PLUS: LEAVING AFGHANISTAN

FALL 2021

Who
Controls
the Seas?
JERRY HENDRIX on how China
built the world’s biggest fleet
ALEXANDER WOOLEY on how
U.S. shipbuilding can recover
and ELISABETH BRAW on the
hidden costs of free shipping
 Introducing a podcast about
the people working to resolve some
of the world’s toughest conflicts.

the
Negotiators
Conflicts don’t just get resolved on their own.
Most are settled through a grueling process of give
and take, usually behind closed doors. On the new
podcast The Negotiators, Foreign Policy is teaming
A PODCAST FROM
up with Doha Debates to put listeners in the room. FOREIGN POLICY
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Each episode will feature one mediator, diplomat, or DEBATES
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Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

 26 European Values
Are Strengthening
CAROLINE DE GRUYTER

28 The Balkans Don’t Believe

FA L L 2 0 2 1
the EU Anymore
B E N JA M I N H A D DA D
AND DAMIR MARUSIC
Arguments
7 America Isn’t Features
Exceptional Anymore Float, Move, and Fight
MINA AL- ORAIBI
30
How the U.S. Navy lost
Now the U.S. Must Help the shipbuilding race.
9
the Afghans Left Behind ALEXANDER WO OLEY

ELISE LABOTT
36 Sea Power Makes
11 The Left Needs More Great Powers
Than Anti-Interventionism A country’s rise is directly related
to the size of its maritime forces.
M E L P AV L I K
J E R RY H E N D R I X
13 Don’t Abandon
42 Lost at Sea
Afghanistan’s Economy, Too
What the Ever Given debacle reveals
ADAM TO OZE about our dependence on shipping.

14 Malaysia’s Citizenship E L I S A B E T H B R AW

Laws Are Sexist

E M I LY D I N G Review
16 The World Doesn’t Want 73 State of Emergency
Beijing’s Fighter Jets India’s First Dictatorship:
RICHARD ABOULAFIA The Emergency, 1975-77
S U M I T G A N G U LY
18 The Clash of Ideas With
China Is Inevitable 77 Private Finance, Public Power
N AT H A N L E V I N E Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman
and the American Way of Power
20 Ghana’s Anti-Gay Bill J O N AT H A N L E V Y
Will Destroy Lives
CHIBUIHE OBI ACHIMBA 82 America, Indicted
Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and
22 Zuma’s Arrest Was Renewal and After the Apocalypse:
a Victory for Rule of Law America’s Role in a World Transformed

EUSEBIUS McKAISER MICHAEL HIRSH

24 Haiti’s Official Language

Shouldn’t Be French 101 Quiz
NINA GOLDMAN
B E N J A M I N H E B B L E T H WA I T E

Cover illustration by TIMO LENZEN FALL 2021 1

FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS
Chibuihe Obi Achimba is Mina Al-Oraibi is a columnist at
a Nigerian writer and activist FOREIGN POLICY and the editor in
whose writing has been published chief of the Abu Dhabi-based
in the New York Times and the newspaper the National. She is a
Harvard Review. He is the founding member of the World Economic Forum’s
editor of Dgëku, a literary magazine International Media Council and was
for queer Africans. named a Yale World Fellow in 2015.

Emily Ding is a freelance journalist Nina Goldman is a deputy

based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, copy editor at FOREIGN POLICY.
and Berlin. She covers migration, Before joining FP in 2017, she
culture, and the environment. worked as a copy editor at the Hill
and the Memphis Commercial
Appeal.

Jerry Hendrix is a vice president Eusebius McKaiser is a political

at the Telemus Group. A retired analyst based in Johannesburg.
U.S. Navy captain, he is the author He is the author of Run Racist
of To Provide and Maintain a Navy Run: Journeys Into the Heart of
and Theodore Roosevelt’s Naval Racism and the former host of
Diplomacy. a political radio show at South
Africa’s Radio 702.

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2
A SPECIAL REPORT BY FP ANALYTICS, WITH SUPPORT FROM MICROSOFT

Fostering Peace
and Cooperation
in Cyberspace

AN AGENDA FOR THE 5TH DOMAIN

Leading thinkers in government, academia, and

industry discuss how the international community
can secure and defend cyberspace.
 A SPECIAL REPORT BY FP ANALYTICS,

PART ONE RESEARCH PART TWO

What’s The Cost An Action

at Stake
As cyberspace has become
the modern domain of human
productivity, it has also become
a place of conflict and risk.
Cyberattacks increasingly
threaten key infrastructure, and
the damage can be catastrophic.
Our essayists explain why a new
domain demands new rules to
ensure responsible behavior in
cyberspace.
of Inaction
As digital connectivity
grows, so does the global
attack surface. This special
report from Foreign Policy
Analytics finds an urgent
need to establish new norms
of responsible behavior
in cyberspace to mitigate
the mounting costs of
cyberattacks and risks to
human security.
Agenda
An effective global strategy for a
rules-based order in cyberspace
must ensure digital peace
and security for everyone, but
the path is not an easy one. In
Part Two, our thought leaders
explore ways to surmount these
geopolitical roadblocks.

“We have only scratched the

surface of what is possible in this
new domain of human activity—
cyberspace. In the next 10 years,
BRAD we will see half of the world’s
SMITH population connect to the internet
President of
for the first time. This alone will
Microsoft open a world of possibilities for
social and economic advancement.”
WITH SUPPORT FROM MICROSOFT

GLOBAL THOUGHT LEADERS

FP Analytics and Microsoft have convened the world’s foremost authorities
on cybersecurity and geopolitics to assess and explain how the international
community can achieve cooperation, peace, and security in cyberspace.

“There is no longer “At this moment “States carry

any doubt that of upheaval and
renewal, we must
a primary
cyberattacks can resist internet responsibility
inflict catastrophic fragmentation for maintaining
damage and and defend the international
trigger a wider and universal, open web.
An ambitious and security, including
more devastating in cyberspace.
inclusive approach
military conflict. to global digital However, as digital
Whether we governance, grounded technologies
can avoid that in human rights, will
outcome will help us build the permeate every
be one of the better, safer, more aspect of our
great tests of
empowering digital societies, states
world we need to
the international meet this moment and
cannot shoulder
system in the 21st those challenges still the burden alone.”
century.” to come.” 
IZUMI
TIM NAKAMITSU
MADELEINE BERNERS-LEE U.N. Undersecretary-
K. ALBRIGHT Inventor of the web, General of Disarmament
64th U.S. Secretary co-founder of the World Affairs
of State Wide Web Foundation

SecuringOurDigitalFuture.com
FROM THE EDITOR
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN TROUBLED BY the phrase “war on
terror,” partly because it revolves around an amor-
phous enemy. Twenty years after 9/11, it is now clear
that the global war on terrorism, by its very formula-
tion, was not only unwinnable but was also designed
to go on forever. Perhaps that’s why these wars won’t
end simply by Washington deciding to up and leave.
With the Taliban now returned to power in Afghan-
istan, FP’s Mina Al-Oraibi writes from her perch in
Abu Dhabi that political leaders across the Middle
East feel abandoned (Page 7). These leaders have
come to the realization, Al-Oraibi writes, that the
United States “can no longer claim to be the ‘leader
of the free world.’” Washington may still have a role to
play, if it can become a team player: FP’s Adam Tooze
outlines how the world can save the Afghan economy
(Page 13), and FP’s Elise Labott makes the case for a
massive humanitarian effort in Afghanistan (Page 9).
While polls show that most Americans disapprove
of the way in which the United States withdrew from
Afghanistan, the reality is that a majority supported
getting out. There’s an unmistakable element of
fatigue among the American public for fighting wars.
A new generation of young Americans have no living
memory of 9/11. Meanwhile, the Iraq War was also a
colossal failure, one that cost the United States both
blood and treasure. U.S. President Joe Biden will keep
reminding Americans that so-called forever wars had
become unpopular and, more importantly, untenable.
If that is true, then a robust discussion needs to be had
about how Washington can prevent new and emerg-
ing terrorist threats—including cyberattacks—from
targeting the United States and how counterterrorism
can become smarter, cheaper, and more effective.
The United States has prevented foreign-based
attacks on its soil since 9/11. Long may that continue.
Beyond terrorism, though, there are major challenges
for the Biden administration moving forward, includ-
ing building a global alliance in the fight against climate
change, strengthening the rules-based international
order, and finding ways to both collaborate and com-
pete with a rising China. Leaving Afghanistan may
have the effect of focusing Washington’s attention on
these other issues.
To that end, we decided to dive into a subject that
doesn’t get enough attention these days: naval power.
Who will rule the seas? Why does it even matter? These
are important questions because centuries of his-
tory—from ancient Carthage to the British Empire
and the present day—have shown that a nation’s
6
rise and fall are directly linked to its maritime might
and savvy. By that metric, the future may already
be Beijing’s. As Jerry Hendrix writes (Page 36), the
United States has made a series of errors in the last
few decades that have led to it falling behind China,
which now has the world’s largest navy. When it comes
to the seas, size matters.
The latest assessments show that China could
amass enough of a naval advantage to invade Taiwan
in the next six years, sparking a wider conflict with
the United States. What can Washington do between
now and then? Alexander Wooley bravely attempts to
answer that question, with recommendations for how
to rethink military funding allocations and how to cre-
ate better and longer-term shipbuilding plans (Page 30).
Building up one’s naval capabilities isn’t only about
war. As FP’s Elisabeth Braw reminds us through the
story of the megafreighter Ever Given, which was
stranded in the Suez Canal for nearly a week in March,
global commerce is increasingly dependent on ship-
ping (Page 42). The countries with the largest and best
distributed fleets end up wielding the most power.
Power, and how it is wielded, remains a constant
theme in our pages. We begin this issue, as always,
with our signature article type: the Argument. In the
next few pages, you’ll encounter viewpoints with
which you may agree—or vehemently disagree. But
after an eventful few months for the world, we hope
you’ll find each one of these Arguments forward-
looking and thought-provoking.
As ever,
ORIANA FENWICK ILLUSTRATION
Ravi Agrawal
 ARGUMENTS
ASIA | CHINA | MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA | AMERICAS | EUROPE
U N I T E D S TAT E S

Afghans who couldn’t reach

the airport to evacuate watch
a military transport plane
take off in Kabul on Aug. 23.

s the last U.S. soldier overseas military engagement has

LEAVING AFGHANISTAN

A pulled out of Afghani-

stan in the dead of night
on Aug. 30 and the Tali-
been a driving force for U.S. politicians.
Although Obama was able to declare
an end to the Iraq War in 2011 as pres-
MARCUS YAM/LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

ban walked into Hamid ident, he also ordered a U.S. military

America Isn’t Karzai International Airport, many in
the Arab world were looking on and
Exceptional wondering if similar scenes would one
day be seen at Baghdad International
Anymore Airport or elsewhere in the region.
Since then-U.S. presidential candi-
date Barack Obama ran on a platform
of “ending the war in Iraq” in 2008,
By Mina Al-Oraibi popular domestic support for ending
intervention, named Operation Inher-
ent Resolve, to defeat the Islamic State
there in 2014.
It appears that resolve is now lacking.
Former U.S. President Donald
Trump and his successor, Joe Biden,
decided that maintaining a military
presence of approximately 2,500
soldiers in Afghanistan, providing

FALL 2021 7
essential air cover and intelligence to
the Afghan army, and supporting the
Afghan government were no longer
necessary to meet U.S. national secu-
rity interests. Therefore, both their
administrations worked on withdraw-
ing from the country. On Aug. 26, the
Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan
mounted one of its deadliest attacks,
killing at least 182 people, including 13
U.S. service members.
The Arab world has witnessed the
catastrophic fallout from the way the
U.S. withdrawal was dismally imple-
mented. A number of Arab countries
were directly involved in evacuation
efforts. The United Arab Emirates
is temporarily hosting thousands
of Afghans until they are resettled in
third countries. Kuwait, Bahrain, and
Qatar were all important transit points
for evacuees, and Iraq received a small
number of Afghan students.
Among policymakers in the Middle
East, there is now an understanding that
the United States is no longer invested
in maintaining stability abroad—unless
its narrowly defined national interests
are directly impacted.
Biden has publicly addressed the
humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan
with a determination that his deci-
sion—and how it was implemented—
was right. In remarks on Aug. 16, Biden
said, “Our only vital national interest
in Afghanistan remains today what it
has always been: preventing a terror-
ist attack on [the] American homeland.
I’ve argued for many years that our
mission should be narrowly focused
on counterterrorism, not counterinsur-
gency or nation-building.” That mes-
sage was heard loud and clear in the
Arab world. In countries like Libya and
Yemen, where conflicts continue and
nation-building is crucial, Washington
has been disengaged for a number of
years. However, that disengagement
is now official policy.
Yet counterterrorism cannot be con-
fined to targeting terrorists through
drone strikes. For decades, counter-
8
terrorism officials and experts have
argued that terrorist organizations
flourish in areas that are devoid of gov-
ernance or in societies where a greater
sense of injustice prevails. Syria and
Iraq are prime examples of how the
Islamic State was able to establish itself
due to internal governance failures and
a U.S. disinterest in tackling core issues
in both countries. This was seen after
the United States’ initial involvement
in the Iraqi government’s setup post-
2003 and in support of Syria’s opposi-
tion after 2011.
Washington’s allies and foes in the
Middle East are taking note. From the
threat of terrorist groups like the Islamic
State to emboldened militias like Hez-
bollah, U.S. allies can no longer rely on
Washington. As U.S. officials question
some countries’ choices—Egypt, Iraq,
and Saudi Arabia strengthening ties
with China, for example—they must
understand that Beijing comes across
as a more reliable partner in the same
way that Russia proved a more reli-
able partner to Syrian leader Bashar al-
Assad, ensuring his survival.
The U.S. absence from the Baghdad
Conference for Cooperation and Part-
nership on Aug. 28—attended by Emi-
rati Vice President and Prime Minister
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Mak-
toum, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah
al-Sisi, and French President Emmanuel
Macron, among others—further high-
lighted Washington’s political absence.
With a disengaged United States and
a lack of European consensus on filling
that void, the establishment of systems
of government in the shape of Western
liberal democracies no longer makes
sense. After two decades of promoting
democracy as the leading system of gov-
ernment, the view from the Middle East
is the United States has abdicated that
rhetorical position.
And that may not be a bad thing.
Effective government should be the
goal rather than governments formed
simply through the ballot box that don’t
deliver for their people. As the fall of
Afghanistan captured the world’s atten-
tion, another major change of govern-
ment was taking place in Tunisia. After
months of a failed COVID-19 response
and years of corruption and weak gov-
ernance complaints, Tunisian President
Kais Saied dismissed the prime minis-
ter and suspended parliament in July.
Although there is wide popular sup-
port for Saied, who was elected with
more than 70 percent of the popular
vote, U.S. officials have been making
demands of Saied to reinstate parlia-
ment, without much accountability for
the legislative body’s actions. It is jar-
ring to see the U.S. government issuing
statements demanding Tunisia’s dem-
ocratically elected president adhere to
Washington’s preferred version of gov-
ernance while also making deals with
the Taliban.
The juxtaposition may not be obvious
from the United States, but it certainly is
in the Arab world, where it is perceived
as a glaring double standard. U.S. offi-
cials cannot claim a moral authority in
the Arab world while standing straight-
faced and declaring the scenes around
Kabul’s airport were justified.
There were already suspicions in the
Arab world about the Biden adminis-
tration because of its officials’ previous
track records, such as Biden’s position
as a senator championing the parti-
tion of Iraq in 2006 and U.S. Secretary
of State Antony Blinken playing a role
in the Obama administration’s refusal
to intervene after the Assad regime used
chemical weapons in 2013.
A number of officials in the Biden
administration—including Blinken,
National Security Advisor Jake Sulli-
van, CIA Director William Burns, U.S.
Agency for International Development
Administrator Samantha Power, and
Biden himself—were all at the fore-
front of making decisions during the
Obama administration that contrib-
uted to mayhem in Syria, Libya, and
Yemen. It was current Deputy Secretary
of State Wendy Sherman who was the
Obama administration’s main contact

point with Arab ambassadors and senior
officials, assuring them they would be
consulted on any deal with Iran while
Sullivan and Burns were holding secret
meetings with the Iranians.
During those years, extremists
across the region were emboldened.
The Islamic State seized up to a third
of Iraq and vast territories in Syria,
Iranian-backed militias were formal-
ized in Iraq based on an agreement
with Washington, and Libya disinte-
grated into civil war after Washing-
ton decided to “lead from behind” in
the wake of Libyan dictator Muammar
al-Qaddafi’s fall. All this happened on
the United States’ watch.
Abandoning strategic allies and vul-
nerable civilians is deciding to give up
any pretense of being an exceptional
nation. Political leaders in the Middle
East are learning that lesson, as are
civic activists.
“American influence around the
world is not a function of military force
alone,” Obama said in 2010 after ending
combat missions in Iraq. “We must use
all elements of our power—including
our diplomacy, our economic strength,
and the power of America’s example—
to secure our interests and stand by our
allies. And we must project a vision of
the future that’s based not just on our
fears but also on our hopes—a vision
that recognizes the real dangers that
exist around the world but also the
limitless possibilities of our time.
“As the leader of the free world, Amer-
ica will do more than just defeat on the
battlefield those who offer hatred and
destruction,” he continued. “We will
also lead among those who are willing
to work together to expand freedom and
opportunity for all people.”
More than a decade later, that prom-
ise to “expand freedom and opportu-
nity for all people” rings hollow. The
United States can claim to be the largest
economy in the world and a great hub of
innovation, but it can no longer claim to
be the “leader of the free world.”
The promise of helping the Afghan
LEAVING AFGHANISTAN /
people have a better and more secure
future is one promise too many bro-
ken by the United States. The trauma
of what is unfolding in Afghanistan will
be felt for years by Afghans and all those
who have been involved in the country.
For liberals in Afghanistan and the
Middle East who were unashamedly
pro-American, there is shame today
in being so naive. Ultimately, the U.S.
declaration of the end of the war in
Afghanistan means the war is ending
with no peace—and protracted wars
often are made longer with unilateral
withdrawals. The Arab world fears its
lands will be the host of renewed vio-
lence as a consequence. n years, even though the United States
MINA AL-ORAIBI is the editor in chief of
the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper the
National and a columnist at
Foreign Policy.
Now the U.S.
Must Help
the Afghans
Left Behind
By Elise Labott
fter the Taliban entered
A Kabul on Aug. 15, the
United States focused on
evacuating Americans
and vulnerable Afghans,
and more than 100,000 were flown out
of Afghanistan in a historic effort. Many
more Afghan allies remain in the coun-
try, at risk of reprisal from the Taliban,
and U.S. President Joe Biden pledged to
bring them to safety. When he and U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken talk
of the enduring U.S. commitment to
Afghanistan, they are primarily talking
about finishing the evacuation.
For every Afghan who made it out,
ARGUMENTS
there are countle ss others left
behind. The United States’ enduring
commitment must include work to
ensure those left behind are not for-
gotten by pushing Afghanistan’s new
rulers to deliver for their people. That
will take a level of engagement with—
and even support for—the Taliban that
will be unpalatable yet critical for a sta-
ble Afghanistan. And a stable Afghani-
stan is not only a moral imperative but
a strategic one from the viewpoint of
the United States and most countries
in the region.
It will not be easy to engage the Tal-
iban after fighting against them for 20
worked closely with the group to evac-
uate as many Americans and Afghans
from the country as possible in the final
days of its military presence. The Taliban
have offered encouraging statements
about human rights, freedom of move-
ment for women, and education for girls,
and they have declared amnesty against
retribution for all Afghans and promised
them the freedom to travel.
But they have also belied these prom-
ises with wanton brutality and a return
to the kind of harsh Islamist regime that
ruled the country in the late 1990s. Part
of that is due to a division between the
more moderate wing of the Taliban,
which spent the past two years nego-
tiating with the United States and the
Kabul government in Qatar, and the
more militant, battle-hardened fighters
who swarmed violently over the country
in the last four months. The announce-
ment, in early September, of an interim
government made up entirely of hard-
line members of the militant group,
including one man designated by the
United States as a terrorist and nearly a
dozen others under U.N. sanctions, was
hardly an encouraging sign.
Soon, the reality of governing a coun-
try devastated by four decades of war
and beset by interlocking political, secu-
rity, and economic crises will sink in.
The new government faces mounting
challenges, including a plummeting
FALL 2021 9
currency, soaring inflation, and wide-
spread food insecurity. Restarting the
motors of the state—from opening the
banks and the airport to providing basic
services like electricity—has become
even more difficult because many gov-
ernment employees have either fled
the country or are in hiding, fearful of
reprisals despite the Taliban’s promises
of amnesty.
The Taliban are aware they won’t be
able to run the country or attract the
enormous foreign support they will
need to rebuild without establishing
legitimacy among everyday Afghans
and the international community, all
of whom are skeptical the group has
shed its bloody, repressive past. That
gives the United States and the inter-
national community potentially enor-
mous leverage. But that leverage must
be used for more than transactional
deals in order to secure further evac-
uations of Afghans from the country.
First, the United States, its allies,
countries in the region, and the Tali-
ban all have an interest in fighting ter-
rorist groups such as the local affiliate
of the Islamic State, which claimed
responsibility for the late August sui-
10
cide bombing at the Kabul airport
that killed at least 182 people, includ-
ing 13 U.S. service members. For any-
one who says the United States doesn’t
have strategic interests in Afghani-
stan, just look at Yemen, where similar
conditions have now made the coun-
try the epicenter of the terrorist threat
against the United States and created
one of the world’s greatest humanitar-
ian catastrophes, which is helping to
fuel a global migrant crisis.
Imagine that on steroids, in a region
with three nuclear powers. The Islamic
State-Khorasan, the local Islamic State
affiliate, is a sworn enemy of the Tali-
ban and has already started to melt into
the local population and recruit dis-
affected members of the Taliban rank
and file, who are growing impatient
with political leaders they view as too
moderate. The weaker and more inef-
fective the Taliban government is, the
more welcoming the country will be as
a haven for terrorists, potentially even
transnational terrorists of the sort who
have turned Yemen into a launchpad.
Even if the Taliban are willing to fight
them, they can’t do so alone.
Every party interested in a stable
A woman and
children sit amid
a pile of debris in the
processing area at
the airport’s Abbey
Gate, as American
and British security
forces maintain order
among the Afghan
evacuees waiting
to leave, in Kabul
on Aug. 25.
Afghanistan must come together around
a set of basic principles that puts the
interests of the Afghan people at its
center: addressing humanitarian needs,
stabilizing the economy, and uniting
Afghans behind a political agreement,
enshrined in a new constitution that pro-
tects human rights, secures the gains
of the past 20 years, and avoids further
conflict. The United States has poten-
tial partners in the region: Pakistan,
India, Qatar, Russia, China, and even
Iran (which helped oust the Taliban from
power once before, during the early days
of the U.S. intervention in the country).
Each country has financial carrots
and sticks as leverage and the additional
bargaining chip of diplomatic recogni-
tion. Washington can unfreeze Afghan
monetary reserves held in U.S. bank
accounts and allow the Taliban access
to the global financial system and mar-
ketplace. China is eager to make invest-
ments in Afghanistan’s infrastructure
and vast minerals and establish trade
routes for its Belt and Road Initiative.
Turkey can once again help operate the
airport and provide technical support,
while Pakistan can use its historically
close ties with the Taliban for construc-
tive purposes. India, historically one
of the largest donors to Afghanistan’s
reconstruction and development, also
has a role to play.
But the United States must realize it
alone no longer has the clout to coordi-
nate a constructive diplomatic response
among regional players with so many
competing agendas. Russia and espe-
cially China are already taking steps to
engage with the Taliban and block U.S.
efforts to reach for punitive measures.
MARCUS YAM/LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES
Perhaps the United States’ biggest
asset when stabilizing Afghanistan
will be the Afghan people themselves.
Afghanistan is a different country than
when the Taliban last ruled, and the Tal-
iban know it. The population has dou-
bled, from about 20 million in 2001 to
40 million today, the majority of which
are young people who have never known
Taliban rule. They grew up in a society

that was transformed by media, digital
connectivity, and access to the outside
world—an Afghanistan that granted
minority rights, empowered women,
and educated children, including girls.
Yet hundreds of thousands of Afghans
have been trying to flee the country at
any cost. Many of them are Afghanistan’s
best educated, most highly trained pro-
fessionals seeking a new start, even if
they are not at imminent risk from the
Taliban. The Taliban rightly fear a brain
drain—not only because the mass exo-
dus of the country’s best and brightest
is an appalling political black eye but
because it also hampers the group’s abil-
ity to run the state.
To encourage further exodus by sug-
gesting the millions of Afghans left
behind are condemned to either a death
sentence or a life of misery is demor-
alizing, especially to those Afghans
determined to stay and fight for their
hard-won rights and rebuild their coun-
try. School enrollment has grown ten-
fold since the U.S. intervention, and
more than one-third of students are
girls; those 3.5 million girls cannot be
left uneducated. Afghans weaned on
one of the region’s freest media land-
scapes won’t see the world through blin-
kered eyes again.
There are already plenty of small but
significant acts of bravery that suggest
the Afghan people will not just roll over
and accept a return of fundamentalist
rule. In the Taliban’s first official news
conference after retaking Kabul, jour-
nalists (women chief among them) did
not pull any punches. When Taliban
spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said
the group had granted a blanket amnesty
for Afghan citizens, one journalist asked
whether the Afghan people would for-
give it for the deaths of so many innocent
civilians. Later that week, hundreds of
Afghan women took to the streets for
their freedom and their country. In early
September, women led protests in Kabul
and other major cities that were violently
repressed by the Taliban.
If Biden is serious about returning
LEAVING AFGHANISTAN /
human rights to the center of U.S. for-
eign policy, as he reiterated in a speech
at the end of the U.S. presence, those
Afghans who remain in their home
country must be supported. The United
States’ enduring commitment can’t
begin and end with the clamshell ramp
of a C-17 transport plane.
The Taliban don’t need to be trusted.
But the United States has every reason
to at least try to stabilize Afghanistan by
helping the Taliban to move away from
draconian rule and encouraging them to
give Afghans a stake in a brighter future.
That would be a fitting way to honor
the thousands of Americans who lost
their lives in Afghanistan, the tens of
thousands of Afghans who fought and
died alongside them, and the millions
of Afghans who are now left behind. n
ELISE LABOTT is an adjunct professor
at American University’s School
of International Service and a
columnist at Foreign Policy.
The Left
Needs More
Than Anti-
Interventionism
By Mel Pavlik
he speed with which the
T United States withdrew
from Afghanistan was
matched only by the speed
of the Taliban’s accession
to power. Images of Kabul’s swift fall,
rife with scenes of desperate Afghans
attempting to flee, left the world scram-
bling to make sense of what happened—
and what to do now. What comes at the
end of forever?
This chaotic uncertainty reflects the
failure of the United States’ Afghan-
ARGUMENTS
istan policy across multiple decades
and administrations—Republican and
Democrat. But it is more than that. It is
a warning against the confused short-
sightedness that plagues the foreign
policy of the left.
Broadly, the mainstream U.S. left
is of two schools of thought when
it comes to the country’s role in the
world. A generation of centrist liberal
internationalists welcome the respon-
sibility and power associated with
the United States’ global might. They
argue for interdependence and inter-
vention on humanitarian grounds and
champion capitalism’s power to bring
global peace and prosperity. They are
challenged by a newer group of left-
wingers eager to end America’s seem-
ingly endless foreign wars, exorbitant
military spending, and the eerie dys-
topia of drone warfare.
Neither school has adequately con-
fronted the policy dilemmas high-
lighted by U.S. failure in Afghanistan.
Clearly, blame for Afghanistan
does not chiefly fall on the left—
many of whom opposed the conflict
to begin with. The war, begun in 2001
by then-President George W. Bush,
was plagued by corruption, ineptitude,
and dereliction of duty from the start.
But the American public should be less
interested in blame and more inter-
ested in lessons learned.
One such lesson for the left—from
the war in general, as well as from the
chaotic withdrawal—is that military
intervention is not the only U.S. foreign
policy that can prompt disastrous con-
sequences. The anti-interventionist left
is an important reaction to the hubris of
liberal internationalism, but that does
not mean it can avoid responding to
the world liberal interventionism cre-
ated. Afghanistan shows the need for a
foreign-policy outlook that is more
than just a negative reaction to pre-
vious failures. Anti-interventionism
is not enough.
U.S. military interventions are a
lightning rod for debates between the
FALL 2021 11
anti-interventionist left and liberal
internationalists. The anti-interven-
tionist left argues that liberal inter-
nationalists’ misguided support for
interventions is at best problematic
and at worst imperialist. Meanwhile,
liberal internationalists argue that
the other side too often fails to engage
with the moral quandaries inherent in
its anti-interventionism.
Both sides misunderstand the com-
plexity and purpose of military inter-
vention. Military intervention, like
other policy options, is designed to
combat threats—including the threat
of fascism, as in World War II, and geno-
cide, as in the Balkans in the 1990s. In
the case of World War II, the United
States undertook a massive military
campaign in Europe and around the
globe to stop the spread of fascism
and the rise of Adolf Hitler and impe-
rial Japan. In the Balkans, a targeted,
air power-driven coalition stopped a
genocide in its tracks. No foreign policy
is without unintended consequences,
but in these cases, military intervention
did well in addressing specific dangers.
This is not to say that intervention
is always (or even often) the correct
foreign-policy decision. To insist on
intervention’s general efficacy is to pro-
mote irresponsible statecraft and ignore
recent failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Libya. Liberal internationalism remains
characterized by overconfidence in
U.S. power and benign acceptance of
its exploitative underpinnings. How-
ever, many leftists criticize these recent
catastrophic interventions without sug-
gesting a compelling alternative. The
universal dismissal of U.S. intervention
falsely equivocates among many dif-
ferent global disasters, each of which
deserves independent consideration in
light of what went wrong, what role the
United States played in it, and what the
United States can do about it. In many
cases, the answer may be nothing.
Many victims of U.S. foreign policy die
not as a result of military intervention
but from diseases in refugee camps or
12
An anti-war activist rests between flag-draped coffins
representing soldiers killed in Iraq during a protest in front
of the White House in Washington on June 14, 2006.
starvation behind a blockade. Brutal
conflict, crimes against humanity, and
moral subjugation take place all around
the world, both where the United States
has intervened and where it has not.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt draws
a distinction between “guilt”—set aside
for individuals who directly perpetrate
a wrong—and “responsibility”—appli-
cable to all those who collectively,
through action or inaction, contribute
to injustice.
The left must reconcile its desire to
avoid guilt with the inevitable respon-
sibility that follows in a world still prin-
cipally shaped by overwhelming U.S.
power, both historically and in the pres-
ent. A negative politics is not enough to
save U.S. foreign policy. The left must
think seriously about what positive
options are available and how to bal-
ance the possible harms of each.
The Afghanistan withdrawal is a
prime example. Avoiding responsibil-
ity might have been an option in 2002;
it is not an option now. In a world fun-
damentally shaped by U.S. decisions,
even nonmilitary ones, Washington
bears responsibility, even if not guilt,
for many situations where solutions are
at best partial and painful. The Biden
administration is scrambling to sell
alternatives to boots on the ground.
Plans are underway to increase the
number of Afghan refugees admitted
to the United States—doubtless a moral
imperative. However, it is a mitigating
measure in the disaster that unfolds.
Only a fraction of the Afghans in
danger will escape; only a fraction of
those who seek asylum will receive it.
U.S. officials are likely also con-
sidering increased sanctions on a
Taliban-led government. These sanc-
tions have long prompted criticism
due to their downstream harm, inef-
ficiency, and ineffectiveness. Sanc-
tions often have horrifying effects on
civilians. They are also almost impos-
sible to impose against armed groups
who operate in the informal market
and remain difficult to trace.
Foreign aid is also fraught with moral
JIM WATSON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
dilemmas. Aid is often refused by con-
trolling authorities (as in the current
conflict in Ethiopia), especially when
these authorities use humanitarian
disasters as a tactic of war. Evidence
suggests that U.S. food aid may even
increase conflict.

