InternationalRelations

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.

there is a mountain of evidence—including the official 9/11 Commission Report—showing that what drove anti-American extremism was opposition to U.S. policy

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

USAID and other international development programs could also channel still more money to mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage financing. Ambitiously, the authors of the fair share pledge suggest the country invest up to $3 trillion into a debt relief and green recovery package to help poor countries with limited means adhere to the Paris Agreement’s goals. That should all come without strings attached since it should help relieve the burdens of debt, not create more of it

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. 

by taking up military history, Gladwell’s half-witted didacticism threatens to convince millions of people that the only solution to American butchery is to continue shelling out for sharper and larger knives

Although the phrase “Bomber Mafia” traditionally refers to the pre-World War II staff and graduates of the Air Corps Tactical School, Gladwell’s book expands the term to include both kooky tinkerers and buttoned-down military men. Wild, far-seeing mavericks, they understood that the possibilities of air power had only just been breached. They were also, as Gladwell insists at various points, typical Gladwellian protagonists: secluded oddballs whose technical zealotry and shared mission gave them a sense of community that propelled them beyond any station they could have achieved on their own.

Gladwell’s narrative is transmitted as seamlessly as the Wall Street or Silicon Valley koans that appear atop LinkedIn profiles, Clubhouse accounts, and Substack missives.

Gladwell has built a career out of making banality seem fresh

In 1968, he would join forces with segregationist George Wallace as the vice-presidential candidate on his “American Independent Party” ticket, a fact literally relegated to a footnote in Gladwell’s book. This kind of omission is par for the course in The Bomber Mafia. While Gladwell constantly reminds the reader that the air force leadership was trying to wage more effective wars so as to end all wars, he cannot help but shove under the rug that which is inconvenient

Drawing a false distinction between the Bomber Mafia and the British and American military leaders who preceded them allows Gladwell to make the case that a few committed brainiacs developed a humane, “tactical” kind of air power that has built the security of the world we live in today.

“What actually happened?” Gladwell asks of the Blitz. “Not that much! The panic never came,” he answers, before favorably referring to an unnamed “British government film from 1940,” which is in actuality the Academy Award-nominated propaganda short London Can Take It!, now understood to be emblematic of how the myth of the stoic Brit was manufactured.

Gladwell goes to great pains to portray Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay as merely George Patton-like: a prima donna tactician with some masculinity issues. In reality, LeMay bears a closer resemblance to another iconic George C. Scott performance, one that LeMay directly inspired: Dr. Strangelove’s General Buck Turgidson, who at every turn attempts to force World War III and, at the movie’s close, when global annihilation awaits, soberly warns of a “mineshaft gap” between the United States and the Commies. That, as Gladwell might phrase it, was the “real” Curtis LeMay: a violent reactionary who was never killed or tried because he had the luck to wear the brass of the correct country on his uniform. “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal,” LeMay once told an Air Force cadet. “Fortunately, we were on the winning side.”

Why would Malcolm Gladwell, who seems to admire LeMay so much, talk at such great length about the lethality of LeMay’s Japanese firebombing? The answer lies in what this story leaves out. Mentioned only glancingly in Gladwell’s story are the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The omission allows for a stupid and classically Gladwell argument: that indiscriminate firebombing brought a swift end to the war, and its attendant philosophical innovations continue to envelop us in a blanket of security that has not been adequately appreciated

