The United Nations lowered the U.S. ranking to #41 among nations in 2022 due to the extreme gap between the rich and the rest and women’s loss of reproductive freedom. Elsewhere the U.S. ranks as a “flawed democracy” because of its severely fractured society.  These ongoing societal failures feed a continuous decline in health, such that we now ranks 48^th among 200 countries in life expectancy, while having the largest number by far of billionaires and millionaires compared to other wealthy countries.  Corporate lobbies for the weapons industry, fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, processed foods, etc. dictate our federal government’s priorities while 78% of US people live paycheck to paycheck.

Blessed is the Poor People’s Campaign: This national campaign in more than 45 states is organized around the needs and demands of the 140 million poor and low income Americans.  Its vision to restructure our society from the bottom up, recognizes “we must…deal with the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of health care, militarism and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism that blames the poor instead of the systems that cause poverty.”  Add sexism to that list of injustices.

Blessed is Fair Share Massachusetts, a coalition of labor unions and dozens of community and faith-based organizations that won passage of the Fair Share Amendment in 2022. The constitutional amendment has instituted a 4% surcharge on annual income over $1 million.  In 2024 the $1.8 billion accrued from the tax on millionaires provides free school meals; free community college; and funds to invest in roads, bridges, and public transit. 

In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which recognizes adequate housing as one cornerstone of the right to an adequate standard of living. All 27 European Union (EU) member states as well as Australia and South Africa institutionalized housing as a human right for their citizens while the United States has not.  In every state except Oregon and Wyoming, it can be illegal to be homeless, essentially casting blame on 650,000 adults and over 2 million children for their poverty-stricken homelessness

Blessed is Rosie’s Place, a model to our country of woman-centered humanism.  Much more than a shelter, it is a mecca and “a second chance for 12,000 poor and homeless women each year” in Boston.  Rosie’s Place was founded on Easter Sunday 1974 in an abandoned supermarket, as the first shelter for women in the country.  From providing meals and sanctuary from the streets, it grew into a multi-service community center that offers women emergency shelter and meals plus support and tools to rebuild their lives.  Rosie’s offers a food pantry, ESOL classes, legal assistance, wellness care, one-on-one support, housing and job search services, and community outreach.  Ninety percent of homeless women have suffered severe physical or sexual abuse at some time in their lives.

Blessed are the nearly 3000 domestic violence shelters and groups organized throughout the U.S. to provide temporary shelter and help women re-build their lives, offering legal assistance, counselling, educational opportunities and multi-services for their children.

“Beating the Blues,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

A recent Gallup Survey found that the U.S. ranks last among comparable nations in trust of their government and major institutions, including business leaders, journalists and reporters, the medical system, banks, public education and organized religion – a plunge from top of the list nearly 20 years ago.

Blessed is Hands Across the Hills, a blue-state red-state seven-year effort formed after Donald Trump’s 2016 election to bring together progressive residents in western Massachusetts and more conservative residents of rural eastern Kentucky, for conversations and sometimes intense dialogues about their political and cultural differences.  They disputed the idea, “that we are hopelessly divided, as a myth sold to us by politicians and mass media, to hide our nation’s all-too-real inequalities.”

Blessed are the peacemakers across dozens of federal agencies, including the military and in communities throughout the country who challenge, resist, resign and refuse orders in our flawed hyper-militaristic government. Since the US-enabled genocide in Gaza, more than 250 veterans and active-duty soldiers have become members, respectively, of About Face: Veterans Against the War,  Feds for Peace, Service in Dissent, and A New Policy PAC.  All have arisen from current and former federal employees aligned with the majority of Americans who want the Israeli-US war on Gaza (now expanded to Lebanon and the West Bank) to end through diplomacy.

Blessed are those of the people, for the people and by the people – beacons in a country sundered by militarism, rich privilege, origins in slavery and genocide of Native Americans, and persistent inequality of women.

As a start, history offers some inspiration. On issues of war and peace, the trajectory of the Reagan administration suggests how surprising hope can prove to be. The man who joked that “we begin bombing [Russia] in five minutes,” and hired a Pentagon official who told journalist Robert Scheer that America would survive a nuclear war if it had “enough shovels” to build makeshift shelters, ended up claiming that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” He even came tantalizingly close to an agreement with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to abolish nuclear weapons altogether.

To his credit, Reagan developed a visceral opposition to such weaponry, while his wife, Nancy, urged him to reduce nuclear weapons as a way to burnish his legacy. A Washington Post account of her role noted that “[s]he made no secret of her dream that a man once branded as a cowboy and a jingoist might even win the Nobel Peace Prize.” Such personal factors did come into play, but the primary driver of Reagan’s change of heart was the same thing that undergirds so many significant changes in public policy — dedicated organizing and public pressure.

Reagan’s presidency coincided with the rise of the largest, most mainstream anti-nuclear movement in American history, the nuclear freeze campaign.

Along the way, in June 1982, one million people rallied for disarmament in New York’s Central Park. And that movement had an impact. As Reagan National Security Advisor Robert MacFarlane pointed out at the time, “We took it [the freeze campaign] as a serious movement that could undermine congressional support for the [nuclear] modernization program, and potentially… a serious partisan political threat that could affect the election in `84.”

Reagan’s response was twofold. He proposed a technical solution, pledging to build an impenetrable shield against incoming missiles called the Strategic Defense Initiative (more popularly known as the Star Wars program). That impenetrable shield never came to be, but the quest to develop it deposited tens of billions of dollars in the coffers of major weapons contractors like Lockheed and Raytheon.

The second prong of Reagan’s response was a series of nuclear arms control proposals, welcomed by reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, including a discussion of the possibility of eliminating the two sides’ nuclear arsenals altogether. The idea of abolishing nuclear weapons didn’t come to fruition, but the Reagan administration and its successor, that of George H.W. Bush, did at least end up implementing substantial cuts to the American nuclear arsenal.

So, in a few short years, Reagan, the nuclear hawk, was transformed into Reagan, the arms-control-supporter, largely due to concerted public pressure. All of which goes to show that organizing does matter and that, given enough political will and public engagement, dark times can be turned around.

Trump at Peace (and War)

Donald Trump is nothing if not a top-flight marketeer — a walking, talking brand. And his brand is as a tough guy and a deal maker, even if the only time he’s truly lived up to that image was as an imaginary businessman on television.

But because Trump, lacking a fixed ideology — unless you count narcissism — is largely transactional, his positions on war and peace remain remarkably unpredictable. His first run for office was marked by his relentless criticism of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a rhetorical weapon he deployed with great skill against both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. That he failed to oppose the war when it mattered — during the conflict — didn’t change the fact that many of his supporters thought of him as the anti-interventionist candidate.

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To his credit, Trump didn’t add any major boots-on-the-ground conflicts to the conflicts he inherited. But he did serious damage as an arms dealer, staunchly supporting Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, even after that regime murdered U.S.-resident and Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In a statement after the murder, Trump bluntly said that he didn’t want to cut off arms to the Saudi regime because it would take business away from “Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and many other great U.S. defense contractors.”

Trump also did great damage to the architecture of international arms control by withdrawing from a treaty with Russia on intermediate-range nuclear forces and the Iran nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. If those agreements were still in place, the risks posed by the current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East would be lower, and they might have served as building blocks in efforts to step back from such conflicts and return to a world of greater cooperation.

But there is another side to Trump, too. There’s the figure who periodically trashes the big weapons makers and their allies as greedy predators trying to line their own pockets at taxpayer expense. For example, in a September speech in Wisconsin, after a long rant about how he was being unfairly treated by the legal system, Trump announced that “I will expel warmongers. We have these people, they want to go to war all the time. You know why? Missiles are $2 million apiece. That’s why. They love to drop missiles all over the place.” And then he added, referring to his previous presidency, “I had no wars.” If past practice is any indication, Trump will not follow through on such a pledge. But the fact that he felt compelled to say it is at least instructive. There is clearly a portion of Trump’s base that’s tired of endless wars and skeptical of the machinations of the nation’s major defense contractors.

Trump has also said that he will end the war in Ukraine on day one. If so, it may be the peace of the graveyard, in the sense that he’ll cut off all U.S. support for Ukraine and let Russia roll over them. But his support for peace in Ukraine, if one can call it that, is not replicated in his other strategic views, which include a confrontational stance towards China, a pledge to further militarize the U.S.-Mexican border, and a call for Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza.

The last thing to consider in assessing what Trump’s military policies might look like is his administration’s close association with the most unhinged representatives of Silicon Valley’s military tech surge. For instance, Peter Thiel, founder of the emerging military tech firm Palantir, gave J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice president, a job at one of his companies and later donated large sums to his successful run for the Senate from Ohio. The new-age militarists of Silicon Valley loudly applauded the choice of Vance, whom they see as their man in the White House.

All of this adds up to what might be thought of as the Trump conundrum when it comes to war and peace and, to deal with it, a peace movement is truly needed.

Peace Resistance

For any peace movement, figuring out how to approach Trump will be like shadow boxing — trying to imagine what position he’s likely to take next.

The biggest problem in working for peace under a Trump presidency may involve whether groups are even allowed to organize without facing systematic government repression. After all, in the past, Trump has labeled his opponents with the Hitlerian-style insult “vermin” and threatened to jail any number of those he’s designated as his enemies.

Of course, the first job of any future peace movement (which would have applied as well had the Democrats taken the White House) will simply be to grow into a viable political force in such a difficult political climate.

