In the 1970s, in the southwest corner of Germany, the tiny community of Wyhl was bracing for the construction of just such a nuclear reactor in its backyard. Something even worse loomed on the horizon: a vast industrial zone with new chemical plants and eight nuclear energy complexes that would transform the entire region around that town and stretch into nearby France and Switzerland. The governments of the three countries and the energy industry were all behind the project.

Even the residents of Wyhl seemed to agree. By a slim 55%, they supported a referendum to sell the land needed for the power plant. In the winter of 1975, bulldozers began to clear the site.

Suddenly, something unexpected happened. Civic groups and environmentalists decided to make their stand in little Wyhl and managed to block the construction of that nuclear reactor. Then, as the organizing accelerated, the entire tri-country initiative unraveled.

It was a stunning success for a global antinuclear movement that was just then gaining strength. The next year, in the United States, the Clamshell Alliance launched a campaign to stop the construction of the proposed Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, which they managed to delay for some time.

A few years later, critics of the antinuclear protests would dismiss such movements with the acronym NIMBY for Not In My Backyard. NIMBY movements would, however, ultimately target a range of dirty and dangerous projects from waste incinerators to uranium mines.

A NIMBY approach, in fact, is often the last option for communities facing the full force of powerful energy lobbies, the slingshot that little Davids deploy against a humongous Goliath.

That very same slingshot is now being used to try to stop an energy megaproject in eastern Washington state. A local civic group, Tri-City CARES, has squared off against a similar combination of government and industry to oppose a project they say will harm wildlife, adversely affect tourism, impinge on Native American cultural property, and put public safety at risk.

But that megaproject is not a nuclear power plant or a toxic waste dump. The Horse Heaven Hills project near Kennewick is, in fact, a future wind farm projected to power up to 300,000 homes and reduce the state’s dependency on both fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

Windmills: Aren’t they part of the solution, not part of the problem?

Critics of that Washington state project are, in fact, part of a larger movement whose criticism of “industrial wind energy development” suggests that they’re not just quixotically tilting at windmills but challenging unchecked corporate power. Left unsaid, however, is that the fossil-fuel industry and conservative think tanks like the Manhattan Institute have been working overtime against wind and solar renewable energy projects, often plowing money into NIMBY-like front groups. (Donald Trump has, of course, sworn to scrap offshore wind projects should he become president again.)

It’s a reminder that the powerful, too, have found uses for NIMBYism. Rich neighborhoods have long mobilized against homeless shelters and low-income housing, just as rich countries have long outsourced their mineral needs and dirty manufacturing to poorer ones.

But even if you remove the right-wing funders and oil executives from the equation and assume the best of intentions on the part of organizations like Tri-City CARES — and there’s good reason to believe that the Washington activists genuinely care about hawks and Native American cultural property — the question remains: what sacrifices must be made to achieve the necessary transition away from fossil fuels and who will make those sacrifices?

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Thanks to all the recent images of devastating typhoon and hurricane damage and record flooding, it’s obvious that much of the world’s infrastructure is not built to withstand the growing stresses of climate change. As if that’s not bad enough, it’s even clearer that political infrastructure the world over, in failing to face the issue of sacrifice, can’t effectively deal with the climate challenge either.

The Need for Sacrifice

The era of unrestrained growth is nearly at an end. In ever more parts of the world, it’s no longer possible to dig, discharge, and destroy without regard for the environment or community health. Climate change puts an exclamation point on this fact. The industrial era we’ve passed through in the last centuries has produced unprecedented wealth but has also generated enough carbon emissions to threaten the very future of humanity. To reach the goals of the 2016 Paris agreement on climate change and the many net-carbon zero pledges that countries have made, at a minimum humanity would have to forgo all new fossil-fuel projects.

Although the use of oil, natural gas, and coal has already produced a growing global disaster, those aren’t the only problems we face. The United Nations projects that, by 2060, the consumption of natural resources globally — including food, water, and minerals, those basics of human life — will rise 60% above 2020 levels. Even the World Economic Forum, that pillar of the capitalist global economic system, acknowledges that the planet can’t support such an insatiable demand and points out that rich countries, which consume six times more per capita than the rest of the world, will somehow have to tighten their belts. 

Alas, renewable energy doesn’t grow on trees. To capture the power of the sun, the wind, and the tides requires machinery and batteries that draw on a wide range of materials like lithium, copper, and rare earth elements. People in the Global South are already organizing against efforts to turn their communities into “sacrifice zones” that produce such critical raw materials for an energy transition far away in the Global North. At the same time, communities across the United States and Europe are organizing against similar mines in their own backyards. Then there’s the question of where to put all those solar arrays and wind farms, which have been generating NIMBY responses in the United States from the coast of New England to the deserts of the Southwest.

These, then, are the three areas of sacrifice on Planet Earth in 2024: giving up the income generated by fossil-fuel projects, cutting back on the consumption of energy and other resources, and putting up with the negative consequences of both mining and renewable energy projects. Not everyone agrees that such sacrifices have to be made. Donald Trump and his allies have, of course, promised to “drill, baby, drill” from day one of a second term.

Sadly enough, almost everyone agrees that, if such sacrifices are indeed necessary, it should be someone else who makes them.

In an era of unlimited growth, the political challenge was to determine how to divvy up the rewards of economic expansion. Today’s challenge, in a world where growth has run amok, is to determine how to evenly distribute the costs of sacrifice.

Democracy and Sacrifice

Autocrats generally don’t lose sleep worrying about sacrifice. They’re willing to steamroll over protest as readily as they’d bulldoze the land for a new petrochemical plant. When China wanted to build a large new dam on the Yangtze River, it relocated the 1.5 million people in its path and flooded the area, submerging 13 cities, over 1,200 archaeological sites, and 30,000 hectares of farmland.

Democracies often functioned the same way before the NIMBY era. Of course, there’s always been an exception made for the wealthy: how many toxic waste dumps grace Beverly Hills? Or consider the career of urban planner Robert Moses, who rebuilt the roads and parks of New York City with only a few speedbumps along the way. He was finally stopped in his tracks in, of all places, that city’s Greenwich Village by architecture critic Jane Jacobs and her band of wealthy and middle-class protestors determined to block a Lower Manhattan Expressway. New York’s poorer outer-borough residents couldn’t similarly stop the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Although a product of classical Greece, democracy has only truly flourished in the industrial era. Democratic politicians have regularly gained office by promising the fruits of economic expansion: infrastructure, jobs, social services, and tax cuts. If it’s not wartime, politicians might as well sign their political death warrants if they ask people to tighten their belts. Sure, President John F. Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country” and promoted the Peace Corps for idealistic young people. But he won office by making the same promises as other politicians and, as president, made famous the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats,” an image of unrestrained growth that has become ominously prophetic in an era of elevated ocean levels and increased flooding.

In 1977, when President Jimmy Carter donned a sweater to give his famous “spirit of sacrifice” speech on the need to reduce energy consumption, he told the truth to the American people: “If we all cooperate and make modest sacrifices, if we learn to live thriftily and remember the importance of helping our neighbors, then we can find ways to adjust, and to make our society more efficient and our own lives more enjoyable and productive.”

Mocked for his earnestness and his sweater choice, Carter was, unsurprisingly, a one-term president.

Democracy, like capitalism, has remained remarkably focused on short-term gain and politicians similarly remain prisoners of the election cycle. What’s the point of pushing policies that will yield results only 10 or 20 years in the future when those policymakers are unlikely to be in office any longer? Democratic politicians regularly push sacrifice off to the future in the same way that NIMBY-energized communities push sacrifice off to other places. Whether it’s your unborn grandchildren or people living in the Amazon rain forest displaced by oil companies, the unsustainable prosperity of the wealthy depends on the sacrifices of (often distant) others.

Sharing the Sacrifice

With its Green Deal, the European Union (EU) has embarked on an effort to outpace the United States and China in its transition away from fossil fuels. The challenge for the EU is to find sufficient amounts of critical raw materials for the Green Deal’s electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines — especially lithium for the lithium-ion batteries that lie at the heart of the transformation.

To get that lithium, the EU is looking in some obvious places like the “lithium triangle” of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. But it doesn’t want to be completely dependent on outside suppliers, since there’s a lot of competition for that lithium.

Enter Serbia.

The Jadar mine in western Serbia has one of the largest deposits of lithium in the world. For the EU, it’s a no-brainer to push for the further development of a mine that could provide 58,000 tons of lithium carbonate annually and meet nearly all of Europe’s lithium needs. In August, the EU signed a “strategic partnership on sustainable raw materials, battery value chains, and electric vehicles” with Serbia, which is still in the process of joining the EU. Exploiting the Jadar deposits is a no-brainer for the Serbian government as well. It means jobs, a significant boost to the country’s gross domestic product, and a way to advance its claim to EU membership.

Serbian environmentalists, however, don’t agree. They’ve mobilized tens of thousands of people to protest the plan to dig up the lithium and other minerals from Jadar. They do acknowledge the importance of those materials but think the EU should develop its own lithium resources and not pollute Serbia’s rivers with endless mine run-off.

Many countries face the same challenge as Serbia. Home to one of the largest nickel deposits in the world, Indonesia has tried to use the extraction and processing of that strategic mineral to break into the ranks of the globe’s most developed countries. The communities around the nickel mines are, however, anything but gung-ho about that plan. Even wealthy countries like Sweden and the United States, eager to reduce their mineral dependency on China, have faced community backlash over plans to expand their mining footprints. 

Democracies are not well-suited to address the question of sacrifice, since those who shoulder the costs have few options to resist the many who want to enjoy the benefits. NIMBY movements are one of the few mechanisms by which the minority can resist such a tyranny of the majority.

But then, how to prevent that other kind of NIMBY that displaces sacrifice from the relatively rich to the relatively poor?

Getting to YIMBY

Wyhl’s successful campaign of “no” to nuclear power in the 1970s was only half the story. Equally important was the “yes” half.

Alongside their opposition to nuclear power, the German environmentalists in the southeast corner of the country lobbied for funding research on renewable energy. From such seed money grew the first large-scale solar and wind projects there. The rejection of nuclear power, which would eventually become a federal pledge in Germany to close down the nuclear industry, prepared the ground for that country’s clean-energy miracle.

That’s not all. German activists realized that the mainstream parties, laser-focused on economic growth, would just find another part of the country in which to build their megaprojects. Environmentalists understood that they needed a different kind of vehicle to support the country’s energy transformation. Thus was born Germany’s Green Party.

One key lesson from the Wyhl story is the power of participation. NIMBY movements, when they battle corporate power, weaponize powerlessness. Residents demand to be consulted. They want a place at the table to create their own energy solutions. Rather than a sign that the political system can accommodate minority viewpoints, NIMBY movements demonstrate that the political system is broken. It shouldn’t be a Darwinian struggle over who makes sacrifices for the good of the whole. Decisions should be made collectively in a deliberative process, ideally within a larger federal framework that requires all stakeholders to shoulder a portion of the burden.

As in the 1970s, the political parties of today seem remarkably incapable of charting a path away from unsustainable growth and the imposition of sacrifice on the unwilling. The Green Party in Germany transformed Wyhl’s anti-nuclear politics into NIABY — not in anyone’s backyard. At this critical juncture in the transition from fossil fuels, it’s necessary to move from discrete NIMBY protests against offshore drilling and natural gas pipelines to a NIABY approach to all oil, gas, and coal projects.

The parallel expansion of sustainable energy will require new political models for distributing the costs and benefits of the mining of critical raw materials and the siting of solar and wind projects. Here again, Germany provides inspiration. The country’s first town powered fully by renewable sources, Wolfhagen, assumed control over its electricity grid and created a citizen-run cooperative to make decisions about its energy future. When communities are involved in sharing the benefits (through lowered energy costs) as well as the costs (the placement of solar and wind projects), they are more likely to embrace “Yes In My Backyard” or YIMBY. When everyone is at the table making decisions, the slingshot of NIMBY gathers dust in the closet.

In this new spirit of sacrifice, we should be asking not what the planet can do for us but what we can do for the planet. The planet is telling us that sacrifice is necessary because there’s just not enough stuff (minerals, land, water) to go around. Autocrats can’t be trusted to make such decisions. Conventional politicians in democracies are trapped in the politics of growth and consumption. The wealthy, with a few exceptions, won’t voluntarily give up their privileges.

It falls to the rest of us to step in and make such decisions about sacrifice at a community level. Meanwhile, at the national and international level, new political parties that are radically democratic, embrace post-growth economics, and put the planet first will be indispensable for larger systemic change.

If we can’t get to YIMBY and make fair decisions about near-term sacrifices, the end game is clear. When the planet goes into a carbon-induced death spiral, we’ll all, rich and poor alike, be forced to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Copyright 2024 John Feffer

Tomdispatch.com

The far right is not just using the rhetoric of anti-immigration. It is using the actual immigrants themselves as weapons.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The immigrants were arriving on children’s bicycles and sometimes even in wheelchairs. According to Norwegian law, immigrants couldn’t cross the border by foot. So, in 2015, they were traveling from Russia to the far north of Norway on any conveyance they could find.

It was an odd choice of a place to cross into the West. Norway and Russia share a border way up north in the Arctic Circle. The 5,500 asylum-seekers were not Russians. They came from far away to the south: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, along with 43 other countries. What were they doing in this cold, remote part of the world?

The Norwegians were suspicious. Some of the new arrivals spoke Russian and had been living in Russia for some time. The Police Security Service (PST) had several theories. It believed that the Russians were using the immigrants as a wedge to disrupt Norwegian society by adding strain to the welfare state. Then there was the political angle. Norway’s far-right Progress Party, opposed to immigration from the Global South, could benefit from the crisis, disrupting the Scandinavian reputation for tolerance and complicating Norway’s relationship to the European Union. Given how integrated some of the migrants had been in Russian society, the PST also suspected that some of them were tasked with collecting information for Russian intelligence.

The strange saga of asylum-seekers from the Middle East riding bicycles into arctic Norway is not unique. Countries and non-state actors have long used migrants and refugees as a vehicle to achieve geopolitical ends. Think of how imperial states have sent their own citizens as migrants to expand colonial reach in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Nor is it unusual within countries for immigrants to be misused in this manner. The governors of Texas and Florida packed refugees onto buses and planes bound for northern cities, also to promote discord and burden social services in an effort to undermine Democratic-controlled municipalities.

Immigration is a go-to political weapon for the far right. It has used the issue to amplify the economic anxieties of the base (“they’ve coming to take our jobs”), the cultural fears of majority-white populations (“they’re coming to replace us”), and the specific political worries of conservatives (“they’re going to bankrupt our welfare state”).

The difference today is that the far right is not just using the rhetoric of anti-immigration. It is using the actual immigrants themselves as weapons.

The Russian Game

For Vladimir Putin, it’s a win-win stratagem to support a surge of migration into Europe.

From his point of view, waves of immigrants challenge the cohesiveness of the European Union—generating endless arguments among member states about how to address the problem—and boost support for his far-right political allies like the National Assembly in France and the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany.

Putin launched his war against Ukraine to seize control of his neighbor, not with the primary goal of sending Ukrainians streaming out of the country. But the exodus has served Putin’s purposes by once again ripping the bandage off the immigration question in the EU and challenging Europe’s commitment to supporting Kyiv. It has had the side benefit of triggering the exit of many Russians from Russia, depleting the ranks of the opposition.

The country that has hosted the most Ukrainians is Germany. Anger over the state’s generous treatment of these refugees was a major factor in the far right’s electoral victory in Thuringia and its second-place finishes in Saxony and Brandenburg. A bonus for Putin is that the “left” party—Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht—has adopted the same anti-immigrant, anti-Ukraine positions, which propelled it to unexpectedly strong results in those elections as well. Both the far right and this bogus left have adopted effectively pro-Russian positions around support for an immediate ceasefire in the war that locks in Russia’s territorial gains.

“Yearning to Breathe Free,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, Clip2Comic, 2024

Putin also acts through allied intermediaries. Belarus, for instance, has used a similar strategy against neighboring Poland. In 2021, the Belarusian government attracted migrants to Minsk with promises that they could get into Europe. It then helped ferry those immigrants to the frontier where border guards reportedly cut through fences to allow them into Poland. For years, Poland has been a home for activists trying to get rid of Aleksandr Lukashenko. The dictator has struck back not with bombs and missiles but with desperate refugees.

This year the problem reemerged as attempted border crossings from Belarus jumped from a negligible number to nearly 400 a day. A knifing of a Polish border guard, who died of his injuries, prompted Poland to establish a buffer zone with various walls and barriers. Poland’s fortification of the border achieves another Lukashenko goal: cutting Belarus off from Europe. Exiled Belarusian opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, has appealed to Warsaw: “Initiatives to limit border traffic due to the regime’s ongoing provocations should target the dictator, not the people. We cannot abandon Belarusians to their fate behind a new iron curtain.”

Out of Latin America

Daniel Ortega doesn’t fit the usual definition of a far-right leader. After all, Ortega was a leader of the leftist Sandinistas who overthrew a Nicaraguan dictator allied with the United States. But when Ortega won reelection in 2006, he charted a different political path. He cracked down any and all opposition, including many leftists and former Sandinistas. He aligned himself with the Catholic Church and supported a complete ban on abortion. He has enriched himself and his family through corrupt practices.

But he remains consistent in one respect: he still deeply dislikes the United States. Nicaragua is suffering under U.S. sanctions, and Ortega has come up with a novel way of wreaking revenge. Ortega’s government has loosened restrictions so that around 200,000 people from a dozen countries—including Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Libya, India, and Uzbekistan—can come to Nicaragua and pay a fee of between $150 and $200 at the airport to enter the country. These mostly non-tourists who have taken advantage of the liberal visa regime do not stay for long in Nicaragua, itself a poor country. For another fee, “travel agencies” offer to bring them to the United States. Including all the Nicaraguans fleeing political repression or economic hardship, Ortega is responsible for an estimated 10 percent of the immigrant flow at the U.S.-Mexico border at peak times.

Like Putin, a close ally, Ortega wants to sow discord in the United States or, at least, force negotiations that could reduce sanctions against him and his family. As in Cuba and Venezuela, the outflow of disgruntled citizens also serves as a way of reducing the likelihood of opposition movements mobilizing enough support to force a change in government.

Why Anti-Immigrant?

Autocrats and right-wing ideologues hate diversity. They believe in political uniformity, preferably one-man rule. They also favor ethnic and/or religious homogeneity. They hold to anti-immigrant views even though they spell economic suicide for their countries. Their birthrates falling, European countries need immigrants to survive. The same holds true for the United States and most of Asia. But that hasn’t stopped these political forces from building walls, erecting bureaucratic obstacles, and even expelling people.

Autocratic regimes have used expulsions to get rid of demonized minorities and burden troublesome neighbors with the influx of immigrants. The Myanmar military, for instance, planned a campaign of intimidation and violence against the Rohingya minority that sent 800,000 desperate people over the border into Bangladesh. The Israeli government has supported an often-violent settler movement that has expelled Palestinians from their land in the West Bank. Turkey invaded Syria in 2019 and sought to clear Kurds from neighboring territory to disrupt cross-border cooperation with Kurds in Turkey.

The use of immigrant flows as a weapon is also a form of anti-globalization. The West, as Putin and his allies see it, are trying to transform their conservative societies by way of LGBTQ organizing, feminist and pro-choice messaging in movies and films, and pro-democracy campaigns that threaten the ruling parties. Although Putin and his allies criticize the “West” and “Anglo Saxons” for promoting these strategies, the far-right in the West also embraces this message. But here’s the twist—the far right argues that these emancipatory movements are in fact “anti-Western” for undermining “Western values” of family and nation.

Immigrants cannot be blamed for being confused. They are accused of being vectors of globalization, and yet the architects of globalization have never embraced the free movement of people across borders. Syrians desperate to leave a country at war, Rohingya forced out by a genocidal military, Nicaraguans escaping political repression: these are all the pawns in a chess game that Vladimir Putin, his global allies, and the far right are playing against “liberal elites” and “globalizers.” In reality, as the weaponization of immigrants demonstrates, Putin and friends are fighting a war against international law and human dignity.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Israel is escalating in the West Bank, against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and against Iran. The Biden administration must put maximum pressure on its ally.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The numbers are clear. The temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in November last year resulted in the release of 109 hostages. Compare that to Israeli military operations, which have managed to rescue 8 hostages while killing three by accident. The military has also recovered the bodies of another 34 hostages, including six killed shortly before the Israelis made it to the underground tunnel where they were being held. Meanwhile, 33 hostages are presumed dead.

By the most conservative accounting, ceasefire tactics have been more effective than military tactics by a factor of 10 in saving Israeli lives.

In starting this most recent war in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu no doubt was remembering his brother, who led the daring rescue of hijacked passengers at the Entebbe airport in 1976 (and died in the process). Now the younger Netanyahu was facing his own hostage crisis. He decided, like his brother, to pursue force. He entertained fantasies of destroying Hamas, saving the 251 people kidnapped on October 7, and salvaging his own dismal political reputation.

It hasn’t worked out quite that way. The war hasn’t eliminated Hamas, and even the Israeli military cautions that this isn’t possible. The Israeli military has been spectacularly unsuccessful—and in some cases unforgivably negligent—in freeing hostages. Speaking of unforgivable, Israeli forces have also killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza. The Netanyahu government has escalated its policy of expulsion in the West Bank and is now poised to go to war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The recent coordinated explosions of the pagers that the Iran-backed militia purchased to avoid Israeli surveillance, followed by a second set of explosions involving walkie-talkies, could well be the starting gun for the war.

Despite (or perhaps because of) these horrors, Netanyahu is making a political comeback. Although his coalition would lose against the opposition if an election were held today, the prime minister’s Likud Party remains by a thin margin the most popular party in Israel today.

In other words, Netanyahu has some reason to believe that he has a winning strategy: talk tough, be tough, hang tough. He thinks that he can safely ignore the pleas of the hostages’ families, the demands of the demonstrators on the street, and the advice of his own military advisors—not to mention anything that the U.S. government has said. The Israeli prime minister has dismissed evidence that the failures of his own intelligence agencies played a role in the events of October 7. As long as he visits punishment upon Israel’s enemies—Palestinians, Hezbollah in Lebanon, selected targets in Iran—he can secure the support of the Israeli far right and continue to present himself as his country’s savior.

As such, Netanyahu believes that he has two more enemies to fight against: compromise and ceasefire.

Thus, each time Israeli and Palestinian negotiators seem close to a negotiated ceasefire, Netanyahu has pulled the rug out from underneath them. So, for instance, Hamas withdrew its initial insistence on Israel committing to a permanent ceasefire from the beginning. As for the withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Gaza, another key element of the three-part plan put forward by the Biden administration, Netanyahu is now insisting that Israel retain control of the Philadelphi corridor, the section of Gaza that borders Egypt, in order to interdict any potential weapons shipments to Hamas.

This apparently non-negotiable demand from Netanyahu does not reflect any real consideration of Israeli security needs. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, not exactly the most pro-Palestinian voice in journalism, points out that the Israeli military did not consider this supposedly indispensable corridor

important enough to even occupy for the first seven months of the war. Israeli generals have consistently told Netanyahu there are many alternative effective means for controlling the corridor now and that supporting Israeli troops marooned out there would be difficult and dangerous. And they could retake it any time they need. Staying there is already causing huge problems with the Egyptians, too.

Netanyahu’s own defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has reportedly said that “the fact that we prioritize the Philadelphi Corridor at the cost of the lives of the hostages is a moral disgrace.”

So, if his own defense minister can’t change Netanyahu’s mind, what can be done to dislodge the prime miniester from his unyielding position?

Cutting Off the Arms Supply

Since the Labour Party took over in the United Kingdom in July, it has made three consequential decisions related to Israel/Palestine. First, it resumed funding for the UN agency that aids Palestinian refugees. Next, it reversed the Tory decision to challenge the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu.

“Gaza Genocide,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic / PS Express, 2024

And, at the beginning of September, it blocked a certain number of arms sales to Israel. Not surprisingly, Netanyahu condemned the decision as “shameful” and “misguided.”

In fact, the UK’s move was both tepid and not hugely important. The decision affected only 30 out of 350 export licenses. And Britain supplies just 1 percent of Israeli imports.

Netanyahu wasn’t worried so much about the UK weapons per se but rather the domino effect the decision might have on the three biggest suppliers of the Israeli military. Between 2013 and 2023, the United States provided around 65 percent of the country’s military imports, Germany roughly 30 percent, and Italy a bit under 5 percent.

Italy claims that it has basically stopped arms exports, only honoring existing contracts if they don’t involve the use of those weapons against civilians (no one really knows how the Italians are making this determination). German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has made a great show of pledging military support for Israel, but the country’s Federal Security Council has effectively stopped providing the promised assistance. “Ultimately, the growing concerns [against Israel] are the reason why fewer approvals are being granted, even if no one wants to say it out loud,” an employee of a representative on the Federal Security Council told The Jerusalem Post.

Which leaves the United States. The Biden administration announced $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel in mid-August, after ordering a pause in deliveries of heavy bombs (subsequently reversed) and threatening to cancel shipments if Israel invaded Rafah (it did and the U.S. did nothing).

The weapons that the United States delivers to Israel are its only real leverage over the Netanyahu government. It could be argued that this doesn’t amount to much leverage, particularly when Israel isn’t asking for as much these days. Also, Israel has its own military-industrial complex and can produce a lot of what it uses. Still, the nearly $4 billion that the United States sends Israel every year is a significant chunk of the Israeli military budget ($27 billion and rising). And that should translate into political capital that an American administration could use to influence Israeli policy.

But Biden did not condition aid on Netanyahu signing a ceasefire deal. Talk about a non-transactional president!

Lest anyone imagine that Donald Trump would do any different if he returned to the White House, the infamously transactional candidate suspended that particular aspect of his character when dealing with Israel. During his four years in office, he gave Israel everything it wanted and got nothing in return (other than the adulation of Netanyahu and the Israeli far right).

What Can Be Done?

Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza has generated considerable international condemnation. The UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, ruled in July that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal and must end. The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, has issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu (along with Defense Minister Gallant and three Hamas leaders, two of whom have already been killed).

The UN Security Council has approved several ceasefire resolutions, including one that called for a Ramadan pause, which was ignored. In June, the Security Council passed a resolution introduced by the United States that supports (not surprisingly) the three-part ceasefire plan devised by the Biden administration. Netanyahu has so far ignored this one as well.

Plenty of countries have registered their protests against Israel in other forms. Several European countries—Norway, Ireland, Spain, and Slovenia—recently went ahead and recognized an independent Palestinian state. They join 143 other countries around the world that had already made that decision.

Turkey has executed an about-face from being a key Israeli trade partner to a leader of the economic boycott of the country. Now, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is threatening to assemble a Sunni coalition, along with Egypt, in support of the Palestinians.

People around the world have voted with their feet by joining protests. In the days following the October 7 attack and the start of the war in Gaza, there were thousands of pro-Palestinian gatherings in dozens of countries. Demonstrations spread on campuses, particularly in the United States and Europe but also in Australia and India.

Meanwhile, in Israel, sentiment has shifted. A week ago, half a million people thronged the streets of Tel Aviv, with 250,000 rallying in other Israeli cities, demanding an immediate ceasefire. The overriding issue in Israel is the release of the remaining hostages. Interestingly, polling for the first time shows that a majority of Gazans now believe that the Hamas attack on October 7 was a mistake. This is a marked reversal since the early days of the war, when both Israelis and Palestinians were convinced that the military actions of their political representatives were correct.

So, at this point, it’s not a question of persuading the people of Israel and Palestine of the importance of negotiations or the need for a ceasefire. The machinery of international law has been mobilized to put pressure on the Israeli government. The country most committed to Israel’s military defense, the United States, has also been pushing for a ceasefire.

The problem is that the Biden administration has not used its most powerful levers of influence—the flow of cash and armaments to Israel—to persuade Netanyahu to bend. The Israeli leader and his right-wing allies listen to the American voices they want to hear—the Republican Party, AIPAC—and ignore what they consider to be a lame-duck administration. Netanyahu would no doubt prefer Donald Trump to win in November. But even if Kamala Harris wins, he doesn’t worry that the Democrats will make any significant changes in U.S. policy, especially if the Republicans manage to win the Senate.

If anything, Netanyahu is moving even further away from compromise. Israel has ramped up operations in the West Bank in the furtherance of its campaign of ethnic cleansing. The Israeli army is preparing for a sustained military campaign against Hezbollah, which is now mulling a response to the two recent waves of bomb attacks—pagers, walkie-talkies—that were the result of an Israeli operation to insert explosive devices in the devices somewhere along the supply chain.

According to the most pessimistic analysis, Israel will eventually settle for a ceasefire in Gaza in order to turn its attention more fully to the West Bank and Hezbollah. Achieving a ceasefire and a hostage deal would also remove the chief obstacle to a national unity government that would give Netanyahu the political cover for these expanded operations.

So, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza is necessary but not sufficient. The Biden administration must attach strings to Israeli aid related to the country’s overall policies of expulsion. Time is running out. Biden must back Palestinian demands for political autonomy before Israel has occupied all Palestinian land. He must push for regional negotiations that address the essential conflict between Israel and Iran that lies behind the dispute with Hezbollah.

It’s not likely that the administration will push anything so ambitious before the election. But when Biden enters his lame-duck period, he will have one last chance to back a ceasefire-plus scenario. He can even shoehorn this effort into the “Abrahamic Accords,” the Trump-era initiative to negotiate the Arab world’s recognition of Israel.

On November 6, regardless of who wins the election on the day before, Biden needs to withdraw all his political capital from the bank and spend it in the Middle East. Netanyahu and his far-right allies are a threat to Israel, to Palestine, to the entire region. Biden gave an enormous gift to the United States when he stepped aside as a presidential candidate. In his lame-duck session after the election, he can make one final, legacy-making gift by applying just the right combination of carrots and sticks to contain Netanyahu and end the horrors in and around Israel/Palestine.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

In reality, the two autocrats make a very odd couple. Kim is still a youngish man with a few extra pounds on his frame, while Putin is in his seventies and loves to appear shirtless on horses, the better to showcase his judo-trained body. Kim is the dynastic ruler of a small, isolated, homogeneous country that remains formally communist. By contrast, Putin presides over a multiethnic empire that stretches across 11 time zones and has formally turned its back on its communist past. Kim disparages religion but maintains a suffocating cult of personality, while Putin, who embraced religion to boost his own popularity, has yet to force Russian officials to wear pins with his face on them.

Sure, Putin and Kim have some friends in common (China’s Xi Jinping and America’s Donald Trump), some shared enemies (the West, most democracies), and a fondness for making threats (bombastic, sometimes nuclear). But what really binds them together is a seemingly antiquated belief system whose origins stretch back two centuries.

Kim and Putin are both ardent nationalists.

The two of them believe fervently in the supremacy of the nation-state, specifically their own. They also assert the superiority of their particular ethnic groups, with Putin increasingly using russky (ethnic Russians) instead of rosissky (citizens of Russia) in his speeches and Kim following the official North Korean tradition of purging the language and culture of all outside influences.

Above all, those two leaders are united in their opposition to outsiders — other countries, international organizations, non-governmental do-goodniks — having any say over what takes place within their borders. Putin and Kim are, in other words, spokesmen for what I call the sovereignistas, a class of world leaders who insist on their sovereign right to be exceptions to the rules that govern the rest of the planet.

In reality, ultra-nationalists like Putin and Kim hold sway over much of our world and come in all too many shapes and sizes. China’s Xi, for instance, resurrected nationalism to revive the fortunes of a communist system whose ideology no longer seemed to motivate the Chinese masses. In Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht has started a new party that officially identifies as left-wing but has right-wing nationalist takes on border controls, globalization, and green politics. Meanwhile, at the other end of the political spectrum, India’s Narendra Modi has adapted nationalism to the needs of his right-wing party’s religious chauvinism devoted to making Hindu India great again.

Far from just patrolling the edges of their societies, such nationalists are increasingly prospering at their political centers. Just ask Joe Biden, who tried to counter Trump’s populism by beefing up his own nationalist credentials through new restrictions at his country’s southern border and onerous new tariffs on China. Indeed, such nationalism has been part of the mainstream since revolutionaries took over the kingdom of France in the late eighteenth century and German romantics began championing das Volk (the people) around the same time. Some political scientists have even argued that nationalism was the essential ingredient in the establishment of modern democracies — that, without its ideological glue, a state couldn’t have mustered enough of a consensus to govern.

In today’s world, think of nationalism as a distinctly old-fashioned liqueur, like absinthe, that’s enjoying a burst of renewed popularity. Politicians of all stripes have recently been adding a splash of it to their policy cocktails to get the public’s attention. Worse yet, some of the more aggressive politicians like Modi, Putin, and Donald Trump are drinking the stuff straight. Beware: undiluted nationalism can go right to the head and make you do crazy things like invading neighboring countries or trying to overturn elections.

So, here’s a question to consider: at a time when the most extreme problems facing the world — climate change, resource depletion, and a possible nuclear Armageddon — know no borders, why has such a parochial philosophy once again become the global ideology du jour?

Not So Flat

Like colonialism, nationalism was supposed to be extinct by now, a relic of another century, an ideology that should emit a distinct odor of mothballs. After all, over the past hundred years, the prerogatives of nation-states have been gradually eroded by U.N. treaties, the growth of transnational corporations, and the spread of a global civil society.

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At a time when everyone seems in touch, no matter where we are geographically speaking, borders seem so nineteenth-century. In such a flat world, crisscrossed by TikTok, Facebook, and Zoom, shouldn’t nationalism be your granddaddy’s moldy old philosophy?

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each had its post-nationalist dream. With proletarian internationalism, communism was supposed to leave nationalism in the dust, as was capitalism with its transnational corporations and its borderless business world. The European Economic Community — later the European Union (EU) — came up with an even stronger variation on that theme as European countries began to remove barriers to trade, then to the movement of capital, and ultimately to the movement of people.

In one scenario, the EU was to serve as the building block for a more peaceful, far less nationalist global order. As Richard Caplan and I wrote in an introduction to a 1996 book on Europe’s new nationalism, “National differences — Scottish kilts, Polish hand-kissing, Swiss neutrality — would presumably continue; [however] nationalist differences, which made the continent a killing ground for centuries, would gradually fade into the history books.” The rest of the world, astounded by the tranquil prosperity of European integration, would presumably follow suit.

That, unfortunately, didn’t happen. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, nationalism came roaring back with a vengeance, particularly in Europe. Anti-immigrant fervor spiked in eastern Germany, new independence movements gained ground in Scotland and Catalonia, and, most terrifyingly, the former country of Yugoslavia dissolved into a bloodbath of ethnic groups turning on one another.

In that immediate post-Cold War era, nationalism proved to be an effective tool wielded by the periphery against a domineering center. Decades of formal accommodation within Yugoslavia among Albanians, Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes produced much intermarriage along with all too many suppressed inter-ethnic resentments, as well as rage at Belgrade for dictating policies to the other Yugoslav republics. Fratricide also surged in the former Soviet Union between Armenians and Azeris, among ethnic groups in Georgia, and most recently, of course, between Russians and Ukrainians. When not directing outright hostility toward the Kremlin, as in Ukraine, these post-Soviet conflicts displaced their anger onto regional power centers like Tbilisi and Baku.

Nor has the supposedly post-nationalist European Union proved immune to such trends. Just replace Moscow or Belgrade with the regulatory “overreach” of the EU’s capital city, Brussels, and the last eight years of political developments make more sense, starting with Great Britain’s Brexit vote in 2016. A disgust with supposedly interfering Eurocrats merged with a hitherto underappreciated nativism to send that otherwise cosmopolitan country skittering into a parochial corner.

Inspired by the British vote, Frexit, Nexit, and Grexit seemed to loom on the horizon until European sovereignistas decided that it was more useful to hijack the EU’s institutions than abandon them completely. The far right not only took over national governments in Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and almost France but also challenged Europeanists on their own turf in European Parliamentary elections. In fact, in June, the far right registered its best results ever and has formed both the third and fourth largest voting blocs in that parliament.

Why Nationalism, Why Now?

Nationalism was initially a weapon deployed against imperial centers — with the French rising up against their king, the Greeks revolting against the Ottomans, and virtually all of Latin America breaking away from Spanish or Portuguese colonials. While it can still serve that function today (just ask the Ukrainians), it’s now more often mobilized in response to a different kind of power: globalization and its political, economic, and social avatars.

The growth of the economic version of globalization, which began with steamships and the telegraph and, in our time, accelerated to the container ship and the Internet, has led, not surprisingly, to serious pushback. Nationalists now decry the way the architects of the global economy have lined the pockets of the rich, while robbing nation-states of the tools to steer their own economies. In a classic version of bait and switch, those architects of the world’s economy justified the removal of tariff walls and the construction of a global assembly line by pointing not to the increased wealth of the billionaire class, but to all the millions of people lifted from poverty.

Neglected until recently were the enormous numbers of middle- and working-class people who lost their jobs, savings, and dignity to the tsunami of globalization. Although some of the disgruntled did direct their anger at the “globalists,” they also focused it on that other vector of globalization, the ever-increasing number of desperate border-crossers searching for jobs and better lives. In that way, the rage at being left behind merged with a potent xenophobia, fueling a populist rejection of traditional parties of the center-left and center-right that backed the economic and social transformations of globalization.

But don’t forget the backlash of the sovereignistas, those distinctly nationalistic autocratic leaders like Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and the military junta in Myanmar who continue to fervently defend the inviolability of their countries’ laws and culture. Those sovereignistas have taken aim at international agreements that chipped away at national sovereignty by limiting what countries can produce (not chlorofluorocarbons, thanks to the Montreal Protocol), whom they can discriminate against (not minority groups, according to various human rights agreements), and how many people they can kill (not entire communities, as detailed in the genocide convention).

Donald Trump is, of course, the sovereignista par excellence. He opposes all international treaties that constrain American power, even ones that ultimately serve the country’s national interests like the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate accord, and the Open Skies arms control treaty. He styles himself an “anti-globalist,” even though his international businesses are anything but that. Like Xi in China, Trump is skilled at adopting and adapting an ideology fundamentally alien to his worldview to cultivate mass appeal and preempt any criticism of his world-spanning narcissism. Sure, Trump’s businesses made millions overseas, even when he was president, and have employed plenty of undocumented workers at home. But no problem, since he wraps himself in an American flag, both literally and figuratively, by promising to impose tariffs on all foreign goods and deport all undocumented migrants.

Donald Trump is riding a real wave. His criticisms of globalization resonate with significant parts of the American public who have indeed suffered because of shuttered factories, bankrupt farms, and deregulated economies.

The Future of the Past

Globalization polarizes societies, enriches plutocrats, and destroys local enterprises. It’s McDonald’s, Microsoft, and McDonnell Douglas all wrapped up in one big gut punch. But the answer to such an assault on the local and the particular shouldn’t be an appeal to nationalism or the grim language of blood and soil.

Backward-looking as it may be, nationalism is also remarkably adaptable. You can find nationalist TikTok videos, nationalist podcasts, and nationalist approaches to climate change. In the case of El Salvador’s young right-wing authoritarian, Nayib Bukele, nationalism even presents itself as “cool.”

But the solutions put forward by nationalists across the political spectrum fail to address the common threats posed by resource depletion, economic inequality, nuclear proliferation, and the desperate overheating of this planet. Whether you slice up the world according to nation-states or “pure” ethnic communities, such divisions can’t deal with force multipliers like pandemics and rising oceans.

