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xtruss · 2 months

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War On Gaza: EU Must Sanction Isra-helli Officials Instead of Timidly Saying Please

If the Goal is Truly to Preserve Peace and International Security, Why Are European States Only Targeting the Palestinian Side with Sanctions?

— Chris Jones | 11 March 2024 | Middle East Eye

EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell Speaks in Brussels on 5 March 2024 (John Thys/AFP)

Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, last month said that the Biden administration’s continued provision of arms to Israel, while calling on the Israeli army to prevent civilian deaths in Gaza, is “a little bit contradictory”. Biden and other western leaders should “stop saying please” to the Israeli government and start “doing something”, Borrell added.

Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, accused Borrell of hypocrisy, given that EU member states - including France, Germany and Italy - continue to export arms to Israel.

But while EU member states have a common position on arms exports that is supposed to “prevent the export of military technology and equipment which might be used for internal repression or international aggression or contribute to regional instability”, Borrell has no power to enforce it.

Still, there is a method through which Borrell could apply pressure on Israel’s government - and he has so far failed to use it.

In January, Borrell signed off on a new EU sanctions regime targeting those who provide support for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the two groups responsible for the 7 October attacks. Those sanctioned face travel bans and asset freezes.

The new sanctions regime makes it possible to cast a wider net than existing rules. The European Council described the measures as allowing the EU to target “the sponsors of those who sponsor the two terrorist organisations”. Six individuals were put on the sanctions list when it was announced.

Despite initial reports of reluctance from the EU to introduce a new sanctions regime, the move was unsurprising. The use of sanctions has grown enormously over the last two decades, as states have sought new ways to advance foreign policy objectives.

The new regime follows the adoption of similar measures by the UK and US, and comes on the back of proposals from France, Germany and Italy for sanctions targeting Hamas.

'Decisive Steps'

Whether the new sanctions regime will be effective remains to be seen; the military wing of Hamas has been on the EU’s terrorist sanctions list since 2001, and its political wing since 2003. But what is most striking about the new sanctions is how they highlight the EU’s desire to condemn and punish some human rights violations, while ignoring - or even supporting - others.

Borrell said the new framework “shows that we are ready to take decisive steps to react to the brutality shown by terrorists on October 7. Israelis and Palestinians deserve to live in a just, lasting, and secure peace.” The European Council cited “the need to fight against violent actions that threaten peace and international security”.

This begs the question: why have no such measures been put in place against the Israeli government?

An indiscriminate bombing campaign and subsequent ground invasion of Gaza has killed, injured or left missing more than 100,000 Palestinians. Hundreds of children have lost a limb. Almost two million people have been displaced. Tens of thousands of buildings have been destroyed, and huge tracts of the territory have been left uninhabitable.

“If The EU 🇪🇺 and Its Member States Genuinely Want to 'Bring About a Change in Bad or Harmful Policies', They Must Do More Than Simply Ask the Isra-helli Government to Stop.”

Israeli government officials have made numerous statements that were used to demonstrate genocidal intent by the South African government in its case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The European Commission has said that Israel “must comply” with the ICJ’s preliminary ruling, although it was unclear how the EU would seek to enforce that, beyond polite requests.

The EU has no compunctions about sanctioning government officials or their allies. It currently has sanctions in place against Venezuelan, Russian and Iranian officials, among others. The bloc says it introduces sanctions with the aims of “promoting international peace and security; preventing conflicts; supporting democracy, the rule of law and human rights; and defending the principles of international law”.

It says its sanctions are “not punitive”, but rather aim “to bring about a change in bad or harmful policies or activities by targeting the non-EU countries, including organisations and individuals, responsible”.

Mealy-Mouthed Statements

It is evident that the Israeli government is pursuing policies and activities that are both “bad” and “harmful”. Indeed, the situation is so bad that the ICJ has found the government’s actions to be plausibly meeting the definition of genocide.

There is an evident need for change, and it appears unlikely that any such change will come from within Israel itself. There is still substantial domestic support for the war on Gaza, and the country’s government shows no signs of changing course. With none of Israel’s international allies putting meaningful pressure upon it to do so, why would it?

There is currently little to no incentive for Israel to halt the war, let alone even to consider ending the occupation, or pursue negotiations for meaningful, long-term peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.

If sanctions are required against Hamas to ensure peace and stability in the region, how is it that the same analysis does not apply to Israeli government officials who have ordered, directed and cheered on a military assault that leaves the prospects for peace buried under the same rubble as Palestinian children and their families?

It is utterly nonsensical and profoundly hypocritical for the EU, its member states, or any other government to continue talking about the need for peace and a two-state solution without taking any steps - beyond the occasional mealy-mouthed statements calling for restraint - to effect change.

It is often said that actions speak louder than words. In international politics, interests speak louder than principles. If the EU and its member states genuinely want to “bring about a change in bad or harmful policies”, they must do more than simply ask the Israeli government to stop. As Borrell himself put it: stop saying please and start doing something.

— Chris Jones is the Director of Statewatch, a Non-Profit Organization that Produces and Promotes Critical Research, Policy Analysis and Investigative Journalism to inform Debates, Movements and Campaigns on Civil liberties, Human Rights and Democratic Standards. He is writing here in a Personal Capacity.

#Middle East Eye 👁️#Chris Jones #War on Gaza #European Union 🇪🇺#Sanctions | Isra-helli War Criminals #Stop ✋ 🛑 | Saying Please 🙏#EU 🇪🇺 Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell #Decisive Steps #Mealy-Mouthed Statements

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sayruq · 19 days

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The Erez border crossing, which connects Israel with northern Gaza, remains closed and no humanitarian aid has been allowed to enter the Strip through it, according to Juliette Touma, director of communications for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), speaking to EL PAÍS from Jordan. Touma stresses that the announcement last Thursday by the Israeli authorities that they would reopen the crossing remains only “a promise.” The Israeli government implicitly confirmed the information to this newspaper. Supplies to alleviate the plight of Gaza’s population have also not yet begun arrive via the nearby port of Ashdod, 30 kilometers (18 miles) north of the enclave. These two concessions were the main commitments made by the Israeli War Cabinet following a telephone call between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden.

This Indian Express article goes into detail about the volume of humanitarian aid entering Gaza

Israel says aid is moving into Gaza more quickly after international pressure to increase access, but the amount is disputed and the United Nations says it is still much less than the bare minimum to meet humanitarian needs. Israel said 419 trucks – the highest since the conflict began – entered on Monday, though the Red Crescent and United Nations gave much lower figures, with the UN saying many were only half full because of Israeli inspection rules.

Aid agencies have complained that Israel is not ensuring enough access for food, medicine and other needed humanitarian supplies and the European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has accused it of using starvation as a weapon of war. UN humanitarian agency (OCHA) spokesperson Jens Laerke also pointed to severe restrictions on delivery of aid inside Gaza itself last month, saying Israel had denied permission for half the convoys it tried sending to the north in March, with UN aid convoys three times more likely to be refused than any other.

An increase in aid flows into Gaza over recent days has also been noted by Red Crescent officials in Egypt, who said more than 350 trucks had crossed from there into Gaza on Monday and 258 on Sunday. That was much more than in recent weeks, when the number was usually fewer than 200, they said. However UNRWA, the main United Nations agency in Gaza, said 223 trucks had entered on Monday, fewer than half the 500 trucks it says are required daily.In its daily situation report on Tuesday, UNRWA said “there has been no significant change in the volume of humanitarian supplies entering Gaza or improved access to the north”.

#yemen #jerusalem #tel aviv #current events #palestine #free palestine #gaza #free gaza #news on gaza #palestine news #news update #war news #war on gaza #famine #gaza genocide #genocide #genocide joe #joe biden

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i-am-aprl · 3 months

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“How many times have you heard the most prominent leaders and foreign ministers around the world saying too many people are being killed?” European Union foreign policy chief @josep_borrell_f asked.

The chief EU diplomat slammed an order by Netanyahu that the +1 million Palestinians sheltering in #Rafah need to be “evacuated” ahead of a planned Israeli military operation there.

He also plainly told allies of #Israel, primarily Biden, to stop sending it weapons as “too many people” are being “indiscriminately” and “disproportionately” killed in #Gaza.

The EU finally has the foreign policy leader it should. But because of how bureaucratic it is, he basically has no power.

Still we should seek solace in the fact that there are a few leaders who are saying the obvious out loud.

#eu parliament #palestine #free palestine #jerusalem #free gaza #فلسطين #israel #gaza #i stand with palestine #israel is a terrorist state

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phoenixyfriend · 3 months

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That one post about great domestic policy and HORRIFIC foreign policy just does not stop being true

Domestic Policy Win: The American Museum of Natural History in NYC is closing down two entire exhibits of Native American belongings in order to comply with a federal order that requires museums to obtain the consent of indigenous nations in order to display artifacts of native origin. The linked ProPublica article specifies that the exhibits in question are the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains Halls. To quote:

The new federal regulations, which went into effect this month, prohibit the display of items subject to NAGPRA without tribal consent and ban all research done without tribal consent. In addition, the regulations closed a loophole that had allowed museums such as the American Museum of Natural History to keep ancestral remains and burial items by claiming that they are “culturally unidentifiable” — meaning in their view they could not be connected to present-day Indigenous communities based on available evidence — and therefore could not readily be returned to tribes.

Foreign Policy Fail: The United States, the UK, and several other nations, in response to claims that several members of UNRWA were involved in the Oct. 7th attacks, have cut funding to the relief agency in question. The Al Jazeera article profiles the Palestinian response, and also specifies that this funding was pulled after the UNRWA launched an investigation in response to Israel's allegations that 12 members of the relief agency were involved.

Australia, Canada, Italy and the United States said they would halt funding to the agency, while European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the 27-member bloc would “assess further steps and draw lessons based on the result of the full and comprehensive investigation”. Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom then also joined the list of countries pausing financial aid to the UN agency, whose facilities where displaced Palestinians sought shelter have been repeatedly attacked in Israeli air raids. Ireland and Norway, however, expressed continued support for UNRWA, saying the agency does crucial work to help Palestinians displaced and in desperate need of assistance in Gaza. - Al Jazeera

"One million displaced people are currently taking refuge in and around UNRWA buildings. They are the ones who will suffer as a result of this decision," said Mr Gunness, adding: "The curtailing of UNRWA services will also destabilise the region at a time when Western governments are trying to contain a regional conflagration." [...] The US, Germany and the EU are among some of UNRWA's biggest donors. - BBC

Unfortunately, the WSJ article is paywalled, so I can't access the full thing for a quote.

Anyway. Call your reps. I'm not even talking to just the Americans this time, call your fucking reps. If they aren't donating to UNRWA, then make them do something. Is the organization possibly a security risk, and the concerns legitimate? Maybe! But you cannot cut the funding that is keeping 2.3mill people alive on an already shoestring budget and not immediately put a backup security net in place.

Until then, pick a charity with a good rating, donate and signal boost it, and politely harass your politicians.

Politely as in "don't shout at or cuss out the staffers that man the phone lines," because they are not your reps, but also because your number is going to get blocked and then you won't be able to pressure them in the future. Do be firm, though.

I'm personally picking the PCRF this time, since one of the three remaining hospitals in south Gaza has been evacuated and shut down, and the evacuees reportedly include women who just got C-sections, which means the evacuees also include newborns, and medical care is in high demand. They're also currently focused on providing clean drinking water to the people of Palestine. That said, so is food, and shelter, and winter clothing. Pick a need, find a charity, and toss them some money.

#yes this was mostly my way of guiding people to charity sites again. and pushing you to push your reps #current events #united states #indigenous peoples #palestine #israel #gaza #death tw

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iberiancadre · 16 days

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I want to preface this question by saying that it is in genuine good faith, I am a communist exploring the issues they have with the various branches and not trying to stir the pot, and you seem pretty thoughtful and clear-headed so I hope you don't mind my asking.

To be direct - what do MLs make of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the following Soviet-Nazi Commerical Agreements?

Naturally I recognise that a lot of what's said in the West about the USSR is propaganda, and I absolutely recognise & respect Lenin's leadership, but I really don't see a way around the fact that Stalin sold oil to Hitler, and as the descendent of a Ukrainian Jew who fled the famine and crossed the continent to escape the rising tide of violent anti-Semitism I don't feel that I could, in good conscience, ally myself with people who support a leader that had any sort of positive relations with the Nazis, no matter how MLs otherwise do have strong merits.

Omg a good-faith question on Stalin and the Holodomor, I feel honored, thanks for you calmness, anon. Everything you've asked I've already made a post about it, or a far more informed tumblr comrade has made a post about it, so I'll just link/quote those ^^

Molotov-Ribbentrop:

(I wanted to put the text of the post here in an indent but it's not letting me post it with it so.)

Personally I'm not as informed on the commercial agreements as I am regarding the pact, so I will not say much in detail except that, knowing the foreign policy of the USSR at this time, it was probably wagered that the trade would have benefited the USSR more than it did Germany. Of course, there are many things to criticize about their foreign policy without having to resort to meaningless handwringing about "totalitarianism" and horseshoe theory. It is doubtless that, in the time of peace when the trades happened (assuming it is a simple as the USSR just selling oil to Germany), this helped fuel their conquest and oppression. It is also doubtless that the benefit it brought to the USSR contributed to their eventual victory.

Before talking about the Holodomor, a quick quote on anti-semitism in the USSR pre-WW2:

It was German practice as they entered Soviet territories to encourage the local populace to engage in pogroms against the Jews as a first stage in their genocidal policy. They had some success in those areas which had become part of the Soviet Union since 1939 but in the Soviet Union proper there was no evidence of spontaneous anti-Semitism. A Jewish historian commentated that “In Byelorussia, a conspicuous difference is evidenced between the old Soviet part of the region and the area which had previously belonged to Poland and was under Soviet rule from September 1939 to June 1941. Nazi and anti-Jewish propaganda drew a weak response in the former Soviet Byelorussia: we encounter complaints in Nazi documents that, ‘it is extremely hard to incite the local populace to pogroms because of the backwardness of the Byelorussian peasants with regard to racial consciousness.’” Another view of the cause of the racial attitudes in Byelorussia was given in a secret memorandum by a collaborator to the chief of the German army in August 1942. He wrote: “There is no Jewish problem for the Byelorussian people. For them, this is purely a German matter. This derives from Soviet education which has negated racial difference … The Byelorussians sympathize with, and have compassion for the Jews, and regard the Germans as barbarians and the hangman of the Jew, whom they consider human beings equal to themselves …”

The Russians are Coming: The Politics of Anti-Sovietism, by V. L. Allen

The USSR managed like no other European country to so effectively suppress antisemitism in an region that just 30 or 40 years prior was witness to pogroms.

The Holodomor: (This is a reblog and not the original post because OP is deactivated).

This is I think a good summary of my beliefs and it's well sourced. Basically, it wasn't a genocide, but a famine which was part of a long historical cycle of famines in the general region. It didn't just affect Ukrainians, and almost just as many Russians died in the famine than did Ukrainians. Moscow was particularly affected by this. It is also of note that it was the last famine that happened in the region. This is a similar accusation to the famine in the years of the Great Leap Forward in China, which was also the last famine in a more than a 1000 year cycle of famines in China. Weird how in both of these DotPs, a cyclical famine happened, it was also the end of the cycle, but capitalists assign it the category of genocide just this once. Nevermind the very targeted and constant global famine which, through the unequal distribution of resources, kills 9 million people each year, almost exclusively in imperialized countries whose wealth is syphoned to the imperial core. Mind you, this is not saying that the famines discussed were less bad because capitalists worldwide and throughout history have killed more people and continue to do so. This is just to point out the very obvious double standard when it comes to labeling famines as genocides.

#real marxist hours

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mariacallous · 1 month

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RUSSELS (AP) — The European Union is pressing ahead with a plan to use the profits generated from billions of euros of Russian assets frozen in Europe to help provide weapons and other funds for Ukraine, a senior official said Tuesday.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell got a green light for the plan from most of the bloc’s foreign ministers this week, and he hopes that EU leaders will endorse it at a summit in Brussels starting on Thursday. The move comes as Ukraine runs dangerously low on munitions, and U.S. efforts to get new funds for weapons have stalled in Congress.

The 27-nation EU is holding around 200 billion euros ($217 billion) in Russian central bank assets, most of it frozen in Belgium, in retaliation for Moscow’s war against Ukraine. The bloc estimates that the interest on that money could provide around 3 billion euros ($3.3 billion) each year.

“The Russians will not be very happy. The amount of money, 3 billion per year, is not extraordinary, but it is not negligible,” Borrell told reporters.

A small group of member countries, notably Hungary, refuse to supply weapons to Ukraine, so these windfall profits would be divided up. Around 90% of the money would be put into a special fund that many EU countries already use to get reimbursed for arms and ammunition they send.

The other 10% would be put into the EU budget to help bolster Ukraine’s defense industry. Countries that object to sending weapons could then claim that they are not arming the country, Borrell said.

The EU budget can’t be used to buy arms, under current expert interpretations of the bloc’s treaties, but the special fund — known as the European Peace Facility — runs off-budget and doesn’t have to respect the same legal standards or be approved by the European Parliament.

The European Central Bank, or ECB, has warned in the past against seizing Russian assets as this could undermine confidence in the euro currency and EU markets. But Borrell said that no assets would be taken, only the windfall profits they make. He added that the ECB has been consulted on the plan.

Some EU leaders, including Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, have said that they want to use the windfall profits to fund Ukraine’s reconstruction, but Borrell said he believes that “the best thing is to avoid that anything is destroyed” in the first place.

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beardedmrbean · 3 months

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UNRWA fires staff accused of role in Israel attacks, launches probe

The United Nations aid agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) has fired several employees following allegations they were involved in the deadly terror attacks by Hamas militants in southern Israel.

"The Israeli authorities have provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several UNRWA employees in the horrific attacks on Israel on October 7," said Philippe Lazzarini, the agency's head.

"To protect the agency's ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay," he said.

Lazzarini again condemned the October 7 attacks, in which Hamas, classified by multiple countries as a terrorist organization, killed about 1,200 people and took around 250 hostages.

UNRWA, which provides education, medical care and welfare services to hundreds of thousands of Gaza's 2.3 million people, has tens of thousands of employees.

"Anyone who betrays the fundamental values of the United Nations also betrays those whom we serve in Gaza, across the region and elsewhere around the world," said Lazzarini.

US pauses UNRWA funding amid Hamas attacks involvement probe

The US government has temporarily suspended additional funding to the United Nations' agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), after the agency said it had terminated the contracts of several employees accused of playing a role in the deadly October 7 attacks against Israel.

The US State Department said it was "extremely troubled" by the allegations, which the UNRWA said it was investigating.

"The Department of State has temporarily paused additional funding for UNRWA while we review these allegations and the steps the United Nations is taking to address them," said spokesperson Matthew Miller.

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has said the bloc would "assess further steps and draw lessons based on the result of the full and comprehensive investigation."

#nunyas news #probably end in similar way as the wfp thing #big fat nothing

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justforbooks · 5 months

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Henry Kissinger, who has died at the age of 100, was the most controversial US foreign policy practitioner of the last half-century, the architect of American detente with the Soviet Union, the orchestrator of Washington’s opening to communist China, the broker of the first peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, and the man who led the US team in the protracted talks with North Vietnam which resulted in US forces leaving Indochina after America’s longest foreign war.

Feted for these accomplishments as national security adviser and later secretary of state under Richard Nixon, Kissinger achieved global celebrity status and in 1973 was awarded the Nobel peace prize. But it later emerged via leaked documents and tapes and former officials’ memoirs that behind his diplomatic skills and tireless energy as a negotiator there lurked an inordinate love of secrecy and manipulation and a ruthless desire to protect US national and corporate interests at any price. His contempt for human rights prompted him to ask the FBI to tap his own staff’s telephones and, more seriously, to give the nod to Indonesia’s military dictator for the invasion of East Timor, to condone the actions of the apartheid regime in South Africa in invading Angola, and to use the CIA to help topple the elected government of Chile.

A formidable academic before he worked for the government, Kissinger reached greater heights of political influence than any previous immigrant to the US. His nasal German accent never left him, an eternal reminder to his adopted countrymen that he was a European by origin. To Kissinger himself, the fact that a man born outside the US, and a Jew to boot, could become its secretary of state was a never-ending source of pride.

Although Kissinger was often seen as a supreme believer in a world order based on realpolitik and a balance of power, at heart he was ultra-loyal to the individualistic American ideal. In love with his adopted country, he was infused with a missionary zeal to maintain American hegemony in a shifting world.

Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born to a comfortable, middle-class family in Fürth in Bavaria. His father, Louis, was a teacher, his mother, Paula (nee Stern), a housewife. As a boy, he was old enough to comprehend the collapse of their domestic stability when the Nazis came to power. He and his younger brother were beaten up on the way to school, and eventually expelled. His father lost his job. The family emigrated to New York in 1938.

Kissinger rarely discussed his refugee past, and once told an interviewer to reject any psychoanalytical link between his views and his childhood, but some observers argued that his personal experience of nazism led to his horror of revolutionary changes as well as to the underlying pessimism of his analysis of world affairs.

After George Washington high school in Manhattan, his accountancy course at the City College of New York was interrupted in 1943 when he was conscripted. He was with the US army in Germany for the Nazi surrender and the first months of occupation. He won a bronze star for his role in capturing Gestapo officers and saboteurs in Hanover. In 1946 he went to Harvard, where he stayed intermittently for the next quarter of a century. He received his PhD in 1954 with a study of the 19th-century European conservatives Metternich and Castlereagh, which he turned into a book entitled A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-1822 (1957).

His subsequent studies led him to become a specialist on nuclear weapons, who caught the eye of Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York and a bastion of east coast liberal Republicanism. Kissinger’s desire for influence on policy was already leading him to spend time in Washington, and he combined his academic work with consultancies for various government departments and agencies, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council under Dwight Eisenhower.

Kissinger’s patron, Rockefeller, failed to make much headway in the presidential campaigns of 1960 and 1964, but after Nixon won the presidency for the Republicans in 1968, Kissinger was appointed national security adviser, with an office in the White House. His intellectual drive, as well as geographical closeness to the president, allowed him to turn what had previously been a backroom job into a high-profile, decision-making post.

Kissinger knew that access is power, and that the relationship goes both ways. Having the ear of the president gave him the ear of a competitive, news-hungry Washington press corps which admired his charm and brilliance and eagerly printed a generous amount of his on-the-record comments while finding ways to divulge unattributably the confidential titbits and insider gossip that he loved to drop.

A battle developed between Kissinger and the secretary of state, William Rogers, the nominal architect of US foreign policy, during Nixon’s first term. Kissinger won it easily. Rogers was excluded not only from the administration’s central concerns – Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China – but even the Middle East, the one area where he achieved some praise in 1970 with the so-called Rogers plan. The plan was a US effort to impose a settlement between Egypt and Israel with the backing of the Soviet Union. Israel rejected it while Kissinger felt that the goal of US policy in the region, as indeed throughout the developing world, should be to reduce the Kremlin’s influence rather than give Moscow equal status.

When Rogers eventually resigned a few months after the start of Nixon’s second term, Kissinger got the job he coveted most. Four years of private advice and back-channel negotiating were to be crowned by formal acceptance as Washington’s senior international representative and America’s major speechmaker on foreign affairs. Kissinger had already scored the two biggest coups of his career, proving that he was more than just an academic consultant and bureaucratic in-fighter, but a cunning negotiator. He ran the secret diplomacy which culminated in July 1971 with the stunning announcement that Nixon was to go to China to meet Mao Zedong the following year. He also led the negotiations in Paris with Hanoi for the peace treaty that sealed the departure of American troops from Vietnam. For the second of these feats, he shared the Nobel peace prize with Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese negotiator, though the latter refused to accept it.

The award aroused a huge controversy since it coincided with revelations that Kissinger had supported Nixon’s decisions to mount a secret campaign of bombing Cambodia in 1969. Cambodia had long been used by North Vietnamese troops for bases and supply depots, but Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, resisted pleas from the joint chiefs of staff to bomb them. The country was officially neutral and its leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was desperately trying not to take sides.

But the Nixon administration wanted to send a strong message to North Vietnam that the new president would be tougher than Johnson. Tapes of White House conversations (the Watergate tapes) revealed that Nixon called it the “madman theory” – “I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war,” he told his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman. Kissinger endorsed the concept, though he preferred to put it in more academic language by arguing that US policy must always retain an element of unpredictability.

In March 1969 Nixon and Kissinger ignored the reluctance of Rogers and launched waves of B52s on carpet-bombing missions over Cambodia, as they had already done in Vietnam. The raids went on for 14 months, although officially the administration pretended the targets were all in South Vietnam. Initially, Kissinger did not even want the pilots to know they were striking Cambodia, but he was advised that they would soon find out and be more likely to leak the information unless sworn to secrecy ahead of the raids.

The bombing remained secret in Washington for an astonishing four years, becoming public only when a military whistleblower wrote to Senator William Proxmire, a prominent critic of the Vietnam war, and urged him to investigate. In Cambodia the campaign led to an estimated 700,000 deaths as well as 2 million people being forced to flee their homes. It also led a pro-US army general, Lon Nol, to seize power from Sihanouk in 1970 and align the country with the US. The bombing and the coup fuelled popular unrest, added to the strength of Cambodia’s communist guerrillas, the Khmer Rouge, and paved their way to power in 1975.

