foreignpolicy--2020-09-29--How the United States Learned to Love Human Rights

How the United States Learned to Love Human Rights U.S. President Donald Trump ’ s cozy relations with authoritarian leaders are just the most publicized part of a deeper change in U.S. foreign policy he initiated .
During his administration , the United States has fully retreated from the emphasis on human rights that has characterized administrations of both parties for more than 40 years .
Human rights are now on the ballot this November .
If former Vice President Joe Biden is elected president , he will move the United States back to its traditional policy .
But it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ became a U.S. tradition in the first place .
The history of universal human rights in U.S. diplomacy is much shorter than most Americans might think—and it largely owes its existence to one man .
One day in the early 1980s , not long after he lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan , a slightly depressed ( and nearly broke ) Jimmy Carter was strolling through the campus of Emory University in Atlanta .
He was introduced to Karl Deutsch , a renowned political scientist visiting from Harvard .
Deutsch told Carter that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a handful of U.S. presidencies would be remembered , but that his would be among them because of his focus on human rights .
Carter ’ s eyes welled with tears .
Carter often argued that the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—drafted by a group of diplomats at the United Nations led by Eleanor Roosevelt—was akin to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution in its importance .
He believed that the values in it were descended from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew , in which Jesus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ another .
Bringing human rights into the center of U.S. policymaking wasn ’ t easy .
Powerful members of the foreign-policy establishment had long claimed that letting Wilsonian idealism interfere with a tough-minded realpolitik approach was soft and naive , especially during the Cold War .
They argued that the “ national interest ” required being critical of communists who abused human rights but indulgent toward authoritarians who did the same .
Carter understood that this double standard drained U.S. foreign policy of its moral authority .
Strong , secure presidents representing strong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even if they are allies ; weak , insecure presidents from countries in retreat give them a pass in order to pursue poorly defined interests .
Carter was strong and secure in his role , even if he didn ’ t always look that way .
The inner strength came from religious and moral conviction .
Carter felt that God had created the United States in part “ to set an example for the rest of the world ” and that the United States was the “ first nation to dedicate itself clearly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In that sense , his new policy was an organic outgrowth of the country ’ s founding ideals and of his own eagerness to consecrate them .
The beauty of Carter ’ s reintroduction of human rights into the foreign-policy debate was that it transformed the concept from a Cold War weapon ( the United States highlighted repression in Eastern Europe ; the Soviet Union highlighted the Jim Crow South ) into what Carter called “ a beacon of light for all mankind.
” It injected a growing international movement with energy and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ struggle , and set a new moral benchmark for governments and civil society to use in assessing the performance of leaders—a benchmark that the U.S. government is now itself failing to meet .
Carter gingerly raised human rights from time to time on the campaign trail in 1976 .
It was a political winner , uniting liberals critical of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ’ s support for dictators , voters who belonged to ethnic groups affected by Soviet control of nations behind the Iron Curtain , Christians worried about religious persecution @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to leave the Soviet Union .
Carter announced his intentions more emphatically in his inaugural address with the line that “ our commitment to human rights must be absolute , ” although most sophisticated listeners knew that the world was much too messy for that .
The president ’ s new policy was selective and inconsistent from the start , especially as applied to strategically important allies .
Vital interests took priority over moral ones , most fatefully in the case of Iran , where Carter toasted the shah and raised the abuses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ private meetings .
When the shah was driven from power in 1979 by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini , Carter ’ s support for the monarch led to the seizure of U.S. hostages in Tehran .
But for all the built-in hypocrisy , the message was unmistakable : For the first time , a U.S. president went from merely promoting U.S. ideals to offering specific critiques of specific countries with specific penalties attached .
Carter aimed to condition military and economic aid— and even World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans—on the progress nations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ without trial , censorship , and other abuses .
And he would keep the pressure on both communist and noncommunist regimes .
The first test of Carter ’ s human rights policy came within 24 hours of his taking office .
On the day after his inauguration , Jan. 21 , 1977 , Andrei Sakharov , an esteemed Russian physicist who had won the Nobel Peace Prize two years earlier for his work as a human rights activist , wrote to Carter .
Sakharov named political prisoners in the Soviet Union and asked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his promises to improve human rights .
Two weeks later , Carter informed Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in a private meeting that he would hold the Soviets to the commitments to human rights made in the 1975 Helsinki Accords and that he intended to speak out about Sakharov , whose Moscow apartment had recently been ransacked .
( This was a break from the approach of former President Gerald Ford , who in 1975 was scheduled to meet with famed novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , a former Soviet political prisoner , but canceled at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ jeopardizing détente . )
Breaking protocol , he sent Sakharov a forthright letter that the dissident held aloft for photographers in Moscow so that they could see Carter ’ s signature at the bottom .
This enraged the Kremlin but had profound consequences .
As Robert Gates , who served as secretary of defense during the administrations of President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama , wrote later , “ Whether isolated and little-known Soviet dissident or world-famous Soviet scientist , Carter ’ s policy encouraged them to press on.
” Several @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who had helped Sakharov translate his letter into English , Anatoly ( later Natan ) Sharansky , was arrested in Moscow on trumped-up charges of treason .
Carter protested to Dobrynin and , that fall , to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko , both of whom responded with stony indifference .
Gromyko told Carter after the opening of the U.N. General Assembly that Sharansky was a “ microscopic dot of no importance to anyone.
” When Sharansky went on trial in Moscow , Carter—again breaking protocol—called the charges that he was an American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meeting with a Soviet official for the rest of his time in office , Carter brought up Sharansky .
And on every visit to a closed society , Carter carried the bully pulpit with him , inspiring local populations by giving a speech or holding a live televised news conference that could not be censored , an important tradition followed by his successors .
In 1979 Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev completed what Carter described as a “ highly emotional ” prisoner swap , trading two Soviet spies being held in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Soviet Union , including three Jewish refuseniks and Georgi Vins , a Russian Baptist pastor jailed in 1974 for conducting an underground ministry in the Soviet Union .
A mere four days after he was transported from prison in a Siberian cattle car , Vins joined the president in Washington for church .
Sitting next to first lady Rosalynn Carter in the pew , he pulled off his shoe , lifted the inner sole , and showed her a small , wrinkled photograph of Jimmy Carter he had kept in prison .
At @ @ @ @ @ @ @ different way of thinking about the country ’ s longtime adversaries .
In an important speech at Notre Dame University , he declared the nation “ now free of that inordinate fear of communism ” that “ led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.
” Carter was venturing where no postwar U.S. president had dared go before : “ For too many years , we ’ ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries , sometimes abandoning our own values for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the decision to fight in Vietnam .
“ We ’ ve fought fire with fire , never thinking that fire is better quenched with water.
” Freedom would be that potent dousing force .
Authoritarians could no longer justify their repression by claiming that they were just fighting communism .
In another bracing speech in 1977 , Carter told the United Nations that nations would have to relinquish certain traditional ideas of sovereignty : “ No member of the United Nations can claim that mistreatment of its citizens is solely its own business.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ community was that freedom could actually enhance security by winning governments the sincere support of their people .
Under this powerful new worldview , human rights were not just compatible with national interests ; they advanced them .
Inside the U.S. government , Carter institutionalized the concept of human rights by founding a new State Department Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs , which issued “ country reports ” tracking the behavior of abusive governments .
These influential reports helped drive policy decisions .
To run the bureau , Carter and Vance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for human rights , and gave the job to Patricia Derian , an activist of unusual vision and determination who had moved to Mississippi in 1959 to work for civil rights .
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance empowered Derian ( even putting her just down the hall from him on the seventh floor ) , but she clashed with the department ’ s other assistant secretaries , who paid lip service to human rights but gave priority to shopworn strategic objectives and arms sales abroad .
They didn ’ t appreciate an outspoken @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their pinstriped world .
Derian was so single-minded in her devotion to human rights that U.S. ambassadors winced when they learned she was traveling to their region .
Upon arrival in a dictatorship , she never unpacked because she wasn ’ t sure how quickly the regime might force her to leave .
Lawrence Eagleburger , a future secretary of state in the Reagan administration , serving as ambassador to Yugoslavia , made a point of leaving Belgrade every time Derian came to town to tongue-lash Marshal Tito ’ s communist government , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in his assessment of Derian and the policy .
“ I never thought I ’ d concede this , ” Eagleburger said .
“ A lot of people in a lot of different countries are better off because Jimmy Carter made an issue of it.
” Back in Washington , the president sometimes invited Derian to the Oval Office for a firsthand report .
Before certain overseas trips , Carter would offer instructions on what to ask for .
Derian would also , as Carter remembered , “ add her own feelings ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He didn ’ t mind .
Carter ’ s human rights policy was “ ambiguous , ambivalent , and ambidextrous , ” as Hodding Carter ( no relation ) , Derian ’ s husband and the State Department spokesman , described it .
His wife was often frustrated by the lack of support in the State Department and White House .
But the policy was historic nonetheless .
Roberta Cohen , who worked closely with Derian , credited Carter with “ planting the seeds for a change of thinking in the world—seeds that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and ideas matter.
” Argentina was especially challenging .
In 1976 the military government launched a vicious “ dirty war ” against suspected leftist terrorists , secretly backed by Kissinger .
By the time Carter took office , an estimated 15,000 people had “ disappeared.
” One publisher , Jacobo Timerman , was imprisoned and tortured in 1977 after publicizing the disappearances .
Timerman credited Derian with saving his life , and resourceful U.S. diplomats in Argentina saved hundreds more .
For all of the successes of the new policy , the Cold @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In Indonesia , the Suharto regime was so anti-communist and friendly to the United States that Carter was slow to denounce the butchering of left-wing separatists in the province of East Timor , where the death toll from violence and starvation reached 150,000 .
( He finally joined efforts to free 50,000 political prisoners . )
The Philippines , a critical strategic ally in the Pacific facing a communist insurgency in its outer islands , offered another example of the clash between “ power and principle ” ( a term which became the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s memoirs ) .
Richard Holbrooke , the talented , egotistical diplomat driving policy in the region , argued that if the Carter administration pushed out longtime president Ferdinand Marcos and the Philippines fell to a Marxist regime , the fallout would be disastrous not just for human rights but also for the future of the Democratic Party .
Carter agreed , though this pragmatism didn ’ t stop him from decrying in his diary the “ weak-kneed approach ” of those in Washington who would be willing to drop the topic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to appease dictators.
” And he so disliked dealing with Marcos and his wife , Imelda , that he fobbed them off on Vice President Walter Mondale at every opportunity .
In South Korea , Carter threatened to pull all U.S. troops if the government executed Kim Dae-jung , a human rights activist and future Nobel Peace Prize winner wrongly accused of being a communist .
The South Korean regime didn ’ t want to give Carter the satisfaction of releasing Kim on his watch , so it wasn ’ t until the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But Kim knew who had saved him .
When he was elected president of South Korea in 1998 , he invited Derian to his swearing-in and told her that he wouldn ’ t be alive without the efforts of the Carter administration .
The worst human rights violation to occur in Asia during Carter ’ s term was the genocide in Cambodia .
From 1975 to 1979 , Cambodian leader Pol Pot ’ s Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 1.7 million people , about one-fifth of the population .
In 1978 Carter declared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rights in the world , ” and he joined international condemnation of the regime , though he later admitted , “ I should have denounced them more forcefully.
” While direct military intervention was out of the question , what Carter did next was out of character .
In late 1978 , Vietnam ( which was backed by the Soviet Union ) invaded Cambodia ( which was backed by China ) and removed the murderous Khmer Rouge .
This should have been welcome news for the president , even if he didn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Cambodian genocide .
But Carter faced a political and moral dilemma .
He knew that accepting Vietnam ’ s attack on its neighbor would validate aggression and complicate efforts to normalize relations with China .
To bond with Beijing , he would have to criticize Hanoi .
This left Carter once again favoring geostrategic considerations over moral ones .
Only years later did it become clear just how entangled the United States had been in the continuation of the Khmer Rouge .
“ I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 1998 .
While he said he considered the Khmer Rouge “ an abomination , ” the national security advisor remained wedded to the old Kissinger formula of “ playing the China card ” against the Soviet Union .
It got worse .
With U.S.-Soviet tensions growing sharply in 1980 , the United States voted in the United Nations to seat the remnants of Pol Pot ’ s government-in-exile instead of the new Cambodian leaders , who may have been the puppets of Vietnam ( and thus the Soviet Union ) but at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Carter ’ s explanation—that he was siding in the United Nations with China , Australia , and Western Europe against the Soviet Union , Vietnam , and Cuba—was practical but unpersuasive even in parts of his own State Department .
Would China have really reversed course and broken its new diplomatic relations with the United States if the United States voted against seating the Khmer Rouge in the United Nations ?
Not likely .
That U.S. vote—described by Vance in his memoirs as “ extremely distasteful ” but necessary to maintain alliances and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Norodom Sihanouk—was a measure of Cold War thinking in that era .
Too often , Carter , despite his best intentions , allowed a narrow and often mistaken definition of “ the national interest ” to prevail .
The seeds that Carter planted slowly bore fruit .
By 1981 , Brazil , Bolivia , Peru , and Uruguay were already moving away from dictatorships .
Argentina returned to democracy in 1983 ; the new president , Raúl Alfonsín , described himself as a “ Carterite ” and said the United States ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lives .
Carter ’ s legacy contributed to democracy building in Chile , Ecuador , Colombia , Costa Rica , and even Paraguay .
In the 1970s , only one or two Latin American nations were democracies ; by the early 2000s , only one or two were not .
Many historians of the Cold War stress the importance of “ soft power ” : nonmilitary cultural factors that cause catalytic change inside closed societies .
Carter was an early believer that Western music could help hollow out the Soviet system .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Gritty Dirt Band become the first rock-and-roll band to play on Russian soil , part of an infusion of Western values that Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev later said “ taught the young there was another life.
” Dobrynin , who served as the Soviet ambassador in Washington through five presidencies , conceded in his memoirs that Carter ’ s human rights policies “ played a significant role ” in the Soviet Union loosening its grip at home and in Eastern Europe .
Once liberalization was under way , Dobrynin concluded , it couldn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the dissident playwright who in 1993 became president of the Czech Republic , put it in psychological terms .
He argued that Carter ’ s policy not only inspired him in prison , it also undermined “ the self-confidence ” of the Soviet bloc , which imperiled the strength and legitimacy of the state .
Meanwhile , the self-confidence of Eastern Europe ’ s human rights organizations grew .
A new global movement was taking shape , as authoritarian regimes on both the right and the left bent to the democratic revolution @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1990s .
Dissidents during these decades no longer felt so alone when the prison door clanged shut .
More important , as former President Barack Obama told me recently , the concept of human rights became permanently encoded in the global conversation : “ He introduced an explicit language around human rights and what previously had been an afterthought in foreign policy.
” Obama saw Carter as an important prod for his successors , who learned from him that “ it wasn ’ t enough to talk about America as being a beacon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did , but that it had to mean something.
” Trump has abandoned the human rights policies of his predecessors .
He supports Chinese President Xi Jinping ’ s abuse of dissidents , expresses admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan , and writes love letters to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un , among other signs of his total disregard for human rights .
He has kept the post of assistant secretary of state for human rights vacant for four years .
( His one nominee was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the George W. Bush administration ’ s torture program . )
If he is reelected , Trump will extinguish the last embers of a policy that , starting in 1977 , had helped spread freedom and democracy around the world .
By contrast , within days of taking office , former Vice President Joe Biden and his choice for secretary of state would revive the human rights policy begun under Carter and move to stem the authoritarian tide .
Voters in November have a clear choice about whether they believe in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recently , been seen as bedrock U.S. values .
This article is adapted from Jonathan Alter ’ s new book His Very Best : Jimmy Carter , a Life .

U.S. President Donald Trump's cozy relations with authoritarian leaders are just the most publicized part of a deeper change in U.S. foreign policy he initiated. During his administration, the United States has fully retreated from the emphasis on human rights that has characterized administrations of both parties for more than 40 years.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s cozy relations with authoritarian leaders are just the most publicized part of a deeper change in U.S. foreign policy he initiated. During his administration, the United States has fully retreated from the emphasis on human rights that has characterized administrations of both parties for more than 40 years.
Human rights are now on the ballot this November. If former Vice President Joe Biden is elected president, he will move the United States back to its traditional policy. But it’s worth considering how that policy became a U.S. tradition in the first place. The history of universal human rights in U.S. diplomacy is much shorter than most Americans might think—and it largely owes its existence to one man.
This article is adapted from Jonathan Alter’s new book His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.
One day in the early 1980s, not long after he lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan, a slightly depressed (and nearly broke) Jimmy Carter was strolling through the campus of Emory University in Atlanta. He was introduced to Karl Deutsch, a renowned political scientist visiting from Harvard. Deutsch told Carter that a thousand years from now, only a handful of U.S. presidencies would be remembered, but that his would be among them because of his focus on human rights. Carter’s eyes welled with tears.
Carter often argued that the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—drafted by a group of diplomats at the United Nations led by Eleanor Roosevelt—was akin to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution in its importance. He believed that the values in it were descended from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus taught people how they should treat one another.
Bringing human rights into the center of U.S. policymaking wasn’t easy. Powerful members of the foreign-policy establishment had long claimed that letting Wilsonian idealism interfere with a tough-minded realpolitik approach was soft and naive, especially during the Cold War. They argued that the “national interest” required being critical of communists who abused human rights but indulgent toward authoritarians who did the same.
Carter understood that this double standard drained U.S. foreign policy of its moral authority. Strong, secure presidents representing strong, secure superpowers take on bullies, even if they are allies; weak, insecure presidents from countries in retreat give them a pass in order to pursue poorly defined interests. Carter was strong and secure in his role, even if he didn’t always look that way. The inner strength came from religious and moral conviction. Carter felt that God had created the United States in part “to set an example for the rest of the world” and that the United States was the “first nation to dedicate itself clearly to basic moral and philosophical principles.” In that sense, his new policy was an organic outgrowth of the country’s founding ideals and of his own eagerness to consecrate them.
