Nearpeer CSS Monthly Press Pack January 2020

Nearpeer CSS Monthly Press Pack January 2020

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Nearpeer CSS Monthly Press Pack July 2020

How to use this document?

T his document was compiled by the CSS wing of Nearpeer to help CSS aspirants by
providing them with all the important articles of last month from local as well as
international newspapers.

This will serve as an important guide in preparation as well as revision of not only current
affairs but many other compulsory and optional subjects such as Islamic Studies, Pakistan
Affairs, Sociology, Gender Studies, International Relations and Political Science.

This issue is designed to help the you in the following ways:

1- It will help you with catching up with all the happenings of the last month
2- It contains analyses of various issues of importance. Analyses is as important as knowing
the content of news
3- A diverse range of articles are selected from among local as well as international newspapers
and journals, so now you know you do not have to go through old archives of old newspapers
4- This will also serve as a quick revision guide for aspirants just before the exams
5- Candidates can use this issue in order to brush up their analytical as well as comprehension
skills
6- Additionally, they can also use it to improve their vocabulary and its usage

All the Best!

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Contents

Nord Stream 2 Could Sever Transatlantic Ties (Bloomberg) .................................................... 5

A Bad Gas Pipeline For Europe ......................................................................................... 5
The oil and coronavirus crises may hasten US geopolitical decline (Al-Jazeera) ..................... 7
Pakistan’s Digital Divide Grows Sharper Amid the Pandemic (The Diplomat) ....................... 8
This Time, Russia Is in Afghanistan to Win (Foreign Policy)................................................. 10
Bringing the Israeli model to Kashmir (Al-Jazeera) ................................................................ 13
This Is What the Future of Globalization Will Look Like (Foreign Policy) ........................... 18
How China Scammed Hong Kong (The New York Times) .................................................... 23
Why Race Matters in International Relations (Foreign Policy) ............................................... 26
China’s Own Documents Show Potentially Genocidal Sterilization Plans in Xinjiang (Foreign
Policy) ...................................................................................................................................... 30
Pakistan’s political crisis is deepening with the rise of COVID-19 cases (The Diplomat) ..... 34
Coronavirus Bailouts Stoke Climate Change (Foreign Policy) ............................................... 35
GREENING THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM ..................................................................... 36
ACCELERATING RISKS ............................................................................................... 37
THE WRONG MESSAGE .............................................................................................. 38
Modi's India should be on the US's religious freedom blacklist (Al-Jazeera) ......................... 38
The case for CPC designation ........................................................................................... 39
How a Great Power Falls Apart (Foreign Affairs) ................................................................... 40
A COUNTRY ON THE PRECIPICE .............................................................................. 42
ALL COUNTRIES END ................................................................................................. 44
India-China tensions: It is decision time for New Delhi .......................................................... 45

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Nord Stream 2 Could Sever
Transatlantic Ties
(Bloomberg)
U .S. President Donald Trump is
furious at Germany for many
reasons, not all of them fathomable.
In phone conversations with Angela
Merkel, he’s allegedly called the German
chancellor “stupid” and denigrated her in
“near-sadistic” tones. Though this be
madness, as the Bard might say, there
is — on rare occasions — method in it. One
such case is Nord Stream 2.
It is an almost-finished gas pipeline under
the Baltic Sea between Russia and Germany,
running right next to the original Nord
Stream, which has been in operation since
2011. “We’re supposed to protect Germany
from Russia, but Germany is paying Russia
billions of dollars for energy coming from a
pipeline,” Trump roared at a recent campaign
rally. “Excuse me, how does that work?”
As is his wont, the president thereby
conflated many things. One of his grievances
is that Germany has long been scrimping on
its military spending, in effect free-riding on
U.S. protection, for which he wants to punish
his “delinquent” ally. Another is that the
European Union, which he considers
Germany’s marionette, allegedly takes
advantage of the U.S. in business. Trump
also wants to sell Europe more American
liquefied natural gas (LNG).
But Trump isn’t the only American trying to
stop Nord Stream 2. In December, Congress
aimed sanctions at a Swiss company that
supplied the ships to lower the pipes into the
water. This delayed the pipeline’s launch.
Then Russia sent another vessel to finish the
job. So this week a bipartisan group of
Senators moved to widen the sanctions in
order to kill Nord Stream 2 altogether.
A Bad Gas Pipeline For Europe
Nord Stream 2 has isolated Germany within
the EU and NATO; only Russia's happy
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The problem is that if this new round
becomes law, it will amount to an all-out
economic assault on Europe. It could hit
individuals and companies from many
countries that are only tangential to the
project — by underwriting insurance for the
pipeline, say, or providing port services to
the ships involved.
Considering this an instance of illegal
American extraterritoriality, the German
government now plans to make the EU
retaliate against the U.S. Trump, in the heat
of America’s “silly season” leading up to
November, could then strike back with new
tariffs on German cars or a full-blown trade
war. The transatlantic alliance, which was
already frayed, is close to tearing.
To me, this situation increasingly resembles
“chicken,” a classic in game theory. The
question is whether both sides are merely
feigning recklessness (as the game assumes)
or are already too far gone. And that applies
just as much to the Germans. They like to
play the reasonable side in transatlantic fights
but deserve just as much blame as Trump and
Congress for causing this mess.
If Russia were a normal country, the German
rationale for this pipeline might make sense.
Europe will need more gas, especially to
replace much dirtier coal and to supplement
renewable sources of energy on the way
to becoming carbon-neutral. And to get that
gas, it makes sense to diversify — between
Norwegian imports, American LNG or any
other sort, including the Russian stuff. And
piping it into Europe along the shortest route
— through the Baltic — is efficient.
But Russia is far from a normal country. It
has for years been waging hybrid warfare in
Europe, ranging from disinformation
campaigns to aggression in Ukraine. At
Germany’s urging, Russia recently extended
a contract with Kiev to keep piping gas
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through Ukraine for several more years. But
in the longer term, the new pipeline gives
Russia dangerous geopolitical and strategic
options.
With two pipelines through the Baltic and
another big one through the Black Sea,
Russia could in the future cut all central and
eastern European countries out of billions in
transit fees. The country already
controls almost 40% of the EU’s gas market
even without Nord Stream 2. Once that goes
online, the rest of Europe may become too
dependent and therefore vulnerable to
blackmail. When Trump calls Germany “a
captive to Russia,” he has half a point.
This is why Poland and the Baltic republics
of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia also oppose
Nord Stream 2. As NATO’s eastern front line
and former victims of invasion
and aggression, they fear Russia more
viscerally than Germans do nowadays.
Psychologically, the Poles distrust any deal
between Germany and Russia over their
heads, because it reminds them of the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, which
carved up their region between Nazi and
Soviet spheres of influence.
Putin. These days he also chairs the
supervisory board of Nord Stream AG,
which is owned by Gazprom PJSC and thus
controlled by the Kremlin, as well as the
board of Rosneft Oil Co PJSC, a Russian oil
giant.
This week, Schroeder testified to the
Bundestag that Germany and Europe should
prepare tough countermeasures against U.S.
sanctions. He won support from The Left,
a party that descends from the former regime
in East Germany.
Nord Stream 2 was and is a terrible idea. It’s
a geopolitical project disguised as a private
business deal. It has shown Germany to be an
insensitive and naïve ally, and the U.S. to be
a truculent one. It is now rending what
little remains of their former relationship. If
there is any way to leave these pipes buried
and forgotten under the sea, all involved
should discreetly and diplomatically search
for it. Otherwise, this game of chicken will
end the way it’s not supposed to.

My question to the Germans, then, is why

they have for years been deaf to these
strategic concerns by their partners in NATO
and the European Union, while coddling
their own pro-Russian business lobbies and,
of course, the Kremlin.

German intransigence looks even more

unsavory when considering who within
Germany is most passionately in favor of the
pipeline. Support for it skews sharply to the
left, with its long tradition of anti-American
and pro-Russian leanings. The most
egregious example is Gerhard Schroeder, a
Social Democrat who was Angela Merkel’s
predecessor as chancellor. He’s always been
buddies with Russian President Vladimir

