But what exactly is feminist foreign policy, and how does it work? That’s a question New York Times reporter Alisha Haridasani Gupta found herself pausing on when she wrote about feminist foreign policy last summer—and one she posed to panelists at last night’s Zócalo/Scripps College event, “What Does a Feminist Foreign Policy Look Like?”

“The more we talk about this, and the more we open up the discussion, the more people will understand what it means,” said Haridasani Gupta, who served as moderator for the online discussion, and writes the Times’ gender newsletter, “In Her Words.”

The best way to start, said Melanne Verveer, former U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues and the executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, is by considering what foreign policy does: “It advances the interest of our country, of our citizens; it advances democracy, human rights, international understanding; it’s about preventing conflicts and it’s about creating good relations with other nations.”

Recognizing that women make up half the world’s population, Verveer continued, feminist foreign policy puts “a gender lens or a gender perspective” on everything the State Department deals with, from economics to human rights issues—a lens that is necessary for meaningful diplomacy. “Women experience most circumstances differently and we have to factor in those differences if we’re going to have more effective foreign policy,” she said.

For Scripps College political economist Nancy Neiman, who studies global markets, her definition is less tied to traditional foreign policy goals. “I would move focus away from the interests of the nation, which is historically what foreign policy is about,” said Neiman, “and think about transnational issues—that the vulnerability of women in global markets is really a transnational issue, and it’s an intersectional issue; it’s about race, class and gender. I think those are the things that have to stay on the table, and the hope would be that more and more countries are interested in actually addressing these important issues.”

Diana Alarcón González, chief advisor and foreign affairs coordinator for Mexico City, meanwhile, considered it from the perspective of her own constituency of 9.2 million people, of which 52.8 percent are women. “Advocating for equal rights and defining our public policies around the issues of rights means making sure that more than 50 percent of people in our city have equal access to rights,” she said.

New America Foundation fellow Elmira Bayrasli spoke last—and welcomed the differing definitions that came before hers. “It isn’t just one thing,” she agreed.

Bayrasli, who is also co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted, an initiative that aims to increase the number of female voices in foreign policy, said she frames feminist foreign policy around “stability and progress.” While she’s met many people in Washington who have dismissed it “as a very kind of niche, a very cute little side issue that feminists like myself like to embrace,” she argued that feminist foreign policy speaks to the challenges of the world today, and how countries have to think beyond their own borders. “Now there are numerous global challenges that really require us to look at the outcomes, which are stability and progress, and fundamentally to me feminist foreign policy is about getting to that,” she said.

Looking at such outcomes, Haridasani Gupta asked the panelists for examples that show how a feminist lens can lead to progressive change on the world stage.

Verveer cited the role of women in the negotiations leading to Colombia’s peace agreement in 2016 after 50 years of civil war. “The women had put out proposal after proposal. Finally [they] gathered, in exasperation, in a summit, and came up with a bunch of recommendations at a time where there was a real serious effort to finally do this,” she said. Because of this, the issues that affected women throughout the conflict were considered, and there were recommendations in place in the peace agreement to address them. “For the first time ever,” Verveer added, “there was a gender subcommission that was part and parcel of the peace talks.”

On the flip side, the North American Free Trade Agreement offers a sobering example of what happens when feminist foreign policy isn’t considered, said Neiman, the professor of politics. “The story of Juárez is just a tragedy,” she said, referring to how the expansion of the maquila industry due to the 1994 trade pact led to a wave of migrants, particularly “young, Indigenous women, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable” to work in the expanding assembly plants in Juárez, where the homicide rate for women would increase by 600 percent between NAFTA’s passage and 2001. “We end up with a large number of disappeared and murdered women that is interconnected with the devaluation of young women’s lives,” said Neiman. All of this, she said, came out of a foreign trade policy that didn’t keep women’s interests in mind.

Audience members from the YouTube chatroom also contributed to the conversation. One asked what holds the U.S. State Department back from joining the countries that have already formally announced feminist foreign policies: “Is it just fear of the word?”

“Certainly, the word has something to do with it,” Verveer answered. Feminism has “been over time a loaded word in the United States, and detractors have tried to put all kinds of interpretations on it. But I don’t want to say we don’t have a feminist foreign policy. I think that’s a misapprehension.”

The U.S. may not be up there with Sweden, which first coined the term, she said, but it has made “vast efforts” to integrate issues that impact women into its foreign policy since the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women, which took place in Beijing in 1995.

In Canada, Haridasani Gupta noted, every budget now goes through gender analysis. Did the panelists have any concrete examples of ways governments can commit to feminist foreign policy?

In Mexico City, González offered, officials are ensuring women are at the policy table. “The chief of government, our mayor, just returned a proposal” from a technical committee, she said, because the group had only “two women [among] ten men at the table, and for her, it was not acceptable.”

There is much more feminist foreign policy can do for the world, the panelists agreed.

“Women always have to prove something is going to work when meanwhile there’s abundant evidence of things that aren’t working” in today’s world, Bayrasli said: democracy declining, strongmen on the rise, tensions simmering, and a pandemic killing millions. “Clearly there needs to be a reassessment to how we’re approaching foreign policy now.”

Feminist foreign policy could be a possible solution to the challenges of today, because, she said, it offers “a modern lens to the modern world.”

