Russia, the West, and the Start of a New Cold War

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton Times & Transcript]

The fall of the Soviet Union presented a monumental challenge for the new Russian state. Economic, political and military collapse exposed its weakness for the West to exploit.

Russia had to navigate a fragmented ethnic population, create relations with states that it had once ruled through imperial conquest, and had to manage its reduced geographic security with less military and productive resources.

There was initial goodwill between the Russian government and the West, but this diminished with an unceasing expansion of Western hegemony. Multilateral institutions such as the European Union and NATO expanded into the former buffer states of Russia and even into the former Soviet Union itself.

The neoconservative turn of American foreign policy was marked by activity to bring about regime changes in former Soviet republics such as Georgia and Ukraine to make them receptive to American power. Russia consequently became interested in controlling its neighbours’ affairs by establishing regional military institutions, countering Western influence in its “near abroad” and withholding trade to enforce its will.

Vladimir Putin was the result of this pushback. Putin has portrayed himself as a strong leader so that the public will view him as capable of leading and defending Russia. In terms of foreign policy, he has based his legitimacy by painting Russia as under attack by illegitimate Western interference. This provided the springboard of his military actions in Georgia and Crimea.

In Ukraine, an oligarchic capitalist system had been aligned with Russia for the maintenance of power by the country’s corrupt rulers. Viktor Yanukovych had become president of Ukraine in 2010 and had been steering the country away from Europe and closer to Russia. But the Maidan Revolution of 2014 ousted him and he was replaced by the pro-western Viktor Yushchenko.

 Fear in the Kremlin that Ukraine might join the EU led to the annexation of Crimea and the sponsoring of secessionist groups in the Donbas. This, predictably, caused outrage in western countries, but increased Putin’s popularity at home. Putin utilized the antidemocratic accusations levied against him by the West to fuel his nationalism.

U.S. President Joe Biden has been playing into Putin’s hands since taking office. Biden in a televised interview on March 17 described Putin as a “killer” with no soul and said the Russian leader would pay a price for alleged Russian meddling in the November 2020 presidential election, something the Kremlin denies.

Putin replied that Biden was accusing the Russian leader of something he was guilty of himself. Russia also recalled its ambassador back to Moscow for the first time since 1998.

Policies in Washington have pushed Russia and China closer together since Putin’s annexation of Crimea and China’s actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.  Biden’s administration has now gone on the offensive with a national security agenda prioritising “rivalry with China, Russia and other authoritarian states.”

 The U.S. is even willing to consider NATO expansion into Ukraine, on Russia’s doorstep, and Georgia, in the Caucasus. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reiterated Kyiv’s desire to be admitted to NATO, something which Moscow has repeatedly warned against, threatening that it could catapult the region toward a major war.

To an ex-KGB officer like Putin, this sabre-rattling must seem like a return to the “capitalist encirclement” of the USSR during the Cold War. U.S. sanctions targeting Russia’s policy on Ukraine and China’s suppression of the Uighurs have further aligned Moscow and Beijing’s interests.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited China March 22-23 for talks with his counterpart, Wang Yi, marking the resumption of regular high-level exchanges between the two countries.

The Chinese and Russian military now routinely hold joint military exercises in the Indian Ocean and East China Sea. Moscow has said it would not rule out a possible pact with China to counter NATO, but Beijing seems less interested.

 

“The latest steps and gestures by the Biden administration, seen as hostile and insulting by the Russian and Chinese leaders, have predictably pushed Moscow and Beijing even deeper into a mutual embrace,” according to Artyom Lukin, a professor of international studies at the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia. U.S.-Russia relations are at their worst since the Cold War ended and will remain so in the coming years.

 

 

Tragic History is Still Haunting the DRC

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

It is hard to think of any country on earth more ruthlessly exploited than the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its natural resources -- tin ore from mines in the interior, timber from its vast forests, gold ore, diamonds, even uranium – are all pillaged. 

The theft of the territory’s wealth goes back to the days of the 19^th century Congo Free State, the lucrative, privately owned colony of Belgium’s King Leopold II.

Traders and explorers from the Middle East, Europe, and even the United States moved rapidly into the region. They created a deadly trade in ivory and rubber for Western markets and in enslaved labour for the Indian Ocean rim.

The brutal practices that King Leopold II later used to extract a huge fortune in rubber from his personally owned colony became a worldwide scandal in the twentieth century’s first decade, as recounted in Joseph Conrad’s 1902 exposé, Heart of Darkness.

Few profits from all these riches ever trickled down to ordinary Congolese, either in centuries past or today. Most households today survive on less than the equivalent of $3 a day.

Recovery from the exploitation built into colonialism often happens faster if a territory previously had a common language and some shared sense of nationhood, but that eludes this vast country.

The region was inhabited by hundreds of different peoples, speaking well over 200 indigenous languages, and absolutely no sense of shared identity. Travel was very difficult due to the thickness of the rain forest, the world’s second largest, and hindered the development of large political entities.

“In many cases,” writes Yale University historian Robert Harms in his 2019 book Land of Tears, “the largest political unit was a single village, or even a segment of a village.”

The Belgian government took control of the vast region away from Leopold but did little to improve conditions. After independence in 1960, the country devolved into anarchy; eventually the major beneficiary became the dictator of the country, Mobutu Sese Seko. During his reign of thirty-two years, Mobutu pocketed even more money from the territory than Leopold had done.

The collapse of the Mobutu regime in 1997 created a power vacuum that drew more than a half-dozen African nations, along with various militias, into an extended and chaotic war in the Congo.

This bloody conflict, which became known as Africa’s World War, lasting from 1998 to 2003, led to the deaths of some four million people. Then came the long-time ruler Joseph Kabila, who used his time in office, from 2001 to 2019, to amass vast business holdings for himself and his family.

Though Felix Tshisekedi is currently president, following a disputed election, Kabila still wields considerable power behind the scenes.

Nor has violence ceased. Armed groups continue to massacre civilians in the troubled east of the country. The Italian ambassador, Luca Attanasio, was killed Feb. 22 during a visit to the eastern part of the country in a World Food Program convoy. 

The U.S. State Department on March 11 declared the Allied Democratic Forces and Madina at Tauheed Wau Mujahedeen as terrorist groups affiliated to the jihadist group Islamic State Central Africa Province.

The despoilation of the country’s resources continues. The Congo Basin contains some 314 million hectares of primary rainforest. “Being a major storehouse of biodiversity, it provides huge services to all of humanity,” explains Simon Lewis, a geographer at University College London.

