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Adviser says Trump won't rip up Iran deal, signals he may not move embassy | The Times ... - 0 views

www.timesofisrael.com/ignals-he-may-not-move-embassy US USA Israel Palestine israelpalestine MEPP Iran nukes foreignpolicy
shared by Ed Webb on 11 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • adviser to President-elect Donald Trump said the new US leader will “review” the Iran nuclear agreement, but will stop short of ripping up the landmark international pact.
  • signaled that Trump might not move the US Embassy to Jerusalem immediately and indicated he would make negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal a priority right off the bat.
  • appeared to represent a break with some comments made by other Trump advisers and the president-elect himself, and highlighted persisting confusion over what the contours of a Trump administration’s foreign policy may look like
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  • “He will take the agreement, review it, send it to Congress, demand from the Iranians to restore a few issues or change a few issues, and there will be a discussion,” Phares added. “It could be a tense discussion but the agreement as is right now — $750 billion to the Iranian regime without receiving much in return and increasing intervention in four countries — that is not going to be accepted by the Trump administration.”
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 11 Nov 16
       
      Note that it is a multilateral deal, so five other powers would also have to agree, as well as Iran itself.
  • State Department spokesman Mark Toner warned that nothing was stopping Trump from tearing up the agreement, rebuffing comments from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani that the pact was enshrined by the United Nations Security Council and could therefore not be canceled by one party
  • Toner said if Trump pulls out of the agreement, it could fall apart and lead to Iran restarting work toward a bomb
  • Phares also told the BBC that while Trump was committed to moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as other presidential candidates have vowed, he would not do so unilaterally. “Many presidents of the United States have committed to do that, and he said as well that he will do that, but he will do it under consensus,”
  • Phares did not elaborate on what consensus would be sought for such a move, which would break with decades of precedent and put Washington at odds with nearly all United Nations member states.
  • Earlier Thursday, Trump Israel adviser Jason Dov Greenblatt told Israel’s Army Radio that the president-elect would make good on his promise. “I think if he said it, he’s going to do it,” Greenblatt said. “He is different for Israel than any recent president there has been, and I think he’s a man who keeps his word.
  • Phares also indicated efforts for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal would be a top agenda item for Trump, casting doubt on a claim by Greenblatt that Trump would not necessarily prioritize trying to push the Israelis and Palestinians into peace negotiations.
  • “He will make it a priority if the Israelis and Palestinians want to make it a priority,” Greenblatt said. “He’s not going to force peace upon them, it will have to come from them.”
  • The gap in signals coming out of Trump’s camp is consistent with frustration some have pointed to in trying to demystify what Trump’s foreign policy will be.
  • Tzachi Hanegbi, a minister-without-portfolio who is a close confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Thursday that the Iran nuclear deal and construction over the Green Line — the two most contentious topics between the Obama administration and Netanyahu — will no longer be a source of tension between Israel and the United States under a Trump presidency.
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Senior Saudi prince says Trump shouldn't scrap Iran deal | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...ction-saudi-iran-idUSKBN1361SS KSA Saudi Iran US USA politics election foreignpolicy nukes proliferation
shared by Ed Webb on 11 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • U.S. President-elect Donald Trump should not scrap a nuclear deal between Iran and world powers but should take the nation to task for its "destabilizing activities" in the Middle East, said a former senior Saudi official.
  • "I don't think he should scrap it. It's been worked on for many years and the general consensus in the world, not just the United States, is that it has achieved an objective, which is a 15-year hiatus in the program that Iran embarked on to develop nuclear weapons," Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and ex-ambassador to Washington and London said on Thursday.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 11 Nov 16
       
      Turki is a very powerful member of the Saudi royal family and widely listened to on security issues
  • would like to see if the deal could become a "stepping stone" to a more permanent program "to prevent proliferation through the establishment of a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East."
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 11 Nov 16
       
