CHIEF EXECUTIVE

ABID WAZIR KHAN Editorial

ADVISORY BOARD
SARWAR SUKHERA
Reductio ad absurdum
HASSAN NISAR
KHAN HASHAM BIN SIDDIQUE
DR. ZAFAR JASPAL
HUSSAIN SHAHEED SOHARWARDI

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
DR. SHAHID WAZIR KHAN

DEPUTY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
SARAH SHAHID WAZIR

EXECUTIVE EDITOR
M. SHAHRUKH

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A
form of repudiation generally used
in Philosophy and other arenas of
inquiry is “Reductio ad absurdum”
translated as “reducing to absurdity”.
Reductio ad absurdum is a manner of
argumentation that hunts for establishing an
argument by stemming an absurdity from its
rejection; hence, contending that a
proposition must be recognized because its
denial would be indefensible. Such is the
state of political affairs around the world. For
instance, if A remains in power then
democracy is in danger; if B can raise voice
then state sovereignty is in peril. Other
instances, if A wins the election then
constitutional rights may suffer; if B is given
freedom then national interest would be
compromised. However, such notions fail to
hold ground if investigated deeply. The
scenario itself indicates a trend of reducing
the political vision to absurdity and renders
the political stage akin to the theater of the
absurd. Hence, Politics in 2020 has been
reduced to absurdity because it has been
preoccupied with the negation trend,
apagogical questions and appeals to the
extremes.
Pakistan has been witnessing a consis-
tent trend of disproving political opponents
to the level of absurdity. All forms of negotia-
tions seem futile. All attempts seem directed
to chaos. Rhetoric appears anarchic in
nature and actions remain monotonous.
Protests are unnoticed, complaints unheard
and issues remain unresolved. For one the
other is an absurdity only, and it is religiously
imperative to defame one another. Blame
game is the order of the day, and no real
attempt is made at addressing the root of evil.
The current political spectrum presents a
classical manifestation of the oft quoted dia-
logue from Beckett’s play ‘Waiting for Godot’
“…blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.”
United States of America is no different
too. The first Presidential debate was as futile
as the dialogue between Viladimir and
Estragon in ‘Waiting for Godot.’ Both Biden
and Trump were bent upon reducing each
other’s argument to absurdity. Economy,
health, politics, education and constitution
all appeared secondary; the primary goal was
to reduce each other’s argument to absur-
dity. It is a trend not to be praised. A conven-
tion not to be adopted. However, it is a popu-
lar tactic to gain popular support. A tactic
that renders the democratic norms absurd
and promotes a culture appalling in nature.
The year 2020 has been challenging in
multiple ways. The implicit casualty has been
politics around the world. The leaders seem
to be clueless. They have been incapacitated
by the emerging challenges. The Personaliza-
tion of power has reduced institutions to
absurdity and the politicians appear to be
floundering in a politically absurd valley with
no spiritual signpost. The attempts at reduc-
ing the opposing ideals to absurdity has
wounded the faith of political adherents. The
futility of political process and the senseless-
ness of political rhetoric is the major chal-
lenge that may deconstruct the political
future of mankind. Nothing but mere rheto-
ric has reduced political faith to absurdity. It
is an irony that politics itself has reduced
politics to absurdity.

4 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020

globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
Current edition
November 2020

4 Editorial
Reductio ad absurdum

Pakistan Democratic Movement

8 No, Fazlur Rehman Cannot Protect Pakistanis’ Democratic Rights
Opposition parties have tapped a right-wing Islamist as the leader of the Pakistan Democratic Movement. That raises serious questions Beijing Vs Washington
Pakistan Opposition 36 US-China rivalry and its impact on Pakistan
The present rivalry between the United States and China has serious global, regional and national ramifications. For Pakistan, the impact is
even greater
10 In a Rare Show of Power, Pakistan Opposition Elites Challenge the Generals
Political temperatures rise in Pakistan as the opposition takes on the military and Imran Khan headlong
Unconstitutional Game
South Asia Cooperation 38 Kashmir’s Future
The test for the Kashmiri leadership has begun
12 Could Bangladesh and Pakistan Make Waves by Cooperating on Climate Change?
Cooperation around climate change could also pave way for normalization of relations between both countries
Argument
Drug Trafficking 40 Decolonizing the United Nations Means Abolishing the Permanent Five
The inequalities of the past can’t set the rules of the present
14 Pakistan’s Drug Habit is Endangering the Region
In the past, Pakistan’s clandestine services have used profits from drug trafficking to fund proxy groups in South Asia 42 Erdogan Is Turning Turkey Into a Chinese Client State
With few friends left in the West, Ankara is counting on Beijing for help

China-Pakistan Relations
Interview
16 Andrew Small on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’s Return to the Shadows
“CPEC has been a chastening experience for China in the context of the BRI” 44 Harry Harding on the US, China, and a ‘Cold War 2.0’
“Calling it a second Cold War is misleading, but to deny that it’s a Cold War is also disingenuous”

US Foreign Relations
Azerbaijan Vs Armenia
20 The False Promise of Regime Change
Why Washington keeps failing in the Middle East 46 An Old Regional Conflict, And Interested Neighbours
Military action claims 100 lives in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. What is the dispute, and how are other countries getting involved?

Ceasefire Agreement
Power Scam
23 Why Armenia and Azerbaijan are on the Brink of War
Local tensions meet global rivalries in Nagorno-Karabakh 48 IPP ‘agreement’
The natural question to ask is what all needs to happen before we can get to an ‘agreement’

Global News
Afghan Peace Process
25 A Foreign Policy for the Day After Trump
Reimagining—not restoring—the liberal international order 50 The Taliban Sanctions
One critical issue remains the Taliban’s relationship with foreign militants in Afghanistan

America Ignores Africa

Education
28 Climate Change Doesn’t Have to Stoke Conflict
Politics matter more than the environment when it comes to war and peace 52 Language of Instruction
The evidence is that children learn best in a language they understand well

Unemployment Benefits
FATF and Pakistan
31 The Basic Income Has Its Moment
How the pandemic made a fringe idea go mainstream 54 Pakistan Remains in the UN Terror Financing Grey Zone
Pakistan has failed in letter and spirit to disrupt and dismantle terrorist financial infrastructure despite repeated warnings

Nuclear Issues
Review Essay
34 Pakistan’s Full-Spectrum Deterrence: Trends and Trajectories
Pakistan’s deterrence strategy and force posture are starting to be geared towards a worst-case scenario that includes India’s strong military 56 Citizens of the World
capabilities and support from the United States favoring India during a conflict How cosmopolitanism made Europe modern

6 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020

globalagemagazine.kipscss.net globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 7
Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM)
No, Fazlur Rehman Cannot Protect
Pakistanis’ Democratic Rights
Opposition parties have tapped a right-wing Islamist as the leader of the Pakistan
Democratic Movement. That raises serious questions
By Umair Jamal
@UmairJamal15
P akistan’s opposition parties have
elected the head of the Jamiat
Ulema-i-Islam-Rehman (JUI-F),
Maulana Fazlur Rahman, as their leader
to drive the incoming agitation
campaign against the government.
JUI-F is an Islamist party known for
its right-wing politics in Pakistan. The
appointment of Rehman as the leader of
a so-called Pakistan Democratic Move-
ment (PDM) has raised questions about
the end goals of the campaign.
With Rehman leading the opposi-
tion parties’ mass movement, Pakistanis
should forget about safeguarding their
democratic rights. Rehman’s politics
presents a dire threat to any idea of a
progressive, tolerant, and liberal Paki-
stan. Historically, Rehman has made a
career by pursuing anti-democratic poli-
tics and he should not be expected to give
up on his most common source of legiti-
macy among his right-wing electorate.
For instance, during the last year’s
Azadi (freedom) march against the gov-
8 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
ernment, Rehman accused Prime Minis-
ter Imran Khan of being a “Jewish
agent.” In the same march, Rehman also
argued that his protest is “against those
who set free” Asia Bibi, a Christian
woman acquitted in a blasphemy case in
2019.
Rehman’s party has also targeted
other minority sects in Pakistan, includ-
ing the Ahmadi religious community. In
last year’s JUI-F’s march against the
government, one of the party leaders
said that they are protesting against the
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)’s gov-
ernment because it “released Christian
woman Asia Bibi” and “hired an Ahmadi
for the Economic Council,” referring to
the appointment of Atif Mian, which was
withdrawn after protest from religious
parties.
Calling the Azadi march a national
movement, Rehman declared that “The
religious parties were the first to note the
extent and depth of the Western (anti-
Pakistan) agenda of the PTI government
when blasphemy convicts were sent off
(abroad) without due process of law.”
“It was not just blasphemy convicts
— a pro-Qadiani agenda followed, which
enraged religious sentiment,” he noted
further. At one point he even termed the
Kartarpur Corridor a “front for allowing
Ahmadis easy access to the town of
Qadian in India.” Qadian is the birth-
place of MirzaGhulam Ahmad, the
founder of the Ahmadi sect.
While JUI-F expresses a commit-
ment to women’s rights, the party has
blocked gender equality reforms and
barred its female voters from taking part
in its protest movements. In 2016, the
party rejected the Punjab Protection of
Women Against Violence bill that
criminalized all forms of violence against
women. During 2019’s Azadi march,
JUI-F barred its female members from
participation by telling them to “stay at
home to fast and pray.”
Two days ago, JUI-F’s chief, during
his joint press conference with the Paki-
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
s A large crowd of supporters of the JUI-F chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman joined their leader and
chanted slogans against the government during Azadi march.
stan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)
vice president, Maryam Nawaz, refused
to answer a question related to his sup-
port for her candidacy for Pakistan’s top
post. “If Maryam Nawaz becomes prime
One JUI-F leader
openly claimed that the
military leadership
invited a JUI-F
delegation last year and
told them to cancel the
Azadi march against the
PTI’s government
minister, would you support her?” a jour-
nalist asked Rehman. In response, he
merely laughed and said that it seemed
to him that the question was planted.
For many Pakistani observers, the
s Pakistan opposition leaders Mulana Fazal-ur-Rehman (right), Shahbaz Sharif (second left) and Maryam Nawaz (left) listen to Bilawal Bhutto Zardari
(second right) during a press conference at the end of an All Parties Conference in Islamabad on September 20, 2020.
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
only reason for Rehman’s appointment
is that he is opposition’s only hope when
it comes to threatening the government
and its supporters via street agitation.
His appointment to lead the opposition
also reflects that major political parties
in Pakistan continue to lack street mus-
cle when compared to religious groups.
Over the last few weeks, Rehman
has raised the stakes against Pakistan’s
national security establishment. During
a recent interview, one JUI-F leader
openly claimed that the military leader-
ship invited a JUI-F delegation last year
and told them to cancel the Azadi march
against the PTI’s government. He also
added that Army Chief of Staff General
Qamar Javed Bajwa told the JUI-F dele-
gation not to interfere in “what we are
doing with Sharif.”
In another veiled reference to the
Pakistani military, Rehman recently said
that “he considers himself more
respected than the officers holding high
positions and high ranks.” Do not chal-
lenge me or my party or “we will do to you
what we did to Americans in Afghani-
stan,” he warned.
Rehman’s appointment as the head
of the opposition alliance will put Paki-
stan’s civil-military leaders in a bind
when the march ultimately gets under-
way. It is relatively easier for the PTI’s
government to hold off political parties
via arrests and detentions than it is to go
after the workers of a religious party.
Further, Rehman’s call to agitation
is expected to bring out thousands of
protesters, which is necessarily not the
case with political parties. The PML-N
has started holding regular party meet-
ings and attempting to mobilize its elec-
toral base in Punjab to convey the top
hierarchy’s sentiment to its followers.
Meanwhile, JUI-F is sitting quietly as it
doesn’t necessarily need to build
momentum to awaken its followers.
Rehman understands the strength
and sentiments of his religious appeal
among his followers. But as he leads the
opposition, his entire political rhetoric is
going to be focused on advocating an
anti-democratic vision for Pakistan – the
only language his followers abide by and
understand.
The incoming march is thus not a
movement for social and political change
in Pakistan. It is a fight of egos and politi-
cal interests, which can only happen at
the expense of Pakistanis democratic
rights.
l Umair Jamal is a freelance journalist based in Lahore, Pakistan. His research
focuses primarily on the analysis of South Asian security and politics.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 9
Pakistan Opposition
In a Rare Show of Power,
Pakistan Opposition Elites Challenge
the Generals
Political temperatures rise in Pakistan as the opposition takes on the military and Imran
Khan headlong
s PML-N supremo says struggle isn’t against PM Imran, but ‘those who brought him into power’.
By Daud Khattak
@DaudKhattak1
P akistan is heading toward an
imminent political deadlock as
leading opposition parties, with
former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif at
the vanguard, have chalked out plans for
a countrywide movement against the
government of Prime Minister Imran
Khan.
As per their plan, public gatherings
will be held in different cities in October,
November and December with the
expected result of bringing the govern-
ment to its knees, or at the negotiating
table at the least. Beyond this, the oppo-
sition plans on a long march toward
Islamabad and a sit-in protest in in the
federal capital in January next year.
Turmoil is not new in Pakistan’s
tumultuous politics. But what seems to
be somehow atypical this time around is
an across-the-board anger and discon-
tent among opposition leadership
against the military’s meddling in politi-
10 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
cal affairs. What used to be discussed by
politicians in drawing rooms or behind
closed doors and off-the-record conver-
sations with journalists is now being
talked about in public meetings.
Moreover, what used to be criticized
by ethnic Sindhi, Baloch, and Pashtun
leadership in the three smaller provinces
— Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and
Balochistan — is now being aired by
mainstream political leadership in the
mainland Punjab, the fourth federating
unit often sarcastically referred to as the
“big brother.”
Breaking his two-year-long silence,
ex-premier Nawaz Sharif told a multi-
party conference through a video link
from London last month that there is a
“state above the state” in Pakistan.
Referring to the widespread allegations
of poll rigging by the military in favor of
Khan in the 2018 elections, Sharif said
his struggle was against “those who had
imposed such an incapable person” upon
the nation through a manipulated elec-
toral process. Opposition parties in Paki-
stan refer Khan as the “selected” and the
military as his “selectors.”
Sharif’s “state above the state”
remarks reverberated a similar state-
ment by another former premier,
YousafRazaGillani, in 2011. Referring to
the army generals and an alleged con-
spiracy to overthrow the elected govern-
ment after the American raid in Paki-
stan’s garrison town of Abbottabad to
capture Osama bin Laden, the otherwise
soft-spoken Gillani told the parliament
that “there cannot be a state within a
state.” There is no confirmation whether
the military had actually tried to stage a
coup.
To neutralize Sharif’s freshly
launched thrust, the government and
few self-proclaimed spokespersons of
the military establishment among politi-
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cians have labelled the top opposition
leaders as “traitors,” “anti-state” and
“Indian-agents,” — a time-tested
weapon in the arsenals of Pakistan’s gov-
ernments in general, and its security
establishment in particular.
In a television interview on October
1, Khan said that Sharif is playing a “dan-
gerous game” by leveling allegations of
political interference against the army.
Khan alleged that Sharif has India’s sup-
port.
Days later, a sedition case was filed
against Nawaz Sharif and other top lead-
ers of his Pakistan Muslim League-N for
“conspiring against the country” and
other top institutions. The “institutions”
or “state institutions” euphemistically
refer to the army and its intelligence
agencies in Pakistan.
The allegations of being “anti-state”
or “foreign agent” are not unprece-
dented. From Fatima Jinnah, the sister
of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali
Jinnah, in the mid-60s, to Nawaz Sharif
in 2020, anyone who raised their voice
for civilian supremacy or against viola-
tions of the constitution and human
rights or in favor of freedom of expres-
sion, has been dubbed anti-state or
Indian agents.
In other words, patriotism means
silent submission to the state-sponsored
narrative as defined by the so-called
“state institutions” with the aim to keep a
tight hold over the reins of powers.
In the late 1980s and early 90s,
Nawaz Sharif was the darling of Paki-
stan’s military establishment for stand-
ing up to the late two-time Prime Minis-
ter Benazir Bhutto, who was declared a
security risk. Two generals – AslamBaig
and AsadDurrani – admitted their
involvement in stopping her party’s re-
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election in the 1990s.
Sharif lost favor with the generals
when he tried to assert his constitutional
authority as the elected prime minister.
His government was sacked twice in the
1990s.
Unlike the past, the generals have
overtly picked a side in a political battle
between Imran Khan and his opponents
this time. This explains why Sharif says
the opposition’s struggle is not against
Imran Khan; he is referring to the mili-
tary. The talks of “hybrid rule” is no more
a secret in Pakistan.
Such is the fear of being declared as
“anti-state” that no 24/7 television chan-
nel has ever questioned the military’s
violation of the Constitution by military
generals the way they criticize politicians
for their “incompetence.”
For example, news of illicit assets of
Sharif and former President Asif Ali
Zardarihave been covered as regularly by
these channels. But they have not dared
to air a single line about the investigative
story by journalist Ahmad Noorani who
reported about alleged undeclared
assets worth millions of dollars owned by
former General AsimSaleemBajwa and
his family. The private television chan-
nels picked the issue only when Bajwa
issued a statement denying the charges
as baseless.
Bajwa, who now heads the China-
Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)
Authority, also served as director-
general of the media wing of the Paki-
stani military.
In the same token, the local media
raised hue and cry about a meeting
between certain politicians and the army
chief General QamarJavedBajwa few
weeks ago. Most commentators and tele-
vision anchors were heard condemning
the politicians for meeting the army
chief. But no one dared to ask on what
authority did the army chief call a meet-
ing with the politicians in the first place.
Despite the government and mili-
tary working hand in glove to smear the
opposition leaders, if the battle contin-
ues the powerful military could suffer.
For example, when the government
ministers or television anchors raise
questions about Nawaz Sharif being an
absconder, the opposition leaders point
accusing fingers at General Pervez
Musharraf, the former military ruler
who also fled the country and was
declared an absconder by the courts. In
the same vein, when the government
functionaries accuse the opposition lead-
ers of being corrupt, the other side raise
questions about SaleemBajwa and his
family’s ill-gotten assets.
Sharif’s revelations that then chief
of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
General Zaheerul Islam had asked him to
resign must be creating waves not only
among the ex-premier’s support base
but also elsewhere in Pakistan.
While the military has already been
accused of bringing into power and sup-
porting a government that, according to
some analysts, has failed to deliver on
many fronts over the past two years,
statements, disclosures and allegations
such as the ones by Sharif is not going to
augur well for the favorable image of
Pakistan’s most powerful institution, its
military. Banning criticism of the army
in the media is not going to help the
hybrid government as social media
makes headway in Pakistan, allowing
news and opinion to be shared unfet-
tered. Expect the political temperature
to rise in Pakistan in an otherwise mod-
erate October.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 11
South Asia Cooperation
Could Bangladesh and Pakistan
Make Waves by Cooperating on
Climate Change?
Cooperation around climate change could also pave way for normalization of relations
between both countries
By Kashoon Leeza
@Kashoon Leeza
I n a rare instance of backchannel
diplomacy between the two
countries, Bangladesh and Pakistan
have indicated a desire to advance
cultural and economic ties. Previously,
the two countries have been at odds with
each other following the 1971 war. With
the recent interaction initiating
prospective reconciliation, fight against
climate change could lend itself as a
ground for building mutual trust and an
impetus to resolve difficulties in the
relationship.
However novel the idea may seem,
history lauds the precedents that exist.
While France and Germany shared a
history of bitter ties, what brought the
two adversaries on the same side of table
was the threat of a common enemy, the
Soviet Union. Similarly, in the case of
Bangladesh and Pakistan the common
enemy is climate change, given both are
among top 10 vulnerable countries to
climate change according to Global Cli-
12 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
mate Risk Index 2020. Even more relat-
able is the Sino-Japanese environmental
cooperation that helped China and
Japan reconcile their historic animosity.
Leaders on both sides have priori-
tized climate change response, evident
from commitment to the cause even in
2018 election manifestos of the ruling
parties in both countries. Redressal of
the Pakistan-Bangladesh relationship
promises two-way benefits, environ-
mental and strategic. Mindful of the grav-
ity of climate-change induced threats, a
collaborative framework could not only
help mitigate environmental threats but
also address securitized regional issues.
In South Asia, a host of researches
on the heels of climate-prone events
rationalize that the issue of climate
change has moved past from being an
environmental concern to being a non-
traditional national security threat. Cli-
mate change induced impacts, shared by
Pakistan and Bangladesh, are coming to
the forefront as underlying socioeco-
nomic vulnerabilities.
Among the various repercussion of
climate change, both countries are most
frequently exposed to flooding and sub-
sequent displacement. While heavy mon-
soon caused floods in most areas of Paki-
stan this year, Karachi was worst hit by
record-breaking monsoon floods, turn-
ing streets into rivers, and displacing
millions of people. Against the backdrop
of Cyclone Amphan wreaking havoc
across Bangladesh in May 2020, the gov-
ernment of Bangladesh had to evacuate
more than 2.4 million people to shelters
in otherwise safer districts.
As a threat-multiplier, climate
change triggers a chain of events: floods
lead to migration, migration leads to
unemployment which, in turn, leads to
poverty, radicalization and internal
social conflicts. For example, studies
suggest that economically devastated
displaced citizens are being recruited by
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
the militant organizations in Bangla-
desh.
Equally impactful is the water inse-
curity, and concomitant economic desta-
bilisation. Christopher Mitchell’s “scar-
city model” contends that unequal distri-
bution of scarce resources inspires con-
flicts. Similar is the case of water-
stressed South Asia where decreasing
water-availability would exacerbate ten-
sions between Pakistan, India, Bangla-
desh, and China. Moreover, while agri-
cultural sector makes major contribu-
tions to gross domestic product of Ban-
s People wade through a flooded residential area after heavy monsoon rains in Karachi.
gladesh and Pakistan, not only did floods
destroy standing crops this year but agri-
cultural production is expected to reduce
in the coming years. Warning increased
frequency of the floods in coming years,
World Water Development Report 2020
predicted that floods would cost South
Asian countries $215 billion each year by
2030. As the climate emergency looms,
joint working framework on climate
change between Bangladesh and Paki-
stan would mitigate the threat and work
as a confidence building measure to heal
the contentious past relationship.
The shared goal of climate resilience
makes data sharing and exchange of cli-
mate-conscious policies pertinent
between government of Bangladesh and
Pakistan. Candid knowledge sharing on
water levels, storage capacity, early warn-
ing mechanism remains sine qua non for
climate cooperation. Also, national poli-
cies aimed at countering climate change
could be exchanged. For example,
Islamabad could follow something simi-
lar to Bangladesh’s national climate
change trust funds for proper manage-
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
ment and dispersal of climate financing.
That said, while both Bangladesh
and Pakistan suffer from financial con-
straints to tackle climate change, they
can best address the structural inequali-
ties vis-à-vis climate change through
joint action. A recent study reiterated
that the poorest ten percent in the world
have contributed less than five percent of
global environment damage. In similar
vein, Prime Minister Imran Khan, while
addressing the 75th United Nations Gen-
eral Assembly, stated that despite mini-
mal contribution to carbon emissions,
Pakistan is most vulnerable to the
threats posed by climate change. Realiz-
ing how Khan successfully led the
“Global Initiative for Debt Relief” for
developing countries during the ongoing
COVID-19 pandemic, leaders of both
countries could initiate a similar cam-
paign for climate funding in accordance
with the Paris Agreement commitments.
Dhaka has objected to
India’s water diversion
from the Teesta River
during dry seasons,
Islamabad resisted
water warfare threats in
the aftermath of the Uri
and Pulwama attacks
A bilateral framework would be best
suited to address climate-related
regional issues and even call attention of
regional actors. As Pakistan and Bangla-
desh are lower riparian to India, New
Delhi’s management of upstream rivers
concerns them both. While Dhaka has
objected to India’s water diversion from
the Teesta River during dry seasons,
Islamabad resisted water warfare
threats in the aftermath of the Uri and
Pulwama attacks. Also, last year India
released water in the Sutlej River unan-
nounced, inundating fifty-three locali-
ties in Pakistan. Thus, negotiating with
India from a common ground enables
both to argue for fair share of water and
avoid diversion mishaps from a leveled
playing field.
Meanwhile in pursuing a case for
equitable water share, Pakistan and Ban-
gladesh could positively galvanize
regional cooperation on climate change.
For instance, South Asians nations are
interdependent on each other for water.
In a similar case, India, lower riparian to
China, fears Beijing’s pursuits to dam
Brahmaputra. Regional complex secu-
rity theory maintains that interlinked
security issues, such as climate
change,.cannot be resolved independ-
ently. Thus, borrowing from this, South
Asian states could mutually negotiate a
sound water sharing treaty catered to the
surging climate crisis.
On an endnote, while the climate
emergency calls for a collective action to
mitigate the threats, the spillover effect
for Islamabad and Dhaka would be
equally rewarding. Instituting a bilateral
framework offers an opportunity to fos-
ter mutual trust, reconcile the past dif-
ferences, and pave way for peaceful, cli-
mate-resilient region.
l
Kashoon Leeza is an Islamabad based independent analyst. She writes for South
Asian Voices.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 13
Drug Trafficking
Pakistan’s Drug Habit
is Endangering the Region
In the past, Pakistan’s clandestine services have used profits from drug trafficking to
fund proxy groups in South Asia
s U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Mark Hickok patrols through a field during a clearing mission in Marja in Afghanistan's Helmand province on April 9, 2011.
By Habiba Ashna Marhoon
@HTasalla
T he Golden Crescent of South Asia
– a region comprising
Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan –
is a principal site for the production and
distribution of opium and heroin. Over
the past few decades, war, terrorism and
a shifting political landscape have
facilitated an active heroin trade
throughout the region.
There are three well-defined heroin
trafficking routes that originate in the
Golden Crescent region. The Balkan
route operates through Iran and Turkey
and traffics the bulk of Afghan heroin to
Europe. The northern route supplies
heroin to the Russian Federation and
Central Asia. Due to increased law
enforcement along these two routes,
alternate routes have emerged, collec-
tively called the southern route, which
traffics heroin to Iran and Pakistan, and
from these countries, via sea and air, to
other parts of the world.
Pakistan’s geographic location next
to Afghanistan, the world’s largest pro-
ducer of opium, places the country in a
veritable front-row position in terms of
drug trafficking. Its establishment has
14 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
left no stone unturned in exploiting this
geographic location to its own advan-
tage. The money generated from the
drug trade has been used to fund proxy
terror groups. The role of narcotics in
funding terror activities by Pakistan was
revealed by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) ter-
rorist David Coleman Headley, one of
the main accused in the 26/11 Mumbai
attacks. During his interrogation in
2010, he revealed the role played by Paki-
stan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI), in linking drug lords
and terrorists and facilitating the trans-
portation of weapons, along with drugs,
to India.
While poppy cultivation has largely
been eliminated in Pakistan, the crop is
still grown in large parts of southern
provinces of Afghanistan like Kandahar
and Helmand, where the Taliban has a
strong influence. Analysts say opium
poppies and heroin are among the main
sources of income for the Taliban, which
controls 80 percent of the drug produc-
tion area in Afghanistan. The problem
for them is how to transport these drugs
to other countries. Here, Pakistan acts as
a facilitator. The drug consignments, in
connivance with Pakistan’s authorities,
are smuggled through the Pakistan-
Afghanistan border. From there, these
consignments head for Pakistan’s air
and seaports and, hence, to further desti-
nations in China, Southeast Asia, Africa
and Europe.
As United Nations World Drug
Report 2012 reported, “Pakistan pro-
vides a vital transit route for smuggling
of drugs worth $30 billion from neigh-
boring Afghanistan.” Though not a
major reason, Pakistan backs restora-
tion of Taliban rule in Afghanistan
because if the group returns to power, all
these drug cartels could be resuscitated
and its major benefactor Pakistan will
have even more funds with which to spon-
sor its proxy terror groups.
Pakistan’s role in drug proliferation
is validated by a number of arrests of its
nationals in other countries on charges
of drug trafficking. Shahbaz Khan, a Paki-
stani national, was the leader of a drug
trafficking organization (the “DTO”)
based in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
which produced and distributed massive
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
quantities of narcotics around the world.
He was arrested by Liberian authorities
in December 2016 and later deported to
the United States, where in 2019 he was
sentenced to 15 years for conspiring and
attempting to import heroin into the U.S.
In May 2017, officials for the U.K.’s Bor-
der Force impounded a Pakistan Inter-
national Airlines (PIA) flight from
Islamabad at London’s Heathrow air-
port. Later, the National Crime Agency
said that a quantity of heroin had been
found hidden in different panels of the
plane. In March 2018, two members of
the cabin crew of a PIA flight, traveling
on an Islamabad-Paris flight (PK-749),
were caught smuggling narcotics on
board the flight.
Of late, speculations abound that
PIA has come under the scanner of Qatar
authorities who have recently discovered
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If Pakistan does not
want to be blacklisted, it
must take action to stop
drug proliferation.
Blacklisting by FATF
could spell ruin for
Pakistan’s already
dwindling economy
narcotics smuggling modules by Paki-
stani nationals who arrive in Doha, tak-
ing advantage of the country’s Visa on
Arrival (VoA) facility. Some suggest that
Qatari officials have photographic and
video evidence of arrested drug smug-
glers from Pakistan. If these specula-
tions turn out to be true, then it is quite
possible Qatar could suspend the VoA
facility for Pakistan’s nationals if it does
not take action to prevent the smuggling
of narcotics into Qatar.
The issue of narcotics smuggling
has the potential to derail Pakistan’s
bilateral relations and besmirch its
international reputation. Indeed, the
question arises as to why Pakistan would
jeopardize its relations with other coun-
tries in order to benefit from narcotics.
The answer is that the money derived
from drug smuggling serves Pakistan’s
larger agenda of sponsoring proxy terror
groups. With the plenary session of the
intergovernmental Financial Action
Task Force (FATF) scheduled for later
this month, Pakistan’s role in funding
terror organizations through
drugs/narcotics smuggling is sure to
come up for discussion, as the FATF
determines the country’s listing. If Paki-
stan does not want to be blacklisted, it
must take action to stop drug prolifera-
tion. Blacklisting by FATF could spell
ruin for Pakistan’s already dwindling
economy.
l Habiba Ashna Marhoon is the founder of AWiD (Afghan Women in Dialogue) and
an activist who works around the Afghan Peace Negotiations (APN) topic.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 15
China-Pakistan Relations
Andrew Small on the China-
Pakistan Economic Corridor’s
Return to the Shadows
“CPEC has been a chastening experience for China in the context of the BRI”
By Catherine Putz
@LadyPutz
I n the five years since the China-
Pakistan Economic Corridor
(CPEC) was launched, it’s been
beset by the winds of local politics and
the waves of geopolitics alike. In a new
report, titled “Returning to the Shadows:
China, Pakistan, and the Fate of CPEC,”
Andrew Small catalogues the grand
promises and countless pitfalls of CPEC.
In an interview with The Diplomat,
Small, a senior transatlantic fellow with
the German Marshall Fund’s Asia
Program, explains the significance of
CPEC to the China-Pakistan
relationship, the contours of its highs
and lows, and what the fate of the grand
scheme means for China’s broader Belt
and Road Initiative.
What’s the significance of the
China Pakistan Economic Corri-
dor (CPEC) to the China and Paki-
stan bilateral relationship?
CPEC was supposed to act as a vehicle to
upgrade the China-Pakistan partner-
16 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
ship. Some Chinese analysts used to
describe the relationship as a “stool with
two legs”: While security and political
ties have been strong for decades, eco-
nomic ties had always been extremely
weak. Even this characterization some-
what overstates the breadth of the rela-
tionship — it was almost entirely con-
fined to military and intelligence mat-
ters, and managed by a very small cast of
individuals on the two sides. China was
never a factor in day-to-day economic or
political life in Pakistan, and its strong
approval ratings in opinion polls
reflected its unimpeachable reputation
as the “all-weather friend” rather than
any deeper affinity among the Pakistani
public.
That narrowness of relations also
made it difficult for China to embrace
Pakistan too openly — despite being argu-
ably Beijing’s closest partner, virtually
anything the two sides did together was
always viewed through a security prism,
and China had to tread carefully to avoid
eliciting alarmed reactions in New Delhi
or further afield. CPEC was a way of
changing that narrative. China could
make a big public push to enhance the
relationship while selling it as an eco-
nomic and development matter. There
was also a gamble involved: CPEC was
dubbed the “flagship” of the BRI, which
tied its fate closely to the reputation of
the entire initiative, and even to Xi
Jinping himself. This was a risk that
Beijing was willing to take. China wanted
its relationship with Pakistan to be a
“model to follow”: Close, trusted military
ties that nonetheless fell short of the com-
mitments of a formal alliance, under-
pinned by a comprehensive Chinese
immersion in the country’s economic
life. If CPEC succeeded, other countries
would look to replicate it.
For Pakistan, the logic was even
more compelling. CPEC was an opportu-
nity to draw China into a deeper level of
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political, security, commercial, and
financial commitment to the country, in
a highly visible way, at a juncture where
U.S. support was being tapered back on
all fronts, and international investors
were very wary of the security situation.
For both sides, the optics are therefore
almost as important as the substance.
China and Pakistan have a strong incen-
tive to put a good face on CPEC whatever
is actually happening in practice.
The Khan administration’s inter-
est in modifying CPEC made head-
lines back in 2018. Since then, as
you note in the report, CPEC first
slowed then gradually sped up
again. But in the interim, did the
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)
government have any success in
pushing for its desired changes?
CPEC was already slowing down even
before the PTI took power — by late 2017
Pakistan’s economic situation was weak-
ening and political uncertainties were
growing as Nawaz Sharif and the Paki-
stan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)’s
struggles with the army intensified.
Imran Khan was known to be skeptical
about CPEC — seeing it as too closely tied
to the PML-N’s agenda, a poor fit for his
own priorities, and almost certainly cor-
rupt too. Prominent figures in the PTI,
such as the commerce minister and lead-
ing industrialist, Abdul Razak Dawood,
were also public critics of CPEC, repre-
senting sections of the Pakistani busi-
ness community that saw the benefits as
too tilted to Chinese firms, and had them-
selves missed out on the explosion of
CPEC contracts.
Beijing was ready to be accommo-
dating to the new government’s priori-
ties. Its position had always been that the
PTI just didn’t understand that they
could be beneficiaries too if they spelled
out clearly enough what they wanted. In
practice though, the model that Imran
Khan was proposing was precisely the
kind of economic relationship that China
had always sought to avoid with Paki-
stan: In his first trip to Beijing after tak-
ing office, he asked for a bailout to
address the country’s weak financial
position, and support for socio-
economic projects, in other words, aid.
Initially, China tried to figure out
some way to rebalance CPEC around the
PTI’s priorities. As one Chinese official
put it to me in the early months after the
elections: “We can do peanut projects
instead of mega projects, if that’s what
they want.” They looked at making Paki-
stan a test country for China’s new aid
agency, as well as some agriculture and
green energy projects, and they talked
about renegotiating the terms of existing
investments. But Beijing quickly grew
fed up with the new government — par-
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ticularly after the open criticism that
CPEC received early in its tenure — and
decided that they needed to go straight to
the army instead, which they increas-
ingly believed was running the show
anyway. The result of that has been a
slowed down and slimmed down CPEC
but not necessarily a CPEC that bears the
imprimatur of the PTI the way that its
conception reflected the PML-N’s infra-
structure and energy-centered agenda.
What factors contributed to the
more recent downgrading of ambi-
tions for CPEC by both Pakistan
and China? Did one drive the damp-
ening of enthusiasm more than the
other?
It’s important to mention that CPEC is
seeing a mini-resurgence at the moment.
What should be the single largest project
under CPEC, the ML-1 railway line
upgrade from Karachi to Peshawar, is
supposed to be moving ahead, and there
are a couple of new hydro-electric dams.
Officials on both sides will publicly
dispute that there has been any down-
grading of ambitions. But the really
transformative plan that was originally
envisaged — a multi-stage
transformative agenda for the Pakistani
economy — is not really there anymore,
and the overall scale is no longer on a par
with the kinds of figures that were being
talked about a few years back.
This reflects a confluence of factors.
Pakistan’s economy has struggled in
recent years, which has affected the gov-
ernment’s financing capacity. The BRI is
no longer characterized by such an over-
riding focus on speed and scale as it was
when CPEC launched. China found the
political obstacles to be a real headache,
and essentially decided to hold back
until it was clear that they had partners
on the Pakistani side that actually
wanted to deliver on CPEC. But in Paki-
stan, too, there were questions from a
number of corners about whether the
full-scale version made sense — the debt
levels, the implications for Pakistani
businesses of an influx of Chinese firms
in the special economic zones, the degree
of dependence on China that was build-
ing, and many other factors besides. For
its part, the army was not so comfortable
about such a vast civilian-led economic
agenda for the country either; it repre-
sented a potential rebalancing of power
in Pakistan, and indeed China even sold
it as that: A move toward a less military-
centric view of national strength. Some
of the frictions around these issues were
not entirely helpful for the broader rela-
tionship either — so if anything there is a
mutual sense that a slimmed-down ver-
sion of CPEC may be preferable, as long
as the public reputation is carefully man-
aged.
With the PTI government less
interested in CPEC than the previ-
ous Sharif administration, the mili-
tary has taken over more control.
What are the implications of the
renewed emphasis on China-
Rawalpindi relations for Paki-
stan’s always tenuous civil-
military balance?
The army was unhappy about the level of
control it exercised over CPEC, and the
role the PML-N occupied in running it.
That has now been “fixed.” Even if China
has certain preferences and views about
how Pakistan should think about its
national strategy, Beijing is ultimately
indifferent about who is in charge in Paki-
stan as long as they deliver on Chinese
objectives. I think there is a recognition
on the Chinese side that CPEC ended up
on the wrong side of the civil-military
struggle and there will be even greater
care to ensure that doesn’t happen again.
There has always been a question of
whether CPEC ends up reinforcing exist-
ing power dynamics in Pakistan or miti-
gating them. There was a genuine case to
be made for the latter in CPEC’s first cou-
ple of years, but that’s clearly no longer
true — instead CPEC is now likely to help
the army entrench its role in an even
wider range of economic decision-
making and execution than its usual pre-
rogatives. To be fair to China, this is not
what they intended. They were not
happy with how the Pakistani army
treated Nawaz Sharif. But they have
accommodated themselves to what hap-
pened and would rather work through a
GHQ-centered set of structures if it
means that some credible version of
CPEC happens. I expect, as a result, that
it will be difficult to get back to a civilian-
led model for CPEC again. Given that it
represents such an important part of
Pakistan’s economic life, even on its
more modest scale, that has some obvi-
ous long-term implications.
At a recent All Parties Conference,
Pakistan’s opposition issued a
series of demands, mostly relating
to allegations of election rigging
and military interference in Paki-
stan’s government. But one of their
demands was that CPEC be “expe-
dited,” with the opposition accus-
ing the PTI of endangering the ini-
tiative. In most countries (Sri
Lanka, Malaysia, and the Mal-
dives, for example), we’ve seen the
opposite: pro-democracy forces
aligned against Chinese invest-
ments and development projects,
citing increased corruption risks
and lack of transparency. Can you
explain the role of CPEC in Paki-
stan’s domestic politics?
The routine with CPEC in Pakistani
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 17
domestic politics is that everyone
expresses their profound support for it in
principle and then the opposition criti-
cizes the form that it is taking in practice
with the government in power, and the
way it is being executed. This reflects
China’s sanctified status in Pakistan. It is
still the ”all-weather friend,” and its
importance as a security partner and
financial backer has only grown.
Beijing also has a radioactive reac-
tion to any hint of public criticism. As we
saw early in the PTI’s term in office, Chi-
nese officials would routinely call on the
army to get any critical ministers to shut
up. So although there are many of the
same concerns about CPEC in Pakistan
as elsewhere — corruption, debt, trans-
parency issues, advantageous terms for
Chinese companies and so on — these
tend to be expressed in private, and gen-
erally not to the Chinese.
But we also have a situation at the
moment where some of CPEC’s biggest
critics are in government. For the PML-
N and the PPP, which also claimed credit
for aspects of CPEC — such as China’s
decision to take Gwadar on again — the
line has been that the PTI is squandering
the economic opportunity that it repre-
sents. BRI politics also reflect electoral
cycles. The skeptical opposition takes
power and figures out its own accommo-
dation with China, while the former gov-
erning parties then either take a more
critical position itself or attack their suc-
cessors for failing to handle relations
with Beijing effectively. Of course, China
doesn’t like this and wants to stay above
the fray, but the scale of the BRI in some
of these countries is on too large a scale
for that to be possible. In Pakistan,
though, Beijing still has the means to
18 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
shut some of these voices down.
What can the fate of CPEC tell us
about China’s Belt and Road Initia-
tive (BRI) more broadly?
CPEC has been a chastening experience
for China in the context of the BRI. Given
its special relationship with Pakistan,
this was supposed to be a politically eas-
ier experience than elsewhere, for all the
security and economic challenges they
knew they would face. It has been a dem-
onstration that the grand-scale version
of its plans may just be too difficult to
execute — too exposing and contentious
in countries where it simply doesn’t have
the depth of relationships or expertise to
pull it off, however close its top-level ties
are. China cannot expect to replicate its
own model outside its borders in very
different political, cultural and economic
contexts.
One response could have been to
come up with a new model — a BRI 2.0
and a CPEC 2.0 — that put things on a
more sustainable footing, financially,
politically, and environmentally, built
consensus, and tailored plans even more
closely to countries’ needs. The alterna-
tive is just to slow things down, scale
things down, but basically plow ahead
with the same approach as before, with a
tighter focus on some of China’s own
higher priorities, such as the Digital Silk
Road projects or, in Pakistan, getting
Gwadar wrapped up. I think that’s gen-
erally what we’re seeing: more of the
same, just not quite as much, and with
some modest re-prioritization.
The big unknown now, though, is
debt. Pakistan is among the many coun-
tries that are having to renegotiate terms
on their overall finances and on specific
projects, given the pandemic-induced
economic crisis. For now that has actu-
ally opened the spigots again as the two
sides look to stimulate the Pakistani econ-
omy with new investments. But there is
still a reckoning to come. This is one area
where Pakistan is in a sui generis posi-
tion — given its importance to China,
Beijing is willing to do more to shore up
the country’s economy than in most
other cases. However, we may yet see
even more constraints on the Pakistani
government’s finances again, as was the
case with the last IMF program, which
played its own role in slowing CPEC
down. For all that China needs to swing
in to secure the BRI’s reputation and
Pakistan’s strategic position, and for all
that the politics of CPEC have been
squared between the army and the Chi-
nese government, there is still the pros-
pect that after this mini-resurgence,
CPEC will collide with hard economic
realities again, as everywhere else along
the BRI.
Finally, we are starting to see, in
Pakistan, less caution about certain per-
ceptions of the BRI — Beijing wants to
maintain a narrative of success but they
seem to care less now about sensitivities
relating to political issues, such as pro-
jects in Kashmir where they once trod
carefully around India’s reaction, or the
fact that CPEC is, given the army’s
heightened role, increasingly
securitized. As we have seen in other
elements of Chinese foreign policy this
year, it appears that we are moving to an
approach that is more unabashed about
the function the BRI is supposed to
occupy in fulfilling China’s wider strate-
gic objectives.
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
US Foreign Relations
The False Promise of
Regime Change
Why Washington keeps failing in the Middle East
s U.S. solider in Kandahar, Afghanistan May 2012.
By Philip H. Gordon
Washington, D.C.
S
ince the 1950s, the United States
has tried to oust governments in
the broader Middle East once
every decade, on average. It has done so
in Iran, Afghanistan (twice), Iraq, Egypt,
Libya, and Syria—a list that includes
only the instances in which the removal
of a country’s leaders and the
transformation of its political system
were the goals of U.S. policy and
Washington made sustained efforts to
achieve them. The motives behind those
interventions varied widely, as have
Washington’s methods: in some cases
sponsoring a coup, in others invading
and occupying a country, and in others
relying on diplomacy, rhetoric, and
sanctions.
All these attempts, however, have
one thing in common: they failed. In
every case, American policymakers over-
stated the threat faced by the United
States, underestimated the challenges of
ousting a regime, and embraced the opti-
mistic assurances of exiles or local actors
with little power. In every case but that of
20 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
Syria (where the regime held on to
power), the United States prematurely
declared victory, failed to anticipate the
chaos that would inevitably ensue after
regime collapse, and ultimately found
itself bearing massive human and finan-
cial costs for decades to come.
Why is regime change in the Middle
East so hard? And why do U.S. leaders
and pundits keep thinking they can get it
right? There are no easy answers to those
questions, and it is important to
acknowledge that in every case, the alter-
natives to regime change were unappeal-
ing. But as U.S. policymakers contem-
plate the challenges of dealing with this
vexing region, they should see the pat-
terns of self-delusion and misjudgment
that have time and again made regime
change so tempting—and, ultimately, so
disastrous.
BLOWBACK
In 2011, as senior officials debated
whether the United States should use
military force against the Libyan ruler
Muammar al-Qaddafi, U.S. Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates—the most experi-
enced member of President Barack
Obama’s national security
team—reminded his colleagues that
“when you start a war you never know
how it will go.” Gates’s warning was an
understatement: in every single case,
however carefully prepared, regime
change in the Middle East has had unan-
ticipated and unwelcome consequences.
Perhaps the most powerful example of
this phenomenon was the 2003 U.S.
invasion of Iraq, when Washington
ended Saddam Hussein’s rule but also
inadvertently empowered Iran, fueled
jihadism, demonstrated to dictators
around the world the potential value of
possessing nuclear weapons (to deter
such invasions), increased doubts all
over the world about the benevolence of
U.S. power, and soured the American
public on military intervention for
decades to come.
Iraq was hardly an outlier: in every
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other case, the most significant conse-
quences were the unintended ones. In
Iran in 1953, the CIA helped oust the
prickly nationalist prime minister
Mohammad Mosaddeq, hoping that
with Mosaddeq out of the picture, the
Iranian shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,
would be a more reliable regional ally
In 2011, the U.S.-
backed ouster of
Qaddafi and the
subsequent collapse of
the Libyan state led to
widespread violence,
allowed weapons to
proliferate across the
region, exacerbated
instability in
neighboring Chad and
Mali, and stiffened
Russia’s resolve to
never again allow the
UN Security Council to
pass a resolution that
would facilitate regime
change, as it did in the
case of Libya
and keep Iran out of the Soviet camp. But
the shah’s baroque corruption and harsh
repression—abetted by his U.S. benefac-
tors—ultimately led to the 1979 revolu-
tion, which brought to power an
intensely anti- American Islamist regime
that has sponsored terrorism and
destabilized the region ever since. In
Afghanistan in the 1980s, U.S. support
for the Islamist mujahideen helped to
undermine the Soviet Union but also
contributed to a decade of chaos, a civil
war, the rise of the brutal Taliban gov-
ernment, an empowered global jihadi
movement—and, ultimately, another
U.S. military intervention, after the 9/11
attacks in 2001, which were planned by
al Qaeda terrorists based in Afghanistan.
After a popular uprising in Egypt in 2011,
the United States used its diplomatic
leverage to help end the decades-long
repressive rule of Hosni Mubarak. The
situation deteriorated in the years that
followed, however. In 2012, elections
brought to power an exclusionary
Islamist government. The next year, that
government was violently overthrown
and replaced by a new military regime
led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi,
which has proved to be even more
repressive that Mubarak’s.
In 2011, the U.S.-backed ouster of
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Qaddafi and the subsequent collapse of
the Libyan state led to widespread vio-
lence, allowed weapons to proliferate
across the region, exacerbated instability
in neighboring Chad and Mali, and stiff-
ened Russia’s resolve to never again
allow the UN Security Council to pass a
resolution that would facilitate regime
change, as it did in the case of Libya.
Advocates for regime change in Libya
had hoped that Qaddafi’s overthrow
would lead other dictators to agree to
leave power or suffer Qaddafi’s fate. In
fact, the intervention had the opposite
effect. In Syria, for example, President
Bashar al-Assad watched Qaddafi bru-
tally tortured and killed by Libyan rebels
and decided to crack down even more
ruthlessly on his opponents, creating an
opening for jihadis, who then spilled
over into neighboring Iraq and under-
mined the government there.
The attempt by the United States
and others to remove Assad by support-
ing opposition rebels proved even more
catastrophic. With Russia and Iran
determined to keep Assad in power,
years of outside military assistance to the
Syrian opposition led not to Assad’s
ouster as intended but instead to
counterescalation by his regime and its
foreign sponsors, fueling a vicious civil
war, a humanitarian tragedy, refugee
flows on a scale not seen since World
War II (which themselves caused a popu-
list backlash in Europe), and an explo-
sion of jihadi extremism. The desire to
overthrow the murderous Assad was
understandable. But the consequences
of trying and failing to do so—in part
because no one had the appetite to
invade and occupy Syria less than a
decade after the Iraq disaster—proved to
be worse than not trying at all.
NATURE ABHORS A
VACUUM
The heart of the problem is that when-
ever an existing regime is destroyed (or
even just significantly weakened by out-
side forces, as in Syria), a political and
security vacuum emerges and a power
struggle begins. In the absence of secu-
rity, people feel no alternative but to orga-
nize and arm themselves and to turn to
kinship networks, tribes, and sects for
safety, exacerbating sectarianism and
internal rivalries and sometimes leading
to demands for secession. In the run-up
to an intervention, groups with little in
common form coalitions of convenience.
But once the regime falls, they quickly
turn against one another. All too often,
the most extreme or violent groups pre-
vail and more moderate or pragmatic
forces are sidelined; inevitably, those
excluded from power work to undermine
those who seized it. When the United
States has tried to fill the vacuum itself,
as it did in Iraq and at times in Afghani-
stan, it has found itself the target of locals
and neighboring states that resist for-
eign interference and has ended up sac-
rificing thousands of lives and spending
trillions of dollars yet still failing to cre-
ate stability.
The security vacuum created by
regime change not only sets up a struggle
for power within states but invariably
generates ruthless competition among
regional rivals as well. When govern-
ments fall (or appear likely to do so),
regional and even global powers rush in
with money, arms, and sometimes direct
military force to put their own proxies in
power and pull the country into their
orbit. U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice’s repeated assertion
around the time of the Iraq war that
Washington’s pursuit of “stability at the
expense of democracy” in the Middle
East had produced neither was broadly
true. But it turned out to have a corol-
lary—that pursuing democracy at the
expense of stability might also produce
neither, but at even higher cost.
Americans like to believe their for-
eign interventions are generous, benign,
and widely appreciated, but it turns out
that even when they help topple unpopu-
lar regimes they are not necessarily
greeted as liberators. Indeed, even well-
meaning interventions in the Middle
East have often led to violent resistance.
After the 1953 coup in Iran, antipathy
toward the United States for empower-
ing the dictatorial shah led to virulent
anti-Americanism that endures to this
day. In Afghanistan, where suspicion of
outsiders runs deep, Hamid Karzai, the
leader whom Washington favored after
its 2001 invasion, could never escape the
impression among Afghans that he was
put in power and supported by foreign-
ers. Today, ridding the country of occu-
pying U.S. troops remains the opposition
Taliban’s most central rallying cry. Most
famously, U.S. Vice President Dick
Cheney’s prediction that U.S. troops
would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq
proved wildly wrong and was followed by
years of bloody anti-American insur-
gency.
Even the allegedly friendly leaders
the United States has put in place have
not always acted according to Washing-
ton’s wishes. After all, they have their
own local interests to worry about and
often have to stand up to outside powers
to bolster their legitimacy. Frequently,
they have defied Washington on a range
of domestic and international issues,
knowing that their U.S. sponsors had
little choice but to continue to support
them. And far from exercising positive
influence on such leaders and helping
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 21
the United States overcome these chal-
lenges, many regional and global players
do just the opposite. For decades, Paki-
stan has helped thwart U.S. efforts to
stabilize Afghanistan. Iran undermined
U.S. efforts in Iraq by supporting violent
Shiite militia groups. Libya has been torn
apart by competing outside powers sup-
porting rival proxies. And in Syria, Rus-
sia and Iran—determined to undermine
U.S.-sponsored regime change in part
lest Americans get the idea of trying it
o n e d a y i n M o s c o w o r T e h-
ran—responded to every U.S. escalation
with a counterescalation of their own.
These regional spoilers often succeed
because they have more local influence
and more at stake than the United States
does, and it’s far easier to cause chaos
than to prevent it.
The more recent U.S. interventions
Numerous Middle
Eastern rulers have
been willing to risk and
even lose their lives
rather than give up their
power voluntarily. The
result is that when the
United States wants to
get rid of such leaders,
it must go far beyond
the low-cost remedies
often proposed by
proponents of regime
change, such as
implementing no-fly
zones, launching
airstrikes, and providing
arms to the opposition
in the Middle East have sought to replace
autocratic regimes with democratic gov-
ernments. But even if those actions had
somehow avoided the pitfalls posed by
security vacuums, popular resistance,
and untrustworthy proxies, they would
have been unlikely to shepherd in new
democracies. Although there are no clear
recipes for democratic development,
extensive scholarly research suggests
that the main ingredients include a high
degree of economic development; signif-
icant ethnic, political, and cultural homo-
geneity (or at least a shared national nar-
rative); and the previous existence of
democratic norms, practices, and insti-
tutions. Unfortunately, the states of the
contemporary Middle East lack all these
attributes. None of this means that
democracy is impossible there or that
promoting democracy should not be an
22 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
American aspiration. But it does suggest
that pursuing regime change in the Mid-
dle East with the hope that doing so will
lead to democratic development is wish-
ful thinking in the extreme.
LEARNING THE HARD
WAY
The deep-seated American desire to fix
problems in the Middle East is in many
ways honorable, but it can be dangerous
as well. The hard reality—demonstrated
by decades of painful experience in the
region—is that there are some problems
that cannot be entirely solved and trying
to solve them sometimes makes things
worse.
Part of the problem is that U.S.
policymakers often lack a deep under-
standing of the countries in question,
making them susceptible to manipula-
tion from parties with their own vested
interests. The most famous example is
the Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who
helped convince top officials in the
George W. Bush administration that Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction and
that U.S. forces would be greeted as lib-
erators in Iraq. Years after the invasion,
Iraqi authorities arrested Chalabi on
charges of counterfeiting and allegedly
working to advance the interests of Iran.
Similar scenarios played out in Libya,
Syria, and elsewhere, where even well-
meaning exiles told Americans and oth-
ers what they wanted to hear in order to
win the support of the most powerful
countries of the world. In each case, it led
to massive miscalculations about what
would happen in the wake of the U.S.
intervention, almost always in the direc-
tion of excessive optimism.
Americans also keep placing hope
over experience when it comes to Middle
East policy because of a persistent ten-
dency to underestimate the degree of
resources and commitment it will take to
get rid of a hostile regime and stabilize
the situation once it is removed. But
many decades of experience demon-
strate that autocratic regimes never
relinquish power in the face of economic
sanctions alone (which hurt the public
more than the leadership) or even in the
face of modest amounts of military force.
Numerous Middle Eastern rulers have
been willing to risk and even lose their
lives rather than give up their power vol-
untarily. The result is that when the
United States wants to get rid of such
leaders, it must go far beyond the low-
cost remedies often proposed by propo-
nents of regime change, such as imple-
menting no-fly zones, launching
airstrikes, and providing arms to the
opposition. Instead, significant U.S.
military deployments are required to
dislodge such leaders, and even after
they are gone, it always proves far more Ceasefire Agreement
costly to deal with the aftermath than
proponents of regime change suggest.
And although officials in Washington
often assume that regional or interna-
Why Armenia and Azerbaijan
tional partners will help bear the bur-
dens and assume the costs of regime
change, that rarely happens in reality.
Some of these problems would be
are on the Brink of War
Local tensions meet global rivalries in Nagorno-Karabakh
manageable if the American public’s
commitment, patience, and staying
power were infinite, but they are not.
Especially because U.S. leaders and
regime change proponents rarely
acknowledge the likely heavy costs as
they make the case for action, once the
immediate crisis passes and public per-
ceptions of the threats at hand diminish,
public support dwindles. Most Ameri-
cans initially supported the invasions of
both Afghanistan and Iraq. Over time,
however, majorities concluded that both
interventions had been mistakes. And
hardly any public support ever existed
for intervening or peacekeeping opera-
tions in Libya and Syria. In every case, as
the problems mounted and the costs
rose, the public backing necessary for
success disappeared.
JUST SAY NO
In the future, there may be cases in which
mass terrorism, genocide, a direct attack
on the United States, or a country using
or proliferating nuclear weapons makes s An Armenian soldier in Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan, September 2020.
the benefits of removing a threatening
regime exceed the costs. But if history is
any guide, such cases will be rare to non- By Jeff Mankoff
existent. And even where they exist, they @DrJMankoff
demand caution, humility, and honesty
about the likely costs and consequences.
O
Regime change will always tempt n September 27, significant and to a lesser extent Ukraine. Azerbaijan regards it as illegally occu-
Washington. So long as there are states fighting broke out between the pied. Although Nagorno-Karabakh typi-
militaries of Armenia and cally gets little attention in the West, it is
that threaten American interests and A FROZEN CONFLICT
mistreat their people, U.S. leaders and Azerbaijan, two states that have been perhaps the most dangerous flash point
locked in an intractable conflict over the HEATS UP across post-Soviet Eurasia.
pundits will periodically be pulled
The origins of the Nagorno-Karabakh
toward the idea that Americans can use disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh The current clashes broke out on
conflict can be traced back to the
their unparalleled military, diplomatic, since the last days of the Soviet Union. September 27, with barrages of artillery
Kremlin’s decision to include the Arme-
and economic power to get rid of bad Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding and the deployment of heavy armor
nian-majority region within Soviet
regimes and replace them with better regions have seen periodic outbursts of along the Line of Contact separating
Azerbaijan. When Moscow relaxed
ones. The long, diverse, and tragic his- violence in recent years, but the current Armenian-controlled Nagorno-
restrictions on popular mobilization in
tory of U.S.-backed regime change in the fighting is the most serious since Karabakh from Azerbaijan proper.
the late 1980s, ethnic Armenians began
Middle East, however, suggests that Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a cease- While each side blames the other for
demanding Nagorno-Karabakh’s trans-
such temptations—like most quick fixes fire in 1994. firing the first shot, local observers have
fer to Armenia. Moscow refused, and
that come along in life and poli- Domestic political factors in both reported for weeks that escalation
when the Soviet Union collapsed a few
tics—should be resisted. The next time countries militate against compromise. seemed imminent. Both countries
years later, a full-scale war broke out
U.S. leaders propose intervening in the The international context surrounding declared martial law and partially mobi-
between Armenia and Azerbaijan, leav-
region to overthrow a hostile regime, it the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh has lized their reserves, suggesting an expec-
ing around 30,000 dead and over one
can safely be assumed that such an also shifted in ways that complicate tation of sustained conflict. Clips of this
million displaced. With Azerbaijan led
enterprise will be less successful, more efforts to peacefully address the underly- week’s fighting posted online show evi-
by the pan-Turkic nationalist Abulfaz
costly, and more replete with unin- ing dispute. In particular, Turkey’s grow- dence of significant conflict involving
Elchibey for much of the conflict, Rus-
tended consequences than proponents ing involvement in a conflict in which artillery, armor, unmanned aerial vehi-
sian forces largely supported the Arme-
realize or admit. So far, at least, it has Russia has long been the dominant cles (UAVs), and infantry forces. On Mon-
nian side. A Russian-brokered cease-fire
never been the other way around. player risks both giving the protago- day, Stepanakert, the capital of
ended the war in May 1994, but not the
nists—especially Azerbaijan—an incen- Nagorno-Karabakh, came under artil-
underlying dispute: today, Nagorno-
tive to keep fighting and opening up a lery fire.
Karabakh and seven surrounding dis-
new front in the Turkish-Russian rivalry This week’s clashes are hardly the
l Philip H. Gordon is Mary and David Boies Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at tricts are under Armenian control, but
the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Losing the Long Game: The that has already engulfed Syria, Libya, first since the 1994 cease-fire. Sporadic
False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East.
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 23
sniping across the Line of Contact is com-
mon. In April 2016, an Azerbaijani offen-
sive recaptured several strategic high
points, leaving around 200 dead.
Although Moscow was able to convince
the two governments to return to the
cease-fire after a few days, the clash was
a warning sign that the status
quo—frozen in place since 1994—was in
danger of unraveling. Fighting along the
Line of Contact broke out again in July
2020, raising tensions and expectations
of further conflict.
Unlike previous bouts of fighting,
this one may result in significant
changes to the status quo. Baku and
Yerevan both face increasing pressure to
resort to harsh measures. In Armenia,
the government of Prime Minister Nikol
Pashinyan—which came to power amid a
popular uprising in 2018 that Russia
largely opposed—is worried about what
it sees as Moscow’s increasingly ambiva-
lent support for maintaining the status
quo. Despite some initial indications
that he would be more open to a negoti-
ated solution, Pashinyan has taken a
harder line, including calling for
Nagorno-Karabakh to be formally inte-
grated into Armenia.
In Azerbaijan, an economic down-
turn and frustration at the authoritarian
rule of President Ilham Aliyev have fed
popular discontent. As the losing side in
the initial war, Baku has made public
calls for the return of Nagorno-Karabakh
to mobilize nationalist support but risks
being outflanked by public opinion. Dur-
ing the fighting this summer, protesters
stormed the parliament building in Baku
demanding war with Yerevan.
The fighting so far has encompassed
soldiers in Armenia, which most Arme-
nians tolerate as a guarantee of their
security. Although it has sided with
Armenia throughout the conflict, Mos-
cow has also cultivated relations with
Azerbaijan and is the leading supplier of
weapons to both sides. As Azerbaijan’s
relations with the West have deterio-
rated in recent years amid declining
interest in its oil and gas reserves and
growing concern about Aliyev’s authori-
tarian rule, Russia has made additional
inroads with Baku.
While Moscow does not call the
shots on the ground, both sides under-
stand that any resolution to the conflict
can come only with Russian support.
During previous rounds of fighting (in-
cluding in July), Russian officials were
instrumental in brokering a truce.
Today, Russia has little interest in a
wider conflict, which could force it to
make difficult decisions about how far to
take its commitments to Armenia and to
devote additional resources to the South
Caucasus at a time when it is already
engaged on multiple other fronts.
ENTER THE TURKS
Although Russia remains the most
important power broker, another exter-
nal power with historical ties to the
region has increasingly sought to shape
the outcome of the conflict. Turkey sided
with Azerbaijan in the initial conflict in
the 1990s, and the two countries share
close ethnic and cultural ties. Commen-
tators and officials—mostly
Turks—describe the relationship as “one
nation, two states.” Until recently, how-
ever, Turkey’s involvement in the dis-
pute was relatively limited. But as
Within the South Caucasus, strong Turk- Global News
ish support could encourage Baku to
take an uncompromising line and resist
calls for a cease-fire that maintains some
version of the status quo ante. Turkish
A Foreign Policy for the Day
involvement could also transform the
conflict into an existential one in the eyes
of the Armenian public, especially in
light of the World War I–era massacres
After Trump
Reimagining—not restoring—the liberal international order
of Armenians by Ottoman forces.
Russo-Turkish relations have
thrived despite the two countries’
postimperial competition. But Turkey’s
intervention in Nagorno-Karabakh is
Ankara’s most overt challenge to Rus-
sian influence in the former Soviet
Union, where Moscow is extremely pro-
tective of its claims to preeminence.
Even if Russia remains committed to
limiting the fighting between Armenia
and Azerbaijan, the overlapping pres-
ence of Russian and Turkish forces in
many other theaters gives Moscow mul-
tiple opportunities to escalate. Indeed,
Turkey’s direct involvement in Nagorno-
Karabakh raises the stakes not only in
the South Caucasus but throughout the
areas where Ankara and Moscow are at
odds. Already, the two countries back
opposing sides in the Libyan and Syrian
conflicts, where their proxies have
engaged in occasional clashes, and have
incompatible ambitions in the Balkans
and Ukraine. Ankara likely sees its
involvement in Nagorno-Karabakh in
part as a bargaining chip not only in the s U.S. marines near the port of Durres, Albania, March 1997.
Caucasus but in its wider rivalry with
Moscow. And the involvement of Turk- By Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper
ish mercenaries from Syria, another the- @RebeccaLissner | @MiraRappHooper
ater where Russian and Turkish inter-
ests clash, suggests that this time the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict may not stay