Industrial activity, such as palm oil plantations, logging and mining, is contributing to deforestation. Primary rainforest loss more than doubled between 2002 to 2019, according to Global Forest Watch, an initiative of the World Resources Institute. In 2019 alone, 590,000 hectares were lost.

One way to halt this is through community forestry concessions in individual villages. The government believes this will provide unprecedented new levels of protection.

For example, the 500 indigenous people of Lokolama, in the Equateur province of northwestern Congo, were granted 10,000 hectares in February 2019 with the support of Greenpeace Africa and are now harvesting honey and tomatoes. In Yanonge, more than 640 kilometres to the east, four remote forest communities established another community concession, cultivating peanuts and plantain.

The country has also instituted a moratorium on new logging concessions. It’s definitely a start.

 

Vietnam’s Government Has Crushed COVID-19

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

In Vietnam, a Communist regime has dominated its society for decades and remains important today. It has been put to the test as it faces the struggle against COVID-19. So how has the country fared?

Despite limited resources and geographical proximity to Wuhan, China where coronavirus first appeared, Vietnam’s low-cost model against COVID-19 has been a success with the number of infected staying low and community infection under control.

Vietnam has kept the total number of infections in the country of 96 million at around 2,500 as of March and reported just 35 deaths. It crushed a first wave of cases in February 2020, and a larger cluster that was detected among foreign tourists two months later.

The Lowy Institute published an index on Jan. 28 ranking 98 countries and their success in handling the coronavirus pandemic, Vietnam ranked second, behind New Zealand.

Vietnam’s first domestically developed COVID-19 vaccine, called Nanocovax, is expected to be available by the fourth quarter of this year and put into use in 2022. Four Vietnamese companies were engaged in vaccine research and production.

Vietnam’s economy has remained resilient, expanding by 2.9 per cent in 2020, one of the highest growth rates in the world, and growth is projected to be 6.5 per cent in 2021, thanks to strong economic fundamentals, decisive containment measures and well-targeted government support, according to the International Monetary Fund’s latest survey of the country’s economy, released March 1.

The government’s pandemic prevention strategy fitted with Vietnamese society’s collectivist culture. Though this exerted constrains on people’s lives, they complied with its actions, the main reason for Vietnam’s success in coping with COVID-19.

Vietnam issued quick and decisive policy responses and it strictly applied health measures. It used mass media and grassroots management system to turn these into advantages to help the country fight COVID-19.

The nation mobilized the whole political system including the Communist Party, the government, the Fatherland Front and other social organizations. The slogan “Fighting the pandemic like fighting against invasive enemies” demonstrated Vietnam’s determination and priority on pandemic prevention.

This did involve intrusive surveillance. There are 2.8 million government officials and employees in the nation, accounting for about three per cent of Vietnam’s total population. They were thrown into the battle.

Grassroots committees were established, and each building and school had its own steering committee for COVID-19 prevention. The establishment of a network from the central to the grassroots level has helped the pandemic prevention activities be widely deployed.

In localized areas where the virus was detected, barricades were set up to prevent people from leaving their houses, while the grassroots management teams helped ensure people’s daily life by supporting their purchase of supplies and necessities. Health checks and monitoring were also conducted continuously to detect new cases in the affected locales.

Vietnam temporarily suspended entry by most foreigners and stopped operating international flight routes, only organizing flights to take Vietnamese home from countries where COVID-19 infections had become critical.

Mass media, which is strictly under political control, has played an important role in raising public awareness of the coronavirus. In Vietnam, there is no private ownership of broadcast outlets.

The national state-owned broadcasting television, Vietnam Television (VTV) is under the control of the two bodies: The Department of Radio, Television and Electronic Information, which regulates technical, legal and economic aspects of the broadcasting system, and the Central Propaganda and Education Commission, which works to ensure that “all media practitioners remain loyal to the Party’s propagandist agenda.”

Mass media in the country continuously delivered messages about the danger of COVID-19, and surveys showed that people accepted the credibility of the information.

The Ministry of Public Security also provided simple instructions for people to identify fake news on the internet that might be harmful to the country. Those evading medical declarations were not only punished by law but also subject to intense social condemnation.

The cooperation of the public was achieved through the application of what the government termed the “two weapons”: domestic mass media and the grassroots management system.

“When people trust the government, people do what the government says,” remarked Professor Guy Thwaites, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit and Major Overseas Programme in Viet Nam.

 

Can Russia Teach Us Anything About Ethnically-Based Federalism

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Political scientists seek to understand events and processes in one place through juxtaposing them with their contemporary equivalents in at least one other society.

So much of the reason we teach comparative politics courses is so that students can compare and contrast political systems elsewhere to our own and perhaps consider potentially adapting some of their features to our own federation.

Russia has a complicated asymmetrical federal structure. There are 85 units, all called “Subjects of the Federation.”

The main grouping is the 46 oblasts, usually named after their main city, for example Sverdlovsk or Volgograd; they have a predominantly ethnic Russian population. They are simply territorial subdivisions, like American or Brazilian states, with no ethnic connotations.

The same is true of the nine krais, such as Kamchatka or Krasnodar. They are named differently than oblasts because they are found in outlying, frontier areas, mainly in Siberia. A Canadian parallel might be Yukon.

Then there are units with a distinct ethnic basis, named republics, which enjoy more autonomy than the other types of jurisdictions.

These 22 republics range from big ethnic entities named for a “titular” nationality, such as Chechnya and Tatarstan, down to tiny entities created as homes for smaller ethnic groups. Some of the latter are even enclaves found within the regular oblasts or krais.

For example, Adygea is one such entity, representing the indigenous Adyghe people. It is the fifth-smallest Russian federal subject by area, with its territory situated within Krasnodar Krai.

Each region, regardless of its status, has an elected leader -- in oblasts and krais, governors or the heads of administration; in republics, usually presidents of the republic.

Regardless of type or size, all 85 “subjects” are represented by two delegates each in the Council of the Federation, the 170-seat upper house of the Federal Assembly, the Russian parliament. The lower house, the State Duma, with 450 members, is an elected body, with representation by population.

In my course on the Russian political system, I introduced the students to this complex system. Then I brought to their attention the ill-fated 1992 Charlottetown Accord, in which aboriginal peoples were to have been a “third order of government.”

The Charlottetown Accord would have substantially altered the status of aboriginal groups in Canada. Under the Accord, an aboriginal right to self-government would have been enshrined in the Canadian Constitution. Moreover, the Accord would have recognized aboriginal governments as analogous to the federal government and the provinces.

