https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/biden-is-taking-modest-but-necessary-steps-to-revive-us-palestine-ties-1.1201279

The administration of Joe Biden is pursuing several ambitious innovations alongside considerable continuity with previous US government policies. In between the two, it is also working to reverse major deviations from long-standing American policies, including on relations with the Palestinians, by the disruptive administration of Donald Trump.

With last week’s announcement of the first major tranche of US aid for Palestinians since it was effectively zeroed out by Mr Trump in 2019, Mr Biden is taking the first major step towards rebuilding these all-but-obliterated ties.

The approach is notably modest.

Unlike various periods during the administrations of all his immediate predecessors – George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and even Mr Trump – Mr Biden has avoided making Palestinian-Israeli negotiations a priority. Efforts to revive negotiations with Iran and end the war in Yemen have special Biden envoys. There isn’t one for the Palestinian-Israeli process.

In an effort to pressure the Palestinians, Mr Trump effectively eradicated all official US ties to them.

The strikingly modest efforts to reconstruct them reflect decades of American failure to resolve the conflict or even prevent it from deteriorating, and the realistic recognition that there is little for Washington to work with on the ground and with leaderships on both sides, especially in Israel.

The Biden administration has resumed traditional US support for a two-state solution, effectively abandoned by Mr Trump. But it doesn’t harbour any illusions that this can be accomplished, or even seriously advanced, in the near term. It correctly views fixing Washington’s relations with the Palestinians as an essential early step to reviving broader peace diplomacy.

The new aid totals approximately $270 million, including $75m for economic development, $150m for the UN agency that cares for Palestinian refugees throughout the region, UNRWA, and additional sums for Covid-19 assistance.

Perhaps most suggestive is $40m being unfrozen from fiscal year 2016 for security assistance. Spending that will involve reopening the office of the US security co-ordinator in the West Bank that, in his drive to eliminate all US-Palestinian diplomatic relations, Mr Trump predictably shuttered.

No money will be directly given to the Palestinian Authority because of the “Taylor Force Act” signed by Mr Trump in 2018. It prohibits direct US funding for the PA because of financial support for the families of all Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, including those accused of violence, which is alleged to encourage and reward terrorism.

Palestinians are eventually going to have to reform this system to satisfy the US Congress, which will also have to change the legislation. But that’s not in the administration’s priorities list since the Act allows security assistance and indirect funding for Palestinians.

Last week, a senior State Department official told me that the administration views renewed aid as “an important step in re-establishing relations with the Palestinian people”, and said a range of other economic and diplomatic measures is being prepared.

The aid package effectively restores US support to the Palestinians to levels at the end of the Obama era. Other damage by the Trump administration will be harder to reverse. Reopening the Palestine Liberation Organisation mission in Washington, the de facto Palestinian embassy, unceremoniously padlocked by Mr Trump, was a Biden campaign pledge. But significant groundwork will be required to ensure that wouldn’t expose the PLO to significant legal liabilities, among other complications.

Eventually, however, a full restoration of US-Palestinian diplomatic relations will be essential for both sides.

Reopening the US consulate in East Jerusalem, a de facto embassy to the Palestinians, also unsurprisingly bolted by Mr Trump, is more straightforward and appears under active consideration. Potential Israeli objections are the only practical obstacle.

So, it’s likely that, assuming the process moves forward, the de facto US embassy to the Palestinians will be reopened much more quickly and easily than the de facto Palestinian embassy in Washington.

However, the considerable current objections and political obstacles, particularly in Congress, to a broad restoration of US-Palestinian ties arose in the context of the mistrust and anger that Mr Trump’s pro-annexation policies, and outraged Palestinian reactions, engendered.

Gradual but steady improvement in ties should erode, and eventually eliminate, most of those obstacles, particularly if the PA addresses concerns regarding payments to prisoners’ families.

Israel has criticised renewed US funding for UNRWA, which, it claims, somehow perpetuates the refugee problem.

But the senior US official told me that, to the contrary, “the administration sees this as a renewed commitment to the US relationship with the Palestinian people, which is why the funding is not only aimed towards the West Bank and Gaza but for UNRWA, an important institution that provides services to the Palestinian people writ large”.

The official said a bumper-sticker summary of the Biden approach would hold that “advancing freedom, prosperity and security for both Israelis and Palestinians, in the immediate term and in tangible ways, is important in its own right and can help lead towards a two-state solution”.

Yet the Biden administration’s commitment to a slow but steady return to productive US engagement on a two-state, or any reasonable and viable, solution faces another serious challenge: strategic Israeli settlement expansions.

The Israeli government last week said an exceptionally sensitive Jerusalem settlement project in Jabal Abu Ghneim (which Israel calls Har Homa), long blocked by Washington, would go forward with 540 new housing units. Seeking to complete the encirclement of occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli governments have been attempting to build there since the 1980s. Any effective slow but steady revival of a two-state US policy is going to have to also involve restraining Israel in such areas, as many previous administrations have.

Mr Biden is doing the right thing by rebuilding relations with the Palestinians. And he is wise to do so carefully and purposively. Many Palestinians and their friends will understandably be dissatisfied. But in life generally, and especially in politics and diplomacy, things either get worse, stay unchanged, or get better.

For the first time in years, US policy towards the Palestinians just got noticeably better. Even if its scope is modest, that’s the very definition of good news.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-07/jordan-s-royal-ructions-should-alarm-its-allies

Palace intrigues against King Abdullah are a reminder of the kingdom’s importance and its precariousness.

A pledge by Prince Hamza to put himself “at the disposal” of King Abdullah II, his half-brother, appears to have resolved the feud within the Jordanian royal family that erupted at the end of last week. But the kingdom’s most serious crisis in decades was as a salutary reminder of both the importance and the precariousness of Jordan’s stabilizing role in the Middle East.

The events of the weekend remain murky and may never be fully disclosed. The kingdom has banned the publication of “anything related to the investigations,” which suggests the palace is keen to draw a line under the affair.