an Azerbaijani offensive against Fizuli
and Jabrayil, two of the Armenian-
occupied districts outside Nagorno-
Karabakh whose relatively flat terrain
facilitates offensive operations. The bulk
of their Azeri-majority population fled
during the 1990s war, and in recent
years, Yerevan has started settling them
with Armenians. While the overall popu-
lation of the two districts remains low, a
continued Azerbaijani offensive into
Nagorno-Karabakh proper could result
in significant refugee flows, possibly in
the hundreds of thousands.
ON THE FRONTLINES
OF EMPIRE
Unlike many other so-called frozen con-
flicts in the former Soviet Union, the
Nagorno-Karabakh dispute is driven
almost entirely by local actors. Russia
remains the most important outside
actor, but its ability to manage, much
less control, the conflict is limited.
Russia maintains upward of 5,000
Ankara has adopted a more assertive
posture in the Middle East and eastern
Mediterranean under President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, it has become more
forthright in its support for Azerbaijan.
Over the past year, Turkey has sold
Azerbaijan a wide range of weapons,
including UAVs, missiles, and electronic
warfare equipment. Once the fighting
started in Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey
also offered Azerbaijan strong political
support. Erdogan declared that Turkey
would “remain by the side of our friend
and brother Azerbaijan” and demanded
that Armenia immediately return its
“occupied territory.” Turkey’s main
opposition parties joined Erdogan’s rul-
ing Justice and Development Party in
passing a resolution condemning Arme-
nian actions. Turkey has also reportedly
dispatched Syrian mercenaries to
Azerbaijan, and Armenia claimed this
week that a Turkish F-16 shot down one
of its fighters (a claim Turkey rejects).
Turkey’s deepening involvement in
Nagorno-Karabakh is a dangerous game.
C
confined to the South Caucasus. ome the November presidential
election, voters in the United
Renewed fighting in and around
Nagorno-Karabakh was not unexpected. States will likely be focused on
the uncontained coronavirus pandemic,
But the scale of the ongoing clashes, Tur-
key’s more prominent role, and the the tattered economy, the unanswered
call for racial justice, and the climate
potential for the conflict to spill over into
other contested regions have already crisis. But another enormous issue is on
the ballot: the future of the United States’
raised the stakes considerably. For now,
Russia is calling on all sides to de- role in the world. The shock of the
COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the
escalate, seemingly caught off-guard by
the extent of the fighting and Turkey’s “America first” strategy of U.S. President
Donald Trump, offering a ready
role in it. Thanks in part to its recent suc-
cess in building ties with Baku, Moscow rationale for closing borders, slashing
international trade, and adopting a
remains reluctant to take sides or inter-
vene directly. Russia is the only outside beggar-thy-neighbor approach to
vaccine development. Some of these
power in a position to force the sides to
return to the negotiating table. Turkey’s measures were necessary, but they must
not become a blueprint for the future of
intervention threatens Russia’s tradi-
tional mediator role, but Moscow still U.S. foreign policy.
The next administration will con-
has considerable financial and political
leverage to push for a stop to the fighting. front a beleaguered nation and world,
but it will also inherit a historic opportu-
It should do so, even if it will ultimately
be up to the protagonists in Baku and nity to meet those circumstances with a
transformative new strategy. Should
Yerevan to step back from the brink.
former Vice President Joe Biden win the
presidency, his team will likely find itself
l JEFFREY MANKOFF is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the U.S. National
Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies.
pulled in opposite directions. Amid unre-
lenting crises, the new administration
may be tempted to restore, rather than
reimagine, U.S. foreign policy in the
hope of reversing four years of damage to
the liberal international order. But a
Biden White House will also field calls
from both sides of the political aisle for a
military and an economic retreat on the
grounds that U.S. security is best served
by making the country more self-
sufficient and reducing its global ambi-
tions.
Neither a nostalgic quest for the old
liberal order nor an isolationist
retrenchment will ultimately serve U.S.
interests or allow Washington to suc-
cessfully navigate the world. The country
has a narrowing window in which to
reconfigure its foreign policy to ensure
that it remains mighty even though it is
no longer the uncontested superpower.
If it fails to transform its foreign policy
approach, the United States will find
itself weaker in the face of great-power
rivals and borderless threats and less
able to guarantee its own security and
prosperity. This necessary evolution will
require Washington to eschew
post–Cold War hubris, with its grandi-
ose claims of liberal universalism.
Instead, U.S. officials must advance an
affirmative vision for an international
order that allies and partners can
embrace—one that we have called an
“open world.”
The current period of disruption
and turmoil presents the greatest world-
ordering opportunity since the end of the
Cold War—and perhaps since World
War II. The United States must lead in
turning the present destruction into a
moment of creation.
AN OPEN WORLD
In “The Open World: What America Can
Achieve After Trump” (May/June 2019),
we argued that the United States can
remain secure and prosperous only in a
free and open international system.
Since then, an epochal global pandemic
has revealed that international institu-