The post Feminist Foreign Policy Can Offer a ‘Modern Lens to a Modern World’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The decision to build these monuments and place them in park-like cemeteries reflects the Cold War of the 1950s as much as the World Wars that these sites commemorate. Over time these cemeteries helped establish an idealized American legacy in Europe, one that told the story of triumph over evil. Among the ideas these memorials convey is an insistence on Christianity as a spiritual beacon. They also offer an artistic presentation of American militarism with the aim of teaching a pointed lesson about the vastness of American power.

Five American World War II cemeteries in France offer a window into the 23 worldwide war cemeteries and 11 monuments built by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC). These five are the permanent burial sites for approximately 30,402 Americans, and like most American war cemeteries, the sites are located on or near the former battlefields: Omaha Beach and the Cotentin in Normandy; the Vosges Mountains and the German border area in Lorraine; and the assault beaches in Provence.

The World War II cemeteries were the first multi-site, government-funded design project after the war. During the initial phase of the American war cemetery, there were 24 temporary American burial grounds in France for just under 87,000 graves. Between 1947 and 1949, 64 percent of these bodies were repatriated upon request of the next of kin. The rest of the fallen soldiers were buried overseas, a decision made for the most part by their families. By 1949, only five of the original 24 cemeteries remained.

Between 1948 and 1952, designs for these five permanent sites in France were finalized and construction began in 1952, concluding in 1956. The care and maintenance of American graves was placed under the official auspices of the American government, and to this day the cemeteries are the responsibility of the ABMC and paid for by American tax dollars.

It is no coincidence that American government officials planned the cemeteries in the height of the Cold War and almost immediately after the United States State Department designated France as the key battlefield between Communists and the West in 1947. U.S. officials had been panicked since the elections of October 21, 1945, when the Parti Communiste Français—the French Communist Party—won 365 seats out of 586 in the French parliament, 62.2 percent of the whole. And, as illustration artist J. N. Darling noted in his political cartoon of 1947, French Communists were aggressively commandeering the postwar economy.

The ABMC coached the artists and architects of the American cemeteries to promote Judeo-Christian beliefs in redemption, and principles of freedom and democracy, through pictorial images, inscriptions, and structures. The ABMC felt that the stunning landscapes of infinite graves, coupled with such impressive messages and stately works of art and architecture, would make unforgettable, ever-lasting reminders of American sacrifice for a European audience. They also believed that the cemeteries would be stages for influencing and supporting diplomacy, both in day-to-day and anniversary occasions. Looking at such cemeteries, French citizens surely would wonder at their own political leanings, including Communism, the Americans thought. And who was to say that the United States military would not come back to Europe and sacrifice again for their capitalist ideology, since it had done this already—not once, but twice?

To see how art was used to communicate specific ideas equating American war dead to that of martyrs, consider Malvina Hoffman’s sculptures. She created the bas reliefs eventually carved into the façade of the memorial building located in the Épinal American Cemetery, in Vosges, Lorraine. The south-facing wall bears a large inscription on the attic, taken from Exodus 19:4, reading “I bare you on eagles wings and brought you unto myself.” As the visitor must pass through this structure in order to visit the graves, Hoffman’s bas reliefs are inescapable, and the memorial building acts as a physical threshold, a gateway to the field of headstones.

In the scene on the left part of the façade, a Hoffman bas relief entitled War, a ferocious eagle escorts battling American soldiers, its wingspan providing cover. The composition is arranged in several groups of soldiers. In the center, one group marches with methodic efficiency, the six silhouettes echoing each other with precise patterning. To their right, three men charge with bayonets engaged, and on the right upper corner in the distance, a group of paratroopers hang like marionettes from their parachutes, swooping down in great, arc-like trajectories.

On the left, a man yells into a radio while another energetically throws a grenade towards the enemy. The grenade thrower is assisted by a radioman, both looking up towards the great arc of the cannon of a 90-millimeter anti-aircraft gun. Schematic, directional lines depict guns firing deadly explosions from left to right. The busy scene highlights an organized calm under fire, demonstrating the tireless might of the American military—a formidable noble enemy, and certainly one that would be better cast as an ally.

After completing her research and drawing studies, Hoffman worked in two stages: first, as intaglios (the term for the clay models for the bas-reliefs) and then as the permanent carvings we see today. During the intaglio stage, in May 1949, Hoffman’s work was studied by representatives of the ABMC and another government agency charged with advising the federal government on matters pertaining to the arts and national symbols, the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA). Their discussion was made into a transcript and given to Malvina Hoffman. It is clear that they did not like what they saw and urged her to change her design.

Hoffman’s original design for War arranged a group of marching men displaying only their backs, creating an impersonal and even robotic effect that the CFA, who counted among its members the famed allegorical sculptor Lee Lawrie, in particular, disliked. Whereas Hoffman wished to place emphasis on pattern and line, the ABMC encouraged her to imagine heroic individuals. With the faces barely visible in Hoffman’s original design, this was impossible. In response, Hoffman created a group composed of the most generic of faces, so that each visitor might imagine one “stand-in” identity as the American soldier.