The beauty of Carter’s reintroduction of human rights into the foreign-policy debate was that it transformed the concept from a Cold War weapon (the United States highlighted repression in Eastern Europe; the Soviet Union highlighted the Jim Crow South) into what Carter called “a beacon of light for all mankind.” It injected a growing international movement with energy and purpose, globalized the U.S. civil rights struggle, and set a new moral benchmark for governments and civil society to use in assessing the performance of leaders—a benchmark that the U.S. government is now itself failing to meet.
Carter was a mediocre communicator who often flubbed his applause lines; the columnist Murray Kempton described his television self as “frozen indifference.” But there was nothing indifferent in his dogged efforts to put “human rights” into the international vocabulary. Among simple ways of framing public policy, only President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society entered the language with the same permanence, and their policies were limited to the United States.
Carter gingerly raised human rights from time to time on the campaign trail in 1976. It was a political winner, uniting liberals critical of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s support for dictators, voters who belonged to ethnic groups affected by Soviet control of nations behind the Iron Curtain, Christians worried about religious persecution, and Jews concerned about dissidents unable to leave the Soviet Union. Carter announced his intentions more emphatically in his inaugural address with the line that “our commitment to human rights must be absolute,” although most sophisticated listeners knew that the world was much too messy for that.
The president’s new policy was selective and inconsistent from the start, especially as applied to strategically important allies. Vital interests took priority over moral ones, most fatefully in the case of Iran, where Carter toasted the shah and raised the abuses of his secret police only in their private meetings. When the shah was driven from power in 1979 by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Carter’s support for the monarch led to the seizure of U.S. hostages in Tehran.
But for all the built-in hypocrisy, the message was unmistakable: For the first time, a U.S. president went from merely promoting U.S. ideals to offering specific critiques of specific countries with specific penalties attached. Carter aimed to condition military and economic aid— and even World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans—on the progress nations made toward ending extralegal killings, detention without trial, censorship, and other abuses. And he would keep the pressure on both communist and noncommunist regimes.
The first test of Carter’s human rights policy came within 24 hours of his taking office. On the day after his inauguration, Jan. 21, 1977, Andrei Sakharov, an esteemed Russian physicist who had won the Nobel Peace Prize two years earlier for his work as a human rights activist, wrote to Carter. Sakharov named political prisoners in the Soviet Union and asked the new president to make good on his promises to improve human rights.
Two weeks later, Carter informed Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in a private meeting that he would hold the Soviets to the commitments to human rights made in the 1975 Helsinki Accords and that he intended to speak out about Sakharov, whose Moscow apartment had recently been ransacked. (This was a break from the approach of former President Gerald Ford, who in 1975 was scheduled to meet with famed novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a former Soviet political prisoner, but canceled at the last minute out of fear of jeopardizing détente.) Breaking protocol, he sent Sakharov a forthright letter that the dissident held aloft for photographers in Moscow so that they could see Carter’s signature at the bottom. This enraged the Kremlin but had profound consequences. As Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense during the administrations of President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, wrote later, “Whether isolated and little-known Soviet dissident or world-famous Soviet scientist, Carter’s policy encouraged them to press on.”
Several weeks later, the young Jewish dissident who had helped Sakharov translate his letter into English, Anatoly (later Natan) Sharansky, was arrested in Moscow on trumped-up charges of treason. Carter protested to Dobrynin and, that fall, to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, both of whom responded with stony indifference. Gromyko told Carter after the opening of the U.N. General Assembly that Sharansky was a “microscopic dot of no importance to anyone.” When Sharansky went on trial in Moscow, Carter—again breaking protocol—called the charges that he was an American spy “patently false.”
In every meeting with a Soviet official for the rest of his time in office, Carter brought up Sharansky. And on every visit to a closed society, Carter carried the bully pulpit with him, inspiring local populations by giving a speech or holding a live televised news conference that could not be censored, an important tradition followed by his successors.
In 1979 Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev completed what Carter described as a “highly emotional” prisoner swap, trading two Soviet spies being held in the United States for five dissidents in the Soviet Union, including three Jewish refuseniks and Georgi Vins, a Russian Baptist pastor jailed in 1974 for conducting an underground ministry in the Soviet Union. A mere four days after he was transported from prison in a Siberian cattle car, Vins joined the president in Washington for church. Sitting next to first lady Rosalynn Carter in the pew, he pulled off his shoe, lifted the inner sole, and showed her a small, wrinkled photograph of Jimmy Carter he had kept in prison.
At the same time, Carter championed a different way of thinking about the country’s longtime adversaries. In an important speech at Notre Dame University, he declared the nation “now free of that inordinate fear of communism” that “led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.” Carter was venturing where no postwar U.S. president had dared go before: “For too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs,” he said, citing the decision to fight in Vietnam. “We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water.” Freedom would be that potent dousing force. Authoritarians could no longer justify their repression by claiming that they were just fighting communism.
In another bracing speech in 1977, Carter told the United Nations that nations would have to relinquish certain traditional ideas of sovereignty: “No member of the United Nations can claim that mistreatment of its citizens is solely its own business.” His larger argument to the global community was that freedom could actually enhance security by winning governments the sincere support of their people. Under this powerful new worldview, human rights were not just compatible with national interests; they advanced them.
Inside the U.S. government, Carter institutionalized the concept of human rights by founding a new State Department Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, which issued “country reports” tracking the behavior of abusive governments. These influential reports helped drive policy decisions. To run the bureau, Carter and Vance established a new position, assistant secretary for human rights, and gave the job to Patricia Derian, an activist of unusual vision and determination who had moved to Mississippi in 1959 to work for civil rights. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance empowered Derian (even putting her just down the hall from him on the seventh floor), but she clashed with the department’s other assistant secretaries, who paid lip service to human rights but gave priority to shopworn strategic objectives and arms sales abroad. They didn’t appreciate an outspoken and refreshingly undiplomatic woman mucking around in their pinstriped world.
Derian was so single-minded in her devotion to human rights that U.S. ambassadors winced when they learned she was traveling to their region. Upon arrival in a dictatorship, she never unpacked because she wasn’t sure how quickly the regime might force her to leave. Lawrence Eagleburger, a future secretary of state in the Reagan administration, serving as ambassador to Yugoslavia, made a point of leaving Belgrade every time Derian came to town to tongue-lash Marshal Tito’s communist government, but he later admitted he was wrong in his assessment of Derian and the policy. “I never thought I’d concede this,” Eagleburger said. “A lot of people in a lot of different countries are better off because Jimmy Carter made an issue of it.”
Back in Washington, the president sometimes invited Derian to the Oval Office for a firsthand report. Before certain overseas trips, Carter would offer instructions on what to ask for. Derian would also, as Carter remembered, “add her own feelings” in meetings with heads of state. He didn’t mind. Carter’s human rights policy was “ambiguous, ambivalent, and ambidextrous,” as Hodding Carter (no relation), Derian’s husband and the State Department spokesman, described it. His wife was often frustrated by the lack of support in the State Department and White House. But the policy was historic nonetheless. Roberta Cohen, who worked closely with Derian, credited Carter with “planting the seeds for a change of thinking in the world—seeds that saved not just lives but ideas, and ideas matter.”
The new policy was most consistent and effective in the Western Hemisphere, where the United States held more sway than elsewhere. By convincing the Senate to ratify the Panama Canal treaties—a great accomplishment won against daunting odds—Carter engendered enormous goodwill throughout Latin America. When a collection of dictators came to Washington for the signing, Carter extracted concessions on human rights from all of them. He also signaled to dictators that the old days of exporting their raw materials to the United States in exchange for a blind eye to their abuses of power were over. This came as a shock to governments that had fought shoulder to shoulder with the United States against communism and terrorism.
Argentina was especially challenging. In 1976 the military government launched a vicious “dirty war” against suspected leftist terrorists, secretly backed by Kissinger. By the time Carter took office, an estimated 15,000 people had “disappeared.” One publisher, Jacobo Timerman, was imprisoned and tortured in 1977 after publicizing the disappearances. Timerman credited Derian with saving his life, and resourceful U.S. diplomats in Argentina saved hundreds more.
For all of the successes of the new policy, the Cold War kept getting in the way. In Indonesia, the Suharto regime was so anti-communist and friendly to the United States that Carter was slow to denounce the butchering of left-wing separatists in the province of East Timor, where the death toll from violence and starvation reached 150,000. (He finally joined efforts to free 50,000 political prisoners.) The Philippines, a critical strategic ally in the Pacific facing a communist insurgency in its outer islands, offered another example of the clash between “power and principle” (a term which became the title of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s memoirs). Richard Holbrooke, the talented, egotistical diplomat driving policy in the region, argued that if the Carter administration pushed out longtime president Ferdinand Marcos and the Philippines fell to a Marxist regime, the fallout would be disastrous not just for human rights but also for the future of the Democratic Party.
