Week 49: Coordinated Effort
Week 49: Coordinated Effort
A crisis of confidence at a crises conference
I had an interesting five days in Dili, Timor Leste, over last weekend and early this week. I was there for the Regional Consultative Group (RCG) on Humanitarian Civil-Military Coordination for Asia and the Pacific – a forum for the region to understand more about each country’s responses to humanitarian crises – whether they be through conflict or natural disasters. And, of course, how countries can better coordinate with each other.
Filling in for my boss at Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue (AP4D), I presented some of the findings from our paper Catalyst for Southeast Asian Civil-Military Cooperation. AP4D is a platform that gathers and presents expertise on various subject matter related to Australia’s foreign policy, rather than being experts ourselves. So having to present in a room full of experts on a subject matter I am not an expert in myself was a bit daunting. I can’t say I did a great job – bumbling my way through the talk, and being unable to answer questions in a compelling manner.
Although from attending the conference my knowledge was vastly improved, and I’ve been able to understand better areas I need to enhance – especially with important practicalities like the ones discussed at this conference. Hiding behind my keyboard I’m good at contemplating ideas, assessing their implications, and making words read nicely – but all this is effectively useless for coordinating responses to humanitarian crises. My brain is one that has never been able to dedicate itself to a single subject matter, which means I may have a breadth of knowledge, but not a great depth. This now feels like something I should improve upon.
Alongside this conference, I also presented – more confidently – at the Asia Foundation’s office in Dili. For our AP4D paper Shape a Shared Future with Timor-Leste, the Asia Foundation coordinated consultations with 24 civil society organisations from across Timor-Leste’s 14 municipalities. The ideas sourced from these consultations formed the central elements to our paper, alongside how Australia is best able to assist with these development priorities.
My talk here was mostly to thank the participants and relate back to them the feedback we have had on the paper from policymakers in Australia. During this afternoon I also have the pleasure to meet the manager of the Covalima Community Centre in the town of Suai. A few weeks ago I spoke here in Melbourne with the Friends of Suai/Covalima who sponsor the centre. So it was excellent to be able to make the local connection with the work they do.
This Week’s Reading:
Robert Kaplan – The New Statesman
“We are now in a world where one crisis prompts a chain reaction with another, and leads eventually to dynamic change in geopolitics. This is sometimes called a “polycrisis”. But that term doesn’t quite suggest the rumbling military instability that is starting to take place. Of course, this has periodically been the case in history, but now – because of communications technology in all of its manifestations – the pace of events has accelerated.
The Second World War actually began in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, though it didn’t begin in earnest until the German attack on Poland in 1939. It was a process that eventually lasted 14 years. War is not a continuous battle. It can start and stop, and then start again. The Israel-Gaza war will end with a Middle East transformed, which will then have subsequent, often violent repercussions. As for Russia, battlefield stalemates do come to an end, and when that happens Russia will find itself weaker in the Caucasus, Central Asia and points further east than it has been in decades.
Looming behind all of this is the US-China conflict over Taiwan, which if it ever becomes violent could unravel financial markets and supply chains all at once, to say nothing of its specific high-end military effects. Russia and Iran are in terminal decline, even as China’s economic waning can lead to more disruptive nationalism. The United States has its own domestic problems. Only in the sense of the great powers being in decline, albeit at different rates, can we talk of a fundamentally unstable, multipolar world that has nothing to do with the deceptive order implied by the United Nations, the G20 or the Global South. For the foreseeable future, geopolitics will essentially be bipolar, and frighteningly so.”
Jared Cohen & Ian Bremmer – Foreign Policy
“In a world where great powers—and the international order that they uphold—are credible, other countries recognize their own interest in working with those powers and within that order. But when great-power credibility erodes, so too do the incentives for countries and other actors to respect established rules and conventions, intensifying geopolitical competition and destabilising the international order as a result.
Although the United States has not lost significant power in recent years, its credibility has diminished, whereas China has gained significant power but not the credibility to match it. As a result, both countries suffer from a significant and growing credibility gap that, in turn, is draining the global system of its own credibility and legitimacy.”
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Psychology of Trauma
Jessica Stern & Bessel van der Kolk
“When people have experienced chronic terror, their minds become quick to detect danger and they tend to react strongly to even minor provocations. Shared trauma creates strong bonds between survivors. It also leads to an “us versus them” orientation, in which the outside world is (often justifiably) perceived as hostile, and only people who belong to the same tribe, religion, or ethnicity are considered worthy of trust and loyalty. Growing up in terror, whether caused by domestic or political violence leaves deep traces on developing minds, brains, and identities: detecting and coping with threats becomes a central preoccupation at the expense of nurturing a capacity for work and play. Disrupting the intergenerational cycle of trauma requires stopping violence in the first place and developing empathy in those who have suffered trauma.
