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282. Grasping Power with Both Hands: Social Credit, the Mass Line, and Party Control
- Author:
- Samantha Hoffman
- Publication Date:
- 10-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- China Brief
- Institution:
- The Jamestown Foundation
- Abstract:
- The CCP’s development of the ‘social credit’ system is another step in the Party’s long exploration of ways to fuse political control and economic prosperity. The expanding global reach of China’s economy means that social credit’s fusion of social and political control will also be used to bend entities outside China’s borders towards the Party’s political objectives. Dozens of international airlines, including four US airlines, recently discovered what this means in practice.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Economy, Ideology, and Surveillance
- Political Geography:
- China and United States of America
283. Why India Won’t Play Its ‘Tibet Card’
- Author:
- Sudha Ramachandran
- Publication Date:
- 05-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- China Brief
- Institution:
- The Jamestown Foundation
- Abstract:
- Upon coming to power in May 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) adopted a more muscular approach to China than its predecessors. As part of this, it was not averse to using the Dalai Lama and the CTA to gain leverage in its dealings with China. Its recent move to put distance between itself and Dharamsala reflects an understanding that playing the ‘Tibet card’ brought India no benefits. In fact, the failure of the BJP’s four-year gambit reaffirms what many Indian diplomats and scholars have been saying for decades: there is no ‘Tibet card’ for India to play.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Diplomacy, Bilateral Relations, and Territorial Disputes
- Political Geography:
- China, India, Asia, and Tibet
284. Iron Curtain over the Arab world: Evaluating Trump’s inaction on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi
- Author:
- Adham Sahloul
- Publication Date:
- 01-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Harvard Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy
- Institution:
- The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
- Abstract:
- The murder of Saudi Arabian columnist Jamal Khashoggi on October 2nd in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has been a clarion call for the Washington foreign policy community, one that is redefining the United States’ relations with the Saudi Kingdom and, by extension, US strategy in the Middle East. The Khashoggi affair will outlive President Donald Trump; the reputation of Saudi’s leadership is beyond repair, and with Global Magnitsky sanctions and the newly proposed bipartisan Saudi Arabia Accountability and Yemen Act, the US Congress appears ready to act where the executive has fallen short. The CIA has concluded that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) ordered Khashoggi’s murder. Trump, who has threatened “severe consequences” for whomever is found responsible, seemed over the past month to be looking for a way out of naming, shaming, and punishing MbS himself. In his statement on November 20th, Trump confirmed many observers’ worst fears about this president’s worst instincts, saying that US security, economic, and political interests transcend this incident. For a sitting US president to balk at the notion of holding an ally accountable and making even a symbolic effort to address such a gruesome crime with clear chains of responsibility constitutes a new low in US foreign policy
- Topic:
- International Relations, Foreign Policy, Crime, Human Rights, Politics, Trump, Journalism, and Crisis Management
- Political Geography:
- Turkey, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, North America, United States of America, and Gulf Nations
285. Going nowhere alone: US sanctions on Iran and the afterlife of the JCPOA
- Author:
- Fridtjof Falk
- Publication Date:
- 01-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Harvard Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy
- Institution:
- The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
- Abstract:
- On November 5th, 2018, the Trump administration re-imposed severe sanctions on Iran. These sanctions, which President Obama called the “toughest sanctions ever faced by the Iranian government,” were lifted by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran Deal. The JCPOA was signed with a view to blocking Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons, allowing international inspectors into Iran in return for sanctions relief. Withdrawing the United States (US) from the deal was a prominent promise of Donald Trump leading up to the presidential elections of 2016. In a May 2018 speech that described the deal as rooted in “fiction,” President Trump made good on his promise to leave the JCPOA and to move to unilaterally re-impose sanctions on Iran.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Nuclear Weapons, Treaties and Agreements, Sanctions, Nuclear Power, and Economy
- Political Geography:
- Europe, Iran, Middle East, North America, and United States of America
286. Groping in the Dark
- Author:
- Robert Cox
- Publication Date:
- 09-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- American Diplomacy
- Institution:
- American Diplomacy
- Abstract:
