Suchergebnisse

Now we know more about why the Environmental
Protection Agency last year suddenly
punted on one Louisiana case trying to expand its powers beyond its legal
authority, thanks to a similar case initiated by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry.

Last
week, a federal district court blocked
the EPA from creating rules that would allow use of disparate impact requirements
in its decision-making process. This process utilizes a disparate impact study,
which assesses whether proposed actions that may have differential impacts on
protected classes under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and assumes
foundationally that significant differences must connote racist intentions deemed
illegal.

Over two decades ago the U.S. Supreme Court
instructed the EPA that it couldn't impose this requirement, but only at the
tail end of the Republican Pres. Donald
Trump Administration did it issue a repeal. But before the rule became
final, predictably the new Democrat Pres. Joe Biden
EPA dropped it. Illegally imposing the rule threatens, in this instance, hundreds
of millions of dollars in state grant money from the federal government because,
as part of its role in approving these, EPA insists on including the language
that the state must follow.

That led to a special interest group ideologically
opposed to chemical facilities in its neighborhood, RISE
St. James, lodging a complaint that used disparate impact as a
justification to curtail development of these facilities. Louisiana argued that
doing this violated statute in that it constituted reverse discrimination, i.e.
to conjure a power not granted by statute made for an illegal race-based
approach, where statute only allowed race-based solutions in the case of intentional
discrimination and not simply on disparate outcomes as an indicator assuming
that.

The court agreed with the state that the EPA
showed no reluctance to trying to impose such a standard again, and so enjoined
it. Landry launched the case (GOP new Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill pushed it across the
goal line), which proved to be his last solo victory in that office (along with
other states, just as he exited office he
also beat the EPA in another case), which will have ramifications
nationwide as the EPA now can't overstretch its authority anywhere in
overseeing use of federal grant monies.

But an interesting side note to that case resonates
both to a case against the state the EPA abandoned last summer and to yet another now
overseen by Murrill still working its way through the courts. The only part
that the state didn't prevail upon was getting the court to declare that the
EPA had illegally coordinated with an interest group, the Sierra Club, in
having the case play out.

It turns out that the state's suspicion that coordination
of the Biden EPA with sympathetic private parties, spanning not just interest
groups but journalists, was much wider. Additionally, attorney general Landry
was, and now Murrill is, pursuing
another suit against the EPA for failure to respond to federal Freedom of
Information Act requests detailing communications between it and these parties.
The state asserts that the EPA is stonewalling production of these records, with
the request going back a couple of years surrounding previous efforts that the
EPA made to try to bludgeon the state with its permitting of chemical producers
from expanding their footprints on the basis that the attempts constituted "environmental
racism." This alleged that the state's decisions were a form of illegal racial
discrimination based upon the alleged impact the subsequent activities would
have on protected classes under the Civil Rights Act.

Landry stepped up to the plate and sued the EPA
for acting on the complaint, asserting that it exceeded its authority under
federal and in the process delegated authority to special interest groups.
Within a month, the EPA abruptly closed its investigation without any action –
an unusual resolution, since with almost every case it typically extracts
concessions. At the time, speculation was it had such a thin case using environmental
racism as a justification that if the case continued the judiciary could rule the
EPA had exceeded its authority. The recent ruling partially addresses that issue
insofar as to the use of disparate impact requirements.

Yet in light of the recent ruling, back then another
and perhaps even greater motivation existed for Biden's EPA to fold up –
evidence of coordination with outside sympathetic parties. Keep in mind that
only weeks earlier Landry and Missouri's attorney general had succeeded in another
federal court case where a number of federal agencies were enjoined from contact
with social media companies after finding sufficient evidence that they had
colluded to support Biden Administration policies and election activities. That
case, after enforcement was put on hold by the U.S. Supreme Court, will
be heard on Mar. 18.

Production of these public records not only would touch
upon the communications with the Sierra Club subject to the other suit, but
also apparently with a host of others entities, including special interests RISE
St. James, Concerned Citizens of St. John, and the Deep South Center for
Environmental Justice, as well as with journalists working with news outlets
including the Times-Picayune, The Advocate, the Guardian, WGNO,
WWNO, and MSNBC. These groups and outlets sympathize with climate alarmism and
other politically leftist issue preferences on issues of the environment and
race, and therefore are antipathetic to Landry.

Given the facts of the case before the Supreme
Court – Murthy
v. Missouri – it's not unreasonable to think that the EPA engaged in
similar tactics to collude with certain special interests and to influence
certain media outlets in order to impose its will on Louisiana. Indeed, that
behavior would be a variant of the "sue-and-settle"
tactics first employed by Democrat Pres. Barack
Obama and adopted by Landry's predecessor Democrat former Gov. John Bel
Edwards. With this, government would try to make end runs around the law by
having a friendly special interest sue over a certain practice, then give the
group its way – also preferred by government – through a court settlement. In
the present variation with the EPA, it would come though administrative law
processes, the complaint procedure.

And maybe that's another reason why the complaint last
summer was dropped like a hot potato, the threat of revelation that perhaps
there exists deep ties among these groups, and even these journalists, with the Biden EPA and its agenda. Continuing it further might have exposed them and opened up
litigation along the lines of Murthy v. Missouri.

Except that Louisiana and now Murrill don't plan on stopping with
discovery, through FOIA requests instead of as attendant to an administrative
law case. Which is the right thing to do to ensure oppressive government with
its beneficiary allies don't run roughshod over democracy.

At the height of the "unipolar moment" of the 1990s and 2000s, a popular school of thought argued that the U.S. could use its unchecked power to do good on the world stage. When peace proved elusive after the fall of the Soviet Union, the world saw exceptionally deadly warfare and attempted ethnic cleansing erupt in Karabakh, the Congo, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia. If there was one power that could do anything about this, it was the United States.The primary ideologue of this push for humanitarian interventionism would become Samantha Power. A journalist and author of the influential book A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, Power argued that the U.S. and other liberal nation states should use military force to halt crimes against humanity in other countries. Nation-states have a responsibility to protect their citizens, and if they are found not be doing this, other states may then step in to do so should the situation continue to deteriorate. This principle was called "Responsibility to Protect," or "R2P," and it became so influential that it was adopted into the United Nations Charter in 2005.Two decades later, the concept has been shown to be both hypocritical and dangerous. As Israel bombs Gaza to dust, world elites have shown no interest in living up to their apparent responsibility to protect civilians. Contrast this with the response to Russia's war in Ukraine, in which commentators called for direct intervention to save innocent Ukrainians. And actual examples of R2P have led to disaster, as civilians in Libya can attest. Fortunately, there's a simple answer to this hellish problem: abandoning R2P once and for all.Who's protecting who?Power's line of argument masked the darker history of so-called humanitarian interventions. Both the Romans and Spanish, more than 1000 years apart, argued that their bloody conquests in Carthage and Central America would help the world by ending the practice of human sacrifice. In the 19th century, the colonial states of western Europe began to see their maritime expansion abroad not simply in terms of wealth and power acquisition but as an inevitable stage of human moral development. France and Britain in particular dove into Africa with the justification of putting an end to tribal wars and extirpating the slave trade. With economic and technological shifts, the same empires who had once expanded with shackles in hand now came, so they said, as liberators. Yet the result of this "liberation" was little more than violence and famine.Unfortunately, the lessons of this sordid history didn't stick. Barack Obama would end up recruiting Power for multiple roles in his administration. While Obama ran explicitly against the disastrous foreign policy of George W Bush in 2008, subsequent events related to the "Arab Spring" would see him continue if not expand these same policies, launching an overt regime change war in Libya (and a covert one in Syria) while intensifying U.S. operations in Yemen.It was in the Libya war that Power would see her dream fulfilled, when R2P was explicitly invoked to protect Libyan civilians in rebel-held areas from retaliation by the government of Muamar Gaddafi. This operation resulted in widespread state failure, a collapse of central authority, a massive refugee crisis, a resurgence of extremism in that country, and, most gallingly of all, the return of slave markets along the North African coast. It turned out that there are worse things out there than oppressive governments.R2P's reputation took a hit and receded from the discourse, at least until Russia's invasion of Ukraine gave it life once more. Some members of the press called for no-fly zones over the country, and politicians in NATO states debated if such ideas were feasible. Ultimately, they decided that it was not, given Russia's conventional capabilities, particularly in the field of anti-aircraft weaponry. There was also the inconvenient fact of Moscow having nuclear deterrence. Any attempts to create a safe area for Ukrainians using NATO military forces risked a level of escalation deemed unpalatable by most in the alliance. This clearly showed that R2P was only ever really meant to be used by great powers against smaller countries that could not defend themselves. It never had any utility against more robust foes. Interestingly, Moscow had picked up on the trick and justified its invasion of Ukraine using explicitly R2P-flavored rhetoric about protecting lives in the Donbass.The Gaza challengeThe current Gaza War is, by all the standards usually cited by humanitarian interventionists, a perfect case for invoking R2P. Rhetoric from some actors inside the Israeli state suggests that some form of population displacement is at least being considered. The incredible population density of the Gaza Strip means civilians bear the brunt of the violence. Lack of access to medicine and food exacerbates all of these problems.Samantha Power is the current head of USAID in the Biden administration. One cannot help but wonder what she thinks of the war currently unfolding in Gaza while she coordinates food shipments through Egypt's Sinai that are often held up at border checkpoints. For one so adamant that the U.S. must intervene whenever war disproportionately hits a civilian populace, she has been strangely silent.Meanwhile, Yemen's Houthis explicitly cite their own version of R2P to justify their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. This shows the true future of R2P, if it is to have any — one of selective applications by great powers that muddy the waters around their wars in an attempt to gain media approval from within their alliance networks. As the world's balance of power inevitably moves into its more normal state of multipolarity, governments further undermine claims of ethical conduct in foreign policy, as states now have constant incentive to claim that their foes have a monopoly on human rights abuses. Inevitably, this will lead to all such claims being met with greater and greater skepticism by the global public, regardless of their factuality.Far from the centers of great power rivalries, the utility of R2P seems to be declining, as crises such as Myanmar and Sudan are assiduously ignored by the countries expected to be intervening, likely out of fear of being sucked into another Syria or Iraq and giving one's foes more opportunities to indirectly strike at stretched-thin tripwire forces.It is a trite observation to point out that great powers have different moral standards for their allies and their enemies, but R2P is a foreign policy doctrine entirely based on moralist claims. Not being able to live up to its own principles when a humanitarian crisis is unleashed by an allied country such as Israel is the last nail in the coffin for a thoroughly failed idea. We can only hope that a silver lining of this difficult moment in history is that we never have to hear about the Responsibility to Protect again.

If Bossier City Republican Councilor Vince Maggio
has any ambitions beyond his current political perch, he has an opportunity to
enhance those by putting the brakes on the runaway train of a Manchac
Consulting no-bid contract renewal to run city engineering and other services.

The politics
and legal
dubiousness of granting Manchac yet another shot at an uncompetitively-sought
deal for this service are well-known. Even though the contract doesn't expire
for four-and-half-months, the existing language – technically the original contract
with a half-dozen amendments to be extended by another – mandates renewal
within the week or else it can't add on an extra $26,000 monthly for additional
unspecified duties, hence the rush.

Of the many legal questions hanging over this
approach, all but a question about whether the contract's limitations violate
the city charter's empowerment of the mayor to hire and fire a permanent city
engineer, could
be resolved by formally withdrawing from a renewal and issuing a request-for-qualifications
within the next couple of months. If no action is taken, the contract automatically
renews next month at the current $169,000 per month level, although the city
would have to follow ordinance – which it never has done regarding the Manchac
contract thereby violating its own law – in (dubiously) declaring this service subject
to a single source provider for that to be legal.

In the city's multiple violations of city
procedures, ordinances, and charter that have typified the Manchac saga, Assistant
City Attorney Richard Ray broached a new defense trying to explain away all of
this and thereby legitimizing the idea that the city solicits just one entity,
grooves it a contract, and continually adds to it and extends without any
competition. At the Jan.
2 City Council meeting, Ray suggested that R.S. 38:2318.1 hamstrung
the city in its ability to bid professional services due to a "recent" change
in the law. He claimed that the state "does not allow bidding of professional services
by professional engineers," in that cost factors were disallowed in the letting
of such contracts.

Such an opinion at best was a misunderstanding.
The "change"
in 2021 actually hardly altered the substance of the statute, which had been in
effect since 2006 as the bill's
author noted, calling the amendment "technical" clarifying that not just
design services were subject to it. And since its original enactment, there has
been plenty of competitive bidding at the behest of local governments across
Louisiana, including after the amending bill came into effect.

For example, in 2011 Central
bid out and changed contractors who performed not just engineering services but
almost every city service through a competitive process. Alexandria routinely launches
competitive processes for engineering work. Each and many others do so without
violating the statute because they issue RFQs,
which gather information about the qualifications, capabilities, and experience
of interested parties before inviting them to submit detailed proposals. Then
they select what they consider the best and negotiate a contract with price. "Competitive
bidding" does not have to be on price basis, but upon judgment of the
suitability of a contractor to fulfill adequately or better the needs of the city

Ray did admit that the city could "research" the
issue and said his advice solely applied to requests for proposals, but at no
point did he surrender that a competitive RFQ was an option, sticking with the
misleading line that competition was not permitted. Regardless, nothing in
state law prevents Bossier City from competitive bidding through an RFQ for this
contract nor mandating that it must award through a no-bid, single source
process. At worst, any suggestion otherwise attempts to provide political cover
to handing over a sweetheart deal to a politically-preferred vendor.

If that pricing prohibition even applies in this case.
Ray alleged that statute covered public-private partnerships, even though there
is no other statute nor attorney general opinion that connects that issue to
R.S. 38:2318.1, which itself mentions P3 arrangements only in the context of
the state's Department of Transportation and Development. As no party Councilor
Jeff Darby
– a longtime critic of Manchac's preferred position – and Republican Chris Smith
noted, services under the Manchac contract went well beyond engineering
services and correctly questioned Ray's view.

Along with Republican Councilor Brian Hammons,
when the matter came to a vote they opposed moving it to a final reading scheduled
for this week. But the graybeards, who other than Darby had three times
previously approved extensions – councilors Democrat Bubba Williams
and Republicans David Montgomery
and Jeff Free
– held to form, joined by Maggio to pass it.Prudence dictates that the Council decline any contract
renewal now, have the city give notice that it won't renew it, and then send
out an RFQ to have a contractor in place by Jun. 1. (Besides, of course, the
many legal doubts swirling over the process and contract's validity that argue
for a reconceptualization – a course which the same councilors in the majority
plus Darby were all too eager to pursue when it came to them abrogating
their duty under the Charter to schedule a citizen referendum on term
limits.) It well could be Manchac, who in a response can point out it has a
track record of performance (whether it's all that great is another matter, as
Hammons often has questioned Manchac's penchant for frequent underestimation
and considerably of project costs) with the very tasks demanded. Solicitation
through an RFQ may do nothing to stop insider politics from prevailing, but at
least it creates a stream of public records that citizens can scrutinize to see
whether councilors really did make the best choice for further negotiation.

Maggio is the key here, being the only member of
the majority not to have dealt with the issue before and not wedded to Manchac,
for whatever reason, as are Free, Montgomery, and Williams. There's no rational
reason for him, or any other councilor, to capitulate to an arrangement that
disserves the citizenry by failing to assure it has the best arrangement
possible in appropriate services rendered at an appropriate price. And citizens
can't rely on Republican Mayor Tommy Chandler to back them up, because even
though he could veto a measure passed 4-3 and unlikely have that overridden,
despite almost three years ago complaining about how the previous Council
renewed the deal on the cusp of his assuming office, as most recently he has made
approving noises about the uncompetitive process.

So, it's on Maggio. He either can gain citizens'
confidence that indeed he wishes to spend wisely their money by abandoning the
graybeards, or he can work against citizen interests by joining the
good-old-boys network that puts special interests ahead of the public interest.
Either way, it's a vote that will be remembered next year at this time, in the
middle of city election campaigning.

The United States is investing in Ukraine's defense industry for the long haul, even if direct Ukraine aid dwindles in 2024. President Biden's most recent drawdown of weapons from U.S. stockpiles is the last he can approve. Other U.S. military assistance to the country now depends on Congress, which has yet to authorize emergency spending that Biden requested in late October.But U.S. military contractors don't need congressional approval to co-produce weapons with Ukrainian companies, and the administration is encouraging it to help grow the Ukrainian defense industry. If the U.S. government isn't careful, however, taxpayers could end up footing the bill to expand weapon production capacity in Ukraine for years to come.The scale of investment required to establish and expand manufacturing capacity in Ukraine is massive. And contractors are reluctant to make capital investments in general — the data show that their priority is paying their shareholders. So it's hard to imagine U.S. contractors setting up shop in Ukraine without guaranteed financing from the United States government, even with a partner's support. The risk of escalating tensions with Russia is also serious.Still, co-weapon production may relieve the White House from facing political headwinds on direct Ukraine aid — and on U.S. strategy in Ukraine writ large, though there are signs the administration is considering a more defensive posture. One of the White House's stated long-term goals is "to advance a robust and self-reliant Ukrainian defense industrial base," which according to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, has been "an important opportunity for partnership with our own defense industrial base." In December, the administration hosted the U.S.-Ukraine Defense Industrial Base Conference in DC. The White House reported that about 350 government and industry representatives from the United States, Ukraine, and European allied countries convened "to focus on significantly increasing weapons production" in support of Ukraine's fight against Russia. There, DOD signed a Statement of Intent on Co-Production and Technical Data Exchange with the Ukrainian Ministries of Defense and Strategic Industries to speed up investment in Ukraine's defense industry.The Biden administration also established the interagency Ukraine Deal Team, "consisting of representatives from the Departments of State, Defense, and Commerce." Penny Pritzler, U.S. special representative for Ukraine's economic recovery, said that the team will "deploy all available U.S. government tools, including resources and expertise, to help U.S. companies compete and succeed in the Ukrainian defense industry." Some U.S. military contractors reportedly already committed to co-producing weapons with Ukraine in the fall preceding a conference in Kyiv, and the administration has been promoting what it calls "co-development, co-production, and co-sustainment" for months. So, while there are certainly operational security concerns with manufacturing in a country at war, there are few details about which U.S. companies will help produce what weapons in Ukraine — especially considering that the U.S. government plans to commit so many resources to the endeavor.National security adviser Jake Sullivan recently indicated that co-production efforts may start with repair and sustainment activities, but "will eventually involve brick and mortar 'Ukrainian outfits with Ukrainian expertise relying upon those licenses and tech transfer — and so forth — from U.S. companies and European companies.'" But Ukraine needs a lot of money to create new production lines, and it remains unclear how exactly the United States will support Kyiv in that process. In the past, U.S. industry has expressed its hesitation about working in Ukraine while the war continues. Reuters recently reported that "two leading American companies" have agreed to co-produce 155 mm artillery shells in Ukraine, starting in 2025 at the earliest. It's possible companies are waiting for the war to end to get down to business in Ukraine, but when asked by Responsible Statecraft, the Pentagon neither confirmed nor denied whether it's shaping or planning to shape these reported agreements. One can only assume it will, given its role in the Ukraine Deal Team. The Pentagon also declined to clarify whether joint production agreements between U.S. and Ukrainian contractors will be subject to any standards for U.S. economic impact, like for example, a certain level of American labor. Military spending is, of course, a terrible jobs producer. But long-term co-production with Ukraine further challenges predominant thinking that military spending (about half of which goes to contractors) is good for U.S. workers and the economy seeing that many of these jobs would go to Ukrainians or other non-American workers.Contractors committed to joint production with Ukraine nearly four months ago, but the administration is holding its cards close about facilitating co-production agreements despite indications that co-production efforts have already begun. Ukraine's ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, said at the December conference that with the help of technical data from the Pentagon and U.S. defense industry, production of FrankenSAM (surface to air missile) systems has already begun in Ukraine. The country produces its own missiles, drones, artillery, and ammunition as well, but there are still severe shortfalls, especially on ammunition. The Pentagon neither confirmed nor denied whether it awarded U.S. companies any Ukraine-related contracts to establish manufacturing capacity in the country prior to the conference in early December. Instead, Pentagon spokesperson Jeff Jurgensen said that "although we have no specific announcements to make at this time, the Department of Defense is actively working with interagency partners and industry to explore approaches for aiding Ukraine in expanding the capacity and capability of its domestic industrial base for the long-term." The United States is not alone in that pursuit.European contractors are pursuing joint weapons production with Ukraine, too. With the approval of the German government, Rheinmetall is helping Ukraine repair armored vehicles, and by the end of the year it'll be producing them in country. According to Euromaidan Press, Rheinmetall invested about 200 million euros to build a new factory in Ukraine, "while Ukraine provided the ground, buildings, and connection to the power grid for free." British contractor BAE Systems established a local presence in the country as well, with the ultimate goal of producing 105 mm light guns in Ukraine. Radio Free Europe reported the Kremlin responding to BAE's announcement by saying that "such a venture would in no way contribute to an easing of hostilities between the two countries," adding that any weapon production facility would garner "special attention" from Russia's military.In an ideal co-production agreement, Ukrainian contractors would bear the costs of operating, maintaining, and protecting production facilities. The Pentagon and U.S. defense industry would share technical know-how, and Ukraine would handle the heavy lifting. But U.S. defense contractors have little if any financial incentive to help their Ukrainian partners operate and thrive independently. Either way, companies need to protect their investments. Weapon production facilities are already Russian targets. New and expanded production facilities in Ukraine will inevitably attract Russia's attention, and the cost to protect them will be great. If Ukraine ultimately can't cover the costs of operating, maintaining, and protecting plants that U.S. contractors help build, contractors are sure to step in on the U.S. government's dime. The administration and Ukraine Deal Team must ensure that co-production agreements explicitly outline how U.S. contractors will transfer to Ukrainian companies financial ownership of operations, maintenance, and protection processes. The administration's goal may be to help Ukraine develop a self-reliant defense industrial base, but that certainly wouldn't be in the financial interests of U.S. military contractors.

A mounting maritime dispute between China and the Philippines, underwritten by spiraling U.S.-China tensions, threatens to ignite the South China Sea. "China-Philippines relations are at a crossroads," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned his Philippine counterpart Enrique Manalo in a call on Dec. 20 following a string of contentious encounters in the South China Sea, including allegations that Chinese boats rammed a Philippine coast guard ship and fired water cannons at a resupply vessel. China, Wang Yi told Manalo, will "definitely safeguard its rights" and "respond resolutely" if the Philippines "colludes with malicious external forces to continue causing trouble and chaos." Wang's warning comes on the heels of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr's announcement earlier this year that his government is mulling a tripartite security pact with the U.S. and Japan. The Philippines and its treaty ally, the United States, have repeatedly accused China of harassing Philippine vessels in the South China Sea. "We condemn, once again, China's latest unprovoked acts of coercion and dangerous maneuvers against a legitimate and routine Philippine rotation and resupply mission," said Jay Tarriela, spokesperson for the National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea (NTF-WPS), on the heels of a confrontation earlier this month near the Second Thomas Shoal. "These actions reflect not only reckless disregard for the safety and livelihoods of Filipinos, but also for international law," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a Dec. 10 statement."The United States stands with our Philippine allies in the face of these dangerous and unlawful actions. We reaffirm that Article IV of the 1951 U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty extends to armed attacks on Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft – including those of its Coast Guard – anywhere in the South China Sea," Miller added.China, which claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, previously accused Philippine coast guard ships of trespassing in what it describes as Chinese waters. A 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling found China's maritime claims in the South China Sea — commonly referred to as the nine-dash line — to be legally baseless. Beijing, which rejected the court ruling as "ill-founded" and "naturally null and void," has persisted in vigorously defending its expansive claims as part of a larger delimitation dispute also involving Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Taiwan. What exactly is at stake for China in its intensifying dispute with Manila and, by extension, its U.S. ally? "I think a lot of people in southeast Asia are mystified by why China is so pushy on this question," said Sarang Shidore, Director of the Global South Program at QI, adding that the unresolved issue of Taiwan's status is far more important to Beijing. "The South China Sea, these tiny features and islands, their economic potential is relatively small, there's fishing, but none of this rises to the level where you'd think China would be risking so much by pushing a very expansive claim," Shidore added. There are fishing and maritime disputes across the world, even including between allies, noted Lyle Goldstein, Director of Asia Engagement at Defense Priorities. "We have a major maritime territorial dispute with Canada… France and Britain go at it all the time over fisheries. It's fairly normal activity even among friends," Lyle told RS. The China-Philippines squall is far from the only theater in Beijing's ongoing maritime disputes, but it has escalated to a greater degree than many of the others due to Manila's readiness to push back against China's pressure tactics. Beijing has not engaged in an escalatory spiral with Malaysia and Brunei, despite their conflicting maritime claims, because these two states "are unlikely to make an issue of Chinese incidents and they don't really even talk about them," said Shidore, adding that their desire to preserve economic ties with China makes them "willing to absorb some costs." The Philippines has taken a more strident approach vis-à-vis Beijing than others in the South China Sea, said Shidore, partly as a byproduct of American presence in the region. "I think U.S. involvement is a big reason —the fact that the U.S. is present in the theater, and there is an alliance commitment, makes the situation not just a China-Philippines issue but a China-U.S. issue, and that's when everything changes from the Chinese perspective," he added. "The Chinese, I think, are more concerned about the U.S., at this point, than the Philippines," continued Shidore, "the U.S. presence is making them see red and emboldening all the nationalist and hawkish forces in the Chinese structures." American obligations under the 1951 U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty have raised concerns that Washington could find itself embroiled in a war in the South China Sea in the event of a direct military confrontation between China and the Philippines. "I think, unfortunately, all the signs are there for an escalating conflict," Goldstein said. "They [the Chinese] perceive that the stakes for them are very high," Goldstein explained. "I believe all this tension with the Philippines is an outgrowth of Taiwan tension," he said, noting that the Luzon strait, situated just south of Taiwan, has become an increasingly important fixture in U.S. preparations for a Taiwan contingency following the sharp spike in cross-strait tensions accompanying Nancy Pelosi's 2022 visit to Taipei. "The U.S. has been trying to put in place the groundwork to prepare for a day when they have to surge forces in a major way into Luzon," he said. Beijing, in reaction to these developments, has sought to dial up the pressure on Manila with threats and maritime shows of force. "The subtext is: if you are going to cooperate with the U.S. on the Taiwan scenario, your interests will suffer badly, and that, I think, is why this bullying is occurring," Goldstein said. Shidore said the White House, in light of growing regional tensions, should "pull back in being so frontal on this issue, whether rhetorically or materially, in terms of its presence in the theater." The U.S. has an active interest in exercising its substantial leverage over Manila "to nudge its more vulnerable partner to be more restrained in some of its actions," Shidore wrote in a piece published by The Diplomat last week. "We shouldn't be encouraging the Philippines to get into a fight with China — they are likely to lose that fight," said Goldstein. "We do have a treaty with the Philippines… but that treaty should be read very narrowly. It should be read as, we defend the main islands of the Philippines — if they are threatened acutely, we will be there," he added. "And if it means we need to put some defensive forces in those areas to reassure the Philippines, I'm okay with that. But my view is that we should not even consider going to war over rocks and reefs or different interpretations of the law of the sea. That would be extremely foolish and reckless, and it would be very hard to explain to American taxpayers." The China-Philippines maritime dispute does not, in of itself, reflect anything approaching an existential conflict. It has, however, become an increasingly dangerous proxy and potential flashpoint for underlying China-U.S. tensions in the South China Sea.

The EU Council summit of December 14-15 offered a significant, if perhaps mainly symbolic, gesture toward Ukraine in agreeing to the formal opening of accession negotiations. But at the same meeting, the bloc failed to approve financial (not military) support for Ukraine for the four-year period through 2027, amounting to 50 billion euros. Approval of this aid was vetoed by Hungary. Thus, a very muddled message about how EU countries are dealing with the Ukraine war issue, nearly two years from the start of the Russian invasion in Feb. 2022. Supporters of the aid package have agreed to take it up again in January, and, if necessary, to get commitments from the 26 supporters of the package to provide the funding for Ukraine bilaterally, rather than as part of the EU budget. In the lead-up to the meeting, Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban pledged to block both the opening of accession talks and the financial aid package. In the end, he left the room just before the vote to open accession talks was held. He may have done so because, days before the Council meeting, the Commission unblocked 10 billion euros of funding for Hungary that had been suspended because of Hungary's failure to meet EU rule-of-law standards. In acquiescing to the opening of accession talks for Ukraine, Orban is very much aware that the process will require unanimous approval by the Council at many junctures ahead. Moreover, it may be very protracted: accession talks are still ongoing with North Macedonia (since 2020), Montenegro (2012), Serbia (2014) and Albania (2022). But the war aid issue is much more urgent. According to the Kiel Institute's Ukraine assistance scorecard, the EU institutions have been to date by far the largest provider of financial support to Ukraine. The IMF has cautioned that even a brief delay in providing this support could potentially destabilize Ukraine's precarious fiscal situation and the provision of essential services to its people. ​The mood in Europe shifting?Efforts to persuade Orban to end his opposition to the Ukraine aid package could well produce results in time for a January reconsideration, but the optics of the EU hesitations are not good, coming as they do in lockstep with those of Washington. These developments have been widely depicted in Western media as a failure of President Zelensky's personal lobbying efforts to unblock essential U.S. and EU aid before the end of 2023. Hungary was alone in open opposition to the two measures of support for Ukraine. It is nevertheless clear that the mood in Europe has turned cooler on Ukraine, given the Eurozone's weak economic performance and the failure of the counteroffensive to make any significant territorial gains. The recent electoral success of the populist, Euro-skeptic Freedom Party in the Netherlands, whose leader Geert Wilders has long opposed military aid to Ukraine, can be interpreted as part of a trend toward Ukraine fatigue in Europe. On the other side of the ledger, pro-European and pro-Ukraine Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who led liberal forces to victory in October against the nationalist-populist former ruling party, made his inaugural appearance at the Council summit and firmly aligned himself against Orban. Although French President Emmanuel Macron had also personally lobbied Orban to change his position, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz claimed credit for persuading him to leave the room when the accession vote was about to be taken. Interpreting the accession decision— strategic intent and economic constraintsThe EU Council voted unanimously to open EU accession talks with Ukraine for "strategic" reasons — because not doing so would have been seen as a rebuke to Ukraine's deepest aspirations. The appeal of this message of encouragement to Ukraine apparently was enough to assuage the worries in several member states in Central and Eastern Europe about the potential impact on their own national economics of eventual EU membership for Ukraine. A leaked internal analysis from the Commission estimates the budgetary impacts of an EU enlarged to include Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and six western Balkans states. By far the most significant impact would be due to Ukraine's accession. The study found that EU agricultural and cohesion funds for Ukraine as an EU member would amount to 186 billion euros in the first seven years. Agricultural support to other EU members would need to fall by about a fifth, and the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia, Cyprus and Malta – would no longer be eligible to receive cohesion funding. Unless there were a dramatic reform of EU programs, the enlargement to include nine new members would turn several net recipient countries into net contributors to the EU budget. The politics of such a dramatic reversal of fortunes in countries accustomed to EU largesse could be difficult to manage and might well give rise to greater popular euro-skepticism. Early indications of this potential impact have arisen in Poland, where popular support for the Ukrainian war effort remains quite robust. However, the situation has been clouded since mid-2023 by emerging grievances among those affected by competition from Ukraine. Troubles arose earlier this year among Polish grain producers affected by cheaper Ukrainian grain. Since November 6, Polish truckers' grievances have erupted in protests involving hundreds of trucks at all major border crossings, bringing Ukrainian trucks' passage to a standstill. The protesters claim that a relaxation of permit requirements for Ukrainians trucks entering the EU — a measure adopted by the European Commission to support Ukraine's economy after Russia's invasion — has harmed the livelihood of Polish truckers. In recent weeks, Hungarian and Slovakian truckers have joined in blocking major border crossings with Ukraine to their respective countries. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has stated that he will end the blockade but will do so in a way that meets some of the Polish truckers' grievances. Even as a convinced European, Tusk is proceeding cautiously. The opening of accession talks is a substantial watershed for Ukraine, but it seems highly unlikely that Ukraine could accomplish the daunting agenda of legal and institutional reforms required for accession while being engaged in a full-scale military confrontation on its territory. Bulgarian regional expert Ivan Krastev argues that the providing of this long-term perspective to Ukraine in fulfillment of its aspirations to be recognized as fully European and a part of the West may induce greater willingness by Ukraine's leaders to consider pursuing a negotiated settlement. "Only strong security guarantees and a promised European future could persuade Ukrainians to accept territorial concessions at some point," he said.In other words, the promise of Europe, while genuine on its own terms, may also serve as encouragement of efforts to end the war short of the full accomplishment of Ukrainian war aims.

It's that time of year, and despite all the budgetary drama unfolding on Capitol Hill, lawmakers have already finished most of their holiday shopping for their favorite children: Pentagon contractors. Through cryptic "program increases" to the defense budget appropriations for fiscal year 2024, most with no listed author and little to no justification, Congress has added more than $25 billion to the Pentagon's procurement and research accounts for fiscal year 2024. Based on the continuing resolution that Congress passed in November, Congress has until February 2 to either pass another stopgap measure, or pass a final Pentagon spending bill, at which point we should be able to see which program increases make the cut. If history is any indication, almost all of them will be in the final bill.In the meantime, a new database created by Taxpayers for Common Sense reveals each of these program increases, whether they fund projects that weren't funded at all in the Pentagon's budget request, and whether they fund projects requested in Unfunded Priorities Lists (UPLs), extra-budgetary wish lists that Congress requires military service branch and combatant command leaders to submit to Congress each year.The numbersLawmakers on the House Appropriations Committees got to work early, adding 479 program increases for a combined $9.5 billion. When their Senate counterparts got to work, they included 636 program increases in their bill worth nearly $15 billion — so all in all 1,115 program increases. Broken down by bill section, there were 172 increases for procurement between the House and Senate at a cost of $14 billion, and 943 for research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) at a cost of $10.5 billion. When the House version of the Defense Appropriations bill came to the floor, lawmakers added 11 more program increases for procurement, and another 90 for RDT&E, for a combined $1.1 billion.While these kinds of adds are nothing new, their numbers do seem to be growing, particularly in the RDT&E category. In fact, the number of RDT&E top-ups has grown by 72% in the past four years, from 600 for FY2021, to 776 for FY2022, to 996 for FY2023, up to 1,033 for FY2024. More troubling still is that 1,010 of the total 1,216 increases, or $14.5 billion of the $25.7 billion lawmakers have added to these accounts, are for projects the Pentagon didn't fund at all in its budget request.Are they earmarks?According to Congress, these increases aren't earmarks, but in practice, they often serve the same purpose and are not subject to transparency reforms traditional earmarks have faced since 2007.Traditional earmarks, rebranded by Congress as "congressionally directed funding" or "community project funding," support projects that fund a specific entity for a specific purpose in a specific place. This made them a favored tool for lawmakers to funnel taxpayer dollars into their district or state. But these earmarks come with rules, requiring members to put their names on them, and in the House's case, requiring members to list their earmarks on their websites. Program increases are not bound by these rules. They have no name attached (apart from amendments, which list their sponsors) and generally lack any accompanying justification. In the Senate Appropriations Committee report on the Pentagon spending bill, a section on "funding increases" stipulates that "funding increases shall be competitively awarded, or provided to programs that have received competitive awards in the past." So Congress seems to differentiate these increases from earmarks on the basis that they're competitively awarded, unlike traditional earmarks. In practice, that rationale breaks down.Next-gen earmarksOne program increase allocates $2 million for "urban subterranean mapping technology," a fancy name for tunnel detection. This increase has appeared in every Pentagon spending bill since FY2020, for a total of $17 million over five years, but there's almost no publicly available information about this project. That is other than Sen. Joe Manchin's (D-W.Va.) regular celebrations of funding for West Virginia-based Marshall University to research urban subterranean mapping technology in press release after press release after press release after press release, all of which were published before the funds they celebrate were formally awarded.Some adds are even more blatantly noncompetitive. In the House, someone added $7 million for "Omniblast water sensor technology." If that sounds weirdly specific, it's because it is. The Omniblast water sensor is a trademarked product, owned by a company called Advanced Materials and Devices (AMAD), Inc. It goes without saying that program increases for patented products can only be fulfilled by the patent owners, so AMAD Inc. is more than a shoe-in for any "competitive" award process. And while AMAD Inc. was awarded a contract for "a wearable underwater blast sensor" in 2022, it was the only bidder, suggesting a not so competitive process in the past.As to whether this funding, like an earmark, is meant to serve the political interests of a specific lawmaker, we can't know for sure without knowing the author. But AMAD Inc. is based in Reno, Nevada, in the district of Rep. Mark Amodei's (R-Nev.), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee. While AMAD Inc. hasn't made any political contributions to Rep. Amodei's campaigns, it did spend $150,000 on lobbying in 2022, and $120,000 on lobbying in the first three quarters of 2023, expenses paid to a lobbying firm called Cornerstone Government Affairs. Cornerstone donated $3,000 to Rep. Amodei so far in the 2024 election cycle, its first time contributing to any of his campaigns.Unjustified adds, unjustifiable secrecyAsked about these program increases, a Senate Appropriations Committee staffer pointed to the unfunded priorities they fund as a justification. But there are two problems with that argument. One is that Unfunded Priorities Lists (UPLs) are just that: unfunded, meaning the Pentagon didn't find them important enough to include in its $826 billion request. Almost by definition, items on these UPLs are non-priorities for the Pentagon. The second problem is that UPLs only accounted for about $1.9 billion of the $25.7 billion lawmakers added to the Pentagon's request for procurement and RDT&E. The staffer also argued that the Pentagon sometimes "relies upon congressional increases to keep production lines open or to sustain readiness of the military." This tack obfuscates the fact that for a lot of the funds Congress adds, it subtracts funds from elsewhere in the Pentagon budget. While the offsets for the committee adds are as opaque as their authors, the offsets listed in amendments overwhelmingly raid the Pentagon's Operations and Maintenance account. That's Congress' prerogative, but lawmakers can't raid O&M to pay for procurement and research adds and then say with a straight face that those adds are about supporting military readiness.All this isn't to say that none of these projects are worth funding. There's more than 1,200 of them, so surely some are. But with the lack of transparency for who requests and approves them, whether the funds are competitively awarded, and whether they align with any cogent national security strategy, who's to say? If lawmakers think cramming another $25 billion for procurement and research into a $826 billion budget of an agency that just failed its sixth audit is worthwhile, they should at least let us know who's adding what and to what end.

It's legacy-salvaging time as the embers die on the
Democrat Gov. John
Bel Edwards Administration, with a full-bore effort to turn impossibly a
sow's ear into a silk purse.

At the specific policy level, for example, you
have its Commissioner of Administration trying to stave off the undoing by
incoming governor Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry of a costly
and counterproductive taxpayer-funded parental leave scheme for state employees
while proclaiming
"History is going to look very favorably on … Edwards and what he's done." This
shilling is backed more broadly by a propaganda campaign
using tax dollars touting alleged accomplishments, if not reframing failures.

Dardenne is dead wrong: if history is kind, it
will relegate the Edwards years as a footnote; if bluntly realistic, it will
register the 2016-23 period as one where his policies botched economic growth
and development and coarsened society while privileging special interests at
the expense of Louisianans – all in all, a retreat into the past following an
agenda that disserved the state for decades. The data leave no other assessment
possible.

While Landry has yet to take office, already he
has signaled he will undo as much as he can of what Edwards inflicted. There is
not much of what Edwards did which can't be reversed in its entirety, but,
unfortunately, where he did the most damage are things that will be the hardest
to contain.

Most egregiously, he grew government at an alarming
rate, much higher than inflation. From the total spending by the state from six
months into his first term through what is budgeted through the six months after
his second term ends, total
state spending will rise 91 percent. Some of this was driven by bad choices
that force fed federal dollars into the state (which now comprise just over
half of budgeted spending), but even from state sources general
fund spending will rise 36 percent in the period while statutory
dedications will rise 72 percent and self-generated dollars will rise 50
percent. For all 50 states, the fiscal
year 2016 to FY
2022 increase was only 59 percent. Meanwhile, inflation increased
only 28 percent in the period through last month.

This spending orgy particularly was egged on by
expanding Medicaid at the start of FY 2017. It now costs Louisianans over
$450 million extra a year in state funds (using FY 2021 figures; this will
rocket higher because of Wuhan coronavirus pandemic policies for the next couple
of years which fortunately since have been discontinued), redistributing wealth
to eligible enrollees anywhere from a third to a half of whom already had
health insurance and providing a benefit that discourages work. And not that it
seems to have done much relative to other states, as its 2017 rank is the same
as its 2023 rank for public
health according to U.S. News and World Report, 45th, while
United Health Care's America's Health Rankings annual report for 2017
and 2022
shows the state slipped – from next from dead last to dead last.

Meanwhile, spurred by this ballooning of
government, the state began falling behind, if not retreating, economically.
Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated, and is the most prominent legacy of
Edwards' policies, than in the depopulation of the Louisiana from the middle
of 2016 through mid-2022.
While the nation grew 3.2 percent and the state's southern neighbors experienced a 5.2 percent increase in residents, Louisiana lost 1.9 percent or 88,000
people as they left seeking better opportunity, if not better-run government.

Naturally enough, because of the state's relatively
poor economic performance. A lower proportion of able-bodied
adults younger than age 65 worked in last month, 59 percent, as opposed to
when Edwards' first budget kicked in in Jul., 2016, then at 60.2 percent, with
this latest figure seventh-lowest in the nation (and only as high as it is because
of the state's depopulation). Contrast this with the national rate of 62.7 percent. And the state's
rate is only as high as it is because of depopulation and aggregate job loss; since Jul., 2016 the state actually has
lost (preliminary Oct., 2023 estimate, seasonally adjusted) 6,000 jobs.

For those who did work, the Edwards' years have
been marked by falling behind. While personal
per capita income grew 39 percent from mid-2016 through last month nationally,
and in the southeast 40.7 percent, it grew just 35.6 percent in Louisiana. In compound
annual terms, the 4.6
percent growth rate ranked 35th among the states.

Regrettably, it will take time to unwind the
massive growth in government and effort to find ways to curtail Medicaid
expansion, unless it is eliminated which may be difficult politically to do
with a critical mass of individuals now hooked on redistribution of wealth to
them. Perhaps the only other consequential policy change – again, with an
overall negative impact – Edwards foisted was his criminal justice changes designed
to incarcerate fewer individuals that supposedly would save money.

People incarcerated since
the end of 2016 through Sept., 2023 have fallen around a fifth although by only
about a thousand in state prisons. Yet this was less than the over quarter
decline in all states (through
2021, the latest available data) And claims that the changes, designed to
send fewer people to prison, caused this decline are tempered
by demographic changes with the proportion of younger individuals falling
(younger males disproportionately commit crime) in this period. Nor was much
money saved, since the charge to house state prisoners in local jails increased.

Worse, despite these changes violent crime
increased in Louisiana from 2016-22,
some 11 percent. Meanwhile, violent crime across the U.S. barely budged, up
about a percent making it just 54 percent as high as Louisiana's. This lends credence
to charges by Landry and many others that the changes came at a cost of safety,
and portends they will intensify efforts over the past couple of years to clamp
down that didn't make it into law because of Edwards' vetoes.

Finally, perhaps the most insidious and tragic impact
Edwards had concerned his pandemic policy, which employed stricter measures
than in many states and, which research has demonstrated, largely
were useless in
combatting viral spread and suffering, but ending up induced misery in
other ways. In fact, running the numbers shows that Edwards'
lockdown policies cost more lives than they saved and certainly did more
damage to the economy and civil society (not
to mention the state Constitution) than did far less
heavy-handed responses from other states' governors who had access to the
very same data but who made wiser decisions.

Unquestionably, overall Edwards – aided by too few
legislative Republicans doing too little to counter him, although things would have
been worse had they not at least resisted his more egregious efforts to raise
taxes, to spend more, and to regulate more heavily – has produced a reign of error
that left the state and its people in relatively worse condition than when he
took over, if not absolutely worse in terms of residents, jobs, and lives lost.
No length to which public relations campaigns will go or amount of lackeys
trying to deflect from their own culpability in disserving the public can
change that fact.

With the world's eyes understandably focused on the carnage in the Gaza Strip, violent manifestations of the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the Israeli-occupied West Bank have been getting even less attention than they normally get, and less than they deserve. Amid concerns about possible spreading of the current war in Gaza, spreading already has begun in the West Bank, with the potential there of stimulating still more spread.Casualties have spiked in the West Bank since the Hamas attack on October 7. More than 100 Palestinians, including civilians, have been killed there.Most of the casualties have been incurred as part of accelerated operations in the West Bank by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), in the form of raids, mass arrests, and crackdowns on protests. The stepped-up Israeli use of force has even included an airstrike on a mosque in a refugee camp in the city of Jenin — a rarity in the West Bank, where the Israelis usually rely on ground forces.Additional violence has come at the hands of Israeli settlers — some of the 670,000 Israelis whose residence in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem is widely recognized as a violation of international law. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded in just the first two weeks of the current crisis 100 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian residents. The U.N. office noted that this represented an average of almost eight such incidents per day, up from a daily average of three incidents since the beginning of this year.The connection between this settler violence and the events this month in southern Israel and the Gaza Strip has two aspects. One is that Israeli anger over the Hamas attack and the blurring of such emotion into a general hatred of Palestinian Arabs has made the current moment even more of an open season on Palestinians than it was before. The second is that the current focus of attention on Gaza among the press, foreign governments, and the world generally has represented an opportunity for settlers to conduct violent and illegal business in the West Bank while drawing little notice. Mairav Zonszein, an Israel-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, notes that a difference between now and before is that the settler violence is occurring "without almost any media attention being paid to it."These developments are a continuation, in intensified form, of longer trends in the physical suffering of West Bank Palestinians. Many of the nearly 1,600 deaths of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis between 2015 (that is, since the last big Israeli attack on Gaza in 2014) and August of this year were in the West Bank. The violence accelerated in 2023, even before October 7. This year was already on pace to be the deadliest year for residents of the West Bank since the United Nations began keeping such records in 2005.The upsurge in Israeli violence in the West Bank clearly is related to the coming to power at the beginning of this year of an extreme right-wing Israeli government. Far from policing or discouraging the settler violence, the de facto Israeli response often has been to permit or condone it, with IDF soldiers standing aside or even participating in some of the violence. One of the most prominent of the extremists currently in power, minister of national security Itamar Ben-Gvir — himself a West Bank settler — promised to distribute as many as 10,000 free rifles to Israeli citizens, including West Bank settlers.All this is part of a longer-term process of one people, defined in ethnic and religious terms, subjugating another people similarly defined, and of the determination of successive Israeli governments to maintain Jewish Israeli supremacy over all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Part of the formula for doing this has been to cordon off some two million of the Arab residents into the Gaza Strip and to rely on blockades, periodic "mowing the grass " with military force, and an occasional misery-alleviating sop to keep those Arabs from interfering with Israeli ambitions. The Hamas attack, of course, shattered some of the assumptions underlying that strategy.The other part of the formula has been the piecemeal displacement of West Bank Palestinians from their land. Although much of the settler violence manifests simple hatred and bigotry, much of it is a more calculated effort to make life for Palestinian neighbors so miserable — or so uneconomic, given settler tactics such as vandalism of olive groves or denial of water and pastures needed by herded livestock — that those neighbors will give up and move. The accelerated anti-Palestinian settler activity this month has included much of this kind of intimidation. The Israeli human rights watchdog organization B'Tselem reported earlier this month that in the previous week, eight entire West Bank communities, numbering 472 people, had abandoned their homes out of fear for their lives and livelihoods.The current war, replete with Israeli orders for millions of Gaza residents to evacuate what the Israeli military has turned into a free-fire zone, has raised fears throughout the region of a new Nakba or catastrophe — another installment of the war in the 1940s that caused the mass displacement of longtime Palestinian residents from what became the state of Israel. The fears gained credibility from the leak of an Israeli government planning document that calls for forcibly transferring the population of the Gaza Strip to the Sinai. Perhaps the only thing preventing Israel from trying to implement such a plan is that the Egyptian government has multiple reasons to refuse to participate in any such scheme.That scheme was about Gaza, but West Bankers probably have the most to fear from any new mass displacements or ethnic cleansing. Gaza is the open-air prison, but the West Bank, with East Jerusalem, is the prize — the land that Israeli hardliners want for, and only for, their own people.The other dynamic that has made the West Bank increasingly become a powder keg since October 7 is the unsurprising increase in anger and resentment among the Palestinians who live there. Fear of a new Nakba is part of it. The casualties from increased settler violence and IDF use of military force are part of it. And so are the miseries in everyday life that have come from roadblocks and other obstructions to movement that the IDF has increased this month.Another big part of it is anger over the death and devastation that the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip has imposed on the Palestinian brethren who live there. This is not a matter of support for Hamas. It is a matter of feeling the pain of co-nationals and of general outrage over the infliction of mass suffering.The chance of a new intifada, or popular uprising, in the West Bank, was already significant before this month and is now even higher. In the current atmosphere, a new intifada would likely be at least as violent as the last one. It would by itself represent a significant spread of the war in Gaza. And by making the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict that much larger, it would increase the chance of further spread, such as by drawing in Lebanese Hezbollah.