While LeMay’s 1945 firebombing campaign was certainly excessive—and represented the same base indifference to human life that got Nazis strung up at Nuremberg—it did not end the war. The Japanese were not solely holding out because their military men were fanatical in ways that the Americans weren’t, as Gladwell seems to suggest, citing Conrad Crane, an Army staff historian and hagiographer of LeMay’s[1]; they were holding out because they wanted better terms of surrender—terms they had the prospect of negotiating with the Soviet Union. The United States, having already developed an atomic weapon—and having made the Soviet Union aware of it—decided to drop it as it became clear the Soviet Union was readying to invade Japan. On August 6, the United States dropped a bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, and mere hours after the Soviet Union formally declared war on the morning of August 9, the Americans dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. An estimated 210,000 people were killed, the majority of them on the days of the bombings. It was the detonation of these bombs that forced the end of the war. The Japanese unconditional surrender to the Americans was announced on August 15 and formalized on the deck of the USS Missouri on September 2. As historians like Martin Sherwin and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa have pointed out, by dropping the bombs, the Truman administration had kept the Communist threat out of Japan. Imperial Japan was staunchly anticommunist, and under American post-war dominion, the country would remain that way. But Gladwell is unequipped to supply the necessary geopolitical context that could meaningfully explain why the American government would force an unconditional surrender when the possibility of negotiation remained totally live.

as is typical with Gladwell’s books and with many historical podcasts, interrogation of the actual historical record and the genuine moral dilemmas it poses—not the low-stakes bait that he trots out as an MBA case study in War—is subordinated to fluffy bullshit and biographical color

This is truly a lesson for the McKinsey set and passive-income crowd for whom The Bomber Mafia is intended: doing bad things is fine, so long as you privately feel bad about it.

The British advocacy group Action on Armed Violence just this month estimated that between 2016 and 2020 in Afghanistan, there were more than 2,100 civilians killed and 1,800 injured by air strikes; 37 percent of those killed were children.

Forest loss and species extinctions have only increased as industrial agriculture has scaled up in Brazil. Farmers are burning unprecedented amounts of forest to expand their operations in pursuit of an industrial model. In August 2019, smoke blocked the sun in São Paulo, Brazil, 2,000 miles away from the fires in the state of Amazonas.

As agriculture has industrialized in India, the use of pesticides and fertilizers has risen as well. Although it has become more difficult to breathe the air in Brazil, it has become harder to find clean freshwater in India, where pesticide contamination is rising. There, the costs of the industrial agriculture model are plainly ecological and human: Unable to drink the water or pay back the loans they took out to finance their transition to industrial farming, an alarming number of Indian farmers are drinking pesticides instead. Almost a quarter-million Indian farmers have died by suicide since 2000, and 10,281 farmers and farm laborers killed themselves in 2019 alone.

we are peering into an abyss of systemic socioecological collapse because every effort has been made to use industrialization to break through all known ecological and human limitations to scaling agriculture.

nutrient runoff from industrial agriculture in the U.S. Midwest has created an annual dead zone—a hypoxic area low in or devoid of oxygen—that is the size of Massachusetts

Rural communities are experiencing rising suicide rates, especially among young people, along with increases in “deaths of despair” from alcohol and drugs—an expanding human dead zone

Industrialized agriculture has been a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II era. Under the guise of development for all and the mantra of “feed the world,” the United States has used policy to dump surplus grain in low-income countries—undermining markets for smallholder farmers—and cultivate foreign markets as importers of high-input, industrial agriculture technologies to scale agriculture. At home, federal policy since the 1970s has explicitly promoted scaling industrial agriculture through the “get big or get out” imperative.

The U.S. Corn Belt, which spans the region from Ohio to Nebraska, produces 75 percent of the country’s corn, but around 35 percent of the region has completely lost its topsoil. Industrial agriculture has been pursued with special zeal in Iowa, where there are 25 million hogs and 3 million people. There, water from the Raccoon River enters the state capital of Des Moines—home to 550,000 people—with nitrates, phosphorus, and bacteria that have exceeded federal safe water drinking standards.

Soil and water-conserving perennial varieties of rice, wheat, legumes, and other food-grain crops—which are now being developed—could serve as components of diverse, perennial, multispecies communities of food crops that replicate how nature functions

smaller, more diverse farm operations

It is time to scale down agriculture and enhance our resilience to coming disruptions

Gyalaphug is now one of three new villages (two already occupied, one under construction), 66 miles of new roads, a small hydropower station, two Communist Party administrative centers, a communications base, a disaster relief warehouse, five military or police outposts, and what are believed to be a major signals tower, a satellite receiving station, a military base, and up to six security sites and outposts that China has constructed in what it says are parts of Lhodrak in the TAR but which in fact are in the far north of Bhutan

The settlement of an entire area within another country goes far beyond the forward patrolling and occasional road-building that led to war with India in 1962, military clashes in 1967 and 1987, and the deaths of 24 Chinese and Indian soldiers in 2020.

