Migration mutiny: EU summit deadlocks

Hungary and Poland took a stand against a recent migration deal during Thursday’s EU summit, blocking any EU leaders’ statement on the issue.

European Council Summit, at the EU headquarters in Brussels | 

Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images

BY JACOPO BARIGAZZI, SUZANNE LYNCH, HANS VON DER BURCHARD, BARBARA MOENS, CLEA CAULCUTT AND CORY BENNETT

POLITICO
JUNE 30, 2023 

BRUSSELS — EU leaders were ticking through their agenda items with alacrity on Thursday. Rumors were circulating they might even cancel Friday’s meeting, having nothing left to talk about.

Then Viktor Orbán stepped in.

Our approach to migration is unacceptable, the Hungarian leader fulminated. Exactly, echoed the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki. We won’t move forward with the summit’s final statement until our concerns are addressed, they vowed.

In the end, they got their way — kind of. The entire summit stalled as the leaders of France and Germany, plus European Council President Charles Michel, negotiated with Hungary and Poland. Eventually, everyone just gave up. Shortly after 1 a.m., EU leaders called off the summit and went home, vowing to try again Friday morning.

It was exactly what everyone had been hoping to avoid: Yet another migration mutiny.

The talks had been “difficult” and “complicated,” Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo conceded on his way out. “We hope the night brings some advice.”

In many ways, the failure to produce a final statement is merely cosmetic. The underlying reason behind Hungary and Poland’s 11th-hour intervention was a protest over a migration deal EU countries pushed through this month to relocate migrants across the Continent.

Statement or not, that deal will remain in place. Yet Hungary and Poland wanted to use the summit to express their discontent — and that, they certainly did.

The late-night obstruction, described to POLITICO by numerous diplomats familiar with the talks, is just the latest indication that migration is becoming an increasingly unavoidable subject at every EU summit. And with migrants continuing to arrive via dangerous Mediterranean routes and horrific tragedies like the recent migrant boat sinking off the Greek coast, the issue is not going away.

We’re always talking migration now

In the room, Dutch leader Mark Rutte suggested leaders discuss it again at their next summit, while De Croo argued it should simply always be on the agenda, according to one of the people familiar with the discussions who, like others, spoke anonymously to share details of the private talks.

Others pointed to the rise in anti-immigrant attacks in their home countries — including in places like Ireland which have traditionally escaped anti-immigration trends — as well as the rise in popularity of far-right parties, fuelled by xenophobic sentiment.

Migration has long been one of the thorniest issues for the EU. Since the 2015 migration crisis, the bloc has tried and failed to overhaul the bloc’s process for welcoming and relocating asylum seekers.

Until last month that is. In May, EU countries finally — after months of tense negotiations — reached an agreement that did both.

The deal, in a nutshell, would install a stricter asylum procedure at the border for migrants deemed unlikely to be accepted. It would also create a system that gives EU countries the choice of either accepting a certain number of migrants each year or paying into a joint EU fund.

Hungary and Poland detest the mandatory relocations and have vowed not to cooperate.

And at Thursday’s gathering, they also expressed anger that the deal was pushed through via majority support — not unanimity. They pushed to adopt a joint statement committing to making EU migration decisions only by consensus (even though the EU doesn’t require that).

The text of one potential compromise version of the statement, seen by POLITICO, calls for the EU to “find consensus on an effective asylum and migration policy.”

Despite Hungarian and Polish protestations, the deal is not going away.

“The migration deal stands,” Rutte said as he left the summit. “What has been the issue today was not the migration pact … but that Hungary and Poland don’t like the way the migration pact was decided.”

And that frustration spilled over into Thursday’s meeting.

“They’re so angry about this that they say that they want no conclusions [on migration] at all now,” Rutte said.

Moments after leaders broke up for the night, Orbán’s political director, Balázs Orbán, summed up the sentiment on Twitter: “Heavy fight against the pro-migration forces of Brussels!”

A sign of things to come

Summit organizers had been hoping to avoid such a prolonged conversation on migration, worried that it might turn heated.

They took several steps in the run-up to try and ensure the joint statement’s language placated everyone. To start, the drafts circulating ahead of time only indirectly referenced the migration agreement.

The drafts also tried to skirt another point of contention: a push from several hawkish countries to include a reference to finding “innovative solutions” on migration.

Though no one wanted to say it publicly, three officials familiar with the talks said the vague term included the prospect of sending asylum seekers to non-EU countries — a model akin to a controversial U.K. plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda. By coincidence, the U.K. proposal was dramatically struck down by the U.K. Court of Appeal Thursday just as EU leaders were arriving in Brussels.

Instead of mentioning the controversial phrase, drafters instead slipped in a reference to a letter EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the EU’s top executive, circulated to EU leaders this week, pledging that her European Commission was “ready to continue developing new ways of advancing on … objectives including through out-of-the-box thinking.”

The term “out-of-the-box thinking” — essentially a euphemism that keeps the door open for a range of migration options — got positive mentions from several leaders during Thursday’s meeting, according to the official familiar with the discussions.

One country that appeared satisfied all day: Italy.

Far-right leader Giorgia Meloni has successfully pulled much of the EU in her direction on migration and was the clear victor of the recent migration deal.

“It was a unique approach that fixed everyone’s problems,” she said as she arrived at the summit.

And De Croo, the Belgian leader, even praised her role as an intermediary with Hungary and Poland on Thursday.

But it remains far from clear if leaders will be able to reach a deal after a night’s sleep.

“There is really, really, really a desire to be able to come to conclusions,” De Croo stressed.

Fortress Europe’s New Migration Pact Evades Legal Obligations

Friday, 30 June 2023, 
Press Release: Euro Med Monitor

European Union Member States at the Home Affairs Council agreed on 8 June 2023 on a negotiating position on the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, initially presented in September 2020. In particular, a political agreement was reached on the asylum procedure regulation and the asylum and migration management regulation that will form the ground of further negotiations by the Council presidency with the EU Parliament.
 

“The content is still unsettled and changeable; however, from the developments proposed so far, Member States are visibly trying to speed up asylum procedures and escape their legal obligations on asylum and migration,” said Michela Pugliese, Asylum Researcher at Euro-Med Monitor.
 

On both proposals, documents show that most of the key issues have not yet been decided, and that complex amendments as well as new concepts have been introduced. EU lawmakers have promised to conclude the Pact by February 2024 as part of a “joint roadmap” on migration agreed upon last September. Discussions on other measures that are part of the Pact are ongoing, but EU interior ministers have indicated their intent to finalise their own negotiating position in the next weeks.
 

Here are the latest updates, according to the Council of the EU’s press release of 8 June:

The asylum procedure regulation (APR) establishes a common procedure that Member States need to follow when people seek international protection in Europe, mainly on procedural arrangements (for example, clear rules for registering and lodging applications, and a time limit for the examination of applications and border procedures) and rules on the rights and duties of asylum seekers (e.g. access to legal assistance and interpretation, adequate support to individuals in need of special guarantees, rules on the right to stay and appeals, and an applicant’s duty to cooperate with the competent authorities).

The APR introduces mandatory border procedures at the EU’s external borders, with the aim to assess quickly—i.e. within 12 to 16 weeks—whether applications are unfounded or inadmissible, and prevent the applicant from entering the State’s territory in the meantime. This stricter procedure is applicable to almost every asylum seeker, as it is triggered in each of these cases: following apprehension in connection with an illegal border crossing; following disembarkation after a search and rescue (SAR) operation; if a person has provided authorities with false information or withheld information; or has a nationality with a recognition rate below 20%.
To carry out border procedures, Member States must establish “adequate capacity” in terms of reception and human resources required to examine an identified number of applications and enforce return decisions, based on the State’s share of irregular entries and disembarkations after SAR. The fact that this mechanism establishes an annual ceiling may cause a race to the bottom, with States declaring a lower “adequate capacity” in order to process fewer people in border procedures and trying to reduce the number of both arrivals and SAR disembarkations, possibly through more pushbacks.

Especially problematic is the proposed location of these border procedures, which would serve to prevent entry into EU territory. Asylum seekers would be transferred “to a specific location at or in proximity of the external border of the concerned Member State, or in other designated locations within its territory where appropriate facilities exist” prior to the examination of their application. The APR explicitly states that Member States should retain discretion in selecting the specific locations at which such facilities should be placed, and notify the European Commission of the exact locations, opening the additional possibility of using these spots to examine applications which are not subject to the border procedure. The question as to whether NGOs and civil society groups will be able to know the specific locations as well, to monitor the human rights situation and authorities’ compliance with legal obligations, remains unanswered.

In line with hastening asylum procedures, the APR proposal foresees that if a person subsequently claims asylum “at the last minute merely in order to delay or frustrate his or her removal”, they should not be authorised to remain; that Member States can provide that the personal interviews as well as hearings before tribunals of first instance be held via video conference; and that a return decision can be issued as part of the rejection of the application for international protection (a declaration of inadmissible, unfounded, or withdrawn). The proposal also states that, when applying the border procedure, Member States may prioritise the examination of applications of certain third country nationals for which there is a high probability of return to their country of origin, a third country deemed safe by EU authorities, or a first country of asylum.

In accelerating the examination of cases and reducing the burden on competent authorities, these policies would end up seriously curtailing asylum seekers’ and migrants’ rights, discouraging their willingness to seek asylum and regularise themselves, and rendering the overall asylum procedure rougher, more superficial, and less humane. For instance, on the duties of the asylum seeker, the APR states that competent authorities should take biometric data upon the making or registration of an application for international protection and transmit the data in accordance with the regulation, adding that, if the person refuses to provide their biometric data, they should not be allowed to lodge an application.

The asylum and migration management regulation (AMMR) should replace the current Dublin III regulation determining the Member State responsible for the examination of an asylum application, but the new proposal would likely effect minimal change—both in relation to the right to freedom of movement of migrants and asylum seekers, and to migratory pressure on frontline States in the Mediterranean region. The original document had proposed that the first State in which an asylum application is registered shall be responsible for examining it, replacing the current restrictive rule of first state of entry. Yet the new proposal adds that, notwithstanding this, where it is established that a person has been disembarked on the territory of a Member State following a SAR operation, that State shall be responsible for examining the asylum claim for up to 12 months after disembarkation. Consequently, the situation of these States, including Greece, Italy, and Spain, will not change much. In this regard, the AMMR also aims at reducing absconding and avoiding “unauthorised” secondary movements between States.

Time limits will change and the possibility of carrying out Dublin transfers will presumably be facilitated and extended without consideration for the willingness of asylum seekers to decide where to seek asylum and build a life for themselves, or if they wish to remain where they have already been living for months. For instance, failure to make the take back notification within the time limit won’t affect the obligation of the Member State responsible for taking back the person concerned. Similarly, the time limit may be extended up to a maximum of one year if the transfer cannot be carried out due to imprisonment of the person concerned, or up to a maximum of three years if the person concerned absconds. In addition to this, the AMMR provides for an exchange of information between States relevant for the examination of an asylum application, also without the applicant’s consent.

A new solidarity mechanism, the so-called “solidarity pool”, is being proposed to support the few Member States that are responsible for reviewing the vast majority of asylum applications—through individual contributions that include relocations of both asylum seekers and refugees recognised less than three years before, direct financial contributions, and deployment of resources or personnel. It is unclear to what extent this new mechanism will be made mandatory, as the proposal envisages that only in certain unspecified circumstances, in order to provide sufficient predictability for the benefitting States, the application of contributing States becomes obligatory. Similarly, EU countries that will become benefitting Member States are not obliged to implement their pledged solidarity contributions. Moreover, as it is explicit that no State will ever be obliged to carry out relocations, the proposal provides for responsibility offsets to compensate for a possibly insufficient number of pledged relocations—for instance, taking responsibility for the examination of asylum claims for another Member State in need.

According to the new AMMR proposal, the Commission should adopt a European Migration Management Report to annually assess the situation along all migratory routes and in all Member States, and issue a recommendation regarding the “solidarity pool” that identifies any needs and measures necessary to address States’ individual migratory situations. The proposal identifies the annual numbers at EU level for relocations (set to at least 30,000) and direct financial contributions (at least EUR 600 million).

The proposal takes into great consideration relations with third countries, which is in line with the EU’s desire to externalise its asylum obligations and prevent departures. The AMMR foresees a High-Level EU Migration Forum for all Member States and third countries that have agreed with the Union on the criteria and mechanisms for establishing a State’s responsiblity for examining asylum requests lodged in either that State or that third country. Allegedly, these third countries can be invited to participate for the purpose of contributing to solidarity on an ad hoc basis. Though the form of contribution they can provide to EU States is not specified, it is notable that if the Commission and the Council deem a third country to be not sufficiently cooperative on readmissions, they should take “appropriate actions”.
“The proposals include exemptions, arbitrariness on the solidarity measures pledged by Member States, and accelerated, approximate, and rough asylum procedures directly at the borders that will prevent people [who have] just arrived and are probably traumatised from having the proper time and place to process their own story and request protection,” stated Pugliese, the Euro-Med Monitor asylum researcher.
Pugliese added that the discretion demanded of States surrounding the specific locations where asylum seekers subjected to border procedures will be transferred should be of great concern. She expressed alarm over the fact that “almost everyone may be subjected to these faster and rougher border procedures, and that a return decision can be issued together with the rejection of the application for international protection”.

“These examples prove how far the political agreements reached by EU interior ministers step away from a modern and sustainable asylum and migration framework,” Pugliese explained, “and closer to a normalised system of the usual criminalisation and invisibilisation of migrants and asylum seekers.”

 

ENDS

 

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based indepenent organisation with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe.

After 22 Years, ExxonMobil Finally Settles Indonesian Human Rights Case

Last month, 11 Acehnese villagers reached a confidential financial settlement with the U.S. oil giant, after accusing it of abuses including rape and torture.

By Aisyah Llewellyn
June 20, 2023
THE DIPLOMAT


A group of Indonesian villagers who sued oil and gas giant ExxonMobil for alleged human rights abuses have finally settled their case, 22 years after it was filed by a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer, Terrence Collingsworth.

“Resolving the case on favorable terms after over 22 years of litigation is amazing for the plaintiffs, who now have obtained justice, and for me and the other lawyers because we did not give up,” Collingsworth told The Diplomat following news of the settlement.

The case stemmed from accusations by 11 villagers from Indonesia’s Aceh Province who alleged that they and their family members were tortured, sexually assaulted, raped, and beaten in and around the ExxonMobil Oil and Gas Plant in the town of Lhoksukon during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

They alleged that they were abused by security guards hired by the U.S. company from the ranks of the Indonesian army to guard the plant after it had been attacked by separatists on a number of occasions over the years, leaving one American staffer dead.

The case had languished in the U.S. courts since 2001, when Collingsworth filed it with the District Court for the District of Columbia after a trip to Aceh to meet with the plaintiffs in person. The slow progress of the litigation was due to a confluence of factors, including repeated legal challenges by ExxonMobil and a chronic backlog of cases in the U.S. court system.

While the details of the settlement are confidential, one of the plaintiffs, who are all listed as John and Jane Does in court documents to protect their identities, told The Diplomat that he was pleased that the legal fight was over.

“We are old men and women now and are all tired. Instead of dying without ever receiving justice, we are happy that we have managed to settle this peacefully,” he said.

The man added that while the plaintiffs had not had their day in court, with the civil trial scheduled to start on May 24 this year, and had therefore not had the chance to give evidence in front of a jury, he felt a sense of peace now that the settlement had been reached.

For its part, ExxonMobil has always denied that it knew of any human rights violations and argued that it could not be held legally responsible for any abuses, if indeed they did occur, as it did not order or authorize them.

“It should be noted that while there were no allegations that any employee directly harmed any of the plaintiffs, the settlement brings closure for all parties,” it said in a statement following the settlement.

“We express our deepest sympathy to the families and the people who were involved.”

ExxonMobil, which came about as a result of a merger between Mobil Oil Indonesia and U.S. company Exxon, apparently paid members of the Indonesian military $500,000 per month to guard its oil and gas plant in Lhoksukon at the height of Aceh’s civil war between local separatists and the Indonesian Army, according to court documents.

The 11 plaintiffs alleged that, while the conflict was still raging in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the security guards working for ExxonMobil conducted sweeping raids in local villages around the oil and gas plant, where they assaulted the local populace while apparently looking for suspected separatists.

The civil conflict, during which Acehnese separatists fought for autonomy from the rest of Indonesia, lasted for decades before a peace agreement was reached in 2005 – in part as a result of renewed calls for a resolution following a devastating tsunami of 2004 that killed over 200,000 people in the region.

One of the John Does who spoke to The Diplomat alleged that he had been kidnapped by security guards hired by ExxonMobil and tortured for days in an effort to get him to admit to being a separatist. He also alleged that he had been taken to a prison camp in Aceh and forced to touch a pile of severed heads, while ExxonMobil security guards threatened to add his head to the pile if he did not give them the names of anyone involved in separatist activity.

“Exxon said they wanted to find a solution and this is the best decision for all of us. I feel like justice has been served, but I won’t be happy until I receive the settlement money in my bank account,” he said.

Another of the John Does listed in the legal documents, who said he was kidnapped by security guards contracted to ExxonMobil and had the letters G-A-M – the acronym of the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) – carved into his back, said that justice had been served as a result of the settlement.

“I am going to use the settlement money to open my own business,” he said, adding that his days as a local fisherman, scraping a living from the sea, were now over. “The most important thing is that my family is provided for now and in the future.”

At the same time, some told The Diplomat that, while this may be seen as a legal victory for the plaintiffs, it was disappointing that ExxonMobil settled before going to trial and was not held accountable in a court of law.

“After 22 long years, it’s good that the victims finally received some kind of compensation for their suffering and loss,” said Ian Wilson, a lecturer in politics and security studies at Murdoch University in Perth.

“However, in the end, it is also another case of corporations being able to buy themselves out of serious legal and public accountability for what was, in this instance, very serious charges.”

“I must concede some disappointment that we were not able to have a major public trial that would have educated the public more about corporate accountability, but our duty was to our clients first and they are very satisfied,” Collingsworth said of the settlement.

“I do not think that there is any question that Exxon was held accountable by resolving the case this way.”

As a result, Collingsworth said that the fight continues for his firm, International Rights Advocates, which also has cases involving other corporate giants such as Nestle, Cargill, and The Hershey Company.

“For International Rights Advocates, I hope the legacy of this case is that other companies that engage in human rights violations should try to avoid the enormous costs of lengthy litigation, and that they need to work with us at the outset to resolve any problems and develop effective mechanisms to identify and prevent human rights violations,” he said.

“I hope we have demonstrated to Exxon and other large multinationals that Martin Luther King Jr. was correct: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’.”

CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
Aisyah Llewellyn is a British writer based in Medan, Indonesia, and a columnist for The Diplomat.

China’s Restless Workers

Labor strikes are rising in China as weak demand sees factories shutter and workers’ pay cut.

By Neil Thompson
June 28, 2023
THE DIPLOMAT

Strikes in China’s manufacturing sector are rising amid a shaky domestic economic recovery and a global economy still weighed down by the war in Ukraine and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chinese manufacturers in industries from electronics to garment manufacturing have faced lower earnings on the back of weaker global consumer demand this year. Many factories have closed or mothballed production without paying their staff severance pay or other benefits. Still others are experiencing difficulties paying meeting their regular payroll obligations. Chinese websites and social media accounts have posted complaints of layoffs and stagnant or falling wages, and examples of job advertisements using discriminatory language or listing illegal requirements.

As a result, the first half of 2023 has seen an increasing number of small-scale incidents of worker unrest across China’s coastal industrial hubs in the Pearl River and Yangtze River Deltas, where China’s work force of rural migrant laborers is concentrated. Hong Kong-based rights group China Labor Bulletin recorded 140 strikes across China from January-May 2023, the highest number since the same period in 2016, when 313 strikes were reported.

China Labour Bulletin collects its own data on strikes, largely pulled from social media posts. The group estimates they only hear about 5-10 percent of the total strikes that actually occur. Any official figures are heavily guarded by the CCP.

Manufacturers typically employ migrant workers on informal or temporary contracts, leaving them vulnerable to labor abuses like unpaid overtime or rounds of sudden layoffs or pay cuts. China does not allow independent trade unions, which might tackle such abuses; all recognized labor organizations must join the umbrella All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU).

Under this arrangement, migrant workers often struggle just to secure the legal benefits to which they are entitled from companies, such as social insurance and housing fund payments. Company-level enterprise unions are often accused of failing to stand up for their members’ rights. Instead, migrant workers frequently find themselves pushed by local government officials into labor arbitration with their companies over unpaid benefits or other grievances.

The ACFTU takes much the same approach, with legal remedies through the courts being the default model of conflict resolution between Chinese workers and companies. The Chinese security forces are quick to break up protests and strikes, while social media censorship removes evidence of labor disputes from China’s internet.

It is thus unlikely that the current wave of localized labor unrest in China will escalate to an industry-, city- or province-wide level, given the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s lack of tolerance for any sort of independent and organized political or social movement. Workers’ grievances over money and other issues may see the number of strikes continue to escalate back toward 2016 levels, but they will remain small, isolated incidents involving specific complaints, which lack any connection to a broader workers’ movement

A few incidents, however, could break through to wider public consciousness, either in China or globally, such as last year’s protests over pay and COVID-19 controls at Apple supplier Foxconn’s Apple iPhone plant in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou. That disruption led to significant supply chains issues for Apple and may have helped spur the company to diversify its manufacturing base away from dependence upon China.

The Foxconn unrest was also an early precursor to the broader “White Paper” protests of late 2022, which saw Chinese residents take to the streets in the thousands to denounced the government’s zero COVID policy. The protests provided a rare example of collective action forcing a policy change in China. The central government quickly scrapped the stringent COVID-19 quarantine and testing rules, even while moving to arrest those suspected of taking part in the demonstrations.

Still, the Zhengzhou incident, and earlier spontaneous protests like it, did not motivate Beijing to overhaul labor law or working conditions for migrant workers in China’s manufacturing sector. China-focused labor rights organizations continue to frequently document labor rights issues, both within China-based supply chains and with the treatment of Chinese workers brought to work in overseas countries by Chinese firms.

Multinationals’ supply chains are unlikely to experience any significant impact from an increase in labor rest within China, given Beijing’s authoritarian political system will stifle any large-scale organizing. However, the growing trend of global companies to diversify their suppliers away from China will have powerful indirect consequences for China’s labor relations, since it will further depress global demand for the services of Chinese manufacturing firms in 2023 and beyond.

Geopolitical tensions between the United States and China have spurred some of this trend but rising labor costs and the chastening experience of the worldwide disruption caused by China’s zero COVID strategy have also weakened foreign firms’ faith in the business environment there. Multinational firms will not abandon manufacturing in China – not least because domestic production there is needed to supply China’s own huge consumer market for foreign goods – but Beijing’s role as the world’s workshop was eroding even before the first cases of COVID-19 were discovered in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. However, foreign firms’ supply chain diversification is likely to exacerbate overcapacity in China’s manufacturing sector, leading to further pay cuts and redundancies across the sector later this year.

Sustained low-level labor unrest could potentially become a headache for the CCP in the same way that public protests over zero COVID eventually resulted in an abrupt abandonment of public health controls late last year. The Chinese regime defends its monopoly on political power in part from its claim to have developed the Chinese economy and delivered rising living standards for ordinary Chinese people. Migrant labor unrest across China’s manufacturing hubs challenges this claim, especially when combined with a slack labor market among graduates and young people.

The issue will not seriously threaten the hold of Chinese President Xi Jinping on power – he consolidated his position late last year at the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party – but it will contribute to a popular feeling of malaise across parts of Chinese social, manifesting in the popularity of internet slang terms like “let it rot” on China’s internet forums. Such narratives erode CCP claims about the positive outcomes of China’s 100-year modernization drive under the party and therefore the CCP’s legitimacy from having delivered them. Historically, student protests and worker unrest have often triggered political crises within the communist system, most tragically in 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Beijing is likely to respond to the persistence of low-level worker unrest by redoubling efforts to ensure reports of the problem do not appear on Chinese social media, and therefore leak out to the wider world via labor rights groups. It could also pressure local officials to reduce incidents of unrest, which could lead to further human rights abuses as municipal governments and other authorities attempt to strongarm workers into settling strikes.

The CCP may bank on the global economy recovering in 2024 and ending the circumstances that are driving employers to cut pay and conditions in the country’s manufacturing sector, even as growth there and in the overall economy remains uncertain in the second half of this year. However, the International Monetary Fund forecasts that growth in China will drop from 5.2 percent in 2023 to 4.5 percent in 2024 and remain sluggish in the 2025-2028 period. This could translate into persistent wage-related unrest in China that further diminishes the appeal of the sector for Chinese workers. Diminishing returns will also increase pressure for an overhaul in the country’s economic model and better social protections for workers.

Popular pressure for a better system of welfare may also be rising in China as younger generations’ expectations increase in line with higher living standards and growth permanently slows in the post-globalization era.

GUEST AUTHOR
Neil Thompson is a geopolitical risk analyst at Emergent Risk International covering East and Southeast Asian affairs.

The Political Ideology Behind Anti-Conversion Laws in India

As Congress vows to amend the controversial law in Karnataka, a look at the motivations underpinning such legislation.

By Rashad Khan

THE DIPLOMAT
June 30, 2023

Credit: Deposit photos

Prior to the Karnataka State Assembly elections, India’s Congress party had promised that if elected, it would repeal the anti-conversion legislation passed during the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s tenure. Officially known as “Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Act,” the Congress leadership viewed the act as controversial and divisive.

Upon forming the Karnataka state government after the declaration of the election results on May 13, Congress leaders announced that they would be removing the clauses added by the BJP government that had given the legislation its divisive characteristics. The rationale behind this move is that legislation against forced conversions has always been present, but that the bill introduced by the BJP government needs to be scrutinized and tweaked.

This moves away from Congress’ earlier promise to repeal the legislation completely. We will have to wait and see the nature of amendments that are made.

India has 12 states in which anti-conversion legislation has been passed, with circumstances that vary from state to state. The laws in all states share three common aspects: prohibitions on conversions, notification requirements to the government, and burden-shifting provisions that automatically presume guilt. All three violate protections for freedom of religion or belief under international human rights law. Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides that everyone has the right to freedom of religion or belief, including the “freedom to have or adopt a religion or belief.” This is violated by the anti-conversion laws, as they prohibit conversions for the purpose of marriage.

The state’s interference in citizens’ personal matters is also disconcerting. As per the anti-conversion legislation in Karnataka, the individual is to convey to the district magistrate their intention to convert, after which a public call will be made to check if any objections are raised by the public. In case of an objection, an investigation is organized. If it is found that the conversion is not “legitimate” and violates the anti-conversion legislation, the findings are provided to the police, who then initiate a criminal investigation.

According to the United Nations Human Rights Committee’s interpretation of ICCPR’s Article 18, the state cannot compel an individual to reveal their adherence to a belief and international human rights law prohibits the state from interfering in an individual’s right to convert and requiring the issuing of notifications regarding the same.

Another contentious element present in the anti-conversion legislation is the shift of the burden of proof onto the accused. Article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that those charged with a penal offense have a right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. The presumption of innocence of the accused is echoed by Article 14 of the ICCPR, which states that the burden of proving the charge must be imposed on the prosecution and the defendant does not share the burden of proving their innocence.

Article 25 of the Indian Constitution guarantees freedom of conscience and the free profession, practice, and propagation of religion. However, due to religion being a matter that concerns the state and central governments, both have the capacity to make laws regarding the same. The Supreme Court of India has ruled that anti-conversion laws are valid and constitutional as long as they do not infringe upon an individual’s right to freedom of religion. The crux of the matter lies in the intention behind the laws and whether their implementation is detrimental to the prospect of communal harmony.

The United State Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recently published a report on India’s state-level conversion laws and came to the conclusion that the laws have been framed to prevent conversions to religions that the state finds unfavorable (Christianity and Islam, as per the report) and not to protect individuals against forced conversions, which was its stated purpose.