The Paris peace talks on Vietnam also coincided with an escalation of US bombing in Vietnam itself. At the height of the negotiations at the end of 1972, Nixon and Kissinger took the war to new heights with the “Christmas bombing” campaign, comprising targets across North Vietnam. It enraged the US peace movement and provoked a huge wave of new protests and draft-card burning by conscripts. Kissinger’s aim was not so much to intimidate Hanoi as to persuade Washington’s ally, South Vietnam’s president Nguyen Van Thieu, to accept the accords which the US was making with the North. The bombing was meant to assure him that if there were any North Vietnamese violations after the accords came into effect, they would be met with all-out American force.

Kissinger was aware that the Paris deal was flawed, and might well lead to Thieu’s replacement by a communist government. His goal was merely to win a “decent interval” between the pull-out of US troops and the inevitable collapse of the regime in Saigon so that the US could escape any perception of defeat. The phrase “decent interval” appeared in the briefing papers for Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing in 1971 that were later declassified. They show he told the Chinese that this was US strategy in Vietnam. A year later he informed China’s prime minister, Zhou Enlai: “If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina.”

When the North Vietnamese army and its southern allies, the Vietcong, stormed into Saigon in April 1975, forcing the US ambassador into a humiliating helicopter escape, the image was clearly one of defeat, in spite of the two-year interval since the departure of most US troops. But Kissinger blamed Congress, claiming it had undermined the peace deal by refusing to finance new arms shipments to Thieu. This was a favourite refrain. He continually attacked Congress for interfering in foreign policy, apparently never recognising the value of democratic checks on strong executive power.

Turning his skills to the Middle East, Kissinger gave birth to the concept of shuttle diplomacy, a term first used to the press by his close aide Joe Sisco. He flew between Jerusalem and Cairo during the October 1973 war to hammer out a ceasefire after the Israelis had sent their troops across the Suez canal and come close to the Egyptian capital. He later secured Israel’s withdrawal back across the canal, and shuttled to and from Damascus to make a deal with Syria for the Israelis to withdraw from a small part of the Golan Heights.

Behind all three issues lay the Americans’ competition with the Soviet Union, then at the height of its international power. The US opening to China was designed to wrong-foot the Russians by turning what they thought was an evolving, bilateral relationship of parity and mutual respect with Washington into an unnerving triangle which seemed to ally China and the US against them. Kissinger hoped to exploit the two communist powers’ rivalry to persuade both of them to abandon the Vietnamese, thus making it easier for the US to win the peace, if not the war. So he threatened Moscow and Peking (now Beijing) with the argument that they would lose the benefits of dialogue and trade with Washington if they did not stop their arms supplies to Hanoi.

In the Middle East, Kissinger’s aim was to exclude the Russians, who had been longtime allies of Egypt and Syria. By extracting concessions from Israel and brokering a ceasefire in the 1973 war, Kissinger persuaded Cairo and Damascus that only the US could achieve movement from the Israelis, thanks to its unique influence. A year before the war, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, had shown his distrust of Moscow by asking thousands of Russian advisers to leave Egypt. The move was meant as a signal to Washington that Egypt preferred good relations with the US, provided Washington put pressure on Israel. Kissinger missed the signal and did nothing until Sadat, in desperation, launched his attack on Israel in October 1973.

Kissinger’s strategy of detente with the Soviet Union was also designed to reduce Moscow’s room for manoeuvre. Although rightwing Republicans criticised it as appeasement, he argued that Washington should not just contain the Soviet Union, as previous American administrations had sought to do. The US should tame it by giving it a stake in the status quo. Instead of going for ad hoc deals with the Kremlin, Kissinger was the first senior American to try to establish a complex of agreements with a range of penalties and rewards for bad and good behaviour. This, he argued, would limit Soviet adventurism. Sometimes he called it a network, at other times a web, but in both cases the aim was to provide the Soviet Union with benefits from expanded trade, investment and political consultation with Washington.

The strategy failed to produce a new world order because Kissinger was not willing to abandon adventurism on the American side. In the developing world, in particular, Kissinger pursued policies of confrontation with Moscow, often based on faulty analysis of what the Russians were doing or exaggerated claims of the extent of their influence. The successful US effort to overthrow the elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in 1973 fitted into the long US history of intervening in Latin America against leftwing governments that nationalised US corporations (in this case, the big copper companies). But Kissinger also disliked Allende’s closeness to Moscow’s ally, Cuba. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” he commented.

By 1974 Kissinger’s boss was being engulfed by the Watergate scandal. Although Kissinger was involved in secretly taping his own staff, he was not connected to Nixon’s decision to burgle the headquarters of the Democratic party at the Watergate apartment complex in 1972 and then cover up the truth – the charges that brought the president down. In spite of the scandal – or perhaps because of it – Nixon’s relationship with Kissinger remained close, in large part because the beleaguered president saw Kissinger as his best ally in foreign policy, the area where Nixon felt that he had been most successful. He wanted Kissinger to be the man to preserve his legacy.

In his memoirs, Kissinger described how Nixon virtually clung to him during his last hours in the White House in August 1974. The disgraced president asked him to pray beside him in the Lincoln bedroom for half an hour. “Nixon’s recollection is that he invited me to kneel with him and that I did so. My own recollection is less clear on whether I actually knelt. It is a trivial distinction. In whatever posture, I was filled with a deep sense of awe,” Kissinger wrote.

Although Kissinger was not charged over Watergate, his image nonetheless became tarnished. Damaged by revelations of the secret bombing of Cambodia, the favourable media bubble burst. Kissinger’s path from miracle worker to being perceived as a cynical trickster proved short. If Nixon was a serial liar on the domestic stage, Kissinger was seen as a similar villain on the international one. Nevertheless the next president, Gerald Ford, who had limited foreign experience, kept Kissinger on as secretary of state as a symbol of continuity. But Kissinger’s star was in decline. He tried to change his focus by shifting his attention to Africa, which he had ignored until then.

His results were far from positive. He may well have set back the fall of apartheid by several years by approving the involvement of the CIA in the Angolan civil war and giving the nod to South Africa’s invasion in 1975 as the Portuguese withdrew from their erstwhile colony and granted it independence. The South African intervention prompted Cuba to send hundreds of troops to support the Angolan government, thereby launching one of the bloodiest “proxy wars” between the superpowers.

