Demonstration in Boston in condemnation of occupation attack on al-Aqsa Mosque

10 April، 2023

New York, SANA- Hundreds of members of Arab and Palestinian community and American activists participated in a demonstration in Massachusetts state, Boston city, in condemnation of the Israeli aggression on al-Aqsa Mosque.

“The participants condemned the attacks launched by the occupation forces and settler gangs on the Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem and their repeated storming into the al-Aqsa yards,” Wafa News Agency stated.

They stressed their support for the Palestinian people’s struggle until restoring all their legitimate national rights.

The participants also called on US administration to stop financial and military support for the occupation authorities and to lift the international cover so that they will be held accountable for their crimes against the Palestinians.

Rafah al-Allouni/ Ruaa al-Jazaeri

If the Law Is Legitimate, Clarence Thomas Must Stand Trial

The Supreme Court justice repeatedly broke the law for two decades. But do the laws even apply to the leaders on our judicial branch?

BY MAX MORAN
AMERICAN PROSPECT
APRIL 10, 2023


CLIFF OWEN/AP PHOTO

ProPublica reported last week that for two decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has secretly taken luxury global vacations at the expense of conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow.

The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

Americans are taught in high school civics classes that our laws are legitimate because they apply to everyone equally. This has never been true. But if we even want to pretend that we believe in this ideal, then Congress must immediately investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.


Recent reporting indicates that Thomas has broken the law, knowingly and repeatedly, for two decades. If an investigation corroborates this reporting, then Thomas must immediately be impeached and removed from the bench.

If Congress instead greets these allegations with a perfunctory shrug, then this country can no longer claim to even theoretically believe in equal justice under law. Congressional inaction would set a precedent that the Supreme Court appointees need not abide by the laws they interpret. “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” Richard Nixon said 46 years ago. Congress would be extending that pathology to the Supreme Court if they do nothing.

On Thursday, ProPublica reported that for two decades, Thomas has secretly taken luxury global vacations at the expense of conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow, a patron of right-wing political influence groups including the Club for Growth, American Enterprise Institute, and Hoover Institution. Thomas also accepted expensive gifts from Crow, such as a $19,000 Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass, and regularly vacationed at Crow’s retreat in the Adirondacks. There, Thomas held court, so to speak, with conservative luminaries like Leonard Leo, the architect of the right-wing Federalist Society and dark-money financier of other conservative projects.

Thomas’s failure to disclose these gifts directly violates the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act. He claims that this all falls under an exception for “personal hospitality” from friends, a reading so tortured it would make the statute pointless. That exception doesn’t apply if the “personal hospitality” involves official government business. How can regular meetings with the leading legal minds of the conservative movement, whose organizations regularly appear before the Court or file amicus briefs in major cases, not be considered “official business”? Thomas once swore in a federal judge in Crow’s personal library, almost certainly taking Crow’s private jet to and from D.C. in the process. Thomas is asking the public to ignore what their lying eyes are showing them.

This is not even the first time he has been caught in this exact scandal. In 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported that Thomas was receiving these same gifts from Crow, down to the Douglass Bible detail, without disclosing them. According to ProPublica, he simply went right back to accepting these gifts without disclosure. Thomas’s fix for the ethical violation, then, was to try to make it harder to track.

There is no reasonable ambiguity about this. If the ProPublica reporting is accurate, Thomas has knowingly and brazenly violated federal ethics law for decades.

Nor is this even Thomas’s only disclosure scandal. In 2011, Thomas was forced to amend 20 years’ worth of disclosure forms after Common Cause “questioned the omission of his wife’s place of employment.” He lied, under penalty of perjury, for decades when asked if his spouse had an income. Congress and then-President Obama did absolutely nothing in response.

If the ProPublica reporting is accurate, Thomas has knowingly and brazenly violated federal ethics law for decades.

No one should have ever believed that Thomas observed an ethical code in the first place. During his confirmation hearings, legal scholar Anita Hill famously testified to Thomas’s serial sexual harassment. She was vilified and slandered for it, which then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden allowed to stand before cutting the hearings short and denying three other women who had prepared to testify to Thomas’s behavior the chance to speak.

Since then, Thomas has made it as plain as humanly possible that he is a purely partisan tool. Over decades of Supreme Court proceedings, he has barely asked any questions. He is there to rule in favor of the maximally conservative position, and he has no interest in maintaining any illusion otherwise. See, for example, his spiteful concurrence in last year’s Dobbs ruling, where he makes clear that he’d like to invalidate other privacy-derived rights, such as same-sex marriage and contraceptive access. Being relentlessly partisan on the Court isn’t illegal. Consistently violating the law is.

Speaking of which, the January 6th Committee revealed that Thomas’s wife Ginni repeatedly urged Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows to help overturn the results of the 2020 election. Later, Justice Thomas refused to recuse himself from hearing Donald Trump’s petition to prevent the House of Representatives from gaining access to January 6th–relevant documents. The Court ultimately ruled against Trump. Thomas was the lone dissenter.

Thomas’s latest scandal is not even that unusual for this right-wing Court. Shortly after destroying Americans’ rights to control their own bodies last year, Justice Samuel Alito enjoyed an ostensibly academic trip to Rome on the dime of the Religious Liberty Initiative at Notre Dame University, which files frequent amicus briefs before the Court.

The difference here is that Thomas may have somehow managed to knowingly break one of the vanishingly few ethics laws for Supreme Court justices that do exist. These allegations demand an investigation and trial.

The conservative movement will, of course, immediately mobilize not only to prevent Thomas from facing any accountability, but to destroy anyone who even attempts to do otherwise. Conservatives have developed a full victim complex on Ginni Thomas’s behalf, and Republicans responded to the arraignment of former President Donald Trump by calling to starve the agencies that investigated him of funds. Defund policing for me, but not for thee.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) is leading that particular charge. Jordan will almost certainly not do the right thing and draft articles of impeachment. Democratic representatives should fight the noble fight to draft their own articles—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) rightly called for impeachment within hours of the ProPublica story’s publication—but the Republican Party hates equality under the law too much for anyone to have much faith in the success of that project.

That means Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) now has an extraordinary responsibility. He must immediately begin a thorough investigation to determine if ProPublica’s reporting is accurate. Thomas should testify as part of that investigation.

Figuring out the facts will not be difficult. According to the story, Crow literally hung a kitschy painting in his Adirondacks resort of Thomas smoking cigars with the masterminds of the conservative legal movement. One of ProPublica’s photos of the Thomases vacationing with the Crows came from a public Instagram account.

The difficult part will be getting Congress to treat this investigation with the urgency it deserves, and perhaps more important, ending the perverse way leading liberal scholars think about the Court of their dreams.