Just exactly how the government was shaping the narrative of the memorial is even more apparent in the story of the creation of the right panel bas relief, Survival of the Spirit, which introduces a glorious death followed immediately by an ascent to heaven. Hoffman’s first study had depicted the fallen soldier’s moment of death and an angel’s lamentation while laying him into a grave, and idea that came from Revelations 7:14, 7:16, and 21:14: “These are they that came out of great tribulation … They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more … And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

But, during the 1949 evaluation of her proposal, the CFA and the ABMC suggested that the angel figure (the Angel of Life, or Gabriel) be made larger and the dying soldier be made smaller. Hoffman subsequently changed the composition to feature the fallen youth in a Pietà, referencing the traditional pose of the Virgin Mary with the dead body of Jesus on her lap. Hoffman then paired the Pietà format with a sequence showing the fallen American soldier’s rise to heaven, heralded by Gabriel and other angels.

This switch, from a lamentation to a triumphant ascension, underscores how the ABMC and CFA intended to create Christian messages of redemption associated with sacrifice and martyrdom. In this symbolism, the American fallen was a Christ-like figure in his pure nobility.

The government-driven change was also ideological, recasting war trauma as a bloodless experience. This was not a new strategy—political leaders have been justifying war death for centuries. But the application of art, architecture, and landscape design to war commemoration—the phenomenological experience, in other words—is particularly American.

Through Hoffman’s design, the large group of American war graves was reimagined as a regiment of heroes. And with this display of sacrifice of over 5,000 men and women comes an implicit caution to anyone who might pose a threat to world freedom. The power of the United States is demonstrated not only by its soldiers’ sacrifices but also through cemeteries that represent America’s visualized promise to never stop fighting.

The post How the U.S. Designed Overseas Cemeteries to Win the Cold War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From: Joe Mathews

Re: Summit

If North and South Korea can have a peace summit, why can’t California and Texas do the same?

The United States desperately needs its two biggest states to figure out how to keep the country together.

Our nation’s political leaders are committed to dividing the country; their business model for elections and fundraising depends on ever-greater polarization of the American electorate. And so the American government’s mission now amounts to three things: mismanaging entitlement programs, handing our tax breaks to donors, and throwing trillions of dollars at endless wars that should instead go to our infrastructure.

So if this country is ever going to put itself back together, it’ll be up to your two states. You’re the two most successful examples of American states—capable of attracting millions of Americans and their dreams. Sure, you represent different constituencies and versions of the American idea. Texas represents the cheap, lightly regulated, freedom- and gun-loving counterpoint to California’s progressive cultural and technological powerhouse.

But you have one big thing in common: the American predicament. You are both nation-sized places stuck inside an even larger country. California, with nearly 40 million people, has the world’s fifth-largest economy; while Texas, approaching 30 million people, has the 10th-largest economy in the world. If you were presidents and your states were countries, they would be the 38th and 49th most populous nations on earth, respectively.

All of which gives California and Texas a common enemy: federal power.

For more than a century, whichever party is in power in Washington has seized more authority for the federal government. Recent presidents of all stripes—from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump—have ruled increasingly by executive order and other dictates.

Quite often, this increasingly dictatorial federal power has been aimed at the two of you.

By now, the drill is familiar. A Democratic administration will seek to impose policies that run contrary to Texas’s preferences on health care, the environment, criminal justice, or labor. And so Texas, often with some of its Southern state friends, fights and sues. That’s why, when you were state attorney general, Governor Abbott, you famously described your job as: “I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.”

Now that Republicans are in power, it’s California’s turn to be targeted for its progressive policies on climate, pollution, immigration, and health care. So now the state gets together with its Western (and Northeastern) friends and resists with lawsuits, more than two dozen against the Trump administration. This endless cycle of litigation appears to be escalating so fast that The New York Times called it a legal civil war.

All this fighting isn’t good for the country, or your states. It takes time and resources away from your states’ efforts to improve the lives of your citizens. And the resentments create internal divisions. Both of your states have movements seeking secession from the United States. And the fights with the federal government often inspire legal battles between your states and their cities.

The good news is: You don’t have to live like this! Together, the two of you can break the cycle.

That’s why you need a peace summit. The goals of the talks should be twofold. First, for both states to reaffirm their American-ness and commit to peaceful coexistence.

Second, for both states to work together to reduce federal power, and enhance the independence of states and their local communities.

This must go beyond reaffirming the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reserves for the states the powers not given to the federal government. California and Texas are now so big that they need more explicit autonomy, so that they can make more of their own decisions without interference.

The D.C. Mandarins will call this a revolution. So be it. California and Texas must declare that this is not the United States of 13 states and 3 million people that adopted the constitution in 1789. Our country of more than 320 million is simply too big to be governed centrally from Washington, much less by the sort of people—first-term U.S. senators and reality TV stars—who get elected president these days. Our states deserve to be left alone to pursue their own destinies, with the federal government existing for little more than social insurance and national defense.

Indeed, the best argument for greater state autonomy is a democratic one. Our country barely passes as a democracy at the federal level, with a presidency often won by the candidate who lost the popular vote, a U.S. Senate that makes a mockery of equal representation, and powerful bureaucracies that defy accountability.

You’ll have to figure out through negotiations what your joint agenda is. But conservative Texas will want to transfer more taxing and regulatory power back to the state and local level, while California will want more regulatory and financing power at the state level to pursue major progressive advances in climate change, health care, and immigration protection.

I realize this will be hard politically: You both will lose the political crutch of blasting the other state, and your voters will accuse you of compromising your principles. And Gov. Abbott might have to cool down his “Don’t California my Texas” rhetoric. (Though, c’mon, Greg, it ain’t so bad having all those In-N-Out Burgers and Trader Joe’s in your state, right?)

