foreignpolicy--2020-09-21--Biden or Trump, the U.S.-Brazil Relationship Is Still Headed for Trouble

Biden or Trump , the U.S.-Brazil Relationship Is Still Headed for Trouble The presidency of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro raised eyebrows in the United States for many reasons , not least because for the first time in two decades , a Brazilian leader spoke openly not of autonomy in foreign policy , but of trying to diminish the country ’ s partnership with China and achieve greater alignment with the United States .
Brasília ’ s progress since has been uneven , and the U.S.-Chinese competition has heated up .
As such , the next U.S. administration will face critical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with Brazil—and about Brazil ’ s ties with China .
It is clear that Bolsonaro wants President Donald Trump to secure another term against former Vice President Joe Biden in November .
Trump ’ s reelection would lend legitimacy to Bolsonaro , since he has emulated much of the American president ’ s populist message—and to a lesser extent , embraced his governing model .
The president ’ s son , Federal Deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro , has made frequent trips to Washington ( sometimes sporting a MAGA hat ) , and was , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s choice for ambassador to the United States .
In a recent tweet , Eduardo Bolsonaro even went so far as to endorse Trump , irking many Democrats who would prefer Brazil keep its electoral preferences silent .
In turn , Trump is one of the few global leaders who is generally friendly toward the Brazilian president at a time when the South American country ’ s international image has suffered mightily .
Indeed , Brazil is under intense international scrutiny on myriad fronts .
Bolsonaro ’ s record on human rights @ @ @ @ @ @ @ continues to appear indifferent to deforestation in the Amazon , disregards the role of multilateral institutions , and downplays the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic .
At one point , even Trump appeared to pile on .
“ If we did what Brazil did , ” he said of the pandemic in May , “ we would have way more deaths in the United States.
” Bolsonaro , who is usually quick to rebuff any criticism , was taciturn in his response .
Maintaining friendly ties with the U.S. president , no matter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ policy priority .
Yet if Bolsonaro gets his wish and Trump emerges victorious in November , the price of continued U.S. friendship could be steep .
The Trump administration has focused unremittingly on Brazil ’ s relationship with China , especially when it comes to a highly anticipated auction to develop Brazil ’ s 5G capabilities—expected in the first trimester of 2021 .
Barring any changes or exemptions , China ’ s Huawei will compete in the auction against Finland ’ s Nokia and Sweden ’ s Ericsson , both of which the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pressure , Brazil has been reticent to exclude the firm from the competition .
The country remains incredibly reliant on China commercially , which diminishes the appetite of Brazilian policymakers to confront China head-on .
There ’ s also fear of potential retaliation from Chinese President Xi Jinping and pressure from Brazil ’ s agricultural lobby and the mining sector—key components of Bolsonaro ’ s political base—to straddle both Chinese and U.S. interests .
Should Trump win a second term , especially on the back of a campaign featuring strong anti-China rhetoric , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sanctions on Chinese Communist Party officials are likely to increase .
That could affect several Chinese companies that are well established in Brazil ’ s market , such as the China Three Gorges Corporation , the state-owned power company , as well as other financial institutions and a few infrastructure companies .
In such a scenario , Brazil may even be asked to enforce and uphold U.S. sanctions on Chinese entities and individuals .
Those demands would be hard for Bolsonaro to ignore .
Alternatively , if Biden emerges victorious in November , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fall at a moment of reduced political pressure .
Bolsonaro could try to hold the auction before Biden ’ s political appointees and chosen ambassadors navigate the labyrinthine Senate confirmation process , all while acting or career officials still occupy key posts in the State , Commerce , and Defense Departments .
Biden ’ s election may help the Brazilian president dodge a bullet on the 5G auction , but his celebrations wouldn ’ t last long .
There ’ s no doubt that Biden would still push Brazil to reorient itself away @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , although his understated style and his preference for diplomacy would likely steer him toward formal , diplomatic channels with less fanfare than Trump ’ s thunderous denunciations .
Biden ’ s propensity to work behind closed doors may keep any public acrimony in the U.S.-Brazilian relationship to a minimum , but it also risks being interpreted by Brasília as an opportunity to put off answering the questions that vex the U.S.-Brazilian relationship .
To avoid that , Biden may seek to condition any new agreements on verifiable changes in Bolsonaro ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could also be subject to such mandates ; in the last few years , the Trump administration reached military cooperation agreements ( even designating Brazil a major non-NATO ally ) , science and technology partnerships ( including one to launch satellites from Brazil ’ s Alcantara space center ) , and most coveted for Brazil , a U.S. endorsement of its application to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development ( OECD ) .
Biden could also remind Bolsonaro of his promise to reform the United Nations Security Council and push for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which would include Brasília , where diplomats have long grumbled about the difficulty of securing a place in the international order commensurate with Brazil ’ s lofty aspirations .
Beyond the China question , faced with a Biden administration , Brazil would have to shift its narrative significantly to curry favor with Democrats—and perhaps disavow its previous pro-Trump stances .
Indeed , senior figures in the Bolsonaro administration , while reading the national polls , have already started hedging their bets .
Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo stated recently that Brazil could “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lukewarm endorsement , but an endorsement nonetheless .
The Bolsonaro administration would have an uphill struggle to win over Democrats on several major sticking points : the environment and preserving the Amazon ; indigenous and minority rights ; and the health of Brazil ’ s democratic institutions .
Recent months have seen several committees of the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives release notes of condemnation regarding Brazil ’ s handling of Amazon deforestation .
While Bolsonaro could tone down his rhetoric temporarily for the sake of better relations with Democrats , doing so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because it would risk alienating his base as he looks toward reelection in 2022 .
A decades-long flirtation with a free trade agreement between the United States and Brazil continues , although it is unlikely to come to fruition under either Trump or Biden .
First , a deal of such size and scope would take several years of intense and nuanced negotiations .
As one of the largest agricultural exporters in the world , Brazil competes with the United States in a number of key industries rather than offering complementarity , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trade frictions .
Second , Trump ’ s positive overtures on trade with Brazil notwithstanding , he is more protectionist than his predecessors ; over the past two presidential election cycles , the Democratic Party has moved in a more anti-trade direction , too .
Under both administrations , there may be room for a series of more circumscribed , sector-based trade agreements that could satisfy Brazil , open markets for American producers , pass muster with the U.S. Congress , and begin to cut into China ’ s economic presence in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in November , the China challenge will remain at the epicenter of U.S.-Brazilian relations .
Unlike other Latin American countries , China has been unable to develop significant lines of credit to Brazil ’ s federal government , which has diminished its power over the Brazilian government .
That gives Brazilian policymakers greater latitude than their counterparts in the region to push back against China .
And it is precisely because U.S. policymakers understand that Brazil has choices that both presidents would continue to pressure it to choose the United States .

The presidency of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro raised eyebrows in the United States for many reasons, not least because for the first time in two decades, a Brazilian leader spoke openly not of autonomy in foreign policy, but of trying to diminish the country’s partnership with China and achieve greater alignment with the United States. Brasília’s progress since has been uneven , and the U.S.-Chinese competition has heated up. As such, the next U.S. administration will face critical questions about the United States’ relationship with Brazil—and about Brazil’s ties with China.
The presidency of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro raised eyebrows in the United States for many reasons, not least because for the first time in two decades, a Brazilian leader spoke openly not of autonomy in foreign policy, but of trying to diminish the country’s partnership with China and achieve greater alignment with the United States. Brasília’s progress since has been uneven, and the U.S.-Chinese competition has heated up. As such, the next U.S. administration will face critical questions about the United States’ relationship with Brazil—and about Brazil’s ties with China.
It is clear that Bolsonaro wants President Donald Trump to secure another term against former Vice President Joe Biden in November. Trump’s reelection would lend legitimacy to Bolsonaro, since he has emulated much of the American president’s populist message—and to a lesser extent, embraced his governing model. The president’s son, Federal Deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, has made frequent trips to Washington (sometimes sporting a MAGA hat), and was, for a brief time, his father’s choice for ambassador to the United States. In a recent tweet, Eduardo Bolsonaro even went so far as to endorse Trump, irking many Democrats who would prefer Brazil keep its electoral preferences silent. In turn, Trump is one of the few global leaders who is generally friendly toward the Brazilian president at a time when the South American country’s international image has suffered mightily.