      A long-term goal on which Saudi and Egypt agree, and they don't agree on much. Of course, a major target of this would be Israel.
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  • His views are described by insiders as often reflecting those of the kingdom's top princes and as influential in Riyadh foreign policy circles.
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Toblerone triangle change upsets fans - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/uk-37904703 chocolate Britain UK Brexit trade commodities socialmedia
shared by Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16
     
    The cost of some key commodities globally has risen, including cocoa. The weak Pound no doubt makes them even more expensive, although the specifics are not clear and have not been made so by the company. Note that a US company selling a Swiss brand in the UK provoked this social media storm: globalization in action.
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European Journal of International Relations-2014-Webber-341-65.pdf.pdf - 0 views

diigo.com/091wje EU Brexit Germany Europe IR politics regionalism analysis
shared by Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • the future of European integration and the European Union is more contingent than most integration theories allow
  • the role of domestic politics
  • he extent to which Europe’s uniquely high level of political integration depends on the engagement and support of the region’s economically most powerful ‘semi-hegemonic’ state, Germany
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  • The European Union’s current crisis is symptomatic of a broader crisis or malaise of regional and international multilateralism
  • he EU has proved an extraordinarily robust and crisis-resistant organization. It survived: the collapse of the European Defence Community project in 1954; France’s rejection of two British bids for accession in the 1960s; the empty-chair crisis precipitated by De Gaulle in 1965; the crisis concerning the UK’s contribution to the EU budget in the first half of the 1980s; the semi-destruction of the European Monetary System in 1992–1993; and the defeat of several proposed new treaties in referenda in Denmark, Ireland, France and the Netherlands since the end of the Cold War
  • s serious as the EU’s crisis seemed to be in 2012, there was no unequivocal empirical evidence that the integration process had begun to unwind and the EU to disintegrate. Still no member state had ever left the EU, while several states were queuing to join it. Still no issue-area into which the EU’s competence had previ-ously been extended had been repatriated to the member states. There had still not been any observable formal or actual diminution of the EU’s decision-making and implemen-tation capacities
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16
       
      How do things look from the vantage point of 2016?
  • far more regional organizations have failed, in the sense that they collapsed, than succeeded
  • to ask to what extent there has been any change in the variables that have fuelled the integration process in the pas
  • growing distrust among Europe’s big powers over ‘hard’ security issues is not at the root of Europe’s current crisis
  • From a realist perspective à la Mearsheimer, European disintegration would hence most probably result from an American military withdrawal from Europe and a collapse of NATO
  • uncertainty as to the durability or reliability of the American com-mitment to European military security has led to more rather than less security and defence cooperation between EU member states
  • Classical intergovernmentalism focuses our attention on the evolution and degree of convergence of the stances of the French, German and British governments as determi-nants of the future of European integration. Trends in this trilateral relationship in the last two decades do not augur well for the EU’s future. Growing British Euro-scepticism has made Franco-German threats to exclude the UK from the integration process increas-ingly hollow — not because such threats cannot be implemented, but rather because the British government has been increasingly impervious to them
  • The Franco-German ‘tandem’ can still exercise a decisive influence in the EU even after the post-Cold War enlargements from 12 to 27 member states, especially where the two governments form ‘opposing poles’ in the EU around which other member states can coalesce
  • Intergovernmentalism implies that if a fundamental breakdown should occur in Franco-German relations, this would surely lead to European disintegration
  • IR institutionalists argue that such organizations can achieve a high level of durabil-ity or permanence by helping states to overcome collective action problems, carrying out functions that these cannot (notably ‘facilitating the making and keeping of agreements through the provision of information and reductions in transaction costs’), monitoring compliance, reducing uncertainty and stabilizing expectations
  • From an IR institutionalist perspective, the critical questions relating to the EU’s future are thus whether, especially in the enlarged EU, there are sufficiently pervasive common interests linking member states and whether, much as for intergovernmental-ists, the ‘most powerful states’ (Keohane and Nye, 1993: 18) — by which the US is as much meant as the ‘big three’ EU members — continue to support the integration pro-cess
  • From an IR institutionalist as well as an intergovernmentalist perspective, the EU’s future seems likely to ride on the evolution of the Franco-German relationship,
  • While the governments of “sovereign” member-states remain free to tear up treaties and walk away at any time, the constantly increasing costs of exit in the densely integrated European polity have rendered this option virtually unthinkable’
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16
       
