Group items tagged

"We are your brothers from Indonesia who have come to join the Islamic state," says a man identified as Abu Muhammad al Indonesi. Speaking in Bahasa Indonesia, he urges fellow Muslims in Indonesia to drop familial and professional obligations to emigrate to Syria.

Any administration faced with these facts, and at this technological moment in the North Korean program, would have weighed carefully the possibility of a preventive war —it would be the prudent strategic thing to do. And then that administration would have walked away from it. A deliberately initiated war still runs the risk of a humanitarian disaster because, as everyone now realizes, Seoul is within range of thousands of North Korean artillery tubes and rocket batteries. Hundreds of thousands of civilians, including American expats and dependents, would perish in the war that could be unleashed. Even assuming some magical technologies that enable the U.S. to disarm North Korea and decapitate its leadership, who is to say that the ensuing war would not have its way even so?

This is serious first and foremost because the North Korean threat is serious.

The consequences of preventive war—a war deliberately initiated by the United States or launched as a result of provocations by one side or both that then escalates—go far beyond this. South Korea, within the memory of people now living, has gone from being poorer than most African countries in 1950 to becoming a first-world technological and economic powerhouse.

What the president’s advisers may not fully appreciate are the political perils of taking such a hazardous course. The fact is that a majority of the American people seem to believe that many words coming out of the president’s mouth are lies.

There are sounds, for those who can hear them, of the preliminary and muffled drumbeats of war. The Chinese are reported to be preparing refugee camps along the North Korean border. Resources are being shifted to observe and analyze the North Korean military. Mundane logistical processes of moving, stockpiling, and updating crucial items and preparing military personnel are under way. Only the biggest indicator—the evacuation of American dependents from South Korea—has yet to flash red, but, in the interest of surprise, that may not happen.

Centuries of humiliation and subjugation, first by the Turks, and then by the European powers that carved up the Middle East into its present configuration after World War I, rankle with traditionalists among the faithful. They look back to the Golden Age of Islam, during the Umayyad and Abbassid caliphates, when the Muslim world was the cultural and scientific center of the western world, and Europe a barbaric backwater.

ISIS, however, finds itself in a different situation than al-Qaeda did and has prioritized the creation of a new caliphate over making direct strikes on the western world. 

Conveniently for ISIS, the two modern nations that contain the former capitals of the Umayyad and Abbassid caliphates are in chaos. Iraq, once the seat of the Abbassid world, is still reeling from the Iraq War (2002 - 2011), and its Kurdish, Shi'ite, and Sunni populations threaten to splinter the country into separate states. Meanwhile, the Syrian Civil War rages in neighboring Syria, former home of the Umayyad state.

ISIS has succeeded in seizing a fairly large, contiguous area of Syria and Iraq, where it acts as the government. It imposes taxes, imposes rules on the local people according to its fundamentalist version of law, and even sells oil drilled from the land it controls.

The self-appointed caliph, formerly known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is gathering young militants to his cause with his success in seizing and holding this territory. However, the Islamic State that they are trying to create, with its stonings, beheadings, and public crucifixions of anyone who does not adhere to their exact, radical brand of Islam, does not resemble the enlightened multicultural centers that were the earlier caliphates. If anything, the Islamic State looks more like Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

layers of complex problems that he seems particularly ill-equipped to manage. He is also not to blame for the carnage at al-Rawdah Mosque.

At least 138 militants and 20 civilians have also been killed, the government says.The BBC's Jonathan Head says there are several reports that the Maute brothers, who lead the Maute group, are among the dead, with intercepted communications from jihadist groups suggesting this.

Marawi is on the southern island of Mindanao, which has a significant Muslim population in the majority Catholic country and has seen a decades-long Muslim separatist insurgency.

The US has had a small logistical military presence in the Philippines, although a programme to advise the Philippine army on fighting the Abu Sayyaf militant group was discontinued in 2015.

But he had what the White House described as a "very friendly" phone call with President Donald Trump in April, and has since said his differences with the US were with President Barack Obama's administration.

"The world of terrorism inside the city is growing smaller by the day," he said.Officials say that foreign nationals are among the militants in Marawi, with the list of countries and territories including Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Yemen, India and Chechnya.

an outbreak erupted in the Yuan Empire and may have hastened the end of Mongol rule over China. Three years later, the disease killed over 90 percent of the Hebei Province's populations

with deaths totaling over 5 million people.

From its origin at the eastern end of the Silk Road, the Black Death rode trade routes west stopping at Central Asian caravansaries and Middle Eastern trade centers and subsequently infected people all across Asia.

"The Land of Darkness," or Central Asia. From there, it spread to China, India, the Caspian Sea and "land of the Uzbeks," and thence to Persia and the Mediterranean.

The Central Asian scourge struck Persia just a few years after it appeared in China — proof if any is needed that the Silk Road was a convenient route of transmission for the deadly bacterium.

Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish

The region's population was slow to recover, in part due to the political disruptions caused by the fall of Mongol rule and the later invasions of Timur (Tamerlane).

In 1335, the Il-Khan (Mongol) ruler of Persia and the Middle East, Abu Said, died of bubonic plague during a war with his northern cousins, the Golden Horde. This signaled the beginning of the end for Mongol rule in the region

He goes on to charge that the Mongol leader "ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in hopes that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside."

This incident is often cited as the first instance of biological warfare in history. However, other contemporary chroniclers make no mention of the putative Black Death catapults.

European observers were fascinated but not too worried when the Black Death struck the western rim of Central Asia and the Middle East

, the holy city of Mecca was hit by the plague, likely brought in by infected pilgrims on the hajj.

It seems more likely, however, that traders from further east brought diseased fleas

It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out... Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed."

Perhaps the most significant impact that the Black Death had on Asia was that it contributed to the fall of the mighty Mongol Empire. After all, the pandemic started within the Mongol Empire and devastated peoples from all four of the khanates.

The massive population loss and terror caused by the plague destabilized Mongolian governments from the Golden Horde in Russia to the Yuan Dynasty in China. The Mongol ruler of the Ilkhanate Empire in the Middle East died of the disease along with six of his sons.

Although the Pax Mongolica had allowed increased wealth and cultural exchange, through a reopening of the Silk Road, it also allowed this deadly contagion to spread rapidly westward from its origin in western China or eastern Central Asia. As a result, the world's second-largest empire ever crumbled and fell.

Five days later, the Supreme Court decided June Medical Services LLC v. Russo, a 2020 decision that struck down Louisiana abortion regulations, though Chief Justice John Roberts’ concurring opinion arguably limited aspects of Whole Woman’s Health. In his petition, Cameron argues that he should have been allowed to intervene to defend the Kentucky law and that the 6th Circuit’s decision striking the law down should be reconsidered in light of June Medical.

There they found drugs and firearms. Three years later, federal authorities indicted Woodard on several charges stemming from the search; each charge turned on the government’s ability to prove Woodard’s constructive possession of the drugs. Woodard moved to dismiss the indictment, alleging unconstitutional pre-indictment delay.

. The government grudgingly concedes there is a split on the issue, and raises a welter of arguments why review nevertheless isn’t warranted. We’ll have a better idea Monday whether the court is persuaded.

And I would worry about something else as well: As Hamas makes itself the vanguard of the Palestinian cause — and becomes its face — more and more progressives will come to understand what Hamas is — an Islamo-fascist movement that came to power in Gaza by a 2007 coup against the Palestinian Authority, during which, among other things, it threw a rival P.A. official off a 15-story rooftop.

This is not a “progressive” organization — and Hamas will not enjoy indefinitely the free pass it has gotten from the left because it is fighting Netanyahu

Indeed, what Kissinger began in 1973 and Jimmy Carter completed at Camp David was only possible because all these leaders actually agreed to ignore the core problem

So, my message to Biden would be this: You may be interested in China, but the Middle East is still interested in you. You deftly helped to engineer the cease-fire from the sidelines. Do you want to, do you dare to, dive into the middle of this new Kissingerian moment?

