Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 158

Climate Refugees and International Law

At the confluence of the rugged Himalayan, Karakoram, and Hindu Kush ranges lies a place called the Throne of the Mountain Gods, where K2 and seven of the world’s 14 tallest peaks glitter in the thin air. This remote region of Pakistan bristles with the severe beauty of the largest concentration of glaciers outside of the Arctic Circle, including the Baltoro, the longest glacier outside of the polar regions and one so large it is visible from space. This rugged icescape is home to the people of Baltistan, who live as they have for centuries, as subsistance farmers. Of late, meltwaters from glacial bodies that used to remain frozen year round are causing severe downstream flooding, called Glacial Lake Outburst Floods. The resulting crop and livestock loss has exacerbated food insecurity in an already fragile environment.

The people of Baltistan, along with millions across the world, are threatened with mass displacement due to the earth’s rising ambient temperatures. Floods, rising sea levels, droughts, and desertification are rendering uninhabitable the homes of communities throughout the world, even as climate change gradually makes other regions more suitable for agriculture. The Secretary General’s 2012 report to the UN General Assembly on Human Rights and Migration predicts that up to 250 million people may be displaced by climate change by the year 2050. This represents nearly four times the number of displaced persons and refugees currently eligible for protection under the UNHCR mandate. Climate hotspots—low-lying islands, large river deltas, and coastal and arid regions—may undergo dramatic environmental change.

Climate change aggravates competition for resources like water, food, and grazing lands in places where people have lived for millennia, potentially triggering violent conflict. In Syria, for example, record drought and massive crop failure beginning in 2006 led to the mass migration of predominately Sunni farmers to Alawi-dominated cities, increasing sectarian tensions and generating conflicts over diminished resources. While the roots of the Syrian conflict are multifaceted, climate and desertification are key elements that compounded with other causes. In 2011, more than a million people fled the combined effects of severe drought and prolonged conflict in Somalia.

Rural and coastal residents forced to migrate to urban areas face numerous problems. Skills such as fishing, herding, and farming are difficult to translate into employment-based livelihoods in cities. The potential for conflict rises when municipal services, including educational and health care systems, are forced to adjust to a sudden rise in population of people with differing languages or customs. The difficulties are frequently the combined result of pressures such a natural disaster, conflict, weak governance, and poverty. Disasters may strike in regions already wracked by conflict or may operate sequentially, with one forcing a family from its home and the other prompting it to move yet again.

Victims of these kinds of multi-causal systemic breakdowns may be described as climate refugees, but this is a category of displaced persons that is, as yet, unprotected by international law. Such refugees face greater political risks than ones who flee their homes due to war or political oppression. Unlike traditional refugees, climate refugees may be forced back to devastated homelands or into refugee camps. Under current international law, climate-induced, cross-border migrations trigger few if any protections or assistance mechanisms.

Our current international legal frameworks were put to the test in 2015, when Ioane Teitiota, a Kiribati national, lost his appeal for asylum in New Zealand in a case that would have made him the world’s first climate refugee. Teitiota claimed his island home was sinking, thereby becoming uninhabitable. His lawyers argued that the people of Kiribati were being persecuted by the world’s major carbon emitters, who had expressed a complete lack of concern. The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as a person who has a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; the New Zealand’s Court of Appeal ruled that, while climate change is a major and growing concern, “its effect on countries like Kiribati is not appropriately addressed under the 1951 Refugee Convention.” Thus, individuals such as Teitiota cannot turn to existing international law when slow-onset environmental issues such as sinking islands or eroding coastal lands render them homeless. The judge worried that accepting climate change refugees would open the door to “millions of people who are facing medium-term economic deprivation”—surely a cynical description for having one’s home drown in the ocean.

The New Zealand Court’s decision should draw our attention to the lack of protections for this growing category of refugees. In order to advance the international debate, we should either revise the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees to include climate refugees or negotiate a new convention to guarantee specific rights and protections for them. Otherwise, the international legal regime will violate the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities between richer and less economically developed nations. Allowing the world’s most prolific carbon emitters to ignore the mass displacement of other peoples would threaten the equality principle of global law, as well as international security.

International consensus on protection of displaced people affected by climate change must be based on the understanding of the complex relationship between conflict and disaster in displacement. The two, layered with poverty and weak governance, together influence decisions to leave a disaster-affected region.

While Australia and New Zealand are among the first countries to face petitions from climate refugees, they will not be the last; indeed we should expect climate refugees to make their way to American shores and courts in the near future. If the world does not arrive at a means of protecting them, including legal recognition of their status as victims, it will find itself unprepared in the face of new violent conflicts and other indirect impacts of climate change. We must build greater systems resilience in the face of this onrushing reality. We can no longer afford to sweep these issues under the rug.

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Will Hartford Be the Next American City to Go Belly Up?

The last major American city to go bankrupt was Detroit, which was dealt a mortal blow by the financial crisis and officially filed for protection from its creditors in 2013. Last year, Puerto Rico became the next car on the bankruptcy train, and other U.S. territories may follow suit. But so far, large U.S. cities have remained solvent, even as the public pension crisis festers, and cities like Chicago look to be on the edge.

But it just became more likely that we will see another big city bankruptcy in the near future. Governing magazine reports on the travails of Hartford, Connecticut:

Standard & Poor’s downgraded Hartford debt to junk bond status late Tuesday, less than a week after the financially troubled capital city hired a New York law firm with expertise in restructuring municipal finances.

The Wall Street ratings agency downgraded most city of Hartford outstanding debt to BB, a level that’s classified as speculative, also known as non-investment-grade, or junk, from BBB-. That reflects a strong possibility that Hartford could default on its debt or renegotiate it to pay bondholders less money.

As we noted before, it’s remarkable that this is taking place in one of the richest states in the union and in the midst of an historic bull market. The structural problems in state and local finance run deep, and they will not resolve themselves.We need to be prepared for the fiscal storm that will sweep the country the next time a recession hits.