- The Europe-US relationship is based on two pillars: a belief in and a promotion of a rules-based international order; a shared set of common values. Both of these pieces of mortar are crumbling. But the partners are not yet in the divorce court. Meanwhile Europeans increasingly sense that their familiar and otherwise comfortable world has gone.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Economics, European Union, and Brexit
- Political Geography:
- Europe, North America, and United States of America
287. Abraham Lincoln, Hillary Clinton, and Liu Xiaobo
- Author:
- Beatrice Camp
- Publication Date:
- 11-2018
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- American Diplomacy
- Institution:
- American Diplomacy
- Abstract:
- Celebrating the bicentennial birthday of our 16th president seemed like a fairly safe event for our Shanghai consulate to undertake, considering that Abraham Lincoln was popular in China and former President Jiang Zemin was well known for quoting from the Gettysburg Address. And, of course, Lincoln provided us an opening to talk about “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Sometime after we decided on the program, the State Department announced that Hillary Clinton would travel to Beijing on her first trip as Secretary of State to highlight the importance of the U.S.-China relationship for the new administration. Shanghai wasn’t on her itinerary and yet, somehow, our consulate preparations to hold a 200th birthday party for Abraham Lincoln in February 2009 almost threw a wrench into this important SecState visit.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Diplomacy, Government, and Memoir
- Political Geography:
- China, Asia, North America, and United States of America
288. The Wests's Turkey Conundrum
- Author:
- Amanda Sloat
- Publication Date:
- 02-2018
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- The Brookings Institution
- Abstract:
- Policymakers in the United States and European Union are struggling with how to manage their relations with Turkey. What makes the country such a conundrum is that its problematic leadership faces real threats. Turkey is confronting challenges from the aftermath of the July 2016 coup attempt and the destabilizing effects of the Syrian war. Yet the country’s president is growing more authoritarian, using virulent anti-Western rhetoric, and making foreign policy choices contrary to the interests of the trans-Atlantic alliance. The policy goal is navigating this gray zone today to preserve the possibility of better relations in the future.
- Topic:
- International Relations and International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Turkey
289. Normal is Over
- Author:
- Constanze Stelzenmüller
- Publication Date:
- 02-2018
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- The Brookings Institution
- Abstract:
- Year one of the Trump administration has been uniquely unnerving. Yet the trans-Atlantic security community has also been breathing a sigh of relief, because many of their worst expectations seem to have been averted: trade wars, an attack on North Korea, the end of NATO. The conventional wisdom in Washington, DC and many European capitals today is that—despite a president who continues to defy conventions—U.S.-European relations have largely normalized. As a result, most Europeans are attempting to ride out what they believe to be a temporary aberration of American politics with a mixture of hugging and hedging. There is certainly evidence for a normalization of U.S. foreign policy, not least in the president’s formal endorsement of NATO’s mutual defense clause, and the reinforcement of American contributions to reassurance and deterrence in Eastern Europe. There are also many signs that the past year has re-energized American civil society, belying determinist critics in Europe. But Trumpism needs to be recognized as a massive discontinuity. Trump is the first postwar American president to question the liberal order as such. In its purest form, the “America First” doctrine has implications for the EU and some of its member states (especially Germany) that should be of intense concern to Europeans. Europeans should worry even more, however, about its fundamentalist critique of globalization (which it refers to as globalism) as a quasiadversarial ideology. The globalization-globalism dichotomy, unlike all previous transAtlantic disagreements, is a dispute about the nature of the world we live in. And it is a wedge that could drive the United States and Europe apart. America could attempt (at immense cost to itself) to decouple from the liberal world order and the global economy. But for Europe to do so would be suicidal. This flips the existing logic of the trans-Atlantic alliance on its head: it is Europe now that has the greater—and for it, existential—interest in preserving an international order that safeguards peace and globalization
- Topic:
- International Relations and International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
290. Building a WMD-Free zone on the two existing conventions
- Author:
- Jean Pascal Zanders
- Publication Date:
- 01-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The Geneva Centre for Security Policy
- Abstract:
- This Policy Forum issue analyses both progress made by and challenges facing the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC). It does so in order to explore under what conditions and to what extent these two conventions might help build a zone in the Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their delivery vehicles (DVs). Finally, the issue presents some options for the future and a major long-term initiative towards this ambitious goal.
- Topic:
- International Relations
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus