Haiti is the poorest country in the region, its riches leached out by colonial overlords, American occupying forces, corporate predators, and home-grown autocrats. As if that weren’t enough, it’s also suffered an almost Biblical succession of plagues in recent years. A coup deposed its first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, not once but twice — in 1991 and again in 2004. An earthquake in 2010 killed hundreds of thousands, leaving 1.5 million Haitians homeless, out of a population of less than 10 million. In the wake of that earthquake, nearly a million people contracted cholera, the worst outbreak in history, courtesy of a contingent of U.N. peacekeepers. To round out the catastrophes, in 2016, Hurricane Matthew made landfall, pushing Haiti back even further.

And now the country has been overrun by gangs that emerged as practically the only groups capable of providing services, however meager, to Haiti’s long-suffering population. People have become the country’s largest export. Anyone who has money, connections, or sufficient courage has fled, even if those who somehow made it to the United States were all too often deported back into the maelstrom. Haiti doesn’t have the three things that might prevent the sort of vacuum into which gangs so eagerly rush: robust democratic governance, a strong civil society, and a sufficiently uncorrupt constabulary. As a result, it’s returned to what political theorist Thomas Hobbes once called a “war of all against all” in which violence and the urge for power prevail, as fist takes precedence over gavel — the perfect environment for gangs to flourish.

Political scientists often label places like Haiti “failed states.” With the breakdown of order, everything from political institutions to border controls disintegrates. In a comparable fashion, clans contested for power in Somalia in the 1990s and paramilitaries battled each other in the Democratic Republic of Congo during its repeated wars, while rebels and jihadis targeted the Syrian government beginning in 2011. In the end, such diverse groups seem to boil down to one thing: guys with guns.

In Haiti, the gangocracy is organized along the classic lines of criminal enterprises like the gangs that ruled New York City in the mid-nineteenth century (immortalized in the film The Gangs of New York) or the Chinese tongs that warred over San Franciscan turf in the years after the Civil War (featured in the current Netflix series Warrior). The two major Haitian gangs in the capital city Port-au-Prince, GPep and the G9 Family, have similarly hierarchical structures, roots in particular neighborhoods, and flamboyant leaders like the former police officer and current G9 head Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier.

But gangs aren’t simply criminal syndicates. The Haitian gangs have close connections to political parties and align themselves with business interests (or run businesses of their own). Sometimes such gangs even begin as anti-gangs, neighborhood self-defense groups meant to help locals survive in an era of lawlessness.

Their mischaracterization resembles the overly narrow understanding of “terrorists.” Hamas, for instance, is on the U.S. terrorism list, but it’s not just a bunch of guys with guns and a predilection for violence. It’s also been a political party, a government, and a service organization that provided food, health care, and other necessities to underserved communities in Gaza.

Don’t make the mistake of associating gangs like Haiti’s with a “primitive” stage of political development or only with countries on the geopolitical margins. What’s happening there today could prefigure the future of the United States, too. In place of the Biblical succession of plagues that swept through Haiti, the U.S. might only need the tinder of climate change and the flint of Donald Trump to go up in similar flames.

Gangs R U.S.

Today, Americans associate “gangs” with the Crips and Bloods, who developed a murderous rivalry in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s or, more recently, Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13, a gang of young Salvadoran transplants to Los Angeles initially focused on protecting its members from other gangs.

But shouldn’t we be more catholic in our definitions? After all, what are right-wing paramilitary forces, from the Three Percenters to the Proud Boys, if not gangs? They have their rituals, worldviews, indifference to the rule of law, even their own “Barbecues.” The gangs associated with far-right ideology and white supremacy today could claim a lineage stretching back to the European settlers of this continent who routinely engaged in the extrajudicial murder of indigenous peoples while expanding westward, or the vigilante mobs that administered “rough justice” to “disobedient” slaves before the Civil War, or even the Ku Klux Klan. As for real-world impact, the Crips or MS-13 never had the audacity to force their way into the U.S. Capitol and trash the place, as Donald Trump’s informal gang did on January 6, 2021.

But why stop there? The Pinkerton detective agency once functioned like a gang in its attacks on the labor movement. The Central Intelligence Agency developed distinctly gang-like behavior overseas with its assassinations, coups, and outright criminal activities. And what about all the deaths associated with corporate gangs like Philip Morris and ExxonMobil? These institutions of “normal” society have had a much higher kill count and a more debilitating effect on the rule of law than the institutions of organized crime.

Buy the Book

When it comes to gang-like activities, much depends on geopolitics. The emergence of the “Washington consensus” and the birth of neoliberalism in the 1970s was an inflection point when it came to encouraging gang-like behavior. Previously, at least in advanced industrial countries, the state had been gradually assuming ever greater economic responsibility through the New Deal and its successors in the U.S. and the development of Europe’s market socialism. Neoliberalism, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in England and President Ronald Reagan in the United States, sought to roll back the power of the state through the defunding, deregulation, and privatization of government services.

That sustained attack on state functions ensured an increase in poverty and painful budget crises for institutions like school systems and hospitals, while corporate misconduct proliferated. In poorer countries, where states were already more fragile, the impact was far more devastating.

In Haiti, after the state borrowed money in the 1970s and 1980s to feed corruption and sustain autocracy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pushed subsequent democratic governments to privilege the free market, while opening ever more quickly to the global economy. Sensing opportunity, non-governmental organizations streamed into Haiti to provide food, housing, and health care, everything a cash-strapped government couldn’t do. The succession of catastrophes — coups, an earthquake, cholera, hurricanes — only strengthened the humanitarian sector but at the expense of effective government. In this century, the situation had become so dire that all too many parents were giving their children up to orphanages run by foreign charities. In other words, the road to Haiti’s hell was, in part, paved by good intentions.

Or take the case of Jamaica where, from the late 1970s on, similar IMF programs translated into disaster, especially in the capital, Kingston. Here, too, the state lost power as gang leaders, known as “dons,” expanded their territories. As Michelle Munroe and Damion Blake put it in Third World Quarterly: “Neoliberal policies not only paralyzed the state’s capacity to control and contain violence in the streets of Kingston, these changes also made dons and the gangs they command more lethal and powerful.”

Dons and the gangs they command: that language could soon seem all too eerily appropriate for the United States.

American Bloodbath

America’s ultimate Don is all too clear about what he expects come November, should he lose. “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath,” he told one of his rallies. According to that scenario, the crew that owes allegiance to Donald Trump — the right-wing militias, diehard conspiracy theorists, open-carry gun enthusiasts — will rise up in gang-like fashion in the face of another “stolen election.”

That, however, is an example of Trump’s magical thinking. The January 6th “insurrection” revealed the limits of his influence. What happened in Washington that day never came close to a coup d’état, thanks to the actions of the police and the National Guard, nor was it repeated, even in the reddest of states.

The real bloodbath would take place if Trump won the election. After all, he’s already promised violence as an organizing principle for his second term. As David Remnick has written in The New Yorker, Trump

“makes no effort to conceal his bigotries, his lawlessness, his will to authoritarian power; to the contrary, he advertises it, and, most disturbing of all, this deepens his appeal. What’s more, there is no question that Trump has so normalized calls to violence as an instrument of politics that it has inflamed countless people to perverse action.”

Trump has also promised a thorough purge of his enemies in the government and beyond, as well as the weaponization of the Justice Department to wage war on all MAGA opponents. As in his first term, he would destroy as many federal agencies as possible. Meanwhile, he would promote drilling über alles and roll back every Biden administration effort to create an industrial policy to guide the United States away from fossil fuels.

What Trump proposes is fundamentally different from the now shopworn Republican strategy of reducing the federal government to the size of something that can be “drowned in the bathtub” (as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once so memorably put it) in favor of “states’ rights.” Trump has nothing but contempt for the politics that advance such a perspective. Like the gang leader he is, he’d rather concentrate federal power in his own hands as an instrument of personal vengeance emphasizing loyalty above all. Instead of the empowerment of state legislatures, Trump prefers chaos, for in fraught times people look to autocratic leaders.

When it comes to starting fires in the American system, Trump is distinctly the Barbecue type. He admires leaders who slaughter people indiscriminately (Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines), change the constitution multiple times to bypass legislative and judicial opposition (Viktor Orbán of Hungary), or kill their political opponents wherever they might live (Vladimir Putin of Russia). He likes the bad boys who have transformed their parties into gangs and their countries into fiefdoms. In short, he’s the ultimate gang leader.

Of course, he won’t do it alone. There are plenty of true believers and opportunists to staff his administration and implement his whims, but that’s not enough. As his first term revealed, the guardrails of democracy — opposition politicians, bureaucrats, even certain Republicans who continue to have qualms – can still prevent the country from tumbling over a cliff.

This time around, Trump and those backing him hope to disable enough of the political infrastructure to create the space for non-state actors to do his work for him. In The Donald’s first term, the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as Trumpophile Steve Bannon so infamously put it, was a strategy meant to empower actors like corporations and religious institutions to grab power for themselves. Next time around, he’s likely to surround himself with advisors pulled from the think-tank crowd that produced the nightmarish Project 2025 blueprint in order to “free” all MAGA-oriented non-state and (often) anti-state actors to do their damnedest.

But even ruthless think tanks, corporations, and apocalyptic preachers aren’t likely to go far enough for Donald Trump, since they also remain the bedrock of America’s more traditional right wing, the coalition that put Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush into the White House. Trump needs genuine mayhem-makers. By removing restrictions on firearms, he aims to deputize every American citizen in his camp to MAGAfy the United States.

Trump’s repeated exhortations to violence — “lock her up,” “punch him in the face,” “be there, will be wild” — may well take a more specific form in a second term. Like McCarthyites at the height of the Cold War, Trumpists have imagined “Marxists” under every bed, even in the Pentagon. It’s not far-fetched to think that the reelected president might issue a coded call to his supporters to round them all up and dispatch them in some grim fashion.

Trump often accuses his opponents of exactly the sins — attempting to steal elections, having distinctly senior moments — of which he is supremely guilty. In the MAGA echo chamber, complaints about witch-hunts targeting Trump should be considered just a preface, should he win this November, to a genuine witch-hunt that could make the Red Scare of the 1950s look like a garden party.

After Autocracy

Haiti has no government, much less a strong-armed autocrat like Donald Trump. So, it might seem ludicrous to compare the crisis there with the prospective “bloodbath” Trump promises here. But remember: Haiti suffered under two ruthless dictators from 1957 to 1986: Papa Doc Duvalier and his son, Baby Doc. Between them, they ensured that Haiti would never easily establish democratic institutions.

Donald Trump is nearly 78 years old. He doesn’t have a long political future. Yes, were he to win in November, he would surely do what he could to destroy democracy. Still, the true nightmare scenario is likely to come later, as climate change sends yet more migrants surging toward U.S. borders, generates more fires that sweep across the land, and heats politics to the boiling point. That’s when future versions of the gangs Trump has encouraged to “stand back and stand by,” the insurrectionists he’s promised to amnesty, and the loyalists who have shared images of Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck could assault the citadels of power in an attempt to destroy once and for all the rule of law that Trump has spent his life undermining.