24 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020

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November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 25

tions are threadbare and multilateral
cooperation is elusive, making it all too
likely that states will seek security by
closing themselves off from the world.
Although the so-called liberal interna-
tional order served the United States
well for decades, many forces have
eroded its foundations: China’s contin-
ued ascent and the diffusion of power
from west to east; rapid technological
change in telecommunications, artificial
intelligence, and digital surveillance;
and growing domestic dysfunction in the
United States and other democracies.
But the United States can still secure its
dearest interests even if it relinquishes
its aspirations to global primacy and
universal liberalism.
An open world is one in which states
are free to make independent political
decisions; international waters, air-
space, and space remain accessible to
military and commercial traffic; and
countries cooperate informally and
through modernized international insti-
tutions. The United States should accept
the reality that its rivals, such as China,
are stronger than they once were and will
have greater influence, but Washington
must resist any attempts to establish
spheres of dominance—whether territo-
rial or technological—that are imperme-
able to outside commercial, military, or
diplomatic access. That means opposing
the efforts of hostile nations to dominate
their regions, subvert the political pro-
cesses of independent states, and close
off vital waterways, airspaces, or infor-
mation spaces.
Achieving an open world does not,
however, require the United States to
dominate all prospective military or
political challengers, as it did in the
26 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
The United States
should also develop new
institutions or regimes
in undergoverned areas,
such as cyberspace, in
which Washington has a
clear interest in setting
open norms and rules.
Authoritarian great
powers will certainly
compete to try to shape
the future global order.
But the United States
and its partners must
keep authoritarians
from dominating
beyond their borders,
thereby ensuring that
the world remains
accessible and
interdependent
post–Cold War era. Nor does it compel
the United States to embrace unre-
stricted trade and immigration or to
refrain from more tightly controlling its
borders in the event of emergencies,
such as the pandemic. The United States
should seek the economic interdepen-
dence that benefits it without champion-
ing unfettered neoliberalism: it should
work to ensure, for instance, the resil-
ience and security of U.S. supply chains.
BUILDING TWENTY-
FIRST-CENTURY ORDER
The liberal international order of the
post–Cold War era is no more. A new
administration should set out to build a
structure suited to the twenty-first cen-
tury. The United States should collabo-
rate with its allies and partners to mod-
ernize international institutions, such as
the World Trade Organization (WTO),
and prevent closed societies like China’s
from exploiting the openness of others,
particularly when it comes to intellectual
property and digital trade. The United
States should also develop new institu-
tions or regimes in undergoverned areas,
such as cyberspace, in which Washing-
ton has a clear interest in setting open
norms and rules. Authoritarian great
powers will certainly compete to try to
shape the future global order. But the
United States and its partners must keep
authoritarians from dominating beyond
their borders, thereby ensuring that the
world remains accessible and interde-
pendent.
Such competition is already evident
in areas subject to rapid technological
change and few clear rules, such as
Internet governance and artificial intel-
ligence. China and Russia prefer a gover-
nance model that establishes state con-
trol over information. The United States
must work with like-minded countries to
set more open rules and norms and to
prevent authoritarian competitors from
imposing their standards on others.
Together with partner states, technology
firms, and civil society groups, Washing-
ton should work to set down rules for
data storage, privacy, cybercrime, and
hacking.
Autocracies may respond by devel-
oping “splinternets,” in which nations or
blocs of nations cordon off flows of infor-
mation. But the United States should
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
lead the charge toward an open and plu-
ralistic information environment that
encourages democracy, benefits the
country economically, and protects the
United States and its allies from the most
pernicious forms of foreign cyber-
attacks. This could be accomplished by
expanding existing alliances in Asia and
Europe to combat the most grievous
forms of cyber-aggression, such as
attacks on critical infrastructure. In
other domains of technological innova-
tion, too, such as artificial intelligence,
Washington can pioneer new norms and
deter malign actors by closely coordinat-
ing with its allies and partners. But the
United States cannot dither and wait for
a global consensus before it acts — other-
wise, authoritarians will write the rules
instead.
An international order is similarly
vital in confronting such existential
threats as climate change and global
pandemics. The United States should
rejoin the Paris climate accord and lobby
other major emitters to unite in embrac-
ing new and ambitious domestic climate
goals. These additional commitments
should be transparent and enforceable,
allowing Washington to monitor the
implementation of environmental mea-
sures and confront cheaters with eco-
nomic sanctions. The United States must
also return to the World Health Organi-
zation, working to reform and
strengthen it. Washington should belat-
edly demonstrate leadership in the
global response to COVID-19 by sharing
vaccines and critical supplies with part-
ners, and it should work with the G-7 to
manage follow-on economic shocks and
with the International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank to provide economic
relief to the developing world.
Trade practices, too, will require an
update in this twenty-first-century
world order. Free trade has benefited the
United States in many ways, but it has
also allowed more closed societies, such
as China, to exploit openness to their
advantage—and to the detriment of U.S.
workers. The United States should nego-
tiate new multilateral trade agreements
that set high labor, climate, and environ-
mental standards and use these agree-
ments to press for changes in the belea-
guered WTO. The country should also
work closely with its trusted allies to pro-
tect sensitive industries and technolo-
gies, such as semiconductors, which
authoritarian competitors may exploit
for their own gain, and to band together
to secure the production and supplies of
those technologies. To address the
inequality that free trade has fostered in
the United States, Washington should
accompany its new trade policy with
domestic reforms—including the reduc-
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
tion of incentives for businesses to shift
production overseas—that address
trade-related inequality and job loss
directly. The United States will be able to
build a successful new international
order only if that order benefits the Amer-
ican people.
NEW NATIONAL
SECURITY CHOICES
The next U.S. administration will inherit
a foreign policy apparatus that is
underequipped for a competition with
China that spans economic, technologi-
cal, ideological, and military domains.
Rising to that demand, in all its variega-
tion and dynamism, requires recogniz-
ing that foreign policy cannot be made by
the Defense Department alone.
The United States must revitalize
the State Department and rebalance
Long-term strategies
often cross regions,
domains, and even the
divide between foreign
and domestic policy: the
new administration
should seek to break
down the barriers that
hinder their
coordination. The
intelligence community
should increase its
collaboration with the
private sector to
improve its ability to
detect threats
national security spending toward diplo-
macy and development. To make an
open world, the United States needs a
well-funded and expert diplomatic corps
to manage ties with small and middling
powers while engaging with great-power
rivals. The next administration must
reverse Trump’s State Department bud-
get cuts in areas such as international
institutions, the environment, and the
Western Hemisphere. It should also
push through national security
workforce reforms that allow the govern-
ment to better respond to nonmilitary
national security threats and improve its
ability to harness private-sector talent
and resources, particularly in new tech-
nologies and in efforts to mitigate and
adapt to climate change.
The next administration need not
chase lost U.S. military primacy to
achieve the objective of an open world.
Instead, the United States should invest
in high-end nuclear and conventional
deterrence capabilities and in research
and development toward the next gener-
ation of military technology. Washing-
ton should envision success as the
defense of U.S. interests without having
to resort to war.
Protecting U.S. interests from non-
military challenges will require the next
administration to rethink the very struc-
ture of the national security bureau-
cracy. Long-term strategies often cross
regions, domains, and even the divide
between foreign and domestic policy: the
new administration should seek to break
down the barriers that hinder their coor-
dination. The intelligence community
should increase its collaboration with
the private sector to improve its ability to
detect threats, such as foreign-backed
information campaigns that use com-
mercial platforms, and to develop more
options for sharing information with
allies, partners, and the public.
THE DAY AFTER TRUMP
With numerous crises at home, a new
administration could be forgiven for
letting long-term strategy and order
building take a back seat. But in so doing,
Washington would squander a fleeting
opportunity. The United States still
remains powerful by most measures, but
if it fails to act now, its relative power will
ebb while China grows stronger. The
institutions and rules that have long
benefited Washington will become ever
more impotent in the face of twenty-
first-century problems and dynamics.
The agenda we lay out is no bigger than
the charge it seeks to address:
reconceiving the U.S. role in the world
and the organization of the international
system in response to historic global
change.
If the United States fails to assume
this mantle of leadership, succumbing
either to nostalgia for the post–Cold War
order or to introverted nationalism, it
will find itself utterly ill equipped for the
world a decade from now. That world
may be an increasingly chaotic one,
ordered by antithetical norms in which
the dearest American economic, politi-
cal, and security objectives are far from
guaranteed. If Washington rises to this
moment, however, the United States can
preside over an open world that will keep
it safe and prosperous for decades to
come. There can be no delay in seizing
this mandate: the day after Trump will
not come again.
l
REBECCA LISSNER is an Assistant Professor at the Naval War College.
l MIRA RAPP-HOOPER is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and
a Senior Fellow at the China Center at Yale Law School.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 27
America Ignores Africa
Climate Change Doesn’t Have to
Stoke Conflict
Politics matter more than the environment when it comes to war and peace
s On the shores of Lake Turkana, Kenya, October 2013.
By Tarek Ghani and Robert Malley
Washington, D.C. | @Rob_Malley
A mong the many sobering
projections of harm to be caused
by climate change is this eye-
popping statistic: on average, according
to economists, a rise in local temperature
of half a degree Celsius is associated with
a ten to 20 percent increase in the risk of
deadly conflict. If accurate, that means
the likelihood of such strife is swiftly
rising. UN climate scientists estimate
that manmade emissions have generated
one degree of global warming since
preindustrial times, and because the
p ac e o f c l i mat e c h a ng e i s f a s t
accelerating, they predict another half a
degree of warming as soon as 2030.
Tropical areas will have even more
extreme warming, with a corres-
pondingly higher risk of climate-related
insecurity.
Ending or preventing conflicts exac-
erbated by climate change requires a
faster and different approach than
addressing climate change itself. Many
governments have begun to curb emis-
sions, but they are gradually phasing in
their climate mitigation efforts. For
28 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
example, 120 countries have embraced a
net-zero carbon emission target by
2050—a worthy goal that could prevent
the earth from eventually becoming unin-
habitable. But millions of people around
the world are already experiencing
record heat waves, extreme precipita-
tion, and rising sea levels—changes that
disrupt livelihoods; exacerbate food
insecurity, water scarcity, and resource
competition; and spur migration. Tack-
ling climate change is a necessary but
inescapably longer-term endeavor. Con-
flict prevention must happen now.
The relationship between climate
and conflict is neither simple nor linear.
The same climate impacts can produce
very different conflict outcomes depend-
ing on the political response. In some
instances, rising temperatures and
uneven rainfall generate scarcity; in oth-
ers, climate change—and human
responses to it—unlocks new resources.
While some countries manage climate-
induced competition well, others don’t
manage it at all—making conflict more
likely. The relationship between climate
and conflict can also be inverted: conflict
and criminality can worsen climate
change and impede mitigation efforts, as
illegal logging has done in the Amazon.
In short, the impact of climate
change depends heavily on how states
are governed. Climate matters when it
comes to war and peace, but the politics
and policies surrounding climate matter
even more. For this reason, the response
to climate change cannot be limited to
curbing its shocks. Rather, the focus will
need to be on bolstering states’ ability to
withstand those shocks and ensuring the
resilience of their most vulnerable com-
munities. Doing so will require under-
standing the complex political dynamics
that either enable societies to manage
environmental change or propel them
toward violence.
A CLIMATE FOR
CONFLICT
Northern Nigeria is a textbook case of
environmental changes stoking deadly
conflict. Starting in the 1970s, the region
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has experienced frequent droughts as a
result of climate change, and the Sahara
has steadily advanced southward into
Nigeria, causing the desertification of an
estimated 351,000 hectares of land annu-
ally. Many natural water sources have
dried up as a result, diminishing pas-
tures and farmland. In the most affected
northern Nigerian states, these environ-
mental changes have intensified long-
standing competition between herders
and farmers over dwindling resources.
Large numbers of herders have migrated
south in search of productive land and in
doing so have come into conflict with
settled crop farmers in central Nigeria.
Both communities have at times mobi-
lized armed groups for protection. The
resulting violence has overextended
Nigeria’s military, which was already
stretched thin from its war against the
deadly jihadi group Boko Haram. Nige-
rian investigative journalists reported
that armed violence by “bandits”—a
term that refers to both herder-allied
and criminal groups in the northern
states— was responsible for 875 reported
fatalities between January and Septem-
ber 2019. That number is more than
twice the 370 fatalities attributed to
Boko Haram over the same period.
Northern Nigeria is hardly alone.
Around the world, climate change is
increasing the risk of violent conflict by
discrediting central governments,
prompting clashes over resources, and
boosting the recruiting appeal of
nonstate armed groups. In northeast
Syria, for instance, a severe drought,
exacerbated by poor water management
policies, lasted from 2006 to 2011.
Among families dependent on agricul-
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ture, 75 percent suffered crop failures,
and herders lost nearly 85 percent of
their livestock. Syria’s 2011 uprising had
many causes—first and foremost the
government’s brutal repression of the
initial protests. But the drought must
surely be counted among them, as popu-
lar unrest and violent clashes began in
cities already strained by food insecurity
and the influx of hundreds of thousands
of rural Syrians displaced by the
drought.
Climate change has also increased
tensions between countries. Consider
the dispute among Egypt, Sudan, and
Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian
Renaissance Dam on the Nile River. Ris-
ing temperatures and falling precipita-
tion portend greater water scarcity
across the Nile basin and have compli-
cated already arduous negotiations over
the dam. Egypt fears that the dam will
constrict its main water supply and has
threatened military action to prevent the
structure’s completion. While an imme-
diate war is unlikely, the talks have been
stalled since Ethiopia began impounding
water this summer; if a major drought
occurs without water agreements in
place, it may be harder to avoid a conflict.
In Central Asia, rising temperatures
have inflamed transboundary water dis-
putes among Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. And in the
Mekong River basin, tensions continue
to simmer among downstream states
grappling with a combination of
drought, floods, and opaque water man-
agement practices at China’s 11
upstream dams.
Many countries also face growing
pressures from climate-related migra-
tion, spurred by collapsing agricultural
sectors and increasingly harsh living
conditions. In Central America, climate
change, coupled with domestic insecu-
rity and economic stagnation, has dis-
placed hundreds of thousands of people
in recent years, with many more
expected to follow. The World Bank pro-
jects there will be more than 140 million
internal climate migrants across sub-
Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin
America by 2050. The impact will be the
greatest in tropical countries where the
temperature rise will be steepest, but
other nations will be strained as well.
Cross-border migration can put new-
comers in competition with locals for
limited economic opportunities and
government support, leading to
sociopolitical strain, xenophobia, and
the scapegoating of refugees—all of
which are recipes for deadly violence.
THE HUMAN FACTOR
But one should pause before jumping to
generalized conclusions about direct
connections between climate change
and conflict. Climate-driven conflict is
not always a straightforward scramble
for diminishing resources, be they water,
food, or arable land. Environmental
shifts—and, more often, human
responses to them—can benefit some
communities at the expense of others,
driving conflict over unexpected wind-
falls that are poorly managed. Like
northern Nigeria, Mali and Burkina Faso
were hit hard by droughts in the 1970s
and 1980s. Predictably, the droughts
caused desertification and altered the
balance of power between farmers and
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 29