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Macron & Merkel Flirt with Eurozone Reform

It was a busy day for Emmanuel Macron on Thursday: hours before welcoming President Trump to the Elysée, the French President was meeting with Angela Merkel to discuss Franco-German ties. And before the meeting, he was laying the groundwork with an interview that had sounded some critical notes about Germany’s exploitation of a “dysfunctional” Eurozone. :

“I have never reproached Germany for being competitive,” Macron said in the interview. “But a part of German competitiveness is due to the dysfunctionalities of the euro zone, and the weakness of other economies.”

“Germany … has a strong economy, but it has demographic weaknesses, economic and trade imbalances with its neighbors and shared responsibilities to give the euro area the future it deserves.”

This isn’t the first time Macron has criticized Germany’s surplus, but it may be his strongest statement of the problem since he became President. Macron’s criticism is both a perennial complaint and an entirely justified one: as WRM has explained in these pages, Germany has long benefitted from the economic weakness of its southern neighbors, with the fiscal woes of the Club Med countries helping to keep the Euro artificially low, thus propping up German exports.

But if Macron’s criticism of Germany heralded a testy exchange with Merkel, the meeting itself showed no such clashes. In fact, Merkel sounded entirely open to Macron’s proposed Eurozone reforms:

Merkel also [said] she was open to the creation of an EU finance minister position and a budget for the eurozone, as proposed by Macron. The moves would require changes to current EU treaties.

“I have nothing against a eurozone budget [and] we can talk about creating a European finance minister,” Merkel said.

“We agree that the eurozone must be stabilised and further developed,” Merkel added. “It is in our greatest interest that all eurozone countries are strong.”

Will these friendly statements will translate to actual, on-the-books reforms? Much will depend upon Macron’s success in legislating domestic economic reforms this summer, and upon the mandate Merkel receives after September’s elections. But she seems to have already concluded that working with Macron is smart politics, and her statements here suggest a path forward on reform, with Germany accepting a common Eurozone budget and finance minister so long as the thornier prospect of common debt pooling is taken off the table. This could be the best chance for meaningful EU reform in a generation. Let’s hope Macron and Merkel are up to the challenge.

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Mahmoud Abbas and the Years of Terror

Mahmoud Abbas entered Yasser Arafat’s office in the Palestinian presidential complex, commonly referred to as the muqata‘a (compound), in the center of Ramallah. It was October of 2000, and violence was raging in the streets. Dozens of people had already died in clashes between Palestinians and the Israeli military. Hundreds were wounded. This was no longer just a burst of anger—it was coordinated, and it was turning into another intifada.

When Abbas arrived at the muqata‘a, Arafat was busy taking phone calls from world leaders. France invited Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to attend a peace conference in Paris, the United States was willing to renew its efforts as a mediator, and Egypt was also working behind the scenes to calm the situation. Abbas was involved in all these efforts, but it wasn’t the main thing he had come to discuss with Arafat. Inside the Palestinian leader’s office, where a large photo of Jerusalem hung on the wall, Abbas delivered a stark warning to Arafat: If you don’t instruct all of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces to stop the violence, the Palestinian people will suffer terrible consequences.

Arafat, in fact, was doing the exact opposite: actively encouraging his security forces to participate in the violence. At one meeting with his top security officials, he reportedly asked, “Why do the Jews not have more deaths? You know what to do.” Qaddura Fares, a former PA cabinet member, explains that “Abu Ammar [Arafat] led Palestinians according to our reality. So, when there was a need to struggle and fight, he did.” Abbas found this direction extremely disturbing. “We are losing control over the street,” he warned Arafat, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation. “This thing will turn against us.”

Arafat acknowledged his deputy, but refused to commit to ending the violence. Over the next few weeks, things only got worse. On October 12, two Israeli soldiers accidentally entered Ramallah after taking the wrong turn at a checkpoint. They were arrested by PA police officers, taken to a local station, and then brutally lynched by hundreds of angry Palestinians, including members of the PA security forces. Horrific pictures from the event were broadcast for hours on Israeli television. Israel retaliated that evening by bombing, for the first time since the creation of the Palestinian Authority, office buildings used by its security agencies. The two sides were now practically at war, just three months after the failed peace summit in Camp David.

If his role during the summit was that of an intransigent hardliner, Abbas’s conduct during the first weeks of the Second Intifada was almost the opposite. “Abu Mazen was one of the first to warn against [violence],” says one of his former advisers. “This might not have been terribly popular, but it did distinguish him from others.”

In opposing the violence and calling for moderation, Abbas was resisting not only his boss but the sentiment of the street. “He was the only one to stand up to Arafat and tell him about the dangers posed by the intifada,” says Avi Dichter, who was the head of Shin Bet at the time. “He realized very early where this was going, and why it had to be stopped. Arafat refused to listen to him.”

Ahmad Tibi, a close associate of Abbas’s, explains that his opposition to violence was a mixture of morals and politics: “He believed it was morally wrong to use violence, and also that it was against the Palestinian people’s interests. He never thought violence would lead to the end of the occupation.” What Abbas wanted, says Tibi, was a “non-violent intifada” consisting of civil protests that would elicit the world’s sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinians. “He thought violence would have the opposite effect.”

Ahmed Qurie, Abbas’s former deputy, wrote in his memoirs that “At this time, there were also internal differences within the Palestinian leadership. In private discussions, there were sharp disagreements between us.” Arafat had unleashed the violent elements within his own party and coordinated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terror group. There was little Abbas and the negotiators in the leadership could do to stop it. “Some Fatah leaders in the field,” wrote Qurie, attempted to “construct their own organizational bases inside Fatah.” The party was fracturing, and older leaders like Abbas and Qurie were ceding influence to a younger, more hostile generation.

In December of 2000, President Clinton, weeks away from leaving the White House, presented both sides with a last-minute peace proposal known as “The Clinton Parameters,” which included a Palestinian state on 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, Palestinian sovereignty over the Aqsa Compound (the Temple Mount), a split Jerusalem based on ethnic lines, and a gradual Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza.