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The oil and coronavirus crises
may hasten US geopolitical
decline
(Al-Jazeera)
T he continuing COVID-19 crisis has
complicated geopolitics in many
different ways. The geopolitics of oil
is one prominent example.
The economic misery enveloping the world,
deepened by the crash in oil prices, has
sharpened a split within the United States
ruling elite. Those who support and fund
President Donald Trump are aligned with
domestic US energy companies that
suddenly face a great risk from plummeting
oil and gas demand. This abrupt market
downturn has forced Whiting Petroleum to
file for bankruptcy and there are already
reports that Chesapeake Energy is preparing
to do the same. Many others may follow.
Many of these companies produce oil by the
costly "fracking" of shale deposits and were
already heavily in debt prior to the COVID-
19 crisis.
From 2006 to 2014, 16 publicly traded shale
oil companies had exceeded the debit side of
their balance sheet over the credit side by
more than $80bn. At current, depressed
prices, most of them are likely to face
bankruptcy before long. As Quartz has
reported, "not one of the 100 largest fracking
operations in the country can turn a profit".
It is not surprising that the owners of these
companies are mobilising Trump's racist
"Make America Great Again" (MAGA) base
in a desperate attempt to save themselves.
The American Legislative Exchange Council
(backed by key Trump supporters, the Koch
family) and the Michigan Freedom Fund
(linked to the Trump supporters, the DeVos
family) have backed gun-toting protests at
state capitols.
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They are demanding an immediate reopening
of local economies, even as thousands of
people are being exposed to the risk of
infection and the death toll from COVID-19
increases every day crossing the tragic
100,000 mark as the nationwide total.
While the heavily armed white
demonstrators with swastikas, nooses, and
Confederate flags are repulsive, the other
"liberal" side in this fight is also not
reassuring to the American citizen.
The neoliberal mainstream Democrats, who
trace their origin to the descendants of John
D Rockefeller and his Standard Oil
monopoly, are spearheaded by multinational
oil and finance capital companies. To protect
their long-term profits, they are pushing for a
slower emergence from the pandemic
lockdown.
Their position is supported by the best
medical science and that has led to even more
panic and fact denial by Trump and his
supporters. Where is this internal fight
headed?
Since deep-pocketed giants like ExxonMobil
are better equipped to wait out a price
squeeze than smaller domestic companies,
they can wait while they watch their
domestic competition wither and die.
In fact, from the neoclassical realist
perspective in international relations, it is not
an unreasonable bet that the neoliberal
politicians - many of whom, like former
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton, were already largely aligned with
the neocons in foreign policy - are planning
for even wider-scale confrontations with
their perceived global rivals China and
possibly Russia.
Thus, the oil crash further complicates
already unstable geopolitics. Clearly, the
historic, pandemic-driven reduction in
energy demand lies at the root of the
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current oil price crisis. But the virus is not
solely to blame.
In early March, when the global economy
was still running at a "normal" pace, Saudi
Arabia and Russia launched a price war that
flooded the market with millions of
additional barrels of oil. Republican Senator
Ted Cruz suggested Saudi Arabia, the once-
reliable US partner, was intentionally driving
US shale oil producers out of business.
Undoubtedly, the US leadership's loss of
influence in the Middle East, even with so-
called allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel, has
been accelerated by the isolationist and
incompetent Trump administration.
However, more worrisome is the prospect
that this decline may be a sign of further
geopolitical instabilities to come. As China
and Russia seek to fill the void from the US
geopolitical decline, the Middle East region
is becoming even more unstable than usual.
The two main perceived - that is to say,
perceived by the US foreign policy
establishment - challengers to US dominance
could emerge from this crisis stronger than
before.
US sanctions against Russian oil forced
Russia to diversify its economy, leaving it "in
very good shape to cope with lower [oil]
prices". China, a net importer of oil, clearly
gains economically from lower oil and gas
prices. Furthermore, the people's republic has
evolved - at least partly - into a form of state
capitalism. Therefore, the Chinese
government actively supports its national oil
companies which are considered to be of
strategic importance.
Combined with the healthcare and economic
disasters of the pandemic, the latest conflict
over oil could accelerate the US's economic
and geopolitical decline leading to
unpredictable behaviour by the US
leadership.
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With respect to China, some confusing,
aggressive behaviour of the US military is
already on display. In April, the US sent the
guided-missile destroyer USS Barry to sail
near the Paracel Islands, a disputed
archipelago in the contested South China
Sea. Shortly after, the US flew two Air Force
B-1B bombers over the South China Sea in a
provocative show of force.
I am not predicting larger confrontations in
the immediate future. Whether hotspots
anywhere including, the strait of Hormuz, a
hotspot of tensions between Iran and its Arab
neighbours, will lead to regional wars is far
from certain. But with growing US-China
friction, changing alliances and new
geopolitical alignments, the risk of violent
regional confrontations will most likely
increase.
Pakistan’s Digital Divide Grows
Sharper Amid the Pandemic
(The Diplomat)
P olice in Pakistan’s Balochistan
province’s capital Quetta recently
arrested more than a dozen student
leaders and activists for demanding internet
connectivity before universities conduct
online classes and exams. While they were
all released eventually, no assurance has
been given to them or to protesting students
in other provinces that they will be able to
take their forthcoming exams.
Pakistan’s statutory regulatory body, the
Higher Education Commission (HEC),
recently directed all registered institutions of
higher education to start holding online
classes followed by online exams. For this,
the schools were asked to acquire and use the
required technology as well as train staff on
an urgent basis.
Tech giant Microsoft deployed teams for
online and remote learning interactions
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across more than 100 public and private
universities to support HEC’s move. Perhaps
that’s good for some students who have
access to the internet.
With about 22 percent of the population
having access to the internet, Pakistan ranked
76th among 100 countries in the Inclusive
Internet Index 2020. The ranking was based
on four parameters: availability,
affordability, relevance, and readiness of
people to use the internet.
Not surprisingly, the HEC’s decision drew
protests from students across Pakistan.
Student protests should also be seen in light
of how precious higher education is for
Pakistan’s youth. Less than 10 percent of
Pakistan’s population has access to
university education, according to the World
Bank. And the number drops significantly,
one would safely assume, among those who
live in backward areas.
Balochistan and the adjoining Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa province are among the most
backward parts of the country, and, on top of
that, the internet remains blocked
intermittently also for “security reasons” in
the region, including parts of Pakistan-
administered Kashmir.
“Being a hosteller, I had to leave the
university and the city as soon as the
lockdown was announced. There’s hardly
any connectivity in my village, and on top of
that 10-12 hours of load-shedding is
common,” said a student, who identified
himself only as Yasir, in the Rawalakot area
of Pakistan-administered Kashmir. “So far,
we were told to submit online assignments
which we managed somehow, because we
had time. But online exams or presentations
are out of question because you can’t hold on
electricity.”
Yasir, who studies at a university in
Islamabad, added, “In cities, people have
proper access to the internet and all the
necessary gadgets required for online classes.
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In my village, there’s neither electricity nor
proper connectivity.”
Members of the Baloch Students Alliance
also went on a hunger strike for three days.
“You can’t reach the moon if you travel by
Pakistan Railways’ Thal Express; you’ll
need a rocket for that. Similarly, if you wish
to implement the online system of education,
you’ll have to provide the internet first.
Where is the internet in Balochistan, or
FATA, or Kashmir?” a student said while
protesting.
The strike was called off after talks with the
chief minister of Balochistan, Jam Kamal
Khan, who assured the students that he
would convey their grievances to the HEC
and the federal minister of education.
Even in the cities, students have raised
questions over the ability of professors and
teachers to be conduct online classes.
“There is no infrastructure, there’s no
internet,” said Omer Adullah, from a student
group called “Revolutionary Students
Front,” in Punjab province. “There is not
even basic training of teachers and
professors. Online examinations at this time
would only help the telecommunication
companies and not students. It is
discriminatory.”
Like elsewhere in the world, educational
institutions had been closed due to the
COVID-19 pandemic, and in-person classes
remain closed in many countries. No
government can be blamed for it, but in
countries like Pakistan – as also India – the
authorities missed the whole point of a
lockdown.
The coronavirus-related restrictions were
meant to “flatten the curve,” or to “delay” the
imminent outbreak, so that governments
would get time to improve the healthcare
infrastructure and prepare themselves for
delivering other essential services, including
education, after the country opened up.
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However, all that the governments in South
Asia seem to have done is enforce the
lockdown with police batons while making
little or no preparations. And now, the batons
are once again being used when citizens are
protesting against government failures.
This Time, Russia Is in
Afghanistan to Win
(Foreign Policy)
T he recent revelations in the New York
Times and other media that U.S.
intelligence officials believed a
Russian military intelligence unit had offered
secret bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S.
and NATO forces in Afghanistan renew deep
concerns about the nefarious agenda
Vladimir Putin’s Russia has not only in
Afghanistan but also to destabilize the West.
The timing of the revelations—the findings
were briefed to U.S. President Donald Trump
in late February—is significant as it
coincided with the signing of the U.S.-
Taliban peace deal in Doha, Qatar, at the end
of February. It is likely that the Taliban’s
murky dealings with Russia were taking
place while they were negotiating with the
United States throughout 2019 and 2020,
calling into question the insurgent group’s
commitment to any peace deal.
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The agreement provided for a phased
withdrawal of NATO forces, with the United
States pulling out 5,000 of its 13,000 troops
over the next few months. In return, the
Taliban claim they would not enable Afghan
soil to be used for terrorism. But the
obstacles to peace are so profound and
numerous that the chances of the deal being
honored are slim. A United Nations
report stated that the Taliban retained close
links to al Qaeda and sought its counsel
during the negotiations with U.S. officials.
And the Haqqani network, the biggest faction
of the Taliban, has been accused by the
Afghan government of collaborating with an
ISIS affiliate—Islamic State Khorasan
Province (ISKP)—to carry out numerous
attacks in Afghanistan in 2020. (The most
horrific examples were the suicide and gun
attack on a Sikh gurdwara and the storming
of the Dasht-e-Barchi hospital’s maternity
ward in Kabul, killing nurses, women in
labor, and newly born babies.)
Amid the peace talks brokered by the United
States, one angle that most observers of
Afghanistan have ignored is the role of
Russia, which has enthusiastically supported
the agreement. Along with Pakistan, Russia
stands to be one of the biggest beneficiaries
of any NATO withdrawal. Over the past
several years, it has been quietly working in
the background to enhance its ties with the
Taliban, with the purpose of expanding its
strategic interests in Afghanistan—and in the
process exorcising the failings of the Soviet
Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Once
NATO and U.S. forces leave, Russia will
once again have an opportunity to step in.
And in that sense, the recent revelations
about Moscow’s sordid arrangement with the
Taliban should come as no surprise.
On Feb. 15, 1989, a column of armored
personnel carriers rolled across the then-
named Friendship Bridge, the last of a Soviet
military contingent that fought a 10-year war
in Afghanistan. After losing more than
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13,000 troops in the conflict, the Soviet
Union withdrew, beaten and humiliated.
Later that year, the Congress of People’s
Deputies passed a resolution that denounced
the war. Consensus developed over decades
that the Afghan occupation and war were
costly mistakes.
However, during Vladimir Putin’s third term
as president, the Russian government began
reevaluating the intervention as one that took
place within the bounds of international law
and in the interests of the Soviet Union.
While remaining critical of the excesses of
the Soviet past, Putin legitimized the strong
state and powerful security forces created
during the Soviet era that somehow
compensated for its brutalities. Putin’s focus
on Afghanistan is an essential aspect of how
Russia seeks to reevaluate its past while
furthering its future strategic interests. As
Syria demonstrates, the Kremlin is rewriting
history to retrospectively justify intervention
abroad as it seeks to regain its status as a
global power.
Putin may have intervened in Syria because
of legitimate security concerns, a legacy of
friendship with the regime of President
Bashar al-Assad, and because of the
opportunity it represented to oppose U.S.
interests. Russia was able to avoid the
perception that its incursion into Syria was
similar to the Soviet Afghan experience
while also ensuring there was no blowback to
Russia from its nationals from the Caucuses
who joined jihadi groups like the Islamic
State. Russia is now using its successful
Syria experience to leverage its interests in
Afghanistan.
2014 signaled an important shift in Russian
foreign policy after the Kremlin moved to
involve itself more centrally in Afghan
affairs. In doing so, Moscow adopted several
different roles: It simultaneously styled itself
as peacemaker, military enforcer, and, most
concerning from Washington’s perspective,
funder of terrorist insurgents. On a surface
level, Russia increased its presence in
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Afghanistan because of the threat of ISKP.
For Moscow, ISKP poses three main
challenges to its strategic interests: the
potential of Russian citizens travelling to
Afghanistan as foreign terrorist fighters;
pledges of loyalty by North Caucasian
militant groups establishing informal and
formal ties; and the potential spillover of
violent extremism into Central Asia, which
in turn directly affects Russian interests. The
Kremlin admitted to its strategic relationship
with the Taliban in 2015, when Foreign
Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova
announced that Russia was sharing
intelligence with the Taliban pertaining to
ISKP movements. However, this is just one
factor in its decision to reinfiltrate
Afghanistan.
In a surprise step, following the U.S.-Taliban
agreement in Doha, the United States and
Russia issued a joint statement on mutually
agreeable issues pertaining to Afghanistan.
Both sides concurred that the preferred
Taliban designation as the Islamic Emirate of
Afghanistan would not be recognized by the
international community. However, Russia’s
prior interactions with the Taliban indicate a
different story especially as the group is
treated by Moscow with much reverence and
courted just like a recognized state actor.
The joint U.S.-Russia statement also calls on
the Taliban “to take concrete steps to ensure
that the territory of Afghanistan should not
be used by al-Qa-ida, Daesh [ISIS], or other
international terrorist groups” against others.
But the Taliban are not obliged to provide
any concrete steps on how this will be
achieved, nor are there any verification
mechanisms. For Russia, this disconnect can
be ignored if it can achieve its broader
strategic goals in Afghanistan. But it’s harder
for the West to reconcile these problems.
Much as it did during the Cold War, Russia
has once again identified Afghanistan as a
theater in which to challenge the United
States. At both the foreign relations and
security levels, Russian activities in
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Afghanistan are products of strategies
designed to counter American influence. One
of the most important lessons Russian
policymakers have learned from the Soviet
experience in Afghanistan is to refrain from
forging local allies in their own image and to
instead seek to galvanize partners wherever
mutual interests intersect. A case in point is
the nexus with the Taliban.
While the Kremlin maintains that its
relationship with the Taliban is limited only
to fighting ISKP and reconciliation within
Afghanistan, its activities go much deeper.
Russia has been accused of funding and
arming the Taliban. Russian night vision
sniper scopes have been discovered in the
hands of the Taliban. In 2017, Gen. John
Nicholson, then-commander of the NATO-
led Resolute Support Mission in
Afghanistan, revealed in a Senate Armed
Services Committee hearing that Russia was
actively funding the Taliban and therefore,
by proxy, al Qaeda. In 2018, Nicholson
followed that up by stating, “We’ve had
weapons brought to this headquarters and
given to us by Afghan leaders and [they]
said, ‘This was given by the Russians to the
Taliban.’”
There is also evidence that Russia has set up
supply networks to deliver weapons across
the border between Iran and Afghanistan. In
2017, Abdul Jabar Qahraman, who then
oversaw the security situation in Helmand
province for the Afghan government,
said Russia had collaborated with Iran to
create training camps for Taliban fighters in
Iran, who in turn would then deliver Russian
weapons throughout western and southern
Afghanistan.
Perhaps more alarming are reports that
Russia is funneling resources into
Afghanistan that can be sold for profit by the
Taliban. This includes shipping fuel tankers
from Uzbekistan through the Hairatan border
crossing, where they are delivered to Taliban
front companies that sell fuel worth $2.5
million per month. The Taliban distribute the
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money directly to their commanders to use
and launch attacks against the Afghan
government, forces, and civilians.
While Russian intelligence services smuggle
weapons and resources to the Taliban, the
Russian government continues to present
itself as a suitable alternative to the United
States in terms of political guidance and aid
for Afghanistan. Russia has attained short-
term benefits by presenting a narrative that it
stands by its allies, like the Taliban, no matter
how ruthless. Simultaneously, it has
denounced the United States as an
untrustworthy ally that will abandon its
friends.
In May 2019, the Putin administration
invited senior members of the Afghan
government and the Taliban to Moscow to
celebrate what it called “100 years of Russo-
Afghan friendship.” At this meeting, Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called for a
“total pullout of foreign forces” from
Afghanistan. It is ironic that Russia
continually calls for an end to foreign
military in Afghanistan despite maintaining
its own presence in the area. The implication
is obvious: Russia is engaging in a
diplomatic and military relationship with the
Taliban in order to counter the United States.
For Russia to succeed in Afghanistan, it also
needs to rectify a relationship with an old
adversary: Pakistan was essential to the U.S.
strategy in Afghanistan in the 1980s by
supplying weapons and providing logistics to
the Afghan-Arab mujahideen. Converging
interests in Afghanistan have been a key
factor in warming relations between Russia
and Pakistan, and both have voiced
affirmations of cooperation and support to
bring the Taliban into the mainstream.
The commencement of U.S.-Taliban peace
talks in October 2018 was a political success
for both Russia and Pakistan, which share a
mutual recognition that the Taliban are a key
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stakeholder in Afghanistan’s future. Russia
arranged Moscow-based talks to augment the
U.S.-Taliban negotiations, which included
regional nations, Afghan opposition leaders,
and the Taliban, although the Kabul
government did not attend. Pakistan actively
participated in meetings in Russia and also
hosted a separate trilateral mechanism with
China and the Afghan government to
advocate greater Taliban involvement.
Russia and Pakistan’s interests continued to
align following the breakdown of the U.S.-
Taliban peace talks. This was underscored in
September 2019, when Russia again invited
Taliban members to Moscow. At this
meeting, Zakharova, the Russian Foreign
Ministry spokesperson, announced: “We are
convinced that the complete end to foreign
military presence is an inalienable condition
of durable peace in Afghanistan.”
Meanwhile, Pakistan hosted Zalmay
Khalilzad, the U.S. special representative for
Afghan reconciliation, and the Taliban
leadership for meetings in Islamabad.
For Russia, the Afghanistan issue can help
Moscow achieve its goal of splintering the
U.S. foreign-policy establishment ahead of
the 2020 presidential election. But the
sacrifices of NATO troops, who have given
blood and treasure for an honorable outcome
in Afghanistan, demand that the West
negotiate an outcome that does not amount to
abandoning Afghanistan or lead to endorsing
Russia’s goals. There should also be an
assurance of protection of women’s rights
and civil society, which the Taliban
historically and continually neglect.
Russia has made serious progress toward
fulfilling both its Syrian and Afghan strategic
objectives by maintaining a decisive hand in
the respective region’s politics. Equally,
there should be no doubt that the Taliban will
forcibly extend their control within
Afghanistan, fueled by opium cultivation.
This would restart a civil war and
consequently result in substantial civilian
deaths and exacerbate the number of refugees
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July 2020
fleeing Afghanistan. With Western troops
leaving, it will have devastating
consequences for the civilian population,
who rely and depend on them for their own
safety. Furthermore, any guarantees that the
Taliban offer to prevent al Qaeda or its
affiliates returning to Afghanistan will not be
worth the paper they are written on. Russia
will assume an advantageous position,
having nurtured both the Taliban and the
Afghan civilian government while taking a
back seat to the insecurity that will grip the
country. Russia’s physical footprint will help
Moscow ensure its strategic interests.
How can the West still justify withdrawing
from Afghanistan when it clearly has the
potential of returning to being a hotbed for
terrorism, which will have direct and
consequential ramifications for the West
itself? The temporary relief in leaving the
region will eventually give way to the stark
reality that Western nationals will be
traveling to Afghanistan for terrorist training.
This will mirror the situation in Syria and
Iraq with the Islamic State. However, this
time the West will find it much harder to go
back into Afghanistan with the crowded field
of Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and China, all of
which will be very reluctant to let in anyone
else. There is an emerging Great Game
Redux in Afghanistan—and Russia is in it
this time to win it.
Bringing the Israeli model to
Kashmir
(Al-Jazeera)
For more than 70 years, Kashmiris have lived
with the dread of the Indian government
changing the demography and special status
of Indian-administered Kashmir, which was
till recently Jammu and Kashmir
(J&K) state. Deemed preposterous and
exaggerated at one time, these anxieties have
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now become completely justified and have
even deepened.
On August 5, 2019, Article 370 of the Indian
constitution, which gave the state its special
status and excluded it from the application of
various constitutional provisions, was
abrogated, while Article 35A, which limited
certain residency rights to the local
population and granted them certain
protections, was altogether scrapped.
These two articles had guaranteed that the
right to buy and own land or apply for
government jobs was the sole prerogative of
those who had inherited permanent residency
by descent. They also meant a bar on
business investments by outsiders or
attempts by big monopolistic companies to
take control of J&K's lands and economy.
This protected Kashmiris' rights and afforded
them a certain level of political and economic
autonomy.
In October 2019, J&K was dissolved as a
state, which meant it no longer had a state
assembly empowered to pass legislation, and
was divided into two union territories -
Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh - allowing
New Delhi to bring them under its direct
control. Until then, J&K was the only
Muslim-majority state in India.
With the abrogation of Article 370 and the
removal of its status as a state, the region was
fully integrated and its population stripped of
the special privileges and entitlements it had
been enjoying in view of the peculiar nature
of the state's history and its accession to
India.
The actual disempowerment, which will
soon begin to be felt on the ground, is more
than the loss of the special local
identity. Brought by stealth and deceit,
without fulfilling the constitutional
requirement of participation of the state
legislature, the abrogation of Article 370 and
demotion of the erstwhile state has become
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fait accompli, as the hearings on a bunch of
petitions challenging the move in the
Supreme Court of India have been postponed
multiple times.
If Article 370 was aimed to lay down the
foundation of the Indian government's
agenda in J&K, the actions that have
followed are the building blocks to serve that
design calculatedly.
Thus, in a late-night move on March 31,
when the Indian government officially
announced a new domicile rule for Jammu
and Kashmir, more clarity was shed on what
the future entails. The devil was in the detail.
According to the notification called "Jammu
and Kashmir Reorganisation (Adaptation of
State Laws) Order, 2020", anyone who
has resided in J&K for 15 years or has
studied in the territory for seven years, and
appeared in either Class 10 or Class 12
examination, will get residency rights. They
will then be eligible for various government
jobs.
The notification's timing, one week after
India announced a countrywide lockdown to
contain the COVID-19 outbreak, was
odd. While a lockdown in the rest of the
country became a safety measure in the fight
against a virus, in Kashmir it assumed a
different meaning. It was a lockdown within
a lockdown that had been partially in place
since August 5, 2019.
A stringent clampdown on J&K under
military boots including an absolute
communication blockade allowed the Indian
government to surreptitiously scrap its
special status and split it into more pliable
units last year. The longest-ever lockdown in
Kashmir served the purpose of scuttling any
public outrage and also ensured that
information slipped into a black hole, making
an entire population invisible and their
grievances inaudible.
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The 2019 lockdown was unconstitutional,
undemocratic and morally erroneous. But
this has now become the foundational
principle of India's strategy in Kashmir with
no punctuations of pretence. If the first
lockdown was successful in preventing
public outcry over the loss of special status
and protections, the other provided a
stepping stone for laying the blueprint of
what the Indian government intends to do as
part of its larger agenda.
The new domicile rule, and its timing, stirred
up anxieties, particularly among the J&K
youth, irrespective of their ethnic and
communal identities or their political
ideologies, as it meant they would be losing
government jobs, they earlier had a
monopoly over, to outsiders. The
government is one of the biggest employers
of fresh graduates in the region and in the
spring a number of recruitment processes
were stalled, prompting suspicions that this
was done intentionally to allow outsiders
who qualified for domicile under the new
rule to apply as well.
On February 27, the authorities scrapped the
recruitment process of J&K Bank for more
than 1,450 posts, which had been going on
since 2018, jeopardising the career prospects
of thousands of aspirants who had been
waiting after clearing their preliminary
exams. On June 2, the bank advertised for
1,850 posts inviting applications for
domiciles.
In the midst of the pandemic, as hospitals
battled with a shortage of infrastructure and
staff, the government showed the door to
hundreds of healthcare employees on
temporary contracts in Srinagar and Kathua
district in Hindu-majority Jammu region.
This, despite shortages of medical staff and
the established practice of offering
temporary workers permanent contracts.
The recruitment, appointment and promotion
processes for various civil service positions
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in the administration, education and
healthcare sectors have also been put on hold
after the J&K Public Service Commission,
which is responsible for civil service
recruitment, was made defunct and the
constitution of a new commission under the
new status of the region as a union territory
was delayed. A new chairman was finally
appointed in May.
The threat of losing jobs to outsiders is
coupled with the anxieties of the existing
government employees with respect to
service-related litigations related to pay,
promotions, etc, of which there are currently
more than 30,000 cases.
On April 29 this year, on grounds that J&K
had lost its statehood, the Administrative
Tribunal Act, 1985 was made applicable to
J&K and Ladakh. In June, the creation of
Jammu Bench of the Central Administrative
Tribunal was announced which will cover the
union territories of J&K and Ladakh. But a
single bench at the south end of the
region will be insufficient, given the large
size of the population and the difficult
mountainous topography which renders the
journey to Jammu too long.
These changes come as over the last couple
of decades, locals in the administrative
bureaucracy have been sidelined or sent out
on deputations. This process has further
picked up steam recently. After the
abrogation of Article 370, the majority of top
bureaucratic positions in the administration
of Jammu and Kashmir are held by outsiders.
The immediate beneficiaries of the new
domicile rule could go beyond the thousands
of Hindu and Sikh refugees, who have fled
Pakistan since partition and have settled in
the suburbs of Jammu city. The rules for
getting a domicile certificate are now pretty
relaxed, so there is no way to assess the exact
number of people who are likely to benefit.
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Thousands of bureaucrats from outside and
those working in the private sector have
spent more than the required 15 years in J&K
in the last 70 years. A sizeable part of the
Indian armed forces is concentrated in J&K
and many have served several postings in the
erstwhile state, easily making many eligible
under the new criteria.
The numbers are likely to add up by each
year and given the easily corruptible system
and lack of accountability, there is no telling
how the laws will be tweaked to further allow
an influx of beneficiaries from outside.
And this is not just about jobs. There is also
the question of land ownership and business
investment over which the new domicile rule
is silent, which means that unlike the past,
any Indian may buy land, settle and start a
business venture in J&K.
Under the Jammu and Kashmir
Reorganisation Act, which came into effect
in October, the legal provisions restricting
ownership of private property to permanent
residents were struck down. In the past, local
land reform legislation empowered peasants
including the socially oppressed classes,
giving them a sense of dignity and making
J&K one of the few states in the country
where nobody died of starvation.
The amended land-related laws induce fears
in the local population of not just losing their
exclusive privileges but also of suffering
under possible monopolistic economic
hegemonies.
The state also had in place its reservation act
that provided for quotas in educational
institutions and jobs for people of
disadvantaged backgrounds, including
Dalits, members of various tribes, etc.
Women enjoyed a 50 percent reservation in
professional colleges. Since the 1950s,
education at school and college level was
free in government institutions. All of that
now stands to be reversed.
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July 2020
For now, using the pandemic as an excuse,
the government has also halted the 150-year-
old annual practice of shifting the capital
from Jammu to Srinagar in the summer.
Though the practice of two capitals - in
Hindu-majority Jammu and Muslim-
majority Kashmir - was ideally inclusive, it
was Srinagar that became the hub of political
power after Kashmir's accession in 1947.
The government decision to begin the
delimitation (redrawing of boundaries) of
electoral constituencies, which is likely to
give Hindu-majority Jammu more seats, will
reshape the local political dynamics. Two
ideas have been mooted by several Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) leaders to that end -
enumeration on the basis of area and not
population, as is the countrywide norm, as
well as adding the kitty of 24 seats of
Pakistan-Administered Kashmir (PAK) and
Chinese-controlled Aksai Chin that lay
vacant for the last 70 years to Jammu region
by fielding Hindu and Sikh refugees from
PAK.
The Delimitation Commission was
announced on March 6 and immediately the
process of data collection was set in motion.
It has been going on without any punctuation
throughout the COVID-19 lockdown.
Structures of power are being dismantled bit
by bit, particularly emaciating the political
significance of Srinagar and turning Jammu
into a symbolic site of victory while keeping
its people disempowered.
Already, the political space in J&K has been
completely decimated. While many top
leaders continue to be in detention,
including former Chief Minister Mehbooba
Mufti, others have been let off or placed
under house arrest on conditions of
maintaining silence.
A lobby of renegades from various parties
recently floated a new political organisation
called Apni Party. It is believed to enjoy the
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patronage of New Delhi and has failed to cut
much ice.
Under the new arrangement, while the far-
flung union territory of Ladakh would be
robbed of a legislative assembly, J&K will
get one with limited powers, turning the two
entities virtually into two remote-controlled
municipalities.
This puts a question mark over the
practicability of managing the erstwhile
state, with its huge area, its complexity, its
socio-political diversity and its fragility,
under this arrangement of one centralised
authority. While a sense of political
empowerment is diminished, the terms of
engagement in local political narrative are
decimated to municipal and administrative
matters.
A sense of loss appears to be a strange
leveller and may have somewhat bridged the
traditionally divisive narratives in Muslim-
dominated Kashmir and Hindu-dominated
Jammu, the latter having seen a phenomenal
rise in Hindu right-wing politics in recent
decades.
But while in Jammu public discontent is
linked to loss of jobs, land, monopoly over
trade and higher education, in Kashmir, in
addition to all these, the dilution of Article
370 and domicile law assumes a whole new
meaning - the fear of a demographic change.
Shaped by Hindu right-wing groups openly
calling for changing demography of Kashmir
and integrationist politics, anxieties of
demographic change have existed in
Kashmir for decades. Today, a pathway is
being paved for replicating the Israeli model
of occupation and colonisation of the West
Bank in Kashmir towards disempowerment
and dispossession of the locals, particularly
Kashmiri Muslims, to exercise hegemonic
control through new settlers.
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July 2020
Sometime in late November last year, a
serving Indian diplomat in the United States,
while addressing a gathering of Kashmiri
Hindus, averred that "Kashmiri culture is
Indian culture; it is Hindu culture" and
espoused the Israeli model of West Bank
settlements as the way forward. Though the
Indian government did not officially support
this policy of apartheid, it also conveniently
did not distance itself from the remarks made
by its serving envoy in his official capacity.
If there were any doubts about the
seriousness of these remarks, they can
now be discarded. The recent moves indicate
a more systemic pattern of making this model
the centrepiece of India's Kashmir policy.
The present lockdown has been used to plot
the points on the map while avoiding any
public outcry. This arsenal of administrative
changes in a fragile setting is like dumping
fuel that could well trigger an inferno of
unimaginable proportions.
The government is underestimating the
patience and silence of the public and the
international ramifications of riding
roughshod over the aspirations of the people
of Kashmir and pushing them to the margins
as secondary citizens with an uptick in
massive human rights abuse.
While this amounts to trampling of Indian
democracy, it also makes peace in South Asia
extremely vulnerable. In all probability, the
transition to demographic change will not be
as smooth. A desperate struggle for self-
preservation within Kashmir and the
heightened level of tensions between India
and Pakistan - two nuclear powers - will
throw up an explosive situation. The present
standoff between India and China also has
the potential to escalate and add fuel to the
fire.
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This Is What the Future of
Globalization Will Look Like
(Foreign Policy)
A pair of sentences, published on April
17, show us how strange globalization has
become: “Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly
marked as food-service vehicles, met us at
the warehouse. When fully loaded, the
trucks would take two distinct routes back
to Massachusetts to minimize the chances
that their contents would be detained or
redirected.”
This passage didn’t appear in one of
Richard Stark’s crime novels or in the script
of an East Coast reshoot of Breaking Bad. It
was published in the New England Journal
of Medicine, describing a hospital’s
desperate efforts to secure a shipment of
personal protective equipment.
This is not simply a story about the United
States. It reflects a much bigger change
from a world of predictable trade and
exchange to one of government blockades
and daring heists—a change triggered by the
coronavirus pandemic. The United
States intercepted medical masks being
shipped from Thailand to Germany and
redirected them for its own purposes, in a
move German officials described as piracy.
Germany itself blocked the export of masks
and other medical equipment at a time
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July 2020
when its fellow European Union member
Italy was begging for help. India restricted
the export of key pharmaceuticals and drug
precursors. Newspaper reports describe a
chaotic global marketplace where
governments and health care officials
consort with dubious middlemen for
medical supplies, acting on rumors and
personal connections, fighting to outbid and
undercut each other. And this behavior has
spread to other sectors like auto
manufacturing; experts worry that the next
battles may be over food.
But the crisis that globalization faces has
roots that go far deeper than the current
pandemic. Many political and business
leaders still hope that they can reverse the
arrow of time, returning to a golden age in
which free market globalization worked
magic. The problem is that that age never
existed, except in their imaginations. In a
hyperglobalized economy, it made sense for
individual firms to focus heavily on
increasing efficiency and achieving market
dominance—actions that led to greater
returns and rising stock prices. But these
trends also generated systemic
vulnerabilities, imperiling fragile supply
chains in times of crisis and tempting
governments to target dominant companies
for their own advantage, creating new risks
for citizens and states.
To move forward from our current crisis of
globalization, we need to build something
better in its stead: a system that mitigates
the risks of economic and political
dependency and supports a new vision of
global society. Rather than withdrawing
from globalization, we would remake it so
that it focused on different problems than
economic efficiency and global markets.
Now that the pandemic has dramatically
underscored what’s wrong with the system,
we can think more clearly about what an
alternative would look like.
Globalization—the vast increase in flows of
money, goods, information, and people over
the last 30 years—was supposed to make
the world less vulnerable to disruptive
economic shocks. How did we get it so badly
wrong?
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In part, we were blinded by the mythology
that pundits like Thomas Friedman
wrapped around the real workings of
globalization. These arguments depicted
globalization as the triumph of market
efficiency over retrograde national politics.
Businesses and consumers could search the
globe for better and cheaper suppliers. If
one supplier proved unreliable, greedy, or
recalcitrant, they could be easily substituted
or replaced. The geopolitics of the Cold War
would fade away as states too were
subjected to the ruthless discipline of a
world market that had escaped their control
and become their master. Finally, while
global interdependence might create new
problems—pandemics, global warming,
pollution, overfishing—these difficulties
could be solved by markets with a little help
from liberal international institutions.
These mutually reinforcing claims
underpinned an apparent golden age for
multinational business. Manufacturing was
transformed from something that happened
mostly inside countries to something that
happened across them, supported by a
fantastical gossamer of global supply chains
and just-in-time delivery. Global economic
networks rapidly conducted information
and money around the world. Governments
bought into the myth, fearing that capital
would flee their economies if they broke
with the iron disciplines of neoliberalism.
Governments also provided the foundation
for global institutions that facilitated
economic cooperation and prioritized
openness as their organizing ambition.
Everyone seemed to agree that more trade
was a good thing. The General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade was transformed into
the World Trade Organization (WTO),
which tore down barriers to global trade
and settled disputes among states. Other
institutions such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund pushed the
famous Washington Consensus, a set of
principles for economic reform that
emphasized liberalization and deplored
government interventions that might
impede market processes. Governments
implemented reforms that reflected these
new principles—willingly or because they
had to.
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July 2020
But behind the soothing stories about the
benefits of the global marketplace,
globalization was quietly becoming more
fragile and riddled with vulnerabilities. In
some sectors, suppliers had become
concentrated in geographically dense
clusters, while in others the demand for
efficiency drove companies to rely on just
one supplier that could provide a necessary
component. Apparent flexibility disguised
the development of new rigidities.
The last decade provides painful evidence of
the fragility of a globalized economic system
that promoted efficiency and the power of
markets. The 2008 financial crisis was the
product of an interconnected banking
system that rewarded short-term thinking,
created risky new financial products, and
was badly regulated at the national and
global levels. Because so many firms were
too big to fail, globalization itself had to fail.
A few key suppliers became bottlenecks,
and systemic risks increased dramatically—
including the possibility of pandemics—but
global institutions had not kept pace.
Instead, states have exploited whatever
vulnerabilities they can as they try to
protect their own populations and pursue
their broader geostrategic interests.
Powerful states had always wriggled out of
the shackles of market discipline when their
security was at stake. Most notably, the 9/11
terrorist attacks and growing U.S.-China
competition led U.S. policymakers to realize
that they could use their control over
businesses that had made themselves
irreplaceable in the global economy to hurt
adversaries and coerce unwilling firms,
organizations, and even states by
threatening to exclude them from the global
marketplace.
The United States, for example, weaponized
institutions that play a central role in
international banking, such as the Society
for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunication, better known as
SWIFT, using them to cut Iran out of the
global financial system. It similarly used its
influence over Qualcomm and other makers
of sophisticated semiconductors to
hamstring the Chinese telecommunications
manufacturer Huawei, which it viewed as a
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strategic threat. Japan has used its control
over specialized chemicals manufacturers to
threaten South Korea’s electronics industry.
The main narrative of the globalizers—that
of a so-called flat earth—concealed the
problems of systemic fragility and state
exploitation. Now, both have emerged and
threaten to reinforce each other. When
powerful states suddenly realize how frail
global supply chains are, they are tempted
to use their coercive power to redirect
supplies to themselves at the expense of
others. This tempts other states to retaliate,
weakening the entire system. It’s hard to get
things done when key parts of the global
economy suddenly seize up. It’s even harder
when they become key battlegrounds in a
tacit economic war.