Indeed, Brazil is under intense international scrutiny on myriad fronts. Bolsonaro’s record on human rights and the environment is poor. He continues to appear indifferent to deforestation in the Amazon, disregards the role of multilateral institutions, and downplays the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. At one point, even Trump appeared to pile on. “If we did what Brazil did,” he said of the pandemic in May, “we would have way more deaths in the United States.” Bolsonaro, who is usually quick to rebuff any criticism, was taciturn in his response. Maintaining friendly ties with the U.S. president, no matter how difficult, seems an immutable foreign policy priority.
Yet if Bolsonaro gets his wish and Trump emerges victorious in November, the price of continued U.S. friendship could be steep. The Trump administration has focused unremittingly on Brazil’s relationship with China, especially when it comes to a highly anticipated auction to develop Brazil’s 5G capabilities—expected in the first trimester of 2021. Barring any changes or exemptions, China’s Huawei will compete in the auction against Finland’s Nokia and Sweden’s Ericsson, both of which the U.S. prefers over Huawei. Despite U.S. pressure, Brazil has been reticent to exclude the firm from the competition. The country remains incredibly reliant on China commercially, which diminishes the appetite of Brazilian policymakers to confront China head-on. There’s also fear of potential retaliation from Chinese President Xi Jinping and pressure from Brazil’s agricultural lobby and the mining sector—key components of Bolsonaro’s political base—to straddle both Chinese and U.S. interests.
Should Trump win a second term, especially on the back of a campaign featuring strong anti-China rhetoric, U.S. tariffs on Chinese industries and targeted sanctions on Chinese Communist Party officials are likely to increase. That could affect several Chinese companies that are well established in Brazil’s market, such as the China Three Gorges Corporation, the state-owned power company, as well as other financial institutions and a few infrastructure companies. In such a scenario, Brazil may even be asked to enforce and uphold U.S. sanctions on Chinese entities and individuals. Those demands would be hard for Bolsonaro to ignore.
Alternatively, if Biden emerges victorious in November, Brazil’s 5G auction may naturally fall at a moment of reduced political pressure. Bolsonaro could try to hold the auction before Biden’s political appointees and chosen ambassadors navigate the labyrinthine Senate confirmation process, all while acting or career officials still occupy key posts in the State, Commerce, and Defense Departments.
Biden’s election may help the Brazilian president dodge a bullet on the 5G auction, but his celebrations wouldn’t last long. There’s no doubt that Biden would still push Brazil to reorient itself away from China and toward the United States, although his understated style and his preference for diplomacy would likely steer him toward formal, diplomatic channels with less fanfare than Trump’s thunderous denunciations. Biden’s propensity to work behind closed doors may keep any public acrimony in the U.S.-Brazilian relationship to a minimum, but it also risks being interpreted by Brasília as an opportunity to put off answering the questions that vex the U.S.-Brazilian relationship.
To avoid that, Biden may seek to condition any new agreements on verifiable changes in Bolsonaro’s posture. The implementation of old ones could also be subject to such mandates; in the last few years, the Trump administration reached military cooperation agreements (even designating Brazil a major non-NATO ally), science and technology partnerships (including one to launch satellites from Brazil’s Alcantara space center), and most coveted for Brazil, a U.S. endorsement of its application to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Biden could also remind Bolsonaro of his promise to reform the United Nations Security Council and push for the creation of permanent seats for emerging powers, which would include Brasília, where diplomats have long grumbled about the difficulty of securing a place in the international order commensurate with Brazil’s lofty aspirations.
Beyond the China question, faced with a Biden administration, Brazil would have to shift its narrative significantly to curry favor with Democrats—and perhaps disavow its previous pro-Trump stances. Indeed, senior figures in the Bolsonaro administration, while reading the national polls, have already started hedging their bets. Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo stated recently that Brazil could “deal with a Biden administration”—a lukewarm endorsement, but an endorsement nonetheless.
The Bolsonaro administration would have an uphill struggle to win over Democrats on several major sticking points: the environment and preserving the Amazon; indigenous and minority rights; and the health of Brazil’s democratic institutions. Recent months have seen several committees of the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives release notes of condemnation regarding Brazil’s handling of Amazon deforestation. While Bolsonaro could tone down his rhetoric temporarily for the sake of better relations with Democrats, doing so permanently is likely out of the question because it would risk alienating his base as he looks toward reelection in 2022.
A decades-long flirtation with a free trade agreement between the United States and Brazil continues, although it is unlikely to come to fruition under either Trump or Biden. First, a deal of such size and scope would take several years of intense and nuanced negotiations. As one of the largest agricultural exporters in the world, Brazil competes with the United States in a number of key industries rather than offering complementarity, and the countries have a well-known history of trade frictions. Second, Trump’s positive overtures on trade with Brazil notwithstanding, he is more protectionist than his predecessors; over the past two presidential election cycles, the Democratic Party has moved in a more anti-trade direction, too. Under both administrations, there may be room for a series of more circumscribed, sector-based trade agreements that could satisfy Brazil, open markets for American producers, pass muster with the U.S. Congress, and begin to cut into China’s economic presence in the country.
Whichever presidential candidate emerges victorious in November, the China challenge will remain at the epicenter of U.S.-Brazilian relations. Unlike other Latin American countries, China has been unable to develop significant lines of credit to Brazil’s federal government, which has diminished its power over the Brazilian government. That gives Brazilian policymakers greater latitude than their counterparts in the region to push back against China. And it is precisely because U.S. policymakers understand that Brazil has choices that both presidents would continue to pressure it to choose the United States.


foreignpolicy--2020-09-21--Brexit Might Break Britain. What Will Scotland Do?

Brexit Might Break Britain .
What Will Scotland Do ?
The United Kingdom ’ s latest push to abrogate its divorce deal with Europe and run roughshod over regional autonomy is renewing the urge of some restive British nations for independence—notably Scotland , where an independence referendum narrowly failed six years ago this month .
And that ’ s got many in Scotland—and elsewhere—thinking about what a future Scottish foreign policy might look like , and what that might mean for Britain , NATO , and the North Atlantic .
Three centuries after Scotland bowed off the main stage , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Many in Scotland were already souring on their ties to the rest of the United Kingdom , as evidenced by a close-run independence referendum in 2014 .
But the Brexit saga has pushed even more over the edge .
The latest move of Prime Minister Boris Johnson ’ s Conservative government in London to rewrite part of the already-agreed withdrawal agreement with the European Union would raise the question of an Irish border and test the integrity of the U.K. itself .
That has renewed calls for Scotland to try to break @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and follow its own north star , with a worldview a lot closer to Brussels than to London .
“ Brexit has changed absolutely everything , ” said Stephen Gethins , who until last year was the foreign affairs spokesman in Parliament for the Scottish National Party ( SNP ) .
Polls throughout 2020 have shown a sustained but narrow majority for independence and the SNP on track to win another landslide in Scottish elections next year .
“ Brexit has changed absolutely everything.
” “ It has changed the independence debate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ perceived overseas .
People now get it , they get the divergence between the unilateralist view down in London and the multilateralism that cuts across political parties in Scotland , ” said Gethins , now at the University of St. Andrews .
London ’ s seeming willingness to trample the rest of the U.K. has many seething .
“ There is no trust in the relationship , absolutely none now , ” said Mike Russell , the Scottish constitution , Europe , and external affairs secretary , the point man for Scotland ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drama has changed the international perception of Scotland .
If formerly seen as a leaver—and the last independence bid , in 2014 , provoked open hostility from everybody from Barack Obama in the United States to Vladimir Putin in Russia—Scotland is now seen as a joiner .
Scots , more than used to sharing sovereignty , voted overwhelmingly to stay in the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum , while England , narrowly , opted to leave .
An independent Scotland , at least in the current SNP vision , would be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and especially engaged in Arctic and North Atlantic security ; SNP politicians compare their planned future sovereign state to Ireland and Nordic and Baltic nations .
Scotland is trying to reassure Europe and the West that an independent Scotland would be , as the European security analyst Kirsty Hughes said , “ one of the global good gals.
” And there ’ s something to that .