For decades, ostensible liberals, often anticipating potential future business before the Court, have treated conservative jurists like Thomas as walking gods on Earth, simply because of their job title. Originalism, the Federalist Society’s go-to tool to shoot down any government intervention, has been mythologized as some high-minded theory, even though it’s not consistently applied, and has now given way to the “major questions doctrine,” which suggests that even textual basis for a policy is not enough if it’s not specific. (Does Thomas actually think it was Congress’s original intent for judges to take multimillion-dollar gifts from political activists who appear before their court, so long as they called them “personal hospitality” when anyone asked questions?)

The unspoken assumption is that, by definition, Supreme Court justices cannot be unethical, partisan cynics. It is an absurd, self-serving mythos propagated by legal elites who have earned the American people’s abhorrence.

Thomas’s ethical quagmire exposes the Supreme Court’s self-mythology for the lie that it is. “Public trust in SC is already bad. A big circus would destroy it completely,” one Democratic congressperson apparently texted a Democratic strategist. Then let it be destroyed.

If the highest justices in the country regularly violate the laws they interpret, then they do not deserve to be arbiters of legality. Failing to act on something this clear means Democrats accept that regular people have no guaranteed rights, and those with power and prestige can do no wrong. Refusing to create “a big circus” might maintain congressional Democrats’ personal delusions of bipartisan comity, which has never been reciprocated. The cost of this self-serving fantasy, though, would be any fleeting claim that the United States government has legitimacy in the first place.

Anyone who does not endorse vigorous, unflinching congressional action believes one or both of the following: that powerful conservatives have an absolute right to do whatever the hell they want, and that keeping a pleasant atmosphere between Democrats and Republicans at D.C. cocktail hours matters more than the consent of the public to their being ruled. It’s as simple as that.

We Need to Talk… About AIPAC—and Develop a Strategy to Defeat the Lobby Too

Summer Lee’s victory in PA is a road map for how progressive Democrats can unite to elect candidates whose values will be consistent at home and abroad.

By Alexandra Rojas and Waleed Shahid
APRIL 10, 2023
THE NATION

Representative Summer Lee at the House Oversight and Accountability Committee organizing meeting on January 31, 2023. (Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

As we head into another cycle of competitive Democratic primaries, conference calls among Democratic Party strategists and progressive organizations keep ending on the same question: “So, what is our AIPAC strategy?” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee endorsed over 100 Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election of Joe Biden, while weaponizing its super PAC, United Democracy Project, to spend millions of dollars on misleading attack ads, often accusing Democrats like Summer Lee, Jessica Cisneros, Nina Turner, Andy Levin, Donna Edwards, and others of insufficient loyalty to the Democratic Party. (Oddly, in all of these ads the words “Israel” and “Palestine” are never mentioned.) The specter of AIPAC’s unlimited spending now looms large over our democracy.

Some Democratic operatives are suggesting that prospective candidates just get “AIPAC’s target off their back” by conceding to the anti-Palestinian spending network (made up of not just AIPAC but also Democratic Majority for Israel, Pro-Israel America, NORPAC, and others) through vague or overly conciliatory positions regarding the billions in largely unrestricted military aid that American taxpayers provide the Israeli military. This view was summarized in one conference call last year in which a consultant suggested to a progressive candidate: “Why don’t you just tweet something about how you support Israel if you want to avoid $5 million in attack ads?” Missing from these short-term, tactical discussions about appeasing AIPAC are ideological, moral, and strategic questions regarding the Democratic Party’s position on a military occupation that leading Israeli and international human rights organizations like B’tselem, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch all call apartheid.

Anxiety about AIPAC’s millions is certainly warranted, because when it spends, it spends big. AIPAC spent in just nine races last cycle and defeated nearly every Democrat it opposed—with the exception of working-class, progressive Summer Lee of Pennsylvania and Sri Thanedar of Michigan, a self-funded multimillionaire. The importance of Lee’s victory cannot be overstated. It is a recent and concrete example of how a strong candidate with a well-run, community-driven campaign and large progressive coalition can overcome AIPAC’s multimillion-dollar machine.

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Lee’s victory is a road map for how progressive Democrats can unite to build infrastructure to elect candidates whose values will be consistent both at home and abroad. The AIPAC network is spending millions of dollars precisely because it is losing the generational and partisan battle to progressive Democrats. Instead of capitulating, progressives should continue building off Lee’s victory by coordinating our own network of anti-occupation donors, operatives, and local community members on the ground—precisely mirroring the ideologically driven electoral infrastructure that the AIPAC network has already built.

At least 88 Palestinians and 16 Israelis have been killed since January, making 2023 the deadliest year in the region in over two decades. A major factor leading to this surge of violence is the Israeli government’s embrace of a much more public racist, anti-Palestinian stance over this past year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has welcomed the support of the ultranationalist, far-right Religious Zionist Party, whose leader, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—a settler himself—said in response to recent settler violence Palestinians, “I think the village of Hawara needs to be erased. I think that the State of Israel needs to do it.”

The Israeli government recently announced a plan for the biggest settlement expansion ever—a direct violation of both international law and stated United States policy, all but ending any realistic possibility of a two-state solution. On top of that, Netanyahu, who is currently on trial for corruption and fraud, is attempting to mount an overhaul of the Israeli judicial system that would give him and his political allies even more unchecked control and power in a “democracy” that has always excluded Palestinians. Yet the Biden administration has shown no sign of even considering making the $3.8 billion in annual military funding Israel receives from the US conditional in order to put pressure on the Israeli government to de-escalate and end their illegal annexation of Palestinian land.


The AIPAC network’s multimillion-dollar spending operation to punish Democrats who stray even one step away from unconditional support for the Israeli occupation makes sense considering how politically untenable such stances would be otherwise. A Gallup poll released this month found that for the first time a majority of Democrats now sympathize with Palestinians more than with Israelis. And as of 2019, 56 percent of Americans and 71 percent of Democrats said the United States should not “give unconditional financial and military assistance to Israel if the Israeli government continues to violate American policy on settlement expansion or West Bank annexation.”

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However, because of the massive political and financial power of the anti-Palestinian lobby, only 14 percent of Democrats in the House of Representatives have signed legislation to condition aid to Israel on ending the expansion of settlements. If the AIPAC network can spend unlimited money to ensure that US politicians don’t represent the generational shift in the Democratic Party and the evolving views of the American people, it will have nothing to worry about.

After Bronx public school principal Jamaal Bowman unseated Eliot Engel—the anti-Palestinian lobby’s favorite Democrat, and chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee—the lobby tripled down on an electoral strategy. In the last cycle, for the first time in history, AIPAC launched its very own super PAC and—alongside the AIPAC-affiliated Democratic Majority for Israel—spent over $41 million attacking Democrats who violated its purity test on unconditional aid and support for the Israeli government.