And dozens of schools have been either damaged or ordered to close, forcing some 600,000 students to miss classes on Monday.

President Biden added his voice to the growing chorus of international leaders calling for a cease-fire on Monday night, but there was little indication that an end to the hostilities was near on Tuesday morning.

“We have a bank of targets that is full, and we want to continue and to create pressure on Hamas,” he said. “This morning, the chief of staff gave us the plans for the next 24 hours, the targets. We will hit anyone who belongs to Hamas, from the first to the last.”

“We warn the enemy that if it did not stop that immediately, we would resume rocketing Tel Aviv,” the militant group’s spokesman Abu Ubaida said, according to Reuters.

While Hamas fighters move through an extensive series of tunnels under Gaza, and as Israeli warplanes drop bombs aimed at destroying that network, it is the people caught between who suffer the most calamitous losses.

At least 10 people in Israel have been killed in rocket attacks, the Israeli authorities said.The death toll in Gaza itself has surpassed 200, including at least 61 children, according to the health authorities in the territory.

Palestinian activists across Israel took part in a general strike on Tuesday to protest Israel’s air campaign in Gaza and other measures targeting Palestinians.Even before the current conflict, Gaza was facing an economic crisis and political crisis.

Since 2007, Hamas has engaged in three major conflicts with Israel and several smaller skirmishes. After each eruption of violence, Gaza’s infrastructure was left in shambles.

By Monday, Israeli bombs had destroyed 132 residential buildings and damaged 316 housing units so badly that they were uninhabitable, according to Gaza’s housing ministry.

More than 40,000 people have been forced into shelters and thousands more have sought refuge with friends or relatives, according to the U.N. humanitarian affairs office.

“Until a cease-fire is reached, all parties must agree to a ‘humanitarian pause,’” the office said in a statement. “These measures would allow humanitarian agencies to carry out relief operations, and people to purchase food and water and seek medical care.”

The scope of U.S. intelligence activity in the region has drawn renewed interest in recent days, in the wake of a U.S. raid on Saturday that killed ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The CIA, as well as Iraqi and Kurdish intelligence officers, tracked the ISIS chief by interviewing the wife of an al-Baghdadi aide and one of his couriers, and by recruiting local spies along the Syrian-Iraqi border.

“The oil fields are small, we blasted them after Daesh [ISIS] seized them, and they will take years to rebuild,” said one official. So why leave forces there to protect them? “Talking about oil was the only way we could talk the President into keeping any U.S. military force in the area,” the official says. On Friday, after the plan to protect the oilfields was unveiled, Trump tweeted, “Oil is secured.”

U.S. officials are worried that a humanitarian crisis and renewed fighting in the region will invite a resurgence of ISIS, which operates best in chaotic situations. Many captured ISIS fighters remain in Kurdish custody in northern Syria. Trump appeared to dismiss the danger of a renewed terrorist threat Friday, when he tweeted, “ISIS SECURED”. Esper told reporters at NATO that the U.S. mission remains preventing a resurgence of ISIS.

U.S. intelligence officials aren’t the only ones seeing evidence of war crimes. The human rights group Amnesty International reported on Friday that Turkish-backed Syrian forces have committed war crimes, including executions of Kurdish civilians.

Mr. Trump, who aides said had on his mind the specter of the 2012 attacks on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, became increasingly angry as he watched television images of pro-Iranian demonstrators storming the embassy. Aides said he worried that no response would look weak after repeated threats by the United States.

When Mr. Trump chose the option of killing General Suleimani, top military officials, flabbergasted, were immediately alarmed about the prospect of Iranian retaliatory strikes on American troops in the region. It is unclear if General Milley or Mr. Esper pushed back on the president’s decision.

The option that was eventually approved depended on who would greet General Suleimani at his expected arrival on Friday at Baghdad International Airport. If he was met by Iraqi government officials allied with Americans, one American official said, the strike would be called off. But the official said it was a “clean party,” meaning members of Kataib Hezbollah, including its leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Mr. Trump authorized the killing at about 5 p.m. on Thursday, officials said.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Saturday urged Trump not to be “trapped” by an alleged Israeli plan to provoke a war through attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.

The United States blames Iran-backed militias for regular rocket attacks on U.S. facilities in Iraq, including near the U.S. embassy. No known Iran-backed groups have claimed responsibility.

The United States killed Fayyad’s predecessor as PMF leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a year ago in a drone strike at Baghdad airport, along with Qassem Soleimani, the top Iranian general leading operations among Tehran’s allies in the region.

he had joined “the honourable ones whom the U.S. administration regards as enemies”. He was also praised by the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah.

The Trump administration has unrelentingly undermined proven international relationships.

Trump is far more comfortable with autocrats like Putin and Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia than with a democratic leader like Merkel. (She has, for the president, the added drawback of being a woman.)

Trump has trampled on the idea of America as a land of immigrants.

The democratic framework of the United States rests on certain principles: checks and balances, a vigorous free press, an independent judiciary, protection of the individual against forms of racial, religious or sexual prejudice. All these principles, inspirations to democracies across the world, have been attacked by Trump. He has turned the Department of Justice into his personal fief. The president has even refused to commit to leaving office if he loses the election.

Since 9/11, the United States has suffered, on average, six deaths per year due to jihadi terrorism. (To put this in perspective, in 2019, an average of 39 Americans died every day from overdoses involving prescription opioids.) If the goal of the global war on terror was to prevent significant acts of terrorism, particularly in the United States, then the war has succeeded.

But at what cost?

Every war the United States has fought, beginning with the American Revolution, has required an economic model to sustain it with sufficient bodies and cash.

Like its predecessors, the war on terror came with its own model: the war was fought by an all-volunteer military and paid for largely through deficit spending.

It should be no surprise that this model, which by design anesthetized a majority of Americans to the costs of conflict, delivered them their longest war; in his September 20, 2001, speech, when describing how Americans might support the war effort, Bush said, “I ask you to live your lives and hug your children.”

This model has also had a profound effect on American democracy, one that is only being fully understood 20 years later.

Funding the war through deficit spending allowed it to fester through successive administrations with hardly a single politician ever mentioning the idea of a war tax. Meanwhile, other forms of spending—from financial bailouts to health care and, most recently, a pandemic recovery stimulus package—generate breathless debate.

, technological and social changes have numbed them to its human cost. The use of drone aircraft and other platforms has facilitated the growing automation of combat, which allows the U.S. military to kill remotely. This development has further distanced Americans from the grim costs of war

the absence of a draft has allowed the U.S. government to outsource its wars to a military caste, an increasingly self-segregated portion of society, opening up a yawning civil-military divide as profound as any that American society has ever known.

For now, the military remains one of the most trusted institutions in the United States and one of the few that the public sees as having no overt political bias. How long will this trust last under existing political conditions? As partisanship taints every facet of American life, it would seem to be only a matter of time before that infection spreads to the U.S. military.

From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The United States today meets both conditions.

Historically, this has invited the type of political crisis that leads to military involvement (or even intervention) in domestic politics.

How imminent is the threat from these states? When it comes to legacy military platforms—aircraft carriers, tanks, fighter planes—the United States continues to enjoy a healthy technological dominance over its near-peer competitors. But its preferred platforms might not be the right ones. Long-range land-based cruise missiles could render large aircraft carriers obsolete. Advances in cyberoffense could make tech-reliant fighter aircraft too vulnerable to fly

It is not difficult to imagine a more limited counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan that might have brought bin Laden to justice or a strategy to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that would not have involved a full-scale U.S. invasion. The long, costly counterinsurgency campaigns that followed in each country were wars of choice.

Both proved to be major missteps when it came to achieving the twin goals of bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice and securing the homeland. In fact, at several moments over the past two decades, the wars set back those objectives

Few years proved to be more significant in the war on terror than 2011. Aside from being the year bin Laden was killed, it also was the year the Arab Spring took off and the year U.S. troops fully withdrew from Iraq. If the great strategic blunder of the Bush administration was to put troops into Iraq, then the great strategic blunder of the Obama administration was to pull all of them out. Both missteps created power vacuums. The first saw the flourishing of al Qaeda in Iraq; the second gave birth to that group’s successor, ISIS.

But what makes the war on terror different from other wars is that victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome; the goal has been to prevent a negative one.

How, then, do you declare victory? How do you prove a negative?

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq represented a familiar type of war, with an invasion to topple a government and liberate a people, followed by a long occupation and counterinsurgency campaigns.

In addition to blood and treasure, there is another metric by which the war on terror can be judged: opportunity cost

For the past two decades, while Washington was repurposing the U.S. military to engage in massive counterinsurgency campaigns and precision counterterrorism operations, Beijing was busy building a military to fight and defeat a peer-level competitor.

Today, the Chinese navy is the largest in the world. It boasts 350 commissioned warships to the U.S. Navy’s roughly 290.

it now seems inevitable that the two countries’ militaries will one day reach parity. China has spent 20 years building a chain of artificial islands throughout the South China Sea that can effectively serve as a defensive line of unsinkable aircraft carriers.

Culturally, China has become more militaristic, producing hypernationalist content such as the Wolf Warrior action movies.

After the century opened with 9/11, conventional wisdom had it that nonstate actors would prove to be the greatest threat to U.S. national security

Nonstate actors have compromised national security not by attacking the United States but by diverting its attention away from state actors. It is these classic antagonists—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—that have expanded their capabilities and antipathies in the face of a distracted United States.

it may seem odd to separate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the war on terror,

The greatest minds in the U.S. military have now, finally, turned their attention to these concerns, with the U.S. Marine Corps, for example, shifting its entire strategic focus to a potential conflict with China. But it may be too late.

Americans’ fatigue—and rival countries’ recognition of it—has limited the United States’ strategic options. As a result, presidents have adopted policies of inaction, and American credibility has eroded.

When Obama went to legislators to gain support for a military strike against the Assad regime, he encountered bipartisan war fatigue that mirrored the fatigue of voters, and he called off the attack. The United States’ redline had been crossed, without incident or reprisal.

Fatigue may seem like a “soft” cost of the war on terror, but it is a glaring strategic liability.

This proved to be true during the Cold War when, at the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and when, in the war’s aftermath, in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Because it was embroiled in a war in the first case and reeling from it in the second, the United States could not credibly deter Soviet military aggression

It is no coincidence that China, for instance, has felt empowered to infringe on Hong Kong’s autonomy and commit brazen human rights abuses against its minority Uyghur population. When American power recedes, other states fill the vacuum.

U.S. adversaries have also learned to obfuscate their aggression. The cyberwar currently being waged from Russia is one example, with the Russian government claiming no knowledge of the spate of ransomware attacks emanating from within its borders. With Taiwan, likewise, Chinese aggression probably wouldn’t manifest in conventional military ways. Beijing is more likely to take over the island through gradual annexation, akin to what it has done with Hong Kong, than stage an outright invasion.

From time to time, people have asked in what ways the war changed me. I have never known how to answer this question because ultimately the war didn’t change me; the war made me

Today, I have a hard time remembering what the United States used to be like. I forget what it was like to be able to arrive at the airport just 20 minutes before a flight. What it was like to walk through a train station without armed police meandering around the platforms. Or what it was like to believe—particularly in those heady years right after the Cold War—that the United States’ version of democracy would remain ascendant for all time and that the world had reached “the end of history.”