SNP leaders , including party boss Nicola Sturgeon , wax about Scotland ’ s ability to fight the good fight and “ engage constructively with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Scotland , at least in the current SNP vision , would be a member of the EU and NATO , and especially engaged in Arctic and North Atlantic security.
“ Scotland very much sits in the European mainstream about how we see ourselves in the world , ” Gethins said .
“ If you are a state the size of Scotland , you don ’ t see yourself as having nuclear missiles and sitting in the U.N. Security Council , but you do see yourself sharing sovereignty with other states—that is where your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nation hoping to soon be one , Scotland has some work to do , Hughes said .
“ They are still not thinking strategically , ” she said , describing Scottish efforts to craft an independent foreign policy as “ shallow , ” if not “ ad hoc.
” “ Some people in Scotland don ’ t seem to realize how hard-nosed foreign policy is in Europe , ” she said .
But Scotland ’ s future defense and foreign policy—if there is one—will matter a great deal .
“ Scotland is really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” said Peter Jackson , an expert on global security at the University of Glasgow .
What ’ s really furrowing brows is the fate of the British nuclear-armed submarines that are currently based on the Clyde near Glasgow .
Scottish leaders like Sturgeon have said they don ’ t want nuclear weapons on Scottish soil .
But Scotland wants to play a role in NATO and North Atlantic security .
And those subs are Britain ’ s sole nuclear deterrent .
“ The whole security realm is very fraught in the argument @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be sorted out one way or another , ” said Jackson .
He suggested the U.K. could lease the naval base from a cash-strapped Scotland struggling to find its economic footing after independence , even if it would be politically unpopular .
“ Some kind of defense modus vivendi with the U.K. would be essential , ” he said .
But that doesn ’ t mean an independent Scotland would hew to London ’ s line on all the big issues—raising yet more questions for a country already wondering what kind of trade @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Europe and the United States .
“ What would Scotland ’ s role be in a future Libya or a future Iraq ?
” asked Jackson .
“ I imagine it would be very different to a future U.K. ’ s .
That will raise all kinds of issues .
”

The United Kingdom’s latest push to abrogate its divorce deal with Europe and run roughshod over regional autonomy is renewing the urge of some restive British nations for independence—notably Scotland, where an independence referendum narrowly failed six years ago this month.
The United Kingdom’s latest push to abrogate its divorce deal with Europe and run roughshod over regional autonomy is renewing the urge of some restive British nations for independence—notably Scotland, where an independence referendum narrowly failed six years ago this month.
And that’s got many in Scotland—and elsewhere—thinking about what a future Scottish foreign policy might look like, and what that might mean for Britain, NATO, and the North Atlantic. Three centuries after Scotland bowed off the main stage, it might be set for an encore.
Many in Scotland were already souring on their ties to the rest of the United Kingdom, as evidenced by a close-run independence referendum in 2014. But the Brexit saga has pushed even more over the edge. The latest move of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government in London to rewrite part of the already-agreed withdrawal agreement with the European Union would raise the question of an Irish border and test the integrity of the U.K. itself. That has renewed calls for Scotland to try to break free of England, rejoin the EU, and follow its own north star, with a worldview a lot closer to Brussels than to London.
“Brexit has changed absolutely everything,” said Stephen Gethins, who until last year was the foreign affairs spokesman in Parliament for the Scottish National Party (SNP). Polls throughout 2020 have shown a sustained but narrow majority for independence and the SNP on track to win another landslide in Scottish elections next year. “Brexit has changed absolutely everything.”
“It has changed the independence debate. It has changed how Scotland is perceived overseas. People now get it, they get the divergence between the unilateralist view down in London and the multilateralism that cuts across political parties in Scotland,” said Gethins, now at the University of St. Andrews.
London’s seeming willingness to trample the rest of the U.K. has many seething. “There is no trust in the relationship, absolutely none now,” said Mike Russell, the Scottish constitution, Europe, and external affairs secretary, the point man for Scotland’s Brexit portfolio. The four-year Brexit drama has changed the international perception of Scotland. If formerly seen as a leaver—and the last independence bid, in 2014, provoked open hostility from everybody from Barack Obama in the United States to Vladimir Putin in Russia—Scotland is now seen as a joiner. Scots, more than used to sharing sovereignty, voted overwhelmingly to stay in the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum, while England, narrowly, opted to leave.
An independent Scotland, at least in the current SNP vision, would be a member of the EU and NATO, and especially engaged in Arctic and North Atlantic security; SNP politicians compare their planned future sovereign state to Ireland and Nordic and Baltic nations.
Scotland is trying to reassure Europe and the West that an independent Scotland would be, as the European security analyst Kirsty Hughes said, “one of the global good gals.”
And there’s something to that. SNP leaders, including party boss Nicola Sturgeon, wax about Scotland’s ability to fight the good fight and “engage constructively with partners around the world.”
An independent Scotland, at least in the current SNP vision, would be a member of the EU and NATO, and especially engaged in Arctic and North Atlantic security.“Scotland very much sits in the European mainstream about how we see ourselves in the world,” Gethins said. “If you are a state the size of Scotland, you don’t see yourself as having nuclear missiles and sitting in the U.N. Security Council, but you do see yourself sharing sovereignty with other states—that is where your strengths lie.”
But for a not-yet-sovereign nation hoping to soon be one, Scotland has some work to do, Hughes said. “They are still not thinking strategically,” she said, describing Scottish efforts to craft an independent foreign policy as “shallow,” if not “ad hoc.”
“Some people in Scotland don’t seem to realize how hard-nosed foreign policy is in Europe,” she said. But Scotland’s future defense and foreign policy—if there is one—will matter a great deal.
“Scotland is really important from an international security perspective,” said Peter Jackson, an expert on global security at the University of Glasgow.
What’s really furrowing brows is the fate of the British nuclear-armed submarines that are currently based on the Clyde near Glasgow. Scottish leaders like Sturgeon have said they don’t want nuclear weapons on Scottish soil. But Scotland wants to play a role in NATO and North Atlantic security. And those subs are Britain’s sole nuclear deterrent.
“The whole security realm is very fraught in the argument for independence, and it needs to be sorted out one way or another,” said Jackson. He suggested the U.K. could lease the naval base from a cash-strapped Scotland struggling to find its economic footing after independence, even if it would be politically unpopular. “Some kind of defense modus vivendi with the U.K. would be essential,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean an independent Scotland would hew to London’s line on all the big issues—raising yet more questions for a country already wondering what kind of trade and security relationship it will have with Europe and the United States.
“What would Scotland’s role be in a future Libya or a future Iraq?” asked Jackson. “I imagine it would be very different to a future U.K.’s. That will raise all kinds of issues.”


foreignpolicy--2020-09-21--You Can Only See Liberalism From the Bottom

You Can Only See Liberalism From the Bottom The fall has been fast and , one might add , furious .
Today , the image of the country is less the wise sage than the village idiot .
During a terrifying pandemic , its president peddles quack cures , his uninspiring opponent appears out of touch , an eviction crisis looms , and more than a third of the populace reports that it would refuse a free vaccine if offered .
As other countries return to normalcy , the United States prepares ineffectively for a second wave .
It already @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worldwide ; the virus has killed nearly 200,000 of its inhabitants .
Taiwan , by contrast , has kept its death count under 10 .
The Democratic Republic of the Congo , which has seen only 88 of its citizens die , has a better contact-tracing system than the United States .
How can a country with so much power and so many resources be so astonishingly inept ?
It ’ s the paradox of our times , made more baffling by seeing the former world leader , Britain , in a similar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is all somehow a fluke .
Trumpism is an aberration , a “ blip on the long arc of history , ” as Donald Trump ’ s predecessor Barack Obama put it .
Once responsible leadership is restored , the Nobel laureates and Silicon Valley geniuses will retake the reins .
Another , more troubling theory is that incompetence is not a bug but a feature .
The fact that the United States has so much power is precisely the problem .
If you can make bad decisions without paying the costs , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Privilege has blinded the country ’ s cosseted elite , indulging its delusions by protecting it from their consequences .
The reckless disregard for reality is nothing new , in this theory .
It has plagued U.S. leadership for decades , though the costs have usually been paid by other countries .
The difference now is that the chickens are returning to roost .
That second theory is not a popular one .
But like many unpopular theories , it has had a Cassandra : the Indian-born essayist , novelist , and historian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump , or COVID-19 , he sounded the siren .
Anglophone leaders , inhabiting a hall of mirrors , were becoming dangerously detached from the actual world .
The problem was not partisan but general , and it was reaching a crisis .
Mishra has been beating this drum for more than a decade .
His new collection , Bland Fanatics , lays out the case in essays dating back to 2008 .
Reading them now , while trapped in an apartment surrounded by strategic reserves of canned food and toilet paper , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : You know , he might have had a point .
Or , at least , that ’ s how it looked from London .
From Beijing , Léopoldville , and Calcutta , the view was different .
Europe ’ s hundred years ’ peace had been a century of invasion , subjugation , and outright slaughter in the world beyond Europe .
Mishra mentions , among other atrocities , Belgium ’ s extractive rubber regime in the Congo , the hundreds of thousands killed in the U.S. conquest of the Philippines , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in German South West Africa ( tantamount to genocide , Germany has since admitted ) .
All this , he implies , was the price of those “ conveniences , comforts , and amenities ” that middle-class Westerners blithely enjoyed .
When World War I broke out , its ferocity took Europeans aback .
Displaying a sort of “ imperial insouciance , ” they had largely ignored the capacity of their own governments for mindless brutality .
But nothing about the war was surprising to those in the colonized world , Mishra argues @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of civilization to be hollow .
World War I was merely the “ extreme , lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism ” boomeranging back on its perpetrators .
The pattern of World War I is the one to fear today , Mishra warns .
Just as in 1913 , the world ’ s leading intellectuals , many now located in the United States , believe unflinchingly in the rightness and universal applicability of their values .
And , just as in 1913 , they have maintained that self-assuredness by taking an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In essay after essay , Mishra excoriates the liberal thinkers of the Anglophone world for what he takes to be their narcissism— “ their own mind-numbing simplicities about democracy , its enemies , friends , the free world and all that sort of thing.
” The deficiencies of such smug doctrines have been readily apparent in the global south for decades , Mishra believes .
There , the United States pursued freedom and democracy by backing despots , meddling in elections , opposing wealth redistribution , and enforcing austerity .
Now , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ scourges afflict the United States , too , putting liberalism ’ s failures on vivid display .
What ’ s so bad about liberalism ?
Mishra is not exactly illiberal : He approves of at least some versions of freedom , democracy , and human rights .
His objection is less the creed than to its priests .
Mainly , he notes how frequently the advocates of liberalism have papered over racism .
Talk of freedom and rights , Mishra notices , usually comes with a tacit addendum : but only for some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have left an ambiguous legacy .
John Locke ’ s theories about the consent of the governed did not prevent him from championing the dispossession of American Indians .
John Stuart Mill offered what remains the most enduring statement of the liberal creed , yet he served the British Empire and felt despotism to be a “ legitimate ” form of government for “ barbarians.
” Woodrow Wilson spoke for self-determination but launched a 19-year military occupation of Haiti .
You can trace a chain of hypocrisy from Thomas Jefferson keeping his own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s disastrous so-called liberation of Iraq .
One time and perhaps it ’ s an accident ; 17 times and it starts to look like a pattern .
Whenever the full extension of liberal freedoms threatens the privileges of the powerful , liberal leaders have sought to restrict those freedoms because they have never truly been comfortable with the consequences of substantive equality .
That large contradiction at the heart of the liberal project has carried dangerous consequences , in Mishra ’ s view .
To accommodate it , liberals have adopted a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the inequalities , violence , and racism endemic to their preferred system .
This is how Niall Ferguson , an open defender of empire , becomes an in-demand pundit .
Or how Thomas Friedman , who has variously championed the Iraq War , Israeli airstrikes on civilian areas , and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman , still commands respect as a paragon of common sense .
It would be better , Mishra feels , to listen to voices from the global south—he is particularly attentive to Asian intellectuals and earlier wrote a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ruins of Empire .
It ’ s not that Asian thinkers have rejected liberalism outright ; it ’ s rather that they ’ ve always known its limits .
Observing the close historical relationship between liberal ideas and imperial practice has led Indian , Chinese , and Japanese writers to political creeds that were more complex , less universalizing , and less fanatically individualistic .
Mishra , who identifies as a “ stepchild of the West , ” finds much to affirm in the more circumspect , conflicted , and self-aware intellectual worlds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ home among the gloomy 19th-century thinkers of Russia and Germany , who also found themselves caught in liberalism ’ s undertow .
This is not just about diversifying the global intelligentsia .
Seeing things from the vantage of the stepchildren , Mishra argues , reveals how insufficient the liberal obsession with formal processes has been .
As Mohandas Gandhi argued , democracies could be only “ nominal ” so long as the “ wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions ” persisted .
Obsessed with procedural justice but largely unbothered by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ kleptocratic oligarchies ” took root in Asia , Africa , and Latin America , Mishra writes .
And now , on cue , the oligarchs have seized the Oval Office .
The most probing essay in Bland Fanatics is on Ta-Nehisi Coates .
Mishra sees in Coates a fellow stepchild , whom he regards with evident sympathy .
Having grown up in Baltimore during the crack epidemic and seen a friend killed by police in college , Coates knows full well the violence that liberal democracy allows .
Yet Mishra believes Coates @ @ @ @ @ @ @ falling too easily into the gravity well of the liberal intellectual sphere .
This happened to Salman Rushdie , a “ helplessly Anglophiliac Indian ” whose later career has been marked more by hobnobbing with celebrities than giving voice to subaltern perspectives .
“ For a self-aware and independent-minded writer like Coates , ” Mishra writes , “ the danger is not so much seduction by power as a distortion of perspective caused by proximity to it.
” Mishra sees Coates teetering on the cusp of the Anglosphere ’ s delusions , particularly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ regards Obama as a “ deeply moral human being ” whose presidency was the “ most incredible of eras.
” Coates ’ s 2017 book , We Were Eight Years in Power , contains a memorable and gushing account of Obama ’ s BET-hosted farewell party : Naomi Campbell strutting about “ in a sleeveless number , ” Common lighting up the stage , a sense of achievement pulsing through the air .
Reading it , it ’ s easy to share Coates ’ s pride .
Yet Mishra rolls his eyes at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s just the same self-satisfied celebration of an ascendant elite , only now racially diverse .
Coates ’ s portrait of the Obama years , Mishra continues , is “ remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones ; despoliation of Libya , Yemen and Somalia ; mass deportations ; and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives.
” Such facets of power are all too easy to miss from a party at the White House .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the problem .
Perching atop the commanding heights doesn ’ t give you a better view ; it gives you a worse one , because benefiting from a stark inequality tends to rob you of perspective .
Without any intellectual ventilation , without taking seriously the warnings of those with other vantages , you ’ ll end up where we are , with “ blond bullies ” presiding over Washington and London and a baffled elite unable to do anything about it .
The barbarians were never at the gate , Mishra observes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ ve been “ ruling us for some time .
”

There was a time, not long ago, when the United States seemed home to the best and the brightest. Its scientists won Nobel Prizes, more than any other country by an enormous margin. Its technology firms blazed paths to brave new worlds. Its studios dominated global entertainment, disseminating dreams worldwide. So-called lesser countries endured “brain drain”—the outward stream of their most educated citizens. The United States, by contrast, was the churning sea of talent and enterprise into which all those rivers flowed.
There was a time, not long ago, when the United States seemed home to the best and the brightest. Its scientists won Nobel Prizes, more than any other country by an enormous margin. Its technology firms blazed paths to brave new worlds. Its studios dominated global entertainment, disseminating dreams worldwide. So-called lesser countries endured “brain drain”—the outward stream of their most educated citizens. The United States, by contrast, was the churning sea of talent and enterprise into which all those rivers flowed.
The fall has been fast and, one might add, furious. Today, the image of the country is less the wise sage than the village idiot. During a terrifying pandemic, its president peddles quack cures, his uninspiring opponent appears out of touch, an eviction crisis looms, and more than a third of the populace reports that it would refuse a free vaccine if offered. As other countries return to normalcy, the United States prepares ineffectively for a second wave. It already accounts for a fifth of COVID-19 cases worldwide; the virus has killed nearly 200,000 of its inhabitants. Taiwan, by contrast, has kept its death count under 10. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has seen only 88 of its citizens die, has a better contact-tracing system than the United States.
Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire, Pankaj Mishra, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pp., , October 2020
How can a country with so much power and so many resources be so astonishingly inept? It’s the paradox of our times, made more baffling by seeing the former world leader, Britain, in a similar state. One theory is that this is all somehow a fluke. Trumpism is an aberration, a “blip on the long arc of history,” as Donald Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama put it. Once responsible leadership is restored, the Nobel laureates and Silicon Valley geniuses will retake the reins.
Another, more troubling theory is that incompetence is not a bug but a feature. The fact that the United States has so much power is precisely the problem. If you can make bad decisions without paying the costs, you will probably make them repeatedly. Privilege has blinded the country’s cosseted elite, indulging its delusions by protecting it from their consequences. The reckless disregard for reality is nothing new, in this theory. It has plagued U.S. leadership for decades, though the costs have usually been paid by other countries. The difference now is that the chickens are returning to roost.
That second theory is not a popular one. But like many unpopular theories, it has had a Cassandra: the Indian-born essayist, novelist, and historian Pankaj Mishra. Well before Brexit, Trump, or COVID-19, he sounded the siren. Anglophone leaders, inhabiting a hall of mirrors, were becoming dangerously detached from the actual world. The problem was not partisan but general, and it was reaching a crisis. Mishra has been beating this drum for more than a decade. His new collection, Bland Fanatics, lays out the case in essays dating back to 2008. Reading them now, while trapped in an apartment surrounded by strategic reserves of canned food and toilet paper, it’s hard not to think: You know, he might have had a point.
If there is one event that undergirds Mishra’s worldview, it’s World War I. The century preceding it had been an exceptionally calm one in European history—a “hundred years’ peace,” the economic historian Karl Polanyi called it, during which leading countries fought each other only rarely and briefly. With peace came prosperity, and by 1914, John Maynard Keynes remarked, even the middle classes possessed “conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.” Europe appeared the height of civilization and Britain the apex.
Or, at least, that’s how it looked from London. From Beijing, Léopoldville, and Calcutta, the view was different. Europe’s hundred years’ peace had been a century of invasion, subjugation, and outright slaughter in the world beyond Europe. Mishra mentions, among other atrocities, Belgium’s extractive rubber regime in the Congo, the hundreds of thousands killed in the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, and the massacres of the Herero people in German South West Africa (tantamount to genocide, Germany has since admitted). All this, he implies, was the price of those “conveniences, comforts, and amenities” that middle-class Westerners blithely enjoyed.
When World War I broke out, its ferocity took Europeans aback. Displaying a sort of “imperial insouciance,” they had largely ignored the capacity of their own governments for mindless brutality. But nothing about the war was surprising to those in the colonized world, Mishra argues. Africans and Asians knew European boasts of civilization to be hollow. World War I was merely the “extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism” boomeranging back on its perpetrators.
The pattern of World War I is the one to fear today, Mishra warns. Just as in 1913, the world’s leading intellectuals, many now located in the United States, believe unflinchingly in the rightness and universal applicability of their values. And, just as in 1913, they have maintained that self-assuredness by taking an extremely selective view of the world. In essay after essay, Mishra excoriates the liberal thinkers of the Anglophone world for what he takes to be their narcissism—“their own mind-numbing simplicities about democracy, its enemies, friends, the free world and all that sort of thing.” The deficiencies of such smug doctrines have been readily apparent in the global south for decades, Mishra believes. There, the United States pursued freedom and democracy by backing despots, meddling in elections, opposing wealth redistribution, and enforcing austerity. Now, a century after World War I, such scourges afflict the United States, too, putting liberalism’s failures on vivid display.
What’s so bad about liberalism? Mishra is not exactly illiberal: He approves of at least some versions of freedom, democracy, and human rights. His objection is less the creed than to its priests. Mainly, he notes how frequently the advocates of liberalism have papered over racism. Talk of freedom and rights, Mishra notices, usually comes with a tacit addendum: but only for some.
Inarguably, the prophets of liberalism have left an ambiguous legacy. John Locke’s theories about the consent of the governed did not prevent him from championing the dispossession of American Indians. John Stuart Mill offered what remains the most enduring statement of the liberal creed, yet he served the British Empire and felt despotism to be a “legitimate” form of government for “barbarians.” Woodrow Wilson spoke for self-determination but launched a 19-year military occupation of Haiti. You can trace a chain of hypocrisy from Thomas Jefferson keeping his own children enslaved to George W. Bush’s disastrous so-called liberation of Iraq. One time and perhaps it’s an accident; 17 times and it starts to look like a pattern. Whenever the full extension of liberal freedoms threatens the privileges of the powerful, liberal leaders have sought to restrict those freedoms because they have never truly been comfortable with the consequences of substantive equality.
That large contradiction at the heart of the liberal project has carried dangerous consequences, in Mishra’s view. To accommodate it, liberals have adopted a “blinkered history,” screening out the inequalities, violence, and racism endemic to their preferred system. This is how Niall Ferguson, an open defender of empire, becomes an in-demand pundit. Or how Thomas Friedman, who has variously championed the Iraq War, Israeli airstrikes on civilian areas, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, still commands respect as a paragon of common sense.
It would be better, Mishra feels, to listen to voices from the global south—he is particularly attentive to Asian intellectuals and earlier wrote a thoughtful book about them, From the Ruins of Empire. It’s not that Asian thinkers have rejected liberalism outright; it’s rather that they’ve always known its limits. Observing the close historical relationship between liberal ideas and imperial practice has led Indian, Chinese, and Japanese writers to political creeds that were more complex, less universalizing, and less fanatically individualistic. Mishra, who identifies as a “stepchild of the West,” finds much to affirm in the more circumspect, conflicted, and self-aware intellectual worlds of Asia. He feels similarly at home among the gloomy 19th-century thinkers of Russia and Germany, who also found themselves caught in liberalism’s undertow.
This is not just about diversifying the global intelligentsia. Seeing things from the vantage of the stepchildren, Mishra argues, reveals how insufficient the liberal obsession with formal processes has been. As Mohandas Gandhi argued, democracies could be only “nominal” so long as the “wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions” persisted. Obsessed with procedural justice but largely unbothered by economic inequalities, liberals nodded politely as “kleptocratic oligarchies” took root in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Mishra writes. And now, on cue, the oligarchs have seized the Oval Office.
Bland Fanatics puts Mishra in the ring with opponents of various sizes. Yet the ones who draw out the fighter in him are not the crude villains. Confronted with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has urged the equivalent of the paleo diet in sexual relations, Mishra does his duty. (“And you call me a fascist?” Peterson replied on Twitter. “You sanctimonious prick. If you were in my room at the moment, I’d slap you happily.”) It is, however, in response to well-intentioned, serious thinkers that Mishra’s analysis comes into sharpest focus.
The most probing essay in Bland Fanatics is on Ta-Nehisi Coates. Mishra sees in Coates a fellow stepchild, whom he regards with evident sympathy. Having grown up in Baltimore during the crack epidemic and seen a friend killed by police in college, Coates knows full well the violence that liberal democracy allows. Yet Mishra believes Coates, now a literary star, is falling too easily into the gravity well of the liberal intellectual sphere. This happened to Salman Rushdie, a “helplessly Anglophiliac Indian” whose later career has been marked more by hobnobbing with celebrities than giving voice to subaltern perspectives. “For a self-aware and independent-minded writer like Coates,” Mishra writes, “the danger is not so much seduction by power as a distortion of perspective caused by proximity to it.”
Mishra sees Coates teetering on the cusp of the Anglosphere’s delusions, particularly in his writings about Obama. Coates regards Obama as a “deeply moral human being” whose presidency was the “most incredible of eras.” Coates’s 2017 book, We Were Eight Years in Power, contains a memorable and gushing account of Obama’s BET-hosted farewell party: Naomi Campbell strutting about “in a sleeveless number,” Common lighting up the stage, a sense of achievement pulsing through the air. Reading it, it’s easy to share Coates’s pride. Yet Mishra rolls his eyes at this gathering of millionaires; it’s just the same self-satisfied celebration of an ascendant elite, only now racially diverse. Coates’s portrait of the Obama years, Mishra continues, is “remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones; despoliation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia; mass deportations; and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives.”