AIPAC’s aggressive entry into Democratic primaries signals the increasingly partisan track that the anti-Palestinian lobby is taking, mirroring Israel’s rightward shift and the Democratic disavowal of groups like the NRA and more recently, Big Oil. While today there is only one NRA-backed Democrat in the House, just 12 years ago Democratic candidates in the House represented nearly 20 percent of NRA-financed candidates (a drop from 39 percent in 1992).

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In the last cycle, AIPAC backed over 100 insurrectionist-aligned Republicans, opposed Democrats in general elections and primaries, spent zero dollars against Republican candidates—and were largely funded by pro-Trump Republican donors Robert Kraft, Bernard Marcus, and Paul Singer. Given the generational shift taking place in the Democratic Party—led by Justice Democrats like Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, and many others—it is clear that the extreme anti-Palestinian sentiment championed by AIPAC will increasingly fall along party lines, which is exactly what AIPAC’s multimillion-dollar spending seeks to avoid.

Just as with Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, or criminal justice reform, we must organize to align the preferences of Democratic legislators with the voters who elected them. It is through Congress, after all, that we have the power to ensure that American taxpayers are not funding the violation of human rights and subsidizing the endless occupation of the Palestinian people. AIPAC and its largely Republican donors know that Democrats who speak out about the occupation also make the party more progressive on a range of other issues. A progressive movement, and a Democratic Party that sells out Palestinians for an easy reelection, is not a movement that can be counted on to fight back for any community when they need us most. Our end goal is not winning for the sake of winning. It’s winning to bring about fundamental change.

Alexandra RojasTWITTERAlexandra Rojas is the executive director of Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited and elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Summer Lee.


Waleed ShahidTWITTERWaleed Shahid is the communications director of Justice Democrats, and a member of The Nation‘s editorial board.

The Racial Element of Trump’s Attacks on His Prosecutors

Why it matters that he calls them “racist” and “animal.”

 someone whose father was Woody Guthrie’s despised landlord in the early 1950s at Beach Haven apartments in Brooklyn, and ended up in a 1954 Guthrie lyric as “Old Man Trump”—who drew a “color line” and stirred up “racial hate.” 

by JILL LAWRENCE

THE BULWARK
APRIL 10, 2023 

Former US president Donald Trump leaves after speaking during a press conference following his court appearance over an alleged 'hush-money' payment, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, on April 4, 2023. 

(Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP) (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)

Indictment season is officially underway and Donald Trump’s legal Houdini act is closing after a fifty-year run. Yes, he’s making history. But let’s focus for just a moment on the prosecutors leading the investigations that may finally hold him to account. Who they are, and the disturbing nature of Trump’s attacks against them, will shape the 2024 campaign and American democracy itself.

Before Trump became the first former president to be indicted, there was the first black person elected district attorney of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg. There was the first woman (and first black woman) elected district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, Fani Willis. And there was Letitia “Tish” James, who in 2018 shattered “a trio of racial and gender barriers,” as the New York Times put it: first woman to be elected New York attorney general, first black woman to be elected to statewide office, first black person to serve as attorney general.

Blood, sweat, and tears doesn’t even begin to describe what it’s taken to get here; the very date of Trump’s arraignment—on the 55th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in Memphis—revives the painful past. You could, if you appreciated U.S. history, celebrate so many glass ceilings in fragments on the ground. Bragg, Willis, and James are proof that the American dream, and MLK’s dream, are alive.

James’s parents reportedly wanted her to marry a plumber. Instead she became a lawyer, a path she chose as a young teen in a courthouse watching her brother fight a false bike theft accusation. The former public defender vowed when she won the attorney general race in 2018 that she would not be shy about investigating Trump. He should know, she said of the then-president, that in New York, “we are not scared of you. And as the next attorney general of his home state, I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn.”

Trump tweeted before James took office that she had “openly campaigned on a GET TRUMP agenda.” In September 2022, just before she won re-election, James filed a civil lawsuit against Trump and his family seeking a $250 million judgment and a ban on any Trumps leading a company in New York State. It alleged Trump and his family had engaged in “numerous acts of fraud and misrepresentations” for twenty years to enrich themselves and cheat lenders.

Willis was raised by her father, John C. Floyd III, a defense lawyer and former Black Panther. She was organizing his home office files at age 8 and absorbing unusual instructions on how to set a table. “I couldn’t remember what side the knife goes on. He told me the knife goes on the right side because that’s where you would stab someone,” she told USA Today. Willis became a tough prosecutor whose targets have included public school teachers in a cheating scandal as well as violent gangs.

Supporters let out a roar when Willis exclaimed at her 2020 victory party: “Y’all, we made herstory!” She came down to earth quickly when the top breaking news story on her first day in office was a recording of Trump asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes (one more than he needed to reverse Joe Biden’s win in the state). Eventually she realized her office was the only one available to investigate. She said in late January that a charging decision is “imminent” after an investigation into that phone call and other attempts by Trump and his allies to subvert the election.

Bragg was elected Manhattan D.A. in 2021. In his victory speech in Harlem, where he grew up, he told supporters he wouldn’t be simply the first black district attorney of Manhattan. “I think I’ll probably be the first district attorney who’s had police point a gun at him,” he said. “I think I’ll be the first district attorney who’s had a homicide victim on his doorstop. I think I’ll be the first district attorney in Manhattan who’s had a semiautomatic weapon pointed at him. I think I’ll be the first district attorney in Manhattan who’s had a loved one reenter from incarceration and stay with him. And I’m going to govern from that perspective.”

On the day of Trump’s arraignment last week, that commitment was clear. “No amount of money and no amount of power” changes the principle that “everyone stands equal before the law,” Bragg told reporters. He said his office has prosecuted many white-collar cases that, like Trump’s, are rooted in allegations that “someone lied again and again to protect their interests” and evade the law. This case, he said, is about “34 false statements made to cover up other crimes. These are felony crimes in New York State no matter who you are. We cannot and will not normalize serious criminal conduct.”

A jury had earlier convicted the Trump Organization of multiple charges of criminal tax fraud and falsifying records in another case Bragg’s office handled, and the company was fined the maximum $1.6 million. Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer, pleaded guilty to evading taxes on $1.7 million in compensation and is serving five months in jail.

Trump contended Bragg “hand picked” Juan Merchan, the judge from those cases, to preside over the arraignment and potentially a criminal trial. But in fact it was a coincidence that occurred “randomly through an assignment wheel” for overseeing grand juries, Politico reported. “I have a Trump-hating judge, with a Trump-hating wife and family,” Trump said Tuesday night of Merchan, who came to the United States at age 6 from Bogota, Colombia.

Shades of 2016, when Trump repeatedly lashed out at a judge overseeing a class-action fraud lawsuit against Trump University in San Diego. The case was eventually settled for $25 million, but not before Trump had called Judge Gonzalo Curiel a “hater” who would be “extremely unfair” to Trump because Curiel, born in Indiana, was Hispanic and Mexican and Trump wanted to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. Why were we shocked? In his first speech as a candidate in 2015, Trump said Mexico sends America criminals and rapists instead of “their best.”

Trump’s brand is spewing abuse, and he certainly has not spared Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel handling the investigations into the Mar-a-Lago documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including the January 6th Capitol attack. Trump has called Smith, who is white, “a terrorist,” a “THUG,” a “fully weaponized monster,” a “Mad Dog Psycho,” and a “hit man” for Democrats “who may very well turn out to be a criminal.”

But the way Trump goes after black and Hispanic prosecutors and judges poses a special menace because of the example he sets—the permission structure he creates—for white nationalism, white supremacy, racism, antisemitism, and immigrant-bashing. There’s no forgetting any of it, from “very fine people on both sides,” to “shithole countries” like Haiti and African nations, to insulting black people as low-IQ, to “stand back and stand by,” to dining at Mar-a-Lago with Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic white supremacist.

With his trademark self-owning projection, Trump has attacked all three black prosecutors investigating him as “racist.” In his post-arraignment Mar-a-Lago rant, he referred to Willis as “a local racist Democrat district attorney in Atlanta who is doing everything in her power to indict me over an absolutely perfect phone call.” James, he added, is “another racist in reverse.” He spared Bragg that particular word that night, but he had already called him an “animal” and warned of “potential death and destruction” if he were to be charged. He was back at it Sunday night with a Truth Social post that started, “Just like New York, the Racist District Attorney in Atlanta . . . ”

Who says things like that? Who says, out loud, that they want more immigrants from Norway, fewer from Haiti? Who even thinks that?

Probably someone whose father was Woody Guthrie’s despised landlord in the early 1950s at Beach Haven apartments in Brooklyn, and ended up in a 1954 Guthrie lyric as “Old Man Trump”—who drew a “color line” and stirred up “racial hate.” Someone whose astonishingly litigious life began when the federal government sued him, his father, and their company, alleging they wouldn’t rent apartments to black people, exactly fifty years ago.

Last week’s rule-of-law breakthrough almost certainly previews more to come. And for Trump, these reckonings are not just threats to his personal future and liberty. They involve three prosecutors who embody a national racial transformation that Trump has exploited from the start to raise money, inflame resentments, and win support. Let’s not lose sight of them amid the legal storms and all-cap Trump onslaughts ahead.


Jill Lawrence is an opinion writer and the author of The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock. She previously covered national politics for the AP and USA Today and was the managing editor for politics at National Journal. Homepage: JillLawrence.com. Twitter: @JillDLawrence.

Is cat poop runoff killing California sea otters?

Toxoplasma is often found in cat feces. Otters, which live along the shoreline, can be exposed to the parasite in rainwater runoff — all four cases scientists studied came in during the heavy rainfall season.

By Dani Anguiano | News | April 10th 2023
#485 of 485 articles from the Special Report: State Of The Animal

The distribution of the parasite in the bodies of the dead sea otters suggests that they died very quickly. Photo by Molly Lockhart/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

This story was originally published by The Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Scientist Melissa Miller was seeing something in California sea otters that she had not seen before: an unusually severe form of toxoplasmosis, which officials have confirmed has killed at least four of the animals.

“We wanted to get the word out. We’re seeing something we haven’t seen before, we want people to know about it and we want people working on marine mammals to be aware of these weird findings,” said Miller, a wildlife veterinarian specialist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW). “Take extra precautions.”

A recent study from the DFW and the University of California, Davis, revealed that a rare strain of the parasite, never before reported in aquatic animals, was tied to the deaths of four sea otters. The strain, first seen in Canadian mountain lions in 1995, had not been previously detected on the California coast.

“This was a complete surprise,” Karen Shapiro, with the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, said in a statement. “The COUG [toxoplasma strain] genotype has never before been described in sea otters, nor anywhere in the California coastal environment or in any other aquatic mammal or bird.”

The extent of the risk to California’s sea otters is not yet clear, but the parasite is concerning, the authors of the study said, due to the effects it could have on the population of the threatened species as well as the risk to other animals. It could pose a public health risk if it contaminates the environment and marine food chain, according to an announcement from UC Davis. The parasite can also infect humans.

Scientists are looking at a few other cases that could be tied to the strain, but won’t know if there is a connection until further analysis is completed, said Miller.

The first case dates back to 2020, she said, and the others surfaced in 2022. The otters all appeared to have severe inflammation of the fat throughout their bodies, something Miller had not seen before. She observed high numbers of the parasites throughout their bodies, except for their brains. Typically, in fatal cases, she would see more of the parasite in the brain.

“That led me to believe these animals died very quickly,” Miller said. This strain of the parasite, she said, “was behaving in a lot of ways that were different than what we’ve seen before”.

Scientists at UC Davis determined that all four otters were infected with the same strain of the parasite, which the team found was previously reported in mountain lions.

April 10th 2023

The Beltway’s Favorite Bogus Budget Model

The Penn Wharton Budget Model, bankrolled by finance moguls, is out to grow its power in Washington.

BY JAROD FACUNDO
AMERICAN PROSPECT
APRIL 10, 2023

ILLUSTRATION BY ROB DOBI
This article appears in the April 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine. 

American politics often goes like this. A politician proposes ambitious social policy. She’s smacked immediately with a barrage of familiar questions: How much does it cost? How are you going to pay for that? What’s the impact on the economy? Will this stop people from working? Have you considered how this might hurt business?

Those questions, she is told, can be answered by only the smartest economists, who magically all arrive at the same conclusions. They say: We ran the numbers and it doesn’t add up. The costs are too high, and the impact on jobs and growth uncertain. We’re not advocating for policy—we’re just calling balls and strikes, contributing data and knowledge to the debate. Rinse, repeat.

In Washington, a metric ton of policy shops, think tanks, and interest groups advocate for their pet issues, on all sides of the political spectrum. The more inoffensive-sounding their names are, the greater your suspicions should be. The institutions that deny having a political agenda the most are typically the ones most invested in ideological outcomes. And that’s especially true of the self-appointed budget scorekeepers.

One of the most influential players in this space can be found just up I-95 from Washington, in America’s original capital city of Philadelphia. There sits the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM), a project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Founded in 2016, PWBM has rapidly risen to the top of the pack of outside budget modelers, which run analyses on various policies and release bite-sized summaries of their impacts. You can see its influence across corporate media; its findings are recited as gospel in newspaper headlines, alongside the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates. Combined, they become the prism through which all policy is debated, and lawmakers take notice.

PWBM touts its work as above politics, pointing to instances where Democrats and Republicans alike have disagreed with its findings. That dual-sided criticism gives the organization the ability to posture that it’s a mere truthseeker, not a political animal.

But in a 2020 interview, PWBM’s faculty director, former Congressional Budget Office economist and George W. Bush administration Treasury Department official Kent Smetters, spoke candidly about the model’s deep involvement in the policymaking process. “Policymakers often come to us before they write bills. It’s very clear when our footprint is on those bills, because we give feedback—usually off the record—about what the impacts would be if they try to achieve something one way versus another.”

What’s more, in recent years the Penn Wharton Budget Model has inserted itself further into the corridors of power. In 2020, the organization developed a highly competitive public-policy education program, designed for congressional staffers and other policy professionals. The Prospect obtained documents from the course’s current iteration, which began last October and runs until early May.

Though Penn Wharton has a website dedicated to the seven-month course, several former government officials and policy experts who spoke to the Prospect were unaware of it. Yet they described the course’s existence as emblematic of how interest groups try to ingratiate themselves on Capitol Hill.

At the core, the Penn Wharton Budget Model is a product of the commingling of America’s financial and political elite.

In other words, Penn Wharton consciously and deliberately attempts to set the terms of debate, mainly through heightening fears about deficits, so that any public spending is viewed unfavorably. This helps push policy in a particular direction, one that aligns with the political and financial elites who support and fund the project.

Announcing the creation of the model in June 2016, the former dean of the Wharton School, Geoff Garrett, said, “We’re harnessing the power of information for policy impact and using our analytics expertise to fuel data-driven decision making.” To assuage concerns over politicking, Garrett’s statement added: “We see an opportunity to make a difference at the intersection of business and policy—to help business, legislators and the public make crucial decisions based on rigorous data rather than ideological debate.”

The model, developed by Smetters and former CBO and Treasury officials, had an interactive component, allowing users to download and test specific policies to see the effect on the budget and the economy. A cute animated video beckoned people to get engaged. But the model’s true impact was always pointed toward Washington.

In 2017, PWBM estimated that the Trump tax cuts would increase economic growth, albeit modestly, because they would stimulate private investment. For the record, this did not happen. But the analysis did jump-start the budget model’s rise to prominence. Numerous traditional media outlets highlighted it; then-Vox writer Ezra Klein called the organization “the respected Penn Wharton Budget Model,” at a time when it was barely a year old.

Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the University of Utah, has a particular familiarity with Penn Wharton. He co-authored a 2017 report for the Roosevelt Institute on the effects to the macroeconomy if the United States implemented a universal basic income (UBI) program. Penn Wharton’s Kent Smetters responded, concluding that no matter how the program was funded, it would result in a lower gross domestic product; that’s economist-speak for “it’s not worth it.”

Steinbaum explained in an interview with the Prospect that the model made two assumptions when analyzing UBI: that increased household income dampens the economy’s labor supply, and that federal budget deficits lead to increasing interest rates. Steinbaum conceded that the Federal Reserve has increased rates lately, but that had nothing to do with budget deficits. “That’s a policy choice,” Steinbaum explained. “Not something that happens automatically.”

The notion that guaranteed income from non-labor activities results in lower labor force participation, Steinbaum said, is a false rationalization for people who believe the welfare state creates a culture of poverty. In fact, one of the citations for Smetters’s analysis was a paper analyzing the labor market effects of the Alaska Permanent Fund, an income-producing social wealth fund for every resident. But the paper concluded that the cash dividend had no effect on employment. Some people on the fringes of the labor market moved from full-time to part-time work, but the impact was not large enough for the original researchers to reach a definitive conclusion. Yet that extraneous result became the basis for Smetters to argue that a nationwide UBI program would have negative macroeconomic effects.
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The Penn Wharton Budget Model leans into the critique that America’s most pressing policy problems are deficits and debt.

The example may seem trivial, because it’s not like Congress is on the verge of passing a UBI for every American citizen. But it matters. Institutions like PWBM and those who rhapsodize about its findings and analyses consider themselves to be the most serious, straight-edged people in the room. Yet if you poke their findings with a stick, they can be just as flimsy as any other pundit’s hot take. These expert conclusions become impenetrable only because of their complex language.

This happens over and over, and across administrations. For example, former President Donald Trump found himself at war with PWBM over his proposed infrastructure plan. Penn Wharton concluded that the $200 billion investment would have no impact on GDP. An independent think tank with actual expertise with transportation, the Eno Center, published a brief deconstructing how Penn Wharton’s analysis was off. But that didn’t matter, because The Washington Post had already run with the blazing headline “The Math in Trump’s Infrastructure Plan Is Off by 98 Percent, UPenn Economists Say,” and the conversation was over.

During the 2020 presidential primaries, Penn Wharton claimed that Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) Medicare for All proposal would reduce GDP by 24 percent over 40 years. This was entirely derived from the fact that the plan “lacks a financing mechanism,” leading the budget model to assume that it would be entirely deficit-financed. A note at the top of the analysis stated that “the long-run impact on GDP varies by as much as 24 percentage points,” or all of the projected loss, “depending on how the plan is financed.” Yet the headlines again did away with the ambiguity, asserting that the model showed that Medicare for All would “decimate” the economy. Potential benefits of the plan, like how workers would no longer be spending out of pocket for insurance premiums, thereby leaving them with additional money that could be circulated through the economy, were not integrated into the analysis.

Along the way, PWBM became a favorite adviser of deficit obsessive Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who used its findings as a pretext to stall the social spending measures of the Build Back Better Act. PWBM projected that the total cost estimate would run higher than what the White House predicted, based on assumptions that the package would be permanently extended. The experience of the enhanced Child Tax Credit, which expired at the end of 2021, shows the extreme uncertainty with such a methodology, but it was enough to collapse negotiations. Most of the social spending was eliminated from the final Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Manchin got a taste of his own medicine later. When the budget model scored the IRA, it claimed that the bill would have little effect on inflation. Manchin’s response that he disagreed with PWBM further bolstered the model’s reputation as a neutral arbiter. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) took the opportunity to publish a short press release titled “Manchin Criticizes Budget Model He Once Touted.”

At the core, the Penn Wharton Budget Model is not simply a conservative, or even entirely a Republican, project. It’s a product of the commingling of America’s financial and political elite.

PWBM’s power is derived from its claims to nonpartisanship and its ability to drive its message through the media.

When you trace PWBM’s universe, you find a web of supporters that would make any sane person doubt the model’s supposed nonpartisan stance. Some actors are better than others, but most are cutthroat business executives who have reaped the most from financialization, at the expense of everybody else. They combine with experts from a decade ago who believe that the financial crisis was handled just fine, or that too much was done. Some even had a hand in its creation.

The most benign of the main trio of financial supporters is former Microsoft CEO, and current owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, Steve Ballmer. He’s a public supporter of good data creating good government. His $10 million donation went toward creating USAFacts, a trove of standardized government data—the raw material that fuels the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

The bulk of the rest of PWBM’s funding comes from John D. Arnold and Marc Rowan, who have donated $6.6 million and $50 million, respectively, through their philanthropic organizations.

In recent years, Arnold has become an enigmatic darling in liberal circles for his work on drug pricing reform. His charity, Arnold Ventures, has spent more than $100 million on the issue, supporting the most respected patient advocacy groups. But as the Prospect has previously reported, Arnold was financing a consultant group that pared down the scope of how far drug pricing reform would go.

Aside from drug pricing, his interests extend into public-employee pensions. A 2017 Governing article titled “The Most Hated Man in Pensionland” detailed Arnold’s support for “pension reform,” that is, privatizing pensions. Matt Taibbi’s 2013 coverage in Rolling Stone detailed how, as Arnold funded the Pew Research Center, the organization started publishing reports on the unsustainable costs of public pension systems, while omitting the role played by the financial crisis and its actors. The conclusions were correct enough for a surface interpretation, but hollow in explaining the underlying reasons.

Before philanthropy, Arnold made a career out of destabilizing oil prices, earning the moniker “the king of natural gas.” He started his career on Enron’s trading desk on the West Coast, becoming indispensable before the company’s collapse. During Enron’s collapse, public pensions lost $1.5 billion through their investments in the company. Thereafter, Arnold rose once again in oil trading through his energy-focused hedge fund. A 2006 Senate investigation placed the blame for rising oil prices squarely on figures like Arnold, for their role in manufacturing conspiracies that the world was running out of oil.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model’s largest supporter is Marc Rowan, CEO of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. In 2018, Rowan and his wife donated $50 million “to attract and retain world-leading faculty.” As a Penn Wharton alumnus, Rowan said he was “honored” to help “Wharton researchers advance and shape their fields.”

Like many private equity firms, Apollo is known for being ruthless, but it has earned a particularly corrosive reputation. Other private equity firms will try to whitewash their own practices by saying things like “We’re not like Apollo.” Co-founder Leon Black tends to catch the most bullets from the media. But Rowan was another co-founder of the firm; he took over the CEO role from Black in 2021.

If you look at the increasing concentration of hospitals, degradation of quality health care services, decreases in employee wages and benefits, and the shutterings of rural hospitals, Apollo is behind those maneuverings. Numerous Apollo-backed firms, from EP Energy to Phoenix Services to Hexion to Chisholm Oil & Gas, have hit bankruptcy in the past few years. Apollo executives helped invent the practice of winning while losing in bankruptcy, stripping assets out of a dying company and avoiding any legal consequences.


Slides from the Penn Wharton Budget Model’s certificate program, a seven-month course designed for congressional staffers and policymakers





The budget model’s assumptions, which push against higher taxes, public investment, and most other things that anger the rich, fit together nicely with the outlook of a financial services industry tycoon or a billionaire CEO.

Financially supporting a project is not an automatic quid pro quo. But for the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the worldview of its funders is not so different from its list of advisers. External advisers include former House Ways and Means Committee member Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-PA). After public office, Schwartz spent six years leading the Better Medicare Alliance (BMA), an insurance industry–backed front group where she served as president and CEO. Wendell Potter, the former insurance industry insider, has said that BMA’s “raison d’etre is to widen the federal spigot of taxpayer dollars” for directing public money away from traditional Medicare and toward Medicare Advantage plans.

Though there is one moderate tax economist with PWBM, UC Berkeley’s Alan Auerbach, there’s also Gregory Rosston, an economist who studied under Bill Baxter, the “total zealot” who rewrote antitrust merger guidelines under former President Ronald Reagan. Former Obama administration alumni and austerity hawks Peter Orszag and Austan Goolsbee are on the external advisory board as well. To Orszag and Goolsbee’s right, PWBM has former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), the anti-government conservative who withdrew his nomination to become Obama’s commerce secretary over “irresolvable conflicts” on the scope of the 2009 stimulus package.

Meanwhile, Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), one of the most consistent budget hawk voices in Washington, also serves on the board. CRFB happens to consistently cite the Penn Wharton Budget Model’s findings, as proof of why various pieces of proposed legislation have deleterious effects on the federal budget. CRFB-friendly language about fiscal responsibility and “tough choices,” by the same token, is prominent on Penn Wharton’s frequently asked questions page.

In a 2020 debate with MacGuineas and Larry Summers about federal deficits, Summers, in the nicest way possible, called her economic view of the world idiotic and unsophisticated. “I think Maya’s move to austerity as soon as possible is dangerous and misguided,” Summers said. “I think it’s analytically wrong because it fails to appreciate the big structural changes taking place in our economy.” Summers continued: “If we had the advice that Maya and those like her had consistently recommended from 2010 and onwards, we would have had an even slower than the slowest-in-history recovery since the 2008 recession.”

MacGuineas is of course well compensated to espouse this worldview. CRFB has for years been funded with the fortune of the late Pete Peterson, the co-founder of private equity giant Blackstone and backer of a number of pro-austerity front groups. Peterson spent nearly half a billion dollars in the late 2000s and early 2010s encouraging deficit reduction, particularly through cuts to earned-benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Step deeper inside the Penn Wharton Budget Model maze, and you find its team of experts. It includes the “internationally recognized expert on entitlement reforms” Jagadeesh Gokhale, a Cato Institute and American Enterprise Institute alumnus. His professional work has focused on ways to privatize Social Security. Meanwhile, Cathy Taylor, listed as a “nonresident fellow,” is just an outright Republican activist. She’s the author of Red Is the New Black: How Women Can Fashion a More Powerful America, a book alleging that the Republican Party embodies the values women care about more than the Democratic Party. The book is conveniently not mentioned in her bio on the Penn Wharton site.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model’s certificate program is broken down into six separate sessions. Half of those are electives, selected by those taking the class. Meanwhile, the required classes include “Intro to the Economics of Tax and Spending Policies,” “An Insider View of Policymaking in the White House,” and “How Do Economists Predict the Economic Effects of Policies?”

The Prospect was able to see some of the names of the people inside the course. Most of them were congressional staffers, while others worked for other federal agencies or were policy types not affiliated with the government. Sources told the Prospect that the congressional staffers in the course are typically an even split of Democrats and Republicans. However, this latest cohort had more Democratic staffers than Republican ones, with an ideological range across the caucus, from Squad members to the most conservative.

In the program’s introductory course, an anonymous source described to the Prospect that the instructors emphasized how economists are not concerned with “politics”—which for them was a reference to race, inequality, or gender. Penn Wharton’s Caroline Pennartz said in a statement that PWBM “takes an economic view of public policy rather than a political science or sociological view,” but that studies on their site do incorporate race and gender.

