Suchergebnisse

Mit einem umfangreichen Sonderbericht hat der Sächsische Rechnungshof kürzlich die finanzielle Förderung der Zivilgesellschaft durch das Sächsische Staatsministerium für Soziales und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt auf den Prüfstand gestellt. Der Rechnungshof bemängelt nicht nur ein fehlendes rechtsstaatliches Verwaltungshandeln und "Anhaltspunkte für Interessenkollision und Befangenheitstatbestände" (S. 11 f.), sondern auch die fehlende politische Neutralität der geförderten Projekte (S. 111 ff.). Tatsächlich ist der Sonderbericht ein weiterer Erfolgsschritt einer langjährigen Strategie der AfD, genau dieses staatliche Neutralitätsprinzip als Waffe zur Einschüchterung einer demokratischen Zivilgesellschaft zu instrumentalisieren.

The FCC's latest attempt to resurrect net neutrality risks slowing innovation and prohibiting practices that can improve network efficiency.
The post Why Resurrect Net Neutrality? appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

In recent months, Israeli officials have gotten into the habit of equating Hamas with ISIS. This framing has obvious benefits for Israel, which hopes to garner global sympathy by comparing its enemy to a group widely viewed as the pinnacle of early 21st century evil.But it also leads to a thorny question. If Hamas is indeed as bad as the Islamic State, then why should its leaders continue to find shelter in multiple Arab states?In the case of Qatar, where Hamas's political leaders have been based since 2012, the answer is pragmatic. Israel needs a reliable mediator in order to reach a deal for the return of Hamas-held hostages. Doha has already shown its worth by facilitating talks that secured the release of 105 hostages during a week-long ceasefire in November.But that arrangement may have an expiration date. Israeli security officials have threatened to kill Hamas leaders wherever they are, even if that means an attack on Qatari soil. More moderate Israeli voices argue that Doha's arrangement with Hamas simply can't last."The United States and Israel still need to lean on Doha to use its leverage with Hamas to achieve some essential wins — even if Qatar must ultimately cut ties with the organization," Yoel Guzansky, a former Israeli security official, recently wrote in Foreign Affairs.As wars rage in Gaza and Ukraine, neutral states are coming under increasing pressure to pick a side. Switzerland, once thought of as the prototypical global referee, has joined sanctions on the Kremlin and even closed its airspace to Russian planes. Finland has joined the NATO alliance, and Sweden could follow suit by the summer. Qatar — long seen as the ideal Israel-Hamas mediator — may soon have to pick between its American patron and the Palestinian militant group.This is natural to some extent. When it comes to neutrality, war is where the proverbial rubber hits the road. Belligerents almost always view their conflict in terms of true good vs. total evil, a framing that neutral states call into question by their very existence."Under just war theory, neutrality is not possible," said Pascal Lottaz, a professor at Kyoto University and an expert on neutrality. "Whenever good fights evil, not fighting evil is equal to being evil."Yet war-fighting states have long leaned on neutrals as mediators, especially when military force shows limited chances of success. So what happens if the neutrals disappear?Switzerland by any other nameIn some ways, Qatar came upon neutrality by accident. The tiny Gulf state was seen as a Saudi dependent until the mid-1990s, when it embarked on an ambitious plan to protect its security by making friends with just about every other country in its fractious region.
A few years into this project, Doha realized that it now had a significant competitive advantage. "It allowed them to be strategically positioned to act as a conduit between actors that didn't otherwise talk to each other," said Mehran Kamrava, a professor of government at Georgetown University Qatar. Pragmatic as they are, Qatari officials played to their strengths and started to pitch themselves as an Arab Switzerland.
By the late 2000s, Doha had already mediated major peace talks in Chad, Sudan, and Yemen. Despite crises stemming from the Arab Spring and a later spat with its Gulf neighbors, Qatar's reputation for neutrality has stuck. Its diplomats have led high-profile talks between the U.S. and its most bitter enemies and even helped secure the release of Ukrainian children taken to Russia.
Of course, Doha isn't neutral in the traditional sense. For states like Switzerland and Austria, neutrality is a formal commitment to stay out of the fighting that allows them to preserve their security without going to war, according to Lottaz. The arrangement is passive: If you don't mess with me, then I won't mess with you.
Qatar's version of neutrality is both less formal and more ambitious. Like traditional neutrals, Doha's primary goal is to stay out of danger in a conflict-prone region. But a second key objective is to raise Qatar's profile such that the tiny state can have an influence over major geopolitical disputes without losing its independence.
This helps explain why Qatar's highest officials often participate directly in mediation. When Hezbollah threatened to tank negotiations during a Lebanese political crisis in 2009, the emir personally called Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and asked him to pressure his ally to break the deadlock.
This type of neutrality relies on a stream of diplomatic fictions. Yes, Qatar has a major U.S. military base on its territory, but that doesn't make it a member of the Western bloc. Yes, Qatar hosted Taliban leaders, but that doesn't make it an Islamist ally. In a black and white world, Doha is infuriatingly gray.
In practice, Qatar takes every chance it gets to build geopolitical leverage, backstopped by the country's seemingly endless supply of liquid natural gas. This brings us to Doha's relationship with Hamas.
Qatari officials say they invited Hamas's political leaders to Doha in 2012 at the behest of the Obama administration, shortly after the militant group fled from Syria amid tensions with Assad. (The earliest Hamas-Doha ties date to 2006, when the Bush administration asked Qatar to open communication channels with the group.) Qatar jumped at the opportunity to both improve ties with the U.S. and improve its competitive advantage as a mediator. But that wasn't enough to shield the Gulf state from criticism after the Oct. 7 attacks.
U.S. officials undermined Qatar in the days following the attack by pulling out of a Doha-mediated deal through which Iran got access to billions of dollars in frozen assets following a U.S.-Iran prisoner swap. Hawkish voices in Congress and the American press also leaped to condemn Doha for supporting Hamas, using as evidence Qatar's policy of paying civil servants in Gaza (with Israel's approval).
Andreas Krieg, a security studies professor at King's College London, says this is mostly bluster. He describes the rhetorical pressure on Qatar as little more than a "circus in Washington to be seen as being supportive of Israel no matter what." The U.S., Krieg says, has not taken any concrete steps to pressure Qatar on this front. Rather, Washington has given Doha extra leeway to pursue talks. And even if Hamas is somehow destroyed by the war, Qatar will be a prime candidate to mediate with whatever new Islamist movement takes its place, Krieg argues.
Only time will tell. Qatari neutrality could face a deep crisis if Israel follows through on its pledge to hunt down Hamas leaders "in every location." But Qatar is nothing if not pragmatic, and Kamrava of Georgetown predicts that Doha's leadership would gladly assent to kicking out Hamas leaders if it meant strengthening ties with the U.S., the most powerful state over which it has significant leverage.The question we're left with is whether this is good for America. Mohamad Bazzi of New York University argues that it's not. "[I]t would be a mistake to force Hamas leaders out of Qatar," Bazzi wrote in a recent op-ed. "[T]hey would probably go to Iran, Lebanon or Syria – and Israel, the US and Europe would have a harder time negotiating with them indirectly." In other words, kicking Hamas out of Qatar would likely make one of the world's most complex conflicts that much more intractable.Cold wars and hot peaceQatar's problems are a microcosm of trends playing out across the world today. The UAE and Turkey have brokered major deals between Russia and Ukraine — deals that less independent states could never have pulled off — and the West have largely repaid them with sanctions and condemnation.
To some extent, it should come as little surprise that powerful states balk at neutrality. "It's usually the stronger party of the two belligerents that will put more pressure on the neutrals," Lottaz said. "The weaker one, the one that has more to lose, usually has more to gain from keeping others neutral."
He points to the Ukraine conflict as a case in point. The U.S. and its allies condemn neutrality toward the war both on moral grounds and because they see their side as stronger. Russia, for its part, knows that it can benefit more from states remaining neutral than it ever could from its allies voicing their support for Russian policy.
Some states have managed to dodge angry powers by keeping a low profile, as in the case of Oman, a rarely mentioned Gulf state that played a crucial role in the talks leading up to the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. But quieter neutrals are not exactly quick to get involved in intractable conflicts that don't affect their vital interests, leaving them outside of most issues entirely.
Qatar, by contrast, seems to revel in the chance to take on well-known conflicts, even when — as in Israel-Palestine — the chances of success are limited. Neutral states, Lottaz reminds us, are intimately involved in the causes they mediate. To the extent that Doha views its mediator image as crucial for its security, it will aggressively seek out leverage points in every conflict it can.
This worked reasonably well when the U.S. was the only true great power on the world stage. But aggressive neutrality is a tougher sell today as Washington has come to view its ties with both Moscow and Beijing in increasingly zero-sum terms. The dawn of a new cold war has given states some room to balance these powers against each other, but the space for forceful independence — especially for smaller states like Qatar — has begun to shrink. A few hot wars have certainly not helped.
So is neutrality dying? It's tough to say for sure. But it's hard to shake the feeling that powerful states will miss it when it's gone.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of last year, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan raised suspicions in Washington for his decision to maintain relations with the Kremlin. In a characteristically unsubtle move, Khan also visited Moscow shortly after the war began. He returned to Islamabad with a chip on his shoulder.