The best way forward would undoubtedly be to knit together a coalition of organizations already opposing some aspect of American militarism — from the Gaza ceasefire movement and antinuclear groups to unions seeking to reduce the roles their members play in arms production, progressive veterans, big-tent organizations like the Poor People’s Campaign, groups opposed to the militarization of the Mexican border, organizations against the further militarization of the police, and climate activists concerned with the Pentagon’s striking role in pouring greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere. A coordinated effort by such movements could generate real political clout, even if it didn’t involve forming a new mega-organization. Rather, it could be a flexible, resilient network capable of focusing its power on issues of mutual concern at key moments. Such a network would, however, require a deeper kind of relationship-building among individuals and organizations than currently exists, based on truly listening to one another’s perspectives and respecting differences on what end state we’re ultimately aiming for.

Even as peace and justice organizations paint a picture of what a better world might look like, they may be able to win some short-term reforms, including some that could even garner bipartisan mainstream support. One thing that the American roles in the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza and plans to arm up for a potential conflict with China have demonstrated is that the American system for developing and purchasing weapons is, at the very least, broken. The weapons are far too costly, take too long to produce, are too complex to maintain, and are often so loaded with unnecessary bells and whistles that they never work as advertised.

A revival of something along the lines of the bipartisan military reform caucus of the 1980s, a group that included powerful Republicans like former Georgia representative Newt Gingrich, is in order. The goal would be to produce cheaper, simpler weapons that can be turned out quickly and maintained effectively. Add to that the kinds of measures for curbing price gouging, holding contractors responsible for cost overruns, and preventing arms makers from bidding up their own stock prices (as advocated relentlessly by Senator Elizabeth Warren), and a left-right coalition might be conceivable even in today’s bitterly divided Congress and the Trump era.

After all, the most hawkish of hawks shouldn’t be in favor of wasting increasingly scarce tax dollars on weapons of little value to troops in the field. And even the Pentagon has tired of the practice of letting the military services submit “wish lists” to Congress for items that didn’t make it into the department’s official budget submission. Such measures, of course, would hardly end war in our time, but they could start a necessary process of reducing the increasingly unchecked power of the Lockheed Martins and Raytheons of our world.

There are also issues that impact all progressive movements like voter suppression, money in politics, political corruption, crackdowns on free speech and the right of political assembly, and so much more that will have to be addressed for groups to work on virtually any issue of importance. So, an all-hands-on-deck approach to the coming world of Donald Trump and crew is distinctly in order.

An invigorated network for peace, justice, and human rights writ large will also need a new approach to leadership. Old-guard, largely white leaders (like me) need to make room for and elevate voices that have either been vilified or ignored in mainstream discourse all these years. Groups fighting on the front lines against oppression have already faced and survived the kinds of crackdowns that some of us fear but have yet to experience ourselves. Their knowledge will be crucial going forward. In addition, in keeping with the old adage that one should work locally but think globally, it will be important to honor and support local organizing. Groups like the Poor People’s Campaign and the progressive feminist outfit Madre have been working along such lines and can offer crucial lessons in how to link strategies of basic survival with demands for fundamental change.

Last, but not least, while such organizing activities will undoubtedly involve real risks, there must be joy in the struggle, too. I’m reminded of civil rights activists singing freedom songs in jail. My favorite of that era isn’t “We Shall Overcome” — although overcome we must — but “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round,” which includes the lyric “gonna keep on walkin’, keep on talkin’, gonna build a brand-new world.” That may seem like a distant dream in the wake of the recent elections, but it’s all the more necessary because of that.

Victory is by no means assured, but what alternative do we have other than to continue to fight for a better, more just world? To do so will call for a broad-based, courageous, creative, and committed movement of the kind that has achieved other great transformations in American history, from securing the end of slavery to a woman’s right to vote to beginning the process of giving LGBTQ people full citizenship rights.

Time is short, when it comes to the state of this planet and war, but success is still possible if we act with what Martin Luther King, Jr., once called “the fierce urgency of now.”

Copyright 2024 William D. Hartung

Via Tomdispatch.com

However, as the Americans chanted “no taxation without representation” when they were fighting for their independence and tried to shake off the yoke of a foreign power over their lives, it is now appropriate for the people of the world to say “no extermination without representation.” If the rest of the world cannot have representation in US elections, at least we are entitled to express a view about it, especially when it affects the well-being or even the continued existence of the rest of the world.

I am writing this not as an enemy of the United States, but as a long-time friend and admirer. From my childhood, I heard glowing praise of America and its history from my father who had spent many years of his life as a young man in New York and who was a great lover of that country. I wrote a PhD thesis on Oriental Influences on the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson when I came to study in England, and spent a wonderful summer in the United States visiting Emerson’s house in Concorde and doing research on his work at the Weidner Library at Harvard. Later on, I spent a year at Harvard as a Senior Fulbright visiting scholar teaching courses on Persian and American literature.

I also established the first Department of American Studies in Iran when I served as professor and Dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan. I also helped arrange the conference on the 200th anniversary of American Independence at the University of Shiraz, which served as the main anniversary conference in the Middle East and Asia. So, I have many reasons to be interested in the outcome of the US election.

The United States continues to be the most consequential country in the world. By nominal GDP, the United States is still the biggest economy in the world, and even by PPP, it is the second richest country. However, from a military point of view, it is by far the most powerful country compared to all its rivals. Never in world history has a country possessed such overwhelming power in all the corners of the world. While Russia and China can be regarded as regional superpowers, the United States is the only hyperpower with global reach and can even be regarded as the sole world hegemon.

As American generals are fond of repeating, the United States enjoys “full spectrum dominance” on land, on sea and in the air, and they are not reluctant to use America’s awesome military power. There are more than 750 U.S. military bases in at least 80 countries. They are spread from Europe to the Middle East to the Far East, right up to Japan, Australia, South Korea, and many offshore bases all over the world. NATO, which the United States leads, has 32 members and constitutes by far the biggest military alliance, surrounding Russia.

In addition to NATO in the West (which has also taken part in US wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East), there are a number of US-led alliances aimed at containing China. Following the Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) and Japan-U.S.-South Korea trilaterals, and the U.S.-Japan-India-Australia Quad, the latest US-Japan-Philippines military alliance is yet another initiative to isolate China and enhance the US’s position in the Asia-Pacific.

Since the Second World War when, on the ruins of European and Asian empires, the United States became the richest and strongest country in the world, it tried to extend its power and became a virtual empire. Although many justifications have been put forward for the use of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the available evidence shows that one of the main reasons for their use was a demonstration of US power to Russia, which was emerging as the main US rival in the form of the former Soviet Union.

Shortly after the Second World War, the United States tried to stop the communist advance in the Far East with the invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, killing many millions of people in those countries. Those wars were really proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union and China. While during the Cold War, there existed some military balance between the Western and Soviet blocs, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States felt that all restrictions on her had been lifted and she could act as the sole superpower in a unipolar world. That gave rise to the US’s Operation Desert Shield to expel the Iraqi forces from Kuwait, which killed tens of thousands of Iraqi forces.

The war was followed by the invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 terrorist outrage, and later Iraq, and different military campaigns in Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, etc. Those wars killed a few million people and cost a few trillion dollars to US taxpayers. Following the expansion of NATO to nearly all former Warsaw Pact member states, and plans to bring Ukraine into NATO, President Putin felt he had no alternative but to invade Ukraine to prevent the establishment of NATO bases in the country that he regarded as Russia’s backyard.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Congress has provided Ukraine with at least $175b of military and humanitarian assistance. This is in addition to billions of dollars of military and economic aid given to Ukraine by Europe and other NATO members.

Since the horrendous HAMAS attack on Israel on 7 October, the Israeli government has conducted a merciless war and massacre on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and lately on Lebanon, which has killed at least 44,000, most of them women and children, 134-146 journalists, 120 academics, over 224 humanitarian aid workers, including 179 employees of UNRWA, and has injured hundreds of thousands of civilians. Most people in the Global South and even in Europe and the United States cannot understand how a Democratic administration can so blindly support a regime which according to ICJ, the world’s highest judicial authority, is engaged in “plausible genocide” and whose leaders are accused by the ICC of war crimes.

Although the Biden administration carries the major responsibility for arming Israel and becoming complicit in its war crimes, the decision of the Trump administration to grant Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to Israel, contrary to international law, and bribe some subservient Arab regimes to normalise relations with Israel in some phoney deals, known as the Abraham Accords, created a feeling of impunity among Israeli leaders who feel they can commit any crime and violate any international law without any sanctions or punishments. As a result, Israel has been acting as though it is above the law and can openly challenge and ignore numerous UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions. This blatant lawlessness and impunity endangers the entire international order and bodes ill for the future of the so-called “rules-based international order”.

In a landmark ruling on 19 July 2024, the ICJ “declared that Israel’s occupation of the Gaza strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is unlawful, along with the associated settlement regime, annexation and use of natural resources.” It called on Israel to immediately withdraw its forces and settlements from the occupied territories and pay reparation to the Palestinians. Not only has the US not implemented that resolution, but it has continued to deliver the most-deadly weapons to Israel enabling its genocide in Gaza and war crimes in the West Bank and Lebanon.

“No Extermination without Representation,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

The scope of the war on Gaza has now expanded to neighbouring countries with dangerous confrontations between Israel and Iran, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Far from punishing Israel for those war crimes, the United States has imposed further sanctions on Iran and several other Middle Eastern countries. Iran and Russia are two of the most sanctioned countries in the world. Not only have those unilateral sanctions not forced those countries to surrender to US demands, but they have also pushed Iran closer to Russia and Russia closer to China.

The recent BRICS summit in Kazan, held from 22-24 October, was convened with the participation of five new members, namely Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The new Nine-member BRICS partnership accounts for 45% of the world’s population and 30% of the world’s land surface. Its combined GDP of around US$65 trillion (35% of global GDP PPP) and an estimated US$5.2 trillion in combined foreign reserves are larger than that of the G7 bloc.

The wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East and growing conflict with China have brought the world to the brink of a devastating world war with unimaginable consequences. The planet is now in a more dangerous position than at any time since the Second World War. At the same time, the United States is now more isolated than ever. A good example of US isolation can be seen in the vote at the United Nations General Assembly on 30th October 2024, demanding an end to the US embargo on Cuba. Only the United States and Israel voted against the resolution, Moldova abstained, and 187 countries, including all European countries, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Canada, voted for it. This level of isolation, the whole world against the United States and Israel, is unprecedented.

Most American voters do not usually pay much attention to foreign affairs, but as can be seen from the above examples, in the current interconnected world no country can keep itself immune to international developments. What the United States does in its foreign policy matters and will boomerang back to itself. Without presuming to tell the Americans how to vote in the forthcoming election, I only wish to urge them to pay more attention to the US’s foreign policies and to American values that must govern those relations.

Well, it turns out that I’ve met a fair number of those undecided voters in person, going door to door canvassing in eastern Pennsylvania, where, it’s fair to say, the 2024 election may be decided. They’re real people, with perfectly real everyday concerns. They have families living in pleasant suburbs in and around Easton, Bethlehem, and Allentown, their neatly tended lawns a mix of grass, crabgrass, and dandelions, and older model SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks in their driveways. And I’d dare you to knock on one of their doors and, when someone answers, say, “So, who the hell are you?”

I get it: they’re easy to demonize, especially if you’re a liberal or leftist news junkie living on the Upper West Side of New York or in Takoma Park, Maryland, or Cambridge, Massachusetts; you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, or Politico; and your Monday nights are built around watching Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart. I’m not surprised if, like Anne Enright, the novelist from University College Dublin, writing for “On the Election” in the New York Review of Books, you vent your pent-up frustration over undecideds who are “lonely and sometimes pathetically grandiose.” It upsets Enright to be “watching twelve billion election dollars chase down a few thousand anxious minds in Pennsylvania.” Can’t they just make up those minds of theirs?

To my mind, the forehead-slapping awe at those undecided in this presidential election took its purest form in a commentary by comedian and satirist Lewis Black on a recent episode of The Daily Show:

“We still have no idea who the fuck is gonna win! And that’s all thanks to one very special group of morons… Oh yes, undecided voters: the same people you see at the ice cream shop asking for 12 mini spoon samples. It’s a $3 cone, asshole! How is anyone still undecided in this election? … This election still comes down to winning over a few dozen Pennsylvanians with carbon monoxide poisoning. Now, don’t get me wrong. Maybe these undecided voters aren’t stupid. Maybe they have a good reason for being idiots.”

But one Sunday afternoon, while crisscrossing several blocks in a neighborhood of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, knocking on perhaps 40 front doors over several hours, I had the opportunity to talk to a number of those very undecideds. Out of the 40 homes curated from lists of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents — those who had, in fact, voted in recent elections — about half of them were home and came to the door. And of those 20, maybe half a dozen told me that they hadn’t yet decided who they were going to vote for or if they planned to vote at all.

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As a start, it turns out, a number of them haven’t really been following the news. According to research by the campaigns, many of them work two jobs. They don’t get the Times or the Post. Many, in fact, don’t even get the local paper. They know who’s running, but while they seemingly know a fair amount about Donald Trump, they know a lot less about Kamala Harris. They didn’t watch the two conventions on TV or even get around to watching the presidential debate between Harris and Trump. And, by the way, that puts them among the majority of Americans: an estimated 67 million people watched that event on September 10th, while 158 million people voted in 2020 and an additional 81 million eligible voters who didn’t cast a ballot back then missed it or skipped it.

My sense, from the voters I talked to — totally unscientific, yes, but backed up by some polling and research — is that voters who say they’re undecided have largely tuned out politics in these years. Maybe that’s because they’ve long come to believe that all politicians are corrupt or feckless; or maybe it’s because they’ve been around long enough to have concluded that “things never change” and that their own lives are only marginally affected by whoever’s in office; maybe it’s because with kids, a job (or two), caring for older parents or relatives with special needs, and struggling to make ends meet, they just don’t have space in their lives for “the news”; or maybe they just didn’t care to share their thoughts with a stranger at their door. Whatever the reasoning, not a single undecided voter I spoke to rejected the message I was carrying or pushed back hard against the idea that maybe Harris deserves a genuine look.

And they’re still up for grabs. The lead story in the October 22nd New York Times was headlined: “Battle is Fierce for Sliver of Pie: Undecided Votes.” Its subhead: “Election Could Hinge on People Who Aren’t ‘Super Political.’”

Harris Chipping Away at Undecideds?

So, how many are there? With the polls showing a razor-thin difference between Harris and Trump among those who have indeed made up their minds, it’s hard to pin down exactly how many people may still be undecided. By some measure, since early summer, things may have been moving toward the Democrats when evaluating undecided voters. According to a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll and analysis, before President Biden quit the race the number of undecideds was just 3%. But when he quit, that number jumped to 9%, reflecting the fact that Harris was an unknown quantity to many Americans. According to PBS, that number shrank after the September debate, as potential voters, women in particular, learned more about Harris, especially over the abortion rights issue. The New York Times reported that the Trump campaign has found that the number of undecideds has fallen from around 10% in August to perhaps 5% today.

And according to Newsweek, citing an Emerson College survey of undecided voters, in recent weeks those voters have been breaking Harris’s way by an almost 2-1 margin. “Emerson College polling, conducted between October 14 and 16,” that magazine reported, “shows that among undecided voters who chose who they would vote for in the past week or month, 60 percent opted for the Democratic vice president, while 36 percent opted for Republican former President Donald Trump.”

It’s impossible, of course, to determine precisely how many voters are actually undecided. Some surveys put the number at about 13%, others at just 3% or so. A Times/Siena survey found that, in the “swing states” alone, the undecideds are 3.7%, or 1.2 million potential voters. Whatever their numbers, in an election in which polls have consistently recorded essentially a swing-state dead heat between Harris and Trump, even that tiny number might be enough to tilt the final result. However, undecided voters could also simply decide to sit out the election (as many analysts suggest they might do) or, if their votes split evenly, have no effect at all on the final tally.

In addition to partisan voters, and those enthusiastic about one candidate or the other, there are those characterized as “swing voters,” “low-information voters,” or simply infrequent voters. All of those categories can reasonably be imagined as “persuadable,” though the cost-benefit ratio involved in efforts to reach them and get them to the polls could be prohibitive. A pair of professors and election specialists, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques, writing for Time, argue that so-called swing voters — “who do lean towards one candidate but are open to voting for the alternative” — will be critical on November 5th. And surprisingly enough, swing voters (including undecideds) may add up to as much as 15% of the current electorate, according to a Times/Siena poll that the two authors cite.

Unfortunately, Harris may not be helping herself, given how she’s running her campaign. At its start, she benefited enormously from a skyrocketing burst of enthusiasm triggered by President Biden’s decision to drop out. His age, seeming infirmity, and catastrophically bad debate performance against Trump cast a pall of depression over many Democratic organizations and activists, and it seemed Trump then had a path toward a clear victory. But Harris’s emergence, her emphasis on “joy” and optimism (and Tim Walz’s effective use of the term “weird” to describe the GOP ticket) touched off a swell of — yes! — optimism. According to Forbes, when Biden was the Democratic candidate, just 30% of Democrats claimed to be enthusiastic about voting in November versus 59% of Trump supporters. By early September, however, 68% of Harris supporters expressed enthusiasm against just 60% of Trump backers.

Since then, however, some have argued that her campaign has been lackluster, her speeches too carefully scripted and vetted, too cautious and repetitive, dampening some of the enthusiasm that erupted over the summer. As Robert Kuttner wrote in “Harris and the Enthusiasm Gap” for The American Prospect, “Interviews and focus groups keep quoting undecided or Trump-leaning voters as saying that they don’t really know what Harris stands for. Could that be because her own message is blurred?”

Still, Harris has maintained a slight but consistent lead over Trump in national polls ever since the Democratic convention and has lately scheduled a burst of interviews on 60 Minutes, Fox News, “The View,” Stephen Colbert’s late show, the popular women’s podcast “Call Her Daddy,” Univision, and a CNN town hall.

The Turnout Imperative

By all accounts, the Democratic ground game — canvassing, phone banking, text banking, postcard writing, local candidate rallies, tables at local events, and more — has been far superior to the GOP’s. Even when taking into account efforts like Elon Musk’s supposed army of paid volunteers, Harris’s on-the-ground efforts are three times the size of Trump’s, according to the Washington Post: “She boasts more staff, more volunteers, a larger surrogate operation, more digital advertising, a more sophisticated smartphone-based organizing program and extra money for extraneous bells and whistles typically reserved for corporate product launches and professional sports championships.”