Such facets of power are all too easy to miss from a party at the White House. And that, for Mishra, is ultimately the problem. Perching atop the commanding heights doesn’t give you a better view; it gives you a worse one, because benefiting from a stark inequality tends to rob you of perspective. Without any intellectual ventilation, without taking seriously the warnings of those with other vantages, you’ll end up where we are, with “blond bullies” presiding over Washington and London and a baffled elite unable to do anything about it. The barbarians were never at the gate, Mishra observes. They were inside it, and they’ve been “ruling us for some time.”


foreignpolicy--2020-09-21--U.S. Election Heats Up After Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Death

U.S. Election Heats Up After Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’ s Death Here is today ’ s Foreign Policy brief : Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’ s death opens a new battleground in the U.S. election , Trump approves Oracle-Walmart deal to buy into TikTok , and Thai protesters take protests to the king ’ s doorstep .
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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday while undergoing treatment for cancer , leading to an outpouring of grief but instantly opening @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political fight between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden less than two months before the country ’ s presidential election .
As Foreign Policy ’ s Michael Hirsh wrote , Ginsburg ’ s “ replacement could crucially tilt the court ” toward either its conservative or liberal wing .
Controversy awaits .
With fewer than 50 days until the election , the timing of Ginsburg ’ s death leaves little time to complete the often long and cumbersome nomination process .
There are also questions over how Senate Republicans will handle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ President Barack Obama ’ s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016 , Merrick Garland , arguing that a president shouldn ’ t have the power to appoint a new Supreme Court justice in an election year .
Nothing guaranteed .
Leading Republicans have already backtracked on the logic they used to block Garland , signaling that they will facilitate the nomination process once Trump selects a replacement .
But with a small 53-47 majority in the 100-member Senate , Democrats would only need four Republicans to vote against Trump ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the election .
Wavering support .
Two key Republicans , Sen. Susan Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski , have already said that the decision to appoint a new justice should wait until after the election .
“ In fairness to the American people … the decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the President who is elected on November 3rd , ” Collins said in a statement on Saturday .
On the docket .
Trump is expected to nominate Ginsburg ’ s replacement in the coming days @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will choose a woman .
“ It will be a woman—a very talented , very brilliant woman , ” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina .
Justice-in-waiting ?
One of the names being floated as a frontrunner is Amy Coney Barrett , a judge on the U.S. court of appeals for the seventh circuit .
Barrett is popular among religious conservatives due in part to her strong Catholic faith , but pro-choice activists have raised concerns that she could help overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ considering his selection to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy , Trump reportedly told several people that he ’ s “ saving [ Barrett ] for Ginsburg.
” September 22 .
The General Debate begins at the U.N. General Assembly .
September 24-25 .
EU leaders host a special summit on the crisis in the eastern Mediterranean .
TikTok survives .
U.S. President Donald Trump has granted approval “ in concept ” to a bid by Oracle and Walmart to buy a share of the popular video-sharing app TikTok from the Chinese tech company ByteDance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the United States , which was due to go into effect on Sunday .
Last week , Oracle and ByteDance agreed to enter into a “ technical partnership ” in relation to TikTok , giving Oracle and WalMart a 20 percent minority stake in the app but leaving ByteDance as the majority owner .
According to Forbes , “ Oracle will serve as TikTok ’ s ‘ secure cloud technology provider ’ and Walmart will be a commercial partner.
” The companies agreed late last week to a series of terms laid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mitigating Washington ’ s national security concerns .
Trump was reportedly skeptical of the agreement at first , but the decision to restructure TikTok ’ s U.S. operations under companies headquartered in the United States seems to have satisfied his misgivings .
ByteDance will continue to own a majority stake in the new company , TikTok Global .
Far-right gaining ground in Italy .
Italian voters are going to the polls in the country ’ s first election since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic .
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte ’ s popularity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government has struggled to tackle issues such as the reopening of schools and the country ’ s continued economic woes .
The local elections are a crucial test for his governing coalition .
A right-wing coalition led by a candidate from the far-right Brothers of Italy party is expected to notch a victory in the region of Marche , bringing more than two decades of left-wing rule in the area to an end .
Strong performances by other far-right candidates are expected across the country .
Airstrikes kill civilians in Afghanistan .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the Taliban-controlled village of Sayed Ramazan in the northern Kunduz province , killing 24 people and wounding six others .
Witnesses told the Associated Press that most of those killed were civilians , but the Afghan defense ministry claimed that it killed 30 Taliban militants .
This violence has occurred against the backdrop of the ongoing peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government in Doha , Qatar .
A wave of killings across Afghanistan has been linked to the Taliban in recent days and weeks , and the United Nations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ continued violence in the country threatens to undermine the still fragile peace process .
Protesters take grievances to king ’ s doorstep in Thailand .
Thousands of protesters in Thailand marched to the king ’ s palace on Sunday to make new demands for limits on his power , marking a dramatic escalation of the country ’ s months-long political crisis .
Demonstrators laid a plaque near King Maha Vajiralongkorn ’ s official residence reading “ This country belongs to the people and is not the property of the monarch as they have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ letter to a police commissioner outside the privy council expressing their demands .
The move is considered especially daring in part because authorities have traditionally resorted to draconian measures to punish challenges to the power of the Thai monarchy .
Protests against the monarchy have gripped the country since February , with demonstrators calling for fresh elections and a new constitution that would put serious limits on the powers of the monarchy .
Opposition growing in the Ivory Coast .
The political crisis in the Ivory Coast is escalating as opposition leaders have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ acts of civil disobedience to block President Alassane Ouattara ’ s bid for a third term .
Critics of Ouattara , who was first elected president in 2010 , argue that his candidacy violates the two-term limit set in the country ’ s constitution .
His supporters , however , contend that Ouattara ’ s term count was reset because the constitution was ratified in 2016 , after he took office .
Protests against Ouattara have gripped the country since last month , leaving more than 12 people dead and raising concerns that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ plunge the country into another deadly civil war .
Russian expansionism goes extraterrestrial .
Dmitry Rogozin , the director general of the Russian state-owned space company Roscosmos , called Venus “ a Russian planet , ” and that “ resuming Venus exploration is on our agenda.
” The surprise statement came during an announcement that Moscow plans to send an independent space mission to Venus , in addition to another one planned with the United States , potentially expanding the new space race to Earth ’ s nearest neighbor .
Researchers said last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phosphine in Venus ’ s atmosphere , a byproduct of some microbial organisms on Earth that live in oxygen-starved environments , leading scientists to believe that it could be a sign of life on Venus .
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Send your tips , comments , questions , or corrections to morningbrief @ foreignpolicy.com .

Here is today’s Foreign Policy brief: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s deat h opens a new battleground in the U.S. election, Trump approves Oracle-Walmart deal to buy into TikTok , and Thai protesters take protests to the king's doorstep.
Here is today’s Foreign Policy brief: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death opens a new battleground in the U.S. election, Trump approves Oracle-Walmart deal to buy into TikTok, and Thai protesters take protests to the king’s doorstep.
If you would like to receive Morning Brief in your inbox every weekday, please sign up here.
Trump Expected to Name a Replacement in the Coming Days
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday while undergoing treatment for cancer, leading to an outpouring of grief but instantly opening a new battleground in an already intense political fight between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden less than two months before the country’s presidential election. As Foreign Policy’s Michael Hirsh wrote, Ginsburg’s “replacement could crucially tilt the court” toward either its conservative or liberal wing.
Controversy awaits. With fewer than 50 days until the election, the timing of Ginsburg’s death leaves little time to complete the often long and cumbersome nomination process. There are also questions over how Senate Republicans will handle the situation. Republicans controversially blocked former President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, Merrick Garland, arguing that a president shouldn’t have the power to appoint a new Supreme Court justice in an election year.
Nothing guaranteed. Leading Republicans have already backtracked on the logic they used to block Garland, signaling that they will facilitate the nomination process once Trump selects a replacement. But with a small 53-47 majority in the 100-member Senate, Democrats would only need four Republicans to vote against Trump’s pick to push the appointment until after the election.
Wavering support. Two key Republicans, Sen. Susan Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, have already said that the decision to appoint a new justice should wait until after the election. “In fairness to the American people … the decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the President who is elected on November 3rd,” Collins said in a statement on Saturday.
On the docket. Trump is expected to nominate Ginsburg’s replacement in the coming days, and he has confirmed that he will choose a woman. “It will be a woman—a very talented, very brilliant woman,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina.
Justice-in-waiting? One of the names being floated as a frontrunner is Amy Coney Barrett, a judge on the U.S. court of appeals for the seventh circuit. Barrett is popular among religious conservatives due in part to her strong Catholic faith, but pro-choice activists have raised concerns that she could help overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.
In 2018, while considering his selection to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, Trump reportedly told several people that he’s “saving [Barrett] for Ginsburg.”
The World This Week September 21. EU foreign ministers meet to discuss a variety of issues, including the ongoing crisis in Belarus. September 21. Trump is set to speak at the U.N. General Assembly. September 21. Washington is expected to announce plans on how to enforce “snapback” sanctions on Iran. September 21-25. Brexit negotiations continue between the European Union and the United Kingdom. September 21-26. Russia hosts the Caucasus 2020 military exercises.
September 22. The General Debate begins at the U.N. General Assembly.
September 24-25. EU leaders host a special summit on the crisis in the eastern Mediterranean.
What We’re Following Today
TikTok survives. U.S. President Donald Trump has granted approval “in concept” to a bid by Oracle and Walmart to buy a share of the popular video-sharing app TikTok from the Chinese tech company ByteDance, preventing the app’s ban in the United States, which was due to go into effect on Sunday.
Last week, Oracle and ByteDance agreed to enter into a “technical partnership” in relation to TikTok, giving Oracle and WalMart a 20 percent minority stake in the app but leaving ByteDance as the majority owner. According to Forbes, “Oracle will serve as TikTok’s ‘secure cloud technology provider’ and Walmart will be a commercial partner.” The companies agreed late last week to a series of terms laid out by the U.S. Treasury aimed at mitigating Washington’s national security concerns.
Trump was reportedly skeptical of the agreement at first, but the decision to restructure TikTok’s U.S. operations under companies headquartered in the United States seems to have satisfied his misgivings. ByteDance will continue to own a majority stake in the new company, TikTok Global.
Far-right gaining ground in Italy. Italian voters are going to the polls in the country’s first election since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s popularity has dipped in recent weeks as his government has struggled to tackle issues such as the reopening of schools and the country’s continued economic woes. The local elections are a crucial test for his governing coalition.
A right-wing coalition led by a candidate from the far-right Brothers of Italy party is expected to notch a victory in the region of Marche, bringing more than two decades of left-wing rule in the area to an end. Strong performances by other far-right candidates are expected across the country.
Airstrikes kill civilians in Afghanistan. The Afghan government launched a series of airstrikes in the Taliban-controlled village of Sayed Ramazan in the northern Kunduz province, killing 24 people and wounding six others. Witnesses told the Associated Press that most of those killed were civilians, but the Afghan defense ministry claimed that it killed 30 Taliban militants. This violence has occurred against the backdrop of the ongoing peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government in Doha, Qatar.
A wave of killings across Afghanistan has been linked to the Taliban in recent days and weeks, and the United Nations’ top official in Afghanistan warned that continued violence in the country threatens to undermine the still fragile peace process.
Keep an Eye On
Protesters take grievances to king’s doorstep in Thailand. Thousands of protesters in Thailand marched to the king’s palace on Sunday to make new demands for limits on his power, marking a dramatic escalation of the country’s months-long political crisis. Demonstrators laid a plaque near King Maha Vajiralongkorn’s official residence reading “This country belongs to the people and is not the property of the monarch as they have deceived us,” before delivering a letter to a police commissioner outside the privy council expressing their demands. The move is considered especially daring in part because authorities have traditionally resorted to draconian measures to punish challenges to the power of the Thai monarchy.
Protests against the monarchy have gripped the country since February, with demonstrators calling for fresh elections and a new constitution that would put serious limits on the powers of the monarchy.
Opposition growing in the Ivory Coast. The political crisis in the Ivory Coast is escalating as opposition leaders have called for the public to engage in acts of civil disobedience to block President Alassane Ouattara’s bid for a third term. Critics of Ouattara, who was first elected president in 2010, argue that his candidacy violates the two-term limit set in the country’s constitution. His supporters, however, contend that Ouattara’s term count was reset because the constitution was ratified in 2016, after he took office.
Protests against Ouattara have gripped the country since last month, leaving more than 12 people dead and raising concerns that next month’s presidential election could plunge the country into another deadly civil war.
Odds and Ends
Russian expansionism goes extraterrestrial. Dmitry Rogozin, the director general of the Russian state-owned space company Roscosmos, called Venus “a Russian planet,” and that “resuming Venus exploration is on our agenda.” The surprise statement came during an announcement that Moscow plans to send an independent space mission to Venus, in addition to another one planned with the United States, potentially expanding the new space race to Earth’s nearest neighbor.
Researchers said last week that they have detected the gas phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere, a byproduct of some microbial organisms on Earth that live in oxygen-starved environments, leading scientists to believe that it could be a sign of life on Venus.
That’s it for today.
For more from FP, visit foreignpolicy.com, subscribe here, or sign up for our other newsletters. Send your tips, comments, questions, or corrections to morningbrief@foreignpolicy.com.


foreignpolicy--2020-09-21--Trump’s Policies Have Convinced Iran to Build a More Advanced Nuclear Program Before Negotiating

Trump ’ s Policies Have Convinced Iran to Build a More Advanced Nuclear Program Before Negotiating After last month ’ s stinging rebuke at the United Nations Security Council , when only the Dominican Republic supported a U.S. resolution to indefinitely extend the arms embargo on Iran , it is now clear that President Donald Trump ’ s Iran strategy has failed in achieving its goal .
The president ’ s decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal in favor of a “ maximum pressure ” strategy has battered Iran ’ s economy but left the deal standing .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ kill off the deal , the more it has found itself isolated and Iran obdurate .
There is little chance of a breakthrough before the U.S. presidential elections .
Iran , however , could see the benefit in engaging the next president to relax pressure on its economy .
Tehran wants the new U.S. administration to return to the 2015 deal .
However , even a Biden administration , which has said it would do so , would look to go beyond the current deal to a more comprehensive nuclear agreement .
Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has made that outcome unlikely .
Over the past four years , Trump has used economic sanctions against Iran with unprecedented ferocity .
In a single day in 2018 , his administration imposed about 700 new sanctions on the country .
The depth and breadth of them reduced Iran ’ s oil exports to a trickle , cut Iran off from international finance institutions , plunged the Iranian economy into greater depths of unemployment and inflation , and denied it access to medical supplies to fight the explosion of the COVID-19 pandemic in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the world Washington ’ s unrivaled ability to inflict economic pain .
But this extraordinary display of power has not borne fruit , and significantly , could make halting Iran ’ s nuclear pursuits less likely .
Trump ’ s maximal use of sanctions has become a policy overreach that has alarmed both U.S. allies and adversaries , prompting not just concerted diplomatic resistance , but investments in economic countermeasures aimed at circumventing the U.S. dollar ’ s supremacy in the global financial order .
For instance , last month Beijing encouraged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the SWIFT network commonly used to conduct transactions , and which is susceptible to U.S. pressure .
China is clearly looking to diminish the United States ’ ability to pressure adversaries by denying them access to international financial networks .
Mounting resistance to U.S. sanctions will make it more difficult for Washington to rally international support to pressure Iran .
That would require fewer U.S. sanctions , not more .
The Obama administration used economic sanctions to compel Iran to negotiate a nuclear deal .
Trump expected to quickly recreate that formula .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ given Iran an incentive to resist .
Despite greater economic pressure , Trump has only encouraged Iran to redouble its investment in its nuclear program .
It has already backed away from a number of its commitments under the nuclear deal and resumed its enrichment activities .