Cue the ominous music: from sea to shining sea, the war of all against all may be just around the corner.

Copyright 2024 John Feffer

Via Tomdispatch.com

A more radical view, however, has been taking shape, thanks largely to the extremism of the Netanyahu government in Israel and the intransigence of a succession of U.S. governments. In 2020, influential Jewish intellectual Peter Beinart published a piece in The New York Times that effectively renounced the notion of a Jewish state in favor of a “one-state solution” in which Jews and Palestinians live together with equal rights in a single state.

Given a choice between liberalism and Zionism, many Americans are giving up on the latter. What started as a trickle has now become a noticeable stream, as Beinart writes in an article last month in the Times. The polling supports his analysis. Last year, Gallup revealed that sympathy among Democrats now favored Palestinians (49 percent) over Israelis (38 percent), a reversal never seen before in the polling. The gap within the Democratic Party is sharply generational. Among Democrats under the age of 35, 74 percent side with Palestinians compared to only 25 percent of those 65 and over.

Here’s an even more startling Ipsos poll, from last year. When asked about a situation in which the West Bank and Gaza remained under Israeli control, a majority of Republicans (64 percent) and Democrats (80 percent) said that they would favor Israeli democracy over its Jewishness. Without really knowing much about Zionism—most respondents in the poll either didn’t know about or were unfamiliar with the ideology—a majority of Americans have already gone down Beinart’s path.

U.S. politics hasn’t quite caught up with U.S. public opinion. In March, Senator Majority Leader Charles Schumer delivered a 44-minute speech on the floor of the Senate that called on Israelis to hold an election and essentially get rid of Netanyahu and his ruling coalition. Even though Schumer expressed his love for Israel and denounced Hamas, he still came in for considerable criticism from Republicans as well as from those who were aghast that he didn’t call for an immediate ceasefire in the conflict.

Like Schumer, the Biden administration has been shifting its position on Israel, but not enough to satisfy younger voters on the left. Together with Arab-Americans, these voters have made their voices heard in the primaries in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Hawaii where the “uncommitted” slate has picked up 25 delegates so far. It may not be enough to tip the election—voters who are uncommitted in the primary are still likely to vote for the Democrats in the face of a potential Trump second term—but it still worries the Biden camp, which is behind in most head-to-head election polls.

The Biden administration has altered its policies toward Israel over the last months, though it might not seem like much of a change given that those policies haven’t ultimately made an impact on the course of the war in Gaza. However, combined with evolving public opinion, these incremental changes may well mark the beginning of a major course correction in U.S. foreign policy. After decades of military assistance and policy coordination, the United States is facing up to its irreconcilable differences with Israel, which could prompt one or both parties to file for divorce.

The Biden Shift

The deaths of over 30,000 Palestinians during Israel’s prolonged assault on Gaza—which was launched after the Hamas attacks of October 7—has certainly concerned the Biden administration. The president and his emissaries have tried to persuade Benjamin Netanyahu to be more “targeted” in his onslaught so that Israeli forces don’t kill quite so many non-combatants. Around 70 percent of Palestinians casualties so far have been women and children.

The Biden administration has also tried to persuade the Israelis not to launch a ground attack against Hamas in the southern city of Rafah, where so many Palestinians have sought refuge. And it has been pushing for a temporary ceasefire that could provide an opportunity for Israel to retrieve some of the hostages that Hamas and its allies still hold and for Gazans to get more humanitarian assistance to stave off serious food and medical crises.

The Israeli authorities have shrugged off U.S. criticisms and suggestions, often angrily, which has basically been the Israeli approach all along.

The most recent Israeli strike on a World Central Kitchen convoy of three vehicles, which killed seven aid workers, has prompted even more soul-searching within the Biden administration. The humanitarian organization provided the Israeli authorities with full information about its intentions and its route. Still, Israeli armed forces struck all three vehicles with pinpoint accuracy, even though the lead vehicle and the one at the back were separated by nearly a mile and a half. Nor were these isolated deaths. At least 196 aid workers have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023.

Netanyahu apologized for the “tragic incident.” But it’s hard not to conclude that “more precise targeting” is not the issue in the Gaza war, given how precisely that convoy had been targeted. The issue is that Israel kills indiscriminately and with impunity. The issue is that the Netanyahu government is engaging in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and, with the assistance of armed settlers, in the West Bank as well. The Israeli government seems determined to remove the material basis for a Palestinian state.

In the face of this policy, the Biden administration’s response is obviously inadequate. In addition to the failed effort to minimize civilian casualties, Washington has pushed for more humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza. Here it has had more success in changing Israeli policy—though the policy hasn’t been implemented at all crossings and, as Oxfam points out, “It is a drop of water in an ocean of need.”

The administration has not stopped supplying Israel with military assistance or attached any conditions on that aid, despite some congressional pressure. More than 30 House Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, recently sent a letter strongly urging Biden “to reconsider your recent decision to authorize the transfer of a new arms package to Israel, and to withhold this and any future offensive arms transfers until a full investigation into the airstrike is completed.” The distressing part is that it took the killing of international aid workers, not the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, to prompt such a letter.

Guardian News Video: “Biden calls for Israel to push for ceasefire and says Netanyahu making a ‘mistake’ on Gaza”

As for the administration’s attempt to forestall an Israeli attack on Rafah, the Netanyahu government has announced on many occasions that it fully intends to “finish the job.” In this context, providing humanitarian assistance so that people don’t starve to death before they are killed in a military operation is a morally dubious position.

So, at what point will the Biden administration—or any U.S. administration—decide that its relationship with Israel is a net negative?

Best Friends?

The boosters of the alliance between Israel and the United States like to note that Israel is a democracy, one of the most prosperous countries on the planet, and “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk,” as former Secretary of State Alexander Haig once put it. President Obama was even blunter, “The United States has no better friend in the world than Israel.”

All of these statements are at best half-truths.

After various autocratic moves by the Netanyahu administration—the judicial “overhaul” designed to weaken the Supreme Court, the various corruption cases—Israel’s democratic credentials have become significantly tarnished. Meanwhile, the Palestinians who make up 20 percent of the population don’t enjoy the full citizenship rights of Israeli Jews. The same can be said about the country’s prosperity: half of Arab families in Israel qualify as poor compared to one in five Israeli Jewish families.

Nor is Israel America’s aircraft carrier. There is only one clandestine U.S. military base in Israel—a radar surveillance site with an unknown number of U.S. soldiers. Most U.S. soldiers based in the Middle East are in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar (with other U.S. forces located in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria). On top of that, Israel frequently engages in military conflicts that run counter to U.S. interests.

As for friendship, the relationship has rarely been all that close. In 1956, the Eisenhower administration was furious at Israel’s occupation of the Sinai peninsula and threatened to withhold aid if it didn’t withdraw. Ultimately, Israel did (though it reoccupied the peninsula a decade later). In 1967, Israel attacked a U.S. spy ship in international waters, killing 34 seamen. In 1981, Israel bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq, which was awkward for the Reagan administration since it was then allied with Saddam Hussein against the Iranians. And Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank has jeopardized relations with several U.S. administrations, beginning with George H. W. Bush.

The Balance Sheet

So, what does Israel provide the United States?

There’s an economic relationship, with Israel investing about $24 billion in the United States. That might sound like a lot, but it doesn’t make it into the top 20 (Singapore invests $36 billion, the UK $663 billion). Meanwhile, since 1946, Israel has absorbed $158 billion in unrestricted aid from the United States, more than any other country.

On the military side, the United States has benefitted (probably) from the sharing of intelligence. On the other hand, Israel kept its own nuclear program a secret from its American friends, so it certainly can’t be accused of over-sharing. Meanwhile, Israel has launched attacks in the region—Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria—that have complicated (to put it mildly) U.S. objectives in the region. However, an argument can be made that Israel sometimes serves as a useful attack dog, taking more aggressive actions than the United States feels that it can make.

Israel used to be a bulwark against Soviet communism. But the Soviet Union is no more, and Israel did not join the sanctions regime against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.

Israel was a more-or-less reliable ally for the United States in its various interventions in the Middle East. But that hasn’t always been the case. Israel’s anti-Iranian positions got in the way of forging a nuclear agreement with Iran. Israel’s invasion of Gaza has drawn the United States back into a military conflict with the Houthis in Yemen. And Israeli strikes in Lebanon and Syria threaten to turn the Gaza conflict into a region-wide war, which would be a nightmare for the United States (among other countries).

Then there’s the reputational issue. The United States has used its veto 45 times at the UN through December 2023 to defend Israel—which is more than half of the U.S. vetoes at the Security Council. Most of these vetoes were about Israeli settlement policy or treatment of Palestinians. In February, the United States was the only country in the Security Council to vote against the Gaza ceasefire proposal. The next month, however, the United States abstained from the vote, allowing the UN resolution to move forward, though it didn’t have any effect on Israeli policy.

The United States did a credible job rallying the world against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That it has failed to do the same against Israel’s invasion of Gaza is obviously hypocritical. True, many countries are equally two-faced for rightly protesting Israel’s actions and doing little to nothing to push back against Russia’s violations of international law. The hypocrisy of other countries notwithstanding, the United States risks what remains of its positive international reputation by its support of Zionism over liberalism.

It’s long past time for the United States to reevaluate its relationship with Israel. The era of arms shipments should end (especially since Israel makes most of what it needs domestically). The recent congressional pushback is a start. The protective cover provided at the UN must end as well, since the United States is so out of step with international public opinion. The abstention on the most recent ceasefire proposal is also a positive sign.

The U.S. ending of its support of Israel as a Jewish state is a much heavier lift. After all, the United States is also a settler state, and there are powerful Christian forces that support the U.S. alliance with Israel for religious reasons. But the process that has begun within the American Jewish community, to choose liberalism over Zionism, must ultimately be the decision for U.S. policymakers as well. Divorce can be averted, of course, if Israel also chooses liberalism over Zionism. Since that’s not very likely at the moment, it might just be time to bring in the lawyers.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Also on the horizon, blazing like an infernal nightmare, is the prospect of an escalation of the current war in Gaza and the spread of destabilizing violence to every corner of the Middle East.

The direction that the region takes could be determined by a feat of imaginative diplomacy. Or an act of murderous stupidity.

Which will it be?

The Widening War

The United States still maintains 40,000 troops across dozens of military bases in the Middle East. Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and Israel invaded Gaza in response, these U.S. facilities and allied forces have sustained over 160 attacks. A number of militias in the region have demonstrated their solidarity with Hamas by attacking Israel across the Lebanese border (Hezbollah), U.S., British, and Israeli ships in the Red Sea (Houthis), and U.S. bases in the region (Iran-allied militias in Iraq and Syria).

Last month, an attack on one such base, Tower 22 in Jordan, left three Americans dead. The Biden administration blamed Iran for the attack. Since Tower 22 is a key node in the coordination of U.S. attacks on Iran-aligned militias, it was a logical target. Responding in part to pressure from its more hawkish critics in Congress, the administration retaliated by launching attacks on 85 sites in Iraq and Syria that are linked to Iran.

Iran’s “axis of resistance” links up a number of groups that have different ideologies, religious beliefs, and positions within their own societies. Israel’s invasion of Gaza has given this constellation of forces a new focus and a new cohesion.

Hezbollah, with 40,000 fighters, is perhaps the most significant, given that its political wing has dominated Lebanese politics. After October 7, Israel and Hezbollah have traded attacks across the border. Most recently, Hezbollah launched drone attacks in northern Israel and Israel responded by destroying weapons depots deep in Lebanese territory. The key to preventing a wider war in the region is negotiating some kind of agreement between the Israeli government and Hezbollah.

The United States has also retaliated against the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, through which 12 percent of global trade passes. These retaliatory strikes don’t seem to have had much effect on the Houthis’ resolve. This weekend, they struck a ship operating under the flag of Belize and also knocked out a U.S. drone. The Houthis enjoy the advantage that real estate agents always talk about: location, location, location. They’ve already caused a dip in the global economy as ships have begun to reroute around South Africa, adding time and cost to shipments of oil and other commodities.

In Iraq, several pro-Iranian militias emerged from the wreckage caused by the U.S. invasion in 2003, including the Popular Mobilization Forces and Kata’ib Hezbollah. Although there is overlap, the former has effectively become part of the Iraqi army while the latter has joined with other groups to form an umbrella organization unaffiliated with the Iraqi government called Islamic Resistance in Iraq. They all want the remaining U.S. troops out of their country.

The Times and the Sunday Times Video: “Israel launches fresh airstrikes on Rafah in southern Gaza”

And they are all incensed by the war in Gaza.

Israel has defied international law and even common sense by continuing to prosecute its war against Hamas and killing nearly 30,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children. It’s not exactly news that Israel is ignoring considerations of human rights and basic morality in its destruction and disenfranchisement of the Palestinian community. What’s different this time is the failure of the Netanyahu government to put the lives of Israeli hostages first and pursue negotiations for their release.

Approximately 130 of the original 253 hostages that Hamas and related organizations seized in Israel on October 7 remain in Gaza. Hamas released 105 in an exchange and four others unilaterally. Israel rescued three and killed three others in a botched rescue attempt. In addition, at least 30 of the 130 remaining hostages are believed to be dead. These hostages are the only real bargaining chip that Hamas has.

Grand Bargain

With negotiations over a ceasefire stalemated in Egypt, the Netanyahu government is planning to launch a new offensive on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city. The United States, basically pleading with its obdurate ally not to attack Rafah, has gone so far as to support for the first time a UN initiative for a temporary pause in fighting (even as Washington continues to reject resolutions calling for an “immediate ceasefire”).

Hamas has proposed a 150-day ceasefire that turns into a permanent truce, a prisoner exchange that would release thousands of detained Palestinians, and an Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza. Netanyahu has dismissed this proposal as “delusional.” He doesn’t want to promise a troop withdrawal. And he insists on a ratio of three Palestinian prisoners released for each hostage.

If the details can be worked out—and there’s no guarantee that Netanyahu in particular will budge—this kind of ceasefire could serve as the keystone of a grand bargain in the region.

Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, has been racing around the capitals of the Middle East to build support for an audacious plan. It looks roughly like this: Saudi Arabia extends diplomatic recognition to Israel and the world comes together to support a new Palestinian state. In effect, Blinken is trying to reignite the Abraham Accords that Jared Kushner started during the Trump administration, but linking Saudi recognition of Israel to a two-state solution rather than simply a cash payout to the Palestinians. According to Axios, “There are several options for U.S. action on this issue, including: Bilaterally recognizing the state of Palestine; not using its veto to block the UN Security Council from admitting Palestine as a full UN member state; encouraging other countries to recognize Palestine.”

You might think that the spoiler in this scenario would be Iran. After all, Tehran has activated its “axis of resistance” in support of Hamas. It has never been coy about its opposition to Israel. And it’s not exactly been cozy with the United States either.

But Iran is actually not the spoiler.

In recent days, the Iranian government has been trying to rein in its allies’ militias in Iraq. Though not all of these forces agree, there have been no attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria since February 4.

This restraint is not just about avoiding a direct conflict with the United States. Iran’s position on Israel has been evolving as well. Even though the Iranian leadership continues to lambaste Netanyahu and his colleagues, it has moved toward embracing a two-state solution. Explains Javad Heiran-Nia at Stimson:

The Iranian position has been that Israel is illegitimate and that a future state should be determined through a referendum of Palestine’s pre-1948 inhabitants and their descendants. However, Iran has been trying not to be isolated in the Islamic world and recognizes that other countries such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey are likely to play a bigger role in diplomacy and reconstruction following the Gaza war. In addition, there are divisions among Iranian Shi’ite clerics about Palestine, with some members of the Qom Seminary supporting a two-state solution. Former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, himself a senior cleric, has said that Iran would accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel if the elected Hamas government chose this path.

Another key part of this evolution was, courtesy of China’s diplomatic efforts, a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia last spring. The longstanding Saudi-Iranian feud, which is both confessional and geostrategic, came to a head recently in the war in Yemen, with Tehran and Riyadh supporting separate proxies in the conflict. That war has large subsided, though talks to bring a formal end to the conflict have stalled. Nevertheless, Iran and Saudi Arabia seem willing to negotiate modest agreements of mutual benefit.

When the elephants are no longer fighting, the grass has a chance to regrow.

Remaining Challenges

Netanyahu has promised to launch the assault on Rafah by the start of Ramadan if the remaining Israeli hostages are not released. Ramadan begins on March 10.

Three weeks is not a lot of time to pull together a grand bargain or even a minor agreement. Barring such an agreement, however, the opportunities for murderous stupidity multiply.

Getting Netanyahu to agree to anything is not easy. But he seems to believe that bringing home the remaining hostages can salvage his tattered reputation. The dismal track record of the Israeli military rescuing those hostages should push him in the direction of a ceasefire and a prisoner exchange. But Netanyahu still has the Entebbe model in his head, the daring rescue of hijacked airline passengers in Uganda in 1976 (the only casualty among the Israeli commandos was Netanyahu’s brother). Without the element of surprise on its side, Israel is not likely to repeat the Entebbe model in an assault on Rafah.

Preventing such an attack on Rafah will be challenging enough. The larger deal that could bring about a Palestinian state faces even longer odds.

Netanyahu has made it clear that his vision of Gaza’s future is as an occupied territory, administered by Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers have eaten away at what might constitute the core of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. That doesn’t leave a whole lot left for an independent state, particularly a non-contiguous one. Meanwhile, Israel has generally insisted that any Palestinian entity can’t have a military. And, because Netanyahu’s government has vowed to eliminate Hamas, it would be difficult to imagine Israel tolerating a role for organization in such an entity.

Which means that a Palestinian state at this point would have to be something of a sleight of hand. The leadership would have to include some representation from Hamas—given its current popularity among Palestinians—but those representatives would probably have to “disconnect” from Hamas. The state would lack such requirements of a state as a military, but it could have bodies like a domestic security force that could one day become an army. There would have to be some “land for peace” arrangement that provides the new state with enough contiguous territory to ensure viability. And Jerusalem would become something of a Brussels shared by the two states.

Ironically it has become easier to get Iran and Saudi Arabia to agree than to expect Netanyahu and Hamas to come to some understanding. There’s no waving of a magic wand to replace the leadership of Israel and the Palestinians with more accommodating leaders. The best scenario is to achieve some reduction of tensions, some release of hostages, some stepping away from the brink of a wider war. With a reduction in tensions comes the possibility of new elections in Israel and the emergence of new leadership in Palestine.

The world waits. Never has the risk of a wider war been greater. Never has the need for imaginative diplomacy been so urgent.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

As 2023 ended, European nations failed to agree on a $54-billion package of assistance for Ukraine at a time when that country was desperately trying to stay afloat and continue its fight against Russian occupation forces. Bizarrely, the failure of that proposal coincided with a surprising EU decision to open membership talks with that beleaguered country.

In other words, no military aid for Ukraine in the short term but a possible offer of a golden ticket to join the EU at some unspecified future moment. Ukrainians might well ask themselves whether, at that point, they’ll still have a country.

One person, right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is largely responsible for that contradictory combo. He singlehandedly blocked the aid package, suggesting that any decision be put off until after European Parliamentary elections in early June of this year. Ever the wily tactician, he expects those elections to signal a political sea change, with conservative and far-right forces — think of them as Donald Trump’s allies in Europe — replacing the parliament’s current centrist consensus. Now an outlier, Orbán is counting on a new crop of sympathetic leaders to advance his arch-conservative social agenda and efforts to cut Ukraine loose.

He’s also deeply skeptical of expanding the EU to include Ukraine or other former Soviet republics, not just because of Russian sensitivities but for fear that EU funds could be diverted from Hungary to new members in the east. By leaving the room when that December vote on future membership took place, Orbán allowed consensus to prevail, but only because he knew he still had plenty of time to pull the plug on Ukraine’s bid.

Ukrainians remain upbeat despite the aid delay. As their leader Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted about future EU membership, “This is a victory for Ukraine. A victory for all of Europe. A victory that motivates, inspires, and strengthens.”

But even if Orbán’s resistance were to be overcome, a larger challenge looms: the European Union that will make the final determination on Ukraine’s membership may not prove to be the same regional body as at present. While Russia and Ukraine battle it out over where to define Europe’s easternmost frontier, a fierce political conflict is taking place to the west over the very definition of Europe.

In retrospect, the departure of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020 may prove to have been just a minor speedbump compared to what Europe faces with the war in Ukraine, the recent success of far-right parties in Italy and the Netherlands, and the prospect that, after the next election, a significantly more conservative European Parliament could at the very least slow the roll-out of the European Green Deal.

And worse yet, a full-court press from the far right might even spell the end of the Europe that has long shimmered on the horizon as a greenish-pink ideal. The extinguishing of the one consistent success story of our era — particularly if Donald Trump were also to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election — could challenge the very notion of progress that’s at the heart of any progressive agenda.

Orbán’s Allies

For decades, Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right Party for Freedom, has regularly garnered headlines for his outrageous statements and proposals to ban Islam, the Quran, and/or immigrants altogether. In the run-up to the November 2023 parliamentary elections in the Netherlands, it looked as if he would continue to be an eternal also-ran with a projected vote total in the mid to upper teens. In addition to the usual obstacles he faced, like the lunacy of his platform, he was up against a reputed political powerhouse in Frans Timmermans, the architect of Europe’s Green Deal and the newly deputized leader of the Dutch center-left coalition.

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To everyone’s surprise, however, Wilders’s party exceeded expectations, leading the field with 23% of the vote and more than doubling the number of Party for Freedom seats in the new parliament.

Although mainstream European parties had historically been reluctant to form governments with the far right, some have now opportunistically chosen to do so. Far-right parties now serve in governments in Sweden and Finland, while leading coalitions in Italy and Slovakia.

Wilders, too, wants to lead. He’s even withdrawn a 2018 bill to ban mosques and the Quran in an effort to woo potential partners. Such gestures toward the center have also characterized the strategy of Giorgia Meloni, the head of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, who downplayed its fascist roots and pledged to support both NATO and the EU to win enough centrist backing to become Italy’s current prime minister.

But what happens if there’s no longer a political center that must be wooed?

