| | | | Fareed: How Trump Has Abused America's Power | | | A flexible approach to foreign policy is fine. But President Trump's loose rhetoric and idle threats risk wasting decades of hard-earned US diplomatic capital, Fareed argues in his latest Washington Post column. "The United States remains a superpower. Its allies search for ways to accommodate it. The Trump administration can keep making outlandish demands, and it will obtain some concessions because no one wants an open breach with the United States. If Trump says the Europeans have to come up with some changes to the Iran deal, they will try to find a way to do so, because they don't want to see the deal collapse and the West fall into disarray. "This is not a sign of power but rather the abuse of it. When the George W. Bush administration forced a series of countries to support the Iraq War, this did not signal American strength — it actually sapped that strength. This is a style that goes beyond the presidency. In recent years, the United States has grown accustomed to all kinds of special treatment. For example, New York state has used the power of the dollar as the world's reserve currency to force foreign banks to pay fines and make settlements. It works, but it creates enormous resentment," Fareed writes. "America has built up its credibility and political capital over the past century. The Trump administration is raiding that trust fund for short-term political advantage, in ways that will permanently deplete it." | | Team Trump Could "Incentivize Iran to Go Nuclear" | | | The appointment of John Bolton as National Security Adviser could be the final nail in the coffin of the nuclear deal with Iran, suggests Trita Parsi in Foreign Policy. But ditching the agreement would merely empower the country's hardliners – and spark a race for the bomb. "Despite Iran's concessions and its adherence to the deal (confirmed by 10 reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency), Trump, Saudi Arabia, and Israel have clearly rejected Iran's regional integration under any circumstance. Changes in Iran's policies proved insufficient, so nothing short of Iran's complete capitulation can seemingly satisfy Trump's allies," Parsi says. "This conclusion will be unavoidable in Tehran if Trump kills the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] to make a deal with Pyongyang. It will strengthen the Iranian hard-line narrative that Tehran's mistake was that it only obtained enrichment capabilities — but not a bomb — before it agreed to seriously negotiate. Had it built a bomb — like the North Koreans — then the United States would have no choice but to show Iran respect, strike a deal with it — and honor that deal. Trump will essentially incentivize Iran to go nuclear." | | | Latin America's three most populous countries hold presidential elections this year. For those hoping that the region had resisted the populist trends that have swept much of the world, the contests are a depressing sight, suggests Andrés Velasco for Project Syndicate. But centrist leaders only have themselves to blame. "Latin American centrist candidates, whether liberal or social democratic, have not managed what Justin Trudeau in Canada or Emmanuel Macron in France did so well: to weave a convincing narrative of why they want to govern and for whom. It is a demanding task indeed. Even appealing figures like Sergio Fajardo, the former mayor of Medellín, Colombia, known for turning around the drug-infested city, have floundered," Velasco writes. "After a string of corruption scandals throughout the region, voters are understandably skeptical. They ask of every candidate: are you on my side? By promising to shoot criminals, keep out immigrants, and punish bankers, populist candidates in Latin America – like their counterparts in the United States or Europe – provide simple, if disingenuous, answers to that question. Until moderates learn to do the same – without misleading voters – they will remain fodder for the populist sharks." | | Britain's Jews the Canary in the Coalmine: Freedland | | As Jewish families around the world gather to celebrate Passover, Britain's main opposition Labour Party finds itself embroiled in controversy over claims its leadership has ignored a resurgence of anti-Semitism on the left of the country's politics. That should be alarming for more than just Britain's Jews, Jonathan Freedland argues in The Guardian.
"Should anyone else, besides Britain's tiny Jewish community, care about any of this? One Morning Star columnist wrote this week that if you're poor and homeless, then 'antisemitism accusations don't figure much in your daily list of getting by.' The implication is that it's impossible to fight both poverty and antisemitism, and that a bit of the latter is a price worth paying for defeat of the former," Freedland writes.
"Do we need to spell out why this is a mistake? Perhaps we do. Maybe it's hard to see antisemitism as a threat equal to other racisms. The implications seem less obvious for Jews than they might for Asian or black Britons: Jews are rarely the target of calls to crack down on immigration, for example. But a change in the political climate could have a concrete effect on Jewish life in this country.
"Less tangibly, it's the cast of mind, the way of thinking, that antisemitism represents that we should fear. Conspiracy theory, fake news, demonization of an unpopular group: what happens to our politics if all these become the norm? This is why Jews have often functioned as a canary in the coalmine: when a society turns on its Jews, it is usually a sign of wider ill health." "Here are some facts that are very hard to talk about: Jews represent less than 1 percent of the population in France, yet in 2014, 51 percent of all racist attacks were carried out against them, according to the French Interior Ministry. A survey from that year of about 1,000 French respondents with unknown religious affiliation and 575 self-identified Muslims, conducted by the AJC Paris and the French think tank Fondapol, found that the Muslim respondents were two or three times more likely to have anti-Jewish sentiments than those from the random French group," Weiss writes.
| | Why Middle East Flight Maps Are, Well, a Mess | | | When does a three-hour flight turn into an almost six-hour trip? When an airline has to deal with the thorny politics of the Middle East, writes Yaroslav Trofimov in the Wall Street Journal. "The Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Khartoum, Sudan travels in a semicircle and takes 5½ hours. A year ago it took two hours less and flew straight across Saudi Arabia—but that was before the Saudis cut off relations with Qatar," Trofimov writes. "If you're flying to Mumbai from Tel Aviv on Israeli carrier El Al, it will take you eight hours as the plane doglegs past Saudi Arabia and Yemen. A direct path would take around five hours. That detour is the result of the longest and most intractable Mideast conflict—between Israel and the Palestinians." "Add to this war-related disruptions of flights over Iraq and Yemen and the latest conflict, between Qatar and Saudi-led Gulf states, in which Qatar Airways was barred from airspace over United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt as well as Saudi Arabia." "Airspace closures exact significant costs on the region's economies (and airlines) as travel takes longer and becomes more expensive due to higher fuel costs." | | | | | | |