The coronavirus pandemic has not only
shown up the weaknesses of the global
economy and the narratives that justify it but
has also demonstrated that unregulated
globalization can be dangerous. One of the
reasons why the economy is hurting so
severely is because it is so densely
interconnected. When the coronavirus
closes down a components factory in Italy’s
Lombardy region, the entire Western
European car industry may be affected.
When cars aren’t being manufactured, car
dealerships can’t do business, and financial
institutions can’t make profits from car
loans. An entire economy can go bad very
quickly when everything depends on
everything else.
But the problem is even worse than that.
The coronavirus dramatically increases the
demand for some goods at the same time as
it damages supply. This explains the
extraordinary shortages of medical supplies
that plagued states in the wake of the
pandemic. Suddenly, everyone wanted
masks, test kits, and ventilators. However,
some of these goods relied on complex
supply chains that have been thrown into
disarray: Test kits, for example, require
chemical reagents that are suddenly hard to
find. The markets for masks and personal
protective equipment are highly
concentrated, with key components
provided by only a few suppliers located in a
handful of countries. Three-quarters of the
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July 2020
hygiene and medical nonwoven fabrics
needed for masks are made by a single
German manufacturer. Finally, the global
logistics system has been paralyzed—it is
not only difficult to find sources for key
components and products, but it is hard to
transport them when you do find them.
This explains why states used dirty tricks to
fight each other for medical supplies. For
example, the Trump administration
identified the key role that businesses like
3M play in manufacturing medical masks.
While masks are made using global supply
chains—it is cheaper to make them in China
than in the United States—companies faced
growing legal pressure from a few powerful
states. When the coronavirus pandemic
started, the Chinese government effectively
blocked all exports of masks, forcing 3M’s
Chinese factories to produce for China
alone. This spurred vigorous complaints
from Trump administration officials such as
trade advisor Peter Navarro, who claimed in
February that Beijing effectively
nationalized 3M, a U.S. company operating
in China, “to prevent them from sending us
any stuff.” In April, after the Trump
administration had finally woken up to the
threat of the coronavirus, it took a leaf from
China’s book, asking 3M to stop exporting
respirators from the United States to
Canada and Latin American companies,
prompting 3M to warn that other countries
might retaliate. The United States also
escalated the crisis by using the Defense
Production Act to require 3M to redirect
masks that were made by its subsidiaries in
China and elsewhere back home.
The immediate consequence was that a
politics of “sicken thy neighbor” flourished
around the world. The immediate problem
was bad enough—limited supply of the
goods necessary to fight the coronavirus
and seemingly limitless demand for those
very same goods. Yet as states continue to
play hardball with each other, they risk
making the problem worse by deepening
each other’s insecurity. Hoarding toilet
paper won’t be funny if it becomes the new
organizing principle for the world economy.
Key supplies will be misallocated across
countries as hot spots come and go. And
those least able to fight for their corner—
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poor and middle-
income countries with little clout over
manufacturers—will suffer most. Brazil’s
government labs can’t carry out coronavirus
tests because the crucial reagents have been
routed to other countries. South Africa and
Zambia are struggling too.
Even if the immediate threat of the
coronavirus lessens in the coming months,
the underlying political problem will not go
away and might get much worse. States are
currently playing defense, looking to protect
their own citizens regardless of the
consequences for others. But what if they
start playing offense instead? Already,
states fear that any company that developed
an effective coronavirus vaccine would
become a new choke point, allowing other
governments to deny access to the vaccine
for purposes of control and punishment. At
the beginning of the crisis, the German
newspaper Die Welt reported that the
United States had offered to purchase
CureVac, a German biotechnology company
with an early lead on a vaccine, and
supposedly requested exclusive rights to the
product. While the details were disputed,
Germany’s foreign minister issued a stark
rebuke to the Washington. Germany doesn’t
trust that the United States would share a
vaccine even with its close allies. China has
even greater reason to worry.
Pundits and politicians assumed that free
markets and economic globalization could
support a self-sustaining international
order. Instead, it has undermined itself. The
corporate world’s quest for efficiency has
made the global economy more fragile, and
its desire to control markets has provided
states with the means to turn that space into
a battlefield.
The current model of globalization is
unsustainable. It is creating unacceptable
levels of risk both for citizens and states.
The future of globalization will depend on
the decisions of political leaders as well as
businesses. The United States faces a
particularly stark choice, as it decides on a
new president amid a pandemic.
If Donald Trump succeeds in setting the
agenda, America’s future direction is clear.
The fragility of the global system will give
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economic nationalists more reason to do
what they want to do anyway, which is to
shift from global free trade to harnessing
the power of the nation-state. The
globalized economy would shrink, as more
production takes place inside national
borders, reducing reliance on foreign
components. The United States is the
primary guarantor of the current global
system. If it shifts to economic nationalism,
other countries are likely to shift too, either
because they want to or in self-defense.
China’s Xi Jinping would respond with his
own form of economic nationalism. Europe
and a few other midsize economies might
try to maintain the ectoplasmic remnant of
a multilateral system among themselves,
but their efforts would be doomed without
support from other great powers.
If Trump is defeated this November, the
United States faces a much more
complicated choice. The easy path is to treat
nationalism as a symptom of Trump’s four
years in power, a temporary aberration that
can quickly be forgotten as the world
returns to the status quo. A Joe Biden
administration might look to rebuild the
existing system of multilateralism while
tacitly redesigning it to hold China down or
perhaps to lock China out. Once again, the
United States would be willing to engage the
WTO, to cooperate with allies, and to do
whatever it took to support the global
spread of free markets.
But going back to business as usual would
worsen the problem, not solve it. The
existing model of globalization, not Trump,
is the root cause of the current breakdown.
Even in the best-case scenarios, embracing
the old approach to multilateralism would
fail to solve the underlying problems.
Businesses would continue to make the
world more fragile as they pursued risky
strategies to make their supply chains more
efficient, and as the most successful of them
consolidated market power, they would
become easier targets for states that never
ceased being interested in coercive power.
The most plausible outcome is bigger future
crises with worse political repercussions.
For that matter, a supposed return to
normality is unlikely to look particularly
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normal. It is difficult to imagine, for
example, how air travel might resume in
anything like its previous form without far
more extensive cooperation among
countries to prevent new outbreaks of the
coronavirus or successor viruses. Free
markets are incapable of sustaining
globalization without a much more
extensive role for the state. Meanwhile, if
China is locked out of the existing
multilateral order, it will start building its
own alternative order, making it far harder
to coordinate to solve global problems.
The more difficult path is also the only
sustainable one, creating a new model of
globalization that can supplement and, over
time, partly supplant the old. If the old
globalization was based on the rule of
markets, the new globalization will have to
be based on the primacy of public safety and
the well-being of people. It must recognize
that maintaining a complex global economy
will sometimes require active corrective
measures to protect the societies embedded
within it.
Rather than assuming that an open
globalized system can solve its own
problems, it would look to prevent them.
Rather than just preserving openness,
global institutions would have to address
problems that ordinary people care about,
such as health, equality, sustainability, and
security.
Firms and governments will have to pay the
necessary short-term costs to confront the
problem of fragility and to reassess the risks
within supply chains. This will require not
just stockpiling but more focus on the
location and distribution of manufacturing,
pushing companies to build in redundancies
both for their own safety and that of the
global economy. As Barry Lynn and others
have argued, it will also require a new
model of antitrust. Regulators need to
recognize how monopolies create single
points of failure in times of crisis, while
judges need to pay attention to the national
security as well as economic consequences
of their decisions. Concentrated economic
power creates new choke points in the
economy that make it less adaptable and
more vulnerable.
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A problem-oriented globalization might also
moderate the security competition that is
heating up between the United States and
China. Continued economic nationalism
will quickly intensify this competition, while
rebuilding multilateralism to exclude China
will lead to a new era of clashes, which the
world can ill afford. The United States and
China are currently more inclined to exploit
the system’s weaknesses than to mitigate
them, even if that hurts them as well as
everyone else in the long run.
The first step toward lowering tensions is
for states to acknowledge that globalization
is not producing a flat world but a complex
system and to figure out how to insulate
themselves from its risks. Mapping this
world’s networks and vulnerabilities will
require new bureaucracies and mandatory
reporting and transparency
requirements for business. Just as
businesses need to report possible adverse
events to their shareholders, they would
have to stress-test their supply chains,
reporting and rectifying the weak points or
risk actions from new regulators or lawsuits
from investors or customers if their supply
chains fail.
A more thoughtful globalization will also
require a new approach to trade: With
better information, states will sometimes
have legitimate reason to limit their
exposure to the world economy so as to
minimize vulnerabilities. Instead of the
crude reshoring and high national tariffs
proposed by economic nationalists, we must
map the intricacies of the system, identify
key vulnerabilities, and mitigate them.
Rather than decoupling, states would have
to recouple. Sometimes that might lead to
reshoring within national borders, but more
often it would involve identifying
bottlenecks and creating more robust global
supply relationships, on the basis of active
agreement among allies and tacit
accommodations among adversaries not to
exploit vulnerabilities.
Individual state action will be insufficient
on its own. Some of those bureaucracies will
have to be international. For example,
resuming travel in a world where new
viruses can instantly circle the globe will
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require extensive—and sometimes
intrusive—information sharing. This new
model of globalization would give
institutions such as the World Health
Organization extensive new powers to
gather information and to investigate when
states are being deceptive. International
organizations could also administer shared
rewards to scientists and companies that
develop vaccines, on the condition that the
vaccines and associated patents and rights
be made universally available. Of course,
the Trump administration wants to defund
the world health apparatus—but U.S. allies
in Europe and elsewhere are betting that
this decision will be reversed if Trump loses
in November.
Similar institutions could help solve other
problems being created by globalization,
most importantly including global warming.
It’s conceivable that state power could be
used to solve some of globalization’s
pathologies, rather than worsen them. A
Biden administration, for example, might
turn its effective control over the dollar and
U.S. clearing system to tackle collective
problems such as climate change, imposing
financial sanctions on climate cheats. The
threat of unilateral action could spur the
creation of new multilateral institutions by
making laggards and free riders pay some of
the costs of their inaction. The EU has long
sought a partner in the global climate fight,
and even China might welcome external
pressure to justify a crackdown on
provincial authorities building coal-based
power plants. The United States has been
willing to use its formidable economic
power in the past, forcing other countries
for example to enforce their laws against
bribery. If it deploys its power to address
obvious global needs, it may find itself
pushing on an open door as domestic
interests realign around solving global
problems.
The coronavirus has exposed the deep
weaknesses of globalization, making it clear
that we need to build something new. In
domestic politics, everything suddenly
seems up for grabs, as social movements
challenge the established political order to
face up to problems that it has swept
beneath the carpet for decades. The
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challenge is to build a better approach to
solving global problems, too, before they
tear everything apart.
Globalization’s current dysfunction is a
product of market forces and will not be
solved either by economic nationalism or a
naive return to the open market liberalism
that created it. Instead, the current crisis
opens up an opportunity to create a
different approach to globalization, one that
recognizes its tendency to generate
problems that it cannot solve itself and also
one that prioritizes people’s safety and
prosperity. Our lives depend on it.
How China Scammed Hong Kong
(The New York Times)
After many years of rejecting the people of
Hong Kong’s persistent demands for genuine
universal suffrage and other rights, China
made its position clear again on Tuesday
with the legislative equivalent of a cracking
head bash.
It chose the eve of July 1, a triple anniversary
— of the birth of the Chinese Communist
Party (1921), the handover of Hong Kong
from Britain to China (1997) and a break-in
of the city’s legislature by pro-democracy
activists (2019) — to pass a draconian
national security law that will forever harm
Hong Kong’s political freedoms and hobble
its economic relations with the rest of the
world.
Hong Kong is a special administrative region
of China with its own, supposedly
independent, executive, legislative and
judiciary branches. Yet the new law was
proposed in Beijing, drafted in Beijing and
promulgated in Beijing.
It went into force as soon as it
was gazetted on Tuesday night — which was
also the first time its contents were released
to the public.
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The law criminalizes acts of secession, the
subversion of state power, terrorism and
“collusion with foreign or external forces to
endanger national security.” Some offenses
in each of these categories are punishable
with life imprisonment. Property damage
alone might amount to terrorism.
Especially severe cases may be referred to
the Supreme People’s Court of China, to be
tried by another court of its choosing
under the mainland’s law of criminal
procedure, which allows for capital
punishment in some cases. The death
penalty was abolished in Hong Kong in
1993, and no execution had taken place since
1966.
The new law trumps any local laws that are
inconsistent with it. A national security
commission will be set up in the city, joined
by a Beijing-appointed adviser, to oversee
the law’s implementation. Its work will not
be made public, nor will that be subject to
judicial review.
The Hong Kong chief executive is to appoint
special judges to hear national security cases.
The city’s Secretary of Justice may deny a
defendant a trial by jury. The ultimate power
to interpret the law rests with Beijing.
Articles 37 and 38 appear to mean that the
law is applicable worldwide — and
universally: not only to permanent residents
of Hong Kong and entities based in the city
while they are abroad, but also to “a person
who is not a permanent resident” of Hong
Kong who commits an offense from
“outside.”
Though the law is being called “national
security” legislation, its true, bespoke
purpose is to suppress the decades-old pro-
democracy movement in the city — which
has grown more vocal in recent years as
repression from Beijing has increased, with
some younger people calling for outright
independence for Hong Kong.
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Leaders of political organizations that China
has previously accused of promoting
separatism promptly
announced their groups’ dissolution on
Tuesday.
Politically astute Hong Kongers are only too
aware of the Chinese government’s
propensity to bring bogus charges against its
political opponents.
So are some foreign governments.
Washington had already announced a spate
of sanctions against officials deemed to
violate the mainland’s obligations to Hong
Kong. On Tuesday, it barred defense exports
to Hong Kong — and said it would begin to
cancel the city’s preferential trade status,
arguing, correctly, that Hong Kong can no
longer be considered to operate with
significant autonomy from the mainland.
The European Union’s Parliament recently
passed a (nonbinding) resolution urging
member states to bring China before the
International Court of Justice if the law was
passed. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of
Britain has pledged to help some three
million eligible people from Hong Kong live
and work in his country. The government of
Taiwan has said that it would grant asylum to
some Hong Kongers on humanitarian
grounds.
But even foreign politicians sympathetic to
the plight of Hong Kong today bear some
responsibility for it — if only by dint of their
wishful thinking about Beijing’s original
intentions.
Many seem to have looked upon the first 15
years or so after Britain handed over Hong
Kong to China in 1997 as the golden age of
the city’s semi-autonomy. They endorsed the
“one country, two systems” principle that
was put forward by the Chinese leader Deng
Xiaoping in the 1980s — and enshrined in
the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-
constitution — as a benign concept that
would protect the city.
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In their view, President Xi Jinping of China
has recently reversed, even betrayed, Deng’s
blueprint for Hong Kong.
But this is faulty thinking. And it would be
simplistic, as well as ultimately dangerous, to
think that China has been acting in bad faith
only under Mr. Xi today.
Deng hardly was a man of concessions.
During the late 1980s, while China was
relatively weak, he repeatedly advised acting
meek and biding one’s time. Yet even during
negotiations with Britain about the status of
Hong Kong, it was he who insisted that
Chinese soldiers should be stationed in Hong
Kong after 1997, over the advice of some of
his top officials. And it was Deng who
ordered tanks into Tiananmen Square in
1989 to mow down peaceful demonstrators
by the hundreds.
Mr. Xi today isn’t betraying Deng’s vision
for Hong Kong back then: He is only
dutifully carrying that vision forward to what
is, some three decades later, its natural,
logical culmination.
The Basic Law, which was designed in the
late 1980s and adopted in 1990, is an
inherently cynical document.
It was instrumental in ensuring the smooth
transfer of sovereignty from Britain in 1997
because it seemed to contain generous
guarantees from China, in particular
provisions that safeguarded Hong Kongers’
fundamental political liberties and promised
to give them more democratic rights in the
future.
But many observers and major political
actors in Hong Kong — including some who
helped draft the Basic Law — have
consistently overrated its apparent
assurances, while overlooking the fact that
many of those come with sleeper clauses or
caveats that can override them.
The Chinese government today isn’t
violating the Basic Law, neither in letter nor
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in spirit, so much as connecting different dots
in it. And that is the true horror lurking
behind its original concessions.
Take Beijing’s plan now to set up in Hong
Kong a commissioner’s office for national
security affairs to ensure that the city’s
authorities will apply the new law
effectively. This move, as I wrote previously,
flatly contradicts the following clause of
Article 22 in the Basic Law:
“No department of the Central People’s
Government and no province, autonomous
region or municipality directly under the
Central Government may interfere in the
affairs which the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region administers on its
own in accordance with this Law.”
But that provision also says that “if there is a
need” for any such department etc. to “set up
offices” in Hong Kong, that department
requires nothing more than the consent of the
central government (and that of the Hong
Kong government, which can be coerced at
will).
Likewise, the first clause of Article 39 says
that “the provisions of the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights” and
other rights agreements “as applied to Hong
Kong shall remain in force.” What if those
protections became irksome to Beijing? No
problem, there’s Article 160:
“Upon the establishment of the Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region, the laws
previously in force in Hong Kong shall be
adopted as laws of the Region except for
those which the Standing Committee of the
National People’s Congress declares to be in
contravention of this Law. If any laws are
later discovered to be in contravention of this
Law, they shall be amended or cease to have
force in accordance with the procedure as
prescribed by this Law.”
And then there’s Article 18. It allows the
Standing Committee of China’s rubber-
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stamping legislative body, the National
People’s Congress, to “add to or delete from
the list of laws in Annex III” in the name of
defense, foreign affairs, national unity or
security, “as well as other matters outside the
limits of the autonomy” of the city. That
annex is a lengthy appendix of laws passed
on the mainland that apply in Hong Kong, all
exceptionally.
Article 18 was, naturally, the perfect vehicle
for implementing the new national security
law.
And so some of them have called for full
autonomy for Hong Kong. Such goals may
be unrealistic now — and as of Tuesday,
even outright dangerous. But they at least
expose China’s decades of deception and put
the world on notice.
Midday on Wednesday, the city
police reported their first arrest under the
new security law: a man holding a banner
that read “Hong Kong independence.”

In the 1980s, when people in Hong Kong

were worried about their post-1997 future,
the Chinese government played up the
concessionary parts of the Basic Law. That
was the first, the good-looking, stage in a
two-stage plan to absorb the city into the
mainland’s universe.

The inevitable second stage is unfolding

today. Now that Hong Kong is under the
watchful eye of both Chinese soldiers
garrisoned in the city and their newly loyal
local cousins — the increasingly violent and
politicized Hong Kong police force —
Beijing is activating the sleeper clauses of the
Basic Law to feather the deathbed of the
city’s autonomy. Why Race Matters in
Politicians and thought leaders in Western International Relations
countries, as well as older members of Hong (Foreign Policy)
Kong’s pro-democracy movement, are only
Race is not a perspective on international
beginning to realize — if they are at all —
relations; it is a central organizing feature of
that for three decades or more they have been
world politics. Anti-Japanese
reading the Basic Law, and China itself,
racism guided and sustained U.S.
wrong. They believed that the West, by
engagement in World War II, and broader
helping China modernize, would also help it
anti-Asian sentiment influenced
democratize and with that, would be
the development and structure of the North
protecting Hong Kong.
Atlantic Treaty Organization. During the
Cold War, racism and anti-communism were
Many of the younger activists I have come
inextricably linked in the containment
across in Hong Kong think differently. They
strategy that defined Washington’s approach
fault their forebears for buying into the Basic
to Africa, Asia, Central America, the
Law and “one country, two systems”; to
Caribbean, and South America. And today
them, all that was a Communist siren song, a
race shapes threat perception and responses
scam.
to violent extremism, inside and outside the

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“war on terror.” Yet mainstream
international relations (IR) scholarship
denies race as essential to understanding the
world, to the cost of the field’s integrity.
Take the “big three” IR paradigms: realism,
liberalism, and constructivism. These
dominant frames for understanding global
politics are built on raced and racist
intellectual foundations that limit the field’s
ability to answer important questions about
international security and organization. Core
concepts, like anarchy and hierarchy,
are raced: They are rooted in discourses that
center and favor Europe and the West. These
concepts implicitly and explicitly pit
“developed” against “undeveloped,”
“modern” against “primitive,” “civilized”
against “uncivilized.” And their use is racist:
These invented binaries are used to explain
subjugation and exploitation around the
globe
While realism and liberalism were built on
Eurocentrism and used to justify white
imperialism, this fact is not
widely acknowledged in the field. For
instance, according to neorealists, there
exists a “balance of power” between and
among “great powers.” Most of these great
powers are, not incidentally, white-majority
states, and they sit atop the hierarchy, with
small and notably less-white powers
organized below them. In a similar vein,
raced hierarchies and conceptions of control
ground the concept of cooperation in
neoliberal thought: Major powers own the
proverbial table, set the chairs, and arrange
the place settings.
Constructivism, which rounds out the “big
three” approaches, is perhaps best positioned
to tackle race and racism. Constructivists
reject the as-given condition of anarchy and
maintain that anarchy, security, and other
concerns are socially constructed based on
shared ideas, histories, and experiences. Yet
with few notable exceptions, constructivists
rarely acknowledge how race shapes what is
shared.
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Despite the dominance of the “big three” in
the modern study of IR, many of the
arguments they advance, such as the balance
of power, are not actually supported by
evidence outside of modern Europe.
Consider the democratic peace theory. The
theory makes two key propositions: that
democracies are less likely to go to war than
are nondemocracies, and that democracies
are less likely to go to war with each other.
The historical record shows that democracies
have actually not been less likely
to fight wars—if you include their colonial
conquests. Meanwhile, in regions such as the
Middle East and North
Africa, democratizing states have
experienced more internal conflicts than their
less-democratic peers. Yet leaders in the
West have invoked democratic peace theory
to justify invading and occupying less-
democratic, and notably less-white,
countries.
This is a key element of IR’s racial exclusion:
The state system that IR seeks to explain
arises from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia,
which ended the Thirty Years’ War and
established European principles of statehood
and sovereignty. Far from 17th-century
relics, these principles are enshrined in the
United Nations Charter—the foundation for
global governance since 1945. But non-
European nations did not voluntarily adopt
European understandings of statehood and
sovereignty, as IR scholars often
mythologize. Instead, Europe, justified by
Westphalia, divided the world between the
modern, “civilized” states and conquered
those which they did not think belonged in
the international system.
IR scholar Sankaran Krishna has argued that,
because IR privileges theorizing over
historical description and analysis, the field
enables this kind of whitewashing. Western
concepts are prioritized at the expense of
their applicability in the world. Krishna
called this “a systematic politics of
forgetting, a willful amnesia, on the question
of race.”
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Importantly, IR has not always ignored race.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s,
foundational texts invoked race as the
linchpin holding together colonial
administration and war. Belief in white
people’s biological and sociological
supremacy offered a tidy dualism between
the civilized and the savage that justified the
former’s murderous exploitation of the latter.
Paul Samuel Reinsch, a founder of modern
IR and foreign policy, christened the 20th
century as the “age of national imperialism.”
He concluded that states “endeavor to
increase [their] resources … through the
absorption or exploitation of undeveloped
regions and inferior races.” Yet,
he assured readers that this was “not
inconsistent with respect for … other
nationalities” because states avoid exerting
control over “highly civilized nations.”
Thinkers’ attention to race in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries spread into academic
journals and research institutions. For
example, the Journal of Race
Development—the first academic IR journal,
established in 1910—advanced racist
treatises, including on the inability of “native
races” to develop states without colonialism.
Nonetheless, the journal’s pages also
included sharp critiques from W.E.B. Du
Bois and other scholars who were critical of
European mercantilism. In 1919, the journal
was rebranded as the Journal of
International Relations without substantive
changes and, in 1922, its successor, Foreign
Affairs, was born.
The mid-20th century brought about some
shifts in IR thinking and in foreign policy.
Black IR scholars, primarily working out of
Howard University, developed a strong
theoretical tradition that resists white-
supremacist privileging of U.S. and
European empires. Anti-colonial revolutions
in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s
further problematized the promise of empire
built into realist frameworks and the idealism
of paternalist cooperation integral to liberal
thought.
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Mainstream IR theory, however, did not
adapt or evolve its position on race. Most IR
scholars just stopped engaging with the
subject altogether. Between 1945 and 1993,
among the five major IR journals of the
period—International
Organization, International Studies
Quarterly, Journal of Conflict
Resolution, Review of International Studies,
and World Politics—only one published an
article with the word “race” in the title.
Another four articles included “minorities”
and 13 included “ethnicity.” Since then,
mainstream IR has neglected race in
theorizing, in historical explanation, and in
prescription, and shuttled race (and gender)
to the side as “other perspectives.” When IR
scholars do engage with race, it is often in
discussions of outwardly raced issues such as
colonialism.
Yet one cannot comprehend world politics
while ignoring race and racism. Textbooks
that neglect historical and modern slavery
when explaining development and
globalization obscure the realities of state-
building and deny the harms committed in
the process. Similarly, when scholarship fails
to call attention to the role that race plays in
Western nations’ use of international law as
a pretext for military intervention, it provides
cover for the modern-day equivalent of
“civilizing missions.” Likewise, studies of
trade and dispute settlement almost always
overlook modern arbitration’s deep roots in
the transatlantic slave trade. This history is
often lost in analyses of wins and losses
in negotiations.
Race and the racism of historical statecraft
are inextricable from the modern study and
practice of international relations. They are
also not artefacts: Race continues to
shape international and domestic
threat perceptions and consequent foreign
policy; international responses
to immigrants and refugees; and access to
health and environmental stability.
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Because mainstream IR does not take race or
racism seriously, it also does not take
diversity and inclusion in the profession
seriously. In the United States, which is the
largest producer of IR scholarship, only 8
percent of scholars identify as black or
Latino, compared to 12 percent of scholars in
comparative politics and 14 percent in U.S.
politics. And that’s despite the fact that the
issues that IR scholars study, such as war,
migration, human rights, development, and
climate change, have a disproportionate
impact on black people, indigenous people,
and people of color.
There are a number of reasons for this
imbalance. First, there is a pervasive and
corrosive tendency among white scholars to
assume that scholars of color study race,
ethnicity, and identity politics in the United
States or in an area-studies context. Though
scholars of color do work in these areas, there
is no intellectual reason to expect that they all
do so. This tendency to presume, even assign,
where different people belong communicates
to IR scholars of color that they are not
welcome.
The International Studies Association (ISA),
the main professional association for IR
scholars and practitioners, does not offer a
research or conference section on race. Nor
do any of its organized sections mention race
in their descriptions. While ISA does have
several identity-related caucuses, including
the Women’s Caucus for International
Studies, there is no caucus for scholars of
color. Scholars of color also experience overt
racism within ISA and other professional
associations. In 2018, Meg
Guliford described her experience as a black
scholar at an ISA conference, where three
separate attendees assumed she was hotel
staff and one asked when she planned to
bring out more food.
How IR is taught also perpetuates the
research and professional inequalities we
detail above. In a 2014 survey of IR
professors, nearly 40 percent reported
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organizing their courses by the traditional
paradigms of IR studies. Since much
paradigmatic work is dominated by white
men and is guided by Eurocentrism, women,
nonwhite people, and issues of race and
racism are displaced in course syllabi.
Interestingly, how professors organize their
courses does not necessarily reflect their own
approach to studying IR. In that same survey,
26 percent of respondents reported that they
do not use paradigmatic analysis. This casts
even more doubt on the paradigms as core,
yet exclusionary, frameworks.
IR scholars cannot cast off the field’s
intellectual history. But neither can scholars
accept it uncritically. Western dominance
and white privilege permeate IR scholarship,
teaching, and professional associations, to
the cost of the field’s integrity, and to the cost
of the relevance and appropriateness of our
advice to policymakers. To help remedy
these problems, IR scholars should focus
their efforts on three initiatives.
First, those who teach IR must address race
and racism in the field and acknowledge the
usefulness of critical approaches. This means
integrating scholarly works on race in
undergraduate and graduate courses, and not
as a segregated “week on race” at the end of
the term. Despite the field’s overarching
exclusion in this area, there
are excellent scholars working on race in IR.
Introductory courses could also be organized
around issues—for instance, interstate
conflict, human rights, environmental
politics—in order to create more points of
entry for relevant scholarship and for
nonwhite students. Second, universities must
improve representation among scholars and
increase diversity in intellectual thought. IR
programs should strive to recruit, train, and
retain diverse graduate and faculty
candidates who can offer new perspectives
and drive innovation. Third, IR professional
associations must become more inclusive.
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One concrete step would be for ISA and other
IR hubs to organize sections on race.
These steps are straightforward and feasible.
Those in positions of power and influence
must simply have the will and do the work.
China’s Own Documents Show
Potentially Genocidal
Sterilization Plans in Xinjiang
(Foreign Policy)
Performance targets:
Target 1: target population for intrauterine
contraception device placement 524 people
Target 2: [target] population for sterilizations
14,872 people.”
These are direct quotes from the 2019 family
planning budget of Hotan, the capital city of
a prefecture with a population of 2.53 million
in in southern Xinjiang, China. The
neighboring county of Guma, population
322,000, set a similarly precise “performance
target” figure of 5,970 intrauterine
contraception device (IUD) placements and
8,064 female sterilizations for that year.
These two counties, predominantly home to
members of the Uighur ethnic minority,
planned to sterilize approximately 14 and 34
percent of women between 18 and 49—in a
single year. Per capita, that represents more
sterilizations than China performed in the 20
years between 1998 and 2018 combined.
Documents from Xinjiang’s Health
Commission indicate that this is part of a
wider project targeting all of Xinjiang’s
southern minority regions in 2019 and 2020.
Since 2017, up to 1.8 million Uighurs,
Kazaks, and other Turkic minority groups in
the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang
have been swept up in what is probably the
largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious
minority since the Holocaust. Exile Uighurs
and China researchers have described this
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campaign as a “cultural genocide.” Now,
new research I published this month with the
Jamestown Foundation provides strong
evidence that Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang
also meet the physical genocide
criterion cited in Section D of Article II of
the United Nations Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide: “imposing measures intended to
prevent births within the [targeted] group.”
Starting in 2018, a growing number of female
former internment camp
detainees testified that they were given
injections that coincided with changes in or
cessation of their menstrual cycles.
Others reported that they were forcibly fitted
with IUDs prior to internment or subjected to
sterilization surgeries.
That same year, published natural population
growth rates (calculated as birth minus
deaths, and excluding migration) in Xinjiang
plummeted. In Kashgar and Hotan, two of
the prefectures that make up the Uighur
heartland, combined natural population
growth rates fell by 84 percent between 2015
and 2018, from 1.6 percent to 0.26 percent.
In some Uighur counties, 2018 saw more
deaths than births. In 2019, Xinjiang’s birth
rates declined by a further 24 percent, with
ethnic minority regions seeing stronger
declines between 30 and 56 percent. In
contrast, birth rates across the whole country
fell by only 4.2 percent between 2018 and
2019.
Worryingly, most recent birth rate figures in
Uighur regions are not being published. In an
unusual development, Hotan’s annual report,
always published in March or April each
year, was not yet out by the end of June, but
one of its counties reported a negative
population growth rate. For the first time
since its publication, Kashgar’s annual
report did not disclose birth or death rates.
However, its total population decreased
compared to the previous year. Clearly, the
government has something to hide. One
minority region, Kizilsu, recently disclosed
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its 2020 natural population growth target:
Shockingly, it was cut down to nearly zero.
The campaign of mass internment would
certainly negatively impact birth rates.
However, by itself it cannot have depressed
population growth to such low levels.
Instead, comprehensive new evidence from
government documents reveals a systematic
state campaign of suppressing minority
births, while simultaneously encouraging a
mass influx of new Han Chinese workers and
settlers.
For years, Han Chinese officials and
academics have lamented “excessive
minority population” growth in Xinjiang. Li
Xiaoxia, the director of the Institute of
Sociology at the Xinjiang Academy of Social
Sciences, wrote in 2017 that high Uighur
population growth rates exacerbated spatial
ethnic segregation, “strengthening the
viewpoint that one ethnic group owns a
[particular] land area.” Such sentiments are
seen as dangerous, because they “weaken
national identity and identification with the
Chinese Nation-Race, impacting long-term
rule and stability.”
However, government efforts to enforce
family planning targets were often met with
failure. A 2013 World Bank report on
vocational training needs in Xinjiang,
compiled by two Han Chinese authors, states
that “Xinjiang’s enforcement of family
planning in rural and minority regions has
been comparatively relaxed.” Many of
Xinjiang’s officials and researchers blame
this directly on the minorities’ predominantly
Muslim faith. One of them wrote in 2016: “It
is undeniable that a wave of extremist
religious thinking has fueled a resurgence in
birth rates in Xinjiang’s southern regions.”
The campaign of mass internment that started
in 2017 under Xinjiang’s current Party
Secretary Chen Quanguo provided the ideal
context for an unprecedented crackdown on
minority birth rates. My research shows that
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July 2020
the detentions have primarily targeted male
heads of households. In some regions,
government lists show that up to 50 percent
of them had been sent to detention camps or
prisons. With community leaders, religious
authority figures, and husbands removed,
nothing prevented the state from seizing
complete control over female minority
reproductive systems.
In February, a leaked government document
called the “Karakax List” (after its origin
from Karakax County) showed the reasons
given for hundreds of camp detainees being
detained. Surprisingly, the most common
reason was having had too many children.
Frequently, the detainees had only had one
more child than permitted by the state. Birth
control violations were often the only stated
reason for internment.
In contrast, in January 2016
China abolished its one-child policy, and it
has since encouraged its citizens to have two
children in order to maintain positive
population growth. Some provinces are
doling out financial rewards such as tax
breaks and wedding or childbirth subsidies in
order to boost birth rates.
The Karakax List indicates a spike in the
number of Uighurs detained for birth control
violations during the spring of 2018. During
precisely that time, Xinjiang’s minority
regions issued draconian new regulations for
dealing with birth control policy violations,
with three counties explicitly threatening
violators with internment. Karakax County’s
2018 government work report proudly stated
that by “severely curbing behaviors that
violate birth control [policies], birth and
natural population growth rates declined
dramatically.” Between 2016 and 2018,
Karakax’s natural population growth rate
plunged by 83 percent.
However, punishing birth control violations
with internment has been just one of several
strategies to suppress minority birth rates.
The second approach was a mass deployment
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of IUDs, a widely used form of birth control
around the world and the most commonly
used form in China. In 2018, a stunning 80
percent of all newly placed IUDs in China
were fitted in Xinjiang, even though the
region only makes up 1.8 percent of the
country’s population. By 2019,
Xinjiang planned to subject over 80 percent
of women of childbearing age in the rural
southern four minority prefectures to “birth
control measures with long-term
effectiveness.” In Xinjiang’s minority
regions, this term refers to either IUDs or
sterilizations. One minority prefecture issued
a related statement that women for whom the
procedure wouldn’t pose medical risks must
have IUDs placed “immediately,” and that
the risks, known as contraindications, must
be proved through a diagnosis certified by a
higher health authority.
Before long, requiring minority women to
get IUDs was not enough. The third and most
draconian birth prevention strategy—
sterilizations—soon followed. Until recently,
sterilization surgeries had been uncommon in
Xinjiang in order to avoid offending the
predominantly Muslim population’s
religious sensibilities. Once the state began
openly persecuting any form of religious
behavior, this was no longer an issue. In
2018, the region performed over seven times
more sterilizations per capita than the
national average. Then, in 2019, when a
growing number of male detainees were
shifted from internment camps to either
prisons or forced labor compounds, the state
moved toward what appears to be a campaign
of mass female sterilization.
This campaign is part of a project titled “Free
Technical Family Planning Services to
Farmers and Pastoralists.” It provides free
“birth control surgeries” specifically in
Xinjiang’s southern Uighur regions. The
project’s explicit aim is to reduce these
regions’ 2020 birth and population growth
rates by “at least” 0.4 percentage points
below the 2016 level. The free “birth control
surgeries” include IUD placements,
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abortions, and sterilizations. The project’s
combined funding for 2019 and 2020
amounted to 260 million RMB, about $36
million, on the regional level alone.
The evidence suggests that this campaign
aims to sterilize some women with one or
two children, and many or all women with
three or more children. One Uighur county’s
2019 family planning policy explicitly
stated that women with three or more
children are to be sterilized. According to the
2010 national census, about 20 percent of all
Uighur women across China had three or
more children; in some predominantly
Uighur prefectures, that share may be as high
as 36.1 percent, which might explain Hotan
City’s 34.3 percent sterilization target. In
addition, in 2019 and 2020 Xinjiang
budgeted about 1.5 billion RMB, over $200
million, at the regional level alone for
financial rewards for women who
supposedly voluntarily opt for IUDs or
sterilizations even though they are legally
permitted to have a third child.
Together with local co-funding, the
regionwide “free technical family planning”
project has enough money to sterilize
potentially up to nearly 200,000 or about 12
percent of all married women aged 18 to 49
years in rural southern Xinjiang. However, at
least one minority prefecture received
additional central government funding for
this initiative, indicating that these estimates
could be higher. There is also nothing to say
that this campaign will end in 2020. Its
obvious intermediate goal would be to
sterilize the 20 percent or more of these
women who have had more than two
children, plus a percentage of those with
fewer children.
Along with the mass deployment of IUDs,
this campaign enables the Chinese
government to permanently maintain Uighur
natural population growth rates at levels that
are 85 to 95 percent below those of the past
two decades. Xinjiang’s goal in Uighur
regions is to achieve “zero birth control
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violation incidents”—not one minority child
is to be born outside the will of the state. Such
targets are no joke. Hotan prefecture’s 2019
birth control performance
indicators mandated that the entire region,
which has over half a million women of
childbearing age, could have no more than
exactly 21 birth control policy violations that
year. Technically, the government can now
dial minority birth rates up and down at will,
like opening or closing a faucet.
Unfortunately, it is unclear where all this will
end. Numerically stagnant or declining
populations are easier to control. Alarmingly,
Xinjiang’s 2019 population growth rate was
far below its original target.
Under the one child policy, China had
previously implemented repressive birth
control measures. However, they were
nothing close to now what is now seen in
Xinjiang: punishing violators in extrajudicial
internment camps, sterilizing up to a third of
all women in a single year, sending women
to family planning clinics with armed police
forces, or setting near-zero population
growth targets.
sought to attract young families from eastern
China (ages 35 and under) with promises of
5.8 acres of arable land, new apartments,
government jobs with annual salaries of up to
102,500 RMB (about $14,000, above the
national average), and additional monthly
livelihood subsidy payments.
The internment of vast numbers of ethnic
minority men in camps and sites of coercive
labor facilitate this process of what often
appear to be coerced relationships.
These findings indicate that Beijing is
complementing its pursuit of cultural
genocide in Xinjiang with a campaign of
ethno-racial supremacy—a campaign that
meets at least one of the five criteria for
physical genocide specified by the U.N. It is
high time that the international community
takes decisive measures. The situation
warrants an investigation into crimes against
humanity, including an assessment whether
Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang are gradually
progressing from cultural genocide to a form
of demographic genocide.