That’s been the case in Hungary since Viktor Orbán took over as prime minister in 2010. He has systematically dismantled judicial, legislative, and constitutional checks on his power, while simultaneously marginalizing his political opposition. Nor does he have to compromise with the center, since it’s effectively dropped out of Hungarian politics — and he and his allies are eager to export their Hungarian model to the rest of Europe. Worse yet, they’ve got a strong tailwind. In 2024, the far-right is on track to win elections in both Austria and Belgium, while Marine Le Pen’s far-right party leads the polls in France and the equally intemperate, anti-immigrant Alternative fur Deutschland is running a strong second to the center-right in Germany.

No less ominously, the Identity and Democracy bloc, which includes the major French and German far-right parties, is projected to gain more than two dozen seats in the European parliamentary elections this June. The European Conservatives and Reformists bloc, which contains the Finnish, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish far-right parties, will also probably pick up a few seats. Throw in unaffiliated representatives from Orbán’s Fidesz party and that bloc could become the largest in the European parliament, even bigger than the center-right coalition currently at the top of the polls.

Such developments only further fuel Orbán’s transnational ambitions. Instead of being the odd man out on votes over Ukrainian aid, he wants to transform the European Union with himself at the center of a new status quo. “Brussels is not Moscow,” he tweeted in October. “The Soviet Union was a tragedy. The EU is only a weak contemporary comedy. The Soviet Union was hopeless, but we can change Brussels and the EU.”

With such a strategy, wittingly or not, Orbán is following the Kremlin playbook. Russian President Vladimir Putin has long wanted to undercut European unity as part of an effort to divide the West. With that in mind, he forged alliances with far-right political parties like Italy’s Lega and Austria’s Freedom Party to sow havoc in European politics. His careful cultivation of Orbán has made Hungary functionally his country’s European proxy.

Not all of Europe has jumped on the far-right bandwagon. Voters in Poland last year even kicked out the right-wing Law and Justice party, while the far right lost big in the latest Spanish elections. Also, far-right parties are notoriously hard to herd and forging a consensus among them will undoubtedly prove difficult on issues like NATO, LGBTQ rights, and economic policy.

Still, on one key issue they’re now converging. They used to disagree on whether to support leaving the EU, Brexit-style, or staying to fight. Now, they largely favor a take-over-from-within strategy. And to make that happen, they’ve coalesced around two key issues: the strengthening of “Fortress Europe” to keep out those fleeing the Global South and frontally assaulting that cornerstone of recent EU policy, the Green energy transition.

The Fate of the Green New Deal

In Germany, the far right has gone after, of all things, the heat pump. The Alternative fur Deutschland’s campaign against a bill last year to replace fossil-fuel heating systems with electrical heat pumps propelled the party into second place in the polls (thanks to an exaggeration of the cost of such pumps). The French far right is also on the political rise, fueled in part by its opposition to what its leader Marine Le Pen, in a manifesto issued in 2022, called “an ecology that has been hijacked by climate terrorism, which endangers the planet, national independence and, more importantly, the living standards of the French people.” In the Netherlands, Wilders and the far right have similarly benefited from a farmer backlash against proposals to reduce nitrogen pollution.

A report from the Center for American Progress concludes that European far-right groups “frame environmental policies as elitist while stoking economic anxiety and nationalism, which erodes trust in democratic institutions and further distracts from genuine environmental concerns.” Researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway are even more pointed: “Populist far-right parties portray fossil fuel phase-out as a threat to traditional family values, regional identity, and national sovereignty.”

The European far right, in other words, is mobilizing behind a second Great Replacement theory. According to the initial version of that conspiracy theory, which helped a first wave of right-wing populists take power a few years ago, immigrants were plotting to replace indigenous, mostly white populations in Europe. Now, extremists argue that clean green energy is fast replacing the fossil fuels that anchor traditional (read: white Christian) European communities. This “fossil fascism,” as Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective have labeled it, marries extractivism to ethnonationalism, with right-wing whites clinging to oil and coal as tightly as Barack Obama once accused their American counterparts of clinging to guns and religion.

Believers in this second Great Replacement theory have demonized the European Green Deal, which is dedicated to reducing carbon emissions 55% by 2030. The overall deal is a sophisticated industrial policy designed to create jobs in the clean energy sector that will replace those lost by miners, oil riggers, and pipeline workers. However urgently needed, the Deal doesn’t come cheap and so is vulnerable to charges of “elitism.”

Worse yet, the backlash against Europe’s Green turn has expanded to efforts in the European Parliament to block pesticide reduction and weaken legislation on the reduction of packaging. As a result of this backlash, Politico notes, “The Green Deal now limps on, with several key policies on the scrapheap.” A rightward shift in the European Parliament would knock the Green Deal to the ground (and even kick it while down), ensuring a further disastrous heating of this planet.

The War of Ideas

The war in Ukraine seems to be about the territory Russia has occupied, the fight over the European Green Deal about politics and the far right’s search for an issue as effective as immigrant-bashing to rally voters. At the center of both struggles, however, is something far more significant. From Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin to Marine Le Pen at the reactionary barricades in Paris, the far right is fighting over the very future of European ideals.

Narrowly, that debate is just the latest iteration of a longstanding question about whether Europe should emphasize expanding its membership or the deeper integration of the present EU. Until now, the compromise has been to set a distinctly high bar for EU membership but provide generous subsidies to the lucky few countries that make it into the club. By turning a cold shoulder to a neighbor in need, after having benefitted enormously from EU largesse since the 1990s, Hungary is challenging that core principle of solidarity.

But Orbán and his allies have a far more radical mission in mind: to transform European identity. Right now, Europe stands for extensive social programs that even right-wing parties are reluctant to consider dismantling. The European Union has also advanced the world’s most consequential collective program on a green energy transition. And despite some backlash, it remains a welcoming space for the LGBTQ community.

In other words, the EU is still a beacon for progressives around the world (notwithstanding the neoliberal reforms that are regressively remaking its economic space). It remains an aspirational space for the countries on Europe’s borders that yearn to escape autocracy and relative poverty. It’s similarly so for people in distant lands who imagine Europe as an ark of salvation in an increasingly illiberal world, and even for U.S. progressives who are envious of European health care and industrial policies, as well as its environmental regulations. That the EU’s policies are also the product of vigorous transnational politicking has also been inspirational for internationalists who want stronger cross-border cooperation to help solve global problems.

In the late 1980s, as the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and the Soviet Union began to fall apart, political scientist Francis Fukuyama imagined an “end of history.” The hybrid of market democracy, he argued, would be the answer to all ideological debates and the European Union would serve as the boring, bureaucratic endpoint of global political evolution. Since the invasion of Ukraine, however, history is not only back, but seems to be going backward.

The far right is at the forefront of that retreat. Even as the EU contemplates expansion eastward, a revolt from within threatens to bring about the end of Europe itself — the end, that is, of the liberal and tolerant social welfare state, of a collective commitment to economic solidarity, and of its leading role in addressing climate change. The battle between a democratic Ukraine and the autocratic Russian petrostate is, in other words, intimately connected to the conflicts being waged in Brussels.

Without a vibrant, democratic Ukraine, the eastern frontier of Europe abutting Russia is likely to become a zone of fragile, divided, incoherent “nation states,” hard-pressed to qualify for EU membership. Without a powerful left defending Europe’s gold-standard social safety nets, libertarians are likely to advance their attempts to eat away at or eliminate the regulatory state. Without Europe’s lead, global efforts to address climate change will grow dangerously more diffuse.

Sound familiar? That’s also the agenda of the far-right in the United States, led by Donald Trump. His MAGA boosters, like media personalities Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, have been pulling for Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders, and Vladimir Putin to send Europe spiraling backward into fascism.

Short on resources and political power, progressives have always possessed one commodity in bulk: hope. The arc of the moral universe is long, Martin Luther King, Jr., prophesied so many years ago, but it bends toward justice. Or maybe it doesn’t. Take away the European ideal and no matter what happens in the American presidential election this year, 2024 will be the year that hope dies last.

Copyright 2024 John Feffer

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The greatest horror of the war between Israel and Gaza is that it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Israeli intelligence received a 40-page document a year before the October 7 attack that provided precise details of the plan of the militant Hamas organization to breach the security wall between Israel and Gaza.

Although the document was widely distributed among military and intelligence officials, the Israeli government did not act. It did not send reinforcements to the border. It did not modify the border wall itself. It dismissed the warnings of an intelligence analyst who reported in July on a Hamas training exercise that closely mirrored the details in the 40-page document. And then, two days before the October 7 attack, two Israeli commando companies were redeployed away from the Gaza border to the West Bank.

This extraordinary news has not brought down the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, even though the Israeli leader has long argued that only he and his far right-wing policies keep Israelis safe. By failing to disrupt the plans of Hamas, his government in fact put thousands of Israelis in harm’s way. Then, on October 7, the government dragged its feet in response to the attack. And it has jeopardized more Israeli lives—particularly those of the hostages that Hamas took during its incursion—by launching an indiscriminately violent attack against Hamas and Palestinians in general in Gaza.

Whatever popularity Netanyahu had before October 7 has largely disappeared. According to a poll in November, only 4 percent of Israelis trust their prime minister. For some time, Netanyahu has also faced numerous charges of corruption, for which he could receive as much as a 10-year prison sentence. Remaining in office doesn’t provide him with immunity. But Netanyahu’s manipulations of the judicial system, which mobilized public sentiment against him prior to October 7, could help him evade prosecution in the future.

On top of his failure to keep Israeli citizens safe, Netanyahu now faces international condemnation for the ongoing attacks in Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces have killed Hamas fighters and innocent civilians alike. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, over 17,000 Palestinians have died so far in the two-month conflict, with another 6,000 people missing. Almost 70 percent of those who have died are women and children.

The Palestinian death toll is already more than 10 times the number of Israelis killed—1,200—on October 7.

The high death toll in Gaza results from a number of factors. First of all, Israel is dropping enormous bombs on crowded neighborhoods. It has blocked all but a trickle of humanitarian aid from making it into the country, putting an even larger number of Gazans at risk. In the Jabalia refugee camp alone, an estimated 100,000 people face starvation. Hamas, too, has contributed to the high casualty rate by embedding itself in the civilian infrastructure, but that’s no surprise for an organization that combines paramilitary operations with political governance and the provision of social services.

Although the Israeli military has warned Gazans to leave areas under attack, the residents of Gaza have nowhere to go as Israel expands the scope of its operations. The only reasonably safe place would be over the border in Egypt. But the Egyptian government has cooperated with the Israeli authorities by effectively sealing off Gaza. The border closure is a reminder of just how low a priority the Arab world has accorded Palestinians, even as various countries like Saudi Arabia pretend to lobby on behalf of the dispossessed.

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

Netanyahu faces international condemnation. Calling the Israeli prime minister “the butcher of Gaza,” Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has predicted that Netanyahu will suffer the same fate as Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. The Colombian government has promised to bring formal charges of war crimes against Netanyahu at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Hamas, too, will face charges of war crimes for the horrifying murders on October 7. But Israel, as a state, should face considerably greater penalties for its conduct. True, Israel is not a member of the ICC. But because Palestine became a member in 2015, Israeli actions there are prosecutable in the international body.