From the very beginning, class participants are drilled with the assumption that all taxes create a loss of efficiency, meaning that any dollar spent toward the government is a dollar never distributed in the economy. This frame of thinking leads one to conclude that hypothetically speaking, a flat tax is actually fairer than a progressive tax system, because such dollars could run further outside of government. (Pennartz said that the course adds the context that flat taxes “are typically perceived as unfair.”)

Notably, the required course “An Insider View of Policymaking in the White House” was taught by conservative Cathy Taylor.

PWBM faculty director Kent Smetters led the final required course, “How Do Economists Predict the Economic Effects of Policies?” Smetters emphasized how the budget model team works closely with lawmakers. “Ninety percent of our time right now is spent on actually just doing private delivery for policymakers who come to us from both [parties],” Smetters said in the lecture. “They come to us typically before they’ve started writing legislation, before they’ve actually introduced something. Relative to the scoring agencies, we’re typically operating on the front end [of policymaking].”

Riffing toward the end of the lecture, Smetters tried downplaying the model’s political influence, but still touted its analytical rigor. He said: “I like to say, [at] the Penn Wharton Budget Model, we’re terrible at politics, good at policy, and we don’t [do] advocacy.”

Other elective lectures included sessions on topics like cryptocurrency, environmental policy, Social Security, antitrust, fiscal imbalances (taught by Jagadeesh Gokhale), prescription drug policy, and others.

The concept of a private institution funded by corporate interests holding classes for policymakers that hew to a particular perspective has an analogue. From 1976 to 1999, the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University held a popular conference for judges, teaching conservative theories about economic efficiency and cost-benefit analysis. According to later research, it had a decided impact on the judges it trained, leading to more conservative rulings. You can see the same potential from Penn Wharton’s indoctrination sessions on economic policy.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model is not necessarily an extraordinary actor in Washington. Different groups have varying degrees of sway over certain lawmakers. Many of them are more narrowly ideologically focused, however; PWBM’s power is derived from its claims to nonpartisanship and its ability to drive its message through the media. Yet it has an implicit motive: Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), sees the budget model as one piece of a larger network in Washington pushing the view that budget deficits are detrimental to the economy.

In the world of budget modeling, some lawmakers take the models too seriously, viewing success or failure through the lens of a budget score. One former staffer for Sen. Sanders, Lori Kearns, explained to the Prospect that ideally, models would be only one input a lawmaker considers when drafting policy.

Bringing economics down from the heavens is an almost impossible task. Unconventional perspectives are smeared. And anybody who questions orthodoxies is automatically cast as an ideological partisan. The entire field protects itself with what the South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang calls an ecclesiastical “language of rulers”—whose entire purpose is to stifle debate. “Once you create this body of knowledge,” Chang said in a 2019 lecture, “you can basically bully other people into accepting your argument because other people cannot understand you.”

The Penn Wharton Budget Model has mastered the language of rulers at a quicker speed than most others. That’s why it has been so successful in its short life span. “The important thing to understand about the Penn Wharton model is that it’s not really supposed to be a model of the macroeconomy. It’s supposed to be a tool by which you could kill progressive policymaking,” Steinbaum said. “So the question [for PWBM] is, what assumptions do you make about how the macroeconomy works such that when you feed a progressive policy into it, it produces a prediction that says it will be bad for the economy?”

Why a WMD-free zone in the Middle East is more needed than ever

By Almuntaser Albalawi | April 10, 2023

BULLETIN OF CONCERNED ATOMIC SCIENTISTS
 

President Biden with leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan at the Jeddah Security and Development Summit in Saudi Arabia in July 2022. Credit: President Biden / Twitter

Recent news reports suggesting Saudi Arabia is seeking US aid for a peaceful nuclear program are bringing attention to the distressing potential for nuclear weapons proliferation in the Middle East. Yet conversations about averting such a doomed future for the region might be heading once again in the wrong direction. History suggests that power politics—in which self-interest is prioritized over global interests—may not be the best lens for looking at issues of arms control.

During the 10th review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty last year, Arab states reiterated their call for establishing a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This has been a long-standing position, but it should not be taken for granted. A growing interest in nuclear technology in the Middle East—combined with ambiguity over nuclear activities in Iran and Israel—raises concerns about potential proliferation in the region. A robust and inclusive WMD-free zone remains the best solution for addressing these concerns.

To be sure, it will be extremely difficult to find a way to bring Israel into such a zone. Still, the other countries of the region and other concerned parties—including the United States, Russia, and China—need to look for a way to at least begin talks with Israel about nuclear proliferation in the region.

A dramatic expansion of nuclear power in the Middle East is expected over the next decade. In 2021, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) became the second nation in the region (after Iran) to commission a nuclear power reactor. Now the UAE’s fourth reactor is under construction. Egypt is following suit and recently started the construction of a four-unit nuclear reactor based on Russian technology. In addition, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have committed to plans centered on Small Modular Reactors and uranium extraction and mining.

There are undoubtedly legitimate motives behind this growing interest in nuclear power. Concerns about climate change and energy security are causing some countries to reconsider nuclear energy, and the developers of new reactor designs are promising lower capital costs and improved safety. Even for oil-rich Middle Eastern countries, the nuclear energy option remains economically attractive, given that regional power demand is projected to rise by at least 40 percent by 2030. Furthermore, desalination using nuclear power is a possible way out of water scarcity for a region characterized by extremely high water risk.

Regional security concerns. Considering the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and a changing security landscape that features active insurgencies, the projected growth in nuclear power creates security complications. Critical nuclear power infrastructure will be an attractive target for violent non-state actors. Over the past decade, these actors have proved to be well-organized.

In 2012, the computer virus Shamoon was used to target Saudi Aramco in one of the most destructive cyberattacks in the region. Similarly, according to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, between 2015 and 2021 the Houthis, an Iran-aligned militia, fired 430 ballistic missiles and launched 851 drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, targeting oil facilities. The same militia attacked the UAE’s capital in 2022 and threatened to target its nuclear power plant earlier. A nuclear disaster in the world’s busiest oil shipping area, the Arabian Gulf, would put one-third of the world’s oil production and the global economy at risk.

For nuclear and other dual-use technologies, sabotage is not the only concern. Theft and trafficking, whether for profit or terrorism, are highly possible. For transnational armed non-state actors, ungoverned areas under conflict create favorable circumstances for such activities.

By 2017, Daesh, also known as ISIS, controlled approximately 45,377 square kilometers of territory and 2.5 million people in Iraq and Syria—larger than Denmark or Switzerland. The terrorist group was able to secretly develop the first non-state actor’s chemical weapons program; tried to acquire radioactive materials; and operated the largest smuggling network in the region, including routes for weapons transfers.