There was provision for aboriginal representation in the Senate, and Aboriginal senators would have had the same role and powers as other senators.

Aboriginal legislation, however, would have been required to be consistent with the principles of “peace, order, and good government in Canada,” and would have been subject to judicial review under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Beyond these general principles, the Charlottetown Accord did not provide any details on the precise form that such self-government would have taken. Further, it provided for a breathing period before they could access the right to self-government.

This would have allowed the federal government and the provinces time to negotiate the details. But how would this have worked, territorially? There are 633 reserves in this country, all within provinces and territories, like raisins in a cake. What would their status become? This remained vague.

But what if we adopted the Russian system, making them all small ethnic republics within the larger provincial entities created by the settlers who came to this country? After all, Nunavut is already effectively an Inuit polity.

So, for example, Kanehsatake, near Montreal, would become a Mohawk republic, within the province of Quebec. The Tsuutʼina First Nation southwest of Calgary would become a self-governing ethnic polity. And so on.

Some First Nations are already, in a de facto sense, on this road. British Columbia is home to 198 First Nations, about one third of all in Canada. The Nisga’a in 1998 signed a treaty with Canada, and as part of the settlement, nearly 2,000 square kilometres in the Nass River Valley in northwestern British Columbia was officially recognized as theirs.

The Wetʼsuwetʼen, in the central interior of the province, last May signed an agreement with the federal and provincial governments, in which Ottawa and B.C. recognized Wet’suwet’en rights and title to their land.

Doing the same with other indigenous nations would make for a more complex federal system than the one we have now, but it might open up all sorts of possibilities for further reconciliation.

As China Rises, Biden Struggles to Resp

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB]  Times & Transcript

On March 19, American and Chinese officials met in Anchorage, Alaska, to discuss a range of security and human rights issues. It didn’t go well. The new Biden administration’s strategy to curb Beijing faces a stiff challenge as China uses its economic, diplomatic and military might to deflect criticism.

The relationship between the two countries got off to a bad start when the new People’s Republic of China, founded in 1949, snubbed the U.S. as the chief global agent of capitalism and imperialism and forged an alliance with the Soviet Union.

Washington retaliated by refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the new Chinese government and continuing to uphold the Republic of China, confined to the island of Taiwan, as the sole legitimate representative of the Chinese people, and denying the Communist regime one of the five permanent seats at the UN Security Council until 1971.

Relations grew more cordial in the 1970s, and the Beijing regime was recognized in 1979. China also emerged from the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution and began its swift rise as a major economic power.

China’s leaders aimed at the creation of a mercantilist, state-capitalist system, guided by a Communist Party holding a monopoly of power, modelled after Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policy in the early years of the Soviet Union.

Lenin characterized it as an economic system that would include a free market and capitalism, but subject to state control.

While China and the U.S. have found some common ground on issues of trade, key issues remain unresolved, the potential for troubling divergence is real, with China now an economic powerhouse, a military force in Asia, and a potential rival to U.S. hegemony.

President Xi Jinping, in power since 2012, is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. In March of 2018, China's parliament amended its constitution, broadening his power and scrapping term limits.

China has become more authoritarian under Xi. He has carried out a massive crackdown on China’s Uighur minority in Xinjiang; launched campaigns of repression in Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet; and stifled dissent among intellectuals, lawyers, artists, and religious organizations across China.

He has come to believe that China should no longer fear any sanctions that the United States might impose in response to violations of human rights. In his view, China’s economy is now strong enough to weather them.

Anyhow, the promise of peaceful reunification with Taiwan under a “one country, two systems” formula has evaporated as the Taiwanese look to Hong Kong, where China has imposed a harsh new national security law, arrested opposition politicians, and restricted media freedom. 

The Chinese think that the United States’ role in their region for the past 75 years has been unnatural and is therefore transient.

China is aiming to become the dominant force in the Asia-Pacific, strengthening its hand toward Taiwan and international disputes in the East and South China Seas. Championing what he calls the Chinese Dream, a vision to restore China’s great-power status, Xi has gone further to push military reforms than his predecessors.

Beijing intends to complete its military modernization program by 2027, with the main goal of giving China a decisive edge in all conceivable scenarios for a conflict with the United States over Taiwan.

So the possibility of war exists, since for the United States to back away from a fight would mean abandoning its commitment to a democratic ally at tremendous reputational cost.

Chen Yixin, the secretary-general of the Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, on Jan. 15 stated that “the rise of the East and the decline of the West” has become a global trend and “changes of the international landscape are in our favor.”

A powerful figure within the China’s Communist apparatus, he is expected to succeed Xi Jinping as the country’s next leader and his remarks reflect Beijing’s growing belief in its inevitable rise as the world’s sole superpower.

China now occupies that place in the American mind that Germany and the Soviet Union once held: an ideological opponent that has the ability to threaten the United States’ position in a key region and perhaps elsewhere too. Can President Joe Biden improve matters? Not so far.

 

Mexico is a Dangerous Country for Journalists

 

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Mexico has for years been one of the world’s most dangerous nations for reporters, and things seem to be getting worse.

It was the deadliest country in the world for the media in 2020, accounting for almost a third of journalists killed, according to the New York based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which investigates attacks against the press globally.

At least 13 journalists were killed in Mexico last year, bringing the death toll to 133 since 2000. A recent string of killings underscored the risks facing journalists who cover sensitive subjects such as crime, politics and the security forces.

This is the fourth time in the past five years that Mexico has also led the International Federation of Journalists’ list in the number of journalists killed. The Brussels-based organization represents more than 600,000 media workers from 187 organisations in 146 countries.

Killing the Story: Journalists Risking Their Lives to Uncover the Truth in Mexico, a book published in 2018 and translated into English last summer, reveals how journalists are risking their lives to expose crime and corruption.

Journalist and filmmaker Témoris Grecko describes how they are frequently caught between nefarious politicians and ruthless criminal organizations, who are often aligned with each other.

A Mexican reporter who wrote about violent crime in the central state of Guanajuato died of gunshot wounds last Nov. 9.

Israel Vazquez was about to broadcast the discovery of human remains in plastic bags in the municipality of Salamanca, in Guanajuato state, when he was shot at least 11 times.

Guanajuato is one of the most active drug cartel battlegrounds in the country and the state that recorded the highest number of murders per year in 2019. It has been shaken by bloody turf wars between rival drug cartels.

Violence is now endemic in almost every sector of Mexican society, and reporters have often been caught up in the conflict, which claimed more than 31,000 lives last year.

