The Middle Kingdom Returns

A great deal of fuss has been made recently about China’s foreign policy activities. Its economic shifts, naval activity and foreign investments have all received extensive coverage worldwide. However, the real focus should be on China’s future moves and long-term intentions. Casual observers often have short-term memories and horizons, but to observe China casually would be a grave error for any strategist or policymaker. Beijing is pursuing two clear foreign policy objectives: first, China will seek reunification with Taiwan, which is the unstated end goal of its recent naval buildup and maritime expansion. Second, Beijing will move to acquire undisputed hegemony in Central Asia to secure access to vital natural resources and resolve several domestic concerns. China hopes to achieve both goals by mid-century.

Fortunately for its neighbors, China’s ambitions and strategies are rarely new. The Middle Kingdom often reaches back into its historic memory for guidance. Mao Zedong was facing a border dispute with India soon after consolidating control of his nation. Rather than relying solely on information about the present-day dispute and the capabilities of Chinese forces, Mao called together his advisors to tell them two stories of ancient Chinese dynasties that dealt with hostilities in the same region years before. The Chinese leadership chose to heed their ancestral lessons, and launched a restrained military operation with clearly limited aims. Their forces amassed along the front lines, dealt a fast, punishing strike against Indian forces and then promptly retreated back to their original positions. The Chinese didn’t take any land, but the Indian forces realized they would be unable to withstand any future assaults. India retreated from the disputed territory, just as Mao intended.

Strategic knowledge is not the only benefit of having maintained a literate civilization for over two millennia. Historic durability has also ingrained contemporary China with a sense of pride in their culture and accomplishments. Like the United States, China believes in its own exceptionalism. But unlike Americans, who proclaim their nation’s Manifest Destiny, the Chinese look back on thousands of years of history and see themselves as the rightful heirs of the empires that have dominated Asia. China will not face any challenge today or in the future that it has not seen before. All the answers lie in the history of a civilization that has outlasted nearly every known historical entity. Mao’s twentieth century forces used different weapons and technologies in their wars, but employed a strategic calculus developed by their ancestors. We can expect the same of China’s present and future leaders.

China’s present day circumstances are not new. Its economy is stagnating because the foreign trade that fueled its rise is now tapering off, so it needs to boost domestic consumption and internal economic activity. The nation has been struggling to construct larger hydroelectric dams and import more coal, oil and natural gas to stave off energy shortages. The country is still reeling from a population explosion, and the one child policy has led to an overabundance of young male citizens. The country also faces a food deficit of drastic proportions, having one of the world’s highest ratios of citizen dependence on each acre of domestic farmland. It simply cannot produce enough food for its billion-plus population, and must import from abroad despite its massive irrigation projects and centrally planned agricultural system. The Communist party also has political incentives to boost domestic consumption. Its political roots lie among rural Chinese citizens, and it cannot ignore its original base of support. With over a billion people to feed, the government must take food security into its own hands.

China’s Plan for Taiwan

Chinese strategic thought has often been traced back to wei qi, a board game now known as Go. The game rewards strategies of encirclement. Each player places his or her stones on the board, and can remove an opponent’s stone by surrounding it in each direction. In more recent times, Chinese strategy has employed measures designed to build up a psychological advantage in global affairs. By acting unpredictably, China can draw objectively stronger nations into diplomatic activity on Chinese terms, and prevent hostile nations from executing clearly defined policies to counter Chinese moves. It has already achieved psychological superiority among its neighbors in the South China Sea. Only Indonesian and Japanese maritime forces have faced down Chinese expansionism, despite the United States’ public backing of the maritime claims of Vietnam, the Philippines and other nations in their disputes with China.

Given the position of new Chinese military outposts in the South China Sea, one can easily see that it aims to encircle Taiwan while keeping foreign powers focused elsewhere as it develops the capacity to blockade Taiwanese waters. The encirclement can be achieved by consolidating control of the Pratas Islands, located southwest of Taiwan, and the Senkaku-Diaoyu islands to the northeast. Although Beijing claims both of these territories, Taiwan presently controls the Pratas Islands and Japan has maintained its claims of the Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands. Despite the importance of these archipelagos, most of the international focus has been on the South China Sea’s distant islands and shoals claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and other nations. The Philippines is Taiwan’s southern neighbor, and the only American ally proximate to Taiwan. By distracting the Philippine navy in the South China Sea and drawing American focus to islands that are hundreds of nautical miles from Taiwan, China can keep Filipino and US naval resources out of the reach of Taiwanese waters.

Additionally, there has been greater focus recently on North Korea, which is aggressively expanding its rocket, ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities. China will certainly attempt to capitalize on a moment when regional powers are distracted by North Korean military activities like their recent nuclear test. East Asian nations should expect a move against Taiwan to occur once China has solidified adequate control over its desired possessions in the East China Sea, when regional navies are concentrating their attention on the South China Sea, and in the immediate aftermath of a major event in North Korea. Taiwan, despite possessing a formidable military and alliance with the United States, will likely be forced to the negotiating table under the strain of a Chinese blockade. The United States and other nations that are friendly with Taiwan have few geo-strategic imperatives to defend its sovereignty. If successful, China will have achieved a milestone sought for generations.

The Long Term Target: Central Asia

Despite its recent naval buildup, the Chinese military’s strength still lies in the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA. China has 1.6 million men on active duty but only a handful engaged in active missions. As the Chinese government grows more comfortable with its maritime claims, it will turn its attention to Central Asia, a region which may hold the solutions for many of the challenges facing the Communist party. The real subject of debate is how China will exercise its power in Central Asia. Beijing will have to decide whether to use its economic heft or military power as the cornerstone of its future hegemony.

Wars can be useful for a country. They invigorate economies by demanding domestic production of military hardware and supplies, and China has the factory infrastructure to support a military campaign. It also has a young male population, and as the Gulf Arab nations learned recently, a large population of unemployed young men is a recipe for political uprising. The Communist leadership is aware of this, and will not risk political legitimacy by letting young Chinese go unemployed. Although China is not at any sort of breaking point right now, its domestic pressures will continue to grow in the coming decades, and may determine whether or not China opts to engage Central Asia peacefully.

Central Asia is the most viable area for Chinese expansion simply because the region poses the least risk to Beijing while offering tangible rewards. Chinese strategists would not want to upset the Korean Peninsula, where Chinese soldiers fought South Korea and a UN coalition (made of almost entirely American military forces) in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. Although China can extract concessions out of foreign nations by tightening or loosening its grip on the North Korean regime, it has no long-term interest in changing the status quo there. Southeast Asia, which is home to large quantities of natural resources, could provide some of what China will need in the future. It would be possible for a conflict to sprout in Vietnam, for example, if today’s maritime scuffles turn into tomorrow’s conquests. But the cost of attempting to conquer densely populated Southeast Asian nations would almost certainly outweigh the benefits of imperialism. China has little to gain by crossing the Himalayas into India’s traditional sphere of influence or by advancing north to the Mongolian and Russian steppes.

Central Asia has been a Russian domain for most of the past two centuries, but that is changing. The American incursion into Afghanistan was accompanied by new Western interest in Central Asian countries such as Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, which housed NATO bases for many years. Additionally, the resource-rich republics of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan have sought to diversify their clientele of natural gas and oil buyers. They have both formed economic relationships with European and East Asian nations, including China, which now purchases vast quantities of hydrocarbons once controlled by Moscow. China knows that it can secure future energy supplies by making more lucrative offers to Central Asian suppliers and by building pipeline infrastructure. In 2012, over half of China’s gas imports came from Turkmenistan alone, and its dependence on Central Asian energy is continuing to rise.

In addition to offering energy security options, Central Asia has the potential to satisfy China’s demand for food resources and electricity supplies. The Fergana Valley, jointly controlled by Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, is one of the most agriculturally productive locations in the world. Uzbekistan controls the most productive fields, which it has traditionally leveraged to grow cotton for export. Kyrgyzstan controls the water supplies, and Tajikistan controls a mountain pass providing easy access to the valley. Central Asia’s two largest rivers, the Syr Darya and Amu Darya, are two of the largest in the world and can be harnessed for even more hydroelectric power than they already produce.

With Russia increasingly focused on Eastern Europe and the Middle East, China will find future opportunities to develop influence in Central Asia. To access the Fergana Valley and the rivers powering its agricultural system, it will need to get through Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, two of the most rugged and underdeveloped nations in the world. China will have no problem pumping aid money, infrastructure projects, and other strategic investments into both countries. Meanwhile, Russia will struggle to keep its own economy afloat and lose sight of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, since they have very little to offer Russia in terms of real economic or political benefit.

Kyrgyzstan is a member of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and Tajikistan is a prospective member. The Russian-designed EEU imposes high tariffs on trade with non-EEU members, hampering both states’ abilities to trade with China. This will become burdensome for Kyrgyzstan and unattractive for Tajikistan as China becomes a larger trading partner. China’s Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) program, initiated by current Chinese President Xi Jinping, will invest at least $40 billion into these and other countries to support infrastructure projects in Eurasia that will later underpin Chinese overland trade. The prospects of Chinese integration are so high that there is already speculation that Kyrgyzstan will leave the EEU relatively soon.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are both members of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). The CSTO is a defensive pact similar to NATO, and also includes Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia. Recently Russia has refocused its security priorities in Europe and the Middle East, notably by annexing Crimea and engaging in limited wars in Ukraine and Syria. It is entirely possible that Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, sensing Russia’s preoccupation with other regions, will seek a new security alignment with China. Beijing could use facilities in each nation as bases for security operations in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. China committed $329 million worth of aid to Afghanistan in 2014, and is investing billions in Pakistan. Beijing will not allow the Taliban or other insurgent actors to undermine its economic activism, and this reality will drive China to seek closer security relationships with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as well.

Once Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are within China’s orbit, Beijing will leverage its access to the Fergana Valley. Chinese demand for crops could encourage the Uzbek regime (currently undergoing an unprecedented power shift in the wake of President Islam Karimov’s death) to restructure its economy and better manage water resources. If China can establish a security presence in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the Uzbeks would be dependent on Chinese controlled water resources. Uzbekistan may someday find itself paying tribute to Beijing with cash crops, not unlike how “barbarian” leaders once obliged dynastic Chinese emperors. Alternatively, the Uzbeks could find themselves facing a legitimate military threat from the PLA.

China has historically targeted long-term gains in its foreign policy, so long as its domestic politics have been stable enough to allow a continuum of its grand strategy. Unlike Western powers that tend to base foreign policy initiatives on values and principles that are revised with each election cycle, Chinese policies are rooted in well-defined goals and objectives with clear benefits for the country. Foreign policymakers need to acknowledge Chinese interests in Taiwan and Central Asia and plan for dealing with China’s power projections to ensure their own foreign policies are not derailed by Beijing’s future moves.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

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Last month I participated in a foreign affairs simulation hosted at the US Air Force Academy, co-sponsored by the US Department of Defense, the Mellon Foundation and Dickinson College. Students of international affairs from a variety of universities were teamed up with cadets and midshipmen from US Military Academies to fill the roles of the Augmented Deputies Committee, a body of senior government officials from all branches of government that advises the National Security Council and the President on issues of national security. A group of highly accomplished academics and government officials with decades of public service experience took on the task of designing and running the simulation as realistically as possible.

This article is an abridged first-person account of the exercise we conducted over three days in the beginning of March; during it I filled the role of Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Department. Some details have been modified for the sake of brevity. Alongside a nightmarish scenario, I also try to describe the work atmosphere of the Executive Branch as it was simulated for us. We had to cope with miscommunication, unreliable information and a lack of group cohesion, just as a young presidential administration would five years from now. Through the simulation I discovered that there is always a human element to governing, and hope to provide a glimpse of that too.

