#us influence

[nawapon17]

Sweden’s Gripen sale to Peru sparks new Latin American arms race

Sweden approves sale of 12 Gripen E/F jets to Peru, boosting its air force with advanced jets. Explore the $2B deal reshaping Latin America’s defense landscape.

[munaeem]

Declining US Influence: Causes and Consequences

Hey there! Grab a seat and maybe a coffee; we’re diving into a topic that might sound a bit dry but is actually the political equivalent of a reality TV show: America’s waning global influence. Yep, the good old U.S. of A., once sitting atop the world stage like a celebrity at the Oscars, is experiencing a serious case of stage fright. So, what’s going on? Let’s unpack this together. The Erosion…

Declining US Influence: Causes and Consequences

[thoughtlessarse]

Harassed and called paedophiles: Librarians describe being targeted by anti-LGBT+ groups

Some librarians fear being physically attacked, according to new research.

Librarians have reported feeling “intense” stress and trauma after being targeted by campaigners who disagree with libraries stocking LGBTQIA material and programming inclusive events, according to a new report. Several libraries around Ireland have been targeted because they supply LGBTQIA-related reading material or hold drag story events where drag queens or kings (usually men dressed as women or women dressed as men) read age-appropriate stories to children. In some cases, reading material was burned by protesters and staff were threatened. In July 2023, Cork City Library was forced to close amid fears for employees’ safety due to an anti-LGBTQIA protest. A number of people have been charged in relation to such incidents in Ireland. The campaign is part of an international trend where libraries in various countries have been targeted. Anti-trans and anti-LGBT+ misinformation campaigns in Ireland and abroad have attempted to conflate homosexuality with child abuse and implied that children can be manipulated into becoming queer or trans through exposure to the LGBTQIA community. Research carried out by UCD’s School of Information & Communication Studies highlights the experiences of Ireland’s public library staff as they face “unprecedented challenges stemming from reactionary agitation against LGBTQ+ materials and programming”.

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[thoughtlessarse]

Russia’s top diplomat has expressed grudging acceptance of expanding US involvement in improving Central Asia’s trade infrastructure. But, curiously, he sidestepped commenting on China’s growing economic influence in the region. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, during a question-and-answer session with students at Moscow’s MGIMO University in early September, noted that “a growing number of extra-regional actors,” including the United States, has taken an interest in fostering trade via the so-called Middle Corridor, a route connecting Asia to Europe via Central Asia, thus bypassing Russia. Rising US interest in Central Asia’s economic future is far from a welcome development for Russia, but Lavrov offered a measured assessment during his MGIMO appearance. He stressed that Russia maintains “warm and allied” relations with Central Asian nations, which are bound to Russia economically and strategically via a number of agreements, including the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States. He then went on to acknowledge that Russia “cannot prevent anyone from forging deeper ties with other partners.”

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The US is trying in Central Asia what Russia is trying in Africa and China in the Pacific, i.e. replace the traditional ally. It's working in Armenia, but that's Russia's fault, having neglected the peacekeeping role it held, much like the US and France have been accused of doing in the Sahel region of West Africa.

[erebusvincent]

Opinion | A U.S. troop drawdown in Africa would be a big mistake

Trump’s plan would diminish their value for U.S. security.

Quit giving China things.

[newstfionline]

Trump sparks a debate over the future of American power

By Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, December 17, 2018

President Trump will retreat to his Florida resort at the end of this week. Nearing the halfway point of his term in office, his political isolation in Washington is deepening. A slew of candidates balked at taking the job of White House chief of staff--a post of tremendous influence that has in the age of Trump become a poisoned chalice from which few want to drink. A funding spat with the Democrats prompted Trump to vow a government shutdown, much to the chagrin of members of his own party. And the legal inquiries into the president’s campaign and businesses are mounting.

It’s not just Trump’s domestic agenda that’s facing scrutiny. Last week, Trump received a stinging bipartisan rebuke from Congress over his administration’s embrace of the Saudi-led war in Yemen and the particularly reckless royal holding power in Riyadh. The high-profile climate meetings that took place in Poland only underscored the extent to which this White House has alienated itself from the international mainstream on environmental policy--and highlighted, yet again, how the rest of the world is plowing ahead in spite of Trump, not with him.

Of course, Trump came to power vowing to be a disrupter on the global stage. He said he was intent on reforming a post-World War II international order that had outlived its usefulness for Americans. But the White House’s efforts overseas--including its rejection of the Paris climate accord, the waging of trade wars, the unraveling of the Iran nuclear deal, the persistent belittling of allies and the perplexing coddling of autocrats--have unsettled Washington as much as they have disturbed American partners abroad.

To be sure, discussions about the waning of the United States as the world’s sole superpower predate Trump. But two years of his tumultuous presidency have intensified Washingtonian angst about the future of American power and how America should seek to lead a more fractured planet--or whether it should try at all.

“It’s historical fact that great nations and empires all have a beginning and an end,” said James Jones, a retired U.S. general, former national security adviser to President Barack Obama and outgoing chairman of the Atlantic Council, speaking Friday in Washington at a forum hosted by his think tank. “There’s a naive belief in our country that there’s some sort of destiny, that the primacy of the United States is ensured for some reason forever. I don’t think that’s the case.”