But a concerted effort to demand greater autonomy for both states—pursued jointly through politics, lawsuits, and even a constitutional amendment—would be healthy. You wouldn’t be able to blame the federal government for your own follies. Instead, California might actually have to confront how its oppressive environmental regulatory regime has made it impossible to build sufficient housing. And Texas might have to face how its lack of planning puts its people in flood plains that stand in the path of hurricanes.

And yes, I know you might miss the good times, when your states were politically aligned with the federal government. But admit it: Even those times weren’t easy, and your federal friends are never that friendly.

President Obama, after all, was little help to California during its housing and budget crises. And President Trump’s trade protectionism is causing headaches for Texas, which has invested heavily in infrastructure and companies that support international trade, especially with its neighbor, Mexico.

Your two states also have more common ground than you might think, even on immigration. While the federal government under Obama and Trump oversaw massive and inhumane deportation of your residents, your two states have invested in educating young immigrants, including the undocumented. It’s no accident that 350,000 of the estimated 800,000 “Dreamers” call one of your two states home.

To get the talks started, California should immediately revoke its counterproductive ban on government-funded travel to Texas. Yes, the Lone Star State has some awfully discriminatory laws on adoption by LGBTQ families, but how do you change minds if you can’t meet with people? And you two governors seem to have a civil relationship: You issued joint statements about natural disasters and the Dodgers-Astros World Series last fall.

Each of your states offers places where a visitor from the other would be comfortable. Why not start the talks in Austin, a chunk of California in the heart of Texas, where Apple employs more than 6,000 people? In California, I can see Gov. Brown taking his Texas counterpart to oil-rich Bakersfield, where you two could chat at Wool Growers, a terrific restaurant serving the food of the Basques—a people who know something about the fight for sovereignty.

I’m not expecting you to produce the political equivalent of “Pancho and Lefty,” the iconic joint album of California’s late Merle Haggard and Texas’s Willie Nelson. (Though bringing Willie to the summit is not a bad idea.) But developing a strong working relationship will be important if Washington totally melts down, and creates a constitutional crisis for the republic, as many fear. In that case, California and Texas will have to put things back together.

In the meantime, regular California-Texas summits would remind us that, while we will never be the most cohesive country, we are a collection of states that requires some unity.

And that, in a country as diverse as ours, there may be no agreement as powerful as an agreement to disagree.

The post Forget North and South Korea. California and Texas Really Need a Peace Summit. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

They were aboard the first American commercial jet to land there since the United States and USSR had imposed a Cold War “Ice Curtain” across the Bering Sea some 40 years earlier. Orr, a 26-year-old Siberian Yupik Alaska Native, grew up on the tip of Alaska’s St. Lawrence Island, the mountains of Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula visible on the western horizon. Her family’s shortwave radio sometimes picked up chatter in Russian. “That was the language of spies,” recalled Orr, who imagined Soviet frogmen splashing up on her village’s gravel beach.

The Alaska Airlines’ “Friendship Flight” helped melt the Ice Curtain by reuniting Alaska and Russia Native people separated for four decades. As soon as she made her way into Provideniya’s chaotic airport terminal that day, the first person Orr met was a member of her own St. Lawrence Qiwaghmii clan.

That flight and other headline-grabbing initiatives by citizen-diplomats to help end the Cold War launched decades of perilous but prolific progress. These citizen-led initiatives not only overcame a stalemate; they offered a durable model of grassroots international cooperation that could be useful around the world—and even in these familiar Northern climes, where the warming oceans have renewed geopolitical conflict over control of the Arctic.

The history of people-to-people connections here is an old one. After the Bering Land Bridge disappeared under the icy Bering Sea an estimated 18,000 years ago, indigenous peoples from Asia and North America plied the 55 miles between the Alaska and Russia in walrus-skin boats. These Inupiaq and Yupik people spoke common languages and shared similar subsistence cultures, with coastal residents surviving primarily on fish and marine mammals while interior Natives followed vast herds of reindeer, commonly known in Alaska as caribou.

The strait was the site of international cooperation during World War II, as the United States supplied nearly 8,000 Lend-Lease warplanes to assist the Soviet war effort. But soon after the war, Cold War suspicions froze those gestures of good will. The Soviets forcefully exiled Natives living on their own Big Diomede Island, replacing them with a military surveillance post aimed at Alaska.

In 1948, American FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, with the concurrence of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, decided national security interests outweighed those of the region’s Natives. The United States and USSR suspended a 10-year-old agreement permitting visa-free travel by Natives, replacing it with an Ice Curtain which sealed the border and isolated indigenous families on either side.

Darlene Pungowiyi Orr (left) of Alaska meets distant relatives from the Russian Far East village of Sireniki. Photo Courtesy of Darlene Orr.

For the next 40 years, Alaskans and Soviets eyed each other through rifle scopes and the cockpits of fighter jets. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, an Alaska-based U-2 spy plane drifted into Soviet airspace and was nearly shot down by Soviet MiG’s. In 1983, the Soviet military blew up a Korean civilian airliner in this same North Pacific neighborhood, killing all 269 on board.

By the 1980s, the last Alaska Natives to interact with long-lost relatives in the Soviet Far East wanted one final opportunity for reunification before passing from the scene. Their quest coincided with Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power. Unlike his predecessors, Gorbachev encouraged interactions with the West, burnishing his image as an enlightened reformist.

