What happens when the adults in the room are scarier than the crying baby?

Originally published in TomDispatch.

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During a lifetime of make-believe, Donald Trump has never pretended to be a conventional politician. When he finally decided to make a serious bid for office, he built his presidential aspirations on the flimsiest of foundations: a wild conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s birthplace. His leadership bona fides were equally laughable, having presided over bankrupt casinos and failed real-estate projects, fabricated the persona of a lady-killer, and created a reality TV show about a tin-pot entrepreneur.

It wasn’t difficult to predict how all this would end up politically. Plenty of oddballs had run for president, from Jello Biafra to Roseanne Barr, and gotten nowhere. The guardrails of American democracy were set up to prevent just such outsiders from making it anywhere near the Oval Office. Donald Trump’s three presidential qualifications — money, name recognition, and unbounded arrogance — were obviously not enough to overcome his lack of sway with party bosses. Seasoned politicians and backroom operators, the putative “adults in the room,” had spent years ridiculing the blowhard with the bad hair banging on the door and demanding red-carpet treatment.

And then, of course, he won. In the 2016 presidential election, the guardrails of democracy collapsed. The Electoral College, designed to weed out all those with what Alexander Hamilton had once called “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity,” delivered a victory to a candidate who had talents for little else. As Jeff Greenfield wrote at Politico immediately after the elections,
“The blunt fact is that many of the guardrails that were supposed to protect the world’s oldest functioning democracy have been shown to be perilously weak, as vulnerable to assault as the Maginot Line was in the face of the German army some 75 years ago.”

In the wake of The Donald’s upset victory, journalists and pundits hastened to recommend a slate of advisers who could inject some gravitas into the new administration and restore an approximation of that Maginot Line. Under counsel from such grey eminences as former national security advisors Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, the new president brought a bevy of such “adults” into his administration, including ExxonMobil oil executive Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and active duty Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as national security advisor. Two “adults,” Republican Party grandee Reince Priebus and retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, have similarly tried, as White House chiefs of staff, to manage Trump. Recently, a New York Times op-ed written by an anonymous “senior administration official” suggested that a “steady state” of “adults in the room” has been covertly ensuring that President Trump doesn’t blow up the country or the world.

In response, President Trump has done his best to fire or at least ignore all such adult supervisors. After the departures of Tillerson, McMaster, and economic adviser Gary Cohn, the New Republic lamented that Trump was “systematically removing the guardrails in his cabinet” (which proved no more effective than the electoral ones). In fact, after the latest “crazytown” revelations in the bestselling new book by veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, perhaps it’s time to retire those creaky metaphors of American politics. No more “guardrails,” no more “adults.” They represent thinking that has proven woefully inadequate for understanding Donald Trump’s rise to power or the America of this moment.

Forget Donald Trump for a second and just think to yourself: Who’s responsible for the last 17 years of never-ending American wars that have convulsed the planet? Babies? Teenagers? Grown men acting like babies? Let’s face it: perfectly sober adults, including the man who left ExxonMobil to become secretary of state, have long seemed intent on ensuring the flooding, burning, and general destruction of this planet. And don’t forget that the adults in the Republican Party, backed by their deep-pocket funders, were responsible for getting Donald Trump over the hump and into the Oval Office. Ultimately they, and not the policy-ignorant president, are to blame for the devastation that followed.

As for those guardrails, they represent, at best, the most imperfect of metaphors. Despite all the actual guardrails on American highways, traffic fatalities have risen to more than 40,000 a year and cars are now the top killers of Americans between the ages of 15 and 24. Guardrails may prevent the occasional drunk from driving into a ravine, but they obviously don’t stop a significant portion of the population from committing autocide.

The truth is: those guardrails of democracy were faulty long before Trump came along and some of the adults in the room are scarier than the squalling infant. Such metaphors, in fact, make it increasingly difficult to see what Trump and his babysitters are really doing: not just destroying a culture of civility or undoing the accomplishments of the Obama administration but attacking the very pillars of democracy.

Moving the Guardrails
Donald Trump, The Washington Post concluded a year after his election, had broken through “the guardrails of presidential behavior.”

Given the sheer number of lies he’s spewed in his tenure in office — more than eight mistruths a day and rising — the Post’s conclusion seems incontrovertible. However, when it comes to wrongdoing, Trump has plenty of presidential precedents, from the high crimes and misdemeanors of Richard Nixon to the torture policies of George W. Bush. Trump is as crude as Lyndon Baines Johnson, as ill prepared as Ronald Reagan, as sexually predatory as Bill Clinton. All of these presidents prepared the American public for a leader who, like some super villain in a comic strip, would combine the worst qualities of his predecessors in one explosive package.

Trump broke through no guardrails (a feature of highway safety that he once disparaged in a Wall Street Journal interview as the “worst crap”). Rather, generations of politicians and operatives incrementally moved them to such a degree that his behavior became acceptable to enough Americans to elect him.

Admittedly, his actions are now breaking new ground. He’s elevated family members — daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner — to senior policy positions, while ensuring that his business empire profits from his presidency in unprecedented ways. Still, to understand the more lasting impact of the Trump administration requires a look at how his crew is transforming the underlying structures of American democracy, whether it’s the influence of money on politics, the hijacking of the judiciary, or the undermining of media watchdogs.

Trump grabs the daily headlines with his loose tweets and outrageous acts. The savvy operators and implementers lurking in his shadow use the cover of scandal to move those guardrails in a big league fashion. The defenders of today’s Maginot Line will wake up some morning to discover that the enemy never had to storm the battlements. They just uprooted the fortifications and shoved them out of the way.

Boosting the Rich
Many democratic countries wouldn’t tolerate the way the rich and corporations call the shots in American elections. To win a House seat, for example, now costs, on average, $1.5 million; a Senate seat, nearly $20 million. By contrast, in Canada, where neither corporations nor unions can make campaign contributions and individuals are restricted to a very modest $1,500 cap on party donations, a typical campaign for parliament costs in the tens of thousands of dollars and nearly half of the biggest spenders lose.

In 2010, the situation in the United States became incomparably worse when the Supreme Court decided, in the Citizens United case, that campaign contributions are constitutionally protected free speech. Super PACs can now spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, giving rich individuals unparalleled impact and a way to cover their tracks through “dark money” contributions. Former president Jimmy Carter has accurately labeled that decision “legalized bribery.”

Meanwhile, money has come to play a remarkable role in policymaking, too. Where other countries struggle to expunge bribery and corruption from their political systems, the United States has simply institutionalized it under the rubric of lobbying. As Michael Maiello wrote in Forbes back in 2009:
“[I]n an open society like the U.S., our brightest minds are unable to draw meaningful distinctions between handing someone an envelope full of cash and flooding a senator’s campaign war chest, except to point out that lobbying is far more effective. A briber wants to circumvent the law. A lobbyist wants to change it.”

Trump famously declared his independence from donors and lobbyists. He told the Koch brothers, for instance, that he didn’t “need their money or bad ideas.” In the end, however, he would prove just as beholden to big donors as any conventional politician. He rode to power with the backing of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder Linda McMahon, hedge fund operator Robert Mercer, and philanthropist Betsy DeVos. After the election, he immediately rewarded McMahon and DeVos with administration positions, then pushed through a tax reform bill that was a bonanza for his billionaire buddies and transformed Middle East policy to reflect the demands of Adelson, Marcus, and Mercer. And though he promised to clean out the Washington swamp, his appointees have been embroiled in one scandal after another.

The Trump team is also making structural changes to restrict the ways that ordinary citizens can, in the future, challenge such a plutocratic form of government. Building on successful Republican Party efforts in, for instance, Florida leading up to the 2000 presidential election, the Trump administration is going all out to suppress the electoral participation of minorities and the poor. New voter ID laws helped him win key states like Wisconsin, so no surprise that he wants to make such a voter ID system a nationwide one.

Leading up to the midterms, the Republican Party has also been rushing to purge voter rolls and put in place racial gerrymandering, even using the Americans with Disabilities Act as an excuse to close polling places in rural Georgia to tamp down the African-American vote. In a team effort by the Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the president has also directed federal agencies to gather voting records in areas of North Carolina with large Latino populations in order to keep likely Democratic Party voters away from the polls.

In this way, Trump is working to return America to its glory days — when only well-off white men had the right to vote.

Tilting the Courts
Trump controls (if that’s the term for it) the White House; the Republicans, in part through voter suppression and gerrymandering, control Congress. But pollsters predict that the Democrats are likely to win back at least the House in the coming midterm elections and the 2020 presidential election is clearly still up for grabs. So, in its quest to move the political guardrails more permanently, the Trump administration has focused on the third branch of government: the courts. There, it can not only neuter one of the most powerful checks on Trump’s 1% agenda, but have an impact that will last for decades.

With the Supreme Court, the Republicans in Congress proved both lucky and strategic. President Trump was immediately able to fill a vacancy, thanks to the Republican Party’s successful Hail Mary decision to block Merrick Garland’s nomination in the waning months of the Obama administration. Then, by nominating Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy created by Antonin Scalia’s death, the Trump team began to make a play for the retirement of swing-voting justice Anthony Kennedy. Gorsuch had clerked for Kennedy and so had the two key candidates (Brett Kavanaugh and Raymond Kethledge) that Trump fingered for his seat, should it become vacant. The president then played up his business relationship with Kennedy’s banker son, while Ivanka worked her charms on the judge over lunch. Administration officials swore that they would honor Kennedy’s legacy, as long as he resigned quickly enough to squeeze in another confirmation before those midterms threatened Republican majorities in Congress.

Meanwhile, the Trump team barreled along making judicial appointments to the lower courts at a time when it could barely be bothered to fill key positions in the State Department. The new president came into office with 105 unfilled judicial vacancies, a legacy of Republican congressional foot-dragging during the Obama years. While conservative allies supplied himwith a wish list of judicial ideologues, Trump acted with all deliberate haste by appointing 22 appeals court judges and 20 district judges (all lifetime positions). These new judges — in the 12 federal judicial circuits with regional jurisdiction — have already made their mark in cases involving campaign finance, presidential authority, and abortion, among other issues. “After just 18 months, Trump has ‘flipped’ two circuits — the Sixth and Seventh — from what Trump’s supporters in the conservative legal movement consider ‘liberal’ to more properly conservative,” writes Jason Zengerle in the New York Times Magazine, pointing out that other circuits are also now nearing the tipping point.

This judicial transformation extends to federal agencies. Administrative law judges are basically civil servants who handle a varied caseload from Social Security benefit claims to regulatory enforcement. After making a broad interpretation of a recent Supreme Court decision, the Trump administration is now transforming these 1,900 judges into the equivalent of political appointees. It also argues that it can fire judges and hire new ones to packsuch administrative courts, which will then help push a Republican anti-regulatory revolution from within.

At one point, Donald Trump casually remarked that he thought the United States should try out the Chinese system of “president for life.” While that’s not likely to happen any time soon, with his judges for life, the president is institutionalizing the 1% ideology of the adults in that room of his before the voters can kick him out of office.

Sidestepping the Watchdogs
After a lifetime using the media to build his brand, Donald Trump is now systematically trying to blow up one of the cornerstones of American democracy. He has called the press the “enemy of the American people,” repeatedly labeled reputable media outlets as “fake news,” and legitimized far-right sources by parroting their claims.

Trump didn’t create such a climate. The rise of Fox News, the spread of websites like Infowars, and the persistent popularity of right-wing radio shock jocks have all contributed to the demonization of the “liberal” media. As a result, for a significant number of Americans, trying to gather facts — as opposed to expressing opinions at top volume — has become a suspect occupation. According to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, when it comes to the general population, trust in the media has dropped five points since 2017 and an astounding 22 points for the “informed public” (defined as college-educated and in the top 25% of household income).

The mainstream media have long aspired to serve a watchdog role. Reporters are supposed to fact-check the powerful, sniff out corruption, and peel away government propaganda to expose the hidden histories behind it. Granted, journalists have blind spots and the economically powerful often don’t receive the sort of scrutiny that the politically powerful do, but media operations with budgets for investigative journalists and fact-checkers are an integral part of any democratic society.

Donald Trump hasn’t just disparaged the mainstream media, he’s done an end run around it. He feels little need to hold press conferences — only one in his first year of office (compared to Obama’s 11) — because he communicates with the America he wants to reach directly through his Twitter account. The news media then have to play catch-up reporting on his tweets.

In doing so, he creates the appearance of candor, since he speaks his mind without PR specialists getting in the way — but not to the entire American population. Typically, he avoids making speeches in blue states (places that his administration’s policies are deliberately crafted to harm). His strategy is to preach to the choir 24/7 in a communications universe free of the mainstream media. When it comes to reporters, the president’s supporters follow his lead and pay them little attention. Indeed, 72% of Republicans trust Trump over the media and nearly half believe that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” His attackson the media, deliberately designed to distract attention from his various scandals, are undermining the entire institution.
In effect, Trump has cultivated a constituency that lies outside the democratic conversation, building on the 22% of Americans who believe autocracy to be superior to democracy and the slightly larger percentage who would support a military coup to combat crime or corruption. Independent media wouldn’t last long in either scenario.

The New Normal
The most dangerous part of Trump’s onslaught on democracy is the cynicism it’s likely to generate, which will only reinforce the goals of the Trumpistas if a significant chunk of the 99% decide that voting isn’t worth it, politics is a game best avoided, and Twitter is superior to a newspaper. Democracy doesn’t just die in darkness. It can die of indifference — not with a bang or a whimper, that is, but with a yawn.

Of course, there’s nothing like a famously corrupt politician to reinvigorate civic action. In the aftermath of the Watergate scandals, a new wave of reformers won places in Congress, immediately launching investigations into covert operations, establishing new rules for campaign finance, and attempting to rein in the power of the presidency through measures like the War Powers Act. In other words, after the scandals of the early 1970s, reformers surveyed the wreckage of the political landscape and attempted to repair the infrastructure of American democracy. At best, they offered quick fixes, while during the Reagan years that followed, the putative adults in the room returned to their favorite activity: moving the guardrails to favor the wealthy and the powerful.

After the midterms in November, new voices like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezand Rashida Tlaib will be in Congress and there will undoubtedly be renewed energy to stop, if not roll back, Trumpism. All those whom the president has insulted — and it’s an ever-lengthening list — may join hands in an effort to break the vicious circle of ignorance, apathy, and anger Trump has encouraged. This will be no easy task. But it would be poetic justice if what’s left of the mechanisms of democracy — voting, the courts, and the press — can still be used to defeat a potential autocrat, his family, and all the putative adults he’s brought into the room to implement his profoundly anti-democratic program. The question is: Will it already be too late?

John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands (a Dispatch Books original) and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book is Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams. This November, Frostlands, book two of his Splinterlands series, will be published by Haymarket Books.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Storyand Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands.

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Anti-Trump protesters float a giant “baby Trump” in London. (Shutterstock)

Donald Trump didn’t fly to Europe to meet with NATO, European leaders, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He got there by stepping through the looking glass.

Once on the other side, Trump made a series of extraordinary statements that have effectively turned U.S. foreign policy upside down. He accused Germany of being “totally controlled by Russia.” He declared that the European Union is a “foe” of the United States. He told British Prime Minister Theresa May that she should forget about negotiating with the EU and sue the institution instead.

And, just days after the U.S. intelligence community and special counsel Robert Mueller confirmed once again that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 elections, Trump said that he believed in Putin’s claims of Russian innocence.

Why on earth would Trump embark on this surrealistic misadventure in foreign policy? True, his first instinct seems to be to disrupt. His statements also reveal his preference for “strong” leaders over “weak.” Perhaps, as some intelligence community insiders claim, the Russian president even has some dirt with which to blackmail Trump.

In fact, Trump’s statements and actions on this European trip aren’t just his own idiosyncratic style. Trump’s erratic behavior reflects a very specific worldview. Trump is attacking Europe and siding with Russia for political — and not just personal — reasons.

A segment of the U.S. right wing, which has now coalesced around Trump, has always been skeptical about Europe. It has long decried the social democratic ideals baked into the European system, at both a national and a European Union level. Indeed, any U.S. politician that leans in that direction inevitably gets branded a European socialist, as John McCain accused Barack Obama of being in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Then there are the more pacifist inclinations of Europe. Donald Rumsfeld famously divided the continent between “old Europe” and “new Europe,” with the former refusing to back the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Support for the U.S. misadventure largely came from East-Central Europe, while EU stalwarts France and Germany expressed the greatest skepticism.

These trends converge in the Euroskepticism expressed by the American Enterprise Institute and media outlets like Fox News and The Weekly Standard, a sentiment that gathered strength in the 1990s and heavily influenced the George W. Bush administration. The European Union represented, in their criticisms, a kind of super-socialism that was spreading eastward and threatening U.S. global dominance.

The other major contribution to Trump’s worldview comes from Europe itself. Right-wing nationalist movements and governments throughout the continent have tried to unravel the European Union. The movement scored its first victory with the Brexit referendum in 2016. But Euroskeptic governments have also taken over in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Italy.

These Euroskeptics view Brussels as an outside force trying to impose foreign customs on nations — unacceptable economic policies, unacceptable numbers of immigrants, unacceptable political requirements. The Polish and Hungarian governments are establishing illiberal regimes that challenge freedom of the press, judicial independence, and the free functioning of civil society. The two countries are risking all-out conflict with the EU.

But there’s another strong Euroskeptic voice: Vladimir Putin.

Under Putin, Russia has supplied rhetorical and financial support for far-right wing parties throughout Europe — the National Front in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Northern League in Italy. There is considerable issue overlap. Putin and the Euroskeptics are anti-immigrant and anti-liberal and favor nationalist and law-and-order policies.

But Putin also sees opportunity in Euroskepticism. A weaker EU won’t be able to attract new, post-Soviet members like Ukraine or Moldova. A weaker EU will be more dependent on Russian energy exports. A weaker EU would have less power to criticize Russia’s political and foreign policy conduct.

Which brings us back to Donald Trump. The president has declared Europe an enemy because of its trade policies. But that’s just a red herring. He actually has a more systemic critique of the EU that coincides with the worldview of Vladimir Putin, Europe’s right-wing nationalists, and Euroskeptics among America’s conservatives.

This is very bad news. If the crisis in transatlantic relations were just about trade, it could be handled by some hardnosed negotiating. If the disputes with the EU and NATO were simply about Trump’s disruptive style, then everything could be resolved by a regime change at the polls in 2020.

But Trump has launched a much larger, ideological assault on European institutions and values. What’s worse: It’s part of the same attack on liberal values here in the United States.

Forget about NATO: Maybe we need a transatlantic alliance against Trump.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.

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Over 22.5 million people have been forced to flee their countries. Last year, less than 200,000 were resettled.

(Photo: UNHCR Photo Unit / Flickr)

It’s a famous story, though perhaps not famous enough.

The 1939 voyage of the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner, was recounted in a 1974 book and a 1976 film (both titled Voyage of the Damned) as well as a 1994 opera. This history is not forgotten. Yet so many unfortunate people around the world are still doomed to repeat it.

In 1939, the MS St. Louis carried more than 900 Jewish refugees away from Germany. The ship docked in Cuba, but the government there allowed only a handful of passengers to disembark. The others learned to their surprise that Havana didn’t recognize their visas.

So, the ship headed to the United States. But the Roosevelt administration also refused to accept the refugees — and even sent out the Coast Guard to make sure that the ship didn’t try to dock illegally and unload its passengers. Canada, too, refused to get involved.

So, the MS St. Louis returned to Europe where it put in at Antwerp. Some of the passengers made their way to the United Kingdom. The rest were caught up in the turmoil of the subsequent Nazi invasions of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Ultimately, 254 of the original passengers died in the Holocaust.

In 2012, the U.S. State Department officially apologized to the survivors of the incident. Canada plans to follow suit this year.

But those apologies mean little to the people who currently face a similar situation. Today, thousands of refugees face grave harm if they return to their countries of origin. And yet the United States, Turkey, Israel, China, and others blithely return these refugees as part of a worldwide crackdown on “illegal” immigration.

This week, as the international community marks World Refugee Day, 22.5 million people have fled their countries to seek refuge elsewhere. In 2016, a mere 189,000 were resettled. That’s less than 1 percent. It’s as if the entire population of Taiwan were uprooted and forced to find a new country, but only a single neighborhood from the capital city managed to find safe harbor.

Donald Trump is at the forefront of this scandalously cruel approach to refugees. But he’s not alone. Here are four examples from around the world of how governments continue to turn away the modern-day equivalents of the MS St. Louis.

Trump’s Dream
The world is experiencing the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. The Trump administration’s response has been to reduce the annual number of spots available for refugees from around 70,000 to 45,000, the lowest number since 1980. And the administration is doing whatever it can to ensure that even this lower number won’t be reached.

Syria, still convulsed by civil war, has produced the world’s largest group of refugees: over 5.5 million people. In the last year of the Obama administration, the United States accepted about 15,000 Syrian refugees, which paled in comparison to Germany (not to mention Turkey, Jordan, or Lebanon). This year, as of mid-April, the Trump administration has allowed in 11. “The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” Trump said this month.

It gets worse. The Justice Department announced last week that asylum-seekers couldn’t claim gang warfare or domestic violence as reasons to stay in the United States. This comes at a time when displacement because of violence is climbing rapidly in Central America, a trend affecting 16 times more people at the end of 2017 than in 2011. Indeed, many of the people desperately trying to get across the U.S. border, including unaccompanied minors, are escaping not just general violence but very specific death threats.

In The New Yorker, Sarah Stillman reported on her project to create a database of all those whom the U.S. government has deported into harm’s way. The stories included Laura S., who pleaded with U.S. border patrol not to return her to Mexico, where her ex-husband, a member of a drug cartel, had threatened to kill her. U.S. agents ignored her entreaties. In Mexico, Laura S. tried to steer clear of her ex-husband. But he was determined, and he eventually succeeded. Her charred skeleton was found in her burned-out car. Thanks to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the de facto indifference of the U.S. government to claims of domestic violence has become de jure.

Another method by which the Trump administration is sending people into harm’s way is by rescinding temporary protected status (TPS). Head of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen has dutifully implemented the president’s directive to kick out as many people from the United States as possible. Reports USA Today:
 

Nielsen has now cut TPS for El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan, which represents 98% of the people covered by the program. That means TPS enrollees from those countries, many of whom have legally lived in the U.S. for nearly 30 years, must return home in the coming months or risk becoming undocumented immigrants.

Imagine FDR not only refusing to accept the MS St. Louis but sending tens of thousands of German Jews, who had been living in the United States for decades, back to Nazi Germany.

Trump’s policy on refugees is only part of his larger assault on immigrants, from the Muslim travel ban and the separation of families at the border to his attempt to deport the 800,000 Dreamers. Even the Republican Party is abandoning Trump on the key elements of his anti-immigrant platform. But Trump wants to make America as white as possible — by all means necessary.

Israeli Cognitive Dissonance
Around 35,000 Eritreans and Sudanese are currently seeking asylum in Israel. They have escaped war and massive human rights violations. Although many have lived in Israel for nearly a decade, speak Hebrew, and send their children to Israeli schools, the government wants to deport them to Rwanda or Uganda. There they faced considerable risks of imprisonment or even forced return to their home countries. Worse, it turned out a couple months ago that the Israeli government didn’t have any agreements with Rwanda and Uganda to protect the deportees.

The government also didn’t count on the public pushback. Writes David Shulman in The New York Review of Books:
 

El Al pilots and flight crews refused to fly the deportees to their deaths. Doctors, academics, lawyers, and many ordinary citizens, including Holocaust survivors and their relatives, spoke out. Some synagogues joined the struggle. Many stressed the unthinkable cognitive dissonance that arises from watching a Jewish state, founded by refugees from lethal oppression, sending tens of thousands of desperate African refugees to an unknown and precarious fate.

In a recent report, Amnesty International blasted the government of Benjamin Netanyahu for its policy. The organization’s head of refugee and migrant rights, Charmain Mohamed, was pointed in her denunciation: “Israel is one of the most prosperous countries in the region but it is going out of its way to shirk its responsibility to provide refuge to people fleeing war and persecution and who are already on its territory.”

As in the United States, the courts have proven to be a major obstacle to the assault on immigrants. Despite the High Court’s rejection of the government’s attempt to deport the Eritreans and Sudanese, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to push the Knesset to override the judicial decision.

As with Trump, Netanyahu is acting on behalf of the besieged majority, in this case Israeli Jews. His appalling immigration policies are of a piece with his apartheid treatment of Palestinians.

Repatriation to Afghanistan
Afghanistan is one of the poorest and most violent countries in the world. It also, after Syria, produces the most refugees in the world. On top of the one million people who have been internally displaced, there are nearly 6 million Afghan refugees, most of them living in either Pakistan or Iran.

Most, but not all.

About 300,000 Afghan refugees live in Europe. Many more have applied for asylum. European governments have been rejecting most of those applications, arguing that Afghanistan no longer poses a sufficient danger to returnees. Yet in 2017, for the fourth year in a row, more than 10,000 Afghan civilians died or were injured in the war. This comes on top of the combat deaths of Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters, which totaled more than 20,000 last year.

Even for those not on Taliban target lists, these refugees are returning to a dangerous and unstable country. Reports Pamela Constable in The Washington Post:
 

Insurgents control or influence nearly 40 percent of Afghan territory and stage frequent attacks in cities. Some of their families have fled rural fighting, weakening their social support networks. The returnees may not face imminent harm, but they see no way to build a future.

Pakistan and Iran have been even more forceful with their deportations. Since January, Iran has sent home 242,000 Afghan refugees; in the last 15 months, Pakistan has expelled 260,000 Afghans. These repatriations are an extraordinary burden on a country ill prepared to provide services to its current population. There are few jobs available for the returnees and little in the way of assistance from international organizations.

A recent ceasefire brought some hope that the Afghan government and the Taliban could work out the terms of a peace agreement. But the Taliban have rejected a proposed extension and vow to continue fighting.

Back to the Gulag
Donald Trump thinks that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is “smart” and “very talented.” The U.S. president didn’t raise human rights issues at the recent Singapore summit — and perhaps that’s for the best, given the focus on nuclear issues and Trump’s own distressing lack of interest in human rights.

But the human rights situation inside North Korea remains dire, particularly for the 80,000-130,000 trapped in the complex of labor camps. Tens of thousands of North Koreans have escaped to China and other countries. Even if they left North Korea for economic reasons, they risk imprisonment in the North Korean gulag if they return. Thus, according to international law, North Koreans in China should be considered refugees sur place, since they have acquired a well-founded fear of persecution after leaving their country. Sending such refugees back is a clear human rights violation.

Yet China continues to detain and send North Koreans back across the border. With the threat of repatriation hanging over them, North Korean women are particularly vulnerable and frequently subjected to trafficking and forced prostitution.
There’s not a lot that either the United States or South Korea can do to persuade North Korea to dismantle its gulag or improve the conditions there. Pyongyang is largely resistant to “name and shame” tactics (though human rights organizations should obviously continue the practice).

However, Seoul and Washington can pressure Beijing to observe international aw by not repatriating North Korean refugees. South Korea has a population of 30,000 North Korean refugees who have become South Korean citizens. That hasn’t prevented Seoul from negotiating agreements with Pyongyang or holding two recent inter-Korean summits. At the very least, China should stop rounding up North Korean refugees, even if it doesn’t accord them proper status.

In 1939, the United States, Canada, and Cuba all refused to help a boatload of desperate refugees from Europe. Today, the world faces an ever-growing flotilla of the desperate. And the response is the same: go back to the hell you just escaped.

The world leaders who adopt this policy have no shame. In the case of Donald Trump and those like him, they’re even proud of it. They richly deserve a return ticket — back to the rocks from under which they crawled.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.

Courtesy: https://fpif.org
 

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The Trump movement uses racism and immigration to turn the Roseanne Barrs of the world from eco-feminists to Trump supporters.

Roseanne Barr (Shutterstock)
 

In 2012, Roseanne Barr ran for president.

The actress/comedian received the nomination of California’s feminist-socialist Peace and Freedom Party. She chose Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war activist, as her running mate.

Barr took strong positions on environmental sustainability. She wanted the United States to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and she opposed any war with Iran. She criticized the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and supported Palestinian self-determination.

After an inept campaign that got her name on only three state ballots, Roseanne Barr unsurprisingly did not become president.

Instead, four years later, another TV star, Donald Trump, ran for office, and Barr supported him with enthusiasm.  When she re-launched her hit TV show Roseanne this year, Trump repaid the compliment. The president phoned to congratulate her after the first episode on ABC attracted over 18 million viewers.

And now Barr is off the air again, after a racist and Islamophobic tweet about former Obama administration senior advisor Valerie Jarrett. ABC cancelled the Roseanne reboot, which took some courage since the network hadn’t had a number-one show like that for 24 years.

Of course, it wasn’t Barr’s first controversial tweet. She has claimed that Jewish financier George Soros, who just managed to escape the Holocaust, was in fact a Nazi. She thinks that the CIA controls Hollywood through mind control. She was a serious birther.

It’s deeply disturbing that someone who espoused a reasonable foreign policy in 2012 — and who also supported the Occupy movement and self-identified as socialist — could swing so far over to the Trump camp only a few years later. She wasn’t alone. Fully 12 percent of Bernie Sanders voters ultimately supported Trump in the 2016 general election — and those turncoats proved to be the winning margin in the three swing states of Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

In 2016, Trump was able to attract the support of many people who wanted an end to wars and distrusted Wall Street. But what ultimately enthroned Donald Trump in the White House is the same thing that eventually dethroned Roseanne Barr from television: racism. And what keeps many people clinging to Donald Trump despite one presidential embarrassment after another is: racism.

The only thing that Trump has going for him, in the end, is white privilege. He’s a living repudiation of the notion that America is either post-racial or a meritocracy.

In his first 18 months in office, Trump has indulged in hate speech by dehumanizing immigrants, sticking up for Nazis in Charlottesville, and calling states in the developing world “shithole countries.” It’s not just rhetoric. In his actions, he has also amplified the racism that’s deeply embedded in both domestic and foreign policy. He has put the interests of white people first in a country that is shifting demographically away from majority white and in a world where non-white peoples are acquiring ever more geopolitical power.
In fact, Trump’s political fortunes and those of the party he has inexorably transformed have begun to rely on more racism, not less. Only by manipulating the threat of the other — immigrants, terrorists, the return of the Obama coalition — does the Republican Party believe that it can avoid huge losses in the fall and possibly — the horror, the horror! — return Trump to the Oval Office in 2020.

Roseanne Barr, after flirting with the unacceptable, finally crossed a line with her Jarrett tweet. Trump has crossed the line innumerable times, but alas there’s no boss who can fire him at the moment. Yes, impeachment is a possibility. Even if it happens, however, it won’t be because of the president’s racist taunts and tweets.

In the meantime, from border politics to the Korean peninsula, the president will continue to toggle back and forth between two modes in his foreign policy: ugly racism and white savior-ism. For the most part, people of color see Trump for what he is and will vote accordingly. But for the next few election cycles, until the demographic balance shifts decisively against them, white people will determine whether Trumpism lives or dies at the polls.

The Ugly Stuff
The TV series Dear White People follows the lives and loves of a group of African-American college students at a fictional Ivy League university. The central figure, Sam, makes it her business to call out the racism of her fellow students through campus activism and her radio program, Dear White People. At the end of the second season, she realizes that she must confront not only the obvious racism of kids throwing a blackface party but also the “white savior” complex of her white boyfriend.

What an appropriate riposte to Roseanne and the racism of the Trump era. In Dear White People, the ugliness of the past persists despite obvious advances made by people of color. And white liberals remain necessary but problematic allies.

Consider the immigration issue. Yes, the Obama administration deported a record number of people. But the Trump administration has racialized the immigration issue in ways reminiscent of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. He talks of the “breeding” that takes place in sanctuary cities, of the criminality of immigrants, of Salvadoran gang members as “animals.” He has also directed federal authorities to expedite deportations, and not just of undocumented with criminal records.

The most recent outrage has been the separation of children from their families at the border. The New York Times reported in April that authorities separated 700 children from their parents since October. In a two-week period in May, the number jumped by another 658 children, according to Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA). The Trump administration sees in this gross human rights violation nothing but a deterrent against future immigration.

Fortunately, the border policy has generated a good deal of pushback, even from some famous white people. On Twitter, actor Jim Carrey wrote:
 

The WORST TERROR a child can experience is being taken from their parents. Would blonde, blue-eyed children ever be treated so brutally at our border? Would 4,600 Puerto Ricans have been left to die if they were “white”? NO. Trumpism is racism. WHAT IN GOD’S NAME HAVE WE BECOME?

There’s method to Trump’s racist madness. All the negative press and Hollywood disgust serve to rally Trump’s base. Immigration may not be a major issue for Americans in general — a majority oppose Trump’s proposed wall and support a path to citizenship for Dreamers — but it has proven to be a superb tactic for getting Trump’s core constituency to the polls. “Voters who listed immigration as a motivating factor in 2016 backed him over Hillary Clinton by nearly 2 to 1,” writes E. J. Dionne Jr. “And the CBS poll found that while Democrats and independents overwhelmingly opposed Trump’s wall, 78 percent of Republicans supported it.”

Steve Bannon, still working behind the scenes to further radicalize the Republicans, has only one card to play, as he explained to Fareed Zakaria:
 

Bannon is most focused on the issue of immigration because it hits both the heart and the head. “Immigration is about not just sovereignty, it’s about jobs.” He believes that the Trump coalition can attract up to a third of Sanders supporters who see trade and immigration as having created unfair competition for jobs, particularly for working-class blacks and Hispanics.

Bannon, in other words, sees immigration as hot-button issue of last resort that can turn the Roseanne Barrs of the world from eco-feminists to Trump supporters.

Trump as White Savior
In 2012, the writer Teju Cole posted a number of tweets in the wake of the Kony2012 video. The first three read:
 

From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the U.S. is the White Savior Industrial Complex. The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening. The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

Although Cole was criticizing liberals — economist Jeffrey Sachs, journalist Nicholas Kristof — the original “white saviors” were anything but. They colonized America and exterminated Native Americans (in order to “save” them). They colonized other countries — the Philippines, Nicaragua — to shoulder the “white man’s burden.” Later still, they launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to “liberate” the populations there.

Donald Trump is the latest in a long line of illiberal white saviors. Indeed, he has a particularly virulent case of the disease. He believes that he, alone, can solve the world’s problems — win the war in Afghanistan, defeat all terrorists, bring peace to Israel and Palestine.
Perhaps the most vivid demonstration of this syndrome is in Korea.

Recall Cole’s observation: “The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.” Accordingly, Trump wakes up in the morning to tweet about bombing North Korea, in the afternoon he charitably agrees to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and in the evening he waits for the Nobel committee to phone him with the news of a peace prize.

On the North Korea issue, Trump largely ignores the advice of everyone else in his administration, which in this case is a good thing since they were either recommending preemptive strikes (National Security Advisor John Bolton) or telling him to avoid the “trap” of a one-on-one summit with Kim (the foreign policy establishment). Trump is convinced that only he, in his enthusiasm, can find a diplomatic solution to a problem that has bedeviled successive administrations.

Ideally, the United States would simply step out of the way and let the two Koreas work out their problems. But because of the legacy of the white savior complex — U.S. complicity in dividing the peninsula, U.S. involvement in the Korean War, U.S. support for South Korean dictators, U.S. efforts to change the regime in North Korea — the United States has become an almost inextricable part of the problem.

Such are the ironies of history. Getting the peace process rolling on the Korean peninsula requires the impetus of a “white savior” like Trump who claims all the credit that’s actually due to the Korean architects of this detente. In the best-case scenario, the president plays his part and then shuts up. Unfortunately, that’s usually not how “white saviors” operate.

White on White
Similarly, it might seem like a peculiar subset of white savior syndrome to argue that white people hold the key to defeating the Trump agenda.

After all, people of color are engaged in widespread movement building that is vital for the future of politics in America. But as Trump’s election proved, the future is not yet here. Indeed, it made a premature appearance in 2008, as Barack Obama himself ruefully acknowledged on his way out of the White House.

In the meantime, it’s up to white people to destroy what they have created. Whites who oppose Trump’s agenda have to reach beyond their comfort zones to flip (and not flip off) other white people. For instance, it’s critical to amplify the voices of former Trump supporters who have changed their minds — as in this video with a former Carrier worker in Indiana (if you know of similar stories, contact me so that we can do more videos).

As the #LivingWhileBlack stories reveal, racism remains deeply baked into American society. White people taking responsibility for Trumpism won’t eliminate that racism. But cancelling the racist reality show that is the Trump administration would be progress after the great leap backward of 2016.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.

Courtesy: https://fpif.org

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(Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

Five hundred years ago, a popular test to flush out witches was called “ordeal by water.” Dunk an alleged witch into a lake. If she sinks, she’s innocent. If she floats, her guilt is plain for all to see and she can be safely burned at the stake.

By this ancient form of waterboarding, witch hunters thought that they could identify the emissaries of the devil. The objects of suspicion were usually people living on the margins of society – spinsters, practitioners of herbalism, Roma, former slaves, Native Americans. It was a convenient way of cleansing communities of the unconventional.

Today’s witch hunters have different prey in mind. They are anxious to flush out terrorists, also purportedly the emissaries of the devil, also bent on upending the status quo, and also often on the margins of society.

The modern “ordeal by water” — the waterboarding that U.S. investigators infamously used in the aftermath of September 11 — is meant to force them to confess not only to their own supposed crimes, but also to the nefarious activities of the hidden network to which they belong.

Given this history, it’s odd that the most powerful person in the world has alleged that he is the subject of a witch hunt.

President Donald Trump tweeted this week about the investigation of Russiagate by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller: “A total WITCH HUNT with massive conflicts of interest!” he called it.

It’s not the first time that Trump has used “witch hunt” in self-defense. It’s not even the first time that he’s capitalized the expression. But in his recent tweet storm, the president went after Mueller by name, which seemed an ominous escalation.

It’s also curious that Trump is talking about witch hunts just after nominating Gina Haspel to head up the CIA. Haspel famously ran a CIA black site in Thailand where she oversaw the waterboarding of suspects and then urged the shredding of evidence of the use of this technique.

So, as Trump proclaims “witch hunt” in bold letters, he’s pushing an authentic, modern-day witch-hunter to one of the very top positions in his administration. The fact that the president has supported the return of waterboarding because he wants to “fight fire with fire” only underscores the dangerous nature of the nomination.

It is but the latest example of Trump grabbing the grenades thrown at him and lobbing them back in the direction of his opponents. Accused of “massive conflicts of interest,” Trump tries to pin the same label on Mueller and the FBI. Derided as one the stupidest men to ever occupy the White House, Trump loves to declare his opponents “low intelligence.”

And the man who cries “witch hunt” is resurrecting an industrial-strength witch hunt of his own.

Trump’s Terrifying Counter-Terrorism
As a candidate, Trump spoke of terrorism as if it were a huge wave about to engulf the United States and the world. He promised to fight “Radical Islam” with “military, cyber, and financial warfare” alongside an ideological campaign. There’d be a new immigration policy. There’d be beefed up law enforcement. It would all represent a radical break from the policies of the Obama administration and what Hillary Clinton had to offer.

As president, however, Trump has largely followed the approach of his predecessor. As Joshua Geltzer and Stephen Tankel explain in The Atlantic:
 

Under Trump, the conduct of actual counterterrorism appears largely consistent with that of Barack Obama’s two terms and George W. Bush’s second term. Those common elements include working with partners wherever possible, beefing up intelligence cooperation, relying on distinctive U.S. capabilities, including armed drones, and utilizing the criminal justice system to prosecute those arrested in the United States on suspicion of terrorist activities. 

Of course, Trump has also introduced some new twists of his own that suggest that he has an animus toward Muslims in general, is indifferent to the suffering of innocent Muslim victims of U.S. air wars, and couldn’t care less about how U.S. allies crack down on their own Muslim populations.

Thus, Trump’s attempted Muslim travel ban managed to piss off all of the “moderate Muslims” that he talked so much of partnering with against “Radical Islam.” The ever-closer partnership with Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen, its blockade of Qatar, and its gathering conflict with Iran all suggest that Trump is taking sides in the complicated political and confessional struggles in the Middle East. Civilian casualties skyrocketed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria under Trump — and those victims have largely been Muslim. And his buddy-buddy relations with dictators in the Arab world, like Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, reinforce the belief among many Muslims that the United States doesn’t care about their human rights.

At the same time, Trump has proudly kept open the U.S. facility at Guantanamo, a symbol for many around the world of U.S. enhanced interrogation techniques. And UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer argues that torture is still going on there. Mike Pompeo, about to transition from head of the CIA to secretary of state, has defended the use of waterboarding, criticized the Obama administration for closing “black sites,” and is willing to revisit the question of interrogation techniques even after a bipartisan effort removed torture from the toolbox.

It took some time before the torture and black sites of the Bush administration came to light. How long will it take before the real counter-terrorism policies of the Trump administration are exposed?

The Other Investigation
Let’s turn now from the real news to the fake news.

Donald Trump has declared that Russiagate is a witch hunt. His use of the phrase suggests three things:

• It’s an investigation into nothing since witches don’t exist.
• It’s a campaign against someone with unpopular views.
• It’s an example of mass hysteria.

Let’s examine the evidence. In the first case, well, the “witches” do exist. A number of members of the coven to which Donald Trump belongs have already admitted to practicing black magic.

Indictments have been handed down to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, former campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates. Flynn lied to investigators and stood liable for much greater penalties for his unregistered foreign lobbying. George Papadopoulos also lied about his foreign contacts. Manafort and Gates were involved in multi-million dollar financial crimes.

All four had substantial dealings with Russian contacts. Manafort had a plan to influence the U.S. elections in Russia’s favor all the way back in 2005 and brought all of his contacts with oligarchs and Russian officials into the Trump campaign when he signed up on March 29, 2016. Papadopoulos worked on establishing a back channel with Moscow for the campaign and revealed for the first time, to an Australian diplomat, that Russia had Democratic Party emails that could help Trump. Flynn, who talked with Russian officials during the campaign, was on the lookout for ways to monetize his new status.
“None of the charges, so far, directly address whether the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with the Russians, or whether the President himself obstructed justice,” writes Amy Davidson Sorkin in The New Yorker. “The list of people who are cooperating, however, suggests that Mueller may be getting close on both points.”

Then there’s that other coven of witches on the other side of the world. Mueller has handed down indictments for 13 Russians for attempting to subvert the 2016 elections in Trump’s favor. The indictment notes that this Russian involvement began in 2014, which coincides with when Dutch intelligence informed U.S. officials that it had evidence of Russian hacking into Democratic Party computers (which the officials inexplicably ignored). The indictments reveal a disturbing pattern of identity theft, Internet trolling, and the organization of pro-Trump rallies.

Did the two covens conspire? They talked. They certainly met on several occasions. They offered the promise of useful cooperation. Criminal conspiracy beyond the election — in the form of money laundering — is also a possibility. Mueller has not come to the end of the investigation.
In the meantime, however, let’s dispense with the notion that those pursuing the truth of the Russiagate scandals are engaging in a witch hunt comparable to the search for Communists under every bed during the McCarthy era.

Those who have been indicted committed actionable offenses (not ideological ones). Those who are associated with Trump and haven’t been indicted are on no black list that prevents them from working (campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, for example, was at Harvard this fall). And those who challenge the Russiagate narrative have not been cast to the margins: They can be heard every day on the wildly popular Fox News. These are not marginal people with unpopular views forced to work under pseudonyms to scrape by.

Finally, is Russiagate an example of mass hysteria? Certainly the media has engaged in a feeding frenzy. But that’s to be expected for a news story involving the president, a foreign power, money, and intrigue. Certainly the Democrats are trying to make political hay out of the scandal. They’d be stupid not to, though Russiagate has not figured prominently in recent Democratic victories in Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Otherwise, Russiagate hasn’t produced a set of investigations at all levels of American society a la the Red Scare of the 1950s. Mueller has been rather narrow in its focus on Trump and his team, and the investigation has been quite sober in its rhetoric.

So far, Mueller has yet to talk to Trump himself. If the president doesn’t ultimately refuse, expect a rather respectful colloquy punctuated by some pointed questions.

Ah, but wouldn’t it be poetic justice if Mueller were authorized to subject the president to a real ordeal by water? Let’s see how Trump reacts to the waterboarding that he so cavalierly wishes upon others.

That would be a true, Trumpian example of fighting fire with fire.
 

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(Photo: Jordi Bernabeu Farrús / Flickr)

The Middle East today is enduring a replay of World War II — with the Islamic State in the role of Nazi Germany.

Having seized much of Europe and parts of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany reached the peak of its expansion by the fall of 1942. Then, stopped at Stalingrad and unable to overwhelm Britain, the Nazis began to fall back, and the war turned into a race between the Soviet troops marching from the east and the Allied soldiers surging from the west. After the war, as a result of the competition between these two sets of armed forces, Europe would remain divided for the next half century.

The Islamic State likewise reached its peak expansion in mid-2014 when it controlled large chunks of Iraq and Syria. It has experienced a rise and fall even more precipitous than the Nazis’. By mid-2016, a mere two years later, it had already lost 45 percent of its territory in Syria and 20 percent of its territory in Iraq.

Today, with the fall of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, the Islamic State has dwindled to a swath of land around the border of the two countries. Once a “state” of 11 million people with an economy worth about $1 billion a year — the size of Great Britain, the population of Greece, the economic output of Gambia — ISIS is now little more than the several thousand fighters desperately fending off attacks from all sides. From the west, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad is attempting to retake as much of Syria as it can. From the east, Iraqi forces and Kurdish peshmerga operating under the cover of U.S. air support have been steadily ejecting the would-be caliphate from Iraqi territory.

In both Iraq and Syria, significant divisions exist among the anti-ISIS fighters. Indeed, the lands encompassing Iraq and Syria would be lucky to experience the frozen hatreds of a Cold War in the wake of the fall of the house of ISIS. The shrinking of the caliphate will more likely lead to a new level of fighting — over the future structure of both Iraq and Syria and, more ominously, the dispensation of the region as a whole.

In Syria
It not only feels like 1945 in Syria, it looks that way as well. After months of saturation bombing, the cities that ISIS once controlled look like Germany after it had been reduced to rubble in the final months of World War II, as the Allies and the Soviets tightened their vise grip on the Nazis.

Thanks to the help of both Russia and Iran and to its ruthless aerial campaign, the Syrian government has managed to regain 60 percent of the country. Syrian forces have continuously bombed civilian targets, such as hospitals. Of the 1,373 attacks on civilian infrastructure in 2016, for instance, Syrian and Russian forces were responsible for 1,198. Last month, September, registered the largest number of casualties for 2017, with nearly 1,000 civilians killed, including over 200 children, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Assad regime has specialized in the comparatively low-tech barrel bombs, which maximize civilian casualties, dropping nearly 13,000 of them in 2016.

The U.S.-led coalition, meanwhile, has been equally brutal in its effort to dislodge the Islamic State from its capital of Raqqa. The city now looks like Dresden after the firebombing of World War II, as the Russian government has rightly pointed out. According to Syrian activists, over 1,000 civilians died in the bombing.

The third leg of brutality in Syria is Sunni extremism. True, ISIS is on the decline. But other militant forces aspire to kick Assad aside, keep the Kurds down, and beat back the Americans, Russians, and Iranians. After several name changes, the latest collection of al-Qaeda-like factions in Syria — which may or may not maintain a link to al-Qaeda itself — is the Levant Liberation Committee (Tahrir al-Sham or HTS). With its ISIS rival shrinking daily, HTS could emerge as the insurgency of choice for those who hate Assad as well as anything associated with the Americans.

Large tracts of ISIS territory in Syria were thinly populated desert, but the caliphate possessed some jewels in their crown. This weekend, on the heels of the liberation of Raqqa, U.S.-backed militias took over the Islamic State’s largest oil field. Syrian government forces were reportedly within a few miles of the strategic asset, but were pushed back by ISIS fighters. The Syrian Democratic Forces that took over the Omar oil field are led by Kurds, but some of the soldiers are also Arab. Although the SDF as a whole is putatively fighting for a secular democratic Syria, the Kurds are more pragmatically trying to gain leverage to safeguard their gains in the north where they have established the de facto autonomous region of Rojava.

Hatred of ISIS has been the lowest common denominator for a broad range of actors in Syria, from American neocons and Syrian generals to Kurdish militias and al-Qaeda sympathizers to Kremlin geopoliticians and Hezbollah. ISIS has been a knife stuck deep into Syria. There’s no argument that the knife is life threatening. But remove it, and Syria risks bleeding out.

In Iraq
On his recent swing through the Persian Gulf, where he failed to get Qatar and Saudi Arabia to kiss and make up, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also made some especially ill-conceived comments about Iraq.

“Iranian militias that are in Iraq, now that the fight against Daesh and ISIS is coming to a close, those militias need to go home,” he said.

There aren’t any Iranian militias in Iraq. The Popular Mobilization Forces that have played a major role in pushing the Islamic State out of Iraq are largely Shiite, but they also contain Sunnis and Christians. Many of the brigades in this coalition force have links to Iran, but at least one major unit so far has been incorporated into the Iraqi army. In other words, the so-called “Iranian militias” are already home. They’re Iraqis, after all.

Tillerson also said, “Any foreign fighters in Iraq need to go home, and allow the Iraqi people to rebuild their lives with the help of their neighbors.” Was Tillerson announcing that all U.S. soldiers currently in Iraq — 5,262 according to the Pentagon, but possibly as high as 7,000 — are about to go home? If so, everyone in the media and the U.S. government seems to have missed this second “mission accomplished” announcement.

Thanks largely to the United States and its earlier decision to invade and occupy the country, Iraq faces the same kind of fragmentation problem as Syria. Iraqis have divided loyalties. Now that the acute threat of ISIS has passed, the fissures in Iraqi society are once again widening.

Consider the ongoing conflict between Kurdistan and the central government in Baghdad. The residents of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq went to the polls last month and overwhelmingly endorsed independence. The central government immediately went on the offensive, putting economic pressure on the wayward province and sending army units to seize the disputed oil-rich region around the city of Kirkuk. With ISIS on the decline, anti-Kurdish sentiment can unite the rest of Iraq. As Juan Cole points out, the Kurdish move brought out Iraqi nationalism even in the Shiite militias that helped the Iraqi army retake Kirkuk.

In retrospect, Kurdistan President Mahmoud Barzani’s bid to use the independence referendum to boost his own political fortunes was, according to veteran Kurdish politician Mahmoud Osman, a “miscalculation.” It may revive Iraqi nationalism and thwart Kurdish aspirations. Or it could trigger more centrifugal forces. With ISIS on its way out and the U.S. military presence relatively modest, Iraqis may well turn back to their post-invasion preoccupation of fighting each other to the point of the country’s dissolution.

After ISIS
The war against ISIS is like a matryoshka “nesting doll” from hell. The campaign against the caliphate is inset in the larger Syrian civil war and the Iraqi federal conflict. These are in turn nested within a larger confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia. And this regional tug-of-war is itself part of an even larger competition for influence between the United States and Russia.

Now, imagine giving this matryoshka doll to a six-year-old child prone to tantrums. Enter Donald Trump. He has done just about everything he can to make a bad situation worse short of destroying the doll with nuclear weapons. He has antagonized the Iranians at every turn, encouraged the worst tendencies of the Saudis, done little to keep Iraq together, made no effort to push the warring sides in Syria back to the negotiating table, and pursued a woefully inconsistent policy toward Russia.

Yes, the looming defeat of ISIS is to be cheered, but the costs have been huge. There’s the enormous loss of civilian life and the destruction of ancient cities. There’s the uptick in ISIS attacks abroad. Iraq remains fragile, though the Kurds have offered to freeze their independence vote. Syria is no closer to an end to its civil war, though more rounds of peace talks are set to begin shortly. Human rights violations by the Assad government continue, though the first trials have taken place in Europe to hold those responsible for those violations.

Most importantly, no one is tackling the nested conflicts in the region. The first step is to take the matryoshka doll out of Donald Trump’s hands. Give him something else to play with, perhaps another tour of his favorite campaign stops in the United States. Then let some real adults — the UN, the EU, Jimmy Carter? — grapple with the post-ISIS realities of the Middle East.
 

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(Photo: Joan Campderrós-i-Canas / Flickr)
 

Democracy can be messy. In the northeast corner of Spain this week, democracy was downright chaotic.

Catalans went to the polls on Sunday to vote in a referendum on whether to stay in Spain or go their separate way. The Spanish authorities, however, declared the vote illegitimate and sent in the national police to disrupt the referendum.

In many locales, as the police swept into the polling station to seize the ballots, the Catalans merely hid all the voting paraphernalia. When the police left, the Catalans set up again to register voter preferences, and lines reformed outside.

Such Keystone Kops scenarios would have been amusing if not for the outright violence of the Spanish police, which beat voters with batons and fired rubber bullets into crowds. In The Independent, Hannah Strange and James Badcock write:
 

Video footage showed officers from Spain’s national police — 4,000 of whom had been brought in by the government to help quash the ballot — fighting with elderly voters, some of whom were left bleeding, and dragging young women away from polling stations by their hair.
 

The Spanish government has been monumentally stupid. Its case for unity is much stronger than Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont’s case for independence. The Spanish constitution of 1978 speaks of the country’s “indissoluble unity,” while also according Catalonia considerable autonomy. “The Catalan government claims the right to self-determination,” The Economist points out. “But international law recognizes this only in cases of colonialism, foreign invasion, or gross discrimination and abuse of human rights.” None of those conditions applies to Catalonia.

Sure, the relatively wealthy Catalans are aggrieved that a portion of their economic success is redistributed elsewhere in Spain. But that’s a fundamental element of the modern state. New Yorkers subsidize New Mexicans, London subsidizes Leeds, Germans subsidize Greeks. Catalans can certainly challenge the terms of the economic arrangement — after all, the poorer Basque region doesn’t share much of its tax revenues with Madrid — but neither Spanish law nor international law allows them to gather up all their marbles and go home.

Meanwhile, the very process by which Puigdemont rammed through the referendum doesn’t reflect well on his democratic credentials. Writes Yascha Mounk in Slate:
 

The government rushed the necessary legislation for the referendum through the Catalan Parliament without giving deputies adequate time to discuss it. It passed the legislation in a late-night session even though the opposition was absent. It vowed to secede from Spain even if a majority of the population stayed away from the polls. And, taking a page from Trump’s playbook, it has been smearing everybody from opponents of secession to judges doing their jobs as enemies of the people.

With only a 42 percent turnout for the referendum, the Catalan authorities have no authoritative mandate for a declaration of independence. Many people who opposed secession simply refused to vote. On the other hand, the Spanish government’s reaction may well have pushed more people into the independence camp. On Monday, thousands of protesters poured into the streets of Barcelona to protest the Spanish government’s actions and assert their popular sovereignty. On Tuesday, unions called a general strike for the same purpose.

Ultimately the Catalan crisis boils down to consent — whether the Catalans continue to agree to be part of the larger Spanish nation. In an 1882 essay on nations and nationalism, the French philologist Ernest Renan famously wrote that the nation is a “daily referendum.” He meant that the nation is a matter not of inviolate borders or ancient history. Renan continued:
 

A nation is therefore a great solidarity constituted by the feeling of sacrifices made and those that one is still disposed to make. It presupposes a past but is reiterated in the present by a tangible fact: consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.

If a majority of Catalans no longer consent to be part of the larger Spanish nation, then the specifics of the Spanish constitution are largely irrelevant. The people will force a change. Given that the younger generation favors independence, demography is on the side of the secessionists. The more polarized the situation becomes in Spain, the less room there will be for the sensible middle option of greater autonomy for Catalonia.

In the past, secessionist movements represented not a challenge to the nation-state system, but its ultimate expression. After all, rebellious provinces or peoples want nothing more than to become nation-states themselves. If every nation deserves a state, then how can the international community deny the Slovaks, the Slovenes, and the East Timorese? Secessionist movements were simply the continuation of a process interrupted by historical anomalies like the Soviet, Yugoslav, or Czechoslovak federations, or the often arbitrary border delineations of colonial administrators.

But the Catalan case suggests a different kind of future. In this future, economics, geopolitics, and technology all point toward what I’ve called in my latest book: the splinterlands.

Catalonia and the EU
The architects of the European Union imagined that their new entity would solve the challenge of endless division on the continent.

Europe has always been a patchwork of different peoples, all striving for sovereignty over their own territory. People of varying histories, cultures, languages, and religions have been mixed together in a way that has defied any easy drawing of borders. Order has usually come over the centuries by force of arms. In the last century, two world wars were fought to upend those orders, and a third war beckoned.

The EU was supposed to change all that by pointing toward something beyond the nation-state.

Not only did the EU weaken the powers of the state by appealing to the benefits of something larger — economies of scale, a unified foreign policy voice, greater individual freedoms to travel and work — it also appealed to a “Europe of regions.” According to this project, regions could deal directly with Brussels, bypassing their national governments, and also cooperate horizontally with one another: Provence with Basque country, Bavaria with Lombardy, and so on. Secession would be rendered moot, for Catalans could get what they wanted if not from Spain then from Brussels or other European entities.

Alas, it was not to be. Writes Anwen Elias back in 2008, “Regionalist or autonomist parties who saw in the EU an opportunity for organizing political authority on a post-sovereigntist basis were also forced to recognize that, in practice, Europe was still dominated by sovereign states and sovereignty-based understandings of politics.” Even in Europe, the nation-state held onto its privileged position. Attempts to revive the “Europe of regions” to accommodate pressures from below, particularly after the last Catalan referendum in 2014, came up hard against the growing Euroskeptical movements, the continued problems in the Eurozone, and ultimately Brexit.

The problem of consent, in other words, has infected the EU as well. Many citizens of wealthier European countries don’t want to subsidize the citizens of less-well-off countries. Europe-firsters have been unenthusiastic about the influx of immigrants that the EU as a whole embraced. Though others threatened to do so, the British have been the first to withdraw their consent entirely.

If the Catalans withdraw from Spain, they are also withdrawing from the EU, which would amount to a second defection in so many years. The decision could prove even more costly for Catalonia than Brexit is proving for the UK, since it doesn’t have an economy the size of England’s, hasn’t preserved a separate financial system (and currency), and doesn’t have the same international profile (for instance, Catalonia is not a member of the World Trade Organization).

Of course, would-be countries are often prepared to take an economic hit for the sake of independence.

But the Catalans have perhaps not factored in just how big a hit they’re going to take, naively thinking that the small bump up in revenues not turned over to Madrid will make the difference. They’re also disgusted, and rightly so, with the economic austerity measures that the EU has imposed on Spain. But little Catalonia will have even less power to resist these forces after independence.

Now that the “Europe of regions” has faded into irrelevance, Europe faces more fracture points. As a result of the Brexit vote, Scotland is once again reconsidering its commitment to the United Kingdom, though public opinion polls suggest that a second referendum on independence would fail by a narrow margin just like the first. In Belgium, the largest political force is a nationalist party, the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), which supports Flemish independence. Of course, the Flemish are the majority in Belgium, and Flanders is doing much better economically these days than Wallonia, but Belgian unity remains a fragile thing. Other regions of Europe are also restive — Basque country, northern Italy, Corsica.

Although the Catalan vote isn’t likely to unravel the tapestry of Europe quite yet, other forces are at work in Europe — and not just Europe.
 

Kurdishstruggle / Flickr
 

Kurdistan, Finally?
Kurds have wanted their own states for centuries. They’ve attempted to carve out autonomous regions in Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Last week, the Kurdish territory in Iraq held a non-binding referendum on independence, which garnered overwhelming support.
Surrounding states all took measures against the would-be new state of Kurdistan. Iran declared a fuel embargo, as did Turkey. Both countries moved troops to their borders for joint military exercises with Iraq. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the referendum “illegitimate.”

Baghdad, too, rejected the non-binding vote. But unlike Madrid, the Iraqi authorities did not attempt to stop the vote from happening. Iraq banned flights to Kurdistan airports and imposed sanctions on Kurdish banks. But it didn’t send in troops. The Kurdish government has announced new elections for November 1, and Baghdad seems to be waiting to see what the Kurds’ next move will be. Neither side wants war.

As in Catalonia, the referendum wasn’t simply a transparent bid for independence. Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani used the vote as a way to boost his own popularity and that of his party, as well as to make a stronger bid for Kirkuk, a disputed oil-rich area that Baghdad also claims. Regardless of Barzani’s motives, however, independence is clearly popular in Kurdistan.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the Kurds dialing back their ambitions in Iraq. They’ve been running a de facto state of sorts for years. They thought, not unreasonably, that they could trade their extraordinary efforts against the Islamic State for a shot at real, de jure sovereignty. They’ve even embraced a rather ruthless realpolitik to their ethnic brethren across the borders. Kurdistan has maintained strong ties toward Turkey — despite President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s crackdown on Turkey’s own Kurdish population — and have been cool toward the de facto Kurdish state of Rojava in northern Syria.

But there’s still a huge difference between de facto and de jure. Just as Catalonia can be the string that unravels the European tapestry, Kurdistan can be the string that unravels the Middle East tapestry. Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq all fiercely defend the unitary nature of their states, and the Kurds represent a strong threat to that structure.

Moreover, the region is as much of a patchwork as Europe. Yemen and Libya have already effectively fallen apart. Palestinians have been thwarted for decades from having their own state. Turkmen, Shia (in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain), and others might lobby as well for a piece of their own pie.

But what if they get their slice just when the pie has become stale and inedible?

Slouching toward Splinterlands
What’s happening in Europe and the Middle East is part of a larger pattern.

The global market has been eroding the power of the nation-state for several decades, as transnational corporations flit around the world to get the best tax deals and the cheapest labor, international trade deals remove key points of leverage that national governments once had over various economic actors, and global financial authorities impose conditions on all but the largest economies that governments must meet or face default.

The global market has delegitimized states. No wonder, then, that subnational units are taking advantage of this weakness.

Technology has amplified this trend. Communications advances make this global market possible, and the transfer in microseconds of huge amounts of capital in and out of nation-states renders national economic policy increasingly illusory. The Internet and social media have broken the monopoly on national media, providing civic movements (along with global disrupters like the United States and Russia) the means to challenge the once authoritative narratives of the nation-state. What happened in the Arab Spring to authoritarian governments is now happening to democratic governments as well (witness the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s victory).

Finally, in the world of geopolitics, the overarching reasons for ideological unity are gone. The West no longer faces a “Communist threat,” while the East no longer huddles together against the “Yankee threat.” Sure, there’s the Islamic State and its ilk to worry about. But all nation-states see these non-state actors as a threat. The “war on terrorism” hasn’t forced states to give up a portion of their sovereignty for the cause — only citizens to give up a portion of their civil liberties.

In the 1950s and 1960s, utopians dreamed of a world government even as dystopians feared a global Big Brother. Today, when the international community can’t even come together to stop climate change, the prospect of world federalism seems impossibly quaint. A much grimmer reality presents itself in places like Libya and Somalia and Yemen: failed states and the war of all against all.

Today the world faces a crisis of the intermediate structure. The EU is under siege. The power of nation-states is eroding. If this trend continues, with the world continuing to splinter, the only entities left with any global power will be corporations and religious organizations, a world where frightened people pray to Facebook and the gods of Google that the fierce winds of nationalism and the rising waters of climate change and the random fire of lone gunmen will stay away for one more day.
 

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