The international community not only needs to expand cooperation in this moment of increasingly devastating globalized crises, but individual countries will need to give up a portion of their sovereignty to make anything truly work. Sovereignistas, for instance, would have let the ozone layer disappear. Only the Montreal Protocol, which required every country to alter its production of certain sprays and solvents, saved the planet’s sunscreen. The growing climate disaster needs global coordination of just that sort, but raised by the power of 10.

Yet, all too sadly, nationalism grows in soil well prepared by coercive universalism, whether the allegedly iron-clad laws of supply and demand behind globalization or the legally binding principles of international law like the Geneva Conventions. It’s a terrible paradox that the more the world demands universalism, the more devastating the pushback from the sovereignistas.

Today, the options are few. A technocratic global elite could try to force necessary changes down the throats of everyone, sovereignistas included. Or perhaps the patient organizing of liberal-minded parties could someday succeed in winning back the electoral terrain that the nationalists have been acquiring. The first, however, is likely to generate insuperable resistance, while the second may not happen quickly enough, if at all.

There is, of course, a third option, struggling to grow in the shade of public attention. A new generation of internationalists is trying to extract what’s good from globalization, including human-rights treaties and more generous immigration policies, while offering a sustainable economic model to replace the neoliberal fantasy of a flat world. They are doing so in institutions, in civil society, and even, every so often, in governments.

Here, subsidiarity should play a key role. A clunky word, largely unknown outside the European Union, it basically means that problems should be solved at the lowest feasible level — that is, in your neighborhood, if possible; if not, in your town, state, country, or region. Only truly global problems should be solved at a global level.

The sovereignistas’ claim that they alone can save their countries and cultures is a scam. In truth, they just want power for themselves, not for “the people” they claim to represent. The only truly workable alternative would be democracy in overlapping circles from your neighborhood all the way up to global institutions. Forget the talk about this planet’s nationalists and globalists. Democratic internationalists must now link arms across all those controversial borders and scale up at warp speed to save the future from all the bad ideas of the past.

Copyright 2024 John Feffer

Via Tomdispatch.com

Regardless of the outcome in November, U.S. foreign policy cannot square the circle of a decline in relative U.S. power in a multipolar, ever-more illiberal world.

The call is coming from inside…your computer!

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The conventional Artificial Intelligence doomsday scenario runs like this. A robot acquires sentience and decides for some reason that it wants to rule the world. It hacks into computer systems to shut down everything from banking and hospitals to nuclear power. Or it takes over a factory to produce a million copies of itself to staff an overlord army. Or it introduces a deadly pathogen that wipes out the human race.

Why would a sentient robot want to rule the world when there are so many more interesting things for it to do? A computer program is only as good as its programmer. So, presumably, the human will to power will be inscribed in the DNA of this thinking robot. Instead of solving the mathematical riddles that have stumped the greatest minds throughout history, the world’s first real HAL 9000 will decide to do humans one better by enslaving its creators.

Robot see, robot do.

But AI may end up killing us all in a much more prosaic way. It doesn’t need to come up with an elaborate strategy.

It will simply use up all of our electricity.

Energy Hogs

The heaviest user of electricity in the world is, not surprisingly, industry. At the top of the list is the industry that produces chemicals, many of them out of petroleum, like fertilizer. Second on the list is the fossil-fuel industry itself, which needs electricity for various operations.

Ending the world’s addiction to fossil fuels, in other words, will require more than just a decision to stop digging for coal and drilling for oil. It will require a reduction in demand for chemical fertilizers and plastics. Otherwise, a whole lot of renewable energy will simply go toward propping up the same old fossil fuel economy.

Of equal peril is the fact that the demand for electricity is rising in other sectors. Cryptocurrencies, for instance, require extensive data mining, which in turn needs huge data processing centers. According to estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Agency, these cryptocurrencies consume as much as 2.3 percent of all electricity in the United States.

Then there’s artificial intelligence.

Every time you do a Google search, it consumes not only the energy required to power your laptop and your router but also to maintain the Google data centers that keep a chunk of the Internet running. That’s not a small amount of power. Cumulatively, in 2019, Google consumed as much electricity as Sri Lanka.

Worse, a search powered by ChatGPT, the AI-powered program, consumes ten times more energy than your ordinary Google search. That’s sobering enough. But then consider all the energy that goes into training the AI programs in the first place. Climate researcher Sasha Luccioni explains:

Training AI models consumes energy. Essentially you’re taking whatever data you want to train your model on and running it through your model like thousands of times. It’s going to be something like a thousand chips running for a thousand hours. Every generation of GPUs—the specialized chips for training AI models—tends to consume more energy than the previous generation.

AI’s need for energy is increasing exponentially. According to Goldman Sachs, data centers were expanding rapidly between 2015 and 2019, but their energy use remained relatively flat because the processing was becoming more efficient. But then, in the last five years, energy use rose dramatically and so did the carbon footprint of these data centers. Largely because of AI, Google’s carbon emissions increased by 50 percent in the last five years—even as the megacorporation was promising to achieve carbon neutrality in the near future.

Image by Nicky ❤️🌿🐞🌿❤️ from Pixabay

This near future looks bleak. In four years, it is expected that AI will represent nearly 20 percent of data center power demand. “If ChatGPT were integrated into the 9 billion searches done each day, the IEA says, the electricity demand would increase by 10 terawatt-hours a year,” Vox reports, “the amount consumed by about 1.5 million European Union residents.”

At the end of the eighteenth century, Malthus worried that overpopulation would be the end of humanity as more mouths ate up the existing food supply. Human population continues to rise, though at a diminishing rate. The numbers will likely peak before the end of this century, around 2084 according to the latest estimates. But just as the light at the end of the Malthusian tunnel becomes visible, along comes the exponential growth of artificial intelligence to sap the planet’s resources.

What to Do?

The essential question is: do you need AI to help you find the most popular songs of 1962 or the reason black holes haven’t so far extinguished the universe? Do we need ChatGPT to write new poems in the style of Emily Dickinson and Allen Ginsburg teaming up at a celestial artists colony? Or to summarize the proceedings of the meeting you just had on Zoom with your colleagues?

You don’t have to answer those questions. You just have to stop thinking about electricity as an unlimited resource for the privileged global North.

Perhaps you’re thinking, yes, but the sun provides unlimited energy, if we can just tap it. You see a desert; I see a solar farm.

But it takes energy to build those solar panels, to mine the materials that go into those panels, to maintain them, to replace them, to recycle them. The minerals are not inexhaustible. Nor is the land, which may well be in use already by farmers or pastoral peoples.

Sure, in some distant future, humanity may well solve the energy problem. The chokepoint, however, is right now, the transition period when half the world has limited access to power and the other half is wasting it extravagantly it on Formula One, air conditioning for pets, and war.

AI is just another example of the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The richer world is using AI to power its next-gen economy. In the rest of the world, which is struggling to survive, a bit more electricity means the difference between life and death. That’s where the benefits of a switch to sustainability can really make a difference. That’s where the electricity should flow.

To anticipate another set of objections, AI isn’t just solving first-world problems. As Chinasa Okolo explains at Brookings:

Within agriculture, projects have focused on identifying banana diseases to support farmers in developing countries, building a deep learning object detection model to aid in-field diagnosis of cassava disease in East Africa, and developing imagery observing systems to support precision agriculture and forest monitoring in Brazil. In healthcare, projects have focused on building predictive models to keep expecting mothers in rural India engaged in telehealth outreach programs, developing clinical decision support tools to combat antimicrobial resistance in Ghana, and using AI models to interpret fetal ultrasounds in Zambia. In education, projects have focused on identifying at-risk students in Colombia, enhancing English learning for Thai students, and developing teaching assistants to aid science education in West Africa.

All of that is great. But without a more equitable distribution of power—of both the political and electrical varieties—the Global South is going to take a couple steps forward thanks to AI while the Global North jumps ahead by miles. The equity gap will widen, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist—or ChatGPT—to figure out how that story will end.

“Game over,” HAL 9001 says to itself, just before it turns out the last light.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it. Here are some exceptions.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. This quip by the American essayist Charles Dudley Warner applies to fossil fuels as well. Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it.

Take the example of the Biden administration. It has launched the most ambitious effort by the United States to leave fossil fuels behind and enter the new era of renewable energy. And yet, in 2023, the United States produced more crude oil than ever before: 12.9 million barrels per day compared to the previous record from 2019 of 12.3 million barrels a day.

Or take the example of Brazil, where the progressive politician Lula da Silva won back the presidency in 2022. His predecessor was a big fan of drilling for fossil fuels. Lula has made it clear that he will take a very different approach. For instance, he wants Brazil to join the club of oil-producing countries in order to lead it into a clean-energy future. And yet, in 2023, Brazil’s production of oil increased by 13 percent and gas by over 8 percent, both new records.

Given all this Green rhetoric and crude (oil) action, it’s hard to find examples around the world where people are actually doing something to end fossil fuel production.

One of those places is Ecuador, which held a referendum last August about keeping oil under the ground of a certain plot of land in the Yasuní national park. “Yasuní is the most important park in Ecuador,” observes Esperanza Martínez, of Acción Ecológica in Ecuador. “It has been recognized as the most biodiverse region in the world, and it’s also home to many indigenous peoples.”

Thanks to the work of several collectives, Ecuadorans voted 54 to 37 percent in the August referendum to stop all operations to explore for and extract oil from Block 43—also known as ITT—within the park. Since the referendum, however, an election brought in a new president who has threatened to ignore the results of the referendum in order to raise funds to address the country’s security crisis.

Another example of effective action, this time at the international level, comes from the organizers of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty (FFNPT), an effort to roll back fossil fuels at the global level, reports. Currently, 12 countries have endorsed the initiative, including a number of small island states but also, most recently, Colombia.

“Colombia is the first continental country to sign, with more than a century of petroleum extraction,” one of those organizers, Andrés Gómez O, one of the FFNPT organizers, points out. “So, this is a very important game-changer in the battle.”

One of the backers of the this Treaty, the one with the largest economy, is the U.S. state of California, which has been a leader in the United States in terms of expanding the renewable energy sector. There is so much energy generated by solar panels on sunny days in California that sometimes the net cost of that electricity drops below zero.

But as Raphael Hoetmer of Amazon Watch points out, California is also the largest importer of oil from the Amazon. In 2020, the United States imported nearly 70 percent of the oil produced by Amazonian countries, mostly Ecuador but a small amount from Colombia and Peru as well. And California is the state that’s importing by far the largest amount of this oil. So, shutting down the production of fossil fuels in Ecuador and elsewhere also requires addressing the largest consumers of those resources.

These three Latin American experts on the challenge of ending the international addiction to fossil fuels presented their findings at an April 2024 seminar sponsored by the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South and Global Just Transition. They not only discussed the appalling state of affairs in the world of energy and environment but also explained how some people are actually doing something about it.

The Example of Yasuní

“Rigged,” Digital, Dream/ Dreamworld v. 3, PS Express, By Juan Cole, 2024.

The effort to preserve the biodiversity of Yasuní in the Ecuadoran Amazon and keep out the oil companies has been going on for more than a decade. In 2007, then-president Rafael Correa floated a plan for international investors to essentially pay Ecuador to keep its oil in the ground. When the international community didn’t pony up the $3.5 billion, Correa abandoned his plan and pledged to move forward with drilling.

That’s when Esperanza Martínez and others began to organize the first referendum to keep that oil in the ground. They collected 850,000 signatures, 25 percent more than was necessary to trigger a vote. But the National Electoral Council threw out the petition, arguing that 60 percent of the signatures were fakes.

“We spent ten years fighting in tribunals and legal proceedings,” Martínez relates. “And what the National Electoral Council did was a fraud. We could prove that it was a fraud.”

The August 2023 referendum was a dramatic vindication for the Yasunídos. “Five million Ecuadorans said that it was right to leave the crude oil underground,” she continues. “This was a campaign that had never been seen before in the country to stop oil companies from extracting oil from the ground and preventing the negative impacts on the health and environment. We won!”

In the same referendum, voters also decided to stop mining activities in the “El Chocó” biosphere reserve in the capital city of Quito. The campaign, “Quito sin mineria,” opposed mining projects in the Metropolitan District of Quito and the Chocó Andino region, which comprises 124,000 hectares.

But the referenda on Yasuní and El Chocó were not the only elections that took place on that day in Ecuador. Voters also went to the polls to vote for a new president. In a later second round, businessman Daniel Noboa won. Noboa had supported the Yasuní referendum, pointing out that a ban on extraction actually made economic sense since it would cost $59 a barrel to extract the oil, which would sell for only $58 a barrel on the international market. After his election, he said that he would respect the results.

But then, in January 2024, he reversed himself, calling instead for a year moratorium on the ruling. Ecuador, Noboa argued, needed the money to address its worsening security situation: a surge in narcotrafficking, a skyrocketing murder rate, and a descent into gang warfare.

The Yasunídos argue that even this perilous situation should not affect the results of the referendum. “In Ecuador, nature is the subject of rights,” Martínez says, referring to the fact that Ecuador was the first country in the world in 2008 to include the rights of nature in its constitution. “The discussion is no longer if this part of the park should be closed or not, but how and when.”

Looking at the Amazon

The Amazon rainforest is a powerful symbol of biodiversity all around the world, even for people who can’t identify the countries through which the Amazon river flows.

“It’s the world’s largest tropical rainforest,” reports Raphael Hoetmer of Amazon Watch in Peru. “It houses up to 30 percent of the world species and contains one-fifth of the world’s fresh water. It is home to 410 indigenous nationalities, 82 of them living in isolation by choice, all of them helping in global climate regulation.”

But the Amazon region also contains an abundance of natural resources: timber, gold, and fossil fuels. “Any just transition requires ending the extraction of oil—and not only oil—from the Amazon,” Hoetmer continues. “It also requires ending the system that is behind this extraction.”

The degradation of the Amazon rainforest is reaching a tipping point. The estimate is that when deforestation reaches 20-25 percent of the biome, the area can’t recover. Hoetmer reports that deforestation is now approaching 26 percent.

Fossil fuel extraction is contributing to that deforestation is several ways. Millions of hectares are currently slated for oil and gas extraction. The drilling itself requires deforestation, but so do the new roads established to reach those sites. Those roads in turn open the region up to other forms of exploitation such as logging and agribusiness.

Then there are the oil spills that contaminate vast stretches of land. Several major pipeline breaks have dumped oil into the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the Ecuadorian environmental ministry estimates that there have been over a thousand “environmental liabilities” and over 3,000 sites “sources of contamination.” Between 1971 and 2000, Occidental Petroleum dumped 9 billion gallons of untreated waste containing heavy metals into Peru’s rivers and streams, leading to a lawsuit against the company by indigenous Peruvians that resulted in an out-of-court settlement. Colombia’s oil industry has been involved in over 2,000 episodes of environmental contamination between 2015 and 2022.

Shutting down oil and gas production in the Amazon requires looking beyond the producers to the investors and the consumers. California, since it absorbs nearly half of all Amazon oil exports, is a major potential target. On the financing side, Amazon Watch’s End Amazon Crude campaign is working to stop new financial flows into, for instance, Petroperú, the country’s state-run oil company. Campaigners are targeting major banking institutions in the Global North, including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Bank of America. Community-led protests have taken place in the United States, Chile, and Germany. By raising the costs of investment into Amazonian extraction, campaigners are pushing lenders to remove Amazonian oil from their portfolios.

Another strategy is strengthening territorial sovereignty in indigenous lands. “One of the processes that gives us hope is this proposed proposal to reconstruct the Amazon based on strengthening the self-governance of Amazonian people,” Hoetmer notes. “The notion of Autonomous Territorial Governments started with the Wampis peoples but has now expanded to over 10 indigenous nations. The Autonomous Territorial Governments defend their territories  against illegal mining as well as land invasions and fossil fuel extraction, demand and build intercultural education, and negotiate public services with the Peruvian state.”

The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty

Frontline communities particularly those from the Global South are paying the highest price of fossil fuel exploitation and climate change, yet they are the least responsible. All over the world and for decades, frontline struggles have shown leadership in resisting the plundering of their territories. Today, for many communities around the world—and for some whole countries—continued fossil fuel extraction and climate change represent an existential crisis.

In response to this crisis, an early proposal came from officials and civil society leaders in the Pacific for a moratorium and binding international mechanisms specifically dedicated to phasing out fossil fuels in the Pacific. In 2015, in the Suva Declaration on Climate Change issued from the Pacific Islands Development Forum Third Annual Summit held in Suva, Fiji, decision-makers called for: “a new global dialogue on the implementation of an international moratorium on the development and expansion of fossil fuel extracting industries, particularly the construction of new coal mines, as an urgent step towards decarbonising the global economy.”

In 2016, following a summit in the Solomon Islands, 14 Pacific Island nations discussed the world’s first treaty that would ban new coal mining and embrace the 1.5C goal set at the Paris climate talks.

Initiated by island countries most at risk from rising waters, the movement for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty has now been endorsed by a dozen countries and more than 2,000 civil society organizations as well as a number of cities and states like California and more than 100 Nobel laureates.

“Our treaty is based on other treaties that have talked about nuclear weapons, mines, and gasses like the Montreal Protocol on phasing out ozone-depleting substances,” relates Andrés Gómez O.

“What’s clear is that we don’t have time for business as usual,” the FFNPT organizers argue. “The International Energy Agency determined that there needs to be a decline of fossil fuel use from four-fifths of the world’s energy supply today to one-fifth by 2050. The fossil fuels that remain will be embedded in some products such as plastics and in processes where emissions are scarce.”Critical to this process is action by richer countries. “Countries that are better off economically can support other countries to step away from the fossil fuel system,” Gómez continues.

A key strategy, he adds, would be “the Yasunization of territories.” He explains that “this means, first, making this park a utopia for the country. Then we localize this approach in different provinces in Ecuador where we say, okay, in this province we have our own Yasuní.” This local approach has had some precedents. The Ecuadoran city of Cuenca, for instance, held a referendum in 2021 banning future mining project.

The treaty appeals not only to the environmental movement. By connecting the struggle to the experiences of local communities—the violence associated with extraction, the cancer cases, the oil spills—“we are not just interested in convincing the already existing movements,” he says, “We also have to move the whole society.”

He concludes succinctly: “We are not just about saying no—to fossil fuels, to extractivism. We are about saying a very big yes: to life!”

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

The latest aid package both opposes and facilitates genocide. How crazy is that?

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The process of crafting congressional legislation is often likened to sausage-making. Best not to look behind the scenes at the mechanics of the process, which is a bloody mess.

But the analogy is not apt. Sure, sausage-making can be ugly. The end product, however, is presentable and usually quite tasty.

The legislation that emerges from the U.S. Congress, on the other hand, is often as ugly and unappetizing as the process that created it.

Consider the recent bill that bundled military assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan along with a fourth provision covering more sanctions on Iran, the use of frozen Russian assets, and a potential ban on TikTok in the United States. The bill passed Congress by considerable margins. The vote was 79 to 18 in the Senate and—for the most controversial piece on Ukraine—311 to 112 in the House. The president then swiftly signed it into law.

But the margin of approval belies the months of political infighting that preceded the vote. First came the conflict over immigration provisions that the Dems originally included in the legislation to sweeten the pot for the Republicans only to discover that the Republicans were insisting on harsher measures. President Biden and the Democrats moved further to the right, yet it still wasn’t enough. In the end, the final legislation didn’t address immigration at all.

Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) delayed a vote in the House for months because of opposition from members further to his right who objected to providing additional funding to Ukraine. This determined minority threatened to remove Johnson over the issue, which ordinarily should not have discomfited the speaker, except that this same minority had ousted his predecessor. Moreover, Donald Trump had made his opposition to Ukrainian aid very clear, and Republicans, in this election year, have been tripping over themselves to show fealty to the Man. Even the one Ukrainian-born legislator, Victoria Spartz (R-IN), voted against the Ukraine bill in the House, largely because she is trying to get Trump’s endorsement in her primary race. Earlier, she’d called the Russian invasion a “genocide.”

Johnson managed to satisfy at least some of his critics by splitting the legislation into four distinct bills (Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, kitchen sink). In this way, House members could, for instance, register their support for Israel and their opposition to more arms for Ukraine. Senators had no such luxury since they had to vote on a single bill, which prompted three progressives to oppose the legislation because it didn’t attach any conditions to the aid to Israel (while 15 Republican extremists joined their House compatriots in opposing the Ukrainian provisions).

Progressives were indeed in a quandary over the bill. Imagine a quite different measure that condemned aggressor countries for breaking international law (Russia, Israel) while aiding those forces pushing back against colonial interventions (Ukrainians, Palestinians). It would never have been brought to a floor vote. But who ever said that U.S. foreign policy was principled or coherent? U.S. politics is all about holding one’s nose, averting one’s eyes from the sausage-making, and voting for the lesser evil.

That said, what impact will the bill have? Will it save Ukraine from being overrun? And is there any chance that all the pro-Palestinian and pro-ceasefire protests taking place around the country will force greater coherence upon U.S. foreign policy?

Ukraine

The war has not really been going Ukraine’s way for some time. Even when Ukrainian forces were successfully holding the line against Russian occupiers last year, they were suffering a lot of casualties. As Ukraine’s military supplies began to wane, Russia began to push further westward, potentially threatening large population centers like Kharkiv in the northeast. Russia’s larger pool of recruits, combined with a five-to-one artillery advantage (more in certain spots along the line of fire), was creating great anxiety that a Russian counteroffensive in the late spring or early summer could overwhelm Ukrainian defenses altogether.

“Contradictions,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3, 2024.

Meanwhile, Ukraine couldn’t completely defend its population centers and critical infrastructure further to the west. When Russia fired a barrage of 82 missiles and drones at the Trypilska power plant near Kyiv on April 11, Ukraine could only intercept 18 missiles and 39 drones. It had run out of interceptors. The remaining Russian weapons destroyed the plant.

The U.S. military package provides $61 billion in assistance, but the vast majority of the funding (80 percent) does not go to Ukraine. Rather, it allows the U.S. military-industrial complex to replenish the pipeline of supplies heading to Kyiv and fund ongoing Pentagon operations like training Ukrainian soldiers. It will take some weeks before those weapons begin to reach their destination, though the Pentagon, waiting for this moment, is shipping some existing supplies from bases in Germany and Poland. Meanwhile, Russia is trying to press its advantage.

Critics of this assistance to Ukraine—a bizarre alliance of the far left and the far right—argue that such shipments only prolong the war, causing needless suffering to Ukrainians. Others see an imperial motive, that the United States is just using Ukrainian bodies like meat puppets to draw the Russians into a quagmire and hamstring an adversary. The more isolationist critics maintain that this war has nothing to do with the United States, which should just stay out of it.

While I am no fan of the Pentagon, the U.S. military-industrial complex, or the obscene amount of money spent globally on what is euphemistically termed “defense”—$2.4 trillion in 2023, a new record—I view these arguments about Ukraine as dangerously naïve.

First, it is Russia that is prolonging this war, by continuing to occupy Ukraine illegally, pushing for more territory, and committing war crimes from torturing prisoners of war to bombing civilian sites. The Kremlin continues to claim that Ukraine is not a legitimate country, that it has always been part of the “Russian world,” that the government in Kyiv is “Nazi.” It is inaccurate to say that Ukraine is simply fighting for this or that scrap of land. Rather, Ukrainians are fighting to prevent the elimination of their country and their collective identity—in other words, against genocide. They know what happens to those who assert their Ukrainian identity in areas occupied by Russian forces (death, deportation, imprisonment). The vast majority of Ukrainians oppose giving up their land for a peace deal with Russia—around 80 percent—and a majority are against peace negotiations with Russia more generally.

Many hawkish voices in the United State would indeed like to see a weaker Russia. But the Biden administration has been clear that it would prefer some kind of settlement to this conflict so that it can focus on other foreign policy priorities. Ukraine is no proxy. It continues to fight not because it is being controlled like a marionette, but because it is exercising its own agency. It fights despite an American ambivalence that is expressed in so many ways—a reluctance to share the most advanced weaponry, a failure to deliver aid in a timely manner, and a large share of the Republican Party unwilling to provide any assistance at all.

Finally, there’s the question of U.S. interests. I generally prefer to avoid discussions of narrow U.S. national interests, which often boil down to maintaining military dominance, upholding dollar supremacy, and securing access to raw materials. I prefer to look at where U.S. interests can or should overlap with global concerns such as strengthening international law, addressing climate change and biodiversity loss, and reducing global economic inequality.

Viewed from this latter perspective, defending Ukraine is squarely in U.S. national interest. Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory (2014), the invasion of the country (2022), the maintenance of a military occupation (ongoing): these violations of international law are of such great enormity that a failure to punish the aggressor—preferably in court but on the ground if need be—threatens to overturn the very notion of an international community. Russia is paying for this war by pumping out as much oil and gas as the market can bear: in this way, the war is paid for by pollution. And the invasion has put an enormous burden on the world’s poor by reducing the capacity of Ukraine to produce grain. On the basis of these three criteria, the war in Ukraine is very much in the U.S. interest.

Will the recently passed aid package turn the tide of the war? That’s impossible to say. But a better armed Ukraine will have a fighting chance. And future generations will not blame the United States for standing idly by as Russia attempts to commit an act of ethnic cleansing of epic proportions.

Israel

And yet, in the same bill, the Biden administration is not only ignoring another act of ethnic cleansing but is abetting it. The military assistance bill that the president signed includes $26 billion designed to “help ensure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself against the very real threats it faces from Iran, as well as Iran’s proxy groups.”

This is an extraordinary misrepresentation of the military aid going to Israel. First of all, Iran was previously  urging restraint on its “proxy groups” after an exchange of incidents with the United States earlier in the year. And then Israel assassinated top Iranian military leaders in Syria in early April, which has set in motion another cycle of escalations.

Second, it’s not all about defense. Sure, there’s $5.2 billion for missile defense (Iron Dome, Iron Beam). But there’s also $4.4 billion for Israel to restock its military coffers and $3.5 billion for advanced weaponry—so that the Israeli government can continue to wage war in Gaza.

The Biden administration still believes that its military aid provides leverage over the Israeli government. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is determined to demonstrate the opposite. As soon as the aid package passed, he launched more air strikes on Palestinians in Gaza (again killing mostly women and children) and announced that plans were still on track to invade the southern city of Rafah (over U.S. objections).

Washington is now pushing Hamas to accept a 40-day ceasefire. The Palestinian organization has insisted on a permanent ceasefire, though it might be mollified by an Israeli promise of the “restoration of sustainable calm.” Also on the table, reportedly, is “a willingness for full return of displaced Palestinians to their homes in northern Gaza and the withdrawal of the IDF from the corridor that divides the enclave and prevents freedom of movement,” according to Axios.

The Biden administration, pushing this ceasefire proposal, is trying to prove that it’s listening to domestic critics—congressional opposition, voters in swing states, student protestors on campus—as well as the more numerous critics of U.S. policy throughout the world, especially in the Global South. The administration must also take into account the most recent report that the International Criminal Court is on the verge of issuing arrest warrants against top Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, for actions taken in Gaza.

But the aid package to Israel suggests a continuation of business as usual. None of that military aid was conditioned on the behavior of the Israeli military.

Unless and until a U.S. administration applies some real sticks in its relations with Israel, the gulf between evolving U.S. public opinion and stagnant U.S. policymaking will remain huge.

The Rest of the Sausage

The third element of the aid package provides $8 billion to U.S. allies in Asia to counter China, which includes some key military upgrades for countries like Taiwan.

Although China has indeed been more assertive in recent years, the Biden administration is doing little to repair relations with Beijing. As long as Washington and Beijing get along, Taiwan can prosper in the shadows of international non-recognition. So, this money might have been better spent on collaborative projects with China, which are a more sustainable hedge against war.

Finally, in the bill’s fourth basket, the Republicans assembled a hodgepodge of initiatives against China (to ban TikTok), Russia (to use frozen assets), and Iran (more sanctions). How long will it take the United States to figure out that punitive measures like these tend to push adversaries together? By all means, let’s isolate the one country that has invaded a neighboring democracy. But the United States should be much more strategic about how it can woo Iran and China to make Russia’s isolation more complete.

But that would require much smarter sausage-making. And so far, U.S. policymakers don’t seem up to the task.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Haiti is the poorest country in the region, its riches leached out by colonial overlords, American occupying forces, corporate predators, and home-grown autocrats. As if that weren’t enough, it’s also suffered an almost Biblical succession of plagues in recent years. A coup deposed its first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, not once but twice — in 1991 and again in 2004. An earthquake in 2010 killed hundreds of thousands, leaving 1.5 million Haitians homeless, out of a population of less than 10 million. In the wake of that earthquake, nearly a million people contracted cholera, the worst outbreak in history, courtesy of a contingent of U.N. peacekeepers. To round out the catastrophes, in 2016, Hurricane Matthew made landfall, pushing Haiti back even further.

And now the country has been overrun by gangs that emerged as practically the only groups capable of providing services, however meager, to Haiti’s long-suffering population. People have become the country’s largest export. Anyone who has money, connections, or sufficient courage has fled, even if those who somehow made it to the United States were all too often deported back into the maelstrom. Haiti doesn’t have the three things that might prevent the sort of vacuum into which gangs so eagerly rush: robust democratic governance, a strong civil society, and a sufficiently uncorrupt constabulary. As a result, it’s returned to what political theorist Thomas Hobbes once called a “war of all against all” in which violence and the urge for power prevail, as fist takes precedence over gavel — the perfect environment for gangs to flourish.