      For governments, perhaps. But when PM Cameron could not resolve this debate within his own party, he opted for a referendum he assumed he would win. It turned out to be thinkable for 52% of those who voted.
  • Whilst historical-institutionalist scholars generally focus on constraints and the ‘“stickiness” of historically evolved insti-tutional arrangements’ and provide ‘explanations of continuity rather than change’, they nonetheless recognize that critical junctures or crises can bring about ‘relatively abrupt institutional change’
  • ‘punctuated equilibrium’
  • ‘As transnational exchange rises, so does the societal demand for supranational rules and organizational capacity to regulate’
  • growing economic interdependence seems increasingly to fore-close other, unilateral policy options and to compel member governments to forge or acquiesce in closer integration
  • Most federations fail (Lemco, quoted in Kelemen, 2007: 53). Multinational federa-tions, of which the EU is certainly an example, may be more prone to failure than others (Kelemen, 2007: 61)
  • it is still not evident that European-level political party groups can ‘discipline’ or ‘moderate’ the positions taken by their national member parties on EU issues
  • R institutionalism and, more so, clas-sical intergovernmentalism are more circumspect about the EU’s future. Viewed from these perspectives, European integration is a more contingent phenomenon, resting on the scope of member states’ common interests, which has arguably narrowed following successive waves of enlargement, and/or on the extent of hegemonic leadership or con-vergence of interests among the EU’s three big powers. The latter has diminished in as far as the UK has proved hostile to closer integration on most issues, leaving the EU’s fate in these perspectives increasingly in the hands of the Franco-German duo
  • Contrasting post-2000 EU politics with that of the preceding half-century, I sug-gest that European integration is threatened by sharply rising hostility towards the EU in the domestic politics of the member states. Contrasting Europe with other regions, I argue that a ‘semi-hegemonic’, pro-integrationist Germany accounts for the uniquely high level of political integration in Europe, but that there is a significant and growing risk that Germany’s commitment to the European ‘project’ will wane in future
  • Hegemonic stability theory derives the indispensability of hegemonic leadership for economic openness and stability from public-goods theory, holding that only large states have a material incentive to supply non-excludable ‘collective’ goods rather than to ‘free-ride’. Germany has strong economic and political incentives in the maintenance of a politically and economically stable Europe that its governments have historically seen as being best secured through integration
  • In some member states, notably but not only in the UK, there was of course always significant domestic political opposition to European integra-tion. Nonetheless, in the post-Cold War and post-Maastricht Treaty period and especially during the last decade, hostility towards the EU and closer European integration has arguably transformed the domestic political context of EU decision-making to the point where one could more accurately speak of an ‘unpermissive dissensus’ that severely constrains the room for manoeuvre of member governments on EU issues
  • At the same time as the balance of political power in many member states has tilted sharply towards ‘anti-European’ political forces, the capacity of governments to control the EU agenda in the member states — a prerequisite for the smooth functioning of the processes of negotiation and ratification of EU policies — has been eroded
  • tension between the requirements or logic of domestic politics, on the one hand, and those of the EU (and international financial markets), on the other
  • , Germany has increasingly visibly assumed the role of the Eurozone’s and the EU’s ‘indispensable’ member
  • growing levels of economic exchange and economic interdependence do indeed create pressures on governments to institutionalize their economic ties. However, levels of political integration in East Asia, the Asia-Pacific and North America are not even remotely comparable to those in Europe
  • It is rather the presence, in the form of Germany, of a pro-integrationist regional hegemon that best explains Europe’s comparatively very high level of political integra-tion
  • What has made the EU exceptional in respect of regional political integration is neither an exceptionally high level of economic integration nor the presence of a ‘leading state’ as such, but rather the fact that, compared with other ‘lead-ing’ regional powers, the member state that occupies this role in the EU — Germany — has pursued a much more radical agenda involving the creation of a quasi-federal European state
  • Germany needs good and close relations with other European states to avert the risk of diplomatic isolation and a resurgence of traditional ‘balance-of-power’ politics in the region
  • EU policy choices do not disproportionately reflect German preferences. Compromise and consensus, not a German diktat, are the rules in EU decision-making
  • As a regional paymaster, but hitherto not typically a disproportionately influential rule-maker, Germany was long more a ‘semi-hegemonic’ than ‘normal’ hegemonic power in the EU
  • A Grand Coalition of pro-European Social and Christian Democrats, on the other hand, may, as the experience of other EU member states suggests, spawn the emergence and growth of new national-populist parties and/or, for electoral-political motives, the transformation into Euro-sceptical movements of those established parties that would then be in the opposition
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16
       