To that end, the Atlantic Council, an organization deeply invested in the furtherance of American leadership, is planning on floating a new set of principles to safeguard the “rules-based order”--the euphemism often used to explain the status quo authored by the United States more than half a century ago. It wants to “revitalize” and “defend” this order, not just from the rising authoritarian might of China, but in the face of Trump’s own nationalist and protectionist agenda and those of his ilk.

At the forum, speakers warned of the White House’s disregard for “values-based” foreign policy--seen both in Trump’s cynical accommodation of figures such as the Saudi crown prince as well as his demagoguery over migrants and refugees coming to the United States. Washington, they feared, was seeing its credibility evaporate among allies. This sentiment was echoed by Jake Sullivan, a former Obama administration official and Hillary Clinton adviser, in a recent essay outlining what a liberal, post-Trump foreign policy ought to look like.

“An energized, inspiring, and ultimately successful foreign policy must cut through Trump’s false, dog-whistling choice between globalism and nationalism,” wrote Sullivan. “It must combine the best kind of patriotism (a shared civic spirit and a clear sense of the national interest) and the best kind of internationalism (a recognition that when your neighbor’s house is on fire, you need to grab a bucket). And it should reject the worst kind of nationalism (damn-the-consequences aggression and identity-based hate-mongering) and the worst kind of internationalism (the self-congratulatory insulation of the Davos elite).”

But that’s a tricky needle to thread. On the right, Trump and his lieutenants have spent their time in power casting the liberal pieties of the Obama era as supposed obstacles to the American national interest and see themselves at the forefront of a nationalist wave taking control across the world.

Among the Democrats, there’s a burgeoning debate about what kind of counter to “internationalism” ought to be embraced: It’s easy to scorn the “Davos elite,” but it’s another thing to pursue policies that target the power and privileges of influential multinational corporations or question the shibboleths of free trade and laissez-faire capitalism. It’s sensible to urge American restraint in the Middle East and other geopolitical flash points, but it’s harder to convince official Washington to eschew new military entanglements.

And though Trump and his political rivals may not agree on much, both may succumb to the old temptations of the Cold War.

At the Atlantic Council’s forum, the specter of China loomed over proceedings. Adm. Michael Rogers, a former head of the National Security Agency, feared China could outpace the United States in its abilities to wage cyberwarfare. Sen. Tom Cotton (R.-Ark.), a figure largely loyal to Trump, described China as “a unique adversary in the world.” Though Cotton’s hawkish views on Iran have earned him many detractors, there aren’t that many lawmakers on the other side of the aisle who would disagree with his antipathy toward Beijing.

That the United States is almost inexorably lurching into a great-power confrontation with China ought to be a concern, suggested Emma Ashford and Trevor Thrall of the libertarian Cato Institute. “The growing consensus on China is troubling. Having identified China as America’s biggest strategic challenge, neither party has identified a clear goal,” Ashford and Thrall wrote. “Nor have they articulated how a new approach to China would provide a foundation for a broader vision of American foreign policy ... The risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy on China--through confrontation without purpose--is real.”

Analysts liken the febrile moment to an earlier era of 19th century politics, when Europe’s industrializing, imperial powers entered into alliances that ultimately convulsed the world into conflict.

“What we are seeing today resembles the mid-nineteenth century in important ways: the post-World War II, post-Cold War order cannot be restored, but the world is not yet on the edge of a systemic crisis,” wrote Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

A century ago, that crisis arrived. This time, the current crop of American politicians--Trump included--can still stave off calamity.

“Now is the time to make sure one never materializes, be it from a breakdown in U.S.-Chinese relations, a clash with Russia, a conflagration in the Middle East, or the cumulative effects of climate change,” Haass continued. “The good news is that it is far from inevitable that the world will eventually arrive at a catastrophe; the bad news is that it is far from certain that it will not.”

[newstfionline]

America’s Anxiety of Influence

By Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy, August 17, 2018

Earlier this week, David Ignatius at the Washington Post published an interesting column ruing the decline of U.S. “influence” in the Middle East. His central theme is that U.S. “disengagement” from the region is allowing local actors to chart their own courses, and that many of them are now making bad decisions. In his view, the prospects for positive change in the region are receding and that we will all be worse off as a result.

It’s a thoughtful column and worth reading. It’s also a revealing one, because it rests on one of those unspoken assumptions that are articles of faith in the U.S. foreign-policy community. Specifically, it suggests that U.S. influence is always a good thing and that its diminution (whether by accident or by design) is something to mourn. But if you’ve been paying attention to the results of U.S. policy over the past quarter-century--especially in the Middle East but also in some other places--that position may not be the hill you want to die defending.

