foreignpolicy--2020-01-10--Is Preemptive Assassination the New Trump Doctrine?

Is Preemptive Assassination the New Trump Doctrine ?
Was Qassem Suleimani ’ s killing lawful ?
And why does it matter ?
The episode raises intertwined questions of law , process , and policy .
The Trump administration ’ s case for assassinating Iran ’ s top general last week in Baghdad is being hotly debated by the U.S. Congress , where the House just passed a war powers resolution aimed at restraining the president ’ s military action against Iran .
While the facts are still emerging , most indications suggest that the strike was illegal .
U.S. officials @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on President Donald Trump ’ s desk , even as an “ extreme option ” they expected the president would reject .
The decision-making process was abysmal and ensured that the legal issues would not be properly vetted and that Congress would be denied its statutory and constitutional role .
As a matter of policy , Trump ’ s unsubstantiated claim that Iran , having responded , is now “ standing down ” hardly vindicates his reckless action .
Assassinating state leaders , provoking retaliation , then narrowly averting needless open warfare is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ true when the episode leaves Iran policy in a far worse place than it was five years ago , when the previous administration negotiated a suspension of Iran ’ s nuclear program .
Most important , by using assassination as a tool of preemptive self-defense , the Suleimani strike raises the haunting question whether Trump has resurrected the very doctrine that many thought had been wholly discredited by the disaster in Iraq .
Under current law , Trump had no business ordering the killing of one of the highest-ranking military leaders of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was not at war .
Before the strike , the United States had not engaged in armed conflict with Iran as a matter of international law .
Nor can it be plausibly argued that Congress authorized the strike under a 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force ( AUMF ) that was designed to authorize force to defend “ against the continuing threat posed by Iraq ” when the long-departed Saddam Hussein was Iraq ’ s president .
Suleimani undeniably orchestrated numerous proxy and terrorist strikes over many years .
But unlike Osama @ @ @ @ @ @ @ terrorist group , Suleimani was de facto the second-highest-ranking official of a sovereign state .
Like Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku , a Japanese military champion of the Pearl Harbor attack , Suleimani should only have been targeted as part of an ongoing armed conflict with Iran .
If killing him was an intentional decapitation strike , it was tantamount to declaring war on Iran , which under the U.S. Constitution ’ s “ declare War ” clause required congressional consultation and participation .
And if his premeditated killing was simply to eliminate him , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ address the imminent threat of attack by Iran , it was an assassination without legal basis , forbidden by a 43-year-old Ford administration executive order .
Even if deemed a terrorist , Suleimani was a high-level state actor , against whom other sovereign states normally act with tools of sanction , diplomacy , and warning , not assassination .
That he was head of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps , a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization , does not make him a legitimate target .
Trump defied precedent in April @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to include an identified unit of a sovereign army .
Suleimani was reportedly in Iraq on a diplomatic mission .
How would Americans react if other countries designated SEAL Team 6 or Joint Special Operations Command as foreign terrorist organizations and then targeted them while training in foreign countries ?
And how are Americans made safer if their country kills the leader of a state military group with an established chain of command that ensures immediate elevation of a replacement empowered to order precisely the same attacks ?
Most dubious is the Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strike under the international law doctrine of self-defense , falsely claiming to build on precedents from former President Barack Obama ’ s time in office .
The Suleimani strike was not a lawful targeted killing of the kind regulated by the Obama administration ’ s well-publicized drone playbook .
Obama administration policymakers and lawyers were acutely aware that preemptive assassinations start , rather than end , wars .
And so , the Obama administration never assassinated a sovereign military leader as part of an offensive assault to promote regime change .
If , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government , the Trump administration claims that it acted in elongated self-defense because of Suleimani ’ s past bad acts , it must produce and share with Congress , U.S. allies , and the public its factual basis for four claims : first , that killing would prevent an imminent attack on U.S. territory or critical American interests ; second , that the attack was necessary because no lesser measure would have sufficed and the action would not escalate ; third , that the attack was proportionate to the threat posed ; and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the United States adequately respected the territorial sovereignty of U.S.-allied Iraq , where the strike occurred .
While its briefings remain classified , the administration has apparently failed to produce evidence that Suleimani was about to launch an imminent attack to which the United States needed to give a proportionate response respectful of Iraq ’ s sovereignty .
Even Republican loyalist Sens .
Mike Lee and Rand Paul found laughable the administration ’ s classified briefing on the topic .
And the New York Times ’ Rukmini Callimachi said that officials briefed on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ imminence “ razor thin ” and saw “ the reading of the intelligence as an illogical leap.
” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ’ s amorphous claim that Suleimani made “ continuing efforts … to build out a network of campaign activities that were going to lead potentially to the death of many more Americans ” gave no assurance that Trump met any of these legal prerequisites : imminence , necessity , proportionality , or respect for sovereignty .
And Trump ’ s listing of Iranian cultural sites—protected under international law from targeting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ violate the fifth legal prerequisite of “ humanity , ” which any government making such targeting decisions must take into account .
Presidential subordinates should never present illegal options .
And government officials sworn to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law have no authority to request , accept , or execute them .
So why was U.S. and international law so casually ignored ?
Simply put , bad process .
The decision was taken abruptly at Trump ’ s private Mar-a-Lago resort , without the careful interagency policy and legal process @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by National Security Council policymakers and agency lawyers .
Neither short- nor long-term strategic consequences were vetted , nor did this irreversible decision consider any coherent vision of Iran policy .
One former National Security Council staffer , Jonathan Stevenson , has chillingly reviewed the intra-executive branch process , testifying to a broader “ abject dysfunction and deterioration of the national security process under Mr. Trump.
” And the interbranch process , particularly prior congressional reporting or consultation , seems to have been limited to Trump ’ s casual Florida conversation with Republican @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a member of the so-called Gang of Eight Senate leaders ordinarily consulted about sensitive intelligence matters .
Mar-a-Lago country club members reportedly had more warning than the highest congressional leaders .
Nevertheless , Trump ’ s supporters justify the strike as good policy because a bad actor has now been neutralized .
But keen observers—such as former senior national security officials Susan Rice and Richard Haass , among others—have all shown why even if somehow deemed lawful , the decision was still awful national security policy that made the United States less safe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ premature claim that Iran is “ standing down ” after a largely symbolic retaliatory strike can not be credited when we don ’ t know what other retaliatory attacks , cyber or kinetic , still await the United States .
Beyond law and process , in an age of drone strikes and targeted killings , what ’ s wrong with including preemptive assassination as a policy option ?
Assassination is forbidden by U.S. law because it starts wars and quickly becomes deeply destabilizing .
The same rationale used to kill Suleimani could be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kim Jong Un , Syria ’ s Bashar al-Assad , or rogue Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro .
Because reciprocity lies at the heart of international law , how long would it be before hostile foreign powers start invoking the same rationale to target America ’ s own bellicose officials ?
Law , policy , and process are deeply interrelated .
Law locks in the lessons of policy , to provide predictability and accountability .
Legality and sound process tend to promote more stable policy , while illegality and bad process foster policy disaster @ @ @ @ @ @ @ process enable multilateral cooperation , accountability , and political agreement about sensitive policies between the executive branch and Congress .
But illegality combined with shoddy process breed cascades of illegality that strain the relationship between the president , Congress , and U.S. allies ; promote executive and U.S. unilateralism ; and enhance secrecy and coverup .
Witness the George W. Bush administration ’ s disastrous embrace of illegal torture .
The Justice Department ’ s infamous 2002 torture memo said , in effect , that if the United States could attack in preemptive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ preemptive self-defense .
The same administration invoked arguments based on preemptive self-defense to put troops into the Philippines , to gear up for its Iraq campaign , and to assert in its national security strategy paper a customary right of preemptive self-defense .
But the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq debunked those claims .
Two Bush administration maxims best illustrate the perils of preemptive war .
Combine a maxim then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld notoriously embraced , “ absence of evidence isn ’ t evidence of absence , ” with then-Vice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Percent Doctrine : “ Even if there ’ s just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due , act as if it is a certainty.
” So even if there ’ s no smoke , assume there ’ s a fire , which justifies attacking preemptively .
But preemptive attacks are not meaningfully restrained by notions of necessity or proportionality .
If you think someone will attack with intent to kill , your best bet is to kill them first , à la Pearl Harbor .
When that mindset prevails , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of evidence , which is what helped create the rationale for intervening in Iraq in 2003 with overwhelming force to stop nonexistent weapons of mass destruction .
Under traditional international legal doctrine of self-defense , an aggressor must take unambiguously aggressive first steps before the object of their aggression can legally respond in self-defense .
But if we change the law to authorize a nation to respond not just to perceived threats , but to mere premonitions thereof , and then to inklings of premonitions that one ’ s adversary might misperceive motives @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or outright lies .
Down this hall of mirrors lies a doctrine that assumes necessity , then authorizes disproportionate use of force to “ shock and awe ” a potential attacker into submission .
We can not let Trump and his administration launch a new forever war against Iran and its various proxies by using vague Twitter claims as weapons of mass distraction .
And Americans should hold Pompeo strictly to his vow , oft-repeated since the strike , that “ every action ” the United States takes “ will be consistent with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their very nature , claims of preemptive war turn on “ trust me ” actionable intelligence .
To prevent a replay of Iraq , Congress , the media , and the public must continue their intensive detailed scrutiny of Trump ’ s factual basis for his claim of imminence .
What factual basis did Trump have for thinking that Suleimani was planning an imminent 9/11-type operational attack on the U.S. territory or interests ?
Without such information , it was illegal to even consider killing Suleimani as a policy option ; but if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ required to have seen it .
Either way , the strike seems to have been illegal .
This also means rejecting Trump ’ s and Pompeo ’ s simplistic flattening of the issue into a false bipolar choice between “ attack ” or “ do nothing.
” Even if , as Pompeo claims , the risk of U.S. nonaction was greater than the risk of action , the action taken did not demand unilateral military force .
It could instead have called for a third way : disarming Iran without pre-emptive attack through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ include diplomacy , transparency , containment , and enhanced sanctions .
This third way should sound familiar , as precisely such a process led the Obama administration to conclude the 2015 Iran nuclear deal .
By reflexively discarding that deal without a safety net , Trump predictably triggered a cycle of tit-for-tat retaliation , and to escape it , he now ironically calls for new multilateral negotiations years later that could at best produce an inferior version of that accord .
Despite its impeachment stalemate , Congress must demand the testimony , under @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the options and argued for killing Suleimani .
At the same time , legislators should force Trump to clarify America ’ s near- and long-term goals in Iran and Iraq .
As debate shifts to the Senate , that body should legislate against further Iran escalation by enacting Rep. Elissa Slotkin ’ s resolution , recently adopted by the House under the War Powers Resolution ’ s expedited procedures .
Congress should also enact Rep. Ro Khanna ’ s bill denying funding to any offensive actions in Iran .
As described elsewhere , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ AUMF and promptly move to hearings on the war powers bill offered by Sen. Tim Kaine , incorporating sound ideas from a related bill offered in the last Congress by Sen. Jeff Merkley .
The House ’ s impeachment of Trump over his national security abuse in Ukraine teaches that the current president is a national security threat .
The Suleimani strike confirms that Congress can not give an impeached yet impetuous , uninformed yet unchecked president carte blanche to wag the dog of war in Iran .

Was Qassem Suleimani’s killing lawful? And why does it matter?
The episode raises intertwined questions of law, process, and policy. The Trump administration’s case for assassinating Iran’s top general last week in Baghdad is being hotly debated by the U.S. Congress, where the House just passed a war powers resolution aimed at restraining the president’s military action against Iran. While the facts are still emerging, most indications suggest that the strike was illegal. U.S. officials had no business putting this illegal option on President Donald Trump’s desk, even as an “extreme option” they expected the president would reject. The decision-making process was abysmal and ensured that the legal issues would not be properly vetted and that Congress would be denied its statutory and constitutional role.
As a matter of policy, Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that Iran, having responded, is now “standing down” hardly vindicates his reckless action. Assassinating state leaders, provoking retaliation, then narrowly averting needless open warfare is not strategic success. This is especially true when the episode leaves Iran policy in a far worse place than it was five years ago, when the previous administration negotiated a suspension of Iran’s nuclear program. Most important, by using assassination as a tool of preemptive self-defense, the Suleimani strike raises the haunting question whether Trump has resurrected the very doctrine that many thought had been wholly discredited by the disaster in Iraq.
Under current law, Trump had no business ordering the killing of one of the highest-ranking military leaders of a foreign state with which the United States was not at war. Before the strike, the United States had not engaged in armed conflict with Iran as a matter of international law. Nor can it be plausibly argued that Congress authorized the strike under a 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was designed to authorize force to defend “against the continuing threat posed by Iraq” when the long-departed Saddam Hussein was Iraq’s president.
Suleimani undeniably orchestrated numerous proxy and terrorist strikes over many years. But unlike Osama bin Laden, who headed a nonstate terrorist group, Suleimani was de facto the second-highest-ranking official of a sovereign state. Like Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku, a Japanese military champion of the Pearl Harbor attack, Suleimani should only have been targeted as part of an ongoing armed conflict with Iran. If killing him was an intentional decapitation strike, it was tantamount to declaring war on Iran, which under the U.S. Constitution’s “declare War” clause required congressional consultation and participation. And if his premeditated killing was simply to eliminate him, not a necessary and proportionate response to address the imminent threat of attack by Iran, it was an assassination without legal basis, forbidden by a 43-year-old Ford administration executive order.
Even if deemed a terrorist, Suleimani was a high-level state actor, against whom other sovereign states normally act with tools of sanction, diplomacy, and warning, not assassination. That he was head of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, does not make him a legitimate target. Trump defied precedent in April 2019 when he stretched that statutory designation to include an identified unit of a sovereign army. Suleimani was reportedly in Iraq on a diplomatic mission. How would Americans react if other countries designated SEAL Team 6 or Joint Special Operations Command as foreign terrorist organizations and then targeted them while training in foreign countries? And how are Americans made safer if their country kills the leader of a state military group with an established chain of command that ensures immediate elevation of a replacement empowered to order precisely the same attacks?
Most dubious is the Trump administration’s effort to defend the strike under the international law doctrine of self-defense, falsely claiming to build on precedents from former President Barack Obama’s time in office. The Suleimani strike was not a lawful targeted killing of the kind regulated by the Obama administration’s well-publicized drone playbook. Obama administration policymakers and lawyers were acutely aware that preemptive assassinations start, rather than end, wars. And so, the Obama administration never assassinated a sovereign military leader as part of an offensive assault to promote regime change. If, like the Obama administration and the British government, the Trump administration claims that it acted in elongated self-defense because of Suleimani’s past bad acts, it must produce and share with Congress, U.S. allies, and the public its factual basis for four claims: first, that killing would prevent an imminent attack on U.S. territory or critical American interests; second, that the attack was necessary because no lesser measure would have sufficed and the action would not escalate; third, that the attack was proportionate to the threat posed; and fourth, that in so doing, the United States adequately respected the territorial sovereignty of U.S.-allied Iraq, where the strike occurred.
While its briefings remain classified, the administration has apparently failed to produce evidence that Suleimani was about to launch an imminent attack to which the United States needed to give a proportionate response respectful of Iraq’s sovereignty. Even Republican loyalist Sens. Mike Lee and Rand Paul found laughable the administration’s classified briefing on the topic. And the New York Times’ Rukmini Callimachi said that officials briefed on the classified evidence found the case for imminence “razor thin” and saw “the reading of the intelligence as an illogical leap.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s amorphous claim that Suleimani made “continuing efforts … to build out a network of campaign activities that were going to lead potentially to the death of many more Americans” gave no assurance that Trump met any of these legal prerequisites: imminence, necessity, proportionality, or respect for sovereignty. And Trump’s listing of Iranian cultural sites—protected under international law from targeting by The Hague and the Geneva Conventions—would violate the fifth legal prerequisite of “humanity,” which any government making such targeting decisions must take into account.
Presidential subordinates should never present illegal options. And government officials sworn to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law have no authority to request, accept, or execute them. So why was U.S. and international law so casually ignored?
Simply put, bad process. The decision was taken abruptly at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago resort, without the careful interagency policy and legal process that accompanies a targeting decision fully vetted by National Security Council policymakers and agency lawyers. Neither short- nor long-term strategic consequences were vetted, nor did this irreversible decision consider any coherent vision of Iran policy. One former National Security Council staffer, Jonathan Stevenson, has chillingly reviewed the intra-executive branch process, testifying to a broader “abject dysfunction and deterioration of the national security process under Mr. Trump.” And the interbranch process, particularly prior congressional reporting or consultation, seems to have been limited to Trump’s casual Florida conversation with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is not a member of the so-called Gang of Eight Senate leaders ordinarily consulted about sensitive intelligence matters. Mar-a-Lago country club members reportedly had more warning than the highest congressional leaders.
Nevertheless, Trump’s supporters justify the strike as good policy because a bad actor has now been neutralized. But keen observers—such as former senior national security officials Susan Rice and Richard Haass, among others—have all shown why even if somehow deemed lawful, the decision was still awful national security policy that made the United States less safe in the world. Trump’s premature claim that Iran is “standing down” after a largely symbolic retaliatory strike cannot be credited when we don’t know what other retaliatory attacks, cyber or kinetic, still await the United States.
Beyond law and process, in an age of drone strikes and targeted killings, what’s wrong with including preemptive assassination as a policy option? Assassination is forbidden by U.S. law because it starts wars and quickly becomes deeply destabilizing. The same rationale used to kill Suleimani could be used tomorrow against North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, or rogue Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Because reciprocity lies at the heart of international law, how long would it be before hostile foreign powers start invoking the same rationale to target America’s own bellicose officials?
Law, policy, and process are deeply interrelated. Law locks in the lessons of policy, to provide predictability and accountability. Legality and sound process tend to promote more stable policy, while illegality and bad process foster policy disaster. Legal compliance and good national security process enable multilateral cooperation, accountability, and political agreement about sensitive policies between the executive branch and Congress. But illegality combined with shoddy process breed cascades of illegality that strain the relationship between the president, Congress, and U.S. allies; promote executive and U.S. unilateralism; and enhance secrecy and coverup.
Witness the George W. Bush administration’s disastrous embrace of illegal torture. The Justice Department’s infamous 2002 torture memo said, in effect, that if the United States could attack in preemptive self-defense, it can torture people in preemptive self-defense. The same administration invoked arguments based on preemptive self-defense to put troops into the Philippines, to gear up for its Iraq campaign, and to assert in its national security strategy paper a customary right of preemptive self-defense.
But the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq debunked those claims. Two Bush administration maxims best illustrate the perils of preemptive war. Combine a maxim then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld notoriously embraced, “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” with then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s so-called One Percent Doctrine: “Even if there’s just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty.” So even if there’s no smoke, assume there’s a fire, which justifies attacking preemptively. But preemptive attacks are not meaningfully restrained by notions of necessity or proportionality. If you think someone will attack with intent to kill, your best bet is to kill them first, à la Pearl Harbor. When that mindset prevails, evidence yields to hunches and the twisting of evidence, which is what helped create the rationale for intervening in Iraq in 2003 with overwhelming force to stop nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
Under traditional international legal doctrine of self-defense, an aggressor must take unambiguously aggressive first steps before the object of their aggression can legally respond in self-defense. But if we change the law to authorize a nation to respond not just to perceived threats, but to mere premonitions thereof, and then to inklings of premonitions that one’s adversary might misperceive motives, hard evidence is displaced by conjecture or outright lies. Down this hall of mirrors lies a doctrine that assumes necessity, then authorizes disproportionate use of force to “shock and awe” a potential attacker into submission.
We cannot let Trump and his administration launch a new forever war against Iran and its various proxies by using vague Twitter claims as weapons of mass distraction. And Americans should hold Pompeo strictly to his vow, oft-repeated since the strike, that “every action” the United States takes “will be consistent with the international rule of law.” By their very nature, claims of preemptive war turn on “trust me” actionable intelligence. To prevent a replay of Iraq, Congress, the media, and the public must continue their intensive detailed scrutiny of Trump’s factual basis for his claim of imminence. What factual basis did Trump have for thinking that Suleimani was planning an imminent 9/11-type operational attack on the U.S. territory or interests? Without such information, it was illegal to even consider killing Suleimani as a policy option; but if such information existed, Congress was legally required to have seen it. Either way, the strike seems to have been illegal.
This also means rejecting Trump’s and Pompeo’s simplistic flattening of the issue into a false bipolar choice between “attack” or “do nothing.” Even if, as Pompeo claims, the risk of U.S. nonaction was greater than the risk of action, the action taken did not demand unilateral military force. It could instead have called for a third way: disarming Iran without pre-emptive attack through a multilateral strategy of disarmament that would include diplomacy, transparency, containment, and enhanced sanctions. This third way should sound familiar, as precisely such a process led the Obama administration to conclude the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. By reflexively discarding that deal without a safety net, Trump predictably triggered a cycle of tit-for-tat retaliation, and to escape it, he now ironically calls for new multilateral negotiations years later that could at best produce an inferior version of that accord.
Despite its impeachment stalemate, Congress must demand the testimony, under oath, of those officials who shaped the options and argued for killing Suleimani. At the same time, legislators should force Trump to clarify America’s near- and long-term goals in Iran and Iraq. As debate shifts to the Senate, that body should legislate against further Iran escalation by enacting Rep. Elissa Slotkin’s resolution, recently adopted by the House under the War Powers Resolution’s expedited procedures. Congress should also enact Rep. Ro Khanna’s bill denying funding to any offensive actions in Iran. As described elsewhere, Congress must repeal the now-obsolete 2002 Iraq AUMF and promptly move to hearings on the war powers bill offered by Sen. Tim Kaine, incorporating sound ideas from a related bill offered in the last Congress by Sen. Jeff Merkley.
The House’s impeachment of Trump over his national security abuse in Ukraine teaches that the current president is a national security threat. The Suleimani strike confirms that Congress cannot give an impeached yet impetuous, uninformed yet unchecked president carte blanche to wag the dog of war in Iran.


foreignpolicy--2020-01-11--Our Top Weekend Reads

Our Top Weekend Reads

Last Friday , U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani , a decision that sparked widespread fear of war and economic turmoil .
The death of Suleimani nearly changed the geopolitical dynamic in the Middle East .
Calls for a full U.S. military withdrawal were made in Iraq , and Russia looked poised to bolster its presence in the region .
Iran ’ s response was swift , but its attack on U.S. military personnel in Iraq resulted in no casualties , an indication that it wanted to de-escalate tensions .
Tensions did begin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ States would not retaliate , but , ultimately , Suleimani will be replaced and the military infrastructure he leaves behind will outlive him .
Meanwhile , the potentially disastrous impact of Brexit on the Northern Irish economy has increased the fortunes of nationalists , reopening the debate over Irish unification .
And now that trade talks between the United States and China are relatively stable , expect U.S. President Donald Trump to turn to Europe for a new trade opponent .
1 .
Petraeus Says Trump May Have Helped ‘ Reestablish Deterrence ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ & A with Foreign Policy ’ s Lara Seligman , David Petraeus said that after years of allowing Iranian aggression to be unchallenged , the killing of Suleimani could restore U.S. deterrence in the Middle East .
2 .
Harry and Meghan Are Leaving the Job but Keeping the Salary The recent decision of Prince Harry and Meghan , the Duchess of Sussex , to step back from their role as senior royals shocked the British public .
But the monarchy has survived scandals before , and this time will be no different @ @ @ @ @ @ @ writes .
The United States will derive no discernible benefit from the assassination of Suleimani , suggesting that the attack was motivated by Trump ’ s need to distract the public from his pending impeachment trial , Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin write .
4 .
With Parliament Voting for Brexit , Is Irish Unification Inevitable ?
The British Parliament recently voted to pass Prime Minister Boris Johnson ’ s Brexit withdrawal deal , reopening the debate over Irish unification , Foreign Policy ’ s Dan Haverty reports .
5 .
Europe ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Front in the Trade War Alleged European trade unfairness and the continent ’ s efforts to curb global warming give Trump an opportunity to present Europe as a new foreign foil , setting the stage for a new round of trade disputes with the EU in 2020 , Bruce Stokes writes .

Last Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, a decision that sparked widespread fear of war and economic turmoil .
Last Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, a decision that sparked widespread fear of war and economic turmoil.
The death of Suleimani nearly changed the geopolitical dynamic in the Middle East. Calls for a full U.S. military withdrawal were made in Iraq, and Russia looked poised to bolster its presence in the region.
Iran’s response was swift, but its attack on U.S. military personnel in Iraq resulted in no casualties, an indication that it wanted to de-escalate tensions. Tensions did begin to cool after Trump suggested the United States would not retaliate, but, ultimately, Suleimani will be replaced and the military infrastructure he leaves behind will outlive him.
Meanwhile, the potentially disastrous impact of Brexit on the Northern Irish economy has increased the fortunes of nationalists, reopening the debate over Irish unification.
And now that trade talks between the United States and China are relatively stable, expect U.S. President Donald Trump to turn to Europe for a new trade opponent.
