https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-28/why-tunisia-s-democratic-experiment-must-succeed?sref=tp95wk9l

It is a vital test of whether secular groups and Islamists can coexist in a constitutional order.

The major constitutional crisis in Tunisia once again raises a key question at the core of contemporary Arab political dispute: Do Islamist parties have a legitimate place in the public square? The apparent autogolpe by President Kais Saied may have been precipitated by widespread protests over government corruption and ineptitude, but it can also be seen as an attempt by the forces of traditional republican authoritarianism to undermine political Islam, here represented by Ennahda, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and the country’s largest party.

This is a battle that has played out repeatedly across the Arab world. When the old authoritarian order is toppled by a pro-democracy mass movement, it is usually the Islamist groups — better organized and less tainted by the former regime than most secular rivals — that rise to power. But they quickly alienate the population by ideological overreach and administrative incompetence, which creates an opening for the return of the secular authoritarians.

The quintessential example of this is Egypt, where popular protest in 2011 brought down the dictator Hosni Mubarak (just days after Tunisians had overthrown their own tyrant), leading to elections won by the Muslim Brotherhood. But the undemocratic policies of President Mohammed Morsi led to even larger protests two years later, which brought General Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to power.

Mainstream Arab attitudes towards Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood are bookended by two rival small and wealthy Gulf states: Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

The UAE champions a strict separation between religion and politics, and holds that relatively moderate groups like the Brotherhood are the thin end of the wedge: Give them space in the public square and it will soon be overrun by more radical and violent Islamist groups. (This argument draws power from the fact that extremists such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State do indeed derive much of their worldview from Brotherhood sources.) Better to eliminate the somewhat milder forms of political Islam before the more dangerous strains take hold.

Qatar, backed by its more powerful partner Turkey, argues to the contrary: That the Islamism of the Brotherhood is the only plausible corrective to more violent extremism — and is, moreover, broadly representative of popular socio-political sensibilities in Muslim communities.

The UAE, with its deep pockets and often backed by Saudi Arabia, has tended to back secular authoritarians such as Egypt’s Sisi against Islamists. The Qataris, hardly lacking in resources, have been generous toward the Brotherhood and its offshoots and use their considerable media clout to implausibly conflate Islamists and Arab democracy.  

But in Tunisia, Ennahda seemed to be pointing toward a third way, a model for post-Islamist Arab politics. Its leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, whom I have talked to at length, is no liberal — but he does appear to be a pragmatic constitutionalist. And there are genuine democrats high in the party’s ranks. Since 2011, Ennahda has sought to demonstrate that it is no longer revolutionary, conspiratorial or internationalist.

Ghannounchi accepted the 2014 Tunisian constitution, even though it went against the Islamist grain by empowering an elected president rather than the mainly parliamentary system favored by the Brotherhood. The party abandoned its secretive character to openly participate in electoral politics. And it distanced itself from other Brotherhood offshoots elsewhere in the Arab world, focusing instead on purely Tunisian issues.

Given the party’s history as an underground movement, it is no surprise that many Tunisians doubt the sincerity of its conversion. But if it is a pretense, Ghannouchi and other Ennahda leaders have kept it up for a decade. In an open, parliamentary system, there is every chance the party will eventually become what they say it is, whatever their private beliefs. And even if Ennahda’s transformation is incomplete or insufficient, it does offer a model for incorporating religious conservatives into constitutional Arab democracies.

Seen in that light, Tunisia’s democracy is rather more than the sole success story of the Arab Spring uprisings: It is also a crucial test of whether Islamists can evolve into normal social and religiously conservative parties and coexist with secular groups in a constitutional order.

If the answer is “No,” that portends a long, potentially violent twilight struggle in many Arab countries. It is extremely important that the answer turns out to be “Yes.”

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/07/27/the-row-over-selling-ice-cream-in-the-west-bank-is-a-big-deal/

Israel needs to maintain an illusion of normalcy even though settling occupied territories is a massive human rights abuse.

You would think a little melted ice cream would be the last thing to alarm one of the world’s major regional powers, with its cutting-edge technology, an OECD economy and a powerful military including its own nuclear arsenal. But the meltdown by Israel’s leaders and advocates over an ice cream company’s marketing decision indicates how vulnerable they feel to criticism or a cursory examination of the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The Vermont-based ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s recently announced that they are no longer willing to sell products in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. This policy is principled and justified, as well as nuanced and limited. It is also symbolic and will have very little, if any, real impact on Israeli society.

But the Israeli government and its global allies have reacted with thunderous outrage. It reached a crescendo when Israeli President Isaac Herzog described this ice cream cold-shoulder as “a new form of terrorism”.

Israel-supporting politicians in the US are threatening to invoke state-level anti-boycott of Israel laws to punish Ben & Jerry’s. If they do, they will succeed only in exposing that much of this legislation is flatly unconstitutional. But it probably won’t come to that.

This dust-up is taking place entirely at the rhetorical and symbolic registers. And in that sense, Ben & Jerry’s announcement is indeed threatening to Israel, particularly with regards to US perceptions of Israel, its occupation of Palestinian lands and growing drive towards eventual annexation of much of the West Bank.

For most of the world, Ben & Jerry’s new policy will make perfect sense.

Israeli settlements are a black-letter violation of fundamental international law, specifically Article 49, paragraph six, of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

This crucial bedrock of international law was adopted in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Unlike the earlier Geneva Conventions, which dealt with the conduct of war between combatants and treatment of prisoners, the Fourth Convention was designed for the protection of civilians during times of war.

It is the quintessential international human rights document.

As the International Red Cross Commentary of 1958 explains, paragraph six was “intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonise those territories”.

In other words, using civilians to settle occupied territories is a major human rights violation. Article 49 clearly establishes that civilians living under military occupation have a right not to be colonised and have their lands taken away from them and given to somebody else.

Yet, that is the essence of Israel’s occupation in the West Bank. Far beyond any other ostensible purpose, it enables a project that has implanted more than 600,000 Israeli civilians and counting into occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

It is only reasonable for anyone to decline to encourage such human rights violations and therefore refuse to do business with Israeli settlements. This stance is growing in Europe, and even creeping into US society.

Yet, many Israelis are scandalised whenever this happens. They have convinced themselves that what they are doing is normal, reasonable and within their rights.

Israel’s leaders know it is essential that the rest of the world view the occupation and the settlements as, if not normal, at least no big deal. These are not occupied territories, they say. They are “disputed”. These aren’t colonial settlements. They are “Jewish towns and neighbourhoods”.

It is particularly important for them that the illusion of normality be maintained in the US. Few Americans – at least outside of fundamentalist parts of the Christian evangelical and some religiously Orthodox segments of Jewish communities – are likely to see it that way if allowed to think about it too closely.

So, for Israel’s leaders, who understand the importance of their country’s “special relationship” with the US, settlement boycotts are, if anything, even more dangerous than generalised boycotts of Israel (which are vanishingly rare in the West).

The Israeli state maintains the fiction that there is, in effect, a mobile, fluid Israel that extends into the occupied territories wherever an Israeli settler, or possibly soldier, happens to be, leaving an undefinable, unresolved reality everywhere else. That’s completely indefensible.

But since continued occupation and eventual annexation have become a virtual consensus within the Israeli political elite, any time the illusion is shattered, and this shell game is exposed as a fiction, the jig is effectively up.

It must be especially alarming that Ben & Jerry’s was founded and led by two liberal and politically engaged Jewish Americans. It is yet another sign that many Jewish Americans are becoming increasingly sceptical about the Greater Israel project embodied by the settlements. This explains the imperative to police Jewish American criticism with particular determination.

An Israeli state committed to a two-state solution would be at pains to distinguish itself from the settlements. But one that is committed to territorial expansion via occupation will instead feel threatened by whatever reinforces that distinction, exactly as Ben & Jerry’s has done.

So, this seemingly ridiculous kerfuffle over the marketing of one of scores of major international ice cream brands to a few hundred thousand Israeli settlers in the West Bank is actually, politically, a big deal.

Israel’s leaders and other supporters of the emerging Greater Israel realise that any effort to distinguish between the Israeli state and its settlements, or that calls attention to its policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian territories, is a mortal threat. Not to Israel as such, but to the Greater Israel they seem so determined to establish.

That project requires the rest of the world, especially Americans, not to think about, or look too carefully at, the occupation and the settlements.

The illusion of normality is absolutely essential.

Anything, even a seemingly minor brouhaha over a little ice cream, is so threatening to this ruse that it can indeed be called, with a straight face no less, “a new form of terrorism”.

For, in truth, the underlying reality is literally terrifying.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/07/19/why-so-many-republicans-are-anti-vaxxers/

A budding authoritarian cult on the US right needs it acolytes to be willing to die for the cause, and many seem to be.

Does former US president Donald Trump really want his voters to die? Can Fox News really want its viewers to perish in large numbers from the coronavirus?

These sound like ridiculous questions. But under current circumstances in the US, they have become unavoidable.

As the world struggles with Covid-19, the US is in what should be the most enviable position: a large country, geographically and demographically, that has, rapidly, been able to make effective vaccinations available to all adults.

Yet, the US won’t reach herd immunity, largely because a substantial percentage of the population is refusing to accept these free and easily available vaccinations. The main reason is that much of the right-wing echo-sphere is working overtime to create doubts, sow fear and in every possible way reduce participation.

But why?

That this is coordinated and systematic is clear. Pandemic misinformation and, yes, disinformation have a long history on the American right, going back to Mr Trump’s notorious news conferences where he insisted the virus was under total control and would soon vanish, touted various ineffective remedies, and suggested the introduction of light and even bleach into the body.

Yet, when he was in office, Mr Trump and his allies trumpeted the development of the vaccines as his greatest accomplishment. With Joe Biden in the White House, that’s thrown out of the window.

Now, Mr Trump is casting a shadow on people’s judgement, unwilling, except on one lone occasion, to urge people to become vaccinated and declining to admit how extremely ill he was with the virus or that he and his entire family were early beneficiaries of the vaccine.

It’s even worse on Fox News. Its owner, Rupert Murdoch, received the inoculation as early as December. Yet, Fox’s most potent programming is working overtime to convince Americans not to get vaccinated under any circumstances.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Its most fervent anti-vaccine propagandist, Tucker Carlson, refuses to discuss whether or not he is vaccinated. If the answer were no, he would surely want to say so. Yet, he continues to fulminate against the vaccines and all efforts to get Americans vaccinated, and provides an exceptionally high-level platform for the worst kind of anti-vaccine propagandists.

Fox’s other major primetime star, Laura Ingram, was all in favour of the vaccine when she was touting it as Mr Trump’s major accomplishment. But since his defeat, she has become passionately opposed to any efforts to vaccinate Americans.

It should come as no surprise that almost all of the currently reported US hospitalisations and deaths from the pandemic are occurring among unvaccinated persons, and that outbreaks are generally concentrated in states that are heavily conservative and Republican, with high numbers of unvaccinated citizens.

Indeed, the Republican Arkansas state legislature has just banned all public and private entities, including hospitals, from requiring their workers to have Covid-19 vaccines. Why would anyone ever encourage their followers to take such risks, or prohibit any requirements that they don’t, even in hospitals?

Obviously, this is partly just anti-Democratic Party and anti-Biden. For many, including Mr Trump, as long as he was president the vaccine was a great accomplishment. Now, it’s a mortal peril. It also feeds into a familiar set of resentments, against expertise, science and government, with alienated, resentful, less-educated and anti-establishment sentiments all being heavily stoked.

In the end, the ‘noble cause’ embodied by the Great Leader demands your death, if it comes to that

It certainly plays into anti-government and libertarian impulses, as well as small-government and anti-authority ideals. But none of that is really enough to explain this incredible phenomenon. The answer certainly lies deeper in the individual and collective human psyche.

With some of the leading protagonists vaccinated – and this is, at heart, understood by the targets of this strange propaganda – then something else is definitely afoot.

It has all the hallmarks of an authoritarian cult. In the final analysis, the tribe and the noble cause, embodied by the so-called Great Leader, demand sacrifice. If need be human sacrifices. If need be, yours.

The process here is easier because only a small percentage of coronavirus victims will actually die. And mitigation, including masking and distancing, was already heavily stigmatised by some Republicans during the Trump presidency.

It’s obvious that tribalism of this variety is all about aggression turned outward, against the other: the minority, the immigrant, the foreigner, or the outsider. The inevitable corollary is that aggression often flips back and turns inward, and violence against others can become expressed in violence against the self.

Suicide bombers of Al Qaeda and ISIS are the most obvious examples. But the inclination to turn aggression inward, as a central feature of affirming in-group cohesion, is constant in human history. Self-sacrifice is the most powerful myth of commitment, patriotism and nobility.

The dying Castro dictatorship in Cuba, for instance, is known for its slogan “Patria o Muerte!” – homeland or death. The message underlying such all-or-nothing nihilism is, die for me.

Authoritarian systems inevitably demand the highest sacrifice. They fetishise authority, submission and death – whether, ideally, for the other, or, if need be, from the self.

In the end, the “noble cause” embodied by the Great Leader demands your death, if it comes to that. And it must be given willingly, as proof of its essential validity. That’s true any time a political movement acquires fundamentalist overtones on left or right, religious or secular.

Does Mr Trump want his supporters to die? Does Mr Carlson want his viewers to die? Or do they need them to be willing to die? What could they be doing other than asking for that? Many of their adherents enthusiastically want to be willing to die for them, in the so-called Great Cause.

One of the most revealing recent reports is of an ardent Trump supporter, a former marine called “Randall”, who, though extremely ill, refused a test for the virus lest it might make his leader “look bad”.

That’s the ideal follower of this cult, someone willing to die to keep the fantasy alive.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/07/11/wheres-the-us-headed-in-next-years-crucial-midterm-election/

The vote will see ‘culture wars’ face off against pragmatic, pocketbook concerns.

“Divided America” may be a cliche but its political impact is deepening. As Democrats and Republicans prepare for next year’s crucial midterm congressional elections, the two parties are not just offering different answers to similar questions, they are talking about completely different aspects of reality.

Parties often want to focus on different matters. But the extent to which Democrats are preparing to run on governance, the economy and recovering from the pandemic, while Republicans are laser-focused on culture and grievance, is remarkable.

Republicans will – if need be – talk about the economy and attribute the post-pandemic boom that is already underway to tax cuts under former president Donald Trump. But unless there is a sudden downturn or inflation scare they are likely to avoid the topic.

Democrats will tend to claim credit for all economic progress. But they will also highlight the supposed benefits of their big plans for the US economy, especially if they can pass another major spending bill before November 2022.

Even if they can’t, President Joe Biden is seeking to engage the US government with the economy to an extent unknown in recent decades, primarily through executive orders that do not require congressional approval.

The White House “Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force” is the centrepiece of a plan to revive US manufacturing. Claiming to have learnt from crises during the pandemic regarding medicines, personal protective equipment, ventilators and other core medical requirements, Mr Biden wants to ensure that the US becomes independent of international suppliers in manufacturing such key products without relying on a complex global supply chain.

It’s part of the Biden version of “America First” economic nationalism. Rather than rely on tariffs, as Mr Trump did, and ignore the reality of complex global supply chains, Mr Biden hopes to revitalise manufacturing by insisting that the US needs to be self-sufficient on broad categories of items.

That is all probably too detailed for much of the electorate, but most of the public, including many Trump-supporting Republicans, want the government to play a major role in overseeing economic growth and securing large numbers of well-paying jobs.

Democrats are going to run on that issue and they will easily link it to the striking success the Biden administration has had in making Covid-19 vaccines available to all adult Americans in very short order.

Many Trump supporters and others are refusing vaccinations, which is the only reason the project has stalled just short of the stated goal of 70 per cent national inoculation by now.

Some Republican House members may try to run on an anti-vaccination and anti-mask platform. But most will avoid the issue altogether, save to again credit Mr Trump with having overseen the development of the vaccines in his last year in the White House.

Instead, Republicans are now focused on three cultural issues in which the federal government is sometimes barely, if at all, involved, but that certainly have a long track record of efficacy.

They will stress their categorical opposition to illegal and even legal immigration, with appeals to both anxieties about low-skilled wages and more cultural and racial xenophobic sentiments. Of the three, that’s the only genuinely federal issue.

Republicans will also point to rising crime rates, attempting to link that to Democratic control of most large cities and falsely painting Mr Biden as leading an agenda to “defund the police”.

There is almost always a strong racial component to such language, with violent crime invariably, if sometimes implicitly, attributed to African-Americans and Latinos.

But perhaps their biggest bet is on a “culture war” motif with “Critical Race Theory” serving as the main target. CRT has come to mean many different things. But it now frequently serves as a synecdoche for “woke progressivism” that is perceived to be, and sometimes can indeed be, an overly aggressive and even irrationally doctrinaire, hard-liberal approach to racial and, more controversially, transgender issues.

Despite the prevalence of QAnon and other bizarre conspiracy theories, and the near ubiquitous personality cult around Mr Trump, within their own ranks, Republicans will try to paint Democrats as the ones who have “gone crazy,” and been taken over by a radical, illiberal and oppressive “cancel culture” ideology.

All that has little to do with Mr Biden’s policy agenda, but Republicans are probably right that it is their biggest opportunity to make gains with a public that is otherwise likely to welcome more competent, expansive and ambitious governance on issues like the economy, infrastructure and climate change.

What is often being attacked as America-hating CRT is simply the public and academic unpacking of the reality that no society can impose centuries of slavery and mandate almost 100 years of segregation and racial discrimination without it leaving deep structural and institutional imprints and lacerations.

Fortunately for Republicans, liberal activists sometimes overplay their hands, and come across as power-hungry ideologues demanding conformity to their, often highly debatable, identity-based assertions. That inevitably alienates many people, and even alienates several African Americans and Latinos, not to mention many committed liberals and traditional leftists.

The irony is that Republican state legislatures across the country are by law mandating a countervailing political correctness which, for example, in Florida, effectively prohibits an honest discussion in schools about the role of racism in American history and present day society.

Such controversies are perennial and cyclical in the US. The cultural battle over race and identity peaked in the late 1960s, the mid-1990s and are again a focal point today. The explosion of anti-racist sentiment following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police last year virtually insured that the right would launch an organised “anti-anti-racism” pushback, which is the core of this controversy.

It’s ironic that the Republicans’ best allies in this debate are precisely some of the most zealous, hyper-progressive identity liberals, much to the dismay of many traditional class-oriented leftists.

The midterms will be about how much traction “culture war” issues can gain against an impressive commercial comeback under Mr Biden’s ambitious economically oriented agenda. The midterms appear set to pit emotional impulses against pocketbook concerns – and symbolic and cultural anxieties against pragmatic interests.

So, November 2022 will indicate whether the US national economy, manufacturing and jobs are more important than ethnic and cultural morale among the still-dominant white American constituency.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia: The Partnership Endures Despite Oil Dispute

Long-standing but underappreciated differences between the UAE and Saudi Arabia are becoming more obvious, but their continuing shared interests remain decisive.

The ongoing spat between the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, in the context of a dispute over oil production among members of the OPEC+ alliance of producers, is being simultaneously overstated and underestimated in different quarters. The rift is real and significant. But the UAE and Saudi Arabia remain fundamentally affiliated at the regional and international level because they continue to share enough core interests to make them far more often partners than rivals. Yet the differences, some long-standing and others more recent, are significant. So, it’s essential to differentiate between what is and is not happening between these two crucial Gulf Arab powers.

Widespread surprise at the seemingly sudden disagreement between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh is rooted in misapprehension about the relationship between the two countries in recent decades. It has been a common assumption that the UAE and Saudi Arabia have effectively indistinguishable worldviews and interests – that the UAE is sort of an appendage or dependency of Saudi Arabia. That has never been the case.

A number of factors perpetuated this misconception, including the UAE’s determination in the 1990s and 2000s to make partnerships with Saudi Arabia and the United States the cornerstone of its national security strategy. Differences with Saudi Arabia were therefore contained or played down as a matter of policy.

Yet even at moments of maximum cooperation, such as the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, the UAE and Saudi Arabia had overlapping but distinct goals and imperatives. Over time, these differences developed into a clear distinction between the Saudi-led war in the north against the Houthi rebels and a UAE-led effort to pacify the south, balancing among the United Nations-recognized Yemeni government, southern parties and militia groups (some of them secessionist leaning), and a complex battle against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. These separate wars became glaringly clear when the UAE began its phased military drawdown in Yemen in July 2019. The UAE had considerably more success in the southern theater than Saudi Arabia had in the northern one and concluded that continued direct engagement had reached the point of diminishing returns. Yet the UAE was at pains to insist that there was no real difference with Saudi Arabia, even though there clearly was, and Riyadh played along.

The widely circulated narrative that the de facto ruler of the UAE, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, acts as a mentor to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has also created confusion. This flawed characterization, which is at best an exaggerated caricature, asserted that, through force of personality, Mohammed bin Zayed, despite the UAE’s junior partner status, was often effectively pulling the strings in Riyadh. Not only was that incorrect, it almost certainly added to mutual suspicions, at least between the two leaders. The more complex reality is that, under King Salman bin Abdulaziz and Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia had moved considerably closer to the UAE ideologically in a broad rejection of Islamism as a political orientation among Muslims.

But this was not because of the charisma or personal influence of Mohammed bin Zayed. It was, rather, a strategic reassessment in Riyadh born out of Saudi Arabia’s own interests. And there were always obvious differences. Saudi Arabia cannot reject the interplay of religion and politics as the UAE tries to do, because even as it is shifting to a more populist and nationalist narrative, Saudi Arabia remains deeply invested in its Islamic history and Islam as a social and political text. This was also evident in Yemen where Riyadh saw the Islamist Islah Party as a major local partner while the UAE deeply distrusted the organization even when senior Emirati officials grudgingly agreed to meet with Islah leaders.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have drifted further apart on regional alliances as well. Saudi Arabia has been engaging in a tentative rapprochement with Turkey, which the UAE views as the leader of a Sunni Islamist regional alliance that has the potential to rival Iran’s Shia Islamist network. Saudi Arabia has tended to see Ankara simply as another worrisome would-be regional hegemon and less of an ideological threat. The divisions between the UAE and Saudi Arabia on Turkey were evident when Saudi Arabia was on the brink of an agreement to end the boycott of Qatar. When the UAE discovered it would not be able to prevent a bilateral deal between Riyadh and Doha, it made a last-minute pitch for a broader Gulf Cooperation Council reconciliation, which was accomplished at a summit in Al Ula in January. Left to its own devices, the UAE may well have preferred to continue the boycott, which it largely viewed in ideological terms seeing Qatar as a key member of Turkey’s fledgling regional network.

These differences have also been evident regarding Iran and Israel. The UAE was quicker to open a dialogue with Iran, and has taken it further, than Saudi Arabia. This is partly because the UAE is much smaller and more vulnerable, particularly to missile attacks, than Saudi Arabia, but also because the UAE sees Iran as one of several regional threats, including Turkey, while Saudi Arabia continues to view Iran as uniquely menacing. Dubai’s long-standing, extensive commercial relationships with Iranian business entities may also have helped shape Abu Dhabi’s threat perceptions regarding Iran.

Saudi Arabia has been clear that it does not object to the UAE’s agreement to normalize relations with Israel, and even reportedly agreed to allow Bahrain, over which Riyadh has substantial sway, to follow suit. But Riyadh has been careful to keep its options open and is weighing the advantages and disadvantages to any such move on its own part. One of the most significant differences here is that Saudi Arabia has regional Arab and global Islamic leadership roles the UAE simply does not. The UAE can act strictly in its own interests with little regard for other constituencies, while Saudi Arabia, sometimes to its own frustration, cannot.

The biggest difference, though, is the one that has given rise to the current OPEC+ dispute. The UAE is much further along than Saudi Arabia in developing the framework for a post-oil economy. Saudi Arabia and Russia, amid several bitter spats, have been using OPEC+ to manage oil pricing, regulating production to benefit their own economies. The UAE has long been seething that it hasn’t been consulted properly and that its concerns are not reflected in production limits. Indeed, while many other oil-producing countries seek to manage pricing over the long run, the UAE wants to monetize its natural resources as quickly as possible to help drive the transition away from a petroleum-based economy. The current OPEC+ arrangement, therefore, isn’t working for Abu Dhabi, and while most analysts seem to think a short-term deal can be struck, these economic differences make it possible to imagine the UAE actually leaving OPEC altogether to free itself from production limitations. It is also easy, however, to appreciate the risks Abu Dhabi could encounter trying to maneuver outside of an OPEC framework, risks that inject a degree of caution into Emirati decision making about any actual exit, as opposed to brinksmanship as a negotiating strategy.

The divisions between the UAE and Saudi Arabia are real and significant, and they have the potential over time to grow into deeper rifts. But any rivals or antagonists hoping that this is the end of the Abu Dhabi- Riyadh partnership may be disappointed. On most issues, at a fundamental level the UAE and Saudi Arabia have broadly compatible goals and can reinforce each other with complementary capabilities. Both are also still within a broad-based pro-United States camp. And, while they see the threats somewhat differently, both have the same major concerns: Iran and its network of regional proxies, Turkey and its budding regional alliance, and the continued threat of extremist and terrorist groups. In a region divided between status quo powers and revisionist forces, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are strongly in the status quo camp.

Economic concerns are often sufficient to draw out and amplify disputes between normally cooperative partners. And there is a fundamental incompatibility between the way the UAE and Saudi Arabia want to manage their energy resources. That’s likely to continue to fuel disagreements. But, even with the various other differences, it is very unlikely to lead to a bitter alienation such as was the case with the dispute with Qatar.

The current dispute is in part the result of a maturation process among Gulf Arab countries. It is quite normal for allied countries to have disagreements that do not rupture their underlying partnership, and economic differences are a typical source. For example, there have been repeated bitter trade quarrels between the United States and Canada. The UAE has been emerging as a more capable international player, and, to some extent, its current willingness to openly quarrel with Saudi Arabia is a function of its growing power. Under such circumstances, long-standing differences are becoming more obvious. But that does not constitute a real break between the UAE and Saudi Arabia or mean the ensuing death of this partnership.

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-why-saudi-arabia-is-now-in-no-rush-to-recognize-israel-1.9976034

Saudi leaders like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have focused on the benefits of normalization with Israel. But the recent violence highlighted the downside, which is far more serious for Riyadh than for the UAE or Bahrain.

Given the recent visit to the UAE by Israel’s Foreign Minister, and de facto cabinet leader, Yair Lapid, and fully-realized exchanges of ambassadors, the normalization process initiated last summer under the rubric of the “Abraham Accords” seems virtually irreversible.

That this progress is happening in the immediate aftermath of the latest spasm of Israeli-Palestinian violence clearly indicates that that tension was not close to sufficient to derailing the process.

The current situation remains in a honeymoon stage, with both Emirati and Israeli societies primarily excited by new economic, cultural and, above all, strategic opportunities.

But honeymoons don’t last forever. Signs of what could go wrong or at least cast a much deeper shadow over the relationship certainly did emerge. So Israel is on notice about where Gulf Arab sensitivities persist, even in the midst of a strategic rapprochement.

The biggest problem was at the beginning of the violence centered in Jerusalem. The core of the last outbreak was the ongoing effort to evict six Palestinian families from an area of occupied East Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah, where they have lived since arriving in the city as refugees in 1948.

It became much more awkward for the UAE, Bahrain, and even those Arab countries contemplating normalization with Israel when heavily armed Israeli troops stormed the Al-Aqsa mosque, purportedly looking for caches of stones intended for demonstrators to throw at Israeli troops or worshipers. The unprecedented mobile phone footage of teargas and stun grenades inside the mosque proved extremely awkward for the UAE and Bahrain.

Both countries were compelled to issue stronger statements than they surely otherwise would have liked, denouncing the violence and calling for protection of the inviolability of holy places. Obviously Islamic sensitivities regarding the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, are well known, and their ability to shift the diplomatic position of the UAE, in particular, ought to be carefully noted.

So should the immediate rush by Mohammed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the UAE, to embrace and reinforce Jordan’s position and authority as the custodian of the Muslim and Christian holy places in occupied East Jerusalem. The role of Jordan in helping to shape and set boundaries for Gulf Arab responses to unrest in Jerusalem cannot be underestimated.

The slight diplomatic tremor between the UAE and Israel would have become much more pronounced if the Jordanians had begun making categorical political and diplomatic moves to register extreme anger at the events.

Had the Jordanians, for example, recalled their ambassador to Israel, or expelled Israel’s ambassador from Jordan, the UAE’s hand would undoubtedly have been forced. What, exactly, they would have felt compelled to do is unclear, but that they would have had to take tangible steps to reinforce and echo Jordan’s position seems almost uncontestable.

But it’s not just the venerable holy places that are problematic. The attempted evictions in Sheikh Jarrah and another, similar, neighborhood, Silwan, encapsulate almost all the most crucial aspects of the Palestinian, and by extension Arab, narrative about Israel, its founding, its relationship with Palestinians in general, and the occupation in particular.

Because the targeted residents were refugees from 1948 already, the specter of them being once again expelled strongly reinforces the Palestinian narrative of dispossession and forcible displacement.

Because similar groups are acting under Israeli laws that allow Jews, but not ever Palestinians, to try to reclaim areas lost in 1947-1948, discrimination against Arabs, including Arab citizens of Israel, by the Israeli state could hardly be more powerfully illustrated.

It reinforces widely-shared Arab instincts to view the founding of Israel as in large part a giant land-grab against existing Arab owners and residents in the 1940s.

And that narrative, particularly reinforced, appears to validate the standard Arab interpretation of the post-1967 occupation as in essence perpetuated to violently seize land and homes from Palestinians, albeit often in a piecemeal fashion, and transfer them to Jewish Israelis, especially in strategically and culturally significant areas.

When Hamas intervened after the first two or three days of unrest in Jerusalem, and by launching a barrage of missiles towards Israel made the issue once again about them and primarily about competing aerial bombardments between Israel and Gaza-based militants, the Abraham Accord countries were effectively taken off the hook.

There was still a great deal of sympathy for Palestinian civilians and anger at Israel’s disproportionate and sometimes indiscriminate bombardments. But there was also dismay, as usual, at the conduct of Hamas, which especially in the UAE is widely viewed as a terrorist organization.

In effect, the Gulf countries were able to throw up their hands and implicitly say that here was yet another senseless war between a belligerent and recalcitrant Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, trying to save his own political skin by fueling another conflict with Palestinians, versus a fanatical and extremist Palestinian group in the thrall of Turkey and, to a lesser extent, Iran.

Under such circumstances, the narrative implicitly holds, there is very little, if anything, the Gulf could have done to prevent or attenuate the conflict once it began.

The lessons of recent weeks are obvious.

First, the normalization agreements are strategic decisions that are robust and enduring and that can, and will, withstand significant stress.

Second, unrest in Jerusalem, whether in holy places or otherwise, presents a completely different strain than events in the far less evocative Gaza, and is especially differentiated from anything that involves or can be laid at the doorstep of Hamas.

Third, Saudi leaders were undoubtedly watching carefully and calculating how much more difficult it would’ve been for them had they already normalized relations with Israel.

The existing agreements are fairly secure and were not really threatened by the unrest. But probably the most significant impact of the fighting was the way it undoubtedly focused minds in Riyadh on the potential downside to Saudi Arabia’s own possible normalization with Israel.

Saudi leaders were already well aware that they have Arab regional and Islamic global leadership roles that would have been significantly strained by the normalization process. And Saudi Arabia has a far larger, more complex and more brittle political architecture than its smaller neighbors.

In recent years, it’s likely Saudi leaders like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman were largely focused on the potential benefits of a possible opening to Israel. The recent violence undoubtedly called close attention to the potential pitfalls as well, and will fortify, for now, Saudi Arabia’s assessment that on normalization, they have no reason to move quickly, and every incentive to wait and see.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2021/07/04/are-trumps-legal-woes-paving-the-way-for-a-new-republican-leader/

With New York indictments and growing signs Republicans are starting to move on, is Trump doing a slow fade out?

Former US President Donald Trump remains the clear leader of the American right. But cracks in this mighty edifice are visible and slowly seem to be spreading.

Charges filed last week in the state of New York accuse the former president’s family business, and its long-serving chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, of criminally avoiding taxes on perks that should have been reported as income.

The immediate impact is limited in several ways.

First, Mr Trump himself has yet to be charged with a crime, although a growing list of his closest associates have pled guilty or been convicted or pardoned for serious offenses. Second, no matter what happens to the firm, Mr Trump will apparently remain a wealthy man.

Finally, prosecutors are seeking to pressure Mr Weisselberg to provide evidence against Mr Trump. But there is no sign he is ready to do so. As with many white-collar offences, the prosecution will have to establish an intent to commit a crime, which is not always easy or possible.

White-collar defendants have a much easier time than run-of-the-mill criminals in claiming that they made a mistake, didn’t realise what they were doing or that their prosecution is either a vendetta or a difference in the interpretation of complex rules and regulations.

Typical sentences are much weaker than those given for more straightforward crimes like grand larceny. Mr Weisselberg, who is 73, could face some jail time, perhaps even a few years. But merely being indicted may not be sufficient at this stage to get him to flip on a man he has worked for since 1973.

Much will hinge on whether this will be followed by additional and more serious charges against the company and its employees. The indictment lists two other unnamed staffers, rumoured to be Mr Weisselberg’s sons, suspected of similar tax dodging.

If Mr Weisselberg concludes that he is in real danger of spending his golden years in prison or that his sons might be joining him in the dock, that could certainly restructure his priorities.

But if this is all there is to it, it is possible to imagine him simply hunkering down and fighting it out.

There is a significant disconnect between Mr Trump’s business and political brands, and the two do not always reinforce each other effectively. In politics, the Trump brand is decidedly white working class in orientation. In business, the name is intended to connote upscale (some would say gaudy) luxury and exclusivity. Mr Trump has alienated much of that market with his populist pandering.

But Mr Trump is also reportedly far more concerned with his political future than the fortunes of his company, which is now run by his sons and over which he has not formally resumed control since leaving office.

The good news for Trump is that he remains the most influential Republican. But he no longer dominates the news cycle as he once did

The charges themselves are a political blow, but also help to feed his grievance-fuelled narrative of being persecuted relentlessly and unfairly by unpatriotic forces in the imaginary construct he calls the American “deep state”.

So, these indictments against his company and senior executives could prove a wash: both embarrassing and validating, depending on the audience.

The good news for Mr Trump is that he remains the most influential Republican.

The bad news is that political trends seem to be increasingly out of his control and moving away from him.

He certainly no longer dominates the news cycle as he once did. Since he was permanently banned from Twitter, he has been unable to find an effective vehicle for his fervid outbursts.

He started a blog that was shut down after less than a month because not enough people were reading it. His associates have talked about a new social media platform, but there is no sign of one. And there doesn’t appear to be any meaningful movement towards a Trump TV or media network.

Two weeks ago, Mr Trump held his first rally since his election defeat. It was largely ignored by the media and he introduced no new ideas or themes. He did not meaningfully discuss President Joe Biden’s agenda or any other significant recent developments. Instead, he harped on the myth of a stolen election and his purported accomplishments in office.

He’s not the only nostalgia act drawing big crowds. The rock group The Eagles are also currently touring the US, performing the1976 album Hotel California in full, along with other golden oldies. They, too, will draw large and passionate crowds. But they won’t be setting any trends.

Meanwhile, all efforts to expose the supposed fraud are, to the contrary, reinforcing the validity of the last US election.

A Trump-supporting Michigan state legislator chaired a commission that investigated supposedly suspicious results in that state, which Mr Trump insists he won. Their report conclusively demonstrates that he lost, and notes that claims to the contrary are absurd, and even malicious, fabrications.

Mr Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, has just given his first substantive interview since leaving office, and said that while he had every motivation to discover and expose fraud, there wasn’t any. He dismissed the whole idea as utter “bullshit.”

Mr Trump, of course, is bitterly lashing out against all of these apostates. But that, too, will ultimately make it harder for him to maintain the loyalty of others.

Instead, evidence is mounting that Mr Trump went much further than previously known in improperly and probably unlawfully trying to overturn the election, with repeated phone calls to Arizona election officials now joining those on the record with state leaders in Georgia and Michigan.

The former president’s standing among Republicans appears to be gradually deflating.

Last year, polls repeatedly showed that most conservatives identified primarily as Trump supporters and secondarily as Republicans. Now, that ratio has inverted, with more identifying primarily as Republicans and only secondarily as the former president’s acolytes.

And, most ominously for Mr Trump, there is finally serious talk of a successor.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is being increasingly viewed as a potential national Republican leader. If this notion gains more traction, it may provoke the former president to try to cut him down to size through nasty, belittling attacks.

A year ago, Mr DeSantis would have been terrified of that. By now, though, surviving a Trumpian onslaught could be just what he needs to establish himself as the first really plausible potential post-Trump Republican leader.

A U.S.-Iran Nuclear Accord is Still Probable, But Will Leave Much Unresolved

With its presidential election over, Iran may now want an agreement, but the biggest issues may remain untouchable.

The carefully engineered “election” of veteran hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi to serve as the next Iranian president doesn’t change the fundamental equation between the United States and Iran at the indirect nuclear negotiations in Vienna or between Tehran and its Gulf Arab adversaries. But it does help clarify the delicate, finely balanced diplomatic reality and the dangerous confrontational alternatives.

In the long run, Raisi’s election does not signal good news about Iran’s intentions. Like his mentor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Raisi has ruled out negotiations or other measures to restrain Iran’s missile development program or, most importantly from many Arab perspectives, network of militias and extremist groups throughout the region. Such tangential issues could be used as strategic bargaining tools in the nuclear talks. But the Iranian government, with power solidified by this hard-line faction, will likely remain dead set against compromises on these non-nuclear issues. And this Iranian position is not new or recently hardened. Iran always made it clear in talks with U.S. officials that those issues were not on the table; the only disagreement was among U.S. policymakers and analysts as to whether the U.S. government had the leverage to force them into the mix.

On the nuclear front, the current negotiations could still yield fruit. Unfortunately, that’s precisely because they are so limited. Washington and Tehran are seeking to revive the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement, which the administration of Donald J. Trump withdrew from in 2018, on what both sides agree should be a compliance-for-compliance basis. What’s essentially being negotiated is what would constitute “compliance” with the terms of the now 6-year-old agreement by both parties. The main question for Iran is what it must do to reverse the steps it has taken toward developing its nuclear program that go far beyond the restrictions stipulated in the JCPOA. On the U.S. side, it effectively boils down to how to roll back a range of sanctions imposed after the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA and the subsequent campaign of “maximum pressure” economic warfare against Iran.

Both issues are fraught. Iran might be able and even willing to roll back activities prohibited by the terms of the JCPOA and divest itself of new stockpiles. But it cannot undo the new engineering and research and development knowledge, particularly regarding more efficient and effective centrifuges, that Tehran has developed over the past three years.

The Trump administration sought to tie up as many sanctions as possible in legislative and administrative mandates and other red tape to make them more difficult to reverse and classified many of them as counterterrorism or anti-crime measures rather than being related to the nuclear negotiations. The administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is reportedly seeking to again ease all the reimposed sanctions that were originally lifted as part of the JCPOA and some that were imposed since. So, in both cases there are new developments that may not be easily resolved simply through compliance with the 2015 document.

Moreover, there is considerable opposition in both Iran and the United States, and doubts among U.S. allies in the Gulf region, about the value of reviving the agreement. Iranian hard-liners always maintained it was a bad deal for the country. For the United States, the JCPOA was essentially a chronological gamble, postponing significant progress on Iran’s nuclear program for 10 to 15 years depending on the specific issue. The value of those sunsets, effectively hoping for a contextual change in the interim that would convince Iran to abandon its nuclear program or at least allow for a meaningful extension of the restrictions, is a lot less convincing in 2021 than it was in 2015 given that six years have passed and Iran is at least as close to nuclear weapons breakout now as it was before the agreement went into effect.

For these reasons, compliance-for-compliance isn’t proving an easy lift. The big advantage is that both sides say they want the same thing, which, in theory, certainly ought to make it attainable. Negotiating compliance is a fairly narrow brief, but the sensitivity of the questions and political opposition are rendering it hard going. The most optimistic scenario for reviving the deal is based on the widely held theory that now that the election has been secured for Raisi, the supreme leader’s faction will be happy to allow incumbent President Hassan Rouhani to agree to terms with Washington and take the blame for unpopular compromises that will be required. Then Raisi’s government will be in a position to claim credit for the economic benefits of sanctions relief and score points by refusing to budge an inch on missiles and sectarian militia groups.

Raisi seemed to signal exactly that approach in the last presidential debate in Iran, when he said he was in favor of a return to the JCPOA but only by a “strong government” that wouldn’t compromise Iran’s national interests, clearly referring to missiles, militias, and other controversial topics. U.S.-Iranian indirect talks may have been bogged down, although some unspecified progress has been reported, in Vienna in part to help Raisi use this as a wedge issue in the election. If this interpretation of Iranian politics and strategy is correct, a breakthrough, at least for a framework, now becomes more likely before Raisi takes office in August.

If they get the green light, Iranian negotiators can compromise on at least two key outstanding issues. They can accept that the United States is not going to lift all of the post-2015 sanctions imposed on Iran and Iranians. And they can commit to restore full cooperation with International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and give them access to the surveillance cameras they installed in key Iranian facilities.

However, there are worrying signs that tensions are starting to overtake good intentions. U.S. and Iranian officials have been increasingly bitter in blaming each other for a lack of progress. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told The New York Times that the Biden administration was not willing to negotiate indefinitely and that if Iran continues with its current nuclear activities the agreement will become “very difficult as a practical matter” to revive. U.S. forces based in Syria and Iraq have recently come under increasing drone attacks from Iranian-backed militia groups, prompting U.S. airstrikes on both sides of the border that a pro-Iranian militia said killed four of its fighters. U.S. forces in northeast Syria were again attacked with rockets, to which they responded with an artillery barrage.

Despite all of this, Iran needs sanctions relief desperately given continued severe economic woes and the devastating coronavirus pandemic. Historically low voter turnout in the recent presidential election, in which all but a few carefully selected candidates were barred from running, is only the most recent indication of a growing alienation between much of the population and the state. The ruling faction is clearly preparing for the supreme leader’s succession. Khamenei is old and has been battling cancer for years. As one of his closest allies, Raisi may have been installed to succeed him or to possibly arrange for Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, to take over after his father passes away. Either way, sanctions relief and economic improvement would make such a transition far smoother and more manageable. So, a return to the 2015 agreement, even considering the challenges, is still more likely than not.

Where to go from there is harder to imagine. The sunsets on nuclear restrictions in the 2015 deal are fading fast. An extension of them is possible but would be far more difficult. For Gulf Arab countries, however, none of that is particularly reassuring, given Tehran’s continued refusal to put missiles or militias on the table. Iran is hardly going to be more likely to do that now, following extreme tensions with the Trump administration and Tehran’s apparent willingness to continue supporting militia attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and the Biden administration’s willingness to hit back.

Some senior figures in the Biden administration have privately said forestalling the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon is the only major U.S. national security imperative in the Middle East, which is essentially the strategic position former President Barack Obama’s negotiators arrived at. Many Gulf Arab leaders would counter that attacks by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria not only target U.S. forces and interests directly but are fully integrated into Iran’s negotiating strategy on the nuclear question. From that perspective, these networks of militants armed with inexpensive and often precision guided drones and rockets, far more than Iran’s conventional missiles or even nuclear weapons, are Tehran’s most potent ace in the hole. But despite the lethality and impact of such weapons, the strategic reality is that they, unlike Iran’s potential nuclear weapons, probably do not have the capability of putting the United States on a path to escalating direct military conflict with Tehran. But, along with Iran’s militia network in the Arab world, these assets will remain major concerns for Gulf Arab governments, highlighting a continued gap in threat perceptions and strategic aims between Washington and its key regional partners.