"What do you think of us? That we are your slaves and will do whatever you ask of us? We are friends of Russia and we are friends of the United States," Khan told a crowd of his supporters. "We are friends of China and Europe, we are not part of any alliance."


Little did Khan know that these words may have helped bring about the end of his political career. According to Pakistani diplomatic cables published by the Intercept, U.S. officials reacted to Khan's stance on the war by subtly encouraging his opponents to remove him from power.


While it is doubtful that the United States was the sole or primary actor in the events that would land the prime minister in jail and lead to a military crackdown on the country's political system (a state of affairs that remains in place today), the cables reveal that opponents of Khan were informed of U.S. anger over Khan's statements on the Ukraine War and may have moved to oust him with the expectation of being rewarded with closer ties by Washington.


Most of the reactions to this breaking story have understandably focused on the Cold War-like aspect of what seems to be brazen interference in another country's internal affairs. However, what is in danger of being overlooked is something more fundamental to how so many in D.C. conceptualize foreign policy as a whole.


While it is hardly surprising that Washington would leverage its influence to support a soft regime change of sorts in Islamabad, what is remarkable is the desire to punish a country far away from Europe and the conflict raging in Ukraine for daring to take an "aggressively neutral" stance (the State Department's terminology, according to the cables) on what to them is a regional conflict far away from their core security concerns.


The presumption among leaders in the U.S. foreign policy establishment is clear: States with less geopolitical influence have to follow Washington's lead on major global crises, whether it benefits them or not. Pakistan's neighbor India, by contrast, has charted a remarkably neutral stance over the course of the war by balancing opposition to border revisionism with a clear-eyed determination to maintain its long-standing military ties with Moscow. But New Delhi knows that its much greater power on the world stage gives it some protection from the wrath of Washington.


Smaller countries do not share this privilege. Meanwhile, it is hard to see why Pakistan's views regarding European affairs even matter to Washington any more than, say, an Eastern European country's formal stance on the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Bulgaria, to use one example, would not be expected to declare a strong position on the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean.


But the U.S. foreign policy elite, so monomaniacally fixated on Ukraine, believes it is of vital importance that everyone else adopt its priorities. This assumption is not only dangerous to many of Washington's partners in various regions around the world; it is also dangerous to the grand strategy of the United States itself. By taking regional conflicts and unnecessarily globalizing them, the risk of spreading instability through the interdiction of vital raw materials or manufactured goods increases. Trade networks adversely impacted by sanctions can thus undermine developing economies. Smaller countries, whose interests must be more narrowly defined, are always going to prioritize regional concerns over the more globally-oriented positions of the major world powers.