Here are Foreign Policy’s top weekend reads.
Gen. David Petraeus
In an exclusive Q&A with Foreign Policy’s Lara Seligman, David Petraeus said that after years of allowing Iranian aggression to be unchallenged, the killing of Suleimani could restore U.S. deterrence in the Middle East.
Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex
The recent decision of Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, to step back from their role as senior royals shocked the British public. But the monarchy has survived scandals before, and this time will be no different, Foreign Policy’s James Palmer writes.
U.S. President Donald Trump leaves the podium after making a statement on Iran at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, on Jan. 3.
The United States will derive no discernible benefit from the assassination of Suleimani, suggesting that the attack was motivated by Trump’s need to distract the public from his pending impeachment trial, Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin write.
Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald sits alongside deputy leader Michelle O’Neill, North Belfast MP John Finucane and Fermanagh and South Tyrone MP Michelle Gildernew.
The British Parliament recently voted to pass Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit withdrawal deal, reopening the debate over Irish unification, Foreign Policy’s Dan Haverty reports.
Workers assemble Porsche 911 cars at the Zuffenhausen Porsche production plant in Stuttgart, Germany, on March 10, 2015.
Alleged European trade unfairness and the continent’s efforts to curb global warming give Trump an opportunity to present Europe as a new foreign foil, setting the stage for a new round of trade disputes with the EU in 2020, Bruce Stokes writes.


foreignpolicy--2020-01-11--When the Green New Deal Goes Global

When the Green New Deal Goes Global

Inspired by what she saw , she returned to New York to oppose the incumbent Democrat in a congressional primary , beating him to become the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress .
On the first day of her orientation , she joined the youth-led civic Sunrise Movement in occupying the office of the speaker of the House of Representatives , the highest-ranking member of her own party .
Three months later , she followed up by proposing her first piece of legislation with veteran Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey : the Green New Deal , a multitrillion-dollar plan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ path to global net-zero emissions by 2050 .
The person is , of course , New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , a self-described democratic socialist .
Her origin story tells us much about the present moment—and the West ’ s future politics .
First , there is the centrality of climate change , which keeps this variety of socialism blissfully distant from that of the Cold War .
Ocasio-Cortez was less than a month old when the Berlin Wall fell and has no vestigial defensive reflex to the red-baiting that she still faces @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there is the will to be guided by projects originating at the grassroots and the margins—a lesson taken from the abject mismanagement of the insular and centrally controlled Democratic machine of the 2016 presidential campaign .
Third , and most expansively , there is a focus on how power runs not just through money and government—Wall Street and Washington—but through the soil , the turbine , and the mortgage lender ’ s redline and in places distant from influence , like North Dakota in Ocasio-Cortez ’ s case , although it might just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ferguson , Missouri .
These are places whose stories are not told in the intervals of four-year terms but in centuries of conquest , enslavement , and resistance .
Most instructive in Ocasio-Cortez ’ s rise is the way it charts the whiplash pace of change in public discourse .
If her election was a tremor in the political landscape , the surprisingly high levels of public support for the Green New Deal on its release have been an earthquake .
A 30-year-old “ former bartender , ” as right-wing voices tried haplessly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the national and even international agenda .
Nearly all Democratic candidates support the resolution , and the European Commission proposed its own Green Deal in December 2019 .
The Overton window hasn ’ t just shifted ; it has fallen off its hinges .
Other activists and intellectuals of Ocasio-Cortez ’ s generation are keen not to let the moment pass .
Think tanks like Common Wealth and the Institute for Public Policy Research in the U.K. and the Roosevelt Institute and People ’ s Policy Project in the United States are not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ preparing to govern .
The authors take the insight of Naomi Klein from her 2007 book , The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism , that catastrophes , both natural and man-made , are often used to ram through policies that expose populations to ever greater risk .
But they reverse it .
“ [ T ] he Right plans for crises meticulously , ” they write .
“ We should , too .
If we can organize in advance , we can use the openings created by the next crises @ @ @ @ @ @ @ No more crises wasted.
” Whether planning for climate disaster , Brexit , or an even deeper political fracture , some leftists have proposed “ disaster communism ” in place of Klein ’ s “ disaster capitalism.
” So can an open catastrophe be used to roll out large-scale transformations of property and collective life ?
The authors ’ battle-ready tone on this score breaks with the often moralistic and soul-searching mode of some of the higher-profile climate books of the last few years .
Think here of books by Jonathan Safran Foer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Nathaniel Rich .
Probing , informative , and often paralyzingly depressing , these books shy away from the directness of the authors of A Planet to Win .
Closer to “ shut it down ” than “ we are screwed , ” their radicalism is worn proudly , born of a post-2000 era of Occupy , graduate student unionization , and Black Lives Matter .
One of the authors is on the steering committee of the Ecosocialist Working Group of the Democratic Socialists of America , of which Ocasio-Cortez is also a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ increase nearly sevenfold since Trump ’ s election .
The authors are aware that the missing element in redirecting the enormous ship of the U.S. economy is less technological capacity than political will .
In place of the vague sentiment that “ the enemy is us , ” A Planet to Win ’ s authors seek out real culprits .
They take for granted that we are not equally guilty for climate change .
Responsibility is distributed as unevenly as the rewards of the carbon economy .
It stands to reason the burden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They draw their first concentric circle of culpability around the United States , which they refer to as “ the belly of the beast ” because it “ remains the world ’ s second-largest carbon emitter , behind China .
In per-capita terms , US emissions are over twice as high.
” Drawing a second , smaller circle in the spirit of what could be called left-climate populism , they argue that “ [ f ] or ethical and practical reasons , a just transition also requires naming and shaming our enemies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rage where it belongs : on fossil fuel CEOs and private utility executives.
” After World War II , many European governments carried out projects of lustration , purging and punishing those who had collaborated with fascist regimes .
The authors of A Planet to Win seem motivated by the same spirit .
Their targets of expropriation , however , are not only players in fossil fuels .
The book ’ s lead author tweeted recently that “ the green new deal doesn ’ t need bill gates ’ s money but it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to take it.
” The pugnacious rhetoric ricochets through the book , even surfacing as direct threats : “ Fossil fuel executives in particular should consider themselves lucky if all we do is take their companies , ” they write .
“ They should be tried for crimes against humanity.
” The authors also offer a dazzling array of constructive projects to accompany the green transition ’ s doling out of economic retribution .
Perhaps most vividly depicted is their vision of the future city .
They call for “ 10 million public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” over the next 10 years .
The building industries , widely considered a natural enemy of green concerns , are treated by the authors as the opposite—they are potential beneficiaries of new publicly funded projects like windmills and solar arrays that fuel local demand for their skills .
So-called “ sunflower homes ” on smart grids will turn off electricity “ for short blips to lower energy use at peak times.
” Publicly owned “ fleets of nimble electric minivans ” will “ accommodate late-night lovers , strollers , wheelchairs , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and community land trusts ” will emerge “ alongside housing built and governed by local authorities , ” and abandoned buildings in places like Baltimore and Philadelphia will be rehabbed and turned into “ locally managed land trusts.
” As grand as some of the schemes can sound , the authors use compelling historical analogies to defend their plausibility .
Like Klein , they recall the era between the New Deal and wartime mobilization .
They offer the astounding example of the world ’ s largest factory being built in Michigan in less @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eventually producing a B-24 bomber every hour .
They are aware that the missing element in redirecting the enormous ship of the U.S. economy is less technological capacity than political will—a commodity that can be neither produced and distributed from above nor accumulated adequately through small acts of conscientiousness or consumer choice .
“ Herculean change , ” they point out , “ isn ’ t the specialty of market nudges.
” It will have to be big , and it will have to be collective .
Moral superiority , they point out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rich do more harm than the poor .
Per capita carbon footprints in New York City ’ s affluent Greenwich Village are two to three times higher than those in the Bronx .
Part of the struggle is identifying previously neglected allies .
“ [ T ] he working class women of color who populate the housing movements that are fighting against gentrification and demanding affordable density , ” they write , “ are in fact low-carbon protagonists—whether they talk about climate or not.
” Time and again , the authors find their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They oppose the impulse to opt out , breaking with the libertarian dreams of clean energy islands that are often the shared endpoint of ecopolitics on both the left and right .
The hyperlocal ex-hippie in Vermont mirrors the survivalist in Idaho ; neither is a viable standard-bearer for the climate left .
Instead , the challenge can only be confronted at scale .
