By early 1966 the mass murders in Indonesia, if not their scale, were well known.In January Robert F Kennedy compared the massacres to “inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the communists” and asked when people would “speak out … against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged communists have not been perpetrators, but victims?”

Wynne regarded the operation as a success. In his 1966 annual report he proudly says his operation was “fairly successful” because all his enemies (Konfrontasi, Sukarno, Subandrio and the PKI) were “destroyed”.

According to Prof Scott Lucas of the University of Birmingham, the declassified documents show that: “Britain was prepared to engage in dirty deeds which ran contrary to its purported values.” They reveal, he says, “how important black propaganda was to give the illusion that Britain could wield global power – even if many people might be killed for that illusion”.

We are accustomed to thinking of Europe as the first historical instance of a full-blown system of sovereign states, but Latin America actually moved toward that form of political organization at just about the same time. After three centuries of imperial domination, the region saw a complete redrawing of its political geography in the wake of the Atlantic Revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Following in the footsteps of the United States (1776) and Haiti (1804), it witnessed a series of wars of independence which, by 1826 and with only a few exceptions, had essentially booted out the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Of course, Britain promptly gained control of trade in the region through an aggressive combination of diplomatic and economic measures often referred to as “informal empire,” but its interactions were now with formally sovereign states.

much as with Western Europe, the region did not stabilize into a system of nation-states that looks like its contemporary iteration until the end of the nineteenth century. It now seems possible to tell a relatively similar story about North America, as in historian Rachel St John’s ongoing project, The Imagined States of America: The Unmanifest History of Nineteenth-century North America.

Until World War II the world was still dominated by empires and the heterogeneous structures of political authority they had created. Once decolonization took off after 1945, the nation-state was not the only option on the table. In Worldmaking after Empire (2019), Adom Getachew describes anglophone Africa’s “federal moment,” when the leaders of various independence movements on the continent discussed the possibility of organizing a regional Union of African States and, in the Caribbean, a West Indian Federation.

“antinationalist anticolonialism” eventually ran afoul of the French government’s unwillingness to distribute the metropole’s resources amongst a widened network of citizens. Yet the fact that it was seriously considered should give us pause. Of course, in the context of decolonization, the triumph of the nation-state represented a final victory for colonized peoples against their long-time oppressors. But it also disconnected regions with a shared history, and it created its own patterns of oppression, particularly for those who were denied a state of their own: indigenous peoples, stateless nations, minorities

what is clear is that a mere seventy years ago, what we now consider to be the self-evident way of organizing political communities was still just one of the options available to our collective imagination

The conventional narrative associates international order with the existence of a system of sovereign states, but the alternative story suggests that the post-1648 period was characterized by the resilience of a diversity of polities

The comparative stability of the post-1648 period may therefore have had more to do with the continued diversity of polities on the continent than with the putative emergence of a homogenous system of sovereign states

an international system in which power is shared among different kinds of actors might in fact be relatively stable

even the most powerful contemporary multinational corporations—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and the rest—are drastically more limited in their formal powers than were the famous mercantile companies who were central actors in the international order until the mid-nineteenth century. The two largest, the British and the Dutch East India Companies, founded in 1600 and 1602 respectively, amassed spectacular amounts of power over their two-hundred-year existence, becoming the primary engine of European imperial expansion. While these companies started off as merchant enterprises seeking to get in on Asia’s lucrative trading network, they gradually turned into much more ambitious endeavors and grew from their original outposts in India and Indonesia into full-on polities of their own. They were, as various scholars now argue, “company-states”—hybrid public-private actors that were legally entitled to rule over subjects, mint money, and wage wars. From this perspective, contemporary non-state actors are still relatively weak compared to states, who still monopolize far more formal power than all other actors in the international system

we should be careful not to suggest that the culprit is an unprecedented weakening of the state and thus that the solution is to expand state power

States certainly were important after 1648, but so were a host of other actors, from mercantile companies to semi-sovereign polities and all sorts of empires more or less formally structured. This system only truly began to unravel in the nineteenth century, with many of its features persisting well into the twentieth. Viewed through this lens, the so-called “Westphalian order” begins to look much more like an anomaly than the status quo

Engaging with this history makes the current centrality of the states-system as a basis for organizing the globe look recent and in fairly good shape, not centuries-old and on the verge of collapse

What is truly new, from a longue durée perspective, is the triumph of the state worldwide, and our inability to think of ways of organizing the world that do not involve either nation-states or organizations of nation-states.