Political scientists often label places like Haiti “failed states.” With the breakdown of order, everything from political institutions to border controls disintegrates. In a comparable fashion, clans contested for power in Somalia in the 1990s and paramilitaries battled each other in the Democratic Republic of Congo during its repeated wars, while rebels and jihadis targeted the Syrian government beginning in 2011. In the end, such diverse groups seem to boil down to one thing: guys with guns.

In Haiti, the gangocracy is organized along the classic lines of criminal enterprises like the gangs that ruled New York City in the mid-nineteenth century (immortalized in the film The Gangs of New York) or the Chinese tongs that warred over San Franciscan turf in the years after the Civil War (featured in the current Netflix series Warrior). The two major Haitian gangs in the capital city Port-au-Prince, GPep and the G9 Family, have similarly hierarchical structures, roots in particular neighborhoods, and flamboyant leaders like the former police officer and current G9 head Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier.

But gangs aren’t simply criminal syndicates. The Haitian gangs have close connections to political parties and align themselves with business interests (or run businesses of their own). Sometimes such gangs even begin as anti-gangs, neighborhood self-defense groups meant to help locals survive in an era of lawlessness.

Their mischaracterization resembles the overly narrow understanding of “terrorists.” Hamas, for instance, is on the U.S. terrorism list, but it’s not just a bunch of guys with guns and a predilection for violence. It’s also been a political party, a government, and a service organization that provided food, health care, and other necessities to underserved communities in Gaza.

Don’t make the mistake of associating gangs like Haiti’s with a “primitive” stage of political development or only with countries on the geopolitical margins. What’s happening there today could prefigure the future of the United States, too. In place of the Biblical succession of plagues that swept through Haiti, the U.S. might only need the tinder of climate change and the flint of Donald Trump to go up in similar flames.

Gangs R U.S.

Today, Americans associate “gangs” with the Crips and Bloods, who developed a murderous rivalry in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s or, more recently, Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13, a gang of young Salvadoran transplants to Los Angeles initially focused on protecting its members from other gangs.

But shouldn’t we be more catholic in our definitions? After all, what are right-wing paramilitary forces, from the Three Percenters to the Proud Boys, if not gangs? They have their rituals, worldviews, indifference to the rule of law, even their own “Barbecues.” The gangs associated with far-right ideology and white supremacy today could claim a lineage stretching back to the European settlers of this continent who routinely engaged in the extrajudicial murder of indigenous peoples while expanding westward, or the vigilante mobs that administered “rough justice” to “disobedient” slaves before the Civil War, or even the Ku Klux Klan. As for real-world impact, the Crips or MS-13 never had the audacity to force their way into the U.S. Capitol and trash the place, as Donald Trump’s informal gang did on January 6, 2021.

But why stop there? The Pinkerton detective agency once functioned like a gang in its attacks on the labor movement. The Central Intelligence Agency developed distinctly gang-like behavior overseas with its assassinations, coups, and outright criminal activities. And what about all the deaths associated with corporate gangs like Philip Morris and ExxonMobil? These institutions of “normal” society have had a much higher kill count and a more debilitating effect on the rule of law than the institutions of organized crime.

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When it comes to gang-like activities, much depends on geopolitics. The emergence of the “Washington consensus” and the birth of neoliberalism in the 1970s was an inflection point when it came to encouraging gang-like behavior. Previously, at least in advanced industrial countries, the state had been gradually assuming ever greater economic responsibility through the New Deal and its successors in the U.S. and the development of Europe’s market socialism. Neoliberalism, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in England and President Ronald Reagan in the United States, sought to roll back the power of the state through the defunding, deregulation, and privatization of government services.

That sustained attack on state functions ensured an increase in poverty and painful budget crises for institutions like school systems and hospitals, while corporate misconduct proliferated. In poorer countries, where states were already more fragile, the impact was far more devastating.

In Haiti, after the state borrowed money in the 1970s and 1980s to feed corruption and sustain autocracy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pushed subsequent democratic governments to privilege the free market, while opening ever more quickly to the global economy. Sensing opportunity, non-governmental organizations streamed into Haiti to provide food, housing, and health care, everything a cash-strapped government couldn’t do. The succession of catastrophes — coups, an earthquake, cholera, hurricanes — only strengthened the humanitarian sector but at the expense of effective government. In this century, the situation had become so dire that all too many parents were giving their children up to orphanages run by foreign charities. In other words, the road to Haiti’s hell was, in part, paved by good intentions.

Or take the case of Jamaica where, from the late 1970s on, similar IMF programs translated into disaster, especially in the capital, Kingston. Here, too, the state lost power as gang leaders, known as “dons,” expanded their territories. As Michelle Munroe and Damion Blake put it in Third World Quarterly: “Neoliberal policies not only paralyzed the state’s capacity to control and contain violence in the streets of Kingston, these changes also made dons and the gangs they command more lethal and powerful.”

Dons and the gangs they command: that language could soon seem all too eerily appropriate for the United States.

American Bloodbath

America’s ultimate Don is all too clear about what he expects come November, should he lose. “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath,” he told one of his rallies. According to that scenario, the crew that owes allegiance to Donald Trump — the right-wing militias, diehard conspiracy theorists, open-carry gun enthusiasts — will rise up in gang-like fashion in the face of another “stolen election.”

That, however, is an example of Trump’s magical thinking. The January 6th “insurrection” revealed the limits of his influence. What happened in Washington that day never came close to a coup d’état, thanks to the actions of the police and the National Guard, nor was it repeated, even in the reddest of states.

The real bloodbath would take place if Trump won the election. After all, he’s already promised violence as an organizing principle for his second term. As David Remnick has written in The New Yorker, Trump

“makes no effort to conceal his bigotries, his lawlessness, his will to authoritarian power; to the contrary, he advertises it, and, most disturbing of all, this deepens his appeal. What’s more, there is no question that Trump has so normalized calls to violence as an instrument of politics that it has inflamed countless people to perverse action.”

Trump has also promised a thorough purge of his enemies in the government and beyond, as well as the weaponization of the Justice Department to wage war on all MAGA opponents. As in his first term, he would destroy as many federal agencies as possible. Meanwhile, he would promote drilling über alles and roll back every Biden administration effort to create an industrial policy to guide the United States away from fossil fuels.

What Trump proposes is fundamentally different from the now shopworn Republican strategy of reducing the federal government to the size of something that can be “drowned in the bathtub” (as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once so memorably put it) in favor of “states’ rights.” Trump has nothing but contempt for the politics that advance such a perspective. Like the gang leader he is, he’d rather concentrate federal power in his own hands as an instrument of personal vengeance emphasizing loyalty above all. Instead of the empowerment of state legislatures, Trump prefers chaos, for in fraught times people look to autocratic leaders.

When it comes to starting fires in the American system, Trump is distinctly the Barbecue type. He admires leaders who slaughter people indiscriminately (Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines), change the constitution multiple times to bypass legislative and judicial opposition (Viktor Orbán of Hungary), or kill their political opponents wherever they might live (Vladimir Putin of Russia). He likes the bad boys who have transformed their parties into gangs and their countries into fiefdoms. In short, he’s the ultimate gang leader.

Of course, he won’t do it alone. There are plenty of true believers and opportunists to staff his administration and implement his whims, but that’s not enough. As his first term revealed, the guardrails of democracy — opposition politicians, bureaucrats, even certain Republicans who continue to have qualms – can still prevent the country from tumbling over a cliff.

This time around, Trump and those backing him hope to disable enough of the political infrastructure to create the space for non-state actors to do his work for him. In The Donald’s first term, the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as Trumpophile Steve Bannon so infamously put it, was a strategy meant to empower actors like corporations and religious institutions to grab power for themselves. Next time around, he’s likely to surround himself with advisors pulled from the think-tank crowd that produced the nightmarish Project 2025 blueprint in order to “free” all MAGA-oriented non-state and (often) anti-state actors to do their damnedest.

But even ruthless think tanks, corporations, and apocalyptic preachers aren’t likely to go far enough for Donald Trump, since they also remain the bedrock of America’s more traditional right wing, the coalition that put Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush into the White House. Trump needs genuine mayhem-makers. By removing restrictions on firearms, he aims to deputize every American citizen in his camp to MAGAfy the United States.

Trump’s repeated exhortations to violence — “lock her up,” “punch him in the face,” “be there, will be wild” — may well take a more specific form in a second term. Like McCarthyites at the height of the Cold War, Trumpists have imagined “Marxists” under every bed, even in the Pentagon. It’s not far-fetched to think that the reelected president might issue a coded call to his supporters to round them all up and dispatch them in some grim fashion.

Trump often accuses his opponents of exactly the sins — attempting to steal elections, having distinctly senior moments — of which he is supremely guilty. In the MAGA echo chamber, complaints about witch-hunts targeting Trump should be considered just a preface, should he win this November, to a genuine witch-hunt that could make the Red Scare of the 1950s look like a garden party.

After Autocracy

Haiti has no government, much less a strong-armed autocrat like Donald Trump. So, it might seem ludicrous to compare the crisis there with the prospective “bloodbath” Trump promises here. But remember: Haiti suffered under two ruthless dictators from 1957 to 1986: Papa Doc Duvalier and his son, Baby Doc. Between them, they ensured that Haiti would never easily establish democratic institutions.

Donald Trump is nearly 78 years old. He doesn’t have a long political future. Yes, were he to win in November, he would surely do what he could to destroy democracy. Still, the true nightmare scenario is likely to come later, as climate change sends yet more migrants surging toward U.S. borders, generates more fires that sweep across the land, and heats politics to the boiling point. That’s when future versions of the gangs Trump has encouraged to “stand back and stand by,” the insurrectionists he’s promised to amnesty, and the loyalists who have shared images of Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck could assault the citadels of power in an attempt to destroy once and for all the rule of law that Trump has spent his life undermining.

Cue the ominous music: from sea to shining sea, the war of all against all may be just around the corner.

Copyright 2024 John Feffer

Via Tomdispatch.com