The authors offer a vision of flexibility .
Microgrids nested inside a continental power grid will gather green energy where it is sunny or windy and then disperse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Public ownership of the national energy grid is one of the book ’ s many concrete demands and should be a signature proposal for any leftist U.S. politician .
Based on the book ’ s front end , one could quibble that the authors ’ discussion stays too close to the United States , looking abroad primarily to admire the people ’ s palaces of Red Vienna and the public buses of Helsinki , in the familiar mode of Sanders ’ s paeans to Scandinavia .
The focus shifts drastically , though , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ internationalism ” based on Riofrancos ’ s ethnographic research in Chile ’ s lithium fields .
Here , the book confronts some of the deepest difficulties of climate transition but also offers an inspiring new way of thinking about global politics and organizing social movements .
The key phrase for this chapter is “ supply chain justice.
” Think of it as a globalization of the Standing Rock model that inspired both Ocasio-Cortez and the book ’ s authors .
Because the territory of the Oceti Sakowin people is , all at once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a transit point for mineral resources , an ecosystem , and a site of fraught overlapping forms of governance , any pursuit of social justice must follow all the threads : the gas , the groundwater , the history , the lines of legal redress , the future means of redistributing profit , and the past means of absconding with it .
The authors directly confront the fact that a renewable energy transition will mean less of some forms of extraction but more of others , including the cobalt , lithium , nickel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ How then to avoid past patterns whereby tapping new reservoirs of energy has deepened , rather than reversed , inequalities ?
Whether through damming , drilling , or logging , historically marginalized populations have seen their territory devastated with little compensation beyond poorly paid menial labor .
“ More than half the world ’ s supply [ of cobalt ] is currently sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo , ” the authors offer as one example , “ from hand-dug mines worked by children , with scant protection of workers ’ safety.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Our core premise , ” they write , “ is that nodes of the vast supply chains of the renewable transition are potential sites of solidarity across borders.
” This is not straightforward , they acknowledge .
Many residents of Chile ’ s capital city of Santiago are enthusiastic about efforts to expand extraction of the country ’ s lithium deposits as part of a project of “ resource nationalism ” ; many indigenous groups , by contrast , would prefer no lithium extraction at all because of its disruptive effects @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a properly socialist policy is formidable : It requires addressing the needs and demands of actors all along the global value chain , rather than focusing only on the demand-side solution of subsidizing middle-class consumers to opt for a new Tesla instead of a Subaru .
The authors have some suggestions about how to create a more egalitarian redistribution along a value chain that usually tilts to the developed countries of the global north .
They follow other progressives in calling for a revision of intellectual property law to force U.S. companies to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ example , and adopt extraction methods that do not damage the local biosphere .
They suggest using the Alien Tort Claims Act to try U.S. firms in domestic courts for violations of environmental law and indigenous rights abroad .
They recognize that strengthening ties between climate activists in the global north and south is necessary to gain larger visibility .
Like A Planet to Win , the alter-globalization movement of the 1990s called for stronger labor and environmental standards to be added to revised trade agreements .
Such rhetoric , although ritualistically invoked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effect against the overwhelming impulse of the multilateral institutions of the World Trade Organization ( WTO ) and the North American Free Trade Agreement to liberalize trade after the 1990s .
Pursuing the climate left ’ s vision will require thinking more concretely about what state-to-state institutions beyond the nation will be required to secure it .
Just as some commentators have begun to demand green quantitative easing from the world ’ s central banks , should we also be bold enough to imagine a green WTO , which would use the tools @ @ @ @ @ @ @ police the behavior of individual states according to their carbon emissions ?
This is what Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann have called for in their recent book , Climate Leviathan : A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future .
Acknowledging the aspirations of the poorer nations in an era of decarbonization will require confronting matters of both consent and constraint .
Yet recall that some of the strongest opponents of labor and environmental standards from the 1990s onward came from the same quarter : the global south itself , whose national representatives protested @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was code for suppressing the growth dreams of the poorer nations .
In the 1990s , as in A Planet to Win , the conundrum was often solved by appealing beyond the border to indigenous actors .
In the 1990s , it was the insurgents of Chiapas in southern Mexico ; here , it is the residents of Chile ’ s Atacama Desert .
The authors cite the 1970s demands for a New International Economic Order as an example of a different way of organizing the world economy .
Emboldened by the vulnerability @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a coalition of poorer nations in the United Nations attempted to leverage resource power , passing a 1974 resolution in the United Nations General Assembly demanding commodity stabilization agreements , drastically increased development aid flows , and colonial reparations .
The defeat of demands for a new , more equal world economy is often remembered as a historic failure .
Yet the New International Economic Order ’ s demands , however egalitarian at a state-to-state level , were premised entirely on the dream of endless carbon-fueled growth we now see as folly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their own borders .
The world ’ s population at large will have to be persuaded of the urgency of the threat and the possibility of a better future .
Then sovereign leaders will have to be convinced to make commitments far beyond those of the risibly inadequate Paris and Kyoto agreements—themselves , of course , symbols for the right-wing of scandalously betrayed sovereignty .
It makes sense that the fraught history of decades of climate negotiation that culminated in those agreements is not surveyed in the book—it ’ s depressing and stops @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vision of rethinking state capacity and property relations .
Yet staring the problem of global governance in the face may not be avoidable .
International lawyers often appeal to a scene in Homer ’ s Odyssey where Odysseus is lashed to the mast to prevent seduction by the sirens .
They speak of the need for governments likewise to be “ bound to the mast ” to prevent them from straying from past commitments , whether it be to human rights or free trade .
Must governments be lashed more tightly to a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how to discipline the actions of climate rogues ?
If so , how to prepare for and even preempt the inevitable backlash against green supranationalism ?
Much depends on the unpredicted and unpredictable transformations of the Ocasio-Cortez moment rolling onward—a movement that the authors are both staking their hopes on and to which they are adding their own formidable force .
A Planet to Win is the American kernel of a vision for a post-carbon future , and its optimism is inspiring .
But taking the Green New Deal global will also mean @ @ @ @ @ @ @ where national leaders are less likely to be moved by visions of fleets of electric buses and more likely to be wary of green as a new shade of U.S. empire .
Finding the hinge between supply chain justice and international diplomacy will be a task hard enough to keep us all busy for as long as our heads remain above water .
This article appears in the Winter 2020 print issue .

After Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a woman in her late 20s drove west from her home in New York City. She passed through Flint, Michigan, and ended up on the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, where protesters had camped out to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, which they said posed a threat to local water supplies.
After Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a woman in her late 20s drove west from her home in New York City. She passed through Flint, Michigan, and ended up on the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, where protesters had camped out to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, which they said posed a threat to local water supplies.
Inspired by what she saw, she returned to New York to oppose the incumbent Democrat in a congressional primary, beating him to become the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress. On the first day of her orientation, she joined the youth-led civic Sunrise Movement in occupying the office of the speaker of the House of Representatives, the highest-ranking member of her own party. Three months later, she followed up by proposing her first piece of legislation with veteran Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey: the Green New Deal, a multitrillion-dollar plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy on the path to global net-zero emissions by 2050.
The person is, of course, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist. Her origin story tells us much about the present moment—and the West’s future politics.
First, there is the centrality of climate change, which keeps this variety of socialism blissfully distant from that of the Cold War. Ocasio-Cortez was less than a month old when the Berlin Wall fell and has no vestigial defensive reflex to the red-baiting that she still faces from her U.S. opponents.
Second, there is the will to be guided by projects originating at the grassroots and the margins—a lesson taken from the abject mismanagement of the insular and centrally controlled Democratic machine of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Third, and most expansively, there is a focus on how power runs not just through money and government—Wall Street and Washington—but through the soil, the turbine, and the mortgage lender’s redline and in places distant from influence, like North Dakota in Ocasio-Cortez’s case, although it might just as well have been Puerto Rico or Ferguson, Missouri. These are places whose stories are not told in the intervals of four-year terms but in centuries of conquest, enslavement, and resistance.
Most instructive in Ocasio-Cortez’s rise is the way it charts the whiplash pace of change in public discourse. If her election was a tremor in the political landscape, the surprisingly high levels of public support for the Green New Deal on its release have been an earthquake. A 30-year-old “former bartender,” as right-wing voices tried haplessly to smear her, is now setting the national and even international agenda. Nearly all Democratic candidates support the resolution, and the European Commission proposed its own Green Deal in December 2019. The Overton window hasn’t just shifted; it has fallen off its hinges.
