The Middle East’s Muted Reaction

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Within days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Western countries invoked international law, imposed crippling sanctions, began welcoming refugees with open arms, and cheered on Ukraine’s armed resistance.

The response elicited outrage among many across the Middle East, where they see a double standard in how the West responds to international conflicts. They especially cite current and recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

With the Ukraine conflict, a distinctive message has gained ground in the West: that Ukraine’s defence is the defence of liberal democracy itself. Ukrainian officials have shrewdly echoed this in their appeals, and the message has resonated powerfully among Western audiences.

The very different Western reactions to the suffering in Ukraine and the Arab world demonstrate that for many, human rights and humanitarian concerns really only matter when they involve those with whom their people identify.

The U.S.-led war in Iraq, which began 19 years ago, was seen in the Middle East as an unlawful invasion of one state by another. But Iraqis who fought the Americans were branded terrorists, and refugees fleeing to the West were often turned away to fend for thmselves.

The U.S. justified its war with false claims about weapons of mass destruction. So, as Ahmad al-Farraj, a columnist with the Saudi daily Al Jazirah, tweeted, when the Ukraine conflict began, if you consider Vladimir Putin a criminal and do not think the same about George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, the senior members of the administration that invaded Iraq, “your brain cells are malfunctioning.”

“We resisted the occupiers, even when the world was with the Americans, including the Ukrainians, who were part of their coalition,” remarked Sheikh Jabbar al-Rubai, who fought in the 2003-2011 Iraqi insurgency against American forces.

More than 5,000 Ukrainian troops served in Iraq during Ukraine’s five years of service in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom between 2003 and 2008. The Ukrainians served as the third-largest coalition contingent in Iraq, with about 1,700 soldiers, from 2003 to 2005.

When Russia intervened in Syria’s civil war on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad in 2015, there was international outrage but little action. Syrian refugees fleeing to Europe died on perilous sea voyages or were turned back as many were branded a threat to Western culture.

In Yemen, a grinding lengthy war between a Saudi-led coalition and Iran-backed Houthi rebels has left infants starving to death, yet this has not brought sustained international attention.

In fact more than 350,000 people have died in Syria and 233,000 have been killed in Yemen. These tragedies have provoked no reactions in the West remotely comparable to the solidarity shown with Ukraine.

So it is “understandable” that many in the Middle East see a double standard by the West, explained Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “The United States and the United Kingdom have supported Saudi Arabia’s seven-years-old war in Yemen, which created the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe in decades,” he noted.

During the United Nations vote in April on whether Russia should be expelled from the organization’s Human Rights Council, only one Middle Eastern country, Libya, voted yes. Almost every other one abstained or was absent. This included the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq, all traditionally seen as friends of the United States.

The vote was about “countries not wanting to blow their bridges to the multipolar world order,” contended Samuel Ramani of Oxford University, who specializes in Russian foreign policy and Middle Eastern security.

For example, Morocco was one of the nations absent from the UN vote. It needs allies on the Security Council, of which Russia is a permanent member, because of its territorial dispute over the occupation of Western Sahara, which is opposed by many countries.

And even as President Joe Biden asks Saudi Arabia to raise oil production to help support the campaign against Russia over Ukraine, he is granting sanctions waivers to Russia so that Moscow can continue to guarantee the nuclear deal with Iran that it helped broker.  

Why should America’s regional allies help the United States contain Russia in Europe, many ask, when Washington is strengthening Russia and Iran in the Middle East?

 

Second Age of Globalization is Coming to an End

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

Globalization has been under sustained attack since 2008, when Lehman Brothers failed and the global financial system almost collapsed. And then in 2020 a virus appeared that froze supply chains and forced the world into hibernation. The war in Ukraine has caused yet more damage.

This has happened before. Prior to 1914 many argued that war was impossible given the interconnectedness of the world. An assassination in Sarajevo changed all that.

The conflagration quickly halted trade, capital flows and migration and eventually produced the Great Depression, with global trade shrinking by more than half in 1928-1933. Trade’s share of global GDP did not return to its 1914 level until the mid-1970s.

Now another conflict that has begun in eastern Europe could mark another lasting change in the way the world economy works and it could well mark the end of the second age of globalization.

For the past 30 years businesses could rely on a world in which countries would specialize in their comparative advantage. Commerce and free trade would bring people closer and businesses that ran themselves globally and with the most cost-effective supply chains would prosper.

But now the supply of basic commodities, from wheat to nickel to titanium to oil, has been disrupted. The West is doing everything it can to “cancel” Russia from the global economic system, by sanctioning oligarchs, expelling Russian banks from the global financial plumbing, and preventing Russia’s central bank from accessing its reserves. Western companies are boycotting Russia and closing down their Russian operations.

Geopolitical pressures are threatening the fragmentation of liberalised trading systems. Trade patterns will be shaped by the return of great power politics and the prevalence of friendly trading blocs.