When the Republicans lost the White House to the Democrats under Jimmy Carter in 1976, Kissinger’s time was up. He spent the next decades as a consultant to multinational corporations, and speaking on the international lecture circuit. In 1982 he founded his own firm, Kissinger Associates.

Although he had brief hopes of a comeback when Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election, the new president and his men did not feel comfortable with Kissinger’s image or the strength of his personality. His public persona of pragmatism did not fit their crusading ideology of anti-communism and their constant claims of Soviet expansionism. They were from the school which felt his contacts with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, during the period of detente, had smacked of appeasement.

The charge was absurd. It reflected the difference between subtlety and simplicity, as I discovered at one of the occasional deep-background “non-lunches” which Kissinger gave for representatives of European newspapers. Europe was never a high priority for Kissinger, in large part because it was not a region of US-Soviet competition. He favoured a strong and united western Europe so as to keep Germany in check, hence his much-quoted comment: “If I want to call Europe, who do I call?”

But he seemed to like meeting European correspondents, flattering us with the sense that we asked deeper questions than our American colleagues. At one such lunch, I was staggered by Kissinger’s emotional outburst when someone delicately raised the appeasement charge that rightwing senators were making. “Do you really think a man who stopped Allende wouldn’t want to stop Brezhnev?” he retorted.

If ever there was an American super-patriot, it was Kissinger. As a European intellectual, he knew better than his adopted compatriots how to run an empire. The bedrock of his policies was fear of a resurgent, “unanchored” Germany, a firm desire to keep western Europe closely tied to the US, and a fierce determination to outwit the Soviet Union and maintain American dominance, if necessary through the use of military might. It was no surprise that in his 80s, long after the Soviet Union had collapsed, he became a close consultant of George W Bush, supporting his invasion of Iraq.

Kissinger’s private life was a tempestuous subject in the Washington gossip columns, at least in the interval between his two marriages, which happened to coincide with his years at the apex of power. His first, to Ann Fleischer, with whom he had two children, Elizabeth and David, ended in divorce in 1964. Ten years later, he married Nancy Maginnes, one of his former researchers. She and his children survive him.

🔔 Henry Alfred Kissinger, statesman, born 27 May 1923; died 29 November 2023.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Henri Kissinger #in memoriam

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eretzyisrael · 7 months

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by Jacob Magid

A senior European source tells The Times of Israel that the decision announced earlier today by European Union Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi to immediately sever all EU aid to the Palestinians will not be implemented, due to opposition from member states.

Varhelyi is a diplomat from Hungary, which takes a much more hawkish approach toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than many of the 27 other members of the EU.

The senior European source speculates that Varhelyi’s decision will be walked back tomorrow when the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borell meets with European foreign ministers.

#european union #oliver varhelyi #aid to palestinians

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timesofocean · 2 years

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G7 calls on Taliban to stop restricting women's rights

New Post has been published on https://www.timesofocean.com/g7-calls-on-taliban-to-stop-restricting-womens-rights/

G7 calls on Taliban to stop restricting women's rights

Paris (The Times Groupe)- The Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers said on Thursday that the Taliban’s increasing restrictions on women and girls’ rights in Afghanistan are isolating the country.

“These measures further isolate the Taliban from the international community,” said the G7 foreign ministers and European Union foreign policy chief.

French officials urged the Taliban to take immediate action to lift restrictions on women and girls, and to respect their human rights, in a joint statement.

In another step toward their past hardline rule, the Taliban, who swept back to power after the Afghan government collapsed last year, ordered women to cover their faces in public on Saturday.

#Afghan government #afghan news #afghanistan news #European Union foreign policy chief #G7 foreign ministers #girls' rights in Afghanistan #Group of Seven (G7)#hardline rule #human rights in Afghanistan #human rights in middle east #islam in afghanistan #Paris #Taliban #The Times Groupe #Times #Times Of Ocean #Unravel News #women's rights in afghanistan #World

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zvaigzdelasas · 9 months

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The European Union has cut off financial support to Niger and the United States has threatened to do the same after military leaders this week announced they had overthrown the democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum. Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world, receiving close to $2 billion a year in official development assistance, according to the World Bank.[...]

“In addition to the immediate cessation of budget support, all cooperation actions in the domain of security are suspended indefinitely with immediate effect,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement. Niger is a key partner of the European Union in helping [reduce emigration] of irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. The EU also has a small number of troops in Niger for a military training mission.

The EU allocated 503 million euros ($554 million) from its budget to improve governance, education and sustainable growth in Niger over 2021-2024, according to its website. The United States has two military bases in Niger with some 1,100 soldiers, and also provides hundreds of millions of dollars to the country in security and development aid.[...]

It is unclear how much support the military junta has among Niger’s population. Some crowds came out in support of [ousted president] Bazoum on Wednesday, but the following day coup supporters also took to the streets.

29 Jul 23

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xtruss · 7 months

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EU Foreign Policy Chief Calls Evacuating 1 Million People From Northern Gaza ‘Impossible’, Two-State Solution ‘Only Long-Term Solution’ to the Crisis

— Chen Qingqing and Bai Yunyi | October 14, 2023

EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell talks with Chinese and Foreign Journalists in Beijing on October 14, 2023. Photo: Chen Qingqing/Global Times

After Israel's military ordered about 1 million people in northern Gaza to evacuate to the southern part of the region within 24 hours, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called it “something impossible.” The escalating conflict in the Middle East was crucial part of discussions with his Chinese counterpart in Beijing, and the two sides agreed that a two-state solution is the only long-term solution to the issue, he said.

“We are facing critical moments in Gaza,” Borrell told in a press conference in Beijing on Saturday. Although the two--state solution cannot be achieved for tomorrow, but this is the only solution that can be implemented, and we believe that we have to work in trying to build on this solution, he noted.

Israel’s military has ordered about 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to evacuate to the south of the territory ahead of an expected ground invasion, the Guardian reported on Saturday. Hamas urged people to stay in place and defy the Israeli military order to evacuate.

Tens of thousands of people in Gaza are believed to have fled their homes and moved south following Israel’s warning, according to estimates by the UN humanitarian office OCHA, the media report said.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that he “rejects the forced displacement” of Palestinians from Gaza, following Israel’s order, the Aljazeera reported on Friday.

Abbas also said that humanitarian corridors must be allowed in the blockaded coastal enclave immediately to prevent a humanitarian disaster, the media report said.