“I knew the plan was tough for both parties,” Clinton wrote in his autobiography, “but it was time—past time—to put up or shut up…. It was a hard deal, but if they wanted peace, I thought it fair to both sides.” Barak, who had lost his majority in the Knesset and was forced into early elections, accepted the parameters. Arafat rejected them. “The deal was so good I couldn’t believe anyone would be foolish enough to let it go,” recalled Clinton, who thought Arafat’s rejection was an “error of historic proportions.” Clinton believed that unlike Arafat, who said no, “Abu Ala and Abu Mazen also would have agreed but didn’t want to be at odds with Arafat.”

By rejecting this offer, Arafat put the last nail in the coffin of the peace process, while simultaneously green-lighting the escalation of the intifada. “[Arafat] saw that repeating the First Intifada in new forms would bring the necessary popular, international, and Arab pressure upon Israel,” recalled Fatah leader Nabil Sha‘ath. Arafat’s wife, Suha, famously recounted her husband urging her to leave before the violence rose: “He said, ‘you have to leave Palestine, because I want to carry out an intifada…. He ordered me to leave him because he had already decided to carry out an intifada after the Oslo Accords and after the failure of Camp David.”

Arafat took most of Fatah on this turn toward terror. Mahmoud Abbas was the most prominent member of a small group of officials who refused to follow him. For much of Abbas’s life, he had been politically isolated. Yet at no point was he more politically removed from the center of Palestinian power than during the Second Intifada. “During that period,” recalls Fatah parliamentarian Nasser Juma‘a, “there wasn’t one Palestinian who declared his or her objection to the intifada.”

“He was very unhappy with Arafat,” recalls Martin Indyk, then the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. “He didn’t at all agree with what was going on. He thought it was tremendously destructive. He was very clear about this, and also very frustrated, because he didn’t have the influence to stop it. He did the right thing, and he paid a political price for it.” Munib al-Masri, a close associate of Arafat, adds that, “Abu Mazen didn’t hide his opinion. He went to Fatah gatherings and said very clearly: this is wrong and it won’t help us end the occupation.”

Jerusalem expressed a similar sentiment regarding Abbas’s conduct during this period. “I think he risked his life,” says one former senior Israeli official. “He walked around and told the young Fatah activists who were organizing to carry out terror attacks: ‘this is a mistake, you are ruining the Palestinian dream.’ This episode convinced me and many others in Israel that despite all his other shortcomings, his opposition to violence and terrorism was sincere.”

Some Palestinian officials, however, are skeptical about Abbas’s efforts and impact. No one doubts that he was opposed to the violent nature of the intifada, but there is a debate on how effective that opposition was. “Abbas was against the Second Intifada, but he did nothing,” argues Juma‘a. “He did not express his views in an influential way. Had he been clearer and more influential—and even stronger—he may have found many who share this opinion.” “I’m not sure this was the biggest disagreement between [Arafat and Abbas] at the time,” says Fares, the former cabinet member. Fares adds that the friction in the relationship between the two leaders was perhaps just because “Abu Ammar was ignoring Abu Mazen at the time.”

Failing to influence the direction of the Palestinian uprising, Abbas found himself in a familiar position of exile. Just as he had done in the past when he disagreed with Arafat, he physically removed himself. He traveled frequently to places like Tunisia and the Gulf. His eldest son, Mazen, was running a successful business out of Qatar, which for decades was somewhat of a second home to the Abbas family. Mazen Abbas was personally close to Hamad bin Jassim, the Qatari Foreign Minister, and also enjoyed a cordial relationship with Eli Avidar, an Israeli diplomat stationed in the rich emirate. The two would play tennis together from time to time. “During those matches, Abbas Jr. often spoke of his despair at the failure of the Camp David summit and his anger at Arafat’s attempts to remove his father from the circle of senior leadership after he had severely criticized the rais’s [President’s] conduct at Camp David,” Avidar wrote in his memoirs.

While the Abbas family began spending more and more time in Doha, terror kept raging in the West Bank and Gaza. Frustrated with Barak’s failure to tamp down the violence, the Israeli public rewarded Ariel Sharon with a landslide victory in the February 2001 special elections. Any prospect of peace negotiations was now gone: Arafat was fully committed to terrorism; Sharon was fully committed to crushing it. In addition, the personal enmity between them, going back to their 1982 standoff in Lebanon, was beyond repair.

With the derailment of the peace process, Abbas’s political standing was at a historical low point, despite (or perhaps because of) the accuracy of his early warnings about the dangers of the intifada. “Arafat was very skillful at cutting down any critics; he was a master at that game” says Indyk. “Ridiculing, spreading rumors, bashing—whatever he needed to do in order to discredit those who dared speak up against him.” Abbas wasn’t doing himself any favors, either. “When Arafat was besieged in the muqata‘a [by the Israelis in 2002], Abbas invited some cadres within Fatah to meet and write a document critical of Arafat,” recalls Yasser Abed Rabbo. “Even if you agree with him on the principles, the time was the worst. Arafat accused him of treason: ‘I am under siege, and you are joining my enemies in criticizing my leadership style?!’” Even after all these years of politicking within the Palestinian national movement, Abbas did not understand the finer points of dealing with Arafat.

The tongue-lashings from Arafat didn’t stop Abbas from campaigning against the intifada. “What have we achieved?” he demanded at a closed-door meeting of local leaders in Gaza in 2002. “What positive or negative aims have we accomplished?” In the heat of a popular uprising, here was the number two official in the Palestinian national movement criticizing everything his colleagues had supported since September 2000. The thousands of lives lost, the international condemnation, the destruction of Palestinian institutions—it all weighed heavily on Abbas. “What happened over these two years,” Abbas bemoaned at that event, “has been the total destruction of all we have built and all that had been built before that.”

Underlying the intifada’s gruesome terror attacks was an escalating battle between the two largest Palestinian political parties, Fatah and Hamas. Some analysts have argued that Arafat decided to launch the uprising in part to take a swipe at Hamas’s increasing “resistance” appeal. Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, saw the uprising as an opportunity to replace Fatah as the leader of the Palestinian national movement. In Abbas’s view, this bloody competition between his party and Hamas was devastatingly destructive to the national cause.

The events of 2002, the bloodiest year of the intifada, certainly strengthened his case. In late March, following the murder of thirty Israeli and foreign citizens by a suicide bombing in the Israeli city of Netanya, Israel carried out a large military operation throughout the West Bank, resuming complete control of the Palestinian cities that had been handed over to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords. The Israel Defense Forces also surrounded the muqata’a, putting Arafat under siege within his own compound, parts of which were destroyed in the fighting. Two years earlier, Israelis and Palestinians were negotiating over an Israeli withdrawal from approximately 90 percent of the West Bank; now, Israel was reversing the withdrawals it had already undertaken in the mid-1990s, and Arafat, instead of being invited to another signing ceremony on the White House lawn, was eating pita bread in the dark while Israeli tanks and snipers surrounded his office.

Abbas’s warning that the Palestinians could lose everything as a result of the intifada had come true. And yet, even then, Arafat still refused to listen to him.

President George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, just four months after the beginning of the intifada and a month before Sharon’s election victory. It didn’t take long for him to develop a negative opinion of Yasser Arafat. The outgoing President Clinton famously said to Colin Powell, Bush’s Secretary of State, about Arafat, “Don’t you ever trust that son of a bitch. He lied to me and he’ll lie to you.” Bush appeared to take that message to heart. Despite expressing support for Palestinian statehood at his first UN General Assembly speech that fall, Bush was not eager to launch a full-blown peace initiative. Instead, the new administration was looking to avoid the fruitless peace process in which Clinton had invested so much. Bush’s senior advisers viewed Arafat more as a menace and less as a partner.

“I would divide it into three periods,” says Elliott Abrams, Bush’s top Middle East expert. “The first is pre-9/11. There’s a general distaste for Arafat and a desire not to engage with him. But on the other hand, he is ‘Mr. Palestine,’ and Powell, among others, is saying we have to deal with him, that he is what he is.” But then 9/11 happened, and the White House’s calculation shifted dramatically. All of a sudden, the Bush Administration was engaged in a war on terror, and Arafat’s support for terror in the Second Intifada put him in the Administration’s sights.

The question for the Administration in this second period of Bush-Arafat relations was basically what to do with Arafat and his connection to terror. According to Abrams, “That question [was] not answered until the Karine A affair in January 2002.” Less than six months after the events of 9/11, Israel seized a cargo ship laden with weapons bound for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. According to the Israeli military, the freighter carried over fifty tons of war equipment. Arafat denied the freighter was bound for his PA, but the Bush Administration wasn’t buying it. “The administration basically concluded that [Arafat] really is a terrorist,” recalls Abrams, “Bush [was] for a Palestinian state, but Arafat cannot lead that state.”

Palestinian officials, too, could see the writing on the wall after 9/11 and the Karine A affair. “It was obvious immediately after the 9/11 events that the intifada was extremely harmful to Palestinian interests,” says Juma‘a. “The whole formula on the international level changed. Suddenly countries of the world were being classified as either pro-terror or anti-terror…. That’s when we started to lose the international compassion and sympathy for our cause.”

These political developments, dramatic as they were, became somewhat meaningless for Abbas in June of 2002, when his oldest son, Mazen, died of a heart attack at the age of 42. Besides running the family’s business interests in Qatar, Mazen was also one of his father’s most trusted political advisers. “He was very close to Mazen and very proud of him,” recalls Tibi, a longtime friend of the family. “His death was a terrible blow to the entire family. He was still young and had a bright future ahead of him.” Mazen’s body was flown to Ramallah, where hundreds attended a state funeral, including Arafat. “We went to the mourning house, and Arafat left the muqata’a to join,” recalls Fares. The Palestinian newspapers were filled with condolence advertisements for an entire week.

While Abbas was grieving the death of his beloved son, the developments on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza continued to make him look prophetic. In his conversation with Arafat in October of 2000, Abbas had said that if Fatah and the PA encouraged terrorism, they would eventually lose control and strengthen their own internal rivals. In October of 2002, a group of Hamas terrorists assassinated a senior commander of the PA’s police force in Gaza in broad daylight. When the heads of the security agencies in Gaza asked Arafat to order a painful retribution against Hamas for the assassination, Arafat refused to do so, disappointing his own security chiefs and causing the entire PA establishment to appear ineffectual. “When they didn’t even try to take care of that problem in Gaza, it became clear to many Palestinians how weak they had become in just two years,” says Dichter. Two years prior, Arafat had refused Abbas’s demand that he use his security forces to stop the violence against Israel. Now, he was too weak to use them to stop violence against his own institutions.

With Israeli tanks rolling into Ramallah, Palestinians began to believe that the intifada had failed them. Aaron David Miller, a longtime State Department adviser on Arab-Israeli issues, recalls visiting Arafat with Bush Administration envoy General Anthony Zinni: “[We] saw Arafat when he was being besieged by the Israelis and the muqata’a was a scene out of a bunker: all the windows were blocked and Arafat was there in candlelight with his pistol on the table. Zinni described Saeb [Erekat, a top negotiator] and [Yasser] Abed Rabbo looking like a bunch of drowned rats.”

A possible peek into Abbas’s thoughts during that period, after two and a half years of a bloody and ultimately failed uprising, can be found in a 2003 article coauthored by his close confidant Hussein Agha in the New York Review of Books: “[Abbas] looks around him and sees Palestinian land thoroughly reoccupied by Israel, the Palestinian Authority destroyed, widespread economic distress, and political mayhem. Practically anyone can acquire a gun and claim to make policy by showing it off. This is not resistance; it is anarchy…. In the court of international official opinion, the Palestinians have lost the moral high ground so patiently acquired for years.”

Agha and his writing partner, former Clinton adviser Rob Malley, wrote that, in Abbas’s eyes,

“the last two and a half years…have been disastrous for the Palestinians, and Arafat, who, better than anyone else, could have brought the disaster to an end, chose instead not to exercise his full authority. There was nothing new about Arafat’s behavior; Abu Mazen was familiar with it as much as he was familiar with the man himself. Only this time, the result was an unmitigated catastrophe because it violated so many of Abu Mazen’s cardinal rules: do not confront Israel with violence but deal with it through negotiations; maintain bridges with the Israeli public; do not dissipate the Palestinians’ international legitimacy.”

Between 2000-03, Abbas emerged as the anti-Arafat. He gained the respect of a small group of peers while also making himself known in Israel and Washington as a man of principle. It’s a testimony to his character that he was averse to terror, yet it’s a barometer of his political acumen that he was unable to stop or even slow the bloody onslaught. Confronting Arafat and the Fatah militants would have been a tall order, but in secluding himself abroad and avoiding the spotlight he showed his tendency to retreat in times of confrontation. It has become a theme in Abbas’s political life ever since.

Arafat’s gamble on terrorism and violence unleashed a disaster upon his own people. Abbas failed in his attempt to stop it. But in defeat he also carved out a position for himself as leader of the disunited opposition. It was a position that soon led to a power struggle between the founder of the Palestinian national movement and his stubborn deputy. Abbas got his chance at righting what had gone so terribly wrong, in his view, during the intifada.

The Second Intifada was a seminal moment in Abbas’s political career: His aversion to terror was tested at home and praised abroad, yet his inability to effect real change on the ground revealed a broader weakness. This inability to convince the Palestinian street of the merits of his arguments plagues him still.

The post Mahmoud Abbas and the Years of Terror appeared first on The American Interest.

The China Housing Bubble Keeps Growing

Midway into 2017, Chinese authorities are still looking for good options to restrain the booming housing market—and they’re coming up empty. With every restriction either engendering local opposition or proving ineffectual, the bubble continues to expand, explains the Wall Street Journal:

With each new policy intended to restrict home purchases, buyers are piling in. Stressed about the prospect of being left behind, many are borrowing heavily, believing prices will continue to rise despite the restrictions and will soar if the government has to lift restrictions to spur economic growth.

Another article of faith is that the Communist Party won’t allow housing prices to collapse. “The government will spare no effort to make sure there are no big swings in the property market,” says Ni Pengfei, a housing expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank.

The desperate home buyers are exposing Beijing’s inability to control a housing market it has been relying on for economic growth. A decade ago, the real-estate sector, including construction and home furnishings, accounted for about 10% of China’s gross domestic product […] It now accounts for almost one-third.

When it comes to reining in the housing bubble, China’s authorities are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. They can’t stop the bubble without wrecking the economy and infuriating the public; they can’t let it keep building without it ultimately wrecking the economy and infuriating the public.

The cost of inaction keeps rising, but so too does the cost of aggressively confronting the bubble. When authorities imposed property controls in Shanghai this year, scores of angry middle-class home-owners took to the streets in protest, leaving the hapless authorities to deflect responsibility while walking back the new restrictions. And it’s not just homeowners who stand to lose from curbs on the market. China’s local governments rely heavily on land sales to fill their coffers; rising property prices suit them because it makes the undeveloped land they hold ever more valuable. In other words, political incentives and short-term economic growth demand the maintenance of a status quo that is clearly unsustainable in the long run.

As ever, it is a fool’s errand to confidently predict when the property bubble will burst. But China’s current slate of regulatory half-measures does not seem to be deflating it—and if it pops, the consequences could be disastrous.

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On Campus Sex Policies, the Shoe Is On the Other Foot

The Obama Administration’s Office for Civil Rights in Education was a victim of what academics call “regulatory capture.” That is, instead of enforcing the law impartially, it began to carry out the will of campus social justice activists—one of the interest groups that has business before the agency. This meant promulgating regulations, based on some of the most far-fetched assumptions of campus feminists, that created a presumption of guilt for young people accused of sexual assault.

But Trump’s OCR sees things very differently. The New York Times reports that the new head, Candace Jackson, believes that the Obama administration’s Title IX enforcement regime has railroaded many innocent young men.

Investigative processes have not been “fairly balanced between the accusing victim and the accused student,” Ms. Jackson argued, and students have been branded rapists “when the facts just don’t back that up.” In most investigations, she said, there’s “not even an accusation that these accused students overrode the will of a young woman.”

“Rather, the accusations — 90 percent of them — fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right,’” Ms. Jackson said.

Jackson later walked back her ’90 percent’ remarks: “What I said was flippant, and I am sorry.” But they still clearly offer a window into how her agency is likely to handle Title IX investigations in the coming years. It’s likely to see campus sexual assault as a problem to be managed, rather than an acute crisis, and it’s likely to give colleges more room for handling it as they see fit.

Many due process advocates have been heartened by Jackson’s remarks. After all, Title IX enforcement is due for a course correction. But it’s important to remember that she made her career not a civil liberties champion but as a partisan firebrand, attacking Bill Clinton for his alleged sexual predation and Hillary Clinton for her ostensible complicity. Hopefully Jackson, unlike her predecessor, will act as a neutral arbiter, rather than allowing the agency to be captured by one side or the other.

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Business Booming Between China and North Korea

President Trump’s plan to curtail Chinese trade with North Korea is not exactly going as planned, Reuters reports:

Chinese customs spokesman Huang Songping told a briefing on China’s overall trade figures that total trade with North Korea expanded by 10.5 percent to $2.55 billion in the first six months of the year.

While China’s imports from North Korea dropped 13.2 percent to $880 million in the period from January to June, exports to North Korea rose 29.1 percent to $1.67 billion, he said.

It looks like those first-quarter numbers were no fluke: bilateral trade continues to climb despite Trump’s urgings to get tough on North Korea. The trade trends here are not illegal, since the growth in exports has been fueled by goods that are not subject to UN sanctions (as the Chinese have been quick to point out). But we suspect those niceties are not going to sit well with President Trump, who expected Beijing to do more than the bare minimum against Pyongyang.

The President has already indicated that his patience with China is up, and he recently levied secondary sanctions on a Chinese bank in an sign of displeasure with China’s efforts in cracking down on trade. As Beijing refuses to budge and Trump moves ever-higher up the escalation ladder, expect harsher economic measures to make Pyongyang feel the pain.

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Reservoir Doggedness

The Frozen Hours: A Novel of the Korean War

by Jeff Shaara

Ballantine Books, 2017, 560 pp., $28.99

The Korean War and the Americans who directed its campaigns have recently seen some new literary light: Arthur Herman’s Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior (2017) is a bio weighing in a just under a thousand pages; H.W. Brands’s The General and the President (2016) examines the relationship between President Truman and General MacArthur, and Adam Makos’s Devotion (2015) is the story of two very unlikely friends flying attack aircraft off of U.S. Navy carriers during the war. Joining the list now is Jeff Shaara, who has made his career writing military historical fiction with a particular focus on the American Civil War. With The Frozen Hours, Shaara has jumped forward 85 years and taken on the Chosin Reservoir campaign, a military story as dramatic and heroic as any that exists.

As a genre, military historical fiction needs to be both a good tale well told and historically accurate. Shaara succeeds on both counts. The Frozen Hours would be a good choice for anyone with an interest in the genre, the Korean War in general, or a good MacArthur-bashing. Historical novelists can approach their work in any number of ways. One might write fictional characters into historical events, sending them skipping merrily, Forrest Gump-style, through cataclysm and catastrophe. Or one might imagine the conversations and sensibilities of significant historical characters involved in the events, only adding fictional characters as needed. The latter approach is Shaara’s, as he carries the reader through the events of the autumn of 1950 alongside Pete Riley, a Marine infantryman; Major General O.P. Smith, the commander of the First Marine Division, Riley’s unit; and Chinese General Sung Shi-Lun, the commander of the Ninth Army Group.

Shaara chooses to focus on the actions of Americans and Chinese to the exclusion of Koreans from both the North and South. The larger story of the campaign is the entrance of Communist China into the war and the resultant devastation of the United Nations forces commanded by General Douglas MacArthur. Koreans are present, as Shaara tells it, but they are unnecessary to one’s understanding of the story. Shaara’s acceptance of their historical presence even as he allows their narrative absence may seem cold if not arrogant, but it reflects how the major antagonists in the war saw Koreans at the time—as walk-ons in their own war. The story he tells is one of courage and of leadership, of integrity and grit, and of the terrible human costs of war. It is also a story of hubris, racism, and a firm but misguided belief in the great-man theory of history.

The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when 75,000 North Korean soldiers backed by Soviet-provided T-34 tanks blitzed across the border into South Korea. The South Korean army withered and, even with U.S. reinforcements, by August the North controlled nearly all the peninsula. U.S. forces under Lieutenant General Walton Walker held a 140-mile perimeter around the east-coast port of Pusan. In September, General Douglas MacArthur ordered an amphibious invasion deep behind North Korean lines, on the west-coast port of Inchon.

The Inchon invasion was perilous and audacious. General O.P. Smith’s First Marine Division stormed the docks and quays of the port and within a day had secured the port city and begun crashing toward Seoul, breaking North Korean supply lines, destabilizing the North’s rear area, and forcing the Communist commanders into a strategic withdrawal. After reclaiming Seoul, MacArthur ordered his field commanders—Walker commanding the Eighth Army in the west and Major General Edward “Ned” Almond commanding Tenth U.S. Corps (X Corps) in the east—to pursue the North Koreans to the Yalu River separating Korea from China.

Shaara begins his story at Inchon. The first line of the book is delivered by MacArthur at the moment of his greatest triumph. Shaara must show us the great man at the opening of the story. MacArthur is the gun, displayed in the first act, that must go off in the third. It is MacArthur’s operational error, his hubris, and his racism that make the events in the story both tragic and inevitable. It is a very sound decision on Shaara’s part to leave him unseen for the remainder of the book, for his presence, even his shadow, is overwhelming. For here is the five-star general, the viceroy; a man authorized to wear the Medal of Honor, three Distinguished Service Crosses, five Distinguished Service Medals, and seven Silver Star Medals. When he commanded the Inchon landings, MacArthur had been a general officer for 32 years. He was a brigadier general when his subordinate field commanders (and his eventual replacement, Matthew Ridgway) were lieutenants. It isn’t possible to tell a story of the U.S. involvement in the Korean War without MacArthur. Nor is there a way to focus on others with Mac on the stage, so just as Shaara must show MacArthur at the beginning, he must also get him off stage in order to continue.

At its best, a novel is a vehicle to illuminate the human condition. Shaara’s focuses the reader on the actions and lives of the three principal characters and those around them. The bombs and fighter planes, the grenades, rifles and machine guns, the tanks and howitzers all play roles in the story, but this is a story about men—only one female character comes onto the stage—and war. Shaara shows us men as complete humans with all their frailties: fears, insecurities, egos, tempers, and ambitions.

O.P. Smith’s First Marine Division is the hub around which the story of the Chosin Reservoir campaign turns. Ned Almond, commanding X Corps, ordered Smith to move his division up the west side of the reservoir while the Army’s Seventh Division moved up the east side. Almond, constantly pushing for faster and more aggressive action by his subordinate commanders, had drunk heavily of the MacArthur Kool-Aid, and allowed himself to believe what MacArthur’s intelligence staff reported—that the Chinese wouldn’t enter the war.

Shaara gives us Almond, flying in and out of unit headquarters issuing orders and handing out medals, as a complicated but clear villain in the narrative. We see him pushing Smith to move faster, to exploit the enemy’s apparent retreat, while Smith delays in order to allow his units to consolidate, his logistics tail to catch up, and his engineers to build airfields.

Shaara’s O.P. Smith is a taciturn Christian Scientist who would probably just as soon be home with his wife and kids as fighting the Chinese in Korea. Smith worries constantly that he will lose the division. To lose a division would mean the destruction of the thing he has spent his life building, and the destruction of the man he has spent his life becoming. As Smith moves his regiments further north through the frozen mountain passes, we feel his anxiety, his contempt for Almond, and his regard for the Chinese soldiers he is about to battle. He worries about how he is perceived; should he smoke his pipe in front of his troops? Should he follow orders as given or find ways to delay the division’s advance in order to protect his men?

In Smith we see the embodied trust of 15,000 men that their general will do everything he can to carry out his mission while sacrificing as few of them as possible. Through Smith we see the hubris of MacArthur and Almond, who are willing to chew up units, driving commanders to overextend their lines of communication in order to meet a political time-table of taking Seoul within ninety days of the North Korean invasion, or of reaching the Yalu River in time to have the boys home for Christmas. Through Smith we see MacArthur’s and Almond’s racism, their belief that they understand “the Asian” mind and that the enemy are a bunch of “laundrymen.”

The key position of the division’s battles is a hill in the Taktong Pass, where the men of Fox Company, Seventh Marines fight. Shaara’s second narrative voice is that of Pete Riley, a private first class in Fox Company. We are with Riley as he digs into the frozen ground atop what will be known as Fox Hill. For six days and nights, from November 27 until they are relieved on December 2, Riley and the Marines of Fox Company repel waves of Chinese infantry charging and sometimes overrunning their positions. Riley is the story’s everyman. His voice is that of every cold, hungry, scared, infantryman from every war ever fought. It is through Riley that we see just what cold and hunger and lack of sleep can do to men and it is through Riley that we see the universal truth that men fight and die not for anything as glorious as a honor or justice or freedom, but for the man in the next fighting position.

Riley and the other Marines in the First Division were fighting against the soldiers of Chinese General Sung Shi-Lun’s Ninth Army Group. Sung’s orders were to destroy the American and South Korean forces before they reached the Chinese border on the Yalu. Mao Zedong gave Sung the 125,000 soldiers of the Ninth Army Group to do this with and Sung slipped them across the border, moving only at night, to positions in the mountains around the reservoir. There they waited and watched while the Americans stretched their lines of communications, extending the distances between units and from secure lines. Sung understood the advantages the Americans had in technology, aircraft and artillery chief among them. Moreover, he understood the American way of war and planned his campaign accordingly.

Shaara’s decision to have Sung as his third narrative voice allows us to sit beside him in a cold hut as he briefs his commanders—the hut is cold because the Chinese won’t make a fire that would be visible to American aircraft. We walk with Sung through the field hospitals where men sit with bandaged hands because their fingers have been amputated after freezing to their weapons. The ones who survive the surgery will be allowed to walk home to China. We try to understand Sung as a man and perhaps through him to understand the Chinese soldiers so underestimated by MacArthur and Almond. As much as O.P. Smith feels MacArthur’s presence, Sung feels Mao watching him, judging him.

Perhaps the dominant character in the book is the cold. Aside from the narrator, it is the character we spend the most time with. According to Dr. Stanley Wolf, battalion surgeon for the Second battalion of the Seventh Marine Regiment, the temperatures during the Chosin Campaign reached as low as 40 below zero. Dr. Wolf wrote that wind chills weren’t estimated then, but current techniques would place the temperatures in the range of 60-70 degrees below zero. Throughout the story of the fighting at Chosin, we read of the Marines’ struggles with the cold. The linings of their pac boots froze, oiled weapons froze, C-rations froze. Hungry Marines quickly figured out that they could thaw pieces of candy—specifically Tootsie-Rolls—inside their mouths and the candies became a staple food. When water in canteens was frozen and rations had run out, the Marines ate Tootsie-Rolls and killed Chinese.

The contemporary parallel to the war in Korea would seem to be Afghanistan. Korea was the first significant hot war in the broader context of the Cold War. But it never quite captured the imagination of the American people as did the fight against fascism or as would the war in Vietnam. America, having fought and won World War II, wanted nothing more than to go back to work, buy houses in the suburbs, and watch Milton Berle, Ed Sullivan, and Howdy Doody. Except there was this war over there somewhere. Korea was an exceptionally violent and stubborn four-year house fire in the context of the larger, global war we knew as the Cold War.

Afghanistan, likewise, was the first war of a new era, and also one that has never captured the imagination of America. Most Americans believed we entered the war there to capture and kill Osama bin Laden and the planners of the 9/11 attacks. We later learned that even though Bin Laden was in Afghanistan when we entered, the strategic role of the fight in Afghanistan was, for President Bush and his war cabinet, to fix the enemy while preparations were made for a larger war in Iraq against a man and nation that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. If Korea was a four-year flare-up of the Cold War, Afghanistan is a long-smoldering tire fire sparked by the long war against terrorism.

The lessons of Korea? “Never get involved in a land war in Asia” springs quickly to mind. But there are others. How about this one? Don’t move the goalposts.

When we went into Korea in July 1950 the goal was to push the invaders back to the status quo ante, defined as the 38th Parallel. That took just over three months and cost just over 8,000 American lives. The war continued for thirty more months and cost nearly 22,000 more American lives because the goals changed. We went into Afghanistan to dismantle al-Qaeda and drive the Taliban from power. Al-Qaeda as we knew it then no longer exists. But it has metastasized into cancerous cells around the globe and spawned Daesh, partially at least because we sent far too few troops to do the job and allowed bin Laden to slip the noose. The Taliban are no longer in power in Afghanistan, but they still exist. And we are sending the Marines back to Helmand because the goal of successfully turning the war over to the Afghans likely isn’t reachable in a generation.