A women who fled Xinjiang last year told

the Associated Press that they would chant
these lines during daily flag-raising events:
“If we have too many children, we’re
religious extremists. … That means we have
to go to the training centers.” Soon after, she
and hundreds of other Uighur women were
taken to a hospital by armed police guards
and forcibly fitted with IUDs. In 2019,
Xinjiang’s population growth rate was far
below its original target.

Xinjiang’s birth prevention tactics are just

one aspect of what appears to be a
multipronged strategy of ethno-racial
domination. Between 2015 and 2018, 2
million new residents moved to Xinjiang—
all of them to regions dominated by China’s
Han majority. The state promotes such in-
migration through lucrative offers. In 2019, a
Han Chinese-dominated region in Xinjiang

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Pakistan’s political crisis is
deepening with the rise of
COVID-19 cases
(The Diplomat)
Pakistan’s national government has followed
a highly politicized approach to dealing with
the COVID-19 threat. The result has
reignited fears that the current government is
not fit to rule the country let alone deal with
a raging health crisis that is fast becoming a
national security issue.
Over the last few months, there has been a
steep decline in public trust about the
capacity of the government’s efforts to deal
with the COVID-19 threat. After putting in
some surface-level effort, the government
has nearly left the entirety of the country’s
population at the mercy of the virus.
The government’s top decision-makers
remain unprepared and unwilling to take the
threat seriously. A few days ago, the Minister
of State for Climate Change Zartaj Gul
Wazir presented a novel definition of
COVID-19 by saying that “COVID-19
means that it has 19 points that can be applied
to any country in any way.” Another senior
leader of the PTI who is also Sindh
province’s Governor recently said that
COVID-19 is nothing more than the flu and
people shouldn’t worry about it.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that the
current government’s approval ratings have
fallen sharply in recent months. According to
a recent Gallup survey, “The percentage of
Pakistanis who believe that the current PTI
government’s performance up to this point in
its tenure is worse than that of the previous
government has increased from 35 percent in
December 2018 to only 59 percent in
February 2020.”
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July 2020
The government’s political allies are either
estranged or walking away to join the
opposition parties. In the province of Punjab,
several disgruntled lawmakers of the ruling
party have been threatening to form forward
blocks if they are not given development
funds. A weak chief minister in the province
often cites the phrase “I am not aware”
regarding key decisions related to his
province. A looming wheat crisis in the
country has involved several top ministers of
the government that manipulated the
domestic market to make billions. The
problem is expected to morph into a serious
food crisis in Pakistan in the coming months.
The issue has created deep divisions within
the government as Prime Minister Imran
Khan has sidelined one of his key advisers,
Jahangir Tareen, after his role in the wheat
crisis was proved recently. Tareen, who has
been credited with managing the ruling
party’s political alliances, has not only fled
the country, but has also left a vacuum to fill
in the government. In the absence of Tareen,
no one could effectively reach out and
satisfy the government’s political allies.
Thus no one in the government has
the political clout to negotiate with the head
of the Balochistan National Party (BNP-M),
Sardar Akhtar Mengal, who recently left the
government to join the opposition. A few
days ago, Mengal met with the chief of the
Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI-F), Maulana
Fazlur Rehman, to chart out a plan to
potentially bring the government down. “In
our meeting, we discussed the changes that
have already taken place in the country and
the changes which are about to come,” said
Mr. Mengal.
Understandably, Mengal’s departure from
the coalition has made the government
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weaker and its other political allies stronger.
“MQM, PML-Q, GDA, and BAP may not
walk out like Mengal did … but their threat
of walking out will now hold greater weight
for PTI. Do not be surprised if you see the
allies becoming a bit more vocal in their
grievances, a bit more aggressive in their
dealings, and a bit more demanding in their
requirements,” notes an op-ed published
in Dawn.
Adding to the crisis are rising incidents of
terrorism across the country. Last week, three
consecutive explosions claimed by a little-
known separatist group, Sindhudesh
Revolutionary Army (SRA), has put
policymakers on alert. Reports indicate that
the group’s leadership operates from the
province of Sindh and “wants the province to
break from the Pakistani federation.”
In another incident on June 22, an officer and
a soldier of the Pakistani Army were killed in
clashes with militants in North Waziristan.
Over the last few months, groups such as the
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Islamic
State (IS), the Baluchistan Liberation Army
(BLA), the Baluchistan Liberation Tigers
(BLT), and others carried out attacks across
Pakistan. The list of militant organizations
targeting Pakistan has now been joined by a
new militant group known as the SRA.
It is a worrying development for Pakistan for
two reasons. First, the rise in militant attacks
is taking place at a time when a governance
and health crisis is consuming law
enforcement agencies majority of the focus.
Second, the growth in attacks, particularly
from new organizations, underscores that
militant networks in the country or
aspirations from different ethno-nationalist
groups in this regard, remain strong. Thus,
any sense of weakness from the state would
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be taken as an opportunity to mobilize
operations to weaken the state further.
Certainly, COVID-19 has exposed
Pakistan’s looming governance and security
woes.
Pakistan’s all-powerful military is
monitoring all these developments closely. It
would not be imprudent to argue that the
military itself is strained due to the existing
political and governance crisis that COVID-
19 has brought to fore. Pakistan’s security
establishment may want an increased role in
managing politics in Pakistan, but it doesn’t
mean that the institution is interested in
running everything for the government.
The next few months are going to be very
important for Pakistan as COVID-19 exposes
the current government’s inability to govern
effectively and manage its allies aptly. As
political uncertainty grows in Pakistan,
issues lying on the periphery have started to
move to the core, challenging the country’s
national security.
Coronavirus Bailouts Stoke
Climate Change
(Foreign Policy)
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed
climate change from the headlines, but it has
hardly arrested it. In the last month, the
warming Indian Ocean has encouraged
swarms of locusts to hop from East Africa to
South Asia. A dust cloud has drifted from the
Sahara desert to the Americas. Wildfires
have raged in the thawing permafrost of
Siberia. This global crisis—like the one
occasioned by the novel coronavirus, only
more permanently—threatens to shock the
global financial system. The consequences of
climate change could lead to turmoil in the
insurance and banking industries, while
upending the energy sector, together
producing a financial crisis unlike one ever
seen before.
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But before the pandemic scrambled
economies, a group of global central banks
and financial regulators led by Europeans
had agreed on ways to manage the risks that
global warming posed. These banks and
regulators have since been forced to enact
emergency measures to cope with the
pandemic, so they have largely ignored,
abandoned, or delayed many of their own
prescriptions. Instead, they are now propping
up the very coal, oil, and gas industries that
ultimately threaten the financial system by
accelerating climate change.
In Europe, as in the United States—where
central banks and financial regulators have
not meaningfully incorporated climate
change into their decision-making—bailout
money is finding its way to struggling, debt-
laden, and increasingly unprofitable fossil
fuel companies. Not only is enabling fossil
fuel investments bad public policy, it makes
little economic sense. The world’s leading
central banks must quickly reverse course
and limit investments in the fossil fuel
industry in order to avoid further increasing
the systemic risk that climate change poses to
the financial system.
GREENING THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM
In the period from 2013 to 2020, the Bank of
England became the first central bank to plan
for the economic effects of a warming planet.
Climate change, the bank determined,
threatened the economy not only through the
physical consequences of intensified storms,
floods, and droughts but also through the
necessary costs of the transition away from
fossil fuels, and possibly by occasioning
lawsuits from parties adversely affected by
the upheaval. In 2017, the bank’s governor,
Mark Carney, began warning of a climate-
driven “Minsky moment”—a sudden market
collapse brought on by reckless speculative
activity—that would threaten the very
foundation of the financial system.
Along with another seven central banks,
including those of China, France, Germany,
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and the Netherlands, the Bank of England
established in late 2017 a network of like-
minded institutions committed to “greening
the financial system.” Today, the Network
for Greening the Financial System comprises
more than 60 central banks and financial
supervisors, accounting for over 50 percent
of global GDP and dedicated to ensuring that
financial markets adequately prepare for
climate risks.
Carney put the Bank of England at the
forefront of policy development in this arena.
It devised the first-ever stress test to quantify
the likely effects of climate change on the
financial institutions it oversaw. The results
suggested that the coal industry would take a
particularly hard hit, losing 65 percent of its
financial value in a scenario of “abrupt
change.” The oil industry didn’t fare much
better, with a 42 percent reduction in its
financial value in the same scenario. These
industries were hit especially hard because
the necessary transition away from fossil
fuels will lead to drastic reductions in the
value of the assets of these companies,
stranding billions in invested capital.
Those projections emboldened the Bank of
England to consider screening its own
investments to limit or phase out purchases
in coal, oil, and gas companies. Indeed,
Andrew Bailey, Carney’s successor, found
aligning the bank’s portfolio with the goal of
lowering carbon emissions to be “perfectly
sensible.” Other central banks looked ready
to follow suit. Christine Lagarde, president of
the European Central Bank, pledged to
gradually eliminate the bank’s high-carbon
assets. Sweden’s Riksbank went
further, selling off the bonds of governments
such as Australia that were heavily exposed
to high-carbon industries. Taken together,
these moves signaled to markets that fossil
fuel companies bore substantial financial
risks and that central banks were trying to
rein them in.
Across the pond, however, U.S. financial
regulators were less convinced. The
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influence of the administration of U.S.
President Donald Trump kept the Federal
Reserve out of formal membership in the
network built by Carney. Unlike its global
peers, the Fed conducted no stress tests and
issued no pledges to screen purchases in coal,
oil, and gas companies, even as U.S. fossil
fuel firms had become very vulnerable. A
decade of low interest rates and easy credit
had encouraged U.S. companies to expand
through borrowing. By early 2020, the U.S.
oil and gas industries, for instance, had more
than $700 billion in outstanding debt
according to the Institute for Energy
Economics and Financial Analysis. But the
sector’s contribution to U.S. corporate
earnings had steadily shrunk even as its debt
levels had skyrocketed—such that the oil
industry now constitutes just four percent of
the S&P 500, down from 25 percent in 1980.
ACCELERATING RISKS
When the pandemic and its consequent
financial crisis hit, the debt markets, on
which fossil fuel firms had come to
rely, seized up. Investors became wary of
lending in an uncertain economic
environment, and companies could no longer
borrow to finance their operations. The once
simple task of issuing debt or rolling it over
suddenly became a matter of financial life or
death. The oil industry turned upside down
overnight, between negative pricing in April
and an enormous fall in global demand. The
coal industry took a similar blow from
reduced electricity demand during the
pandemic, which disproportionately harmed
the industry because its operating costs are
greater than those of many other forms of
power. State and federal regulations favoring
renewable energy over coal also affect the
industry, with analysts now predicting that
coal will generate only ten percent of U.S.
electricity by 2024, down from 50 percent a
decade prior.
The overall financial crisis forced central
banks around the world to leap into action to
protect their national economies from a tide
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of pending bankruptcies. But bailouts have
been fairly indiscriminate, driving financial
support to many sectors, including the very
same coal, oil, and gas industries upon which
central banks had cast doubt. Not only have
financial regulators supported fossil fuel
companies with new investments but they
have also, at least temporarily, abandoned
their attempts to address the long-term
climate risks that those investments create.
The Bank of England postponed its stress
tests and its efforts to redirect investments
away from high-carbon-producing
industries. The European Central Bank,
which had followed the Bank of England’s
lead before the crisis, similarly delayed its
climate policy review. Worse, the ECB’s first
wave of asset purchases between the middle
of March and the middle of May drove 7.6
billion euros directly to fossil fuel
companies. The same financially risky assets
that so worried these central banks before the
crisis—coal, oil, and gas—are now rapidly
arriving on their balance sheets.
U.S. fossil fuel companies, abetted by
Republican allies in Congress and by Trump
himself, pressured the Fed to ease credit
requirements that constrained the purchase of
junk debt (much of the debt of fossil fuel
companies is considered high risk and well
below investment grade). The Fed did relax
investment criteria through a program called
the Main Street Lending Program, which
allowed indebted companies to service their
debts with government-backed loans, despite
the alarm of congressional watchdogs. At the
same time, the coal industry raided other
emergency relief measures such as the
Paycheck Protection Program, meant to
support small and medium-sized businesses.
On average, the industries that accepted these
PPP funds used them to cover 52 percent of
payroll costs; the coal industry, however,
successfully secured funds to cover 72
percent of payroll costs.
In addition, two new programs announced in
March allowed the Fed, for the first time
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ever, to buy corporate debt (historically it has
bought only government debt and
mortgages), opening the door to direct
purchases of the bonds of coal, oil, and gas
companies. While the government has
directed only a fraction of available money
into the market, Influence Map, a London-
based economic think tank, has revealed that
just one of these programs has driven
nearly $100 million to fossil fuel companies.
If the program continues without any further
restrictions, it could channel $19 billion to
fossil fuels. Fossil fuel companies in the
United States are likely to spend a good
portion of the bailout funds they receive on
servicing their own debts, not on hiring new
workers—and potentially not even
on preventing layoffs.
president to place limits on financial flows to
coal, oil, and gas companies.
Ultimately, regulators can decide which
direction they want to push their economies.
The current course for many central banks
that are all too aware of the threat climate
change poses to their financial systems is to
nonetheless send billions of taxpayer dollars
to fossil fuel companies. If they do not
reverse course, the debts of these companies
will sit on public and private balance sheets
as ticking time bombs, epitomizing the very
risk that central banks have warned against
for years