Even thinkers in tune with limitations of the nation-state cannot seem to free themselves from the statist straitjacket of the contemporary political imagination. Debates about state-based supranational institutions likewise fall along a remarkably narrow spectrum: more power to states, or more power to state-based international organizations?

Misrepresenting the history of the states-system plays into the hands of nationalist strongmen, who depict themselves as saving the world from a descent into stateless anarchy, controlled by globalist corporations who couldn’t care less about national allegiance. More broadly, getting this history right means having the right conversations. Giving power to actors other than states is not always a good idea, but we must resist the false choice between resurgent nationalism on the one hand and the triumph of undemocratic entities on the other.

Today the norm is that states enjoy far more rights than any other collectivity—ranging from indigenous peoples to transnational social movements—simply because they are states. But it is not at all clear why this should be the only framework available to our collective imagination, particularly if its legitimacy rests on a history of the states-system that has long been debunked.

we are on the verge of a global boom in mining linked to the energy transition

by 2040, the IEA forecasts that demand for lithium will have increased 42 times relative to 2020 levels

In the US and Europe, policymakers increasingly talk about a “race” to secure the minerals linked to energy transition and shore up domestic supplies; the idea of a “new cold war” with China is frequently invoked

natural resource sectors, which include extractive activities like mining, are responsible for 90% of biodiversity loss and more than half of carbon emissions. One report estimates that the mining sector produces 100bn tons of waste every year. Extraction and processing are typically water- and energy-intensive, and contaminate waterways and soil. Alongside these dramatic changes to the natural environment, mining is linked to human rights abuses, respiratory ailments, dispossession of indigenous territory and labour exploitation. Once the minerals are wrested from the ground, mining companies tend to accumulate profits and leave behind poverty and contamination. These profits only multiply along the vast supply chains that produce electric vehicles and solar panels. Access to these technologies is highly unequal, and the communities who suffer the harms of extraction are frequently denied its benefits.

battles between competing visions of a low-carbon world are intensifying – and they will become increasingly central to politics across the world

there are multiple paths to rapid decarbonisation

A transportation system based on individual electric vehicles, for example, with landscapes dominated by highways and suburban sprawl, is much more resource- and energy-intensive than one that favours mass transit and alternatives such as walking and cycling

Chilean activists are clear: there is no zero-sum conflict between fighting climate breakdown and preserving local environments and livelihoods. Indigenous communities in the Atacama desert are also on the frontlines of the devastating impacts of global heating. Rather than an excuse to intensify mining, the accelerating climate crisis should be an impetus to transform the rapacious and environmentally harmful patterns of production and consumption that caused this crisis in the first place

While much has been written about Chinese overfishing, it’s only recently become possible to document its vast extent, thanks to new satellite technologies such as those providing data to Global Fishing Watch. The same tracking technology that is used to prevent vessels from hiding or circumventing sanctions shows that China’s fishing fleet appears engaged, often illegally, in the effort to haul in as much seafood as it can, as fast as it can, in as many places as it can—with little regard for how its practices affect malnourished people or diminish the stocks of their fish.

China’s yearly bill for fisheries subsidies—of which 94 percent covers shipping fuel—comes to $5.9 billion. That’s about $347,000 per vessel per year, far more than any other major fishing country. European Union vessels, also considered highly subsidized, receive only about $23,000 a year

its record contains little in the way of sustainable fishing. Its own coastline, once among the richest in the world, has been more overfished by its 300,000-strong domestic coastal fleet than the waters of almost any other nation, with less than 15 percent of the original fish biomass remaining

Some 250 Chinese vessels fish for squid just outside Argentina’s 200-mile EEZ, sometimes dashing into Argentina’s waters illegally. When a Chinese jigger intruded in 2018, an Argentine warship pursuing it was nearly rammed by three other Chinese jiggers. “It’s literally a war,” said Milko Schvartzman, a former Greenpeace campaign manager and fisheries expert who estimates the illegal Argentinian fishery at $1 billion a year. “I have no doubt this will end in tragedy.”