The USCIRF report also highlights how the law is used to target interfaith marriages between Hindu women and Muslim men, derogatorily referred to as “Love Jihad.” Indeed, in the campaigns by BJP representatives to enact an anti-conversion law in a given state, the term “Love Jihad” is mentioned multiple times to justify anti-conversion legislation. In many cases, BJP representatives refer to the anti-conversion laws as “Love Jihad Law.”

Through the enactment and propagation of the anti-conversion laws, the ulterior motive of the BJP is to create fear in the minds of the Hindu population that a demographic war is ongoing. In this war, the “outsider” religions are engaging in various methods to reduce the native Hindu population, including through conversions. The mass hysteria that is created translates into political capital for the BJP, which is seen as a conservative party that fights for the interests of the Hindu population. The “Love Jihad” campaign has been weaponized in order to raise support for the Hindu cause, which the BJP represents.

The anti-conversion laws have also made marriages between individuals of different faiths more difficult. The legislation is used to identify and monitor those who would wish to engage in inter-faith marriages, with the police and local vigilante groups of the right-wing interfering in personal matters between consenting individuals, sometimes with the threat of violence. The cases that are filed under sections of the anti-conversion laws are often coupled with criminal charges of kidnapping, abduction, or inducing women to compel marriage. This displays the misogynist viewpoint of those engaging in the making and enactment of the legislation, as women are not seen as able individuals who can choose their partners. Instead, the final decision of marriage rests with the community and must be within the community. The anti-conversion laws show the status quo that the BJP wishes to establish, one where inter-faith marriages are to be prevented in order to preserve the Hindu identity of the country.

The amendments made by the Congress government in Karnataka can act as a way forward to break the myths that have been propagated by the BJP. As per the Supreme Court, no individual’s right to freedom of religion can be denied. Now we must wait and see the extent of changes that will be made by the Congress in the state’s anti-conversion legislation in the face of the protests that are being planned by BJP against the changes.

GUEST AUTHOR
Rashad Khan is currently an academic associate at the Kautilya School of Public Policy. He completed his Master’s in Women’s Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. His interests lie in religiosity, social movements, and gender.

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The War on Terror Entailed Mass Deception

The United States legitimized military conquest during the War on Terror by using an expansive battlespace that disciplined citizens and soldiers alike. It spread lies, deception, and military propaganda to sow confusion and produce consent.

ROSS CAPUTI

CATALYST
06.29.2023

REVIEW

CHRISTOPHER J. COYNE AND ABIGAIL R. HALL

Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror

Stanford University Press, 2021


The Iraq War — or, more accurately, the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq — is widely remembered by Americans as a mistake. But appreciate for a moment how remarkable it is that our invasion of Iraq could be regarded simply as a mistake. Not only does this reframing presuppose that it was an “intelligence failure” that led us into the conflict rather than a deception by the George W. Bush administration; it also redirects attention from our moral and legal responsibility for the invasion to the pragmatics of empire, in which going to war is decided by a cost-benefit analysis.

Iraq did not have WMDs, or any connections to al-Qaeda, as the Bush administration claimed. So the 4,614 American soldiers who were killed in Iraq did, in the most tragic way, die for nothing. As did over one million Iraqis. The invasion itself was a war crime. Such is the consensus view of legal experts. And by all standards of foreign policy, the entire endeavor was a failure. So how could the fact that we were deceived into supporting an illegal invasion and foreign policy disaster not be front and center in our memory of the conflict?

There are likely several factors, but only one, argue Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall in their new book, Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, threatens to undermine our democracy: propaganda.

More and more in our democracy, information is being wielded like an instrument of statecraft to build domestic support for predetermined policies and to construct legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. Propaganda was once a temporary retreat from the liberal values of transparency and open debate during times of war. But according to Coyne and Hall, it has grown into a permanent and pervasive enterprise of the political elite that threatens to transform our democracy into a veiled authoritarian state. In their words, “Government propaganda is a direct threat to freedom and liberty because it empowers a small political elite who wields awesome discretionary powers to shape policies while keeping citizens in the dark about the underlying realities and the array of alternative options available.”

In short, propaganda is no longer the opaque Uncle Sam posters of WWI. Nor is it simply the sterile and euphemistic speech we’ve all come to expect from government and military spokespersons. Our contemporary propaganda apparatus is a whole-of-government activity with the resources and sophistication capable of inverting the relationship between the citizenry and the state such that the public is regarded as an obstacle to policy rather than its end. And it is exactly these kinds of “information asymmetries” and their causes that are the focus of Manufacturing Militarism.

While the field of propaganda studies has traditionally focused on the rhetorical analysis of propaganda messages, Manufacturing Militarism breaks from this trend by offering a political economy of the propaganda function. Coyne and Hall interrogate the “pathologies” of our democratic system that allow for information asymmetries to develop between policymakers and the public, which incentivize manipulative government messaging, secrecy, and the exaggeration of external threats. While some amount of government secrecy in a war of self-defense might be justifiable (though the United States hasn’t fought one of those in a very long time, arguably ever), Coyne and Hall argue that American policymakers have exploited their prerogative to secrecy and their access to information to their own ends.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of Manufacturing Militarism is its final chapter that highlights four potential constraints on our propaganda apparatus — domestic law, whistleblowers, media criticism, and critical citizenship. Unfortunately, the first three offer more loopholes for government officials to exploit than they do protections for the public.

There is, in fact, a set of domestic laws in place aimed at constraining the abuses of propaganda; but due to a conjunction of factors — a lack of federal oversight, unwillingness on the part of the DOJ to prosecute, and the difficulty of defining what exactly constitutes propaganda — these laws have done little to protect Americans. Similarly, flaws in the legal protections for whistleblowers make the dissemination of classified information, even if it reveals government deception and wrongdoing, an act of martyrdom, as the examples of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning demonstrate. Even journalists and media corporations can be prosecuted for publishing classified information. When the media is willing to report critically on government and military actions, they can provide an important check on government propaganda. And there have been exceptionally brave journalists who, at great personal risk, have pulled the curtains back on government deception. However, these individuals are often bucking the trend of media complicity with government propaganda.

With little reason to believe that the federal government will police its own propaganda activities, Coyne and Hall place their hopes in an informed and vigilant citizenry. Since consent is the objective of propaganda, Americans need only realize, they argue, that by removing their consent, by demanding transparency and access to information, we have the power to undermine the would-be propagandists.

There’s only one problem. We can only speak out against propaganda if we can recognize it in lies and misinformation. And if we couldn’t do this in 2003 to stop the invasion of Iraq, why should we think we’re capable of this now?

Coyne and Hall’s case study of the propaganda leading up to the Iraq invasion illustrates my point well. They rightly highlight the Bush administration’s manipulation of the intelligence surrounding Iraqi WMD programs and the alleged connection with al-Qaeda, and are duly critical of the practices of press information centers, the embedding of journalists in military units, and the selective leaking of intelligence that created such a distorted public understanding of our mission in Iraq. However, the historical narrative they offer reproduces elements of propaganda. There is no mention of war crimes nor any detailed account of Iraqi experiences or perspectives. Also, some of the legitimizing vocabulary of American propagandists slips through in their analysis. Was it a war? Was there even an insurgency, as Coyne and Hall presuppose? I don’t point this out as irony or as a takedown but only to highlight the level to which propaganda has saturated the historical memory of the conflict and the challenge this poses to scholars.

It was in the spring of 2004 when the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) — the occupation government in Iraq — made a deliberate shift in its characterization of the anti-occupation militants from being “former regime elements” and “criminals” to “insurgents.” The term “insurgent” was chosen specifically because it denied the militants the status, as far as international law is concerned, of being belligerents. And the dubbing of Operation Iraqi Freedom as a “war” was a similar attempt at perception management. For the same reason that the appellation the “German-Polish War of 1939” obscures Nazi aggression, the characterization of our actions in Iraq as a “war” was an attempt to legitimize the invasion. Legitimacy was, after all, the primary military objective of the occupation, and US forces sought to achieve this objective through military means, including propaganda.

So if Coyne and Hall’s very excellent case study on Iraq propaganda assumes some of the vocabulary and framing peddled by the war’s propagandists, how can we expect ordinary citizens to speak out against propaganda when even the experts don’t always know it when they see it?

After all, Coyne and Hall admit that contemporary propaganda is diffuse while being hidden in plain sight. Manipulative government messaging has invaded our personal lives through pop culture and the news media. It is present in everything from sporting events to superhero movies, through the Department of Defense’s efforts to parade soldiers around during every halftime show and the State Department’s efforts to liaison with Hollywood. Our lives are saturated with militaristic messages that are impossible to trace, even if we’re capable of recognizing them as propaganda. I agree with Coyne and Hall that change must begin with critical citizenship, but I’m skeptical that such an awakening could occur without targeted political action. And the areas highlighted in their final chapter, perhaps especially domestic law, offer a good place to start.

One could read the sense of urgency in Manufacturing Militarism as a call to action, one intended to shock readers out of their lethargic trust in government officials and compel them to action. But how long have things been this bad? The tools of political economy that Coyne and Hall bring to the study of propaganda undoubtedly shine new light on its function in our democratic system. But for all their attention to the propaganda function, one could ask for greater attention to the propaganda apparatus and how it has evolved over time. One might assume from their analysis that our propaganda during WWII and Vietnam was equally deleterious as it is today. I don’t believe this to be true. American propaganda, in recent decades, has only become more militarized and opaque across government communications.

The transformation of propaganda from public relations into a warfighting activity occurred shortly after the 1991 Gulf War, when the US military underwent a revolution in military affairs that gave new strategic importance to the application of soft power in combat operations. By the start of the Global War on Terror, the new military discipline of information operations had been integrated into all combat activities. Moreover, the new strategic emphasis on soft power rendered the traditional concept of a battlefield obsolete, to be replaced by a multidomain battlespace reaching into the abstract realms of information and cyberspace. These doctrinal and conceptual developments have created a militarized way of thinking about information and purveyors of information among American propagandists, and one consequence of this has been an erosion of the distinction between the war zone and the home front. For the last two decades, Iraqis and Americans have been living in a battlespace together, without knowing it, and we have both been subject to the same propaganda.

Information operations may be the most dangerous wing of our propaganda apparatus, since they mislead us in the area of policy with the most human lives at stake. But propaganda is now a cross-government activity, unified by the concept of strategic communications, with a militarized cynicism toward the consent of the governed permeating our political institutions.

Three years ago, in a call with the president on how to handle the protests in response to the murder of George Floyd, then secretary of defense Mark Esper urged state governors “to dominate the battlespace.” During the early years of the Global War on Terror, many commentators warned that our adoption of counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan threatened to leak into our domestic security apparatus, furnishing the police and the FBI with the rationale to view the American public as the enemy. In many ways, these warnings have proven true. Unfortunately, the danger posed by the battlespace was overlooked, and we are only now beginning to recognize how it empowered a political elite to view our hearts and minds as objects to be governed.

The winning of Iraqi hearts and minds was the central military objective of the occupation, and the word “winning” accurately reflects the extent to which persuasion was being treated as a military activity. We certainly weren’t there to respect Iraqi hearts and minds. We were there to win them. And if Iraqis wanted something other than what we were offering, this was viewed as only a temporary state of affairs until we could convince or coerce them to want something else.

The American state-building mission in Iraq depended on, if not actual Iraqi consent, at least the appearance of their consent as its source of legitimacy. Iraqis, in fact, violently rejected the American mission in the form of an armed national liberation movement. But through the practice of perception management, the United States was able to depict the Iraqi resistance as an ideologically fringe movement of religious extremists in order to secure the consent of American audiences for the continuation of the occupation.

If I could offer an example from my own research to highlight the problem, the case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is illustrative, but not exceptional. His name first entered American political discourse in 2002, when the Bush administration alleged that he, a jihadist who had joined Osama bin Laden’s cause in Afghanistan, was now leading a terrorist cell in northern Iraq. After the invasion, nearly a year passed before his name reemerged, curiously around the same time the CPA began characterizing the anti-occupation violence as an insurgency led by al-Qaeda. A communication that he had written to the al-Qaeda leadership was intercepted by the United States and leaked to the New York Times, which ran the story alleging scary new developments for American forces in Iraq.

After the United States was forced to cancel its first attempt to sack Fallujah in April 2004 due to political backlash for the deaths of over five hundred civilians, American military spokespersons began claiming that Zarqawi himself was in Fallujah recruiting soldiers for al-Qaeda in Iraq. No hard evidence has ever been produced placing Zarqawi in Fallujah. Nonetheless, his presence was uncritically accepted in the American media and was treated a casus belli for the second siege of Fallujah in November 2004. Just before the second siege began, Fallujah’s political and military leadership held negotiations with the new Interim Iraqi Government (IIG) and US officials to reach a peace settlement. However, the United States and the IIG demanded that Fallujans turn over Zarqawi as a condition for peace. The operation proceed, this time killing an estimated four to six thousand civilians, producing over two hundred thousand refugees, and destroying half the city. Yet through a reinvigorated campaign of information operations, the US military was able to sell the story to the Western media that we had in fact “liberated” Fallujah.

It was later revealed, in 2006, that the US military was conducting a psyop to exaggerate Zarqawi’s role in the anti-occupation violence. Military spokespersons claimed that the objective wasn’t to target Americans but Iraqis with misinformation. However, most Fallujans didn’t even believe Zarqawi existed. They regarded him as no more than a boogeyman invented by the Americans to justify attacking their city. In fact, Fallujah’s own city council was so frustrated by the US military’s repeated appeals to the presence of Zarqawi as a justification for bombing his “network” in Fallujah that they placed a bounty on his head. Meanwhile, Zarqawi had become a familiar, menacing figure in the American news coverage of the occupation and American audiences had come to believe deeply that he posed an existential threat to the Iraqis we claimed to be liberating, to our soldiers in Iraq, and to American national security more generally.

In the case of Zarqawi, it is near impossible to separate the outsize myth of Zarqawi’s deeds and his role in the anti-occupation violence from fact. The Zarqawi psyop spread such pervasive rumors about his leadership role and his presence in Fallujah that they became conventional wisdom among American policymakers and military planners. So as a Marine infantryman in Fallujah in 2004, I believed it when a platoon commander told us that he just received word from our intel shop that Zarqawi was just a few blocks away and he was wounded in the leg. Keep fighting, he said. To this day, I still struggle to understand which levels of command were in on the deception and who believed our own propaganda.

Coyne and Hall have issued us an important wake-up call to the dangers of our propaganda apparatus, currently subject to no checks and balances apart from the feeble Freedom of Information Act. (At the time of writing, I have had a FOIA request in the queue with CENTCOM requesting documents on information operations in Iraq for over three years now.) But awareness that we do in fact have a propaganda apparatus may not be enough, as the Zarqawi psyop illustrates. Even experts struggle to sift truth from propaganda without intimate knowledge of how our apparatus is structured and what each component is doing. But we must start somewhere, and Manufacturing Militarism is a welcome call to action.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ross Caputi is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the main author of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History (2019) and is the director of archives at Archive Iraq.

American and Israeli Intransigence Prevented Peace in the Middle East

During the Cold War, the United States blocked the path for a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East. Global power competition with the Soviet Union played a crucial role — but so did the Israel lobby.

Israeli soldiers celebrate the capture of Old Jerusalem from the Jordanians, 1967. 

(Bettmann / Getty Images)

SALIM YAQUB

CATALYST

06.29.2023

A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979

Cornell University Press, 2023


In September 1971, while meeting in the Oval Office with President Richard M. Nixon, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko conveyed an extraordinary personal pledge from Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev. If Israel withdrew from the Arab lands it had seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Moscow would remove all its military forces from the Middle East, including the thousands of troops and advisers stationed in Egypt since 1970. The exchange would be part of a broader process involving Arab recognition of Israel and superpower guarantees of the resulting peace settlement. Though noncommittal during the meeting, Nixon was impressed by the Soviet offer. The next day, he told his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, that it was a “hell of a concession” and instructed him to follow up on it.

Nothing, however, came of the promised deal. The 1972 presidential campaign season was fast approaching, and Nixon proved unwilling to jeopardize his reelection prospects by incurring the wrath of Israel and its American supporters, the certain outcome of any US effort to achieve a full Israeli withdrawal from Arab territory.

The Gromyko gambit is one of several missed opportunities that Galen Jackson details in his insightful and richly researched new book, A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979. Why, the author asks, did the United States and the Soviet Union fail to cooperate with each other to resolve the geopolitical crisis resulting from Israel’s occupation of Arab territory in 1967? The question becomes all the more pressing in light of the ample evidence that both Washington and Moscow had powerful incentives to pursue a comprehensive Middle East settlement. Indeed, Jackson shows, the superpowers’ formulas for resolving the dispute were, at least on paper, broadly similar.

Jackson’s answer to the conundrum is simple and forceful: the United States was mainly at fault. “US decision makers — although they were tempted at points to respond favorably to Moscow’s proposals — were not interested in working with the Soviets, and instead sought to expel them from the Middle East, with the aim of making unilateral Cold War gains at their expense.” While Jackson also blames domestic politics for stymying US peace efforts, he cautions the reader not to make too much of this dimension. The political clout of pro-Israel Americans was a significant constraint on policymakers, but ultimately “the domestic factor was not decisive.” The real culprit was Americans’ propensity for zero-sum Cold War thinking.

Initially, Jackson notes, the Soviets were less inclined to compromise over the Middle East. In 1969–1970, they supported Egypt’s rejection of the Rogers Plan (named for Secretary of State William Rogers), the Nixon administration’s proposed land-for-peace deal, showing little stomach for urging flexibility on Egypt or other Arab countries.

But from mid-1971 on, Jackson writes, “the Soviets . . . were interested in working with the Americans on a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement” and repeatedly pressured their Arab clients, principally Egypt and Syria, to seek diplomatic rather than military options. Prior to the October War of 1973, which began when those two nations attacked Israeli positions in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, respectively, “the Soviets tried hard to dissuade the Arabs from taking military action,” agreeing to accelerate arms supplies to them only after the Nixon administration failed to reciprocate Cairo’s peace overtures and rebuffed Moscow’s warnings that the Arabs could no longer abide the status quo. Once the war ended, the Soviets attempted, futilely, to join the United States in brokering a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement. They tried and failed again in 1977. Meanwhile, Moscow firmly opposed any Arab talk of “liberating” all of Palestine, insisting that Israel’s creation was irreversible. When, in the aftermath of the October War, the Palestine Liberation Organization began inching toward acceptance of a two-state solution, the Soviet Union enthusiastically endorsed that vision.

Officially, the US State Department favored a comprehensive settlement involving Israel’s withdrawal from nearly all occupied territory in exchange for recognition by and peace with the Arab states. Starting in the late 1970s, the United States also contemplated a measure of political autonomy (though not statehood) for West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. In practice, however, Washington never pushed Israel to conduct the full-scale withdrawals necessary to enact this vision. Instead, Henry Kissinger, who replaced Rogers as secretary of state shortly before the 1973 war, launched a step-by-step peace process after the war that prioritized bilateral accords between Israel and Egypt. These efforts culminated in the Sinai II Agreement of September 1975, whereby Israel relinquished a fraction of the Sinai, and Egypt foreswore future military action against Israel. According to Jackson, Kissinger opted for the bilateral strategy “to prevent the Soviet Union from playing a meaningful role in the peace process,” as probably would have occurred had the United States sought a comprehensive settlement.

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter actively pursued the comprehensive strategy that Kissinger had disdained. But a cascade of mishaps at home and abroad upended Carter’s scheme, and his administration was obliged to resume Kissinger’s old bilateral process, ultimately brokering a formal peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979. Egypt regained the rest of the Sinai, but Israel continued to hold the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and parts of South Lebanon (these last areas occupied after 1978). The conclusion is less obvious in Carter’s case, but here, too, the author sees the triumph of Cold War thinking on the US side.

Jackson recognizes the salience of domestic politics to US Middle East policymaking but ultimately regards them as less decisive than Cold War attitudes. This is a curious stance, for the decisive impact of domestic politics — particularly the ability of pro-Israel Americans to punish US politicians deemed insufficiently supportive of Israel — is something A Lost Peace repeatedly affirms.

Time and again, Jackson inquires into Washington’s failure to pursue a comprehensive settlement that would have served its geopolitical interests, only to arrive at the same answer. Why didn’t the Nixon administration take advantage of Gromyko’s dramatic offer in September 1971? “The main reason that the White House did not move energetically to work out an agreement with Moscow had to do with domestic politics.” Why did the administration of Gerald Ford (who succeeded Nixon in 1974) press on with the step-by-step peace process even though a wide swath of the US foreign policy elite had lost confidence in that approach and wished to seek a comprehensive settlement despite Israel’s bitter opposition to such a course? “Ultimately, the White House chose to back away from a confrontation with Israel and to pursue instead a second Egyptian-Israeli interim deal — which would come to be called Sinai II — primarily for domestic political reasons.” Why did President Carter’s own hopes for a comprehensive settlement come to naught? “In this case, the domestic political argument is persuasive.” In each successive instance, the Nixon, Ford, and Carter White Houses geared up for a dramatic “showdown” with Israel and its American supporters but backed down after considering the political pain that would inevitably ensue.

Jackson acknowledges all this but nonetheless insists that the domestic factor was not as formidable as many assume. “Although it was certainly a significant variable and, as such, merits careful attention in any fair analysis,” he writes, “the domestic political constraint was not insuperable.” The very fact that US leaders contemplated these “showdowns” demonstrates that they realized the situation was not hopeless. Indeed, “the evidence suggests that if the problem [had been] handled the right way — that is, if US officials [had] employed effective tactics and timed their initiatives appropriately — there was a good chance that such a campaign might have succeeded.” In the end, however, the leaders either lacked the necessary political skill, were thrown off course by unforeseen events, or simply chose not to try their luck.

Jackson is surely right to stress the contingent nature of the domestic factor. But shouldn’t this caveat also apply to his other, more favored explanation? It was not inevitable that US leaders would, at all times, ruthlessly press their Cold War advantage. Jackson himself cites several instances in which Nixon, Ford, and especially Carter chose to downplay their nation’s direct rivalry with Moscow for the sake of diplomatic progress in the Middle East. On these occasions, the three leaders perceived that the unresolved nature of the Arab-Israeli dispute was destabilizing the region in ways that imperiled pro–United States Arab regimes and Western access to Middle Eastern oil. They thus concluded (at least for a time) that their nation’s interests were best served by a moderate settlement sponsored and guaranteed by the superpowers. The narrative of A Lost Peace details how US leaders repeatedly gravitated toward, and retreated from, such a scenario. Yet the contingent character of their Cold War thinking is far less prominent in the book’s explanatory framework.

To be sure, there was one US policymaker whose pursuit of direct Cold War advantage actually was fairly relentless: Henry Kissinger. His role reveals the decisive impact of pro-Israel sentiment at home and of Cold War obstreperousness abroad; it also shows how those two qualities could be mutually reinforcing. In early 1973, Nixon was poised to launch a fresh Middle East peace initiative. He had been overwhelmingly reelected the previous November and finally felt free to press the Israelis to be more reasonable. “Every other year,” he told British prime minister Edward Heath in February, “the United States Government were inhibited, by one or [an]other of their Elections, from taking any action in relation to the Middle East which would be unacceptable to Israeli opinion. 1973, however, was a year in which they were free from this particular inhibition.”

Within weeks, though, Nixon was embroiled in the Watergate affair, which quickly depleted his authority at home. Gravely weakened by the scandal, he was in no position to withstand the ferocious domestic outcry that would surely greet any White House effort to put the squeeze on Israel. At the same time, Watergate’s consuming nature made it much harder for Nixon to focus on foreign policy, granting greater leeway to Kissinger’s more thoroughly anti-Soviet inclinations. Although Jackson treats this latter development as the more consequential result of Watergate, the thwarting of Nixon’s planned Middle East initiative also merits special attention. Working together, domestic politics and reflexive anti-Sovietism delivered a “one-two punch” to diplomatic prospects in the region.

Jackson chronicles other instances in which those two factors reinforced each other. After the October War, he writes, a significant obstacle to any US drive for a comprehensive peace agreement was an incipient “domestic backlash against détente. . . . Israel’s supporters — who feared that the development of more cooperative US-USSR relations might lead to the sort of imposed settlement that Nixon favored — became especially critical of the White House’s Soviet policy.” They joined forces with other domestic critics to anathemize the Nixon administration’s dealings with the Soviets. The resulting “decline in détente’s popularity gave US officials a political incentive not to cooperate with Moscow” in the Middle East. Similarly, Jackson notes that one of the most crippling setbacks to Carter’s pursuit of a comprehensive settlement was the “explosive domestic reaction” to the issuing, in October 1977, of a US-Soviet joint statement calling for the reconvening of the Geneva Peace Conference on the Middle East. The outrage emanated “from both Israel’s supporters and Cold War hawks who opposed the reintroduction of the Soviets into the negotiations.” In the overall framing of his argument, Jackson presents domestic politics and Cold War preoccupations as competing explanations. Yet his more detailed treatment suggests that they were often enmeshed with one another.

There is another way in which such either-or framing is not fully satisfying. Frequently, a given policy approach would emerge to the fore less because it was the favored option in an absolute sense than because alternative approaches had lost viability. The best evidence for the claim that the Carter administration succumbed to Cold War thinking comes from the period after Carter tried and failed to launch a comprehensive peace process. The separate Egyptian-Israeli agreement he pursued in its place was antithetical to the Soviets’ own commitment to a comprehensive settlement (and deeply unpopular in the Arab world to boot), and so Moscow felt compelled to denounce it. Consequently, Jackson writes, by 1978, “the United States was again formulating its policy in the Middle East with the Cold War in mind.”

A version of this dynamic had unfolded in the Kissinger years. Kissinger was fixated on thwarting the Soviets at every turn, to a degree that even Nixon sometimes found excessive. Yet this hard-line approach had a self-perpetuating quality. Although the Soviets tried for as long as they could to secure for themselves a role in post–October War diplomacy, Kissinger’s unflagging drive to exclude them eventually drew their opposition — and thus vindicated American narratives about Moscow’s obstructionism.

The upshot of all this was a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli peace process that came to fruition in the Camp David agreements of 1978 and 1979. Carter’s diplomatic triumph not only delayed the quest for a comprehensive settlement but made such a peace immeasurably harder to achieve. Egypt’s neutralization sharply reduced the military pressure on Israel, enabling it to tighten its grip on Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese territories and to ignore international calls for an end to the occupation. It’s a grim legacy that few scholars of US foreign relations, even ones who specialize in Carter’s presidency, appear to grasp. Galen Jackson brings it out with unflinching acuity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Salim Yaqub is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of UCSB's Center for Cold War Studies and International History.

Hiroshima peace park and Pearl Harbor memorial will work together to promote peace

Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor, two symbols of World War II animosity between Japan and the United States, are now promoting peace and friendship through a sister park arrangement

By MARI YAMAGUCHI 

Associated Press

June 29, 2023, 

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, left, and Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui show the documents they signed for a sister park arrangement between the Pearl Harbor National Memorial and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park at the U.S. Embassy T...

The Associated Press

TOKYO -- Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor, two symbols of World War II animosity between Japan and the United States, are now promoting peace and friendship through a sister park arrangement.

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel and Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui signed a sister park agreement on Thursday for Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park and the Pearl Harbor National Memorial of Hawaii.

“Nobody can go to Pearl Harbor, and nobody can go to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and enter the front door, walk out the exit door and be the same person,” Emanuel said at the signing ceremony at the American Embassy in Tokyo.

“I think the hope here is that we inspire people from all over the United States and all over Japan to visit Hiroshima Peace Memorial and to visit Pearl Harbor so they can learn the spirit of reconciliation,” Emanuel said.

Under the sister park arrangement, the two parks will promote exchanges and share experiences in restoring historic structures and landscapes, the use of virtual reality and digital images for preservation and education, and best practices in youth education and tourism management, the embassy said.