But Alaska Natives faced intransigence from their own national government. President Ronald Reagan resisted people-to-people overtures as incompatible with his “peace through strength” foreign policy.

So average Alaskans joined the campaign to reunify Bering Strait Natives. Business and civic promoters also jumped at the prospect of contacts with the mysterious Soviet Union after 40 years of isolation.

A Nome realtor engaged in “balloon diplomacy,” attempting to launch weather balloons across the strait carrying goodie bags and messages of friendship. A Juneau musician led 67 Alaska Natives and other performers singing and dancing their way across the USSR to promote peace.

In 1987, a California endurance athlete swam the 2.5 miles between Alaska’s Little Diomede Island and Russian Big Diomede in 38-degree seas in nothing but a swimsuit, goggles, and cap to highlight Cold War tensions. A medical doctor born to glitterati Hollywood parents returned to his Alaska Native roots to dedicate his career to reuniting Bering Sea Natives by addressing their common health challenges.

These efforts finally won the blessing of both national governments and launched decades of chaotic but often productive interactions in business, culture, science, and education, with thousands of Alaskans and Russians crossing the International Date Line on regular flights by Alaska Airlines and other air carriers. Nearly 60,000 Russians learned western business practices in training centers set up by Alaskans across the Russian Far East. Enticed by Alaska’s guarantee of in-state tuition, more Russian students attended the University of Alaska Anchorage than any other American university.

Alaskans helped form dozens of Russian Rotary Clubs that improved care to elderly pensioners hit hard by the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse. Alaska and Russia communities rushed to establish sister cities to strengthen civic and commercial ties. And scores of Alaskans and Russians married, settling in each other’s countries and advancing cultural understanding.

Endurance swimmer Lynne Cox approaches a snowy beach on Soviet Big Diomede Island after becoming the first person to swim across the Bering Strait from Alaska’s Little Diomede Island in 1987. Photo by Claire Richardson.

With the dawn of the 21st century, relations cooled across the strait as well as between Moscow and Washington. Russia’s rip-the-bandage-off transition to a market economy under Boris Yeltsin was too chaotic for many U.S. companies. Vladimir Putin’s subsequent rise to power was initially welcomed for stabilizing the economy, but as his regime restricted the operations of international companies and non-profits and infringed on human rights, many westerners ceased their involvement with the country.

Today in the Bering Strait air service is limited and visits are burdened by bureaucracy and high costs, so contacts are rare. Relations between countries at the highest levels also have deteriorated as tit-for-tat sanctions, expulsion of diplomats, and crackdowns on “foreign agents” harken back to the Cold War.

The year 2017 was the 150th anniversary of America’s purchase of Alaska from Russia. At many events marking the occasion, Alaskans said they remained inspired by the vision of William Seward, President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, who consummated the Alaska purchase. Seward, a bold internationalist, believed Alaska could advance a U.S.-Russian relationship and strengthen America’s standing in the world.

Fulfilling Seward’s vision of U.S.-Russia cooperation could start with the natural affinity between citizens of the Far North regardless of national borders. Alaskans and nearby Russians are challenged by common problems—climate, geography, transportation, indifference from our national capitals—for which common solutions can work.

That’s especially the case among the indigenous peoples who struggle on both sides of the strait to preserve traditional languages and culture, combat substance abuse, and scratch out a subsistence way of life endangered by climate change. A 1989 U.S.-Soviet “visa-free” agreement for travel by Alaska and Russia Natives remains in place, but contacts suffer from costly and irregular transportation.

Managing a rapidly changing Arctic is the area of greatest potential cooperation between our countries. Nearly half the world’s Arctic falls within Russia, and the United States is an Arctic nation only because of Alaska. As Russia beefs up its fleet of some 40 ice-breaking vessels and opens scores of mothballed Soviet-era Arctic military bases, the United States and Russia should expand joint efforts for search and rescue, environmentally sound resource development, and scientific research.

Three decades ago, Alaskan and Russian citizen-diplomats melted the formidable Cold War Ice Curtain separating them in the face of significant resistance. Many were branded kooks, communists or worse. Juneau musician Dixie Belcher was summoned to the Alaska legislature to explain her suspected ties to the KGB, while Alaska Gov. Steve Cowper was criticized for cozying up to “reds.”

Darlene Orr was so inspired by that day-long visit to Provideniya that she mastered the Russian language and returned to the Russian Far East 13 times, dedicating her career to researching Native languages and native plants. On one trip, she ignored warnings about visiting restricted areas, dressed herself as an average Russian, and spent a long day on the coast harvesting seaweed and mushrooms.

“It was worth any risk to me to visit the shoreline where my ancestors had walked,” she said.

Inspired with courage and persistence like Darlene Orr, Alaska and Russia citizen-diplomats overcame enormous obstacles to transform history.

The post When Alaskan and Russian Native People Thawed the Cold War’s ‘Ice Curtain’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Washington’s foreign policy establishment is an imperial court of a particularly Byzantine kind, and when it comes to Russia and certain other areas of policy, the court’s insular, conformist, and bipartisan consensus has so crushed free discussion, essential critiques have been banished to the fringes. No Washington analyst or commentator who values his or her career, and wants to be recognized as residing within the narrow confines of mainstream American “nationalism,” is likely to have the guts to challenge settled wisdom when it comes to U.S.-Russia relations.