The most likely explanation for this behavior on the part of Washington is an attempt to shore up a dedicated "international community" that it can use to blunt the ambitions of revisionist powers like Russia and China. The problem with this approach, however, is that it breeds resentment and an even greater desire for pressured countries to break out of the U.S. orbit. This helps explain why an increasing number of states are considering dropping the dollar as the default global currency. When there are multiple options available, the least invasive one is usually considered the safest.


Thankfully, a better approach is possible. A great power that can compartmentalize various regions and not assume all that its smaller compatriots must adopt its priorities is one that will actually have an advantage over its rivals in the contest for influence abroad. The more the United States allows its smaller partners to pursue their own paths, the less threatening it will seem and the more desirable a partner for voluntary association it becomes.


This was a major part of why the United States once had so much more global goodwill compared to traditional European powers, as it leveraged its geographic isolation with its economic power to be comparably less threatening than most of its rivals. If Washington is truly serious about showing the world the danger presented by the ambitions of Beijing and Moscow, then U.S. policy should be less threatening to the sovereignty of others than that of its rivals.


As the relative power of 'middle power' countries increases, many regionally anchored states will increase their autonomy of action and so greatly expand their ability to diverge from great power expectations. As this trend accelerates, their ability to choose partnerships will tilt more towards reliability and mutual respect rather than simple deference. In this polycentric and, yes, multipolar world, massive overreaches into a partner's domestic policy are far more likely to create backlash than truly constructive long-term results.


To bring about this turn of thought and increase the amount of strategic empathy in a blinkered U.S. foreign policy establishment, perhaps it would be wise to consult the words of George Washington's farewell address, which sounds notes quite similar to Imran Khan's speech about Pakistani foreign policy:



"Nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."



Many countries today find themselves in the same uncertain place as the early United States once did. The U.S. foreign policy apparatus would do well to remember that.

An open letter released today from the AFA, HxA, and FIRE

A few months ago Jacob Levy (McGill) published a lengthy Op-Ed, "Campus culture wars are a teachable moment in how freedom of speech and academic freedom differ," in the Globe and Mail. It offered a salutary account on the nature of academic freedom in the aftermath of the "Dec. 5 U.S. House of Representatives committee […]

A closer read of Timothy B. Lee's 2008 paper on net neutrality highlights the weaknesses of the neutrality argument and compares an over-regulated internet to other inefficient, policed industries.
The post A Durable Argument: Network Neutrality Without Regulation appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Unfortunately, policymakers often do not react rationally when their ideas are disproven by reality; hence the FCC's new net neutrality push.

Toward the end of this month, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will hold a vote to reinstate a set of rules for internet providers. Consisting of 434 pages and resembling a 2015 order passed during the Obama administration, the new rules are expected to pass given the makeup of the FCC. If enacted, broadband companies and other […]
The post The Past and Present of Net Neutrality appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Technology has outgrown net neutrality and now benefits from a more flexible, evidenced-based regulatory approach that balances innovation and consumer interests.
The post The Evolving Internet and the Net Neutrality Debate appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel has initiated a new rulemaking that would enact what are largely the same net neutrality rules tried back in 2016.

The Federal Communiucations Commission's shift on agency action raises important questions about what role, if any, state authorities will play in future Internet governance.
The post Net Neutrality and the Future of State Broadband Regulation appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The concept of "net neutrality" that internet service providers should treat all data on the internet equally fails to acknowledge the realities of network management and the benefits of a free-market approach to internet services.
The post The Myth of Net Neutrality and the Reality of Network Management appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Hopefully, the net neutrality controversy will be retired—by courts or by Congress—before it does much damage to the Internet services and infrastructure sectors and before it enters a fourth decade.

The internet, once an open frontier, is again at the center of a contentious debate over regulatory approaches, thanks to a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal to once again impose its Title II authority on broadband providers. The nearly 30 year debate has been marked by partisan contention and regulatory oscillations. From a hands-off strategy […]
The post Competition—Not Net Neutrality Regulations—Should Determine the Future of Broadband appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.