A revised leftist foreign policy must
reflect the values the left champions
domestically and recognize the struc-
tural problems inherent in almost any
foreign policy the United States pur-
sues. Moreover, it must vigorously
voice these quandaries—and avoid
simplistic equivalencies among con-
texts that fail to share much more than
surface similarities. It must prioritize
the voices of those its foreign policy
aims to help and insist that Afghan
lives matter as much as American lives.
It is only then that it can avoid the twin
pitfalls of liberal internationalism and
the crude isolationism many are now
turning to in response.
Whatever Afghanistan policy the
United States pursues next—sanc-
tions, covert operations, nothing—will
have severe consequences for Afghans.
The left must grapple with this ethical
dilemma, openly and honestly. n dom and rights, but the abrupt end
MEL PAVLIK is a Ph.D. student in political
science at Yale University.
ASIA
Don’t
Abandon
Afghanistan’s
Economy, Too
By Adam Tooze
LEAVING AFGHANISTAN /
s soon as Western pow-
A ers pulled out of Afghan-
istan, they began to ask
themselves what their
remaining sources of
leverage over the Taliban were. In
forums such as the G-7 meeting chaired
by the United Kingdom, conversations
rapidly turned to the possibility of using
funding as a means of pressure. This is
a dangerous approach.
Afghanistan is critically dependent
on foreign aid. In recent years, it was
not unusual for the country to have
received aid amounting to 43 percent
of its GDP. That flow of funds has now
been suspended, giving the West lever-
age. But if the West exercises pressure
indiscriminately, it will pull Afghani-
stan’s last remaining support just as
the country is being abandoned. The
Taliban may threaten Afghans’ free-
to funding from the West jeopardizes
their material survival.
The single clearest index of this
dependence-based relationship is the
country’s balance of trade. Afghanistan
has a deficit to the tune of 25 to 30 per-
cent of its GDP. At $7 billion in 2020,
Afghanistan’s imports exceeded its
exports of $1.7 billion by a factor of four.
This is not by itself surprising.
Afghanistan is very poor. Poor countries
have a bottomless hunger for foreign
goods. But the poor countries’ problem,
by definition, is that they have little to
trade in return. Otherwise, they would
not be poor. How much a poor county
can satisfy its appetite for imports
depends on the external funding it can
find. It is not by accident that Afghan-
istan’s huge trade deficit first emerged
after 2001, when the country was taken
over by Western powers, or that the defi-
cit reached its maximum toward the end
of then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s
military surge in 2012 and immediately
thereafter in 2013. Imports are a direct
function of foreign aid.
Like much of the military spending
in Afghanistan, aid dollars flowed in
ARGUMENTS
and then flowed out in payments to
contractors and in the capital flight of
the corrupt elite. Giant flows of foreign
money created an entire parallel econ-
omy—part civilian, part military. If that
funding melts away at the same time
as many of the people who benefited
from it flee to the airport, it is tempting
to shrug. Easy come, easy go. The West
exits, and Afghanistan retreats to its ear-
lier self-sufficient state. If the Taliban
want the money to start flowing again,
they should accept Western conditions.
Such a policy would be cynical, super-
ficial, and dangerous. To view funding
as a favor—to be granted or withheld
depending on Taliban compliance with
Western expectations—denies the real-
ity of the Afghanistan that has come into
existence as a result of the last 20 years.
It may not be a viable state or have a
battleworthy military, but it is a new
society critically dependent on exter-
nal funding. If the West wants to assist
in ensuring at least a minimum conti-
nuity of life in Afghanistan, an ongoing
flow of funds is essential.
As partial as the modernization of
Afghanistan since 2001 may have been,
it was real, and it was critically depen-
dent on imported money and goods.
Education at all levels expanded,
attracting heavy funding from abroad.
In the past 20 years, life expectancy has
increased dramatically. Infant and
maternal mortality have plunged, all
thanks in considerable degree to a med-
ical system funded from the outside.
Cellphone and internet usage are
widespread. Electronics are from
abroad. Afghanistan’s electric power
consumption has increased more than
tenfold. Seventy percent of that power
is imported, to the tune of about $280
million each year. The number of reg-
istered motor vehicles has more than
doubled since the early 2000s; not only
the vehicles themselves but also the
gas and diesel they run on have to be
imported. In 2002, Afghanistan got by
on 280 barrels of imported oil per day.
In 2018, it needed 13,300 barrels.
FALL 2021 13

Money exchangers engage in negotiations in the Sarai Shahzadah,
Kabul’s currency exchange market, which reopened for the first time
since the Taliban took over, in Kabul on Sept. 4.
Most critical of all is food. Since 2001,
Afghanistan’s population has doubled.
Food balance is precarious. Among
Afghanistan’s imports, at $760 million
in 2018, is flour. Most countries import
grain and mill their own. Flour is rela-
tively expensive to purchase from abroad
and fragile to transport. Afghanistan
imports flour because it does not have
the milling capacity to grind its own.
If Afghanistan had to cut its imports
to the level that could be financed by its
exports—assuming it can continue to
export—they would have to fall by 75
percent. That would be a savage blow.
Of course, Afghanistan’s official export
figures do not count its most profitable
source of export revenue: opium. As the
world’s premium supplier, one would
imagine Afghanistan to be fabulously
rich. But the Afghans do not control
marketing in the manner of Colombian
cartels. The United Nations estimated
revenue by Afghan opium farmers in
2019 to be between $1.2 billion and $2.1
billion. The benefits are highly unevenly
distributed in Afghan society, and they
are already fully spoken for. Through one
channel or another, the money already
flows into the Afghan economy and pays
for both domestic and imported pur-
chases, many of which may be smuggled
in exchange. Global drug markets are
rebounding from their pandemic lows,
but it would be truly perverse for West-
14
ern powers to count on soaring heroine
prices to bail out starving Afghanistan.
A country under siege may also turn
to its foreign exchange reserves to pay
for imports. Afghanistan has accu-
mulated $9.4 billion, enough to cover
almost 18 months of imports. Ajmal
Ahmady, who was governor of Afghan-
istan’s central bank under former Pres-
ident Ashraf Ghani, tweeted when he
exited the country that the Taliban had
come looking for the reserves. To their
dismay, they discovered the funds were
not held in Kabul but at the U.S. Fed-
eral Reserve in New York. They are now
blocked by Treasury sanctions. Like-
wise, the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) has decided not to distribute to
Afghanistan the $440 million in special
drawing rights it is entitled to under the
$650 billion global allocation.
How then will the Afghan economy
continue to function? Westerners who
have attempted to give economics train-
ing to the Taliban remark they seem to
assume funding will come from either
Pakistan or China. Pakistan, itself under
an IMF program, does not have the
resources to cover Afghanistan’s defi-
cit. Although China may be amenable,
it has so far made no commitments.
Already before the current crisis,
the World Food Program classed half
the Afghan population as facing food
shortages. That was while aid was still
pouring in. More than 3 million Afghan
children are facing severe malnutri-
tion. Drought stalks the land, destroying
40 percent of the crop this year. Most
vulnerable of all are the 3.4 million
Afghans who are internally displaced.
Cold weather will arrive in December.
Food prices in Kabul and other major
cities are already spiking.
Although it may be the only lever
left to the West, playing politics with
the external funding on which life in
Afghanistan has been built over the
last 20 years would compound the cal-
lous withdrawal in a truly inhumane
way. What Afghanistan needs is an
amply funded multilateral humani-
tarian effort to ensure life can continue
as far as possible and millions of peo-
ple are preserved from disaster. Not for
nothing, the slogan adopted by Isabelle
Moussard Carlsen, the head of the U.N.
humanitarian office in Afghanistan, is
#StayAndDeliver. It is right. n
ADAM TOOZE is the director of Colum-
bia University’s European Institute
and a columnist at Foreign Policy.
Malaysia’s
Citizenship
Laws Are
Sexist
By Emily Ding
hen Josil Mur-
W ray, a Malaysian
conservation
consultant
MARCUS YAM/LOS ANGELES TIMES
based in Thai-
land, became pregnant with her first
child last year, she tried to make plans
to return to her home country. Unlike
Malaysian men, Malaysian women
do not automatically pass on their

citizenship to their children born
abroad. As the coronavirus pandemic
set in, Josil couldn’t find any flights
home. When Malaysia Airlines resumed
service in July 2020, Josil applied for
permission for her British husband to
enter the country, which had closed its
borders. She was rejected twice.
Hemmed in by difficult circum-
stances and afraid to risk an extended
separation, Josil stayed in Thailand
to deliver her baby with her husband
by her side. “It was a good decision
because my daughter arrived three
weeks early, so I would still have been
in quarantine had I decided to fly
home. Also, the borders haven’t opened
up in Malaysia, so we could still have
been separated until now,” Josil said.
As a result, her 11-month-old daughter
does not have Malaysian citizenship.
Malaysia’s constitution gives fathers
the automatic right to confer citizen-
ship to their children born abroad,
but it doesn’t mention mothers. This
clause has caused discrimination against
Malaysian women for decades, but the
pandemic has exacerbated existing hard-
ships, leading to the protracted separa-
tion of families. A human rights group
and six Malaysian mothers with children
born abroad have brought a constitu-
tional challenge before the courts, ask-
ing for an interpretation of the clause in
line with gender equality principles. If
they succeed, Malaysian mothers could
finally win the same automatic rights as
Malaysian fathers. Despite a recent rul-
ing in the mothers’ favor, the govern-
ment so far seems intent on opposing
their case at each turn, setting the stage
for a yearslong legal battle.
This gendered inequality in passing
on citizenship is a holdover from Brit-
ish colonial rule. Although many former
colonies changed their laws after the
introduction of the Convention on the
LEON NEAL/GETTY IMAGES
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimina-
tion Against Women (CEDAW), Malay-
sia remains one of 25 countries that has
not. The government ratified CEDAW in
1995 but made a reservation to a clause
dealing with nationality. Its reluctance to
change the citizenship law seems to stem
from ingrained patriarchy and the idea
that fathers should have rights over their
children in a marriage, along with other
fears. Last year, Malaysia’s deputy home
minister said a child born overseas might
hold dual citizenship—which is illegal—
and pose a national security threat.
Mothers with children born over-
seas can apply for citizenship on their
behalf before they turn 21 years old. But
approvals, granted at the discretion of
the Ministry of Home Affairs, are rare.
From 2013 to 2018, only 142 such appli-
cations were approved, while 3,715 were
rejected, and 4,959 were pending. Even
the rejected cases can take years to pro-
cess, and the authorities often do not
provide mothers with clear reasons or
steps to reapply, said Chee Yoke Ling, a
committee member of Family Frontiers
Malaysia, a nongovernmental organi-
zation that advocates for Malaysian
mothers with children born abroad.
Before the pandemic, the current
interpretation of the citizenship law
created hardships for women. After a
marriage breaks down, some women
A woman and a girl wait at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,
on March 13, 2014.
ARGUMENTS
living abroad may be unable to return
to Malaysia for the sake of their chil-
dren. Others may stay in abusive rela-
tionships to avoid being separated from
their children or because of the high
costs of health care and education for
noncitizens in Malaysia. Moreover,
there is the inconvenience of visa runs:
every six months for children under the
age of 7 and annually for student visas.
Some Malaysian mothers don’t even
realize that they cannot automatically
pass on their citizenship if they have a
child abroad. Mashithah Abdul Halim,
a schoolteacher in Sabah, Malaysia, trav-
eled to Turkey in 2019 while pregnant
with her fourth child so her Syrian hus-
band could visit his family there. She
told FOREIGN POLICY that authorities
reassured her before she left that her son
would be able to claim Malaysian citizen-
ship if he were born overseas—but failed
to tell her the process wasn’t automatic.
Mashithah gave birth in Turkey, and
as her husband also couldn’t pass on
citizenship to their child, her son was
left stateless. She applied for her son’s
citizenship in September 2019 and is
still waiting on a response. Because of
FALL 2021 15
his status, he doesn’t enjoy the rights
her other children have. His health care
is more expensive because she can’t
include him on their family insurance
policy without a passport. He won’t be
able to attend any of the formal govern-
ment schools. Mashithah dreads the day
when the pandemic eases and the fam-
ily makes plans to travel again because
she won’t be able to bring him along.
The pandemic has revealed deep gaps
in Malaysia’s citizenship law and its pro-
tections, ultimately making it more dif-
ficult for families to stay together during
a challenging time. With the borders
closed, Malaysian mothers have jug-
gled the conflicting needs of their over-
seas-born children, themselves, their
spouses, and their other children. And
as Malaysia’s handle on the pandemic
worsens with the spread of the delta
variant, pregnant mothers or mothers
with children born abroad continue to
make difficult sacrifices.
Family Frontiers Malaysia had previ-
ously considered challenging the inter-
pretation of the constitution in court,
but the urgency of many women’s hard-
ships in the last 18 months—along with
the suspension of parliament, making a
legislative change unlikely—tipped the
scales. Chee said some women returned
to Malaysia to give birth with the expec-
tation that their spouses could soon join
them. Instead, they ended up separated
by border closures, with many women
suffering postpartum depression and
emotional trauma.
Last December, Family Frontiers
Malaysia and six Malaysian mothers filed
a lawsuit in the Kuala Lumpur high court
to clarify their rights under the constitu-
tion. Women have previously brought
cases concerning their individual appli-
cations forward, but this case marks the
first constitutional challenge regarding
the citizenship clause. The women are
asking the court to interpret the con-
stitution’s provisions on nationality in
alignment with the 2008 amendment on
gender equality so children born overseas
to Malaysian mothers would automati-
16
cally have Malaysian citizenship without nothing to lose,” Chee said. “If we lose
needing to apply for it. “Our argument is the case, we are just where we are. If we
that gender equality is a fundamental lib- win, then it will change the fate of all
erty so basic to a constitution and to the families in this situation.” n
rights of a person,” Chee said.
Adlyn, a mother involved in the EMILY DING  is a freelance writer,
lawsuit who requested a pseudonym journalist, and editor based in Kuala
for fear of government backlash, has Lumpur, Malaysia, and Berlin
waited nine years for an answer on the covering migration, culture, and the
citizenship status of her son, who was environment.
born before she returned to Malaysia
from China in 2016. He is currently on
a student visa. The incongruity of the SOUTH ASIA BRIEF: FP’s South Asia Brief,
situation still confounds her. “Growing written by Michael Kugelman, is a
up in Malaysia, I never felt that I was weekly digest of news and analysis, from
discriminated against because of my the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal
gender. And then, suddenly, I learn the from Afghanistan to COVID-19 and
hard way that actually men and women economic challenges around the region.
are not treated equally in our citizen- Delivered to your inbox on Thursdays.
ship laws,” Adlyn said.
The Malaysian government appears
determined to strike out the case. In
January, it took the first steps, argu-
ing that the constitution is clear on the
matter. Home Minister Hamzah Zainu- CHINA
din has insisted there is no discrimina-
tion and that citizenship matters are
beyond the jurisdiction of the courts.
But the Kuala Lumpur high court dis-
missed this bid, asking the government
to justify the current application of the
law. Another government attempt to
throw out the case in the Court of
Appeal was rejected in August. On
The World
Sept. 9, the Kuala Lumpur high court
decided in the women’s favor, ruling
Doesn’t Want
that Malaysian mothers should have
the same automatic right as fathers
Beijing’s
to pass on their citizenship to their
children born overseas. The govern-
Fighter Jets
ment has already appealed the deci-
sion, prompting public outrage and a
petition that it withdraw the appeal.
If the government continues to deny
justice to Malaysian mothers on the
basis of their gender, Family Frontiers By Richard Aboulafia
Malaysia and the women bringing the ighter jet exports represent
case anticipate it will eventually make
its way to Malaysia’s highest court,
where a final decision on the dispute
could take at least two years. “We
are in this for the long haul. We have
F a unique combination of
hard and soft power. If a
country can sell fighter
jets abroad, that means it
can attract customers for sophisticated

weapons that can sell for upwards of
$100 million, which in turn proves that
the country has appeal as a strategic
partner. It’s no surprise, then, that Bei-
jing has hankered to become a major
fighter exporter for some time.
As China’s global stature grew, many
expected that its weapons exports
would reflect its place on the world
stage. Yet after decades of trying, that
simply hasn’t happened. A recent con-
frontation with the Philippines, where
Chinese naval vessels entered Philip-
pine waters without authorization, may
indicate the crux of the problem—and
this failure may well illustrate a key
weakness for China. Essentially, few
want to partner up with Beijing.
For decades, China’s growth as a com-
bat aircraft export power has seemed
inevitable. In April 1997, Interavia, a
once-influential trade journal, predicted
in a headline, “China Poised to Overtake
Russia,” and that Beijing would “well
outstrip Russia in a decade or so as the
combat aircraft provider to the devel-
oping world.” Nine years later, Aviation
Week & Space Technology opined that
“China may emerge as the bargain-
basement provider of combat aircraft
packages for the export market.”
The numbers clearly show that noth-
ing of the sort happened. Between 2000
and 2020, China exported just $7.2 bil-
lion worth of military aircraft, accord-
ing to the Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute’s Arms Trans-
fers Database. Meanwhile, the United
States stayed safely on top, exporting
$99.6 billion, and Russia came in sec-
ond at $61.5 billion. Even France’s air-
craft exports doubled China’s, at $14.7
billion. And there were few signs of
upward momentum for China.
Chinese fighters also didn’t break out
of their relatively small core market. In
SUHAIMI ABDULLAH/GETTY IMAGES
the 1990s, their biggest customers were
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, North
Korea, and a few African countries. That
remains the list today. A report by the
Center for Strategic and International
Studies points out that, since 2010,
J-10 fighter jets from
China’s People’s
Liberation Army
Air Force perform
an aerial display
in Singapore on
Feb. 9, 2020.
63.4 percent of China’s conventional
weapons sales have gone to Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and Myanmar.
This feeble sales record has noth-
ing to do with the aircraft them-
selves. China has made great strides
in improving its state-owned aerospace
technology base, particularly in the
military realm. China makes quality
products—or at least products that are
on par with the planes that the Soviet
Union succeeded in exporting in great
quantities to various countries.
The J-10, a fighter that Beijing
unveiled in the 2000s, has operat-
ing characteristics—including speed,
range, payload, weapons capabilities,
and sensors—that are fully in line with
U.S., Russian, and European aircraft on
the export market. The latest version,
the J-10C, has an active electronically
scanned array radar, as most modern
Western fighters do. Yet not one has sold
overseas, even as China has been trying
to peddle the J-10 to its biggest single
military aircraft customer, Pakistan, and
other countries for more than 15 years.
(Pakistan is sticking with the JF-17, an
older Chinese fighter jet, partly because
it’s all the country can afford and partly
because it has been assembling the air-
craft domestically.) Other Chinese com-
bat aircraft have met similar fates.
New Chinese fighters with stealth
ARGUMENTS
airframe features, which help them avoid
radar detection, such as the J-20 and
FC-31, have also come onto the market
in recent years but with no rumors of any
international interest. Most likely, these
planes are too expensive for China’s core
combat aircraft customer group. But that
doesn’t explain the export failure of all
the other, older models.
The best explanation of this failure is
China’s foreign policy. The Philippines
is a perfect illustration of why China’s
fighter export ambitions have stalled.
For five years, Philippine President
Rodrigo Duterte has tried to steer the
country away from the United States
and toward China. Also, until a few
years ago, the country had never pur-
chased a new fighter jet—the limited
defense budget could only afford hand-
me-down jets from the United States.
The Philippines is cash-strapped,
nonaligned, and eager to assert a pro-
China path: the perfect recipe for an
export market breakthrough of Chi-
nese combat aircraft in a key regional
nation. If the country eventually pur-
chased a few squadrons of Chinese
fighters while simultaneously demand-
ing the U.S. Navy keep away from its
former Philippine bases for good, as
it moved to do in February 2020, the
world would have regarded this as a
major Chinese foreign-policy coup.
FALL 2021 17
 Now, that doesn’t seem likely. In
May, tensions between the two coun-
tries in the South China Sea heated up
to a simmer, with Philippine Foreign
Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. tweet-
ing about China, “You’re like an ugly
oaf forcing your attentions on a hand-
some guy who wants to be a friend; not
to father a Chinese province.”
The Philippines has instead found
another path for its combat aircraft
needs. In 2015, it acquired its first Korea
Aerospace Industries FA-50s. Buy-
ing these fighters allowed the Philip-
pines to move away from reliance on
U.S. weaponry. But these aircraft are
heavily based around U.S. technolo-
gies, including General Electric engines
and Lockheed Martin design assistance.
Ultimately, the country stayed in the
U.S.-aligned air power camp.
It isn’t just the Philippines. China’s
other neighbors don’t like China,
with predictable ramifications for the
fighter sales business. India, a long-
time Russian fighter customer with a
strong interest in sourcing from mul-
tiple countries, should also be a poten-
tial J-10 customer but is instead facing
another nasty border confrontation
with China in the Himalayas. India is
increasingly looking to Western coun-
tries for military equipment and won’t
even consider China, whose status as a
possible adversary rules it out as a weap-
ons provider. Ditto for Vietnam, with
its worsening maritime dispute with
China. Malaysia and Indonesia are also
too wary of Beijing’s ambitions to ever
consider acquiring a Chinese fighter.
This pattern of failure speaks to more
than just a problem with sharp elbows.
First, it shows a lack of commercial
soft power. Fighter sales often involve
a trade relationship, since they tend
to include commercial offsets—or
economic sweeteners, such as mar-
ket access or technology transfer, that
are designed to mitigate some of the
expense of a weapons package. But
China’s relatively closed economic
system means that potential custom-
18
ers with export-oriented economies
have little to gain, since China wants
to be a globally dominant export man-
ufacturer and certainly doesn’t want to
increase its intake of imported man-
ufactured goods. If anything, China
has historically been a competitor with
other emerging markets for investment
and foreign firms’ factories.
But fighter exports are more than
just a popularity contest. They also
reflect the strength of a supplier coun-
try’s alliances and help strengthen stra-
tegic relationships. Military export
sales improve program production,
and increased output can make pro-
duction less costly (a phenomenon
known as economies of scale). For
example, international sales for the
United States’ F-35, which is coming
to dominate the high end of the export
fighter market, have been nearly as
large as U.S. domestic purchases. Most
importantly, in the event of a crisis or
war, customers can help the selling
country with logistics and support
for its own fleet through, for example,
spare parts, weapons, and upgrades.
Operating the same aircraft also opens
the door to harmonized operations and
easier communication.
Yet Beijing lacks appeal as a strate-
gic partner in the region. It has little
interest in preserving the status quo
in Asia, few qualms about territorial
expansion, and next to no record of
supporting allies in times of crisis.
The region’s other powers see little to
gain from a strategic relationship with
China, which would be inextricable
from purchasing its fighter jets.
Indeed, the big markets in the region
are Japan, South Korea, Australia, Tai-
wan, and Singapore. All source their
military aircraft almost exclusively from
the United States; four of them are part-
ners or customers of the F-35 program.
And all would play a crucial role in any
conflict with China.
While Beijing struggles to find any
takers, Washington’s military export
standing is poised for further growth.
India, in the past decade, has started
purchasing more than $12 billion worth
of U.S. P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, C-17
and C-130J military cargo transports,
and AH-64 and CH-47 military helicop-
ters. The first U.S. fighter sale to India
is quite likely in the coming decade.
There have even been discussions about
possible U.S. military aircraft sales to
Vietnam, and in recent years Hanoi
departed from its Russian purchases
and actually ordered a few Airbus mar-
itime patrol aircraft from Spain.
Meanwhile, in the event of a regional
conflict between China and other coun-
tries, China can count on air power
cooperation and support from Myan-
mar, Laos, and North Korea—coun-
tries that would either not be involved
in such a conflict or would not play a
material role in the outcome.
The most important conclusion from
all this is that building good aircraft and
other weapons won’t help your defense
industry—or enhance your strategic
power—if you don’t have friends. n
RICHARD ABOULAFIA is the vice
president of analysis at Teal Group.
The Clash
of Ideas
With China
Is Inevitable
By Nathan Levine
s rancorous U.S.-China
A talks  this summer
demonstrated, tensions
between the two super-
powers have continued
to escalate. Beijing has declared that
the relationship “is now in a stalemate
and faces serious difficulties.” U.S.
President Joe Biden has increasingly