By mirroring in the Himalayas the provocative tactics it has used in the South China Sea, Beijing is risking its relations with its neighbors, whose needs and interests it has always claimed to respect, and jeopardizing its reputation worldwide.

China has tried building roads into Bhutan before—but mainly in its western areas and with limited success. In 2017, China’s attempt to build a road across the Doklam plateau in southwestern Bhutan, next to the trijunction with India, triggered a 73-day faceoff between hundreds of Chinese and Indian troops and had to be abandoned. Last November, an Indian media outlet reported that a village called Pangda had been built by the Chinese government in subtropical forest just inside the southwestern border of Bhutan. (China denied the claim.) It’s possible, however, as some analysts have speculated, that Bhutan had quietly ceded that territory to China but not announced it to the outside world.

It is in an area of exceptional religious importance to Bhutan and its people.

Given its incomparable importance for the Bhutanese and for Tibetan Buddhists in general, no Bhutanese official would ever formally relinquish this area to China, any more than Britain would yield Stonehenge or Italy Venice.

In the face of raw Chinese power, Bhutan appears to have chosen to maintain what the Bhutanese political commentator Tenzing Lamsang has previously characterized as a “disciplined silence.” As a “small country stuck between two giants,” he said, Bhutan’s strategy is “to avoid unnecessarily antagonizing either side.”

Bhutan’s border guards are posted in the Beyul each summer, but their task is primarily to defend Bhutanese herders in encounters with their counterparts from Tibet. From the mid-1990s onward, these encounters became more aggressive: The Bhutanese accuse the Tibetans of cattle rustling; collecting timber; constructing shelters; driving huge, consolidated flocks of yaks across traditional Bhutanese grazing lands; and demanding that Bhutanese herders pay taxes to them for grazing there.

Today all of the Menchuma Valley and most of the Beyul are controlled by China. Both are being settled. Together, they constitute 1 percent of Bhutan’s territory; if it were to lose them, it would be comparable to the United States losing Maine or Kentucky. If Bhutanese troops try to reenter these areas, they will have to do so on foot and, given the lack of infrastructure on their side, would be immediately beyond the reach of supplies or reinforcements. The Chinese troops would have a barracks close at hand, would be motorized, and would be only three hours’ drive from the nearest town in China.

reciprocal cross-border grazing was the norm in the Himalayas and in the Beyul before the Chinese invasion and annexation of Tibet in the 1950s

China has long renounced the 19th-century claims by Qing emperors—repeated by Mao Zedong in the 1930s—to sovereignty over Bhutan and other Himalayan states. Relations between China and Bhutan have been amicable since the early 1970s, when Bhutan supported China’s entry into the United Nations. As one Chinese official put it recently, the two countries are “friendly neighbors linked by mountains and rivers.” But as with China’s other Himalayan neighbors, the legacies of colonialism and conflict have left behind uncertain borders

In December 1998, China signed a formal agreement with Bhutan, the first and so far only treaty between the two nations. In that document, China recognized Bhutan’s sovereignty and its territorial integrity and agreed that “no unilateral action will be taken to change the status quo on the border.” The construction of roads, settlements, and buildings within the Beyul and the Menchuma Valley is clearly a contravention of that agreement.

China’s principal aim in the Beyul is clear from its stance in talks with the Bhutanese government: Ever since 1990, China has offered to give up its claim to 495 square kilometers (191 square miles) of the Beyul if Thimphu will give China 269 square kilometers (104 square miles) in western Bhutan. Those areas—Doklam, Charithang, Sinchulungpa, Dramana, and Shakhatoe—lie close to the trijunction with India and are of far greater strategic importance to China than the Beyul, offering China a foothold only 62 miles from India’s geographic weak point, the 14-mile-wide Siliguri Corridor that connects the Indian mainland to its northeastern territories.