The killing of Vazquez drew a backlash from international press groups, including the CPJ, Reporters Without Borders and the Inter-American Press Association.

“The brazen killing of Israel Vazquez Rangel underscores how Mexico is more dangerous for reporters than even war zones,” maintains Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative.

“Mexico is suffering a multi-faceted crisis with regard to press freedom. The crisis principally stems from impunity.” Overall, at least 90 per cent of journalist killings remain unsolved.

The murder of Vazquez was no isolated incident. On Oct. 29, TV host Arturo Alba Medina was shot in Ciudad Juarez in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, across from El Paso in Texas.

A week before Vazquez’s death, two other journalists met the same fate. Jesus Alfonso Pinuelas, was shot dead in Cajeme, in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, while Victor Manuel Jiménez, a reporter who left home to attend a baseball game in the city of Celaya and never returned. He is presumed to have been murdered.

Journalists covering protests have also come under attack in Mexico. On the same day Vazquez was murdered, four journalists were injured when police in the city of Cancun opened fire at a crowd protesting against femicides.

Deadly violence against women reached record heights in 2019; more than 1,000 women were murdered because of their gender, an increase of 10 per cent over 2018.

In 2006, the government of Vicente Fox Quesada created the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Crimes against Journalists (FEADP). But current president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has weakened protection for journalists under threat and cut funds for investigations.

Two of the journalists killed last year were under supposed federal protection after having reported deaths threats linked to their work. In both cases their assigned bodyguards also died in the attacks.

Indeed, sometimes officials themselves target reporters. On March 2, a vehicle attempted to force Alberto Amaro Jordan off the road while he was driving in the municipality of Tetla de la Solidaridad, in Tlaxcala state. Its driver was Eleazar Molina Pérez, the mayor of that municipality, who has been accused of corruption.

Biden Lionized by the Press, but Deeper Problems Loom

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

The Joe Biden love-fest continues. So glad are they to be rid of Donald Trump, that journalists have been “jumping the shark” in their praise of a president who has been in office barely two months.

On March 11, New York Times columnist David Brooks headlined an article on the paper’s website titled “Joe Biden is a Transformational President.” It took longer for Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to reach that exalted status.

They need to find space on Mount Rushmore for a man born in 1942 who had been running for this office since 1988. I wonder why nobody had noticed his amazing talents before, while the Democrats were nominating Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.

Biden’s inauguration was treated as a coronation and cable TV pundits were euphoric. John Heileman at MSNBC compared Biden’s speech to Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural, while fellow commentator Rachel Maddow was overcome by emotion. CNN’s David Challen in a fit of over-the-top rhetoric told us that the lights along the Washington Mall were like “extensions of Joe Biden’s arms embracing America.”

On Valentine’s Day, an article on the Politico website announced that the Bidens had brought “presidential PDA back to the White House.” For those scratching their heads, the acronym refers to public displays of affection.

“On a mission to rebuild institutional norms and help heal a hurting nation, Joe and Jill Biden are trying something novel after four years of the Trumps: a little tenderness,” gushed Quint Forgey.

Also, as Matt Taibi, in a March 12 article, “The Sovietization of the American Press,” joked, “We now know in advance that every Biden address will be reviewed as historic and exceptional.”

In reality, Biden can barely get through a speech nor has he held a press conference. So why such propaganda, worthy of writers who turned Stalin, Mao and Kim Jong-un into living gods?

Because, as Newsweek columnist Marianne Williamson noted, in a March 10 article, the country remains “The United States of Oligarchy.”

This had become the case long before Trump appeared on the scene, and it’s unlikely Biden will turn things around. More and more Americans realize that America has turned into an oligarchy.

“The oligarchic take-over of the U.S. government started in 1980, sometimes moving faster and sometimes moving slower but never really waning,” she asserts. The massive transfer of wealth into the hands of one per cent of Americans has been “a march of malfeasance that began with the Republicans but which no Democratic president stopped.”

Unlike the sunshine stories from Biden’s hagiographers, Williamson warns that so far Biden “is in too many cases supporting policies that paved the way to Trump's ascendency to begin with.”

His massive $1.9 trillion rescue bill “provides just enough relief to enable people to go back to living lives as economically stressed and traumatized as they were before the pandemic occurred.” She wonders why reforming the financial system to prevent further disasters isn’t on Biden’s agenda.

Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, in the September 2019 issue of the Atlantic magazine, wonders “How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition,” and contends that today’s economy hollows out the middle class and “excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite.”

Harvard University Law School professor Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?  warns these elites that the very system that has afforded them the tools to thrive amid economic and social instability has given rise to political discontent and lies at the root of populist backlash.

He too cites a string of failures from 1980 to the present, includ­ing “stagnant wages for most workers, inequalities of income and wealth not seen since the 1920s, the Iraq War, a nineteen-year, incon­clusive war in Afghanistan, financial deregulation, and the financial crisis of 2008.”

In each instance the ruling class benefited from these crises, or at least were not harmed by their consequences. Reflecting on this situation, University of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, notes, in “A Tyranny Without Tyrants?” in the spring 2021 issue of American Affairs, that approximately half the country showed its contempt by voting for Trump in 2016.

 

COVID-19 and the Commonwealth South Pacific

By Henry Srebrnik, Moncton Times & Transcript

Eight South Pacific island microstates are members of the Commonwealth. Nauru became a member on attaining independence in 1968, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga in 1970, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu in 1978, Kiribati in 1979, and Vanuatu in 1980.

Two others, the Cook Islands and Niue, are involved with many Commonwealth activities but are ineligible, being in a free association relationship with New Zealand.

Insularity, small size, and geographic remoteness best describe these small polities and helps explain their limited exposure to COVID-19.

Unlike a compact region of islands like the Caribbean area, in the South Pacific travelling to, and within, the region involves very significant distances. As well, none have land borders and all are archipelagic except for Niue. This would help in isolating hotspots domestically if the international borders were breached.

These factors explain why the bulk of the cases in the South Pacific have been limited to countries with substantial international traffic such as tourism. Most of the region’s polities do not engage directly with global pandemic hotspots.

The initial public health reaction to COVID-19 was fairly similar across the Commonwealth Pacific. The closure of international airports, quarantining of cruising yachts, restrictions on domestic travel along with limiting public gatherings, closures of schools and businesses were typical responses.

These decisions were made less controversial because international travel into the region was cut off at the source. Not only did Australia, New Zealand and other states restrict their international flights, but quarantining travellers at transit or entry points into the region discouraged using what access was available.