Israel claims that, for security purposes, it must eliminate Hamas as a threat. But with its indiscriminate attacks, Israel is radicalizing a new generation of Palestinians who no longer believe in engaging with Israeli authorities.

The United States wants the Palestinian Authority (PA) to replace Hamas as the government in Gaza, with the 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas remaining as the leader. But according to a former PA official, “a staggering 87 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believe that the PA is corrupt, 78 percent want Abbas to resign, and 62 percent believe that the PA is a liability.” Not surprisingly, support for Hamas has significantly increased in the West Bank since the latest war began.

Pressure on Israel to abide by a ceasefire is also increasing. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter in declaring the war in Gaza to be a threat to world peace. The United States and United Kingdom are so far opposing a humanitarian pause in the conflict, but the EU is increasingly on the side of the Arab world in demanding that Israel stop the carnage. Only eight countries—Austria, Czechia, Guatemala, Liberia, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay—joined the United States and Israel in opposing the most recent ceasefire resolution at the UN.

The Netanyahu government, unfortunately, has nothing to lose by continuing its attacks. It can’t sink any lower in the polls, and the vast majority of Israelis support the current effort to destroy Hamas. Although some members of the U.S. Congress want to put conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel and hundreds of synagogues and Jewish groups in the United States have urged the Biden administration to support a ceasefire, the U.S. president shows no signs of abandoning Netanyahu. Israel has faced firestorms of international criticism in the past and, even in the face of U.S. lobbying, refused to modify its policies in the Occupied Territories.

The Biden administration has tried to persuade Netanyahu that his actions in Gaza and failure to support a two-state solution are isolating Israel. In fact, the Biden administration’s policy on Israel is isolating the United States, particularly given the obvious disconnect between Washington’s condemnation of Russian war crimes and silence over Israeli war crimes.

Palestinians, meanwhile, are caught in the crossfire between a desperate Hamas and a determined IDF. A ceasefire, followed by a more durable peace, can save their lives, provide an opportunity to rebuild their neighborhoods, and offer them eventually an opportunity for some degree of self-governance. Right now, ordinary Palestinians are powerless to the point of erasure. Any solution to the current crisis must put Palestinians at the center of decision-making. They must be given the chance to shed their victim status and become architects of their own lives.

Or perhaps, because of poll numbers that fall as trial dates approach, the Republican Party won’t end up nominating the current frontrunner as their presidential candidate in 2024.

And, of course, in the general election, despite its lukewarm attitude toward Joe Biden, the American electorate could still unite in the face of the political equivalent of an asteroid strike to reject the greatest-ever threat to American democracy.

But sometimes you just have to face your nightmares. What would Donald J. Trump do to the world if he once again enters the White House in 2025?

Enter the Joker

The world of geopolitics is relatively predictable—until it isn’t. The greatest source of unpredictability are the wild cards: Vladimir Putin’s decision last year to invade Ukraine, the subsequent victory of political outsider Gustavo Petro in the Colombian presidential elections, the surprise announcement this year of a diplomatic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Donald Trump is the ultimate wild card, a joker-in-chief whose every pronouncement threatens to disrupt the status quo. When he became president in 2016, he certainly made some predictable decisions—canceling U.S. participation in the Paris climate agreement, withdrawing from the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement—which fulfilled campaign promises.

But who could have guessed that he would sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un not just once (Singapore), not just twice (Vietnam), but three times (at the DMZ)? I don’t remember any pundits predicting that Trump would commit an impeachable offense by delaying aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. And what about Trump’s attempt to buy Greenland, his disparagement of “shithole countries,” his sudden decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and greenlight Turkey’s invasion of that country?

Unpredictability is not always a bad thing. Meeting with the North Korean leader could have been a shrewd move if Trump actually understood a thing or two about Kim Jong Un and his country. But there was no method in Trump’s erratic behavior. He was not a crafty “mad man” trying to emulate Richard Nixon. He was just going with his (fast-food-filled) gut.

So, the first thing to know about the prospect of another Trump term, when it comes to foreign policy, is that all bets are off (along with all gloves).

Battling the State

Trump and his MAGA followers have an almost pathological disgust for government. His future plan to fire huge numbers of federal employees, based on an executive order he pushed through in the waning days of 2020, targets about 50,000 civil servants who have the most impact on federal policy: the so-called deep state.

But Trump and company don’t simply want to “deconstruct the administrative state,” as Trump whisperer Steve Bannon famously said. They want to remake the state to concentrate political and economic power in the hands of themselves and their wealthy friends. That requires removing the checks on executive power that are embedded in the federal bureaucracy.

Basically, Trump wants to transform a system that already tilts dangerously in the direction of oligopoly into a full-blown patronage state along the lines of what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary and Vladimir Putin has accomplished in Russia.

The same can be said for his attitude toward the institutions of the international community. In 2025, Trump will again try to wreck as many global deals and bodies as possible, from the Paris agreement on climate change to the UN Human Rights Council. He’ll do his best to undermine NATO, even withdrawing from the security pact, according to his former national security advisor John Bolton, himself no friend to internationalism.

Trump despises everything global beyond his own business empire. He’s not against free trade per se, and he is certainly not thinking of improving the lives of U.S. workers. But he fancies himself a great dealmaker who can force the Europeans, the Chinese, and everyone else to negotiate more favorable terms for U.S. businesses. For Trump, this must be in a bilateral context, mano a mano. That’s why he opposes multilateral trade deals, even if they would ultimately advantage the United States.

If he wins, Trump has promised to create a tariff wall around the United States at a rate of 10 percent for all countries. Right now, some countries face practically no tariffs while a country like China has to deal with an average rate of 19 percent. Trump’s proposal, which has the odor of something composed on the back of a cocktail napkin, is designed not so much to protect American interests as to reward nations (with tariff reductions) that kowtow to Trump and stimulate a global trade war among everyone else.

This stance might eventually cost Trump the election, because Wall Street doesn’t trust him to make good deals. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal upbraided Trump for his scattershot protectionism. Sure, such populist moves might win him some votes in battleground states—though progressives and conservatives alike argue that those policies actually lost jobs in the Rust Belt—but it will probably send a lot of high-level donors to the Democrats. Alas, in the United States, money doesn’t just talk, it votes.

War and (Not So Much) Peace

Trump is positioning himself as the peace candidate. Like everything else about the man, it’s a sham.

Trump has claimed that he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours by using threats to goad both sides to the negotiating table. The plan, specifically, would be to threaten Ukraine with a cut-off in aid and simultaneously threaten Russia with a sharp increase in aid to its adversary.  Trump makes no mention of the other countries that supply Ukraine with substantial military assistance or the current difficulty of pushing additional Ukraine aid packages through Congress.

The plan consists of a double-bluff—and is, itself, a bluff. Having shown his hand, however, Trump would find it rather difficulty to execute his plan.

Elsewhere, Trump is likely to escalate not de-escalate. Having wrecked the Iran nuclear deal, Trump will likely pick up where he left off. During his time in office, Trump risked war with Iran on two occasions, ordering the assassination of a top military leader and contemplating missile strikes in his last days in office. Because the ayatollahs will never contemplate a Trump Tower Tehran, thus rebuffing the most transactional and self-serving president in U.S. history, the Donald will no doubt turn up the volume of his attacks on the country.

There are other possibilities for war under Trump. After all, he’s irascible, quick to anger, and trigger-happy. During his presidency, he threatened North Korea, Venezuela, and Syria.

But honestly, the most terrifying war that Trump is planning is his attacks on America: on the Constitution, on democracy, on the state. The only reason that Trump in a second term might not end up waging war on another country is because he’ll be too focused on destroying his own.

The world awaits the judgment of the American voters. Democracy is all about learning from collective mistakes. If America makes the same mistake again, it will have committed democratic harakiri.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Still, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that there’s a catch. If you don’t sell a pile of products or sign up a ton of friends to do the same, the odds are that you’ll end up losing money, no matter how hard you work, especially if you take out loans to build your “business.”

The founders of multi-level marketing schemes always make a lot of money. Some of their friends become wealthy, too. But 99% of those who sell the products, whether cosmetics or dietary supplements, lose money. That’s worse than a conventional pyramid scam, which fleeces only nine out of every 10 people involved.

Now, imagine that you’re a poor country. The international financial institutions (IFIs) promise that, if you follow a simple formula, you, too, will become a wealthy nation. In a fit of desperation or madness, you take out loans from those same IFIs and commercial banks, invest in building up your export industries, and cut back on government regulations. Then you wait for the good news.

But of course, there’s a catch. You have to sell a staggering number of exports to actually make money. Meanwhile, you have to repay those loans, while covering the compounding interest payments that accompany them. Soon you’re caught in a debt trap and falling ever further behind the wealthy countries of the north. The main winners? The corporations that flooded into your country in search of tax incentives, cheap labor, and lax manufacturing and mining regulations.

The nation-states that founded the modern global economy have indeed made tons of money, as have some of their friends and allies. Despite the devastation of World War II, for instance, Japan was able to scramble up the ladder again to join the treehouse club of powerful nations. Meanwhile, in a single generation, South Korea’s economy was transformed from the per capita gross domestic product of a Ghana or Haiti in 1960 into one of the world’s most powerful by the 1980s. In Latin America, Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica all managed to join South Korea in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a collection of the planet’s 38 most prosperous countries.

But in 2023, there’s a catch to climbing that ladder into the industrialized world. As the board of directors of the club of the wealthy points out, the classic ladder of development, industrialization itself, has become rickety and ever more dangerous. After all, it requires energy traditionally supplied by fossil fuels, now known to radically heat up the planet and endanger the very survival of humanity. Today, countries aspiring to join the charmed circle of the wealthy can no longer hope to climb that ladder in any usual fashion, thanks in part to the carbon-neutrality pledges virtually all nations made as part of the Paris climate accord.

The Global South is divided on how to respond. For instance, as the world’s second-largest consumer of coal and third-largest consumer of oil, India wants to grow in the old-fashioned fossil-fuelized way, becoming the last one up that ladder, even as its rungs are disintegrating. Other countries, like renewables-reliant Uruguay and carbon-neutral Suriname, are exploring more sustainable paths to progress.

Either way, with global temperatures setting ever more extreme records and inequality worsening, poor countries face their last shot at following South Korea and Qatar into the ranks of the “developed” world. They may fail, along with the rest of us on this overheating planet, or perhaps one or two might get lucky and make it into the club. However, with some clever negotiating, judicious leveraging of resources, and a lot of solidarity, it’s just possible that they could team up to rewrite the very rules of the global economy and achieve a measure of prosperity for all.

Growing Inequality

The boosters of globalization point to a steady decline of inequality among nations between 1980 and 2020, largely because of the explosive economic growth of China and other Asian countries like Vietnam. However, those boosters often fail to mention two important facts: in 2020, such inequality was still roughly the same as it had been in 1900 when colonialism was in full swing. Meanwhile, in recent decades, inequality within countries has skyrocketed. Since 1995, in fact, the top 1% of the wealthiest among us have accumulated 20 times that of the bottom 50%.