But the roots of the royal ructions can be traced back to 2004, when the king removed Hamza as crown prince, as a prelude to giving the title to his own son, Hussein. This was not unusual for Jordan — Abdullah’s father had made a similar switch in the succession on his death-bed — and Hamzah seemed to accept his demotion with equanimity.

But in recent months, he is reported to have grown strident in his criticism of corruption that he linked to his half-brother’s reign. Perhaps more alarming for the palace, he is thought to have reached out to powerful tribal leaders, whose support is crucial for the monarchy and has been the bedrock of its power for almost a hundred years.

Still, it came as shock to Jordanians when Hamzah released a video saying he was under house arrest. Several of his associates had been arrested, and government statements suggested there had been an attempted coup, with foreign connivance.

This set off inevitable speculation that Israel or Saudi Arabia had been involved. Israel is frequently blamed for mysterious unrest in Arab countries, especially those that are deeply enmeshed in the Palestinian issue. Saudi Arabia has also become one of the usual suspects for unexplained developments and one of Hamzah’s arrested associates is a Saudi.

But Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf monarchies were quick to issue statements of strong support for Abdullah. Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz offered help with what he described as “an internal Jordanian issue.” And the Biden administration reaffirmed American backing for the king, describing him as “a key partner.” 

But the coup against Abdullah — if that is indeed what it was — failed, it nonetheless brought royal tensions into the open, breaking with the Hashemite clan’s tradition of dealing privately with internal dissent. Plainly, all is not well in the kingdom as it prepares to celebrate its centenary this coming Sunday. The U.S. nonprofit Freedom House recently downgraded Jordan from “partly free” to “not free” in its annual assessment of the state of democracy worldwide. The report cited “harsh new restrictions on freedom of assembly, a crackdown on the teachers union [and] a lack of adequate preparations that harmed the quality of parliamentary elections during the covid-19 pandemic.”

The 100-year-old monarchy faces serious challenges at home and abroad. The Jordanian government’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has deepened the longstanding public dissatisfaction over endemic corruption and general economic malaise. By casting himself as a crusader against corruption, Hamzah might have scored powerful points against the status quo represented by his half-brother.

On the foreign-policy front, Jordan has long felt taken for granted by the U.S., Israel and Gulf Arab countries, all of which rely on the kingdom to play a quiet but essential regional role. The resentment in Amman deepened during the administration of President Donald Trump, when Washington seemed to go along with Israeli plans to annex large swathes of the West Bank. Jordanians regard annexation with existential dread because it could export Palestinian nationalism into the kingdom, given that over half its population is made up of Palestinians displaced by Israel in the 1948 and 1967 wars.

More generally, Jordanians feel they are punished for the relative stability of their country in a restive region, the non-squeaking wheel that doesn’t get much grease. The consequences of instability in its neighborhood are often visited upon the kingdom, most obviously in the form of refugees, whether from Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion or from Syria after the rise of the Islamic State and the subsequent civil war. 

For the West, Israel and Gulf Arab states, the Jordanian government is an important contributor to political and diplomatic initiatives, whether on the Palestinians, Iraq or Syria. They also rely on Jordanian intelligence services in the fight against terrorism and extremism.  

So the specter of instability in Amman should have set off alarms in capitals across the Middle East, and in Washington. A collapse of order could easily turn much of Jordan into a facsimile of parts of Iraq and Syria just over the border, with militias, ISIS-like terrorist groups, tribal warlords and other forces battling it out in a situation of protracted chaos. The Hamzah affair is a useful reminder of how much all the other parties stand to lose if, like many of its neighbors, Jordan begins to fall apart.

The government’s success in reining in Prince Hamzah may in the short run strengthen the king’s hand and undermine oppositional activities. The challenge for Jordan’s allies is to preserve the stability of the monarchy while pressing the palace for the political, institutional and economic reforms necessary to prevent a repeat of last weekend’s events.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-04/a-new-syria-process-cuts-out-iran-to-bring-in-gulf-arabs

The marginalization of the Islamic Republic would suit all the other parties involved.

The plot just thickened in the contest to shape post-conflict Syria: Russia, Turkey and Qatar have launched a new trilateral “consultation process” to promote a political solution to the 10-year civil war. Crucially, it does not include Iran.

The goal, it would appear, is to pave the way for broader Gulf Arab re-engagement with Syria, and a concomitant marginalization of Iranian influence.

Since the war was effectively resolved in December 2016 when pro-government forces overran opposition-held eastern Aleppo, most of the action has centered around the so-called “Astana process” that began in January 2017, in which Russia, Turkey and Iran have been negotiating over the spoils. But the Iranian involvement effectively kept out the Gulf Arab states, whose financial muscle is essential for the reconstruction of Syria — and whose diplomatic backing is critical to ending the country’s pariah status.

The new initiative is also an acknowledgment that the Astana process has, for all practical purposes, failed. The original troika have only held five meetings since 2018, and the four “de-escalation zones” they established were entirely disregarded by the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad who, with Russian and Iranian support, seized control of three of them. Nor was Astana able to prevent Turkey’s offensives in northern Syria in October 2019, or a confrontation in February last year between Turkish forces and Assad’s troops directly supported by the Russian Air Force.

Astana has produced no political progress in Syria and precious little reconstruction. So, it’s not surprising that Russia and Assad would seek another way forward, this time with Arab partners.

The Gulf states backed the rebel forces at the start of the war, but their unified stance against Assad has softened. The United Arab Emirates, for instance, has already reopened its embassy in Damascus and seems open to an accommodation with the regime. At the same time, Russia has been trying to get Arab states involved in the Astana process.

That was never going to happen while the two other states in the process, Iran and Turkey, remained hostile to the Gulf Arabs. The new forum cuts out the Iranians and seeks to build on recent Turkish efforts to mend fences with the Arab world. (In turn, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have signaled an interest in better relations with Turkey.)