In Chinese, the term for so-called salami-slicing tactics—slowly cutting off  piece by piece of other nations’ territory—is can shi, or “nibbling like a silkworm.” It’s serious business: The belief that India was gnawing at fragments of China’s territory drove Mao to launch the 1962 Sino-Indian War. And the converse of the phrase is jing tun, “swallowing like a whale.” The small bites of the silkworm can turn into crushing jaws.

a large red banner says, “Resolutely uphold the core position of General Secretary Xi Jinping! Resolutely uphold the authority of and centralized and unified leadership by the Party Central Committee!”

A special unit from the police agency overseeing borders is based in or near the village. The most important task of this police agency, one officer stationed on the western Tibetan border told a Chinese news agency, is to catch “illegal immigrants”—meaning Tibetans trying to flee to India or Nepal.

So far, Chinese troops cannot reach China’s claimed border with Bhutan at the southern tip of the Beyul except by foot. But work has nearly been completed on a strategic road heading southwest from Gyalaphug across the Ngarab La. A second road from the upper Jakarlung leads southwest across the mountains to what some unofficial Chinese sources say is a military outpost next to the deserted temple of Lhalung Lhakhang, also on the bank of the Pagsamlung, 9 miles south of the Bhutanese border. These roads will provide the Chinese with motorable access to the Pagsamlung, allowing them to get troops and construction crews down to the far south of the Beyul; once that is done, we are likely to see permanent border posts along China’s claim line. None of these roads or military sites existed five years ago. There is little that Bhutan can do, given that the 1998 agreement, in which both sides undertook not to alter the status of disputed areas, has been shredded by Beijing’s actions on the ground.

“Current global warming is the result of emissions from both the recent and more distant past.”

A senior Biden adviser told me, during the transition between election and inauguration, that the region would rank “a distant fourth” in Biden’s priorities, after Asia Pacific, Europe, and South America

As Trita Parsi recently put it in Foreign Policy, “It’s not so much anything Washington has done but rather what Washington has stopped doing—namely, reassuring its security partners in the region that it will continue to support them unconditionally, no matter what reckless conduct they engage in.”

Biden’s pushback also marks a departure from President Obama’s policy, which, in many ways, perpetuated Washington’s accommodation of Saudi interests—a carryover from U.S. policy dating back to just after World War II—despite his avid desire to “pivot” away from the region. For instance, in order to placate Saudi anxieties over his signing of the Iran nuclear deal (which would involve lifting U.S. sanctions against Tehran), Obama allowed Riyadh to use American munitions against Iranian-backed rebels in the Yemen war. (Obama later regretted this concession.)

in recent years, the Saudi Crown and other Sunni powers have cozied up with Israel, a partner in the cold war with Iran—which, even if the Saudi-Iranian talks are fruitful, isn’t about to vanish

Ignore moral values for a moment. Is there any reason, on strictly geopolitical grounds, for an American president to accommodate Saudi interests when they compromise our own? No.

Letting Saudi Arabia and Iran reach some modus operandi on their own does not reflect a decline of American power, nor is anyone likely to see it that way. It’s more likely to be seen as a sensible end to the squandering of our resources.

we may be sure that without Washington to encourage their ambitions and save them from the consequences, even the most expansionist European members of NATO will in fact be very glad to do nothing

The S.D.F. offers a remarkable vision to counter ISIS’s draconian rule — local councils, farmers’ cooperatives, and committees that promote the rights of oppressed minority groups. In the village of Jinwar, a female-controlled town, the S.D.F. has built a commune for women and their children, both Kurdish and Arab, seeking to escape oppressive families and realize a community without patriarchy. According to the constitution of the so-called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the S.D.F.-linked ruling authority in the region, a post-ISIS Syria will be “a society free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs.” In order to realize this vision, part of the S.D.F.’s mandate is not just to govern, but also to annihilate ISIS. Several soldiers and S.D.F. spokesmen told me that the war against ISIS isn’t over — its aim now, with the support of the U.S., is to destroy sleeper cells and root out the ideology.