In such a risky environment, any nuclear power program must adopt extra measures to prevent theft or sabotage, based on regular risk assessments. Furthermore, these nuclear security and safety risks necessitate cross-border cooperation, with Middle Eastern countries maintaining effective channels for collaboration on emergency preparedness and crisis management. This could also increase transparency about nuclear activities and reduce the risk of a nuclear arms race.

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Nuclear proliferation and changing geopolitics. Historically, superpower rivalry during the Cold War influenced regional ambitions for nuclear weapons. But only after 1967, when Israel was believed to have secretly developed the region’s first nuclear weapons, did countries like Iraq and Libya seek the bomb (and fail to obtain it). The risk of nuclear proliferation rose again in the early 2000s, when Iran’s suspicious nuclear activities came to light. That risk grew further after the collapse of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear deal. Troubled by the idea of a nuclear weapon controlled by Tehran, Saudi Arabia promised to seek a nuclear bomb as soon as possible if Iran developed one.

Arab states have been suspicious of Iran’s nuclear program since day one, but what makes them much more alarmed now is skepticism about the US commitment to their security. Mistrust between Gulf states and the United States grew after the 2019 Houthis’ major attack on Saudi oil facilities, which cut oil production in half and shocked the global market. Dissatisfied by the US response, Gulf states started questioning US regional security guarantees. President Joe Biden’s administration got off on the wrong foot with Gulf states by reconsidering security concessions promised by the Trump’s administration, including arms sales.

The Gulf states find Biden’s “democracies good, non-democracies bad” view, as presented in the National Security Strategy released in October, alarming in two aspects: First, as part of the non-democracies group, Arab states are being offered a second-class partnership that comes with fewer benefits and lower credibility. Second, the region is being deprioritized on the US foreign policy agenda, with less US involvement in, and liability for, regional security.

Tensions rose even more following the OPEC decision to cut oil production, after which the United States accused Gulf states of siding with Russia in the Ukraine war. Amid calls to halt arms transfers to Saudi Arabia, the United States canceled a key meeting with the Gulf states on integrated air and missile defense, and promised to re-evaluate the relationship with Saudi Arabia.

As a result of these developments, Arabs—and Gulf states in particular—started to believe they should shore up the region’s security independently and explore nontraditional strategies and partnerships. Thus it was not surprising to see a recent de-escalation deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia brokered by China and, earlier, Riyadh holding three summits with China, paving the way for cooperation on a wide range of issues, including defense, security, and nuclear energy.

Is Saudi Arabia the next nuclear weapons state? Recently, the last chances to salvage the Iranian deal seemed to vanish, as Iran decided to massively expand uranium enrichment to 60 percent at its Fordow underground facility. In response, the Saudi foreign minister warned that “all bets are off” if Iran gets the bomb and vowed that Gulf states would act to reinforce their security. But what does “all bets are off” entail? And how far could the Saudis and other Gulf states go?

For the past two decades, Saudi Arabia has shown interest in nuclear energy and sought cooperation with major exporters of nuclear power technology. Recent updates about the Saudi atomic project show progress on human resources development, regulatory frameworks, and preliminary studies for nuclear power projects. However, the country has no substantial nuclear-related infrastructure, not even a research reactor.

Speculation about Saudi Arabia seeking the bomb are built on three observations. First, the Kingdom refuses to follow the UAE’s “gold standard” by signing the 123 agreement and giving up the right to enrich uranium. As part of its nonproliferation policy, the United States demands that partners sign the agreement in exchange for receiving the technology and nuclear materials needed for nuclear energy projects. Saudi Arabia’s hesitance to sign the agreement could be a red flag. Still, enriching uranium is a sovereign right that many countries with clean records of peaceful nuclear activities have practiced.

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Second, a 2020 report on secret cooperation between China and Saudi Arabia on uranium mining and extraction brought more attention to the Saudis’ activities. Saudi Arabia’s ambitions to develop its own nuclear fuel for peaceful and commercial purposes have been no secret. While this is a legitimate right granted under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the history of nuclear secrecy makes some states doubtful. Yet it is essential to recognize that the product of uranium mining and extraction, yellow cake, is produced commercially in over 20 countries worldwide, and it is a long way from weapons-grade uranium.

Finally, Saudi Arabia has yet to sign the International Atomic Energy Agency additional protocol, which allows the agency to search for undeclared nuclear activities. In principle, Riyadh does not reject the protocol, as it already has a safeguards agreement in force with the agency since 2009. But Saudi Arabia has little reason to sign the additional protocol, given that its nuclear activities are minimal.

None of these observations prove that Saudi Arabia is seeking the bomb. In the absence of technical expertise and basic nuclear infrastructure, Saudi Arabia is far from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Considering the acute threat from Iran and the skepticism about US security guarantees, Saudi Arabia could be aiming for nuclear hedging: not now, but not never. Based on the hedging theory, countries like Saudi Arabia would pursue the bomb if allies’ security guarantees vanished. So, is the US security assurance for Arab states sufficient? For now, the answer is still yes.

A solution within reach. In the Middle East, the predominant approach for dealing with nuclear proliferation is problematic. It narrowly focuses on predicting the next possible proliferator while ignoring root causes that may make proliferation inevitable. From a realistic point of view, a spiral effect of proliferation is highly likely if security threats continue to exist while trust among rivals is missing.

In particular, Israel’s secret nuclear weapons continue to be perceived as a threat by some countries in the region. As a result, Israel’s nuclear program contributes to proliferation as much as Iranian nuclear activities do. As long as compliance is not required from all countries, rivals may find themselves with no option, from a security perspective, but to pursue weaponization. Only a comprehensive approach will be effective and sustainable.

Despite its shortcomings and the obstacles in its path, the UN General Assembly-mandated Conference on the Establishment of a Middle East Zone Free of Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction remains the most promising option to prevent nuclear proliferation in the region while securing the right for peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Similar to the five existing nuclear-weapon-free zones, but with an extended scope to reinforce the global ban on chemical and biological weapons, a negotiated and inclusive Middle East zone could incorporate a robust compliance verification system complemented with nuclear security arrangements and possibly a joint nuclear fuel cycle in which enrichment is collectively overseen to ensure transparency.

Discussions on the proposed zone are held annually and open to all concerned states, including Israel, Iran, and the five nuclear weapon states. However, the zone is no closer to realization than it was in 1974, when first proposed by Egypt and Iran.

Persuading all countries in the region, particularly Israel, to adopt a WMD-free zone will be difficult. But revitalizing the proposal and showing political commitment from the international community, including the United States and European Union, is timely and more needed than ever.

Editor’s note: This article is an adaption of a paper presented at the International Student/Young Pugwash (ISYP) Third Nuclear Age conference in November 2022. Selected participants had the opportunity to submit their work for publication by the Bulletin, which was one of ISYP’s partners for the conference.