In eastern Pennsylvania, as I saw, local and out-of-state unions are going all-out in canvassing, voter registration, and GOTV drives. When I visited Democratic headquarters in Easton, Pennsylvania, in early October, its large meeting hall was filled with what looked like a hundred union volunteers in matching T-shirts from Local 1199 SEIU (Service Employees International Union), who had traveled to Easton from Newark, New Jersey.

That area, part of Northampton County, just north of the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia, is a mostly working-class region of 320,000 people, increasingly diverse and still bearing the mark of a fading heavy manufacturing base. (Billy Joel’s 1982 anthem, “Allentown” — like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” — is an ode to what Allentown once was and what it was becoming: “Well, we’re living here in Allentown/And they’re closing all the factories down/Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time/Filling out forms, standing in line.”) For the Harris campaign, it’s a vital area.

In a feature story on the 2024 campaigns in Northampton County, the Washington Post noted that the county has voted for the winner in almost every election for a century:

“The battle over voters in Northampton County reflects some of the biggest themes and tensions running through the presidential contest all across America less than three weeks from Election Day. Strategists view Pennsylvania as perhaps the most important swing state on the map this year and believe its 19 electoral college votes could be the tipping point. Northampton is an unusual cross-section of the country — one of 26 ‘pivot’ counties nationwide that backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.”

If you’re not from one of the swing states, much of the presidential campaign has undoubtedly gone largely unnoticed, since electioneering and campaign ads are targeted and often particularly designed for the states, cities, and communities that are most in play. If you live in a place like Allentown or Bethlehem, on the other hand, you’ve been inundated. “I’m a Pennsylvania native and have been through many election cycles in a state that is no stranger to high-profile competitive campaigns, but I haven’t seen anything like what is playing out here this fall,” Christopher Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, told the Times. “I share a laugh with my mailman when he drops off our mail because of the size of the pile of mailers he brings each day, and I’m getting used to evenings and weekends full of knocks on my door.”

The Harris campaign, especially, has gone high tech and there are a host of phone apps and websites that have emerged in recent election cycles to apply technology to local campaigning. Many of them, like Reach, allow canvassers and campaigners to chat with each other, keep track of voter conversations and results from door-knocking and phone banking, while updating information as it’s collected, and maintaining a file on which voters are interested, say, in volunteering or making a donation.

When canvassing myself in Bethlehem, I used Minivan, another popular phone app from NGP, which describes itself as “the leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive political campaigns and organizations, nonprofits, municipalities and other groups.” Through it, activists can “access an integrated platform of the best fundraising, compliance, field, organizing, digital and social networking products.” Even for the uninitiated (like me) Minivan is simple to use. After visiting a voter on a neighborhood walking tour, it’s easy to report whether that voter is home or away, record notes on your conversation, and enter other data that’s instantly synced into the system for follow-up.

Reach, Minivan, and other systems (including the progressive donation site ActBlue) can be accessed through Mobilize.us, which claims to have connected 5.5 million volunteers to local political actions nationwide. (That, too, for a novice like me, was blessedly easy to use.) Saying that it provides “the most powerful tools for organizing,” Mobilize.us can link any volunteer with “single-shift events,” recurring events, virtual events (like Zoom programs), in-person events (like rallies, speeches, and debates), and phone call campaigns to legislative offices.

In Pennsylvania, as in many parts of the country, voting is already underway. It’s far too early to make sense of what’s known so far, but it’s at least encouraging for Harris partisans that, of the more than one million mail-in ballots already returned, 62% came from Democrats and just 29% from Republicans. Even in Northampton County, hardly a Democratic Party bulwark, mail-in ballots are running about two to one in favor of the Democrats. And canvassers like me, the phalanx from 1199 SEIU, made sure that every voter we spoke to knew how to cast their votes early or by mail.

At this point, of course, it’s just fingers crossed and keep ringing those doorbells until November 5th, since the one thing none of us can afford is a Project 2025 version of a Trump presidency.

Copyright 2024 Bob Dreyfuss

Via Tomdispatch.com

Given that Helene’s human impact was plain for all to see, what struck me was that significant numbers of headlines about that storm’s devastation centered not on those people hardest hit, but on the bizarre conspiracy theories of extremist observers: that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is funneling tens of millions in funds and supplies meant for hurricane survivors to migrants, that the Biden administration has been in cahoots with meteorologists to control the weather, or that Biden and crew actually planned the storm! One of my personal favorites came from a neighbor I encountered at the post office in our rural Maryland town: we don’t have enough money for FEMA rescue operations, she told me, because we’re funding Israeli healthcare and housing — a reference, undoubtedly, to the tens of billions of dollars of bombs and other aid this country has sent Israel’s military in its war in Gaza and beyond.

Of course, some conspiracy theories have a grain of truth at their core: if only we had focused long ago on issues of human welfare here instead of funding decades of foreign wars, it’s possible we might not be living in such an inequitable, infrastructurally weak country, or one increasingly devastated by climate-change-affected weather. But why did it take the deranged rantings of figures like former President Donald Trump and multibillionaire Elon Musk on social media to begin a discussion about how we choose to spend limited federal dollars? If only more government relief money was indeed spent on basic human necessities like housing and healthcare, anywhere at all, and not on war!

All of this ambient chatter has had an impact as real as the 140 mile-per-hour-plus winds and severe flooding that razed communities in six states across the Southeast in the last month and killed hundreds of Americans, with more still missing. In a region where death remains so omnipresent that observers can smell human bodies as they drive through mountain passes, conspiracy theories have led to real threats that forced FEMA crews to relocate from hard-hit Rutherford County, North Carolina, after reports of armed militia members who said they were “hunting FEMA.”

Given the truly destructive nature of all that chatter, I wasn’t surprised to hear New York Times “The Daily” host Michael Barbaro open one of his podcasts about Hurricane Milton with a question to fellow political journalist Maggie Haberman that would have seemed odd in any other context: “How quickly do we expect this storm to become political?”

How quickly do we expect this storm to become political? How about: How long before the next storm hits category 4 or even 5 status and makes landfall? It seems as if the world we’re living in isn’t Helene’s or Milton’s but the alternative-factual world of former Trump staffer Kellyanne Conway and forecasting what nonsense will pop up next about the weather (or almost anything else) has become more real than the weather itself.

The Complex Identity of Rural America

At the start of the Covid pandemic, I moved to a fairly progressive rural community in Maryland after my family purchased a small farm there where we have an orchard, a large produce garden, and a flock of egg-laying chickens (all of which are, I suppose, our versions of hobbies). I remain confounded by the fact that so many Americans — especially rural ones — vote for the party whose leaders divert aid and attention from solving problems that affect their communities, including the hurricane season and other kinds of extreme weather, not to speak of the rescue work that follows such natural disasters, and the need to provide services and protection for migrants who work on such farms and in rural businesses. Case in point: Republican members of the House and Senate voted against stopgap funding for FEMA a few weeks before Helene hit, doing their part to jeopardize aid to so many of their supporters, even though such efforts may ultimately prove unsuccessful.

It’s well known that many rural Americans provide a bulwark of support for Republican candidates and far-right causes. During the 2016 presidential elections, Donald Trump gained more backing from that group than any other president had in modern American history. The impact of rural America on his coalition of voters in the 2020 presidential elections was comparable to that of labor unions for Democrats.

Buy the Book

Some rural voters also have spoken up loudly when it comes to far-right causes and identity politics. Typically, Tractor Supply Company, which bills itself as the “largest rural lifestyle retailer” and sells gardening tools, feed, small livestock, clothing, and guns, among other things, succumbed last summer to a pressure campaign from its customers to stop anti-discrimination and awareness-raising diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring programs that had previously earned it national recognition. Its management also pledged to stop participating in LGBTQ+ pride events and eliminate its previous goals to cut carbon emissions in its operations. The campaign kicked off after a right-wing influencer in Tennessee, who ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in 2022, posted on X that the company was funding sex changes, among other baseless accusations.

Rural America and Climate Change

I had to balk at such a campaign. Anywhere you look in my town, you can find evidence of how initiatives like Tractor Supply Company’s serve to benefit our community.

To consider (at least to my mind) the most pressing case in point, it’s increasingly difficult for people to farm in today’s climate because governments are not curbing greenhouse gas emissions fast enough. The Biden administration has significantly chipped away at the problem by investing in clean energy, reining in the worst corporate polluters, and curbing emissions and coal usage. Unfortunately, this country still produces record amounts of oil and natural gas, and the ravages of extreme weather in my mid-Atlantic agricultural community are plain to see, as is also true nationally.

Let me share a few small-scale, personal examples. A few years ago, I found that there was enough water locally and nighttime temperatures dipped sufficiently low to grow vegetables, meaning my family wouldn’t have to purchase much produce during the summer months. The past two summers, however, heat, wildfire smoke, and more recently, drought, have made small-scale farming prohibitively difficult, at least for my less experienced hands. My tomatoes haven’t cooled enough at night to ripen sufficiently. More than half of the new fruit trees I purchased to add to our orchard died for lack of sufficient water, and I found myself having to stay up in our barn with one of my best laying hens that I found collapsed from heat stroke one summer day. Dipping her little feet in cool water and forcing electrolytes down her beak ultimately revived her, but the near death of that tiny animal that the local Tractor Supply branch had sold me and advertised as “heat hardy” shook me.

Worse yet, earlier this spring, wildfires swept through my back woods and neighborhood, burning down one of my neighbor’s sheds, threatening numerous homes, including mine, and forcing a neighboring farm to evacuate their livestock. And even worse than that, there wasn’t enough water in my once robust creek for the local fire department to extinguish the flames quickly before the fire impacted several properties.

Our family is lucky. We each have a full-time job to sustain us and so don’t have to rely on farming to do anything but enrich our lives. Unfortunately, other families who have bravely sought to feed more people for a living can’t always say the same. Hurricane Helene is a case in point. According to the American Farm Bureau, that storm (and Milton on its heels) had a unique impact on rural communities and agriculture, with billions of dollars in fruit, nuts, and poultry lost. Food supply in rural communities across the Southeast has already been impacted and grocery price increases throughout the country will be likely.

In the U.S., where more than half of all land is used for agricultural purposes, the number of farms has been decreasing since the 1930s. And while climate change has made growing seasons longer, it’s also made the weather far less predictable. Despite farmers scaling up production and adapting their methods, doing everything from bringing horticulture indoors to using recycled human food waste as feed, yield has fallen and it’s growing ever more difficult to stay in the black. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the crucial global research body tracking that phenomenon, recently found that the largest casualty of our overheating planet is the struggle of agriculture to produce enough food for people to live, leading to growing food insecurity in regions around the world.

Worse yet, government efforts to help farmers survive sometimes create more problems than they solve. For example, financial and tax incentives for farmers who can demonstrate that they are using their crops to capture carbon require large amounts of paperwork, while climate regulations that may help farms in the long run entail red tape and restrictions that make paying the bills far harder in the short term. Yet some of the more vulnerable farmers like those in communities of color have welcomed recent government interventions as reparations for decades of discrimination in federal loan programs, as have indigenous communities who benefit from grants to develop more sustainable farming practices.

Nonetheless, if voting patterns and consumer pressure campaigns are any harbinger of the future, too many rural voters and consumers don’t seem to be thinking about how to create just such sustainable farming practices in a climate-changing world. Instead, the loudest voices in rural America seem focused on fear-based identity politics and anger rather than what elected officials have — and have not — said and done to aid their everyday lives in increasingly difficult times.

By some indicators, rural lives have only grown far more precarious in our moment and maybe that helps explain why so many farm families are frustrated with the powers that be. Farmers in this country are more than three times as likely to die by suicide as people in the general population. Factors like high rates of gun ownership and social isolation have an impact, but so do unpredictable weather, supply chain interruptions born of the Covid-19 pandemic, and our government’s slow and haphazard response to so much in the Trump years.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

I find it perplexing that the rural customers of Tractor Supply rejected diversity, equity, and inclusion campaigns from that rural retailer, since people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ folks make up a significant part of rural communities, just not the well-paid or well supported ones. Most farmworkers who tend crops and livestock and engage in other forms of manual labor like processing or transporting our food are, in fact, foreign born and work for only the little more than half of the year that encompasses the growing season. Those workers or others in their families need to get second jobs just to make ends meet. They are more at risk of climate- and access-related health issues because of air pollution and heat-stroke. Such risks were compounded by Trump-era policies that cut federal funding for rural health centers and curbed insurance regulations in struggling rural clinics and hospitals.

In an America where discrimination as well as pay gaps based on race, gender, and sexual orientation remain rampant, making equity a priority can only help those who actually sustain this country’s farming communities. In my county, where equity and inclusiveness are central to social policy, about a third of the children at our small rural school receive free lunches and other services. That portion of the school population consists significantly of kids whose parents are willing to do low-wage work on local farms and that’s not generally white, American-born families.

What’s clear is that Donald Trump’s politics of grievance appeals to voters who see their lives and those of their children worsening, not getting better, as time goes by. Social science research has identified emotions like anger, fear, and nostalgia as key to his appeal to rural Americans and other groups whose health indicators, isolation, and economic well-being are only worsening. If his recent seemingly unhinged “dance party” in Pennsylvania is anything to go by, I suspect he’s hearkening back to a time in American history when communities were smaller, life was simpler, and racism was rampant and — yes! — unhinged. (Note, by the way, his inclusion of “Dixie,” the unofficial Confederate anthem, on that playlist he danced to for 39 straight minutes.) While rural America certainly struggles in more ways than I can describe, it’s precisely the things that Democratic candidates are trying to do now that would bring them back to a healthier, more sustainable way of life.

In a world where the weather’s only growing worse, if my community is a good example — and I suspect it’s as good as any — rural Americans need to think hard when they go to the ballot box (or the cash register) and consider the universe of hard scientific facts rather than just listening to the latest conspiracy monger on X or Instagram. Their lives and their livelihoods may just depend on it.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

Time to look at history from the point of view of the arms industry?

(Jacobin NL ) – An article published in the Dutch daily newspaper Financieel Dagblad on Friday 6 September 2024 stated that we need to ‘make the armed forces as a whole more of a deterrent’, and that €1 billion has been appropriated for this purpose. Society must ‘become … more aware of our growing insecurity and … make the necessary preparations, otherwise life in the Netherlands may be disrupted.’ It is as if this growing insecurity has come out of nowhere and all we can do is prepare for it – as if there are no forces that are actively contributing to it. Such scaremongering about warfare implies that this is a completely new and exceptional situation.

But there are forces that benefit from war and will do all they can to boost this sense of insecurity – first and foremost, the arms industry. It has constantly been looking for threats in order to sell its weapons; and again and again it seems to find a reason to use those weapons, so there are always plenty of opportunities to perfect their military use. A cunning example is the recent ‘pager attack’ on people in Lebanon who were assumed, without any investigation or judicial procedure, to be members of Hezbollah.

To rid ourselves of the idea that ‘our growing insecurity’ is some kind of natural phenomenon that ‘just happens’, it is useful to look at developments in war and peace over the past century from the point of view of the global arms industry. This automatically brings us to the two threats that have predominated in the most recent cases of warfare: the Russians who will soon be on our borders, and the Muslims who want to take over the whole of the West. And it also brings us to what is perhaps even more important to the arms industry: creating a warlike atmosphere that will let it continue operating unabated.

The arms industry after the First World War

Let us start in 1918, just after the First World War. A war which had really been about nothing at all, or in fact only about supposed threats stirred up on either side – was over, and a disappointed arms industry had to look around for a suitable replacement. Luckily the search did not take long, for the Germans felt so humiliated by their defeat and the high cost of Allied war reparations that they swiftly found a new military target: their former enemies. For the arms industry it was back to business as usual.

After the Nazis had come to power in Germany in 1933, they were first joined by likewise fascist Italy in 1936, and later also by Japan. Meanwhile General Franco was mounting his coup in Spain – but there was so much armed resistance to it, including from international brigades, that it took him until 1939 to finally seize power and establish his dictatorship.

From the outset, all these fascist and autocratic states worked feverishly to build up a military apparatus, especially to carry out their own domestic purges. But the newly-made aircraft, bombs, tanks, cannons and rifles were soon able to display their deadly capabilities, for in 1939 Nazi Germany began attacking its European neighbours, and in 1940 it was the turn of the Netherlands to be invaded.

On the other side of the world, in the Pacific, Japan had been attacking other countries for far longer. In 1941 it bombed the American fleet in Pearl Harbor in an act of war against the United States; and in 1942 it attacked the Dutch East Indies colony, where we Dutch still held sway. That was where I was enjoying my colonial life of luxury as a child along with my parents, sister and little brother, and a host of Indonesian servants at our beck and call. I can still see my mother sitting at the breakfast table, issuing instructions to our female cook who was squatting on the ground.

An anti-fascist alliance

In response to all this fascist warfare, France, Great Britain, Canada and the United States formed the Western alliance, and so a new world war had begun. In 1941 the Allies were also joined by the Soviet Union.

During the Second World War, the weapons first destroyed homes, schools, factories and other buildings, and claimed millions of dead and injured. And during the ensuing occupations the weapons were used to capture, starve and torture the thousands of local people who dared to resist. The many traumatised survivors and refugees would remain filled with feelings of revenge, for generations to come. The same was true of the survivors of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis in a cunning military system – a mechanism whereby the Jews were gradually excluded from everyday life, and were finally destroyed by an industrial killing machine.

On 8 May 1945 Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies; Italy had already surrendered, and Spain was for the time being allowed to remain fascist. But in the Pacific there were several more months of fighting against a Japanese army which, although very much weakened, was still trying to postpone its inevitable defeat with its desperate kamikaze flights – flying bombs manned by pilots who were prepared to commit suicide for their homeland.

The spectre of communism had begun to haunt Europe at the start of the century, and the Western Allies had deplored the fact that they had needed the Soviet Union to beat Nazi Germany. But in 1945 the possibility had fortunately arisen to launch what came to be known as the ‘Cold War’. After Nazi Germany had signed its surrender on 8 May 1945, the Allies discussed how to pursue the war in the Pacific. The Soviets let it be known that the huge losses in human life they had suffered meant they would need some time to recover – and so they could only join in with the war against the Japanese in the Pacific precisely three months later, on 8 August 1945.

But rather than wait for this, the United States rushed to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6 and 9 August 1945. Hundreds of thousands of civilian victims were killed, and the thousands of survivors who had been exposed to nuclear radiation many miles away would suffer the consequences for decades, including cancer and foetal deformities. But Japan did surrender on 15 August 1945.