If we portray certain enemies solely as existential threats, we sweep over the political conflicts unfolding in places like Iraq and Syria, and the political violence wrought upon these communities, even by those who claim to be fighting a just war.

If our enemy is everywhere, we will seek allies in even the most oppressive of regimes (like Egypt and Saudi Arabia) to hunt down “terrorists,” no matter if they are gun-wielding militants or political dissidents who believe that the current state of affairs does not serve them.

If a war is a “good war,” or merely conceived of as a necessary one, it matters little why a terrorist group gained support, or how we may be inadvertently contributing to the group’s appeal. Yet, while the current approach to terrorism has been wildly successful in building a cottage industry of extremism and deradicalization experts, it has failed to rid the world of terrorists.

Massacres of Iraqi civilians, deaths of Afghan civilians by airstrikes, and indiscriminate detention and torture and rape have all happened at the hands of state security forces, including those allied with the U.S.

The Manichean framework helps absolve the West of its role and its responsibility in ending an endless conflict. “Terrorism” has become so synonymous with horrific violence that most Americans are likely unaware that the vast majority of civilian deaths in global conflicts today are caused by states, not non-state actors.

As with other battles against evil, the “killers and fanatics” necessitated the dropping of bombs, an operation that Obama’s successor continued.

a core argument for the war depended on the idea that terrorism was, in essence, a form of religious violence

What the Bush administration argued, and what the media accepted, was that terrorism is not a mere tactic, but a full-blown ideology — what Bush called “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” including “fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.” In practice, this means non-state armed groups not allied with the U.S. should be understood as terrorist organizations — no matter if, like the Taliban, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and Hamas, they have little else in common

By and large, the media accepted the Bush administration’s framing. By 2006, public criticism of the handling of the Iraq War was mounting, but even then, few questioned the legitimacy of the war itself. In a 2009 study of media coverage after 9/11, two scholars from the University of Texas found that journalists “helped brand the policy, [then] labeled the frame as public opinion,” ultimately contributing to the acceptance of that frame as a “fact of life,” and a “larger narrative of struggle and heroism.” Journalists did not treat the War on Terror as a policy decision made by the Bush administration, but as the natural and inevitable order of things. 

The political scientist Austin Doctor recently conducted a study of sexual assault by 143 rebel groups around the world, from 1989 to 2011, and separately applied the results of his analysis to ISIS.  He found a correlation between the presence of foreign fighters and increased incidence of sexual violence, which suggests that the Islamic State functioned much like other rebel groups — that ISIS is not so singular as it may seem.

mainstream media coverage of ISIS receives almost no scrutiny. But many other publications and reporters have operated on the same flawed assumptions and premises as Caliphate, ones that animated the West’s understanding of the Middle East long before ISIS gained its first foothold

the issue here isn’t just the violence — after all, Assad has also relished the torture, starvation, and murder of his citizens. Since 2011, his regime has used chemical weapons repeatedly, more than three hundred times according to one study. The critical difference is that while Assad depends on the international system for legitimacy (Russia and Iran are key supporters, and Syria remains part of the global financial system), ISIS rejects it. While Assad would prefer that the world looks away, ISIS practically begs us to stare. It aims to demoralize Western audiences, while projecting to potential recruits its vision of a new world order

In parts of the Caliphate, ISIS did promise a different model, at least nominally. In one piece of propaganda, the group declared, “The people are as equal as the teeth of a comb. There is no difference between the rich and the poor and the strong and the weak. The holder of a right has redress, and the grievance of an injured party will be answered.” In appealing to residents and new recruits, ISIS touched upon something familiar: the desire for justice, equality, and law and order in a world that has manifestly failed to deliver any. Women, too, found opportunities under ISIS. In Fallujah, they used the regime’s justice system to secure divorces, which had been more difficult under the Iraqi government.

civilians were likely to stay in ISIS-controlled territory because, among various reasons, the “quality of governance,” including “availability of electricity, cleanliness of streets, and crime rates,” was better compared to services provided by the Iraqi government