Enter Trump. The candidate may be a professional TV clown, with buffoonish and dangerous opinions on a wide array of issues, but when it comes to Russia, his views merit serious consideration.

The U.S. media obsesses over Trump’s rather grotesque personal admiration for Vladimir Putin, and the authoritarian, macho, tough guy image that both seek to portray. But this focus allows the media and foreign policy analysts to avoid addressing the actual content of Trump’s broader Russia policy.

Perhaps that’s not surprising, given how the U.S. media and commentariat have long conflated Russia with Putin. Russia’s behavior is often portrayed as springing from the personal whims of a brutal dictator, rather than reflecting an overwhelming consensus among Russian policy elites and society—a consensus with deep roots in Russian nationalism, strategy, and Russian history. Of course, that does not make Russian external policies correct. It does, however, make them enduring, coherent, and largely predictable. They are unlikely to change significantly even after Putin retires from the scene.

Russian actions found objectionable in Washington are most often supported by all significant factions of the Russian opposition, who can be more nationalist than Putin. But challenging “Putin” may seem an agreeable and cost-free occupation for Washington’s policy elites; challenging Russia has a rather more challenging ring to it, for anyone who knows history.

These days, Washington policy elites rarely articulate reasons why continued confrontation with Russia is in the interest of ordinary Americans. This goes back to a collective failure to answer a question set by the realist thinker Owen Harries, former editor of The National Interest: that if the Cold War with Soviet Communism was indeed an essential and epochal struggle requiring the transformation of U.S. institutions and the massive mobilisation of U.S. resources, then why did the end of the Cold War and the Communist threat not naturally also lead to a transformation of institutions and a demobilisation of resources?

For Trump, the failure to adjust the U.S.-Russia relationship to a new reality serves the entrenched policy establishment, not the American people. The pillars of Trump’s retrenched nationalism (which he shares with far-right European political factions like Marine Le Pen’s French National Front) rest on what he claims are the real interests of ordinary U.S. citizens: restrictions on immigration; protection against terrorism, which threatens the lives of Western citizens in a way that the Russian government has not the slightest desire to do; and the management of trade relations so as to protect the jobs and living standards of ordinary people. On these issues Russia is either irrelevant or an ally.

Foreign policy and national security elites, meanwhile, have become so bound up with a continuation of Cold War institutions that abandoning them would amount to a mortal threat to their personal and institutional interests, and so the necessary structures of hostility and confrontation have to be continued. By this I don’t mean to impute conscious individual cynicism and opportunism to most U.S. foreign policy experts. Rather, the policy elites’ attitudes towards Russia reflect beliefs deeply entrenched in American culture. These collective beliefs have a grip so powerful that they can lead people to act against their interests, and even (as in war) against their survival.

In the case of the U.S. policy elites, what followed the end of the Cold War can be summed up in the curious trajectory of Paul Wolfowitz and his beliefs. In 1992, Wolfowitz, then serving as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the George H.W. Bush administration (under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney), together with his assistant “Scooter” Libby, wrote an advisory calling for the U.S. to prevent the emergence of any potential rival, not only on the world stage but in any one region of the world, and be prepared to use force unilaterally to this end. In other words, the USA should be the sole and permanent hegemon in every part of the world.

Leaked to The New York Times, this document alarmed much of the U.S. policy establishment and commentariat, who wasted no time in pointing out that no country in history had achieved this sort of hegemony, that it would impose a massive burden on U.S. resources, that it would conjure up enemies who otherwise would have no reason to be hostile to the USA, and that the fading of the global Communist threat made such hegemony less necessary than ever. In effect, the plan amounted to U.S. global primacy for the sake of U.S. global primacy and was promptly disowned by the Bush administration itself.

Remarkably, in subsequent years the basic principles of the Wolfowitz/Libby paper were gradually and quietly adopted as strategy without serious debate by both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. After the overwhelming U.S. victories in the first Gulf War and in NATO’s Balkans campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, by the late 1990s both Republican and Democratic foreign policy elites were lulled into thinking that the American “hyperpower” could have its way in a newly “unipolar” world with relatively little effort. And America’s civic nationalism has always believed passionately that U.S. power in the world is a force for good, morally justified, and welcomed by all people of good will in the world.

If Hillary Clinton wins in November, these principles look to be the guiding light of U.S. foreign policy in the next administration as well. Barack Obama, by his own confession a cautious realist at heart, was only able to slightly moderate this approach to the world, with its deep roots in the old nationalist (“exceptionalist” if you like) belief in America’s role, duty, and right to lead the world towards freedom and progress.

This approach led to the bipartisan U.S. strategy of extending NATO, first into Eastern Europe and then into the former USSR itself, contrary to promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev in return for Soviet agreement to German reunification. This was accompanied by the creation of GUUAM—a bloc of Georgia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova that was supposed to erode Russian influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus and replace it with U.S. leadership. (It should be noted, by the way, that Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan are open dictatorships, with Uzbekistan widely understood as an exceptionally repressive one.)

At no stage was there any serious attempt to address the obvious question of why Washington, after two centuries of completely ignoring these former Soviet regions, had suddenly developed a vital national interest in them; or whether there was anything that ordinary Americans could conceivably gain from the inevitable confrontations with Russia that would result from acting on this new interest. Instead of seeking to answer these questions, let alone raise them, Washington’s establishment has engaged in intellectual and moral sleight of hand: the Russian reaction to U.S. encroachment into Russia’s centuries-old influence in its near-abroad has been exploited to create an image of Russian expansionism and revisionism. Washington’s own expansionist policies have thus been sold to the U.S. public as necessary to defend the USA against Russian aggression—even though since the end of the Cold War there has been no recorded Russian threat against the U.S. homeland or its citizens.

Russian actions may have been correct or incorrect in particular cases (thus incorrect on the annexation of Crimea but obviously correct in opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq and intervention in Libya), but they have been overwhelmingly reactive to those of the USA.

None of this should be read as a plea to vote for Donald Trump. Quite apart from his odious personal character, in the area of climate change alone— by far the greatest real challenge facing America, along with the rest of humanity—Trump’s stance, like that of most Republicans, should disqualify him from any high office. But international co-operation on climate change and any other important international issue (such as the fight against ISIS) depends on some measure of international harmony. And if the bipartisan Washington strategic consensus under a second President Clinton continues to counteract international co-operation by provoking serious crises with Russia (and China, for that matter), then Trump the clown will have had the last laugh.

The post Don’t Laugh, But Trump May Be Right on Russia appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That no other big news out of Cuba seemed conceivable is a sign of how tediously stuck the narrative of the U.S.-Cuba telenovela has seemed in recent years. Our Cold War antagonism with the Castro brothers has been a blend of Waiting for Godot and Bill Murray’s classic Groundhog Day. Until Wednesday, that is, when the bold headlines I clicked on announced the restoration of diplomatic ties with Cuba.

The unexpected and historic deal between presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro, brokered by Canada and the Vatican, was announced in Washington with unmitigated candor. President Obama conceded that our outdated approach toward Cuba these past five decades has failed to advance U.S. interests (and this is putting it mildly). It isn’t often you hear a political leader, let alone a president, basically say: “This thing that we’ve been doing forever isn’t working.” Bravo.

The policy was more than a failure. It was the glaring exception to America’s self-assured, capitalistic, beacon-on-the-hill approach to the world. By preserving an embargo and travel bans against the island all these years (which Obama still needs congressional action to lift), we have prevented Cuba from confronting the full shock and awe of America’s seductive commercial and cultural influence.

This was out of character. We don’t shy away from engaging Communist dictatorships halfway around the world—like China and Vietnam—because we don’t like their system. On the contrary, we seek to engage them more precisely because we believe, correctly, that American culture is the best antidote for their people’s lack of freedom. Even during the apartheid regime in South Africa, in the 1980s, conservative Republicans were advocating for “constructive engagement” with that nation, to have American companies, goods, and cultural imports undermine an unjust system. And Cuba, with its close proximity and historical ties, would be far more susceptible to this theory.

Iran and North Korea, like Cuba until this week, are members of the pariah nation club and face sanctions meant to isolate them. But those sanctions are different. They aren’t imposed by us alone simply because we don’t like their domestic political systems. Rather, they’re imposed by a group of countries concerned about those nations’ efforts to destabilize their regions and develop weapons of mass destruction. Cuba long ago ceased falling into that category.

As it happened, the greatest beneficiary of the longstanding U.S. embargo intended to harm the odious Castro regime in Havana has been none other than the odious Castro regime. So long as the rulers of the tropical Gulag could portray themselves as the victims of the vengeful imperio yanquí, they had a convenient scapegoat for all their revolution’s shortcomings and excesses. The sanctions have helped them keep the island cut off from the outside world and its pesky trade winds of information, online connectivity, and democratizing influences. It’s not surprising that in the past, when a thaw in relations appeared imminent, it was Cuba that repeatedly sabotaged progress at the 11th hour—most recently in 2009, when the regime first arrested Alan Gross, the USAID contractor charged with spying (and released as part of this week’s deal).

For the Castro brothers, who have bedeviled 11 U.S. presidents, playing victim to the American imperialists while being propped up by foreign sugar daddies has provided them with the best of both worlds. Until now. One reason they are agreeing to end the Cold War with el imperio is that they have run out of sugar daddies. Venezuela, which succeeded the Soviet Union as the Castros’ main benefactor, is now a basket case, devastated by years of mismanagement and plummeting oil prices. Meanwhile, modest economic reforms introduced by the Havana regime have failed to accomplish much. So the Castros are recognizing that the game is up, and that things need to change, especially if they want their revolution to outlive them.

But it won’t. Absent the Cold War, Marxism is doomed in Cuba.

Cuba’s people will be the main beneficiaries of more engagement with the United States, but normal relations with Cuba also will allow the United States to reset ties with the rest of Latin America. For far too long, partly as a consequence of it being an extension of Florida electoral politics, Cuban policy has claimed a disproportionate amount of attention in Washington. Cuba has been a thorn in the side of our relations with the rest of the hemisphere, providing people from Mexico to Argentina with a pretext to view the United States with suspicion. Even friends of the United States in the hemisphere have long been puzzled, and frustrated, by the extent to which Washington obsesses over the small Caribbean island at the expense of a broader strategic engagement with Latin America.

The consolidation of democracy in the Western Hemisphere has been a welcome trend in recent decades. Once Cuba can no longer claim to be a victim of U.S. imperialism, the ability of the continent’s revolutionary left to threaten this democratic consolidation will further recede. It should become easier for Latin America’s democracies to start pressing Havana to live up to its regional commitments to respect human and civil rights–since it will no longer come across as piling onto America’s bullying. And if that doesn’t secure freedoms on the island, the airlifting of Coca-Cola, Hollywood movies, and smartphones (hello Facebook!) should do the job.

The post Did Obama Just Reset the Entire Western Hemisphere? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Unfortunately, the people on the receiving end of those assurances aren’t always convinced.

Last week’s “postponement” of a state visit to Washington by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is just the latest reminder: In each of the major emerging democracies, suspicions of American intentions run deep, no matter how frequently or insistently we try to dispel them. For anyone on the alert for neo-imperial plots, Edward Snowden’s revelations of NSA surveillance activities in Brazil confirmed every suspicion of Yankees being up to no good. While Rousseff herself may have hoped to salvage the visit, the reaction among the base of her own party and members of Congress would have made going forward an act of audacious political folly, according to Brazilian commentators, whatever the strategic arguments for or against.

On the face of it, the two vibrant continental-sized republics of Brazil and the United States have much in common: a legacy of immigration, racial diversity, agricultural prowess, a popular culture venerated around the world, a tradition of global sports dominance. But the cancellation and ensuing disappointment feel all too familiar. Every American administration identifies Brazil as an obvious candidate for improved relations before a rockier reality sets in.

Countries that see themselves as leaders of their regions can often find themselves in conflict. Brazil, the only nation outside of North America and Europe with a successful manufacturer of commercial airliners, is a nascent industrial power often eager to embrace protectionist trade policies. It blocked American designs to extend NAFTA into South America (the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas), opting instead to protect the Mercosur trading bloc it dominates. As a farming superpower, Brazil bridles at what it considers the unfair advantages that American farmers get in exporting their goods. And as a leading member of the Nonaligned Movement, Brazil often joins in opposition to the U.S. agenda in institutions like the U.N. Security Council. This in turn has made Washington wary endorsing Brazil for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

As document after salacious document created a stir earlier this month, Washington insisted that Brazilians had nothing to fear from NSA activity. Yet most Brazilians had a hard time seeing how U.S. eavesdropping on the conversations of presidential advisers or hacking into supercomputers at Petrobras, the state oil company, had helped “not only to protect our nation but protect other people in the world, including Brazilians,” as John Kerry claimed on a visit to Brasilia.

Neither a subsequent meeting between the Brazilian foreign minister and National Security Adviser Susan Rice nor a pair of long conversations between the two presidents was enough to sooth Brazilian indignation. “I want to know everything they have regarding Brazil,” Dilma said. “The word ‘everything’ is very comprehensive. It means all. Every bit. In English, ‘everything.’” The White House eventually expressed “understanding” and “regret” over Brazil’s concerns, (though not over what provoked them). But there was never any chance that Obama or anyone else would order a major change to the way the U.S. intelligence community does business just to keep the visit on the schedule.

For many in Washington, the “know everything” conditions Dilma was laying out for her trip were both preposterous and presumptuous. Skeptics took it as confirmation of their view that Brazil is more interested in grandstanding than in playing a serious role on the world stage. They viewed it as one more example of Brazil’s left-wing leaders using reckless foreign-policy gestures—befriending Iran, enabling Chavista excess in Venezuela—as a means of placating domestic supporters unhappy with the government’s lack of radicalism on economic policy.

Wary Brazilians, meanwhile, took the NSA revelations as confirmation of their worst suspicions of the United States. Former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva held it up as yet more proof that “the rich countries are not ready to accept the rise of emerging countries” and accused the United States of “committing a crime against democracy.” Members of the PT, Dilma’s left-wing party, saw in it echoes of Brazil’s dictatorship, which jailed and tortured many PT figures (including Dilma herself) and at points received Washington’s support. Most unsettling of all may have been the snooping into Petrobras, the state-owned oil behemoth: Outlandish fears of foreign plots to steal the country’s resources—oil reserves, minerals, even trees in the Amazon—have a remarkably strong hold in Brazil.

None of this changes the fact that for all the friction, Brazil and the United States have a huge amount to gain from a good relationship—in terms of economic growth, in terms of cultural and educational exchange, in terms of regional and global politics. For Washington, Brazil’s growing middle class represents an important new market, its oil and biofuels stable sources of energy, its formula of democratic development in a large and diverse society a model we admire and want to see replicated.

Yet when it comes to capturing that potential, the old suspicions still prevail. Brazil’s desire for U.S. support for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council runs into doubts about Brasilia’s reliability. The United States’ interest in Brazilian markets runs into wariness of foreign competition. The departing American ambassador, Tom Shannon, is one of Washington’s most highly regarded diplomats and has labored valiantly to build cooperation and mutual trust through a flurry of lower-profile programs; yet he spent much of his first year in Brasilia under the shadow of Manning and WikiLeaks and leaves under the shadow of Snowden and Fantástico.

It may be true that the short-term costs of the cancellation are higher for Brazil than they are for the United States. Still, the persistence of these old suspicions, in Brazil and elsewhere, has unsettling long-term implications. We root for the “emerging democratic powers” because we hope they will become our partners in a post-American world that retains the best characteristics of American-led liberal order.

And yet: If not Brazil, if not India, if not South Africa, who will join us in working to sustain it?

The post Be Worried About Brazil’s Tantrum appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.