The message from Moscow and Ankara to the Arabs is clear: Your rebel friends may have lost the war, but that doesn’t have to mean that your Iranian enemies will be the main beneficiaries. If you help this new process succeed, it will go a long way towards marginalizing Tehran’s influence in Syria.

This would suit Assad. The dictator currently depends on both Russia and Iran in securing his control of much of the country. But he would prefer a long-term arrangement in which Russia is the principal outside power in Syria, since Moscow’s demands on him are less onerous than Tehran’s.

Russia’s goals include maintaining its naval and other bases in Syria, securing its considerable investments in the country and using Damascus as the key to its renewed influence in the region. Iran wants to integrate Syria into a regional network of supplicant states, and to use it as a springboard to threaten Israel on one side and maintain its domination in Iraq on the other. Moscow would allow Assad a great deal of local authority; Tehran, on the other hand, would be a micromanaging overlord with designs on most of his prerogatives.

For its part, Turkey is primarily concerned about U.S.-backed Kurdish militias, along its border region in northern Syria. The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan regards these fighters as proxies of Kurdish terrorists and separatists operating within Turkey. So long as the Arabs don’t support the Kurds, Ankara would welcome their involvement in Syria.

As Turkey’s closest Arab ally, Qatar’s inclusion in the new forum was inevitable. Moscow and Ankara are clearly hoping to capitalize on the end of Doha’s isolation in the Gulf. The Qataris have deep pockets of their own, of course, but just as importantly, they might be able to bring other Arab states into the postwar arrangements in Syria. Qatar’s cordial relations with Iran were useful during the embargo, but its return to the Arab embrace gives it space to distance itself from Tehran.

Iran can be expected to fight tooth and nail to maintain its influence in Syria. Overstretched and impoverished as it is, the Islamic Republic has considerable leverage in Damascus, and a tried and tested formula of using proxy militias and co-sectarian politicians to protect its interests — as it does in Iraq and Lebanon. Tehran’s Arab opponents will have to be watchful that they’re not being played by Assad and Russia, and that the money and effort they invest in Syria really does mean a diminishment of Iran’s control.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/an-ambitious-biden-s-margin-for-error-or-bad-luck-is-close-to-zero-1.1197030

US President Joe Biden has breathtaking ambitions. The $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill is the most far-reaching legislation in 50 years to redirect assets to the poorest Americans, especially children. And he intends to go far beyond that spectacular start.

He is now promoting a massive $2tn infrastructure and climate change package. Securing that means operating at the Franklin Roosevelt-level of historic significance.

Since the 1960s, Democrats mainly emphasised social spending. Republicans have mostly promoted the interests of corporations and the wealthy. Both robustly fund the military and serve the special interests that support them.

Suddenly here is a major federal initiative for the country as a whole, the basic infrastructure of the US.

It goes far beyond traditional definitions of “infrastructure”, although it does provide considerable spending on roads and bridges, railways and public transportation, schools and affordable housing. Yet there are also vast investments in home and community care, universal high-speed broadband, the power grid, cleaner energy and electric vehicles.

Critics see a liberal laundry-list grab-bag, especially since the plan will supposedly be primarily funded through tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, effectively reversing former US president Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut. It would be another huge step in rearranging social and economic relations in the interests of ordinary people at the expense of corporations and the wealthy. And it would transform significant aspects of the living conditions of many Americans.

Passing anything like this will be extremely difficult given the Democrats’ razor-thin majorities in the US Congress.

Eventually, Mr Biden should be able to win the support of the House of Representatives, despite objections from several New York-area representatives who want to lift the cap on deductions for state and local taxes imposed by the Trump tax bill. The Senate, however, is an entirely different matter. And Democratic hopes of passing any such bill this year begin with a little-known official called the Senate “parliamentarian”.

The pandemic bill, like Mr Trump’s tax cut, was adopted by a simple majority under “budget reconciliation” – an unwieldy workaround to bypass the 100-member Senate’s otherwise inflexible 60-vote supermajority to allow legislation to move forward. This exception to the filibuster only applies to spending proposals, meaning that all or most of the infrastructure legislation will probably, but not certainly, qualify.

The main complication is that reconciliation, being supposedly a budget procedure, has never been used twice in the same year. Whether it can will be ruled on by Elizabeth McDonough, the Senate’s professional parliamentarian who referees issues of parliamentary procedure and the correct application of Senate rules.

Ms McDonough has already shown herself willing to thwart the re-empowered Democrats by correctly ruling that a minimum wage increase that had been intended for the pandemic relief bill exceeded the parameters of what is allowed under reconciliation and therefore had to be removed.

A simple Senate majority can always overrule the parliamentarian, but that’s rare and arguably improper. Ms McDonough is a fair-minded arbiter, and changing the rules – not overruling her impartial interpretations – is the appropriate response to an unwelcome ruling.

If she finds that the infrastructure bill can move forward despite reconciliation already having been used for pandemic relief, the really difficult problems commence.

Unless Mr Biden can win some Republican support, which seems exceedingly unlikely on this or any other significant legislation, he will need to hold every single Democratic vote in the 50-50 split Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie.

Some conservative Democratic senators from largely Republican-leaning states, especially Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, will find supporting such an expansive spending programme politically risky. Moreover, for the same reason they strongly oppose filibuster reform – to preserve their own centrality in Senate deliberations under current circumstances – they may be tempted to either greatly dilute the proposed legislation or simply oppose it altogether.

Mr Biden’s ambitions are at least as grand as those of Lyndon Johnson in the early 1960s. But he will have to somehow channel Johnson’s legendary parliamentary skills and powers of persuasion to prevail.

Prospects are even dimmer for another potentially historic bill, this one on securing voting rights, which would require reforming or bypassing the filibuster. That isn’t necessary for the infrastructure spending package. But the same block of all 50 Democratic Senate votes plus Ms Harris’ tiebreaker will probably be needed to secure either.

Yet the pandemic relief, infrastructure and voting rights acts – if all three passed – would almost certainly make Mr Biden a transformative president, probably beyond even Johnson’s legacy and closer to Roosevelt’s.