The date is 31 January 2021, and the newly elected president has been in the White House for ten days. The incumbent elected in 2016 had lost re-election to a centrist politician in 2020. The National Security Staff and Cabinet had barely moved into their offices when the third gut-wrenching intelligence report hit the room, courtesy of the Deputy Director for National Intelligence: “The Israelis are beginning preliminary preparations for a unilateral airstrike.”

At this point, we knew the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, had heard the same reports that we had—Iran had secretly set up an undisclosed uranium enrichment facility. Israel considers any Iranian attempt to develop fissile nuclear material to be an existential threat, and thus would not hesitate to remove the facility by any means necessary.

“How long do we have?” asked a State Department officer.

“Depends what they’re after. They’ll take their time selecting targets carefully. Tel Aviv will only want to do this one time if they really go through with it.”

Reports began floating in that the Iranians were hiding 1,000 centrifuges from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). (Centrifuges are big, rapidly spinning containers used to separate Uranium-235[1] from Uranium-238.) If we had not prevented Iran’s development of the bomb through diplomatic means back in 2015, Israel would have had no problem acting alone to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. Yet with these new reports, the tenuous peace appears to have been broken.

We also heard that a senior fellow from the Brookings Institution, an American citizen who was visiting Tehran on an academic trip, was detained by Iranian law enforcement last night for unknown reasons. So in addition to the usual crew from the intelligence community and the Departments of Defense and State, the White House called in Homeland Security, the Justice Department, Energy Department and my beloved Treasury to form the Augmented Deputies Committee.

“So what should we be doing?” asked my Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Intelligence and Analysis (the title barely fits on her business card). She had been chugging bottles of Robitussin since 7AM to hide her bronchitis.

“Well, if the Attorney General wasn’t in the room, I’d be buying oil futures before this news hits the markets,” I joked. “Any news that stokes fears of Middle East instability will give oil a ten dollar boost these days, so any sign that Iran has belligerent intentions will send it off the charts.

“So what do we do?”

“Well, nothing right now. This is still State and Intel’s ballgame, so I think I might go visit State. Think you could find a copy of the SDN list? We should go over it and see if any obvious names are missing. Let’s have some names ready for the White House to sanction at will.”

“But sanctions don’t work. We’ve got reams of reports telling us that. It’s a waste of our time.”

“Of course they don’t work. But it sounds good to the American people, and I think the man in the Oval would like to make it to February before his approval rating drops below 60%. Let’s feed some new SDN’s to the media so they don’t eat this administration alive.”

The SDN list, or Specially Designated Nationals list, has the names of every person that the US has implemented special sanctions against. It’s composed of mostly Iranians, Russians, North Koreans, a few African dictators and a bunch of terrorists. If we could add some Iranian scientists or clerics to the list, that could dampen the public outcry when this inevitably leaks—buying us time to find a real solution. But I wasn’t visiting the State Department office to explain all that. The Deputy Secretary of State was trying to get the Israeli ambassador on the phone when I walked in.

“Hey Bren, got a sec? Need to see you and the American ambassador to the UN.”

He hung up the phone in disgust. “The Israeli ambassador is participating in a Latke-Hamantash debate at Georgetown during an international crisis. Unbelievable.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t need her. We can make a public move to delay Tel Aviv by asking for an IAEA inspection team.”

He stopped to think about it, but I could tell he understood the reasoning. If Israeli jets bombed UN inspectors on a peacekeeping mission, the entire world would eviscerate them. They couldn’t afford to bomb Iran unilaterally while inspectors were in the country. “We still don’t know where to send them,” he countered.

“We don’t have to announce a location right now. We just have to make a statement from the White House and ensure it gets voted on in the Security Council later today. It won’t be hard to get the Russians and Chinese on board if they know that the Israelis are already strapping bombs on their planes. It buys us time, and we can use that to gather more information. It also saves us from having to implement unilateral sanctions if this were to get leaked. We can keep the Israelis fenced in and take control of the news cycle on this one.”

He nodded in agreement. “Let’s run this by the Deputy NSA.”

Aside from the missing Brookings Institution fellow, we felt like we had most things under control for a few hours. Russia, China, Germany, France and the UK were all on board with the plan to send international inspectors to Iran. But as we were walking into our third plenary meeting, nearly everything spun out of control.

“Khameini is dead? Did I hear that right?”

Yes you did, Mr. Assistant Secretary of Something Obscure from the Department of Energy.

A White House official was enjoying an I-told-you-so moment. “He’s been out of contact for days and we have good intel that he went into the hospital over a week ago! He’s probably been dead for a while now, and we have nothing in place to deal with this!”

Worse, the Iranian public didn’t know yet, and it was unclear if the regime wanted to announce his passing. Without an Ayatollah, the Iranian government is essentially leaderless. We had asked the Iranians to accept an IAEA mission to look for undocumented centrifuges, but the mission approval relies on the Ayatollah’s consent.

The presence of IAEA inspectors was meant to be our insurance policy against an Israeli strike on Iran, and that was no longer possible. On top of that, the Israelis would probably love to hit a dysfunctional Iranian government.

“New intel came in,” said the White House’s Deputy Chief of Staff. “The IRGC are mobilizing and spreading across the country. Looks like a possible coup.”

The Ayatollah of Iran is perhaps one of the most hated Middle Eastern political figures in the West. Having him gone would be a dream come true on literally any other day. But having the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) ascend to create a theocratic military dictatorship would be worse. With no obvious solution in sight, we spent most of a few hours bickering among ourselves and hoping for new intelligence that might provide a pathway out of this mess. But it never came.

“Guys, we don’t have any other quick fixes to slow down the Israelis, and there’s only one way we get the IAEA into the country. We need an Ayatollah.”

Personal experience has taught me that in government, most of the scenarios you plan for never actually occur, and the ones that do become real are never precisely what you imagined. Eventually we all agreed to break the news of the Ayatollah’s death in order to speed up the process of getting a new leader selected. But we had to accomplish that without appearing to be the leakers: if we broke news of his death, that would be like Kim Jong Un announcing the death of a sitting US President. Ayatollah Khameini is of ethnic Azerbaijani descent, so we decided that if the news had not broken by the next morning, it would be leaked to Azerbaijani media disguised as a tipoff from a distant relative.

The next morning, Iranian authorities had announced his death and our hours of designing a nearly foolproof leak were for naught. We decided to prioritize working out a diplomatic resolution with what was left of the civilian government in Tehran before making any regional moves. Threat levels were raised, travel advisories were issued and our sincere condolences were shared with the Brookings researcher’s family and colleagues, as a video of his beheading had surfaced overnight. We nervously watched IRGC units mobilize across the country, unsure if they were cementing a coup or deploying to prevent political unrest in the wake of the Ayatollah’s passing. We began contemplating military and economic options that could be useful for responding to any of the possible outcomes in Iran.

Ultimately, we enacted a policy of “strategic patience” — observing and doing nothing, waiting for an opportunity to act — while we tried to make sense of a new Iran. This was just the beginning of a scenario that would have implications for many years beyond 2021. And we had only dealt with the first two days of it.

[1] U-235 is an atom of uranium with three less neutrons than normal. Therefore it is less stable and useful for anyone trying to build an atomic bomb. Under the Iran Deal signed in 2015, the Iranians are supposed to have only a certain number of centrifuges and let the IAEA monitor them to ensure that they don’t enrich a mass of uranium above 3.67% U-235.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

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The former Soviet republics occupying the Caucasus and Central Asia have been out of the limelight this year. Instead, the world’s attention has been focused on a ring of areas surrounding the Caucasus and Central Asia. Just look at Russia’s western borders and sweep in a counterclockwise circle to the east. NATO has been vocally bolstering the Baltics and supporting Ukraine against an increasingly assertive Russia. Greece dominated financial headlines again this summer during its political battles with the European Central Bank and Germany. The relationship between Turkey and Russia has completely soured and taken on militaristic overtones. The Islamic State has been the center of attention in the Middle East. Iran made history by signing its nuclear agreement this summer. The Taliban are back in Afghanistan. Narendra Modi cemented himself at the heart of Indian politics and has become a respected global leader. In East Asia, China is squaring off with anyone and everyone in its efforts to solidify claims to maritime territory far beyond its shores, while its slowing economy has sent jitters through global financial markets.

To look at all of these events from the Americas, separated from it all by two very large oceans, grants a completely different perspective than that of observers in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Being surrounded by these phenomena can lend itself to a different lens and a different reaction as well. For the states surrounding the Caspian Sea, attention from the outside world can be a blessing or a curse. Most countries have been happy to let others take center stage, but a few are vying for more international prestige with busy political agendas.

Turkmenistan: New Pipeline Will Diversify Gas Export Destinations
Turkmenistan rarely made headlines this year until mid-December with the groundbreaking ceremony of a new pipeline. The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India Pipeline, or TAPI, is finally under construction. The four partner nations are projecting that it will be completed in 2019, bringing Turkmen gas to Afghan, Pakistani and Indian markets. The project is estimated to cost $10 billion, but violence in Afghanistan or Pakistan could send that figure skyrocketing.

TAPI is one of several ambitious pipeline projects being pursued by Turkmenistan, which has long sought to diversify its export capabilities away from Russian controlled pipelines aimed at other former Soviet states.  So far, Turkmenistan has only been able to add China as a major foreign client. Turkmenistan recently completed the East-West pipeline that can move gas internally from fields in the east to its Caspian shoreline. The country had long anticipated a multinational effort to construct a Trans-Caspian pipeline, which would bring Turkmen gas to Europe via Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. But that project has been shelved due to political pressure from Russia, so the East-West pipeline will be a dead weight loss for the Turkmen government until their gas becomes a necessity in the European energy portfolio.

Kyrgyzstan: Expect the Unexpected
In years past, Kyrgyzstan has made headlines for sectarian riots, political strife and revolution. The mountainous nation has been beset by recurring failures in governance since the breakup of the Soviet Union. But the nation has been on the mend since 2010. With the departure of US forces from the air base at Manas in 2014, the past year and a half has been relatively easygoing; Western media had to find other things to write about when covering the country’s recent developments. The Guardian discovered an active sex school and raved about the nation’s hiking opportunities for mountaineering tourists who would prefer to summit Mount Lenin instead of crowded Himalayan peaks.

But the short era of whimsical news stories about Kyrgyzstan may soon be coming to an end. The Kyrgyz government is beginning to face new political and economic challenges, especially since many families depend on remittances from husbands and fathers working in Russia, where the economy is faltering. Despite feeling the effects of Russia’s economic decline, Kyrgyzstan has strengthened political ties with Moscow since the closure of the US air base at Manas. Perhaps the most important new political news about Kyrgyzstan came when Vladimir Putin made his public reappearance in March at a meeting with Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev. (Putin had been out of public view for over a week, leading to wild speculations about the likelihood that he had been deposed in a coup or secretly fathered a child.) Putin’s choice to reappear from his mysterious absence alongside the Kyrgyz president is an indication that Atambayev’s government is strongly within the Russian political orbit; the Russo-Kyrgyz relationship will be interesting to watch in the future.

Uzbekistan: Some Things Never Change
Somehow, Islam Karimov is still alive and still president of Uzbekistan. He was reelected in March, capturing a predicted victory with over 90% of the vote. The affair was roundly criticized by Western observers, but Karimov has held firmly onto power since 1990, and he will continue to rule until he is ready to walk away. Uzbekistan’s human rights record has continued to be abysmal, as Human Rights Watch once again slammed the government for a myriad of abuses and injustices. The most exciting recent news came in 2014 when photos were released showing Karimov’s own daughter under house arrest—likely as punishment for a very public Karimov family feud on Twitter that has been a festering wound in the Uzbek political scene. Twitter has also played an important role in defining Uzbekistan’s international image. During a tour around Central Asian countries, US Secretary of State John Kerry tweeted a photo of himself shaking hands with President Karimov.