While remaining free of the disease itself, the South Pacific entities have nevertheless been impacted economically by COVID-19. The collapse of international tourism, the barriers to labour mobility, and the job losses in diaspora host countries, with the resulting decline in remittances – a massive source of income -- have been devastating.

Economic conditions have reduced the demand for the region’s exports while diminished imports cut national income from customs and excises. Reduced trade even threatened food security as many islands depend on imports for basic food stuffs.

While Fiji, Samoa, and Vanuatu have not been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus in terms of health, the economic consequences have been severe.

No economic sector has been more affected than tourism, both land-based and cruise ships. It represents the single most important component of GDP and of the labour force, and it was a valuable source of foreign exchange in each of the countries that depend on it.

 Fiji claimed as many as 100,000 workers employed directly and indirectly in the tourism industry -- about 45 per cent of the labour force -- serving almost 900,000 visitors in 2019. The industry contributed about 40 per cent of GDP. Samoa and Vanuatu had smaller numbers with around 135.000 and 300,000 tourists, respectively.

Fiji pursued the most aggressive measures against COVID-19 because it was the first to directly experience the disease. The government imposed a nationwide curfew and lockdowns of affected areas in spring of 2020.

All South Pacific island these states have legislated economic stimulus programs to reduce the consequences of unemployment, business closures and reduced family support from overseas relations. Financing these measures has involved borrowing from international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.

Estimates of a decline of 5.9 per cent in regional GDP and an increase in extreme poverty by 40 per cent are compounded by the debt incurred to stave off the worst of the business and social impacts of these losses.

While the use of stimulus packages to keep people employed is necessary, it is a risk. It could prove ill-advised if tourists and markets do not return to pre-COVID levels. New debts will make the post-COVID economic recovery far more challenging.

Essentially these states have escaped the virus at the expense of their economies. Sustainable economic activity in the region will depend on post-COVID international revitalization. Greater diversity and self-reliance are also essential.

Fortunately, Australia and New Zealand have taken a leadership role in seeking solutions for the sufferings the pandemic has inflicted on their fellow Commonwealth states. It is crucial to these traditional aid donors that failed states do not emerge in the region.

 

Caribbean Economy Hit Hard by COVID

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

How are various Commonwealth Caribbean island jurisdictions coping with the coronavirus pandemic? Overall, the small states and territories have done relatively well in controlling the spread of COVID-19.

Measures were taken to restrict population mobility through shelter in place measures, curfews, and national or localised economic lockdowns. Ten countries imposed national or localised states of emergency to enforce public compliance with prohibitions against the frequenting of bars, beaches and other recreational places.

All countries temporarily banned religious gatherings and closed their borders for varying durations. They have since maintained public health-related border protocols.

This capacity for control has been facilitated by their isolated geographical location. The most severe impacts of the pandemic on them have been economic, as many of these polities are highly dependent on tourism and remittances through labour migration.

The pandemic has highlighted the limited agency of the island countries, buffeted as they are by developments occurring elsewhere. The result has been higher levels of indebtedness, unemployment and psychological stress, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations throughout the region.

COVID-19 has further weakened the fragile socio-economic fabric of the Commonwealth Caribbean. Economies have been stifled by lockdowns, and by a global decline in travel and tourism. Their export-oriented economies are heavily dependent on tourism, air and maritime transport, financial services, remittances and commodities, including fossil fuels.

For economies based on oil and gas exports, COVID-19 has dramatically decreased the demand for energy, due to reduced international and domestic travel. Trinidad and Tobago illustrate this trend. An increase in the country’s deficit spending has accompanied the decreased contributions of the energy sector to GDP.

The hard-hit Caribbean tourism sector accounts for 15.5 per cent of GDP and employs approximately 2.4 million people. For countries like Jamaica, recently emerged from International Monetary Fund restructuring programs, COVID-19 has dealt a crushing blow to economic recovery efforts. The US$73 million allocated to the COVID Allocation of Resources for Employees program proved to be insufficient early in the pandemic.

The pandemic revealed the inadequacies of existing social assistance programs in a crisis. It is estimated that existing social assistance programs cover just 11 per cent of the most vulnerable in Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Lucia; approximately 30 per cent in Trinidad and Tobago; 43 and 45 per cent in St. Kitts and Nevis, and Grenada respectively; and 76 per cent in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

The pandemic has exposed the inadequacies of health care systems in the region. Governments have responded by increasing expenditure on health care in many countries. Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Kitts and Nevis, increased their health care budget by 0.5 per cent of their GDP and local manufacturing of medical equipment and supplies has been bolstered in countries like Trinidad and Tobago.

Given the widespread adverse economic impacts of COVID-19, traditional donors may be less willing and able to enter into development cooperation agreements and to offer assistance to developing countries. Leveraging support from multilateral development agencies is therefore likely to be crucial to the process of restructuring and rebuilding.

Some elements of international cooperation have remained, as with the World Health Organisation’s COVAX facility, enabling developed countries to assist developing countries in obtaining a COVID-19 vaccine.

Despite their limited size and resources, Commonwealth Caribbean states have sought to support business and individuals alike, stimulate economic activity and preserve livelihoods. This offers opportunities to deepen functional cooperation and build resilience.

Policy responses to cushion the impact on the most vulnerable have included measures to boost employment in labour-intensive sectors like construction. Many governments expanded existing programs to meet demands arising from the adverse pandemic effects.

Examples include Antigua’s COVID-19 Government Assistance Food Voucher. As well, St. Vincent and the Grenadines expanded social safety net programs, and St. Kitts and Nevis provided additional support for its poverty alleviation program.

Grenada expanded the government employment programs, while Barbados expanded unemployment benefits to self-employed workers, expanded National Assistance payments and coverage under the National Assistance program. The British Virgin Islands stimulus package included an unemployment fund, business grants, and funds for the National Health Insurance program.

The responses that have been implemented should in future push Commonwealth Caribbean governments to go beyond just facing the pandemic’s immediate impacts.

 

Houthis Make Gains in Yemen’s Civil War

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

U.S. President Joe Biden on Feb. 4 announced an end to support for Saudi-led military offensive operations in Yemen. A day later, the State Department said it would lift the terrorist designation against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Both moves will be welcomed in Iran, their ally, and the tide has turned in favour of the rebels.

The Houthis, an armed movement representing Yemen’s Zaydis, a branch of Shia Islam, continue making gains in Yemen’s civil war, whereas the Saudi-led forces opposing them face discord within their coalition.

Saudi Arabia’s air force launched its first air strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in March 2015. The campaign, Operation Decisive Storm, at the time seemed likely to be over within weeks.

The Saudis wanted Abdu Rabu Mansur Hadi restored as Yemen’s president following his overthrow in a Houthi-led rebellion the previous September. Hadi had been elected president in 2012 after protests lasting nearly a year against former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Fearing their growing power, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates opened their air and ground war against the Houthis.

The UN Security Council in April 2015 retrospectively gave carte blanche to the coalition, which in addition to Saudi Arabia involved a dozen Arab and Muslim countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Morocco, and the Gulf states, except Oman.

The resolution legally sanctioned coalition military action and control over movements in and out of Yemen, including the use of a blockade, which soon exacted an appalling human toll.

The Houthi movement, named after the family it is associated with, emerged from Yemen’s northern province Saada, bordering Saudi Arabia, in the 1980s. Yemen’s Zaidi Shia minority makes up about one-third of the country’s population.

The Houthis had formed a broad tribal alliance in Yemen’s north in opposition to an expanding extremist Sunni Salafism in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, which exported the ideology to Yemen. In response, Zaidi clerics began to militarise their followers against Riyadh and its allies. They were also motivated by what they saw as Saleh’s economic discrimination of the north.

A hybrid range of forces make up the Houthis, also referred to as Ansar Allah, with some 60 per cent of the former Yemeni army having allied with the group. Their influence has grown since first challenging Saleh in 2004. They fought six rounds of war from 2004-2010 against Saleh’s forces, until the 2011 Arab Spring uprising toppled him.

A September 2019 report by Renad Mansour and Peter Salisbury, “Between Order and Chaos,” estimated Houthi strength at 180,000-200,000 armed men with access to weapons systems ranging from tanks and technical vehicles to anti-tank guided missiles and long-range ballistic missiles. The group claims many of the advanced parts their arsenal were captured when they took control of Sanaa in 2014.

The Houthis have had support from Iran, a fellow Shia state. Saudi and Yemeni governments have accused Iran of smuggling arms, including ballistic missiles and drones, to the Houthis, enabling them to keep fighting. The Saudis have intercepted many arms shipments off the Yemeni coast over the past several years.

But Tehran’s influence is likely limited politically, especially since Iranians and Houthis adhere to different schools of Shiite Islam.

The Houthis control a third of Yemeni territory including the major population centres. They have even breached Saudi borders.

For the past year, they have steadily advanced in Marib province, roughly 160 kilometres northeast of Sanaa. Capturing it would give the Houthis control over lucrative oil and natural gas reserves.

During his election campaign, Biden expressed opposition to the war in Yemen and was highly critical of the Saudis’ stance. He has made ending the conflict in Yemen a priority since taking office.

Meanwhile, the war continues to drag on and has caused a humanitarian catastrophe affecting some 80 per cent of the population, with 250,00 dead and more than 3.6 million people internally displaced, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

More than two million Yemeni children under the age of five are expected to suffer acute malnutrition this year, which may lead to the death of 400,000 of them, report the World Food Program, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, UNICEF and the World Health Organisation.

China’s New Ideologues

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

We know that the days when China’s Communist rulers quoted Lenin, Marx and Mao are long gone. If anything, those former Communist saints are something of an embarrassment to today’s capitalist-mandarin coalition. After all, it governs what has become arguably the most successful state capitalist country on earth.

But who would have thought that many of them are gravitating towards a long-dead German philosopher who admired Adolf Hitler? On second thought, maybe it’s not that surprising. Remember, China has now been accused of genocide in dealing with its Uighur minority.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has markedly shifted the ideological center of gravity within the Communist Party. The limited tolerance China had toward dissent has all but dissipated, so a new group of scholars have started defending the party’s hardening policies. Only with a heavy hand, they believe, can a nation secure the stability required to protect prosperity.

China’s new statists have come to admire the work of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. He joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, and, though he was only a Nazi Party member for three years, his anti-liberal jurisprudence had a lasting impact, helping to justify Hitler’s extrajudicial killings of Jews and political opponents.

Why has a Nazi thinker garnered such a lively reception in China? Schmitt gives pro-Beijing scholars an opportunity to anchor the party’s legitimacy on nationalism and external enemies rather than the notion of class struggle.

Whereas liberal scholars view the rule of law as the final authority on value conflicts, Schmitt believed that the sovereign should always have the final say. Commitments to the rule for law would only undercut a community’s decision-making power, and “deprive state and politics of their specific meaning.”

Xu Jilin, Liu Xiaofeng and Gan Yang are three of the most prominent Chinese political philosophers who have actively introduced Schmitt to China. Schmitt, they maintain, provides the Chinese with new theoretical resources with which to consider the issue of political legitimacy in China.

Their ideas have energized the political science, philosophy, and law departments of China’s universities. Chen Duanhong, a law professor at Peking University, called Schmitt “the most successful theorist” to have brought political concepts into his discipline. “His constitutional doctrine is what we revere,” Chen wrote in 2012.

The German jurist, he argued, distinguishes between state and constitutional norms. “When the state is in dire peril,” Chen wrote, citing Schmitt, state leaders have the right to suspend constitutional norms, “especially provisions for civil rights.” This was Schmitt’s notorious doctrine known as the “state of exception.”

Chen’s argument is a straight-forward Schmittian defence of China’s decision to impose a national security law on Hong Kong last June.  In a keynote address at the “2020 Constitution Day Seminar,” held there on Dec. 4, Chen argued that the state is a security system, necessary to guarantee the safety of the individual and the group.  The sovereign protects the state; this is the “law of national self-preservation.” 

Chen illustrated the importance of sovereignty, national security, constitutional rule, and the state of exception by citing U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s actions leading up to the Civil War, when he overrode legal niceties and Supreme Court objections to oppose the secession of the Southern states, only after which, Chen insists, did the United States truly “become a nation.”

Jiang Shigong, Chen’s colleague, has made a similar case. Jiang, who worked as a researcher in Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong from 2004 to 2008, used Schmitt’s ideas extensively in his 2010 volume, China’s Hong Kong: A Political and Cultural Perspective, to resolve tensions between sovereignty and the rule of law in favour of the Communist Party.

Chen and Jiang are “the most concrete expression” thus far of China’s turn to Schmittian ideas, Ryan Mitchell, a law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, wrote in a paper last year. They are the vanguard of the statist movement, which supplies the rationale for the authoritarian impulses of China’s leaders.

The perceived threat of invasion, or at a minimum suspicion of outsiders, continues to inform contemporary politics in China. Such anxiety lends credence to the anti-liberal theories of Carl Schmitt, for whom all politics came down to a distinction between friends and enemies.

 

America's Elite Are Too Close to China's Government

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Many writers across the ideological spectrum have contended that the American people’s trust in government lessened in recent years as they realized that a rising political establishment had become culturally united in disdain for them, leaving them impoverished and disempowered.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory drew upon these feelings, but it created ferocious opposition because the ruling elites recognized he was mobilizing millions of Americans against the arrangements by which they lived.

These were summed up in the word globalism, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of their own country.

The determination to feel superior to the people whom Hillary Clinton had called the “deplorables” was what bound together Wall Street movers and shakers, the media, officials of public service unions, all manner of administrators, race and ethnic activists, and so on. The so-called “Resistance” grew by further awakening these groups to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them.

Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite, in particular the way they benefited and grew incredibly wealthy by offloading American jobs to cheap-labour countries like China, gave them a collective as well as a powerful motive for solidarity.

Why did they deal with an authoritarian regime by sending millions of American manufacturing jobs off offshore and thereby impoverishing working Americans? Because it made them rich.

Together, they saw that they represented a coming together of public and private sector interests that shared the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits. Connections that might have once seemed tenuous or nonexistent became lucid under Trump’s scorn, and the reciprocal contempt of the elite that loathed him.

Meanwhile, think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, Center for American Progress, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others became recipients of Chinese money.

Nearly every major American industry now has a stake in China, from Wall Street to hospitality. Example? A Marriott Hotel employee was fired in 2018 when Chinese officials objected to his “liking” a tweet about Tibet. They have all learned to play by the Chinese Communist Party’s rules.

On Trump’s final days in office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims.”

Yet last year Apple, Nike, Coca Cola, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act being considered by Congress.

Trump’s trade war with Beijing showed that he was serious about forcing American companies to move their supply chains. But under Joe Biden, they no longer need worry. The new administration is loaded with lobbyists for the American tech industry, who are determined to get the U.S.-China relationship back on track.

Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain was formerly on the executive council of TechNet, the trade group that lobbies on behalf of Silicon Valley in Washington. Incoming Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked at a Beltway firm called WestExec, which had lobbied on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.

Biden security aide Colin Kahl was with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, which oversees the university’s links to Peking University. The latter is run by a former Beijing spy chief, Qiu Shuiping.

Biden’s special assistant for presidential personnel, Thomas Zimmerman, was a fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, flagged by Western intelligence agencies for its ties to China’s Ministry of State Security.

U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield gave a 2019 speech at a Chinese-government-funded Confucius Institute in Savannah, Georgia, where she praised China’s role in promoting good governance, gender equity, and the rule of law in Africa.

“I see no reason why China cannot share in those values,” she maintained. “In fact, China is in a unique position to spread these ideals given its strong footprint on the continent.”

Winning the 2020 election was the objective behind which the oligarchy had coalesced during the Trump years. For them, the point of having Biden elected was to protect themselves.

 

Alexei Navalny Continues to Defy Putin

By Henry Srebrnik. [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

A nationwide referendum held last summer on amendments to Russia’s constitution allows President Vladimir Putin another 12 years in power after his current term ends in 2024, should he win two more presidential elections.

His main political opponent is not some ordinary politician, but opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has been gaining momentum despite efforts by the government to stop him – including, perhaps, even trying to murder him.

The 44-year-old anti-corruption activist has been waging the battle against Putin for more than a decade, as a lawyer and a blogger, through his organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, during his run for mayor of Moscow in 2013, and in his abortive 2018 run for president.

Navalny was prevented from becoming a candidate in the election because of an embezzlement conviction that he says was politically motivated. He has continued to take his battle to the streets, saying protests are justified to encourage political change.

Navalny doesn’t mince words. He calls Putin’s United Russia party full of “crooks and thieves” and accuses the president of “sucking the blood out of Russia” through a “feudal state” concentrating power in the Kremlin. But he is no western puppet – for instance, he has also said the Crimea, which was wrested from Ukraine by Putin in 2014, should remain part of Russia.

Navalny was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in Siberia in August in what has been described as an assassination attempt by the Russian state.

He was administered Novichok, a potent neurotoxin, and fell ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The pilot made an emergency landing and Navalny was flown to Berlin where he spent weeks in a coma.

He was airlifted to Germany and recovered. After flying home to Moscow from Berlin Jan. 17, he was arrested at passport control, ostensibly for violating the parole terms from a suspended sentence he received six years ago.

On Jan. 23, tens of thousands of people across Russia called for his release. Videos showed protesters scuffling with police officers who were swinging batons and kicking them. More than 4,000 people were detained in more than 100 cities.

More protests Jan. 30 saw police arrest more than 4,000 people across the country, including 1,167 in Moscow and 862 in St Petersburg. There were further arrests Feb. 2 when a Moscow court on Feb. 2 ordered Navalny to prison for two years and eight months on parole violation charge. In a message from jail, Navalny urged Russians to stage new rallies.

“I think it's only the beginning of problems for the regime,” argues Andrei Kolesnikov of the Moscow Carnegie Centre. “It's not just the political opposition, but civil society that’s irritated by the cruelty.”

Navalny knows how to get under Putin’s skin. He has exposed the corruption of officials and tapped into growing discontent. In the days before the protests, his Anti-Corruption Foundation published an investigation describing a lavish secret palace built for Putin on the Black Sea that cost the equivalent of more than $1 billion.

Putin denied the charges; it was built by billionaire Arkady Rotenberg. But the video has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube, a record number for the platform in Russia.

“We will live normally only when we stop tolerating officials who steal and re-electing them,” contends Navalny. “And if they refuse to hold fair elections, then we’ll take to the streets and remove them from power in this way.”

The next likely flash point will come with parliamentary elections in autumn, when Navalny had plans to “decimate” the pro-Kremlin United Russia party at the polls. But now he’ll be in prison.

The Kremlin has long painted Navalny as an “agent” of the West bent on undermining Russia. A news anchor on Russia’s state-controlled Channel One suggested that the United States, with a Democratic president now in the White House, had in fact organized the protests.

Navalny had spent a student year in the U.S. as part of the Yale University World Fellows program in 2010.  “As they say, draw your own conclusions,” he told viewers. But perhaps Russians are drawing different conclusions.

 

Yemen’s Ruinous Civil War May Soon Take a Turn

By Henry Srebrnik. [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

U.S. President Joe Biden on Feb. 4 announced an end to support for Saudi-led military offensive operations in Yemen. A day later, the State Department said it would lift the terrorist designation against the Houthis in Yemen. Both moves will be welcomed in Tehran and the tide may turn in favour of the rebels.

The Houthis of north Yemen have been engaged in a long-standing and intermittent insurgency against the government of the country.

The conflict has its roots in the failure of a political transition supposed to bring stability to Yemen following an uprising that forced its authoritarian president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, after 33 years of rule, to hand over power to his vice-president, Abd Rabbo Mansur Hadi, in 2011.

As president, Hadi had to deal with a variety of problems, including a separatist movement in the south, the continuing loyalty of security personnel to Saleh, as well as corruption, unemployment and food insecurity.

The Houthi movement, known formally as Ansar Allah, which champions Yemen’s Zaidi Shia Muslim minority and had already fought a series of rebellions against Saleh during the previous decade, took advantage of the new president’s weakness.

Disillusioned with the transition, many ordinary Yemenis, including Sunnis, supported the Houthis. The insurgency escalated sharply in 2014, when their movement seized the capital, Sanaa, and the surrounding areas.

This was facilitated by a newly forged alliance of convenience with former President Saleh -- whom they killed in 2017. The Houthis continue to hold Sanaa, and a large part of the country’s territory. 

Beginning in March 2015, a coalition of Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia launched a campaign of economic isolation and air strikes against the Houthi insurgents. 

Yemen abuts a strategic choke point of global importance, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea.  It is a vital route for oil and natural gas shipments passing from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea and on to the Suez Canal.  Around nine per cent of total global petroleum products pass through the strait. 

The Saudis and their allies failed to reconquer the entirety of Yemen but they did protect the Bab el-Mandeb.  Similarly, the intervention prevented the main port of Yemen, al-Hudayda, from falling under the complete control of the Houthis. 

The result is that Yemen, like some other Arab countries, is now subject to de facto division and ongoing conflict. The Houthis control the capital and a large part of the populated center of the country. Hadi’s internationally recognized government controls much of the east and the strategically important south and western coastal areas. 

To further complicate matters, the separatist Southern Transitional Council, supported by the United Arab Emirates, controls the port of Aden and a section of the southern coast. Finally, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State group are active on the ground. 

The Houthis follow the Zaidiya branch of Shia Islam, whereas the Iranians are Twelver Shia. Nonetheless, the Houthis have had support from Iran.  Also, some 60 per cent of the former Yemeni army having allied with them.

Iran uses the territory in Yemen controlled by the Houthis for the launching of missiles on Saudi Arabia. For example, the Houthis claimed responsibility for the sophisticated attack on Saudi oil facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in September 2019, but the weapons came from Iran. 

Yemen’s economy, already fragile prior to the conflict, has been gravely affected. The war has wrecked the country's roads, hospitals, water and electricity networks, as well as other infrastructure.

Hundreds of thousands of families no longer have a steady source of income, and many public servants have not received a regular salary in years. The country’s civil war has worsened the humanitarian crisis. 

All parties to the conflict have committed human rights violations. Almost a quarter of a million people have died in Yemen’s war, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in December.

As well, 3.6 million people have been internally displaced and some 20 million are experiencing food insecurity. And public health experts warn that the COVID-19 pandemic may have further significant negative effects on Yemen’s vulnerable population.

 

Putin's Policies Aimed at Re-establishing Russian Conservatism

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton,NB] Times & Transcript

Russian politics has been characterised by increasing cultural and political conservatism since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. This “cultural turn” has seen the promotion of social, political and cultural conservative themes in official political discourse.

The notion that Russian traditional values should be the source of regime legitimacy and a guide to public policy was not particularly strongly developed by Putin during his first period as president between 2000 and 2008.

But it became more prominent in recent years, particularly as the country has grappled with ongoing economic problems, exacerbated by sanctions imposed by other countries since the takeover of Crimea in 2014.

Action against oligarchs and regional leaders, and Putin’s efforts to strengthen the capacity of the Russian state through the reassertion of its monopoly rights over violence, has enhanced his personal powers.

Putin has promoted the concept of “sovereign democracy,” a term first coined by the ideologue Vladislav Surkov in 2006, to argue that Russia’s democratic standards were not comparable to those proposed by Western conceptions of democracy.

Russia, he contends, is different to other places because of the character of its civilisation and the extent to which it has retained it. It is, for Putin, a “state-civilisation.” There is, he stated in 2013, a close alignment between Russia’s ability to exist as a state and as a civilisation; each depends on the other.

The character of this civilisation is essentially a religious one, namely Russian Orthodoxy. This identity needs to be protected so that the state can survive.

 “Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures,” Putin declared in his address to the Russian Federal Assembly in 2013. And this, he claimed, is antithetical to true democracy, “since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority.”

Putin is part of a long Russian tradition that predates the Soviet Union and goes back as far as the Orthodox Christian idea of Russia as the “third Rome,” first put forward in the early 16^th century.

Rome itself was the first, but it was succeeded by Constantinople after the Christian Church split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths in the 11^th century. When the Muslim Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, Moscow inherited the mantle of Orthodoxy, as the third Rome, making Russia a “world-historical” country.

In the 19^th century, intellectuals who became known as Slavophiles began to oppose the westernization of tsarist Russia. They declared that Russia was unlike Europe and that its type of civilization was higher than the European.

They denounced the ongoing Europeanization of Russia as a fatal deviation from the genuine course of Russian history and wanted Russia to come back to the principles of the Orthodox Church and state -- in other words, to autocracy.

Their opponents, the westernizers, believed that Russia’s development depended on the adoption of western technology and liberal government. They were rationalistic rather than emotional and mystical. Some remained moderate liberals, while others became socialists and political radicals.

The Bolsheviks who took control of the Russian Empire after 1917 were adherents of western ideas; after all, they were followers of the German political theorist Karl Marx. The dissolution of the Soviet Union also temporarily led to westernization.

Russia tried to become part of the “common European home,” as the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, put it. In a July 6, 1989 speech before the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Gorbachev declared that the concept “rules out the probability of an armed clash and the very possibility of the use of force.” Westernizers sought reforms under Russian President Boris Yeltsin, but his decade in office was a shambles.

So the westernizers have, for now, lost the battle for Russia’s future. Putin’s “cultural turn” is in fact a “re-turn” to Slavophilism, and he has put these ideas into practice, especially since his 2018 presidential election victory. It accounts for the extreme measures taken against westernizers such as the activist Alexei Navalny.

A referendum held last summer on Russia’s constitution allows Putin another 12 years in power after his current term ends in 2024, should he win two more presidential elections.