Stevenson’s army, March 23
I’m getting very frustrated with the administration’s slow,disjointed approach to the pandemic, so let me rant.
Who’s in charge? Ideally there should be an experienced bureaucratic organizer who knows what different agencies can do and has the backing of the president to get things done. [Think Harry Hopkins, Jim Baker,] HHS, CDC, FDA, FEMA all have strengths, but they need to be coordinated and prioritized — and they should have been activated on January 24, not March 13. And the core team should not be spending several hours a day in meetings, especially not listening to a ruminating president who isn’t listening to them.
Take the Defense Production Act, a powerful tool that has been invoked in name only by the president. It could do so much to get production of key items going and supply chain glitches solved. Instead, the president for ideological reasons doesn’t want to interfere with the market, so he has an ad hoc White House operation where Peter Navarro and a 2 star from the Joint Staff take phone calls from businesses who have good ideas to help, both the country and their profits. This is a lobbyist-led operation when it should be government-led.
I think Congress will come through with a bipartisan bill that, yes, will contain a lot of waste. That’s the price to avoid catastrophe. I think the Democrats see they have leverage to get more of their priorities, since Trump and the GOP will more likely be blamed for inaction or delay. And for logistical reasons, the House would like to pass a agreed measure by voice vote so they don’t have to bring all members back and fight over details. They also remember when bipartisanship was dropped by the GOP in the past. They won’t be fooled again.
Meanwhile, there’s an encouraging report in NYT that helps identify infected people not yet showing symptoms: almost all first suffer a loss of sense of taste or smell. [If that happens to someone you know, they should self-quarantine.]
Look what has happened to the Peace Corps: volunteers brought home and fired.
WSJ reports Marine Corps plans to reshape for the China threat.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Stevenson’s army, March 22
We’re still waiting for the bipartisan stimulus bill, and hoping for its quick passage by the Senate, but things could still go off the rails. After all, the lobbyists have been busy, as WSJ reports. As I said the other day, the Senate will use a House-passed bill, lifting taxes on medical devices, as the vehicle for the stimulus, since revenue measures must “originate” in the House.
Several writers, Jennifer Senior of NYT and Margaret Sullivan of WaPo have urged an end to live broadcasts of presidential news conferences on the coronavirus because they have become campaign rallies filled with misinformation. It is worth noting that FDR had only 30 fireside chats in his 12 years in office, 2.5 per year.
NYT reports new threats to the US in Africa from al Shabab.
US-Chinese relations continue to deteriorate, most recently with the expulsion of journalists and false claims about the coronavirus. WSJ reports that the evacuation of US diplomats for health concerns has left American poorly staffed to deal with China.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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COVID-19 in the Middle East
The outbreak of coronavirus in Iran began on February 21. The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported at least 1300 deaths in the Middle East and North Africa. On March 20, the Middle East Institute hosted a panel discussion on “COVID-19 in the Middle East: Assessing the Risks, Exploring Policy Remedies.” The discussion featured four speakers:
Basma Alloush: Policy and Advocacy Advisor, Norwegian Refugee Council.
Jihad Azour: Director, Middle East and Central Asia department, International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Rana Hajjeh: Director of Program Management, World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean
Hannah Kaviani: Senior Journalist, Radio Farda, RFE/RL’s Persian Language service
Paul Salem, President of the Middle East Institute, moderated
Current Context
Hajjeh pointed out that testing standards are different from state to state. For example, Iran only tests severe cases and makes mild cases stay at home. Iran’s country-wide transmission will lead to an increased number of deaths. Conflicts and wars in the region have weakened health infrastructure, which may not be able to handle the pandemic and may increase the risk of suffering. To reduce the proliferation of COVID-19, WHO is increasing the supply of personal protection equipment across the region. It also attempts to convince religious figures to stop mass gatherings and maintain social distance.
Alloush demonstrated that the COVID-19 has a severe impact on refugee communities. In Yemen and Syria, health infrastructure has been targeted by militias. Public facilities and services are insufficient. Ongoing conflicts have weakened local governance and imposed restrictions on humanitarian assistance. Living conditions don’t allow refugees to do social distancing. Quarantine leads to a decreased access to market. As the situation deteriorates, there have been more tensions between communities.
Kaviani attributed Iran’s pandemic crisis to several reasons:
- Iranians’ lack of education
- Lack of trust in the government
- Sanctions
- Mismanagement
- Lack of regional cooperation
These factors cause the shortage of medicine and medical devices, as well as Iranians’ distrust of government’s instructions and statistics.
Impacts
Azour stated that the pandemic and the oil war between Russia and Saudi Arabia are leading to economic turmoil. Domestic and external demand has dropped because customers have lost confidence on the market. Trade has slowed. The oil price has dropped by more than 60%, which puts pressure on government budgets. Azour expects that any measures to contain the pandemic will cause an increase in unemployment and a reduction in wages. Investments in production and manufacturing will also decline. The impacts will spread to the bond and the equity markets as well.
Remedies
Alloush emphasized that refugees are more vulnerable in this pandemic due to the lack of service access. She listed four main concerns of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs):
- Maintaining operations aimed at meeting pre-existing humanitarian needs,
- Ensuring humanitarian exemptions in order to provide services to refugee communities,
- Providing accurate information and instructions, and
- Guaranteeing the duty of care and protection of NGO staffs.
Hajjeh added that new political agendas may create more uncertainty at this time. States’ ministries of health should take what happened in China into consideration.
Azour prioritized public health and financial improvements in his policy recommendations. The market should reduce consumer payments. Governments should offer timely, targeted support to sectors in need. They should also preserve financial stability by allowing cash transactions as well as encouraging regional and international coordination.
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Our race is “human”
What is it like, this time we are spending distancing ourselves from others and trying to avoid falling victim to Covid-19? I wrote this piece last Thursday, but it still applies:
I’m finding it peaceful and even quietly enjoyable. Johns Hopkins/SAIS was already scheduled to be on Spring Break, so I wasn’t expecting to be working as usual. I had planned to spend most of the 10 days in San Antonio and Atlanta enjoying my children, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. Canceling that trip was a big disappointment.
But staying at home, trying to catch up on both professional and personal business, getting ready to teach via Zoom and talk to students on Skype, ordering supplies to be delivered, occasionally puttering in the garden, listening to music, and watching a bit more TV than usual is not a bad way to wait out an epidemic. Our long walks in the neighborhood are particularly enjoyable.
Yesterday it was a mid-afternoon 4.5 miles. The weather was sunny and warm, so lots of people were out in this suburban-seeming part of the District of Columbia. Parents and children, many on bikes and scooters. There was little traffic. Rush hour was noticeably less frenetic than usual. People are saying hello as they pass, but they don’t tarry, and some go out of their way to maintain that six feet of separation.
It is all deceptively non-threatening. You wouldn’t know what we are all doing is trying to avoid a virus that could threaten our lives, especially but not exclusively in my age group. I imagine sooner or later most of us will get it, but it would be better not to get sick at the peak of the epidemic, when hospital beds will be full and personnel scarce.
Meanwhile our various governments–Federal, state and local–are trying hard to recover from a late start caused by the lack of testing capability and the associated contact tracing. Even now, tests are few compared to countries that have been successful in responding effectively, like South Korea and Hong Kong. Hospitals are approaching capacity in some urban centers, but there is still a long way to go and the system isn’t likely to be able to meet the demand.
For months President Trump tried to talk down the risk, in an apparent effort to calm the stock market and limit the economic damage. But the virus wasn’t listening. His failure to properly prepare and react is now costing trillions as the economy slows markedly, people lose their jobs, and businesses start to go under. He wants checks sent to big US companies and American taxpayers, hoping that $1200 or so will assuage their anger before the November election. He is far less concerned with those who have no health insurance (he is still trying to undo Obamacare in the courts), without having even hinted at what would replace it), those who can’t live on unemployment insurance, and those who don’t get sick or family leave.
Yesterday I received our census questionnaire, which I happily filled out on line. But I was not happy with the choices for defining my race and national origins. I grew up in an America where white Anglo-Saxon protestants (WASPs) were the majority. Jews and even Catholics did not fit there. We were minorities. Now I am expected to check that I am “white.” How did that happen? There just weren’t enough Anglo-Saxon protestants, so the majority expanded itself by accepting non-Anglo-Saxons, Catholics, and anyone else who would accept the label “white.”
That label however doesn’t just refer to the color of my skin, which admittedly is whiter and pinker than my wife’s or my children’s, who are all “black.” “White” is increasingly an ethnic identity, one that has taken on a political significance in Trump’s America. He has declared himself a “nationalist,” by which he meant to convey to his supporters “white” nationalist, or in the terminology of my youth a white supremacist or racist. I don’t care to be associated, however remotely, with that ethnic identity. So I checked “other” on the census form and wrote in for race “human.” I hope many others will do likewise.
In my America, I’m pleased to say, there are many who might. The folks I see walking in this quiet neighborhood are a rainbow of colors and faiths. Their yard signs proclaim welcome to others, no matter where they come from or what language they speak. I’m pleased to live among such people. We believed Covid-19 was real from the first. We also think global warming is real and caused in large part to human activity. We are appalled at the disinformation our President is spreading in an effort to coverup his own culpability for a disastrous epidemic.
Human is our “race.”
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Stevenson’s army, March 21
– NYT reports the interagency clash on how to respond to the latest attack on US forces in Iraq.
– WaPo reports the intelligence community gave numerous warnings about the pandemic threat.
– No surprise here: NYT says lobbyists are working to grab a piece of the big stimulus bill.