It has become consensus view in Iran that it miscalculated last time ; it went into negotiations with the U.S. government too early and with too little leverage .
That is why Trump administration officials could so hastily withdraw from the nuclear deal and see no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
To secure the 2015 deal , the United States gave up little at the negotiating table , and what it gave up it quickly took back by reimposing economic sanctions .
If Iran ’ s nuclear program had been more advanced , then Iran could have asked for more concessions giving up less , and Washington would have shown greater commitment to agreement .
The lesson Tehran has learned is that a nuclear deal will only be successful if Iran has enough leverage to force the United States to lift more sanctions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Twenty thousand centrifuges and a few hundred kilograms of 20 percent-enriched uranium were clearly not enough .
If there is a next time , Iran will aim to come to the table with much more .
Iranians believe that they fulfilled their commitments to the 2015 nuclear deal .
They point to a dozen favorable reports by the United Nations nuclear watchdog , the International Atomic Energy Agency ( IAEA ) .
Tehran believes that even before leaving the deal , the United States was dragging its feet on fulfilling its side @ @ @ @ @ @ @ failed to appreciate the many legal intricacies of the U.S. sanctions regime and did not secure guarantees of sanctions relief in the deal .
But the larger lesson is that in the deal Iran gave up tangible physical assets that it had built over time and at great cost , whereas the U.S. merely agreed to rescind laws that could one day come back into force .
There was no meaningful cost to lifting sanctions nor to reimposing them .
It is to change that calculus that Iran has resisted sanctions pressure , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pay compensation for abandoning the deal and inflicting economic pain on Iran .
For Iran ’ s Supreme Leader , Libya is the object lesson .
When Muammar al-Qaddafi agreed to give up his nuclear program , the Supreme Leader told his advisors that this was a monumental mistake that would undo the Libyan leader .
That the West played a hand in toppling his regime proved to the Ayatollah that giving up nuclear ambitions will only buy you regime change .
Iran ’ s leaders have come to see regime change as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ They have blamed popular protests that have rocked the country over the past three years on outside interference—assuming Washington ’ s strategy is to squeeze the population into unrest and then use its agents to light the fuse for a mass uprising .
Would the United States have followed such a strategy had Iran not given up its nuclear program ?
The guardians of the Islamic Republic think not .
The imperative of regime survival will remain a barrier to easy concessions in nuclear talks , unless the fear of regime change subsides @ @ @ @ @ @ @ taught Iran—and all aspirants seeking to join the nuclear club—the wrong lessons : that they should have a bigger nuclear program before talking , negotiate incrementally , and give up nuclear assets slowly lest sanctions come back .
For the United States , there is no easy path to a larger nuclear deal with Iran .
It will have to start by fully restoring the 2015 nuclear deal , and then work with Europe , China , and Russia to plan for the difficult task of rebuilding trust and momentum for a new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .

After last month’s stinging rebuke at the United Nations Security Council, when only the Dominican Republic supported a U.S. resolution to indefinitely extend the arms embargo on Iran, it is now clear that President Donald Trump’s Iran strategy has failed in achieving its goal.
After last month’s stinging rebuke at the United Nations Security Council, when only the Dominican Republic supported a U.S. resolution to indefinitely extend the arms embargo on Iran, it is now clear that President Donald Trump’s Iran strategy has failed in achieving its goal.
The president’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal in favor of a “maximum pressure” strategy has battered Iran’s economy but left the deal standing. The harder the administration has pushed to kill off the deal, the more it has found itself isolated and Iran obdurate. There is little chance of a breakthrough before the U.S. presidential elections. Iran, however, could see the benefit in engaging the next president to relax pressure on its economy. Tehran wants the new U.S. administration to return to the 2015 deal. However, even a Biden administration, which has said it would do so, would look to go beyond the current deal to a more comprehensive nuclear agreement. Trump’s failed gambit, however, has made that outcome unlikely.
Over the past four years, Trump has used economic sanctions against Iran with unprecedented ferocity. In a single day in 2018, his administration imposed about 700 new sanctions on the country. The depth and breadth of them reduced Iran’s oil exports to a trickle, cut Iran off from international finance institutions, plunged the Iranian economy into greater depths of unemployment and inflation, and denied it access to medical supplies to fight the explosion of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country. Trump has made clear to the world Washington’s unrivaled ability to inflict economic pain. But this extraordinary display of power has not borne fruit, and significantly, could make halting Iran’s nuclear pursuits less likely.
Trump’s maximal use of sanctions has become a policy overreach that has alarmed both U.S. allies and adversaries, prompting not just concerted diplomatic resistance, but investments in economic countermeasures aimed at circumventing the U.S. dollar’s supremacy in the global financial order. For instance, last month Beijing encouraged Chinese banks to reduce their reliance on the SWIFT network commonly used to conduct transactions, and which is susceptible to U.S. pressure. China is clearly looking to diminish the United States’ ability to pressure adversaries by denying them access to international financial networks. Mounting resistance to U.S. sanctions will make it more difficult for Washington to rally international support to pressure Iran. That would require fewer U.S. sanctions, not more.
The Obama administration used economic sanctions to compel Iran to negotiate a nuclear deal. Trump expected to quickly recreate that formula. This time, however, pressure has given Iran an incentive to resist. Despite greater economic pressure, Trump has only encouraged Iran to redouble its investment in its nuclear program. It has already backed away from a number of its commitments under the nuclear deal and resumed its enrichment activities.
It has become consensus view in Iran that it miscalculated last time; it went into negotiations with the U.S. government too early and with too little leverage. That is why Trump administration officials could so hastily withdraw from the nuclear deal and see no cost to imposing maximum pressure on Iran.
To secure the 2015 deal, the United States gave up little at the negotiating table, and what it gave up it quickly took back by reimposing economic sanctions. If Iran’s nuclear program had been more advanced, then Iran could have asked for more concessions giving up less, and Washington would have shown greater commitment to agreement.
The lesson Tehran has learned is that a nuclear deal will only be successful if Iran has enough leverage to force the United States to lift more sanctions and then remain committed to a deal. Twenty thousand centrifuges and a few hundred kilograms of 20 percent-enriched uranium were clearly not enough. If there is a next time, Iran will aim to come to the table with much more.
Iranians believe that they fulfilled their commitments to the 2015 nuclear deal. They point to a dozen favorable reports by the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Tehran believes that even before leaving the deal, the United States was dragging its feet on fulfilling its side of the bargain. Iranian negotiators clearly failed to appreciate the many legal intricacies of the U.S. sanctions regime and did not secure guarantees of sanctions relief in the deal.
But the larger lesson is that in the deal Iran gave up tangible physical assets that it had built over time and at great cost, whereas the U.S. merely agreed to rescind laws that could one day come back into force. There was no meaningful cost to lifting sanctions nor to reimposing them. It is to change that calculus that Iran has resisted sanctions pressure, and recently demanded that the U.S. government pay compensation for abandoning the deal and inflicting economic pain on Iran.
For Iran’s Supreme Leader, Libya is the object lesson. When Muammar al-Qaddafi agreed to give up his nuclear program, the Supreme Leader told his advisors that this was a monumental mistake that would undo the Libyan leader. That the West played a hand in toppling his regime proved to the Ayatollah that giving up nuclear ambitions will only buy you regime change.
Iran’s leaders have come to see regime change as the ultimate goal of maximum pressure. They have blamed popular protests that have rocked the country over the past three years on outside interference—assuming Washington’s strategy is to squeeze the population into unrest and then use its agents to light the fuse for a mass uprising. Would the United States have followed such a strategy had Iran not given up its nuclear program? The guardians of the Islamic Republic think not. The imperative of regime survival will remain a barrier to easy concessions in nuclear talks, unless the fear of regime change subsides in Tehran.
The Trump administration has taught Iran—and all aspirants seeking to join the nuclear club—the wrong lessons: that they should have a bigger nuclear program before talking, negotiate incrementally, and give up nuclear assets slowly lest sanctions come back.
For the United States, there is no easy path to a larger nuclear deal with Iran. It will have to start by fully restoring the 2015 nuclear deal, and then work with Europe, China, and Russia to plan for the difficult task of rebuilding trust and momentum for a new deal—and for managing the long road beyond.