THE WRONG MESSAGE

The bailouts will not make the coal, oil, and
gas industries any more sustainable. Rather,
these companies will remain at death’s door,
burdened by debt. In propping them up,
central banks are ignoring the same financial
advice they themselves have for years
presented to others. Moreover, they send the
message to investors that nothing is too
suspect to bail out in a time of crisis—not
even the flailing fossil fuel industry.

Financial regulators still have time to tack in

a better direction. In Europe, Lagarde has
recommitted to a climate policy review set to
conclude in the middle of next year—in time
for the next major international climate
summit in Glasgow. Civil society groups
have called on her to make good on previous
pledges. Her leadership could help encourage
other central banks to once again begin
curtailing investments in fossil fuels.
In the United States, however, Republican
leaders seem committed to bailing out the
fossil fuel industry (they have publicly said
as much). But a Democratic administration,
should one come to power, could invoke the
Dodd-Frank Act without seeking
congressional approval, allowing the
Modi's India should be on the
US's religious freedom blacklist
(Al-Jazeera)
On June 10, US Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo released the 2019 International
Religious Freedom Report which documents
major instances of violations of religious
freedom across the world.
The report's 27-page chapter on India is a
scathing indictment of the sharp decline in
religious freedom in the South Asian country
under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's
watch.

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Noting that there have been reports
of "religiously motivated killings, assaults,
riots, discrimination, vandalism, and actions
restricting the right of individuals to practice
and speak about their religious beliefs", the
report heavily criticises the Indian
government's policies and actions that result
in the erosion of religious freedoms of India's
minority communities.
The report highlights the revocation of
Indian-administered Kashmir's autonomy in
August, the passage of the Citizenship
Amendment Act (CAA) in December,
undemocratic anti-conversion and anti-beef
laws and their gross abuses, and the state's
reluctance to hold Hindu vigilante groups to
account for their attacks on religious
minorities. "Authorities often protected
perpetrators from prosecution and filed
charges against victims," it notes.
With the report, the United States officially
acknowledges the Modi government's crimes
against India's religious minorities. But this
is not enough. Secretary Pompeo also needs
to take policy action to hold India to account.
Luckily, he has a list of policy
recommendations readily laying on his desk
that could help him do just that.
The case for CPC designation
In April, the US Commission on
International Religious Freedom (USCIRF),
an independent federal body that advises the
US president and Congress, released its
annual report. In the report, USCIRF called
for India to be designated as a Country of
Particular Concern (CPC) for "engaging in
and tolerating systematic, ongoing, and
egregious religious freedom violations". The
federal body also recommended the
imposition of "targeted sanctions" on Indian
officials and agencies "responsible for severe
violations of religious freedom in India".
A CPC designation would confirm India's
status as one the world's worst offenders of
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religious freedom, alongside Iran, Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia, North Korea and China. It
would amplify international pressure on
India to take the necessary precautions to
stop religious violence and discrimination.
Moreover, it would allow the Trump
administration to show that it is serious about
countering religious discrimination, even
when the perpetrator is an allied government.
The US has long been turning a blind eye to
India's failures due to its strong economic
and strategic ties to the country - India is not
only a major importer of US arms, but it is a
key US partner against China in the Indo-
Pacific region. But the US's tendency to
ignore state-sanctioned rights abuses in India
to remain in favour of the Modi government
already had disastrous consequences for the
country's religious minorities.
Confident that he would not receive any
pressure from the US, the Modi government
instituted national level policies violating
religious freedom, especially for Muslims, in
the past few years. According to the
USCIRF, it also engaged in "hate speech and
incitement to violence", allowing anti-
minority violence to "continue with
impunity".
In December, the Modi government passed
the CAA, which excludes Muslims from a
path to citizenship for religious minorities
from its neighbours. Many believe that the
government will combine the CAA with the
National Register for Citizens (NRC), a
headcount that will seek from India's 1.3
billion people proof-of-citizenship
documents going back generations, to target
India's 200 million Muslims.
Millions of bona fide Indians, who do not
possess any citizenship documents, will
certainly fail the NRC test, as they did in a
pilot in Assam state last year. According to
the USCIRF, this will put their citizenship
status, and all associated rights, "under
question". The CAA will provide non-
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Muslims in this situation "a path to restore
their citizenship and avoid detention or
deportation", while Muslims will "bear the
indignities and consequences of potential
statelessness".
In February, several leaders and prominent
supporters of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) incited violence against anti-CAA
protesters in New Delhi. More than 50 people
died in the resulting pogrom. The USCIRF
blamed Delhi Police for "failing to halt
attacks and even directly participating" in the
violence.
India's Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah, a
Modi confidante who was once accused of
ordering extrajudicial killings of Muslims,
directly supervises Delhi Police. In
December, the USCIRF had called on the US
Government to sanction Shah, due to his role
in the enactment of the CAA.
India's 30 million Christians are also being
targeted in Modi's India. "Empowered by
anti-conversion laws and the police's
complicity," Hindu vigilante mobs target
Christians with "campaigns of harassment,
social exclusion and violence", according to
the USCIRF. Instead of arresting the
perpetrators, the police "often arrest the
religious minorities who have been
attacked".
The US needs to realise that Modi's relentless
push for imposing a Hindu nationalist agenda
will eventually destroy India's social and
religious fabric and cause internal strife. This
will not only cause immense suffering for
Indians of all religions but also negatively
affect US' geo-strategic interests in the
region. A divided, conflict-ridden India
cannot be a trusted economic partner to the
US or help it control China's growing
ambitions. It is thus in Washington's self-
interest to press India for greater adherence
to religious freedom.
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In 2016, Modi told the US Congress that just
as "the idea that all citizens are created equal
is a central pillar of the American
constitution", India's "founding fathers, too,
shared the same belief and sought individual
liberty". India's Constitution is a "holy book"
in which "freedom of faith, speech and
franchise, and equality of all citizens,
regardless of background, are enshrined as
fundamental rights," he added. The time has
come for Pompeo to remind Modi of this
speech.
It is not easy for the authors of this article -
who are Indian-born US citizens - to
recommend India to be designated as a
CPC. But we support the USCIRF's
recommendation for such a harsh measure
precisely because we love India deeply. We
believe only strong pressure from the US,
and the wider global community, could save
India from the dire consequences of its
government's divisive policies, and
guarantee that it remains a secular
democracy.
How a Great Power Falls Apart
(Foreign Affairs)
On November 11, 1980, a
car filled with writers was making its way al
ong a rain-slick highway to a conference in
Madrid. The subject of the meeting was the
human rights movement in the Soviet Union,
and in the vehicle were some of the
movement’s long-suffering activists:
Vladimir Borisov and Viktor Fainberg, both
of whom had endured horrific abuse in a
Leningrad psychiatric hospital; the Tatar
artist Gyuzel Makudinova, who had spent
years in internal exile in Siberia; and her
husband, the writer Andrei Amalrik, who had
escaped to Western Europe after periods of
arrest, rearrest, and confinement.
Amalrik was at the wheel. Around 40 miles
from the Spanish capital, the car swerved out
of its lane and collided with an oncoming
truck. Everyone survived except Amalrik, his
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throat pierced by a piece of metal, probably
from the steering column. At the time of his
death at the age of 42, Amalrik was certainly
not the best-known Soviet dissident.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had published The
Gulag Archipelago, won the Nobel Prize
in Literature, and immigrated to the United
States. Andrei Sakharov had been
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which
he was forced to accept in absentia because
the Soviet government denied him an exit
visa. But in the pantheon of the investigated,
the imprisoned, and the exiled, Amalrik
occupied a special place.
Starting in the mid-1960s, a series of high-
profile prosecutions of writers, historians,
and other intellectuals under Soviet leader
Leonid Brezhnev had galvanized the
country’s dissidents. To many observers in
the West, this nascent democratic
movement seemed to offer a path toward de-
escalating the Cold War.
In the summer of 1968, just weeks before
Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, The New
York Times set aside three pages for an essay
by Sakharov on “progress, peaceful
coexistence, and intellectual
freedom.” In the era of nuclear weapons,
Sakharov said, the West and the Soviet
Union had no choice but to cooperate to
ensure the survival of humankind. The two
systems were already witnessing a
“convergence,” as he put it. They would have
to learn to live together, leveling out national
distinctions and taking steps toward
planetwide governance.
To all of this, Amalrik showed up with a
bucket of cold water. In the fall of 1970, he
managed to smuggle his own short
manuscript out of the Soviet Union. It soon
appeared in the London-based
journal Survey. Global capitalism and
Soviet-style communism were not
converging, Amalrik argued, but were in
fact growing further apart. Even the
communist world itself was in danger of
splitting up. The Soviet Union and China
were increasingly mistrustful of each
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other and seemed on a clear course toward a
cataclysmic war. (A year earlier, in 1969, the
two countries had skirmished along their
common border, with significant casualties.)
But the real problem with Sakharov,
Amalrik wrote, was that he failed
to recognize that the Soviet state and the
Soviet system—both the country
and communism as a political and economic
order—were headed for self-destruction. To
make his point, he titled his essay “Will the
Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?”
The piece was a persecuted dissenter’s
struggle to diagnose early Brezhnev-era
malaise, but Amalrik ended up identifying a
more general political syndrome: the process
through which a great power succumbs to
self-delusion. By the 1960s, the Soviet
government had hammered into existence a
country that citizens under Lenin or Stalin
would have thought impossible. Consumer
goods, single-family apartments, a space
program, international sports heroes, a globe-
spanning airline—the successes of Soviet
society were on full display. Yet more than
any other thinker at the time,
Amalrik grasped the fact that countries decay
only in retrospect. Powerful states, as well as
their inhabitants, tend to be congenital
conservatives when it comes to their own
futures. The “comfort cult,” as he called it—
the tendency in seemingly stable societies to
believe “that ‘Reason will prevail’ and that
‘Everything will be all right’”—is seductive.
As a result, when a terminal crisis comes, it
is likely to be unexpected, confusing, and
catastrophic, with the causes so seemingly
trivial, the consequences so easily reparable
if political leaders would only do the right
thing, that no one can quite believe it has
come to this.
Amalrik also provided a kind of blueprint for
analytic alienation. It is actually possible, he
suggested, to think your way through the end
of days. The method is to practice living with
the most unlikely outcome you can fathom
and then to work backward, systematically
and carefully, from the what-if to the here’s-
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why. The point isn’t to pick one’s evidence
to fit a particular conclusion. It is rather to
jolt oneself out of the assumption of linear
change—to consider, for a moment, how
some future historian might recast
implausible concerns as inevitable ones.
Viewed from 2020, exactly 50 years since it
was published, Amalrik’s work has an eerie
timeliness. He was concerned with how a
great power handles multiple internal
crises—the faltering of the institutions of
domestic order, the craftiness of unmoored
and venal politicians, the first tremors of
systemic illegitimacy. He wanted to
understand the dark logic of social
dissolution and how discrete political choices
sum up to apocalyptic outcomes. His
prophecy was time delimited, ending in
1984, but it isn’t hard to hear its ghostly echo
today. To know how great powers
end, one could do worse than study the last
one that actually did.
A COUNTRY ON THE PRECIPICE
Amalrik began his essay by setting out some
of his qualifications for the task. As a history
student, he had researched Kievan Rus, the
medieval principality that gave rise to
modern-day Russia and
Ukraine, and suffered for some of his
findings. He had been expelled from
Moscow State University for suggesting that
it was Norse traders and colonizers, not
Slavs, who were the real founders of Russian
statehood—a claim now widely accepted by
historians but that at the time ran counter to
official Soviet history writing. As an
intellectual and friend of writers and
journalists, he had been closely associated
with the democratic movement in the Soviet
Union and knew its major players. For people
in the West, he said, he was what a talking
fish would represent to an ichthyologist: a
miraculous communicator of the secrets of an
alien world.
It was a great mistake, Amalrik continued, to
believe that one could make political
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predictions about a country by surveying its
main ideological currents. People might
cleave themselves into rival camps or be
sorted into them by outside experts: hard-line
leftists, nationalists, liberals, and the like. But
these groups are always amorphous. Their
constituents display little real agreement
among themselves about what constitutes
orthodox belief or a coherent political
program.
A better way to think about political
cleavages was to observe which portions of
society are most threatened by change and
which ones seek to hasten it—and then to
imagine how states might manage the
differences between the two. Bureaucrats and
politicians want to keep their jobs. Workers
want a better standard of living. Intellectuals
question old verities of national identity.
These divides can create a survival problem
for the institutions of state power. “Self-
preservation is clearly the dominant drive,”
Amalrik wrote. “The only thing [the
government] wants is for everything to go on
as before: authorities to be recognized, the
intelligentsia to keep quiet, no rocking of the
system by dangerous and unfamiliar
reforms.” But what happens in times of rapid
disruption, when economic transition, social
evolution, and generational shifts make it
impossible for things to go on as before?
Repression is always an option, but smart
rulers will use their power selectively—
prosecuting a writer, say, or dismissing a
senior official who has fallen afoul of the
leadership. Even more enlightened
authorities might ensure self-preservation
“through gradual changes and piecemeal
reforms, as well as by replacing the old
bureaucratic elite with a more intelligent and
reasonable group.”
But one should be skeptical about the degree
to which leaders who trumpet reform are in
fact committed to enacting it. Governments
are good at recognizing the faults in other
places and times, but they are terrible judges
of the injustices built into their own
foundations. This was especially the case for
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great powers such as the Soviet Union,
Amalrik believed. If a country could sail the
seas unrivaled and put humans into outer
space, it had little incentive to look inward at
what was rotten at the core. “The regime
considers itself the acme of perfection and
therefore has no wish to change its ways
either of its own free will or, still less, by
making concessions to anyone or
anything.” Meanwhile, the old tools of
repression (all-out Stalinism in the Soviet
case) had been given up as backward and
inhuman and were now too rusty to be
functional. Society was becoming more
complicated, more riven with difference,
more demanding of the state but less
convinced that the state could deliver. What
was left was a political system far weaker
than anyone—even those committed to its
renewal—was able to recognize.
Of course, no one ever thinks their society is
on the precipice. When he talked to his
comrades, Amalrik reported that they just
wanted things to calm down a bit, without
really knowing how that might be
achieved. Citizens tended to take their
government as a given, as if there were no
real alternative to the institutions and
processes they had always known. Public