s Iraqi men remove pieces of cracked earth from the marshes crossing the southern Iraqi town of al-Azeir, 02 April 2007.
herders. Nomadic groups saw their
herds decimated, and many from their
ranks were forced to seek employment
tending the livestock of settled farmers.
Yet, paradoxically, although the amount
of arable land contracted each year
because of climate change, areas under
cultivation grew, as did total agricultural
production.
In the Mopti region of central Mali,
for instance, the government and its part-
ners drilled new wells to ease the plight
of nomads, making arid areas more liv-
able and inadvertently attracting farm-
ers who, over time, laid claim to the land
around the wells originally dug for the
herders’ benefit. Government officials
and traditional authorities failed to regu-
late the resulting land-use issues fairly or
effectively, and relations between farm-
ers and herders, already frayed, turned
violent. In Burkina Faso’s Soum Prov-
ince, a similar conflict played out
between settled and nomadic popula-
tions when development projects
boosted rice production in the Belehédé
municipality. Non-native farmers
moved to the newly bountiful areas, stir-
ring tensions with the indigenous popu-
lation, mainly nomadic herders.
In Mali and Burkina Faso, conflict
was not a result of competition over dwin-
dling resources. Rather, groups fought
over the spoils of human responses to
climate change. New water sources and
increased agricultural production
brought settled and nomadic peoples
into conflict over arable land that
authorities proved unable to manage.
Some herders, feeling marginalized and
neglected by the central authorities,
turned to jihadi and self-defense groups
30 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
for protection they couldn’t get from the
state. In both nations, the rise in violence
was triggered not by diminishing
resources but rather by newfound but
poorly regulated resource abundance.
NAVIGATING THE
STORM
Right and wrong lessons can be drawn
from these examples. The wrong lesson
would be that climate change bears little
or no responsibility for deadly conflict.
As the cases above illustrate, climate
change is clearly putting governments
and their populations under strain, and
conflict prevention will grow more
urgent before climate change can be
reversed. But if one ought not to under-
state the effect of climate change on con-
flict, neither should one overstate or
misstate it.
The right lesson is that governments
must do more than mitigate the long-
term effects of climate change. They
must put in place mechanisms that can
peacefully regulate access to
resources—be they scarce or abundant,
within or among states. When govern-
ments fail to peacefully regulate access to
resources, armed groups—ranging from
self-protection militias to criminal gangs
to jihadi organizations—can exploit
marginalized communities’ distrust of
government and fill the vacuum.
Developing nations at risk of future
conflict should not face the pressures of a
changing climate alone. These countries
are paying twice over for the decisions of
more developed ones—not only suffer-
ing the effects of climate change that they
largely did not cause but also being asked
to curb their own carbon emissions
because of the excesses of others. They
deserve increased support from those
whose fossil fuel intemperance has
caused a climate crisis. Wealthy nations
can start by living up to their pledge at
the 2011 climate summit in Durban,
South Africa, to provide developing coun-
tries with $100 billion annually for cli-
mate change adaptation and mitigation
efforts starting in 2020. UN climate sci-
entists can help by providing more local-
ized climate projections with shorter
timelines to guide decision-making by
governments and their partners.
As they support developing coun-
tries grappling with climate change,
Western donors must also heed the les-
sons of Mali and Burkina Faso and
ensure that climate-related develop-
ment projects reduce rather than exacer-
bate local divisions. They and their part-
ners should be wary of overly securitized
approaches to conflict exacerbated by
climate change. It may be necessary to
use force against armed nonstate actors,
but military measures should be accom-
panied by political measures (such as
dialogue with armed groups), economic
measures (such as reforms to formalize
or regulate the gray economy and
thereby prevent capture by criminal
groups), and humanitarian measures for
those most affected by environmental
changes.
Unless developing nations can
match climate adaptation efforts with
efforts to address local divisions and
make their politics more inclusive, they
will remain, figuratively and literally, in
the eye of the gathering storm.
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
Unemployment Benefits
The Basic Income Has Its Moment
How the pandemic made a fringe idea go mainstream
s Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang at a rally in Los Angeles, April 2019.
By Evelyn L. Forget
@evelyn_forget
A basic income—a regular,
unconditional payment
distributed by the
government—is an old idea. Thomas
More wrote about it during the
Renaissance in Utopia, and Thomas
Paine preached its merits when the
United States was in its infancy. But the
idea never gained mainstream
acceptance. Although social scientists
had long been testing the effects of a
basic income with pilot projects around
the world, it was easy to imagine that the
governments permitting these
experiments hoped that public
enthusiasm might die out by the time the
results were compiled. After the 2008
financial crisis, the International Labor
Organization, the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and
Development, the World Health
Organization, and, especially, the World
Bank showed some interest in a basic
income. Never, however, did the idea
make the leap from white papers to real-
world policy.
In the United States, the most prom-
inent advocate of a basic income was the
2020 Democratic presidential candidate
Andrew Yang. As a solution to structural
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
unemployment caused by automation,
Yang proposed that every American
adult receive a monthly check of $1,000.
He called it the “Freedom Dividend,” and
it formed a major part of his platform.
But on February 11, having received just
2.8 percent of the votes in the New Hamp-
shire primary, Yang dropped out of the
race. The lack of interest in his idea did-
n’t seem surprising. In most high-
income countries, it was fair to say that a
basic income had a cult following, popu-
lar only among the kinds of people who
read speculative fiction and wore T-
shirts sporting jokes disguised as mathe-
matical equations. It was something of a
fringe interest.
Then came the pandemic. In March
and April, after COVID-19 forced gov-
ernments to shut down entire econo-
mies, leaders across the world realized
that existing benefit programs weren’t
up to the task of helping people meet
their basic needs while not working. In
the United States, even conservatives
lined up to support unconditional cash
grants. Senator Mitt Romney, Republi-
can of Utah, proposed sending every
American adult a one-time payment of
$1,000. Congress swiftly passed a mas-
sive stimulus package, which handed out
payments of up to $1,200 to people
under a certain income threshold,
expanded the class of people eligible for
unemployment insurance, and added an
extra $600 to every weekly unemploy-
ment check. In less than a month, an idea
that nearly all politicians had considered
off the wall had—in temporary, partial
form—become actual policy.
EMERGENCY
RESPONSE
What changed, of course, was the poli-
tics. In normal times, the unemployed
hardly constitute an important voting
bloc, but the pandemic dramatically
increased the number of people without
jobs, and politicians felt they had to
respond. As the lockdowns began and
businesses shuttered, people who had
never expected to need government
assistance began to panic when their
paychecks stopped. Many turned to
established social programs and discov-
ered that they didn’t qualify—because
they worked part-time, worked for them-
selves, or worked in the gig economy.
Those who did qualify found that the
level of benefits they were eligible for
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 31
wouldn’t come close to meeting their
basic expenses.
Faced with millions of applicants
who had never before needed support,
welfare systems were overwhelmed. The
pandemic revealed the degree to which
unemployment insurance and other
social programs had failed to keep up
with the evolution of the labor market.
Around the world, civil servants were
tasked with designing stopgap programs
that were rolled out in a matter of
weeks—some more successfully than
others. Many high-income countries
made cash infusions to individuals a
centerpiece of their response. In June,
Spain rolled out a program offering
monthly payments of around $1,100 to
poor households. In August, Germany
started a pilot project in which 120 Ger-
mans would receive $1,400 a month for
three years. Without any intention of
doing so, governments found themselves
experimenting with various forms of
basic income.
Fiscal hawks had long argued that
more generous social programs were
simply too expensive to fund and too
complicated to manage, but this was
revealed to be untrue. Canada had a gen-
erous emergency response benefit up
and running just two weeks after the
World Health Organization declared
COVID-19 a pandemic. The program
covered not only people who lost their
jobs or had their hours reduced due to
the shutdown but also those who could-
n’t work because they were quarantining
or taking care of children. Gig workers
and the self-employed were eligible. Peo-
ple could apply online or over the phone
in minutes, and payments were depos-
ited directly into recipients’ bank
32 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
accounts within days.
Neither the Canadian program nor
its counterparts in other countries are
true basic incomes. All were designed to
be temporary, and virtually all of them
required recipients to have worked in the
previous 12 months, a rule that excluded
the long-term unemployed and people
with disabilities. But with their larger
size, looser eligibility requirements, has-
sle-free application process, and under-
lying trust in recipients to make their
own decisions, the programs evoked
some of the hallmarks of a basic income.
THE CASE FOR A BASIC
INCOME
A real basic income is not a short-term
emergency benefit but a permanent pro-
gram offering a predictable payment.
There are two main forms. The first is a
universal basic income, which pays
everyone the same amount on a regular
basis and relies on a progressive tax sys-
tem to recover some of the payments
from high earners. The second is a guar-
anteed minimum income, which pays
higher earners less (and nothing at all to
those at the top). But both types are
designed to ensure that everyone in soci-
ety has enough money to live a modest
but dignified life. And both do not
require people to show a history of paid
work, prove that they are looking for a
job, or participate in job-training pro-
grams.
A basic income is not a replacement
for public services; people with disabili-
ties or addictions still require special
support, and everyone needs health care
and education. A basic income is just
money, but that is its advantage over
other income-support programs. With a
basic income, all governments have to do
is transfer cash to people. That is a far
more efficient method of support than
many of the complex, bureaucratic sys-
tems currently in place. A basic income
has another leg up over existing pro-
grams: it does not presume to know what
someone needs. Think of the U.S. gov-
ernment’s Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program, which provides
money that can be spent only on food.
The underlying assumption is that peo-
ple will make bad decisions if left to their
own devices. The premise of a basic
income, by contrast, is that the proxi-
mate cause of poverty is a lack of money,
and so the government should solve that
problem and let the people decide for
themselves how to spend it.
When they do, good things begin to
happen. For one thing, people get
healthier. My first foray into a basic
income was a reexamination of the Mani-
toba Basic Annual Income Experiment,
or Mincome, which offered a basic
income from 1975 to 1978. I found that
people who received a basic income used
hospitals 8.5 percent less than those who
didn’t. The decline was largely due to
reduced demand for mental health ser-
vices: fewer people visited family doctors
complaining of depression, anxiety,
sleep disorders, or family dysfunction.
Other studies have reached similar con-
clusions. In an experiment conducted in
Malawi in 2008–9, for example,
researchers found that when families
were given regular cash payments, HIV
transmission rates fell, possibly because
fewer adolescent girls engaged in
transactional sex work.
There is also reason to believe that a
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basic income could reduce crime. Sociol-
ogists have long linked poverty and
crime, and many of the most common
offenses—theft and drug traffick-
ing—have an economic motivation
behind them. During the Mincome
experiment, crime declined by 15 per-
cent in the small rural town that served
as a test site where all families were eligi-
ble to participate. The community
recorded not only less property crime
but also less violence.
One of the biggest arguments
against a basic income is that it will dis-
courage work, but there is no evidence to
support that claim. Consider the
Mincome experiment again. The pay-
ments were relatively modest, with a
family of four that had no other income
receiving around $15,000 annually in
current U.S. dollars. The experiment,
which was intended to see whether those
who received a basic income worked less,
found that most did not.
Two groups, however, did reduce
their hours, but they were the just the
kind of people one might hope would
temporarily remove themselves from the
labor market. One was new mothers,
who used the stipend to buy themselves
longer maternity leaves to care for their
children at a time when most companies
offered just four weeks off, the legal mini-
mum. The other was young men, who,
instead of dropping out of high school as
soon as they turned 16, stayed in school
and graduated—a decision that delayed
the start of their working lives but drasti-
cally improved their long-term career
prospects.
Every other experiment with a basic
income reveals similar outcomes: receiv-
ing one has virtually no effect on primary
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earners, while secondary and tertiary
earners—mostly people working only a
few hours a week to begin with—work a
little less. Moreover, people invest in
education. In the Mincome project’s
rural test site, more boys from poor fami-
lies graduated from high school. In a
randomized control trial conducted in
Ontario in 2018, recipients used the
extra cash to enroll in community col-
lege. In the Malawi experiment, families
receiving payments were more likely to
send their adolescent girls to school. This
is not merely charity; it’s smart strategy
for increasing the productivity of the
labor force.
Two other recent experiments—one
in Finland and the other in the Nether-
lands—found evidence that a basic
income can also help people who have
been unemployed for years. In both tri-
als, those who received a basic income
were more likely to find full-time jobs by
the end of the experiment than the con-
trol group, where subjects stuck with the
status-quo approach of mandated job
searches, job-readiness programs, and
regular contact with a case worker.
Researchers theorized that without all
the bureaucratic requirements, partici-
pants had more time to look for a better
job; they didn’t have to settle for a tem-
porary gig that was available immedi-
ately just to meet the program’s require-
ments.
WORTH IT
Perhaps the most common argument
against a basic income is that however
beneficial one may be, it is simply too
expensive. One estimate put the cost of
Yang’s proposal, for example, at $2.8
trillion a year. Although the gross cost of
a universal basic income is eye watering,
some of the expenditure would be
returned to the government through
taxation, especially if the program goes
hand in hand with a more progressive tax
system. Guaranteed minimum incomes,
for their part, are targeted to those with
low incomes and thus have a much lower
price tag. In fact, their cost is comparable
to the expenditures on social programs
that many governments already make,
such as child benefits, and much lower
than what most governments spend on
pensions.
But viewing basic income as an
expenditure is the wrong way to look at
it. It is an investment in the kind of soci-
ety people want—one that values and
invests in their health, education, and
security. The returns on that investment
come not only in a higher quality of life
but also in dollars, because a basic
income reduces the burden on other
programs, such as Medicare, that have
long been responsible for treating the
consequences of poverty. Better to give
poor people money upfront so that they
can care for themselves than wait until
they get sick and pay for their treatment
then. A basic income is both cost-
effective and humane.
For a long time, policymakers have
been reluctant to embrace a basic
income. It seemed too unthinkable, too
unconventional. But crises have a way of
changing politics overnight. The pan-
demic has awoken politicians to a truth
that many have known for a long time:
the existing social safety net is riddled
with holes, and it’s time something new.
l Evelyn L. Forget is a Professor at the University of Manitoba.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 33
Nuclear Issues
Pakistan’s Full-Spectrum
Deterrence: Trends and Trajectories
Pakistan’s deterrence strategy and force posture are starting to be geared towards a
worst-case scenario that includes India’s strong military capabilities and support from
the United States favoring India during a conflict
By Sannia Abdullah
@iamsaniya_close
T wenty two years ago, the
government of Pakistan decided
to respond in kind to India’s
nuclear tests in May 1998. Pakistan
conducted six nuclear explosions to
India’s five, after which Pakistan’s then
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif declared,
“We have settled the score.” Since then,
Pakistan’s strategic deterrent has
remained India-centric. However, the
immense ambiguity surrounding
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program
makes it challenging to ascertain the
exact force goals or technological ends.
The components of credibility and
minimalism are subject to change in
response to increasing Indian force
capabilities. For this reason, Pakistani
officials have said that “deterrence
requirements remain dynamic” and that
a particular number of nuclear weapons
to meet the requirements “cannot be
quantified.” In the last two decades,
34 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine and force
posture evolved steadfastly from
minimum credible deterrence to
credible minimum deterrence in line
with the dictates of full-spectrum
deterrence (FSD).
FSD came to the fore in a press
release when Pakistan tested the tactical
nuclear weapon HATFIX/NASR in 2011.
According to General Khalid Kidwai of
Pakistan’s National Command Author-
ity, the implications of FSD are many,
but include the development of a nuclear
capability to bring “every Indian target
into Pakistan’s striking range” and
acquire “appropriate weapons yield cov-
erage and the numbers to deter the
adversary’s pronounced policy of mas-
sive retaliation.” Kidwai also specified
that another tenet of FSD is the liberty to
select from a range of countervalue, bat-
tlefield, and counterforce targets.
As mentioned in a 2018 article, the
concept of FSD involves the following
key assumptions. First, FSD maintains
Pakistan’s India-centric policy and pos-
ture. Additionally, it seeks to buttress
strategic equivalence vis-à-vis India and
to deter threats ranging from sub-
conventional to strategic levels (adding
nuclear “rungs” to the escalation ladder).
Moreover, though Pakistan regards
nuclear weapons as “weapons of last
resort,” it reserves the option of first-use
against a nuclear weapon state; the
development of tactical nuclear weapons
was intended to reaffirm this policy.
Lastly, FSD involves deterrence of all
forms of aggression through a combina-
tion of conventional and strategic forces.
This has in turn revamped Pakistan’s
conventional warfighting doctrine, now
titled “comprehensive response.”
After India’s proactive military oper-
ations strategy, commonly dubbed Cold
Start, came to the attention of
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Islamabad, the need for improving Paki-
stan’s doctrine and force posture became
evident. Since then, Pakistan’s strategic
leadership decided to gradually fill the
strategic gaps in its force posture with
nuclear-tipped missiles through air, sea,
Pakistan’s strategic
leadership decided to
gradually fill the
strategic gaps in its force
posture with nuclear-
tipped missiles through
air, sea, and land-based
delivery systems to deny
India any advantage in
the warfare domain
and land-based delivery systems to deny
India any advantage in the warfare
domain. This doctrinal strategy is aimed
at averting a conventional attack from
India by “plug[ging] the gaps” in its
deterrence posture. The last decade has
seen major developments at the techno-
logical end, including the induction of
low yield ballistic missiles, cruise mis-
siles, Multiple Independently Targetable
Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs), and
improvements to sea-based deterrence.
To advance its counterforce targeting
and reduce its vulnerability to India’s
missile defense systems, Pakistan has
placed an emphasis on its cruise missiles
program, i.e. by testing sub-sonic cruise
missiles such as Babur/Hatf-VII.
The increased number of missiles in
Pakistan’s inventory demands an
increase in the production of fissile mate-
rial. To overcome fissile materials defi-
ciencies and meet the present and future
needs of these systems, Pakistan is con-
structing new reprocessing facilities at
PINSTECH and CHASMA. There is no
public discussion in Pakistan on these
classified developments, though the
construction can be seen through satel-
lite imagery and is predictive of Paki-
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stan’s force goals. According to the 2018
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ assess-
ment of Pakistan’s nuclear forces, its
current warhead count is between 140-
150 warheads. Clearly, Pakistan’s full-
spectrum deterrence policy is not com-
patible with the tenets of minimum cred-
ible deterrence.
Trends and Trajectories
in Pakistan’s Force
Structure
Since 1998 nuclear tests, Pakistan’s offi-
cial position maintains that its deterrent
is India-centric, which justifies develop-
ing a medium-range ballistic missile
(MRBM) like Shaheen-III that can target
all of India’s territory. However, Paki-
stan’s major defense partner, China, is
cooperating to reduce vulnerability to
their common adversary, India. In light
of the burgeoning U.S.-India strategic
partnership, Pakistan’s fears of Indian
aggression have multiplied.
Under this security dilemma, Paki-
stan is boosting its defense build-up. Its
deterrence strategy and force posture are
starting to be geared towards a worst-
case scenario that includes India’s
strong military capabilities and support
from the United States favoring India
during a conflict. Some members of Paki-
stan’s national security establishment
believe that Pakistan should be prepared
for two scenarios: one in which India
conducts a preemptive strike to elimi-
nate Pakistan’s deterrent, and another in
which the United States does so on
India’s behalf. Perhaps, in this strategic
calculation, intercontinental ballistic
missiles (ICBMs) would serve as a deter-
rent against the United States to cease
what the establishment perceives is Paki-
stan’s unwavering support of India. The
development of ICBMs require a number
of satellites and effective circular error
probable (CEPs). On this technological
front, Pakistan and China’s strategic
cooperation is underway. However,
there are internal debates within the
Pakistani military on the rationale for
testing an ICBM.
The next important leg of FSD is the
completion of Pakistan’s sea-based
deterrence that ensures the survivability
of its strategic forces, allowing second
and third nuclear strikes options. Paki-
stan is preparing for a counterforce tar-
geting strategy against India through
land, sea, and air platforms. According to
a press release, the submarine-launched
cruise missile (SLCM) Babur-III pro-
vides Pakistan with a “credible second
strike capability, augmenting the exist-
ing deterrence regime.” Trends indicate
that Pakistan is likely to follow France’s
naval deterrence strategy where it seeks
to deploy a smaller nuclear-powered
ballistic missile-carrying submarine
(SSBN) and use other vessels for opera-
tional needs during crisis situations. It is
likely that Pakistan will mate its French
Agosta 90B-class submarines with the
domestically manufactured SLCM,
which has a range of 450 kilometers.
Rawalpindi is also procuring Chinese
Type 039A submarines that closely
resemble French Agosta 90B-class and
may also serve as a launch platform for
Babur-III.
Conclusion
The full-spectrum deterrence doctrine,
in the eyes of Pakistan’s defense estab-
lishment, assures a sound retaliation
strategy against India’s massive retalia-
tion doctrine. Rawalpindi firmly believes
that FSD has reduced the chances of war
in South Asia and deterred India from
any Cold Start-type operational maneu-
vers in the near future. The current doc-
trine envisions a force posture with
escalatory capabilities to counter Indian
offensives through conventional and
nuclear deterrence. Pakistani security
planners have preconceived escalation
dynamics in their minds and envision
achieving “escalation dominance” in a
conflict where India runs short of
response options. To Pakistan, it
appears to be a war termination strategy
in a limited nuclear warfighting sce-
nario. However, the history of warfare
tells us that wars often turn out to differ-
ently than they are drafted on paper.
Pakistan’s current force posture
walks a fine line between nuclear
warfighting and a robust deterrence.
With no No-First-Use affirmation, Paki-
stan’s build-up of offensive capabilities
under a nuclear warfighting force pos-
ture is a recipe for possible nuclear use.
l Dr. Sannia Abdullah is a political scientist and Research Affiliate at the Center for
International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Previ-
ously, she was a Stanton Nuclear Security Post-doctoral Fellow (2017-2018) at
CISAC and has also worked with Cooperative Monitoring Center, Sandia National
Labs (Albuquerque, NM). Previously, she had been teaching in the department of
Defense and Strategic Studies, Pakistan.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 35
Beijing Vs Washington

US-China rivalry and its impact

on Pakistan
The present rivalry between the United States and China has serious global, regional and
national ramifications. For Pakistan, the impact is even greater

novel coronavirus has adversely affected
this interaction.
For the US, Pakistan’s role in the
Afghan peace process is crucial. This
aspect is quite evident from the role Paki-
stan’s military leadership has played in
bringing the two warring sides—the
Taliban and the Afghan leadership—to
the negotiating table. Interestingly, both
the US and China want peace in Afghani-
stan even if their objectives are different.
A relatively peaceful Afghan neighbor-
hood would have a salutary effect on
By Talat Masood neighboring Xinjiang Uyghur Autono-
mous Region. Besides, it would open
talatmasood186@gmail.com
new avenues for trade and commerce
with Central Asian states. For the US, a
peace agreement would facilitate with-
military base to keep an eye on Paki-
The lack of mutual stan’s nuclear facilities. This indicates
confidence between suspicious motives and constitutes an
Pakistan and the US— area where Pakistan is justified in being
wary of Washington’s policy and intent
and the latter’s toward it. What is most intriguing is the
alignment with India— fact that Pakistan’s nuclear capability is
of concern to the US even when it is spe-
has been a major factor cifically meant to counter India’s con-
why Pakistan has leaned ventional and nuclear capability and has
so heavily on China. By no other motive.
It is these clandestine motives or
contrast, Beijing’s policies that have been a major obstacle
steadfast support since in developing a sound relationship and
trust between Washington and
the 1960s and a strong Islamabad. Even more surprising is this
convergence of leak since it came at a time when the Paki-
economic and strategic stan military was playing a pivotal role in

I t is evident that US President

Donald Trump has made it a part of
his election manifesto to build
maximum pressure on Beijing to alter its
economic and trade policies.
Simultaneously, he is also targeting
Beijing’s expanding strategic interests
worldwide, giving a clear impression
that his administration would place
maximum hurdles to impede China’s
rise that seems determined to challenge
the lone super power in the world. By
pursuing this aggressive course, Trump
expects to benefit in the coming
presidential elections as well.
In pursuit of this policy, India is
Washington’s close strategic partner in
this region. By fully supporting India in
the form of strengthening its defense
capabilities and economy, the US
expects to be in a better position to chal-
lenge China at the regional level and hin-
der its rapid rise. In the recent China-
India clash of troops in Ladakh, the US
fully backed India’s territorial claim.
India is maximizing this relationship to
its advantage by seeking cutting edge
technologies and weapon systems from
the US, Israel and France. Undeniably,
India is a lucrative market for the
defense industries of Western powers,
an important factor in the context of
their relationship.
There is, however, a caveat here.
Whereas India would like to fully exploit
the US-China rivalry to its advantage, it
would continue to maintain close eco-
nomic and trade ties with Beijing as well.
According to the available data, India’s
two-way commerce with China during
2018-19 was close to US$87 billion. This
figure may even increase during this
year.
It is unlikely that this pattern of
enhanced engagement would alter in the
near future. Moreover, this stance also
allows New Delhi a certain flexibility and
semblance of a rising regional power that
is not subservient to the US. It is not sur-
prising that the restraint shown by both
sides in the recent flare-up in Ladakh,
apart from other considerations, was
largely due to the mutual economic
interests.
Meanwhile, close ties with Beijing
and China-Pakistan Economic Corridor
(CPEC) projects are considered quite
significant across the political divide in
this country.
There is also a broad consensus
among Pakistan’s major political parties
and the military leadership to maintain a
cooperative and mutually beneficial rela-
tionship with the United States.
In fields of higher education, health
and technology, the US is considered the
most attractive destination for Pakistani
students, doctors and engineers. It is the
most sought after market for our textile
products, and other export items. There
is also a significant Pakistani expatriate
community with strong links that acts as
a useful bridge between the two coun-
tries. Trump’s present policy of tighten-
ing the visa regime and the spread of the
drawal of its forces from Afghanistan
before November, giving Trump a boost
in his election campaign.
Pakistan’s adversarial relations
with India should be of concern to the US
for they distract its new strategic ally in
the region from focusing on China by
dividing its attention on multiple fronts.
interests have led
Pakistan to ally more
closely with it
According to a leaked US secret
report, stationing a few thousand troops
in Afghanistan would serve as a suitable
the Afghan peace process.
Frequent suspension of military
and civilian assistance and embargoes
on sales of weapon systems and restric-
tions on transfer of technology by the
United States has been a source of fric-
tion in the checkered history of the two
countries.
Pakistan’s support of militant
groups to counter Indian oppression in
Kashmir has also been a major irritant
and led to frequent sanctions by the US
and its allies.
The lack of mutual confidence
between Pakistan and the US—and the
latter’s alignment with India—has been a
major factor why Pakistan has leaned so
heavily on China. By contrast, Beijing’s
steadfast support since the 1960s and a
strong convergence of economic and
strategic interests have led Pakistan to
ally more closely with it.
l Talat Masood is a retired Lieutenant General from Pakistan Army and an eminent
scholar on national security and political issues.

36 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020

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November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 37
Unconstitutional Game
Kashmir’s Future
The test for the Kashmiri leadership has begun
By A.G. Noorani
Mumbai, India
T he National Conference led by Dr
Farooq Abdullah and the
People’s Democratic Party (PDP)
led by Mehbooba Mufti have joined
hands to face the onslaught on Kashmir’s
rights launched by the BJP government
on Aug 5, 2019. On the eve of that vicious
attack, these two and other political
parties had come together to set up a
united front to combat the dire threat to
the very existence of Kashmir. A well-
drafted, unanimous statement called the
Gupkar Declaration was issued.
The very next day, the blow fell.
Abrogation of Article 370 of India’s con-
stitution, which supposedly guaranteed
Kashmir’s autonomy and its special sta-
tus, was always the BJP’s dream. The
Modi regime did worse. It destroyed
Kashmir’s very identity. Kashmir was
now to be ruled as a centrally governed
union territory along with Jammu with a
lieutenant governor at the head. Ladakh
was lopped off to be centrally governed.
The political parties have rightly decided
not to contest an election under the new
set-up and thus legitimise it. What is
afoot is a plan to confer supremacy on
Jammu and BJP rule over Kashmir.
The assembly has 111 seats. In 2002,
the status quo was frozen by law until
2026. “Until the relevant figures for the
first census taken after the year 2026
have been published, it shall not be nec-
essary to constitute a (delimitation) com-
mission to determine the delimitation of
the assembly constituencies.”
Ominously, the centre has set up a
delimitation commission as part of its
abrogation process. The entire game is
unconstitutional and dishonest. Article
370 cannot be amended let alone abro-
gated. The centre has set at naught Kash-
mir’s constitution. It will have panchayat
raj.
The PDP has been split by one of its
former ministers, Altaf Bukhari. He is a
great admirer of Bakshi Ghulam
Mohammed who, in concert with Nehru,
had Sheikh Abdullah removed from
office as premier and imprisoned for 11
38 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
long years.
India has based its rule on several
props. One is a mole in the Kashmir gov-
ernment. Before his arrest, prime minis-
ter Jawaharlal Nehru had marked a copy
of his letter to Shaikh Sahib to Bakshi.
Abdullah mentioned that to Nehru. It
had no effect.
The worst of the lot was P.D.
Thakur. “What does morality have to do
with politics?” he asked governor B.K.
Nehru, who records in his memoirs how
the Intelligence Bureau’s pouches were
used to send lakhs of rupees to buy MLAs
to remove Farooq Abdullah as chief min-
ister.
India’s Intelligence Bureau was
itself suborned by Vallabhbhai Patel
early enough, as its director B.N. Mullick
recorded in his memoirs. Unlike Nehru,
Patel did not like his reports and he did
as desired. Former spy chief A.S. Dulat
writes that that the Intelligence Bureau
was “key ... to the central government’s
hold on Kashmir”.
This sordid game succeeded only
because the principal political elements
in Kashmir were divided and fought bit-
terly against each other. That explains
the roots of militancy. Gupkar holds out
hope that Farooq Abdullah would at long
last bury the hatchet and present a
united front to New Delhi. After their
release from imprisonment the major
parties of the Gupkar conclave of Aug 4,
2019, met again in Srinagar at Farooq
Abdullah’s residence on Oct 15, 2020.
They decided to form an alliance called
People’s Alliance for the Gupkar Decla-
ration.
Farooq Abdullah struck a fresh
note: “Dialogue with all the stakeholders
who are involved in the problems of
Jammu & Kashmir” — ie Pakistan. He
pledged to reach out to the people. Above
all, Kashmir’s leaders must come out
with sets of proposals; a duty they have
evaded. Why not a conclave on the lines
of the one Shaikh sahib convened in 1968
and 1970?
President Pervez Musharraf and
prime minister Manmohan Singh had
brought Kashmir to the gates of a settle-
ment. Small minds in India, Pakistan
and Kashmir wrecked it; some for per-
sonal reasons. Kashmiris were obsessed
with Geelani & Co. He is now a spent
force.
The red lines are: India will not
accept Kashmir exercising autonomy;
Pakistan will not accept the LoC as the
international border; Kashmiris will not
accept partition or denial of democracy.
The Musharraf-Manmohan formula met
all these tests in its famous four-point
formula.
Domestically, the alliance must
heed the needs of the common man who
has suffered a lot. Its agitation must be
peaceful and constitutional. Once confi-
dence is established it must assert the
fundamental rights to assemble peace-
ably and march in procession.
The hateful politics has harmed the
poor shopkeepers. The alliance must
draw up a programme for attending to
the needs of the common man which the
Hurriyat harmed.
It must win the confidence of the
people, draw up a list of grievances and
work for their redress. The test for the
top leadership of Kashmir has just
begun. They have acted wisely. History
will not forgive them if they fall apart and
fail the people.
l The writer is an author and a lawyer based in Mumbai.
Courtesy Dawn
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Argument
Decolonizing the United Nations
Means Abolishing the
Permanent Five
The inequalities of the past can’t set the rules of the present
s U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley (center) addresses the U.N. Security Council during a meeting at the United Nations in New York on
November 26, 2018.
By Hannah Ryder, Anna Baisch and Ovigwe Eguegu
@hmryder | linkedin.com/in/annabaisch | @OvigweEguegu
T his year, as the effects of COVID-
19 continue to be felt around the
world, leaders are preparing to
meet virtually to mark 75 years of the
United Nations: its “diamond”
anniversary. But 2020 has brought into
focus some sharp issues around the
U.N.’s effectiveness, including its largest
donor, the United States, pulling funds
from the World Health Organization
(WHO). There were mounting problems
in the U.N. prior to this. The U.N. and its
agencies are constantly fighting for new
money to cover escalating costs of
various missions such as on health,
education, and peacekeeping, despite
global improvements in poverty. In
terms of maintaining peace and
security—the U.N.’s record has been
dismal—from dithering over apartheid
in South Africa, to Iraq, Rwanda, Yemen,
40 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
the 2008 financial crisis, and now,
COVID-19.
The typical responses to the U.N.’s
failure have been to enlarge the P5, the
five permanent members of the Security
Council who represent the chief victors
of World War II. Bring in other global
powers such as India or Turkey. Move
around the representational seats and
create new categories. Create more seats
for Africa. Dilute the veto power exer-
cised by the P5.
But all of these measures are tinker-
ing. None are adequate. The only way
forward is to acknowledge the key differ-
ence between 1945 and 2020, decoloni-
zation, and abolish the permanent mem-
bers of the Security Council altogether.
Here’s why and how.
The roots of the U.N. are deeply colo-
nial. Back in 1945 four out of the five
members of the P5 were colonial states.
Over the 75 years of the U.N.’s existence,
80 former colonies have gained inde-
pendence, from India to Kenya, to Nige-
ria and Kazakhstan.
This has meant a significant shift in
population terms. In 1945 the
P5—China, the United States, the United
K i n g d o m , F r a n c e , a n d R u s-
sia—accounted for 10 percent of member
states and over 50 percent of the world’s
population, within their empires. Now,
the P5 account for 26 percent of the
world’s population, and just 3 percent of
the U.N. member states.
Even with the 10 additional nonper-
manent members of the Security Coun-
cil—who have to compete to be elected to
sit on the council for two years, which
costs millions of dollars in lobby-
ing—Security Council seats are distinctly
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
Eurocentric. As our research shows, the
Western European and Others Group
and the Eastern European Group com-
bined represent just 17.1 percent of the
global population, but they have held 47
percent of Security Council seats.
And within these groups, the big
countries almost always win. Japan has
spent 22 years on the Security Council.
Brazil 20 years. Within African coun-
tries, only Nigeria, with 10 years, comes
close.
This poorly distributed allocation is
reflected in other parts of the U.N.—in
particular the secretary-general position
itself. Since 1945, four out of the nine
secretaries-general have been white
European men. There has never been a
Muslim secretary-general.
U.N. leaders have sought to address
this by diversifying heads of agencies or
undersecretaries-general, but individu-
als are not the answer. Take COVID-19.
Despite an Ethiopian head of the WHO,
who might be expected to advocate for
the poorest countries in the world, the
only resolution the P5-led Security Coun-
cil has unanimously adopted referring to
COVID-19 this year is resolution
2532—supporting a call made by the
secretary-general in March for a global
cease-fire to focus on efforts to fight
COVID-19. This is important but hardly
influential, and it’s largely irrelevant to
the thousands of people who have since
died prematurely due to lax COVID-19
responses and lack of international
finance to manage the impacts of
required lockdowns in the poorest coun-
tries. Instead, African leaders have
turned closer to the African Union’s
Africa Centres for Disease Control and
Prevention for COVID-19 advice, and to
the unrepresentative yet powerful G-20
and IMF for financial support, not the
U.N.
Why does this distribution matter?
The shift in postcolonial (and post-Cold
War) membership is essentially the
U.N.’s only major shift in composition in
75 years.
Contrary to what many observ-
ers—especially economists like our-
selves—might have us believe, there has
not been a great economic rebalancing.
Our calculations suggest—again includ-
ing former colonies—that the P5’s share
of global GDP in 1940 was around 47
percent. Today, the P5 accounts for just 2
percentage points more of GDP—49 per-
cent of the global total.
Yes, China’s economic rise within
the P5 has been notable—in fact, dou-
bling in economic importance from
accounting for 14 percent to 33 percent
of the P5’s total wealth. But for the rest of
the world, their economic relationship
with the P5 has hardly changed over the
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U.N.’s 75 years. Global economics and
the U.N. structure remain rooted in the
power structures of 1945, despite the
political independence.
Has the P5’s U.N. status helped to
maintain economic imperialism, or has
their economic might helped them to
maintain their powerful U.N. positions?
In some ways it is only the correlation
that matters. The U.N.’s structural
inability to compel the P5 countries them-
selves to act decisively for the greater
good is often acknowledged as a key jus-
tification for change, but this is often
countered with economic arguments
that we are all better off now. This coun-
ter does not hold water. The P5’s failure
There is no country in
the world that deserves
a permanent seat. Veto-
based decision-making
on behalf of others, as
the Security Council
does, should be earned,
and criteria for
responsibility and
capability transparently
demonstrated and
rewarded
to distribute economic benefits to the
rest of the world despite decolonization
is also a structural problem that justifies
change.
The answer lies in the geopolitical
ideals leaders set out back in 1945. The
Security Council was conceived on a
basis of responsibility and capacity of
working collaboratively, rather than on
the principle of representation. At that
time, after emerging from World War II
and meeting in San Francisco, the lead-
ers of the P5 felt themselves to be respon-
sible and capable, despite their colonial
pursuits.
While the economics might be the
same, the potential member states that
might be deemed responsible or capable
in 2020 are very different to those in
1945. And they will likely be different in
2030, 2045, or another 75 years ahead.
With climate change, it’s likely that our
global crises will only become more com-
plex over the next 75 years.
There is no country in the world that
deserves a permanent seat. Veto-based
decision-making on behalf of others, as
the Security Council does, should be
earned, and criteria for responsibility
and capability transparently demon-
strated and rewarded.
A reimagined structure for a Secu-
rity Council would see all 15 seats being
made temporary, for periods of five years
to provide more continuity, with wide,
nonregional open competition for each
seat, alongside clear, monitored restric-
tions on lobbying expenses and two-
term limits within a cycle of 30 years to
reward excellence while avoiding domi-
nation.
Such a structure would not be a
toothless democratic body like the U.N.
General Assembly, where every country
has one vote, regardless of its record,
wealth, population, or military might,
and no country has a veto. Nor would it
be an easy and potentially diverse yet
unaccountable “coalition of the willing,”
nor a supposedly elite and powerful
grouping of countries such as the G-7,
BRICS, or G-20, subject to groupthink
and hiding behind each other.
These 15 countries, just as nonper-
manent members have established pre-
cedent for doing now, would need to be
elected by others—they would need to
prove their worth to others. They would
need to build allies within the U.N., for
instance within their groupings, and
campaign to show they are indeed
responsible and capable to be trusted to
help the world tackle issues from poverty
and climate change to pandemics and
financial crises. P5 members could thus
arguably remain on the council, but they
would need to compete and pitch to do
so.
While a 15-seat Security Council
might initially seem large, a council that
aimed to be effective in decision-making
while embedding the principle of collab-
oration would also implement a rule that
veto power can only be exercised by two
members together—i.e., any country
would need to find another supporter to
oppose a decision. Preserving the veto
would also maintain its distinction from
the General Assembly and from the pre-
World War II League of Nations, the
U.N.’s failed predecessor.
Detractors will immediately con-
tend that the P5 will not accept this. Nor
would they submit to decisions made by
others. Indeed, some P5 members have
remained out of certain U.N.-based
mechanisms for this reason. Three out of
the five permanent members do not rec-
ognize the U.N. General Assembly-
endorsed International Criminal Court
(ICC) decisions. Yet the ICC has made
important contributions to justice for
thousands, if not millions of people. The
U.N. can and does still play a guardian
role, even if P5 members remain outside.
The world cannot take another 75
years of unaccountability and inequality.
A reimagined, stronger structure has a
chance of creating a more fit-for-
purpose and adaptive U.N., ready to face
the challenges of the future.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 41
Argument
Erdogan Is Turning Turkey Into a
Chinese Client State
With few friends left in the West, Ankara is counting on Beijing for help
s Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan before their meeting on September 3, 2016 in Hangzhou, China.
By Ayca Alemdaroglu and Sultan Tepe
@makrevis | sultant@uic.edu
T urkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan used to send
shockwaves to Beijing with his
outspoken support of China’s Uighur
minority, a predominantly Turkic-
speaking Muslim group in Xinjiang that
is subject to horrific human rights
violations. “The incidents in China are,
simply put, a genocide,” Erdogan said in
2009, when he was prime minister. And
it wasn’t just empty words: Turkey has
been a safe haven for Uighurs fleeing
persecution ever since the Chinese
Communist Party took control of
Xinjiang in 1949 and hosts one of the
largest Uighur diaspora populations in
the world.
Then came a sudden, unexpected
switch. In 2016, Turkey arrested
Abdulkadir Yapcan, a prominent Uighur
political activist living in the country
since 2001 and initiated his extradition.
In 2017, Turkey and China signed an
agreement allowing extradition even if
the purported offense is only illegal in
42 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
one of the two countries. Since early
2019, Turkey has arrested hundreds of
Uighurs and sent them to deportation
centers. And Erdogan’s remarks have
turned diplomatically bland, just like
any Uighur-related coverage in newspa-
pers controlled by Erdogan and his sup-
porters.
Erdogan’s remarkable U-turn has a
simple explanation: His regime and Tur-
key’s economy are in crisis. With few
other friends, Ankara is counting on
Beijing to patch things up, and that
requires adherence to Beijing’s talking
points. Erdogan’s problems are mount-
ing: Turkey’s economy has been hit hard
by the coronavirus pandemic, which has
devastated its primary economic sector,
tourism. As Erdogan tightens his control
over the central bank and the courts,
foreign reserves are shrinking, the trade
deficit is rising, and the Turkish lira is
plunging. Once seen as a model of
democracy and economic development
in the region, Turkey is now an authori-
tarian country; on the Liberal Democ-
racy Index compiled by the University of
Gothenburg’s V-Dem Institute, Turkey
now ranks among the bottom 20, closer
to China than the developed countries to
which it once aspired. Western compa-
nies and investors, once attracted to Tur-
key’s fast-growing economy and popula-
tion, are staying away.
China’s appetite for expansion into
Western Asia and Europe offers Erdogan
a lifeline. Cooperation has expanded
exponentially: Since 2016, the two coun-
tries have signed 10 bilateral agreements
including on health and nuclear energy.
China is now Turkey’s second-largest
import partner after Russia. China has
invested $3 billion in Turkey between
2016 and 2019 and intends to double
that by the end of next year. Cash flowing
in from China has become critical for
Erdogan’s regime and has strengthened
the president’s hand at crucial moments.
When the lira’s value dropped by more
than 40 percent in 2018, the state-owned
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
Industrial and Commercial Bank of
China provided the Turkish government
$3.6 billion in loans for ongoing energy
and transportation projects. In June
2019, in the wake of Istanbul municipal
elections that indicated crumbling sup-
port for Erdogan, China’s central bank
transferred $1 billion—the largest cash
inflow under a swap agreement between
China’s Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI) offers
Turkey a source of fresh
cash—and Beijing a
strategic foothold on the
Mediterranean Sea
the two countries’ central banks that was
last renewed in 2012. As Erdogan’s popu-
larity has dwindled this year amid the
coronavirus crisis and a severe currency
shortage, China came to the rescue again
in June. Beijing is now allowing Turkish
companies to use the Chinese yuan to
make trade payments, allowing them
easier access to Chinese liquid-
ity—another step up in financial cooper-
ation.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative
(BRI) offers Turkey a source of fresh
cash—and Beijing a strategic foothold on
the Mediterranean Sea. As part of the
infrastructure-building initiative, Tur-
key completed a railroad from Kars in
eastern Turkey via Tbilisi, Georgia, to
Baku, Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea,
from where it links to transportation
networks to China. In 2015, a Chinese
consortium bought 65 percent of Tur-
key’s third-largest container terminal,
Kumport, in Istanbul, acquiring a pivotal
position in container transportation.
Chinese investors also helped salvage
Erdogan’s own poorly managed
megaprojects. In January 2020, a Chi-
nese consortium bought 51 percent of the
Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge connecting
Europe and Asia across the Bosporus
after revenue projections failed and the
Italian-Turkish consortium controlling
the bridge wanted out.
The BRI projects help shore up
Erdogan in other ways. They have rein-
forced Turkey’s strategy to assert itself as
a transportation corridor and have
boosted Erdogan’s political brand by
promoting him as someone who can
develop infrastructure, attract funds,
and undertake large-scale projects. And
the cash keeps coming: This year,
China’s Export and Credit Insurance
Corp. committed up to $5 billion for Tur-
key’s Wealth Fund, to be used for BRI
projects. The fund’s limited transpar-
ency and accountability raise further
concerns about where the money is
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going and Turkey’s ability to repay.
Energy, another sector whose devel-
opment has been key to Erdogan’s
power, has seen even greater investment
under the BRI umbrella. China is provid-
ing $1.7 billion to build the Hunutlu coal-
fired power plant on the Mediterranean
Sea, projected to produce 3 percent of
the country’s electricity when it is com-
s President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (2nd L) and his wife Emine Erdogan (L), Chinese
President Xi Jinping (2nd R) and his wife Peng Liyuan (R) pose for a family photo in Beijing, China on
July 02, 2019.
pleted. Ankara plans to sign a deal with
China’s State Nuclear Power Technology
Corp. to build Turkey’s third nuclear
power plant.
Beyond infrastructure, Sino-
Turkish cooperation involves deepening
bilateral military and security ties,
including in intelligence and
cyberwarfare. Turkey’s Bora ballistic
missile—modeled on the Chinese B-611
missile, introduced in 2017, and
deployed in the Turkish military opera-
tion against the Kurdistan Workers’
Party (PKK) in May 2019—is a product of
bilateral defense cooperation, as was the
participation of Chinese military officers
in Turkey’s Ephesus military exercise in
2018.
Huawei, which has been designated
a national security threat in the United
States and elsewhere due to its ties to the
Chinese government and military, has
no such opposition in Turkey. Its share
in the Turkish market has grown from
only 3 percent in 2017 to 30 percent in
2019. Allegations about Chinese use of
telecommunications infrastructure for
state surveillance and suppression are
especially worrisome in Turkey, where
the population relies on the internet and
social media for information due to strict
control of other media channels.
Another Chinese technology company,
ZTE, took over 48 percent of Netas, Tur-
key’s key telecommunications equip-
ment manufacturer, in 2016. Netas man-
ages pivotal projects including the new
Istanbul Airport’s telecommunications
and the digitalization of national health
data.
For now, strengthening relations
between China and Turkey appears to
benefit both sides. China has found a
highly strategic foothold in Turkey—a
NATO member with a large market for
energy, infrastructure, defense technol-
ogy, and telecommunications at the
crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
For Turkey and Erdogan, China provides
desperately needed resources to fund
high-profile megaprojects and maintain
the veneer of development despite the
crippling economic reality underneath.
Just as importantly, Chinese cash helps
Erdogan avoid seeking help from West-
ern-dominated institutions such as the
International Monetary Fund, which
would require him to commit to reforms
and other measures that could under-
mine his unfettered control over the
country’s economy.
There is another reason why Turkey
and China are in an ever tighter embrace.
Both are increasingly shunned by West-
ern countries for their anti-democratic
practices at home and expansionism
abroad. Neither has many friends in its
region. Both share a vision of challenging
the hegemony of the United States and
an international order based on West-
ern-created institutions. Casualties of
the emerging Sino-Turkish strategic
partnership are groups like the Uighurs
and dissidents in both countries whose
protection requires responsive political
systems where rights and freedoms are
protected through democratic institu-
tions and processes without making
them secondary to economic survival
and growth.
l Ayca Alemdaroglu is the associate director of the program on Turkey at Stanford
University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
l Sultan Tepe is a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at
Chicago.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 43
Interview
Harry Harding on the US, China,
and a ‘Cold War 2.0’
“Calling it a second Cold War is misleading, but to deny that it’s a Cold War is also
disingenuous”
s The Diplomat and the US-China Perception Monitor had a joint interview with Professor Harry Harding of the University of Virginia.
By Juan Zhang and Shannon Tiezzi
@JuanZhang6 | @ShannonTiezzi
H arding is a specialist on Asia
and U.S.-Asian relations. His
major publications include
Organizing China: The Problem of
Bureaucracy, 1949-1966; China’s
Second Revolution: Reform after Mao; A
Fragile Relationship: the United States
and China since 1972; and the chapter on
the Cultural Revolution in the
Cambridge History of China.
Below are Harding’s thoughts on
the idea of a new Cold War – what he
calls the “Cold War 2.0” – between the
United States and China. You can read
more from Harding on the U.S.-China
relationship here.
Scholars have different opinions
on whether we are in a Cold War.
You coined a phrase called Cold
War 2.0 to describe the current
state of bilateral relations. Could
you explain your thinking?
The phrase “new Cold War” is an
example of the use of analogies in under-
standing the world. The world is a very
complicated place. People like to find
ways of coming to a clearer and simpler
44 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
understanding. That’s human nature, I
think. And one way to do that is by the-
ory, in other words, to apply theories of
political science, international relations,
and comparative politics to other coun-
tries to understand where they are and
where they’re going. Another way of sim-
pler thinking is by historical analogy, by
comparing the past and the present, to
try to find similarities and draw lessons
from the past. That’s always tempting,
but it’s always dangerous because the
present is never exactly like the past.
In some ways, this is like the original
Cold War. It’s a global competition
between two superpowers. It’s a compe-
tition that is multi-dimensional; it is a
competition that will involve episodic
confrontation. It’s a competition over
ideas and political and economic sys-
tems, although the differences between
China and the United States are some-
what less than the differences between
China and the Soviet Union. But the big
differences between then and now are,
first of all, that China and the United
States have been, up until now, much
more interdependent than the United
States and the Soviet Union or between
the United States and China before nor-
malization.
I remember one very memorable
comparison, that before the American
pingpong team visited China in April
1971, more Americans had set foot on the
moon than had been to the People’s
Republic of China, with the permission
of both governments. (You can see a little
qualifier there because some had tried to
sneak in, or had been there in various
ways without the authorization of both
governments.) But we had much more
contact with China before 1949 than we
did up until the late 1960s and early
1970s when rapprochement began to
occur, let alone after 1979, when normal-
ization had taken place.
So, the United States and China had
been mutually isolated during the Mao
era just as the United States and the
Soviet Union had been mutually isolated
during the Cold War. Now we are very
much more interdependent. There is a
lot of decoupling going on, but it’s going
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
to be difficult to make that a complete
mutual isolation and interdependence
will continue to be a factor in the rela-
tionship.
But I think the biggest difference is
that the Chinese economy seems, at this
point, to be much more vibrant, much
more sustainable than the Soviet econ-
omy, and therefore the Chinese political
system is likely to be much more resilient
than the Soviet Union’s was.
The Cold War moderated when the
Soviet Union’s economy was beginning
to stagnate, and then it ended when the
Soviet Union collapsed. There are some
who predict the collapse of China, as you
well know, either the Chinese economy,
the Chinese political system or both, but
right now that seems relatively unlikely.
So China will be, I think, a far more effec-
tive competitor than the Soviet Union
was.
Finally, another difference is that
the arenas of competition will be quite
different. Yes, there will be competition
over military hardware and other impor-
tant technologies, but a wider range than
in the original Cold War, when it was
basically a competition over space explo-
ration and weapons systems. Now it’s
still going to include those two, but also
artificial intelligence, quantum comput-
ing, new generations of information and
communications technologies, new
materials, nanotechnology, and autono-
mous systems.
There will be competition over these
new technologies but the biggest differ-
ence to me is the way in which social
media and cyber warfare will provide
new kinds of competition and potentially
offensive weapons. Those were not avail-
able at all during the original Cold War.
That’s why I call it Cold War 2.0, to imply
both that it is another Cold War, very
competitive while hopefully not becom-
ing a hot war, but also that in other ways
it will be quite different than the original
Cold War. I think that calling it a second
Cold War is misleading, but to deny that
it’s a Cold War is also disingenuous. Cold
War 2.0 is a better way of implying that it
will be similar but also very different.
Have you thought about the end
game of Cold War 2.0? The Cold
War ended up with the Soviet
Union losing and the U.S. winning.
Do you envision this would apply
to the Cold War 2.0?
This is a very important question.
What is the end state that the United
States would like to see, and what is the
end state that might actually happen? I
don’t think that the United States gov-
ernment has announced a very clear
view as to what it wants to happen in
China. I think that there are some who
actually would like to see the Chinese
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Communist Party lose power. I think
more people in the government and in
the United States generally are looking
for a change in Chinese policies, both
inside and outside its borders. Some
would add that that is really going to
require a change of leadership in China.
There’s no real agreement even as to
what we want, let alone what is actually
going to happen. I’m not able to predict
what’s going to happen; it’s too compli-
cated. We obviously could begin to spin
out a lot of different scenarios, and then
try to estimate the factors that might
make one more likely than another. And
maybe even identify the American poli-
cies that could influence the conditions
under which one might occur, or another
not, but that is a very complicated exer-
cise and we would have to be revising it
on almost a daily basis.
On July 9, China’s foreign minister
gave a speech on U.S.-China rela-
tions, and in his remarks he said,
“China and the U.S. must work to
find ways to peaceful coexistence,
with different systems and civiliza-
tions.” What messages did you get
from these words? Is China’s pro-
posed coexistence a feasible solu-
tion for the period of Cold War 2.0?
It’s very interesting that China has
now endorsed the concept of peaceful
coexistence. China, of course, has been
very firm in rejecting the idea of a second
Cold War and in criticizing Cold War
thinking but, of course, the concept of
peaceful coexistence comes right from
the first Cold War. This was the way in
which the United States and the Soviet
Union tried to manage their relationship
at a middle stage of the original Cold
War. So I find it quite interesting that
China is bringing it up again. But just as
analogies are never perfect, I’m skeptical
about the applicability of coexistence to
the U.S.-China relationship today.
Peaceful, yes, of course we hope it will
remain peaceful; but peaceful coexis-
tence, I’m skeptical about it. Why? It
depends, of course, what is meant by
coexistence. And it’s not clear to me what
Beijing means by this.
If what China wants is enthusiastic
American acceptance of the Chinese
model as best for China – the Chinese
people have made their choice; the
United States respects that choice and
admires it; it is working for China and
maybe for other countries as well. If that
is what Beijing means, then don’t think
that is going to happen. There are too
many aspects of the Chinese model of
domestic governance, and even domes-
tic economic policy, that simply run
against basic American values.
So if that’s what the Chinese are
looking for, then I think it’s going to be
difficult for the United States to respect
all aspects of the Chinese model. You can
respect a fact, acknowledge a fact,
respect and acknowledge power, but to
respect it in the sense that you admire it
or approve of it, that I think is going to be
very difficult. And if China means
accommodation to Chinese core inter-
ests, that’s not necessarily part of peace-
ful coexistence in the original sense, but
it is certainly something that the Chinese
have talked about. And, in fact, mutual
respect for each other’s core interests
was a key element in another formula
that China presented in recent years: the
concept of a new type of major power
relations. It then depends on what those
core interests are. If China’s core interest
is to use any means necessary including
force to compel the unification of Taiwan
against the will of the Taiwanese people,
then the United States is not going to be
able to respect that core interest either. If
it means to try to weaken American alli-
ances in Asia, then that is also not going
to be something the United States will
find easy to accept. So I think it really
depends on the details of what the Chi-
nese are implying by peaceful coexis-
tence.
One the five principles of peaceful
coexistence that China advocated early
in the first Cold War was non-
interference and respect for sovereignty,
and again, respecting the choices that
other countries make. That was again,
much easier to agree to when China and
the United States, and the United States
and the Soviet Union were basically not
connected with one another, but with so
many people now, including myself, liv-
ing and working in China, in Taiwan, and
Hong Kong, we are directly affected by
what Beijing sees as its domestic poli-
cies. For example, China sees the
national security law in Hong Kong as
something that is its own sovereign right
to decide for Hong Kong because Hong
Kong was not enacting it itself and the
rest of the world should understand that
this was China’s sovereign right. Other
countries should not interfere and
should not criticize.
But I live every day in the tense situ-
ation created by the National Security
Law in Hong Kong. When I go to Taiwan
which I will be doing again shortly, I will
live under the threat of a possible Chi-
nese decision to use force against Taiwan
to compel unification. If it comes to that,
it’s very difficult for me to be indifferent
and just say, that’s only China’s business.
So, I think interdependence actually has
this mixed impact on the relationship. In
some ways it is stabilizing, but otherwise
it is destabilizing. We have to understand
both sides of that coin.
Courtesy The Diplomat
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 45
Azerbaijan Vs Armenia
An Old Regional Conflict, And
Interested Neighbours
Military action claims 100 lives in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. What is the
dispute, and how are other countries getting involved?
s Demonstrators wave flags of Azerbaijan and Turkey during a protest against Armenia in Istanbul, Turkey October, 2020.
By Mehr Gill
@MehrGill
O
ver the last one week, military
action in Nagorno-Karabakh, a
region disputed between
Armenia and Azerbaijan, has resulted in
the death of at least 100 civilians and
Armenian combatants. While the two
countries have fought over the region for
decades, the current conflict is being
seen as one of the most serious in recent
years. Azerbaijan has not released
information on its casualties.
What is Nagorno-
Karabakh?
Straddling western Asia and Eastern
Europe, Nagorno-Karabakh is interna-
tionally recognised as part of Azerbaijan,
but most of the region is controlled by
Armenian separatists. Nagorno-
Karabakh has been part of Azerbaijan
territory since the Soviet era. When the
Soviet Union began to collapse in the late
1980s, Armenia’s regional parliament
voted for the region’s transfer to Arme-
nia; the Soviet authorities turned down
46 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
the demand.
Years of clashes followed between
Azerbaijan forces and Armenian sepa-
ratists. The violence lasted into the
1990s, leaving tens and thousands dead
and displacing hundreds of thousands.
In 1994, Russia brokered a ceasefire, by
which time ethnic Armenians had taken
control of the region.
While the area remains in
Azerbaijan, it is today governed by sepa-
ratist Armenians who have declared it a
republic called the “Nagorno-Karabakh
Autonomous Oblast”. While the Arme-
nian government does not recognise
Nagorno-Karabakh as independent, it
supports the region politically and mili-
tarily.
Even after the 1994 peace deal, the
region has been marked by regular
exchanges of fire. In 2016, it saw a Four-
Day War before Russia mediated peace.
The Organization for Security and Co-
operation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk
Group, chaired by France, Russia and
the US, has tried to get the two countries
to reach a peace agreement for several
years.
What is the fresh conflict
about?
It began on the morning of September
27, since when each country has claimed
to have inflicted serious loss on its oppo-
nent. What’s different about the current
flare-up is that this is the first time that
both countries have proclaimed martial
law.
According to the Warsaw-based
Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW), the
current escalation was “most likely” ini-
tiated by Azerbaijan. Media reports have
noted that the clashes were possibly a
fallout of Azerbaijan’s bid to reclaim
some territories occupied by separatist
Armenians.
The chairman of Azerbaijan’s
National Council has said in a statement
that the “military operation of the
Azerbaijani army continues to clear the
territories occupied by the enemy for
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
Organisation. In a statement released on
Monday, Dmitry Peskov, the Press Sec-
retary of the President of the Russian
Federation, said Russia “has always
taken a balanced position” on the matter
and has “traditionally good relations”
with both countries. He added that Rus-
sia is in contact with Turkey regarding
the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Other countries, including the US,
have limited their participation to
appeals for maintaining peace so far. For
all countries, the region is an important
transit route for the supply of oil and
natural gas to the European Union.
What next?
As of now, both sides are standing their
ground. The Russian state news agency
TASS quoted Azerbaijan President
Ikhlam Aliyev as saying that for the fight-
Muslim-majority and recently condemned Christian- ing to stop, Armenia must uncondition-
majority Armenia for not resolving the ally leave Nagorno-Karabakh.
Turkey backs issue through peaceful negotiations. On Monday, the Armenian govern-
Azerbaijan, and Turkey recently declared unconditional ment lodged a request with the Euro-
recently condemned support to Muslim-majority Azerbaijan. pean Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for
Russia and Turkey also back oppo- an interim measure (applicable only
Christian-majority site sides in the civil wars playing out in when there is imminent risk of irrepara-
Armenia for not Syria and Libya and Turkey’s support for ble harm) against Azerbaijan. It
resolving the issue Azerbaijan may be seen as an attempt to requested the court to indicate to the
counter Russia’s influence in the region Azerbaijani government to “cease the
through peaceful of South Caucasus. military attacks towards the civilian set-
negotiations. Turkey Russia’s role is somewhat opaque tlements along the entire line of contact
since it supplies arms to both countries of the armed forces of Armenia and
recently declared and is in a military alliance with Armenia Artsakh”.
unconditional support called the Collective Security Treaty
to Muslim-majority
Azerbaijan. Russia and
Turkey also back
opposite sides in the
civil wars playing out
in Syria and Libya and
Turkey’s support for
Azerbaijan may be seen
as an attempt to counter
Russia’s influence in the
region of South
Caucasus
almost 30 years”. He said September 27
was a “day of exhaustion” and alleged
Armenia has occupied regions around
Nagorono-Karabakh with the “direct
support” of Russia to create a “security
zone”.
What are the stakes for
Russia, and other
countries?
The conflict is getting worldwide atten-
tion because of the involvement of
regional rivals Turkey and Russia. Mus-
lim-majority Turkey backs Azerbaijan,
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 47
Power Scam
IPP ‘agreement’
The natural question to ask is what all needs to happen before we can get to an ‘agreement’
By Khurram Husain
@khurramhusain
T he first thing to note about the
recent ‘agreement’ signed on Aug
13 between a group of power-
producing companies and a government
committee is that there is, in fact, no
‘agreement’. What we have at the
moment is an agreement to have an
agreement at a later point in time, hence
why they are calling it a Memorandum of
Understanding (MoU) for now.
So the natural question to ask is
what all needs to happen before we can
get to an ‘agreement’. There are two hur-
dles that need to be cleared before an
agreement can be reached, and both of
these hurdles present their unique chal-
lenges. And the government has six
months in which to clear both these hur-
dles failing which the understandings
will expire.
First is that the 13-point MoU needs
to be cleared by respective authorities
from both sides of the negotiating table.
It needs to be cleared by the manage-
ment of the IPPs as well as their boards,
which is unlikely to present major issues.
A challenge is possible on the gov-
ernment’s side. The committee that nego-
tiated these understandings now needs
48 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
to present them for approval to the fed-
eral cabinet as well the power sector regu-
lator, Nepra. At the cabinet level, the
terms outlined in the understanding
might activate some politics, and those
who are unhappy with the outcome try
and oppose the MoU.
Some of this may have already
begun. Senator Nauman Wazir of the
ruling PTI has already referred to the
IPPs as “criminals”, said an FIR ought to
have been registered against ‘them’ —
presumably their sponsors and manage-
ment, for the “excess profits” that the
inquiry report alleged they have made
over the past couple of decades. In a TV
appearance he said the MoU signed
between the government and the IPPs
“will legalise their criminality” and
totally rejected the understandings con-
tained within it. The next day he followed
these words up with more objections
during the Senate panel hearing. Let’s
see if others join him in rejecting the
MoU.
After the approvals a second chal-
lenge looms. Before an agreement can
even be reached, Clause 10 of the under-
standing says all outstanding dues owed
to them should be settled “within an
agreed time period”.
The amount the government will
have to pay for this settlement is esti-
mated by the IPP managements to be
above Rs200 billion. The total outstand-
ing owed to power producers is
Rs600bn, but not all of those producers
are part of these talks. The IPP team tells
me they expect a full settlement of all
outstanding receivables owed to them
before they will consider activating any
of the other clauses in the MoU. But the
language of Clause 10, where this under-
standing is written, does not specifically
make activation of the terms of the
agreement conditional on prior payment
of outstanding receivables. The MoU
simply says there will be “agreement on
payment of receivables within an agreed
time period”.
The language of the clause is care-
fully crafted to leave just enough ambi-
guity to let the IPPs decide either way, to
either press for full payment or activate
the terms against an agreed timeline
only. They will probably check the tem-
perature at decision time before choos-
ing their course of action on this clause.
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
The other clauses in the MoU are
minor details, even the IPP manage-
ments agree. The revised formulae for
sharing of efficiency gains or the revision
in the Delayed Payment Rate are nothing
special. The reduction in the DPR is only
for the first 60 days, for example, after
which it reverts to an exorbitant Kibor
plus 4.5 per cent.
The switch to “take and pay” — a
reference to eliminating capacity pay-
ments — has been thrown indefinitely
into the future since both sides agreed it
can only happen after a competitive trad-
MoU signed with IPPs to cut cost: minister
M
inister for Information and
Broadcasting Senator
Shibli Faraz has said that
provision of cheap
electricity to consumers on a
sustainable basis is the government’s
top priority.
Addressing a news conference
along with Special Assistant to the
Prime Minister on Power Shahzad
Qasim, the minister said that as a first
major step towards providing cheap
electricity to consumers, the govern-
ment signed a basic agreement with
Independent Power Producers (IPPs).
Senator Faraz said expensive
power contracts had been signed in the
past, as the previous governments had
failed to negotiate with the IPPs for the
benefit of consumers. However, he
said, it was not possible for the present
government to undo the contracts uni-
laterally though Prime Minister Imran
Khan wanted to address the issue of
expensive electricity on an immediate
basis. For this purpose, he said, the
government constituted a team that
held negotiations with the IPPs to
revisit the old contracts.
The minister said under the new
agreement signed with the IPPs, pay-
ments would only be made for the elec-
tricity acquired and consumed instead
of the total installed capacity of a par-
ticular power plant. Also, the equity
return would be made in rupees rather
than US dollars, as was the past prac-
tice, he said.
He said the government intended
to enhance the share of renewable
energy to 20 to 25 per cent in the over-
all energy mix by 2030, as it would also
help reduce dependence on petroleum
fuel and the cost of power production.
While giving details of the recently
signed memorandum of understand-
ing with the IPPs, the special assistant
on power said there was a need to exer-
cise caution as sovereign guarantees
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
ing arrangement comes into being, an
idea that has languished for more than
20 years already. There is little reason to
believe it will happen in the next five
years, and even that is being optimistic.
The committee has also agreed to
abide by the principle of first in first out
when making all future payments, which
will prove to be costly for the govern-
ment. Common practice that helped save
the government money was to pay off
those bills first that came with the high-
est interest rates, and FIFO ends that
discretion.
with the IPPs were involved. He high-
lighted that among the key milestones
achieved in the latest MoU with the
IPPs was to hold fuel efficiency tests of
plants and the results would be shared
with the electric power regulator as
well.
“The IPPs would not only have to
follow the prescribed limit of Nepra
but also the savings would have to be
shared with the government,” he said,
adding that it would help reduce the
cost of electricity.
Mr Qasim said late payment sur-
charge to be paid by the government to
the IPPs, which was earlier Kibor plus
4.5 per cent, was dropped to Kibor plus
2 per cent only. The special assistant
said the government was working to
change the whole power purchase
regime with the IPPs, as the current
system guaranteed payment of elec-
tricity to the IPPs as per their installed
capacity even if the actual purchase of
electricity was much lower.
“It will take between one and two
years to devise a new power purchase
regime,” he added.
He said the MoU would be appli-
cable only after the dues were cleared.
He added that the tariff of various
hydro power plants of Wapda were
being rationalised at a uniform rate,
while currently different projects had
different rate of return.
Responding to a question, Mr
Qasim said the MoU had been signed
and its impact would be felt by the con-
sumers after some time but he did not
specify the time when the consumers
would get the benefit of the new agree-
The government has
done the right thing to
seek these talks, and it
has also done the right
thing to ensure
sovereign guarantees
are not violated in the
process. But these terms
do little for the vaunted
goal of tariff reduction.
The terms in the MoU
are meek and the IPPs
have largely escaped the
kind of accountability
that the government
was screaming about
when this whole affair
was launched
The biggest allegation that launched
this entire exercise in the first place was
the one of “excess profits” that the IPPs
were said to have made by misrepresent-
ing their costs or their fuel consumption
or their efficiency levels. The govern-
ment marched into these talks alleging
trillions of rupees worth of wrongdoing
in “excess profits”. Yet under the MoU,
the whole matter has been lobbed into
Nepra’s court, which will decide only
whether the profits were made in accor-
dance with the 2002 policy, the tariff
determinations and the power purchase
agreements of the IPPs, based on num-
bers that were reconciled between gov-
ernment and the IPPs during these talks.
The rupee indexation of returns for
local investors sounds good on the sur-
face, until you see that the rupee has
been indexed at 148 to a dollar. Given
these plants made their equity invest-
ments in the year 2002, when the dollar
was around a third of this value, the
indexation compensates the IPPs very
generously in return for losing their dol-
lar-based certainty.
The government has done the right
thing to seek these talks, and it has also
done the right thing to ensure sovereign
guarantees are not violated in the pro-
cess. But these terms do little for the
vaunted goal of tariff reduction. The
terms in the MoU are meek and the IPPs
have largely escaped the kind of account-
ability that the government was scream-
ing about when this whole affair was
launched. In the meantime, the circular
debt, power sector governance and the
rising power bills of consumers will
remain large challenges for the govern-
ment.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 49
Afghan Peace Process
The Taliban Sanctions
One critical issue remains the Taliban’s relationship with foreign militants in Afghanistan
By Muhammad Amir Rana
@AmirRana
T he initiation of the intra-Afghan
dialogue in Doha has raised
optimism about achieving
political reconciliation in Afghanistan.
The stakeholders are apparently aware
that this could be a patchy and lengthy
process, and that they may need to
review their positions from time to time
during the whole discourse.
One critical issue, which has fac-
tored in both the US-Taliban deal as well
as the commencement of intra-Afghan
dialogue, is the Afghan Taliban’s rela-
tionship with foreign militants in
Afghanistan. There are indications that
the Taliban have begun a review process
to address this concern of Afghan and
external stakeholders.
Former Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan
(TTP) spokesperson Ehsanullah Ehsan,
who escaped from custody a few months
ago, surprised many last week with a
tweet in which he claimed that an Afghan
Taliban delegation was negotiating new
terms with the TTP for the latter’s stay in
Afghanistan. According to him, the
Taliban have come up with 27 rules for
foreign militant groups, including Al
Qaeda, Islamic State (IS) and the TTP.
These conditions also include not using
Afghan territory against any other coun-
50 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
try.
Ehsan also claimed that the Afghan
Taliban have made it mandatory for for-
eign militants to register themselves
with full identification with them. For-
eign militants have also been asked to
pledge to not recruit new fighters, stay in
the places designated by the Taliban, and
inform the latter about their movements.
The TTP has reportedly rejected
these terms, but both sides have decided
to continue talks.
Though independent sources have
not verified the claim, it is understand-
able why the Afghan Taliban would issue
such instructions to foreign militants.
They made a commitment in the Doha
deal, reached on Feb 29, that they would
not allow any terrorist individual or
group to use Afghan soil against the US
and its allies.
The foreign militants issue will cer-
tainly come under discussion in the
intra-Afghan dialogue at some point,
and the Afghan Taliban may share some
plans, including granting foreign mili-
tants citizenship if they commit to living
there peacefully. The Taliban’s recent
conditions for foreign militants also
seem to indicate this may be a possibility.
Such a proposal echoes the Dayton
Accords, 1995, between Bosnia, Croatia
and Serbia. At the time of the agreement,
the total number of foreign fighters in
Bosnia — who had entered the country
from 1992 to 1994 and fought along with
the Bosnian civil defence forces — was
The foreign militants
issue will certainly come
under discussion in the
intra-Afghan dialogue
at some point, and the
Afghan Taliban may
share some plans,
including granting
foreign militants
citizenship if they
commit to living there
peacefully
estimated to be as many as 5,000. Many
fighters were integrated as a separate
battalion within the Bosnian Armed
Forces. These fighters were required to
leave the Balkans under the Dayton
Agreement’s terms, but the majority
stayed there and a third were granted
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
Bosnian citizenship.
It is not certain if the Taliban’s
potential offer would work for all foreign
militants — the TTP’s accepting to stay
peacefully under the Afghan Taliban’s
patronage is especially highly doubtful —
but the experiment produced mixed
results in Bosnia, and only a few had con-
tinued their militant activities. After
9/11, pressure on the Bosnian authori-
ties increased; as a result, more than
1,000 citizenships were revoked.
However, it will be hard for the TTP
to accept the Afghan Taliban’s condi-
tions, as the group would not want to
abandon its stance against Pakistan.
Meanwhile, the TTP might try to relocate
its infrastructure in Pakistan. However,
there is very little probability that it
would be able to hold any territory inside
Pakistan for long or run its operations
effectively on the ground. If it changes its
strategies and splits the group into small
circles and cells, it could sustain terror
operations for a while, but in the long run
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
its organisational structure will weaken
and internal differences will ultimately
create a crisis within the rank and file. In
that case, sectarian groups could take
more prominent leadership roles.
The second option the TTP will con-
sider is to operate as a proxy of nations
hostile to Pakistan. In that case, it would
stay in Afghanistan, but maintaining its
relationship with the Afghan Taliban
would become complex. The TTP’s
nexus with IS in Afghanistan could
become a probability, but both have a
history of accusing each other of being
proxies of their enemies. Even their
nexus would not create a big impact, as
IS is a weak organisation and not in a
position to provide any financial, polit-
ico-ideological or operational support to
the TTP.
From the TTP’s angle, the least
promising option would be to accept a
possible surrender-and-reconciliation
option offered by Pakistan; the Afghan
Taliban could help such a deal. The
chances of such a deal are, however, very
bleak, as the TTP’s leadership has not
accepted such offers even in the past.
Nonetheless, the Afghanistan situation
has brought the TTP at a crossroads once
again. On the one hand, its leadership is
trying to unify its factions to fight against
Al Qaeda’s case is
different. It may show
more flexibility to the
Taliban conditions
Pakistan, and on the other it has the fear
of losing the patronage of the Afghan
Taliban.
Al Qaeda’s case is different. It may
show more flexibility to the Taliban con-
ditions. During the Doha talks between
the US and Taliban, reports appeared
that the Taliban had consulted Al
Qaeda’s leadership before signing the
deal. It is not possible that the US would
not be aware of it. The US, Afghanistan
and Nato countries will not have serious
concerns if Al Qaeda’s leadership guar-
antees that it is going to live peacefully in
Afghanistan. The recent statement by
the Al Qaeda chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
issued on Sept 11, 2020, did not mention
the US and Afghan Taliban deal. Ana-
lysts perceive it in the context of increas-
ing pressure on the group by the Taliban.
Secondly, Al Qaeda’s leadership wants to
remain calm unless they find another
place to relocate. Al Qaeda will not try to
sabotage the peace process in Afghani-
stan and will hope that the Taliban come
to power, which may change all the equa-
tions for the group again.
l
The writer is a security analyst.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 51
Education
Language of Instruction
The evidence is that children learn best in a language they understand well
By Anjum Altaf
anjum.altaf@habib.edu.pk
P olicymaking can be based on self-
interest, whim, opinion, dogma
or evidence. The choice we
exercise says a lot about us.
Take the language of instruction
that is in the news once again. There is
less self-interest on display here than
there is in the case of sugar and sweets
and other such things. But we have seem
whim at play many times. Among the
most egregious was the case recently
mentioned by Zubeida Mustafa on these
pages (‘Which language?’, Sept 25).
Referring to the 2006 White Paper
on Education (2006) as “the only thor-
oughly deliberated official policy docu-
ment on education that I have read in
Pakistan” she recalled how the education
minister at the time (an ex-army gen-
eral) rejected it because “it recom-
mended the mother tongue to be used as
the medium of instruction”. I recall the
rationale that was proffered by the edu-
cation minister at the time — ‘I was edu-
cated in English and I have been so suc-
cessful.’ The less said about that the
better.
It is not all that great an improve-
52 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
ment to move from whim to opinion no
matter how well-intentioned. At the end
of September, the Ministry of Education
assembled a set of individuals to reach a
decision on the language of instruction.
The conclusion was that there were too
If the country is 70
per cent rural, then
clearly all rural students
can be taught in their
respective first
languages. Even in
large cities like Karachi,
ethnic conflicts have
resulted in residential
segregation
many opinions and a smaller group
needed to be formed to resolve the issue.
All this time, the evidence is so over-
whelming that qualified educationists
consider the matter settled — children
learn best in a language they understand
well. This evidence is based both on care-
ful research studies and on real-world
experience that developing countries
employing first languages for education
have done very well. The conclusion has
been repeatedly endorsed by interna-
tional organisations like Unesco, Unicef
and the EU.
If our policymakers are serious, they
should stop being dogmatic, defer to the
evidence and move on to implementa-
tion, which, given the muddle spread
over 70 years, is not going to be easy.
There are a number of controversies
associated with implementing a policy of
teaching in the first language that have
been used to stall action and perpetuate
the status quo.
The first is the dilemma of which
language to choose for instruction where
students speak a mix of first languages.
The solution proposed is to use English
because it does not favour any group,
which morphs into an argument for
using English across the board.
There is no denying such situations
exist, but the relevant question to ask is
what proportion of the total number of
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
students in the country face this
dilemma? If the country is 70 per cent
rural, then clearly all rural students can
be taught in their respective first lan-
guages. Even in large cities like Karachi,
ethnic conflicts have resulted in residen-
tial segregation. So, at the outside 20pc
of students are in mixed locations. The
common-sense solution is to go ahead
with the first-best policy for 80pc of stu-
dents while thinking of a compromise for
the remaining 20pc.
For the remaining 20pc the problem
is not as insurmountable as it seems if
one keeps in mind how languages are
acquired in childhood. Children growing
up in mixed neighbourhoods pick up all
the languages they are exposed to, and
there is almost always a common lan-
guage in which they can communicate.
From the perspective of cognitive devel-
opment, there is nothing sacrosanct
about the first language. The real consid-
eration is that the child be taught in a
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
language he or she understands. Given
that consideration, a regional language
or Urdu is a much better choice com-
pared to English which is an alien lan-
guage for everyone.
The second objection to using local
languages for instruction is that texts are
not available in them. A little bit of eco-
nomic sense should make one realise
that there will be no supply without a
demand and that, in general, supply
responds quickly to demand. In any case,
it is much worse to have texts in English
if the teacher is going to explain them
anyway in a local language. As it is, early
education should not be text- or fact-
based since, combined with our testing
procedures, they encourage rote learn-
ing.
The third argument against using
local languages in early education is that
it would hamper the learning of English,
which is the language of everything that
matters in life. This is a false binary as
should be obvious from the experience of
many successful countries where chil-
dren are educated in local languages and
learn as much English as they need to
when they need to. In fact, there is evi-
dence that children educated in their
first language learn English better than
those taught in English from the outset.
The fourth argument, that parents
overwhelmingly prefer English, is con-
sidered to be the clincher in the case
against local languages. It is rarely asked
why parents express this preference. It is
because we have a system in which we
have, by choice, made English the pass-
port to success. Instead of questioning
the wisdom of the system, we would
rather have everyone be educated in Eng-
lish, quite oblivious to the price that has
to be paid for adopting that route.
The deep irony is that when every-
one is educated in English we will dis-
cover that it is no longer a passport to
success as it is not in the US. Meanwhile,
immense cognitive damage would con-
tinue to be inflicted on millions of chil-
dren. All we need to do to change the
preferences of parents in the interest of
their children is to remove English as the
passport to success. It is not so in China
or Iran or Turkey, and it need not be so
here.
The primary resource of this coun-
try is its children. The major investment
of parents is in their children. Let us nur-
ture this resource wisely so it can be con-
fident, creative and productive and con-
tribute to the reinvigoration of society.
We need to set aside whims, dogma and
prejudices and go by the evidence of
what is best for the child.
l The writer is a former dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at
Lums.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 53
FATF and Pakistan
Pakistan Remains in the UN Terror
Financing Grey Zone
Pakistan has failed in letter and spirit to disrupt and dismantle terrorist financial
infrastructure despite repeated warnings
By Husain Haqqani
@husainhaqqani
A The FATF made 40
lthough Pakistani Foreign
Minister Shah Mehmood
Qureshi has assured his
countrymen that Pakistan would soon
get off the pre-sanctions watchlist of the
U.N. money laundering and terror
financing watchdog, it is unlikely that
the international community will let
Pakistan completely off the hook any
time soon.
The United Nations Financial
Action Task Force (FATF), is holding its
virtual plenary on Wednesday and
Thursday (October 21-22) and once
again Pakistan’s case is likely to receive
most attention.
Pakistan has, for years, not fulfilled
the international organization’s stan-
dards against money laundering and has
failed to shut down financing of terrorist
groups operating on its soil.
But several countries have been
reluctant to add Pakistan’s name to the
54 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
only on Iran and North Korea. Given the
country’s poor track record in shutting
recommendations for down terrorist groups, Pakistan has been
what Pakistan needed to on FATF’s “grey list,” which has resulted
do and Pakistan fully in “enhanced monitoring” off and on for
years.
complied with two of The grey list is normally meant to
them, up from force governments into tightening their
legal regimes against money laundering
compliance on one item and terrorist financing in order to get off
a year ago. Pakistan was it. But for Pakistan, it has become a way
reported as being to indefinitely escape the blacklist.
Avoiding the blacklist has become a goal
non-compliant in four in itself for Islamabad and after every
areas, partially FATF meeting that gives Pakistan a
reprieve, its leaders celebrate the failure
compliant on 25 of its enemy, India, in securing the impo-
counts, and largely sition of full sanctions.
compliant on nine The plenary that starts on Wednes-
day was originally scheduled for June,
recommendations but the COVID-19 pandemic helped Paki-
FATF “blacklist,” which entails global stan get an additional four months to
economic sanctions currently imposed meet the U.N. task force’s requirements.
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
Still, the FATF’s first follow-up report
(FUR) on the mutual evaluation report
(MER) about Pakistan suggests that the
country has made little progress in creat-
ing an effective mechanism to end
money laundering and combat terror
financing.
The FATF made 40 recommenda-
tions for what Pakistan needed to do and
Pakistan fully complied with two of
them, up from compliance on one item a
year ago. Pakistan was reported as being
non-compliant in four areas, partially
compliant on 25 counts, and largely com-
pliant on nine recommendations.
Since June 2018, when Pakistan
was last placed on the grey list, Pakistan
has had the benefit of three extensions
for complying with 27 points. In Febru-
ary 2020, FATF gave Pakistan a four-
month grace period to complete imple-
mentation of its 27-point action plan
against money laundering and terrorist
financing. Then, Pakistan delivered on
14 points but missed 13 other targets.
Pakistan’s compliance is largely
technical, coming in the form of legisla-
tion or modification of banking rules.
But it has repeatedly missed deadlines
for shutting down all access to funding of
United Nations Security Council desig-
nated terrorist groups, especially those
with close ties to the country’s security
establishment. These include the
Taliban, al-Qaida, Lashkar-e-Taiba and
the Jaish-e-Mohammad.
Initiation of a few high profile cases,
usually just ahead of FATF meetings,
notwithstanding, Pakistan has shown no
serious desire to prosecute the leaders of
these groups for accessing finance or for
actual acts of terrorism. Many of those
designated as terrorists by the U.N. have
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
gone through Pakistan’s revolving door.
One month before the FATF meet-
ing, Pakistan announced the freezing of
964 properties of proscribed groups
such as Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and
Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) under the
United Nations Security Council (Freez-
ing and Seizure) Order, 2019.
In February an anti-terrorism court
sentenced JuD chief Hafiz Muhammad
Saeed to five-and-a-half years in prison
in two cases after finding him guilty of
terror financing and affiliation with an
outlawed group. In August, three of his
associates were sentenced to jail terms
by a court in Lahore: Malik ZafarIqbal
and Abdul Salam Bhattvi to five years
In January 2020,
China officials praised
Pakistan’s “visible
progress” in
strengthening its
counter terrorism
financing system, and
asked the world to
encourage Pakistan
each in jail, and Abdul RehmanMakki to
18 months. All sentences are under
appeal.
Also in August, the government
tried to quickly pass the 2020 Anti-
Money Laundering Act (AMLA) and
Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC)
Amendments but they failed to convince
the parliamentary opposition, which
blocked the move.
It is impossible for the international
community not to notice how terrorist
leaders are detained just in time to avoid
international sanctions and released
once the immediate threat of sanctions
subsides. But Pakistan’s status as the
world’s only Muslim nuclear weapons
power and its strategic location, coupled
with close ties with China and a past alli-
ance with the United States, enable it to
avoid punishments that other countries
receive for similar actions.
Pakistan has so far successfully man-
aged to avoid the blacklist due to diplo-
matic support from China, Turkey,
Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and other Middle
East countries. Avoiding the blacklist
requires support of fewer countries, but
support of 12 out of FATF’s 39 members
is needed to exit the grey list. Difficulty in
getting that level of support is the reason
why Pakistan remains ever on the grey
list even when it cannot be put on the
blacklist.
Pakistan’s main international bene-
factor, China, is currently the chief of the
Asia-Pacific group of FATF, something
that helps Pakistan breathe easy. When
China hosted the meeting of the interna-
tional terror financing watchdog in
Beijing in January 2020, its officials
praised Pakistan’s “visible progress” in
strengthening its counter terrorism
financing system, and asked the world to
encourage Pakistan.
For this week’s plenary, Pakistan is
also hoping for concessions from the
United States in return for Pakistan’s
support for U.S. talks with the Afghan
Taliban. But the best the U.S. can do for
Pakistan is to keep it on the grey list
again. It would be difficult for the U.S.
and other Western governments to
ignore the evidence about the continuing
operation of jihadi groups in Pakistan.
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 55
Review Essay
Citizens of the World
How cosmopolitanism made Europe modern
By Jerrold Seigel
New York, United States
O
ne thing that has long made
Europe what it is, distinct from
any other part of the world, is a
peculiar mix of division and integration.
Since the fall of Rome, Europe has never
been unified by an overarching imperial
power. Instead, the continent evolved
from feudal fragmentation into a system
of independent, competing nation-
states, restrained from devouring one
another—at least before the twentieth
century—by a system of balance-of-
power politics. Competition goaded each
state to develop its political and
economic capabilities, so that by the
mid-1700s, the continent as a whole was
well on the way to realizing its potential
to dominate other regions—a power that
would alter the world in the age of
imperialism.
This mix of separateness and coor-
dination preserved the distinct identities
of Europe’s parts but created a frame in
which trade, competition, and a sem-
blance of religious unity drew them all
together. It was also a chief factor in cul-
tural development and social change.
Take, for example, the Enlightenment.
In France, the movement was largely
devoted to a critique of the ancien
régime’s political and religious oppres-
56 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
sion. It morphed into a celebration of
native civility and constitutional liberty
in Great Britain and shifted its focus in
Germany from the French philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s emphasis on
the politics of domination to the condi-
tions of inner moral freedom.
It was against this background that
the notion of cosmopolitanism began to
spread in Europe. Cosmopolitanism was
primarily a political ideal, associated
with the German philosopher Immanuel
Kant, who in a 1795 essay entitled Per-
petual Peace posited a “cosmopolitan
law” that would give individuals rights as
“citizens of the earth” rather than as citi-
zens of particular countries. But cosmo-
politanism also had a strong literary
dimension. Travel writing—such as Cap-
tain James Cook’s diaries of his travels to
Oceania and the Pacific and
Montesquieu’s fictitious Persian Let-
ters—encouraged people to imagine
themselves in foreign environments.
One French writer of the period thus
referred to himself as a cosmopolite,
declaring that “all countries are the same
to me.”
Other people drawn to a cosmopoli-
tan perspective approached it by way of
the special mix of internal division and
integration that made Europe a favor-
able site for cosmopolitanism in the first
place. They posited a kind of dialectical
relationship that made more restricted
ties a starting point for developing
broader ones. This dialectic was also at
the heart of the celebrated Republic of
Letters, which attracted many partisans
of the Enlightenment. The republic was
made up of writers, thinkers, and other
truth seekers linked together by net-
works of correspondence, publication,
patronage, and friendship. It was dedi-
cated to liberating its members from the
prejudices and attachments that their
local, national, or denominational ties
produced. But this goal could only be
pursued as long as it was never fully real-
ized, because if it were, then all otherness
would be eradicated, depriving succes-
sive participants in the republic’s activi-
ties of the exposure to the alternative
perspectives that could help them
become more enlightened, more ratio-
nal, and more cosmopolitan citizens.
Had this interplay between the local
and the universal fully informed the
story of cosmopolitanism that Orlando
Figes puts at the center of his cultural
history, The Europeans, his good book
could have been much better. Figes pro-
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vides a vast store of information on Euro-
pean cultural institutions—theaters,
opera houses, museums, and interna-
tional exhibitions—as well as their social
and economic underpinnings. He seeks
to integrate all this material in two ways.
s Portraits of Ivan Turgenev, Pauline Viardot, and Louis Viardot.
First, he shows how Europe’s cosmopoli-
tan culture was formed by the interna-
tional links that were either created or
strengthened over the nineteenth cen-
tury, so that by the end of the period, not
only was “all of Europe reading the same
books”—a fact that the literary historian
Franco Moretti established with statis-
tics in his Atlas of the European
Novel—but people everywhere were also
hearing the same music and looking at
the same pictures. This development
owed much to an expansion of publish-
ing and, in particular, of translations. It
also stemmed from a variety of new pho-
tographic techniques that publishers
combined with lithography and engrav-
ing in order to tap a growing market of
consumers. But the most powerful
engine of cultural integration in the nine-
teenth century was the railroad.
Trains crisscrossed the continent
with great rapidity starting in the 1850s,
bringing together people and objects
that were once weeks or months of travel
apart. Figes begins his book with a color-
ful account of the opening of the first
short-range international lines in 1843
and 1846. This appealing curtain raiser
already announces the book’s one-
sidedness, however, because such an
emphasis on the railroad as an engine of
internationalism obscures the degree to
which it served as a vehicle for national
integration, providing such countries as
France and Germany with the market
unity that was crucial to the establish-
ment of modern industry. In addition, it
underestimates the role railroads played
in forging cultural unity. Continental
Europe entered the nineteenth century
as a linguistically splintered congeries of
local cultures. Railways helped merge
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many of these cultures and turn them
into national characteristics by making
travel easier and faster than ever before.
The Europeans’ second unifying
thread is human rather than technologi-
cal: throughout his volume, Figes traces
the lives of three exceptionally cosmo-
politan Europeans. One of the protago-
nists of Figes’s narrative is a Spanish
soprano, Pauline Viardot. Although best
known as an opera singer, Viardot was
also a first-rate pianist and a talented
composer, whose charm and intelligence
made her the center of cultural life wher-
ever she set up her household. The Euro-
peans also follows her French husband,
Louis Viardot, who was a writer, art
critic, impresario, and radical political
activist. The last of the three lives in the
book’s subtitle belongs to the Russian
novelist Ivan Turgenev, best known for
his remarkable story of radicalism and
generational conflict, Fathers and Sons.
What bound Turgenev to the
Viardots was his emotional attachment
to Pauline, with whom he fell in love in
1843. Turgenev would spend the rest of
his life either in close proximity to Pau-
line or wishing for it, following her and
Louis to Paris and London, often living
near them and spending long, languor-
ous days in their company. Turgenev was
also Pauline’s lover and very likely the
father of one of her children. Louis
accepted his wife’s liaison with Turgenev
and maintained friendly relations with
the Russian writer throughout his life-
time.
UNITY IN DIVERSITY
The richness of both the personalities
and the story seeds Figes’s book with
memorable moments. Pauline, in partic-
ular, stands out. A figure less remem-
bered than her achievements merit—in
large part because her singing and her
ability to foster far-reaching networks of
friends and acquaintances left little mate-
rial trace—Pauline captured the cosmo-
politanism of the period. Descriptions of
her deep yet flexible soprano and the
dramatic quality of her performances
leave one yearning for some way to hear
them; alas, her work as a composer,
which competent judges admired, was
impeded by the common assumption
that women were not up to writing
music. Pauline was also connected to
dozens of famous composers and musi-
cians, from Frédéric Chopin and Richard
Wagner to Johannes Brahms, Giacomo
Meyerbeer, Camille Saint-Saëns, Clara
Schumann, and Johann Strauss II. One
memorable example of Figes’s talent for
uncovering fascinating vignettes is his
account of a soiree at the Viardots’ house
in 1860, where Pauline and Wagner gave
the first performance of the famous love
duet from the second act of Tristan und
Isolde, Wagner’s great epic of love and
death.
Turgenev’s career also serves as a
lens through which to view European
cultural history. His literary realism pro-
vides an entry into the development of
the novel, and his radicalism, into the
continent’s politics. One of his early
books helped turn Russian opinion
against serfdom. Turgenev was a deter-
mined westernizer who was nevertheless
close to such deeply Russian figures as
Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Among his contributions to cosmopoli-
tanism was his sponsorship of French
and German writers in Russia—he was
especially close to Gustave Flaubert and
Émile Zola—and of Russian ones in the
West. Turgenev was also an active partic-
ipant in the movement to establish an
international system of copyright. Louis
Viardot receives the least attention of the
three, but he, too, has a place in the weav-
ing of international connections; his
writings on Spanish art and his guides
for visitors to museums were highly pop-
ular.
But there are two reasons why,
despite these virtues, The Europeans
falls short of fulfilling its promise. The
first is that Figes’s attempt to make a
general cultural history of the period
cohere around the lives of Turgenev and
the Viardots forces him to alternate bio-
graphical sections with ones that take up
various bigger topics. This may seem like
a promising way to integrate individual
lives with larger historical currents, but
as a result of this organization, the
reader is obliged to engage in a kind of
literary multitasking, made even more
difficult by the many complex details and
the multitude of minor figures who enter
into the story along the way.
The greater problem, however, is
not organizational but conceptual. There
can be no doubt that Europe became
more closely integrated as railroad con-
November 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 57

s A view of Paris, 1865.
struction proceeded; there was also
something new about the fact that peo-
ple across the continent were reading the
same books, listening to the same music,
and gazing at the same works of art. But
Figes is also perfectly aware that opposi-
tion to cosmopolitanism developed
alongside its progress, notably in the rise
of nationalist currents in every cultural
domain. Because he generally regards
these currents as mere episodes of resis-
tance to cosmopolitanism, he never suc-
ceeds in establishing a meaningful rela-
tionship between them and the growth of
a cosmopolitan outlook. At the start of
the book, he quotes the British art histo-
rian Kenneth Clark’s claim that “nearly
all the great advances in civilization”
have come at times of “utmost interna-
tionalism.” And he calls on the German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche at the
end to say that “the process of becoming
European” involves “a growing detach-
ment” from local conditions, “an
increasing independence of any definite
milieu.” He extends this point even fur-
ther in his discussion of the opera
Carmen. Figes writes that “it was no lon-
ger possible, or even meaningful, to dis-
tinguish between what was nationally
‘authentic’ and what foreign or interna-
tional—so much cultural exchange was
there across national borders in the mod-
ern world.”
And yet people still found it neces-
sary to make such distinctions, as Figes
himself tells us a few pages later. West-
ern audiences still “wanted Russian
music to sound ‘Russian,’ Spanish music
‘Spanish,’ Hungarian ‘Hungarian.’”
When the Belgian journal L’Art moderne
proposed to serve as a space where Latin
58 | GLOBAL AGE November 2020
Cosmopolitanism is
not a state into which
people can enter once
and for all
and Germanic sensibilities could inter-
act and stimulate each other, the prem-
ise was not that becoming fully Euro-
pean required dissolving such differ-
ences but that something positive would
come of the encounter between them.
Moreover, sometimes The Europeans
seems to question its own premise that
the overall trajectory of nineteenth-
century European cultural history was
toward the triumph of cosmopolitanism.
For instance, Figes observes that
Meyerbeer’s death in 1864 marked “the
passing of the cosmopolitan idea of Euro-
pean culture which his life and work had
embodied.” Elsewhere, he quotes Henry
James’s accusation that the writers in
Flaubert’s circle were dogmatic to the
point of being “ignorant of anything that
was not French.”
A NARROW PATH
The point is not that Figes would have
done well to pay more attention to the
kind of nationalism that would become
so destructive in the twentieth century,
and remains so today. In order to under-
stand the manner in which Europe could
and could not be cosmopolitan, histori-
ans must remain attentive to the long-
standing pattern wherein the continued
separateness of Europe’s parts functions
as the underlying condition of the conti-
nent’s special mode of unity. Cosmopoli-
tanism is not a state into which people
can enter once and for all by reading the
same books or listening to the same
music. Human beings can never wholly
detach themselves from the definite
milieus of which Nietzsche saw only the
dark side; they can only aspire to be citi-
zens of the world by acknowledging their
rootedness in some smaller part of it.
The British poet T. S. Eliot affirmed this
when he defined a “good European” not
as one who seeks to diminish “local and
national” differences but as one who
becomes more critical of his or her own
culture by recognizing that other ways of
life have something to teach. Treating
cosmopolitanism as an aspiration to
dissolve all differences in favor of some
universal way of being is misguided, as it
would lead to a condition “in which we
should have nothing to gain from each
other,” Eliot notes. Since the same differ-
ences that make those gains possible are
the ones that also lead to conflict and
hostility, the path Europeans must walk
is a narrow one.
This lesson is especially important
after the success of Brexiteers in con-
vincing a large proportion of the British
electorate that the United Kingdom’s
national interests could be served only
by renouncing international ties. To save
liberal cosmopolitanism at a time when
populist sentiment in Europe and the
United States promotes the revival of a
divisive and narrow nationalism, it is
important to recognize that cosmopoli-
tanism need not set itself against local
loyalties and attachments and that, prop-
erly understood, the two can nurture
each other. The best way to become cos-
mopolitans is by aspiring to the broad
perspectives that coming to know a
range of diverse cultures and viewpoints
opens up. One belongs best to the wider
world when one perceives it as the sum of
all the particular ways of being and see-
ing of which it is composed.
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