The Eurasia Group Foundation's latest survey report, titled "Order and Disorder: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Fragmented World," covered a range of issues from sanctions and arms sales to drone strikes and the war in Ukraine, and it contains several notable findings about how Americans perceive different aspects of U.S. global engagement. According to the report, Americans are very open to diplomacy with hostile powers, but they are also supportive of going to war with China to a disturbing degree. One of the chief findings is that Americans are broadly in favor of direct diplomatic engagement with adversaries and even more support negotiations with Iran on the nuclear issue. According to the poll, two-thirds of Americans favor negotiations with adversaries even if they are responsible for human rights abuses, authoritarian governments, or home to terrorist organizations, 77% support continued nuclear talks with Iran, and 58% of Americans also want the U.S. to push for a negotiated settlement to end the war in Ukraine. Support for diplomatic solutions has majority backing of Americans from across the political spectrum, so it is remarkable how little support for those same solutions can be found among our elected representatives and policymakers in Washington.Some of the report's findings are unsurprising. There is a partisan divide over Ukraine policy with Democrats tending to be much more supportive of the administration approach than Republicans and Republicans are the most hawkish when it comes to China. But perhaps one of the most surprising and significant results is the extent to which Americans of all political camps now say that they support direct intervention in a war over Taiwan. Other surveys in recent years have found that roughly 40% of Americans back direct U.S. intervention in the event of a Chinese attack, but the EGF survey found that overall support for intervention is at 60%. That may be the result of rising tensions between China and Taiwan and the ongoing deterioration of relations between the U.S. and China over the past year since former House Speaker Pelosi's ill-advised visit to Taipei last summer. It may be caused by the constant drumbeat of anti-China rhetoric from members of both parties. It could be some combination of all three. Regardless, this represents a significant increase in public support for going to war over Taiwan, and that suggests that the public does not fully grasp how costly and dangerous such a war would be. Support for intervention is relatively soft with most of the supporters saying that they only "somewhat" support sending U.S. forces to help defend Taiwan, but it can't be denied that this is a major shift in U.S. public opinion in the last ten years. It is a measure of how dominant hawkish groupthink on China policy has become if a majority of the public now says that they support waging a major war with a nuclear-armed adversary.The public is split almost exactly in half over whether the U.S. should sell arms to other countries. Fifty-three percent believe that the U.S. should stop selling arms. The finding on arms sales is striking because the question refers only to "selling arms globally" without saying anything about the governments that are purchasing them. Most Democratic and independent respondents say that the U.S. should not continue arms sales, and even 48% of Republicans say the same. While this opposition to arms sales is likely influenced by debates over arming Saudi Arabia and other abusive authoritarian governments, it is important to note that the respondents are rejecting all arms sales no matter where they are going.While Americans are divided over the desirability of arms sales, most are generally fine with U.S. sanctions and for some reason believe them to be an effective policy tool. Just over 60% of Americans overall said that sanctions were "always" or "often" an effective tool, and only 39% said that they were "rarely" or "never" effective. That is somewhat surprising given the repeated failures of sanctions, especially broad sanctions, to achieve stated policy goals and the extensive humanitarian harm that they cause to target populations. Where would so many Americans get the impression that sanctions are an effective tool when they clearly are not? It is hard to say, but perhaps one reason for this view is the constant use of sanctions as the default government response in so many different places. It could be that the public assumes that sanctions must be effective or else they wouldn't be imposed so frequently. When they were prompted by the government's many different reasons for imposing sanctions, perhaps the respondents concluded that the tool must be useful if it is being used to address so many issues. The responses to the question on sanctions were among the most disheartening in the entire survey, because they are so divorced from reality and show no awareness of the terrible track record that economic sanctions have. Independent respondents were least likely to say that sanctions are an effective policy tool, but even here the pro-sanctions view narrowly prevailed. The public's unfounded confidence in the efficacy of sanctions is not a new development, but it is another obstacle to efforts to rein in and possibly end the use of economic warfare. One of the more encouraging results was the narrow majority support for repealing the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Fifty-four percent say they favor repealing the authorization, with support for repeal being strongest among Democrats (56%) and independents (62%). Two out of five Republicans agree that the authorization should be repealed. It is significant that they did not mention passing a new authorization to replace the old one. Most Americans appear to be done with the "war on terror," and they want to get rid of the authorization that has been used to fight it.Two years after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the public still has a generally negative assessment of the war. Most Americans understandably conclude that the war was a failure, and 30% believe that the war had a failed mission from the start. Another 32% say that the war should have ended following the death of Osama bin Laden. Only 13% believe that the withdrawal hurt U.S. credibility, and that shows that very few people in the country buy the bogus credibility argument that hawks have been selling all these years.The findings in the EGF survey point to some promising areas for policy reform. There seems to be fertile ground for pursuing AUMF repeal and a major overhaul of U.S. arms sales. Unfortunately, there are other policies, including sanctions, that will require a lot more work in terms of educating the public and changing how Americans understand these issues.

UPDATE: 10/9: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and a bipartisan delegation of Senators met with Chinese President Xi Jinping today in Beijing. Among the issues addressed: the U.S. fentanyl crisis, human rights and "economic reciprocity" between the two countries. The meeting was overshadowed however, according to Bloomberg News, by Schumer's stated disappointment with China's response to the Hamas attacks on Israel over the weekend. China called for a ceasefire and for a two-state solution, with an independent state for Palestinians. A bipartisan senate delegation led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) touched down in Shanghai on Sunday, the first stop in a diplomatic mission that also includes Japan and South Korea."We are prepared to compete but we do not seek to conflict," Schumer told a Chinese official, reflecting the Biden administration's continued attempts to strike a balance between engagement and competition with Beijing even as relations between the world's two leading powers have sharply declined over the past several years.In an earlier statement this week, China said it hoped the visit would "contribute to a more objective understanding of China in the U.S. Congress."The high-level talks are accompanied by fresh affirmations from the White House that there is tentative agreement on a Biden-Xi summit in San Francisco, with officials adding that plans for the meeting will take a more concrete form after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's upcoming visit to Washington. "It's pretty firm" that there will be a face-to-face meeting between the two leaders, an administration official told the Washington Post. The Senate delegation trip comes on the heels of Secretary of State Antony Blinken's meeting with Xi earlier this summer. The Blinken-Xi talks, which were followed by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's four-day visit to China in July, are part of an ongoing effort by the Biden administration to stabilize U.S.-Chinese relations amid mounting military tensions over Taiwan, U.S. allegations of Chinese human rights abuses, and simmering frustration that China's booming trade with Russia is hobbling the Western sanctions regime established in response to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration has tried to balance its mounting competition with Beijing by seeking out areas of bilateral cooperation, particularly including a suite of climate change initiatives being championed by John Kerry, U.S. special envoy on climate change. The full scope of the Senate delegation's mission to China has not been revealed. Senator Bill Cassidy (R- La.), one of the group's republican members, reiterated hopes that the delegation will be able to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, clarifying that such a meeting has not been scheduled. "If the talks proceed well, there is the possibility that President Xi will meet Schumer," said Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University of China, to the Associated Press. "If their meeting is realized, the chances for a Xi-Biden meeting will become greater."The senators are widely expected to raise thorny issues of human rights and what U.S. officials have described as deadly inflows of fentanyl from China. There is little to suggest that the delegation's Chinese interlocutors will reciprocate positively on either issue. Beijing has vigorously rebuffed accusations of systemic abuses carried out against China's Muslim Uyghur population in the northwestern Xinjiang region, with top Chinese officials previously denouncing such claims as malicious slander. Attempts by Blinken to broach the human rights issue at a 2021 bilateral summit in Anchorage, Alaska prompted a "lecture" from Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi. "The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength," Yang said, adding that it is "important for the United States to change its own image and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world." Beijing has adopted a similarly defensive posture on "fentanyl-related issues," dismissing them as a smear against China and a pretext for "illegal sanctions on Chinese counter-narcotics institutions" in a heated response to recent Justice Department charges against China-based companies accused of being involved in the fentanyl trade."They are fueling the fentanyl crisis that is poisoning communities across the United States," said Schumer, referring to the Chinese producers in question. "Every one of us knows families who have lost young men and women to fentanyl."China has forcefully and consistently rejected Washington's positions on human rights and fentanyl issues; there is nothing to suggest that the upcoming Senate delegation can yield a different result. An aide to Schumer said the senators plan to "raise concerns related to global competition and what many of them considered China's unfair business and trade practices," according to The New York Times. Here, too, the two sides are unlikely to find common ground, as successive waves of new U.S. export controls --with similar measures being considered by the EU — auguring an expanding trade war between Washington and Beijing. The Senate delegation will also visit Japan and South Korea, key players in East Asia that have found themselves increasingly at odds with Beijing in recent months. The agenda for these two stops is less clear, but they come amid attempts by the White House to corral Tokyo and Seoul into a regional bloc with the purpose of thwarting Chinese ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.Beijing has previously responded to what it sees as grievous missteps by U.S. officials and politicians by cutting off bilateral contacts, as it did shortly following former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. Stable channels of military communication between Washington and Beijing have still not been restored despite repeated appeals by Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and President Joe Biden. There is scant basis for anticipating, nor has Schumer or any delegation member promised, concrete bilateral agreements or other propitious developments from the senators' upcoming China trip. It is, however, easy to see how bilateral relations could further deteriorate, with Beijing in no hurry to restore diplomatic contacts or to work with Washington in the few remaining areas where cooperation still seems feasible. The White House, meanwhile, is increasingly coming under fire from congressional Republicans arguing that the administration has little to show for its efforts to calm tensions with China. The delicate balancing act between competition and engagement with Beijing appears increasingly difficult to sustain in the absence of clear diplomatic results. It is unclear if the upcoming senate delegation will prove to be a step in the direction of breaking the emerging diplomatic impasses that exist between the two countries, or make it worse.