      Since this article was written, the Alternativ für Deutschland party, a far-right populist, anti-immigrant, anti-EU, racist party, has made some inroads in local assemblies in Germany. They don't yet appear a major threat at the national level, though.
  • the EU’s future is more contingent
  • the EU is very vulnerable to domestic political backlashes manifested in the rise of national populism in the member states, particularly so long as few citizens in the member states share a strong European identity and there are no strong pan-European political parties that can effectively integrate and mediate their conflicting interests
  • German domestic politics therefore matters more for the EU’s future than that of any other member state
  • n more than 60 years, the European integration process has confronted and survived many crises. But it has never so far had to confront a crisis ‘made in Germany’.
  • The plethora of regional and pluri- or minilateral trade agreements signed across the world over the last decade or so cannot disguise the fact that most regions in the world remain at best only very weakly politically integrated and regionalorganizations therefore cannot be relied upon to institutionalize and secure peaceful cooperation among their members.
  • Is it possible that, as hegemonic stability theory would suggest, the roots of the gathering crisis of interna-tional multilateralism are to be found in the ‘end of the United States’ unipolar moment’ (Layne, 2006) and the arrival at long last of the long-anticipated decline in the capacity as well as willingness of the US to play the role of a stabilizing international hegemon?
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Return to the Commonwealth? UK-Africa trade after Brexit will not be straightforward | ... - 0 views

blogs.lse.ac.uk/...h-uk-africa-trade-after-brexit UK EU Brexit trade economy Africa analysis
shared by Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • while the UK outside the EU may well look to maintain equivalence with existing European trade agreements in Africa, it is unlikely that these will be extended or reformed and the UK will lose the significant influence it once had in shaping EU trade policy towards Africa
  • Upon leaving the EU, the UK will cease to be party to EU trade agreements and third countries will lose any preferential access to the UK market that those agreements currently confer. However, there are political reasons why the UK may seek to preserve the duty and quota free access to the British market that the large majority of African countries currently enjoy.  Although trade with the UK accounts for only a small proportion of total African goods exports (3.6 per cent), any loss of market access would have a significant negative effect on certain industries (for example Kenya’s cut flower producers).  There will therefore be pressure on the UK from African governments and UK-based development organisations to make sure that African countries do not face increased trade barriers.
  • The UK seems unlikely to engage in drawn out negotiations to extend or replace existing EU-Africa trade arrangements given the severe constraints on UK trade negotiating capacity after Brexit – the UK currently has only a handful of the estimated 500–750 experienced negotiators that will be needed for post-Brexit trade talks.
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  • The UK’s trade negotiating efforts will instead be targeted, first, at reaching a satisfactory arrangement with the EU and renegotiating British membership of the World Trade Organisation.  A secondary priority will be to negotiate trade deals with other key markets and partners (for example the US, Canada, India, Brazil and China).
  • The UK will have no say in the EU’s plans to extend the Economic Partnership Agreements, in the EU’s ongoing efforts to promote regional integration in Africa, or in the future of European agricultural subsidies that continue to cause damage to African producers
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Brexit risks unravelling UK's role in the web of trade _ The Exchange.pdf - 0 views