Today, the United States is different; it is skeptical of its role in the world, more clear-eyed about the costs of war despite having experienced those costs only in predominantly tangential ways. Americans’ appetite to export their ideals abroad is also diminished, particularly as they struggle to uphold those ideals at home, whether in violence around the 2020 presidential election, the summer of 2020’s civil unrest, or even the way the war on terror compromised the country through scandals from Abu Ghraib prison to Edward Snowden’s leaks. A United States in which Band of Brothers has near-universal appeal is a distant memory.

When I told him that even though we might have lost the war in Afghanistan, our generation could still claim to have won the war on terror, he was skeptical. We debated the issue but soon let it drop. The next day, I received an email from him. A southerner and a lover of literature, he had sent me the following, from The Sound and the Fury:

No battle is ever won. . . . They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

the United States military congratulated Iraq on the capture, describing Mr. al-Ajuz as one of the group’s most senior leaders.

a cross-border operation would have required the cooperation of at least the Syrian-Kurdish forces in Syria

“This is one of the most significant counter-ISIS achievements in recent years,” Charles Lister, director of the Washington-based Middle East Institute’s Syria and Countering Terrorism and Extremism Programs, said in an email.

For Berlin, loosening its energy dependence on Russia is not simply about hitting Moscow’s main revenue stream. It’s a threat to roll back “Ostpolitik,” a totemic post-World War II policy of rapprochement with the Soviet Union, and by extension later Russia, that involved economic and political engagement, notably through oil and gas links.

Yet as customers desert Russia, its partnership with the oil titans of the Middle East, with which it jointly leads the OPEC+ coalition, has so far stayed intact. Russia and Saudi Arabia are the world’s top oil exporters, accounting for 29% of the global total. 

“The U.S. can try to make Saudi Arabia increase production, but why would they accept a break in the alliance, which is key for them?”

Riyadh’s OPEC+ partnership with Moscow calmed years of distrust between the two oil rivals, and saved the kingdom from relying exclusively on Washington.

“Saudi Arabia doesn’t want to switch horses mid-race when they do not know if the other horse is actually going to show up,”

Gulf Arab nations accused the U.S. of a lack of support in the face of repeated attacks by Iranian-backed militia on Saudi oil facilities and Gulf tanker traffic, and on Abu Dhabi this year. In a measure of the discord, the United Arab Emirates abstained in a U.S.-led United Nations Security Council vote to condemn Russia’s invasion.

Another source of friction lies in U.S. efforts to reinstate the nuclear agreement with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.

“Now that we are in a crisis moment, we’re reaping the effect of that lack of trust that’s been building over the years,” said Karen Young, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. 

Demonstrating just how exceptional the times are, a U.S. delegation traveled to Russian ally Venezuela last weekend in an overture to a country that holds the largest known crude reserves in the world.

Venezuela has been subject to international sanctions since the Trump era that have crippled its ability to sell oil. While there is not yet talk of allowing exports to resume, President Nicolas Maduro responded by offering to turn on the taps anyway, saying that state oil company PDVSA is prepared to raise output to as many three million barrels a day “for the world.”

the U.S. visit was “unexpected, surprising, a complete change in policy orientation,” with energy as the strategic catalyst.

“But I think there is a more important geopolitical move that is redefining the West,” he added. The U.S. is looking to confine the spheres of influence enjoyed by Russia and especially China, and for Venezuela that means a gradual process “to reincorporate with the West, through energy.” 

China will continue to carry on “normal trade cooperation” with Russia, including in oil and gas, said Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesperson. China is considering buying or increasing stakes in Russian companies such as Gazprom PJSC,

Even assuming a discount on the price per barrel, state-owned importers would weigh very carefully the impact on their global business of large purchases from a country that’s subject to so many sanctions, according to Qin Yan, an analyst with research house Refinitiv.

Neither would buying energy from Moscow be an easy solution, even if it meant less pollution, said Li Shuo, a climate analyst at Greenpeace East Asia. “To change China’s current energy structure, to replace a lot of coal it uses now with Russia’s oil and gas, would be a huge project for China, and it would take time,”

In Europe, the EU is refusing to budge on its climate commitments as it seeks to slash imports from its biggest supplier this year and replace flows from Russia completely by 2027. Those efforts were given a jolt by a suggestion that Moscow might shut off gas supplies through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Europe.