Since the Korean War America has fought a series of improvisational and inconclusive wars without either declarations of war or the consensus of the citizenry, taken to the field against ideologies rather than states, and given our generals and troops ever-shifting goals and definitions of “victory.”

Korea introduced Americans (and the world) to the idea of limited war. In 1950 George Kennan’s containment strategy—“Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points….”—stood against MacArthur’s (and his supporters’) vehement distrust of the idea that “war can be fought in a piecemeal way, that you can make a half war, not a whole war.”

At the tactical level, the current American way of war is similar to that first displayed in Korea. Sung’s armies knew the Americans were road-bound and reliant on technology (in those days aviation and long-range artillery) to win. We are still pretty much road-bound (or helicopter-bound) and reliant on technology. In Korea, the enemy fought from the high mountains using limited technology and guerilla tactics honed during the Chinese civil war. In Afghanistan, the enemy fights from high mountains using low technology (and some higher tech) and with tactics, techniques, and procedures honed against the Russians and updated by nearly two decades of fighting the long war. America’s warfighters are probably the same type of men (and now ever more women) as those who fought in Korea: valiant, smart, and dedicated. How we, the American people, and the military bureaucracy treat our troops has changed, though. The U.S. government awarded 13 Medals of Honor for actions during two weeks of fighting at the Chosin Reservoir. There have been 14 Medals of Honor awarded in 16 years of fighting in Afghanistan.

The Frozen Hours succeeds in reminding us of the valor of the Marines at Chosin, and of the incredible capacity of human beings to suffer and to survive in order to protect something larger than themselves. The story of the Marines’ fight at Chosin deserves a good retelling once in a while, for it bears lessons that transcend any particular war. Shaara gives them to us.

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Xi Jinping, New Defender of Liberal Order, Lets Chinese Dissident Die

Seven years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, China’s most famous political prisoner has died, locked away under the heavily guarded watch of the Chinese state. The New York Times: 

Liu Xiaobo, the renegade Chinese intellectual who kept vigil on Tiananmen Square in 1989 to protect protesters from encroaching soldiers, promoted a pro-democracy charter that brought him an 11-year prison sentence and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize of 2010 while locked away, died on Thursday. He was 61. […]

The Chinese government revealed he had liver cancer in late June only after it was virtually beyond treatment. Officially, Mr. Liu gained medical parole. But even as he faced death, he was kept silenced and under guard in a hospital in northeastern China, still a captive of the authoritarian controls that he had fought for decades.

As Bill Bishop points out in his Sinocism newsletter, Liu’s death will be difficult for even Beijing’s most dedicated apologists to spin. “The last Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to be effectively killed by his own government was Carl Ossietsky, in Germany in 1938,” Bishop notes. “Does Xi care that the the likely precedent here for Beijing will be pre-World War II Nazi Germany?”

Another question follows from that one: will the West’s newfound defenders of Xi Jinping care that the man they have anointed in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as the champion of the “liberal world order” drove a courageous dissident to his death? Or will they persist in the delusion that Xi is a liberal darling, content to overlook his human rights abuses so long as he delivers rhetorical paeans to globalization and needles Trump on the world stage?

Sadly, the answer is not clear. Many in the West have already proven easy marks as Xi has tried to reinvent himself as a principled defender of international values. All it took was a single speech at Davos for the plaudits to pour in: China has become the “global grown-up,” claimed the front cover of The Economist. Beijing would now be seen “as the linchpin of global economic stability,” raved Bessma Momani in Newsweek, while “Trump’s America [would] no longer play the role of enforcing the liberal rules and norms the country once coveted and benefited from.” Susan Shirk, a former China hand in the Clinton administration, perhaps went the furthest in singing Xi’s praises to The Guardian:

“Let’s lavish praise on them … I think it was super-smart of Xi Jinping to go to Davos and give the speech … More credit to him, really.” […]

“I believe the United States actually has sponsored China’s emergence as a constructive global power – not just allowed it but really, actively encouraged it – and I don’t see anything bad about that. The only bad thing is that the United States is not just sitting by the sidelines, but actively subverting [the status quo].”

Liu Xiaobo’s death should be a sobering reminder that this kind of thinking is nonsense. China is a dictatorship and a revisionist power, not a defender of liberal values or a responsible stakeholder. As the world pays tribute to Liu’s brave legacy of speaking truth to power—and his family remains under house arrest in China, unable to speak out—acknowledging that reality is the very least we can do.

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Lula Gets Convicted

Brazil’s former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been convicted for corruption and sentenced to prison for nine and a half years. The Financial Times notes that markets are loving the news:

While the populist leader remains free pending appeal, the ruling threatens to eliminate him from the running for presidential elections next year, an outcome that pleased markets.

The country’s benchmark Bovespa stock index rose 1.6 per cent on the news, while the Brazilian real extended its earlier gains to trade 1.4 per cent higher at R$3.2079 per dollar — a two-month high.

“You are removing a candidate who definitely the market did not want to see there,” said Alberto Bernal, chief emerging markets and global strategist at XP Securities in Miami.

Many on the Left will believe that the court is acting politically. Over the last few years it has become clear that almost every member of the country’s political establishment is corrupt, Left, Right and Center. Paradoxically that can lead voters to discount corruption allegations: If they are all crooks, why not pick the crooks on “your” side?

Lula remains the most popular politician in a divided country. The establishment fears, probably with good reason, that a new Lula administration would be even more statist and corrupt than before. But if much of the population believes that he is being unfairly punished for sins that all the other politicians commit, jailing Lula or banning him from the next election could bring on a crisis. It is not clear how long the fragile consensus behind Brazil’s legal and political institutions will last under these unprecedented circumstances.

Brazil, with roughly half the population and half the GDP of all of Latin America, is floundering badly. Stability, prosperity and democracy in Brazil are more important than ever as Venezuela edges toward civil conflict. This story is worth following.

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