diigo.com/091vud UK EU Brexit trade business economy analysis
shared by Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • thedeficitongoodsandserviceswillhavetoshrink.ThebenignwayfortheadjustmenttocomeaboutwouldbeabigimprovementinUKexports.However,reducedaccesstoimportantexportmarkets,particularlyfortheservicesinwhichtheUKisstrong,wasthebiggestsinglefactorbehindthenear-universalagreementamongeconomiststhatleavingtheEUwillharmtheBritisheconomy
  • Thefirstunbundlingwasdrivenbyfallingtransportationcostsbetweenthe1940sand1980.Itledtogreatlyincreasedtradeinfinalmanufacturedgoodssuchaswashingmachinesandcars.Thesecondunbundlinghasbeendrivenbyreducedcostsofinformationandcommunicationsince1980,andhasledtotherapidgrowthoftradeincomponentsandervices
  • Ifyouhaveanunskilledworkforceandweakinfrastructure,itiseasiertobecomeamanufacturerofballbearingsthanofentiresophisticatedmachinetools,andthenbuildontheexperiencegained.AdamSmith’sprosperitythroughspecialisationandthedivisionoflabourhasbeguntooperateatafarfiner-grainedlevelthanbefore.
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  • UKexporters’abilitytoreducetheirpricesoverseaswillbelimitedbecausetheyimportahighproportionoftheircomponentsandinputs,whichraisestheircosts
  • heUS’sdeficitwithChinaismuchsmallerseenthroughthislensbecauseChinahastoimportcomponents,includingfromtheUS,fortheproductsitexports.Researchersarebeginningtousearecent“valueadded”tradedatabasecreatedbytheWorldTradeOrganisationandtheOrganisationforEconomicCo-operationandDevelopmenttoexplorethiscomplexity
  • Becauseoftheinterconnectednessthroughsupplychains,anyreductionsinexportsofgoodsandservicesintheyearsaheadwillhavewiderramificationsthanisapparentatfirstsight.Thankstothesecondunbundling,theweboftradeconnectingcountriesisintricate,acat’s-cradleofeconomicrelationships.TheBrexitvotethreatenstakingapairofshearstotheparticipationofUKbusinessesinthesechains.Thereismuchatstakeinthenegotiationsahead.Disruptiontothecountry’stradeinthe2020scouldbefar,farmorecostlythantheretreatfromglobalisationacenturyago
  • Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16
     
    Highlighted version of blog post assigned for 170, fa16.
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Why do diplomats use this alien WhatsApp emoji for Vladimir Putin? | Technology | The G... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...tsapp-emoji-for-vladimir-putin UK Britain EU UN diplomacy socialmedia digital communication
shared by Ed Webb on 05 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 05 Nov 16
     
    Diplomacy has changed in some of the details since I used to do it
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China: Soon the most visible victim of deglobalisation - Al Jazeera English - 1 views