The Covid pandemic only made matters worse. According to one estimate, it threw 90 million people into extreme poverty, while increasing the wealth of billionaires more rapidly in just two pandemic years than in the previous 23 years combined.

And mind you, the super-rich no longer reside only in the prosperous “north.” China and India now have the most billionaires after the United States. The consolidation of obscene wealth alongside abject poverty is one reason inequality has risen more rapidly within countries than between them.

But something else strange is happening. In addition to making the ladder of fossil-fuelized industrialization more difficult to climb, climate change has been pushing the architects of the global economy to rethink their animus toward state intervention. Accelerating as it is due to a fundamentalist faith in markets, climate change may also be delivering the coup de grace to neoliberalism.

Climate Debts

During the Industrial Revolution and the ensuing century and a half of global economic expansion, the countries of the North grew wealthy by exploiting oil, natural gas, and coal. In doing so, they pumped trillions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Poorer countries generally supplied the raw materials for that “miracle of progress” — at first, involuntarily thanks to colonialism and then more-or-less voluntarily through trade.

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From 1751 to 2021, the United States was responsible for fully one-quarter of all carbon emissions, with the members of the European Union in second place at 22% (followed by China, India, Japan, Russia, and other major powers). On the other hand, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Oceania have collectively contributed only a tiny fraction of those emissions over time. Of the existing carbon budget — the amount the world can emit without crossing the 1.5C degree red line set by the Paris climate accord — only 250 gigatons remain. That’s approximately what China alone had emitted by 2021 while muscling its way into the clubhouse of the rich and powerful.

The wealthy club members have all now embarked on transitions to “clean energy.” The European Union’s “Fit for 55” aims to reduce its carbon emissions by 55% by 2030. The Biden administration pushed through the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act to incentivize states, corporations, and individuals to move away from fossil fuels, so that the United States could become carbon-neutral by 2050. In both cases, the state is playing a much more active role in guiding the transition than would have been tolerated in the heyday of Thatcherism or Reaganism (or, today, Trumpism).

The Global South, which bears little responsibility for the climate mess the planet faces, doesn’t have the necessary billions of dollars to devote to “clean energy transitions.” So, because climate change knows no borders, in 2010, the richer countries promised to contribute $100 billion a year to fund “mitigation” (emissions reductions) in the Global South. However, that promise has proved to be — the perfect image for our overheated moment – mostly hot air. Ten years later, according to Oxfam, the wealthy nations have managed to mobilize at most $25 billion in real assistance annually.

Meanwhile, climate change is wreaking havoc in the here and now. Though Canadian wildfires and European heat waves have dominated the climate headlines in the north this summer, the effects of climate change are actually being disproportionately felt south of the equator. According to one estimate, by 2030, developing countries will be hit with climate bills of between $290 billion and $580 billion annually.

Last year, rich countries made another pledge of money, this time to a “loss and damage fund” to compensate poor nations for the ongoing impacts of climate change. Those funds, however, have yet to come into existence, while the desperately poor countries of the Global South await the next round of climate negotiations — in oil-rich Dubai of all places — to find out how much is involved, from whom, and for whom.

Promises, promises.

So far, the poorer countries have been shaking their tin cups outside the meetings of the powerful, hoping that some loose change will eventually trickle down to them. But there may be another way.

Global Just Transition

The fossil-fuel-free future the Global North is touting depends on critical materials like lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements to build electric batteries, solar panels, and windmills. Most of these essential assets are located in the south. In one of those ironies of history, the economic development of the north once again depends significantly on what lies beneath the ground (and the oceans) south of the equator. In this brave new world of “green colonialism,” the north is maneuvering to grab such needed resources at the lowest price possible in part by perpetuating for the poor the very neoliberal model of “less government” that it’s begun to abandon itself.

There’s also a Cold War twist to this tale. According to policymakers in Brussels and Washington, the “clean energy” transition shouldn’t be held hostage by China, which mines and processes many of its critical minerals (producing 60% and processing 85% of all rare earth elements). China might one day decide to shut down the supply chain of such critical minerals, a foreshadowing of which took place this summer when Beijing imposed export controls on gallium and germanium in response to a Dutch ban on certain high-tech exports to China. The Chinese leadership will undoubtedly continue out-negotiating the West to gain privileged access to what it needs for its own high-tech industries.

A new “mineral rush” is underway. The European Union (EU) is now debating a “Critical Raw Materials Act” meant to reduce dependency on Chinese inputs through more mining closer to home, from Sweden to Serbia, not to speak of more “urban mining” (that is, recycling materials from used batteries and old solar panels).

Europe is also locking in deals with mineral-rich countries in the Global South. The EU typically negotiated a trade agreement with Chile that ensures EU access to that country’s lithium supplies, while making it more difficult for Chile’s government to supply its own manufacturers with cheaper inputs.

Washington, meanwhile, put a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act to ensure that electric car manufacturers source at least 40% of their batteries’ mineral content from the United States or U.S. allies (read: not China). That percentage is to rise to 80% by 2027. Washington is not only scrambling to secure its own critical minerals, but forcing allies to cut ties with China and compete for sources elsewhere in the world.

Such an effort to “secure supply chains,” while a blow to China, represents a possible boon for the Global South. A country like Chile, which commands so much of the lithium market, can theoretically negotiate more than just a good price for its product. It could leverage its mineral riches to acquire valuable technology, intellectual property, or greater control over the overall supply chain. Collectively, those mineral suppliers could also take a page from the playbook of the oil producers. Indonesia, for instance, has already floated the idea of a nickel cartel.

Such strategies, however, face a threefold challenge. The United States and Europe are already boosting mining at home to become more self-sufficient. Then there’s the prospect that such minerals will be rendered obsolete by technological advances, much as the United States created a synthetic substitute for rubber when supplies became tight during World War II. Scientists are now racing to invent electric batteries that don’t depend on lithium or cobalt.

Even more worrisome are the environmental consequences of such mining. The countries of the Global South could indeed use “ladders” made of lithium, cobalt, or nickel to climb into the club of the wealthy. But they would be hard-pressed to do so without creating “zones of sacrifice,” destroying communities and ecosystems around mineral extraction sites.

So, let’s take a fresh look at the cartel idea. Venezuela originally proposed the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (or OPEC) as a method of reducing oil consumption. The problem Venezuela grasped 70 years ago was not just the low price of what the then-Venezuelan oil minister called “the devil’s excrement” but the unsustainable nature of a global dependency on fossil fuels. OPEC was to help conserve resources. Could a mineral cartel serve that very purpose?

Breaking the Cycle

The central problem facing the planet is not just carbon emissions and climate change. They’re both, in their own fashion, symptoms of an even larger crisis of the overconsumption of resources, including energy. Consider one minor example: the amount of stuff Americans buy at Christmas and then return without using amounts to $300 billion a year. That’s more than the economic output of Finland, Peru, or Kenya.

That gives “shop ’til you drop” a new meaning.

Rather than building a different ladder to climb into prosperity, the countries of the Global South could take the unprecedented challenge of human-induced climate change as an opportunity to rewrite the rules of the global economy. Instead of dreaming of consuming at the same rate as the Global North — inconceivable given the planet’s shrinking resource base — the Global South could use its mineral leverage to effectively lessen inequality on a planet-wide basis. In practice, that would mean forcing the North’s middle class to begin trimming its consumption by reducing the supply of fossil-fuel energy to the addicted.

In a referendum in Ecuador last month, its citizens voted to keep the oil in the Yasuni National Park beneath the ground. A number of countries in Oceania — Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Tonga — have similarly endorsed a “non-proliferation treaty” for fossil fuels that would phase out oil, gas, and coal production. Great Britain and the EU have considered rationing plans for fossil fuel.

Nor can the rich be allowed to sit on their billions while the planet burns. The wealth taxes that some countries have implemented — and others like the United States are now considering — would go a long way toward shifting funds from the super-rich to the greatest victims of climate change and biodiversity loss. Consider this slogan for our changing times: more butterflies, fewer billionaires.

The global economy is essentially on a downward debt spiral for the poor and an upward consumption spiral for the rich. In short, it’s a rigged game. The solution is not to usher a few lucky countries into the world of unsustainable excess, which would just be a new version of green colonialism.

Rather, it’s time to flip the game upside down and end that very green colonialism by requiring a southernization of the north — forcing the latter to reduce its consumption of energy and other resources to meet that of the Global South. The inequality of industrialization got us into this crisis. Addressing that inequality is the only way out.

Copyright 2023 John Feffer

Here’s the kicker: Russia is not on the invitation list.

It’s quite an embarrassment that all the BRICS countries except Russia are poised to attend the Saudi event. It’s also telling that Saudi Arabia, which has long collaborated with Russia on setting the price of oil, is deliberately snubbing its erstwhile petro-ally.

True, Saudi heir apparent Mohammed bin Salman has been looking for ways to salvage his international reputation after ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A very public effort to end the war in Ukraine could go toward rehabilitating the murderous prince (at least among those countries willing to excuse the heinous crime).

But the decision to work with Ukraine on such a summit is likely more about Saudi anger over Putin’s recent decision to destroy the grain deal that facilitated the delivery of Ukrainian agricultural products to global markets.

Wealthy Saudi Arabia is not so much worried about feeding itself in the wake of the deal’s demise. But it is worried about the impact of higher prices elsewhere in the region. The Arab Spring protests, after all, were triggered by the rising cost of basic commodities in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. Saudi influence in the region depends on the maintenance of a conservative political order anchored in despotic regimes that can manage the discontent of their own populations. In its blind ambition to destroy Ukraine, Russia is ignoring the more far-reaching consequences of its military policies.

It’s not just Saudi Arabia that’s angry about these consequences.

Recently, the Kremlin hosted a second summit of African leaders in Moscow. Back in 2019, 43 leaders showed up for the first such gathering. Last month, a mere 17 bothered to make the journey.

Here, too, multiple factors are at play. African leaders are understandably put off by Putin’s high-handed treatment of the African delegation led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa that visited St. Petersburg in June, which turned into a dressing down of the visitors for their presumptuousness at including a Russian troop withdrawal in their peace plan.

But another major reason for the no-shows was Russia’s reckless rejection of the grain deal. African countries are particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of grain and have relied a good deal on relatively inexpensive Ukrainian imports.

At this point, Vladimir Putin is willing to suffer any number of self-inflicted wounds in order to beat Ukraine into submission. He will alienate a close ally like Saudi Arabia. He will anger an entire continent of people (where Russia already had a low reputation prior to the 2022 invasion). He will make it more difficult for millions of poor people to afford food. He will even complicate the efforts of Russian grain producers to bring their product to market.

Threats by Russian leaders to use nuclear weapons jeopardize the livelihoods of everyone on the planet, but such scenarios are highly speculative and constitute a future risk. The Russian campaign to undermine the world’s food supply, meanwhile, jeopardizes the livelihoods of the world’s most vulnerable people in the here and now.

Russian Actions in Detail

Because of the grain deal inked last summer, Ukraine managed to get to market more than 20 million tons of wheat, corn, and other grains that had been stuck in the country’s southern ports. In all, Ukraine managed to export 36.2 million metric tons of food during the year the deal was in place. Over half of those exports went to the developing world.

These shipments brought down the prices of food, which had spiked immediately after Russia’s invasion last February. The end of the deal did not quite reverse all the progress in keeping food affordable but it did lead to the largest one-day increase in wheat futures since the war began in February 2022. According to The Washington Post, “Unless Russia reverses course, this will make low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East more dependent on slightly more expensive Russian wheat, which produces about 20 percent of the world’s supply.”

Image by Сергей Канавин from Pixabay

Russia didn’t just destroy the deal. It has also set out to destroy Ukrainian grain directly by bombing silos and other agricultural infrastructure. In this way, it has managed to remove 60,000 tons of grain from the global food supply. Most recently, it has begun to target ports and storage facilities along the Danube river, an alternative route to get Ukrainian products to market. The latest attacks pushed wheat prices up around 3 percent and corn prices around 2 percent on world markets.

Russia is thus deploying two strategies to undercut its agricultural competitor: prevent grain from getting to markets and destroying it in storage facilities.

It’s not just the Middle East and Africa that will be affected by Russia’s agricultural warfare. The biggest importer of Ukrainian foodstuffs over the last year was actually China, which received one-quarter of the shipments. So, add China to the list of countries pissed off at the Kremlin for its tactics.

And while we’re at it, let’s expand that list to include the UN and everyone at risk of starvation wherever they live in the world. Over the last year, Ukraine supplied the World Food Program with 80 percent of its grain, which was up from 50 percent before the war. With its strategy of bomb and blockade, Russia is literally taking the food out of the mouths of the hungry.

But what about the supposed advantages that Russia received from signing the deal in the first place?

A parallel deal facilitated by the European Union made it easier for Russia to export its own grain, despite the thicket of economic sanctions imposed after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Last year, Russia exported a record 45.5 million metric tons of wheat, with an even larger amount expected this year. As the world’s largest wheat exporter, Russia could even take advantage of the moment to raise export taxes.

The bottom line: Moscow doesn’t need the deal any longer, especially if its dual strategy of bomb and blockade effectively eliminates a chief competitor.

War and Hunger

The food-insecure portion of the global population has been hit by a triple whammy: pandemic, climate change, and the war in Ukraine. According to the World Food Program, the number of people facing acute hunger in 2019 was around 135 million. By 2022, that number had risen to 345 million.

Ukraine faces significant food insecurity as well. One in three families—or 11 million people—are vulnerable. In the 1930s, Stalin’s regime used hunger as a tool to suppress Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule and the collectivization of agriculture. Around 3.9 million people died during the Holodomor (death by famine).

Putin can’t use the same tools as Stalin did to punish Ukraine’s rebelliousness. But the current Russian government is certainly attempting to destroy or otherwise undermine Ukraine’s capacity to feed itself. By so doing, the Kremlin is also forcing millions of other people around the world to go hungry.

Russia is flexing its muscles because it thinks it’s self-sufficient. It is the world’s second largest producer of fossil fuels (after the United States), third largest grower of wheat, fifth largest producer of iron and of steel, and eighth largest manufacturer of cement. The world needs what it produces, and large importers of energy and grain like China and India are willing to overlook what’s happening in Ukraine despite the occupying army’s ongoing violations of international law.

But Russia’s self-sufficiency is illusory. If the war were taking place in the nineteenth century or even the 1950s, Russia could indeed ignore the world’s anger. It can feed itself, power its factories, build its infrastructure. But in today’s modern society, advancement—or even, treading water—requires high-tech. And here, Russia is falling behind, thanks to corruption, sanctions, and war-related brain drain.

So, Russia pisses off the world—Saudi Arabia, Africa, China, the UN—at its own peril. The only question is: how many people will have to suffer for Putin’s grandiose ambitions before their collective representatives force the Russian government to give back the land it stole?

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

The war has cost lives and destroyed the Ukrainian economy. But it has also been a major environmental hazard.

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has resulted in the deaths so far of more than 8,700 Ukrainian civilians, including more than 500 children. It has caused a massive drop in the country’s economic output, with GDP declining by 29.1 percent.

And it has had widespread consequences for the environment: inside Ukraine, in surrounding countries, and beyond.

Russia has occupied at least 25 percent of Ukraine’s renewable energy facilities and destroyed about 6 percent of the country’s renewable energy capacity. The war has rendered 40 percent of the country’s energy system at least temporarily inoperable. The air, soil, and water of Ukraine have been severely contaminated, with more than 1,000 industrial, agricultural, and maritime cases tracked by the Ukrainian NGO Centre for Environmental Initiatives “Ecoaction.” Thousands of landmines pose a continued risk to residents and farmers.

An even greater environmental catastrophe lies in wait at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest such facility in Europe. A meltdown at Zaporizhzhia on the order of the Chernobyl accident would have even greater impact than what happened on the territory of Ukraine in 1986.

“The difference is that Zaporizhzhia is close to the Black Sea and the Azov sea,” reports Yevheniia Zasiadko, the head of the climate department at Ecoaction and a climate policy expert. “So, it might also impact the whole marine ecosystem. The Russians are planting mines and exploding bombs on the territory of the Zaporizhzhia station.” The plant was built to withstand certain shocks, but the risks remain high.

Although Ukraine’s carbon footprint has likely decreased as a result of the war’s impact on the economy, the invasion has caused considerable unnecessary emissions. In collaboration with several international NGOs and the Ukrainian environment ministry, Ecoaction has calculated that the war-related greenhouse gas emissions equal the amount of carbon into the atmosphere as the country of the Netherlands or Belgium emitted over the same period. Fully half of those emissions come from the destruction of civilian infrastructure and its subsequent reconstruction.

Although the conflict is still ongoing, Ukraine has been able to rebuild in areas that aren’t too close to the conflict zones. The government has pledged to “build back better,” but there have also been enormous pressures to prioritize speed over sustainability.

“We want to build the country to be greener,” says Anna Ackermann, a board member of Ecoaction and a policy analyst at the International Institute for Sustainable Development working on the green reconstruction of Ukraine. “It’s not only about the environment. It’s also a lot about public participation—how to make sure that the communities are engaged—and how to make sure that International funds are effectively used. We shouldn’t be rebuilding roads or cities the way they were. In eastern Ukraine, where the war is still going on, these regions depended on heavy industry, coal, and so on. No one will be investing in coal anymore, and some of this heavy industry is also based on coal.”

Even as Russia’s war in Ukraine causes untold environmental consequences, it is also paradoxically pushing the world toward a tighter embrace of renewable energy. In Europe, for instance, coal consumption and carbon emissions hit their post-COVID peak in September 2022 but have been declining ever since. “Renewables and nuclear power were responsible for a record 39 percent of global electricity generation last year,” according to Fortune in 2023. “The gains came almost entirely from new wind and solar installations, which now account for a record 12 percent of global electricity generation, up from 10 percent in 2021.”

Ukraine, too, has discovered that renewable energy can be a tool of resistance. As Russia massively targeted the country’s energy infrastructure, some institutions from hospitals to schools turned to solar power, a relatively cheap and decentralized alternative, to keep the electricity on.

At a Global Just Transition webinar, Zasiadko and Ackermann discussed the many adverse environmental impacts of Russia’s war on Ukraine. But they also reflected on how post-war recovery can allow Ukraine to leapfrog into a Greener future.

Russia’s Devastation

It’s not easy to address environmental disasters during a war.

“The first reaction of most of the staff members of Ecoaction was that everything that we had been doing before was not relevant somehow after the Russian invasion,” recalls Anna Ackermann. “So that’s why we started to search for ways to help Ukraine and to do at least something. One thing we thought was important was to collect data about damage to the environment. This work is still going on, thanks to the support of our volunteers.”

The Ukrainian Ministry of Environment reached out to Ecoaction and other Ukrainian civil society organizations “during the second week of the war to help with monitoring because it was clear that the environmental consequences were huge,” adds Yevheniia Zasiadko. “We need to talk not only about war crimes and crimes against humanity, but also environmental impact. It’s been 14 months since the invasion, and we’ve compiled almost 1,000 cases. At the beginning, half our team at Ecoaction was involved in monitoring.”

That team divided the country up by region to assess damage to industrial facilities, energy safety, nuclear safety, and the war’s impact on marine, livestock, and waste. It has recently relied more on volunteers as well as media reports and government statistics to compile its cases.

“The largest damage in terms of cost has been to housing, buildings, industry, and infrastructure like road and rail,” Ackermann notes. “The price tag for this direct damage is $140 billion, which is much more than the annual state budget of Ukraine. This figure takes into account how much it would cost to actually rebuild Ukraine better according to European Union standards and not just the old Ukrainian standards. As the Russian invasion continues, this price is increasing every day.”

There are some obvious limitations to these assessments. For one, the Russian attacks have been so intense in some areas that it’s hard to grasp the full environmental impact. “In my hometown, we actually had thousands of missile strikes, so it was not possible to monitor missile by missile,” Zasiadko relates.

Also, there is very little information available for the Russian-occupied territories. “There is no independent journalism or any Ukrainian representatives in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” she continues. “We couldn’t even go to these occupied regions after 2014, so we don’t know the real situation, which is now much worse.” In that region, for instance, dozens of coal mines have been flooded since the war began in 2014, which not only renders them inoperable but threatens to pollute surrounding territory.

Then there’s the issue of demining the country. “Some experts estimate that it will take 10-15 years to demine all of Ukraine after the war,” Zasiadko reports. “That’s a minimum. In the example of the Balkans, 30 years after the wars in former Yugoslavia, there’s still heavily mined territory that poses a high risk. Russia has also mined the Black Sea, which also affects Georgia, Turkey, and Romania.”

Pollution, like mines, can have considerable future consequences. “Our team is planning a fact-funding mission to liberated territory to understand the real impact of pollution on the soil and the water and to actually understand the real risks for us,” she says, adding that contamination will eventually make its way into the food supply. “The moment when the territory is liberated people usually start to grow something on the land, even though it can be heavily polluted.”

Ukraine is a primarily agricultural country. “Soil is a very important resource for Ukraine since 40 percent of our economy comes from agriculture,” Zasiadko says. “And this soil has been heavily polluted from the military action.” Using soil samples from the Kharkhiv and Kherson regions, Ecoaction identified physical damage from vibration, radioactivity, and thermal impact, including the release of chemical pollution, all of which threatens both agricultural production and the health of surrounding communities.

France, after World War I, similarly had to deal with polluted lands, part of which was declared uninhabitable because of chemical contamination and unexploded ordnance. These became effectively nature-protected zones. “Maybe it’s good that we will have more nature-protected zones in Ukraine,” she adds. “But it won’t be because of biodiversity but because it’s too dangerous to grow anything or do anything on that land.”

Then there are the consequences of the destruction of industrial facilities. “In the east and south of Ukraine in particular we had a lot of industry,” Zasiadko points out. “When the Russians attacked, they damaged or destroyed many industrial facilities in Kharkhiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipro. During first year of the full-scale war, 426 large or medium-sized enterprises were damaged or destroyed. Probably everyone saw the pictures of the destruction in Mariupol. But this happened in other places too. We saw a huge risk of pollution from the heavy metal and chemical industries, which were bombed. Russia also targeted livestock waste facilities, which contaminated rivers and killed fish. They bombed ships and ferries in the Black Sea and the Azov Sea, which has contaminated the marine ecosystem.”

But perhaps the greatest risk lies with the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which Russian troops occupied and have kept running with Ukrainian staff working under enormous stress. “Specific experts should be working there,” she notes. “Even though the Russians brought in some nuclear experts from Russian nuclear facilities, it doesn’t mean that they actually know how to deal with the facilities, because each plant is unique. So that’s why Ukrainian people are still there, trying to keep safe the whole world from this threat. We have two types of heroes in Ukraine: those in the military and those working in the energy sector like Zaporizhzhia.”

There is also the threat of Russia weaponizing Zaporizhzhia. “Depending on weather conditions—how strongly the wind is blowing and in which direction—an explosion at the plant could affect Europe to the west or lands to the south or north,” she continues. “Experts say that we are still lucky that nothing has happened yet.”

Zasiadko laments that the international response to these nuclear risks has been weak. “Russia’s state atomic energy corporation, Rosatom, still doesn’t face any sanctions,” she adds. “They are still selling nuclear fuel to Europe and to other countries.”

In a report on carbon emissions associated with the war, Ecoaction and its partners looked at five sources that produced approximately 100 million tons of carbon dioxide (or their equivalent). The largest source of emissions, fully half, comes from reconstruction, followed by fires (roughly one-quarter), warfare (just under 10 percent), and the movement of refugees (only 1.4 percent). Also included in the calculations was the leakage connected to the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines, which accounted for 15 percent of the total amount. These figures only cover the first seven months of the war, though a full-year accounting is in the works.

“In this way, Russia has attacked the whole world,” Zasiadko says. “The war is affecting the whole climate discussion.”

Building Back Better

Ukraine is a huge country. If it entered the European Union, it would suddenly become second largest member by territory. The war is concentrated in the eastern and southeastern parts of the country. So, different regions experience the war in different ways: some through direct ground attacks, others through aerial bombing, and still others mostly from the movement of refugees and relocation of businesses.

“In the north, some territories were temporarily occupied by Russia in February and March last year, and then liberated by the Ukrainian army,” Anna Ackermann points out. “The damage was huge, but demining is already happening and so is reconstruction. The whole world heard about Bucha, which was heavily destroyed. It’s already been rebuilt. You can actually go there and see how this is happening. Meanwhile, cities in the east are still being destroyed, even erased: Bakhmut, Vuhledar, Marinka.”

For those areas of the country destroyed by the war—through occupation or by aerial attacks—the Ukrainian government is engaged in an ongoing process of planning and reconstruction. “We are thinking about how to improve, how to enlarge, how to change the economy, and so on,” she continues. “And now the question is: who’s going to pay? Who’s going to rebuild? Ukraine will not be able to do all this. The economy has shrunk, and we don’t have enough resources because everything is going into fighting the aggressor at the moment.”

One option has been to divide the country into zones of international support. According to one map considered by the Ukrainian government, different countries would take primary responsibility for financing the reconstruction of different Ukrainian regions: Canada for Sumy, Germany for Chernihiv, and so on. With Ukraine becoming an EU candidate member in 2022, the EU is likely to take the overall lead in terms of reconstruction, with the United States and other G7 countries playing important but secondary roles. Also, as Ackermann notes, because of its candidate status, “Ukraine has to be moving toward European standards, climate neutrality goals, and other EU policies.”

Environmental standards play an essential role in this process. “We have dirty industries based on coal,” she continues. “Do we want to rebuild new heavy industries? What will happen with our coal mines? We have to transition to something else, to another type of economy. NGOs are trying to shape the discussion of this transition. But it’s progressing slowly.”

The essential challenge is to balance the need to build back sooner and the desire to build back better. “No country after a war has been built back that much better,” Ackermann observes. “No country was thinking really long term. Many of our colleagues from European countries where cities were rebuilt after the Second World War say that it was more about mass production and building back faster, definitely not about better.”

The motto “build back better” applies across the economy. “Here in Ukraine,” she continues, “we will have to transition from fossil-fuel power plants to renewables, from energy-inefficient buildings (of which we have a plenty) to using heat pumps and improving the energy efficiency of our building stock, to using new types of transportation.”

Ukraine has come to a new appreciation of renewables as a result of the war. “If we think about a destroyed thermal power plant, to fix it takes months or even years,” Ackermann reports. “But with solar panels, if several are shelled, you can move them around. You can quickly fix them and in just a few weeks the array works again. Some Ukrainians had their lives saved because their communication was sustained during the occupation. Thanks to the solar panels on their roofs, they could call their relatives to say that they were fine despite the blackouts when there there was no electricity.”

Ecoaction realized during the early days of reconstruction that it was important to provide concrete examples of the importance of renewables and Green building techniques. “Together with other NGOs, we worked to rebuild the energy system of a hospital in the north of Kyiv, not far from Bucha, in the city of Horenka,” she relates. “It’s a small hospital that was shelled by the Russian army. It was repaired. Then we put solar solar panels on top with energy storage and heat pumps. Ukraine can get quite cold in the winter, so we need good heating. This system also works during cloudy weather. It started up in January this year, and we calculated how much it actually costs. Now we have infographics to show to the government and our international partners. We brought them there to demonstrate why It was important.”

To replace destroyed energy infrastructure, outside donors sent diesel generators to Ukraine. “This was really critical and important,” she continues. “Running these generators is super expensive, in addition they are usually noisy and polluting. So, we wanted to show how renewables could be part of the critical infrastructure for hospitals, for water supply facilities, for kindergartens and schools that restarted their work recently. We are working with international partners to scale this up as much as possible, and the government also became interested in having this sort of installation around Ukraine. For us today it’s less about climate friendliness and more about resilience and security.”

Ackermann sees lessons here for the rest of the world as well. “These stories of resilience can affect a lot of people and show that these systems can work well,” she says. That includes building model cities that can inspire other countries. “What about having the first climate-neutral city in the whole of Europe?” she asks. “We’re working with coal mining communities, and they’d love to be this kind of pilot. It’s very sad, but making a city that was completely destroyed climate neutral is easier than remaking an intact city.”

One major obstacle to reconstruction efforts is labor. More than two million Ukrainians lost their jobs after Russia invaded last year with the destruction of industries and the mass displacement of people. At the same time, the military has absorbed many able-bodied personnel, and millions more fled the country. All of this has contributed to a shortage of skilled workers in the construction sector.

“We have to think about people coming back, and not just coming back but returning to rebuilt houses and roads and places to work,” Ackermann observes. “That’s why rebuilding Ukraine is also about rethinking what kind of economy we are building.”

It’s also about what place Ukraine will occupy in Europe. Will it just be a source of raw materials or agricultural goods?  “We have to be an equal partner in this discussion,” she continues. “We have to be higher in the value chains of the whole of the EU. If we talk about building a green economy, we could be producing heat pumps that everybody needs now in Europe and beyond. We could be producing high-standard energy-efficient materials. Ukraine is already producing parts for wind turbines. There was a big factory in Kramatorsk, now quite close to the front line, and this production moved to the western part of the country. Together with German companies, they are planning to enlarge. This is the kind of example we need to expand upon. The question is, how many countries want to have Ukraine as a competitor? Probably no one, so Ukraine has to be fighting for this.”

Part of the rebuilding process is environmental restoration. Ecoaction is currently researching the new kinds of pollution associated with the war and how best to restore soil and water. Then there’s the question of dealing with military waste, which the country has little experience in addressing. “We don’t have the human resources to deal with this issue,” Zasiadko laments.

Photo by Alex Fedorenko on Unsplash

Another key part is democratic participation. “One of the best reforms in Ukraine before the war was decentralization,” she continues. “During the first period of the war, the cities survived because of this decentralization. During the last year, people and local authorities actually felt that they can decide for the communities. They have their own money, they can make decisions. And these cities are looking for partners to rebuild better. One of the best example is Irpin,” a liberated suburb of Kyiv that The New York Times has dubbed a “laboratory for rebuilding.”

International Environmental Solidarity

The countries of the Global North have sided with Ukraine in its struggle against Russia. Much of the rest of the world condemned Russia’s invasion but has not levied sanctions against Russia or provided military support to Ukraine. Could environmental solidarity—around climate debt, for instance—serve as the basis for greater cooperation between Ukraine and the Global South?

“I can understand why there is less support from the Global South, which depends from country to country,” Anna Ackermann observes. “Before February 24, 2022, most people associated Ukraine with post-Soviet countries, including Russia. Then, everybody started discovering us, and we are also discovering the world. Now our diplomats started reaching out to secure international support.”

Russia, on the other hand, has long worked around the world to cultivate ties. “Promoting their culture, setting up embassies everywhere,” she continues. “They’ve had the resources. And we see the results of this kind of strategic work. Unfortunately, Ukraine did not do that.”

“Climate-related and energy transition-related issues offer some potential links,” Ackermann points out. “In terms of the production of critical raw minerals needed for the energy transition, Ukraine is in the very same position as many countries of the global South.”

Ukraine, like many countries in the Global South, is burdened with a lot of debt. “I’ve heard discussions that perhaps this debt should be forgotten,” she notes. “But in fact it keeps increasing. We hear a lot about countries claiming that they give a lot of assistance to Ukraine, but we never know if it’s a loan or a grant. Probably only our government knows all of the details.”

Ackerman understands why the government solicits all types of foreign investments. “Government officials see the very bad situation our economy is in, so their only thought is how to get any investments at all when there is no insurance, no guarantees for anyone,” she observes. “There is already big interest for reconstruction. Hundreds of German companies are in the queue to enter once the war is over, and the same applies to Italian companies and many others.”

Looking Ahead

Ecoaction has developed a detailed call to action for the international community around energy and environmental issues. At the top of the list is “strengthening Ukraine’s emergency response capacity” and demilitarizing and de-occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Ecoaction needs help in its monitoring efforts. And this includes building up their corps of experts, a problem that goes back at least to 2014 when the war with Russia started. The lack of expertise applies in particular to addressing environmental consequences such as land mines.

The call to action isn’t just focused on the here and now. It calls for holding Russia responsible for all of the consequences of the war and developing a global environment peace and security agenda that emerges from the wreckage of the conflict.

Nor should the international community wait before committing to long-term projects. “We don’t have to wait until the war is over,” Yevheniia Zasiadko says. “Reconstruction is happening now, so it’s important to have this vision of green sustainability.”

The war has had even larger climate implications. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine actually led to an acceleration of the energy transition as countries realized their dependence on fossil fuels,” Anna Ackermann observes. “This very tragic situation has led to many changes in climate policies—in the EU, of course, but also around the world. It revealed the vulnerability of countries to global agricultural trade, so hopefully countries will work on increasing sustainable domestic food production.”

And then there’s the link between climate and security. “We should work to combine security issues with the environmental and climate agenda,” Ackermann concludes. “This war revealed so many things that we hadn’t seen, that we didn’t want to see, so we’d closed our eyes. Now they are revealed, and we have to be working on that.”

Via Foreign Policy in Focus