https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/biden-s-first-100-days-have-been-great-but-for-this-one-thorn-in-his-side-1.1210604

Despite a strong first 100 days in office, most notably securing the massive pandemic relief bill, migration has emerged as a major vulnerability for US President Joe Biden.

His exposure on this is worse than anticipated, and comes from the left as well as the right, as a chaotic set of reversals last week regarding refugees amply demonstrated.

Following the November election, Republicans settled on border and migration issues as the focus of their campaigns for next year’s crucial congressional midterm elections.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric is a mainstay of the new, Donald Trump-influenced, nativist Republican orthodoxy. And they lack many other avenues of attack, especially since Mr Biden managed the vaccine rollout superbly – already all adults are eligible for vaccination – and this year’s economic performance is forecast to be the strongest in 40 years.

Nonetheless, migration looks like a more potent issue than even Republicans had hoped. The refugee quota reversals last week underscore the administration’s anxiety and uncharacteristic confusion on migration issues.

Americans don’t seem to understand this: coming to the border unannounced and requesting asylum is not unlawful

One major problem is that most Americans, including many politicians and mainstream media commentators, incorrectly but consistently conflate three distinct issues: undocumented or unlawful migration, asylum seeking and refugee entry.

Refugees are typically conflated, explicitly or implicitly, with asylum seekers, who, in turn, are generally equated with undocumented migrants.

Refugees make their case for entry based on persecution from when they already are. Asylum seekers request similar protection but at the border. Though many otherwise-informed Americans don’t seem to understand this, coming to the border unannounced and requesting asylum is not unlawful.

Under former presidents Barack Obama, and especially Mr Trump, measures were enacted to compel asylum-seekers to return to their own countries or third countries such as Mexico, while their cases are reviewed. Given the pandemic, virtually no adult asylum seekers are being allowed to remain in the US pending adjudication.

Under US law, however, unaccompanied minors cannot be summarily expelled to an uncertain fate. Instead they must be protected and placed with relatives or foster families until their cases are resolved through a usually lengthy process. Under Mr Trump and now under Mr Biden, there were several surges of families and especially unaccompanied minors requesting asylum at the Mexican border.

Last fall, the Trump administration was quietly bracing for another major surge at the beginning of this year, based on ongoing economic and crime crises and severe hurricanes in Central America, and predictable seasonal fluctuations.

But because Mr Biden won, he inherited this problem, and his pro-immigration rhetoric and promised policy changes may have helped promote the current surge of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum.

Certainly Republicans are stridently blaming him for what they are inaccurately describing as “the worst border crisis in history”, but which is clearly a big problem.

Many of Mr Biden’s conservative or Republican sympathisers, particularly in the American media, have been urgently warning that this is likely to be the most powerful Republican weapon against him. The biggest concern is that his control of Congress is razor thin, especially in the equally-divided Senate, but also the House of Representatives.

Historically, new presidents’ parties suffer significant setbacks in their first congressional midterm. Next year, Democrats cannot afford to lose ground in either chamber, especially not the Senate.

Bucking that historical trend is Mr Biden’s primary political task right now. That helps explain why in the past three weeks his administration changed its tune at least six times on refugees.

Technically, refugee acceptance is not related to border control. Refugees apply over a long process from outside the country, have convincingly demonstrated past, or a well-founded fear, of persecution and are thoroughly vetted and approved before entry.

But Americans tend to think of refugees and asylum seekers as synonymous, and then often even equate both with undocumented migrants who skirt the law altogether.

Many Americans, following Mr Trump’s lead, are categorically opposed to almost any immigration from non-white countries.

All migration is now effectively refracted through a lens of overriding panic on the Republican right about demographic racial and ethnic transformation, and a perceived loss of status and power among white, Christian Americans.

From this perspective, details don’t matter. It is simply and by definition objectionable and alarming for more non-white people to enter the country.

Some rightists, encouraged by the stridently white nationalist FoxNews TV host Tucker Carlson, are increasingly describing even lawful immigration as a Democratic plot to dilute the votes of white Americans by adding “slavish,” “servile” non-white immigrants. It is, they absurdly insist, a “voting rights” issue.

This is an only slightly encoded reiteration of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory that liberals, especially Jews, are attempting to overwhelm traditionally white-majority societies with immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America in a plot to “destroy Western civilisation”.

This escalating mania is the context and subtext of the current controversies.

Mr Biden campaigned on reversing Mr Trump’s near zeroing out of refugee acceptance, pledging to increase from a mere 15,000 to 125,000 annually.

But following the border crisis and related Republican attacks, he overruled his own officials and decided to stick to 15,000 for 2021.

That produced an immediate, massive outcry among Democrats. The left was infuriated and even some of the President’s closest allies complained bitterly.

Mr Biden has proven unexpectedly popular with progressives, but not enough to get away with maintaining Mr Trump’s anti-refugee policies.

Within hours he pledged to accept over 60,000 this year instead, but the official change is pending. Mr Biden was clearly caught off guard and lacks both a political and practical plan to deal with this incendiary issue.

Smelling political blood, Republicans feel vindicated in making migration their primary campaign issue, with pandemic mitigation like school closures a distant second. If the President continues to score victories on controlling the pandemic and reviving the economy, the Democrats should survive migration-based attacks and do well in the midterms. But their exposure is evidently significant, particularly if other failures emerge.

Mr Biden has had an excellent first 100 days, but as he seems to understand, he’s quite vulnerable on migration and border issues. He urgently needs better policies and, especially, messaging to protect his paper-thin Congressional majorities next year.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-24/there-s-no-easy-way-back-to-the-iran-nuclear-deal?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

Technical and political complications stand in the way of Biden and Rouhani.

The outlines of a potential agreement between the U.S. and Iran are emerging from the indirect negotiations in Vienna. The two sides will probably succeed in their professed aim of resurrecting the nuclear deal secured by President Barack Obama and renounced by President Donald Trump. But how much that would practically accomplish is questionable.

Washington and Tehran say they’re prepared to return, on a “compliance for  compliance” basis, to the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action they agreed, with other world powers, in 2015. On the American side, that would mean the gradual lifting of economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic; on Iran’s part, it would involve scaling down uranium-enrichment activities and disposing of new stockpiles.

But turning the clock back is more complicated than it sounds, for both technical and political reasons.

The Biden team looks willing to drop nuclear-related sanctions while retaining others based on Iran’s support for terrorism, its human-rights violations and other malign activities — but not all of the sanctions fit neatly into these silos. After taking the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, the Trump administration imposed hundreds of new sanctions on Iran, many of which straddle these categories. It also made many older and re-imposed restrictions harder to revoke.

On the other side of the equation, even if Iran does get rid of its new stockpiles and downgrade its enrichment activities, its nuclear threat will not recede to the level achieved by the 2015 deal. That’s because, having breached the JCPOA’s terms, Tehran has made major strides in mastering sophisticated enrichment technology. Such knowledge, once acquired, can’t be unlearned.

This technological progress has significantly reduced the “breakout time” it would take Iran to manufacture a nuclear weapon, by some estimations to a mere six months.

This is crucial because the nuclear deal was essentially a chronological gamble. In 2015, the Obama administration wagered that 10-15 years of nuclear inactivity would facilitate political changes within Iran that would eventually help extend or improve the arrangement. Now that five years have passed and Iran has reduced the breakout time, those odds have obviously changed.  

The politics have changed, too — and, for the American perspective, for the worse. Hard-liners have consolidated their control of most of the levers of the Islamic Republic, and expect one of their own to win the presidential election in June. They may allow the lame-duck President Hassan Rouhani to secure a general understanding with the U.S. and other world powers, but would prefer to delay a full return to the JCPOA until after their man has been elected, so they can claim the credit for the economic benefits accruing from sanctions relief.

To that end, they are putting political hurdles in Rouhani’s path. They have attacked him for suggesting a phased return to the JCPOA terms, and have used their control of parliament to enact legislation narrowing his negotiating options. Rouhani has openly accused his domestic opponents of trying to sabotage his efforts to have the sanctions lifted.

What can the Biden administration do about any of this? In order to get around Trump’s “poison pill” sanctions, the U.S. is offering Iran a combination of formal and informal measures, including discretionary non-enforcement. These measures would in effect restore the status quo that existed between the signing of the 2015 agreement and Trump’s arrival in the White House. But other sanctions on terrorism and human rights issues will remain in place.

Such an arrangement may suit Rouhani’s successor, who would cash in on the economic dividend. The hard-liners will also be reassured by the fact that the Biden team has dropped its demand that Tehran commit to additional talks to extend the restrictions in the JCPOA and reckon with Iran’s missile program as well as its support for a range of violent, extremist militias in the Arab world.

This may get the JCPOA going again, but time and technology have greatly diminished the deal’s value. The challenge for the U.S. will be to achieve what Secretary of State Antony Blinken has described as a “longer and stronger agreement” with the Islamic Republic. For Biden, that promises to be a much higher mountain to climb.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/afghanistan-is-the-latest-example-why-the-us-needs-clear-policy-goals-1.1206035

For over a decade, US presidents have been vowing to end “forever wars,” especially by – at last – completely withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan.