Such an achievement would be all the more remarkable because it can only be done by keeping the fractious and still ideologically diverse Democratic Party unanimously united behind extraordinarily bold spending plans. And in the unfortunate event any one of the several elderly Democratic senators passes away, his task would become even more daunting and perhaps impossible.

So his margin for error or bad luck is close to zero.

Yet Republicans lack a coherent rebuttal other than budget concerns. Since they evinced no interest in fiscal discipline during the Trump administration, that will be highly unconvincing for anyone paying attention to their stances. And a major infrastructure project would probably be broadly popular, including among Republican voters.

Such spending would generate huge numbers of good working-class jobs, which Mr Trump always promised but never really delivered beyond what the economy was already in the process of achieving. His endless but meaningless “infrastructure weeks” became a national joke.

If Mr Biden can hold the Democrats together, pass transformative legislation while defeating the pandemic, and avoid sustained, high inflation (the obvious danger of such huge expenditures), the Democrats would be in an extraordinarily strong position.

Typically, a new president’s party loses congressional seats in the first midterm, and Mr Biden cannot afford any losses in either the House or the Senate next year. But the historic exceptions have always come during times of crisis, and no one doubts there is one now.

If Mr Biden shows that sweeping government actions can solve big problems, the existing Republican playbook may be rendered obsolete. They will finally have to abandon the Donald Trump personality cult and categorically opposing almost everything, and seriously reengage with policy and governance.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/against-iran-the-us-needs-to-reactivate-its-cold-war-strategy-1.1192643

Since the so-called “Islamic revolution” of 1979, the problem of Iran has bedevilled every US president. Joe Biden is no exception. The challenge intensified following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. But at no point in the past two decades has the US developed a viable long-term strategy for dealing with Iran.

Mr Biden has placed Iran at the top of his international priorities. That gives him the opportunity to craft a strategy that learns lessons from his predecessors’ successes and failures. Most importantly, he could establish a broad framework that avoids fragmented or contradictory partial solutions and that bequeaths coherence to his own successors.

A persistent lack of coherence has been central to his predecessor’s failures.

Although George W Bush reviled the Iranian regime as part of an “axis of evil”, he greatly strengthened Tehran by, among other things, invading Iraq, leaving the country shattered and largely dominated by Iranian proxies.

The 2015 nuclear deal was Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement but it was both flawed and limited. The agreement merely postponed a reckoning over Iran’s nuclear ambitions for about a decade and resolved nothing. It also left Iran’s other destabilising policies, particularly its support for a network of sectarian armed gangs in neighbouring Arab countries, completely unaddressed.

If anyone in the Obama administration was hoping that the sanctions relief and international legitimacy provided by the nuclear deal would moderate Tehran’s behaviour, they were deeply disappointed.

Donald Trump promptly charged in the opposite direction, walking away from the agreement in 2018 and imposing a thoroughgoing regime of “maximum pressure” sanctions. But while the sanctions created significant economic hardship for Iran, Tehran’s regional behaviour became more belligerent than ever.

Because reality is complex, it isn’t automatically true that Iranian setbacks translate into American successes. Indeed, Mr Trump found no formula for achieving anything through the considerable pressure and leverage he accumulated.

Mr Biden inherits this legacy of profound confusion on one of his key priorities.

He clearly wants to revive nuclear diplomacy and even the 2015 agreement, but insists important lessons were learned from the failures and eventual collapse of the Obama approach.

The good news is that the Biden administration isn’t rushing into anything, and may even be dawdling a little.

The bad news is that senior administration officials may be so fixated on preventing Iran from going nuclear that some appear to think that this is the only really serious problem confronting Washington in the Middle East and that everything else is relatively minor.

Yet a single-minded fixation on reviving or even “fixing” the deal would trap Washington in the same fragmentary and contradictory framework responsible for 20 years of failure.

In an important new essay, Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace suggests a modified version of the “containment” policy the US deployed towards the Soviet Union and its network of allies to provide a rational, unifying structure to the US approach towards Iran over the long run.

Shifting to such a “Cold War” model begins by recognising that a meaningful rapprochement between Washington and an unreconstructed Islamic Republic is simply impossible. Opposition to the US is hardwired into the core identity of this regime.

Expecting anything else is naive.

Such a radical transformation in Iran’s worldview and policies towards the US and the rest of the Middle East would surely signal the end of the Islamic Republic as it has existed since 1979. Whether such a change is viewed as revolutionary, imposed on the state from outside the regime, or evolutionary, with existing structures taking the lead in such a shift, is irrelevant semantics. The resulting reality would be the same and utterly transformational.

Therefore, two key realities must be simultaneously acknowledged.

First, such a transformation must be the long-term goal of the US and its allies, because real reconciliation with this regime as it stands is not possible. But, second, such a change, no matter how vital, cannot be imposed from the outside.

The Obama administration appeared to be hoping that the nuclear agreement would strengthen “moderates” and encourage evolutionary change. It didn’t. The Trump administration seemed to be hoping “maximum pressure” would result in regime collapse. Not even close.

Neither aspiration was realistic, and the resulting policies were at least somewhat misguided and ultimately ineffective.

The containment framework Sadjadpour suggests would, drawing on the US’ broadly successful Cold War policies towards the Soviet Union, have three main prongs. It would seek to bolster US allies; undermine Iran’s own network of support; and use both carrots and sticks to influence Tehran’s policies. Its purpose would, eventually, be to provide a framework for fundamental, but domestically driven, change inside Iran.

Mr Biden’s goal of an early return to the nuclear agreement fits nicely into this framework, as long as it’s not an end in itself. So might a far broader diplomatic engagement with Iran if possible.

But the US would have to take care to strengthen ties to its own regional allies, all of which have a stake in keeping Iran non-nuclear.

Also indispensable would be major efforts to combat and fragment Iran’s regional network of violent gangs, primarily by strengthening the dilapidated Arab state structures that Iran’s militia proxies prey upon.

This approach also requires the careful reconceptualisation of both sanctions and engagement with Iran, all carefully tailored to promote Iranian civil society and turn social, political and nationalist aspirations against the regime itself.

The keys would be persistence, patience and the understanding that Iranians will only change their system when they are ready and on their own terms. Clearly there’s already a great deal to work with in Iranian society, but that can only be done with subtlety and a clear vision.

Such a framework can provide coherence and flexibility, allowing what might otherwise be contradictory impulses and policies to become mutually reinforcing.

Without a guiding strategic concept, based on the largely successful American approach to a far more challenging and dangerous Soviet adversary, Washington is likely to continue to stumble from one miscalculation and missed opportunity to another.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-28/india-and-pakistan-the-uae-is-seeking-a-new-role-as-peacemaker?sref=tp95wk9l

The tiny Gulf state dubbed “Little Sparta” has scaled back its military projection.

Nicknamed “Little Sparta” by American generals like former U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the United Arab Emirates is widely acknowledged as a small country that punches far above its weight in military terms. But the tiny Gulf state also has outsized ambitions as a peace broker.

Its de facto ruler, Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, was the prime mover in last year’s Abraham Accords between Israel and several Arab states. Going further back, Emirati diplomats played a key role alongside their Saudi counterparts in mediating the 2018 peace deal between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The UAE’s latest peacemaking project is arguably its most audacious ever. As Bloomberg reported last week, the Emiratis brokered the negotiations between India and Pakistan that led to an unexpected February 25 announcement that the South Asian rivals would respect their 2003 cease-fire agreement, despite heightened tensions between them.

The UAE is hoping to facilitate an exchange of ambassadors between New Delhi and Islamabad and restoration of trade links between the two countries. More ambitious still, it is aiming to secure a viable understanding on Kashmir, which has been the flashpoint for several wars since their 1947 partition upon independence from British rule.

The two nuclear-armed neighbors are locked in what may be the world’s most dangerous faceoff. The latest round of tensions began two years ago when 40 Indian soldiers were killed in a suicide bomb attack, claimed by a Pakistan-based terrorist group, in Kashmir. India retaliated by launching air strikes inside Pakistan. Since then, the leaders of the two countries, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Imran Khan, have blown hot and cold, with little progress toward peace — until last month’s announcement.

In many ways, the Emiratis are uniquely qualified to mediate between the two countries. It has strong trade and commercial ties to both, and is home to millions of Indian and Pakistani expatriate workers. And since the conflict is rooted in mistrust between Hindus and Muslims, the UAE’s credentials are strengthened by its aggressive promotion, at home and abroad, of a separation of politics and religion.

Kashmir has been a consistent rallying cry for terrorist groups and radical Islamist organizations, such as Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Taliban, which the UAE considers its most dangerous opponents. Helping to defuse the conflict would allow the Emiratis to strike a significant blow against violent extremists.

The South Asian initiative also plays into the UAE’s pursuit of other important foreign-policy objectives. It helps to deepen the partnership with Washington by paralleling American efforts to resolve the conflict in neighboring Afghanistan, where India and Pakistan have competing economic and security interests. At the same time. amity between its allies is doubly desirable for the UAE as American appetite to act in the Middle East appears to be waning.

In recent years, the UAE has shifted its attention away from military projection to diplomacy, investment and other forms of soft power. Most of the regional conflicts through which it has sought to advance its interests militarily, either directly or through proxies, are resolved or stale-mated, or have otherwise passed the point of diminishing returns.

The UAE has greatly reduced its footprint in Yemen and drawn down its forces in the Horn of Africa. It is looking to scale back in Libya, where it provided both air cover and material support for the rebel forces of Khalifa Haftar; the Emiratis are now backing a political solution to the civil war.

The UAE has also sought to reduce tensions with Iran and is leading Arab efforts to reengage with the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, having concluded that the war there has effectively ended and that the only way to advance Emirati interests is through political, diplomatic and commercial means.

The UAE is hoping that India and Pakistan will take a similarly enlightened view of their conflict. If they do, some of the credit will redound to the Emiratis. And if not, “Little Sparta” will be credited for at least trying to make peace.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/the-latest-test-for-us-democracy-is-which-americans-get-to-vote-and-how-easily-1.1188511

American democracy keeps lurching from one existential crisis to another. Republicans and Democrats are now gearing up for a titanic struggle over voting itself.

It is partly an extension of the conclusive but bizarrely unresolved 2020 presidential election.

Despite US President Joe Biden’s decisive victory, Republican leaders continue to either bluntly claim or strongly imply that the result was tainted by widespread fraud. Former US President Donald Trump failed to overturn the outcome despite the most sustained effort to invalidate an election in US history.

In fact, the election was one of the cleanest ever, and saw the broadest public participation in a century.

Most Republicans believe Mr Biden won because of fraud, but only because most of their political and media leaders have relentlessly trumpeted this lie.

Mr Trump notes that 74 million Americans voted for him, a considerably larger number than in 2016 (when he still lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million), and mocks the reality that Mr Biden got over 81 million votes. Obviously Mr Trump was an extremely polarising figure who convinced vast numbers to support him but a considerably larger group to vote him out.

That is simply unacceptable to him and many other Republicans.

Whether or not they endorse the “stolen election” mythology, Republicans have launched a massive state-level campaign to restrict ease of, and access to, voting throughout the country.

This attack on voting rights is unprecedented, at least since segregation and the systematic denial of African-American voting in the South until the 1960s.

Republican lawmakers in 43 states are pursuing 253 bills to significantly restrict voting access. They claim to be defending “election integrity,” as if there had been a significant degree of fraud in the last election. And, with breathtaking cynicism, they cite doubts among their supporters about the 2020 election, unfounded suspicions that these leaders themselves promoted in stark contradiction of the established facts.

Since Mr Trump’s defeat, a number of Republican leaders have effectively dropped all pretense that they seek to limit fraud rather than votes. They have plainly concluded that their only reliable path to national victory under current circumstances is to restrict by all possible means the number of Americans who participate in elections.