Kazakhstan: It’s the Economy, Stupid
While President Nazarbayev has been keeping pace with Karimov in their race to outlast each other as longest-reigning Central Asian rulers, the Kazakh economy has been the newsmaker in recent months. The drop in energy prices has hit Kazakhstan particularly hard, forcing the country to free its long-controlled currency, the tenge. It lost over 20% of its value overnight last August and shows no signs of recovering, given the economy’s reliance on energy and trade with Russia. Kazakhstan is attempting to attract more foreign investment over the long term, and is implementing a plan to allow visa-free entry for all OECD nation citizens by 2017. For now, though, the country is weathering an economic storm.

Tajikistan: More of the Same Failed State
Tajikistan really has nothing going for it these days. An autocratic government has made no efforts to slow down regular civil and human rights abuses, the Russian-supported economy is showing no signs of growth and a military commander recently joined the Islamic State. The country is as corrupt as they come. It will also begin to feel the effects of cross-border instability from Afghanistan as the US mission winds down there. Like Kyrgyzstan, the Tajiks are quietly moving deeper into a Russian orbit as their economy continues to disintegrate. But a lack of headlines in foreign papers reflects a year of relative stability in Tajikistan, at least compared to its neighbors.

Azerbaijan: European Games, Human Rights, Currency Devaluation and a Hawkish Outlook on Karabakh
Azerbaijan has been the lynchpin of South Caucasus affairs, with Armenia leaning heavily on Russian assistance and Georgia embedding itself politically in the NATO camp. The capital city Baku hosted the inaugural European Games this summer. The event was a coming-of-age party for a regime celebrating its perceived arrival on the world stage. It was an internationally televised show of the progress made in Azerbaijan since its cease-fire with Armenia was signed two decades ago.

Unfortunately, not everything in Baku has been cause for celebration this year. The global glut in energy prices forced the central bank to devalue the Manat by over 30% in a single overnight devaluation. The country’s human rights record only got worse this year, as several prominent opposition figures and journalists were jailed.

The case of Nagorno-Karabakh remains at the forefront of Azerbaijani foreign policy. With Russia heavily invested in Ukraine and now Syria, Azerbaijan has an opportunity to take advantage of Moscow’s distractions. The Azerbaijani military has increased the tempo of its cross-border skirmishes with Armenia, and a flurry of diplomatic activity between actors involved with the conflict has sparked speculation that Armenia may cede some of the occupied territory back to Azerbaijan as part of a negotiated settlement.

Armenia: Reconsidering Karabakh
Armenian negotiators met with EU representatives in December for a new round of discussions about the Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan. Given Russia’s ongoing military activities in Ukraine and Syria, Armenia is quietly having doubts about its security guarantor’s defense commitments in the event Azerbaijan sees an opportunity to retake Karabakh by force. But the conflict is unlikely to be resolved by negotiations anytime soon, despite pressure from outside parties and a rumored settlement proposal put forth by Russia.

Georgia: Surprise Political Turnover
The ruling Georgian Dream coalition’s Prime Minister, Irakli Garibashvili, resigned on December 23 for reasons that remain unexplained. He was quickly replaced by Foreign Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili on December 30. The Georgian Dream party is relatively pro-Russian compared to previous governing bodies, although it still retains ties with the West. Its popularity has fallen since it gained power in the last elections. The government revoked the citizenship of former anti-Russian Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, who took up a post as governor of a province in Eastern Ukraine at the behest of the Ukrainian government. Saakashvili was an avidly pro-Western leader for many years, seeing Georgia through its 2008 war with Russia. Georgia’s elections in late 2016 will likely lead to the swearing in of a new government and another change in course for the small country’s foreign policy initiatives.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

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It’s not every day we get to see a country draft a new constitution, but Thailand is quietly attempting to do just that. On May 22, 2014, after months of political turmoil, General Prayuth Chan-Ocha led a military coup that seized power in Bangkok. The Pheu Thai Party, led by Yingluck Shinawatra, was removed from power and the constitution was largely suspended. The military leaders who took power are now awaiting a new constitution that they find suitable for approval, but General Chan-Ocha’s royalist, anti-Pheu Thai tendencies may hinder progress. Thailand has an exceptionally volatile political history, and the new constitution must address the roots of these historical problems to ensure that the future government system remains intact.

Thailand’s previously elected government administrations have rarely lasted their 4-year mandates under prior constitutions, and military coups are the rule rather than the exception. Two political parties, the Pheu Thai and the Democrat Party, have jockeyed for power in recent years. Pheu Thai has its stronghold in the north and east of the country, while the Democrat Party has traditionally controlled the south and the western border. The capital city of Bangkok is heavily contested.

The Democrat Party has been struggling in recent years to attain political clout; it is often characterized as a royalist party representing the old-school Bangkok elites, and is generally considered to be the mainstream opposition movement. The Democrat Party has also long supported Thailand’s monarchy. The Pheu Thai, on the other hand, is the populist successor party to the now disbanded Thai Rak Thai (TRT) and the People’s Power Party (PPP), representing the rural northern districts and the bulk of the population.

Political strongman Thaksin Shinawatra is the driving force behind the Pheu Thai. He was the Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006 when he was toppled by a military coup and fled into self-imposed exile in Dubai. But Shinawatra remains a powerful figure in Thai politics, and many believe that he was heavily involved in his sister Yingluck’s election as Prime Minister in 2011. She later tried and failed to pass a bill granting amnesty to Thaksin. This was the biggest of several political maneuvers that riled up the opposition. 150 Democrat Party parliamentarians threatened to resign en masse from the government, and mass demonstrations took place in Bangkok. Yingluck tried to regain control by suspending the lower house of parliament, but the ensuing political battle caused the crisis we have today.

While the Democrat Party and Pheu Thai dominate political spotlight, the monarchy plays a reserved but equally important role in Thai politics. King Bhumibol Adulyadej has ruled since 1946 and is the longest serving monarch alive today. During periods of political instability and violence, he has given his blessing to the military juntas that have acted to restore order. The King has often stayed out of day-to-day politics, only stepping in during times of crisis to rebalance the political situation and calm the nation. Under his leadership, the royal family has used its political capital sparingly but effectively. But that could soon change.

Now 87 years old, King Bhumibol is nearing the end of his reign. His son Maha Vajiralongkorn is the Crown Prince of Thailand, and it seems likely will rule differently from his father. The Prince has been actively involved with both political factions in recent years. His sister Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, whose charitable initiatives have made her beloved among the Thai population, is a more popular candidate for the throne, but the laws of succession would put Vajiralongkorn in power. The Crown Prince would increase the royal family’s political involvement, which could destabilize Thai politics more—especially if he assumes the throne before a new constitution is completed.

General Chan-Ocha needs a constitution that can ensure peace and withstand the maneuverings of the Pheu Thai, Democrats and future monarchs. Since the coup, Chan-Ocha has kept military officials in charge of all central government ministries. However, the military has made efforts to re-democratize Thailand by setting up a 21 member body called the Constitutional Drafting Committee (CDC). An early draft of a new constitution included a “civil crisis panel” to intervene when Thai politics get out of hand, provisionally named the National Strategic Reform Committee. Since any future crisis may present unknown complications, building a crisis-solving mechanism with specific procedures would be futile. Instead, the panel would be endowed with the responsibility to peacefully manage any unruly Thai political events. In a time of need, the committee would draw up a charter designating a process for addressing the issue at hand in accordance with five principles:

1. The charter must comply with international norms but also suit Thai social conditions, the Thai way of life and Thai traditions.
2. The charter must contain mechanisms to bring about reforms and reconciliation.
3. The charter must put in place measures to prevent abuse of power and exploitation of state funds to attract votes or serve vested interests.
4. The charter must provide measures to eradicate corruption.
5. The charter must encourage public participation in protecting the national interest and building collective responsibility.

The details for the National Strategic Reform Committee are still up for debate, and it ultimately may not even be implemented. But the attempt to design such a mechanism does signify that Thailand is getting weary of its own political volatility.

The immediate problem of military rule remains, and there are signs that the ruling junta may not have entirely benign intentions. The military recently proposed a provision to be included in the next constitution that would protect it from prosecution for certain crimes. The proposal states that any military action “carried out with honest intention” would be exempt from legal prosecution, and the personnel involved would be immune from charges. A representative from Human Rights Watch told Reuters that the clause would essentially be a “license to kill.”

Thailand needs to develop political institutions and mechanisms strong enough to let elected civilian governments work through political crises on their own. Given the nation’s opaque politics, anything goes. No one knows what the next crisis will be—only that one is almost certain to occur. Additionally, the Bangkok terrorist bombing in August signaled that Thailand might have more than just the usual political grievances to deal with in the future.

For the time being, the military remains in charge. General Chan-Ocha rejected the latest proposed constitution in October, deeming it insufficient for the military’s rather unclear expectations. He also indefinitely delayed elections that had been planned for this past summer. Whether the military thinks the nation needs more time to cool off is anyone’s guess at this point, but the proposed legal protections for the military suggest that Chan-Ocha will not be stepping down without some serious concessions. Thailand probably will not see any major changes in its domestic politics until at least late 2016 or 2017, and even that would depend on a political stabilization over the next several months.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

The post Thailand’s Next Steps appeared first on Glimpse from the Globe.

As 2015 draws to a close, every region of the world is experiencing some amount of volatility that will persist into 2016. Some countries around the world will resolve their problems and thrive;  others will fail to meet their challenges and continue to suffer.

Europe continues to muddle through its occasional economic crises while bearing the weight of a politically fractious influx of Middle Eastern refugees. Russia is attempting to punch above its weight in conflicts on its near abroad while NATO beats its chest in response. Former Soviet states in the Caucasus and Central Asia have seen their economies take a collective nosedive, following the descent of both oil prices and the Russian ruble. China’s government is grappling with a domestic economic slowdown while trying to secure a sphere of influence. The rest of Asia, suspicious of Beijing’s initiatives, is coalescing around security concerns, but each nation there is dealing with its own domestic challenges. Latin America is enduring simultaneous political crises in Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela. Several countries in Africa are dealing with persistent terrorist threats from Islamic State (IS) affiliates, while others have seen their domestic politics unwind into violence. In North America, the United States is witnessing the ugly sides of domestic politics emerge as the November 2016 presidential election looms. Looking forward, it is better to focus on larger international issues rather than the futures of individual states.

Global Economic Outlook

The global economy is slowly piecing itself back together. Europe has pushed through a number of economic crises, East Asian economies are still moving along and North America is rebounding well. “The Economist” predicts a global growth of 2.7% in 2016. They also predict that Asia, Africa and North America will grow at or above 3% in the coming year. With the US Federal Reserve set to hike interest rates, this seems plausible, but financial markets will need time to adjust. This will also have consequences for the value of currencies worldwide—the rate hike is meant in part to stave off inflation in the US where years of quantitative easing have flooded the economy with cheap dollars. A rebounding dollar could hit developing states hard, especially in emerging markets across Latin America and Asia. But it would also make their exports more attractive compared to American goods and services.

Natural resource exporters will suffer from low commodity prices. The addition of Iranian and American hydrocarbons to world markets will keep energy prices depressed. These same low prices can help fuel growth in other countries that leverage the availability of cheap energy and raw materials. More developed and sophisticated economies like India and South Korea are best positioned to take advantage of cheap, plentiful energy. Economies that depend on a sole supplier – especially those in Eastern Europe that depend on Russian hydrocarbons – may use this time to diversify their supply options.

The Cyber World

Cybersecurity continues its rise in importance and prominence. Developed nations will compete to create better cyber capabilities to protect utilities, banks and other types of infrastructure that are connected to the internet, and the demand for skilled information technologists will continue to surge worldwide. Developing nations, beset with other challenges, will struggle to keep apace. The most advanced countries, such as the US, China and Russia, may begin to offer cyber capabilities to developing nations in efforts to gain influence.

Meanwhile, increased government interest in the cyberworld will be matched by private citizen efforts to protect internet freedoms. Nations will settle debates over the competing importance of security and privacy differently. Those that land on the side of security and surveillance may find themselves under scrutiny from both hacker collectives like Anonymous and prominent civil liberties advocates. But mass surveillance and data collection will continue across the world; internet privacy for individuals will continue to be dismantled in 2016.

Terrorism

Terrorism will remain a worldwide security concern in 2016. Countries across the globe will continue to collaborate to combat terror threats, although different governments will implement vastly different measures. Inevitably, headline-grabbing attacks will be attempted in the West and Asia this year. The victimized nations will ramp up their security capabilities, possibly at the expense of civil liberties.

The Islamic State’s appeal to jihadists will remain strong, but it will remain physically isolated within parts of Iraq and Syria and focused on securing and legitimizing its caliphate. While fresh attacks are all but certain, an event on the scale of 9/11 is highly unlikely based on what information is available. IS cannot match al-Qaeda’s former capabilities, and multinational efforts will likely prevent IS from reaching that level. Al-Qaeda itself is no longer potent enough to carry out major attacks on the West, and it does not seem capable of resurrecting itself this year.

Politics and Security in the Middle East

The Syrian crisis won’t be resolved. Refugees will continue to flee the conflict zone and surrounding nations must deal with the consequences. As the Islamic State is continually bombarded, outside actors like the United States, Russia and Iran will pick their proxies on the ground and commit to them this year. The US will continue to back Iraq as long as possible, but with Iranian and Russian military advisors also present in Baghdad, the Iraqi-American relationship may start to unravel. As relations deteriorate, the US will have no choice but to put its weight behind the Kurds. Washington must attempt to forge a mutual understanding between Kurdish leaders and Turkey to bring them both together against IS and the Assad regime. But the US will likely fail to create a meaningful Turkish-Kurdish alliance, unless both the Islamic State and the Assad regime cause all three enough pain to bring them together.

Turkey will not stand for the Kurds, IS or Assad gaining power in Syria and will vehemently protest American support for Iraqi Kurds. It will consider a unilateral incursion into Syria, and taking some of northeastern Syria under its control is likely. However, Turkey will not aim to engage Russian forces, limiting its activities to Kurdish and IS territories.

Russia and Iran will continue to support the Assad regime. However, they will seek a diplomatic solution where Assad remains in power over the Alawite-controlled areas of Syria between the western cities of Damascus and Aleppo. Russia will push hard for a diplomatic solution ensuring Assad’s survivability, even if that means leaving the regime with a smaller territory and putting the rest up for grabs among rebel groups. Assad’s forces have lost substantial manpower, and Russia needs to get out and focus its attention on issues closer to home. Iran has apparently begun withdrawing some of its forces from Syria. If IS becomes threatening enough to demand the full attention of other rebel forces, a settlement may become a possibility. But rebel enmity for Assad will not fade this year, and no agreement will be reached.

Sunni Arab nations will mull the possibility of extending support to non-Islamic State Sunni factions in Iraq and Syria, but will not get deeply involved unless a major Shia-led atrocity occurs. But in this conflict, the possibility of genocide cannot be ruled out. Arabs will maintain their strong focus on the civil war in Yemen where they will increase their support for anti-Houthi forces. Kuwait recently became involved on the ground alongside Saudi, Bahraini and Emirati forces; all these nations will redouble their efforts to eliminate the Houthi rebels. On the other side of the conflict, Iran will struggle to provide comparable aid to the Houthis due to Saudi Arabia’s effective blockade around Yemen. Yemen’s civil war could end this year in favor of the ousted Sunni government. The coalition of Sunni forces are certainly stronger right now, but they must achieve a decisive victory over the Houthis to see the conflict end. Iranian support will not enable the Houthis to push back, but economic pressure on the Gulf nations may diminish the total commitment that coalition members can make, delaying the end of the conflict.

Maritime Claims in Asia

China will continue to aggressively exert control over its proclaimed possessions in the South China Sea and East China Sea. Japan and South Korea will hold fast against these claims in the East; Japan’s recent apology to South Korea for atrocities committed during World War II is a sign of the two states’ emerging strategic alliance. Similar apologies may be coming out of Tokyo to nations such as the Philippines or Vietnam, but Beijing will get no such treatment.

In the South China Sea, the US will publicly raise the profile of its military and diplomatic support for nations with maritime claims competing against China. The US has announced its intent to base more forces in the Philippines, and it has also declared its intent to hold more multilateral exercises with ASEAN nations, obviously to deter Chinese aggression. America will be successful in forging a common cause across Asia to prevent the spread of China’s navy, but a formal alliance of nations aimed at deterring China is unlikely.

However, China will not be intimidated. It will continue its strategy of building and developing artificial territory that it claims for its own. No country will resort to the use of force against China in defense of an uninhabited island, but inhabited islands will be actively defended. China may succeed in taking control of most of its desired area, but won’t prevent American naval vessels from patrolling throughout the South China Sea. Neither side will provoke a military conflict; the economic impact would be disastrous.

Western Hegemony

The United States will remain the world’s superpower throughout 2016 and NATO the most potent military coalition. When bundled together, the European, North American and Australian economies dwarf the rest of the world, and this is the foundation of Western power today. However, the political appeal of the West has been diminishing and will continue to decline; China has proven that economic growth can be achieved without implementing democracy and developing nations have taken notice. The West cannot rely on its own perceived political superiority or glorifying human rights to influence other nations. Economic strength and cultural appeal are the foundations of Western soft power.

Vibrant economies will also support hard power, financing Western military expeditions worldwide as the West continues its global counterterrorism campaign. America’s combat mission in Afghanistan will also continue unabated through this year and the next American president will decide its fate. Eastern European NATO members will be bolstered as NATO’s original nemesis continues to revive itself. Russia may be seething at the loss of a jet to Turkey, but it will not seriously entertain the idea of confronting NATO. With the economy reeling, Putin cannot afford any defeat in foreign affairs, much less one with such astronomical consequences.

Trade between Eastern and Western economies will hold steady, with Western demand keeping manufacturing alive in East Asia and providing a basis for the expansion of the services sector. China and India will continue to feed off this energy to grow and diversify their own economies. American growth and European steadiness will keep demand for goods high. Dollars and Euros will continue to circulate globally as the preferred currencies for trade, and Western financial institutions will remain the standard bearers of the economy. Alternative financiers like the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank will see their influence grow, but the West will maintain a strong lead in available capital. China will counter the West by attempting to invest faster and more actively in infrastructure projects across Asia and Africa, but its own economic slowdown will constrain its capabilities.

Overall, Western hegemony may not remain as powerful as it has been, but the West’s economic and military strength will persist even as other states ascend into regional powers.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

The post A Glimpse of the Future: 2016 Global Forecast appeared first on Glimpse from the Globe.

I received the email pictured above from a friend last year shortly after returning to the United States from Azerbaijan. He was alleging that my email account had been hacked into, and that the perpetrators were editing my emails before they could arrive at their intended destinations. Above is his reply, in which he explains his suspicions about the incident; I have blacked out sections of it to protect his identity. I have been unable to verify who hacked into my account and scrubbed a few sentences of the email. Given the Azerbaijani government’s distaste for independent journalists, I could think of a couple good reasons why my account may have been monitored: two articles I had written for Glimpse from the Globe on the country, The Price of Independence and A Caspian Perspective. The realization that perhaps I had worn out my welcome was disconcerting, but I had no way to prove it. Given the recent crackdowns on journalists in Azerbaijan and elsewhere around the world, I wasn’t entirely surprised.

I had sent dozens of other emails over the prior months containing far more politically noxious prose than what was in the allegedly edited email. At the time, I had used the same email to send stories to my editors at Glimpse in the US. If someone was interested in censoring my opinions, those emails containing my stories could have been blocked. This curious incident led me to wonder: is a student publication like Glimpse really a threat to certain states? Was I making myself a persona non grata in a foreign country? Given the Obama administration’s policies for avidly investigating and prosecuting most leaks, could student writers be seen as a threat to their own government? When does one cross the line into professional journalism and begin to bear the attendant responsibilities?

The State of Journalism

Even the most well-intentioned journalists can cause unintentional harm to their sources, themselves and to other third parties. When I went overseas, I went as a student with no intention of reporting at all. But as someone conducting research, I ran into problems similar to those encountered by professional foreign correspondents. Countless journalists have made valiant contributions to public discourse by reporting illegal government programs, wars, corruption and human rights violations taking place across the globe. As a result, some of these men and women have been imprisoned, injured and killed.

For example, Jake Hanrahan and Philip Pendlebury, a journalist and cameraman working for Vice News, were arrested in Turkey on August 27, 2015 and charged with filming near a military base without permission, along with their Iraqi translator Mohammed Ismael Rasool. Hanrahan and Pendlebury were then interrogated about alleged links to the Islamic State (IS) and Kurdish militants. Vice News stated that the duo had been filming skirmishes between Turkish police and Kurdish militants around Diyanbakir.

Hanrahan and Pendlebury have been released, but Rasool remains in custody despite continued uproar about his case. Robert Mahoney, a representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists, decried “a worsening press freedom climate” in Turkey; Ankara’s moves against journalists have not been limited to isolated arrests. The Turkish government has launched an official investigation into Dogan Media Group for alleged “terrorism propaganda” through their use of IS promotional clips in new reports. Dogan is a part owner of CNN’s Turkish channel and the popular Hurriyet newspaper. Certainly, the Islamic State wouldn’t be so successful in its recruiting efforts without such broadcasted propaganda. But western-style outlets run by Dogan are not responsible for this. When they show clips of IS propaganda, it is to inform the general public about the horrifying atrocities the group has committed. Still, the charges brought by the Turkish government do compel us to reexamine what content professional journalists should and should not be reporting in mainstream media.

Responsibilities in International Journalism

Nonfiction writing depends on building a comprehensive story out of verified facts, and that can be a risky undertaking. A journalist’s most basic responsibility is to witness reality and put it into words. Foreign correspondents often serve as the sole sources of information for audiences in their home countries. These journalists have to be prudent about choosing what topics to cover. In addition to considering how useful any given information may be to an audience, the reporter also has to have enough confirmed facts to weave a readable, useful and complete story. In the case of Hanrahan, Pendlebury and Rasool, they decided that they needed to film near a military installation to communicate their content fully.

Some journalists are simply tasked with reporting events for the general public, and the readers can decide on their own how to interpret the information. Any introductory journalism class will emphasize the need for reporters to distance themselves from the story, and report every side of an affair equally and without bias. But today, writers commonly add their own analyses, opinions and predictions to investigative or informative pieces. Reporting and op-ed writing are not so distinct anymore. Vice certainly has a penchant for documenting the personal stories of people caught up in the events that are shaking our world, and they often let people speak freely for themselves.  So should journalists condone or condemn the use of opinionated speech in contemporary media? There are strong arguments for and against it.

Prominent journalists like Glenn Greenwald argue that all writers are inherently biased in some way, and that instead of attempting to cover those biases in vain, they should be noted and used. No story is just the sum of its facts; people are affected by what happens in our world, and emotions and opinions tend to guide our responses. Perhaps these opinions are needed to have constructive dialogues about important issues.

On the other hand, maybe journalists ought to be less aggressive expressing political views.  There are plenty of cases like that of Hanrahan, Pendlebury and Rasool. Other journalists have even gone so far to suggest that Greenwald’s own coverage of the NSA was criminal. In our global media era, journalists have to be wary of the laws of both their home nation and abroad. Political attitudes are important too; to my knowledge, I never broke any laws while doing academic research or reporting from overseas, but experienced some minor harassment nonetheless. In that case, the laws on the books didn’t matter so much as the informal perceptions of the government, and this is often the case in nations with restricted freedom of the press. The Vice team in Turkey were arrested on trumped up charges of being accessories to terrorism—an obvious ruse as there is no supporting evidence.

Whether or not to insert one’s own opinion into an article can be a dicey decision, and probably should be considered on a case-by-case basis. Political and social commentaries can be incredibly influential, and they can fuel political occurrences in and of themselves. At the international level, a journalist who unleashes any kind of opinion is bound to create enemies for him or herself, and that can be lethal. But journalists have a professional obligation to report the truth, and many are willing to take extraordinary risks to do so.

For a developing media outlet like Glimpse, determining when and how to allow correspondents to offer their own controversial analyses is an important responsibility. The words we write here as correspondents will shadow us for the rest of our careers. Student journalists need to be especially mindful of their futures as writers. We also need to be cognizant of the reality that we are not just observers of the world, but also part of it. That Heisenberg uncertainty may give us some serious challenges, but we must remain vigilant about maintaining our ethical and journalistic standards, even if it costs us a little cyberbullying along the way.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

The post The State of Journalism appeared first on Glimpse from the Globe.

Well, it’s done. The Iran Deal, formally named the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was finally signed in Vienna on July 14, and the negotiators all went home feeling like winners. Few observers had the foresight to predict such an event would occur less than fifteen years after 9/11 kicked off America’s “War on Terror” and President Bush put Iran in his Axis of Evil. You can read the full 159 page JCPOA here, courtesy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Moscow’s masters of propaganda released it first, just like their honored guest Edward Snowden would have wanted. If you would rather not visit a Kremlin website, Buzzfeed embedded the JCPOA document within their coverage of the deal here (just scroll down a bit to see it). Or, if you would rather spend your time reading a novella of the same length, you can stay right where you are for this correspondent’s thorough analysis and insights on the deal of the decade.

This review is broken up into two parts. The first is an in-depth analysis and forecast of how all the signatories (the “E3/EU+3 and Iran”) and other nations will be affected by the deal, and how these actors will adjust their foreign policies as a result. The second section is an exploration of a contingency that your regular news outlets probably haven’t covered: What if Iran already has a hidden nuclear arsenal? Additionally, a summary of the main 20 pages of the JCPOA is available here to explain how the deal works. Feel free to skip around to the parts that interest you most and see the summary for reference. The remaining 139 pages of the JCPOA consist of various appendixes that explain the finer details of the deal. If you’re interested in the precise numbers of centrifuges and other materials Iran is allowed to have, check out the appendices linked in the full text.

Section I: A New Geopolitical Era

Iran
Strategically, Iran wins big from this deal, as long as it allows the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to do its job and it respects the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The execution of this deal will signal a new geopolitical era in the Middle East, one in which Iran and the West will interact regularly. There can be no doubt that the Iranians will be gaining influence in Iraq—once the exclusive stomping ground of NATO forces. The Shia-dominated Iraqi government is already accepting substantial aid from Iran for its fight against the Islamic State (IS), and this aid comes without the kinds of restrictions attached to western aid; Iran will surely try to present itself as a more favorable ally to Baghdad than Washington has been. Furthermore, it would come as no surprise if Iran and the US re-established formal diplomatic relations and reopened their respective embassies within a few short years. After all, President Obama has already reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba, another longtime strategic rival and enemy of the United States. Iran is also in talks with the UK to reopen a British Embassy in Tehran, and British Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond has publicly stated that he hopes to reopen the British embassy there by the end of 2015.

In early 2016, many of the UN and EU administered sanctions against Iran will be removed on “Implementation Day” under the terms of the JCPOA, and the Iranian economy will be poised for a period of significant growth (see the attached document above for a breakdown of the timeline for executing the agreement, among other information). The benefits could be huge, since the Iranian economy has been largely isolated from Western markets for years. As Western businesses move in to claim their stakes in Iran, Tehran will be overseeing Iran’s resurgence onto the global energy markets. Bijan Zangeneh, Iran’s Minister of Petroleum, claimed that the country could boost output to 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) as soon as the deal was signed, and that total output would grow by a million bpd within six months. His claims are unlikely to come to fruition within such a short timespan; however, it is important to remember that Iran exported over 40% of its oil to Europe before the sanctions regime was implemented. Deputy Petroleum Minister Mohsen Qamsari said Iran would attempt to recapture that market share, but first the country will focus on building upon its existing 1 million bpd of exports to East Asian markets.

Iran stated recently that it would not allow American inspectors on the IAEA team in Iran due to suspicions about US motives, and that only nations with formal diplomatic relations with Iran could contribute inspectors to the team. But this is unlikely to make the deal untenable. The IAEA and UN inspectors working in Iraq prior to 2003 were right about the nature of Saddam’s alleged WMD program, while US intelligence was dead wrong, so whatever team the IAEA assembles should be more than competent to carry out its tasks. Iran will only get to keep part of the Natanz center as a base for isotope enrichment research, and the Arak heavy water facility will be renovated and have its activities heavily restricted. On the whole, Iran’s enrichment capabilities under the deal will make it impossible to produce enough radioactive material for nuclear weapons, so long as they hold up their end of the bargain.

The United States
President Obama has been trying to wash his hands of the Middle East since he was first elected in 2008, and the Iran deal may very well be the bar of soap he has been looking for all along. Iraq has been the foreign policy bane of his presidency, and it still is. Iran and the US have both spent years blaming each other for causing problems in Iraq, but Washington knows that there are some small advantages to be gained from having Iran back on the scene in the region. Every IS soldier killed by an Iranian bullet or bomb is an IS fighter that the American military didn’t have to kill. For better or worse, the United States and Iran now have a common enemy. However, no one in the US government will ever admit to stepping aside from Middle Eastern conflicts to let Iran fill the gap, and it remains highly unlikely that Iranian and American forces would jointly conduct operations against IS. As Obama said, “This deal is not based on trust,” and the two countries are still generations away from formulating a cordial relationship.

Contrary to popular beliefs held among some Republicans, President Obama and his administration are not likely to tolerate any future Iranian pursuit of a nuclear weapons program. Obama’s political opponents can cite many foreign policy blunders, such as the unilateral “red line” imposed on Bashar al Assad’s regime, as evidence that Obama cannot be trusted to keep his word in the Middle East. But the reality remains that the US foreign policy apparatus is largely in support of the deal, since it will reduce the overall level of unpredictability of Iran’s behavior. Additionally, the multilateral deal will have widespread support internationally, and it actually has a fairly well designed dispute resolution mechanism for dealing with any misbehavior by its signatories. It is far better to have the IAEA conducting regular inspections under an internationally recognized agreement than it is to have the alternative: Israel and the US creating media hype about Iran’s alleged nuclear capabilities every other year, only to be calmed after motorcycle-borne assassins knock off an Iranian scientist or two. The JCPOA creates a structure for dialogue in the region that has not existed in previous years, and that structure could very well avert a disaster. The US learned its lesson in the Cuban Missile Crisis that being able to communicate with rivals is essential, and the infamous red telephone between Moscow and Washington was born as a result. For once, it appears the US learned something from history.

The E3/EU
The “E3” are the European nations of France, Germany and the UK, and the EU is the European Union, which also took part in the talks since it has collectively passed sanctions on Iran in the past. France, Germany, the UK and the collective EU all make similar gains from this agreement, so it makes sense to analyze them together, despite the nuanced differences between the foreign policies of each of these parties. Europe stands to reap significant economic benefits as Iran emerges from its shell in the coming months. Previously severed diplomatic ties between some EU nations and Iran are likely to be re-established over the short and medium term. Specifically, Iranian flagged cargo ships and aircraft will regain the privilege of using EU ports and airports, which will certainly boost trade. The key commodities in the future Iran-EU relationship will be, predictably, oil and gas.

The E3/EU group has much bigger problems on its hands – namely Russia and the Greek financial crisis – that are far more pressing than the Iranian issue has ever been. The continuation of the Ukrainian conflict has forced Europe to diversify its energy supplies away from Russia by any practical means. It would be no surprise to see firms like BP and Total jump into the Iranian production lines at the earliest opportunity. Not unlike the US, the EU is wholly disinterested in being militarily involved in the Middle East’s conflicts. The EU would also like to see IS disappear while expending as little effort on that goal as possible. The Ukrainian conflict, Greek financial crisis, illegal immigration and Russian maneuvers on NATO’s frontier all outrank Iran-related security concerns in the EU right now. The JCPOA allows the Europeans to take one of their many problems off the list of high-priority issues.

Russia
Russia has been less involved in the actual negotiation process than the US and E3/EU, but there can be no doubts that it sees advantages to having Iran back on the world stage; the precise terms of the agreement are less important to Russia than they are to other signatories. Russia and Iran have a common cause in supporting the Assad regime in Syria, so a tighter relationship between Iran and Russia is likely to develop over the next several years. The removal of UN sanctions targeting Iran will open up opportunities for struggling Russian businesses, especially in the defense and energy infrastructure sectors. Rosneft and Gazprom are just as likely to carve niches in the Iranian energy market as any European energy firm, and increased Russian arms sales to Iran are almost a certainty.

Russia’s foreign policy game is a complicated one right now, and Moscow has certainly not made many new friends in recent months. Iran is also looking for new friends as it comes out of its shell. It will be interesting to see how the two nations align, but even more importantly, where they diverge. The two countries may have a mutually beneficial relationship and shared interests, but they do not necessarily trust one another.

China
Like Russia, China has been a more passive member of the negotiations. If China was not a UN Security Council member, Beijing probably would not have been directly involved at all. But the importance of the UN sanctions against Iran forced China to play a role in the process. As with Russia, the precise terms of the agreement are less important to Beijing than the broader opportunities for trade and strategic realignments that have arisen.

The strategic benefits for China are not as great as they are for the aforementioned signatories. China will grow its existing trade relationship with Iran, especially since every Yuan counts in Beijing these days. It will be interesting to see if China will try to recruit Iran into its sphere of influence via the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) economic bloc. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will be another body to watch as global financial actors take aim at Iran. China is an important member of both the SCO and AIIB, alongside Russia. Iran could be more partial to financial tools and economic benefits offered by these bodies instead of their Western counterparts, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). China may also look to Iran as a potential partner for its investments in Afghanistan.

Israel
Israel has nothing to celebrate as a result of the JCPOA, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is making it known to the USA that he is an unhappy man, through both public remarks and private talks. Israel will be making a big lobbying effort to turn Senators against the deal in a last-ditch attempt to prevent its ratification, but it will almost certainly fail.

Given the fire and brimstone rhetoric coming from Jerusalem over the past several months, one would expect the deal to be Israel’s death knell. In reality, the opposite is likely true. Israel now has a direct line to Iran via diplomatic channels in Washington, and vice versa. Even sworn enemies can talk politely on occasion, especially when their interests align. Sure, Israeli forces have been intermittently at war with Iranian supported militants like Hezbollah for decades. But Hezbollah, Iran and Israel all now have a common enemy in the Islamic State. At the very least, Israel probably will not interfere if Iran wants to support the Assad regime and Hezbollah in its fight against IS. But Israel will certainly jump into the fray if anyone threatens its territorial sovereignty, but only its direct neighbors could pose such a threat. The Israeli government’s primary task is self-defense, and this deal will only amplify that reality. Israel’s geostrategic position is never good, but it has been much worse than it is today.

The Gulf Cooperation Council
The GCC nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Qatar and Oman are nearly as unhappy as Israel. These nations share historical memories that predate their modern countries, and all see a common, imperious enemy waking up on the other side of the Persian Gulf. These Arab nations know that the wealth and prosperity they accumulated over the past decades would have been far more difficult to aggregate in the face of Iranian power, and they took full advantage of Iran being hidden inside its shell for so long.

As a result of high oil prices and American interest in the region, the GCC nations have been able to bolster their military prowess over the last decade. Iran could not easily take on the GCC in a direct confrontation. But the GCC states are worried about covert Iranian support for minority groups that could create civil unrest or spark additional domestic terrorism in their own countries. Sunni leaders have long suspected Iran of attempting to create civil unrest among Shia minority communities in GCC nation in the hopes of causing revolutions to bring new, Iranian approved governments to power across the Gulf. The Sunni-ruled GCC nations won’t tolerate Shia uprisings, as evidenced by Saudi Arabia’s willingness to engage the Houthi rebels in Yemen. GCC governments also oppose Sunni jihadist movements like IS, but they will not cooperate in any counterterrorism efforts on that stage.

Turkey
Turkey is in the midst of serious political flux. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), led by President Erdogan, lost absolute power in recent elections, and Turkey has yet to form a new government. Meanwhile, it is surrounded by foreign challenges: the Greek economic crisis in the west, Russian resurgence to the north, a medley of intensifying civil war, jihad and Kurdish separatism in the south, and now Iran’s reappearance onstage in the east. The Syrian civil war is the top priority right now in Ankara, and to that end Turkey is reconsidering an incursion into northern Syria to create a buffer zone against the Islamic State and maintaining control over Kurdish militias (the idea was on the table last October).  Turkish foreign policy is always rather opaque, and that is just the way Ankara likes it.

The JCPOA does not appear to threaten Turkish objectives in the immediate future. However, Iran’s consequential resurgence onto the scene does not bode well for Turkish foreign policy objectives over the long term. While Turkey is no fan of the Islamic State, Ankara is still a member of NATO and a fierce opponent of the Assad regime, and therefore is unlikely to cooperate directly with Iran on anti-IS efforts. Furthermore, Turkey trusts Iran about as much as Israel. Ankara could be concerned about Iran supporting Kurdish separatist efforts, which would create enough internal turmoil to take Turkey off the world stage for some time. Altogether, Ankara sees Russia moving south, the Syrian and Iraqi civil war spilling north, and a resurgent nationalist movement among the Kurds. Adding an ambitious, confident Iran to the mix will make Turkey very uncomfortable for the next several years, but Ankara probably won’t play its cards until someone forces its hand.

Syria, Iraq & Yemen
Iran’s foreign policy sights are set on the three highly vulnerable countries of Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Syria and Iraq are sharing a civil war, and both nations are home to Shia controlled governments fighting the Islamic State. In Syria, the situation is even more complicated as a bevy of militant groups jostle for control of the country. Iran would love to have friendly Shia governments secure in both Iraq and Syria, as this would form a belt of Shia nations stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea. Both Damascus and Baghdad already depend on Iranian aid to some degree; these relationships will only tighten as the Iranian economy improves and Iran expends more resources in Syria and Iraq. Both governments will accept as much aid as they can for the least costs, and Iranian demands are likely to be light.

Yemen is a different case from Syria and Iraq, since it is a battleground for the Iranian-supported Houthi rebels against Yemeni government forces, the Saudi Arabian military and a smattering of jihadists. Saudi Arabia needs to keep the entirety of its peninsula secure, and will not tolerate an Iranian puppet regime sitting on its southwestern doorstep. The presence of Iranian Scud missiles across the Persian Gulf is enough of a challenge for Riyadh; it cannot afford to have a second front open up in Yemen in any potential conflict with Iran. Tehran can distract Saudi Arabia, and by extension the whole GCC, by supporting a limited Houthi insurgency in Yemen at a relatively low cost and low risk. Iran will continue to support its proxies in Yemen in the near term to keep the GCC members on their toes, testing their patience.

Section II: The Biggest Risk

One question remains that must be answered to justify the agreement: What if Iran already has the bomb? By signing the agreement, every signatory has taken a tremendous risk, while GCC nations and Israel are left to solemnly consider their new security concerns. If it was discovered that the Iranians stashed away a nuclear arsenal while under watchful eyes for all these years, it would be the counterintelligence victory of the decade, and Israel would certainly make the most of its “I told you so!” opportunity. But regardless of whether Iran does have the bomb, it still makes sense for the negotiating parties to conclude this agreement, for several reasons.

First, there’s a good chance the IAEA would discover a hidden nuclear weapons cache, or they would be blocked by the Iranian government from inspecting a suspected arsenal, which would be a violation of the JCPOA. While the IAEA is responsible for the actual inspections, there can be no doubt that a troupe of Western intelligence agencies will feed the inspectors leads and tips while they continue scouring the Persian landscape for nuclear compounds. Either the discovery of illicit materials or a blockage of IAEA activities would indicate malign intentions in Tehran; the sanctions and military posturing of the past decade would snap back into action shortly thereafter.

Secondly, Iran remains vulnerable to second-strike counterattacks from nuclear capable enemies, such as all-but-certain-to-exist Israeli nuclear weapons or nuclear missiles launched from US submarines. Thus, the Cold-War era theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) stubbornly persists in our post-Cold War world. The US is not abandoning their Arab allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), contrary to popular belief on “the Arab Street.” The GCC member nations and Israel have been busy developing their economies and militaries with US aid ever since 9/11, and will continue to beef up their security apparatuses in the future. Quiet Israeli-GCC cooperation will continue unimpeded for the near term, as Iran becomes a common problem and Palestine (remember that place?) falls by the wayside. The evidence speaks for itself: in February, Saudi Arabia granted Israel permission to use its airspace in any future strike against Iran in return for unspecified “progress” from Israel on Palestinian issues. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia bought $1.75 billion worth of Patriot air defense systems from the USA last year to defend against Iran’s considerable arsenal of missiles and rockets.

Third, the strategic benefits for all the signatories far outweigh the costs. Iran has capitulated to most every demand made by Western negotiators in the deal, and that alone shows how desperate Tehran is to conclude the deal. The White House has been gloating about the deal, and has been on a major public relations campaign to generate popular support for it. US Secretary of State John Kerry even claimed that he walked out of the talks on three occasions over the years of negotiations, and that the Iranian negotiators eventually agreed to demands made by Western powers in order to continue the negotiations. The US and its European allies have made a huge step in crafting a sustainable balance of power in the region. Crafting a Middle Eastern arrangement that can exist without active oversight and military intervention has been a goal of Western powers since the occupation of Iraq went downhill shortly after the initial invasion. Iraq is still a work in progress, but the West is confident that the GCC states are strong enough to counter Iranian influence while (hopefully) pounding away at the Islamic State. Having the Iranian segment of the Middle Eastern equation figured out is a massive accomplishment. As for the Iranians, they have been given an opportunity to come out from their isolation and retake their historical place as a regional power based upon the lands of ancient Persia. They will look for opportunities to skirt provisions of the deal, as any self-interested power would, but they cannot afford to squander their ascent. Direct military engagement would cost Iran the opportunities for development it has worked to achieve over the last several years.

So what are the odds that Iran has nukes? Well, that depends on who you ask. You might believe “Reza Khalili”, who wrote a Washington Post article under a pseudonym in 2011 in which he claimed that he was a CIA spy and that the Iranian regime had acquired nuclear weapons from old Soviet arsenals. You might also choose to put faith in Foreign Policy Magazine’s 2015 argument by Graham Allison, who claims the Iranians merely have the capability to produce nuclear weapons in short order if needed. Or, you could go with the testimony of senior US officials, who claimed in a 2012 New York Times article that Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons and only wants the capability to produce them.

Regardless of if Iran has nukes, has the capability to produce them, or has neither, the deal still makes sense for all of the reasons outlined above. If they do have nuclear weapons, that makes the JCPOA pills much easier to swallow, and the Iranian government is probably struggling to keep a straight face after successfully bluffing the entire world. But logic still compels Iran to sign the agreement even if they don’t have any nuclear weapons stashed away. Remaining a political pariah and isolating a population of 77 million people from the world just for the sake of building weapons that are unlikely to be used outside of World War III doesn’t make sense from any pragmatic standpoint. “The Iranians aren’t pragmatic! They’re radicals!” screams Jerusalem. Well, some are, but not all. The Iranian leadership today is not made up of the angry mob that stormed the US Embassy in Tehran all those years ago. President Rouhani is not Ahmadinejad; Rouhani is a comparably level-headed career diplomat and academic, and has written books like his 1,200 page tome National Security and Nuclear Diplomacy. Political rhetoric in Tehran may be radical, but the thinking going on there is very realistic. The current government understands that Iran is outgunned and outnumbered by the American, Israeli and GCC militaries. Self-destruction is not on the table in Tehran.

Thoughts? Opinions? Disagreements? Feel free to leave your ideas down here in our oft-neglected comment section.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors, or governors.

The post Deal of the Decade: How the Iran Deal Will Change the Future appeared first on Glimpse from the Globe.

In a move that shook the world for more than a few diplomats, Reuters recently published an exclusive investigative report claiming that on at least two occasions in 2013 and 2014, Turkey supplied lethal aid to Syrian rebels, including Islamist groups, and that at least some of that aid later ended up in the hands of the Islamic State (IS) and other jihadist units operating over the border in Syria. The May 21 report cited a Turkish prosecutor and court testimony from Turkish gendarmerie officers who searched trucks escorted by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (called Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı, or MIT). The Reuters investigation appears to have taken several months, if not over a year. The local police and gendarmerie alleged that the MIT was caught covertly supplying weaponry to areas of Syria controlled by Islamist rebels on two occasions, in November 2013 and January 2014. Since then, the prosecutors and over 30 officers who searched the MIT trucks have been charged by the Turkish federal government with crimes ranging from carrying out an illegal search to revealing state secrets, military espionage and attempting to overthrow the government of Turkey.

Exactly whose hands these weapons ended up in remains uncertain. At the time, the Syrian territory closest to where the shipments were discovered was under the control of Ahrar al-Sham. This hardline Salafist group was then led by Abu Omair al-Ahamy, who was a known associate of al Qaeda leaders including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Al-Shamy was killed in Aleppo in February 2014.

Ibrahim Kalin, the official spokesperson for Turkish President Erdogan, recited to Reuters the oft-repeated official statement that “Turkey has never sent weapons to any group in Syria.” But as the Reuters report suggests, there is ample evidence to the contrary. Additionally, the MIT has the support of President Erdogan. When questioned on the incident last August during a television interview, he commented that “You can’t search an MIT truck, you have no authority.” He further claimed the trucks were carrying humanitarian aid to Turkmen communities.

But according to Reuters, Turkey was supplying lethal aid to rebels in Syria, which begs the question: Whose side is Turkey on?

Regardless of what the trucks in question were carrying or where they were sending their supplies, there can be no doubts that President Erdogan is juggling conflicting foreign policy interests while preparing for the upcoming general election on June 7. Turkey straddles the Bosporus Strait, and is geographically part of both Europe and the Middle East. Many of NATO’s European members are heavily focused on the Ukrainian crisis, their energy security and the financial state of the EU. All of these things are problematic for Turkey, NATO’s southeastern anchor. But lately, Turkey’s focus has been largely on the Syrian civil war that continually ravages Syrian and Iraqi lands south of Turkey’s long Anatolian border. The primary objective for the Turks in this conflict so far has been to maintain their own territorial sovereignty. Given the strength of the Turkish military and stability of the government in Ankara, this has not been much of an issue. The core of Turkey lies in the northwest, in the area surrounding Istanbul and Ankara. The rugged Anatolian landscape serves as a significant buffer between Turkey’s population centers and the chaos swirling in the Arab lands to the south.