There are glimmers of hope that outside powers will now find a way to help the Israelis and the Palestinians come to a solution—whether it involves the creation of two states, as envisioned in the Oslo accords; a confederation like the European Union, an idea supported by a new generation of Palestinian and Israeli peacemakers; or a single state with equal rights for both Palestinians and Jews. Whatever comes next, it will be important to bear in mind that after having been hurt, hatred can be enormously energizing, while mourning, reciprocity, and reconciliation are profoundly complex and laborious processes. But they are the only hope for breaking the intergenerational transmission of violence.”
In Taiwan, China Is Covertly Preparing For Battle
Elizabeth Green – Prospect
“Russia, Iran and China do not perceive war and peace in binary terms, instead operating fluidly in the “grey zone”. Labelled variously as political warfare, sub-crisis manoeuvring and hybrid warfare, grey-zone activities are coercive statecraft actions below the threshold of armed conflict. This nebulous realm exists between peaceful diplomatic engagement and outright warfare, allowing revisionist states to shift the status quo through a subtle blend of political, informational, technological and economic tactics. These methods often deviate from internationally accepted norms and are calibrated to advance these states’ interests little by little—without triggering armed combat or providing a casus belli. The emphases are on ambiguity and gradualism, allowing room for plausible deniability. For example, the Kremlin’s actions before its annexations in Georgia (2008) and Crimea (2014) exemplified the grey-zone approach: in Georgia, it backed separatists and staged military exercises, and in Ukraine, it deployed unmarked troops— “little green men”—to seize the Crimean parliament, thereby achieving strategic gains while denying involvement.
The PLA have similarly mastered the grey zone. Chinese military thinkers drew pivotal lessons from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, noting the transformative impact of precision munitions, real-time intelligence and surveillance systems, and electronic warfare in the US-led coalition’s victory. From this, they predicted the centrality of information in modern warfare, an idea that transformed traditional conceptions. Now, the battlefield is everywhere, and encompasses all economic, financial, technical and informational domains. A new warfare paradigm emerged, with PLA colonels advocating the use of every means at a nation’s disposal to “compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.”
In 2003, China incorporated the “Three Warfares” (三戰, sanzhan) into its PLA Political Work Regulations, formalising this shift. This strategy comprises public opinion warfare (輿論戰, yülunzhan), aimed at aligning global and domestic narratives with Beijing’s interests; psychological warfare (心理戰, xinlizhan), intended to sap the morale of enemy forces and exploit internal divisions; and legal warfare (法律戰, falüzhan), the manipulation of legal frameworks to serve China’s geopolitical aims.”
Class Conflict and the Democratic Party
Musa Al-Gharbi – The Liberal Patriot
“The alignment of knowledge economy professionals with the Democratic Party has also shifted the socioeconomic composition of the Democratic base. To give some perspective of how much has changed: in 1993 the richest 20 percent of congressional districts were represented by Republicans over Democrats at a ratio of less than two to one. Today, they tilt Democratic by nearly five to one. The socioeconomic profiles of Democratic primary voters have shifted significantly as well. Counties with higher concentrations of working-class Americans are today a much smaller portion of the Democratic primary electorate than they were in 2008, while counties with large concentrations of affluent households comprise an ever-growing share. This has important consequences for the types of candidates that succeed in primary elections, the language those candidates use, the issues they centre, what the party platform ends up looking like and, ultimately, who is drawn to the party and its candidates in national elections (and who is alienated from it).
The increasing dominance of knowledge economy professionals over the Democratic Party has had a range of profound impacts on the contemporary U.S. political landscape. First and foremost, it has contributed to a growing disconnect between the economic priorities of the party relative to most others in the U.S., especially working-class Americans. As sociologist Shamus Khan has shown, the economics of elites tend to operate “counter-cyclically” to the rest of society, meaning that developments that tend to be good for elites are often bad for everyone else and vice versa.
For instance, professionals tend to be far more supportive of immigration, globalisation, automation, and artificial intelligence than most Americans because they make professionals’ lives more convenient and significantly lower the costs of the premium goods and services they are inclined towards. Those in knowledge professions primarily see upsides with respect to these issues because their lifestyles and livelihoods are much less at risk—indeed, they instead capture a disproportionate share of any resultant GDP increases—and their culture and values are largely affirmed rather than threatened by these phenomena. Others may and often do experience these developments quite differently.”
Mark Leibovich – The Atlantic
“This is not who we are,” Representative Nancy Mace, the newly elected Republican of South Carolina, said of the deadly riot. “We’re better than this.” There was a lot of that: thoughts and prayers from freaked-out Americans. “Let me be very clear,” President-elect Joe Biden tried to reassure the country that day. “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are.”
One hoped that Biden was correct, that we were in fact not a nation of vandals, cranks, and insurrectionists. But then, on the very day the Capitol had been ransacked, 147 House and Senate Republicans voted not to certify Biden’s election. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, skulked back to the ousted president a few weeks later, and the pucker-up parade to Mar-a-Lago was on. Large majorities of Republicans never stopped supporting Trump, and claim they never stopped believing that Biden stole the 2020 election and that Crooked Joe’s regime is abusing the legal system to persecute Trump out of the way.