In the Japanese concentration camp on the island of Java, where I was imprisoned together with my mother, sister and brother, we were told it was this miracle of engineering, the atomic bomb, that had forced the Japanese to surrender. I was then nearly eleven years old, and could already understand quite a lot of what was going on. I imagined all those men, women and children falling to the ground and slowly dying, and thought how terrible it was that all this had been necessary just to give me back my freedom. It was true that the Japanese had kept us locked up for all those years, and the grown-ups said the Americans had had to show the Japanese how powerful they were.

But then why hadn’t they dropped the bombs on an uninhabited island? No-one would give me an answer, and once I had reached adulthood it became clear to me that things had been even worse: the inhabited city of Hiroshima had been chosen with cynical meticulousness because the surrounding mountains would amplify the force of the explosion. Nor could I help wondering whether, and if so to what extent, the fact that the victims were not white had played a part in the decision to drop the bomb there.

“Arms Trade,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

This notion that the Second World War was brought to an end by the two atomic bombs is still often heard, but must be dismissed as a myth – for negotiations about Japan’s surrender were almost over, and were now really only about the Japanese fear that their emperor would lose his divine status.

Creation of myths to justify unjust acts of war

What really mattered to the Americans was to sideline the Soviet Union; they wanted to make sure the Russians would not be involved in the postwar occupation of Japan and would have as little influence as possible in the Pacific – and in this they succeeded. This effectively marked the start of the Cold War, the rift between the capitalist West and the communist East; and at the same time it gave the Western arms industry a monopoly on nuclear weapons, a situation that would remain unchanged until 1949, when the Soviet Union developed an atomic bomb of its own.

The Cold War divided Europe into two with an ‘Iron Curtain’, and to the delight of both the Western and the Eastern arms industries both sides immediately embarked on an arms race – involving, in particular, vast quantities of nuclear weapons which between them would be capable of wiping out all life on earth. There were a few scary incidents that could have ended in disaster, but it is generally assumed that the mutual ‘balance of terror’ ensured that those weapons were not in fact used.

At the same time, the arms industries on both sides eagerly began developing long-range weapons which could also carry nuclear warheads. This had the deadly advantage that the people pressing the buttons would no longer be troubled by the sight of the damage they had done. This had already happened when bombs were dropped on civilians from the air, for instance when the British bombed German cities in the closing days of the Second World War, and also when the Americans bombed the inhabitants of Japanese cities; one of the pilots involved is said to have later gone insane with remorse.

In all these cases the perpetrators could still see their targets from a distance, or at least have some inkling of what was happening there. But the missiles and drones that were subsequently developed broke the link between individual feelings of guilt in the air and the people killed on the ground. If human compassion had ever played a part in warfare, this was now entirely eliminated. An added boon for the arms industry was that the users of the weapons – the ‘consumers’, if you will – were themselves at less and less risk as the distance from their targets increased.

In 1948 another country, Israel, had joined the Western camp, and soon began to build up an impressive stock of armaments, which eventually included nuclear weapons. At first its conventional weapons were used to expel some of the original inhabitants of the area, the Palestinians, and then to keep them under control, including those in the numerous refugee camps. And later Israel used the weapons to defend itself against the Islamic countries that surrounded it and in fact attacked it in 1967. Israel then occupied parts of those countries; and the occupations have continued up to the present day.

The use of weapons in global decolonisation

Outside Europe, the Cold War was thus far from ‘cold’, and this bore plenty of juicy fruit for the Western arms industry. Now that there was no longer an alliance with the Soviet Union, the communist threat was gratefully exploited to cast suspicion on independence fighters all over the world and take up weapons against them. After the Second World War they had found the courage to cast off their Western colonisers’ stranglehold, and by no means all of them considered it self-evident that their future economic system would be a capitalist one. At the same time, communist rebels had been making inroads in the Chinese countryside, and in 1949 they proclaimed the People’s Republic of China – which, together with the Soviet Union, was to serve as a role model for the decolonised new states.

The arms industries in the countries that were then communist, such as the Soviet Union, Cuba and China, worked at full steam during the Cold War. Their weapons, sometimes backed by military personnel, were deployed all over the world to support the freedom fighters who had risen in revolt against their colonial masters.

One of the countries that adopted a communist social system was North Vietnam; and from 1955 to 1975 the United States waged a terrifying war there, in which the country was ‘carpet-bombed’. Large numbers of cluster or fragmentation bombs, which have no impact on military targets but do all the more damage to human bodies, were also dropped on the population. An ugly feature of these bombs is that, after entering a body, the fragments travel on inside it and cause acute pain, so that the victim can no longer take part in the fighting. Not forgetting napalm, which was intended to destroy their crops and at the same time deprive them of their hiding places, which they then rebuilt underground. North and South Vietnam together eventually managed to drive the Americans out of their country.

Another colony where a bloody four-year battle for independence was fought during the Cold War was the Dutch East Indies, now renamed Indonesia. My parents, who had started out in the colony as typical colonials, had experienced for themselves in the Japanese camps what it meant to be oppressed, and then gave the Indonesians their unconditional support. This made our family the target of much aggression. Most Dutch minds were poisoned by colonial racial prejudice, and so failed to see that no people on earth will let itself be oppressed for centuries; they disguised their military assaults on the local population as legitimate ‘policing operations’; and our family’s support for the independence struggle made them think of us as traitors.

Soon after gaining its independence, Indonesia began wondering which economic system to adopt, and looked to countries including communist China. This was viewed with utter dismay in the West. But in 1965, as the failure of the Americans’ openly military attempts to dissuade Vietnam from making the same choice was growing increasingly clear, use was made of a secret weapon that was to prove far more effective. Intelligence services in the Netherlands and several other Western countries conspired with right-wing forces in Indonesia itself to unleash an unprecedented massacre of presumed communists. This destroyed the democratically elected Indonesian communist party, and for the next thirty years the West could rely on the support of a thoroughly pro-capitalist dictatorship. The dictator’s opponents were jailed without trial and tortured, and the West did not lift a finger.

Of course, this overt and covert tyranny had the same effect as tyranny always does: large numbers of people were killed and injured; the resulting traumas festered for generations, sowing the seeds of new warfare; and thousands of refugees had to build up new lives for themselves in foreign countries to escape from their unspeakable suffering.

The new threat Islam

If  one threat comes to an end, a new one is needed. 1989 saw the end of the Iron Curtain and in Europe the capitalist West and the communist East came back into contact, and for the time being it looked as if the capitalist/communist conflict could no longer be exploited to produce and sell new weapons. Nor could all the stocks of atomic bombs turn any profit in the short term, for they had to be carefully guarded until they could actually be used.

Gloom and despondency spread through the global arms industry – where could new, profitable enmities now be generated? But suddenly, just in time for the West, a useful new threat appeared on the world stage: Islam. Islamophobia was already widespread in the former colonising countries of Europe, due to the age-old contemptuous racism that had prevailed during the colonial era. This Islamophobia now found a convenient target in the many Islamic migrant workers who had moved into Europe. And in 1987 the largely Islamic Palestinians had begun their first intifada in Israel.

On 11 September 2001, amid this growing anti-Muslim mood, the Western arms industry received an unexpected boost: the assault on the Twin Towers. Islam now seemed to have found its ultimate justification as a threat, and the Western arms industry had little difficulty in unleashing a new wave of warfare: the ‘War on Terror’. The Muslim countries Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya were reduced to rubble by vast quantities of weapons. And in the midst of all this, in 2011, Syria appeared on the scene, with easy pickings for the arms industry on both sides; and here again the result was total chaos.

In the meantime, the global arms industry had been working assiduously to provide digital backup for its long-range weapons, missiles and drones. One ironic spin-off of this technological innovation is that it has nullified a former advantage of the original long-range weapons – namely that the perpetrators no longer had to see the damage they had done. The people pressing the buttons can now see in full detail what they are firing at, and how their victims are dying. What is unchanged is that they themselves are not at risk; but at least a few of them will again feel twinges of conscience. But not to worry, the arms industry has again found an answer: great improvements in PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) therapy.

The arms industry shows its true face

The arms industry has taken its biggest step backwards in terms of human decency by developing missiles that can take out people in distant countries without causing an explosion. Just before the head of the projectile reaches the neck of a living person who is suspected of something, it ejects six rapidly revolving blades that do the dirty work. Such killings are not preceded by any form of judicial procedure, there is no prior declaration of war against the country concerned, and the victims have no chance of escaping. Israel has recently killed two Muslim men in this way: one in Beirut, and another in Tehran.

And before long, on 17 September 2024, a moral low point was reached when the Israelis caused thousands of ‘pagers’ to eliminate people in Lebanon whom they suspected of belonging to the organisation that provides support for the Palestinian struggle in Gaza and on the West Bank. Just before exploding, the pager emitted a signal, and when the victims took it out to answer it they lost the hand they were holding it in or one or both of their eyes – or, if they did not respond to the signal, the pager exploded in their trouser pockets and they lost vital organs or were castrated.

Yet the Western arms industry kept looking for threats other than Islam. Not that the threat was about to disappear in the short term, for as early as 2014 the Palestinians who had to live in the Gaza Strip faced Israeli bombardments that lasted seven weeks and claimed thousands of dead and injured. In addition, the bitter truth was that the men, women and children could not flee, because they were enclosed behind fences equipped with the most advanced equipment and watchtowers in order to fire at the refugees. In this case the reason was the killing of three young Israelis on the West Bank.

But meanwhile the Russian arms industry was working at top speed, and making use of its experience with the surrounding NATO, so that Ukraine could become its new threat. This suited the Western arms industry right down to the ground. In the Western world there was still enough anti-Soviet resentment to revive the existing tension and hostility between Ukraine and Russia (which has long ceased to be communist) from 2014 onwards. The Cold War slogan ‘The Russians are coming’ was still working.

These two threats – the Russian threat to Europe, and the Muslim threat to the entire Western world, have now culminated in two bloody wars that are bringing huge profits to the global arms industry. And so all their weapon systems have had an ideal opportunity to be tested and perfected in warfare – in other words, on human bodies. But, perhaps better still, the two threats have made people’s minds ripe for an atmosphere in which the arms industry can continue to operate in the same old way for many years to come.

Once again there have been all kinds of reasons involved, and the last word has not been spoken. But whatever people eventually conclude, the arms industry is bound to profit from it. One reason was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to which the Ukrainians at first responded defensively, but eventually, with Western aid, more offensively. The other reason arose in 2023, in the form of an armed Palestinian break-out from Gaza in which over two hundred Israelis were taken hostage. To which the Israeli army responded – and is still responding – with disproportionate military force, leaving the local population enclosed within a concentration camp less than a few hundred square kilometres in area. Men, women and children are being starved, deprived of medical facilities and drinking-water, and repeatedly expelled to supposedly safe areas where they are again bombarded – always on the pretext that all this is aimed at members of Hamas. Tens of thousands have already been killed, including 16,000 children.

And now that there is a ‘risk’ of negotiations about the latter two wars, the Ukrainians, with support from the West, are making a last desperate attempt to prolong the war by making attacks on Russian territory. And the Israelis seem so fearful of their oppression of the Palestinian people finally being brought to an end that they are thwarting every opportunity to achieve a lasting truce.

All wars eventually come to an end. But not to worry – if world peace should unexpectedly break out, the West is already gearing itself up for a new war, with a no longer communist China. And grateful use can then be made of yet another echo from the past: ‘the Yellow Peril’.

Anne-Ruth Wertheim, Amsterdam, 2024

This article was published in the Dutch magazine Jacobin.NL:

https://jacobin.nl/wapenindustrie-geschiedenis-anne-ruth-wertheim/

( Middle East Monitor ) – To be humanised is to be recognised as worthy of life, respect and the fundamental right to be seen and heard. Yet, for Arabs, this acknowledgement has persistently been withheld, rendering their humanity invisible in the global narrative.

Arabs have long been cast beneath the weight of dehumanising labels—“terrorists,” “violent,” “oppressive,” “uncivilised.” These narratives, woven into the very fabric of Western media and culture, strip away our humanity.

This is the legacy of Orientalism, a concept defined by Edward Said, the Palestinian-American scholar and activist. He described it as the lens through which the West distorts the East, painting us as exotic, backwards and uncivilised, all to justify its own dominance.

The lingering impact of Orientalism remains, and in our desire to dismantle every stereotype the West has forced upon us, we find ourselves yearning to become like it. We believe that if we speak its language, share its educational background and consume what it consumes, we may finally be seen as worthy—perhaps even a little more human. Or so we thought.

A stark example of this obscured reality is the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As I scroll through social media, a platform that gives the people of Gaza a chance to be seen and heard, it’s clear that after 12 months of war, we are witnessing ethnic cleansing. Yet, despite this, people are still pleading, begging viewers not to scroll past and asking for donations to their cause. Even Palestinian children, speaking at a press conference in Gaza, were forced to plead for protection in English, desperate to be understood by the world, in particular, the Western world.

This act of speaking in English—a language not their own—reflects the painful reality that Palestinians must conform to the standards of the Global North just to be acknowledged. Their cries, if spoken in Arabic, might fall on deaf ears, for it is not enough to suffer; they must articulate their suffering in a language that the world is willing to hear. This begs the question: what does it truly mean to be humanised if one must strip away their identity to be seen as human at all?

Through the lens of Palestine, the question of humanisation takes on an urgent and poignant meaning. The Palestinian experience reveals that the struggle to be humanised is not just about being seen but about being recognised in one’s own truth.

For Palestinians, humanisation has indeed been conditional—tied to their ability to fit Western narratives, whether through language, media portrayals or appeals to shared values that the Global North deems acceptable. A striking example is Bisan Owada’s series for AJ+, where she documents her daily life under Israel’s bombardment, often having to convey her story in ways that resonate with Western audiences.

This reflects the broader issue: Palestinian voices are only acknowledged when they align with global powers’ moral comfort. For instance, the necessity for Palestinians to speak in English or frame their suffering within Western frameworks highlights this conditionality.

Moreover, Palestinian narratives rooted in their own culture, language and experiences—especially when expressed in Arabic—are frequently disregarded or mistranslated, sometimes to dangerous degrees.

A poignant example of this occurred when Israeli Defense Forces at Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza misinterpreted a sheet of paper written in Arabic. They assumed it contained a list of Hamas members, but in reality, it merely listed the days of the week. This misreading speaks volumes about how deeply language and cultural misunderstandings contribute to dehumanisation. Palestinians, speaking in their native language and living their everyday realities, are often seen through a lens of fear or suspicion, making their humanity visible only when it fits the established narrative.

Through this lens, we see that humanisation, as it relates to Palestine, is a fractured concept. It becomes clear that true recognition of Palestinian humanity can only come when they are seen as complete beings—not only as victims, but as people with their own culture, language and right to self-determination.

The dehumanisation of Palestinians reflects a broader pattern that impacts Arabs across the world. The portrayal of Arabs as violent, backwards or inferior is not limited to the context of Palestine; it seeps into global narratives about the Arab world. Whether in media, politics or public discourse, Arabs are often reduced to caricatures—devoid of complexity, individuality and humanity. This dehumanisation transcends borders, making it easier for Western powers to justify military interventions, political oppression and the silencing of Arab voices.

Across the Middle East, Arabs face a similar struggle for recognition. From Iraq and Syria to Yemen and Lebanon, narratives painting Arabs as perpetual threats or victims perpetuate this dehumanisation. In Western media, Arab suffering is often overshadowed or diminished unless framed in ways that suit geopolitical interests. Even in diaspora communities, Arabs confront the burden of having to constantly prove their worth, navigating stereotypes that follow them wherever they go.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

The impact is profound. This dehumanisation denies Arabs the right to define their own identity, history and future. It creates a world where Arab voices are only acknowledged if they conform to dominant narratives, while their struggles for justice and freedom are either overlooked or dismissed. This global phenomenon renders Arabs, like Palestinians, as less deserving of empathy, less worthy of protection and ultimately less human in the eyes of the world. We see this play out in Lebanon today, where the dehumanisation of Palestinians in Gaza has extended into another Arab nation, perpetuating a cycle of disregard for Arab lives.

By broadening the conversation from Palestine to the wider Arab experience, it becomes clear that this form of dehumanisation is deeply entrenched. It is a legacy of colonialism, Orientalism and power imbalances that persist in global systems. To combat this, there must be a collective effort to reframe how Arabs are perceived—not as objects of pity or fear, but as complex, whole individuals with their own stories, struggles and humanity.

True humanisation for Arabs, including Palestinians, requires dismantling the structures that perpetuate their dehumanisation and recognising them on their own terms. This means acknowledging Arab identity without forcing them to fit Western norms, such as the expectation for Arabs in the media to distance themselves from their culture to appear “civilised”.

Historical recognition is also key, as the long-standing impact of colonialism across the Arab world, from the Sykes-Picot Agreement to ongoing conflicts, is often erased or minimised in global narratives. For example, the struggles of Iraqis post-invasion or the humanitarian crisis in Yemen are frequently framed through Western geopolitical interests rather than the voices and experiences of Arabs themselves.

In essence, being humanised is to be seen in the entirety of one’s identity, history and rights. Arabs, including Palestinians, deserve to be regarded not through the distorted lenses of terrorism, resistance or oppression, but as whole human beings—worthy of empathy, justice and respect on their own terms, in their own land and in their own voice.

Without this recognition, the concept of humanisation remains but a flicker, incomplete and conditional, a mere shadow of the profound dignity that is their rightful due.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

( The National ) – A series of pager explosions across Lebanon, and secondary attacks on walkie-talkies the following day, have killed and maimed a number of Hezbollah operatives, as well as many civilians, including children. The attacks have also injured thousands, including Iran’s ambassador to Beirut.

Israel normally does not claim responsibility for attacks on foreign soil – and it did not do so in this case either – but Defence Minister Yoav Gallant gave strong indications in a speech on Wednesday of Mossad’s role in the sabotage.

Mr Gallant also said that Israel, which has been battling Hamas in Gaza for almost a year, was opening a new phase in the war. “The centre of gravity is shifting northward, meaning that we are increasingly diverting forces, resources and energy towards the north,” he added.

The Lebanon attacks demonstrate Israel’s ability to strike from a distance, establishing a form of deterrence, while claiming plausible deniability, and avoiding a US rebuke at a time when Washington is pressuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike Hezbollah. Nevertheless, the Lebanese group does have the ability to weaponise the digital, raising the possibility of violent non-state actors retaliating against their adversaries and taking digital warfare into the realm of AI across the Middle East.

Notwithstanding the vague allusions to the attacks over the past couple of days, historical precedent does demonstrate that weaponising communications is a modus operandi of the Israeli state.