Other activists and intellectuals of Ocasio-Cortez’s generation are keen not to let the moment pass. Think tanks like Common Wealth and the Institute for Public Policy Research in the U.K. and the Roosevelt Institute and People’s Policy Project in the United States are not only preparing to protest; they are preparing to govern.
What might the reign of young green socialists look like? We catch a first glimpse in the book A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, co-written by one journalist and three academics—Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos—and published in November 2019 by the storied left-wing press Verso on its imprint run by Jacobin, the U.S. magazine itself closely linked to the rise of millennial socialism. If the future looks anything like that described in the book’s pages, the answer to the question of whether the center and right have something to fear is: absolutely.
The authors take the insight of Naomi Klein from her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, that catastrophes, both natural and man-made, are often used to ram through policies that expose populations to ever greater risk. But they reverse it. “[T]he Right plans for crises meticulously,” they write. “We should, too. If we can organize in advance, we can use the openings created by the next crises to directly attack their root causes. No more crises wasted.” Whether planning for climate disaster, Brexit, or an even deeper political fracture, some leftists have proposed “disaster communism” in place of Klein’s “disaster capitalism.”
So can an open catastrophe be used to roll out large-scale transformations of property and collective life? The authors’ battle-ready tone on this score breaks with the often moralistic and soul-searching mode of some of the higher-profile climate books of the last few years. Think here of books by Jonathan Safran Foer, David Wallace-Wells, Roy Scranton, and Nathaniel Rich. Probing, informative, and often paralyzingly depressing, these books shy away from the directness of the authors of A Planet to Win. Closer to “shut it down” than “we are screwed,” their radicalism is worn proudly, born of a post-2000 era of Occupy, graduate student unionization, and Black Lives Matter. One of the authors is on the steering committee of the Ecosocialist Working Group of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Ocasio-Cortez is also a member—an organization that has seen its rolls increase nearly
sevenfold since Trump’s election.
The authors are aware that the missing element in redirecting the enormous ship of the U.S. economy is less technological capacity than political will.
In place of the vague sentiment that “the enemy is us,” A Planet to Win’s authors seek out real culprits. They take for granted that we are not equally guilty for climate change. Responsibility is distributed as unevenly as the rewards of the carbon economy. It stands to reason the burden of climate repair must also fall unevenly. They draw their first concentric circle of culpability around the United States, which they refer to as “the belly of the beast” because it “remains the world’s second-largest carbon emitter, behind China. In per-capita terms, US emissions are over twice as high.” Drawing a second, smaller circle in the spirit of what could be called left-climate populism, they argue that “[f]or ethical and practical reasons, a just transition also requires naming and shaming our enemies, focusing the climate movement’s rage where it belongs: on fossil fuel CEOs and private utility executives.”
After World War II, many European governments carried out projects of lustration, purging and punishing those who had collaborated with fascist regimes. The authors of A Planet to Win seem motivated by the same spirit. Their targets of expropriation, however, are not only players in fossil fuels. The book’s lead author tweeted recently that “the green new deal doesn’t need bill gates’s money but it’s gonna feel sooo good to take it.” The pugnacious rhetoric ricochets through the book, even surfacing as direct threats: “Fossil fuel executives in particular should consider themselves lucky if all we do is take their companies,” they write. “They should be tried for crimes against humanity.”
The authors also offer a dazzling array of constructive projects to accompany the green transition’s doling out of economic retribution. Perhaps most vividly depicted is their vision of the future city. They call for “10 million public, beautiful, mixed-income, no-carbon homes” over the next 10 years. The building industries, widely considered a natural enemy of green concerns, are treated by the authors as the opposite—they are potential beneficiaries of new publicly funded projects like windmills and solar arrays that fuel local demand for their skills. So-called “sunflower homes” on smart grids will turn off electricity “for short blips to lower energy use at peak times.” Publicly owned “fleets of nimble electric minivans” will “accommodate late-night lovers, strollers, wheelchairs, and walkers”; “limited equity co-operatives and community land trusts” will emerge “alongside housing built and governed by local authorities,” and abandoned buildings in places like Baltimore and Philadelphia will be rehabbed and turned into “locally managed land trusts.”
As grand as some of the schemes can sound, the authors use compelling historical analogies to defend their plausibility. Like Klein, they recall the era between the New Deal and wartime mobilization. They offer the astounding example of the world’s largest factory being built in Michigan in less than a year in the 1940s, eventually producing a B-24 bomber every hour. They are aware that the missing element in redirecting the enormous ship of the U.S. economy is less technological capacity than political will—a commodity that can be neither produced and distributed from above nor accumulated adequately through small acts of conscientiousness or consumer choice. “Herculean change,” they point out, “isn’t the specialty of market nudges.” It will have to be big, and it will have to be collective.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addresses on topics including climate change and poverty ahead of the Women’s March in New York City on Jan. 19, 2019.
All moments of political and economic transformation look impossible until they happen. That does not make them inevitable, but it does mean strategy is paramount, as the authors recognize. Rather than putting the onus on individuals to change their personal habits to slow climate change and then blaming them when they fail, the authors know that scapegoating the poor and underresourced leads only to backlash of the kind seen in the yellow vest movement in France. Conditions need to be created first where people have the access to services that allow them to lead greener lives.
Moral superiority, they point out, is often misplaced anyway. The rich do more harm than the poor. Per capita carbon footprints in New York City’s affluent Greenwich Village are two to three times higher than those in the Bronx. Part of the struggle is identifying previously neglected allies. “[T]he working class women of color who populate the housing movements that are fighting against gentrification and demanding affordable density,” they write, “are in fact low-carbon protagonists—whether they talk about climate or not.”
Time and again, the authors find their solutions in collective rather than individual action. They oppose the impulse to opt out, breaking with the libertarian dreams of clean energy islands that are often the shared endpoint of ecopolitics on both the left and right. The hyperlocal ex-hippie in Vermont mirrors the survivalist in Idaho; neither is a viable standard-bearer for the climate left. Instead, the challenge can only be confronted at scale. The authors offer a vision of flexibility. Microgrids nested inside a continental power grid will gather green energy where it is sunny or windy and then disperse it to cloudier or calmer places. Public ownership of the national energy grid is one of the book’s many concrete demands and should be a signature proposal for any leftist U.S. politician.
Based on the book’s front end, one could quibble that the authors’ discussion stays too close to the United States, looking abroad primarily to admire the people’s palaces of Red Vienna and the public buses of Helsinki, in the familiar mode of Sanders’s paeans to Scandinavia. The focus shifts drastically, though, in a final chapter on “recharging internationalism” based on Riofrancos’s ethnographic research in Chile’s lithium fields. Here, the book confronts some of the deepest difficulties of climate transition but also offers an inspiring new way of thinking about global politics and organizing social movements.
The key phrase for this chapter is “supply chain justice.” Think of it as a globalization of the Standing Rock model that inspired both Ocasio-Cortez and the book’s authors. Because the territory of the Oceti Sakowin people is, all at once, a place of human residence, a transit point for mineral resources, an ecosystem, and a site of fraught overlapping forms of governance, any pursuit of social justice must follow all the threads: the gas, the groundwater, the history, the lines of legal redress, the future means of redistributing profit, and the past means of absconding with it.
The authors directly confront the fact that a renewable energy transition will mean less of some forms of extraction but more of others, including the cobalt, lithium, nickel, and graphite required for batteries. How then to avoid past patterns whereby tapping new reservoirs of energy has deepened, rather than reversed, inequalities? Whether through damming, drilling, or logging, historically marginalized populations have seen their territory devastated with little compensation beyond poorly paid menial labor. “More than half the world’s supply [of cobalt] is currently sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo,” the authors offer as one example, “from hand-dug mines worked by children, with scant protection of workers’ safety.” The authors believe this is unnecessary. “Our core premise,” they write, “is that nodes of the vast supply chains of the renewable transition are potential sites of solidarity across borders.”
This is not straightforward, they acknowledge. Many residents of Chile’s capital city of Santiago are enthusiastic about efforts to expand extraction of the country’s lithium deposits as part of a project of “resource nationalism”; many indigenous groups, by contrast, would prefer no lithium extraction at all because of its disruptive effects on their homes. The task for a properly socialist policy is formidable: It requires addressing the needs and demands of actors all along the global value chain, rather than focusing only on the demand-side solution of subsidizing middle-class consumers to opt for a new Tesla instead of a Subaru.