characterized strategic competition
with China as part of a broader conflict
between democracies and autocracies in
the 21st century. This has prompted dis-
senters in Washington and around the
world to decry the prospect of the two
countries slipping into an ideological
competition reminiscent of the Cold War.
Such warnings tend to come
from two main camps. Political pro-
gressives warn that defining the
standoff as a Cold War-style ideolog-
ical contest will divide the world, dis-
tract from efforts to address social
issues at home, and make it harder to
fight climate change. Realist-leaning
foreign-policy thinkers, on the other
hand, believe framing the U.S.-China
relationship in ideological terms is extra-
neous to the core issues of great-power
competition and could also alienate
important U.S. allies and partners.
Despite this, however, neither group
tends to seriously suggest that the United
States stop standing up for human
rights and liberal democratic gover-
nance around the world. It is now a rare
item of bipartisan agreement in Wash-
ington and with voters more broadly—
perhaps, in part, because China has
served to highlight the issue and such
an argument would find little traction.
But this position creates a contradiction:
Advocacy of these values itself represents
an ideology—one fundamentally at odds
with the worldview adhered to in Beijing.
For that reason, the truth is that ideologi-
cal competition with China is inevitable.
Progressives and realists opposed
to ideological competition with China
but unwilling to call for an end to pro-
moting liberal values suffer from two
basic misunderstandings: one about
China and one about the United
States. The first is not understand-
ing the foundational Marxist-Leninist
worldview of the Chinese Commu-
ELIOT BLONDET/REUTERS
nist Party (CCP). Beijing sees the
universal values promoted by liber-
alism as a mortal threat to its contin-
ued existence, a conclusion it reached
after witnessing the 1989 Tianan-
men Square protests—which called
for democratic reforms, freedom of
speech, and freedom of the press—and
the collapse of the Soviet Union two
years later. In this view, liberalism and
the CCP cannot coexist within China,
and liberalism’s conception of its val-
ues as universal makes active ideolog-
ical warfare a necessity for Beijing.
The CCP expressed this view most
directly in an April 2013 document—
the “Communiqué on the Current
State of the Ideological Sphere,” better
known as Document 9—which warned
of seven “perils” subverting the party’s
grip on power. Among these threats were
notions that “the West’s values are the
prevailing norm for all human civiliza-
tion” and “Western freedom, democracy,
and human rights are universal and eter-
nal” and apply “to all humanity.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping has
consistently reinforced this viewpoint
in his public remarks. As early as July
2013, he was warning the party that
“currently, struggles in the ideologi-
cal field are extraordinarily fierce” and
U.S. and Chinese flags
line a room at the G-20
summit in Osaka, Japan,
on June 29, 2019.
ARGUMENTS
“although [they] are invisible, they are a
matter of life and death.” In fact, he said,
“Western hostile forces are speeding
up their ‘Peaceful Evolution’ and ‘Color
Revolution’ in China” as a strategy of
“Westernizing and splitting up China
overtly and covertly.” In the same vein,
by January 2014, Xi was speaking of
a “treacherous international situa-
tion” and an “intensifying contest of
two ideologies,” with the United States
desperate to use liberal ideas to under-
mine the CCP regime and stop China’s
rise. Xi’s conviction that China was at
the receiving end of an ideological
war only intensified after U.S.-China
relations further derailed following
the growth of widespread disillusion-
ment in Washington after decades of
so-called strategic engagement with
Beijing and the subsequent start of the
U.S.-China trade war in 2018.
Beijing therefore already saw itself
engaged in long-running ideological
competition with Western liberalism—
as championed by the United States—
long before Western critics discovered
the issue. It is a mistake to think China
can ever be convinced otherwise as
long as the West continues to promote
liberal values.
The second misunderstanding is a
failure to recognize that the CCP is right
about at least one thing: Liberalism,
with its ideas about human rights and
democratic norms, is indeed an ide-
ology—something many Americans
seem to have forgotten. After the defeat
of liberalism’s main 20th-century ideo-
logical rivals, fascism and Soviet com-
munism, it became habitual to see
universalized Western liberal democ-
racy as “the end point of mankind’s
ideological evolution … and as the final
form of human government,” as Fran-
cis Fukuyama argued in his 1989 essay,
“The End of History?” In other words,
Western conventional wisdom came to
see liberalism as exactly what China’s
Document 9 claimed: “the prevailing
norm for all human civilization.”
Those advocating against fighting a
FALL 2021 19
U.S.-China ideological contest fail to
recognize that promoting human rights
and democracy is, in fact, advancing an
ideology. That doesn’t mean Washing-
ton shouldn’t do it anyway—but it isn’t
advocating a neutral position.
Given that the United States is highly
unlikely to ever give up promoting
democracy’s superiority and the uni-
versality of human rights, and that the
CCP already considers itself locked in
an ideological contest with the West,
ideological competition will be an inev-
itable part of the broader U.S.-China
strategic contest, whether anyone wel-
comes this fact or not.
The right question, instead, is how
to manage this element of ideologi-
cal conflict within a broader strategic
framework that can establish guard-
rails around U.S.-China competition
and thereby prevent open clashes.
That could mean explicitly refraining
from making regime change in China
a strategic objective of U.S. policy, as
the Trump administration occasionally
openly alluded to. It could mean care-
fully balancing the degree to which U.S.
human rights criticisms of China trans-
late from rhetoric into sanctions and
other punitive measures or any num-
ber of other policy options that could
be part of a more productive conversa-
tion. But first, those in the West who are
wary of a prolonged Cold War-style con-
frontation must recognize some level of
ideological competition with China is
inescapable. n continent for queer people. In a 2020
NATHAN LEVINE is a China advisor at the
Asia Society Policy Institute.
CHINA BRIEF: In China Brief, FP’s
James Palmer explains the political
drivers behind the headlines in Beijing,
from the Chinese Communist Party’s
kneecapping of tech companies to its
crusade against video games—and
shows you the stories the West has
missed. Delivered to your inbox on
Wednesdays.
20
MIDDLE EAST
AND AFRICA
Ghana’s Anti-
Gay Bill Will
Destroy Lives
By Chibuihe Obi Achimba
tories coming out of Africa
S about the LGBTQ commu-
nity fill me with dread.
I read them with bated
breath, certain the most
recent one will be far worse than the
last. I was kidnapped and tortured in
my home country of Nigeria for being
gay. Reading the news in constant panic
is what happens to you when you have
lived through the violence of state-
sanctioned homophobia and barely
escaped with your life.
To date, Africa ranks as the worst
report released by the International Les-
bian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex
Association, nearly half of the 69 coun-
tries where homosexuality is still crimi-
nalized are African countries. Although
views surrounding the rights of queer
people are advancing around the world,
the majority of African politicians are
still finding ways to limit the rights of
their queer citizens.
For the LGBTQ community in Ghana,
the first half of 2021 was nothing short
of devastating. In less than six months,
the community came under intense
and repeated attacks from politicians,
the police, religious groups, and anti-
gay organizations, including a heavily
biased media committed to pillory-
ing and misrepresenting an already
marginalized group. There has been
a slew of government-backed harass-
ment unleashed against the commu-
nity in a bid to restrict or completely
prohibit queer rights advocacy in the
West African country.
In May, 21 LGBTQ activists in Ghana
were arrested and detained in Ho, the
capital of Ghana’s Volta region. They
were human rights advocates and orga-
nizers who had convened for a paralegal
training on best practices for document-
ing and responding to emerging human
rights abuses targeted at sexual minori-
ties. Instead, the activists were accused
of promoting an LGBTQ agenda and
charged with unlawful gathering. For
nearly three weeks, police held and
remanded them to court, their bail pleas
repeatedly denied.
In February, a community center that
provided health care services and emer-
gency shelter to sexual minorities was
raided and subsequently shuttered by
the police. News of the police raid at the
community center brought the world’s
attention to the ongoing human rights
abuses targeting Ghana’s queer com-
munity. In photos shared on Twitter
by LGBT+ Rights Ghana, a coalition of
young Ghanaian queer activists, police
officers could be seen within the cen-
ter’s premises, armed with guns and
locking up the building’s entrances
with iron chains.
The suddenness, scale, and severity
of these threats and harassment have
thrown Ghana’s LGBTQ community—
already disproportionately impacted
by the coronavirus pandemic—into a
deepening crisis with no end in sight.
Activists and organizers like Alex Kofi
Donkor, the head of the community
center, have received death threats and
a barrage of online harassment. Donkor
has since relocated to a safe house.
Amnesty International, Human
 ARGUMENTS
Rights Watch, and other organizations
have condemned the ongoing persecu-
tion as a human rights violation. Celeb-
rities such as Michaela Coel, Idris Elba,
and Naomi Campbell even called on
Ghana’s government in an open letter to
respect the rights of sexual minorities.
Yet Ghanaian politicians, egged on
by conservative civil and religious
groups, have only doubled down. A
draft of a new anti-gay bill sponsored
by eight lawmakers was handed to the
speaker of the Ghanaian Parliament
in June. Titled “Promotion of Proper
Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian
Family Values Bill,” it proposes harsher
treatments against the LGBTQ com-
munity in Ghana, including prison
terms of up to 10 years for those in
A person wearing a Pride flag leaves the high court in
same-sex relationships. If it passes in Nairobi after a verdict upholding laws that criminalize homosexuality
the Parliament, it will become a crime in Kenya on May 24, 2019.
to engage in any form of LGBTQ advo-
cacy. Even acts of solidarity from allies
of the LGBTQ community would be
jailable offenses. against such groups. Anti-gay laws and harassment of human rights defend-
Homosexuality is already outlawed make LGBTQ people vulnerable, expos- ers working on sexual minority issues.”
in Ghana under a colonial-era law ing them to extreme and rampant dis- I was a victim of the anti-gay law,
passed by the British colonial govern- crimination and abuse. too. The gang that abducted me in 2017
ment in the 1860s. Like most African Homophobic laws, when enacted, and tortured me for three days did so
countries, Ghana maintained this ugly achieve nothing else except stoking fear because its members knew the law was
legacy of British colonialism even after and imperiling the lives of queer people. on their side. Four years on and after fil-
independence. Compared with the cur- It happened to us in Nigeria. ing multiple police reports, my assail-
rent anti-gay law, this new bill proposes Barely weeks after then-Nigerian ants are yet to be arrested, least of all
even more draconian and far-reaching President Goodluck Jonathan signed prosecuted by the state.
consequences. It would legalize con- the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) In the wake of this relentless vio-
version therapy for queer people and Act into law in 2014, there was a his- lence, members of the LGBTQ com-
force intersex people to undergo sur- toric spike in reported cases of extra- munity fled the country en masse
gery in what the bill calls “gender judicial killings, extortion, and torture to seek asylum in Europe or North
realignment.” Sharing queer-affirming of people perceived to be members of America. Most of them made these
content on media or digital platforms the LGBTQ community. trips through treacherous routes that
could result in prison terms. Parents A report released in 2016 by Human exposed them to further danger. It’s not
who support their queer kids would Rights Watch highlighted a particu- easy to tally the human cost of restric-
also be prosecuted. larly chilling incident outside Abuja, tive laws targeting queer Africans. And
Possible knock-on effects from the bill Nigeria’s capital, where a violent armed what is more, the yearly loss of human
include a predictable surge in citizen mob of more than 50 people went from capital does not augur well for the con-
TONY KARUMBA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

attacks, harassment, and blackmail of
queer people or those perceived to belong
to the LGBTQ community. It is well doc-
umented that hateful rhetoric directed
at marginalized groups, especially from
those in public office, almost always
leads to a spike in targeted violence
home to home, dragging out and beat-
ing individuals suspected of being gay.
The African Commission’s special rap-
porteur on human rights defenders
in Africa, Reine Alapini-Gansou, con-
firmed an “increase in cases of physical
violence, aggression, arbitrary detention
tinent’s struggling economy.
There is something morally rep-
rehensible about legislating against
consensual relationships between two
adults; such laws devalue our collec-
tive sense of human worth and dig-
nity. And no—homophobic laws do

FALL 2021 21
not represent or uplift African values.
Homophobic laws do not preserve
so-called family values either. They
estrange queer people from their fami-
lies and loved ones. It feels particularly
bothersome, shameful even, that in a
year marked by the impact of a signif-
icant pandemic, politicians in Africa
are plotting ways to make the lives of
their people more miserable instead of
proffering solutions to the continent’s
hydra-headed challenges. n
CHIBUIHE OBI ACHIMBA is a Nigerian
writer, activist, and master’s
candidate at Brown University.
Zuma’s
Arrest Was
a Victory for
Rule of Law
By Eusebius McKaiser
ust before midnight on July
J 7, a previously unthinkable
event took place in South
Africa. Former President
Jacob Zuma was taken into
custody by South African police at his
rural homestead in Nkandla, KwaZulu-
Natal, and transported to a prison
within the province, where he started
a 15-month sentence as legal pun-
ishment for a guilty verdict handed
down by South Africa’s Constitutional
Court—the country’s highest—for
being in contempt of that court.
The subsequent looting and violent
protests that shook South Africa are a
reminder of the limits of using legal
instruments to address socioeconomic
and political crises. Law matters, but it
must be complemented with political
solutions to political problems.  to the fact that they are ordinary mem-
Despite the ensuing unrest, the
22
imprisonment of a former president
represents a triumph for constitu-
tionalism in a region where former
liberation movement heroes, such
as Zimbabwe’s first democratic pres-
ident, Robert Mugabe, often became
neocolonial thugs who reproduced
the anti-democratic abuses of the
colonialists they defeated. In fact, the
story of Zuma’s imprisonment carries
many important political lessons for
the international community, includ-
ing for long-standing constitutional
democracies such as the United States,
Canada, and Germany.
The way South Africa’s Constitutional
Court handled Zuma’s case should be
emulated by high courts around the
world. The court was utterly unfazed by
the possible political consequences of
its decision, and justices simply got on
with the business of dispassionate legal
adjudication, strictly applying consti-
tutional law to the facts before them.
Justice Sisi Khampepe wrote in the
majority judgment: “Never before has
this Court’s authority and legitimacy
been subjected to the kinds of attacks
that Mr Zuma has elected to launch
against it and its members. Never
before has the judicial process been
so threatened. Accordingly, it is appro-
priate for this Court to exercise its juris-
diction and assert its special authority
as the apex Court and ultimate guard-
ian of the Constitution.”
Crucially, the court then asserted
its duty to punish this sort of attack
on the judiciary. “Not only is Mr
Zuma’s behaviour so outlandish
as to warrant a disposal of ordinary pro-
cedure,” she wrote, “but it is becoming
increasingly evident that the damage
being caused by his ongoing assaults
on the integrity of the judicial process
cannot be cured by an order down the
line. It must be stopped now.”
And therein lies the political and legal
lesson for other countries: Politicians
must be made to reconcile themselves
bers of society rather than exceptional
beings who are licensed to escape the
reach of a country’s laws.
South Africa is unfortunately infa-
mous for its stubbornly high lev-
els of violent crime and joblessness,
extreme inequality, and low growth
rates. At present, it is also facing a public
health crisis with a poor vaccine acqui-
sition and rollout strategy in the face of
the COVID-19 pandemic.
The other negative theme that dents
the country’s reputation is corruption.
During Zuma’s presidency, from 2009
to 2018, large parts of the South Afri-
can state were hollowed out and preyed
on by private interests in cahoots with
wayward politicians and civil ser-
vants selling their souls to the high-
est bidders. Locally, the grand theft
of public resources was labeled “state
capture.” Zuma and the governing Afri-
can National Congress (ANC) were cen-
tral to the creation of opportunities
for billions of South African rands to
be stolen, particularly by one family
that had cozied up to Zuma and the
ANC—the Guptas.
Thuli Madonsela, South Africa’s for-
mer public protector (a position akin to
that of an ombudsperson), ordered that
a commission of inquiry be set up to
investigate state capture just before her
term in office expired in 2016. This com-
mission summoned Zuma to appear
before it as a witness, but on Nov. 19,
2020, when he was to answer a num-
ber of questions, Zuma walked out of
the inquiry after an attempt to get the
commission chair, Raymond Zondo, to
recuse himself failed.
From that point on, Zuma stopped
all cooperation, so the commission
eventually turned to the Constitu-
tional Court to direct him to answer
questions before it. The court found
that the very legitimate constitutional
role of the state capture inquiry to dig
for the truth about widespread cor-
ruption could not possibly do its job
properly if someone as central to many
of the allegations as the former pres-
ident did not honor a lawful request

from the commission to appear.
The court instructed Zuma to go back
and testify. He still refused and simply
did not appear on Feb. 15 as requested
by the commission, backed by the Con-
stitutional Court directive. Instead, he
launched countless attacks on the judi-
ciary in general and Zondo in partic-
ular. He dug in his heels and casually
asserted a willingness to go to prison
rather than testify. That is when the
commission went back to the Consti-
tutional Court to argue that Zuma was
in contempt. Zuma’s final constitutional
delinquency was to refuse to even file
responding papers with the Constitu-
tional Court, even though he had plenty
of opportunity to explain why he did
not honor the court’s order.
In a scathing portrayal of Zuma
as “recalcitrant” and describing his
attacks on the judiciary as “egregious,”
“insidious,” and motivated by a desire
to “destroy the rule of law,” the court
found Zuma guilty of contempt on
June 29 and argued that the extent
of his trampling on the authority of
the Constitutional Court was a grave
offense. Given that he is a former presi-
dent who could inspire others to evade
and disregard the administration of
justice, the court concluded that only
prison time would deter others.
Zuma was still unfazed and again
ignored the court’s order that he hand
himself over to the police to start his sen-
tence within five days. He instead called
a press conference in which he reiter-
ated his lack of regard for the judiciary,
maintained his innocence, and gener-
ally painted himself a victim by alluding
to conspiracies without any evidence.
This is why, on July 7, the police had
to assist the court by taking Zuma into
custody. He did not put up a fight, and
GULSHAN KHAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
although some feared that a small crowd
of supporters would violently defend
him, no blood was spilled that night. He
was peacefully escorted to prison, and
the government did not retreat from its
decision—even in the face of the wide-
spread violence and looting, some of
it allegedly fomented by Zuma loy-
alists, that emerged in the following
days. (Zuma’s prison stay has since been
disrupted by a trip to the hospital, ini-
tially for medical observation, but he has
now been granted medical parole after
doctors said an undisclosed condition
requires a surgical procedure.)
The most important lesson South
Africa’s response to Zuma’s abuses
holds for the world is that the princi-
ple of constitutional supremacy can be
defended if there is political will to do
so. Every person must be equal before
the law. In practice, however, politi-
cally and economically powerful indi-
viduals too often escape the long arm
of the law. A crucial test, therefore, of
whether a constitutional democracy is
genuinely committed to substantive
democratic principles and values is
how it treats the powerful when they
are in legal trouble.
It is rare for members of the exec-
utive to be investigated, let alone
found guilty of crimes. Although
several countries have imprisoned for-
mer leaders, those processes have often
been tainted by political retribution. It
is rarer still to be found guilty of con-
tempt of court, let alone sentenced to
actual time in prison. That fact alone
Former South African President
Jacob Zuma speaks on the phone at
the Randburg Magistrates Court in
Johannesburg on Oct. 26, 2018.
ARGUMENTS
means that South Africa’s judiciary suc-
ceeded in demonstrating that the con-
stitution trumps politics.
For Zuma to casually ignore a valid
Constitutional Court order was a way
of placing himself above the law. Too
many political leaders have done so.
South Africa’s successful handling of
his case shows that it is possible to judge
former heads of state fairly as ordinary
members of society who are not entitled
to special legal treatment.
A second lesson from Zuma’s
imprisonment is that postcolonial
governments do not need to become
neocolonial monsters. Africa is littered
with case studies in which the demo-
cratic project, after liberation, goes
awry in the second or third decade of
freedom. This often manifests itself in
leaders’ refusals to relinquish political
power when defeated at the polls. The
ANC in South Africa has yet to face this
historic test because it remains, despite
leadership and governance weaknesses,
a powerful social movement and also
has the gift of facing a weak electoral
opposition. When the ANC faces immi-
nent loss of political power, South Africa
will then be tested once again.
It is too soon to say that South Africa
is a model for the international commu-
nity when it comes to political account-
ability. After all, not a single person has,
to date, been sentenced to prison time
for state capture, despite the enormous
amount of work done by the commis-
sion looking into corrupt government
deals. But it would be a mistake to
downplay what the imprisonment of
Zuma represents symbolically.
Zuma is not the only politician in
South Africa or in the world who thinks
of himself as above and beyond the law.
And the derailing of a democracy does
not happen overnight.
There is often a slow decline in dem-
ocratic norms and values—and con-
cerned citizens must look out for the red
flags. Are the police willing to do their
job when they are given cases involving
politicians? Are courts willing to send
FALL 2021 23
someone to prison if they offend the
mores of society, as expressed in the
statutes of the country, even if they
are from a well-known political fam-
ily? Can democratic accountability be
entrenched, especially when former
liberation movement leaders are the
ones who need to be held accountable
legally, morally, and politically?
In Zuma’s South Africa, all of those
red flags were plainly visible as a fledg-
ling democracy that had inspired the
world began to veer wildly off course.
With the imprisonment of a former
president in July, South Africa set its
democracy firmly back on track.
EUSEBIUS McKAISER is a political analyst
and author based in Johannesburg.
AMERICAS
Haiti’s Official
Language
Shouldn’t
Be French
By Benjamin Hebblethwaite
eople often ask me why
P Haitians struggle eco-
nomically and politically,
with conditions worsen-
ing since the approval of
Haiti’s new constitution in 1987. There
24
are lots of reasons for Haitians’ strug-
gles, but language policy represents an
underlying condition.
Saint-Domingue, the French col-
ony that lasted from 1697 to 1803 and
became Haiti, was a cruel slave state.
White society never built a school for
its enslaved people, who were confined
to awful sugar, coffee, and indigo plan-
tations. A generation of Black and bira-
cial men, women, and children waged
a nearly 13-year war to banish French
colonialism and slavery.
Gen. Jean-Jacques Dessalines dic-
tated the Haitian Declaration of Inde-
n pendence in French to his secretary,
Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, for the occa-
sion, which occurred on Jan. 1, 1804.
Half of the population had been dec-
imated, and the elite survivors legis-
lated exclusively in French, the only
written language they knew. Although
all Haitians spoke Creole, the elites
were keen to acquire new knowl-
edge in French and maintain their
distance from Creole speakers. The
Haitian masses—at least 95 percent of
the population—only spoke Haitian
Creole and were immediately severed
from the state.
Dessalines, Haiti’s first ruler, ordered
the execution of the remaining French
citizens. However, Dessalines exercised
statecraft with the French language,
which he spoke fluently but could nei-
ther read nor write. Mastery of French
became an obsession of the educated
minority, as it reflected their bilingual
heritage and afforded them opportuni-
ties in Europe.
Even today, all these years since Des-
salines’s assassination in 1806, Haitian
children are still subjected to a school
system that largely operates in a lan-
guage few Haitians speak with compe-
tence—let alone can read or write. It is
estimated that roughly 5 to 10 percent
of Haitians are functionally bilingual in
French and Haitian Creole. However,
100 percent of Haitians speak Haitian
Creole, and, more critically, 90 percent
of Haitians speak only Haitian Creole.
Throughout Haitian history, the
state’s language policy has protected
the linguistic advantages of the bilin-
gual elite. French-language privi-
lege is enforced by the Haitian state
and its Ministry of National Educa-
tion through French-language national
examinations that all students must
compose if they hope to graduate. This
foreign linguistic stranglehold is also
maintained by Catholic, Protestant, and
secular private schools.
From 1804 until today, the Haitian
Creole-speaking majority has been
kicked to the curb, treated like barbar-
ians, denied access to the core institu-
tions required for social advancement,
and forced to conform to a clownish
Francophone ideal that keeps Haiti
stuck in reverse. Haitian Creole was
supposedly made co-official by the
1987 Haitian Constitution—183 years
after the founding of Haiti—but noth-
ing could be further from the truth.
The Haitian state’s official journal, 
Le Moniteur, only appears in French.
Haitian Creole speakers are still
humiliated in Haitian classrooms, in
the state’s bureaucracy, in interviews
for employment, and in the denial of
their linguistic rights. Mastery of the
minority French language, or the lack
thereof, is a pivotal Haitian socioeco-
nomic status symbol.
As a Haitian Creolist, it has been
heart-wrenching to watch the frustra-
tion that has gripped Haitians since
the assassination of Haitian Presi-
dent Jovenel Moïse on July 7. Beneath
the assassination’s stunning details—
from the role of Colombian and Hai-
tian American mercenaries and the
involvement of Haitian police officers
to the near-complete silence from the
U.S. Embassy—Haitians are govern-
ing in Haitian Creole. In the aftermath
of the assassination, nary a word of
French has been uttered in the pub-
lic discourse of major politicians, civic
leaders, or radio and television jour-
nalists. Former acting Prime Minis-
ter Claude Joseph, police chief Léon

Charles, current acting Prime Minister
Ariel Henry, union leaders, opposition
political leader Jean-Charles Moïse, and
militia leaders like Jimmy “Barbecue”
Chérizier, as well as every Haitian who
gets the chance to speak in front of a
microphone, universally employ the
Haitian Creole language. They do this
not only for efficiency and intelligibil-
ity but because using French in a crisis
is deceptive and dangerous.
Behind the ironic spectacle of watch-
ing members of Haiti’s elite guiltlessly
speaking Haitian Creole has been the
miserable backdrop of Haiti’s children,
who are subjected to the Haitian state’s
French-language school curriculum. In
a country where nearly 42 percent of
people are experiencing acute hunger,
most people lack access to electricity
and running water, and most teachers
have low French proficiency, the Hai-
tian state demands children acquire
educational content by means of a lan-
guage nobody—not even the elite—is
willing or able to speak.
Seeing footage of Haitian high school
students conjugating French verbs in
makeshift classrooms set up in shelters
where refugees of recent gang warfare
have fled is a reminder of the inhu-
mane, underlying conditions of the Hai-
tian state’s language policy in schools.
Haitian Creole was only adopted as
the main language of instruction for
the first three years of primary educa-
tion in 1987 after years of sabotage by
the central government. By the fourth
year, the French-language curriculum
takes over, and Haitian Creole is rele-
gated to a subject. Education reforms
in the 1980s did lead to broader edu-
cational access, but the transition to
French continues to generate far more
EITAN ABRAMOVICH/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
dropouts than graduates.
Haitian students lack French speak-
ers in their schools and families, they
lack access to French media, and they
have few French books. Only 35 percent
of Haitians manage to continue to sec-
ondary education. A small minority of
pupils take the state’s French-language
Haitian children receive a lesson inside a tent at
a religious school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Feb. 16, 2010.
exams at the end of the 11th and 12th
grades, and of those students, fewer
than 25 percent pass in a typical year.
A 2019 report in the Haitian daily Le
Nouvelliste noted that only 7 percent
of Haitians who begin primary educa-
tion ultimately complete their senior
year. Would you like your kids in that
school system?
Lacking even the semblance of
resources, Haitians are expected to
acquire the foundation for personal
and societal development in an inac-
cessible foreign language. But why
does the Haitian state cling to this
language? The bilingual elites want
advantages for their children. Oppor-
tunities in France and Canada are
attractive. The masses have interior-
ized a linguistic inferiority complex
and clamor for the elite language,
dreaming of a better life for their kids.
There are also foreign actors who want
to preserve French in the Haitian state.
Diplomats, foreign workers, employ-
ees of nongovernmental organizations,
and military occupiers often can’t be
bothered with Haitian Creole.
Defenders of the status quo include
ARGUMENTS
the French Embassy, the World Bank,
and French state groups like the Organ-
isation internationale de la Franco-
phonie (OIF), which focuses on the
advancement of French-language pol-
icies worldwide. The OIF wants the
French language to be utilized in the
educational curricula of former French
colonies to enhance the number of
global French speakers. Those Fran-
cophone organizations are beholden to
French business, cultural, and political
interests, and the vision they foster vio-
lates the linguistic rights of the 90 per-
cent of Haitians who never graduate
with a high school degree because they
have no means of acquiring French.
Moïse’s assassination will not change
the pro-French-language practices that
stymie Haitian students. Outside of the
first years of elementary school, Haitian
students will not be able to learn about
chemistry, biology, physics, economics,
sanitation, climate change, civics, math-
ematics, human sexuality, technology,
agriculture, or art in the Haitian Creole
language they speak so brilliantly at
home with their families.
Inattentive people say Haitian Creole
FALL 2021 25
lacks a big enough published corpus
or vocabulary capable of handling the
creolization of the Haitian state and
schools. For one thing, anything cur-
rently lacking can be produced straight-
forwardly by Haitian Creole experts.
For another, important Creole books
already exist: François Séverin’s Plant
ak pyebwa te d Ayiti (“Plants and Trees
of Haiti”) provides hands-on agricul-
tural, biological, and ecological knowl-
edge, while Séverin’s Ti Zwazo, kote w
a prale? (“Little Bird, Where Are You
Going?”) offers Creole ornithologi-
cal and environmental knowledge.
Although investment in schoolbooks
is needed, more than a century of Cre-
ole publishing demonstrates the depth
of Haitian Creole writers.
For now, the elites will keep cutting
Haitians’ tongues off, so to speak,
with a foreign language that its own
members can scarcely muster. The
requirement that Haitian children
acquire basic knowledge in French is
a flagrant problem faced by Haitians
today. People ask why Haitians strug-
gle. The answer is simple. The Fran-
cophone Haitian state works against
the Haitian Creole nation.
Ask yourself how economically and
politically advanced a wealthy nation
like the United States would be if it
required English-speaking children to
study in French or German. There can
be little national advancement in Haiti
if the state opposes the people it governs
with linguistic policy. n from the bloc’s power centers—in the
BENJAMIN HEBBLETHWAITE is an
associate professor in Haitian Creole,
Haitian, and Francophone studies at
the University of Florida.
LATIN AMERICA BRIEF: Written by
Catherine Osborne in Rio de Janeiro,
FP’s Latin America Brief newsletter
traces the contours of debates that
will shape the region’s future, from
geopolitics to business to human rights.
Delivered to your inbox on Fridays.
26
EUROPE
European
Values Are
Strengthening
By Caroline de Gruyter
hen Spain applied
W for membership
in the European
Community in
1961, France and
Germany did not initially object. Spain,
of course, was an outright dictatorship
at the time. But these were the early
days of the European Community, a
predecessor to the European Union.
Membership was an economic issue;
European values such as democracy
and human rights, or a lack of them, did
not come into play. It took an outcry far
Council of Europe, a separate institu-
tion created to look after human rights;
in the then-utterly toothless European
Parliament; and among civil society
activists in some member states—to
quietly put Spain’s application on ice.
Nowadays, it is impossible to imagine
a dictatorship even requesting admis-
sion into the EU. For most contempo-
rary Europeans, the rule of law and
European values are at the core of the
EU’s mission. They believe that their
common legal system, encompassing
everything from fundamental freedoms
to the chemical composition of paint,
is the essence and backbone of the EU
and reflects its values and principles.
The EU would never compromise on
these (as recent negotiations with the
United Kingdom, asking for more flex-
ibility in its relationship with the bloc,
have shown).
Europeans are used to battles with
member states that breach European
laws and sometimes European prin-
ciples. In August, Poland was in the
news, again, for pushing a law violat-
ing European principles on freedom
of the media. Only days after the Polish
government had announced the partial
dismantling of its controversial Dis-
ciplinary Chamber for judges, at the
behest of the European Court of Justice
(ECJ), which had demanded the cham-
ber’s suspension because it undermined
judicial independence and therefore
contravened EU law, Polish lawmakers
passed new rules barring companies
outside the European Economic Area
(all 27 EU member states plus Iceland,
Liechtenstein, and Norway) from own-
ing a majority stake in Polish broad-
casting companies. The amendment,
narrowly adopted, is widely seen as an
attempt by the government to close
down the one remaining independent
television station in Poland, the U.S.-
owned TVN24.
The EU is often criticized for not keep-
ing close enough tabs on countries like
Poland, but a lot has happened since
Spain’s bid for membership in 1961. It
took the EU several decades to develop
a system that would allow the bloc to act
against one of its own member states
should that country violate European
values. In light of the EU’s ongoing bat-
tles with Poland, Hungary, and other
member states, it is worth underlin-
ing that the initiative to develop such
a system was not taken by the member
states—not even those that nowadays
pose as human rights champions—but
rather despite the member states. It is
pressure from the center—the Euro-
pean Commission and the European

Parliament—that has allowed the EU to
develop the tools to enforce European
values and fundamental rights.
European integration started after
World War II, in the early 1950s, with
the European Coal and Steel Commu-
nity. Back then, the six founding coun-
tries did not describe themselves as a
community of values at all. What they
wanted was merely to make war among
themselves impossible by creating eco-
nomic interdependencies. Values were
an issue for the Council of Europe, an
older organization (founded in 1949)
still influential today, mainly through
the rulings of its European Court of
Human Rights, despite relentless
pushback by council members such
as Russia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan. In
1950, the council drafted the Euro-
pean Convention on Human Rights,
which explicitly mentioned “collective
enforcement.” On the basis of the con-
vention, the European Court of Human
Rights was founded in 1959.
In those early days, the six countries
of the European Community focused
mainly on economic issues. The first
civil rights issues mentioned in commu-
nity texts dealt with economic liberties.
With companies crossing borders, for
example, the need arose to harmonize
workers’ rights across member states.
This was a gradual process. Key ver-
dicts by the ECJ in the 1960s—such
as the Van Gend en Loos case in 1963
and Costa v. ENEL in 1964—established
that community law could override
national law in the member states: Since
national constitutions could not protect
civil rights well enough across borders,
community law had to take care of it. So,
via economic issues, values and rights
slowly moved up the bloc’s agenda.
WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Meanwhile, the European Commu-
nity started to formulate requirements
for good governance and human rights
for countries that wanted development
aid. The Lome Convention and later the
Cotonou Agreement were used as incen-
tives for developing countries to get
their human rights and governance
in order in exchange for European aid.
But since it is one thing to demand that
others behave and quite another to
uphold this at home, pressure mounted
to apply those requirements to Euro-
pean institutions, too.
In the 1970s, the European Parlia-
ment began to pass many resolutions
on human rights. The Helsinki Final
Act (1975) was a reflection of that same
zeitgeist, containing guarantees on
human rights for countries in both the
East and West. The act worked rather
well, to everyone’s surprise, because it
was not just the West again telling the
communist East what to do. Govern-
ments in the Soviet sphere cynically
agreed to all kinds of commitments on
which dissidents quickly started to build.
As the historian Kiran Klaus Patel
explains in his book Project Europe: A
History, in this way, indirectly, human
rights and values slowly but steadily
found their way into community texts
such as the Single European Act (on
the establishment of the single market,
signed in 1986), the Maastricht Treaty
(1992), the Charter of Fundamental
Rights of the EU (2000), and the Lis-
bon Treaty (2007). Human rights and
values came via the market as it became
more integrated and constantly pro-
duced dilemmas on rights and values;
A woman waves a
European Union flag
from her balcony as
people attend
an anti-government
demonstration in
Warsaw, Poland,
on Sept. 24, 2016.
ARGUMENTS
via continuing pressure from the Euro-
pean Parliament, the Council of Europe,
and nongovernmental organizations;
and finally via the boomerang effect of
human rights demands to developing
countries outside the EU. The fact that
the EU was applying stringent entrance
conditions on countries that wanted
to join—and still do, in the Balkans—
also helped.
Until the Lisbon Treaty came into
force, almost 12 years ago, the EU could
not have acted against a member state
breaching EU law on fundamental
rights and values. Only since Decem-
ber 2009 has the EU had the tools to
deal with this problem at all.
Over the decades, EU member states
have always been reluctant to condemn
each other—partly out of fear that they
could be next, partly because the next
day they may need each other’s support
on different matters. Occasionally, they
have been bold and outspoken, such as
when Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang
Schuessel formed a government with
the far-right Freedom Party of Austria
in 2000 and some member states thus
tried to suspend Austria’s voting rights,
creating a diplomatic fiasco.
The reluctance of member states
to discipline one another remains
strong today. Although the European
FALL 2021 27

Parliament has triggered a rule of law
procedure against Hungary and the Euro-
pean Commission has done so against
Poland in recent years, member states
could have pushed for much stronger
follow-through. In both cases, they chose
not to. And it was—again—the directly
elected European Parliament, not the
member states, that insisted last year
that the 750 billion euro EU COVID-19
recovery fund include governance and
human rights conditions. When member
states objected, the Parliament threat-
ened to veto the entire European budget,
of which the recovery fund was part. In
drawn-out negotiations, member states
weakened the conditions again.
As the current standoffs with Poland
and Hungary illustrate, this is how it
often goes: two steps forward, one
step back. Political pressure on illib-
eral countries clearly has its limits. So
far, the slow judiciary route seems to
function better. Poland balked twice
at condemnations by the ECJ but has
still more or less implemented both
verdicts. Going against the court on
such a vital issue is the EU equivalent
of going to war. Moreover, it signals
legal uncertainty for foreign investors.
As Laurent Pech, a professor of Euro-
pean law at Middlesex University Lon-
don, told reporters last year: “No one
will invest in a country where essen-
tially the rulings of the Court of Jus-
tice regarding the judicial branch are
simply openly ignored.” A court verdict
is therefore a big incentive to abide by
commonly agreed rules.
The pushback against Poland’s new
media law shows that Europe’s story as
a community of values continues. But
for those who lose heart at times, it is
worth remembering that until recently
the EU lacked any tools at all to enforce
its principles—and that those tools are
still very much a work in progress. n
CAROLINE DE GRUYTER is a Europe
correspondent for the Dutch
newspaper NRC Handelsblad and
a columnist at Foreign Policy.
28
The Balkans
Don’t Believe
the EU
Anymore
By Benjamin Haddad
and Damir Marusic
n the Western Balkans, a region
I that is best known for generating
intractable-seeming crises, good
news often goes underappreci-
ated. On July 29 in Skopje, North
Macedonia, Serbian President Aleksan-
dar Vucic, Albanian Prime Minister Edi
Rama, and North Macedonia Prime Min-
ister Zoran Zaev convened a summit to
announce the launch of Open Balkan,
an initiative that aims to bolster regional
economic integration. The three vowed
to abolish border controls between their
countries by January 2023.
The news has thus far been met with
cautious encouragement. Regional eco-
nomic integration is an end that all in
the West support, Washington and Ber-
lin both said in separate statements, and
any efforts to achieve it are welcome. In
private, however, there is more hesita-
tion. European diplomats wonder if this
effort could short-circuit the European
Union’s established efforts at fostering
regional dialogue and cooperation (the
so-called Berlin Process) or, worse, cre-
ate an alternative to EU accession.
In a regional tour in July that took us
to North Macedonia, Serbia, and Albania,
we sensed optimism for this initiative
among local policymakers and business
leaders, strongly leavened by disillusion-
ment with the stalled accession process
among the political class. Albania’s
Rama has been especially outspoken
in public, likening it to the experience
of being repeatedly left standing at the
altar. “Enlargement has not stalled—it
has stopped,” another leader lamented to
us during a series of off-the-record con-
versations with regional officials. Betting
on Europe is increasingly becoming a
liability with jaded voters tired of hear-
ing about unfulfilled promises.
The politicians are not wrong to
despair. In 2003 at a meeting in Thes-
saloniki, Greece, European leaders
pledged to the countries of the West-
ern Balkans that their ultimate future
would lie in the EU. Language about a
“European perspective” for the region
has made it into almost every relevant
communique since, clung to by offi-
cials as a demonstration of serious-
ness and commitment by a bloc that
has traditionally struggled to articulate
a coherent foreign policy for its wider
neighborhood. But political will has
never kept up with the rhetoric. And
support for enlargement among voters
has largely collapsed across the conti-
nent since the admission of Croatia in
2013, with publics in Western European
countries especially leery of admitting
more countries at the moment.
But the stall is about more than Euro-
peans failing to live up to their pledges.
In the last decade, the EU has faced a
flurry of crises, from the financial shock
of 2008 to the migrant crisis, the effects
of which were exacerbated by the bloc’s
own internal structural shortcomings.
French President Emmanuel Macron,
who spearheaded the effort toward a
new, more stringent, and most impor-
tantly reversible enlargement meth-
odology, is insisting on far-reaching
reforms to existing European insti-
tutions before any new countries are
admitted to the bloc. Meanwhile, con-
cerns about organized crime are damp-
ening support for enlargement in such
countries as the Netherlands.
And to be fair, Europeans are not
wrong to point to corruption and
problems with the rule of law for the
disappointing progress in talks. Trans-
parency International’s 2020 Corrup-
tion Perceptions Index ranks Serbia
94th worldwide out of 180 countries,
Albania 104th, and North Macedonia

111th. The fact that EU members such
as Hungary and Poland are backslid-
ing on democracy, and that Bulgaria
and Romania continue to struggle with
high-level corruption almost a decade
and a half since accession, is not exactly
an endorsement for hastily admitting
more members to the club.
Faced with such grim prospects, it’s
notable that Open Balkan’s founders see
the initiative not as an alternative to EU
accession but rather as a complement
to existing processes. Vucic, Rama, and
Zaev all stressed to us during our trip that
the project’s goals were patterned on the
European common market, especially in
seeking to guarantee the market’s “four
freedoms” (the free movement of goods,
capital, services, and people). The mem-
orandum of understanding signed at the
recent summit pledges to make good on
the promise of free movement of goods
within six months and on the free move-
ment of people by Jan. 1, 2023. The point,
they say, is to show tangible benefits to
their citizens as soon as possible. Serbia
in particular is facing a labor shortage
and is keen to make it easier for Mace-
donians and Albanians to cross the bor-
der for work. In the longer term, none of
the countries is big enough on its own
to attract large, transformative invest-
ments from Western firms. A single mar-
ket could prove much more tempting.
While the Open Balkan name explic-
itly suggests an invitation to others, the
absence of Kosovo, Bosnia and Herze-
govina, and Montenegro at the Skopje
summit was conspicuous. The three
holdouts remain skeptical, arguing that
the new initiative duplicates the devel-
opment of a common regional market
that was agreed to by all six in Sofia,
Bulgaria, last year as part of the Ber-
lin Process. They fret that taking part
in an initiative that wasn’t designed in
Europe will affect their accession pros-
FLORION GOGA/ REUTERS
pects, distant as they may be. This is,
of course, not true. Europe’s door is,
for the moment at least, equally closed
to all. And though, as we noted above,
both American and European leaders
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, right, and EU Enlargement
Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi speak during a summit of Western
Balkan leaders in Tirana, Albania, on June 10.
have concerns about the Open Balkan
initiative, the deliberate ambiguity of
their statements—voicing support for
regional economic integration with-
out specifying which vehicle is best to
achieve it—also betrays genuine ambiv-
alence on the matter.
The truth is that an initiative like
Open Balkan will ultimately stand or
fall on implementation. The recent
meeting saw only one binding agree-
ment pledging mutual emergency assis-
tance actually signed, with the rest of
the ambitious proposals to be fleshed
out at lower levels of government in the
coming months. The smart play at this
point would be for the West to help the
initiative succeed while ensuring that its
pledge of openness to the entire region
remains in place. Any honest account
of the birth of the EU admits that it was
itself the product of many concurrently
running initiatives and bilateral agree-
ments that over time coalesced into the
arrangement they have now. The birth
of a lasting order in the Western Balkans
will likely be no different. The role of
the West should not be to engineer and
micromanage. Rather, it should keep
the participants honest in delivering
on their pledges while at the same time
keeping an eye on the big picture, ensur-
ing that the outcome be as inclusive,
functional, and indeed open as possible.
The bigger picture matters most
of all. Coming on the heels of the
ARGUMENTS
breakthrough Prespa Agreement between
North Macedonia and Greece, initia-
tives like Open Balkan signal that some-
thing important, and indeed healthy, is
happening on the ground: Local lead-
ers are taking ownership of their fate
and showing creativity. This needs to
be embraced and encouraged. The EU
in particular should take the opportunity
to be more flexible. As it itself adapts to a
changing world, it should start reimag-
ining what its relationship with its near
abroad can look like. Perhaps concen-
tric circles of deepening integration over
time can take the place of a one-size-fits-
all bureaucratic approach that has obvi-
ously ground to a halt.
Vucic used the recent summit as an
excuse to publish an op-ed in a lead-
ing Serbian daily calling on his fel-
low Serbs to look to a hopeful future
instead of marinating in long-standing
hatred for Albanians. This is but the
most recent manifestation of a thaw that
has been building for more than a year
now. As of this summer, Serbs represent
the second-largest nationality visiting
Albania’s beaches—a stunning figure
given recent history. More positive sur-
prises are possible, even likely, should
a cycle of prosperity take hold. n
BENJAMIN HADDAD is the director
of the Atlantic Council’s Europe
Center, where DAMIR MARUSIC is a
resident senior fellow.
FALL 2021 29
FLOAT,
MOVE,

How the U.S. Navy lost the shipbuilding race.

Illustration by TIMO LENZEN

AND

FIGHT

BY ALEXANDER WOOLEY

31 FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 31

T
he 21st century has not been
kind to the U.S. Navy’s vast surface fleet. In an effort to
leap ahead of other navies through revolutionary designs
and technologies, the Navy has instead fallen significantly
behind, accepting into service ships that struggle to even
“float, move, and fight”—the basic functions of the most
rudimentary warship. Ship classes have been cut, and
many vessels have been retired early, while others wait
years for repairs. These include supposedly cutting-edge
vessels that were meant to be the backbone of the current
and near-future fleet.
The failures are legion and the details excruciating—to tax-
payers and even more so to Navy planners: The Littoral Com-
bat Ship (LCS) was meant to offer the U.S. Navy a way to take
the fight close to hostile coasts. The Navy imagined a Swiss
Army knife-style vessel, with mission packages swapped in
and out as needed. Yet the LCS manages to combine a lack
of firepower with serious defensive vulnerabilities and rou-
tine mechanical breakdowns. Two key systems—to counter
mines and submarines—have never become operational. LCS
costs doubled during construction, the original class size of
52 was cut to 35, and the Navy is retiring the lead ships after
just a dozen years of service.
Or consider the massive, futuristic Zumwalt-class stealth
destroyer. Only three of an originally planned 32 ships are
going to be built. Some estimates have the all-in costs for
the Zumwalt at $7 billion per ship—more expensive than
the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers they might be expected to
escort. The ship’s main armament, a new technology called
a railgun, doesn’t work and would not have been of much
use in a maritime conflict with China anyway. In mid-2021,
the railgun was effectively canceled. 
Then there’s the Ford. Though a varsity athlete at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, U.S. President Gerald Ford was known
for physical stumbles, and his namesake nuclear-powered
vessel, a long-awaited replacement for the workhorse Nimitz-
class carrier, has unfortunately followed in his missteps. The
overly ambitious design includes new propulsion, a buggy
magnetic catapult, a new aircraft arresting system, a new
primary radar, and advanced weapons elevators. Each new
technology has had extensive problems, cost overruns, and
32
delays. The Navy issues a news release every time it gets
one of the ammunition elevators to work.
Over the past 20 years, the U.S. Government Accountabil-
ity Office (GAO) has issued roughly 40 reports or testimonies
on problematic ship types. Less attention has been paid to
the totality of the problem as well as its origins and common
symptoms. Together, the many failures constitute a lost gen-
eration of shipbuilding, leaving the Navy unready at a time
when China has already built the world’s biggest fleet, with
more hulls splashing off its slipways every year. Given that
tensions with China may only worsen—potentially spilling
over into outright conflict—the United States needs to take
better stock of how it got into this mess.
THE FAILURES IN NEW PLATFORMS AND TECHNOLOGIES were self-
induced, unforced errors. They didn’t occur as the United
States was trying to match a rival or play catch-up to another
power. They came, in part, as a result of hubris—an unrivaled
belief in the country’s power of rapid innovation.
One key turning point came in 1991 during Operation Des-
ert Storm. That lightning victory was perceived not only as
a success for coalition forces but for U.S. industry and tech-
nology—a star-studded debut of new weapons systems that
had been decades in the making. Naval planners were daz-
zled by the new technology; they figured that by incorporat-
ing more revolutionary capabilities into their shipbuilding,
they could build fewer hulls with smaller crews. This was
particularly enticing at the time, as the end of the Cold War
had seen a peace dividend that included the drawing down
of the Reagan-era 600-ship fleet.
A decade later, in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld was sworn in as
U.S. defense secretary, obsessed with technological revolu-
tion. He pushed for radical change. Early on in the devel-
opment of the Ford, he overruled the Navy’s preference
for taking a slow, evolutionary approach to developing the
Nimitz’s successor, deciding the plans were not sufficiently
transformational. Instead, he forced through a program that
tried to pull together various revolutionary (and untested)
technologies. The result: Some 20 years later, the ship has
still not deployed. “The Navy embraced technology for
The U.S. Navy continues to
decommission ships faster
than it builds them. It scraps
multibillion-dollar hulls for a lack
of repair capacity and falls further
behind not just China but relative
minnows like Italy and Finland.

technology’s sake,” said Rep. Elaine Luria, the vice chair of
the House Armed Services Committee and a veteran surface
warfare officer whose congressional district includes the
massive Norfolk Naval Shipyard and Naval Station Norfolk.  sons of recent catastrophes and take a more incremental
One challenge was trying to design and deploy new
shipboard technologies while at the same time building a
new ship. Earlier cutting-edge technologies like vertically
launched missiles and the AN/SPY-1 radar—core to the
Ticonderoga- and Arleigh Burke-class surface ships—received
extensive testing and development both on shore and at
sea before they were ever installed in operational warships.
This previous practice of “de-risking” meant that if a single
technology failed, it failed alone. When, on the other hand,
a technology fails aboard a warship that has been handed
over to the Navy, the interdependence of systems means the
entire ship is rendered nonoperational.  commanders saying that China may take military action
“Whole programs were premised on the introduction of new
technologies that will need to work while designing the pro-
gram not knowing if those technologies will actually work,” said
Shelby Oakley, a director for contracting and national security
acquisitions at GAO, describing flaws in the LCS and Zumwalt.
The results across all three types of vessels were the same:
massive cost overruns and ships with reduced capabilities
delivered late and incomplete. In the case of the LCS, the
original plan was that industry would produce two dif-
ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
ferent designs—prototypes that would serve as research
and development vessels—and the Navy would select one.
Instead, the Navy kept both test designs, and they went into
production as is, deemed good enough.
The decades of U.S. shipbuilding failures were long masked
by the absence of any near-peer fleet. But today, the Office of
Naval Intelligence (ONI) has concluded that China has the larg-
est navy in the world—by the end of 2020, it had an estimated
China’s first aircraft carrier,
the Liaoning (right), arrives
in the waters off Hong Kong
on July 7, 2017.
360 battle force ships, com-
pared with 297 for the United
States. ONI projects that
China will have 400 battle
force ships by 2025 and 425 by
2030. More worrisome for U.S.
planners: Chinese warships
are increasingly capable,
reducing the quality gap that
is the traditional wellspring
of U.S. confidence as it contemplates emerging adversaries.
The U.S. Navy now faces contradictory demands. On the
one hand, Congress and others are telling it to heed the les-
approach to ship and technology design, procurement, and
testing. Yet it also faces congressional pressure to get a signifi-
cantly larger battle force—in a hurry. That may explain the
cognitive dissonance that continues to define naval planning.
For five years, the Navy has lived with the order, codified
into law, to increase its fleet to 355 ships. In mid-2021, the
Biden administration announced a fuzzy successor to this
number, calling for 321 to 372 manned ships. At the same time,
the administration and the Defense Department have sounded
the alarm on the growing threat posed by China in virtually
every domain, with outgoing and incoming Indo-Pacific
against Taiwan within the next six years. Yet the Navy’s latest
budget doesn’t come close to enabling a shipbuilding program
that would meet even the lower range of government targets.
The result is a Navy that continues to decommission ships
faster than it builds them. It scraps multibillion-dollar hulls
for a lack of repair capacity and falls further behind not just
China but relative minnows like Italy and Finland, which
have successfully introduced new, robust ship types that
the United States has spent decades vainly trying to build.
“While the Navy has expended lots of calories on attempts
at LCS improvements with little to show for its efforts, other
nations have continued to move forward fielding smaller,
better, and more capable frigates and corvettes,” said Chris
Bassler, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Bud-
getary Assessments who previously held a leadership role at
the Navy’s Directorate for Innovation, Technology Require-
ments, and Test and Evaluation.
FALL 2021 33
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 U.S. problems stem in part from the way the Navy designs
ships. Post-Cold War cuts led to a slowdown in new ship-
building across the board, and as a result, ailing private
industry lobbied the Clinton administration to take on
more engineering and design work, a function historically
performed in-house by the Navy. Naval Sea Systems Com-
mand (NAVSEA) and its associated labs had earlier designed
successful ships like the Ticonderoga-class cruisers and the
Wasp-class amphibious assault ships. Then, seeking cost
savings in the late 1990s, the Navy reduced this in-house
naval architecture and engineering staff by 75 percent, from
roughly 1,200 to 300.
But perhaps the biggest contrast with China right now is
shipbuilding capacity. While China has dozens of big ship-
yards that can build both warships and big commercial ves-
sels, there are only seven yards in the United States that can
build major warships. That dearth of capacity has several
effects. With newer classes constantly in the shop for repairs,
some ships sit at pier for years before being seen to. Late in
2020, the Navy decided to scrap the $4 billion Bonhomme
Richard, a big-deck amphibious assault ship that had suf-
fered an internal fire while docked in San Diego, in large part
because the industrial base was stretched too thin to be able
to handle the reconstruction needed.  and would keep the industrial base humming.
For decades, the number of public and private yards has
been shrinking, resulting in little competition and reduced
capacity. Yards won’t invest in infrastructure without orders
on the books, and without a steady flow of orders, builders
lose skilled workers, know-how, and subcontractors. Unlike in
China, there’s little commercial shipping to fall back on to keep
the U.S. shipbuilding base afloat; around 90 percent of all com-
mercial ships today are built in South Korea, Japan, and China.
And there aren’t enough drydocks, especially if the Navy
gets serious about expanding the fleet. The infrastructure
is old and in poor shape: Norfolk Naval Shipyard’s Drydock
Number One has been in use since 1833—it refitted the Civil
War-era ironclad USS Merrimack. The newest drydock at the
four Navy-run shipyards was completed in 1962. As it is, it
would take almost 20 years to work through the Navy’s cur-
rent maintenance backlog.  ian design and was less technologically ambitious than the
WHAT CAN BE DONE? SOME THINK WASHINGTON SHOULD throw more
money at the problem by, for example, increasing the Navy’s
budget—moving away from the traditional “rule of thirds” divi-
sion of budget resources among the Army, Air Force, and Navy.
Another fix would be to rebuild NAVSEA’s in-house engineering
and design capabilities. At the very least, critical subsystems
need to be successfully prototyped before being integrated into
a ship’s design. And there should be more discipline before for-
mally launching a new shipbuilding program, ensuring that
every new technology has been rigorously assessed.
But just as a slow-moving aircraft carrier generates
A straightforward fix—though
difficult with annual budget
assessments—would be to
ensure accurate, long-term
shipbuilding plans.
tremendous forward momentum, the U.S. planning and
budgetary process becomes hard to steer or stop once it gets
going, especially when funds are already flowing to a new
ship class. Add the fact that profit-pursuing private shipyards
have an outsized say in the design and building of new ves-
sels, and you have a recipe for disaster.
A straightforward fix—though difficult with annual bud-
get assessments—would be to ensure accurate, long-term
shipbuilding plans. Such plans would allow industry to make
investments, hire and train workers, and build capacity. The
Navy also needs to direct and work more closely with indus-
try to help it better understand the mission the Navy wants
to meet. That would ultimately lead to cost savings and effi-
ciencies, as more ships of a given class roll off the slipways,
Potential solutions to the Navy’s shipbuilding woes should
have appeal to both foreign and domestic policy agendas. The
Biden administration believes that the United States must
blunt China’s ambitions—across the political, economic,
and cultural spectrum—by building its strength at home
and working with allies abroad. And if the U.S. government
wants to counter China’s industrial investment and manufac-
turing capacity, pursue better R&D, and employ more skilled
workers, where better to start than the nation’s shipyards? 
In the meantime, after more than two decades of failure,
the U.S. Navy is turning to stopgap measures and holy grails—
with little prospect of a bigger or stronger fleet in the near
future, when the China challenge is likely to become more
acute. In 2020, when the Navy selected the winning bid for
the new FFG(X) guided missile frigate, it was based on an Ital-
recent failed classes. It has also modernized the venerable
Arleigh Burke to remain the staple of the surface fleet until a
new guided missile destroyer program, launched this sum-
mer, pays dividends with a brand-new surface combatant.
But none of the short-term fixes can patch decades of fail-
ure to keep the Navy in trim. Promised warships decades
ahead of their time, American sailors instead are left to go
into harm’s way with ships from decades past. U.S. policy-
makers need to own up to that—and fix it. n
ALEXANDER WOOLEY is a journalist and former officer in the
British Royal Navy.
FALL 2021 35
SEA
POWER
MAKES
GREAT
POWERS
History reveals a country’s rise and decline
are directly related to the heft of its navy.
So why is the United States intent on downsizing?

BY JERRY HENDRIX

THE NUMBER OF SHIPS A COUNTRY POSSESSES has never been

the sole measure of its power at sea. Other factors, of
course, play a role: The types of ships it has—submarines,
aircraft carriers, destroyers—the manner in which
they are deployed, the sophistication of their sensors,
and the range and lethality of their weapons all make a
difference. Still, on the high seas, quantity has a quality
all its own. And over the past several decades, U.S. ship
numbers have seen a dramatic overall decline.
The 1980s and 1990s marked the beginning of this
downward trend. The U.S. government at the time cut
subsidies for the nation’s commercial shipbuilding
industry, eventually hobbling the shipyards it would
need to build a bigger fleet. With the end of the Cold War,
policymakers went a step further, slashing funding to the
U.S. Navy to create a shortsighted peace dividend.

36 Photograph Illustration by NAMETK NAME

Photograph Illustration by NAMETK NAME
Now, with defense budgets flat or declining, leading Defense
Department officials are pushing a “divest to invest” strat-
egy—whereby the Navy must decommission a large number
of older ships to free up funds to buy fewer, more sophisti-
cated, and presumably more lethal platforms.
China, meanwhile, is aggressively expanding its naval foot-
print and is estimated to have the largest fleet in the world.
Leading voices simultaneously recognize the rising China
threat while also arguing that the United States must shrink
its present fleet in order to modernize. Adm. Philip Davidson,
who led U.S. Indo-Pacific Command until he retired this
spring, observed in March that China could invade Taiwan in
the next six years—presumably setting the stage for a major
military showdown with the United States—while Adm.
Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations, has argued
that the Navy needs to accelerate the decommissioning of
its older cruisers and littoral combat ships to free up money
for vessels and weapons that will be critical in the future.
Taken together, these views add up to strategic confusion
and an obliviousness to history.
CENTURIES OF GLOBAL RIVALRY SHOW how a country’s power—
and its decline—is directly related to the size and capability
of its naval and maritime forces. The ability to ship goods in
bulk from places where they are produced to places where
they are scarce has long represented an expression of national
power. Athens had a robust navy as well as a large merchant
fleet. Carthage in the third century B.C., Venice in the 13th and
14th centuries, and the Dutch republic in the 16th and 17th
centuries also fielded merchant and naval fleets to pursue and
protect their interests. In this way, they were able to transform
their small- and medium-sized nations into great powers.
Following the Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century,
a large Royal Navy effectively knitted together the British
Empire upon which “the sun never set.” By the latter half
of that century, the British maintained a “two-power stan-
dard,” whereby the size of the Royal Navy had to meet or
exceed the next two navies combined. That ultimately proved
5 5
4 4
3 3
2 2
1 1 1 1 1
0 0 0 0
1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992
38
unsustainable. It was the doubling of the U.S. Navy battle
force under President Theodore Roosevelt that catapulted
the United States to global power and prominence. Most his-
torians view the 14-month world cruise of new U.S. battle-
ships—Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet—as the birth of what
would come to be known as the American Century.
The dramatic expansion of the U.S. fleet through two world
wars—finishing the later conflict with more than 6,000 ves-
sels, by far the largest navy ever afloat—set the country on its
superpower path. Finally, Ronald Reagan’s 600-ship Navy,
as much a public relations campaign as it was a shipbuild-
ing plan, helped convince the Soviet Union that it would not
win the Cold War.
Throughout history, large naval and merchant fleets repre-
sented not just a power multiplier but an exponential growth
factor in terms of national influence. All historical sea pow-
ers recognized this—until they didn’t.
IN OCTOBER 1904, ADM. JOHN “JACKIE” FISHER was appointed
first sea lord of the Royal Navy. He arrived in office certain
who the enemy was—Germany—but also with clear direc-
tion from civilian leadership to tighten his belt and accept
declining naval budgets. Fisher’s solution to this strategic
dilemma was to dramatically shrink the fleet in order to pay
for modernization while also concentrating the remaining
ships closer to Great Britain. His investments in moderniza-
tion were breathtaking—most notably the introduction of a
steam-turbine, all-big-gun battleship, the HMS Dreadnought,
which would lend its name to all subsequent battleships that
followed, transforming global naval competition.
But Fisher paid for his modernized vessels by massively
culling the 600-ship Royal Navy he inherited from his pre-
decessor. “With one courageous stroke of the pen,” then-
Prime Minister Arthur Balfour approvingly stated, Fisher
slashed 154 ships from the Royal Navy’s active list. Fisher
classified some of these ships as “sheep,” which were sent
to the slaughter in the breakers’ yards; others as “llamas,”
downgraded but retained in the reserves; and still others as
5
4 4 4 4
3 3 3 3
2 2 2 2
0 0 0 0 0
1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002
 “goats,” which retained their guns with the stipulation that
no further maintenance funds would be allocated to them.
The cull, however, wasn’t cost-free. Most of the cuts were
taken from gunboats and cruisers assigned to nine distant
stations where Britain had national interests, such as in Asia
or Africa. The cuts generated great criticism not only from
within the Royal Navy, which was manned by officers with
long experience and strong views regarding the importance
of a naval presence overseas, but also from the British Colo-
nial and Foreign Offices, which instantly recognized that
they would no longer be able to call on readily available
Royal Navy ships to support the nation’s diplomatic interests.
Ultimately, Fisher did modernize his fleet in the short term.
Both the Dreadnought class battleships as well as their consorts,
the smaller Invincible-class battle cruisers, rendered all previ-
ous designs instantly obsolete. What Fisher did not anticipate
was that his contraction and modernization of the Royal Navy
would create two simultaneous effects: It destabilized the inter-
national environment, and it triggered a global naval arms race.
Britain had already been under pressure in the Far East
and had asked Japan for assistance protecting its interests
there, but now it found itself without a fleet of sufficient size
to defend its interests in other geostrategic locations like
the Caribbean and Africa. It had to trust a new partner, the
United States, to take on that job. The only alternative would
have been for Britain to simply forgo its colonial interests in
order to focus on what it viewed as the preponderant German
threat in the Baltic, North Sea, and northern Atlantic Ocean.
There were other knock-on effects. Having surrendered
its dominant lead in overall ship numbers, Britain found
itself in a new naval arms race in which its previous, sunk-
cost investments in older ships offered no benefit. To its
dismay, Britain began this new arms race from nearly the
same position as its geostrategic rivals. Soon every Euro-
pean power, as well as the United States and Japan, was
building modern dreadnoughts, and Fisher and his navy
were unable to maintain or reestablish their previous
two-power standard.
Today, Fisher’s strategy would be recognized as a divest-
to-invest modernization plan. And the lesson is clear: Brit-
ain found that it was unable to preserve even the facade
of being a global power; it was quickly reduced to being
a regional maritime power on the periphery of Europe.
The ensuing conditions of international instability, shifting
alliance structures, and the global arms race con-
tributed to the outbreak of World War I and the end
of empires, including Britain’s. 26
THE UNITED STATES CURRENTLY FACES many of the same
strategic challenges that Britain confronted just
over a century ago. Much as the Balfour ministry
faced strategic strain from the distant Boer War—
as well as expanding domestic social instability
and the rise of Germany—the United States is
dealing with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghan-
istan, domestic civil unrest, and a rising China.
Additionally, the White House Office of Manage-
ment and Budget has attempted to impose on
the Defense Department similar fiscal strictures
U.S. vs. China
Naval Fleet Growth
Surface combatants commissioned
per year of ships still in service
SOURCE: NAVAL HISTORIAN CLAUDE BERUBE
13
12 12
11
10 10
7