In 1972, in retaliation for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Mossad operatives detonated an explosive in the phone of the Palestinian official Mahmoud Hamshari in his Paris apartment. While that telephone was an analogue device, the digital revolution made long-distance assassinations easier for Israel. Another telephone was weaponised in 1996, when Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, targeted the Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash’s Motorola Alpha mobile phone. Working with a Palestinian collaborator, Shin Bet placed 50 grams of explosives in the device, enough to kill him when he held the phone to his ear.

The recent deaths in Lebanon are the epitome of the postmodern, a product of the digital culture of the easy-edit, a time when science and technology allow us to change and manipulate information easily through code, making distances relatively obsolete.

The book Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weaponrefers to Israel’s ability to destroy parts of Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility in 2010 with a malicious digital code known as Stuxnet. This code, sneaked into a USB drive, caused nuclear centrifuges to accelerate to the point that they destroyed themselves.

In 1981, by contrast, Israeli F-15 and F-16 aircraft had to fly long distances, refuel in mid-air and drop bombs on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility to destroy it, with some even missing their target. Israeli pilots risked being shot down or even crashing, which almost happened when the planes narrowly missed telephone wires on the way to their target outside Baghdad.

Stuxnet did not put any Israeli operatives at risk when they sought to target Iran’s nuclear facility. The code, unlike a conventional bomb, could be easily edited, put onto a USB drive, travel a far distance, achieve its objective, and give Israeli deniability.

“Cyberwar,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Notwithstanding the technological sophistication and difficulty to tamper with thousands of communications devices, Israel over the past two days was able to strike targets all over Lebanon, even in neighbouring Syria, with relative ease, in that none of its operatives had to be present to target individuals. It was assassination by remote control.

Establishing deterrence is based on signalling and demonstrating the ability to inflict hurt on an adversary. While the death toll is relatively low, Israel has been able to warn Hezbollah that its members are not safe anywhere in their country, without having to violate the sovereignty of Lebanon.

Tragically, it has also had another effect, in that it has disrupted the civilians’ ontological security, meaning the mental state derived from a sense of order and continuity, even banality of everyday life. Even medical workers in the country use pagers due to electrical outages, and every citizen is bound to be left wondering if their mobile phone has been weaponised.

Deterrence cannot be measured, however, and instead of Israel having deterred Hezbollah, the group will be under pressure to save face by striking back. Israel should have learnt a lesson from when it introduced drone technology to the region in the 1970s, which only led to its proliferation among its adversaries, including the Houthis, who struck Israel directly with a long-distance drone in July.

Israel was the first to use drones in the Middle East in 1973 and had a monopoly on them in the region. But as Rami Khouri, the American University of Beirut professor, once told Peter W Singer, the world’s foremost expert on drones: “The response to drones is to get your own drones. They are just tools of war. Every tool generates a counterreaction.” Indeed, by 2024, Hezbollah released videos of its drones having violated Israel’s sovereignty, having reached the city of Haifa.

While it is uncertain if AI-enabled drones have ever been used, Israel did use an AI programme named Gospel to generate targets for its military campaign in Gaza.

With the digital domain having been weaponised, Hezbollah will feel the need to retaliate. The retaliation, however, is unlikely to be a brute rocket or missile strike that Israel can intercept. The group might play the long game of scoring its own digital victory, perhaps pursuing its own weaponisation of AI to achieve this goal.

Reprinted from The National with the author’s permission.

(The Conversation) – Turkey tends to march to its own drum in international affairs.

Take the United Nations vote on Dec. 14, 2022, when the body’s General Assembly approved a resolution in favor of a New International Economic Order. Some 123 member states – largely the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America – voted in favor; only 50 cast a ballot against. Turkey was the only abstention – emblematic of the foreign policy of a country that strides the divide between Europe and Asia, East and West, North and South.

Or consider the most recent expansion of the NATO military alliance: Turkey held back its support for the entry of Sweden for nearly two years, much to the chagrin of fellow members.

It was nonetheless a remarkable moment when Turkey formally announced in September 2024 that it was applying to join the BRICS Plus group – the first time a NATO member country has requested membership in a club born in 2006 out of dissatisfaction with Western-dominated global governance mechanisms and that has since expanded from its original lineup of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

With NATO being the bulwark of the Western alliance, and BRICS seen as a key challenger to that established order, this is no minor matter – especially in a year in which BRICS is chaired by Russia, currently at war with Ukraine, and at a time when NATO members are scrambling to support Ukraine in whichever way they can.

The move by Ankara, which the United States has by now decided to live with, suggests Turkey is increasingly wary about achieving its foreign policy goals primarily through the West’s institutions.

Between two worlds?

Turkey’s interest in joining BRICS does not come out of the blue. As far back as 2018, after being invited to attend that year’s BRICS annual summit meeting, Turkey had been toying with the idea of doing so. Looking back, it was only a question of time for full membership to happen.

Straddling the European and Asian continents, Turkey has long been attracted to the European Union, the world’s largest single market and a key Western institution, and has made repeated attempts to join the body during the 21-year rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Yet, the EU has been adamant that it is not ready to accept it as a full member.

Trade agreements? Yes. Military cooperation through NATO? No problem. But full membership that grants voting rights in the European Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament? Nope, not yet.

With a population of over 85 million, Turkey would be the largest country in the EU if it joined – surpassing Germany, with about 84 million – and would thus play a key role in its governance and leadership.

Yet amid a surge of Arab and African migration to Europe – and a concomitant rise in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment – European acceptance of a nonwhite, Muslim-majority nation in its midst seems less likely than ever.

As has been apparent in the contrasting reactions to the war in Ukraine and to the one in Gaza, many Europeans have come to define the continent as “white and Christian.” They see Europe as under siege from the rest of what it considers to be an uncivilized world.

This notion has been reinforced by the rise of the far right in recent European elections and is even reflected in some of the rhetoric coming out of senior policymakers in Brussels. The European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Josep Borrell, for example, said in a 2022 speech to young European diplomats: “Europe is a garden. We have built a garden, where everything works,” but “most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.” It was a comment for which he later apologized.

Looking beyond the West

In addition to facing a cold shoulder from the EU, Turkey also seemingly feels hampered by the broader Western-dominated global order. The Erdogan government blames the West, and especially the U.S., for holding back the growth of its defense sector, and its industry in general, and for not allowing the country to take the place it deserves in world affairs as a rising middle power.

For example, Turkey’s 2019 acquisition of the Russian S-400 missile defense system led to a prolonged spat with the U.S., which blocked Turkey from acquiring F-35 fighter jets as a result. And Washington only reluctantly gave the green light to Turkey’s purchase of 40 F-16 fighter jets earlier this year, a transaction that met significant opposition in the U.S. Senate.

Beyond the differences with Western entities of various kinds, Turkey also has grievances about the existing global order. A particular pet peeve for Erdogan is the composition of the United Nations Security Council and its five veto-wielding permanent members – the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, China and Russia – something he feels does not reflect the geopolitical realities of the 21st century.

To be sure, Turkey has concluded that it will stick with NATO and continue to do much of its foreign trade with Europe, where its main export markets are. But in the wake of what some refer to as the Asian century, Turkey sees the world as moving in a different direction.

Joining BRICS would thus open new opportunities both on the economic and the diplomatic front. In fact, such a move would put Turkey in a key position as a diplomatic bridge between East and West, as well as between North and South, with a foot in each of these camps, while also bolstering its position in all.

“Turkey can become a strong, prosperous, prestigious and effective country if it improves its relations with the East and the West simultaneously,” Erdogan said in early September. “Any method other than this will not benefit Turkey but will harm it.”

The evolution of BRICS

BRICS has come a long way from the days of its founding in 2006, when many commentators in the Western media dismissed the organization as an entity that talked a good game but didn’t get much done.

It now has its own bank, the New Development Bank, based in Shanghai, with an initial capital allocation of US$50 billion, and whose performance in its first decade of existence has been well evaluated by credit agencies and the press. BRICS also has a Contingent Reserve Arrangement to provide member states with protection against global liquidity pressures.

“Tayyip Erdogan and Xi Jinping,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3/ Clip2Comic, 2024; (reference –the two met on July 4, 2024 at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization conference in Astana).

From the original four members – Brazil, Russia, India and China – to which South Africa was added in 2010, the group now has nine members. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates joined in 2024, while Saudi Arabia has mulled accepting the invitation it was extended at the BRICS summit held in Johannesburg in August 2023. Now dubbed “BRICS Plus,” the body represents 46% of the world’s population, 29% of the world’s GDP, 43% of oil production and 25% of global exports.

The BRICS economies clearly complement Turkey’s. Half of Turkey’s natural gas imports come from Russia, and China’s Belt and Road Initiative aims to connect the world’s fastest-growing region, East Asia, with the world’s biggest single market, Europe, with Turkey positioned as a key distribution hub for the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

A bigger platform

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the BRICS group would provide Turkey with a bigger diplomatic platform from which to air its demands and leverage its influence. This should not be surprising from a country that believes, as many others in the Global South, it has gotten a raw deal from the West and is keen to reform the existing order.

Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani famously argued that the Asian century started on March 13, 2015 – the day a Conservative government in the U.K. applied to join the Beijing-based Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank, defying the express wishes of Washington.

Without putting too fine a point on it, one could well argue that a page has been turned in the transition toward a less Western world when the first NATO member, in this case Turkey, applied to join BRICS.

Jorge Heine, Interim Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.