www.aljazeera.com/...alisation-161016052547323.html China economy globalization trade investment FDI economics analysis
shared by Ed Webb on 25 Oct 16 - No Cached
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  • China's exports hit an all-time high in December, 2015 and (ignoring season fluctuations) have been declining ever since. China is increasingly turning inward for growth - and having trouble finding it
  • Most other countries export intermediate goods that are just parts and components of the finished goods that consumers actually buy. China more often exports the finished goods
  • both Chinese and global exports are falling
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  • Annual global FDI is down roughly 50 percent from its 2007 peak of just over $3 trillion. It's still much larger than it was in the 1990s or earlier decades, but global FDI has stabilised at roughly the levels of the early 2000s.
  • the roots of today's global economy really go back to 1973, when the United States went off the gold standard and most countries moved from fixed to floating exchange rates. Floating exchange rates meant that the era of managed trade was over. The global economy moved into a new phase driven by market forces. The oil exporting countries of the Gulf were the first to benefit as the market price for oil quadrupled between 1973 and 1974. China came to the party just a few years later. Since then the global economy has become more and more open. After the currency liberalisation of 1973 came a huge increase in international trade and then, in the 1990s, in foreign investment. Both trade and investment peaked in 2007-2008
  • These days China has to compete with India, Southeast Asia, Latin America and even Africa for scarce foreign investment dollars
  • China's export-oriented garment industry employs about 10 million people. These jobs are increasingly threatened as companies move production to lower-cost countries such as Vietnam
  • China has been the most visible beneficiary of the increasing globalisation of the global economy. Soon it may be the most visible victim of deglobalisation
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Turkey's New Maps Are Reclaiming the Ottoman Empire | Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...t-ottoman-borders-iraq-erdogan Turkey Syria Iraq irridentism history geography borders states maps Erdogan foreignpolicy analysis AKP
shared by Ed Webb on 25 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • an alarming burst of Turkish irredentism
  • Erdogan criticized the Treaty of Lausanne, which created the borders of modern Turkey, for leaving the country too small. He spoke of the country’s interest in the fate of Turkish minorities living beyond these borders, as well as its historic claims to the Iraqi city of Mosul, near which Turkey has a small military base. And, alongside news of Turkish jets bombing Kurdish forces in Syria and engaging in mock dogfights with Greek planes over the Aegean Sea, Turkey’s pro-government media have shown a newfound interest in a series of imprecise, even crudely drawn, maps of Turkey with new and improved borders
  • they aren’t maps of the Ottoman Empire, which was substantially larger, or the entire Muslim world or the Turkic world. They are maps of Turkey, just a little bigger
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  • this combination of irredentist cartography and rhetoric nonetheless offers some insight into Turkey’s current foreign and domestic policies and Ankara’s self-image. The maps, in particular, reveal the continued relevance of Turkish nationalism, a long-standing element of the country’s statecraft, now reinvigorated with some revised history and an added dose of religion
  • while countries like Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungary brought disaster on themselves by trying to forcibly rewrite their postwar borders, Turkey — under Ataturk and his successor — wisely resisted this urge
  • Erdogan, by contrast, has given voice to an alternative narrative in which Ataturk’s willingness in the Treaty of Lausanne to abandon territories such as Mosul and the now-Greek islands in the Aegean was not an act of eminent pragmatism but rather a betrayal. The suggestion, against all evidence, is that better statesmen, or perhaps a more patriotic one, could have gotten more.
  • Criticism of Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman foreign policy is now as likely to come from the Arab world as anywhere else
  • Government rhetoric has been quick to invoke the heroism of Turkey’s war of independence in describing the popular resistance to the country’s July 15 coup attempt. And alongside the Ottomans, Erdogan routinely references the Seljuks, a Turkic group that preceded the Ottomans in the Middle East by several centuries, and even found a place for more obscure pre-Islamic Turkic peoples like the Gokturks, Avars, and Karakhanids that first gained fame in Ataturk’s 1930s propaganda
  • The Sultan Murad Brigade, comprising predominantly ethnic Turkmens, has been one of Ankara’s military assets inside Syria against both Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the PKK. Meanwhile, the Turkmen population living around Mosul and its surrounding area has been a concern and an asset for Ankara in Iraq. Turkish special forces have worked with the Iraqi Turkmen Front since at least 2003 in order to expand Turkish influence and counter the PKK in northern Iraq.
  • Turkish minorities in northern Greece and Cyprus have played a similar role. That is, their well-being has been a subject of genuine concern for Turkish nationalists but also a potential point of leverage with Athens to be used as needed
  • Erdogan has also emphasized a new element to Turkey’s communitarian foreign-policy agenda: Sunni sectarianism
  • Erdogan’s new sectarianism is evident in Mosul, where Turkey has warned of the risks to Sunnis should Shiite militias take control of the city. But the policy’s influence is clearest in Syria, where Turkey has been supporting Sunni rebels aiming to topple the Assad regime (including those now struggling to hold the city of Aleppo). In both Iraq and Syria, however, Turkey’s sectarianism has not been allowed to trump pragmatism. Ankara has been keen to maintain a mutually beneficial economic relationship with Iran despite backing opposite sides in Syria and in the past year has also expressed its willingness to make peace with Assad if circumstances require it.
  • the points at which Turkey has proved susceptible to irredentism in the past have all come at moments of change and uncertainty similar to what the Middle East is experiencing today. In 1939, Ankara annexed the province of Hatay, then under French control, by taking advantage of the crisis in Europe on the eve of World War II
  • Ankara is all too aware of the fact that the power to do so remains the only rationale for foreign intervention that matters
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Is this the end of the International Criminal Court? - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...e-international-criminal-court ICC Africa analysis
shared by Ed Webb on 21 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 21 Oct 16
     