Joe Biden has finally taken the plunge, announcing that the remaining 2,500 US troops in the country will be removed between May 1 and the symbolically resonant date of September 11.

This is obviously a US defeat, but of what kind exactly is ambiguous because the overriding US policy was never clearly defined or agreed upon.

This war, which began as a striking success but degenerated into an interminable debacle, reveals much about what has gone wrong with American national security policy-making.

Unlike the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Afghan war was necessary. It cannot be written off as a misbegotten adventure that was avoidable and likely to backfire.

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US by Al Qaeda, which were headquartered in Afghanistan and harboured by the Taliban, a military response was imperative.

No self-respecting power could allow such a deadly and ruthless threat to operate with impunity on the other side of the world, particularly when eliminating it was well within US capability. Consequently, the Afghanistan mission was relatively non-controversial when it began, as opposed to the invasion of Iraq.

Yet time and again, even when there is a consensus for a major American foreign policy initiative, there is an evident lack of agreement about what is the goal. As a consequence, it is often impossible to seriously measure the progress of a major initiative, not only “objectively” but on its own terms, simply because fundamental aims are not defined.

Any policy initiative that lacks clear goals and which can therefore be subjected to a systematic measure of success or failure, is destined to fail. Short of an implausible victory, it cannot succeed because Washington does not agree on what would constitute success in the first place. If no one agrees what success would look like, it cannot be achieved.

This was obviously true of the Iraq invasion from the outset, but it became quickly and increasingly true in Afghanistan as well. The initial US thrust into Afghanistan, led at first by the CIA and other irregular forces, in conjunction with anti-Taliban Afghan groups, was remarkably successful. Within a few weeks the Taliban were negotiating the terms of a de facto surrender.

That is precisely when the policy lost its initial coherence.

It made sense for the US to act forcefully in Afghanistan to eliminate the threat of Al Qaeda and deliver the Taliban such a blow that the organisation would never again harbour anti-American international terrorists.

But having achieved that, almost immediately the US abandoned this clear, limited and achievable aim in favour of a quixotic effort to arbitrarily reshape Afghani governance.

Over the next two decades, Washington attempted to build a new, centralised and unified state based in Kabul that corresponded to American ideas of how Afghanistan ought to be governed. But these ideas had nothing to do with realities on the ground – what is possible, and what makes sense for the people of Afghanistan.

Worse, there was never any honest debate about why the US would seek, in effect, to rule Afghanistan from the other side of the world.

Why would any American cherish such an ambition?

And why would any Afghan be tempted to embrace such a project, other than for immediate self-interest?

The state-building agenda in Afghanistan was irrational, insofar as it offered few, if any, major strategic benefits. Worse, it never stood any chance of success. The whole project therefore made no sense.

The US position in Afghanistan has ebbed and flowed, but there has been a consistent deterioration in relative American power and leverage since the early crushing victory in November and December 2001.

The tragedy is that Washington could have secured favourable terms with the Taliban and other Afghan forces at that time and at a low cost regarding the imperative issue of international terrorism and other limited, focused and necessary demands.

Yet over far too many years and at a vast cost, US policy has consistently eroded Washington’s ability to secure such terms. The US is now leaving Afghanistan without any real, serious or enforceable commitments by the Taliban. It is a sorry tale that begins with an overwhelming victory at the end of 2001 and will end, later this year, in an ignominious strategic defeat.

Mr Biden is probably doing the right thing by swallowing this bitter pill, because after so many blunders, there is likely no cost-effective way to salvage US policy in Afghanistan.

Better, as in the case of Vietnam, to accept reality: that a conceptually flawed project, which could never succeed, has inevitably failed.

The biggest tragedy for Americans is not that what amounts to a Taliban victory in Afghanistan means that country will again become a major hotbed of anti-American terrorism. It probably won’t. It is that the lessons of this fiasco will almost certainly remain unlearnt.

As with so many other post-Cold War policy failures, this again illustrates that Americans need focused and limited consensus goals, to which they need to apply precise leverage, pressure and, if necessary, force required to achieve them – but no more.

The last time a major US success like that occurred was in Kuwait in 1991. And that was before it became clear that what had been a relative US foreign policy consensus had effectively collapsed along with the Soviet Union, not long after the USSR’s own Afghanistan fiasco.

What is needed is the kind of honest, serious policy conversation that is not rewarded in the American system, and which instead mostly incentivises the avoidance of blame which then hinders bold decision-making.

Most of all, it would require something that may not be possible: the restoration of a shared American vision. But even without that, major policies must have reasonable and shared aims.

Having clear, limited and achievable goals is not a guarantee of success. But without them, failure is virtually certain.

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.