Carter agreed, though this pragmatism didn’t stop him from decrying in his diary the “weak-kneed approach” of those in Washington who would be willing to drop the topic of human rights altogether in order “to appease dictators.” And he so disliked dealing with Marcos and his wife, Imelda, that he fobbed them off on Vice President Walter Mondale at every opportunity.
In South Korea, Carter threatened to pull all U.S. troops if the government executed Kim Dae-jung, a human rights activist and future Nobel Peace Prize winner wrongly accused of being a communist. The South Korean regime didn’t want to give Carter the satisfaction of releasing Kim on his watch, so it wasn’t until the Reagan administration that he was freed. But Kim knew who had saved him. When he was elected president of South Korea in 1998, he invited Derian to his swearing-in and told her that he wouldn’t be alive without the efforts of the Carter administration.
The worst human rights violation to occur in Asia during Carter’s term was the genocide in Cambodia. From 1975 to 1979, Cambodian leader Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 1.7 million people, about one-fifth of the population. In 1978 Carter declared Cambodia “the worst violator of human rights in the world,” and he joined international condemnation of the regime, though he later admitted, “I should have denounced them more forcefully.” While direct military intervention was out of the question, what Carter did next was out of character.
In late 1978, Vietnam (which was backed by the Soviet Union) invaded Cambodia (which was backed by China) and removed the murderous Khmer Rouge. This should have been welcome news for the president, even if he didn’t yet know the full extent of the Cambodian genocide. But Carter faced a political and moral dilemma. He knew that accepting Vietnam’s attack on its neighbor would validate aggression and complicate efforts to normalize relations with China. To bond with Beijing, he would have to criticize Hanoi. This left Carter once again favoring geostrategic considerations over moral ones. Only years later did it become clear just how entangled the United States had been in the continuation of the Khmer Rouge. “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot,” Brzezinski told the New York Times in 1998. While he said he considered the Khmer Rouge “an abomination,” the national security advisor remained wedded to the old Kissinger formula of “playing the China card” against the Soviet Union.
It got worse. With U.S.-Soviet tensions growing sharply in 1980, the United States voted in the United Nations to seat the remnants of Pol Pot’s government-in-exile instead of the new Cambodian leaders, who may have been the puppets of Vietnam (and thus the Soviet Union) but at least weren’t genocidal maniacs. Carter’s explanation—that he was siding in the United Nations with China, Australia, and Western Europe against the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Cuba—was practical but unpersuasive even in parts of his own State Department. Would China have really reversed course and broken its new diplomatic relations with the United States if the United States voted against seating the Khmer Rouge in the United Nations? Not likely. That U.S. vote—described by Vance in his memoirs as “extremely distasteful” but necessary to maintain alliances and show respect for the exiled Cambodian prince, Norodom Sihanouk—was a measure of Cold War thinking in that era. Too often, Carter, despite his best intentions, allowed a narrow and often mistaken definition of “the national interest” to prevail.
But Carter’s emphasis on human rights proved surprisingly durable. Even after Reagan’s first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, said human rights would take a “backseat” to fighting terrorism, neither he nor other Reagan-era policymakers fully abandoned the Carter policy. Many of these policymakers (including Elliott Abrams, Reagan’s hawkish assistant secretary of state for human rights) reappeared in important positions in the administration of George W. Bush, who made the expansion of democratic values central to his foreign policy.
The seeds that Carter planted slowly bore fruit. By 1981, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, and Uruguay were already moving away from dictatorships. Argentina returned to democracy in 1983; the new president, Raúl Alfonsín, described himself as a “Carterite” and said the United States’ human rights policy had saved thousands of lives. Carter’s legacy contributed to democracy building in Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, and even Paraguay. In the 1970s, only one or two Latin American nations were democracies; by the early 2000s, only one or two were not.
Many historians of the Cold War stress the importance of “soft power”: nonmilitary cultural factors that cause catalytic change inside closed societies. Carter was an early believer that Western music could help hollow out the Soviet system. In 1977 the White House helped the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band become the first rock-and-roll band to play on Russian soil, part of an infusion of Western values that Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev later said “taught the young there was another life.” Dobrynin, who served as the Soviet ambassador in Washington through five presidencies, conceded in his memoirs that Carter’s human rights policies “played a significant role” in the Soviet Union loosening its grip at home and in Eastern Europe. Once liberalization was under way, Dobrynin concluded, it couldn’t be controlled.
Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who in 1993 became president of the Czech Republic, put it in psychological terms. He argued that Carter’s policy not only inspired him in prison, it also undermined “the self-confidence” of the Soviet bloc, which imperiled the strength and legitimacy of the state. Meanwhile, the self-confidence of Eastern Europe’s human rights organizations grew. A new global movement was taking shape, as authoritarian regimes on both the right and the left bent to the democratic revolution sweeping the globe in the 1980s and 1990s.
Dissidents during these decades no longer felt so alone when the prison door clanged shut. More important, as former President Barack Obama told me recently, the concept of human rights became permanently encoded in the global conversation: “He introduced an explicit language around human rights and what previously had been an afterthought in foreign policy.” Obama saw Carter as an important prod for his successors, who learned from him that “it wasn’t enough to talk about America as being a beacon for freedom as JFK or Ronald Reagan did, but that it had to mean something.”
Trump has abandoned the human rights policies of his predecessors. He supports Chinese President Xi Jinping’s abuse of dissidents, expresses admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and writes love letters to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, among other signs of his total disregard for human rights. He has kept the post of assistant secretary of state for human rights vacant for four years. (His one nominee was forced to withdraw when he was connected to the George W. Bush administration’s torture program.) If he is reelected, Trump will extinguish the last embers of a policy that, starting in 1977, had helped spread freedom and democracy around the world.
By contrast, within days of taking office, former Vice President Joe Biden and his choice for secretary of state would revive the human rights policy begun under Carter and move to stem the authoritarian tide. Voters in November have a clear choice about whether they believe in the global projection of what had, until recently, been seen as bedrock U.S. values.


foreignpolicy--2020-09-29--‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’: War-Weary Syrian Americans Want Resolution

President Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 by about 11,000 votes .
There are roughly 27,000 Syrian Americans in Michigan—but they ’ re torn over who to vote for and watching both campaigns carefully with an eye on foreign policy , making this slice of the American electorate crucially important .
For well over a century , Syrian Americans have been lured to Michigan , first drawn to Henry Ford ’ s Model-T plants and then a halt to federal immigration quotas that allowed Syrians to flee the wars of the 1960s .
For these voters , the problem is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nothing to stop the carnage in a Syrian civil war that has claimed as many as 600,000 lives , yet a Joe Biden administration could promise more broken red lines and has hinted at accommodation with the Bashar al-Assad regime to rebuild the country .
“ There is no Syrian I know that doesn ’ t have family that didn ’ t get killed by Assad , imprisoned by Assad , or disappeared by Assad , ” said Ismael Basha , the head of Americans for a Free Syria , who fled his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hills in the 1980s fearing persecution from Bashar ’ s father , Hafez al-Assad .
Trump pulled U.S. troops out of Syria ( except those needed to “ take the oil ” ) , while some voters perceive that Biden has been ambivalent about his willingness to stand up to Iran ’ s proxies in places like Syria .
“ They are in between a rock and a hard place , ” Basha said .
“ We ’ d like to see Biden more stern in his signals to Iran.
” Biden has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ digital stump speeches that have replaced his rallies due to the coronavirus pandemic .
But he courted controversy last month by releasing a plan that called on the United States to mobilize other countries to aid in Assad ’ s reconstruction of the country .
And Biden ’ s reliance on former Obama officials , including former Deputy National Security Advisor Antony Blinken , has stoked fears in Syrian American circles that another Democratic White House could lead to more wavering on Syria .
The Obama administration said in 2012 that the use @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would be a “ red line ” that would draw a U.S. response ; when Damascus gassed civilians , Obama dithered and later authorized a botched CIA training program for Syrian rebels that was eventually canceled by Trump .
“ It ’ s obvious that there are various opinions in the Biden camp about how to resolve Syria , ” said Jomana Qaddour , a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an advisor to the Syrian American support group for Biden .
“ I don ’ t think one position is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over.
” Syrian Americans are one part of a patchwork of Arab diaspora groups in Michigan that are split between the foreign-policy impulses of hard and soft power .
The state ’ s Arab American community more than doubled between 1980 and 2000 , and elections two years ago that saw Democrats retake the U.S. House of Representatives brought Detroit ’ s Rashida Tlaib as the first-ever Palestinian American woman in Congress , giving Michigan an ardent Trump critic wary of U.S. military overreach on the Democrat ’ s left wing .
Yet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ looked at U.S. engagement in Syria with unease , Assad ’ s brutal reign and the recent unraveling in Lebanon—where Iran-backed Hezbollah wields a heavy hand—still leave the Syrian diaspora wanting to see the United States engage in the Middle East .
“ The Syrian-American community absolutely opposes willy-nilly regime change and reckless adventures , but we do feel that there ’ s a role for the U.S. military and diplomatically to uphold human rights , ” said Wael Alzayat , a former State Department official during the Obama administration and now CEO @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on encouraging Muslim voter turnout .
“ We have strong interests in curbing the ability of authoritarians to get away with stuff.
” For many Syrian Americans , Trump ’ s perceived challenges to U.S. democratic norms and short-term travel ban against seven majority Muslim countries , including Syria , have made him a political pariah .
But in this decisive state , the margin for error is slim , and progressives are still tepid in their enthusiasm for Biden .
On the heels of her primary victory last month , Tlaib pledged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Detroit—but she stopped short of endorsing him .
In an election so far dominated by a pandemic , economic collapse , Supreme Court picks , and Trump ’ s taxes , some key voters are still up for grabs—depending on who can end the bloodshed in Syria .
“ Between now and Election Day , Trump can make a statement about Syria , and he can sweep people in one direction , and Biden can make a statement and sweep them in another , ” said Basha , the head of Americans for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are up , and they are watching.
” Correction , Sept. 29 , 2020 : Rashida Tlaib was the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress .
A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Tlaib was the first Palestinian American elected to Congress .
She is from Detroit , not Dearborn .

President Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 by about 11,000 votes. There are roughly 27,000 Syrian Americans in Michigan—but they’re torn over who to vote for and watching both campaigns carefully with an eye on foreign policy, making this slice of the American electorate crucially important.
President Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 by about 11,000 votes. There are roughly 27,000 Syrian Americans in Michigan—but they’re torn over who to vote for and watching both campaigns carefully with an eye on foreign policy, making this slice of the American electorate crucially important.
For well over a century, Syrian Americans have been lured to Michigan, first drawn to Henry Ford’s Model-T plants and then a halt to federal immigration quotas that allowed Syrians to flee the wars of the 1960s. For these voters, the problem is vexing: Trump has done little to nothing to stop the carnage in a Syrian civil war that has claimed as many as 600,000 lives, yet a Joe Biden administration could promise more broken red lines and has hinted at accommodation with the Bashar al-Assad regime to rebuild the country.
“There is no Syrian I know that doesn’t have family that didn’t get killed by Assad, imprisoned by Assad, or disappeared by Assad,” said Ismael Basha, the head of Americans for a Free Syria, who fled his homeland for the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills in the 1980s fearing persecution from Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad.
Trump pulled U.S. troops out of Syria (except those needed to “take the oil”), while some voters perceive that Biden has been ambivalent about his willingness to stand up to Iran’s proxies in places like Syria.
“They are in between a rock and a hard place,” Basha said. “We’d like to see Biden more stern in his signals to Iran.”
Biden has been mostly mum on Syria in the digital stump speeches that have replaced his rallies due to the coronavirus pandemic. But he courted controversy last month by releasing a plan that called on the United States to mobilize other countries to aid in Assad’s reconstruction of the country. And Biden’s reliance on former Obama officials, including former Deputy National Security Advisor Antony Blinken, has stoked fears in Syrian American circles that another Democratic White House could lead to more wavering on Syria. The Obama administration said in 2012 that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would be a “red line” that would draw a U.S. response; when Damascus gassed civilians, Obama dithered and later authorized a botched CIA training program for Syrian rebels that was eventually canceled by Trump.
“It’s obvious that there are various opinions in the Biden camp about how to resolve Syria,” said Jomana Qaddour, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an advisor to the Syrian American support group for Biden. “I don’t think one position is going to win out before Biden takes over.”
Syrian Americans are one part of a patchwork of Arab diaspora groups in Michigan that are split between the foreign-policy impulses of hard and soft power. The state’s Arab American community more than doubled between 1980 and 2000, and elections two years ago that saw Democrats retake the U.S. House of Representatives brought Detroit’s Rashida Tlaib as the first-ever Palestinian American woman in Congress, giving Michigan an ardent Trump critic wary of U.S. military overreach on the Democrat’s left wing.
Yet while the majority of American voters have looked at U.S. engagement in Syria with unease, Assad’s brutal reign and the recent unraveling in Lebanon—where Iran-backed Hezbollah wields a heavy hand—still leave the Syrian diaspora wanting to see the United States engage in the Middle East.
“The Syrian-American community absolutely opposes willy-nilly regime change and reckless adventures, but we do feel that there’s a role for the U.S. military and diplomatically to uphold human rights,” said Wael Alzayat, a former State Department official during the Obama administration and now CEO of Emgage Action, a nonprofit focused on encouraging Muslim voter turnout. “We have strong interests in curbing the ability of authoritarians to get away with stuff.”
For many Syrian Americans, Trump’s perceived challenges to U.S. democratic norms and short-term travel ban against seven majority Muslim countries, including Syria, have made him a political pariah. But in this decisive state, the margin for error is slim, and progressives are still tepid in their enthusiasm for Biden. On the heels of her primary victory last month, Tlaib pledged to help Biden turn out voters in Detroit—but she stopped short of endorsing him.
In an election so far dominated by a pandemic, economic collapse, Supreme Court picks, and Trump’s taxes, some key voters are still up for grabs—depending on who can end the bloodshed in Syria.
“Between now and Election Day, Trump can make a statement about Syria, and he can sweep people in one direction, and Biden can make a statement and sweep them in another,” said Basha, the head of Americans for a Free Syria. “Their antennas are up, and they are watching.”
Correction, Sept. 29, 2020: Rashida Tlaib was the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Tlaib was the first Palestinian American elected to Congress. She is from Detroit, not Dearborn.


foreignpolicy--2020-09-30--Welcome to a Brand-New Middle East

Welcome to a Brand-New Middle East

It ’ s a brand-new Middle East .
Within the span of only a month , the United States has brokered peace between Israel and two Arab countries—first the United Arab Emirates , then Bahrain .
Both deals are revolutionary in scope : By normalizing ties and focusing on business , trade , and travel , these “ warm peace ” agreements go beyond the often tenuous “ cold peace ” that Egypt and Jordan made with the Jewish state decades ago .
Not only do the UAE and Bahrain deals set the stage for a sea change in Arab-Israeli @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a novel opportunity to finally solve the most intractable conflict between the two sides : the Israeli-Palestinian conflict .
Ties between Israel and the Gulf have grown exponentially in recent years .
Underpinned by the common threat from Iran , what began as whispers of covert intelligence cooperation gradually transformed to increasingly public signs of amity .
Gulf leaders have acknowledged Israel ’ s right to exist and defend itself , Israel ’ s flag has flown at sporting events , and Israeli officials have been allowed to visit .
This process culminated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which seeks to break a major taboo in Arab-Israeli relations by establishing deep bilateral ties not just between Israeli and Emirati officialdom or security establishments , but between their peoples .
That deal provides the necessary cover for other Gulf states to follow suit .
Critically , because the UAE and Bahrain are regional business hubs , the two peace deals will facilitate people-to-people interactions between growing numbers of Israeli visitors and hundreds of thousands of expatriate workers from across the Arab and Islamic world—including Iranians , Iraqis , Lebanese , Palestinians @ @ @ @ @ @ @ relations with Israel , if any .
Even if the process will be incremental , creating a space for these populations to interact with each other for the first time as real human beings—away from hostilities , mutual recriminations , and governmental propaganda—will have a revolutionary impact on all sides , and on regional peace .
The new peace deals remedy a critical deficiency of Israel ’ s earlier agreements with Egypt and Jordan .
The new peace deals thus remedy a critical deficiency of Israel ’ s earlier agreements with Egypt and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s historic 1979 peace agreement with Egypt remains an unassailable benchmark for ending Arab-Israeli wars by removing the Arab world ’ s most populous and powerful nation from the conflict .
Without that critical change , no subsequent agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors might have been possible .
But that peace—and its 1994 successor with Jordan—remains a cold one , confined to strong security coordination and a smattering of economic deals .
Dependent on the survival of regimes of questionable longevity , such a peace is perpetually vulnerable to regional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ obvious during the brief Arab Spring in 2011 , when the Egyptian revolutionaries who deposed Hosni Mubarak labeled him an “ agent of the Jews ” —and later stormed Israel ’ s embassy in Cairo after Israeli forces mistakenly killed three Egyptian soldiers during a border clash with Islamist militants .
Israel ’ s peace deal with Jordan—which , like the UAE deal , formalized decadeslong clandestine ties—has experienced similar volatility .
The July 2017 attack on the Israeli Embassy in Amman , and the case of Ahmed Daqamseh , the Jordanian soldier @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 1997 , are two of the more tragic examples .
Popular calls to annul the treaty are routine , and official relations ebb and flow in tandem with Israeli-Palestinian tensions .
In 2019 , Amman terminated an Israeli lease of a Jordanian border enclave due to lack of progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace , and this year even it mulled canceling their peace treaty altogether if Israel annexed West Bank territories .
The new normalization deals are different .
Anwar Gargash , the UAE ’ s minister of state for foreign affairs , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ warm ” —and therefore more durable—peace with Israel , which he said should be a “ two-way street ” with “ people-to-people movement.
” He was echoed by Ali al-Nuaimi , another senior Emirati official , who said the deal is a “ peace message , not a political treaty.
” He stressed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not hinder Emirati-Israeli peace—not “ even a war with Gaza.
” Demonstrating their seriousness , the Emiratis have followed through with a flurry of steps to deepen relations with Israel .
They have concluded an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to COVID-19 , signed an Israeli player for Dubai ’ s Al-Nasr soccer team , inked a film and television cooperation agreement that plans to establish a regional film festival , sent direct flights to Tel Aviv , and allowed open visits by Israeli journalists .
There is great interest in expanding tourism , but that will depend on Israel lifting its coronavirus-related travel restrictions .
Gargash said that these kinds of mutual exchange will interlink the two countries and permanently end the “ belligerent state of affairs ” between them .
This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reflects a sea change in the Gulf states ’ approach to the Palestinian issue .
Bahrain sounded a similar note , casting its normalization decision as something that would “ strengthen Bahrainis ’ security and their economic stability.
” Bahrain ’ s normalization announcement is particularly important because such a decision likely would have needed Saudi Arabia ’ s approval , indicating tacit acceptance of normalization even if Riyadh ’ s public support has been muted .
Bahrain ’ s deal also raises the possibility that Saudi Arabia might be persuaded to sign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the political sensitivities and constraints that Riyadh faces due to public hostility toward Israel .
This dramatic break with the old pan-Arab consensus—which predicated any normalization of relations on a final peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians—reflects a sea change in the Gulf states ’ approach to the Palestinian issue .
No longer is the Palestinian cause at the center of Arab countries ’ politics , as was reflected in the Arab League ’ s refusal of a demand by the Palestinian Authority to condemn the UAE-Israeli deal .
Despite continued concern @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seem to have tired of the Palestinian Authority ’ s obstinacy and rejectionism in its dealings with Israel , and now they ’ re opting to flip the old equation : Normalization with Israel is seen as the first step to secure Palestinian rights .
If Israel , Bahrain , and the UAE play their cards right , their agreements could have a positive impact on Israeli-Palestinian relations and accelerate progress toward a two-state solution .
Under the aegis of this deal , Abu Dhabi and Manama could act as a moderating force @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out malign actors such as Qatar , Iran , and Turkey , which have stoked the Palestinian rejectionism that feeds into the Gulf ’ s frustration and Israeli hesitation to offer concessions .
Currently , the Palestinians are angry , having been urged by their backers to view these deals as a stab in the back .
But over time , this can be mitigated .
Israel could facilitate Emirati aid and investment in Gaza and the West Bank in order to both counter Iranian , Qatari , and Turkish efforts and enable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alternative mediator between Israelis and Palestinians .
Moreover , goodwill gestures and concessions from Israel—brokered by the Emiratis and Bahrainis—would demonstrate to the Palestinians that these Gulf states are capable of delivering on legitimate Palestinian rights and demands .
In time , this could lead to the rise of a more moderate and responsible Palestinian society and leadership that could be a more willing peace partner to Israel .
But peace is a two-way street .
To facilitate the UAE ’ s and Bahrain ’ s emergence as interlocutors with the Palestinians , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Palestinian people ” and demonstrate the positive impact that these peace deals will have on them .
The first step is for Israel not just to suspend , but to halt permanently its promised annexation of certain West Bank territories , including the Jordan Valley .
The messaging on this issue has been inconsistent : While the Emiratis have said the peace deal would “ stop further Israeli annexation , ” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted annexation is merely “ on hold , ” pending further coordination with the United @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of annexation remain unclear .
Indeed , Israeli intentions on the future of annexation remain unclear .
Some Likud party insiders claimed that Netanyahu had already frozen the annexation process before the deal was reached .
But as Netanyahu ’ s coalition agreement with Defense Minister Benny Gantz ’ s Blue and White movement remains shaky and the specter of a fourth Knesset election in less than two years looms , Netanyahu might use the annexation card to consolidate support from his right flank—both within and outside of Likud—in order to remain prime @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government .
At the moment , Netanyahu is vulnerable to a right-wing challenge because of his turnaround on annexation , and because he is seen as undermining Israel ’ s zealously guarded military edge by lifting its objections to the United States ’ sale of F-35 fighter aircraft to the UAE .
Whether Netanyahu will actually proceed with annexation or permanently renege on it remains unclear .
If he does move forward , he will not only impede any moderating influence the UAE or another peace-minded Gulf state might have on the Palestinians @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the world , and their populations , that an end to annexation was what Israel brought to the table for peace .
There are other pitfalls as well .
There is no timetable for finalizing further concrete agreements on the various kinds of cooperation that have been announced .
This could not only cloud the process of implementing normalization but also give fodder to the naysayers for casting their aspersions .
Many technical details remain in the air , and the region ’ s volatility is no source of comfort .
But despite @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Emirati and Bahraini agreements with Israel remain nothing short of revolutionary .
They upend decades of stifling status quo and fruitless political orthodoxies that have failed to advance the cause of a genuine , positive peace—not merely the absence of conflict—for the region ’ s war-weary inhabitants .
The deals plant the seeds for a societal sea change and reveal how regional geopolitics have undergone a decisive shift .
In time , the Gulf ’ s embrace of Israel could even encourage Egypt , which welcomed the deal , and Jordan , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ toward a warmer peace with the Israelis .
In that , the agreements should be praised for being truly game-changing , laying the groundwork for genuine Israeli-Arab friendship , and signifying the long-awaited acknowledgment of each other ’ s humanity .

It’s a brand-new Middle East. Within the span of only a month, the United States has brokered peace between Israel and two Arab countries—first the United Arab Emirates, then Bahrain. Both deals are revolutionary in scope: By normalizing ties and focusing on business, trade, and travel, these “warm peace” agreements go beyond the often tenuous “cold peace” that Egypt and Jordan made with the Jewish state decades ago. Not only do the UAE and Bahrain deals set the stage for a sea change in Arab-Israeli relations, but they might even present a novel opportunity to finally solve the most intractable issue between the two sides: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It’s a brand-new Middle East. Within the span of only a month, the United States has brokered peace between Israel and two Arab countries—first the United Arab Emirates, then Bahrain. Both deals are revolutionary in scope: By normalizing ties and focusing on business, trade, and travel, these “warm peace” agreements go beyond the often tenuous “cold peace” that Egypt and Jordan made with the Jewish state decades ago. Not only do the UAE and Bahrain deals set the stage for a sea change in Arab-Israeli relations, but they might even present a novel opportunity to finally solve the most intractable issue between the two sides: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ties between Israel and the Gulf have grown exponentially in recent years. Underpinned by the common threat from Iran, what began as whispers of covert intelligence cooperation gradually transformed to increasingly public signs of amity. Gulf leaders have acknowledged Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, Israel’s flag has flown at sporting events, and Israeli officials have been allowed to visit. This process culminated in last month’s UAE-Israel deal, which seeks to break a major taboo in Arab-Israeli relations by establishing deep bilateral ties not just between Israeli and Emirati officialdom or security establishments, but between their peoples. That deal provides the necessary cover for other Gulf states to follow suit.
Critically, because the UAE and Bahrain are regional business hubs, the two peace deals will facilitate people-to-people interactions between growing numbers of Israeli visitors and hundreds of thousands of expatriate workers from across the Arab and Islamic world—including Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians—whose home countries have hostile relations with Israel, if any. Even if the process will be incremental, creating a space for these populations to interact with each other for the first time as real human beings—away from hostilities, mutual recriminations, and governmental propaganda—will have a revolutionary impact on all sides, and on regional peace.
The new peace deals remedy a critical deficiency of Israel’s earlier agreements with Egypt and Jordan.
The new peace deals thus remedy a critical deficiency of Israel’s earlier agreements with Egypt and Jordan. To be sure, Israel’s historic 1979 peace agreement with Egypt remains an unassailable benchmark for ending Arab-Israeli wars by removing the Arab world’s most populous and powerful nation from the conflict. Without that critical change, no subsequent agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors might have been possible. But that peace—and its 1994 successor with Jordan—remains a cold one, confined to strong security coordination and a smattering of economic deals. Dependent on the survival of regimes of questionable longevity, such a peace is perpetually vulnerable to regional and domestic vicissitudes.
This was most obvious during the brief Arab Spring in 2011, when the Egyptian revolutionaries who deposed Hosni Mubarak labeled him an “agent of the Jews”—and later stormed Israel’s embassy in Cairo after Israeli forces mistakenly killed three Egyptian soldiers during a border clash with Islamist militants.
Israel’s peace deal with Jordan—which, like the UAE deal, formalized decadeslong clandestine ties—has experienced similar volatility. The July 2017 attack on the Israeli Embassy in Amman, and the case of Ahmed Daqamseh, the Jordanian soldier who shot and killed seven Israeli schoolgirls in 1997, are two of the more tragic examples. Popular calls to annul the treaty are routine, and official relations ebb and flow in tandem with Israeli-Palestinian tensions. In 2019, Amman terminated an Israeli lease of a Jordanian border enclave due to lack of progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace, and this year even it mulled canceling their peace treaty altogether if Israel annexed West Bank territories.
The new normalization deals are different. Anwar Gargash, the UAE’s minister of state for foreign affairs, said that his country wants a “warm”—and therefore more durable—peace with Israel, which he said should be a “two-way street” with “people-to-people movement.” He was echoed by Ali al-Nuaimi, another senior Emirati official, who said the deal is a “peace message, not a political treaty.” He stressed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not hinder Emirati-Israeli peace—not “even a war with Gaza.”
Demonstrating their seriousness, the Emiratis have followed through with a flurry of steps to deepen relations with Israel. They have concluded an agreement on medical research and development related to COVID-19, signed an Israeli player for Dubai’s Al-Nasr soccer team, inked a film and television cooperation agreement that plans to establish a regional film festival, sent direct flights to Tel Aviv, and allowed open visits by Israeli journalists. There is great interest in expanding tourism, but that will depend on Israel lifting its coronavirus-related travel restrictions. Gargash said that these kinds of mutual exchange will interlink the two countries and permanently end the “belligerent state of affairs” between them.
This dramatic break with the old pan-Arab consensus reflects a sea change in the Gulf states’ approach to the Palestinian issue.
Bahrain sounded a similar note, casting its normalization decision as something that would “strengthen Bahrainis’ security and their economic stability.” Bahrain’s normalization announcement is particularly important because such a decision likely would have needed Saudi Arabia’s approval, indicating tacit acceptance of normalization even if Riyadh’s public support has been muted. Bahrain’s deal also raises the possibility that Saudi Arabia might be persuaded to sign one of its own, even with the political sensitivities and constraints that Riyadh faces due to public hostility toward Israel.
This dramatic break with the old pan-Arab consensus—which predicated any normalization of relations on a final peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians—reflects a sea change in the Gulf states’ approach to the Palestinian issue. No longer is the Palestinian cause at the center of Arab countries’ politics, as was reflected in the Arab League’s refusal of a demand by the Palestinian Authority to condemn the UAE-Israeli deal. Despite continued concern for the Palestinians, some Gulf states seem to have tired of the Palestinian Authority’s obstinacy and rejectionism in its dealings with Israel, and now they’re opting to flip the old equation: Normalization with Israel is seen as the first step to secure Palestinian rights.
If Israel, Bahrain, and the UAE play their cards right, their agreements could have a positive impact on Israeli-Palestinian relations and accelerate progress toward a two-state solution. Under the aegis of this deal, Abu Dhabi and Manama could act as a moderating force on Palestinian politics and society, edging out malign actors such as Qatar, Iran, and Turkey, which have stoked the Palestinian rejectionism that feeds into the Gulf’s frustration and Israeli hesitation to offer concessions.
Currently, the Palestinians are angry, having been urged by their backers to view these deals as a stab in the back. But over time, this can be mitigated. Israel could facilitate Emirati aid and investment in Gaza and the West Bank in order to both counter Iranian, Qatari, and Turkish efforts and enable the UAE to position itself as an alternative mediator between Israelis and Palestinians. Moreover, goodwill gestures and concessions from Israel—brokered by the Emiratis and Bahrainis—would demonstrate to the Palestinians that these Gulf states are capable of delivering on legitimate Palestinian rights and demands. In time, this could lead to the rise of a more moderate and responsible Palestinian society and leadership that could be a more willing peace partner to Israel.
But peace is a two-way street. To facilitate the UAE’s and Bahrain’s emergence as interlocutors with the Palestinians, Israel must—as Nuaimi urged—“directly approach the Palestinian people” and demonstrate the positive impact that these peace deals will have on them.
The first step is for Israel not just to suspend, but to halt permanently its promised annexation of certain West Bank territories, including the Jordan Valley. The messaging on this issue has been inconsistent: While the Emiratis have said the peace deal would “stop further Israeli annexation,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted annexation is merely “on hold,” pending further coordination with the United States.
Israeli intentions on the future of annexation remain unclear.
Indeed, Israeli intentions on the future of annexation remain unclear. Some Likud party insiders claimed that Netanyahu had already frozen the annexation process before the deal was reached. But as Netanyahu’s coalition agreement with Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s Blue and White movement remains shaky and the specter of a fourth Knesset election in less than two years looms, Netanyahu might use the annexation card to consolidate support from his right flank—both within and outside of Likud—in order to remain prime minister and form a more stable future government. At the moment, Netanyahu is vulnerable to a right-wing challenge because of his turnaround on annexation, and because he is seen as undermining Israel’s zealously guarded military edge by lifting its objections to the United States’ sale of F-35 fighter aircraft to the UAE. Whether Netanyahu will actually proceed with annexation or permanently renege on it remains unclear. If he does move forward, he will not only impede any moderating influence the UAE or another peace-minded Gulf state might have on the Palestinians but also embarrass the governments that told the world, and their populations, that an end to annexation was what Israel brought to the table for peace.
There are other pitfalls as well. There is no timetable for finalizing further concrete agreements on the various kinds of cooperation that have been announced. This could not only cloud the process of implementing normalization but also give fodder to the naysayers for casting their aspersions.
Many technical details remain in the air, and the region’s volatility is no source of comfort. But despite the caveats and remaining questions, the Emirati and Bahraini agreements with Israel remain nothing short of revolutionary. They upend decades of stifling status quo and fruitless political orthodoxies that have failed to advance the cause of a genuine, positive peace—not merely the absence of conflict—for the region’s war-weary inhabitants. The deals plant the seeds for a societal sea change and reveal how regional geopolitics have undergone a decisive shift. In time, the Gulf’s embrace of Israel could even encourage Egypt, which welcomed the deal, and Jordan, which did so more tepidly, to move toward a warmer peace with the Israelis. In that, the agreements should be praised for being truly game-changing, laying the groundwork for genuine Israeli-Arab friendship, and signifying the long-awaited acknowledgment of each other’s humanity.


foreignpolicy--2020-09-30--The Death of Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah Could Diminish the Country’s International Standing

The Death of Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah Could Diminish the Country ’ s International Standing Here is today ’ s Foreign Policy brief : Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah dies at 91 , Trump and Biden spar in the first U.S. presidential debate , and the political crisis in Mali looks set to continue .
We welcome your feedback at morningbrief @ foreignpolicy.com .
Kuwait ’ s Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah died on Tuesday after almost 15 years at the country ’ s helm , causing an outpouring of grief as international leaders from across the world mourned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ East ’ s most respected statesmen .
Prior to becoming leader in 2006 , Sabah spent decades as the country ’ s foreign minister , navigating the region ’ s intense geopolitical rivalries during some of its most turbulent episodes .
Notably , Sabah served as foreign minister just prior to Iraq ’ s invasion and occupation of the country in 1990 .
After the conclusion of the subsequent Gulf War , Sabah was instrumental in restoring Kuwait ’ s international standing , adopting a nonaligned approach to foreign policy that made it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s key players .
Stepping in .
Sabah was replaced on Tuesday by his brother , Crown Prince Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Sabah , after an announcement by the cabinet .
Nawaf is expected to continue the foreign-policy approach pursued by his brother .
But without the decades of diplomatic experience that Sabah brought and with regional tensions on the rise , it is uncertain if Kuwait can continue to play its traditional role as mediator .
A different Middle East .
Relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in particular have steadily deteriorated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ push for Arab states to normalize relations with Israel as a way of building a wider regional bulwark against Iran are dramatically changing the geopolitical landscape .
Without Sabah ’ s experience , Kuwait could find it increasingly difficult to balance these competing interests .
A country at the crossroads .
Nawaf is considered a reluctant ruler who tries to keep a low public profile , so he is expected to delegate much power to his heir apparent , the next crown prince .
Several members of the royal family are jockeying for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appointed to serve as Nawaf ’ s second-in-command could have outsized influence in the country .
U.S. debates kick off .
U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden squared off for the first of three presidential debates on Tuesday in an event that will likely be remembered as the most chaotic U.S. presidential debate in decades as Trump repeatedly interrupted Biden and the moderator and both candidates traded insults .
The discussion , predictably , focused almost solely on domestic issues .
Trump doubled down on his allegations of electoral fraud @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and right-wing militia groups when asked to do so .
Biden , for his part , rejected several key left-wing policy positions , including the Green New Deal and calls to defund the police .
Foreign Policy ’ s Michael Hirsh wrote that “ Biden may have gotten the upper hand by putting down Trump in the sort of derisive terms that previously Trump has used successfully against his previous rivals.
” No peace talks in Nagorno-Karabakh .
The governments of Azerbaijan and Armenia have each rejected peace talks as fighting between their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev outright rejected the possibility of talks , while Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said talks were impossible while fighting continued .
Dozens of people have been reported killed and hundreds wounded since fighting broke out on Sunday , representing the deadliest clash between the two sides in years .
There are concerns that the conflict could develop into a broader regional confrontation .
On Tuesday , Armenia accused Turkey , which backs Azerbaijan , of shooting down one of its fighter jets in Armenian airspace .
Turkey was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into Azerbaijan .
Russia , which backs Armenia , has urged Ankara to assist in efforts to establish a cease-fire .
New sanctions on Lukashenko .
The United Kingdom and Canada both imposed sanctions on Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko and several senior officials in his government over allegations of election rigging in last month ’ s presidential election .
The sanctions , the first of their kind for major Western powers , include travel bans and asset freezes .
Western governments were initially reluctant to challenge Lukashenko due to his close relationship with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have ramped up the pressure this week after Lukashenko was inaugurated in a secret ceremony last weekend .
It is not clear how Moscow will respond .
Putin previously warned foreign powers against meddling in Belarus ’ s internal affairs , and he formed a reserve police force last month that he vowed to send to Belarus if Lukashenko requested it .
Sanctions remain on Mali .
It may take longer than initially thought for regional leaders to lift sanctions on Mali .
Last week , Mali ’ s new interim President Bah @ @ @ @ @ @ @ foreign minister with no military background , as prime minister .
The move appeared to meet a core demand of the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States ( ECOWAS ) that the new prime minister had to be a civilian in order to remove the sanctions it imposed after last month ’ s coup .
But on Tuesday , Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said that regional leaders “ may confer again to discuss outstanding grey areas in the Mali political situation ” after meeting with ECOWAS , a sign the bloc is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ instead put pressure on the junta to remove coup leader Col. Assimi Goita as interim vice president .
Lebanon in turmoil .
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the militant group still accepts France ’ s role in trying to find a way out of Lebanon ’ s political impasse , but urged French President Emmanuel Macron to change his approach to the situation .
“ We do not accept such language , ” said Nasrallah , referring to a news conference in which Macron accused Lebanon ’ s political leaders of choosing “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the general detriment of the country.
” Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Mustapha Adib resigned on Saturday less than a month after taking the job after failing to meet a deadline set by France to form a new government .
The country ’ s latest round of political turmoil erupted after two explosions last month tore through the capital of Beirut , leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Hassan Diab ’ s government .
A potential diplomatic row between the United Kingdom and Malta over a shark tooth has been averted .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a leading British natural historian and broadcaster , presented a fossilized shark tooth that he found in Malta to 7-year-old Prince George .
The tooth once belonged to a now-extinct species of shark , and it is estimated to be millions of years old .
After the exchange was publicized on social media , Maltese Culture Minister Jose Herrera said he wanted to retrieve the tooth in order to put it on display in Malta as a reflection of the island nation ’ s natural history .
The sudden dispute led to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ultimately the Maltese government relented .
“ The minister would like to note that with reference to this case , it is not the intention to pursue this matter any further , ” a spokesman for Herrera said .
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 .

Here is today’s Foreign Policy brief: Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah dies at 91, Trump and Biden spar in the first U.S. presidential debate, and the political crisis in Mali looks set to continue.
Here is today’s Foreign Policy brief: Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah dies at 91, Trump and Biden spar in the first U.S. presidential debate, and the political crisis in Mali looks set to continue.
If you would like to receive Morning Brief in your inbox every weekday, please sign up here.
A Changing Middle East Could Force Kuwait to Change Tack
Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah died on Tuesday after almost 15 years at the country’s helm, causing an outpouring of grief as international leaders from across the world mourned the loss of one of the Middle East’s most respected statesmen.
Prior to becoming leader in 2006, Sabah spent decades as the country’s foreign minister, navigating the region’s intense geopolitical rivalries during some of its most turbulent episodes. Notably, Sabah served as foreign minister just prior to Iraq’s invasion and occupation of the country in 1990. After the conclusion of the subsequent Gulf War, Sabah was instrumental in restoring Kuwait’s international standing, adopting a nonaligned approach to foreign policy that made it a go-between for many of the Gulf’s key players.
Stepping in. Sabah was replaced on Tuesday by his brother, Crown Prince Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Sabah, after an announcement by the cabinet. Nawaf is expected to continue the foreign-policy approach pursued by his brother. But without the decades of diplomatic experience that Sabah brought and with regional tensions on the rise, it is uncertain if Kuwait can continue to play its traditional role as mediator.
A different Middle East. Relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in particular have steadily deteriorated in recent years and Washington’s push for Arab states to normalize relations with Israel as a way of building a wider regional bulwark against Iran are dramatically changing the geopolitical landscape. Without Sabah’s experience, Kuwait could find it increasingly difficult to balance these competing interests.
A country at the crossroads. Nawaf is considered a reluctant ruler who tries to keep a low public profile, so he is expected to delegate much power to his heir apparent, the next crown prince. Several members of the royal family are jockeying for the position, and whoever is ultimately appointed to serve as Nawaf’s second-in-command could have outsized influence in the country.
What We’re Following Today
U.S. debates kick off. U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden squared off for the first of three presidential debates on Tuesday in an event that will likely be remembered as the most chaotic U.S. presidential debate in decades as Trump repeatedly interrupted Biden and the moderator and both candidates traded insults. The discussion, predictably, focused almost solely on domestic issues. Trump doubled down on his allegations of electoral fraud and refused to explicitly denounce white supremacists and right-wing militia groups when asked to do so. Biden, for his part, rejected several key left-wing policy positions, including the Green New Deal and calls to defund the police.
Foreign Policy’s Michael Hirsh wrote that “Biden may have gotten the upper hand by putting down Trump in the sort of derisive terms that previously Trump has used successfully against his previous rivals.”
No peace talks in Nagorno-Karabakh. The governments of Azerbaijan and Armenia have each rejected peace talks as fighting between their forces over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region intensifies. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev outright rejected the possibility of talks, while Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said talks were impossible while fighting continued. Dozens of people have been reported killed and hundreds wounded since fighting broke out on Sunday, representing the deadliest clash between the two sides in years.
There are concerns that the conflict could develop into a broader regional confrontation. On Tuesday, Armenia accused Turkey, which backs Azerbaijan, of shooting down one of its fighter jets in Armenian airspace. Turkey was also accused of moving militants from Syria into Azerbaijan. Russia, which backs Armenia, has urged Ankara to assist in efforts to establish a cease-fire.
New sanctions on Lukashenko. The United Kingdom and Canada both imposed sanctions on Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko and several senior officials in his government over allegations of election rigging in last month’s presidential election. The sanctions, the first of their kind for major Western powers, include travel bans and asset freezes. Western governments were initially reluctant to challenge Lukashenko due to his close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but they have ramped up the pressure this week after Lukashenko was inaugurated in a secret ceremony last weekend.
It is not clear how Moscow will respond. Putin previously warned foreign powers against meddling in Belarus’s internal affairs, and he formed a reserve police force last month that he vowed to send to Belarus if Lukashenko requested it.
Keep an Eye On
Sanctions remain on Mali. It may take longer than initially thought for regional leaders to lift sanctions on Mali. Last week, Mali’s new interim President Bah Ndaw appointed Moctar Ouane, a former foreign minister with no military background, as prime minister. The move appeared to meet a core demand of the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) that the new prime minister had to be a civilian in order to remove the sanctions it imposed after last month’s coup.
But on Tuesday, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said that regional leaders “may confer again to discuss outstanding grey areas in the Mali political situation” after meeting with ECOWAS, a sign the bloc is not ready to lift sanctions and could instead put pressure on the junta to remove coup leader Col. Assimi Goita as interim vice president.
Lebanon in turmoil. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the militant group still accepts France’s role in trying to find a way out of Lebanon’s political impasse, but urged French President Emmanuel Macron to change his approach to the situation. “We do not accept such language,” said Nasrallah, referring to a news conference in which Macron accused Lebanon’s political leaders of choosing “to favor their partisan and individual interests to the general detriment of the country.”
Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Mustapha Adib resigned on Saturday less than a month after taking the job after failing to meet a deadline set by France to form a new government. The country’s latest round of political turmoil erupted after two explosions last month tore through the capital of Beirut, leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Hassan Diab’s government.
Odds and Ends
A potential diplomatic row between the United Kingdom and Malta over a shark tooth has been averted. The controversy began last weekend when David Attenborough, a leading British natural historian and broadcaster, presented a fossilized shark tooth that he found in Malta to 7-year-old Prince George. The tooth once belonged to a now-extinct species of shark, and it is estimated to be millions of years old. After the exchange was publicized on social media, Maltese Culture Minister Jose Herrera said he wanted to retrieve the tooth in order to put it on display in Malta as a reflection of the island nation’s natural history.
The sudden dispute led to a storm on social media, and ultimately the Maltese government relented. “The minister would like to note that with reference to this case, it is not the intention to pursue this matter any further,” a spokesman for Herrera said.
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.