You can dismiss Trump voters all you want, but give them this: They’re every bit as American as any idealised vision of the place. If Trump wins in 2024, his detractors will have to reckon once again with the voters who got us here—to reconcile what it means to share a country with so many citizens who keep watching Trump spiral deeper into his moral void and still conclude, “Yes, that’s our guy.”
How Donald Trump Warped America’s Reality
Lora Kelley interview with Megan Garber – The Atlantic
Facts require a certain amount of effort. They require learning and patience and work. Above all, facts require humility: a recognition that your personal reality is not necessarily everyone else’s reality, and that there are truths that exist beyond you and your preferences.
There’s something very compelling about someone who says, You know what, you don’t need to do that. If you feel that the world is a certain way, Trump’s pitch goes, then the world can be a certain way. Trump himself models that, and gives his followers permission to share that idea. Take the Big Lie, for example. Trump did not want to have lost the election. And so he said, I did not lose the election. There is, perversely, this almost elegant simplicity to it. Feelings are so much easier than facts.
Americans defer to entertainment so much, not just in the world of culture but in the world of our politics. Much of the way Americans are taught to think about politics is incredibly superficial—an approach that equates politics with an ongoing show where the biggest responsibility is not to democracy but to entertainment and distraction.
Trump does that even for the people who are not his supporters. So in this very tragic way, he captures something that is broadly true, I think, about American culture: that entertainment is our truest ideology and the truest value that we share. The media, especially early on, treated Trump as a performance. And that treatment generally underplayed all of the terrible things he represents.”
Why Fundamentalists Love Trump
David French – New York Times
“I’m certainly not arguing that all regular churchgoers are fundamentalists, but in my experience fundamentalists are virtually always regular churchgoers. To understand why they support Trump, it’s important to understand fundamentalism more broadly and to understand how Trump fits so neatly within the culture of fundamentalist Christianity.
For some readers, that might be a head-spinning idea. How on earth could a secular, twice-divorced, philandering reality television star fit in neatly with fundamentalist Christians? It makes no sense until you understand that the true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.” That’s why, for example, you can have competing Christian fundamentalisms, competing Muslim fundamentalisms and secular movements that possess fundamentalist characteristics.
Certainty is the key building block. The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt. In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree. That certainty breeds ferocity.”
The Mystery of India’s Assassination Plots
Hartosh Singh Bal – Foreign Affairs
“Blaming Khalistanis for the agricultural defeat has not been easy, and for a very simple reason: within India, there is no Sikh separatism to speak of. The secessionism that drove the insurgency in Punjab during the 1980s and 1990s lost traction decades ago. In the previous 20 years, there have been only a handful of Khalistan-related fatalities. (For comparison, there are roughly 400 terror-related deaths in India each year.) And according to a security assessment written by South Asia’s Institute for Conflict Management—based on Indian government data—the seven Sikh separatist murders that did happen between 2019 and 2022 were carried out by petty criminals and gangsters, not ideologues.
But there is still an active separatist movement among Sikhs living abroad, particularly in Canada and the United Kingdom. As a result, the Modi government has trained its focus overseas. It has, for example, fervently decried the vandalism of Indian consulates and Hindu temples by Sikh separatists in Australia, Canada, and the United States (although in at least one instance, local police have said the vandalism may have been committed by Hindus).”
Why Two Parents Are the Ultimate Privilege
Bari Weiss – The Free Press
“In the ’60s and ’70s, there was a sociocultural revolution in the U.S., which included changing expectations about marriage, a greater acceptance of having a child outside of a marriage, and changing expectations about gender norms. We saw decreases in marriage across the education distribution in roughly equal proportion. In the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s, marriage rates among college-educated adults stabilised. Economics is a big part of the story. College-educated adults did really well in those decades, and they continued to see increases in their earnings. But outside the college-educated class, men saw their employment rates decline and their earnings decline.
We saw a loss in a number of jobs that in previous generations provided family-sustaining, well-paying jobs for men without college degrees: manufacturing jobs, industrial production jobs, etc. Those jobs were eliminated, and we saw a corresponding decrease in marriage and an increase in the share of kids living in single-mother homes among affected communities such that economists have drawn a causal connection. That’s the sort of unromantic model that strips out love and compatibility and just looks at the economic incentives to marry or not. It turns out to be pretty predictive.”
Melbourne’s notoriously temperamental weather is currently neither Spring nor Summer, while back in Sweden there has recently been a cold snap and a lot of snow. So a solar-inspired soundtrack doesn’t seem apt, but it may be welcome regardless.
As revitalised obscurities tend to do nowadays, Beverley Glenn-Copeland’s 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies found traction within the ambient/new age YouTube algorithm several years ago. Although this song is called Sunset Village it feels to me to be more of a sunrise song – it has the hope of beginnings to it.