One former booster of global interconnectivity, Mark Leonard, the founder of the European Council on Foreign Relations, in his new book The Age of Unpeace, admits he believed in a world dominated by the U.S. at the helm of “a liberal international order cemented by economic globalization and the internet and governed by liberal democracy and free-market capitalism.” Now he foresees an “unpeace” of permanent contest among states.

Larry Fink, CEO and chairman of the world’s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, which oversees more than $10 trillion in assets, in his March 24 letter to shareholders said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upended the world order that had been in place since the end of the Cold War.

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades.” Companies and governments would be looking hard at their dependencies on other nations and seeking to “onshore or nearshore more of their operations,” he added.

The whole system of international trade has been based on the dominance of the U.S. dollar. Yet by explicitly weaponizing the dollar to punish Russia in this way, Washington and its allies risk provoking a backlash that could undermine the currency and turn the global financial system into rival blocks that could leave everyone worse off.

“If you change the rules for Russia, you’re changing the rules for the whole world,” argues Mitu Gulati, a financial law professor at the University of Virginia. “Once these rules change, they change international finance forever.”

“This is the beginning of the end of the dollar’s monopoly in the world,” Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the Russian Duma, said April 6. Anyone who keeps money in dollars today “can no longer be sure that the U.S. will not steal their money.”

Countries like China have taken note of this. President Xi Jinping is going to move ahead with “decoupling” and insulating his country from dependence on the West. Xi has spent much of his rule building a Sinocentric economic order through the Belt and Road Initiative.

China’s vast holdings of dollar assets now look like a liability given America’s willingness to confiscate Russia’s assets. Any contracts and agreements can be abrogated in international financial activities if foreign central banks’ assets can be frozen.

China has long-term plans for its currency to play a much bigger role in the international financial system. Beijing views the dollar’s dominant position as one of the bulwarks of American power that it wants to lessen.

 

 

Women still Trail Men in Politics Worldwide

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Canada still trails many countries in terms of the number of women in parliament. According to the most recent Inter-Parliamentary Union statistics, their share in the House of Commons stands at 30.5 per cent, placing the country at 58th place on the global list of the countries with the highest share of women in their national legislature. (The unelected Senate has almost equal male and female representation.)

The United States is worse: the House of Representatives stands at 27.3 per cent, the Senate at 25 per cent, giving the country 67th place in the rankings.

Rwanda is first with its lower house 61.3 per cent female as of January 2022. Cuba has the second highest share of women in its legislature at 53.4 per cent, while third place belongs to Nicaragua, at 50.6 per cent.  Exactly half of the legislators in Mexico and the United Arab Emirates are female. All of these countries also have gender parity laws in place for their national assemblies.

New Zealand, in sixth place at 49.2 per cent, uses a system called mixed member proportional representation (MMP), in which voters pick their representatives by district, but also vote for a political party. If the elected representatives shares and the overall party vote do not match up, the parliament is enlarged until it represents the party vote, effectively handing more power over to the parties to pick out who becomes an MP.

In Iceland, seventh at 47.6, parties also drive gender party with all four major parties enacting voluntary quotas to achieve between 40 and 50 per cent of women represented in roles within the party and on electoral lists. Grenada and South Africa, at 46.7, and Andorra at 46.4, round out the top ten.

In the 48 countries that had parliamentary elections in 2021, women candidates won 28.6 per cent of the new seats, a cumulative improvement of 2.1 percentage points compared to previous elections.

Among the 30 countries that had some form of quota in place for the single or lower house in 2021, 31.9 per cent of MPs elected were women, compared to 19.5 per cent in countries with no form of quotas.

Two countries have elected women presidents for the first time in their history: Xiomara Castro de Zelaya in Honduras and Samiha Suluhu in Tanzania. And Samoa elected Naomi Mata’afa as its first woman prime minister. As of 2022, 26 women are serving as heads of state and or government in 24 countries.

There is evidence that women’s participation in political decision making improves the quality of life for people. Generally, male lawmakers are less likely to pass laws that serve women’s and children’s interests. Men less often think about rape, domestic violence, women’s health, and child care.

For example, India discovered that the number of drinking water projects in areas with women-led councils was 62 per cent higher than in those with dominated by men. In Norway, there was a direct causal relationship between the presence of women in municipal councils and childcare coverage was found.

But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story, as Rwanda demonstrates. In pre-genocide Rwanda, it was almost unheard of for women to own land or take a job outside the home.

 The 1994 genocide changed all that. Rwanda was forced to implement sweeping changes and open society to women. The call for equality was led by President Paul Kagame. So the country’s new constitution, passed in 2003, decreed that 30 per cent of parliamentary seats be reserved for women.

But no matter how powerful these women became in public, that didn’t extend into their own homes. Women were still expected to perform domestic duties. Political culture has lagged far behind constitutional mandates.

Cuba also has not made as much progress in achieving gender equality in political decision making as some of the official data would indicate, and women continue to be largely excluded from the most important political bodies.

Cuban women in political positions grow fewer and fewer the further up you go among the ranks and levels of importance, keeping women within local and provincial positions which make less impactful decisions. So there too there is less than meets the eye.