-WaPo fact checker gives both sides on claim that NSC reorganization harmed health response.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Bosnia needs Biden
Ismet Fatih Čančar, who holds a BA in Economics from Sarajevo School of Science and Technology and University of Buckingham and an MA in International Political Economy from King’s College London (where he studies under the Chevening scholarship program awarded by the United Kingdom), writes:
The results of last week’s primary confirmed the heavy frontrunner. Winning four out of six states that voted, Joe Biden has completed a turnaround rarely seen in American politics. Barring a political scandal, Biden is the preemptive candidate to secure the nomination of the Democratic party. When he faces Trump in November, it will be a clash of two opposing ideologies. However, some 5000 miles away, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a small country in the Balkans, Biden’s win could mean salvation.
The history and present
Biden’s history with Bosnia goes back to the 1990s. During his Senate Foreign Affairs Committee tenure, he was a staunch supporter of American intervention to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide of Muslims in Bosnia. Following Joe Lieberman’s and Bob Dole’s lead, he was also one of the first to support lifting the arms embargo on Bosnian Muslims and advocated for “lift and strike” – a NATO air power mission. Through those murky times, Biden’s passionate speeches in the Senate drew the sympathies of Bosnians as a rare, genuine friend.
The last visit of a high-level US official to Bosnia was in 2009 – and it was Joe Biden. During his stay he urged the political elites to turn the page from nationalistic politics and focus on real reforms that would pave the way for EU and NATO accession. Little has changed since he last set foot in Sarajevo. On the contrary, the country has regressed on its Euro-Atlantic road.
The recent political crisis, whose chief architect is Milorad Dodik, has once again put the country in crisis. Calling actively for secession from the Bosnian state, the nationalist Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) has a history of threatening peace in Bosnia. While Dodik is already under sanctions by the US, the failure of the EU to follow this course of action has led to lukewarm results.
Additionally, the Kosovo-Serbia issue has regained momentum with US engagement. According to this report, redrawing borders along ethnic lines is back on the menu. Such a solution bears catastrophic consequences. Dodik has been abundantly clear he intends to use this partition in pursuing the independence of Republika Srpska. But more so, politics of this kind move us further away from what the US goal for the region was in the first place – the establishment of liberal democracies and the integration of the Balkans into the modern Western world.
Restoring US credibility
In his platform published in Foreign Policy, Joe Biden has put strengthening democracy at the helm of his global agenda. He has committed to making the United States prepared to lead again “not just with the example of our power but also with the power of our example”. The challenge the United States will face under Biden is restoring its credibility as a world beacon of democracy that entails an integral respect for human rights and opposition to authoritarianism and nationalism. Bosnia and Herzegovina could be a good starting point.
Biden’s reengagement could shift the focus of the American administration to help solve the structural issues in the country. It could safeguard Bosnia by countering the breakthrough of Russian interference through Dayton’s Peace Accords – which Holbrooke himself said would need upgrading. Being a sui generis state with two entities and three constituent people, Bosnia is damned to be dysfunctional. The solution is chartering a new constitution of a civil (citizen) character on the basis of the civil constitutions many modern European countries possess. This is a condition Bosnia has to fulfill if it is ever to see the entrance doors of NATO and EU.
Handling such a complex issue would again grow America’s reputation in the world as a credible and trustworthy factor that can effectively address crises around the globe. However, the challenge also implies a risk of failure; the inability to gather partners along the way, primarily in right-wing Europe which is increasingly displaying a more xenophobic character. Bringing the EU along with US lead is mandatory for the region. I wrote earlier about the United Kingdom initiative in taking a more active role with its allies in Bosnia. Together, the Anglo-American partnership could establish a new leadership format. Biden’s personal experience in solving similar issues can lead the way.
For this to work, American pressure has to fall on Serbia to give up the Greater Serbian ideology, the same ideology that was responsible for the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia during the war. Until Serbia and Republika Srpska acknowledge what has been done under Milosevic’s and Karadzic’s rule – both in Bosnia and Kosovo – and stop the revisionism of settled historical records, no relationship will be prudent or friendly in the future. Furthermore, redrawing borders should be an absolute red line. Biden knows this. He experienced the consequences of Serbian ethno-national exclusivism first-hand and has understood that staying silent to nationalist ideologies is not an option. It instead leads to new conflicts in the Balkans.
If Biden really is as he says ready to “champion liberty and democracy, reclaim our credibility, and look with unrelenting optimism and determination toward our future” then keeping the status quo in Bosnia is counter-productive. The worst possible solution for Biden’s US, as the face of a democratic administration, is doing nothing. That would not only betray everything that was successfully done during the Clinton administration, which is deliberately undermined by the current Trump administration, but would also surrender Bosnia and the Balkans to growing Russian hegemony.
Making America great by making America good again
America cannot be made great again through Trump’s selfish and xenophobic media tirades that are music for right-wing ears all over the world. America can only be great if it establishes the far-reaching political vision that is occasionally seen in Biden’s election campaign. Freedom, peace and a sense of responsibility for the global good seeks the support of democratically-minded men and women all across the US, and especially Bosnian Americans who have found their second homeland in the United States.
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