discontent, where it existed, was most often
directed not against the government as such
but merely against certain of its faults.
“Everybody is angered by the great
inequalities in wealth, the low wages, the
austere housing conditions, [and] the lack of
essential consumer goods,” Amalrik wrote.
So long as people believed that, by and large,
things were getting better, they were content
to hold fast to the ideology of reformism and
the hope of gradual, positive change.
Up to this point in his argument, Amalrik was
following an analytic line that would have
been familiar to Sakharov and other
dissidents. Stability and internal reform were
always in tension. But he then made a leap by
asking a simple question: Where is the
breaking point? How long can a political
system seek to remake itself before triggering
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one of two reactions—a devastating backlash
from those most threatened by change or a
realization by the change makers that their
goals can no longer be realized within the
institutions and ideologies of the present
order? Here, Amalrik warned, great powers’
proclivity for self-delusion and self-isolation
puts them at a particular
disadvantage. They set themselves apart
from the world, learning little from the
accumulated stock of human experience.
They imagine themselves immune to the ills
affecting other places and systems. This
same predisposition might trickle down
through society. The various social strata
could come to feel isolated from their
regime and separated from one another.
“This isolation has created for all—from the
bureaucratic elite to the lowest social
levels—an almost surrealistic picture of the
world and of their place in it,” Amalrik
concluded. “Yet the longer this state of
affairs helps to perpetuate the status quo, the
more rapid and decisive will be its collapse
when confrontation with reality becomes
inevitable.”
There was no reason to believe such a
reckoning would threaten only a particular
set of elites. Given the right circumstances,
the country as a whole could be its ultimate
casualty. In his own society, Amalrik
identified four drivers of this process. One
was the “moral weariness” engendered by
an expansionist, interventionist foreign
policy and the never-ending warfare that
ensued. Another was the economic hardship
that a prolonged military conflict—in
Amalrik’s imagination, a coming Soviet-
Chinese war—would produce. A third was
the fact that the government would grow
increasingly intolerant of public expressions
of discontent and violently suppress
“sporadic eruptions of popular
dissatisfaction, or local riots.”
These crackdowns were likely to be
especially brutal, he argued, when the
suppressors—police or internal security
troops—were “of a nationality other than
that of the population that is rioting,” which
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would in turn “sharpen enmities among the
nationalities.”
It was a fourth tendency, however, that
would spell the real end of the Soviet
Union: the calculation, by some significant
portion of the political elite, that it could
best guarantee its own future by
jettisoning its relationship to the national
capital. Amalrik supposed that this might
occur among Soviet ethnic minorities, “first
in the Baltic area, the Caucasus and the
Ukraine, then in Central Asia and along the
Volga”—a sequence that turned out to be
exactly correct. His more general point was
that in times of severe crisis,
institutional elites face a decision point. Do
they cling to the system that gives them
power or recast themselves as visionaries
who understand that the ship is sinking?
Especially if the regime is seen to be “losing
control over the country and even contact
with reality,” canny leaders on the periphery
have an incentive to preserve themselves
and, in the process, simply ignore the
directives of the higher-ups. In such an
unstable moment, Amalrik said, some sort
of major defeat—for example, “a serious
eruption of popular discontent in the capital,
such as strikes or an armed clash”—would
be enough “to topple the regime.” In the
Soviet Union, he concluded, this “will occur
sometime between 1980 and 1985.”
ALL COUNTRIES END
Amalrik missed the precise date of his
country’s disintegration by seven years.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to liberalize
and democratize the state unleashed a set of
forces that caused the Soviet Union to
disappear, piecewise, over the course of
1991. At the end of that year, Gorbachev
stepped down as president of a country that
had faded away beneath him. Still, in the
annals of political prognoses of world-
historical events, Amalrik’s accuracy
probably deserves a prize. He was certainly
right about the big picture. In the Soviet
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case, reform was ultimately incompatible
with the continuation of the state itself.
Amalrik was dead by the time Western
academics and policy experts began to write
their own late-century big histories: Paul
Kennedy’s warning of the perils of imperial
overstretch, Francis Fukuyama’s millenarian
paean to liberal democracy, and Samuel
Huntington’s neo-racist clash of
civilizations. But in the early 1990s,
Amalrik’s work finally came into its own.
He turned out to be especially insightful on
what would emerge after the Soviet demise:
a congeries of independent countries, a new
quasi commonwealth dominated by Russia,
the entry of the Baltic republics into “a Pan-
European federation,” and, in Central
Asia, a renewed version of the old system,
combining bits of Soviet-style ritual with
local despotism. American conservatives
came to cite him as a kind of Cassandra of
the steppe. While globalists and antinuclear
campaigners were stroking Sakharov and
feeding their own fantasies of coexistence
with a tyrannical empire, the argument
went, they should have heeded Amalrik.
Doing so might have forced an earlier
confrontation with the teetering Soviet
state—“Mr. Brezhnev, tear down this
wall!”—and hastened the collapse of
communism.
In the Soviet case, reform was ultimately
incompatible with the continuation of the
state itself.
There was also much that Amalrik got
wrong. He misjudged the likelihood of a
Soviet-Chinese war, which was one of the
pillars of his analysis (although one might
say the Soviet-Afghan conflict was a good
stand-in: a drawn-out, exhausting war,
prosecuted by decrepit leaders, which
drained the Soviet government of resources
and legitimacy). He overstated the violence
associated with the Soviet collapse. It was
far more peaceful than anyone might have
expected, especially given the panoply of
border disputes, clashing nationalisms, and
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elite rivalries churning through the world’s
largest country. Within three decades, one
of its successors, Russia, had even
reconstituted itself as a great power with the
ability to do something the Soviets never
managed: to understand and exploit the
principal social divisions of its rivals, from
the United States to the United Kingdom,
with significant political and strategic effect.
Amalrik also failed to foresee the possibility
of East-West convergence of a different
kind: toward capitalist oligarchies that were
surveillance obsessed, deeply unequal,
selectively observant of human rights,
dependent on global supply chains, and
structurally vulnerable to both markets and
microbes. He might have been surprised to
learn that this was the form that Sakharov’s
“peaceful coexistence” eventually took, at
least for a while.
“Soviet rockets have reached Venus,”
Amalrik wrote toward the end of his 1970
essay, “while in the village where I live
potatoes are still dug by hand.” His country
had invested in catching up to its rivals. It
had worked hard to compete as a global
superpower. But fundamental things had
gone unattended. Its citizens were stuck at
different way stations along the path of
economic development, poorly understood
by one another and by their rulers. In such a
situation, a future of gradual
democratization and fruitful cooperation
with the West was a chimera, Amalrik felt.
Faced with a series of external shocks and
internal crises, and pursued by more
dynamic and adaptable competitors abroad,
his country had far less life in it than anyone
at the time could see.
All countries end. Every society has its own
rock bottom, obscured by darkness
until impact is imminent. Already in the
sixth century, Amalrik wrote, goats were
grazing in the Roman Forum. As a theorist
of his own condition, he was in many ways
a fatalist. He believed that the Soviet Union
lacked the nimbleness to engage in system-
shaking reform and still survive, and he was
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correct. But his broader contribution was to
show the citizens of other, differently
structured countries how to worry well. He
offered a technique for suspending one’s
deepest political mythologies and posing
questions that might seem, here and now, to
lie at the frontier of crankery.
This method won’t reveal the secret of
political immortality. (Remember those
goats in the Forum.) But in working
systematically through the potential causes
of the worst outcome imaginable, one might
get smarter about the difficult, power-
altering choices that need to be made now—
those that will make politics more
responsive to social change
and one’s country more worthy of its time
on the historical stage. The powerful aren’t
accustomed to thinking this way. But in the
lesser places, among the dissidents and the
displaced, people have had to be skilled in
the art of self-inquiry. How much longer
should we stay? What do we put in the
suitcase? Here or there, how can I be of use?
In life, as in politics, the antidote to
hopelessness isn’t hope. It’s planning.
India-China tensions: It is
decision time for New Delhi
The disputed Sino-Indian border, which
stretches some 3,500km (2,175 miles) along
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some of the world's most rugged terrain, is
roiling after soldiers from the two countries
clashed violently in the last fortnight. The
two militaries remain poised eyeball-to-
eyeball in Ladakh - a high-altitude desert of
which China claims and controls a 43,000-
square-kilometre (16,602-square-mile)
chunk.
Decades of negotiations between New Delhi
and Beijing have not yielded a solution to
their competing claims over 135,000 square
kilometres of territory along the border.
Even so, violence of the kind witnessed on
June 15, when 20 Indian soldiers and an
unknown number of Chinese soldiers died
in a brutal clash in the remote Galwan River
Valley, is rare.
According to Indian accounts, the
impasse began in early May when soldiers
from China's People's Liberation Army
(PLA), who were engaged in their
springtime exercises in Tibet, unexpectedly
crossed the de facto border – known as the
Line of Actual Control (LAC) - and grabbed
chunks of unoccupied territory. India's
thinly deployed military could only watch,
since its springtime manoeuvres had been
cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Chinese occupation of Indian-claimed
territory and the killing of Indian soldiers
are a heavy challenge to Prime Minister
Narendra Modi's image, which rests on
muscular Hindu nationalism. It exposes Mr
Modi to allegations of political
misjudgement since he has, over the years,
invested personal and political capital into
wooing China and befriending its President
Xi Jinping. The two have met numerous
times, including in two "informal summits"
at Wuhan in 2018 and in Chennai, in India,
last year. Modi portrayed each of these
meetings as heralding a new era of strategic
cooperation with China.
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His government has been unusually mindful
of China's sensitivities, even as it repeatedly
opposed India's bids for membership of the
Nuclear Suppliers Group, which controls the
world's export of nuclear materials. Beijing
stalled New Delhi's attempts in the United
Nations to have a Pakistan-based radical
preacher, Maulana Masood Azhar,
designated a global terrorist for 10 years
before agreeing to the designation last year.
It also ignored India's objections to building
a China-Pakistan Economic Corridor
through territory claimed by India.
Overlooking all this, New Delhi has avoided
criticising Beijing over its heavy-
handedness against Taiwan and Hong Kong,
brutal crackdowns in Tibet and Xinjiang, its
role in the COVID-19 pandemic, or even the
Belt and Road Initiative that tramples on
India's territorial claims.
Most significantly, Modi has remained non-
committal to blandishments from
Washington for India to play a major role
alongside the US in deterring Chinese
adventurism in the Indo-Pacific region. New
Delhi has consistently rebuffed invitations
to carry out joint patrols with the US
military, and chosen to project military
power only in the Indian Ocean, rather than
in the contested South China Sea.
Given the government's care not to offend
Beijing, India's opposition parties have
seized the opportunity to lampoon Modi,
who had famously claimed in a 2014
election rally that his "56-inch chest" made
him suitable for governing. Now his
political rivals are criticising him that his
musculature exists only in dealing with
Pakistan, but not with China.
Modi is also facing trenchant criticism over
inadequately funding the military
throughout his six years in power. In the
current year, the defence budget has fallen
to its lowest level, as a share of GDP, since
1962. That year, debilitated by a decade of
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dwindling budgets, India's military was
traumatically drubbed in a war with China.
Amid a chorus of rising criticism, Modi is
downplaying the Chinese intrusions, while
publicly announcing that the military was
handling matters. There is no word on what
demands Beijing has made, if any, in on-
going discussions between diplomats of
both countries.
If Beijing refuses to vacate the territory it
has occupied, or makes impossible demands
of India, Modi will be left with few options.
In what would be a tectonic shift in global
power dynamics, India would probably
align openly with the US, enormously
boosting the emerging containment of
China. While Beijing might regard New
Delhi's burgeoning relations with
Washington as provocative, and this may
have motivated it to teach India a lesson, the
outcome would be a strategic debacle for
China: Its largest neighbour, India, being
pushed into the arms of its superpower
adversary, America.
Already, Washington has signalled its
readiness to stand alongside India. On at
least three occasions since the beginning of
May, senior US political officials have
pledged support to New Delhi, following up
those offers through diplomatic channels. So
far, Modi has demurred, replying that India
is capable of handling the situation, but this
could change.
Also, on the cards is the probability of India
galvanising the Quad – a four-nation
diplomatic grouping with military overtones
that also features Australia, Japan and the
US. Since 2007, India has been mindful of
Beijing's sensitivities about what was billed
as an anti-China "concert of democracies".
Now, by allowing Australia into the
Malabar trilateral naval exercises, which
also include the US and Japan, India could
militarise the Quad, making it a significant
anti-China grouping in the South China Sea.
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India could also pursue economic
retribution against China. In an emphatic
signal, in April, New Delhi imposed
restrictions on Chinese financial
investments into India, blocking cash-rich
Chinese companies from cheaply buying
stakes in Indian firms financially distressed
by the pandemic-related economic
slowdown. New Delhi could also bar
Chinese telecommunications firms from
participating in the rollout of India's 5G
telecom network.
With Sino-Indian trade heavily weighted in
China's favour - the trade imbalance was
about $56bn last year - New Delhi could
impose damaging restrictions on imports
from China. However, the trade
interdependence between the two countries
would impose a cost on Indian firms as
well. For example, India's well-developed
pharmaceutical industry relies heavily on
bulk drugs sourced from China.
Perhaps the greatest damage to Chinese
interests has already taken place - in its
image among Indians. While India's 1962
generation, and perhaps the next, held onto
a demonised image of China, India's
millennials had tended to perceive China
more favourably, as a modern economic
powerhouse. Now, the Ladakh intrusions
and the media glare around "Chinese
backstabbing" has created another Indian
generation that regards China with
animosity.
Most immediately, New Delhi must deal
with the situation of having Chinese troops
in occupation of Indian territory. Given the
nationalistic mood in India, which Modi
himself has been central to creating, a soft
response or the surrender of territory would
be politically unacceptable. The
government's strategy to obtain time to
negotiate with Beijing by downplaying the
situation has been scuttled by an active
media and an opposition that is keen to
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corner the government on the issue of

national security.

Nor have the Chinese shown any inclination

to de-escalate. If anything, Beijing is upping
the ante, with reports coming in of fresh
Chinese intrusions at other spots along the
border. With armed Indian and Chinese
troops eyeball-to-eyeball and reserve
formations mobilising to the border, the
situation could quickly spin out of control.
The various Sino-Indian confidence-
building agreements that have kept the
peace for the past few decades appear to
have lost their validity.

Simultaneously, there are reports of cross-

border firing on the Line of Control with
Pakistan, raising apprehensions of India's
two main enemies - who tout themselves as
"iron brothers" - joining hands to force a
two-front war on India. With New Delhi
unlikely to prevail in that unequal contest, it
would have little choice but to call on
Washington for assistance, or to fall back on
its nuclear deterrent.

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