“All the locals here wonder why the U.S. coalition never came to rescue them from Assad’s machine guns, but run to fight ISIS when it took a few pieces of land,” one rebel told the Guardian. 

the current global order has left many people behind

decades of imperialism, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and Russia and Iran’s interventions, have irrevocably transformed communities in the Middle East. Similarly, though ISIS opposes the Saudi government, the Salafi-Jihadi underpinnings of the group could not have gained traction without the Kingdom’s years of effort of exporting and standardizing a particular form of Islam across the Middle East. 

devoid of any political context, terms like “radicalization” and “ideology” lose meaning

how ISIS appeared in the public imagination: as a movement beyond human understanding. The only sensible answer to so inscrutable and atavistic an adversary was total war.

This frenzied interest in the U.S.’s darkly powerful new enemy lured some journalists and analysts to focus on the group full-time. It emerged as a distinct topic from the Syrian civil war, whose crowded theater was becoming difficult to explain, or the Iraq War, now a nearly-adolescent 11 years old. Soon, writers covering ISIS, what Wired called “the world’s most important beat,” developed a signature flourish, describing it not just as a terrorist organization, but as an almost supernatural threat. “It is not clear,” argued a New York Review of Books piece in 2015, “whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.”

Stories of the group’s atrocities emerged in quick succession, echoing the parade of violence ISIS was proudly broadcasting on its own channels: public executions, conscription of child soldiers, disappearances and murders of thousands, Yazidi girls sold into slavery.

by narrowly focusing on the savagery of ISIS fighters, we miss the deeper and more important story of how ISIS grew into a political force, and of how it moved not just the hearts and minds, but the physical bodies, of tens of thousands

the core issue with Caliphate isn’t just that a lying source may have misled overeager journalists. Rather, the controversy, and indeed even the proposition that a “terrorism editor” would have resolved the problem, points to a deeper flaw in the way media has long covered extremism: divorced from the local and historical contexts that have fueled its rise

After a decade of the War on Terror and chaos in the Middle East, ISIS seemed to be the ultimate testament to an enduring clash of civilizations. It is not that surprising that ISIS itself encouraged this fantastical narrative — but it is striking that our media took their word for it.

public officials and leaders of government-aligned militias such as Mohammed and Farhad are forbidden by law to hold mineral rights.

Bush administration Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq invasion, and other U.S. defense officials also joined the SOSi board

Task Force officials remained bullish on strategic mining long after the project was closed down; some even saw it as a possible form of Taliban rehabilitation. “The only way to realistically economically reintegrate the Taliban back into Afghanistan’s economy is with mining,” Emily Scott King, the former director of the Task Force’s natural resource group, said in 2019 at a special operations policy forum in Washington, D.C. “It can work within the hierarchy that the Taliban is used to, with commanders running small processing facilities or becoming the brokers for small miners.”

SOSi’s transition to a military contracting powerhouse came through its connections to the office of retired Army General David Petraeus

“There’s no conceivable way extraction or export could be done without the collusion of insurgent groups,”

Beyond its powerful American connections, SOSi was well positioned for growth because it wasn’t afraid to get dirty. In his thesis, Hartwig recommended offering the Afghan government “some type of benefit” to win support from “key leaders” for future mineral projects. Through its subsidiary, that is exactly what SOSi did, apparently cutting the president’s brother in on the deal.

“The U.S. government cannot directly do business with Afghan companies, so it goes through SOSi, a private entity, to secure deals with all the major Afghan media networks to broadcast Resolute Support and NATO communication material,”

A Southern Development document on file in the Ras al-Khaimah Offshore Free Zone, the secretive United Arab Emirates jurisdiction where its full ownership records are held, confirms that on June 17, 2014 — three days after Ashraf Ghani was elected president — SOSi owned 80 percent of the company, with Hashmat Ghani owning the remainder

Hashmat Ghani’s son, Sultan Ghani, listed a short SOSi internship in 2013 on his resume. Sultan Ghani now runs The Ghani Group, the family’s privately owned conglomerate with interests that include mining and military contracting. He apparently keeps in touch with old friends at SOSi. A photo uploaded to LinkedIn during the summer of 2019 shows him meeting with SOSi Vice President Helmick, and the account features praise for his interpersonal skills posted by another SOSi executive

Buying chromite from unlicensed local mines remains illegal in Afghanistan, but Ashraf Ghani’s election opened a rich new vein of opportunity. While the American Task Force and his own son once urged legalization of artisanal mining, the president has instead redistributed bureaucratic power, enabling extralegal activities.

