President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey

As the dust begins to settle from the failed Turkish coup, we can start to identify some winners and losers, although predicting things in the Middle East these days is a tricky business. What is clear is that several alignments have shifted, and those shifts could have an impact on the two regional running sores: the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.

The most obvious winner to emerge from the abortive military putsch is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his campaign to transform Turkey from a parliamentary democracy to a powerful, centralized executive, with himself in charge. The most obvious losers are Erdogan’s internal opposition and the Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

Post-coup Turkish unity has conspicuously excluded the Kurdish-based People’s Democratic Party (HDP), even though the party condemned the July 15 coup. A recent solidarity rally in Istanbul called by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) included the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), but the HDP—the third-largest political organization in the country—was not invited.

The deliberate snub is part of Erdogan’s campaign to disenfranchise the HDP and force new elections that could give him the votes he needs to call a referendum on the presidency. This past June, Endogen pushed through a bill lifting immunity for 152 parliament members, making them liable for prosecution on charges of supporting terrorism. Out of the HDP’s 59 deputies, 55 are now subject to the new law. If those deputies are convicted of terrorism charges, they will be forced to resign and elections will be held to replace them.

While Erdogan’s push for a powerful executive is not overwhelmingly popular with most Turks—polls show that only 38.4 percent support it—the president’s popularity jumped from 47 percent before the coup to 68 percent today. With the power of state behind him, and the nationalism generated by the ongoing war against the Kurds in Turkey’s southeast, Erdogan can probably pick up the 14 seats he needs to get the referendum.

The recent Turkish invasion of Syria is another front in Erdogan’s war on the Kurds. While the surge of Turkish armor and troops across the border was billed as an attack on the Islamic State’s (IS) occupation of the town of Jarablus near the Turkish border, it was in fact aimed at the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG).

According to Al Monitor, the IS had been withdrawing from the town for weeks in the face of a YPG offensive, and the Turks invaded to preempt the Kurds from taking the town. The question now will be how far south the Turks go, and whether they will get in a full-scale battle with America’s Kurdish allies. The Turkish military has already supported the Free Syrian Army in several clashes with the Kurds. Since the invasion included a substantial amount of heavy engineering equipment, the Turks may be planning to stay awhile.

While the YPG serves as the U.S.’s ground force in the fight against the IS, the Americans strongly backed the Turkish invasion and sharply warned the Kurds to withdraw from the west bank of the Euphrates, or lose Washington’s support.

The Kurds in Syria are now directly threatened by Turkey, were attacked in Hasaka Province by the Syrian government, and have been sharply reprimanded by their major ally, the U.S. The Turkish Kurds are under siege from the Turkish army, and their parliamentary deputies are facing terrorism charges at the hands of the Erdogan government. The Turkish air force is also pounding the Kurds in Iraq. All in all, it was a bad couple of weeks to be Kurdish.

Although Erdogan has been strengthened, most observers think Turkey has been weakened regionally and internationally.

It looks as if an agreement with the European Union (EU) for money and visa-free travel, if Ankara blocks the waves of immigrants headed toward Europe, is falling apart. The German parliament is up in arms over Erdogan’s heavy-handed repression of his internal opposition and his support for extremist groups in Syria.

Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian bomber last Nov. 24 has badly backfired. Russian sanctions dented the Turkish economy and Moscow poured sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons into Syria, effectively preventing any possibility of the Turks or the U.S. establishing a “no-fly zone.”

Erdogan was also forced to write a letter of apology for the downing and trot off to St. Petersburg for a face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. All were smiles and hand shakes at the Aug. 9 get together, but the Russians have used the tension generated by the incident to advance their plans for constructing gas pipelines that would bypass Ukraine. Indeed, the EU and Turkey are now in a bidding war over whether the pipeline will go south—Turkish Stream— through Turkey and the Black Sea, or north—Nord Stream—through the Baltic Sea and into Germany.

Erdogan apparently has concluded that Russia and Iran have effectively blocked a military solution to the Syrian civil war, and Ankara has backed off its demand that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has to go before there can be any resolution of the conflict. Turkey now says Assad can be part of a transition government, adopting more or less the same position as the Russians. Iran—at least for now—is more invested in keeping Assad in power.

Iran has also come out of this affair in a stronger position. Its strategic alliance with Russia has blocked the overthrow of Assad, Teheran’s major ally in the region, and its potential markets have the Turks wanting to play nice.

Any Moscow-Ankara-Tehran alliance will be a fractious one, however.

Turkey is still a member of NATO—it has the second largest army in the alliance—and its military is largely reliant on the U.S. for equipment. NATO needs Turkey, although the Turks have mixed feelings about the alliance. A poll taken a year ago found only 30 percent of Turks trusted NATO. The post coup polls may be worse, because it was the pro-NATO sections of the military that were most closely tied to the putsch.

Iran’s Shiite government is wary of Erdogan’s ties to the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood and Ankara’s close relations with Iran’s major regional nemesis, Saudi Arabia. The Russians also have a tense relationship with Iran, although Moscow played a key role in the nuclear agreement between the U.S. and Teheran, and Iran calls its ties with Russia “strategic.”

The Saudis look like losers in all of this. They—along with Turkey, France, Britain, and most the Gulf monarchies—thought Assad would be a pushover. He wasn’t, and five years later some 400,000 Syrians are dead, three million have been made into refugees, and the war has spread into Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

The Yemen war has predictably turned into a quagmire, and even Saudi Arabia’s allies are beginning to edge away from the human catastrophe that the conflict has inflicted on Yemen’s civilian population. The United Arab Emirates, which provided ground forces for the Saudis, is withdrawing troops, and even the U.S. has cut back on the advisors assigned to aid the kingdom’s unrestricted air war on the rebel Houthis. U.S. Defense Department spokesman Adam Stump said aid to Riyadh was not a “blank check,” and several U.S. Congress members and peace groups are trying to halt a $1.15 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia.

In military terms, the Yemen war—like the Syrian war—is unwinnable, and Washington is beginning to realize that. In fact, were it not for the U.S. and British aid to the Saudis, including weapons resupply, in-air refueling of war planes, and intelligence gathering, the war would grind to a halt.

The Saudis are in trouble on the home front as well. Their push to overthrow Assad and the Houthis has turned into expensive stalemates at a time when oil prices are at an all-time low. The Kingdom has been forced to borrow money and curb programs aimed at dealing with widespread unemployment among young Saudis. And the Islamic State has targeted the kingdom with more than 25 attacks over the past year.

Ending the Yemen war would not be that difficult, starting with an end to aid for the Saudi air war. Then the UN could organize a conference of all Yemeni parties—excluding the IS and al-Qaeda—to schedule elections and create a national unity government.

Syria will be considerably more challenging. The Independent’s long-time Middle East correspondent Patrhdpick Cockburn calls the conflict a three-dimensional chess game with nine players and no rules. But a solution is possible.

The outside powers—the U.S., Turkey, Russia, Iran, and the Gulf monarchies—will have to stop fueling their allies with weapons and money and step back from direct involvement in the war. They will also have to accept the fact that no one can dictate to the Syrians who will rule them. That is an internal affair that will be up to the parties engaged in the civil war (minus the IS and the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.)

The Kurdish question will be central to all of this. The Syrian Kurds must have a place at the table regardless of Turkish opposition. The Iranians are also hostile to the Kurds because of problems with their own Kurdish population. If there is to be eventual peace in the region, Ankara will also have to end its war against the Kurds in southeast Turkey. Turkish army attacks have killed more than 700 civilians, generated 100,000 refugees, and destroyed several cities. The Kurds have been asking for negotiations and Ankara should take them up on that.

Erdogan has made peace with the Kurds before—even if part of the reason was a cynical ploy to snare conservative Kurdish voters for the AKP. It was also Erdogan who rekindled the war as a strategy to weaken the Kurdish-based HDP and regain the majority that the AKP lost in the June 2015 elections. The ploy largely worked, and a snap election four months later saw the HDP lose seats and the AKP win back its majority. The Turkish president, however, did not get the two-thirds he needs to schedule a referendum.

Erdogan is a stubborn man, and a popular one in the aftermath of the failed coup. But Turkey is vulnerable regionally and internationally, two arenas where the U.S., the EU, and Russia can apply pressure. The hardheaded Turkish president has already backed off in his confrontation with the Russians and climbed down from his demand that Assad had to go before any serious negotiations could start.

If the chess masters agree to some rules they could bring these two tragic wars to a close.

The post Turkey’s Coup: Winners & Losers appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com and middleempireseries.wordpress.com

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In January 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron pledged that if re-elected in 2015 he would hold an in/out referendum on the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Union. By June 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU with a 72.2 percent turnout—the highest in a national election since 1992—and with 51.9 percent of the electorate in favor of Brexit.

Many miles away, In April 2013, a terrorist group operating mainly in Iraq and Syria adopted the name: Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIL proclaimed the creation of a global Islamic Caliphate in June 2013. From then onwards, a broad and brutal campaign devoted to intimidate, polarize, and terrorize took center stage.

These two phenomena are vastly complex and distinctive occurrences, but they share some singular commonalities that deserve a more thorough evaluation. It is essential to avoid categorical conclusions. Asking why and how they happen is crucial. If we try to understand, rather than judge, we may improve and even refine the analysis of what has been going on.

Both cases arise at a time marked by widespread and severe social, economic, and political malaise that has been expressed in both peaceful and violent ways. We are not witnessing an episodic or country-specific malfunctioning. Societal dissatisfaction, fear, and fragility are present and exacerbated worldwide. This negative matrix derives sooner than later into resentment, pugnacity, and even fantasy. Although data shows that there are more people leaving poverty, especially in Asia, the global reality is more intricate and dialectic than that. In fact, vast sectors of the citizenry feel neglected, abused, and helpless.

A majority of economists are wrong when they insist, implicitly or explicitly, that people are merely blind to the benefits of globalization and that their actions through vote or force are irrational. A more nuanced perspective that takes into consideration sociological and psychological aspects is needed to explain both the Brexit and formation of ISIL. For example, the limits to integration and the potential to disintegration in the EU cannot be examined only with the tools of economics: class tensions, institutional stalemate, xenophobic propensity, and political corrosion are part of  deeper and larger processes and dynamics. Likewise, the persistent bloodshed and recurrent instability in the Middle East are not new features. The place of force in local politics, the lack of a single powerful state, and Western involvement and power politics in the region have been customary.

In this context it is important to introduce the concept of a regressive arcadia. It shouldn’t be confused with utopia: an imaginary and remote place in the future where an ideal of perfection in government, laws, and social conditions will prevail. Nor does it refer to a dystopia: another imaginary place where people are unhappy, alienated, and usually afraid because they are not treated fairly. Arcadia must be located in its poetic sense: a place in the past where splendor, simplicity, and harmony reign. Regressive implies a move backwards, to a time believed to be recoverable and where tensions dissipate completely: cohesion, communal life, and collective well-being are thought to be the rule here. Thus, a regressive arcadia is a defense mechanism that can lead to radicalism and even extremism.

In that sense, both Brexit and the Caliphate are regressive arcadias. Essentially, British voters faced two narratives. Proponents of leaving the EU insisted on the illusion of a return to the historical national greatness. They appealed to those aggrieved and alarmed by the economic and demographic changes of the last three decades. They blamed a dysfunctional political system characterized by the decline of the traditional parties and wide public cynicism towards politicians. A vision of imperial splendor and a reclaimed sovereign pointed to the passion, anxiety, and expectation of many Brits. Proponents of staying in the EU stressed the many evils that the UK would live if it renounced European integration and highlighted few benefits if it continued to belong. The Remain alternative was not particularly encouraging: there was never a clear and promising vision of the future. Not even regions like East Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire, that are highly connected by trade with the European Union, supported the status quo. The Leave vote in these areas was around 65 percent. In the end, the British decided to extricate themselves from the European Union. Without a hopeful prospect for the future, a vote in favor of a return to an imagined arcadia wasn’t so surprising.

The Arab Muslim world is the epicenter of a series of dramas and traumas where internal oppression, exclusion, and external manipulation and aggression have become a regular trait. The succession of frustrations from North Africa to the Middle East — for nationalists and Marxists, reformists and moderates, secular and modernizing forces — has been eloquent. Grand pan-Arab projects from the 1960s to the 1980s undertaken by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya were defeated. With a different ideal and on a more national scale, the Arab Spring was an opportunity for the people to push for liberalization and democratization. But its ultimate failure, in most  countries, only reaffirmed a state of exasperation, pessimism and powerlessness among the masses. In this context, Al Qaeda first, and now ISIL, has sought to recreate the Caliphate.

The first Sunni Umayyad Caliphate (661-750) with its capital at Damascus, followed by the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate that lasted until 1258, was the Muslim Golden Age. Several centuries after that grand Muslim era, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is attempting to reestablish that glorious past. Ignoring the sentiments of the vast majority of Muslims and resorting to violence, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is searching for its own regressive arcadia. For them, it’s as if going back to that Muslim Golden Age is the only antidote to a dark, chaotic, and unpromising present.

Thus, Brexit and the formation of the Caliphate—notwithstanding their significant dissimilarities–are both products of an idyllic restoration of a lost order, of a pleasant community, and a glorious dignity. The means to get there are obviously quite different—referendum in one case and terror in the other—but their underlying, anxious outcry for a regressive arcadia is strikingly similar.

The post What Brexit and ISIL Have in Common appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Juan Gabriel Tokatlian is the director of the department of political science and international studies at Universidad De Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has published various books, essays, and op-eds on the foreign policies of Aregentina and Columbia, U.S.-Latin American relations, contemporary globla politics, and drug trafficking, organized crime, and violence in the Americas.

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I had many lessons from the Battle of Seattle, and one of them was that policewomen can deal it out as good as any policeman. I got beaten up, badly, by one of Seattle’s best.  Yesterday, I decided go down memory lane and visit the scene of the crime.  I remember seeing Medea Benjamin of Code Pink being treated fairly roughly and I rushed forward to try to get the police to stop. At that point, a policewoman rushed me and started beating me with her baton, while dragging me and dumping me on the street, with the coup de grace being a well planted kick to my derriere. But that was not the biggest blow of all. The biggest was to my ego: I deserved to be beaten and kicked, but wasn’t fit to be arrested.

Like Caesar, I will divide my talk into three parts. First, some reflections on what Seattle means for change in knowledge systems. Second, a discussion of how, despite the deep crisis of neoliberalism, finance capital has managed to retain tremendous power. Third, an appeal for a new comprehensive vision of the desirable society.

Seattle and the Crisis of Neoliberalism

In Thomas Kuhn’s theory of how change takes place in the physical sciences, dissonant data cannot be accommodated in the old paradigm until someone comes out with a new one where they can be explained. Social scientists have appropriated Kuhn in their efforts to explain the displacement and replacement of hegemonic thinking in politics, economics, and sociology. I think that while the role of dissonant data has been exhaustively studied, as in the case of the displacement of Keynesianism in the late seventies and of the rational choice and efficient market theories during the recent financial crisis, explanations of change in knowledge systems have failed to adequately take into account the role of collective action.

The Battle of Seattle underlines, in my view, the very critical, if not decisive role of collective mass action in displacing knowledge systems. Let me explain.

It is now generally accepted that globalization has been a failure in terms of delivering on its triple promise of lifting countries from stagnation, eliminating poverty, and reducing inequality. The ongoing global economic crisis, which is rooted in corporate-driven globalization and financial liberalization, has driven the last nail into the ideology of neoliberalism.

But things were very different over two decades ago. I still remember the note of triumphalism surrounding the first ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Singapore in November 1996. There, we were told by representatives of the U.S. and other developed countries that corporate-driven globalization was inevitable, that it was the wave of the future, and that the sole remaining task was to make the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the WTO more “coherent” in order to more swiftly get to the neoliberal utopia of an integrated global economy.

Indeed, the momentum of globalization seemed to sweep everything in front of it, including the truth. In the decade prior to Seattle, there were a lot of studies, including United Nations reports, that questioned the claim that globalization and free market policies were leading to sustained growth and prosperity. Indeed, the data showed that globalization and pro-market policies were actually promoting more inequality and more poverty and consolidating economic stagnation, especially in the global South. However, these figures remained “factoids” rather than facts in the eyes of academics, the press, and policymakers, who dutifully repeated the neoliberal mantra that economic liberalization promotes growth and prosperity. The orthodox view, repeated ad nauseam in the classroom, the media, and policy circles was that the critics of globalization were modern-day incarnations of Luddites or, as Thomas Friedman disdainfully branded us, believers in a flat earth.

Then came Seattle in 1999. After those tumultuous days in the city, the press began to talk about the “dark side of globalization,” about the inequalities and poverty being created by globalization. After that, we had the spectacular defections from the camp of neoliberal globalization, such as those of the financier George Soros, the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and the star economist Jeffery Sachs. The intellectual retreat from globalization probably reached its high point of sorts in 2007, in a comprehensive report by a panel of neoclassical economists headed by Princeton’s Angus Deaton and former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff. That report sternly asserted that the World Bank Research Department—the source of most assertions that globalization and trade liberalization were leading to lower rates of poverty, sustained economic growth, and less inequality—had been deliberately distorting the data and/or making unwarranted claims.

True, neoliberalism continues to be the default discourse among many economists and technocrats. But even before the recent global financial collapse, it had already lost much of its credibility and legitimacy. What made the difference? Not so much research or debate, but action. It took the anti-globalization actions of masses of people in the streets of Seattle, which interacted in synergistic fashion with the resistance of developing country representatives in the Sheraton Convention Center, and a police riot, to bring about the spectacular collapse of a WTO ministerial meeting and translate those factoids into facts. And the intellectual debacle inflicted on globalization by Seattle had very real consequences. Today, the Economist, the prime avatar of neoliberal globalization, admits that the “integration of the world economy is in retreat on almost every front,” and a process of “deglobalization” that it once considered unthinkable is actually unfolding.

Seattle was what Hegel called a “world-historic event.” Its enduring lesson is that truth is not just out there, existing objectively and eternally. Truth is completed, made real, and ratified by action. In Seattle, ordinary women and men made truth real with collective action that discredited an intellectual paradigm that had served as the ideological warden of corporate control.

I would not say that neoliberalism was defeated in Seattle. But, to use a war metaphor, Seattle was certainly the Stalingrad of neoliberalism. It would take another decade before it would be definitively rolled back, and it took the global financial crisis to do this, with its sweeping away of the Rational Choice Theory and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis that had been the cutting edge of the globalization of finance.

Finance Capital’s Persistent Structural Power

But the rollback of the neoliberal paradigm is only half the story. Even with its ideational crisis, the forces of global capital have waged a fierce rearguard battle. As an example, take the case of finance capital’s successful effort to resist any change in the face of the naked necessity and social consensus for comprehensive reform.

When the ground from under Wall Street opened up in autumn 2008, there was much talk of letting the banks get their just desserts, jailing the “banksters,” and imposing draconian regulations. The newly elected Barack Obama came to power promising banking reform, warning Wall Street, “My administration is the only thing that stands between you and the pitchforks”.

Yet, over eight years after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, it is evident that those who were responsible for bringing it about have managed to go completely scot-free. Not only that, they have been able to get governments to stick the costs of the crisis and the burden of the recovery on their victims.

How did they succeed? The first line of defense for the banks was to get the government to rescue them from the financial mess they had created. The banks flatly refused Washington’s pressure on them to mount a collective defense with their own resources. Using the massive collapse of stock prices triggered by Lehman Brothers going under, finance capital’s representatives were able to blackmail both liberals and the far-right in Congress to approve the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Nationalization of the banks was dismissed as being inconsistent with “American” values.

Then, by engaging in the defensive anti-regulatory war that they had mastered in Congress over decades, the banks were able, in 2009 and 2010, to gut the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of three key items that were seen as necessary for genuine reform: downsizing the banks; institutionally separating commercial from investment banking; and banning most derivatives and effectively regulating the so-called “shadow banking system” that had brought on the crisis.

They did this by using what Cornelia Woll termed finance capital’s “structural power.” One dimension of this power was the $344 million the industry spent lobbying Congress in the first nine months of 2009, when legislators were taking up financial reform. Senator Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, alone received $2.8 million in contributions from Wall Street in 2007–2008. But perhaps equally powerful as Wall Street’s entrenched congressional lobby were powerful voices in the new Obama Administration who were sympathetic to the bankers, notably Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Council of Economic Advisors’ head Larry Summers, both of whom had served as close associates of Robert Rubin, who had successive incarnations as co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, Bill Clinton’s Treasury chief, and chairman and senior counsellor of Citigroup.

Finally, the financial sector succeeded by hitching the defense of its interests to one of the few remaining resonant assumptions of an otherwise crumbling neoliberal ideology: that the state is the source of all things bad that happens in the economy. While benefiting from the government bailout, Wall Street was able to change the narrative about the causes of the financial crisis, throwing the blame entirely on the state.

This is best illustrated in the case of Europe. As in the U.S., the financial crisis in Europe was a supply-driven crisis, as the big European banks sought high-profit, quick-return substitutes for the low returns on investment in industry and agriculture, such as real-estate lending and speculation in financial derivatives, or placed their surplus funds in high-yield bonds sold by governments. Indeed, in their drive to raise more and more profits from lending to governments, local banks, and property developers, Europe’s banks poured $2.5 trillion into Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain.

The result was that Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 148 percent in 2010, bringing the country to the brink of a sovereign debt crisis. Focused on protecting the banks, the European authorities’ approach to stabilizing Greece’s finances was not to penalize the creditors for irresponsible lending, but to get citizens to shoulder all the costs of adjustment.

The changed narrative, focusing on the “profligate state” rather than unregulated private finance as the cause of the financial crisis, quickly made its way to the U.S., where it was used not only to derail real banking reform but also to prevent the enactment of an effective stimulus program in 2010. Christina Romer, the former head of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimated that it would take $1.8 trillion to reverse the recession. Obama approved only less than half, or $787 billion, placating the Republican opposition, but preventing an early recovery. Thus the cost of the follies of Wall Street fell not on banks, but on ordinary Americans, with unemployment reaching nearly 10 percent of the workforce in 2011 and youth unemployment reaching over 20 percent.

The triumph of Wall Street in reversing the popular surge against it following the outbreak of the financial crisis is evident in the run-up to the 2016 presidential elections. The U.S. statistics are clear: 95 percent of income gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the top 1 percent; median income was $4,000 lower in 2014 than in 2000; concentration of financial assets increased after 2009, with the four largest banks owning assets that came to nearly 50 percent of GDP. Yet regulating Wall Street has not been an issue in the Republican primary debates, while in the Democratic debates, it has been a side issue, despite valiant efforts from candidate Bernie Sanders to make it the centerpiece.

The political institutions of one of the world’s most advanced liberal democracies were no match for the entrenched structural power of the financial establishment. As Cornelia Woll writes, “For the administration and Congress, the main lesson from the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 was that they had only very limited means to pressure the financial industry into behavior that appeared urgently necessary for the survival of the entire sector and the economy as a whole.”.

In Greece, austerity policies provoked a popular revolt — expressed in the June 2015 referendum on the bailout in which over 60 percent of the Greek people rejected the deal — but in the end their will was trampled on as the German government forced Tsipras into a humiliating surrender. It is clear that the key motives were to save the European financial elite from the consequences of their irresponsible policies, enforcing the iron principle of full debt repayment, and crucifying Greece to dissuade others, such as the Spaniards, Irish, and Portuguese, from revolting against debt slavery. As Karl Otto Pöhl, a former head of Germany’s Bundesbank admitted some time back, the draconian exercise in Greece was about “protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs.”

Yet, the victory of the banks is likely, in the end, to be pyrrhic. The combination of deep austerity-induced recession or stagnation that grips much of Europe and the U.S. and the absence of financial reform is deadly. The resulting prolonged stagnation and the prospect of deflation have discouraged investment in the real economy to expand goods and services.

With the move to re-regulate finance halted, the financial institutions have all the more reason to do what they did prior to 2008 that triggered the current crisis: engage in intense speculative operations designed to make super-profits from the difference between the inflated price of assets and derivatives based on assets and the real value of these assets before the law of gravity causes the inevitable crash.

The non-transparent derivatives market is now estimated to total $707 trillion, significantly higher than the $548 billion in 2008. According to one analyst, “The market has grown so unfathomably vast, the global economy is at risk of massive damage should even a small percentage of contracts go sour. Its size and potential influence are difficult just to comprehend, let alone assess.” Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the SEC, agreed, telling one writer that none of the post-2008 reforms has “significantly diminished the likelihood of financial crises.”

The question then is not if another bubble will burst, but when. And for us here, the key lesson is that in spite of the ideological discrediting of neoliberalism and popular anger at the depredations of the banks, the structural power of capital remains immense and has prevented any significant financial figure from being jailed, much less allowed significant reform.

The Need for A New Comprehensive Vision

My sense is that the persistence of Capital’s structural power is related to the fact that while the combination of objective developments, intellectual critique, and collective action eroded the legitimacy of neoliberalism, we have had a signal failure to articulate the bold alternative that can match the depth of the crisis of capitalism that we are in.

There is great, seething discontent out there, at the multiple crises triggered by capitalism. I wish, however, one could say, as Mao did, “There is great tumult under heaven, the situation is excellent.” Unfortunately, the situation is not excellent. Many of those who have been run over by corporate-driven globalization are turning to demagogues and ideologues of the right such as Donald Trump and Marin Le Pen. Or, in my own country, President Rodrigo Duterte, who has managed to convince a large section of the citizenry that crime and drugs are the root of the country’s problems and that the main cure for the ills of the country is to kill ‘em all, pushers and users alike. In this regard, let me say that the U.S. and Europe have no monopoly on dangerous right-wing demagogues with a heated, angry mass base, a great many of them resentful people from the lower middle classes who want simple solutions and are willing to countenance violence to bring about the leader’s version of heaven on earth. The key difference at this point is that your demagogues are still on the sidelines chomping at the bit to grab power, while ours has already come to power by electoral means.

Undoubtedly, part of the problem is the failure of the traditional forces of the left to educate their core bases of support, such as the white working class. Another part has been the inability to integrate minority populations into the ranks of the left, which has traditionally been the home of the disenfranchised and marginalized, forcing some to turn to radical fundamentalist groups such as ISIS. Thus the very real hurts imposed on so many sectors by corporate-driven globalization have been successfully joined to myths about displacement and crime by immigrants, on the one hand, and to the very real failures of immigrant integration, on the other. Donald Trump, Marin Le Pen, and ISIS have been very astute in taking advantage of the openings that were made by the left, by those who brought about the Seattle debacle of neoliberalism, by those who had been in the forefront of the anti-globalization and the Occupy Movement. These people have been eating our lunch.

I will not go further into the sociological reasons for their success and our failure, since many others have done that, but I do want to raise one question. That is, whether it is not overdue for us to take on the super-ambitious task of creating that overarching vision, language, and program to spell out the alternative and flesh it out. Bernie Sanders started this brave task by calling for “democratic socialism,” something that has resonated in the Philippines and the Global South. I think it is urgent that we flesh it out since the other side is already fleshing out their alternative in the form of Trumpism or National Frontism or Brexitism, a task which marries some of our intellectual critique of capitalism with the highly charged emotional appeal to return to an idealized past of white homogeneity, cultural purity, or religious uniformity. I think it is urgent that we overcome our fears of articulating grand narratives and lay out a vision that spells out the overcoming of the present world blighted by Capital through common struggle, with the end being the construction of societies that harness men and women’s deepest instinct— cooperation. Needless to say, such an endeavor must also be one that acknowledges the limitations, failures, and distortions of past efforts at building post-capitalist societies, especially when it came to dealing with issues of democracy, gender, and the environment.

I am not usually a bible quoting speaker, but there is definitely something profound in that passage in Proverbs 29:18: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” It would be tragic if people were left to the phlegmatic alternatives posed by the historically bypassed Social Democrats in Europe, the tiresome Clintons in the United States, and uninspiring elite-run reform movements in the Global South. Such political alternatives are no match for the counterrevolutionary movements that are on the march.

The post From the Battle of Seattle to the Financial Crisis appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Walden Bello is a Professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton, senior research fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of Kyoto University, and a former member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines.

(Photo: Baz P / flickr)

When Pope Francis visited the U.S. Congress in September 2015, he boldly posed a moral challenge to his American hosts, asking: “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?”

“Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money,” he solemnly concluded. “Money that is drenched in blood.”

In this case, it’s innocent Yemeni blood.

During his almost eight years in office, President Obama has approved a jaw-dropping, record-breaking $110 billion in weapons sales to the repressive Saudi regime, all with Congressional backing.

“In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and stop the arms trade,” Pope Francis said. Our lawmakers have failed miserably at heeding the Pope’s call.

Manufacturers such as Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and McDonnell Douglas have been pushing these sales to offset military spending cuts in the United States and Europe. These weapons manufacturers spend millions on lobbying, filling the campaign coffers of both Republicans and Democrats.

In addition to that lobbying power, U.S. officials were pressured to placate Saudi Arabia after the Obama administration made a deal with its adversary, Iran. That appeasement came in the form of a level and quality of arms exports that should’ve never been approved for a repressive regime with an atrocious human rights record.

Saudi Arabia is the number one exporter of radical Islamic extremism on the planet. Fifteen of the 19 Sep. 11 hijackers were radicalized Saudi citizens. The regime oppresses religious minorities, women, LGBT people, and dissidents, while dozens of non-violent participants in their own Arab Spring protests face execution, usually by beheading.

The Pentagon says that providing the Saudis with F-15s bombers, Apache helicopters, armored vehicles, missiles, and bombs supports Saudi Arabian defense missions and helps promote stability in the region. But since March 2015, the Saudis have being using these weapons offensively to intervene in neighboring Yemen.

Their relentless onslaught has killed thousands of innocent civilians, decimated Yemen’s infrastructure, and left more than 21 million people—that’s 4 out of 5 Yemenis—desperately in need of humanitarian assistance. The United Nations has said that Saudi air strikes on civilian targets likely constitute war crimes and calls the situation in Yemen a “catastrophe.”

Despite this carnage, the Obama administration just announced an additional $1.15 billion in Saudi weapons sales.

In the week following that announcement, the Saudis bombed a Yemeni potato chip factory, a school, a residential neighborhood, and a Doctors Without Borders-run hospital. Most of the dead and wounded were women and children.

But it’s not too late for Congress to stop this madness.

By law, they have 30 days after arms sales are announced to stop or modify the deals. And despite the overall apathetic response to the crisis in Yemen, not all members of Congress are turning a blind eye to the violence.

California Democratic Congressman Ted Leiu, for example, is ready to take a stand. “When Saudi Arabia continues to kill civilians, and in this case children, enough is enough,” he said.

Senators Chris Murphy and Rand Paul have also come out against the sale. But for the sake of thousands of innocent civilians who could be slaughtered with these weapons, many more members must act quickly.

It’s high time for Congress to answer the Pope’s challenge to stop the arms trade and help prevent more Yemeni bloodshed.

The post U.S. Weapons Sales Are Drenched in Yemeni Blood appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of the peace group CODEPINK and the author of nine books, including the recently released Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.

(Photo: thaths / flickr)

Throughout the summer, as a growing number of southern French municipalities banned burkinis on their beaches, the measure was widely decried as Islamophobic, counter-productive and oppressive to women. While it would be easy to reduce it to a misled, demagogue measure by right-wing mayors attempting to appear ‘tough on extremism’ in the aftermath of the Nice attack and in a national climate of rising Islamophobia, the bans are only the latest development in a long history of state-led oppression of Muslim women. In fact, the French State has been unveiling Muslim women for decades.

During colonial rule in Algeria and the Algerian War of Independence, French military propaganda enjoined women to unveil themselves as acts of allegiance to both the French state and “civilization” itself. In turn, remaining veiled was an act of cultural and national resistance. Following years of controversy on the subject, France passed a law to ban headscarves in schools in 2004, and in 2010 Nicolas Sarkozy’s government banned the burqa in all public spaces.

Each time the French government attempts to unveil Muslim women, it does so under guise of liberalism. The universalistic, humanist values of the Enlightenment are brandished as the state presents itself as the protector of secularism, women’s rights, and civilization itself against the supposed, constructed barbarism of an extremist other, an enemy within the French nation. Yet these supposedly universal values are in fact eminently specific to France and its colonial history, and instrumentalized to perpetuate state racism. So when Prime Minister Manuel Valls declares that burkinis are “not compatible with the values of the French Republic” he is, in a way, correct, but the issue lies with the values of the French Republic, not the burkini.

A foundational principle of the French modern state is that of laïcité, which, although synonymous with secularism, is a uniquely French concept. While anglo-saxon secularism traditionally defines itself as a kind of neutrality allowing for the practice of diverse religions, french laïcité is a value-laden concept which requires others to remain neutral, devoid of religious signs in the public sphere. While secularism in the U.S. or other European countries focuses on protecting religions from the state, in France the state protects individuals from religion crossing the boundaries of privacy and tainting the public space.

The idiosyncrasy of laïcité is linked to the historical formation of the French state since the 1789 revolution. As Christianity was deeply tied to the monarchy that the new republic was attempting to replace, allegiance to the new republican regime demanded from its citizens both a repudiation of religion and an embrace of Republicanism itself as a new, secular religion, a transference which laïcité scholar Jean Baubérot has called “revolutionary religiosity.”

Through the regime changes of the 19^th century and until the law of 1905, which instituted the current institutional version of laïcité, the nation underwent “le conflit des deux Frances:” an internal struggle opposing clerics and anticlerics, mirroring the political struggles between republic and restoration, revolution and reaction. The strategy of the Third Republic (1870-1940) to gain the people’s unconditional allegiance was to take public education out of the hands of the clergy and turn it into a manufacturer of republican citizens: Jules Ferry’s public schools taught non-religious moral and civic education, schoolmasters endorsing the role of “secular missionaries.”

If laïcité was historically constructed not as an ideology of religious acceptance, but as a kind of Republican state religion in direct competition with Christianity, and used as a means to strengthen the modern French State, it is not surprising that it is still used today by various governments attempting to reassert the authority of the state.

But it is no longer against Christianity that the French republic asserts itself, it is against Islam. In the 19^th century, the struggle for laïcité against the Catholic Church was a proxy for the republic to assert itself against the forces of reaction and monarchy. In contemporary France, the struggle for laïcité against Islam has become a proxy for the protection of a national identity infused by colonialism: white, western, and, ironically enough, of Christian heritage. The purity of this identity is under threat, many French citizens feel, prompted by the media. From Michel Houellebecq’s bestselling racist fantasy of Muslim political takeover, Soumission, to the increasingly popular white supremacist idea of “Le Grand Remplacement” according to which “traditional” European populations are soon to be “taken over” by immigrant invaders, French culture is teeming with these populist ideas of civilizational purity.

While this “philosophy of decline” is unquestionably linked to austerity and the failures of social-democratic governments to protect its citizens against the damage of neoliberal policies, there is, once again, something eminently French about the way it fits well within the country’s tradition of assimilation. French colonial rule, much like its recent policies on the clothing of Muslim women, was consistently justified through the rhetoric of universal Enlightenment values which France, more than any nation, was supposed to embody as the pinnacle of civilization, and was morally charged with bringing to the uncivilized, backward parts of the world: its colonies.

The native, under French colonial rule, could gain access to this superior plane of humanity through its assimilation into French culture and society, with the ultimate reward of becoming un “évolué,” literally an “evolved.” This implied getting rid of one’s culture, religion, language, beliefs and sense of belonging. Of course, the promise of full and equal citizenship dangled by the colonial skin was never actually fulfilled: it always remained an horizon for the colonized to strive for, without ever being able to reach—and a very powerful means of social control for the colonizer.

Because France as a nation has never collectively dealt with its colonial heritage nor recognized its errors in any public, cathartic way, it is unsurprising that the assimilationist model has been applied, after colonies gained their independence, to its immigrant population. Just like the native was enjoined to “evolve” toward civilization by embracing Frenchness in the colony, France demands that its immigrants (the non-white ones, at least) shed all traces of their culture and completely dissolve into French culture, deemed universal. In the words of anti-racist activist Pierre Tevanian, “Identity becomes the condition of equality: being identical is required to be equal.” Of course, as in the colonial context, the promise of full integration often remains unfulfilled as institutional and cultural racism remain strong.

It is from this intact colonial hubris that France’s Burkini ban stems. The deeply-rooted idea that universality is synonymous with Frenchness, that neutrality means what civilized French women wear, and that any deviance from this model, any attempt at diversity, is a sign of backwardness, inferiority and worse: a threat to the enlightened Republic. That it is up to others to “evolve” to their level of civilization. Of course, this ideological model has always been racist, and like any system of thought in which the identity of those in power is considered the only norm, is doomed to remain inescapably so. To answer Manuel Valls, if the burkini is incompatible with fundamental French values, it is those fundamental values that have to change.

The post The Deep Colonial Roots of France’s Unveiling of Muslim Women appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Jeanne Kay is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

Photo by Jamelle Bouie via Flickr

The history of political parties is rather boring. Not much has changed since the French Revolution, which produced the the terms “Left” and “Right” to reflect where people sat in the National Assembly. The early 20^th century saw the rise of Communist parties on the far left. Shortly later, fascist parties began to emerge on the far right. Aside from these challenges from the margins, most countries have produced some version of a conservative (Christian Democrat, Republican) party and a liberal (Labor, Social Democratic) party. These parties have alternated in power, sometimes even ruling in coalition.

The one major innovation of the last 50 years has been the Green Party. Starting in Australia but achieving greatest prominence in Germany, Green parties have been both conservative (in terms of preserving the environment) and radical (in challenging economic orthodoxy). There are Green parties in 90 countries around the world. They have participated in several European governments. But they have not fully transformed politics. The traditional liberal and conservative parties have simply made a little room on the political spectrum for their Green colleagues.

Now, however, this stable political order seems on the verge of collapse.

All over the world, people in democratic societies have grown disgusted with politics as usual. The rise of Donald Trump, who has focused the anger of Americans at the elites in both major political parties, is mirrored by similar populist leaders elsewhere: Viktor Orban in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, Marine Le Pen in France, Nigel Farage in the UK, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Narendra Modi in India.

These leaders call themselves different things – left, right, socialist, nationalist. They also all function within democracies. But they all share one thing in common. They are “illiberal.”

Illiberal politicians are not very interested in civil liberties. They will manipulate the rule of law to “get things done.” They tend to appeal to religious or national identity rather than political ideology. They also generally favor greater state intervention in the economy.

In short, they defy the usual political categories.

If Donald Trump weren’t so personally unpopular and so tactically inept, he might be able to join the ranks of these successful illiberal leaders. Still, he has gotten as far as he has – seizing the nomination of a major political party – by articulating the same anger and resentment as the others.

Trump and the other illiberal populists have been benefiting from three overlapping backlashes.

The first is cultural. Movements for civil liberties have been remarkably successful over the last 40 years. Women, ethnic and religious minorities, and the LGBTQ community have secured important gains at a legal and cultural level. It is remarkable, for instance, how quickly same-sex marriage has become legal in more than 20 countries when no country recognized it before 2001.

Resistance has always existed to these movements to expand the realm of civil liberties. But this backlash increasingly has a political face. Thus the rise of parties that challenge multiculturalism and immigration in Europe, the movements throughout Africa and Asia that support the majority over the minorities, and the Trump/Tea Party takeover of the Republican Party with their appeals to primarily white men.

The second backlash is economic. The globalization of the economy has created a class of enormously wealthy individuals (in the financial, technology, and communications sectors). But globalization has left behind huge numbers of low-wage workers and those who have watched their jobs relocate to other countries.

Illiberal populists have directed all that anger on the part of people left behind by the world economy at a series of targets: bankers who make billions, corporations that are constantly looking for even lower-wage workers, immigrants who “take away our jobs,” and sometimes ethnic minorities who function as convenient scapegoats. The targets, in other words, include both the very powerful and the very weak.

The third backlash, and perhaps the most consequential, is political. It’s not just that people living in democracies are disgusted with their leaders and the parties they represent. Rather, as political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk write in the Journal of Democracy, “they have also become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives.”

Foa and Mounk are using 20 years of data collected from surveys of citizens in Western Europe and North America – the democracies with the greatest longevity. And they have found that support for illiberal alternatives is greater among the younger generation than the older one. In other countries outside Europe and North America, the disillusionment with democratic institutions often takes the form of a preference for a powerful leader who can break the rules if necessary to preserve order and stability – like Putin in Russia or Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt or Prayuth Chan-ocha in Thailand.

These three backlashes – cultural, economic, political – are also anti-internationalist because international institutions have become associated with the promotion of civil liberties and human rights, the greater globalization of the economy, and the constraint of the sovereignty of nations (for instance, through the European Union or the UN’s “responsibility to protect” doctrine).

The terrible irony is that the planet currently faces tremendous challenges – climate change, health pandemics, global inequality, Islamic State terrorism – that require greater internationalism to resolve. This should be the time when the disgust that people feel toward the political status quo gets channeled toward parties that pledge a much more urgent response to these global issues. Instead, the political focus is turning inward, becoming narrower and more parochial.

It’s not too late for a different kind of party to challenge the liberal-conservative political order. Such a party would prioritize the response to climate change. It would promote a sustainable economic system that doesn’t generate huge income inequality, consumer waste, and dubious public goods like warships and jet fighters. And it would embrace civil liberties and the rule of law while emphasizing the importance of civic engagement. It would speak to the disgust that people have with the political and economic status quo without shifting the blame onto the weak or retreating from the global challenges before us.

The current political order is coming apart. If we don’t come up with a fair, Green, and internationalist alternative, the illiberal populists will keep winning.

The post Trump and the Transformation of Politics appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

(Photo: buck82 / flickr)

The contrast between the two games couldn’t be starker. On the one hand, the world’s most technologically advanced militaries and weapons systems are deployed to practice combat. On the other, despite tremendous nationalist pressure to beat the other, athletes from North Korea and South Korea competed with each other peacefully, even gracefully, in the 2016 Olympic games.

Among the most touching moments from Rio was when two gymnasts, Lee Eun-Ju from South Korea and Hong Un-Jong from North, posed for a selfie with Eun-Ju holding up a peace sign. The photograph went viral, particularly in South Korea where the 17-year old Eun-Ju became a celebrity diplomat. Her gesture— to walk over to Hong, a fellow Korean but from a nation considered to be an enemy of her own—captured that Olympic spirit where humans are able to triumph over fear and pain to move the world forward.

And it wasn’t just a female thing, either.

A few days later, Kim Song-Guk, a North Korean athlete, won bronze at the men’s 50-meter pistol shooting competition. Instead of expressing remorse for coming in behind gold winner Jin Jong Oh from South Korea, Song-Guk reflected, “If the two [Koreas] become one, we could have a bigger medal.”

Overnight, South Korean social media went wild over Song-Guk’s heartfelt wishes for Korean reunification. In a few hours, the video had 2.2 million views and 160,000 likes, including comments like, “Even though you got a Bronze medal, your words deserve a gold medal.”

“We mingle and say hello with athletes from other countries, so why can’t we do that?” Eun-Ju innocently asked.

North and South Korean athletes cannot communicate directly with one another because the two countries are officially still at war. It is illegal under both countries’ national security laws for civilians to interact without government permission.

The Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, ended with a ceasefire, but not a permanent peace accord. Although military leaders from the United States, People’s Republic of China, and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea promised within three months to replace the Armistice Agreement with a peace treaty, 63 years later they have yet to deliver.

As a result, the Korean people—like these Olympic athletes—have been separated by the world’s most militarized border, unable to see, know, and understand one another for three generations.

Not only have relations completely hardened between the two Koreas, the unresolved Korean conflict is driving a new arms race in an already highly militarized region, particularly straining relations between Washington and Beijing.

In July, South Korea announced that to protect against the threat of North Korean missiles, it would deploy the U.S.’ Terminal High Altitude Aerial Defense (THAAD) in Seongju, a farming region 180 miles south of Seoul. Angry South Korean citizens protested the announcement by hurling eggs and water bottles at their prime minister and staging massive protests.

Equally vocal over their opposition to the U.S. missile defense system is Beijing, which has asked Seoul to “think twice” about this decision and has begun to chill relations between the two countries. In a statement, China’s foreign ministry said the THAAD deployment “doesn’t help achieve the objective of denuclearization in the peninsula, doesn’t benefit maintaining peace and stability in the peninsula. It’s going toward the opposite direction of solving the problem via dialogue and negotiation.”

Against this tense backdrop, the U.S-R.O.K. joint military exercises will proceed. The spring war games were the largest ever, involving 315,000 U.S. and South Korean soldiers and nuclear-capable submarines, B-52s, and F-22s. In response to the recent U.S. deployment of B-1 bombers to Guam, North Korea’s foreign ministry issued a statement via the Korean Central News Agency that this “proves that the U.S. plan for a preemptive nuclear strike at the DPRK has entered a reckless phase of implementation.”

Travis Lindsay, researcher of international security at the University of California, San Diego, recently advocated for rethinking the military exercises. “Demobilization and de-escalation isn’t complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization, but it’s a necessary step forward that will make denuclearization an attainable goal.”

In spite of nationalist media coverage, the Korean athletes in Rio showed the world that seemingly intractable divisions imposed by politicians could be transcended by the simplest and most sincere human interactions.

Instead of continuing to engage in saber-rattling actions that only lead to more provocation and dangerous military escalation, American and Korean leaders should shift their policies to reflect the desires of the Korean people for peaceful co-existence. Not only have Olympians shown their ability to conquer the insurmountable through their super human ability, they have inspired all of us by engaging in ordinary human actions.

It was only 16 years ago during the 2000 Olympics that Korean athletes walked together during the opening ceremony in Sydney carrying a blue One Korea flag. When asked why, Chang Ung, the North Korean delegate explained, “We are the same blood.”

The post Let the Peace Games Begin appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Christine Ahn is the Executive Director of Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of women walking to end the Korean War, reunite families, and ensure women’s leadership in peacebuilding.

Trump World Tower (Photo: Eric / Flickr)

Here at Emergency Travel Services, we believe that it’s never too early to plan your vacation.

Or your emigration.

Based on the latest polls, most of you are confident that Donald Trump won’t be elected president in November. If the election were held today, according to statistician Nate Silver, Trump would have about a 12 percent chance of winning. His odds improve to about 13 percent for November (according to the polls) and a mere 23 percent if you factor in other data on the economy and so on. Trump, who insists on being top dog in everything, is now barking loudly as the underdog.

But that could change. Hillary Clinton’s campaign could implode. An October surprise—a huge info-leak, a major terrorist attack—could mean a 5 to 10 percent swing in popular sentiment.

Bottom line: don’t plan your life around public opinion polls.

Time is running out. Some of our best deals at Emergency Travel Services have already been taken. I know that many of you liberal types have a soft spot for New Zealand: tolerant culture, lots of nice hiking paths, language mostly intelligible to Americans. But our Notorious RBG package is already sold out. Following the lead of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, practically half the populations of the Bay Area, Portland, Oregon, and Burlington, Vermont have planned their escape route to down under.

Don’t wait until November 9. Last minute vacationers often make terrible mistakes. Desperate to get out of town and seduced by misleading ad campaigns, they end up at the Club Med on the Aral Sea or on a summer beach vacation in Kuwait. Our travel agency never forgets to account for global warming. The same goes for political climate change.

Always one step ahead, our risk analysts have prepared a guide to the planet’s most welcoming and least welcoming destinations, that is, if your primary objective is to run screaming in the other direction from the specter of President Trump. We’ve divided our guide into four sections: Trump Plus, Trump-Like, Trump Light, and Trump-Free.

Pay close attention. You don’t want to jump out of the American frying pan and into some foreign fire. Let Emergency Travel Services ensure that your landing is a safe one.

Trump Plus

This is probably not news to anyone, but Pyongyang and Damascus are not good places to establish a new life abroad. Donald Trump is perhaps the greatest threat to democracy that the United States has witnessed in the last 75 years. But he’s not Kim Jong Eun or Bashar al-Assad. Of course, give Trump an army and a vast prison system and who knows? Bashar was once just a white-collar professional with a pretty wife. Jong Eun was once just a privileged child who got a big boost from his father. There but for the grace of democratic institutions goes Donald.

Also in the category of one-man dystopias are Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan, Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus, Islam Karimov’s Uzbekistan, and Butch Otter’s Idaho (in case you were considering internal exile in a survivalist bunker).

We recommend that you don’t go to war zones (much of the Middle East), pandemic zones (check the CDC site), and island nations that are about to disappear under the ocean. Cancun during spring break is also a no-no.

In short, there are places in the world that are worse than living under Donald Trump. Sure, if you’re a nuclear physicist or a trainer of commando units, Pyongyang and Damascus might welcome you with open arms. We run an exfiltration service—think Argo—if things go horribly wrong. But that will cost you big time. Bottom line: maximize your flexibility and minimize your cost and risk.

Trump-Like

It’s easy to avoid dictatorships. But if you are considering a destination based solely on its designation as a democracy, think again. Plenty of other countries around the world have gone to the polls to install their own little Trumps.

Consider, for instance, the Philippines. The country has suffered under some appalling leadership in the past. Ferdinand Marcos steered the country into pauperdom; Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was under hospital arrest for four years on corruption charges. But the recently elected Rodrigo Duterte is already demonstrating that he can out-Trump the competition. He called the U.S. ambassador a “gay son of a bitch” and refused to apologize. He made a rape joke too offensive to be repeated here. He even insulted the Pope. In terms of specific policies, he pledged to dump the corpses of 100,000 gangsters into Manila Bay—indeed, extrajudicial killings are already on the rise—and suspend the country’s legislature if it doesn’t do what he says. At the same time, he wants to shake up the country’s elite, negotiate with armed rebels, and make a deal with Beijing over the disputed territory in the South China Sea. Bottom line: Duterte is an offensive and unpredictable loudmouth whose war on crime might be balanced by peace initiatives elsewhere, but we don’t recommend that you relocate to Manila.

Russia could legitimately claim that its leader Vladimir Putin championed “illiberal democracy” long before the White House appeared on Trump’s real estate wish list. And Trump seems to defer to Putin—on the threat of terrorism and the proper means to address it, the annexation of Crimea and the questionable utility of NATO, and the rise of Euroskepticism and the weakening of the European Union. Trump wants to bring back torture to deal with America’s enemies; Putin gets rid of opposition in less medieval but equally distasteful ways. After Boris Yeltsin turned Russia into a post-Soviet backwater, Putin claims that he has made the country great again, measured by military spending, cross-border meddling, and nationalist rhetoric. By ruling like an oligarch and pouring money into the Pentagon, Trump promises to duplicate that feat. Bottom line: unless you plan to keep your mouth shut about human rights, corruption, and geopolitics, don’t move to Moscow.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan once won accolades as a reformer for breaking the power of the military, reaching out to the Kurdish community, and bringing Turkey closer in line with European human rights standards. But after throwing dozens of journalists in jail and reigniting a war against the Kurds, Erdogan has swung the other way. His recent efforts to pass a new constitution, which would put even more power into his hands, has a definite Trumpian feel. The recently attempted military coup gave Erdogan a fresh excuse for sweeping potential opponents from the system, and it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine such a scenario in Trump’s America. Bottom line: Turkey’s a lovely place, but this is not the time to establish residence in Istanbul.

Japan has long been a popular destination for Americans looking for safe, economically advanced locales. But Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been steadily remilitarizing the country by undermining the “peace constitution.” Recently he installed a war-crimes denier as his defense minister. Unlike Trump, Abe is not given to outrageous statements. Nor has he proposed any outlandish walls (Japan’s an island, after all). But he’s no fan of immigrants, and he desperately wants to put Japan first (evoking some of the same noxious World War II-era slogans as Trump’s America First rhetoric). Bottom line: we’re not predicting another Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, but who wants to live in a country that’s been ruled by the same party practically for the last 70 years?

Then there’s a man, a plan, a canal: Ortega. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega has partnered with a shadowy Chinese tycoon to build a huge canal that will ruin the environment, undermine the livelihoods of farmers, and maybe never turn a profit – if it gets built at all. The former comandante of the Sandinistas, Ortega has been politically reborn as an anti-abortion, pro-business autocrat who has manipulated the electoral rules to run for a third term as president this year. He recently chose his wife as his vice presidential candidate. Like Trump, he’ll do practically anything to win. Unlike Trump, he was a Marxist revolutionary who once deposed a tyrant. Bottom line: the 70-year-old Ortega is expected to win another four-year term in November by a wide margin, so unless you can stomach Trump in the guise of a putative leftist, stay away from Managua.

The European Union might seem a safe emigration bet, if you’re coming by plane from America and not a boat from North Africa. However, some EU countries have anticipated Trump by electing their own offensive blowhards. In the Czech Republic, President Milos Zeman has argued that Muslim integration in Europe is “practically impossible,” ignoring the experience of millions of immigrants, not to mention Bulgarian Turks, Bosniaks, and Albanians. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pledged to remodel his country along the lines of Russia’s “illiberal democracy.” In Poland, the ruling Law and Justice Party has interfered with press freedom, made controversial statements against homosexuality, and squared off against the EU. Bottom line: beware this “new Europe” of intolerance, nationalism, and Euroskepticism.

The spread of illiberal democracy has reached epidemic proportions. There’s simply not enough room in this report to cover them all: Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Malaysia’s Najib Razak, and so on. Trump is not as unique as he’d like to believe.

Trump Light

The last thing you want to do is move to a country that seems safe only for the citizens to turn around and suddenly install their own Trump, forcing you to pick up and move again. We call these at-risk countries Trump Light.

Take France, for example. Perhaps you’re already planning a four-year term in Provence. The country has great food, civilized conversation, and a humane vacation policy. But it also has Marine Le Pen. The right-wing extremist is now twice as popular as current president Francois Hollande and is leading in the polls against the other presidential hopeful, Nicolas Sarkozy. If she becomes president next year, expect her to try to join the UK in leaving the EU and implement any number of Trump-like laws against Muslims and immigrants. Bottom line: a lot of French might be joining you next year in whatever safe haven we’ve found for you.

Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world. It is also a tolerant democracy under the leadership of Joko Widodo. But two variants of extremism lie in wait. The Great Indonesia Movement Party and its frontman Prabowo Subianto want to turn back the clock to the days of Sukarno, cultivating a potent mixture of hypernationalism and militarism. Subianto came in second in the presidential elections in 2014, and his party commands the third largest bloc of seats in the legislature. Meanwhile, Islamic extremism in the form of Hizb ut-Tahrir is on the rise, and terrorists have launched a series of attacks to gain headlines and followers. Bottom line: you might want to play it safe and stay away so as not to be caught in the extremist crossfire.

Over one-third of the world lives in India and China, so why not you too? Both countries appear relatively stable at the moment. But before you throw in your lot with the global plurality, consider the following. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the head of the Hindu nationalist party, BJP, which has precipitated communal violence in the past. Modi has been rather circumspect as leader, but that could change if radicals in and around the party get the upper hand. In China, meanwhile, Xi Jinping is the anti-Trump: a careful bureaucrat comfortable with navigating within the system. But Xi is not above using nationalism—against “separatists,” against Japanese militarists, against claimants to territory in the South China Sea—to sustain support in the Party at a time of cooling economic growth. Bottom line: keep your eye on the headlines before heading to Beijing or Mumbai.

Trump Free

If you’ve been busy crossing off countries on the map as you’ve been reading along, you’ll realize that there’s not a lot of free space left at this point. Much of the globe is downright dangerous in its Trump-like proclivities. If these global Trumps have not already taken power, as in the Philippines or Poland, they are gathering strength, as in France and Indonesia. We are experiencing the formation of a Trump International.

That leaves you with a couple of choices. You could:

• Run across the border and throw yourself on the mercy of Justin Trudeau – until the Canadians build their own wall and make Donald Trump pay for it;
• If you miss the boat on Canada, you could find a quiet, boring, and relatively obscure place to live like Andorra, Tuvalu, or Belize;
• Volunteer to take ice floe measurements in Antarctica for the next four years;
• Get on a cruise ship and stay on it, circling the globe until people come to their senses or the world blows up, whichever comes first.

At Emergency Travel Services, we can help you with any of these options. Don’t be caught with your pants down and your passport expired on November 9. Even if Trump loses this time around, his followers aren’t going anywhere. They’ll get behind an equally offensive but more politically viable candidate in 2020.

Bottom line: in these desperate times, it’s not just the Pentagon that needs an exit strategy.

The post The Globalization of Trump appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

John Feffer directs Foreign Policy in Focus

(Photo: U.S. Pacific Fleet / Flickr)

A combination of recent events, underpinned by long-running historical strains reaching back more than 60 years, has turned the western Pacific into one of the most hazardous spots on the globe. The tension between China and the United States “is one of the most striking and dangerous themes in international politics,” says The Financial Times’ longtime commentator and China hand, Gideon Rachman.

In just the past five months, warships from both countries—including Washington’s closest ally in the region, Japan—have done everything but ram one another. And, as Beijing continues to build bases on scattered islands in the South China Sea, the United States is deploying long-range nuclear capable strategic bombers in Australia and Guam.

At times the rhetoric from both sides is chilling. When Washington sent two aircraft carrier battle groups into the area, Chinese defense ministry spokesman Yang Yujun cautioned the Americans to “be careful.” While one U.S. admiral suggested drawing “the line” at the Spratly Islands close to the Philippines, an editorial in the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times warned that U.S. actions “raised the risk of physical confrontation with China.” The newspaper went on to warn that “if the United States’ bottom line is that China has to halt its activities, then a U.S.-China war is inevitable in the South China Sea.”

Earlier this month China’s Defense Minister Chang Wanquan said Beijing should prepare for a “people’s war at sea.”

Add to this the appointment of an extreme right-wing nationalist as Japan’s defense minister and the decision to deploy anti-ballistic missile interceptors in South Korea and the term “volatile region” is a major understatement.

A History of Conflict

Some of these tensions go back to the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco that formally ended World War II in Asia. That document, according to Canadian researcher Kimie Hara, was drawn up to be deliberately ambiguous about the ownership of a scatter of islands and reefs in the East and South China seas. That ambiguity set up tensions in the region that Washington could then exploit to keep potential rivals off balance.

The current standoff between China and Japan over the Senkakus/Diaoyu islands—the Japanese use the former name, the Chinese the latter—is a direct outcome of the treaty. Although Washington has no official position on which country owns the tiny uninhabited archipelago, it is committed to defend Japan in case of any military conflict with China. On Aug. 2 the Japanese Defense Ministry accused China of engaging in “dangerous acts that could cause unintended consequences.”

Tokyo’s new defense minister, Tomomi Inada, is a regular visitor to the Yasukuni shrine that honors Japan’s war criminals, and she is a critic of the post-war Tokyo war crimes trials. She has also called for re-examining the 1937 Nanjing massacre that saw Japanese troops murder as many as 300,000 Chinese. Her appointment by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seems almost calculated to anger Beijing.

Abe is also pushing hard to overturn a part of the Japanese constitution that bars Tokyo from using its military forces for anything but defending itself. Japan has one of the largest and most sophisticated navies in the world.

Over the past several weeks, Chinese Coast Guard vessels and fishing boats have challenged Japan’s territorial claims on the islands, and Chinese and Japanese warplanes have been playing chicken. In one particularly worrisome incident, a Japanese fighter locked its combat radar on a Chinese fighter-bomber.

Behind the bellicose behavior on the China and U.S. sides is underlying insecurity, a dangerous condition when two nuclear-armed powers are at loggerheads.

Containment Updated

From Beijing’s perspective, Washington is trying to “contain” China by ringing it with American allies, much as the United States did to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Given recent moves in the region, it is hard to argue with Beijing’s conclusion.

After a 20-year absence, the U.S. military is back in the Philippines. Washington is deploying anti-missile systems in South Korea and Japan and deepening its military relations with Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India. The Obama administration’s “Asia pivot” has attempted to shift the bulk of U.S. armed forces from the Atlantic and the Middle East to Asia. Washington’s Air Sea Battle strategy—just renamed “Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons”—envisions neutralizing China’s ability to defend its home waters.

China is in the process of modernizing much of its military, in large part because Beijing was spooked by two American operations. First, the Chinese were stunned by how quickly the U.S. military annihilated the Iraqi army in the first Gulf War, with virtually no casualties on the American side. Then there was having to back down in 1996, when the Clinton administration deployed two aircraft carrier battle groups in the Taiwan Straits during a period of sharp tension between Beijing and Taipei.

In spite of all its upgrades, however, China’s military is a long way from challenging the United States. The Chinese navy has one small aircraft carrier, the United States has 10 enormous ones, plus a nuclear arsenal vastly bigger than Beijing’s modest force. China’s last war was its disastrous 1979 invasion of Vietnam, and the general U.S. view of the Chinese military is that it is a paper dragon.

That thinking is paralleled in Japan, which is worrisome. Japan’s aggressive nationalist government is more likely to initiate something with China than is the United States. For instance, Japan started the crisis over the Senkaku/Diaoyus. First, Tokyo violated an agreement with Beijing by arresting some Chinese fishermen and then unilaterally annexed the islands. The Japanese military has always had an over-inflated opinion of itself and traditionally underestimated Chinese capabilities.

In short, the United States and Japan are not intimidated by China’s New Model Army, nor do they see it as a serious threat. That is dangerous thinking if it leads to the conclusion that China will always back down when a confrontation turns ugly. Belligerence and illusion are perilous companions in the current tense atmosphere.

Rising Risk of Nuclear War

The scheduled deployment of the U.S. Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile systems has convinced Beijing that the United States is attempting to neutralize China’s nuclear missile force, not an irrational conclusion. Although anti-missile systems are billed as “defensive,” they can just as easily be considered part of the basic U.S. “counterforce” strategy. The latter calls for a first strike on an opponent’s missiles, backstopped by an anti-ballistic missile system that would destroy any enemy missiles the first strike missed.

China is pledged not to use nuclear weapons first. But given the growing ring of U.S. bases and deployment of anti-missile systems, that may change. It is considering moving to a “launch-on-warning” strategy, which would greatly increase the possibility of an accidental nuclear war.

The AirSea Battle strategy calls for conventional missile strikes aimed at knocking out command centers and radar facilities deep in Chinese territory. But given the U.S. “counterforce” strategy, Chinese commanders might assume that those conventional missiles are nuclear-tipped and aimed at decapitating China’s nuclear deterrent.

According to Amitai Etzioni of Washington University, a former senior advisor to President Jimmy Carter, “China is likely to respond to what is effectively a major attack on its mainland with all the military means at its disposal—including its stockpile of nuclear arms.”

A report by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that if China moves to “launch on warning,” such a change “would dramatically increase the risk of a nuclear exchange by accident—a dangerous shift that the U.S. could help to avert.”

President Obama is said to be considering adopting a “no-first-use” pledge, but he has come up against stiff opposition from his military and the Republicans. “I would be concerned about such a policy,” says U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James. “Having a certain degree of ambiguity is not necessarily a bad thing.”

But given the possibility of accidents—or panic by military commanders—”ambiguity” increases the risk that someone could misinterpret an action. Once a nuclear exchange begins it may be impossible to stop, particularly since the U.S. “counterforce” strategy targets an opponent’s missiles. “Use them, or lose them” is an old saying among nuclear warriors.

In any case, the standard response to an anti-missile system is to build more launchers and warheads, something the world does not need more of.

China Alienates the Region

Although China has legitimate security concerns, the way it has pursued them has won it few friends in the region. Beijing has bullied Vietnam in the Paracel islands, pushed the Philippines around in the Spratly islands, and pretty much alienated everyone in the region except its close allies in North Korea, Laos, and Cambodia. China’s claims—its so-called “nine dash line”—covers most the South China Sea, an area through which some $5 trillion in trade passes each year. It is also an area rich in minerals and fishing resources.

China’s ham-fisted approach has given the United States an opportunity to inject itself into the dispute as a “defender” of small countries with their own claims on reefs, islands, and shoals. The United States has stepped up air and sea patrols in the region, which at times has seen Chinese and American and Japanese warships bow to bow and their warplanes wing tip to wing tip.

The recent decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague that China has no exclusive claim on the South China Sea has temporarily increased tensions, although it has the potential to resolve some of the ongoing disputes without continuing the current saber rattling.

China is a signatory to the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, as are other countries bordering the South China Sea (the U.S. Senate refuses to ratify the treaty). China has never tried to interfere with the huge volume of commerce that traverses the region, trade that, in any case, greatly benefits the Chinese. Beijing’s major concern is defending its long coastline.

If the countries in the region would rely on the Law of the Sea to resolve disputes, it would probably work out well for everyone concerned. The Chinese would have to back off from their “nine-dash-line” claims in the South China Sea, but they would likely end up in control of the Senkakus/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea.

But to cool the current tensions Washington would also have to ratchet down its military buildup in Asia. That will be difficult for the Americans to accept. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been the big dog on the block in the western Pacific, but that is coming to an end. According to the International Monetary Fund, China surpassed the U.S. economy in 2014 to become the world’s largest. Of the four largest economies on the globe, three are in Asia: China, Japan, and India.

Simple demographics are shifting the balance of economic and political power from Europe and the United States to Asia. By 2015, more than 66 percent of the world’s population will reside in Asia. In contrast, the United States makes up 5 percent and the European Union 7 percent. By 2050, the world’s “pin code” will be 1125: one billion people in Europe, one billion in the Americas, two billion in Africa, and five billion in Asia. Even the CIA predicts, “The era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945—is fast winding down.”

The U.S. can resist that inevitability, but only by relying on its overwhelming military power and constructing an alliance system reminiscent of the Cold War. That should give pause to all concerned. The world was fortunate to emerge from that dark period without a nuclear war, but relying on luck is a dangerous strategy.

The post China and the U.S. are Approaching Dangerous Seas appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus.

Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com and middleempireseries.wordpress.com

Team Refugee (Photo: IOC / Olympic.org)

It was after midnight when the small refugee Olympic team strode into the stadium in Rio, the very last before host country Brazil’s huge contingent danced in to the samba-driven opening ceremonies. Ten amazing athletes, originally from four separate countries but sharing their status as unable to return home, marching under the Olympic flag.

It was an extraordinary sight — moving and powerful far beyond the cheering for the national teams.

Some of them — the young Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini in particular — had become familiar to many, her story told and retold in the run up to the games. It was an amazing story indeed. She and her sister, both top swimmers in their native Syria, had been forced by the brutality of the civil war to flee. Like so many hundreds of thousands before and after them, they managed to find places on an overcrowded rubber dinghy for the last leg from the Turkish coast to safety in Greece.

But also like so many before them, they found the boat overcrowded, taking on water, and in danger of sinking altogether. Mardini and her sister, along with the one other person on board who knew how to swim, jumped overboard and swam the three and a half hours alongside the boat, lightening the load just enough that the boat — and its exhausted accompanying swimmers — made it to safety, landing on the rocky coast of Lesbos.

The others — five runners from South Sudan and one from Ethiopia, another Syrian swimmer, and two judo competitors from the Democratic Republic of Congo — had powerful and inspiring stories of their own. All of them had faced the loss of home, family separations, and despair. Their athletic prowess, strong enough to bring them to international stature despite all they had lost, and despite the grinding poverty in which many of them grew up, brought them to Rio.

It’s all been a moving and powerful exemplar of what the Olympics are supposed to represent, but rarely achieve: the celebration of individual athleticism, beyond national borders.

And yet, what does it say about our world of wars today that massive refugee flows — and the conflicts that cause them — have become so normalized that war refugees now constitute the equivalent of a nation?

Refugee Nation

That’s no exaggeration.

There are 65 million forcibly displaced people desperately seeking safety around the world — the highest number since World War II. That’s about equal to the population of France, Thailand, or the United Kingdom, and greater than Italy, Spain, or South Africa. Together they give what might be called the Refugee Nation the 23^rd largest population in the world.

Have our world’s wars become so normalized that the Refugee Nation will now be routinely granted institutional representation, maybe even beyond the Olympics?

Most of the numbers, let alone the real lives behind them, remain out of the reach of understanding. If we look at just those refugees arriving in Europe alone last year, the highest number, 360,000, were fleeing the civil war in Syria. The next three highest groups were all from countries where U.S.-led wars, bombing campaigns, and occupations had left behind violence, instability, and dispossession. Those three — Afghanistan with 175,000, Iraq with 125,000, and tiny Kosovo, from which 60,000 refugees fled last year — together match the numbers fleeing Syria.

Those refugees are direct casualties of the foreign policies of Washington and its allies in Europe: military intervention (whether in the name of “the war on terror” or “humanitarian intervention”), economic exploitation, diplomatic abandonment, and more. And they’re part of an even longer legacy of failure. Some of those 65 million, like the 6.5 million Palestinians, have been refugees for three or four generations. Others are among the millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, or Iraqi refugees in Iran, who arrived years ago in response to U.S.-led wars and still cannot go home.

Nor is the problem limited to Europe and the Middle East. Sub-Saharan Africa hosts 26 percent of the world’s refugees, but we hear little about them because few make it out of Africa to land on European shores. They’re displaced by wars often fought with U.S. or other Western weapons, or by humanitarian or climate-driven crises ignored by Western powers until public outcry demands that “something” be done — and that “something” is often more military intervention or arms sales.

Those same powers fail to take responsibility to find shelter for displaced and vulnerable people, or to invest in the kind of serious diplomatic solutions that the disasters require. The wars continue, and the refugees keep coming.

The West’s Blind Spots

To be sure, prolonged and violent conflict is nothing new. But as the great Pakistani scholar Eqbal Ahmad explained, speaking on the eve of the first U.S. war against Iraq in 1991, conflicts are often only elevated to “world wars” — with all the urgency for resolution that entails — when they’re fought among the powerful: Americans and Europeans.

The seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries witnessed the genocidal destruction of grand civilizations: the great Mayas, Incas, Aztecs, and the Indian nations of North America; the conquest and subjugation of the rest of humanity. Eventually, even India was colonized; so was China, all of Africa, and ultimately the Middle East.

Finally the wars of greed and expansion came home to roost. The colonial have-nots of the West took on the haves. Europeans fought a war among themselves, called it a World War, and gave it a number: One. It was a devastating conflict in which air and chemical warfare were introduced…. Then the West fought another World War and gave it the next number: Two.

Just look at the Congo, from which two athletes now compete for the refugee team.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been at war for some two decades. The war morphed into a regional conflict, in which national armies and numerous militias based in the surrounding countries all staked out their interests and launched their own sections of the Congolese war. No one knows for sure, but the best estimates are that about 6 million people have been killed in the war. And the killing hasn’t stopped.

Many have called it Africa’s World War. But it never was recognized as such in the West. Instead, just one more conflict among black Africans, of non-Europeans whose wars would never count as a World War Something, because virtually no Westerners are among the dead.

A New Global “War”

Perhaps now, in the age of the “Global War on Terror,” it’s different. Maybe now it just requires that the victims include at least some Europeans and Americans to qualify for “world” status.

Though President Obama rejected the “Global War on Terror” label in favor of the anodyne “overseas contingency operations,” the conflict remains global, and it remains a war. The war stretches from Syria and Libya to Iraq to Afghanistan, and in a drone war stretching from Yemen to the Philippines. It’s a brutal military battle of conventional weapons — including B-52 bombers, the nuclear-capable Vietnam-era behemoths capable of dropping 70,000 pounds of gravity bombs that are now flying over Syria.

No one even claims that the bombs we’re dropping over Syria are “smart.” And no one except the grieving families even try to count those they kill.

Even as members of Team Refugee win their Olympic heats, the wars that sent them running for their lives and that populated the Refugee Nation continue apace. Streams of refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean or traipsing across African deserts merge until they become one. As do our wars.

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Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies.