| | | | India's Citizenship Law Betrays Its History | | As protests spread across India in the wake of a new citizenship law—which welcomes regional immigrants of faiths besides Islam—observers (including Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor, on Sunday's GPS) have argued the country is turning away from its secular democratic founding. The new law is part of a descent into theocracy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Edmond Roy writes at the Lowy Institute's Interpreter blog; at Bloomberg, Mihir Sharma suggests India can no longer claim democratic superiority over the more overtly religious government in Pakistan.
As noted by The New York Times' Jeffrey Gettleman and Maria Abi-Habib, the new law is only the latest in a series of measures seen as targeting Muslims: After mass detentions in Kashmir and citizenship inquiries in the state of Assam, many worry the government "will use both these measures—the citizenship tests and the new citizenship law—to strip away rights from Muslims who have been living in India for generations." As Ravi Krishnani writes for CNN, the repressive turn has extended online: The world's largest democracy is also the world leader in Internet shutdowns, as the Modi government blacks out communication to keep citizens from voicing dissent or staying informed. | | Does Turkey Have a Viable Alternative to Erdoğan? | | Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has kept a firm grip on power, but cracks emerged this year with opposition mayoral wins in Istanbul and Ankara. At The Washington Post, Asli Aydintasbas writes that a new opposition party launched by former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu might provide an alternative. "With Davutoglu's 'Future Party,'" and another expected to be launched by former finance minister Ali Babacan, "it is hard to imagine Erdoğan as a lifetime president," Aydintasbas writes.
Davutoglu might appeal to an important swath of voters, Aydintasbas suggests. The liberal intelligentsia criticizes him for having allied with Erdoğan, but Turkey "is not solely a country of urban liberals—the key demographic for political change is Sunni conservatives, many of whom would never consider voting for the secularist main opposition party (CHP) or the Kurdish party (HDP). Davutoglu's message will no doubt resonate in the Anatolian heartland." Turkey may be growing frustrated with Erdoğan's authoritarianism, and it's risen up before, Aydintasbas writes: "This ebb and flow of repression and pushback is a century-old story—and Turkey will self-adjust again." | | The Trade War Has Been Useless | | Building on Fareed's new Foreign Affairs essay on US overreactions to China's rise, David Frum writes for The Atlantic that President Trump's trade war has been futile: After last week's "phase one" deal, Frum writes that the US has "gained little" so far. At the same time, Trump has picked a tough fight while scuttling America's best asset: its allies. By withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, pushing Japan into a recession by assailing global trade, rattling South Korea by threatening nuclear war with the North, and going back on a refugee-settlement deal with Australia, Trump has weakened America's network of friends at an inopportune time.
"Trump's slogan of America First in practice translates to America Alone. In the 21st century, America Alone means China First, America Second," Frum writes. "Trump's 'I order, you salute' model of leadership will end at best in failure and at worst in defeat." | | The US No Longer Protects Gulf Oil | | President Trump has ended decades of US policy to safeguard Persian Gulf oil, write Hal Brands, Steven A. Cook, and Kenneth M. Pollack at Foreign Policy. Since President Jimmy Carter, the US has provided regional security to ensure oil keeps flowing to world buyers; after Trump declined to retaliate over attacks on Saudi oil facilities in September, that's no longer the case, and the retreat has rattled America's Gulf Cooperation Council allies while giving Iran a free hand. Together with Trump's withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal, the authors argue, his policies have made any future deal unlikely and have rebalanced power in Iran's favor.
"[F]or Iran's hard-liners, even after the widespread protests that rocked Iran last month, the economic pain that a new nuclear deal might alleviate is probably of lesser importance than the geostrategic goal of severing the U.S.-GCC alliance and driving the United States out of the Gulf," the authors write. "And if the Iranians believe that Riyadh is now more determined than ever to acquire a nuclear weapon, as seems likely, they will be even less interested in making deeper nuclear concessions to the president who handed them the Persian Gulf on a silver platter." | | The field of economics is intellectually bankrupt, David Graeber writes in a New York Review of Books essay reviewing Robert Skidelsky's Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics. Beyond the circular logic of markets in equilibrium, Graeber argues, economists don't even have a grasp on where money comes from (banks create it out of thin air, since today's money is essentially credit). While evidence disputes that money supply can control inflation, economists still tout central-bank monetary policies as an antidote to crises like 2008's.
"Doubling the amount of gold in a country will have no effect on the price of cheese if you give all the gold to rich people and they just bury it in their yards, or use it to make gold-plated submarines," Graeber writes; "(this is, incidentally, why quantitative easing, the strategy of buying long-term government bonds to put money into circulation, did not work either)." His conclusion: The financial crash proved economics is broken, and it must learn from other disciplines to confront a fundamentally new set of problems, including "how to deal with increasing technological productivity, decreasing real demand for labor, and the effective management of care work, without also destroying the Earth." | | | | | | |