Borrell met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who is also a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, on Friday, and they co-chaired the 12th China-EU High-Level Strategic Dialogue in Beijing. (超链接：https://enapp.globaltimes.cn/#/article/1299829 )

The Way the US Handles the Palestinian-Isra-helli Conflict Shows Lack of Wisdom and Courage

“Certainly, we discuss about the situation there [in Gaza],” Borrell said, noting that he agrees with the Secretary General of the UN that asking 1 million people to leave within 24 hours is something that could not be done.

“You cannot move such a volume of people in short period of time, especially there is no shelters neither transportation means,” he said.

The position is clear is that we certainly defend the rights of Israel to defend itself within the fact that it has been suffering. But as anyway, it has limit, Borrell said. “This limit is international law.”

In addressing his meeting with the Wang Yi, Borrell said despite of differences, we believe that “there is still a space for cooperation and most important challenges that the world is facing cannot be solved without a strong engagement with China.”

A most important and crucial part of our discussion was the situation in the Middle East, and we certainly agree that the only long-term solution to this crisis is to work on the solution for the two states, Borrell said.

The two-state solution must be fully implemented for the Middle East region to achieve true peace, and for Israel to attain lasting security, Wang said on Friday as he exchanged views on the escalating Palestine-Israel conflicts with Borrell.

Just as Israel has the right to establish a state, so does Palestine. While the Israeli people have secured their survival, who is there to care about the survival of the Palestinian people? The Jewish nation is no longer wandering the Earth, but when will the Palestinian nation be able to return to their homeland? In this world, there are various injustices, and the injustice toward Palestine has been prolonged for half a century, carrying the pain of several generations. This cannot continue any longer, Wang stressed.

#Forever Palestine 🇵🇸#European Union 🇪🇺#European Union 🇪🇺 | Foreign Policy Chief | Josep Borrell #Gaza Strip | Forever Palestine 🇵🇸#Two State Solution #China 🇨🇳#Chen Qingqing and Bai Yunyi #Global Times

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nicklloydnow · 7 months

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“For the generation of Americans who came of age in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, the world America had made came with a question mark. Their formative experiences were the ones in which American power had been used for ill, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Middle East more broadly, and for much longer, the United States had built a security architecture around some of the world’s most repressive regimes. For those on the left, this was nothing new, and it was all too obvious. I spent my college years reading Noam Chomsky and other leftist critics of U.S. foreign policy, and they weren’t entirely wrong. On balance, the U.S. may have been a force for good, but in particular regions and at particular times, it had been anything but.

Blaming America first became all too easy. After September 11, U.S. power was as overwhelming as it was uncontested. That it was squandered on two endless wars made it convenient to focus on America’s sins, while underplaying Russia’s and China’s growing ambitions.

(…)

Russia’s unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, in Europe no less, has put matters back in their proper framing. The question of whether the United States is a uniquely malevolent force in global politics has been resolved. In the span of a few days, skeptics of American power have gotten a taste of what a world where America grows weak and Russia grows strong looks like. Of course, there are still holdouts who insist on seeing the United States as the provocateur. In its only public statement on Ukraine, the Democratic Socialists of America condemned Russia’s invasion but also called for “the U.S. to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.” This is an odd statement considering that Russia, rather than the United States, has been the world’s most unabashedly imperialist force for the past three decades. But many on the anti-imperialist left aren’t really anti-imperialist; they just have an instinctive aversion to American power.

America’s low opinion of its own capacity for good — and the resulting desire to retreat or disengage — hasn’t just been a preoccupation of the far left. The crisis of confidence has been pervasive, spreading to the halls of power and even President Barack Obama, whose memorable mantra was “Don’t do stupid sh*t.” Instead of thinking about what we could do, or what we could do better, Obama was more interested in a self-limiting principle. For their part, European powers — content to bask under their U.S. security umbrella — could afford to believe in fantasies of perpetual peace. Europe’s gentleness and lethargy — coaxing Germany to commit even 2% of its GDP to defense seemed impossible — became something of a joke. One popular Twitter account, @ISEUConcerned, devoted itself to mocking the European Union’s propensity to express “concern,” but do little else, whenever something bad happened.

(…)

The coming weeks, months, and years are likely to be as fascinating as they are terrifying. In a sense, we knew that a great confrontation was coming, even if we hadn’t quite envisioned its precise contours. At the start of his presidency, Joe Biden declared that the battle between democracies and autocracies would be the defining struggle of our time. This was grandiose rhetoric, but was it more than that? What does it actually mean to fight such a battle?

In any number of ways, Russia’s aggression has underscored why Biden was right and why authoritarians — and the authoritarian idea itself — are such a threat to peace and stability. Russia invaded Ukraine, a democracy, because of the recklessness and domination of one man, Vladimir Putin. The countries that have rallied most enthusiastically behind Ukraine have almost uniformly been democracies, chief among them the United States. America is lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical in its conduct abroad, but the notion of any moral equivalence between the United States and Putin’s Russia has been rendered laughable. And if there is such a thing as a better world, then anti-imperialists may find themselves in the odd position of hoping and praying for the health and longevity of not just the West but of Western power.”

“The “rules-based world order” is a system of norms and values that describe how the world ought to work, not how it actually works. This aspirational order is rooted in the idealistic aftermath of the Second World War, when it was transcribed into a series of documents: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, among others. In the more than seven decades since they were written, these documents have frequently been ignored. The UN Genocide Convention did not prevent genocide in Rwanda. The Geneva Conventions did not stop the Vietnamese from torturing American prisoners of war, did not prevent Americans at Abu Ghraib from torturing Iraqi prisoners of war, and do not prevent Russians from torturing Ukrainian prisoners of war today. Signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include known violators of human rights, among them China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. The UN Commission on Human Rights deteriorated into parody long ago.

Nevertheless, these documents have influenced real behavior in the real world. Soviet dissidents used to embarrass their government by pointing to human-rights language in treaties the Kremlin had signed and did not respect. Even when fighting brutal or colonial wars, countries that had signed treaties on the laws of war either tried to abide by them—avoiding civilian casualties, for example—or at least felt remorseful when they failed to do so. Americans who mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war were court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to time in military prisons. The British still agonize over the past behavior of their soldiers in Northern Ireland, and the French over theirs in Algeria.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all. Terrorists, by definition, are not fighting conventional wars and do not obey the laws of war. Instead, they deliberately create fear and chaos among civilian populations. Although terrorist tactics are usually associated with small revolutionary movements or clandestine groups, terrorism is now simply part of the way Russia fights wars. Although a sovereign state and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia first began deliberately hitting civilian targets in Syria in 2015, including power stations, water plants, and above all hospitals and medical facilities, 25 of which were hit in a single month in 2019. These attacks were unquestionably war crimes, and those who chose the targets knew they were war crimes. Some of the hospitals had shared their coordinates with the UN to avoid being hit. Instead, Russian and Syrian government forces may have used that information to find them.