China’s South Atlantic fishing fleet is based in Montevideo, the capital and main port of Uruguay, Argentina’s northern neighbor. Uruguay seems to have given China and its fishing fleet a free hand

China’s 1.4 billion people not only consume 38 percent of global fish production, but indulge in one of the highest per-capita consumption rates of fish and seafood, both wild and farmed, in the world—37.8 kilograms per person per year, up from only 7 kilograms per person per year in 1985, according to figures provided by China to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

The Europeans, in particular, are also involved in a lot of illegal fishing, said Vanya Vulperhorst, director of Oceana’s campaign against illegal fishing, often using boats with non-European flags to get around the rules. The illegal market in Mediterranean bluefin tuna, for example, is twice the size of the legal one, according to Europol.

In Mozambique, the Chinese were more successful. In 2017, they effectively took over the port of Beira, doubling its capacity so it could accommodate over 100 trawlers

The Mozambican Channel, between Madagascar and Mozambique, had been relatively unfished, and the Chinese fleet has been able to catch over 60,000 tons a year of large, high-quality bottomfish like seabream and groupers, all of which go to China. “They pay the government a pittance for the right to fish,” Failler said. “The locals now complain they aren’t catching anything anymore.”

in northwest Africa, the Chinese built around 20 fishmeal plants to process sardinella, a once-abundant and highly nutritious mackerel-sized fish, into feed for aquaculture and poultry. That industry has created a similar situation as in North Korea: During the winter dry season, smoked sardinella constituted the main source of affordable protein for the region, one of the poorest in the world. In Gambia, Chinese companies operate three fishmeal plants built five years ago and suck up so much sardinella that the local supply is reduced to a trickle. “It’s devastating,” said Mustapha Manneh, a Gambian journalist. “Gambians depend on this fish for their daily meal.” In Kartong, where he lives, he says the price has risen five-fold. Further inland in Koina, where the country reaches into the arid Sahel region, sardinella prices have risen tenfold. Fishing in the Gambia river instead can’t compensate for the loss of sardinella. “It is dangerous because there are so many hippos,” Manneh said. “The destruction cannot be overemphasized.”

90 percent of fishmeal is made from perfectly edible fish like sardinella

Half the global catch, much of it taken from or near the waters of poor countries, is then turned into fishmeal to grow fish like salmon, which are consumed in rich countries.

China has been paying fishermen to cast their nets around the Paracel Islands since the 1970s and the Spratlys since the 1980s

China is the only country with a strategic fishing fleet. Of the crew on the vessels operating in the South China Sea, Poling said “either they’re fishers paid to go fish somewhere, and that’s the only reason they do it, or they are officially in the militia, which means they never fish—they just use fishing boats to monitor other fleets, run supplies, or ram other boats.” Pauly, the fisheries scientist, said that “no one else does this except in war.”

There, the Chinese not only make up 40 percent of the foreign fleet, but have also drawn attention with the high number of dead crew members they have been reported to bring in—about one a month. “Conditions on their boats are horrible, some of the worst in the world,” Schvartzman said. “Sometimes they dump the bodies at sea, but usually they don’t because the crew would rebel.”

At the World Trade Organization, talks are underway to reduce fishing subsidies, with an agreement due by the end of the year

Economic power, location, and access to resources determine how communities can respond to climate impacts. But these factors are shaped by existing global injustices: the history of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism that enriched some countries at the expense of others. Global warming has exacerbated these inequalities, and the climate crisis will lead to new divisions between those who can mitigate its impact and those who cannot.

The climate crisis is the result of the relentless pursuit of private interests by both multinational corporations and powerful countries: Fossil fuel companies seek profit, governments seek energy security, and private investors seek financial security. These pursuits have contributed to the campaigns of climate denialism that have slowed the international response to climate crisis, and that continue to fuel resource and land grabbing in many parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

when short-term shareholder value faces off against the public good—and it often does—the former tends to win out. This mismatch of incentives is itself a fundamental cause of the climate crisis

to mitigate climate change effectively and fairly, the international community needs to broadly redistribute funds across states to respond to inequalities in resilience capacity and the unjust system underpinning them

When refugee flows from non-European countries increased in the second half of the 20th century, many Western powers shifted policy. While some refugees were accepted and resettled, many others were warehoused, detained, or subject to refoulement—forcible return—in violation of the U.N. Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has so far refused to grant refugee status—and the protection that comes with it—to the 21.5 million people fleeing their homes as a result of sudden onset weather hazards every year, instead designating them as “environmental migrants.”

climate reparations are better understood as a systemic approach to redistributing resources and changing policies and institutions that have perpetuated harm—rather than a discrete exchange of money or of apologies for past wrongdoing

two distinct but interconnected issues: climate change mitigation, which would aim to minimize displacement; and just climate migration policy, which would respond to the displacement that governments have failed to prevent

The continuation of this status quo will make climate colonialism a near certainty, especially considering recent responses to migration in Europe, Australia, and the United States. Rich Western countries have already responded punitively to migration, holding thousands of migrants in detention centers under horrific conditions and responding with indifference or violence to attempted suicides and protests by the incarcerated for better treatment. Since 2015, European countries have reacted aggressively to the plight of asylum seekers; there is no indication that their response to climate refugees would be any more humane.

A reparatory approach to the climate crisis would require an overhaul of the existing international refugee regime. With this approach, the international community would reject the framing of refugee policy as rescue and rethink the framework that allows states to confine refugees in camps with international approval

In the context of the climate crisis, the West is responsible for more than secondary harms experienced within the international refugee regime. A reparatory approach seeks to understand which harms were committed and how through structural change, those harms can be addressed. A historically informed response to climate migration would force Western states to grapple with their role in creating the climate crisis and rendering parts of the world uninhabitable.

A failure to admit more refugees will accelerate the worst political effects of the climate crisis: fueling the transition of eco-fascism from fringe extremism to ruling ideology. The recognition of rights to movement and resettlement, and a steady liberalization of rich-country border policies fit under a reparatory framework, especially when paired with more sensible mitigation policies. However extreme this renegotiation of state sovereignty and citizenship may seem, it’s nowhere near as extreme as the logical conclusion of the status quo’s violent alternative: mass famine, region-scale armed conflict, and widespread displacement.

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

“any intergroup order must be defined by rules of group membership and … political authority.”

the issue is not the United States’ preference for a “rules-based” order and China’s alleged lack of interest in it; rather, the issue is who will determine which rules pertain where

The United States (generally) prefers a multilateral system (albeit one with special privileges for some states, especially itself) that is at least somewhat mindful of individual rights and certain core liberal values (democratic rule, individual freedom, rule of law, market-based economies, and so on).

the United States also likes many existing institutions (the IMF, NATO, the World Bank, the reserve role of the dollar, to name a few) because they give the United States greater influence.

China favors a more Westphalian conception of order, one where state sovereignty and noninterference are paramount and liberal notions of individual rights are downplayed if not entirely dismissed. This vision is no less “rules-based” than the United States’, insofar as it draws on parts of the United Nations charter, and it would not preclude many current forms of international cooperation, including extensive trade, investment, collaboration on vital transnational issues such as climate change. China is also a vocal defender of multilateralism, even if its actual behavior sometimes violates existing multilateral norms

International orders inevitably reflect the underlying balance of power, and China’s rise means that its ability to shape some of the rules (or to refuse to go along with rules that it rejects) will be considerable

what U.S. allies really want is for the United States to take its oft-repeated commitment to a “rules-based” order more seriously.