The only recent threat to Turkish sovereignty involved the tomb of Suleyman Shah, grandfather of Ottoman Empire founder Osman I, which was located on the bank of the Euphrates River in Syria, about 30 kilometers south of the Turkish border. Shah’s tomb has long been guarded by a platoon-sized element of Turkish soldiers, and Shah’s burial site is considered Turkish sovereign soil. As IS approached the area in February, the decision was made to exhume the remains of Suleyman Shah and move them to a new location in order to avoid a large-scale confrontation between IS fighters and the Turkish guards. On February 22, the Turkish military conducted the operation, bringing home the contingent of guards in a rapidly executed rescue mission. Suleyman Shah now resides in a new, temporary tomb. It is still in Syria, but now less than 200 meters from the Turkish border. The Assad regime naturally condemned the operation as a violation of Syria’s territorial sovereignty.  But the Assad regime has no interest in fighting Turkey over such a relatively trivial matter, and Turkey is not willing to join the melee just to take down Assad. What’s more important is that the Suleyman Shah incident highlights a continuation of the Turkish government’s non-confrontational policy towards the Islamic State.

Back in October of last year, the city of Kobani came under siege from IS forces. The city lies on the Syrian side of the Turkish-Syrian border and is (or was) inhabited predominantly by Kurds, who also populate a large swath of eastern Turkey. Much to the chagrin of Kurds in the area, the Turkish government stationed tanks on the border in a firm stance against any violent spillover, but did nothing to assist the besieged Kurds militarily. Given the uneasy and often violent history between Ankara and the Kurdish people, this was not much of a surprise. While Erdogan could have scored major points with the Kurdish minority in Turkey by intervening, he was unwilling to make Turks the target of the Islamic State’s brutality or Assad’s barrel bombs. As a result, Turkey stood back and watched while keeping Anatolia secure.

For its part, the Islamic State has not conducted any major operations in Turkey. IS has been expanding in two ways. First, it has been expanding its influence by supporting small cells located throughout the Middle East. Second, it has been gaining the loyalties of more distant, well-known terrorist groups in Asia and Africa, most notably Nigeria’s Boko Haram, which pledged allegiance to IS in March. But IS activity in Turkey has been largely limited to recruiting, since many jihadists enter the Syrian battlefields from across the lengthy Turkish border. An uneasy truce between the Islamic State and Turkey can be observed; both want the Assad regime to fall. Since IS has no air force, a Turkish no-fly zone is no threat to them—they would actually gain mobility from the absence of Syrian aerial attacks.

Meanwhile, the Turks have not actively participated in anti-IS coalition airstrikes led by the US and its Western and Gulf allies, launched in September 2014. Turkey is, however, home to a US air base. When the airstrikes began, Erdogan voiced support for the operations, which targeted the al-Qaeda aligned Khorasan group and IS targets in both Syria and Iraq. He stated that Turkey could provide “military or logistical” support for the operation, leaving the door open to future involvement.

Turkey doesn’t have a favorite in the Syrian conflict so much as it has a least favorite  – the Assad regime – whose actions are responsible for the countless Syrian refugees who have fled to Turkey. For Ankara, anyone who wants to depose Assad is welcome to do so. The Islamic State is the most powerful actor besides the regime in Syria, so Turkey won’t impede any IS activities. But Ankara also knows from the Islamic State’s rhetoric and operations throughout the Middle East that its ultimate goal is to create an all-encompassing caliphate. That too would be unacceptable for Turkey, but the prospect of a pan-Islamic caliphate is a long way off. So far, IS has only posed a significant threat to the sovereignty of weak and failing states, and doesn’t have the operational prowess to make territorial gains in more stable countries like Turkey or Saudi Arabia.

Besides the Islamic State, every other rebel faction is out to get rid of Assad as well. These groups range in ideology, practices and strength from the secular, US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) to jihadist groups to ethnic Kurdish militias. Many of these groups find themselves in conflict over incompatible ideologies and long-standing feuds. These smaller groups also tend to find themselves pinched between regime forces in the east and IS strongholds in the west of Syria. The medley of smaller militant groups are Turkey’s best options to use as proxy forces in Syria, and many are in dire need of military assistance.

In deciding whom to support, Turkey must turn west and juggle the concerns of its European and American partners, whose attention is divided between the Middle East, Ukraine and tensions in the South China Sea. While Turkey may see the Islamic State as a lesser evil than the Assad regime, its NATO partners disagree. The US, its Gulf partners and Israel do not want to see the Islamic State supplant Assad and rule all of Syria. For the US, it is better to have a Syria divided among evildoers and to focus instead on keeping the Baghdad regime intact. There are no good options right now in Syria for the US or its European partners. The West’s preferred politically moderate, secular rebel forces have been holding a weak hand for a long time now in Syria, and providing them with lethal aid means undertaking the risk that those supplies could fall into terrorist hands. Publicly taking sides with the Assad regime to oppose terrorism is still morally and politically untenable among NATO members. Letting the civil war continue unabated is actually the best of all these bad strategic options.

Western powers find themselves doing four things under US leadership: 1) giving parcels of aid to refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and elsewhere, 2) bombing the least desirable jihadist elements in an effort to maintain the current balance of chaos in Syria, 3) preventing terrorist attacks outside the region, and 4) attempting to preserve a semblance of a government in Iraq by reluctantly accepting Iranian help in the region. Turkey has only been an active partner in the humanitarian aid mission and contributing to counterterrorism efforts outside the conflict zone. It is unlikely to join the airstrike coalition or to assist the government in Baghdad. But Turkey’s opinion about the utility of assisting certain groups does not align with the thinking of its NATO partners, as evidenced by the smuggling activities uncovered by Reuters.

So whose side is Ankara on? For now it stands alone. Technically, Turkey is a NATO treaty ally, but given its reluctance to participate in NATO operations in Iraq, anyone can see that the NATO-Turkey relationship has been fraying slowly over time. NATO offers Turkey a hedge against aggression from Assad, but Turkey remains reluctant to take part in US-led NATO missions. Additionally, Turkey depends on the United States to keep Iraq from imploding. Like the Arabs, Turkey is uncomfortable with expanding Iranian influence in the region. But Turkey is unlikely to openly challenge Iranian power, unlike the Saudis, who have been actively fighting Iranian supported Houthi militants in Yemen. Turkey also has the unique problem of dealing with a quite large Kurdish population with territorial ambitions. Keeping the Kurds in check is a national security priority for Ankara, and the Turkish government would undoubtedly diverge from its allies’ policies to keep Kurdish militants under control if necessary. Turkey also does not want to arm Kurdish forces fighting in Syria or Iraq for fear that those weapons could be used against Turkey in the future.

Like the US, Turkey is unlikely to fight outside of a supportive coalition. But its interests no longer align with those of its NATO allies, and so it finds itself isolated in many areas. Perhaps the upcoming elections will result in a change for Turkish policies, but for now its foreign agenda will remain intact. Turkey will have to come up with solutions for its foreign policy challenges on its own, lest they be resolved in favor of its foes. Maybe letting the Islamic State achieve its short-term goals in Syria wouldn’t be so bad for Turkey, if Ankara could figure out a foolproof and bloodless way to prevent IS from achieving its larger ambitions in the future.

Good luck with that, Erdogan.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors or governors.

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It was a bad idea and everyone knew it. Well, everyone except our professor. The assignment for our class was to go out into the more downtrodden neighborhoods surrounding Baku, Azerbaijan and ask people how oil wealth and government policies affected their lives. The professor would grade the questions for their inquisitiveness. Basically, the task was to get people to speak their minds about sensitive topic in public. “Better” questions were those that would provoke the average person into a diatribe about society, politics, economics or energy policies. This was something few Azeris seemed likely to do, and thus none of the students in the class were enthusiastic to conduct the experiment. We would look more like journalists than researchers, and independent journalists were suffering in Baku.

By this time, my first piece for Glimpse from the Globe had been published, which painted a decidedly negative picture of Azerbaijan’s political landscape; I had no idea if anyone in Baku was aware of it, but it was possible. Azerbaijan is known for its powerful class of political elites, floating on a geyser of Caspian oil. They are busy enough with international political and commercial affairs, so they rely on manipulated elections and a vast security apparatus to maintain stability in the domestic arena. I knew the society well, I knew the neighborhoods we were supposed to visit, and I already knew the silent opinions of many citizens. The last thing I wanted to do was ask pushy questions like “Do you think the government has managed oil wealth fairly?” in some of Baku’s poorest neighborhoods.

Further complicating the situation was the ethnic makeup of my research team: one Azeri and five foreigners, three of whom had absolutely no chance of blending in. The native student and I could speak Azerbaijani and conduct interviews, but the rest of the team would be useless. They were doomed to attract the attention of people who had never before seen foreigners roaming their neighborhoods and bazaars en masse. I knew how to blend in well enough on my own, but with two Africans and a blonde Aussie on my team, there would be no escaping the wary stares of thousands of Azeris who had probably never seen people from other continents in their neighborhoods.. Inevitably, there would be undercover police officers among them.

The inevitable approach from the local cops happened at our second of four locations. We were interviewing a man on the street – who was rather apprehensive from the outset – about how things have changed in the last decade. Instead of asking directly about energy policies, income inequality or other controversial topics, we asked about the quality of healthcare and education, job opportunities and the affordability of food, knowing that the answers would be positive. In 2004 the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline opened, wealth surged into Baku and life began to improve dramatically for many people. According to World Bank figures, Azerbaijan’s GDP per capita increased from under $2,000 to over $7,000 by 2013. Our strategy turned out to be a safe move, and we avoided triggering negative opinions. But as we interviewed the man on the sidewalk, a crowd of onlookers gathered around the unusual group of foreigners jotting notes about the conversation. They interrupted, asking what we were doing. I fended off nosy pedestrians by answering that we were students doing research, enabling the rest to keep going with the interview.

One man was particularly rude and kept asking us questions. Where were we from? Why were we asking these questions? Why did we come to this neighborhood? After explaining our project, I asked if he would be willing to do an interview himself, which he declined. Then he pulled out a government identification card, revealing himself as an undercover policeman.

We were surrounded. It was obvious that several other men around us worked with the officer questioning us. Others may have just been curious pedestrians. Uniformed policemen showed up a few minutes later, but the plainclothes officer was clearly in charge. He wanted to see identification from all of us and various government registration documents as proof we had permission to conduct our research. Naturally, we had no such documents. We spotted our professor down the street, so I broke out of the circle and got him to come explain the situation since he could speak Russian.

Upon being introduced to the professor, the officer said: “I represent Azerbaijan, I must speak Azerbaijani.” Azeris are very proud of their heritage, and tend to display serious and heartfelt nationalism. For all I know, the officer probably could have been charged with neglecting his duties if he had not shown us his robust patriotism. Our Azeri group member offered to translate, but eventually the cops acquiesced and switched to Russian. Azerbaijan’s schools used Russian throughout the Soviet period, but switched to Azeri after declaring independence in 1991. Most of the population still speaks Russian fluently. We slipped around the corner and back to the bus during our professor’s conversation with the police, who had lost interest in what was clearly a student assignment.

I could understand the officer’s position; he was doing his job. I was more disappointed with how the professor handled the class. He did not seem to think that there would be any issues with his assigned research project, and took none of the precautions that I assumed would be common sense, like sharing his cell phone number with the class. Additionally, I felt that he was on some kind of moral crusade to open the minds of Azeris to the injustices of their government. But the injustices he had in mind were related to poverty, not security or freedom of expression.

Our professor wanted us to understand that the quality of life of most Azeris had not improved as a result of the energy boom. But everyone in our class already knew the facts of life in Azerbaijan; a relatively small number of citizens are making incredible gains while the rest of the country struggles to keep up. Stability and order are strictly enforced by the government, which fears popular dissent for a variety of reasons. The government must sanction public events of any kind, no matter the size. At home, Americans can encounter musicians, reporters, pollsters and vendors on the streets virtually anywhere. In former Soviet states, this is less common since their rigorous security apparatuses can and do question “suspicious” pedestrians.