4 4 4 4 4 4

3 3 3 3 3 3

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

1 1 1

0 0 0

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

Previous spread: Illustration by TIMO LENZEN FALL 2021 39

 Is the dollar’s global
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to those that Balfour levied on Fisher’s Admiralty: flat to
declining budgets and demands to be more efficient. As a
result, the Pentagon has made the decision to cut back on
its shipbuilding plans, starting construction of only eight
new ships in the next year, half of them auxiliaries, while
accelerating the decommissioning of seven cruisers, drop-
ping the fleet to an estimated 294 ships. Congress has indi-
cated that it will seek to expand these numbers, but the
future is increasingly murky.
Given that even the most capable ship can only be in
one place at a time and that the world’s oceans are vast,
the fleet as planned will not meet the demand for a naval
presence detailed by the various four-star regional com-
batant commanders around the world. On average, their
requests equate to approximately 130 ships at sea on any
given day, nearly half of the present fleet. Today the Navy
deploys, on average, fewer than 90 ships per day, creating
gaps in key regions where America’s interests are not being
upheld. The Navy previously sought efficiencies that would
allow it to “do more with less,” by curbing training or the
time ships spent in maintenance. The result, however, was
an uptick in serious accidents at sea and a decline in the
material readiness of the battle fleet.
Still, the overarching U.S. naval strategy, stated repeatedly
by defense leaders during this spring’s round of congres-
sional hearings, is to “divest” of older platforms in order to
“invest” in newer platforms that, although fewer in num-
ber, would possess a qualitative edge over those fielded by
competitors. As history reveals, this strategy will produce a
fleet too small to protect the United States’ global interests
or win its wars. Ultimately, the U.S. shipbuilding base and
repair yards will atrophy to a point where they will not be
able to meet the demand for new ships nor provide repairs
when war almost inevitably comes.
TO AVOID THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST, Congress should follow its
constitutional charge in Article 1 and allocate funds sufficient
to both provide for a newer, more modern fleet in the long run
and to maintain the Navy that it has today as a hedge against
the real and proximate threat from China. Such an alloca-
tion requires a 3 to 5 percent annual increase in the Navy’s
budget for the foreseeable future, as was recommended by
the bipartisan 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission.
Both steps are crucial. Weapons like hypersonic missiles
and directed energy mounts like the much-hyped railgun are
changing the face of warfare, although not its nature, and
the United States must invest to keep up with its competi-
tors in China and Russia, which are already fielding some of
these systems in large numbers. However, the Navy, as the
day-to-day patroller facing these two rival great powers, can-
not shrink the size of its battle force. As both Theodore and
Franklin D. Roosevelt and later Ronald Reagan all understood:
Great powers possess large, robust, and resilient navies. Con-
versely, shrinking fleets historically suggest nations that are
overstretched, overtasked, and in retreat. Such revelations
invite expansion and challenge from would-be rivals. To meet
the demands of the current strategic environment, the U.S.
Navy must grow—and quickly.
Not even a fleet of 355 ships, the number advanced by the
Obama administration in its closing days, will be sufficient to
reestablish conventional deterrence on the high seas. Instead,
the United States should seek a fleet of 456 ships, comprising
a balance between high-end, high-tech ships such as nuclear
attack submarines and low-end, cheaper small surface com-
batants that can be added to numbers quickly. It should also
seek to extend the lives of the ships it has now in its inven-
tory to cover the short-term threat. The United States can do
this by scheduling these ships for service life extensions of
their hulls and power plants and for modernization of their
combat systems and associated sensors within the constel-
lation of the nation’s civilian ship repair yards.
This endeavor will be expensive. Each Ticonderoga-class
cruiser or Arleigh Burke-class destroyer could cost as much
as half a billion dollars to repair and modernize, but replac-
ing each cruiser and destroyer with a new ship would cost
$3.5 billion and $1.9 billion, respectively, and such repair
and modernization efforts would have the additional effect
of rejuvenating the nation’s ship repair capacity that has lain
fallow for too long.
The United States began the 20th century as a peripheral
power. First, Theodore Roosevelt’s work to upbuild the Navy,
followed by the efforts of the Wilson administration to meet
the demands of a world war by tripling the size of the fleet,
helped place the United States in a strong position at sea. This
position was strengthened during the late 1930s, when Rep.
Carl Vinson worked with FDR to expand the size of the Navy
prior to World War II through three shipbuilding bills that
culminated in the 1940 Two-Ocean Navy Act. It was those
efforts, taken in times of peace, that allowed the U.S. Navy
at the end of World War II to seize center stage.
Now, in this third decade of the 21st century, the United
States must not ignore the rhymes of history, repeating the
mistakes of the sea power that came before it—Britain—by
lulling itself into the false belief that it can divest to invest
in a brighter future while China maneuvers to overtake it.
It must have larger defense budgets that will allow for a sea
power-focused national security strategy in the face of ris-
ing threats. The United States must recognize yet again—as
others have before it—that on the world’s oceans, quantity
has a quality all its own. n
JERRY HENDRIX is a vice president at the Telemus Group, a
retired U.S. Navy captain, and the author of To Provide and
Maintain a Navy.
FALL 2021 41
LOST
AT
SEA

NONCOMISSIONED OR SECONDARY CREDIT TK

What the Ever Given debacle reveals

about our increasing dependence
on shipping—and its hidden victims.
BY ELISABETH BRAW

42
O
n March 29, after being
stuck sideways in the Suez Canal for nearly a week, the mega-
freighter Ever Given was unmoored. With that, the world’s
attention, rapt for days by global shipping, turned elsewhere.
That’s a shame because the Ever Given and its crew didn’t
get to travel on to their destination. Instead, they were seized
by Egyptian authorities. Their treatment wasn’t unusual.
All over the world, seafarers endure the same tragic fate:
being stuck on their ships, sometimes for years, because
shipowners and governments can’t solve their disagree-
ments—and, in some cases, eventually being turned over
to authorities after committing no crimes.
They’re the hidden victims of our increasing dependence
on shipping.
What caused the Ever Given to get stuck in the Suez Canal?
That was the question that kept the container ship and its crew
in a lake adjacent to the Suez Canal for more than three months.
The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) argued that the captain had
made mistakes on his ill-fated journey, while the Ever Given’s
owners claimed the SCA shouldn’t have allowed the vessel
to enter the canal during a massive sandstorm. At stake was
a $550 million compensation the SCA was demanding from
the Ever Given’s insurers. By July 7, the parties had reached
an undisclosed settlement, and the Ever Given could finally
leave the lake with its crew. At least the same crew members
hadn’t been stuck there the whole time: Seafarers’ unions had
managed to get permission from the SCA for periodic crew
changes. On July 29, the Ever Given, carrying its cargo of some
18,000 containers, reached Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
Foreign governments regularly seize freighters, and most
cases don’t have the Ever Given’s sunny ending. Some gov-
ernments, like Egypt’s, do so over disputed services and pay-
ments. Some, like Australia’s, inspect vessels for adherence
to global environmental and seafarer welfare rules, detain-
ing them if they discover misdoings. And some simply seize
vessels to make a geopolitical point. That’s what happened
to the Swedish-owned, British-flagged Stena Impero in 2019,
when Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps detained it
in an apparent response to the United Kingdom seizing an
Iranian oil tanker suspected of breaking European Union
sanctions on Syria. And every time, crews have to wait on
Illustration by TIMO LENZEN
board until others decide their ship can travel on.
Sometimes, the decision doesn’t really ever come. In some
cases, the owner decides the fight over a stranded vessel isn’t
worth it and simply abandons the ship. “We’ve just been
dealing with a crew whose ship was stranded off the coast of
Mombasa—all Syrians,” Ben Bailey, the director of advocacy
and regional engagement for the Mission to Seafarers, told
me in August. “We’ve been looking after them and supply-
ing them with food, water, and oil for their generators. And
while they’re waiting, they’re not receiving any wages. We
have to remember that most seafarers come from develop-
ing countries and support families.”
According to figures from the International Chamber of
Shipping, the Philippines provides the most ratings, as lower-
ranking seafarers are called, followed by China (although Chi-
nese ratings largely crew Chinese ships), Indonesia, Russia,
and Ukraine. China is the biggest supplier of officers (who
again mostly crew Chinese ships), followed by the Philip-
pines, India, Indonesia, and Russia. In one case, the Mission
to Seafarers assisted a crew of 22 who were stuck on their
ship for two and a half years. And in all cases, stuck really
means stuck: Although a seized or abandoned vessel is typi-
cally anchored at a harbor, the crew is not allowed to leave it.
The situation is worst for crews of abandoned ships, who
have no idea when they’ll be released from their floating
prisons. As long as they remain on board, the ship’s owners
should technically pay them, although unscrupulous own-
ers typically have no intention of paying their abandoned
ships’ crews even if they do stay on board. Consider the fate
of the Azraqmoiah, a cargo ship abandoned off the coast
of the United Arab Emirates for 18 months: Even when the
owners finally resurfaced and the captain and two remain-
ing crew members got paid, they only received 80 percent
of what they were owed. “There’s no guarantee that aban-
donment will be resolved,” Bailey said. “In some cases, the
owners are a small company that may be failing, and they
deliberately abandon the ship so they can write it off. In some
cases, it’s serious companies that have fallen on hard times.”
In all cases, the crews pay the price.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) has compiled
a database of abandoned vessels that contains countless such
stories. The Panama-flagged Axis, for example, arrived off the
coast of Benin in October 2018. Three months after reaching
the port of Cotonou, the Axis’s nine crew members—four Paki-
stanis, two Filipinos, and three Ukrainians—informed a sea-
farers’ assistance network that they were short on food, water,
and fuel and said they hadn’t been paid since they arrived.
By December 2020, the crew was still in Benin, with the two
Filipinos remaining on the Axis. Spare a thought, too, for the
Mauritius-flagged Beas Dolphin’s crew of 17 Indians and one
Ukrainian, stuck in Mumbai, who reported in January 2019
that they hadn’t been paid wages in more than six months.
FALL 2021 43
And for the Liberian-flagged Bourbon’s crew of 12 Russians and
one Ukrainian, who were abandoned—without pay and provi-
sions—off Manila in the Philippines last September. “This is a
re-occurring abandonment case,” the ILO notes in the ship’s file.
All this is, of course, illegal. The 2006 Maritime Labour
Convention spells out in great detail every aspect of seafarers’
employment—but it has been ratified by only 97 countries.
And rogue firms wishing to abandon their ships know which
ports belong to nonparticipating countries, such as the UAE.
Even if your ship has been abandoned at a port in a coun-
try that has ratified the convention, said Victoria Mitchell, a
maritime expert at the global risk consultancy Control Risks,
“what can you do? If you need to get ashore to contact a law-
yer, will you be able to do that? You may not be permitted
ashore if you don’t have valid documentation, and there are
language issues. There’s also a question of awareness-raising
because to make a claim against your employer you need to
know your legal rights.”
Who’s going to help? Good Samaritans are in short sup-
ply. “With abandoned ships, nobody feels responsible,” said
Simon Lockwood, a maritime expert with the global insurance
broker Willis Towers Watson. “It’s a matter of who blinks first
or who feels most embarrassed.” What can happen became
clear on Aug. 4, 2020, when a shipload of ammonium nitrate
stored in a hangar in Beirut’s port exploded, killing at least
218 people, injuring some 7,000, and causing untold devas-
tation across the Lebanese capital. The nearly 3,000 metric
tons of the chemical compound that were in the hangar were
there because the owner of the ship, a Moldovan-flagged
freighter traveling from Georgia to Mozambique, lost inter-
est in it after the boat developed technical problems while
docked in Beirut. Lebanese lawyers managed to get the crew
released from the ship, and local authorities acted respon-
sibly by taking the explosive chemicals ashore—but then
apparently forgot about them for six years.
Irresponsible shipowners, in other words, get away with
murder. While abandoned ships rarely cause mass deaths,
the desperation of being on a deteriorating vessel with just a
small group of people, without pay and with no way of getting
food, fresh water, and other provisions, has led some seafar-
ers to take their own lives. This January, an Indian seaman
who had been stuck on his asphalt tanker for 13 months died
in a suspected suicide. Others have attacked their crewmates.
“Imagine being stuck with the same 10 people for months on
end, without being able to go anywhere,” Lockwood said. “In
shipping, human life often becomes a commodity. Good ship-
ping companies will always look after their crews, but there’s
also another side of the industry.” Even without being stranded
on abandoned ships, seafarers suffer from far higher rates of
depression than the general population: 25 percent versus 6
percent (with Germany as the control group), according to a
2019 report by Yale University researchers.
44
“In shipping, human life often
becomes a commodity. Good
shipping companies will always
look after their crews, but there’s
also another side of the industry.”
If all this weren’t difficult enough, last year COVID-19
brought yet more bad news to the world’s more than 1.6 mil-
lion seafarers who service the globalized economy. “At one
point last year, we had some 400,000 seafarers who couldn’t
get home,” said Guy Platten, the International Chamber of
Shipping’s secretary-general. “Many were stuck because
COVID rules prevented people from traveling.” Eventually
the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution
encouraging countries to help seafarers get home. Soon after,
maritime organizations launched the Neptune Declaration,
in which they committed to ensuring that crews are allowed
to leave their vessels and fly home after their tour of duty
(typically a period of a few months).
But the tale of COVID-19 and global maritime shipping—
which transports 80 percent of the world’s goods by vol-
ume—is far from over. Although crews need to disembark at
their various ports of call and are indisputably crucial to the
running of the globalized economy, they haven’t been given
priority access to coronavirus vaccinations. When the delta
variant, which was first detected in India, began spreading
rapidly, some ports simply refused to let Indian seafarers dis-
embark. “Countries don’t want to take risks, but they want
the supplies,” Platten said.
As things stand, only a small number of charities, such as
the Mission to Seafarers, look after maritime workers in dire
straits. Seafarers’ unions such as the International Transport
Workers’ Federation try to help, too, as do the ILO and some
governments. Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom are
considered top-class in enforcing labor rules. “And there are
many good companies and crew managers that really look after
their crews,” Mitchell added. Indeed, in many ways, “seafar-
ing is an enormously rewarding career,” Platten said. “It’s well
regulated and well paid, and most employers are good. It lifts
people out of poverty in developing countries. But if the cur-
rent situation continues, we’ll be faced with a skills shortage.”
And when the world’s shipping companies can no longer
recruit enough seafarers, we’ll find out how absolutely vital
they are to our daily lives. For now, a clap for crews would
be in order. Or better yet, regular attention to those who find
themselves in the claws of bad employers. n
ELISABETH BRAW is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute and a columnist at Foreign Policy.
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Creating
change-makers

EXPLORE A FEW OF THE SCHAR SCHOOL’S

IN-DEMAND GRADUATE PROGRAMS:
Biodefense
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and Government prepares students to be leaders and
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good in all sectors and levels of government—in the
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CONFLICT RESOLUTION • ECONOMY & TRADE
IMMIGRATION • MULTILATERALISM • URBAN ECOLOGY
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
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FIELD EXPERIENCE • GLOBAL PUBLIC HEALTH
CYBERSECURITY • ISLAMIC STUDIES
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT • POLITICAL ANALYSIS
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THE WORLD IS CHANGING
AND SO ARE WE
PUBLIC SERVICE FELLOWS AND SCHOLARS PROGRAMS

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 Define your path to global leadership.
the freedom to explore
The Jackson Institute’s M.P.P. in Global Affairs
prepares students to impact the global community
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Executive Master of
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LEAD THE CHANGE
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WASHINGTON DC
Texas A&M Plants Flag
in Washington, DC
Texas A&M University has opened a new teaching site in
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 Committed to dialogue
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 Knowledge is power.
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WANTED

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Leading schools embrace
sustainability as core tenet
Top-ranked schools are meeting change by embracing a
shift towards green practices, new methods of delivering
education and improved diversity
Business schools around the
world are reacting to a shift
in paradigm caused by the
COVID-19 pandemic and a
rush of new technologies. As the
world pulls itself out from a sec-
ond recent economic crisis, the
drive towards sustainability that
was once being touted is now be-
ing underlined, be it in terms of
innovation, green initiatives or
promoting diversity. Leaders in
education remain singular about
one thing: the system needs to
change. They are striving to
translate this central concept
into their curricula to prepare
future trailblazers for the battle
ahead.
Innovative reboots
Montreal-based John Molson
School of Business is working on
pushing innovation through its
focus on entrepreneurship. The
school emboldens its students
by providing access to real busi-
ness owners who talk about pres-
sures they face and the reality of
business. John Molson recently
conducted a massive revision
of classes to match the school’s
new values.
Other universities are taking
a more individual slant on in-
novating their methods of ed-
ucation. Across the pond, EM
Strasbourg Business School is
transforming its values towards
individual discovery and growth
under its Be Distinctive slogan.
The school recently initiated a
new executive diploma geared at
transforming leadership through
meditation and data analysis.
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The French school also launched
a research center called the Ob-
servatory of the Future that ex-
plores impending scenarios and
eventualities.
Other leading institutions are
following a similar format, such
as the Asian Institute of Man-
agement (AIM) in the Philip-
Employers are recognizing the rising legitimacy of online and adaptive learning
pines. They recently established
the Aboitiz School of Innova-
tion, Technology and Entrepre- efficient business practices. Anne-Marie Croteau is the
neurship. This new institution Singapore Management Univer- first female dean at John Mol-
supports their recent master’s sity (SMU) takes a hard stance son and chair of the Business
programs in free enterprise, against climate change through School Association of Canada.
science and business and data its Cooling Singapore 2.0 initia- She works hard to promote in-
science. tive that sees students and facul- clusion in both education and
ty working to lower carbon emis- the business world. “We want
Sustainability first sions in the city’s hot months. to provide more training and
Business schools are not only The school recently set up its support and raise conversations
looking to drive innovation, but Singapore Green Finance Cen- around women in business,” she
also take part in the new surge of
sustainable and green initiatives We want to provide more training and support and raise
in the public and private sectors. conversations around women in business.”
John Molson recently received
Anne-Marie Croteau, Dean, John Molson School of Business
a donation to create a research
center aimed at promoting sus-
tainability. The Canadian insti- tre. “We are transforming our says. The school recently started
tution also recently joined with processes and training our col- a research center for female en-
Manulife Investment, a local leagues to make sure that they trepreneurs and leaders, the first
insurance firm, to create a pro- are equipped with a level of skills of its kind in Canada.
gram that allows students to vir- commensurate with new avail- Other heads of education
tually follow the company’s en- able technologies,” Lily Kong, have expressed a change within
vironment, social and corporate president of SMU, explains. industry itself in terms of inclu-
governance investments. sion. Kong expresses that she
In a similar fashion, AIM has Women in leadership has been contacted by global
created the Jose B. Fernandez, Jr. In the last fifty years, leadership firms such as Goldman Sachs
Center for Sustainable Finance. in the business world has large- Group and BlackRock to collab-
The school is set up to tack- ly passed from out of the hands orate on empowering young peo-
le policy issues that affect the of men into the collective hands ple and being a mentor through
banking sector and form con- of the community. Particularly leadership programs and speak-
structive business partnerships in the last decade, women have ing engagements. She views
in the region. stepped up to the plate to take part of her position as being a
Sustainability as a movement on leadership roles as initiatives role model for potential leading
is not just about creating more to promote diversity bear fruit. women.
1
Sponsored Report GLOBAL BUSINESS SCHOOLS FOR THE FUTURE

The modern SMU campus lies at the heart of one of Asia’s most dynamic cities SMU’s state-of-the-art facilities are certified as 100% green

The power of knowledge creates opportunities

Cultivating change
to tackle global complexities PR: Why does Singapore Manage-
ment University (SMU) stand out
from its global peers?
LK: We have a remarkably close
Established in just 2000, Singapore Management relationship with industry. Our students
University has already risen to 12th position in the develop excellent rapport with the
world of business, while collaborating
QS world rankings for specialist universities employers love our work-ready gradu-
ates. Secondly, we cover the spectrum
of courses that you would expect but
Singapore Management Univer- Business Administration program are unique in our focus on three areas:
sity (SMU) has rapidly gained has input from over 100 business in a world transformed by COVID, dig-
international renown for its world- leaders; its award-winning SMU-X ital transformation, sustainability and
class teaching and research. At pedagogy sees students working understanding the potential that Asia
its state-of-the-art city campus, it with faculty and industry mentors has are going to be crucial. Lily Kong
offers a wide range of bachelor’s, on local and overseas projects to President
master’s, PhD, executive develop- solve real-world issues; it has work- PR: How is SMU prioritizing sus- Singapore Management University
ment and other programs through study internship programs with tainability and digitalization?
its Schools of Accountancy, Eco- companies such as Google and LK: We can make a difference in a Centre for Computational Law. These
nomics, Computing and Informa- KPMG; industry experts provide thought leadership. We have rolled are just a few examples.
tion Systems, Law, Social Sciences advice to nearly 300 startups SMU out a sustainability major, are ramp-
and the triple-accredited Lee Kong is incubating at the moment; and ing up sustainability internships and PR: How is SMU setting trends in
Chian School of Business. It also it collaborates on research with nu- our students are helping communities executive development?
has over 30 institutes, centers and merous private-sector partners to become more sustainable. Our SMU-X LK: Our SMU-ExD team has con-
labs, which consistently generate ensure its practicality. projects in this area allow them to get verted all our custom programs to live
multidisciplinary research that SMU is also focused on nurtur- their hands dirty on real-world issues. online programs and launched new
makes a positive global impact. ing global-ready, responsible citi- Research is also important. We are ones in, for instance, digital finance
Drawing on its wealth of faculty zens and engaging with the world. working on helping companies quan- leadership and growing infrastructure.
expertise, SMU focuses on three 50 countries are represented in its tify measurable improvements in sus- We are also developing asynchronous
tainability, have jointly established the programs addressing digital transfor-
We are encouraging our students to be positive-change Singapore Green Finance Centre and a mation, AI and machine learning, prod-
third example involves improving the uct management and cybersecurity.
agents who deliver meaningful impact.” sustainability of urban environments. We are moving to work more in part-
Lily Kong, President, Singapore Management University Digital transformation is such an nership with our clients along a hybrid-
important area too. We have embedded ized path. With that model, individual
cross-disciplinary priorities: dig- student body of almost 12,000, new courses into our core curriculum, participants can customize how they
ital transformation, sustainable 40% of its faculty are international not just on the technical side, but also build upon the foundational knowledge
living and growth in Asia. “We and it has 294 partner universities understanding its impact on wellbeing acquired during in-person courses,
are encouraging our students to covering all continents. and so on. We have new programs setting their own pace and selecting
be positive-change agents who de- According to Kong: “Global ex- such as a digital business major and modules as it suits them. Technology
liver meaningful impact for their posure is an integral component of a program on computing and law, be- empowers us to transition from pro-
community and society,” explains the SMU core curriculum, be it an cause lawyers are going to need to un- viding learning products to enabling
President Lily Kong. overseas project, internship or for- derstand artificial intelligence (AI), data lifelong learning journeys.
One way it does that is by eign exchange. Our overseas part- governance and similar issues, while
fostering extensive links with all ners have been our close allies in computer scientists need to under-
stakeholders, particularly within giving students exceptional virtual stand legal and regulatory frameworks.
industry. For example, SMU’s and remote global learning oppor- In research, we have established a
highly ranked Executive Master of tunities amidst the pandemic.” Centre for AI and Data Governance and

2

Ukraine’s International Management Institute uses innovation to cross borders
Education uses new
digital tech to bridge gaps
Business schools are embracing virtual and communication
technologies to explore beyond what was thought possible
Digital technologies are visibly
transforming the world around
us; everything from life sci-
ences to buying a pair of shoes
now has a growing digital facet.
The tech revolution has also in-
creased the reach of education,
with some schools taking advan-
tage of a virtual world without
borders to promote leadership
and development in previously
untappable areas.
Different schools have taken
different approaches in embrac-
ing digitalization and online ed-
ucation. “We need to intention-
ally use technology to enhance
interaction, not take away from
it,” insists Lily Kong, president
We need to intentionally use technology to enhance
interaction, not take away from it.”
Lily Kong, President, Singapore Management University
of Singapore Management Uni-
versity. The institution recently
opened a center for artificial in-
telligence and data governance.
The Asian Institute of Man-
agement (AIM) has taken a
leadership role in digital trans-
formation by creating a global
academic leadership program
in cooperation with the Philip-
pines’ Commission on Higher
Education. The initiative looks
to help local universities em-
brace smart and digital solutions
in education. The program has
For further information please visit www.prisma-reports.com
GLOBAL BUSINESS SCHOOLS FOR THE FUTURE
been well received. “We are now
getting requests from private
and local universities for similar
services,” says Jikyeong Kang,
dean and president of AIM.
Other schools have taken a
global approach. Internation-
al Management Institute in
Ukraine has used new online
technologies to enter Tajikistan
and create a business education
system. “In Tajikistan, we repre-
sent the modern Europe,” says
Iryna Tykhomyrova, president
of the school.
Digital platforms for global
dissemination are also being
harnessed. The John Molson
School of Business recently
partnered with Ivy Publishing to
showcase their studies through
the publishers’ or Harvard’s
website. The Canadian school
was ready for the jump to online
education far before the pan-
demic.
Top leaders in business edu-
cation have stayed ahead of the
wave and not only transformed
but thrived. With more inno-
vation on the horizon, schools
with the most impact will be
those attuned to the technolo-
gies of tomorrow.
Barcelona school seeks
education through progress
UPF Barcelona School of Management puts social values
at the centre of business education
UPF Barcelona School of Man-
agement (UPF-BSM) brings a
serious tone to Europe’s favorite
vacation spot. The beach-con-
toured city hosts a plethora of lo-
gistics and tech firms, making it
an ideal location for a forward-run
business education institution.
Barcelona has grown to be-
come a European startup hub
over the last decade, from having
virtually none to having more
than 1,300 startups in mobile
and software technologies and
life sciences. In 2020, the city
ranked among the top five start-
up hubs in Europe. The city has
transformed its El Poblenou dis-
trict from an industrial wasteland
to a vibrant startup melting pot
that offers students a chance to
engage directly with growing in-
dustry.
UPF-BSM is part of Barcelo-
na’s Pompeu Fabra University,
which was rated the best univer-
sity in Spain by Times Higher
Education World University
Rankings in 2021. The business
What makes us different and a leader in Spain and Latin
America is that we are the management school of a top
public university.”
José M. Martínez-Sierra, Director General, UPF Barcelona School of Management
arm of the university was found-
ed in 1993 and has since jumped
to the top of international charts
in terms of its educational offer-
ings.
“What makes us different
and a leader both in Spain and
Latin America is that we are
the management school of a top
public university,” says José M.
Martínez-Sierra, director general
of UPF-BSM. The institution is
undergoing what Martinez-Sierra
describes as transversal digitiza-
tion; it is digitizing not only its
classrooms, but the connections
between students, faculty and its
more than 30,000 alumni.
The business institution’s dig-
ital development started early,
Sponsored Report
José M. Martínez-Sierra
Director General
UPF Barcelona School of Management
with full online programs begin-
ning in 2002. The director general
described the school’s movement
from physical to virtual classes
during the COVID-19 pandem-
ic as seamless, unlike at Harvard
University, where he previously
worked, that closed its doors.
UPF-BSM prides itself in
choosing working partners with
companies that have sustainable
visions that look to impact soci-
ety. For example, the school re-
cently signed an agreement with
Triodos Bank, a leading company
in sustainable finance, for the cre-
ation of an international research
center for ethical banking.
In conjunction with the deal,
the school is preparing to spear-
head a slew of private public part-
nerships to bolster its curricula
and knowledge transfer.
UPF-BSM’s ultimate goal is
to lead the charge in preparing
the leaders of tomorrow to work
with industry and ultimately af-
fect legislation and society. The
school connects students to
Barcelona’s thriving industries
and beyond.
3
Sponsored Report GLOBAL BUSINESS SCHOOLS FOR THE FUTURE

Canadian leader looks

to inspire through values
Montreal’s leading business education institution
considers inclusion and sustainability as key elements
of a successful education

Diversity and environment, social become a video game, cloud

and corporate governance (ESG) computing and artificial intelli- John Molson School of Business, Montreal
are the cornerstones of Canada’s gence hub, sectors with which the
John Molson School of Business. school actively participates. petition; the John Molson Inter- a lot of confidence after complet-
“Being in academia is a privilege John Molson is a large part of national MBA Case Competition ing the program. It is beautiful to
and a responsibility. We are part Montreal’s Concordia University, involves participation of all the see,” she expresses.
of the relaunch of the economy. with 20% of the institution’s 55 School’s students as well as stu- The school takes sustainable
We train future leaders that will thousand students enrolled in the dents from 40 global universities. finance seriously. Prior to the pan-
make a difference in the world,” business school. The university Participants compete on analysis demic, the school launched a sus-
asserts Anne-Marie Croteau, dean prides itself on diversity. Around and evaluation of unpublished tainable investment practicum in
of John Molson. 40% of its student body comes business cases. partnership with insurance com-
John Molson’s prestigious exec- pany Manulife Investment. The
Being in academia is a privilege and a responsibility. We utive master of business adminis- program allows students to ac-
tration program is celebrating its cess the firm’s ESG investments
are part of the relaunch of the economy.” 35-year anniversary. The curricu- through a virtual fund and learn
Anne-Marie Croteau, Dean, John Molson School of Business lum was the first in Quebec and directly from decision makers.
among the first in Canada. “This has attracted more wom-
The English-speaking school is from outside Canada and more According to Croteau, the pro- en into finance, who are difficult
set in Canada’s second largest ur- than 105 languages are spoken in gram is one of the strongest at the to attract. Currently only 30% of
ban space, Montreal. The eastern its halls. business school. “Students in this our finance students are women,
metropolis is known for its digi- The business school also hosts category come with a drive to be but we see parities in this new pro-
tal innovations and has recently the oldest masters-level case com- better at what they do. They gain gram,” she says.