China’s emergence (and, to a much lesser extent, Russia’s regional sway) gives other countries more options than they had during the unipolar era

Autocratic nationalists in some countries may prefer China’s explicit rejection of liberal values and ideas about sovereignty, but Beijing’s increasingly bellicose behavior and its willingness to punish others for even minor transgressions has sparked growing concerns about what a more China-centric order might be like.

Americans may exaggerate the benevolent nature of U.S. hegemony, but its geographic distance from others and relatively benign intentions made its position of primacy more acceptable to many other states than the overall distribution of power might suggest.

even like-minded allies who welcome U.S. leadership want it to be exercised more judiciously. It’s not U.S. hegemony per se that bothers them; it is the excessive exploitation of hegemonic privilege

The United States and China are going to have a great deal of influence over the rules that emerge either globally or within whatever partial orders each might lead. But to gain others’ compliance, they will still have to give other states at least some of what they want, too.

Merely showing up at major global forums, treating other participants with respect, and showing a degree of empathy for others’ concerns are going to play well. If Beijing remains committed to its self-defeating “wolf warrior diplomacy,” a U.S. charm offensive will be even more effective.

If Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s loftiest ambitions are realized and China eventually occupies the commanding economic heights of the 21st century, it still won’t be able to take over the world. But such a position will give it a great deal of influence over the rules of the international system, because other states will be less willing to defy it openly and forced to adapt some of their practices to conform to Chinese preferences

Undertaking the reforms that will be needed to retain the necessary economic strength would be good for the United States in any case

Several recent developments make Antarctica an urgent geostrategic concern. First, rapidly worsening climate change—scientists in 2015 noted a record-high temperature of 63.5°F—has led to a reduction in the continent’s ice mass. As a result, it is becoming increasingly feasible to reach resources beneath the cold surface

pressure from an increasingly heterogeneous group of signatories to further open up governance—resulting in part from regulatory gaps in the current ATS infrastructure—will likely threaten the ATS’s integrity

unresolved sovereignty questions may enable increasingly aggressive behavior by major powers such as China

China’s demonstrated Arctic strategy can serve as a road map for policymakers to extrapolate its potential Antarctic agenda. The latter may be a generation behind the former

Exploitation of Antarctic resources will probably become inevitable as domestic needs grow, turmoil in the Middle East continues and geopolitical competition drives incentives for diversification.

Beijing views environmental regulation in the polar regions as a “gambit to control territory.”

China will almost certainly seek to increase influence in the ATS on a bilateral basis with key players

In the Arctic, Beijing has proclaimed itself a “near-Arctic state” and in 2013 gained observer status on the Arctic Council, allowing it to help formulate policy. China has also used actors at home (scientific institutions, tourist agencies, media, cultural initiatives and bloggers) to bolster its polar connection. Brady notes that Beijing has already begun crafting a narrative around Antarctica based on five key frames: past exclusion from science and governance, a treasure chest of mineral resources, a global commons, a barometer of climate change, and “a zone for China’s emergence as a global power.”

While seven nations claim territory in Antarctica, none has been legally recognized

China will likely use informal mechanisms to gain a foothold on the continent. For example, the country has increased place naming, permanent bases and research funding. Beijing will likely also continue to increase domestic presence in and awareness of the region, laying the groundwork for possible territorial claims.

The United States stands woefully unprepared to compete in Antarctica with just three (aging) stations, a single failing icebreaker, a lack of capital investment and dated communication technology

The ATS does not have a clear mechanism by which parties can punish violators. Instead, the United States and its allies should publicly broadcast infractions and pursue sanctions through other international forums like the United Nations

Research shows that U.S. companies have reduced their emissions and pollution at home by offshoring manufacturing to poorer nations with looser regulations. In the already stifling heat in places like India and Bangladesh, that offshored pollution can become more deadly. American consumption has also created environmental crises abroad. The U.S. is responsible for more plastic pollution than any other country, which can harm marine ecosystems already under stress due to hotter waters and ocean acidification.

the U.S. should recognize its role in global destabilization and grant people protections within its borders

Communities within U.S. borders have also been exploited, from California to Appalachia to the South. This is the wealthiest nation in the world, and the climate crisis is the most urgent threat facing us. There’s no reason to choose between transformative national and international action. We need both.

There was a modestly attended rally outside the city’s Labor Temple, where Nichols and I talked with a shirtless member of the Santa Cruz chapter of the Lesbian Avengers who said, “When we got here, the Steelworkers weren’t very queer-friendly. As the week wore on, they got more comfortable with us. My nipples stand in solidarity with the Steelworkers and Teamsters and all the laboring people!” A locked-out Kaiser Aluminum worker standing near her said: “A year ago I thought a redwood deck was the most beautiful thing in the world. Now I understand the importance of sustainability. I guess I’m an environmentalist now.” There’s nothing like common struggle to forge alliances among the most apparently unlikely people.

The Seattle-era left was heavy with philanthropists and the NGOs they funded. Critiques of capitalism were largely over size and style, never critiques of capitalism as a social system. “Globalization” was identified as the major problem, a word that always sounded like a euphemism for capitalism and imperialism, but those concepts were shunned as hopelessly antique. If you pointed out the euphemizing, you were red-baited.

Some of the spirit of Seattle animated the Occupy movement — the same aversion to structure, hierarchy, and agenda, the same belief that taking up public space could lead to some kind of durable social transformation. But as marvelous as it was in many ways, it couldn’t.

On a website put together by a group of DAN activists to memorialize the Seattle events, there’s a page listing the moment’s heirs: the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Movement for Black Lives, the migrant justice movement, struggles for gender self-determination, against the prison-industrial complex. All these are thoroughly admirable and worthy of support (though, not surprisingly, there’s no mention of the revival of socialism). But the whole approach seems a holdover from the days of hot-linked nodes and movements of movements.

As rich countries have been allowed to maintain their level of agricultural subsidies – which are mostly handed out to large producers, not family farms – developing countries have not been allowed under WTO rules to subsidise food production for domestic consumption to guarantee food security, nor to protect their farmers from unfair dumping.

subsidies for the environmentally damaging production of oil and gas remain undisciplined, while countries have successfully sued each other in the WTO for directing subsidies towards greener fuels, especially if they try to create jobs at the same time.

The environment has suffered as countries use environmental exploitation as a comparative advantage, and trade is responsible for a growing percentage of the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

supporters of the WTO were able to get developing countries to agree to a new round of trade talks only by claiming it would be a “development” round – ie, one that put the needs of developing countries at its heart.  Since then, unfortunately, developed countries have never delivered on their promises to address the constraints that bad WTO rules put on development

most developing countries that have gained from trade have done so by exporting to China, whose growth is usually attributed to its divergences from the WTO model. 

At a time when most conversations regarding Big Tech are around the need for stronger antitrust and tax enforcement, and how their model of surveillance capitalism should not be allowed to shape the contours of our media, democracy, human rights, education and social relationships – or even how to break them up – they are working through the WTO, without public debate, to gain a new constitution that will consolidate their power and profits.

the problem with the dispute system is that it adjudicates according to a set of rules guided by corporate interests

The crisis is that people around the world have suffered through nearly 25 years of a damaging pro-corporate trade model, encapsulated by the WTO, and the domestic policies of austerity that have led to uprisings on four continents, mass migrations, and the election of right-wing governments in many countries.

We all need a global economy that facilitates decent jobs, access to affordable medicines, healthy food, and a thriving environment. Nearly all governments agreed to this mandate through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Agenda 2030 in 2015. The rules of the global economy should be shaped around ensuring that trade can help achieve these goals, but at the minimum, it should not constrain governments from doing so.

The solution to the current conflicts on trade policy is not a false nationalism that nonetheless expands corporate control, nor a defence of the current failed corporate system. We need a wholly different system than that embodied in the WTO, just as the protesters clamoured for in Seattle 20 years ago. That will require a multilateral vision of ecological stability, shared prosperity, and leadership committed to that vision. Until then, we can expect more crises.