Look, it’s easy to understand why American foreign-policy elites like having lots of “influence.” To some degree it’s unavoidable. The United States is still the 800-pound gorilla in the international system and other global actors will inevitably pay close attention to whatever Uncle Sam is doing. For foreign-policy practitioners, having lots of influence and being fully engaged is also a heady experience; it means foreign governments will take your calls, treat you with deference and respect when you visit, and sometimes they follow your advice (or at least pretend to). If you’re in the foreign-policy business, it’s a lot more gratifying to represent the United States than to be out there pitching on behalf of a small or weak country whose voice does not carry.

But “influence” (a notoriously nebulous term) is merely a means to some end; it is not an end itself. Having lots of influence is not necessarily a good thing if you have no idea what to do with it, or if what you choose to do is wrong-headed, or if you end up shouldering burdens and bearing responsibility for mishaps and miscues that you lacked the wisdom or foresight to avoid.

Which brings me, naturally, to the Middle East, where American influence is now supposedly waning. What’s the track record of U.S. influence over the recent past?

One could argue that U.S. influence was a net positive for much of the Cold War. The U.S. role in the Middle East was fairly limited: Washington backed a number of allies for some combination of economic, strategic, and domestic political reasons, and it worked hard to limit the Soviet role in the region and to make sure that oil and gas kept flowing to markets around the world. And until the first Gulf War in 1991, Washington did all this without having to send its own ground or air forces to the region for any length of time and without having to fight any costly wars. Instead, the United States relied on diplomacy, intelligence cooperation, and foreign assistance and generally acted like an “offshore balancer,” relying on local allies and keeping its own forces over the horizon. It even switched sides once or twice when strategic circumstances dictated. U.S. policy wasn’t a perfect success, perhaps, but on the whole this approach worked pretty well.

But U.S. influence in the region--though considerable--had been almost entirely negative ever since. For starters, despite having enormous potential leverage at their disposal, successive Democratic and Republican administrations mishandled the Oslo peace process, fueling extremism and helping make the two-state solution that the United States favored a dead letter by 2018. Unconditional U.S. support for its various Middle East clients also helped inspire groups like al Qaeda, and the policy of “dual containment” adopted by the Clinton administration in 1993 helped turn Osama bin Laden’s attention away from his local enemies (i.e., the House of Saud) and toward the “far enemy,” with the results we all saw on Sept. 11, 2001.

After 9/11, the Bush administration decided the United States needed more influence in the region, and it tried to kick-start a democratic transition by toppling Saddam Hussein and establishing a pro-American democracy in Iraq. That misguided exercise of “influence” led to heightened Iranian influence and the rise of the Islamic State, squandered several trillion dollars and thousands of lives, distracted two successive administrations, and struck a severe blow to U.S. prestige. Remarkably, the Obama administration repeated this error on a smaller scale in Libya, helping topple Muammar al-Qaddafi even though it had no idea what would come after him.

The “global war on terror” dragged the United States into Somalia and Yemen too, with baleful effects in both places, and the United States is now using its remaining “influence” to support a brutal Saudi military campaign in Yemen, thereby bearing indirect responsibility for the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis. And let’s not forget how U.S. “influence” first pressed Egypt to democratize after President Hosni Mubarak was driven from power, and then tacitly embraced the military coup that ousted Mohamed Morsi, and now turns a blind eye to the repression and corruption that continues to afflict Egypt.

I could go on, but the point should be clear. The United States had plenty of influence during this period, but it’s hard to argue that it exercised that influence with much wisdom or success. Both Democrats and Republicans bear responsibility for these repeated debacles; their common failures are one of the few examples of bipartisanship left in our polarized polity.

To be clear: I understand why our foreign-policy elites worry (constantly!) about declining U.S. influence, and I can even see how that might be a bad thing in some circumstances. But we ought to recognize that “influence” is insufficient by itself and in some cases is counterproductive. Excessive U.S. influence leaves us performing missions we don’t know how to do (such as creating workable political institutions in radically different societies), allows local actors to blame us for their own failings, fuels conspiracy theories at home and abroad, and distracts U.S. officials from other problems that they might actually know how to solve. In some regions--and the Middle East would be high on my list--less U.S. influence might be more. Given all the success we’ve had trying to manage that region, maybe we’d be better off letting somebody else try. They could hardly do worse.

Moving in that direction will require a major change in the mindset of the U.S. foreign-policy elite. For too long, its members believed the United States was in fact the “indispensable nation,” and that the solution to all (or at least most) global problems had to be made in Washington. Students of management are often taught that effective leadership also requires learning how to delegate responsibility, because no single person has the power, knowledge, and wisdom to do everything. What is true for individual leaders is true for leading nations: learning how to offload problems onto others is in fact a consummate strategic skill. As long as Americans view influence as an inherent end, and as a resource to be hoarded like gold, we’re going to find ourselves overcommitted and be much less effective than we could be. As President Harry Truman supposedly said, “it’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets credit.”

Henceforth, Americans should worry rather less about the level of influence their country enjoys and worry a lot more about how that influence is being used. And guess what? If U.S. officials did a better job of selecting the right goals and actually achieving them, they would quickly find their influence growing; then, the number of problems they would then have deal with might shrink, instead of growing like kudzu or crabgrass in the warm summer sun.