A document leaked to OCCRP reveals that on December 26, 2019, the High Economic Council, in a process overseen by the president, authorized Southern Development to take on a project far larger than the original task force project in Kunar. The company received a mineral processing permit and permission to purchase artisanal chromite in six Afghan provinces: Khost, Paktia, Paktika, Kunar, Ghazni and Maidan Wardak.

In the spring of 2018, more than a year before Afghanistan’s High Economic Council signed over the rights to the chromite, Southern Development’s Kabul office had imported new crushing equipment from South Africa for its Afghan operation. In fact, Global Venture and its consultants, according to Scott King, had since 2013 been “advising private sector investors” with mining interests in Afghanistan about how to “quietly” restart initiatives like the Kunar chromite project. At the same 2019 Special Operations forum, she highlighted a mysterious $10 million investment into what she claimed were “legal” Afghan chromite mines.

Until late 2019, the company falsely claimed to have won chromite exploration rights in Kabul province from Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum. The claim disappeared from the website after reporters asked about it.

Mining takes time to generate profits and it’s unclear if SOSi has started to see a return on its investments yet, but the price of chromite ore hovers around $200 per ton and with a worldwide market for stainless steel, Southern Development could become highly profitable. Meanwhile, its success is already spawning copycats.

Another American military contractor, DGCI, which is under federal investigation for its work in Iraq and Afghanistan, hired another former Task Force staffer in 2019, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to mine lithium in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province. Since then, DGCI has also tried to cultivate a relationship with the Ghani family, holding public charity events with Sultan Ghani.

the hype around the disarmament of Colombia’s largest guerrilla group was short-lived. The government couldn’t effectively occupy the territories where former fighters operated, providing combatants with another opportunity to join dissident groups or create new groups with the aim of taking over illegal trades.

Residents of the western department of Chocó are particularly vulnerable to displacement by armed groups. Deserted jungles and a network of rivers running to the Pacific Ocean make it a profitable region for illegal trades such as mining and drug trafficking, and a hotbed of conflict between armed groups including the ELN and the Gaitanista Self-Defence Forces of Colombia.

The statements by armed groups apparently siding with the government and threatening to enforce the curfew not only intimidate residents, but also compromise the credibility of the authorities. “They are trying to supplant the authorities,” said Col. Henry Galán of the Chocó police department

Cauca is a remote and mountainous region on Colombia’s Pacific coast with limited state presence, where ethnic Indigenous communities have a long history of organizing themselves. “Everyone knows that if that disease reaches us, there is no possibility of survival because there is no medical infrastructure,” said Lisifrey Ararat, a leader from the town of Suárez. For Ararat and other leaders, the lack of hospitals, telecommunications, roads, and infrastructure in their region puts their communities at higher risk—forcing them to make difficult decisions such as placing biosecurity checkpoints and sealing off outsiders. Such measures have increased tensions with armed groups which fight to control the region, and further isolated the communities from basic health services and food supplies.

Historical analogies aren’t always relevant. As useful as the past’s lessons can be, the parallels drawn can say more about the priorities of the pundit than the messy realities of ancient empires that bore little resemblance to our own challenges

To be sure, Asian history is harder to access in English than Europe’s, and the continent’s military history is shamefully underwritten. But the materials are out there—and they are far more geographically, culturally, and historically relevant to the continent that is defining the 21st century than dipping into Thucydides again.

We will be publishing our study soon along with over 20 other studies from the World Bank exploring the link between forced migration and social cohesion.