The authors have some suggestions about how to create a more egalitarian redistribution along a value chain that usually tilts to the developed countries of the global north. They follow other progressives in calling for a revision of intellectual property law to force U.S. companies to share technology with Chilean firms, for example, and adopt extraction methods that do not damage the local biosphere. They suggest using the Alien Tort Claims Act to try U.S. firms in domestic courts for violations of environmental law and indigenous rights abroad. They recognize that strengthening ties between climate activists in the global north and south is necessary to gain larger visibility.
Climate activist Naomi Klein in Berlin on Dec. 12, 2019.
The authors’ vision in the book is bracing. But given their laudable desire to write a point-by-point program for the climate left, some questions are left hanging. Perhaps the biggest matter is that of enforcement. Who will be the green cop for the global Green New Deal? Although the authors pay little attention to the alter-globalization movement of the 1990s, there are many ways in which the world has been here before. It is instructive to compare the two moments, as the climate left is, in many ways, the alter-globalization movement’s rightful heir. This is signaled most clearly in the foreword written by Klein, the patron saint of the earlier wave of activists in Seattle; Porto Alegre, Brazil; and Quebec City. Klein was the enfant terrible then, writing the book No Logo when she was 29 years old. That book also took a pugilist’s stance, with the subtitle “taking aim at the brand bullies.” She was also a pioneer of the climate left with her 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
Like A Planet to Win, the alter-globalization movement of the 1990s called for stronger labor and environmental standards to be added to revised trade agreements. Such rhetoric, although ritualistically invoked by Democratic lawmakers, has had little effect against the overwhelming impulse of the multilateral institutions of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the North American Free Trade Agreement to liberalize trade after the 1990s. Pursuing the climate left’s vision will require thinking more concretely about what state-to-state institutions beyond the nation will be required to secure it. Just as some commentators have begun to demand green quantitative easing from the world’s central banks, should we also be bold enough to imagine a green WTO, which would use the tools of dispute settlement and punitive countermeasures to police the behavior of individual states according to their carbon emissions? This is what Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann have called for in their recent book,
Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future.
Acknowledging the aspirations of the poorer nations in an era of decarbonization will require confronting matters of both consent and constraint.
Yet recall that some of the strongest opponents of labor and environmental standards from the 1990s onward came from the same quarter: the global south itself, whose national representatives protested that talk of green and fair trade was code for suppressing the growth dreams of the poorer nations. In the 1990s, as in A Planet to Win, the conundrum was often solved by appealing beyond the border to indigenous actors. In the 1990s, it was the insurgents of Chiapas in southern Mexico; here, it is the residents of Chile’s Atacama Desert. The authors cite the 1970s demands for a New International Economic Order as an example of a different way of organizing the world economy. Emboldened by the vulnerability of Western nations to the oil embargo, a coalition of poorer nations in the United Nations attempted to leverage resource power, passing a 1974 resolution in the United Nations General Assembly demanding commodity stabilization agreements, drastically increased development aid flows, and colonial reparations. The defeat of demands for a new, more equal world economy is often remembered as a historic failure. Yet the New International Economic Order’s demands, however egalitarian at a state-to-state level, were premised entirely on the dream of endless carbon-fueled growth we now see as folly and paid no attention to inequality within their own borders.
The world’s population at large will have to be persuaded of the urgency of the threat and the possibility of a better future. Then sovereign leaders will have to be convinced to make commitments far beyond those of the risibly inadequate Paris and Kyoto agreements—themselves, of course, symbols for the right-wing of scandalously betrayed sovereignty. It makes sense that the fraught history of decades of climate negotiation that culminated in those agreements is not surveyed in the book—it’s depressing and stops miles short of the authors’ expansive vision of rethinking state capacity and property relations.
Yet staring the problem of global governance in the face may not be avoidable. International lawyers often appeal to a scene in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus is lashed to the mast to prevent seduction by the sirens. They speak of the need for governments likewise to be “bound to the mast” to prevent them from straying from past commitments, whether it be to human rights or free trade. Must governments be lashed more tightly to a green mast now? If not, how to discipline the actions of climate rogues? If so, how to prepare for and even preempt the inevitable backlash against green supranationalism? Much depends on the unpredicted and unpredictable transformations of the Ocasio-Cortez moment rolling onward—a movement that the authors are both staking their hopes on and to which they are adding their own formidable force.
A Planet to Win is the American kernel of a vision for a post-carbon future, and its optimism is inspiring. But taking the Green New Deal global will also mean entering the scrum of state-to-state politics, where national leaders are less likely to be moved by visions of fleets of electric buses and more likely to be wary of green as a new shade of U.S. empire. Finding the hinge between supply chain justice and international diplomacy will be a task hard enough to keep us all busy for as long as our heads remain above water.
This article appears in the Winter 2020 print issue.


foreignpolicy--2020-01-11--British Elites Know Who Isn’t Quite Their Type

British Elites Know Who Isn ’ t Quite Their Type As a British journalist living abroad , I get asked many questions , from the role of the queen to the peculiarities of Parliament .
But one theme comes up again and again : poshness .
What does it really mean ?
What ’ s posh , and what isn ’ t ?
Outsiders think they know the term , but they don ’ t understand it viscerally .
And they often miss that when the British deploy the term , it comes with an edge whetted on the stone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ especially since it is in the air again : Like the damp in an old country house , it never truly goes away .
And it ’ s back now with the current British prime minister , Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson , an alumni of Eton College , the University of Oxford , and the Bullingdon Club .
It can be seen plainly in the leader of the House of Commons , Jacob Rees-Mogg , a man whose aristocratic self-fashioning is so risibly parodic he ’ s been labeled the “ honorable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in particular , lap it up .
The notion of poshness seems to stir in them a kind of longing for the orderly hierarchies of the old world .
They think of it as classy .
They chuckle at those Brits and their cute accents , or they gasp in admiration or bewilderment at Downton Abbey .
In fact , outsiders everywhere seem to admire it—but they miss the underlying complexities of class , and , as a result , they misunderstand Britain .
Poshness has frayed and faded over the years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ series of customs and habits , many of them inherited from feudal times : riding to hounds ; murdering pheasants , rabbits , foxes , squirrels , and really anything with a pulse in the right season ; drinking too much wine ; and occasionally bonking each other ’ s spouses .
It ’ s an attitude better suited to times of indulgence than ones of moral rectitude ; the Victorian era , with its great surge of the middle class , was distinctly anti-posh , until it swung back the other way @ @ @ @ @ @ @ More than anything else , to be posh is to reside at the top end of an ancient caste system .
This is what outsiders all too often miss about class .
They admire the aesthetics and the charm of what appears posh but miss the unforgiving social stratification that class imposes on Britain .
Johnson is the 20th prime minister to have attended Eton—a single astonishingly dominant school .
Under Boris and his Etonian predecessor David Cameron , homelessness in the United Kingdom nearly tripled .
Posh people , meanwhile , still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ published in 2019 found that some 25,000 people—and a few corporations—own more than 50 percent of land in the U.K .
The Duke of Buccleuch ’ s estates , for example , extend to nearly half a percent of the entire country .
And even when working-class people break into the professions , they earn 17 percent less a year than their posh contemporaries .
At the core of poshness is a network , a tapestry of titled aristocrats , gentry , and the fanciest of the upper-upper-middle classes .
They attend the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Downe House , Marlborough , Winchester ) and universities ( Oxford , Cambridge , Edinburgh , Bristol , St. Andrews ) and eventually intermarry to keep the whole show on the road .
Poshness derives much of its power from educational hegemony .
Even as the number of privately educated pupils at Oxbridge has declined , the grip of the elite high schools has tightened .
A 2018 report revealed that eight top schools in the U.K. get as many pupils into Oxford and Cambridge as three-quarters of all schools and colleges put @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to poshness : It ’ s not just about money .
It ’ s about signaling your access to wellsprings of power that have flowed through the U.K. for centuries—to being “ the right kind of person.
” Poshness usually comes with wealth but not always .
You can be posh but not rich , though it ’ s difficult to sustain indefinitely , and you can certainly be rich but not posh .
Self-made moguls such as Philip Green ( of Topshop ) and Alan Sugar ( of Amstrad ) are seen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is access to wealth , even when you ’ re broke : the ability , for example , to bum around friends ’ house parties and borrow holiday homes in Italy or France .
And it can catapult you into the top ; going to the right school makes you 94 times more likely to reach the country ’ s professional elite .
It ’ s not just about money .
It ’ s about signaling your access to wellsprings of power that have flowed through the U.K. for centuries—to being “ the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also an aesthetic , the original shabby chic—one that signals not just possession of land but also the antiquity and confidence of its ownership .