“We simply cannot rely on a supplier who explicitly threatens us,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said as she unveiled the bloc’s plans this week. 

as Scholz told the Bundestag, Russia’s attack on Ukraine means “we are in a new era.” The world today “is no longer the same world that it was before.”

They had become disillusioned with what they saw as an outmoded way of working. “It wasn’t how I imagined the future of architecture,” says He, who worked in OMA’s Rotterdam office before moving to China to oversee construction of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange building. “The design and construction processes were so traditional and lacking in innovation.”

XKool is at the bleeding edge of architectural AI. And it’s growing fast: over 50,000 people are already using it in China, and an English version of its image-to-image AI tool, LookX, has just been launched. Wanyu He founded the company in 2016, with others who used to work for OMA

“The problem with architects is that we almost entirely focus on images,” says Neil Leach, author of Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. “But the most revolutionary change is in the less sexy area: the automation of the entire design package, from developing initial options right through to construction. In terms of strategic thinking and real-time analysis, AI is already way beyond what human architects are capable of. This could be the final nail in the coffin of a struggling profession.”

She and her colleagues were inspired to launch their startup after witnessing AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a human champion at the Chinese board game Go in 2016. “What if we could introduce this intelligence to our way of working with algorithmic design?” she says. “CAD [computer aided design] dates from the 70s. BIM [building information modelling] is from the 90s. Now that we have the power of cloud computing and big data, it’s time for something new.”

XKool aims to provide an all-in-one platform, using AI to assist with everything from generating masterplan layouts, using given parameters such as daylight requirements, space standards and local planning regulations, right down to generating interiors and construction details. It has also developed a tool to transform a 2D image of a building into a 3D model, and turn a given list of room sizes into floor plans

It’s early days and, so far, the results are clunky: the Shenzhen hotel looks very much like it was designed by robots for an army of robot guests.

“We have to be careful,” says Martha Tsigkari, head of applied research and development at Foster + Partners in London. “It can be dangerous if you don’t know what data was used to train the model, or if you haven’t classified it properly. Data is everything: if you put garbage in, you’ll get garbage out

The implications for data privacy and intellectual property are huge – is our data secured from other users? Is it being used to retrain these models in the background?”

Although the actual science needed to make such things possible is a long way off, AI does enable the kind of calculations and predictive modelling that was impossibly time-consuming before

Tsigkari’s team has also developed a simulation engine that allows realtime analysis of floor plans – showing how well connected one part of a building is to another – giving designers instant feedback on the implications of moving a wall or piece of furniture.

One told me they now regularly use ChatGPT to summarise local planning policies and compare the performance of different materials for, say, insulation. “It’s the kind of task you would have given a junior to do,” they say. “It’s not perfect, but it makes fewer mistakes than someone who hasn’t written a specification before.”

Others say their teams regularly use Midjourney to help brainstorm ideas during the concept phase. “We had a client wanting to build mosques in Abu Dhabi,” one architect told me. “I could quickly generate a range of options to show them, to get the conversation going. It’s like an instant mood board.”

“I like to think we are augmenting, not replacing, architects,” says Carl Christiansen, a Norwegian software engineer who in 2016 co-founded AI tool Spacemaker, which was acquired by tech giant Autodesk in 2021 for $240m, and then rebranded as Forma. “I call it ‘AI on the shoulder’ to emphasise that you’re still in control.” Forma can rapidly evaluate a large range of factors – from sun and wind to noise and energy needs – and create the perfect site layout. What’s more, its interface is designed to be legible to non-experts.

Another type is the majlis-ash-shura, which is quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial, though traditionally not democratic. No voting is involved. But people do have a chance to be heard, and there is an expectation of being treated fairly. The decision may be handed down by the local leader, such as a sultan, or by religious leaders who are respected for their piety.

That brings us up to Dubai and the sultan. Considering that Al Jaber is the president of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, I think he deserves credit for cajoling delegates from nearly 200 countries to, for the first time, approve a pact that calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” In his closing address he thanked delegates “who met me at 4 and 5 a.m.” When does this guy sleep?

Al Jaber may have been right that there was more speaking from the heart than usual. “The gathering seemed to evoke a more personal, emotional tone, and confidences were shared,” Environment News Service wrote.

In both cases, no one is clearly in charge. In ancient Arabia, tribal leaders who had conflicts couldn’t appeal to some higher authority. They had to work things out among themselves.

There is no higher authority — certainly not the United Nations — that can tell sovereign nations what to do. They need to work things out among themselves.

Modern majalis might be able to resolve disputes — and help save the planet — by drawing on sources of authority beyond one-person, one-vote democracy. Trust that’s built up over time, for one.

A majlis is also a natural forum for scientific experts, religious leaders and artists to be heard and heeded.

In modern diplomacy, Yusuf said, “There’s just a complete lack of regard for expertise and any type of leadership.

The majlis is based on a kind of decorum. There are things that are totally unacceptable in a majlis, such as backbiting, speaking ill of people. There’s a hushed aspect to it. People speak in a very respectful, formal way. Each situation is going to be unique.”

Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist who won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2009, showed how ranchers, fishermen and others had devised clever ways to cooperate, without appealing to government, and to avoid the tragedy of the commons, which is the overexploitation of shared resources. One way they built the necessary trust was through what Ostrom called “cheap talk,” which is simple communication. “More cooperation occurs than predicted, ‘cheap talk’ increases cooperation, and subjects invest in sanctioning free-riders,” Ostrom wrote in her Nobel lecture.

The trust-building communication that Ostrom put her finger on in her Nobel lecture seems like the kind of talk that occurs in a majlis, Erik Nordman, the author of “The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom,” told me.

I also don’t want to make too much of the role of the majlis in reaching the deal. The majlis should not be a replacement for democracy but a complement to it. In that role, I think it could be quite useful.

First, the Turks and Russians have too much to gain from staying in Libya. Second, they have little incentive to leave under current circumstances because the only power in the world that could potentially use its leverage to pressure Turkish and Russian forces to depart is the United States. It is unlikely for the US to play its cards in such a manner.

Washington is not interested in Libya, especially at this time when there are far more pressing problems – from Donbas to North Korea, to China and, above all, to the enormous internal problems that the Biden administration is facing,”

From Washington’s perspective, this is not necessarily problematic so long as the Wagner Group’s presence does not expand. Because of such concerns about the Russian force enlarging its footprint in Libya, the US sees the Turkish military’s presence in the polarised North African country as the best outcome that Washington could realistically expect.

Beyond issues stemming from economic competition, there are security issues that give EU members reason to perceive the Turkish and Russian hard power in Libya as threatening national interests of European powers. “Finally, whoever controls the Libyan coast controls migration flows and this is a strategic issue that Brussels should not underestimate,” said Fasanotti.

The presence of both Turkish and Russian forces in the North African country is deeply unsettling to European powers, unlike Washington that has taken a far more favourable stance towards Ankara’s role in Libya.

“The presence of Turkish forces there is of course considered detrimental to France’s interests, given the strategic alignment of Paris to Abu Dhabi and its support of the Eastern forces of General Khalifa Haftar in the 2019-2020 Tripoli offensive,”

“Economic competition must be also factored into these considerations, which help explain why after many years of a worrisome intra-European spat, Paris [which backed Haftar] and Rome [which backed the Government of National Accord] decided to come together, set aside their differences, and face outsiders expanding their influence in the Libyan arena.”

“The only mechanism that the United States has is the Turkish presence. When the United States looks at Turkey it sees a NATO member.

If the US remains unwilling to throw its weight around in Libya and maintains its own perspectives on Turkish-Russian rivalry for influence that leads Washington to be more accommodating of Ankara’s Libya foreign policy than several of the US’s close European allies, these divisions could deepen.