Many of these new state bills seek to end early voting, greatly restrict postal voting, and eliminate Sunday voting (favoured by African-American churchgoers), among other egregious measures. The obvious targets are ethnic minorities and the poor. Money purchases convenience, time and flexibility. The less cash you have, as a practical matter the harder it is to accommodate rigid rules and schedules.

Since there is a strong correlation between poverty and some core Democratic constituencies, particularly African-Americans and Latinos, restrictions that make voting more difficult for poorer people are assumed to be useful to Republicans.

Moreover, African-Americans and other minorities are much less likely to carry the kinds of identification documents some new rules would demand. The racial subtext is unmistakable.

Democrats, too, are confronting the issue, but at the federal level.

The House of Representatives recently passed a sweeping voting rights bill that would nationally mandate measures such as 15 days of early voting, unrestricted postal voting, automatic voter registration, and other provisions intended to maximise the number of Americans who vote.

This horrifies most Republican leaders. Texas Senator Ted Cruz even claims that Democrats are trying to ensure that “illegal aliens” and “child molesters” vote in large numbers. Such absurd hyperbole aside, most Republicans agree Democrats are trying to slant the playing field dramatically in their favour, and they are indeed.

Republican attitudes were summed up by Mr Trump last year, when he warned against “levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

As he acknowledged, Republicans now fear they simply cannot prevail if there are high “levels of voting”. Following recent defeats, particularly stunning losses in formerly reliably Republican Georgia, the Republicans are seeking at the state level to make voting more difficult.

With equal certainty that high turnout favours them, Democrats are pushing in the opposite direction at the federal level.

Both sides are undoubtedly motivated by what they perceive as politically advantageous. But there is no denying that Republicans are frantically seeking to practically disenfranchise as many qualified voters as possible. With increasing frequency, the mask drops and they openly admit their goal is to lower turnout.

Republicans are, in effect, attacking democracy, or at least voting.

Right-wing anxiety about too many people voting is nothing new. In the 1960s, conservative guru William Buckley insisted the problem in the South was not too few Blacks voting but too many Whites.

A familiar semantic ruse notes that the US was established as “a republic” not “a democracy”.

That is true, but only insofar as, at the time of the founding, “democracy” suggested Athenian plebiscites on almost everything, while representative government with a strong default to majoritarian rule was precisely what was understood by a “republic”. Now, we call the system a “democracy”.

Depending on the fate of the filibuster, as I recently explained in these pages, Republicans may block the voting rights bill in the Senate, and even restrict voter access in some states.

But seeking to disenfranchise millions of Americans – now probably the issue on which, nationally, Republicans are most united – is not only unacceptable and embarrassing, but also surely doomed as a partisan strategy.

What’s being overlooked is that even Mr Trump did better than expected among African-American and Latino men, among others.

So, there is no reason to assume that a principled conservative agenda can’t ever defeat liberals, including among minority groups in a diverse and equitable society. But Republicans would have to significantly alter course.

They are probably right to fear that an increasingly authoritarian, philosophically anti-democratic, and effectively white supremacist agenda will ultimately doom their ability to compete nationally in the emerging multi-ethnic and multicultural America.

Yet as David Frum has argued, Republicans appear more willing to compromise democratic principles than these disturbing tenets. That could prove the gravest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-16/yemen-is-more-complicated-than-biden-thinks

Ending the war is not merely a matter of persuading the Saudis to leave.

The two main goals of President Joe Biden’s Middle East policy are clear enough: resuming nuclear diplomacy with Iran and ending the war in Yemen. But as Washington begins to engage with Yemen seriously, after four years of sustained disinterest under President Donald Trump, it is learning that the realities of that conflict are very different than many Americans imagined — and that the administration’s objectives will be hard to achieve.

 During the Trump presidency, Yemen was primarily viewed as Saudi Arabia’s problem. The war was cast as the consequence of Saudi aggression — specifically, Riyadh’s leadership of the Arab alliance against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. As a result, it was assumed that ending the fighting was just a matter of compelling the Saudis to get out of Yemen.

This view served a political purpose: Democrats, in particular, used Yemen as a stick to beat Trump for his see-no-evil defense of Saudi Arabia, and especially its day-to-day ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In Congress, there was a bipartisan effort to punish Riyadh for the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Yemen. But Trump’s veto power frustrated demands for the withdrawal of American support for the war in Yemen and ending U.S. arms sales to the Saudis.

Now that they are in power and Biden is actively seeking solutions, the Democrats are having to reassess their previous analysis of the problem. Biden’s special envoy on Yemen, the veteran diplomat Tim Lenderking, a highly respected veteran U.S. diplomat, is confronting the stark reality that ending the war isn’t about convincing the Saudis to go — they’ve wanted to, for several years. 

The main challenge is convincing the Houthis to allow the Saudis to leave on reasonable terms.

Having expended enormous resources in Yemen, Riyadh will want to leave behind some sort of power-sharing agreement between the Houthis and the internationally recognized government led by President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. The Saudis also need guarantees that the Houthis will cease cross-border raids and rocket attacks. 

But the Houthis, a Shiite militia that overthrew the Hadi government in 2015, have never shown any serious interest in peace. Since the war has gone fairly well for them, they have little incentive to stop fighting. And their Iranian patrons are certain to press them to keep the Saudis bogged down. The conflict in Yemen has given Tehran plausible deniability while repeatedly striking at its main regional rival in its exposed underbelly.

In theory, it shouldn’t be that difficult to incentivize the Houthis to come to terms. A political agreement would have to recognize and institutionalize the power they have accumulated over the past five years. 

However, there are a number of serious challenges. Since the war started, no one has been able to ascertain what the Houthi bottom line is, much less what kind of deal they might accept. Not only are they fanatical in the extreme —their rallying cry is “God is great! Death to America! Death to Israel! A curse upon the Jews! Victory for Islam!” — they are also internally divided. Their representatives at previous peace talks apparently did not represent the views and commitments of commanders on the ground.

Another problem is Hadi, who has his own history of recalcitrance. He is fearful of losing authority and exclusive international recognition, but unable to mount a serious military counterattack. Persuading the president to come to terms will be only somewhat less difficult than corralling the Houthis.

And then there are the Iranians, who seem perfectly happy to keep supplying the Houthis with arms while pronouncing piously about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. 

The Biden administration has begun with an interesting mix of carrots and sticks, including the resumption of humanitarian assistance to areas controlled by the Houthis. It reversed Donald Trump’s last-minute designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization in order to facilitate diplomatic contacts with Lenderking. Biden also ended U.S. military support for the Saudi-led coalition. 

But more recently, the Treasury Department imposed targeted sanctions on two senior Houthi leaders. And Lenderking has begin to openly question the rebels’ desire for peace.

American patience is being tested by a Houthi offensive against Marib, the government-held city in a hydrocarbon-rich region around 100 miles east of the capital Sanaa. The rebels have rejected U.S. calls for a cease-fire, and seem oblivious to the plight of hundreds of thousands of Yemeni refugees who live in tent cities in and around the city.

Ironically, it is the Saudis and their allies who may represent the best hope of preventing the Houthis from unleashing what the United Nations fears will be a fresh humanitarian catastrophe in Marib.

In Yemen, as the Biden administration is discovering, there are no good guys — or, as yet, good options.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/biden-s-covid-19-bill-might-be-his-most-powerful-political-weapon-1.1183984

With his ceaseless bluster and boasting, former president Donald Trump vowed to be a transformative American leader. Yet he proved more a symptom of disruption than an agent of change. Instead, it is his highly focused and low-key successor, Joe Biden, who is already well underway with the most ambitious transformative agenda in half a century.

In just a few weeks, Mr Biden secured a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package that alone constitutes a comprehensive reorientation of government policy.

Its huge size isn’t terribly unusual, but the allocation is genuinely revolutionary.

Mr Trump’s 2017 tax cut cost about $2tn over 10 years but was heavily focused on benefiting the wealthy and corporations.

Barack Obama oversaw at least two major spending bills, the first targeting recovery from the economic meltdown in 2008. George W Bush, too, oversaw major spending for that recovery, his various wars and so on.

What’s unheard of is not the amount but that the spending is focused clearly at aiding disadvantaged Americans, including direct, one-time payments, extended unemployment benefits and, especially, measures targeting childhood poverty.

Since the mid-1960s, there hasn’t been any comparable effort to mobilise the power of government to assist working people and, especially, the poor. Republican critics grumble that this is Venezuela-style “socialism”. While it’s obviously nothing of the kind, it is clearly a step towards redistributing wealth in a society in which income stratification has become grotesquely unfair.

The changes will be truly significant.

The poorest fifth of households will see 20 per cent increases in income. A Washington-based think tank the Urban Institute estimates that just four provisions of the bill will reduce the national poverty rate by fully one third.

And the attack on poverty will be most beneficial to the neediest communities, with African-American poverty being reduced by 42 per cent, Hispanic by 39 per cent and 34 per cent for poor whites.

Perhaps the most far-reaching change is a new refundable child tax credit, which for the poorest will come in the form of monthly cash transfers, at a rate of $250 for each child over five and $300 for those younger.

No family can live off of those amounts, but they are clearly a major step towards a guaranteed minimum income, at least for children. And unlike with past support for children, these payments will not be tied to work requirements or other conditions.

Health insurance subsidies are greatly increased. There’s even a hint towards reparations for slavery, with $4 billion set aside to help black farmers.

When the dust settles on such spending, especially if measures such as the child tax credit become permanent, as Democrats confidently predict, the socio-economic landscape of the US will have been nudged in favour of the neediest people, particularly children.

It’s already clear that the role of the US government in shaping the lives of its citizens has been revolutionised.

The Republican mantra that tax cuts pay for themselves has been tested many times and irrefutably disproven. Democrats are now going to try to demonstrate that, over time, it is well-targeted social and economic spending that really can pay for itself.

As whoever authors the pseudonymous “James Medlock” Twitter account brilliantly phrased it: “The era of ‘the era of big government is over’ is over.”

That refers to a phrase used by former president Bill Clinton when he effectively eliminated traditional welfare in the 1990s.

But the idea is far older.

Since at least Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, Republicans have been united around the claim that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem”. Even many Democrats eventually came to share such suspicions.

Several factors have reversed this process, reviving the view, including among many Republicans, that government is a necessary force in shaping social and economic conditions.

Underlying the antipathy to social spending was a racist conviction among many whites that too much help was being given, at their expense, to presumptively unworthy citizens, particularly African Americans and Hispanics.

But in recent years, problems that used to plague minority-dominated inner cities, particularly chronic unemployment and the despair, alcoholism and addiction, and crime this produces, have migrated into white-majority rural areas while many cities are thriving.

The coronavirus pandemic also reminded everyone that there’s no alternative to federal authorities when coping with huge disasters.

Suddenly the government doesn’t look so bad to many Republicans.

Mr Trump also played a crucial role. He isn’t and never was a conservative. In fact, he was a fairly liberal Democrat (except on racial issues) for most of his life. As a Republican leader, he championed a populist agenda that in theory promised to use the government to deliver tangible benefits to ordinary voters.

Yet working with Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and other conservatives, his only real domestic accomplishment was the tax cut for the rich. But he never stopped boasting about all the marvellous programmes he was just about to secure for working people.

His constituency was already primed to dump the Reagan-era allergy to government programmes. But Mr Trump delivered a rhetorical framework and political legitimacy.

So, the Biden spending bill is popular among Republicans, especially the less affluent.

That’s why Republicans in Congress, although none of them voted for the bill, and right-wing commentators put up no serious fight against the legislation. Instead, they raged impotently about preposterous non-issues – discontinued Dr Seuss children’s books and re-branded Mr Potato Head toys – completely unrelated to governance.

Four years ago, I wrote in these pages that Mr Trump had a remarkable opportunity to secure a lasting US political realignment by combining his economic nationalism with major government spending programmes, particularly on infrastructure, designed to create large numbers of good working-class jobs. His inability to do so undoubtedly contributed to his electoral defeat.

Frantic Republican claims to now be the party of the working-class ring desperately hollow, especially as Mr Biden has just taken a huge step towards such a realignment and embraced a lot of Mr Trump’s economic nationalism.

If he can maintain party unity, reform or repeal the Senate filibuster, or gain significant Republican cooperation in Congress, Mr Biden could become one of the most consequential presidents in US history.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/washington-is-broken-here-s-one-way-to-fix-it-1.1178711

New US President Joe Biden has hit the political ground running. Confronted by huge crises, most immediately the coronavirus pandemic and associated economic downturn, Mr Biden has wasted no time in initiating one of the most ambitious governance agendas in American history. But much of it may hang on the future of a poorly understood and arcane Senate rule known as the filibuster.

Democrats and Republicans are now split evenly in the 100-seat Senate, which must approve all legislation.

If there is a strict party-line vote of 50-50, Vice President Kamala Harris can cast a tiebreaking 51st vote. That solves Mr Biden’s problems if all Democrats support his preferred legislation and a simple majority is required for passage, as is the case in the House of Representatives and almost all legislative bodies around the world.

That’s how it was in the Senate, too, originally, but over time a system has evolved where, on most legislation, a super-majority of 60 is needed to “end debate” and allow a vote.

During the presidency of Barack Obama, the routine use of the filibuster by Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell – who said his main priority was to try to ensure that Mr Obama was a one-term president – illustrated how the filibuster has become a crippling obstacle.

It’s clear that elimination or reform of the filibuster is necessary for the US government to operate without relying almost entirely, as both Mr Obama and his successor Donald Trump did, on executive orders.

The US Senate is arguably the world’s most eccentric legislative body. And the filibuster is the most noxious of its byzantine maze of irrational rules. As Alexander Hamilton and other framers of the Constitution noted, the disastrous Articles of Confederation – the first American system – demonstrated that requiring super-majorities might seem to invite compromise, but in practice invariably promotes obstruction.

The Constitution avoided super-majorities except for impeachment and constitutional amendments because its framers had seen that minorities find it hard to resist the temptation to embarrass majorities by blocking them at every stage if they easily can – exactly as in the contemporary Senate.

The change developed slowly.

The Senate abolished the power of a simple majority to force a vote on an issue, essentially by mistake, when it revised its rules in 1806. This loophole was later seized upon by defenders of slavery led by the notorious Sen John Calhoun. Later still, it became a favourite tool of segregationists, led by Sen Richard Russell. In 1917, Senate Rule 22 set the required number to allow a vote at two thirds. In 1975, it was reduced to three fifths, or 60 votes.

During the 20th century, filibusters were rare, primarily used by southern senators to block civil rights legislation and defend white supremacy. In the 21st century, however, the filibuster has become a constant feature of all Senate business.

Mr Obama faced such obstructionism on his appointments that his Senate allies eliminated super-majorities for confirming officials in 2010. Republicans extended that to include Supreme Court nominations in 2017.

Mr Biden just got his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package passed in both the House and the Senate, but only because of another bizarre rule: budget reconciliation. Created in 1974, it allows certain budgetary measures to be passed by simple majority – an obvious acknowledgment that the filibuster makes essential governance unworkable. “Reconciliation” is also how Mr Trump passed his only significant piece of legislation, a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.

The Senate calls itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body”. That’s risible. In fact, it is no longer a deliberative body at all. These days, reconciliation aside, it is not a governing body either. As veteran Senate staffer Adam Jentleson explains in his new book Kill Switch, the Senate now typically functions as an override mechanism shutting down legislative work altogether.

That suits Republicans, who have in recent times become a persistently minority party. They have also become a doggedly obstructionist party, whose only guiding principle appears to be unshakable loyalty to Mr Trump and alignment with his mercurial views. But even before the Trump personality cult, Republicans were clear on what they categorically opposed, but had virtually no practical agenda. For example, they zealously opposed Obamacare, but for more than a decade have never proposed any healthcare alternative.

Mr Biden wants to follow the now-adopted coronavirus bill with a major infrastructure initiative, climate change proposals and other urgent measures. Since few Republicans appear willing to support even the coronavirus package, it is hard to see how Democrats can forgo reforming or eliminating the filibuster.

That won’t be easy. Even a simple majority will be elusive because some conservative Democratic senators, especially Joe Manchin of West Virginia, will probably resist major changes. That’s partly to mollify Republican-leaning constituents. More importantly, the filibuster ensures their institutional clout. Without it, Mr Manchin and the others would be far less relevant. As things stand, they are central to most horse-trading.

Major filibuster reform, at a minimum, is essential to Mr Biden’s prospects. Use of the filibuster could be restricted, the numbers required reduced, or other measures taken to limit its obstructionist power.

The filibuster originated in a mistake, mainly took shape in defence of slavery, was largely consolidated in defence of segregation, and now functions, as it always has, primarily as a tool of a recalcitrant minority blocking majority decisions. Indeed, it’s now central to chronic American minority rule.

Republicans will claim Democrats are acting cynically and will regret such reform when Republicans once again have a majority. But it’s irrelevant. Obstruction by Democrats wouldn’t be particularly preferable to that by Republicans. Obstruction itself is the problem.

The obvious institutional and political imperative for reform is far more important than motivations. And it’s likely that, without a powerful filibuster, the incentives and potential for cross-party compromises would actually greatly increase in the Senate.

Many Democratic traditionalists, including Mr Biden, are uneasy about reforming, let alone eliminating, the filibuster. But their agenda and fortunes depend on it. Moreover, elimination or at least reform of the filibuster would restore rationality and the original constitutional design to the Senate.

The excision of this malignant tumour from one of the central organs of the American body politic is one of the greatest legacies this Senate and the Biden administration can bequeath to future generations.