Grand houses , yes , but with fraying rugs and dreadful central heating , full of tweed jackets and Wellington boots that don ’ t belong to anyone in particular but line up muddily by the front door for whoever is nominated to take the dogs out .
Poshness is a voice , sometimes described as cut glass—pronounced clearly and carefully .
And with the voice comes a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; scent , not perfume ; and napkin , not serviette .
The forbidden terms are French and thus associated with middle-class social climbers striving to use seemingly classy language .
Many foreigners think posh is a compliment , but only posh people view it as such—and even then not always .
Everyone else in Britain uses it as an insult .
To be called posh outside of the houses of the posh is to be called spoiled , entitled , or pretentious .
The British monitor class carefully .
And maybe that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ realism , especially over their trans-Atlantic cousins .
Class is not the story America chooses to tell about itself today .
People don ’ t write about it .
They don ’ t make movies about it .
The national myth is founded on the idea of freedom , wealth , and opportunity unshackled from the conventions of the old world .
And if one doesn ’ t like that story , well , then there ’ s a far gloomier one to tell about racial oppression and native genocide .
Class doesn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much as the British often overlook race .
But when you examine the numbers , the British have a slight edge on social mobility over Americans .
A child born into a family in the bottom 20th percentile of income levels has an 11.4 percent chance of making it to the top 20th percentile in the U.K.—as compared with a 7.8 percent chance in the United States .
Tellingly , Americans are much more likely to overestimate social mobility in their country , even though the middle class has grown in Britain while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Much of Britain ’ s relative success on that front has been driven by traditional equalizers such as universal health care and low-cost higher education .
Yet those systems were in fact created in part because of poshness—the middle-class politicians who created them despised and campaigned against the aristocracy .
So too , ironically enough , was the Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s—a grocer ’ s daughter who taught herself a posh accent but whose contempt for antique institutions was legendary .
A country that thinks about class so obsessively also understands @ @ @ @ @ @ @ British poshness might be unique , but to understand its core , take a look at the people who have power almost anywhere in the world—and examine whose kids they are and what schools they went to .
They might speak with a different accent , be less charming , and have less of a fondness for dogs and horses—but they will likely embody the inherited privilege that comes with being posh .
This article appears in the Winter 2020 print issue .

As a British journalist living abroad, I get asked many questions, from the role of the queen to the peculiarities of Parliament. But one theme comes up again and again: poshness. What does it really mean? What’s posh, and what isn’t? Outsiders think they know the term, but they don’t understand it viscerally. And they often miss that when the British deploy the term, it comes with an edge whetted on the stone of class.
As a British journalist living abroad, I get asked many questions, from the role of the queen to the peculiarities of Parliament. But one theme comes up again and again: poshness. What does it really mean? What’s posh, and what isn’t? Outsiders think they know the term, but they don’t understand it viscerally. And they often miss that when the British deploy the term, it comes with an edge whetted on the stone of class.
Understanding poshness matters, especially since it is in the air again: Like the damp in an old country house, it never truly goes away. And it’s back now with the current British prime minister, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, an alumni of Eton College, the University of Oxford, and the Bullingdon Club. It can be seen plainly in the leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man whose aristocratic self-fashioning is so risibly parodic he’s been labeled the “honorable member for the 18th century.”
Americans, in particular, lap it up. The notion of poshness seems to stir in them a kind of longing for the orderly hierarchies of the old world. They think of it as classy. They chuckle at those Brits and their cute accents, or they gasp in admiration or bewilderment at Downton Abbey. In fact, outsiders everywhere seem to admire it—but they miss the underlying complexities of class, and, as a result, they misunderstand Britain.
Poshness has frayed and faded over the years, but it lives on in a series of customs and habits, many of them inherited from feudal times: riding to hounds; murdering pheasants, rabbits, foxes, squirrels, and really anything with a pulse in the right season; drinking too much wine; and occasionally bonking each other’s spouses. It’s an attitude better suited to times of indulgence than ones of moral rectitude; the Victorian era, with its great surge of the middle class, was distinctly anti-posh, until it swung back the other way with the bulgy sybarite Edward VII.
More than anything else, to be posh is to reside at the top end of an ancient caste system. This is what outsiders all too often miss about class. They admire the aesthetics and the charm of what appears posh but miss the unforgiving social stratification that class imposes on Britain.
Johnson is the 20th prime minister to have attended Eton—a single astonishingly dominant school. Under Boris and his Etonian predecessor David Cameron, homelessness in the United Kingdom nearly tripled. Posh people, meanwhile, still own much of the country. Research published in 2019 found that some 25,000 people—and a few corporations—own more than 50 percent of land in the U.K. The Duke of Buccleuch’s estates, for example, extend to nearly half a percent of the entire country. And even when working-class people break into the professions, they earn 17 percent less a year than their posh contemporaries.
At the core of poshness is a network, a tapestry of titled aristocrats, gentry, and the fanciest of the upper-upper-middle classes. They attend the same schools (Eton, Harrow, Downe House, Marlborough, Winchester) and universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Bristol, St. Andrews) and eventually intermarry to keep the whole show on the road. Poshness derives much of its power from educational hegemony. Even as the number of privately educated pupils at Oxbridge has declined, the grip of the elite high schools has tightened. A 2018 report revealed that eight top schools in the U.K. get as many pupils into Oxford and Cambridge as three-quarters of all schools and colleges put together.
And that’s key to poshness: It’s not just about money. It’s about signaling your access to wellsprings of power that have flowed through the U.K. for centuries—to being “the right kind of person.” Poshness usually comes with wealth but not always. You can be posh but not rich, though it’s difficult to sustain indefinitely, and you can certainly be rich but not posh. Self-made moguls such as Philip Green (of Topshop) and Alan Sugar (of Amstrad) are seen as decidedly gauche. What poshness guarantees is access to wealth, even when you’re broke: the ability, for example, to bum around friends’ house parties and borrow holiday homes in Italy or France. And it can catapult you into the top; going to the right school makes you 94 times more likely to reach the country’s professional elite.
It’s not just about money. It’s about signaling your access to wellsprings of power that have flowed through the U.K. for centuries—to being “the right kind of person.”
Posh is also an aesthetic, the original shabby chic—one that signals not just possession of land but also the antiquity and confidence of its ownership. Grand houses, yes, but with fraying rugs and dreadful central heating, full of tweed jackets and Wellington boots that don’t belong to anyone in particular but line up muddily by the front door for whoever is nominated to take the dogs out.
Poshness is a voice, sometimes described as cut glass—pronounced clearly and carefully. And with the voice comes a dialect: Say loo, not toilet; scent, not perfume; and napkin, not serviette. The forbidden terms are French and thus associated with middle-class social climbers striving to use seemingly classy language.
Many foreigners think posh is a compliment, but only posh people view it as such—and even then not always. Everyone else in Britain uses it as an insult. To be called posh outside of the houses of the posh is to be called spoiled, entitled, or pretentious.
The British monitor class carefully. And maybe that gives them an edge, a certain realism, especially over their trans-Atlantic cousins. Class is not the story America chooses to tell about itself today. People don’t write about it. They don’t make movies about it. The national myth is founded on the idea of freedom, wealth, and opportunity unshackled from the conventions of the old world. And if one doesn’t like that story, well, then there’s a far gloomier one to tell about racial oppression and native genocide. Class doesn’t usually come into it, much as the British often overlook race.
But when you examine the numbers, the British have a slight edge on social mobility over Americans. A child born into a family in the bottom 20th percentile of income levels has an 11.4 percent chance of making it to the top 20th percentile in the U.K.—as compared with a 7.8 percent chance in the United States. Tellingly, Americans are much more likely to overestimate social mobility in their country, even though the middle class has grown in Britain while it has shrunk in the United States. Much of Britain’s relative success on that front has been driven by traditional equalizers such as universal health care and low-cost higher education. Yet those systems were in fact created in part because of poshness—the middle-class politicians who created them despised and campaigned against the aristocracy. So too, ironically enough, was the Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s—a grocer’s daughter who taught herself a posh accent but whose contempt for antique institutions was legendary. A country that thinks about class so obsessively also understands its power better.
The specifics of British poshness might be unique, but to understand its core, take a look at the people who have power almost anywhere in the world—and examine whose kids they are and what schools they went to. They might speak with a different accent, be less charming, and have less of a fondness for dogs and horses—but they will likely embody the inherited privilege that comes with being posh.
This article appears in the Winter 2020 print issue.