"You've got to leave the country, Jamal. You've got to get out before they arrest you too," I told my friend, Jamal Khashoggi, just a few months before his fateful decision to leave his homeland in 2017. Little did we know that rather than find safety in Washington D.C., Mohamed bin Salman and his henchmen would trick him into visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where they brutally tortured and murdered him. Little did we expect that five years after his shocking murder, the Biden administration would be potentially rewarding MBS with an unprecedented security guarantee for his monarchical dictatorship.As a human rights advocate, this was not the first time I had urged someone to flee from an Arab regime, but the others were prominent activists long in conflict with their governments. Khashoggi was a long-time government insider, acting as spokesman for the Saudi embassy in Washington D.C., where we first met, before returning to serve as a journalist and editor in the Saudi media. We remained in touch over the years, and I saw his evolution during the Arab Uprisings of 2011, when he came to the firm conclusion that only democracy and the rule of law would secure stability and peace for the Middle East.With the rise of King Salman and his son, Mohamed bin Salman (MBS), then merely the deputy crown prince, in 2015, repression in the country escalated dramatically. By 2017, they carried out mass arrests of the Kingdom's leading reformers, religious leaders, journalists, and activists, even before the roundup and shakedown of hundreds of the country's business and royal family leaders. After Khashoggi penned an article critiquing then-President Trump, MBS ordered him to stop writing and remain quiet.Khashoggi faced a terrible choice: remain in the country effectively as a prisoner or flee. Initially, he refused to leave, sending me pictures of his grandchildren to explain why leaving the country would be too great a pain for him to bear. I argued and tried to persuade him: he could just take a temporary break, until things calmed down. Perhaps the King and MBS would relent in their repression, confident their rule was secure. Perhaps they would release those they had imprisoned, many of them Khashoggi's friends. But remaining in the country at that moment would be too great a danger. So Khashoggi finally relented and came to the United States, hoping that he would, indeed, one day return.Khashoggi soon found himself with a global audience, and able to express his true voice in his writings for the Washington Post, where his columns provided the only independent Saudi counterpoint to the unfolding disasters under the country's new rules, not just domestically but in MBS's catastrophic war in Yemen. MBS and his cronies tried hard to persuade him to come back, promising to lavishly fund a center for him back in Riyadh. We laughed at the ham-handed pleading texts from Saud al-Qahtani, MBS's top henchman, who would later go on to be the principal engineer of Khashoggi's murder.By 2018, Khashoggi knew he could never return so long as King Salman and MBS remained in power. He grieved his loss but understood that his principles required that he speak out, remarking, "I have left my home, my family, and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot."He told me about his plans to launch a new organization in Washington D.C., Democracy for the Arab World Now, because he understood the outsized role that the United States played in protecting and enabling the region's dictatorships. He dreamed of a group that would challenge continued U.S. support for them. In June of 2018, he showed me his new business card as the Executive Director of DAWN. On October 2, 2018, MBS executed his plan to murder Khashoggi, hoping to silence him once and for all.Following the global uproar over Khashoggi's murder, the United States and Western governments around the world strongly condemned the murder, suspended arms sales to Saudi Arabia and promised to hold the perpetrators accountable. Businesses ended their ties to the Kingdom, canceling contracts and returning Saudi government investments. Many believed that Khashoggi's death would not be in vain, because at last, it would trigger a recalibration of Western protection for the violent, sociopathic Saudi leadership. Such was the change in mood Khashoggi's death triggered that Congress voted on three occasions to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and President Biden campaigned on a pledge to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the murder, to make them "pay the price, and make them the pariah that they are," arguing that there was "very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia."Five years since Khashoggi's murder, however, the United States and other Western governments are falling over themselves to woo Saudi Arabia and MBS. The twin sirens of Saudi's billions in buying power — including the world's largest arms purchases — and control over oil prices are too great to resist, and MBS has understood that the best way to bring the West to heel is to threaten closer ties to China. In a remarkable turn of fate, the once globally reviled MBS finds himself lauded with awards in Pakistan, feted in Paris by President Macron, and invited for a state visit in London. Most dangerous of all, President Biden is now reportedly offering MBS the ultimate prize: a treaty-level security guarantee that commits American troops to protecting his dictatorship, purportedly as his reward for normalizing with Israel.What's so painful and disturbing about these developments isn't just the failure of Western governments to stay true to their promises to hold MBS accountable for the murder of Khashoggi, or the murder of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, who continue to endure a Saudi blockade of their country. It's their willingness to sell our values for short-term economic and political returns, whatever the costs to those who face increasing attacks by not just the Saudi government, but copy-cats like India. With expanded Saudi acquisitions of Western businesses, cultural and sporting institutions, and even hundreds of former political and military officials, the message MBS is sending is that he can buy our democracies too.Perhaps Western political leaders will come to their senses and understand the cost of acquiescing to tyrants like MBS is simply too high, not just tainting and humiliating our nations as we knowingly capitulate to a tyrant's demands, but undermining the true our competitive edge — our freedoms and our rights. But the onus will rest, as it always must in our democracies, on the citizens of our countries to demand that we do better, for the people of the Middle East and the people of our own region.

The vitriolic dispute between Poland and Ukraine brings out some aspects of the West's approach to the war in Ukraine that the Ukrainian government would do well to study carefully.

The dispute originated in charges by Poland and other central European governments that Ukraine's greatly increased grain exports to Europe — a consequence of the Russian closure of the Black Sea to Ukrainian maritime trade — were flooding European markets and depressing prices for Polish and other farmers.

The relaxation of EU limits on Ukrainian shipments was supposed to allow Ukraine to resume exports to Egypt and other countries where vulnerable populations are suffering from increased prices as a result of the war. A considerable proportion has in fact gone to the EU itself instead. The EU imposed a temporary ban, which, however, it refused to lift when it expired on September 15th. Poland, Hungary and Slovakia have however continued the ban, in defiance of EU rules.

The Ukrainian government has brought charges against Poland at the World Trade Organization, and alleged that the Polish move has been motivated chiefly by the government's desire to hold onto farmers' votes in next month's Polish general elections. Speaking to the United Nations, President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Poland and other countries of engaging in theatrics and "making a thriller out of grain." Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki hit back ferociously:

"I want to tell President Zelensky never to insult Poles again, as he did recently during his speech at the U.N. The Polish people will never allow this to happen, and defending the good name of Poland is not only my duty and honor, but also the most important task of the Polish government."

Polish President Andrzej Duda added:

"Ukraine is behaving like a drowning person clinging to anything available. A drowning person is extremely dangerous, capable of pulling you down to the depths…and drowning its rescuer."

In a move widely interpreted as retaliation for Ukraine's protests against the grain ban, moreover, Poland has halted arms shipments to Ukraine, insisting that it will now concentrate on equipping its own armed forces to defend Poland.

What makes this so extraordinary is that Poland has long portrayed itself as Ukraine's greatest friend in the West, and has accused other Western governments of cowardice for not doing more to arm and support Ukraine.

The first lesson to be learned from all this is that even in countries whose populations are most supportive of Ukraine, that support will have limits when it imposes high and visible costs on themselves, and that politicians will inevitably exploit the resulting political backlash. This has implications in particular for Ukraine's chances of joining the European Union.

In the case of Poland and other former Communist states of Central Europe, their path to EU membership was helped by copious amounts of EU financial assistance. The EU's Regional Development Fund continues to support depressed areas of Poland and its neighbors. Supporting Ukraine to the point where it could enter the EU will, however, be a task of a different order of magnitude. Even before the Russian invasion, Ukraine was one of the poorest countries in Europe, with an average GDP per capita in 2021 of only $4,828 (compared to an EU average of $38,436) and its chances of joining the EU in the foreseeable future were considered vanishingly small.

Moreover, EU countries (in Western as well as Central Europe) were always fearful of cheap Ukrainian food imports. Ukraine's Association Agreement with the EU explicitly barred most Ukrainian grain exports as part of the EU's strategy of defending European farmers through its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). This ban was removed by Brussels only in response to the Russian invasion and blockade. Poland has now restored it.

In March of this year, the World Bank estimated the cost of postwar reconstruction up until then at around $411 billion, and that cost will of course increase further the longer the war goes on. The whole of EU spending on depressed areas within the EU in the seven years from 2014 to 2021 was $200 billion. To judge by Poland's latest moves, it seems improbable that a future Polish government would ask its voters to pay Poland's share of such costs; and if Poland won't, who will?

The other thing to which Ukrainians should pay attention is that, as dramatized by Poland's latest actions, hatred for Russia and real sympathy for Ukraine are not at all the same thing and may even contradict each other. Concerning Polish hatred of Russia, there can be no doubt; but underlying the remarkably harsh rhetoric of recent days has been the fact that historically speaking, Poles and Ukrainians also used to be bitter enemies.
The Polish kingdom, and the Polish republic between 1919 and 1939, sought to Polonize their Ukrainian subjects just as the Russians tried to Russify theirs. Ukrainian revolts against Polish rule massacred Poles along with Jews. Political struggles between Poles and Ukrainians for control of Galicia helped undermine the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the years before 1914. After 1918, Poland annexed the Ukrainian areas of Galicia by force, and held them until they were transferred to Soviet Ukraine by Josef Stalin as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - which is why they are in Ukraine today, and not in Poland.
During and immediately after the Second World War, Ukrainian nationalist partisans massacred tens of thousands of ethnic Poles, and Ukrainians serving in the 1st Galician Division of the Waffen SS participated in ruthless German operations against the Polish resistance. In recent years, both Kyiv and Warsaw have sought to play down this history, but memories of it continue to flow very close to the surface on both sides.

This history is peculiar to Poland and Ukraine; but with regard to the United States too, Ukrainians should ask themselves how much of U.S. support for Ukraine is motivated by real sympathy for them, and how much is devoted to killing as many Russians as possible and weakening Russia as much as possible, no matter how many Ukrainians die and how much Ukraine is weakened in the process — as some statements by U.S. politicians and officials have tended to suggest. Thus Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) recently boasted, "We are destroying the Russian army without losing a single American soldier."

Other hawkish U.S. commentators have argued that it is necessary to defeat Russia in Ukraine in order to weaken China - which is not why Ukrainian soldiers think they are fighting and dying.
An indefinite war with no clear victor will indeed weaken Russia; but it will also ruin independent Ukraine — something that now appears to be a key Russian war aim; and a ruined Ukraine will never be able to join the EU. If this is the case, then Western promises and declarations about Ukraine's Western path will ultimately count for nothing. Ukraine will remain — as it was for most of history — an impoverished borderland between Poland and Russia.That is not an outcome that the West should be working towards, however much Russia may also be hurt in the process.

When the BRICS grouping held its annual summit in late August, it was widely covered as a portentous affair that signaled a ripening challenge to the U.S.-led global order. For the first time, the group expanded considerably, reflecting a growing ambition not necessarily shared by each original member. It was reasonable to wonder whether a robust challenge to U.S. hegemony was imminent.For Latin America's largest nation, however, participation in an increasingly assertive BRICS need not conflict with a warm working relationship with Washington. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva demonstrated as much at last week's UN General Assembly. Indeed, Lula's deft diplomacy turned his country into arguably the biggest winner at the annual gathering of global leaders, showing almost single-handedly that the door is not yet shut on a genuinely independent foreign policy in a moment of heightening superpower tensions. He did so by identifying substantive areas of mutual interest with the United States and taking concrete steps to show flexibility and an openness to dialogue, also with respect to the Ukraine war.When Lula, who began an unprecedented third term in January, announced early in his address on Tuesday that "Brazil is back," he was interrupted by applause from members of the General Assembly, which by tradition Brazil opens. Lula's address emphasized many of the same points he made as Brazil assumed the reins of the G20 in India earlier this month: the urgency of combating climate change, the need to find mediated solutions to armed conflicts, and the importance of reversing growing inequality worldwide. Lula's return to the dais 20 years after his first address as president marked a welcome return to form for Brazil, a country long committed to the UN as a meaningful arena of international diplomacy. Indeed, aside from South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa, Lula was the only BRICS leader to attend this year's General Assembly.Lula used his address to criticize the UN for its inability to preserve its relevance, describing the impasse as he sees it and calling for reforms that he believes can make the body matter more. "The international community must choose: On the one hand, there is the expansion of conflicts, the deepening of inequalities and the erosion of the Rule of Law," he said." On the other, the renewal of multilateral institutions dedicated to promoting peace." He decried sanctions applied unilaterally and the ongoing embargo against Cuba. He also criticized the ineffective insularity of the UN Security Council, discredited by "the actions of its permanent members, who wage unauthorized wars in search of territorial expansion or regime change. Its paralysis is the most eloquent proof of the need and urgency to reform it, giving it greater representativeness and effectiveness." Lula made clear that his nation wants a greater say in a UN that is actually functional and effective, not withdrawal from a body consigned to irrelevance.Lula's meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the next day demonstrated his careful and even-handed diplomacy in pursuit of an early end of the war in Ukraine. Brazil, like most Global South states, has prioritized relations with both warring parties as it realizes well the high economic costs of the conflict's continuation. Even though he has clearly criticized Russia's invasion of its much smaller neighbor, he had before this week not met personally with Zelenskyy. Finally having done so, Lula has bolstered his claim to fairness and balance.For his part, and from a different angle, President Joe Biden argued for the continued importance of the UN. He called the lack of further world wars, the ascension of hundreds of millions out of poverty, and the eradication of several devastating diseases "a profound testament to what we can achieve when we act together when we take on tough challenges." U.S. health assistance in Africa — such as PEPFAR and fighting the Ebola epidemic — have been excellent examples in this regard. Biden urged the UN to re-embrace its founding precepts of collaboration, respect for sovereignty, and human rights and seemed to signal support for a reform of multilateral institutions to reflect shifting international dynamics. He also spoke of strengthening democratic values around the world. In these areas, his message aligned with Lula's.The following day, Lula and Biden held a bilateral meeting to discuss a host of issues, but most importantly to announce a new joint effort related to workers' rights. "Over the last few days," Biden said by way of introducing the initiative, "the nations of the world have talked about climate change, sustainable development, food security, economic resilience." The president noted the centrality of working people to each one of these challenges and concluded that "we have to empower them as well. And that's what this new partnership is all about." Pointing at Lula, he added, "the partnership actually was this man's idea." While both leaders talked about the importance of union protections, living wages, pensions, and other basic rights often denied in the modern economy — Lula's labor minister also took the opportunity to sit down with members of the United Auto Workers to discuss the ongoing strike and working conditions in the United States — it remains to be seen what concretely will come from this new undertaking. Nevertheless, its importance should not be underestimated. More than anything, it marks an identifiable point of convergence between Brasília and Washington, an issue on which both leaders are personally and politically invested. Durable, productive ties between nations require such investment. A willingness to collaborate in this area — or even just to be seen committing to collaboration — is a positive sign. However, the Biden-Lula convergence on global labor standards may not be aligned with many Global South states, especially in Asia, who see the U.S. push for such standards as protectionism in disguise.Labor was not the only area in which members of the Brazilian delegation sought to make clear that it still very much wants to engage with the United States. Climate action was another. Finance Minister Fernando Haddad held multiple meetings with activists, government officials, and investors to pitch them on green investments in Brazil. Before flying to New York, Haddad gave an interview in which he praised Biden's economic agenda and said there was absolutely no reason the United States shouldn't see Brazil as a key trading partner — not least because, as he noted, "China is entering America through the Southern Cone." Minister of the Environment Marina Silva held several meetings as well, emphasizing Brazil's role in mitigating the effects of climate change. Together, these efforts underscored Lula's attempts to show that Brazil's embrace of a multipolar world does not mean it is eager to turn its back on the United States. That Brazil is finding meaningful areas of collaboration with countries of various ideological and political stripes indicates that international relations in Latin America have not yet ossified into the rigid opposing camps that would characterize a new cold war.It might serve as a model, in fact, for countries looking to avoid one.

With about 120 days remaining until Taiwanese voters head to the polls for the January 2024 presidential election, it's evident that Lai Ching-te, the candidate of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has established a clear lead over each individual contender (although not when the combined strength of the others is taken into account). Although some public opinion polling has shown a strong sentiment for change in 2024, Lai has been consistently ahead with support fluctuating at around 35 percent, while his opponents have scored an aggregate of around 50 percent since May. And his prospects have improved even more since the founder of electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn, Terry Gou, formally declared his candidacy in late August, further fragmenting Lai's opposition by creating a third opposition candidate alongside Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People's Party (TPP) and Hou Yu-ih from the Kuomintang (KMT). Even though Hou, Ko, and Gou have all declared a readiness to forge a coalition — a strategy that has emerged as the only plausible possibility of thwarting Lai's occupancy of the presidential palace – the prospect of each assuming a subordinate role in another's campaign likely remains highly unattractive to them, especially to Gou. Moreover, should any party display a willingness to make concessions, reaching consensus will likely require meticulous, confidential, and protracted negotiations. Given the current trend, a critical question looms large regarding the future of U.S.-China relations: Are Washington and Beijing prepared for another DPP administration in Taiwan led by Lai Ching-te, the self-proclaimed "political worker of Taiwan Independence?" Are the two powers ready for the unique set of risks that a Lai-led government in Taiwan could pose to their bilateral relations?As an avid baseball fan, Lai used to describe himself as a "relief pitcher" on the political mound, an observation elaborated by President Tsai Ing-wen, who praised Lai as a "skillful pitcher." Unfortunately, however, in terms of stability across the Taiwan Strait, what Lai could be skillful at is possibly delivering a "strikeout" scenario to the already fragile Sino-U.S.-Taiwan triangle.Lai's "strike one" could very well exhaust Beijing's strategic patience regarding peaceful unification. While discussions swirl about the possibility of Beijing having set a reunification deadline — some U.S. analysts argued for a 2027 timeline, others a 2035 deadline for forceful unification — these predictions often overlook the role that Taiwan's domestic politics could play in affecting Beijing's calculations. Beijing would likely be hesitant to confront a Taiwan leadership aligned with the "92 consensus" should the KMT's Hou pull off next year's presidential election. However, a third consecutive triumph for the DPP's presidential bid led by one of the mainland's least favorite Taiwanese politicians might lead Beijing to conclude that Taiwan's public sentiment has irreversibly shifted in favor of formal independence. If so, the prospects for much greater Chinese pressure on Taiwan – perhaps even a coercive takeover – could increase considerably."Strike two" on Lai's part would be the impact of his policies on the efficacy of Washington's longstanding "dual deterrence" strategy regarding the Taiwan Strait, an approach intended to discourage unilateral changes to the status quo by both Beijing and Taipei. Within the DPP, Lai is seen as a political figure deeply aligned with pro-independence forces, as witnessed by the more extreme stance he took during his challenge to President Tsai in the DPP primary in 2019. Lai's label, promoted at the time as the "golden grandson of Taiwan Independence" frequently evokes parallels with former Taiwan president Chen Shui-bian's moniker of "son of Taiwan."In recent months, some in the United States have seemed to cast doubt on Lai's stated intention to maintain the status quo. However, there is also strong support for Lai's pro-independence stance in Washington, especially in Congress. A Lai victory in next year's election would likely embolden support for Taiwan Independence in Congress and elsewhere and encourage him to alter President Tsai's relatively cautious stance on cross-strait issues and adopt more assertive pro-independence policies, thus undermining Washington's "dual deterrence" strategy.Lai's "strike three" would be the blow that he could deliver to Taiwan's economic prosperity. Despite President Tsai's effort to pursue economic diversification from China through initiatives such as the "New Southbound Policy," Taiwan's economic growth still largely relies on China. As Taiwan's biggest trading partner, China (Hong Kong included) accounted for nearly 40 percent of Taiwan's total trade in 2022. Taiwan's trade surplus with the mainland and Hong Kong even surged to $100.43 billion in 2022 from $66.66 billion in 2016. Such growth could be explained by China's tireless effort to woo Taiwan through economic incentives, as well as the geographically and culturally entwined relationship between Taiwan and the mainland.However, China has also been active in using economic disincentives, by stifling trade and exchanges on certain targeted commodities, to pressure Taiwan. Concerns have recently surfaced about China's possible intention to terminate the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with Taiwan if Lai were to be elected. Although many argue that such a move itself would have only a limited impact on Taiwan's economy, the deeper implications for Taiwan could be substantially negative, as Taiwan's prosperity relies on investors' faith in a secure and stable environment.Of course, Lai rejects the notion that his presidency would constitute a "strikeout" for Taiwan. In a Bloomberg interview in August, Lai stressed his commitment to peace and the importance of upholding the status quo. In late August, he even playfully conveyed his willingness to share shrimp fried rice and bubble tea with Chinese President Xi Jinping in what was intended as a goodwill gesture.. In early September, Lai stated that he would "fight for peace" and seek cooperation with China if elected. In the eyes of many in Taiwan and across the globe, Lai's rebuttals present a compelling case. There are valid concerns regarding the KMT's pro-Beijing stance and the relative inexperience of the four-year-old TPP's ability to run a national government. These concerns revolve around the potential consequences: either strengthening China's sway and influence within Taiwan if the KMT should win, or weakening Taiwan's governance under the TPP at a time when the need for internal strength and unity is paramount in countering China's mounting pressure. Terry Gou's candidacy raises even more pronounced concerns, primarily stemming from the fact that Foxconn, the multinational company he founded, possesses billions of dollars in assets located within mainland China. This substantial economic stake potentially provides Beijing with significant leverage over a President Gou.These concerns have led many observers to view a government led by Lai as the least risky option, albeit not without its challenges.But a Lai victory in January 2024 will clearly pose major challenges to both Washington and Beijing. It is imperative that both capitals carefully think through the possible consequences that could result from such a development and consider policies designed to avert them. Doubling down on extreme opposition to a President Lai through coercive means (by Beijing) or greater political support for his pro-independence instincts (by Washington) could prove disastrous.