    Important test for ICC: can it survive these challenges?
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How Many Guns Did the U.S. Lose Track of in Iraq and Afghanistan? Hundreds of Thousands... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tan-hundreds-of-thousands.html US USA arms weapons proliferation Iraq Syria Afghanistan
shared by Ed Webb on 21 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • In all, Overton found, the Pentagon provided more than 1.45 million firearms to various security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, including more than 978,000 assault rifles, 266,000 pistols and almost 112,000 machine guns. These transfers formed a collage of firearms of mixed vintage and type: Kalashnikov assault rifles left over from the Cold War; recently manufactured NATO-standard M16s and M4s from American factories; machine guns of Russian and Western lineage; and sniper rifles, shotguns and pistols of varied provenance and caliber, including a large order of Glock semiautomatic pistols, a type of weapon also regularly offered for sale online in Iraq. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Many of the recipients of these weapons became brave and important battlefield allies. But many more did not. Taken together, the weapons were part of a vast and sometimes minimally supervised flow of arms from a superpower to armies and militias often compromised by poor training, desertion, corruption and patterns of human rights abuses. Knowing what we know about many of these forces, it would have been remarkable for them to retain custody of many of their weapons. It is not surprising that they did not.
  • the Pentagon said it has records for fewer than half the number of firearms in the researchers’ count — about 700,000 in all
  • Overton’s analysis also does not account for many weapons issued by the American military to local forces by other means, including the reissue of captured weapons, which was a common and largely undocumented practice.
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  • One point is inarguable: Many of these weapons did not remain long in government possession after arriving in their respective countries. In one of many examples, a 2007 Government Accountability Office report found that 110,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and 80,000 pistols bought by the United States for Iraq’s security forces could not be accounted for — more than one firearm for every member of the entire American military force in Iraq at any time during the war. Those documented lapses of accountability were before entire Iraqi divisions simply vanished from the battlefield, as four of them did after the Islamic State seized Mosul and Tikrit in 2014, according to a 2015 Army budget request to buy more firearms for the Iraqi forces to replace what was lost.
  • According to its tally, the American military issued contracts potentially worth more than $40 billion for firearms, accessories and ammunition since Sept. 11, including improvements to the ammunition plants required to keep the cartridge production going. Most of these planned expenditures were for American forces, and the particulars tell the story of two wars that did not go as pitched. More than $4 billion worth of contracts was issued for small arms, including pistols, machines guns, assault rifles and sniper rifles, and more than $11 billion worth was issued for associated equipment, from spare machine-gun barrels to sniper-rifle scopes, according to Overton’s count. A much larger amount — nearly $25 billion — was issued for ammunition or upgrades to ammunition plants to keep those firearms supplied. That last figure aligns with what most any veteran of ground combat in Iraq and Afghanistan could tell you — American troops have been involved in a dizzying number of gunfights since 2001, burning through mountains of ammunition along the way.
  • In April, after being approached by The New York Times and reviewing data from Armament Research Services, a private arms-investigation consultancy, Facebook closed many pages in the Middle East that were serving as busy arms bazaars, including pages in Syria and Iraq on which firearms with Pentagon origins accounted for a large fraction of the visible trade
  • many new arms-trading Facebook pages have since cropped up, including, according to their own descriptions, virtual markets operating from Baghdad and Karbala
  • The American arming of Syrian rebels, by both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department, has also been troubled by questions of accountability and outright theft in a war where the battlefield is thick with jihadists aligned with Al Qaeda or fighting under the banner of the Islamic State.
  • The data show large purchases of heavy-machine guns and barrels. This is a wink at the shift in many American units from being foot-mobile to vehicular, as grunts buttoned up within armored trucks and needed turret-mounted firepower to defend themselves — a matériel adaptation forced by ambushes and improvised bombs, the cheaply made weapons that wearied the most expensive military in the world.
  • a startlingly risky aspect of the Pentagon’s arming of local forces with infantry arms: the wide distribution of anti-armor weapons, including RPG-7s, commonly called rocket-propelled grenades, and recoilless weapons, including the SPG-9. Each of these systems fires high-explosive (and often armor-piercing) projectiles, and each was commonly used by insurgents in attacks. After the opening weeks of each war, the only armor on either battlefield was American or associated with allied and local government units, which made the Pentagon’s practice of providing anti-armor weapons to Afghan and Iraqi security forces puzzling. Why would they need anti-armor weapons when they had no armor to fight? All the while rockets were somehow mysteriously being fired at American convoys and patrols in each war.
  • a portrait of the Pentagon’s bungling the already-awkward role it chose for itself — that of state-building arms dealer, a role that routinely led to missions in clear opposition to each other. While fighting two rapidly evolving wars, the American military tried to create and bolster new democracies, governments and political classes; recruit, train and equip security and intelligence forces on short schedule and at outsize scale; repair and secure transportation infrastructure; encourage the spread or restoration of the legal industry and public services; and leave behind something more palatable and sturdy than rule by thugs.
  • The procession of arms purchases and handouts has continued to this day, with others involved, including Iran to its allies in Iraq and various donors to Kurdish fighters. In March, Russia announced that it had given 10,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles to Afghanistan, already one of the most Kalashnikov-saturated places on earth. If an analysis from the United States’ Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or Sigar, is to be believed, Afghanistan did not even need them. In 2014 the inspector general reported that after the United States decided to replace the Afghan Army’s Kalashnikovs with NATO-standard weapons (a boon for the rifles’ manufacturer with a much less obvious value for an already amply armed Afghan force), the Afghan Army ended up with a surplus of more than 83,000 Kalashnikovs. The United States never tried to recover the excess it had created, giving the inspector general’s office grounds for long-term worry. “Without confidence in the Afghan government’s ability to account for or properly dispose of these weapons,” it noted, “Sigar is concerned that they could be obtained by insurgents and pose additional risks to civilians.” Write A Comment
  • What to do? If past is precedent, given enough time one of the United States’ solutions will be, once again, to ship in more guns.
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Donald Trump Is the First Demagogue of the Anthropocene - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...504134 climate environment politics conflict EU US USA migration refugees analysis opinion
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  • Jürgen Scheffran, a professor of geography at the University of Hamburg, has been investigating whether climate change makes armed conflict more likely for more than a decade. In 2012, he worked on a team that analyzed all 27 empirical studies investigating the link between war and climate change.“Sixteen found a significant link between climate and conflict, six did not find a link, and five found an ambiguous relationship,” he told me. He described these numbers as inconclusive. Trying to prove that climate change is linked to war, he said, would be like trying to prove that smoking causes cancer with only one available case study.
  • there is only one world, and not a million worlds, in which the temperature is rising, and you cannot associate a single event—like a single hurricane or a single conflict—to climate change. It’s a statistical problem, and we don’t have enough data yet
  • 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
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  • 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.)
  • a drought-and-flood-fueled armed conflict near the Mediterranean Basin could send people toward Western Europe in the hundreds of millions
  • “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
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