Transitioning to “democracy”, as many in the West think of it, means making societal changes that simply do not work well in some countries. It will never be easy to convince an entire police force that student activism, street reporting, impromptu performances or other “unusual” activities are nothing to fear. Many Western citizens who visit these places come to believe democracy and human rights don’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell of thriving in “oppressive” nations.

The reality is that outside the West, many nations are culturally, institutionally and practically unprepared to become “Western democracies”, regardless of what their constitutions say. Azerbaijan and many other former Soviet states have little historical experiences with Western-style democracy. Their Soviet legacies are also incredibly strong, so their government institutions tend to model those first implemented by the Kremlin. Institutions born of Soviet lineage continue to shape societies in ways that reflect the Soviet period.  Therefore, incidents like my experience occur regularly. As a result, nations like Azerbaijan are condemned by moral authorities such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Human Rights Watch, the US State Department and the EU for not allowing protests, jailing journalists and other incidents. Granted, some incidents do merit international exposure and condemnation. But simply condemning regimes for human rights abuses will do nothing except document and publicize the incidents.

Am I unhappy about the status of human rights in many countries? Of course. But another problem lies in the misperceptions of those Westerners who think they have all the answers, but who don’t actually offer meaningful solutions. Despite unsuccessful Western intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade and a half, Americans still habitually delude themselves into thinking that we can somehow manipulate regimes into adopting a stronger rule of law. Military interventions, economic aid packages and sanctions, training programs and a host of other activities have failed to produce functioning, favorable or idealistic governments in various states.

The world can be improved, but not overnight. Transformations in states and societies take time, and we must know that from history. The US took its merry time in establishing civil rights for citizens of all races. Two centuries, in fact, and it still has problems with race relations. No nation has an innocent history. Those governments pursuing morally inspired foreign policies need to run forensics on their own souls before passing judgment on other nations. They also need to examine the practicality of a morally driven foreign policy, both for the sake of preserving amoral strategic interests and ensuring that their foreign policy goals are realistically attainable. As President Eisenhower once said, “Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.” Maybe we should work on our World Press Freedom Rankings before lecturing others on media rights—the US stands at 46th worldwide.

Being briefly investigated by undercover cops was an unpleasant experience. After all, being jailed in Baku was not on my bucket list during my semester abroad. The interaction was a firsthand lesson in the everyday realities faced by independent reporters in Azerbaijan. I don’t envy their positions, and their work is laudable. But the work of a free press is meaningless when the audience of ordinary citizens is unreachable, cowed, uninspired or hopeless. Just as a population strangled by fear is unlikely to change a regime, a regime in fear will not easily change itself in any manner that would sacrifice its security.

So what does it take? What does it take for the West to understand, and for developing countries to learn? Anyone with a laptop can peruse Radio Free Europe and then write a fairly well informed blog post about the status of journalistic liberties in Azerbaijan, or an article on civil liberties in just about any nation. But understanding the causes requires experience. I had no intention of becoming a journalist of any kind when I took off for Baku last June. I had no intention of writing about my experience on the research trip until long after it had ended. But I realized that the lessons offered by that excursion and a host of other classes and experiences enabled me to realize the complexity of a seemingly straightforward situation. Just as an average American may not wholly appreciate the finer aspects of conducting journalism in a place like Azerbaijan, the average Azeri – and even the most extraordinary Azeri officials, who are quite talented – may not comprehend how a free press serves its nation by operating independently. As I learned the complexity of Azeri strategic calculus with regards to controlling the media by learning firsthand, an Azeri could learn about the workings and benefits of a free press through personal experience.

More international exchanges between the West and nations like Azerbaijan should be encouraged in order to bring the realities of Western societies to bear in developing countries. Societal changes occur one citizen at a time. Almost every Azeri I met who had travelled to the West could talk for hours about how different those countries were. I ran into dozens of students who had completed year-long student exchange programs during high school and college, and every one of them could talk for hours about how that time abroad totally changed their lives. They became fluent in English, learned the true value of education and realized that they are actually capable of starting their own businesses and becoming successful without a government job or a family connection. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of Azeris travel overseas, and foreign ideas are slow to filter into the country. American, French, Spanish and British flags can be seen on shirts and soccer jerseys throughout Baku, but the societies they represent are all but absent.

Azerbaijan is not alone in this condition. Similar political and social realities exist in countries worldwide. Nations large and small continue to dampen popular dissent for a variety of reasons. They range from more respectable goals, such as preserving national sovereignty or maintaining stable governance, to sheer abominations, like covering up war crimes. Residents of politically undeveloped countries need to experience foreign excursions in order to understand that alternatives do exist, and that they themselves are capable of implementing changes in their home nations. Encouraging citizens of politically underdeveloped countries to travel abroad might help them gain insights about what can be possible in their homelands. After all, a nation’s history is written primarily by its own people. Providing new perspectives to regular Azeris, Congolese or Venezuelans can give those citizens the tools to reshape their nations in ways the West has been dreaming about for decades. I would happily gamble a round trip ticket from Baku to New York that a certain cop would never have stopped me in the street if he had spent a week in Manhattan.

Actually, he definitely would stop me. I’ve never met a foreigner who had been to New York and didn’t have five stories to tell about it.

The post Growing Pains: Life as a Foreign Correspondent appeared first on Glimpse from the Globe.

Kenneth Lee

Just a week before the tragic earthquake in Nepal, a group of earthquake specialists gathered in the capital, Kathmandu, to discuss how to prepare the region for the impending “big one”. For decades, experts have warned that the whole Himalayan region was at risk. Unfortunately, due to Nepal’s underdevelopment, there were no earthquake warning systems or earthquake resistant building codes in effect on April 25.

There is a reactionary mentality to earthquakes; most governments simply implement response mechanisms rather than measures to mitigate potential damage. While humanitarian operations have improved significantly in recent years thanks to technological innovations, the current policy approach toward earthquakes is unsustainable. Massive earthquakes are not freak disasters; they occur relatively frequently across the globe, leaving developing countries most at risk (e.g., Indonesia, Chile and Haiti).

Contrary to popular opinion, the approximate location and intensity of earthquakes can be predicted. Scientists are even developing estimated timeline technology. Armed with this promising research, the global community needs to aid developing countries in becoming equipped with the necessary technology, warning systems and architectural knowledge to mitigate earthquake damage. Japan is a clear example of an immensely successful proactive approach to earthquakes, regularly withstanding massive earthquakes above 7.0-magnitude. There is no excuse for the international community not cooperating on earthquake preparedness as it has on issues such as disease and poverty.

Dan Morgan-Russell

The New York Times’ Wednesday headline blared that the earthquake revealed the “hubris and imbalance” on Mount Everest, Nepal’s main attraction for foreigners. However, the climbing world has known about the appalling and embarrassing racial politics on Everest for decades.

Western adventure seekers often pay tens of thousands of dollars to join guided expeditions up Everest. These expeditions cheaply hire local Nepali Sherpas to haul gear while treating the Sherpas as second-class citizens. Sherpas break trails on the most dangerous parts of the mountain–places like the Khumbu Icefall, a glacial river of ice, where crevasses miles into the earth shift day by day. Sherpas on Everest have incredibly high death rates, higher even than US soldiers operating in Iraq from 2003 to 2007.

Himalayan expeditions have been unequal since Westerners started summiting Everest. At the start of the 1953 expedition, when Sir Edmund Hillary (a New Zealander) and Tenzing Norgay (a Nepali Indian) first stood atop the world, the Western climbers were given bunks in the homes of British embassy staff in Kathmandu, while the 20 Sherpas were offered a place on the garage floor of the embassy. After the expedition, the Queen knighted Sir Edmund Hillary for his successful summit, but did not bestow the same honor upon Sherpa Tenzing Norgay.

Nepal is an underdeveloped country, but with the Himalayan climbing industry becoming increasingly popular in recent decades, there is no reason for Nepal to remain destitute. Paying living wages to Sherpa guides and treating them with the respect they deserve is an important first step.

Erin Wong

With over 6,000 dead and 14,000 wounded, Nepal has suffered its greatest natural disaster of the century. Earthquakes in this region are not surprising, since the country lies directly on a fault line. Location, however, may not have been the only cause of Saturday’s tragedy.

Each year, the monsoon season brings heavy rainfall over the Himalayas, gathering in rivers basins in India and Bangladesh. The seasonal influx and outflow of rainwater weighs down the Indian subcontinent’s tectonic plate and builds potential energy along its edges. Over the weekend, this tension may have contributed to the Indian plate slipping under the Eurasian plate, causing the fatal earthquake. When climate change interferes with the natural magnitude of monsoon season in South Asia, this externality creates greater sensitivity between the two plates.

Geologists are predicting an increased frequency in earthquakes and volcanic action in the years to come. According to a team at University College London, humanity will face a series of “extreme geological events” in the near future. Simply put, changing weather patterns and the melting of major ice caps will lead to a massive displacement of water and weight, triggering abrupt seismic activity. There is no way to pinpoint exactly where these disasters will occur, but the Himalayas are among those regions most at risk.

This week, and for many thereafter, the international community must extend its prayers and support to those in Nepal. What this disaster has taught us is that the effects of climate change are no longer limited to the weather and will come at a great cost.

Jack Anderson

The earthquake in Nepal has brought the small country into the spotlight, and the picture is atrocious. Stratfor, a global intelligence company, made its assessment of Nepal’s geographical challenges available for free in the wake of the quake. On a seismically calm day, Nepal would probably still look incredibly disorganized and largely undeveloped. Nepal is landlocked high in the Himalayas, and its weak economy is heavily dependent on foreign tourists who want to see places like Mount Everest or to experience the local culture. A natural disaster is the last thing this tenuously positioned, poor and ill-governed country needed.

Vice News has been releasing video dispatches from Nepal, which show that the problems facing Nepalis in cities like Kathmandu and in small villages across the countryside are multitudinous. The government cannot help them all, even with the millions of dollars, tons of supplies and thousands of volunteers pouring into the country. Even the best organized recovery efforts would take years to get Nepal back to where it was before the quake–and that isn’t a very desirable state to be in anyway. Nepal’s recent history is rife with tragedies. Perhaps this one can be turned into an opportunity to build a country the right way. Their future survival might depend on it.

Kshitij Kumar

In the midst of a humanitarian crisis, politics has not disappeared. Consider the fact that on Monday, Nepal rejected an offer from Taiwan to send a rescue team, citing a desire to “prioritize help from neighboring countries.” Yet, the facts speak otherwise: search and rescue teams have also arrived from countries as far away as the US, Finland and Israel. The Nepali government appears to be prioritizing its belief in “One China” possibly at the expense of those affected by the quake.

China and India seem to be vying to win the hearts of the Nepali people, many of whom are frustrated by their own government’s slow relief response. China has dispatched 300 aid personnel; the Indian Air Force alone has sent 950 personnel and provided 400 tons of aid. Why? Both countries have significant geopolitical interests in the small country. China needs Nepal as an ally against the Tibetan independence movement. India needs Nepal to serve as a buffer against China. However, India has continuously failed to maintain healthy relations with the Nepali government. Perhaps this is why its aid has been so substantial and so quick; this is possibly one of New Delhi’s fastest and most expensive responses to a natural disaster in the region.

As Nepal recovers and begins reconstruction efforts moving forward, both India and China will make politico-economic moves to maintain influence. This soft power battle for the two regional hegemons to woo Nepal should be in the small country’s benefit. Let’s hope that the aid war going does not further hurt the many victims of the quake.

Correction: The previous version of Erin’s response mistakenly referred to the newly researched connection between increased monsoon rainfall and more frequent earthquakes as fact. The article has been corrected to reflect the doubt in the scientific community as to the validity of that conclusion.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Glimpse from the Globe staff, editors, or governors.

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