(…)

The Hamas terrorists paid no attention to any modern laws of war, or any norms of any kind: Like the Russians, Hamas and its Iranian backers (who are also Russian allies) run nihilistic regimes whose goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online. Their goal was not to gain territory or engage an army, but rather to create misery and anger. Which they have—and not only in Israel. Hamas had to have anticipated a massive retaliation in Gaza, and indeed that retaliation has begun. As a result, hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian civilians will now be victims too.

To explain why one permanent member of the UN Security Council and one quasi-state have adopted this kind of behavior, it is best to start with the nature of their own totalitarian regimes. But there is plenty more blame to go around, because the rules-based order, always pretty tenuous, has actually been dying for a long time. Autocracies, led by China, have been seeking to undermine or remove language about human rights and the rule of law from international forums for years, replacing it with the language of “sovereignty.” Not that this is just a matter of language: The Chinese have carried out atrocities against their Uyghur minority for years, so far with impunity, and openly conducted a successful assault on the rights of the population of Hong Kong. They, and others, have also indulged in deliberately provocative behavior, designed to mock the rule of law outside their own borders. Belarus got away with forcing an Irish-owned airplane to land in Minsk and then kidnapping one of its citizens who was onboard. Russia has organized murders of its citizens in London, Washington, and Berlin.

(…)

During its lifetime, the aspirational rules-based world order and the international community that supported it were frequently mocked, and rightly so. The crocodile tears of the statesmen who expressed “profound concern” when their unenforced rules were broken were often unbearable. Their hypocrisy, as they opined on distant conflicts, was intolerable. On Saturday, Russia’s deputy defense minister parodied this kind of talk when he called for “peace” between Israel and Hamas based on “recognized agreements,” as if Russia accepted any “recognized agreements” as a basis for “peace” in Ukraine.

But like the equally outdated Pax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order—the expectation that the U.S. plays some role in the resolution of every conflict—we might miss the Geneva Conventions when they are gone. Open brutality has again become celebrated in international conflicts, and a long time may pass before anything else replaces it.”

“The history of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh was ended in the old manner of conflict resolution: siege, conquest, expulsion. After a 10-month blockade, Azerbaijan launched an attack on Sept. 19, claiming the enclave in a day and causing nearly the entire ethnic Armenian population to flee. Give war a chance, as the saying goes.

For Armenians, a classic relic ethnic minority whose Christianity and peculiar alphabet date to the epic struggles between the Romans and the Parthians, it was another genocide. For the Azerbaijanis, Turkic in language and historically Shia Muslim, a great triumph. Yet despite appearances, the conflict is not a Samuel Huntington-style clash of civilizations. Instead, in its emboldening of traditional regional powers like Turkey, scrambling for geopolitical spoils after the retreat of superpowers, it’s a harbinger of the coming world disorder.

(…)

In the chaotic aftermath of Soviet collapse, the Armenians undertook to defend Nagorno-Karabakh by force. Instead of poetic intellectuals, the wartime generation of Armenian leaders became militia commanders. They proved earthier and, soon, brazenly corrupt. Defending the country became their sole means of legitimacy, ruling out the concessions that peace would require. By 1994 the Armenians, mobilizing around the traumatic memories of genocide, succeeded in expelling scores of Azeris from the enclave. Last month, Azerbaijan got more than even.

In that project, it had a powerful backer: Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a master of vertiginous visions, has already tried Islamic liberalism, joining Europe, leading the Arab revolts, challenging Israel and negotiating peace in Ukraine. He now has another dream: opening a geopolitical corridor from Europe through Central Asia, all the way to China. This is the “Zangezur corridor,” a 25-mile-long strip of land to be carved through Armenia as part of a peace deal imposed at gunpoint.

Iran is not happy with Azerbaijan’s victory. As openly as the Iranians ever do, they’ve threatened to use force against any changes to the borders of Armenia. Iran, a millenniums-old civilization central to a whole continent, cannot tolerate being walled off behind a chain of Turkish dependencies. India, similarly, is on Armenia’s side and has been sending a regular supply of weapons. One spur for such support, no doubt, is Pakistan’s joining the Azeri-Turkish alliance. In the jargon of American lawyers, this opens a whole new can of worms.

Then there’s Russia, whose absence from the denouement in Nagorno-Karabakh was striking. Even after the 1990s, Moscow still remained by far the biggest supplier of weapons to both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their economies and societies, above all the elites and their corruption networks, were until very recently molded together. What we are seeing now, as both nations slip out of Russia’s orbit, might be the second round of Soviet collapse.

(…)

That brought nearly all the perimeter of the former Soviet Union into Russia’s sphere of influence. Rebellious Belarus, its dictator dependent on Russian support, was in hand; so too the war-torn Caucasus. The large and oil-rich Kazakhstan itself requested Russian peacekeepers during a bewildering bout of street violence in January 2022. Strangely, the elite Russian troops soon departed from Kazakhstan. A month later, the whole world realized that they had been dispatched to Ukraine, the last sizable piece of Mr. Putin’s post-Soviet gambit. And there his plan broke down.

History has a habit of serving the same lessons with changed variables. In 1988, it was the dreamer Gorbachev stumbling over Nagorno-Karabakh that unwittingly shattered the world order. Today, Mr. Putin could become the second, much darker incarnation of the Kremlin aggrandizer going awry on all fronts. The consequences — from emboldening international aggression to reanimating the West under the banner of NATO — will be profound. As events in Nagorno-Karabakh show, the fragile post-Cold War order is giving way to something else entirely.

The Caucasus might seem strange and distant. Yet it might prove the wedge that turns the fortunes of world order. Trieste, Smyrna, Sarajevo, Danzig and Crimea were all such places. Let us not have to relearn history at the cost of yet another ethnic cleansing.”

#russia #ukraine #israel #gaza #hamas #nagorno karabakh #armenia #azerbaijan #geopolitics #world order #pax americana #war #wwiii #anne applebaum #shadi hamid #war crimes #genocide

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