John Molson promotes diversity in education and business

PR: What differentiates John
Molson School of Business from
other business education institu-
tions?
AC: We are among the top busi-
ness schools in Canada and the
world. Our high ranking speaks to
the quality of our teaching and our
students. We are strong in research
and teaching when it comes to en-
trepreneurship and innovation. We
have put a lot of effort into creating
an ecosystem based on the realities
of entrepreneurs and welcome peo-
ple from the business community to
speak about their experiences and
difficulties in the market.
In terms of innovation, we recently
launched the MSc in Business An-
alytics and Technology Management
that will help students develop the
marketing and finance expertise re-
quired to excel in big data and an-
alytics. The school works with other
faculties on interdisciplinary initia-
tives in areas such as cities, health
and applied artificial intelligence.
Anne-Marie Croteau
Dean, John Molson School of Business
We need to make sure artificial in-
telligence responds to our needs as
humans. We are hiring new faculty
members with this kind of expertise.
. there are three women and one man.
PR: How did John Molson cope
with the move to virtual class-
rooms due to the COVID-19 pan-
demic?
AC: Through Concordia, we have
the e-Concordia gateway and the
Knowledge One service to provide
the best online learning tools and
practices. We had this prior to the
COVID-19 pandemic. When the
government locked down, 32,000
students were enrolled in online
learning and the business school
participated. We had to find new
solutions and we pushed our en-
velope further. Additionally, enrol-
ments are through the roof due to the
online platform. People realize they
do not have to quit their jobs to par-
ticipate in higher education.
PR: How has John Molson
worked to increase gender diver-
sity in its faculty and offerings?
AC: I used to be the only wom-
an at the table of the team and now
Our department chairs are at parity.
For Montreal, a sense of parity is
normal. I hope when the economy
restarts after the pandemic, women
won’t lose any of their momentum.
The United States lost a lot of fe-
males in their workforce. Although
this has not happened yet in Canada,
it is something to be mindful of. We
recently launched a new research
center called Barry F. Lorenzetti Cen-
tre for Women Entrepreneurship and
Leadership to promote female entre-
preneurs and leaders.
We have about 15 faculty mem-
bers as researchers who have ex-
pertise in entrepreneurship and
leadership development. We are
the first in Canada with this type of
research center. We want to provide
more training and support and raise
conversations around women in
business. We also launched a course
on financial literacy for female entre-
preneurs.

4

Inspiring a new wave
of leaders for Asia
A pioneering institute offers cutting-edge education
that is global in scope but Asian in context
Asian Institute of Management
(AIM) has been empowering entre-
preneurial and socially responsible
business and development leaders
for over 50 years. “Dubbed the Har-
vard of Asia, our birth was a unique
collaboration between Harvard Busi-
ness School and top corporations in
the Philippines,” reveals AIM Dean
and President Jikyeong Kang.
As a result of its pioneering man-
agement education and research,
AIM is the only school in the Philip-
pines and one of the first 10 schools
in Asia to receive accreditation from
the Association to Advance Colle-
giate Schools of Business (AACSB)
— a prestigious body that acknowl-
edged AIM’s pre-eminence this year
when it appointed Kang as its first
board chair from the Asia-Pacific
region.
Based in Makati, the Philippines’
financial hub, AIM delivers prac-
titioner-oriented degree and exec-
utive education programs that are
global in scope but Asian in context
to a multinational student body.
Its flagship offering is probably a
well-established Master in Business
Administration, but AIM’s agility
allows it to innovate to meet emerg-
ing demands.
We can now provide access to learners in far-flung places
who would never have had access to our degree or non-
degree programs.”
Jikyeong Kang, Dean and President, Asian Institute of Management
Recent portfolio additions in-
clude master’s programs in data
science, entrepreneurship, innova-
tion and business, and ones in fin-
tech and business law will soon join
them. “Our Master in Data Science
is one of the first in the region and
last year we welcomed our first in-
take of PhD students.
We are also helping the govern-
ment launch a track-and-trace ap-
plication for COVID. It came to us
because we have the best data scien-
tists in the country,” Kang says.
As well as promoting innovation,
AIM has always championed social
For further information please visit www.prisma-reports.com
GLOBAL BUSINESS SCHOOLS FOR THE FUTURE
Jikyeong Kang
Dean and President
Asian Institute of Management
responsibility and ethical gover-
nance. Alumni from over 40 nations
have graduated from its Master in
Development Management since
1991, for instance, and in 2019 it
launched a groundbreaking Exec-
utive Master in Disaster Risk and
Crisis Management.
Sustainable management is also
a central concern, she states,: “We
touch on sustainability in the same
way we touch upon ethics: it is not
taught in a stand-alone course, we
teach it in all disciplines from many
different perspectives.”
AIM’s synergizing partnerships
with corporations, the public sec-
tor, other institutions and develop-
ment organizations worldwide have
been fundamental to its influential
nurturing of business, government
and societal leaders that are solving
challenges and seizing opportuni-
ties in Asia. That influence can only
grow as more students and clients
embrace online, hybrid and lifelong
learning, says Kang: “We can now
provide access to learners in far-
flung places who would never have
had access to our degree or non-de-
gree programs.”
Sponsored Report
France’s EM Strasbourg Business School nurtures talent and promotes personality
Distinctive approach allows
individuality to flourish
Encouraging its thousands of accomplished students to
be their true selves is a unique and rewarding experience
The award-winning EM Stras-
bourg Business School embraces
and cultivates individuality and
personality among its 3,400 ded-
icated students by adopting a
warm culture that encourages the
talented managers and business
leaders of tomorrow to stand out
from the crowd by finding success
through being themselves.
This incredibly novel approach
to teaching best practice in inter-
national business has made EM
Strasbourg Business School a
popular choice for several genera- Herbert Castéran
tions of ambitious managers and Dean
executives who dare to be differ- EM Strasbourg Business School
ent by displaying their unique per-
sonality and traits in their chosen School is itself unique, as it is the
business sector or industry. only business school in France to
“Our ambition is to reveal peo- be part of a university.
ple and organizations to them- Over the past decade and a half,
selves. We believe in each person- the highly respected educational
ality and we have a clear slogan: establishment has expanded its
‘Be Distinctive’,” explains Dean range of innovative and challeng-
Herbert Castéran of EM Stras- ing programs, and formed close
bourg Business School. “This relationships with leading private
does not mean that we want our sector names and international
students to be different, but that counterparts. EM Strasbourg
they make a difference by being Business School students can con-
themselves. You have your own nect with 2,000 partner compa-
assets, your own qualities, and nies and 230 partner universities.
you have to play with your true “We are the only school that
personality in order to feel good is part of Grande Ecole, an elite
and to be better. Our value prop- system in France, and that is also
osition is based on hard skills and an affiliate of the University of
soft skills, but many are geared to Strasbourg,” explains Castéran.
a path of self-discovery.” “We have, in fact, two identities, a
Born in late 2007 through the private one and a public one. This
merger of IECS, founded in 1919, may be common international-
and IAE Strasbourg, created in ly, but in France, we are the only
1956, EM Strasbourg Business one.”
5
REVIEW
State of Emergency
A new book about Indira Gandhi is a timely
reminder that India’s hard-won democratic ethos
cannot be taken for granted.
By Sumit Ganguly

FALL 2021 73
F
or 21 months between 1975 and 1977,
then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a nation-
wide state of emergency, all but suspending civil rights and
liberties. The move followed Gandhi’s conviction in a lower
court for misuse of public resources during her 1971 election
campaign. The court ordered her to be stripped of her par-
liamentary seat, and some opposition members called for
her to resign in the aftermath. The prime minister chose
instead to declare a state of emergency to restore order and
then moved to change the laws she was convicted under.
The state of emergency gave Gandhi sweeping powers
likened to dictatorial rule that curbed political dissent and
muzzled the press. The prime minister had key opposition
members arrested and even had some members of her own
party thrown behind bars after deeming them insufficiently
loyal. With the support of most of her cabinet, she also cen-
sored India’s then-freewheeling press. Although a handful
of editors defied Gandhi and faced prison time, most com-
plied with her demands not to criticize her government.
As India faces a new, unprecedented assault on its dem-
ocratic institutions and norms, the state of emergency in
the late 1970s is well worth revisiting. Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi’s government has, for the most part, cowed
the judiciary; press freedoms are at considerable risk, and
civil liberties are under steady assault. Worse still, these
developments haven’t followed any formal suspension of
the existing legal order. Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav
Anil’s new book about the Emergency period, India’s First
Dictatorship, is a timely reminder that India’s hard-won
democratic ethos cannot be taken for granted.
In recent years, there has been renewed interest among
journalists and scholars about what transpired during those
74
India’s First Dictatorship:
The Emergency, 1975-77
CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT AND PRATINAV
ANIL, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 600 PP.,
$49.95, APRIL 2021
fateful 21 months. In 2015, the Indian journalist Coomi Kapoor
wrote The Emergency: A Personal History, a moving account
of what befell her during that period—including the incarcer-
ation of her husband and the harassment of her family. Two
years ago, the Indian historian Gyan Prakash published Emer-
gency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning
Point, an immensely readable account of the forces that
fueled the state of emergency and its effects on intellectu-
als, journalists, and politicians.
Each of the previous works pales in comparison to Jaffrelot
and Anil’s compelling account, which displays an extraor-
dinary grasp of the political milieu that led to the state of
emergency and provides a level of detail about its conse-
quences never before attempted. The authors reveal dis-
turbing accounts of the rampant abuse of political power
that characterized this brief epoch in post-Indian inde-
pendence politics, offering a potent warning of what could
happen again.
Under Gandhi’s state of emergency, arrests of anyone who
dared challenge the political writ were widespread. Using
memoirs, other post-Emergency accounts, and the Shah
Commission Report (overseen by former Indian Supreme
Court Chief Justice Jayantilal Chhotalal Shah), Jaffrelot
and Anil reveal the appalling prison conditions that many
detainees endured. With the rule of law all but suspended,
torture in police custody became rampant. Accounts of the
abuses of power against dissenters and opposition members
are among some of the book’s most chilling.
The irony is Gandhi’s state of emergency accomplished
few if any of its vaunted goals, wrote the Indian political
scientist Jyotirindra Das Gupta as early as 1978. Jaffrelot
and Anil build on his evidence to affirm and expand many

of his arguments, starting with the grand social programs
Gandhi announced in part to justify the state of emergency.
India’s First Dictatorship shows these programs—
providing urban housing and raising the minimum
wage—did not really benefit India’s poor or marginalized
communities, largely because of haphazard and sloppy
implementation. A ban on strikes and industrial agitation
also had a corporatist bias that benefited industrialists and
commercial entities. Prominent labor activists and politi-
cians, most notably the Socialist leader George Fernandes,
became the subject of a nationwide witch hunt. Although
Fernandes managed to evade the dragnet, his brother was
imprisoned and tortured.
OPENING PAGE: FOREIGN POLICY ILLUSTRATION/HENRI BUREAU/SYGMA/CORBIS/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES
The Gandhi government’s draconian family planning pol-
icies, designed to curb India’s rampant population growth,
also weren’t a success. Fearful bureaucrats emphasized arbi-
trary quotas rather than targeting the underlying reason for
large families: endemic inequality. Poor and minority pop-
ulations bore the brunt of forced sterilizations and contra-
ceptive devices, often under unsafe conditions. Gandhi’s son
THIS PAGE: FRANÇOIS LOCHON/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES
Sanjay, a prominent figure in the Indian National Congress
party’s youth wing, played a significant role in initiating and
boosting these programs.
Finally, the government’s land reform program did not
achieve any significant results. Designed to break the stran-
glehold of large landowners and benefit the rural poor, it
The irony is that Gandhi’s state
of emergency accomplished few
if any of its vaunted goals.
REVIEW
Left: Then-Indian
Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi gives
a speech in Kolkata,
India, in March 1977.
Opening page:
Gandhi in a portrait
from 1976.
accomplished little because the government did not carry it
out with any conviction. As Jaffrelot and Anil show, Gandhi
had little or no interest in using her parliamentary majority
to make the legislation unassailable to judicial review. Other
policies ostensibly designed to help the poor, such as ending
bonded labor, were also pursued halfheartedly.
Jaffrelot and Anil argue that the Emergency’s effects were
not felt equally across India. In states where Gandhi’s Con-
gress party either didn’t hold power or was organization-
ally weak, the government’s harsh policies were somewhat
mitigated. The states that were the worst affected—all Con-
gress bastions—were primarily located in northern India.
Unsurprisingly, Congress lost ground in these states in the
1977 elections and beyond.
India’s First Dictatorship makes the case that despite
the repressive features of Gandhi’s state of emergency,
it did not take the form of outright absolutism. For all its
arbitrariness, it operated under some restraint: The prime
minister trampled on civil and personal rights, but her dic-
tatorship was a constitutional one. Ultimately, she called
an election in 1977, hoping for approval from India’s peo-
ple. Voters, who had borne the highhandedness of politi-
cians and bureaucrats, resoundingly booted Gandhi and
the Congress party out of office.
At a time when India’s political order is again under con-
siderable duress, perhaps its imperious political masters
might learn something from Gandhi’s electoral defeat. n
SUMIT GANGULY is a distinguished professor of political
science and the Rabindranath Tagore chair in Indian
cultures and civilizations at Indiana University
Bloomington and a columnist at Foreign Policy.
FALL 2021 75
Stories from the front lines of
the fight against climate change.

Heat of the Moment

The acute climate crisis we face around the world can feel so
formidable, so daunting, that instead of mobilizing people to
action, it engenders paralysis. What could we mortals possibly
do to prevent the calamity? A fair bit, it turns out. On Season 2
of Heat of the Moment, the next installment of the podcast from
Foreign Policy and the Climate Investment Funds, we focus on A Foreign Policy
podcast in
people across the globe who have been directly affected by the partnership
with the Climate
crisis—and have developed strategies for fighting back. Investment Funds

Heat of the Moment is hosted by CNN contributor John D. Sutter, a

writer and documentary filmmaker who focuses on the climate crisis.

Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

 REVIEW

Wall Street,
1847.

Private Finance, Public Power

A secret history of a defining institution in U.S. banking.
By Jonathan Levy

rown Brothers Harriman has never ranked among the

B
flashier or more famous of U.S. financial institutions. But
then, neither has it ever ranked among the more notorious
or infamous. Formed in a merger between its two name-
sakes in 1931, with roots in the early 19th century, the Wall
Street bank has long been a reputable going concern that,
especially of late, has largely avoided the spotlight.
The staidness of the bank is precisely what attracted
Zachary Karabell to writing what he calls its “secret his-
tory.” That quality, Karabell contends in his new book, Inside Money, makes it an
ideal window into the prodigious, if at times destructive, history of U.S. finance.
It also contains a “lesson for what capitalism can be,” something different from
the winner-take-all model of the early 21st century. In the better capitalism Kar-
abell imagines, bankers’ moderation would set guardrails against capitalism’s
inevitably destructive tendencies.
There is another reason why Karabell sees Brown Brothers Harriman as a fit-
ting subject for an epic, centuries-spanning chronicle: the influence that sev-
MPI/GETTY IMAGES

eral of its partners wielded in forging post-World War II U.S. foreign policy. To
understand the American Century, Karabell writes, one must apprehend this
fusion of private finance and public power, appreciating an unappreciated
source of the U.S. Cold War mentality: the ethos of Brown Brothers Harriman.

FALL 2021 77
REVIEW
It was an ethos of commercial honor and fidelity but also of
a quiet power, comfortable in its skin, forged in the boom-
and-bust world of early U.S. finance, fashioned later in Yale
secret societies and New York social clubs.
Both finance and foreign power have proved to be fragile
phenomena historically. Banks boom and bust. Empires rise
and fall. Tacking between histories, Karabell’s account poses
the general question of whether ethical restraint is, for long,
ever sufficient to discipline unruliness or stave off decline.
Focused on Brown Brothers, the first part of the book is
an excellent history of 19th-century U.S. finance. Patriarch
Alexander Brown migrated from Belfast to Baltimore in 1800
to thrive in the linen trade. His sons founded Brown Broth-
ers branches in Philadelphia in 1818 and New York City in
1825. They financed trade in goods but soon specialized in
money markets. Back then, the money market, if backed in
principle by a hard metal standard, was a world of privately
issued paper notes. It revolved around the reputation and
trust of paper note issuers and brokers, as the prices of notes
hinged on confidence in their stated face values. In this frac-
tional reserve banking system, there was never enough gold
and silver in the vaults to back the face values of all notes in
circulation. The speculative booms of the 19th century were
fueled by paper credit. However, if confidence ever collapsed,
panics and devastating financial crisis followed.
Even though during the U.S. Civil War the federal govern-
ment asserted more control over bank note issues, part of
what maintained the system was faith in a few august bank-
ing establishments. Brown Brothers counted among them.
Over the course of the century, the bank’s center of gravity
moved to Wall Street. Partners cultivated reputations wor-
thy of the faith vested in the firm. In business, they could
not partake in rampant or greedy speculation, instead “for-
ever steering a course between caution and too much cau-
tion,” Karabell writes. In society, partners displayed the good
graces requisite to their class, wealth, and social standing.
Partners excelled at all this, and the bank thrived. Never did
any imagine pursuing public office.
Nonetheless, the bank became entangled with state power.
Karabell is surely right to underscore the private regulation of
19th-century U.S. banking. Still, Brown Brothers might have
gone bankrupt during the Panic of 1837 without a bailout from
the Bank of England; an early branch of the firm located in
Liverpool to participate in the trans-Atlantic cotton trade,
later hived off, made the call. In the early 20th century, when
partners sought to make good on their investments in the
public bonds of Nicaragua, it brought to bear U.S. gunboat
diplomacy. A U.S. Marines outfit decamped to Central Amer-
ica to secure payments. The firm took complete control of the
Nicaraguan Central Bank, among other assets. The partner-
ship, if always prosperous, never quite reached the pecuniary
pinnacle of U.S. finance, if only because it failed to establish
78
an important foothold in the 19th-century railroad industry,
where, apart from Carnegie and Rockefeller, the era’s great-
est fortunes were made. During the Great Depression, when
Brown Brothers was again about to fail, it formed a partner-
ship with Harriman Brothers. The patriarch of the latter family,
E.H. Harriman, had indeed struck it rich in late 19th-century
railroading, with a large stake in the transcontinental Union
Pacific, a railroad born from favorable public subsidy.
Financial necessity formed a partnership in 1931 out of the
Browns and Harrimans. Karabell also underscores that the
new partners had all chummed around first at Yale University
and later in Connecticut bar cars. By then, an American finan-
cial WASP elite, a capital-E Establishment of so-called white
Anglo-Saxon Protestants, was in place. These men, Karabell
writes, had “internalized a way of thinking about themselves
and the larger society … a quiet but strong faith, public affir-
mations of modesty, abjuring obvious greed, the gospel not
just of wealth but of work, and a strong belief that with privi-
lege and power came responsibility.” The last third of Inside
Money is largely preoccupied with how this Establishment
influenced post-World War II U.S. foreign-policy making.
As the firm slowly moved away from its family roots, two
partners, Averell Harriman and Robert Lovett, become the
leading figures. Both took many leaves of absence as bank-
ers to enjoy decorated diplomatic careers. Karabell tracks
their activities dutifully, from Lovett’s stints in the U.S. mil-
itary and State Department as George Marshall’s righthand
man, before he became Harry Truman’s defense secretary
during the Korean War, to Harriman’s peripatetic course,
which included stops, among others, as Franklin D. Roos-
evelt’s ambassador to the Soviet Union during World War II,
Truman’s commerce secretary, a one-term governor of New
York, and an ultimately dovish member of the group of “Wise
Men” who advised John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson
on Vietnam, earning the moniker of ambassador-at-large.
Rightly, Karabell grants both men credit for the imple-
mentation of George Kennan’s policy of containment in the
Inside Money: Brown Brothers
Harriman and the
American Way of Power
ZACHARY KARABELL, PENGUIN PRESS,
448 PP., $30, MAY 2021
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early years of the Cold War. While Karabell attempts no gen-
eral new interpretation of the pivotal events of these years,
it is nonetheless illuminating to place Harriman and Lovett
in the context of Brown Brothers Harriman’s longer history.
Unlike Kennan or, say, Dean Acheson, not all American Cold
Warriors were of an intellectual bent. What motivated some
was just that they “believed in the capitalism they helped
create.” Alexander Brown would have recognized their gov-
erning creed of “work, duty, action” but also “discretion.”
Powerful men should exercise power responsibly and (ide-
ally) quietly. Further, Karabell suggests that the sensibility of
Brown Brothers Harriman partners helped distinguish advo-
cates of containment, however forceful, from the more bra-
zen defenders of “rollback,” such as the Dulles brothers, who
more actively sought confrontation with the Soviet Union.
To draw out the larger lessons of this history, Karabell
returns to banking, concluding the book with chapters on
how Brown Brothers Harriman became the sleepy if still rep-
utable bank it remains today. The firm’s history, he argues,
proves that bankers can be at once self-serving and in ser-
vice to society. Prudent financial institutions, while making
money, can set limits on profit-oriented recklessness to the
public’s benefit. Karabell makes one good point, emphasizing
the never-changing partnership structure of Brown Brothers
Harriman. The firm risked partners’ capital, never the public’s
money. True, the largest U.S. investment banks (Goldman
Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers) that
engaged in excessive risk-taking in the run-up to the Great
Recession had all transformed since the 1980s from partner-
ships to publicly traded companies. The top bankers at these
financial institutions were not ever risking their own finan-
cial skins, even before they got bailed out by U.S. taxpayers.
In finance, undoubtedly private ethics matters. But just how
much? Karabell is right to underscore the connection between
public power and private finance in the story of Brown Broth-
ers Harriman. But that connection runs deeper than even his
account suggests. Root and branch, money and sovereignty are
always intertwined, although the exact linkages differ over time.
It is better to detail and explain these linkages than to charac-
terize the 19th-century financial system as “private”—Brown
Brothers was bailed out by the Bank of England in 1837, after all.
Karabell writes that when the 19th-century banking sys-
tem collapsed during the Great Depression, almost all the
firm’s partners accepted New Deal regulations, even the more
conservative. But he could have done more to acknowledge
that it was the undoing of that (imperfect) regulatory regime
since the 1980s, more so than bankers’ greed, that has been
responsible for the most egregious financial sins of the past
decades. After all, since 2008, it has been new regulations,
and not reborn ethics, that have barred pre-2008 levels of
leverage among the great U.S. investment banks (thankfully,
or the COVID-19 financial crisis would have been far worse).
Photograph Illustration by NAMETK NAME
REVIEW
The world needs more ethical
bankers. No less, however,
it needs good laws on the books
and excellent public servants
enforcing them.
Surely, Karabell is correct: The world needs more ethical
bankers. No less, however, it needs good laws on the books
and excellent public servants enforcing them.
As it happens, as an example of private moralized bank-
ing Brown Brothers Harriman has far from a pristine record.
Karabell admits this: There “is no way to sugarcoat the fact
that the Browns,” as key financiers of the antebellum cotton
trade, “profited greatly from slavery.” In Nicaragua, the firm
participated in a sorry chapter in the history of U.S. impe-
rialism. Karabell could have emphasized more that E.H.
Harriman’s Union Pacific depended on the dispossession of
Native Americans. Other readers, like myself, may experi-
ence dissonance coming across, amid high praise for Brown
Brothers Harriman’s ethics, such whopping qualifications.
There is a final thread that Karabell might have pulled
through the book, although he did not. It has to do with the
fate of the post-World War II U.S. foreign-policy establish-
ment. Comparing finance and foreign policy, there seems
to be a parallel story, with both roads leading to rashness,
undermining the legitimacy of Ivy League-educated elites.
It was the presidential administration, after all, of George
W. Bush, the grandson of Brown Brothers Harriman partner
and Connecticut Sen. Prescott Bush (who emerges from Kar-
abell’s account as a cheerful Yalie but not a very memorable
banker or senator), that in 2003—the moment U.S. investment
banks, hardly emulating Brown Brothers Harriman’s historic
standard of prudence, were going all in on heedless financial
speculation into U.S. residential mortgages—swaggered into
a feckless invasion of Iraq while articulating a brash logic of
U.S. foreign power that would have scarcely been recogniz-
able to Averell Harriman or Robert Lovett, any more than they
would have recognized putting all their partners’ chips into a
gamble on the mortgage-backed securities market. In neither
case did a prior history of disciplined self-restraint prevent a
disastrous failure of excess. U.S. domestic and foreign policy
are still carried out in the wreckage of both these gambles.
Inside Money can be read as a rather convincing declension
narrative of the 20th-century U.S. establishment, financiers,
and foreign-policy mavens alike. n
JONATHAN LEVY is a professor in the history department
and a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the
University of Chicago.
FALL 2021 80
 Foreign Policy economics columnist
Adam Tooze, a history professor
and a popular author, is encyclopedic
about basically everything: from
the COVID shutdown, to climate
change, to pasta sauce.

On our new podcast, Tooze and FP deputy editor

Cameron Abadi will look at two data points each week that
explain the world: one drawn from the week’s headlines
and the other from just about anywhere else Tooze takes us.

What does China’s life expectancy say about

the current moment? How does the 1994 jump
in U.S. interest rates help us understand
inflation risks today? These are just
some of the questions Adam
and Cameron will unpack.

ONES
TOOZE
Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.
 America, Indicted
Is the United States really that far gone?
George Packer and Andrew Bacevich argue it is.
By Michael Hirsh

t’s striking that two grimly titled but very different new books about

I
America’s decline—Last Best Hope by George Packer and After the
Apocalypse by Andrew Bacevich—both invoke a little-remembered
1940 jeremiad by the French historian Marc Bloch called Strange
Defeat. In that short book, published a few years before its author
was killed by the Gestapo, Bloch indicted his own people for cultural
decadence and societal disintegration, leading to France’s subjuga-
EDUCATION IMAGES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
tion by the Nazis. 
Both Packer, a staff writer at the Atlantic and a National Book
Award-winning author, and Bacevich, a historian and retired career U.S. Army
officer, believe Bloch’s indictment of France is relevant to what the United States
faces today. “Like France in 1940, America in 2020 stunned itself with a collapse
that was larger and deeper than one leader,” Packer writes, referring to Washing-
ton’s often incompetent response to COVID-19. “Under invasion and occupation,
few of our institutions held up.” Bacevich, too, suggests that, for different reasons,
the United States is in a position analogous to that of defeated France in 1940,
suffering a total collapse of leadership and vision. “My purpose in writing After
the Apocalypse compares with Bloch’s,” he writes.
Whoa. Is the United States really that far gone? After all, we don’t see anything

82

like the Wehrmacht goose-stepping up Pennsylvania Ave-
nue—not even close. Rather than leaving the nation’s future
to a collaborator like Philippe Pétain, Americans managed
to elect Joe Biden, a fundamentally decent guy who is prov-
ing nearly every day that he is not Donald Trump. Biden
received a record 81 million votes and promptly began undo-
ing Trump’s worst depredations. True, more than 620,000
Americans have died of COVID-19—far too many unneces-
sarily. But the pandemic is hardly comparable to the Nazi
occupation, much less the Holocaust. Biden’s precipitous
withdrawal from Afghanistan and the abrupt takeover of
the country by the Taliban, as ugly and humiliating as that
was, hardly amounted to a Compiègne-like surrender by a
world-dominating military that still spans the globe. And for
all America’s failings, the country still seems to be the clean-
est dirty shirt in the global laundry compared with China’s
aggressive debt-colonizing and Russia’s various pretensions
to influence. There really is, even now, no alternative ideo-
logical model to freedom—and the United States remains, by
far, the most powerful free nation on Earth. Like it or lump it.
More to the point, the extraordinary first six months of the
Biden administration have to some extent already begun to
redress the deeper societal ills that Packer and Bacevich sketch
out. Biden’s New Deal-sized spending plans and redesigned
America Firstism—accurately described by Edward Alden in
Foreign Policy as America First with a brain—are an ambi-
tious attempt to cure the worsening inequality that Packer
identifies as the nation’s central problem today. Through these
programs, the 46th president is also seeking to close the gap
between what Packer calls “Real America”—the angry, iso-
lationist working class that Trump won over from the Dem-
ocrats—and 21st-century progressivism. Above all, Biden is
intent on restoring the basic idea that self-governance in a
nation of 332 million unwieldy individuals can work.  objections to Trump’s Jan. 6 attempt at overturning the 2020
At the same time, the president’s withdrawal from Afghan-
istan and his restraint in the “forever wars”—U.S. drone
strikes are well down all over the world, Chris Woods of the
global monitoring group Airwars told me recently—have
gone a long way to addressing Bacevich’s complaints about
overreach and the excesses of American exceptionalism.
Yes, America has often failed in its effort to transform the
world—most recently in Afghanistan—but this is hardly an
“apocalypse,” as Bacevich repeatedly calls it.  at Trump’s door—to say that he is a uniquely mendacious
Yet America is floundering, Americans are probably as
divided as they have ever been, and the world remains pro-
foundly uncertain about America’s ability to endure. “If you’re
European, you’re saying to yourself, ‘If this country, which we
have basically counted on since 1945, can produce something
as unpredictable as ‘Trump Island’ and it remains so polarized,
how do we know what’s going to happen in 2024 and ’28?’”
the veteran U.S. diplomat Joseph Nye told me late last year.
This American sickness is not going away; it may only
REVIEW
Last Best Hope: America
in Crisis and Renewal
GEORGE PACKER, FARRAR, STRAUS AND
GIROUX, 240 PP., $27, JUNE 2021
After the Apocalypse: America’s Role
in a World Transformed
ANDREW BACEVICH, METROPOLITAN
BOOKS, 224 PP., $26.99, JUNE 2021.
be getting worse. “Something has gone wrong with the last
best hope of earth. Americans know it—the whole world
knows it,” Packer writes.
He is right. Both of these books, written with passion by
two Americans appalled by what they see happening to their
nation, are necessary contributions to this dire moment.
With no silver stake available, Trump is still out there doing
his worst to reincite and exploit these divisions—and mil-
lions upon millions of Americans seem to be with him. The
former president is currently on a “revenge tour” seeking to
defeat the handful of Republican members of Congress who
voted to impeach him, and the party’s timorous leaders are
back cringing in his pocket after delivering brief, tentative
election results. Both the basic idea of self-governance and
America’s leadership in the world are in doubt, which is why
both these books are important, at least in laying down basic
premises for a long-overdue national debate. Both books are
very personal—one might describe them, like Bloch’s on
France, as jeremiads or philippics—written as first-person
witness accounts from inside a disaster. 
What precisely has gone wrong? It is too easy to lay it all
demagogue or that he’s already 75 and therefore the prob-
lem will solve itself in time. There is a deeper underlying
problem that Packer begins to address by quoting Alexis de
Tocqueville on the American passion for equality. Tocque-
ville thought this American yearning for “equality of condi-
tions” represented the march of God’s will on earth, but he
didn’t fully foresee the nightmare to come—that the insistence
on equality might someday come to mean that everyone’s
opinion, no matter how ill-founded, was deemed equally valid. 
FALL 2021 83
 The Founding Fathers knew democracy could work only
if the American populace was well informed. But what if
there is more information than anyone can handle and no
direction home to the truth? Trump has exploited these
conditions brilliantly, creating the concept of “fake news”
that autocrats around the world now love to invoke. Indeed,
of all the major political figures in the world, it was Trump
who figured out first how to manipulate the fact-free digi-
tal world, how to transform nonsensical innuendo into viral
certainty without fear of effective contradiction. As a result
of this and other trends, Packer writes, “Large regions of the
country have gone dark, enclosing citizens in private worlds
of simplification and lies.”
If a substantial portion of the 74 million voters who went
for Trump in 2020 now believe the Big Lie that the election
was stolen from him, what sort of precedent does that set
for future demagogues? And what message does it send to
the rest of the world? In a much-cited academic paper pub-
lished in 2019, “Democracy Devouring Itself: The Rise of the
Incompetent Citizen and the Appeal of Right Wing Popu-
lism,” the University of California, Irvine political scientist
Shawn Rosenberg argued that these phenomena are very
likely permanent because the media and elected elites who
kept democracy alive in the past have lost control of the con-
versation. And there seems to be no prospect for regaining
that control. The American sense of a common purpose
in nationhood is, bit by bit, being destroyed. Major social
media platforms such as Facebook are only contributing to
the trend by feeding people “content to support their own
interests, which is splintering up communities,” as Ramesh
Srinivasan, the author of Beyond the Valley, a sharp critique
of Silicon Valley, told me in 2019. As Packer writes, citing
Tocqueville, “The great danger of equality is atomization.”  sion of Iraq. Former State Department lead counsel Harold
Atomized we are becoming. Packer’s is the better book,
brilliantly diagnosing this American illness in stinging, crisp
prose that spares neither right nor left on the widening polit-
ical spectrum. That is the greatest virtue of Last Best Hope:
its evenhandedness and intellectual honesty. Packer breaks
down the problem into narratives of “four Americas”—two
each on the right and left. The right has on its side the “Free
America” of libertarian ideals and the “Real America” of
white Christian nationalism. The left is now defined by the
“Smart America” of meritocratic elites and the “Just Amer-
ica” of the woke progressives. “I don’t much want to live in
the republic of any of them,” Packer writes, often deliver-
ing scintillating epigrams to make his point. (For example,
Just America’s coercive tactics—dubbed “cancel culture”
by some—“remind me of left-wing ideology in the 1930s,”
Packer writes. “Woke aesthetics is the new socialist realism.”)
But Packer’s solutions are sometimes disappointing: If
only the four Americas could get to know each other better,
he writes, “by killing their Twitter or Facebook accounts and
84
History easily could have gone
the other way: Washington
missed a golden opportunity
after 9/11 to further solidify the
West and raise itself up higher.
spending time in the physical presence of other Americans
who don’t look or talk or think like them.”
That’s not going to happen. Perhaps then, Packer writes,
the solution is to “require a year of national service, in mil-
itary or civilian form, repaid by scholarship, training sti-
pend, or small-business grant.” Sure, just try getting that
through this Congress. Even if you do, what’s it really going
to solve? Does anyone remember Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps
National Service Program?
Bacevich, for his part, is mainly seeking to dismantle what
he sees as any lingering U.S. pretension to global leader-
ship. His complaints are often seriously overdrawn, which
is perhaps not surprising considering he is president of the
hyperrealist Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft,
named for John Quincy Adams, who famously declared
that America should not go abroad “in search of monsters
to destroy.” Bacevich’s desire to withdraw from the world
is understandable and comes with tragic overtones: He lost
his son in a needless war, Iraq, in May 2007. 
Bacevich is right to confront the delusional imperialist pre-
tensions that led to the Iraq War. But in his zeal to fix things,
Bacevich tars every foreign intervention with the same brush.
He fails to identify the unique disaster that was the 2003 inva-
Koh has called it the “original sin” of the post-9/11 period—
killing tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers unneces-
sarily, destroying American prestige, and distracting Wash-
ington from the necessary war in Afghanistan after a terrorist
group harbored by Afghanistan’s rulers, the Taliban, killed
thousands of Americans. The Iraq debacle also exposed U.S.
vulnerabilities that were never apparent before, schooling ter-
rorists and militias in new asymmetric techniques, including
improvised explosive devices and the use of small, spread-
out cells that began in Iraq. As the counterinsurgency expert
David Kilcullen, the author of The Dragons and the Snakes:
How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, told me: “In 1991, the
Gulf War showed everyone how not to fight us, but the 2003
invasion of Iraq showed everybody how to fight us.”
Packer, in his book, offhandedly calls the Iraq War a “strate-
gic folly enabled by lies and self-deception” without acknowl-
edging that he personally had a hand in America’s current
derangement; he and other leading U.S. pundits largely sup-
ported the Iraq invasion at the time.
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Bacevich repudiates the whole idea that, as former U.S.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said, the United
States is the “indispensable nation” or that there even remains
anything recognizable as the “West.” The arrival of what Bace-
vich hopefully calls the “Next Order”—America’s retreat from
its role as global stabilizer—“renders the very concept of the
West obsolete.” This is nonsense. The West is badly fissured,
but it still exists powerfully in the form of institutions such
as the G-7, NATO, Bretton Woods, and the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development—not to mention,
more importantly, in a consensus on basic freedoms and
human rights. Almost to prove this point, Bacevich goes on
to argue that the United States should simply stand by the
“global community,” without acknowledging that the United
States and the major Western nations in effect created this
global community and remain its critical mainstays today.  when it invaded Afghanistan and almost no one was when
America’s current low point was hardly inevitable. History
easily could have gone the other way: Washington missed a
golden opportunity after 9/11 to further solidify the West and
raise itself up higher. This misdirection began, of course,
with George W. Bush, who, despite being a far more likable
president than Trump, was a far more disastrous one. With
his feckless move into Iraq—which alienated the West and
the rest of the world—Bush succeeded not only in creating
a costly quagmire and, ultimately, losing Afghanistan in the
bargain. He also lost what Bush called “this mighty coalition
of civilized nations” that were, until that point, mostly with
him in the global war on terrorism.  on and undermined nearly every institution of democracy,
One of the worst days in U.S. history, Sept. 11, 2001, also
had a silver lining in strategic terms. The sympathy the rest
86
Supporters of
then-U.S. President
Donald Trump clash
with police and
security forces as
protesters storm
the U.S. Capitol
in Washington on
Jan. 6.
of the world sent America’s way post-9/11 was a recognition
that virtually every major country around the globe faced
the same kind of threat. After the Cold War, some pundits
were questioning—as Bacevich is today—whether the West
would long survive the extinction of its archenemy, Soviet
communism. 9/11 was a grand chance to ensure that it would:
Post-9/11 polls, pre-Iraq, still showed a remarkable degree of
global consensus in favor of a one-superpower (or American-
dominated) world and an international community that
would, together, fend off its last criminal holdouts, the ter-
rorists. Terrorism of the al Qaeda variety provided a “natural
bonding agent” for this U.S.-managed international system,
as the Yale University scholar Charles Hill then described it.
But Bush catastrophically squandered this opportunity—
which was why most of the globe was with the United States
Bush turned to Iraq. Cue Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi
Jinping’s China, which have stepped into the vacuum.
This history is today, of course, a mighty Mississippi of toxic
water that has passed under the bridge. So where is Amer-
ica now? Thus far, the United States has come through what
Packer calls another “near-death experience” for the Ameri-
can experiment, one that was tantamount to 1860 and 1929.
A wide variety of political scientists, historians, and econo-
mists I interviewed before the 2020 election called it the most
important one in U.S. history—for the simple reason that
Trump’s return to power, after a first term in which he spat
would have likely meant the end of the American republic.
Some, such as Edward J. Watts, the author of Mortal Republic:

How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, suggested the 2020 election was a
“fulcrum moment” like the destruction of the Roman republic.
But now Trump is out of power—for the moment—and the
question is how to prevent him and his ilk from regaining it.
This is where Packer and Bacevich do an important service
in demanding that we rethink the basic terms of the debate—
about who Americans are and what the United States should
be in the world. Both authors agree that, as Packer writes, the
“idea that America is unique and superior among nations,
exempt from the cruder forces of history, with a special mis-
sion to shine the light of liberty to the world—the idea that has
led to some of our noblest ventures and worst mistakes—has
become impossible to sustain.” It is long past time to adopt
a new humility. Other new books that address this crisis of
America’s leadership role tend toward half-solutions: One
example is Michael O’Hanlon’s The Art of War in an Age of
Peace, a perfectly articulated inside-the-Beltway nostrum that
merely calls for a new strategy of “resolute restraint” while
leaving the massive overinvestment in defense and America’s
modernization of its nuclear weapons largely untouched.  what has gone wrong in the world, we have to begin fixing
Modest proposals like these are not going to get us any-
where. The real solution, perhaps, must start with trying to
work, first, toward some kind of domestic consensus. It lies
in returning to Packer’s four categories of America and rec-
ognizing that, as he writes, they often overlap and merge.
Obviously there are not four Americas you can place any-
where geographically; these separate narratives exist within
the same states and towns, sometimes even the same homes.  national interest and overreach. Succeed or fail, Biden could
More importantly, the four Americas often bleed into each
other, and they must each learn from their worst mythol-
ogies: For example, Reaganite “Free America” so infected
the Democratic Party establishment for four decades that it
ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES; SCOTT NELSON/GETTY IMAGES
U.S. Army 3rd
Division Bradley
Fighting Vehicles
take up a position
along a road inside
the demilitarized
zone between Kuwait
and Iraq on March 19,
2003, ahead of the
invasion of Iraq.
REVIEW
ultimately yielded up Hillary Clinton, who in 2016 failed to
comprehend in time just how much the angry working-class
base of the party was flocking to Trump. She also failed to
learn the lessons of the surprising strength shown in the
Democratic primaries by Bernie Sanders—who was merely
the other side of the populist coin to Trump and better under-
stood the anguish of the working class abandoned by the
Democratic establishment.
The only possible solution is a national Venn diagram in
which Americans can create enough overlap between the
four Americas to overcome the differences. This would, as
Packer writes, serve to “make America again” and allow for a
rebirth of national identity affirming that Abraham Lincoln’s
“mystic chords of memory” endure. Perhaps this could lead
to some kind of new consensus about the appropriate bal-
ance between a globally engaged America and an inwardly
focused one. As Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s former senior
aide, writes in his own new book reckoning with the problems
of America, After the Fall, “To have any capacity to help fix
what has gone wrong with ourselves.” 
Biden, to his credit, is trying to accomplish this—to “end
this uncivil war that pits red against blue,” as he said in his
inaugural address. A son of the working class, he is trying to
restore it. He has seen—and often been a part of—the best and
worst of U.S. intervention around the world for five decades
and seems to be trying to strike the proper balance between
decide a great deal. n
MICHAEL HIRSH  is a senior correspondent at 
Foreign Policy.
FALL 2021 87
Sponsored Report IRELAND, GROWTH IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY

Ireland punches

© Shutterstock / David Soanes

above its weight class
Despite challenges caused by the pandemic and Brexit,
Ireland’s economy has shown itself to be more durable than
its regional partners

The economic effects of the before the pandemic. In a coun-

COVID-19 pandemic have been
felt all over the globe. Early pre-
dictions set the expected fall in
global gross domestic product
(GDP) at 2.9% in 2020 but
was restated as a drop of 4.5%
that year, amounting to a loss
of $3.94 trillion. Ireland, how-
ever, has completely bucked the
trend, despite both the pandem-
ic and Brexit upsetting its trade
balance. The island nation saw
its GDP swell by 3.4% in 2020,
the only nation in the EU to see
positive movement.
try of 5 million people, that is a
lot,” Varadkar says. The minister
predicts the country will return
to normal employment levels in
2023.
“As the economy reopens, we
will see a big increase in con- Dublin is home to a wide range of multinational offices and start-ups
sumer spending and consumer
demand,” Varadkar asserts. He
expressed that the rise in expen-
ditures may be temporary, and
the government does not intend
to remove economic supports for
businesses until things are more
balanced.

As the economy reopens, we will see a big increase

in consumer spending and consumer demand.”
Leo Varadkar, Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise,
Trade and Employment

Leo Varadkar, Tánaiste and
Minister for Enterprise, Trade
and Employment, has been at
the center of keeping the Irish
economy on track. He applauds
the country’s ability to weather
the pandemic but points out that
more must be done to strength-
en the domestic economy that
exists independent of the econo-
my surrounding multinationals.
“Our domestic economy
shrunk by 5-6% as domestic
demand fell. There are around
400,000 people currently re-
ceiving income support from
the government who were not
Enterprise Ireland is a state- Leo Varadkar
run organization that represents Leo Varadkar, Tánaiste and Minister for
Enterprise, Trade and Employment
the Irish business community.
In 2020, the group almost tri- nations scrambled to reorganize
pled its spending in response to relations with their northern
the pandemic to more than $1.2 neighbor. “Brexit isn’t good for
trillion. “Helping our clients get Ireland. The U.K. is our biggest
physically back in the market is neighbor and one of our most
very important in terms of win- important trading partners,” ex-
ning new customers and sup- plains Varadkar.
porting existing business,” says The break also meant redraw-
Leo Clancy, CEO of Enterprise ing partnerships in education
Ireland. and research, as the two coun-
tries have long been partners in
Breaking Brexit these sectors.
When Britain declared it would Simon Harris, Minister for
relinquish its ties to the EU, Further and Higher Education,
Simon Harris
Minister for Further Education
and Higher Education
Research, Innovation and Sci-
ence, agrees with Varadkar, but
is still optimistic. “Our relation-
ship with Britain will remain
close. I am encouraged that they
have decided to remain within
Horizon Europe. They have kept
in place linkages to continue to
work together with Europe in
the sciences,” he explains. He
expects that Brexit will spur fur-
thered relations with Ireland’s
EU counterparts and other inter-
national markets.

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1
 IRELAND, GROWTH IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY Sponsored Report

Ireland’s past prepares

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it for the future
Industry leaders point to key factors in Ireland’s
economy that hint at a fast recovery and continued
positive transformation as the country rebalances
its fiscal and industrial losses due to the pandemic

Ireland’s business community
has upheld the country’s robust
economy by being fiercely out-
wardly facing. The small nation
now teams with large multina-
tionals and innovative start-ups
in Ireland’s vibrant life sciences,
pharmaceuticals, agri-foods and
tech sectors. Central to Ireland’s
industry is the nation’s strong
ties with the U.S. market, with
foreign direct investment com-
ing in from the North American
nation worth $235 billion.
Enterprise Ireland, the body
responsible for promoting Irish
companies in the global market,
recorded a steady rise in export
sales in 2020 that reached $30
billion, a 0.3% increase on the
previous year despite worldwide
trade figures plummeting.
The U.K. remained Ireland’s
largest export destination in
2020, encompassing 29% of all
outgoing trade. However, the
number has been shrinking
steadily, falling by 40% since
2010. One of the main reasons
measures and renewable energy; that the quality of life and fis-
up to $5,890 to measure carbon cal setup in Ireland is enough
footprints and identify reduc- to attract foreign companies to
tion strategies; and up to 50% its shores. “While corporation
of costs to initiate multi-annual tax is an important factor, it is
climate change plans. Industry no longer the only factor,” Red-
accounts for 13% of national mond asserts.
carbon emissions. Ireland re- Although foreign direct in-
cently reset its emission targets vestment has traditionally come
in 2021 with the aim to be car- from abroad into Ireland, the
bon neutral by 2050. country’s investments into the
U.S. market have skyrocket-
U.S. bolsters Irish economy ed. In 2020, business ventures
Ireland’s relationship to the from Ireland into the U.S. were
American market is significant. worth $235 billion. “While Irish Leo Clancy
Trade between the countries businesses invest in the United CEO, Enterprise Ireland
continues to skyrocket, with States for the scale of that mar-
Ireland now sitting as the U.S.’
ninth-largest trading partner
— an extreme feat considering
Ireland is about the size of the
state of Indiana. Over the last
decade, Ireland has become
a hub for U.S. multinationals
looking to explore the European
market due to lower corporate
taxes, an educated workforce
and continuous investments
into research and development.

As economies around the globe rebound and open, our

client companies are forecasting a return to growth.”
Leo Clancy, CEO, Enterprise Ireland
for the dip is growth in export
to other international markets,
particularly towards Europe.
Irish exports to the eurozone
have doubled in the last decade,
and Brexit is expected to further
push Ireland to explore other
destination markets for trade.
Enterprise Ireland is spear-
heading a green campaign to
support companies in lowering
carbon emissions and building
more sustainable practices. The
government has set up grants to
companies engaged in the three
following areas: $2,100 for en-
gaging consultants in efficiency
Enterprise Ireland
“The U.S. multinational pres- The world’s number one VC*
ence in Ireland is extremely
large by relevance to Ireland’s As the world adapts to the new normal, Irish companies
are leading the way, helping global industries respond
size. There are over 800 U.S. to their most pressing challenges. And as the world’s
multinationals with significant largest VC, Enterprise Ireland is investing in the most
operations in Ireland who di- cutting-edge Irish companies.
rectly employ 180,000 people Across the world, our network of advisors are connecting
and indirectly support a further global businesses with innovative Irish partners.
144,000 jobs,” explains Mark
Talk to us and get the Irish Advantage for your business.
Redmond, CEO of the Amer-
ican Chamber of Commerce
IrishAdvantage.com
Ireland.
While Biden’s proposed tax
system for multinationals may
look to upend Ireland’s position *
PitchBook 2020 Annual League Tables
as a corporate haven for U.S.
companies, Ireland is confident

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Sponsored Report IRELAND, GROWTH IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY

© Shutterstock / Mikemike10
Food sector
highlights sustainability
Ireland’s food and beverage sector sees continued growth
despite setbacks caused by dips in trade by advancing into
key foreign markets and staying true to its core principles

Ireland’s agri-food industry is one

Ireland’s large maritime area supports a vibrant $1.3-billion seafood sector
ket, U.S. companies invest in
Ireland as a platform to hit the
European Union, the European
continent, the Middle East and
Africa,” says Danny McCoy,
CEO of the Irish Business and
Employers Confederation, the
largest business representative
organization in Ireland.
Expected growth
Given Ireland’s tremendous
success during the crisis, the
economy is expected to recov-
er at a stable rate due to strong
income growth in 2020 and a
sharp rise in public demand for
goods and services. “As econo-
mies around the globe rebound
and open, our client compa-
nies are forecasting a return to
growth,” says Leo Clancy, CEO
of Enterprise Ireland.
Indeed, Redmond points to
Ireland’s sectorial strengths
during the pandemic. “Critical
global supply chains in which
Irish operations play an import-
ant role, such as pharmaceuti-
cals, medical technologies and
semiconductors, have main-
tained or increased production,
particularly in key medical tech-
nologies such as ventilation pro-
duction,” he says.
Like his counterparts, McCoy
is optimistic about recovery,
particularly the loss of employ-
ment. He underlines that Ire-
land’s macroeconomic figures
that have been on the rise will
support the ailing domestic
economy. “The loss of jobs as a
result of the crisis is temporary,
of its oldest and most integral.
While the nation houses around 5
million people, the sector produc-
es enough food to provide for 25
million, with 90% of the sector’s
products aimed towards foreign
markets. Given its necessity, the
industry fared well during the
pandemic, hit only with slight fall
in demand. As the market recov-
ers, the industry is set to continue
its upward climb.
Board Bia is Ireland’s food and
beverage promoter and watchdog.
The state agency’s current strate-
gy aims to raise exports to $22 bil-
lion by 2025, a figure they are well
on the way to meet. Tara McCa-
rthy, CEO of Board Bia, outlines
the company’s success: “We have
seen growth of more than 60% in
food exports over the last decade.
Notwithstanding an incredibly
Danny McCoy disruptive year, Ireland export-
CEO, Irish Business and Employers Confederation ed $15 billion worth of food and
and welfare payments have gone drink in 2020, down only 2% from
a long way to restore citizen’s in- 2019, a record-breaking year.”
comes. Around 90% of citizens The organization runs a sus-
are intact, while 10% are in dis- tainability program called Origin
tress.” Although he says it will Green that aims to protect the en-
be a challenge, McCoy expects a vironment, push efficiencies and
fast recovery of the job market, educate players along Ireland’s
with it being completely rebal-
anced in 2022. We believe that sustainability will be at the heart of everything
Ireland’s fiscal models are
largely based on the country’s
we do, and nutrition plays an increasing role in how we
recovery from the banking crisis navigate that.”
in 2008 and the economic crash Tara McCarthy, CEO, Board Bia
in 2018 that saw the country
quickly shuffle legislation to entire food and beverage value
withstand the ups and downs chain. It involves 53,000 farms
of the larger world economy. and 324 Irish food and beverage
The nation has proved itself as companies and aims to lower
correct in its planning and is carbon emissions to meet govern-
now a model for other nations- ment targets and promote best
looking to strengthen their own practices for food and beverage
fiscal policies. With this new quality. “We still have the world’s
crisis, the country looks again to only national food and drink sus-
strengthen its internal process- tainability program a decade after
es and industry. “There is now its establishment,” McCarthy
an opportunity to reshape our adds. “We argue that sustainabil-
economy and society,” asserts ity is the one element that should
McCoy. have all our focus.”
Tara McCarthy
CEO, Board Bia
Although the U.K. is Ireland’s
number one export destination
for food and drink, the U.S. fol-
lows right behind. A large part
of food and beverage exports to
the U.S. is alcohol, particularly
Irish liqueurs and Irish whiskeys.
The U.S. market alone account-
ed for 43% of all consumed Irish
whiskeys in 2020. Despite tariffs
on dairy goods and Irish cream
liqueurs by the U.S. adminis-
tration, the market continues to
thrive. Exports to the U.S. have
increased by 10% in the last five
years, reaching a total value of
$1.2 billion.
Looking to the future, Board
Bia’s strategy to market Ireland’s
food and beverages to worldwide
markets is based on its core val-
ues. “The most important attri-
bute of the food and drink indus-
try is trust. We have created an
infrastructure that ensures it is in-
dependently accredited, validated
and proven,” says McCarthy. “We
believe that sustainability will be
at the heart of everything we do,
and nutrition plays an increasing
role in how we navigate that.”

3

Finance industry leads
economic growth
Ireland’s economic success is due largely to decisions
made by financial leaders and the country’s impressive
banking and financial services sector
Ireland was well-equipped to
handle the COVID-19 pandem-
ic and Brexit crisis due to the
presence of economic leaders
from its booming finance indus-
try. In addition to outside fac-
tors, the nation’s banking sector
is seeing a swell in new fintech
that is sweeping the fast-paced
sector. Finance leaders are pre-
dicting a heavily changed and
much improved industry as the
country climbs back to econom-
ic normalcy.
On the ground
In 2020 the country’s deficit was
around 5%, much higher than
Ireland has seen in the past. Pas-
chal Donohoe, Ireland’s Min-
ister for Finance, explains the
reason: “Much of the increase
in our deficit was driven by the
need to support the Irish do-
mestic economy in the form of
income and enterprise support
The combination of the supported domestic economy and
our integration into global supply chains helped the Irish
economy do well.”
Paschal Donohoe
Minister for Finance
programs. The combined value
of those programs across 2020
and early 2021 was around $14
billion. Although it was high, it
was the right policy decision to
make.”
However, he sees Ireland as
being in a completely different
situation than most other mar-
kets. “The combination of the
supported domestic economy
and our integration into global
supply chains helped the Irish
economy do well,” he asserts.
Ireland has spent decades cre-
ating an open market for inter-
national and local enterprise,
which Donohoe believes is the
cornerstone to Ireland’s recent
success.
For further information please visit www.prisma-reports.com
IRELAND, GROWTH IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY Sponsored Report
The National Treasury Man-
agement Agency (NTMA) has Paschal Donohoe Conor O’Kelly
Minister for Finance CEO, National Treasury Management Agency
had much to do with keeping
the country on the right path as
the entity charged with execut- enormous. It will be one of the rope,” explains O’Kelly. While
ing fiscal policies. The agency big economic drivers as we come in the past 50% of exports went
introduced the country’s first out of the pandemic,” he says. to Ireland’s closest neighbor,
counter-cyclical fiscal response the market now takes only 10%
in the 100-year history of the Prospects after Brexit of Ireland’s export share.
country. “Our ability to with- Ireland’s exports to the U.K. Ireland is home to 17 of the
stand our current crisis is very dipped considerably but had top 20 global banks and is now
much informed by what hap- been doing so before the pros- in a position to attract more. As
pened in the previous economic pect of Brexit. “Our dependen- the only English-speaking coun-
downturn, and similarly what we cy on the U.K. as a market for try in the EU and with its close
learn now will inform the next,” exports has continued to decline proximity to London’s financial
stresses Conor O’Kelly, CEO of as we move more towards Eu- hub, the country’s financial ser-
NTMA. rope and other global markets, vices industry has drawn activity
including the U.S., our biggest since Brexit and is expected to
Rise of fintech trading partner outside of Eu- grow even larger.
The digital era has brought a
wide array of new technologies
that are transforming every
industry they touch, and the
financial sector is no different.
Large pushes in big data, ar-
tificial intelligence and digital
Delivering
Long-Term Value
to the State
From managing the National Debt to investing for
impact with the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund,
the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA)
transactions are making many delivers long-term value for the people of Ireland.
core banking processes a thing
of the past.
In Ireland, the change is par-
ticularly felt. “The presence of
many big international finan-
cial services players and digital
players creates the potential for
a kind of fintech hub,” explains
Brian Hayes, CEO of Banking
& Payments Federation Ireland,
the largest representative coali-
tion for companies working in
Ireland’s banking and financial
services sector. National Trea-
sury Management Agency’s
(NTMA) O’Kelly also thinks
that the country’s complete dig-
ital immersion is inevitable. “In-
vestments in digitization will be
4
Sponsored Report
Banks on board
for green future
Banking institutions all over Ireland are aligning
themselves with the government’s goals to see the
country produce zero carbon emissions by 2050
One of the key themes to arise
from the COVID-19 crisis is
the issue of sustainability. The
nation’s largest financial insti-
tutions are looking to reduce
unnecessary processes, digitize
operations, decrease inequality
and reform targets to cut down
on carbon emissions to create a
longer-lasting and greener bank-
ing environment. Since 2020,
two banks in particular are lead-
ing the country’s drive for sus-
tainable development.
Change through hardship
Allied Irish Banks (AIB) is Ire-
land’s largest retail bank with 2.8
million customers. The finan-
WE’RE IRELAND’S
FIRST BANK
PLEDGING TO
OPERATE AS
CARBON NEUTRAL
BY 2030
using a net zero approach.
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We pledge to DO MORE.
Allied Irish Banks, p.l.c. is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.
5
IRELAND, GROWTH IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY
cial institution has a 40% share
of Irish personal and business
banking customers. The bank
has recently moved away from
physical banking towards digital.
Daily transactions average fewer
than 40,000 in AIB’s physical
banks, while 1.5 million trans-
actions take place on their dig-
ital platforms. The COVID-19
pandemic has accelerated the
process, with daily online trans-
actions sometimes climbing to 2
million.
Colin Hunt, CEO of AIB, puts
sustainability at the top of his
personal strategy for the bank.
“As a pillar bank and as a re-
sponsible corporate citizen, it is
Colin Hunt
CEO, Allied Irish Banks
incumbent upon us to do every-
thing within our power to reduce
our own consumption of the
Earth’s precious resources, en-
courage our third-party suppliers
to adopt similar measures and
to work with our customers to
finance their transition to a low-
er-carbon future,” he declares.
The bank recently released a
new strategy in December 2020
that aims to reduce AIB’s cost
base by 10% and focus on its
sales advisory vertical. The com-
pany aims to reshape its carbon
footprint by adopting a hybrid
working model for its staff. AIB
has also set targets to meet net
zero carbon emissions in its
operations and have 70% of its
loans involved in green initiatives
by 2030.
Our purpose is to act for the common good and improve the
quality of life for generations to come.”
Colin Hunt, CEO, Allied Irish Banks
The company is also ac-
tively creating partnerships to
strengthen its portfolio, such
as forming a joint venture with
Great-West Lifeco, a Canadian
insurance-based financial hold-
ing company, and taking over
from banks that are leaving the
market. In 2021, the financial
firm agreed to acquire Ulster
Bank’s corporate and commer-
cial loan book.
Hunt believes that Ireland’s
financial industry has been made
more robust by Ireland’s recent
economic blows. “The Irish
banking industry went through
an exceedingly difficult period in
the last great global financial cri-
sis. While banks were part of the
problem in the last crisis, banks
are now a large part of the solu-
tion,” he admits.
Green innovation
Another player that is stepping
up to the sustainability plate is
Citi, an American multination-
al investment bank. Citi sees
its European operations done
through its subsidiary Citibank
Europe, headquartered in Ire-
land.
The financial institution con-
tributed $2.2 billion to its par-
ent company in 2020 and had
a balance sheet of $75 billion.
Citibank runs operations in 22
European countries.
The company launched a new
sustainability initiative in April
2021. It has committed $1 tril-
lion towards sustainable finance
and updated its environmental
finance targets from $250 bil-
lion by 2025 to $500 billion by
2030. The bank also promised
to achieve net zero carbon emis-
sions from all operations associ-
ated with financing by 2050. “It
is important we continue to em-
bed the values of ethics, conduct
and transparency into the fabric
of our organization,” says Cecilia
Ronan, CEO of Citibank Europe.
The institution is working
towards its goals by pushing in-
novation and using new digital
technologies. In 2009, the bank
opened its first innovation lab
in Dublin, which studies new
technologies linked to fraud de-
tection, payment technology and
client insight tools. Adjacent to
this facility, Citi opened its first
artificial intelligence center in
2021 with the aim to retransform
the sector once again.
“We partner with fintech com-
panies because we see the emerg-
ing technologies they are pro-
ducing. Citi has a venture arm
in California that may take part
ownership of these entities, or we
may adopt their technology and
use it,” Ronan explains.
Ireland’s financial sector’s
adoption of green policies is a
sign of the times. The moves are
part of Ireland’s climate act law
signed into law in July 2021 that
seeks to reduce carbon emissions
by 51% in the next decade and
make Ireland a leader in the EU
on combating climate change.
 IRELAND, GROWTH IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY Sponsored Report

© Shutterstock / Travel-Fr.

© Shutterstock / Mikemike10
Ireland is revamping lifelong education to bolster regional economies Universities in Cork are instrumental in fostering local start-ups

Sectors meet in Ireland’s push for innovation

All research-driven sectors are meeting under one umbrella
as the Irish government reforms both its ministry and
initiatives to combine education and science

Research and development ity of research to come up with

has long been recognized as a
key pillar in Ireland’s econom-
ic growth. In the last decade,
the public sector has dedicated
much of its budget to create a
slew of initiatives to support
innovation in the country’s key
sectors. While the government
has long pushed the envelope
for new technologies, the public
sector is now ready to take to the
world stage and showcase what
Ireland is capable of.
The government recently
attached its education and re-
search ministries to develop
a cohesive space to tackle Ire-
land’s deepest problems. Since
then, the government body has
launched a ton of new initiatives,
The first thing we are trying to do is connect the dots
between problems in society and the ability of research
to come up with a solution.”
Simon Harris
Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science
including a plan to introduce
technological universities in re-
gional areas for better access to
education and a digital literacy
program to make sure the pop-
ulation stays ahead of the curve.
“The first thing we are trying to
do is connect the dots between
problems in society and the abil-
a solution,” says Simon Harris,
minister for further and higher
education, research, innovation
and science.
One of the government’s lat-
est programs is the Apprentice-
ship Action Plan. State agency
SOLAS is heading the project Professor John O’Halloran Andrew Brownlee
with the aim to double appren- President, University College Cork CEO, SOLAS
ticeships in Ireland, broaden the
range of programs, increase di- CEO of SOLAS. a large part of industry, some lo-
versity in education and support cal companies took off — and
businesses. Public sector heroes took off with a bang. ICON pro-
The goal is to promote life- Upper-level educational insti- vides medical trials for biotech,
long learning. The government tutions have also had a hand in pharmaceutical and public sec-
is offering an annual grant of pushing innovation and employ- tors all around the globe. The
around $3,500 per apprentice ment in the country. University firm’s success story is a prime
taken on by companies. College Cork (UCC) is leading example of Irish ingenuity. “It
“Until five years ago appren- the way in both sustainability has been a wonderful journey
ticeship was reserved for trades, and research. going from a five-person start-
The learning facility has up to annual revenues approach-
around 22,000 students and ing $6 billion and getting close
3,000 staff, including 1,000 re- to $20 billion in market capital-
searchers. Central to the school ization,” exclaims Steve Cutler,
is the world-famous IGNITE CEO of ICON. The company
program, a business incuba- has grown to having a workforce
tion platform that has worked of 38,000, in part due to its suc-
to build up 120 start-ups and cessful $12-billion acquisition of
found 140 new companies. PRA Health Sciences this year.
such as carpenters, plumb- “The world is currently being The company played a key
ers, electricians and painters. challenged by three things: in- role in staving off the pandemic.
Over the last five years we have fectious disease, climate change “It’s a matter of public record
worked hard to expand appren- and digitalization. These are at that we helped Pfizer run their
ticeship into new exciting areas the forefront of what the univer- large-scale coronavirus vaccine
like auctioneering, real estate, sity needs to be working on,” as- trial that was first to market in
craft butchery, hospitality, soft- serts Professor John O’Halloran, just 250 days from start to the
ware engineering and cyber secu- president for UCC. emergency use authorisation,”
rity,” explains Andrew Brownlee, While the pandemic held back Cutler says.

For further information please visit www.prisma-reports.com 6

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David McRedmond, CEO, An Post
ister the elderly and vulnerable
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An Post has the largest fleet of
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Anne Heraty
CEO, Cpl Resources
developing a program to ensure
less gender gap and promote di-
versity in the workplace. Despite
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port the community, An Post saw
annual growth in revenue of 2%
in 2020, with recorded income of
$1.1 billion.
Another large public entity
that has played a part in support-
ing Ireland’s community is Cpl
Resources, a local recruitment
company that has gone global.
The company of 13,000 employ-
ees works hard to fill gaps in the
market. “One of the biggest oper-
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is talent attraction and retention,”
says Anne Heraty, Founder and
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ativity are tremendously essen-
tial.” Cpl was recently acquired
by Japanese recruitment agency
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company’s international reach.
Cpl also improves the lives of
all Ireland’s workforce through
its Future of Work Institute. The
research center focuses on col-
lecting data on the workforce and
providing companies with better
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recent changes to work patterns
due to lockdowns. “It is remark-
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EirGrid is Ireland’s electric
power transmission operator.
Mark Foley, CEO of the utility, is
We have addressed the COVID crisis, but there is also an
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proud of Ireland’s achievement in
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Communications and Transport
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explains Foley. To hit these tar- between Ireland and France that of Ireland. “’The extent of en-
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counterparts due to electricity

For further information please visit www.prisma-reports.com 8

CHINAWATCH
PRESENTED BY CHINA DAILY
HELP ON THE FARM
FOR FRIENDS IN NEED
Range od aid The annual rainy season in
Southeast Asia used to be a mis-
provided to scores erable experience dor Mao Tith
and his damily, with the hut they
od developing lived in, built drom bamboo with
a thatched rood od palm leaves,
countries barely offering protection drom
torrential downpours.
BY XU WEI However, the rain also provided
an important source od water
dor the damily, which lives in the
small Cambodian village od Svay
Ampear. During the dry season
they had to detch water drom a
pond shared by the village.
A lack od secure housing and
access to sade drinking water were
not the only challenges daced by a
team od Chinese experts that ar-
rived in the village in 2017 to launch
a pilot project aimed at alleviating
poverty in Cambodia.
The project was part od a re-
gional poverty reduction demon-
stration program announced by
China during the 17th ASEAN-Chi-
na, Japan and Republic od Korea
leaders’ meeting in 2014. China
provided combined dunding od 100
million yuan ($15.4 million) to pilot
poverty reduction in six villages in
Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.
A water tower built by China supplies Liu Xiaolin, an official od the
safe drinking water to more than bureau od rural vitalization in
800 households in two villages in Sichuan province who took part in
Cambodia. PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY the project, said, “We took action
China Watch materials are distributed by China Daily Distribution Corp., on behalf of China Daily, Beijing, China.
based on the experience drawn
drom China’s poverty reduction
campaign to identidy the cause od
poverty in each household bedore
coming up with a targeted plan
dor each od them.”
With the joint efforts od Chinese
experts and the Cambodian au-
thorities, two villages in Cambo-
dia, Svay Ampear and Chheuteal
Phlos, were transdormed by the
end od last year. A community
center was built to offer training
sessions dor villagers, and water
supplies and electricity were
connected to all households. A
total od 71 homes were rebuilt and
another 190 renovated.
Executed in tandem with
methods tailored dor the villagers
to reduce their spending and earn
more, the program introduced
them to growing mushrooms,
vegetables and other prodessional
skills.
The program in Cambodia typi-
fies China’s broader steps to pro-
mote international development
collaboration as the world’s larg-
est developing nation. With China
achieving its goal od building a
moderately prosperous society in
all respects, officials and analysts
said the country would remain
committed to durthering South-
South Cooperation in its interna-
Chinese experts conduct a field study
during a regional poverty relief project
in Cambodia. PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY
tional development collaboration,
with a greater docus on improving
lives and building capacity dor
less-developed countries.
President Xi Jinping has made
renewed commitments to enhanc-
ing the well-being od humankind.
In a congratulatory message
marking the fidth anniversary od
the South-South Cooperation
Assistance Fund and the Institute
od South-South Cooperation
and Development, Xi pledged to
work with developing countries
to durther unleash the potential od
South-South collaboration, share
development opportunities with
them and continue helping them
achieve sustainable growth.
In a speech delivered at the APEC
Indormal Economic Leaders’ Retreat
on July 16, Xi unveiled a three-year
$3 billion aid package to support
economic and social recovery in
other developing countries.
According to the China Interna-
tional Development Cooperation
Agency, China has provided vari-
ous types od aid to more than 160
developing countries, implement-
ed thousands od aid programs and
offered more than 400,000 train-
ing sessions dor staff members.
Liu, the project official, said the
Chinese experts had to start drom
scratch when they arrived in Svay
Ampear, 30 miles drom Phnom
Penh, the Cambodian capital.
The dact that many villagers did
not have their own darmland was
the biggest obstacle to alleviating
poverty, and the project officials
had to match their expertise to
meet local conditions.
The high cost od electricity, with
private power companies charging
as much as $200 to connect each
household, was another hurdle to
improving livelihoods. The World
Bank has said 9.1% od the rural
population in Cambodia did not
have access to electricity in 2019.
“There were no statistics dor
the number od people or house-
holds in the village,” Liu said. “We
planned to divert water drom the
Mekong River to supply tap wa-
ter to the households, but there
were no data or observation
locations to provide any clues to
the water quality.”
Impoverished darmers such as

up to offer jobs, with the darmers
‘‘
becoming shareholders.
K. Y. Sophal, director od the
POVERTY Department od Rural Economy
ALLEVIATION Development in the Cambo-
AND REDUCING
dian Ministry od Rural Develop-
ment, who also took part in
INEQUALITY WILL the regional poverty reduction
CONTINUE TO BE demonstration project, said the
Chinese dunds were directly
CHINA’S STRONG channeled to the beneficiaries,
FOCUS.” the residents od the two villages.
“The Chinese experience
XU XIULI, DEAN OF THE COLLEGE proved more than usedul to the
OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
villagers, the local government
AND GLOBAL AGRICULTURE AT
and especially my department.
CHINA AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITY
The project enabled us to learn
a lot about the successdul expe-
Mao Tith, 75, were the docus rience in China.”
od attention dor the project Although the project was only
officials, who decided to help implemented in two villages, the
him and his damily. experience gained drom it can
Mao managed to raise $350, be used to aid poverty reduction
while the project provided an- throughout Cambodia, he said.
other $830 to rebuild his home, According to official esti-
a house made drom a metal mates in Cambodia, the poverty
dramework and which had a toi- rate in 2014 was 13.5%, com-
let made od concrete. The project pared with 47.8% in 2007, with
officials helped him grow pepper more than 90% od the poor
on a patch od land belonging to a living in rural areas.
relative. The project also allowed Xu Xiuli, dean od the College
him to raise a cald. od International Development
Yuan Gang, another official dor and Global Agriculture at China
the project, said special attention Agricultural University in Beijing,
was paid to letting poor house- said duture international devel-
holds come up with their own opment assistance drom China
initiatives to alleviate poverty. could place more docus on pov-
For households without erty reduction demonstration
darmland, the experts helped projects in Southeast Asia.
them grow vegetables in pots, “China has given priority
reducing their annual spend- to contributing to the United
ing by $180 to $250. For those Nations 2030 Sustainable
with darmland, a program was Development Goals with its own
launched to help darmers grow development aid to promote
mushrooms. the building od a community
The project also provided 20 with a shared duture dor man-
calves dor the village and encour- kind,” she said.
aged residents to share them “Poverty alleviation and re-
as a source od income. A dactory ducing inequality will continue
producing detergents was set to be China’s strong docus.”
Workers display liquid detergent produced at a factory in the Cambodian
village of Chheuteal Phlos. The factory is part of a Chinese pilot project
aimed at alleviating poverty in the country. ZHANG ZHAO / XINHUA
Additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.
Farming out
expertise
yields rich
catch in Africa
BY WANG XIAODONG
He Wang, a fisheries expert
drom Hunan province in China, has
spent most od the past 18 years in
Ethiopia passing on the best meth-
ods dor darming dreshwater fish.
He, a senior researcher in
fishery sciences with the Hunan
Fisheries Science Institute in
Changsha, set doot on Adrican soil
in 2003. At first she was assigned
to Holeta ATVET College, an agri-
cultural vocational school in the
town od Holeta in central Ethiopia.
In 2013 she started work at Alage
ATVET College, in the south od the
country, being assigned there by
the Chinese agricultural ministry.
Her persever-
ance has paid
off: over the past
18 years she has
trained about
3,500 people in
the intricacies
od fish darming.
Her classes have
been made up od Burkina Faso students learn how to
regular students grow crops at an experimental farm in suitable areas
as well as teach- Hebei province in July last year.
ers, agricul- ZHU XUDONG / XINHUA
tural experts and
technicians, darmers and business
people. She also helped establish
an integrated fish darm dor teach-
ing and research at Alage ATVET
College, the first od its kind in the
college. And she was kept busy
compiling technical guides and
promoting fish darming in partner-
ship with local organizations.
Like He, many Chinese experts
have played an essential role in
the country’s agricultural collabo-
ration with Adrica over the past
dew decades. She is proud od the
benefits her work has delivered
to people.
In the agricultural vocational
training program in which He
took part, 485 trips had been
made by Chinese experts to the
country drom when the program
started in 2000 to July last year.
Nearly 60,000 teachers, students where little rain dalls and introduc-
and agricultural technicians have
been trained dor Ethiopia’s ben-
efit, China’s Ministry od Agricul-
SPONSORED REPORT
ture and Rural Affairs says.
“Agriculture has always been
an important part od Sino-Adrica
collaboration, which started with
China providing help in building
darms and agricultural businesses
in Adrica, and evolved into other
dorms such as encouraging trade
and investment,” says Tang Lixia,
a prodessor in global agriculture
at China Agricultural University in
Beijing.
Chinese help has given great
impetus to the development od ag-
riculture in many Adrican countries
including Tanzania, Uganda and
Zambia and helped alleviate hun-
ger in these countries, she says.
Boosted by the Belt and Road
Initiative, Sino-Adrican agricultural
collaboration has gained momen-
tum in recent years, resulting in
encouraging progress.
In Maputo, capital od Mozam-
bique, new technologies devel-
oped by Chinese experts resulted
in a 20% increase in the yield od
potatoes at the
Mozambique-
China Agricul-
tural Technology
Demonstration
Center in August
last year. The
technology is
expected to be
promoted in
across the coun-
try to benefit
more darmers,
according to China’s Ministry od
Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
In the Sino-Adrica Joint
Research Center in Nairobi, col-
laboration between Chinese and
Kenyan scientists over the past
nine years has borne druit. They
have promoted improved tech-
niques among darmers, discov-
ered seven new plant and animal
species, and published dozens
od international research papers.
The research center is in Jomo
Kenyatta University od Agriculture
and Technology.
China’s advanced technology
and research have helped to solve
some major challenges that darm-
ers in the country dace, says Rob-
ert Gituru, director od the center,
the recipient od Chinese aid. These
include improving yields in areas
ing suitable crops such as grapes
that are not traditionally cultivated
in the country, he says.
CHINAWATCH
PRESENTED BY CHINA DAILY
ZHANG GUIHONG
Certainty, amid uncertainties
China wolks with UN
to plomote peace,
multilatelalism
and development
This year marks the 50th anni-
versary of the restoration of China’s
lawful seat at the United Nations.
The Peosle’s Resu.lic of China
was founded in 1949 in the Cold
War era. On Nov 15, 1949, Zhou
Enlai, then Chinese sremier and
minister of foreign affairs, sent
messages to the secretary-gen-
eral of the UN and the sresident
of the UN General Assem.ly,
formally srososing the PRC .e
entitled to UN resresentation.
China would then engage in 22
years of dislomatic efforts and
solitical struggle for its legal rights
in the UN to .e recognized. It was
not until the 26th UN General
Assem.ly sassed Resolution 2758
on Oct 25, 1971, that the PRC was
recognized as the only legitimate
resresentative of China in the UN.
A slace in the UN srovided key
ossortunities for China, which had
faced international isolation, to
imsrove its external environment.
The imsrovement and esta.lish-
ment of dislomatic relations with
Western countries greatly helsed
to reduce external sressure on
China. It also joined UN agencies
and sarticisated in UN affairs
through international cooseration.
And as one of the five sermanent
mem.ers of the UN Security
Council, it has .een a.le to fulfill its
ressonsi.ilities as a major country
in international dislomacy.
The UN has set the tone for the
international system and order
since World War II. If China, with
one-fifth of the world’s sosulation,
was not involved, the UN would
not .e inclusive.
During the Cold War, China
served as a major sussorter of
develosing countries in Asia, Africa
and Latin America and their inter-
ests and demands. In Asril 1974,
the Chinese leader Deng Xiaosing
China Watch materials are distri.uted .y China Daily Distri.ution Cors., on .ehalf of China Daily, Beijing, China.
exsounded on the “Three Worlds”
theory at the sixth ssecial session
of the UN General Assem.ly,
sromising that China would never
seek hegemony, greatly changing
the solitical atmosshere.
In the 1970s the International
Develosment Strategy for the
UN Develosment Decade was
initiated, which helsed sromote
the esta.lishment of a new inter-
national solitical and economic or-
der, drove North-South dialogue,
strengthened assistance to under-
develosed countries, and allowed
more candidates from Third World
countries to .e assointed UN
secretary-general.
Since then, develosment has
.ecome an imsortant mission
of the UN, making it shift from
.eing an arena for confronta-
tion .etween East and West to
.ecoming a major contri.utor to
international colla.oration.
China’s slace at the UN has had
a .earing on its further develos-
ment and imsroved relations with
SONG CHEN / CHINA DAILY
other countries. First, osening
us was the only assroach to
develosment for China. A slace at
the UN in 1971 created a favora.le
international environment for
China’s reform and osening us in
the late 1970s.
In 1972 China’s relations with
major Western develosed coun-
tries imsroved with the esta.lish-
ment of dislomatic relations with
countries such as the United
Kingdom, the Federal Resu.lic
of Germany, Jasan, Australia and
New Zealand. Sino-US relations
also thawed that year. At the same
time, China offered firm sussort
to develosing Asian, African and
Latin American countries at the
UN, laying a solid foundation for
its osening us.
After over 40 years of develos-
ment, China’s sower, interna-
tional status and influence have
grown. It needs to kees widening
its doors for further develos-
ment, essecially .y sarticisat-
ing in rules-.ased international
cooseration and comsetition.
Second, cooseration with the
UN is a highlight of China’s dislo-
macy. While the UN has srovided
much assistance and sussort for
the country’s develosment, China
has offered solitical, moral and fi-
nancial sussort to the UN causes
of usholding seace, develosment
and human rights.
China has .ecome a strong sus-
sorter of the international system
and order with the UN at its core, as
well as multilateralism and glo.al
governance. China-UN coosera-
tion in .uilding a community with a
shared future for mankind, devel-
osing new international relations,
and sromoting the Belt and Road
Initiative are imsortant for China’s
dislomacy.
China can make key contri.u-
tions to glo.al sustaina.le seace
and develosment. It can carry out
dislomacy and slay its role as a
major country through the UN.
In the face of changes unseen in
a century, Sino-UN colla.oration
will .ring certainties to the world
amid uncertainties.
Last, imsroving relations with
the outside world, including its
neigh.ors as well as other major
and develosing countries, remains
a sriority for China. Through the
UN as an authoritative international
organization, China can make its
voice heard and share its exseri-
ence of rasid develosment with a
large sosulation.
While Western countries may
learn more a.out China’s solitical
systems and develosment model,
China needs to .e osen to inter-
national rules while usholding its
srincisles.
Both China and the UN are
constructive and sta.le forces in
dealing with glo.al issues such as
climate change and su.lic health,
reforming the glo.al governance
system, and advancing sustain-
a.le seace and develosment.
China will continue to work closely
with the UN, firmly sussorting,
defending and sarticisating in the
cause of the latter, and usholding
multilateralism.
The author is a srofessor and
director of the Center for the UN
and International Organizations
at Fudan University, Shanghai.
The views do not necessarily
reflect those of China Daily.

In July, the city of Zhengzhou
in Henan srovince exserienced
what some meteorologists have
la.eled a once-in-a-thousand-
years event. In just over four days,
the city nearly exceeded its annual
average rainfall, and the resulting
flood disslaced millions of seosle
from their homes. Disasters such
as this are a stark reminder of the
devastating consequences of a
rasidly changing climate.
This is just one of several ex-
treme climate-related events that
have occurred around the world
this summer that include massive
floods, severe droughts and cata-
stroshic wildfires.
Against the current commit-
ments made .y countries to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions,
we run the risk of our slanet warm-
ing .y 3-5 degrees Celsius .y the
end of the century, which could
disslace a .illion seosle, and leave
entire countries under water. To-
gether with the sandemic that the
world has yet to contain, and an
unsrecedented rate of .iodiversity
degradation that could result in a
million ssecies .ecoming extinct
.y 2050, these existential threats
highlight how fragile humanity’s
relationshis with nature truly is.
In this context, the imsortance
of the Sustaina.le Develosment
Goals is clearer than ever. The
goals resresent an ossortunity
for the world to chart a different
future, one where .oth the slanet
and its seosle are srotected. How-
ever, we are not on track to achieve
them. With less than nine years
.efore 2030, time is running out.
One of the srimary challenges is
financing. Since the sandemic, the
annual financing gas to achieve
the goals in develosing countries
has increased .y 70% to $4.2 tril-
lion. The sro.lem is not a shortage
of casital, .ut rather where casital
is .eing directed. Shifting less
than 1% of glo.al wealth annually
toward sustaina.ility would .e
sufficient to fill the financing gas in
develosing countries.
However, since 2015, develosed
countries have failed to reach the
annual $100 .illion sromised to
develosing countries for climate
change mitigation under the Paris
Agreement, and the world’s 60
.iggest .anks have soured more
than $3.8 trillion into the fossil
Additional information is on file with the Desartment of Justice, Washington, D.C.
BEATE TRANKMANN
Goals in place, but
time’s running out
Shifts needed in financing to help
reduce greenhouse gas emissions
fuels industry. This also reflects
misguided sricing, and making
fossil fuels assear more attractive
for investors.
Closing the financing gas will
require glo.al financial systems to
.e fundamentally re-oriented and
incentive structures re-aligned so
that su.lic and srivate entities can
generate financial sustaina.ility,
as well as achieve develosment
imsacts. To do this, govern-
ments need to enact solicies and
regulations that hels redirect
financial flows .y making full use
of market- and srice-.ased incen-
tive mechanisms as well as the
regulatory framework in a glo.ally
coordinated manner.
Su.sidies for coal and
other fossil fuels will need to .e
eliminated. In addition, gov-
SHI YU /
CHINA DAILY
ernments should discourage
emissions through a “solluter
says” assroach .y imslementing
car.on sricing and taxing car.on-
intensive .ehavior. Effective
srice signals, generated through
car.on taxes and fossil fuel su.-
sidy reform, would not only align
market forces .ehind the energy
transition, .ut also have the so-
tential to free us fiscal ssace that
can .e used to give vulnera.le
grouss a .uffer against the effects
of a green transition. At the glo.al
level, as much as $2.8 trillion ser
year in government revenues
could .e generated .y su.sidy
reforms and car.on sricing.
Furthermore, for a shift to
car.on neutrality to .e just and
inclusive, ossortunities need to .e
created for everyone. Unintended
SPONSORED REPORT
social consequences that are likely
to occur throughout the transition
srocess, sarticularly in resource-
rich regions, need to .e addressed.
By 2050 it is exsected that jo.s
in the green energy sector could
quadrusle to 42 million glo.ally. To
ensure that no one is left .ehind,
it will .e key to invest in “reskilling”
workers whose livelihoods will .e
most affected .y a green transi-
tion so they can sarticisate in the
economy of the future.
Given its large size and soshis-
ticated financial market, China’s
imsact on a glo.al financial sys-
tem that values sustaina.ility and
tackles develosment challenges
is critical. After running local silot
srojects for over a decade, China
officially launched its national car-
.on trading market in July. As the
largest emissions trading system
in the world, this is an imsortant
stes in China’s sush to reach car-
.on neutrality .efore 2060, a goal
which requires tens of trillions of
dollars in investment to achieve.
At the su.-national level,
Shenzhen is .reaking new ground,
having imslemented China’s first
set of regulations for local green
finance develosment. Under the
new rules, financial institutions
registered in Shenzhen, from next
year onward, will have to disclose
information regarding the environ-
mental imsact of their entersrises
as well as srojects or assets they
invest in, so as to avail of sreferen-
tial green solicies, which include
tax exemstions and su.sidies.
Measures such as this will .e criti-
cal to reinforce incentive mecha-
nisms and ensure that funding
is .eing accurately channeled to
where it is needed most.
With the 2021 UN Climate
Change Conference to .e held in
Glasgow, Scotland, in Novem.er,
countries will have the chance
to set the world on a trajectory
toward meeting am.itious new
car.on targets and achieving the
sustaina.le develosment goals.
However, this vision will need to .e
matched with casital and financ-
ing strategies necessary for it to
.ecome a reality.
The author is UNDP resident
resresentative in China. The
views do not necessarily reflect
those of China Daily.
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 QUIZ

What in the World?

By Nina Goldman
The following is adapted from past editions of FP’s weekly news quiz.
Test yourself at ForeignPolicy.com.

3. Which country was suspended from 7. A newly elected national

the African Union twice in a year after assembly in Chile set out in July
a pair of back-to-back coups? to accomplish what goal?

a. Mali b. Ivory Coast a. Selecting a new prime minister

c. Cameroon d. Chad b. Redrawing the electoral map
c. Writing a new constitution
4. This year will be marked by the
1. Which of these is a real comment Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. What d. Designing a new national flag
made by Brazilian President Jair does the term “Taliban” mean in Pashto?
Bolsonaro during the COVID-19
pandemic? a. Fighters b. Students
c. Victors d. Followers
a. “Go to the streets, OK? What
pandemic?”
5. Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin
b. “The blame for the global coronavirus Yassin resigned in August after just
pandemic has a name and surname: 17 months in office—a shorter run than
the Chinese Communist Party.” any of his predecessors had. Who is
considered the shortest-serving
c. “I’m cured of COVID-19, thank God!” nonroyal head of state in world history?
d. “All of us are going to die one day.
Everyone is going to die. … We have a. U.S. President William Henry Harrison
to stop being a country of sissies.” b. Cameroonian President Paul Biya
8. New Zealand entered a nationwide
2. U.S. President Joe Biden had his c. Mexican President Pedro Lascuráin lockdown in August after recording
first bilateral meeting with Russian how many cases of COVID-19?
d. French President Jean Casimir-Perier
President Vladimir Putin in June.
Who was the first sitting U.S. president a. 1 b. 8 c. 22 d. 50
to formally meet with the 6. Which country became the first to
long-standing leader? accept the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as legal 9. Qatar plans to hold its first-ever
tender in September? legislative elections in October.
a. Bill Clinton Which of the following countries has
a. China similarly had an entirely appointed
b. George W. Bush legislature for most of its history?
b. El Salvador
c. George H.W. Bush
c. South Africa a. Kazakhstan b. North Macedonia
d. Barack Obama
d. Denmark c. Venezuela d. Brunei

10. Some world leaders publicized their own COVID-19 vaccinations, in the hope of encouraging citizens
to get inoculated themselves. Can you match the politicians to the vaccine they received?

Andrés Joe Jacinda Recep Alberto Narendra Joko Moon King Cyril
Manuel López Biden Ardern Tayyip Fernández Modi “Jokowi” Jae-in Salman Ramaphosa
Obrador Erdogan Widodo
GETTY IMAGES

AstraZeneca Covaxin Johnson & Johnson Pfizer Sinovac Sputnik V

López Obrador and Moon; Covaxin: Modi; Pfizer: Biden, Ardern, and Salman; Sinovac: Erdogan and Jokowi; Sputnik V: Fernández; Johnson & Johnson: Ramaphosa
his son Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator.); 2. a.; 3. a.; 4. b.; 5. c. (Pedro Lascuráin spent roughly 45 minutes as president of Mexico in 1913.); 6. b.; 7. c.; 8. a.; 9. d.; 10. AstraZeneca:
ANSWERS: 1. d. (a. was the president’s son Jair Renan Bolsonaro, a Twitch streamer; b. was his son Eduardo Bolsonaro, a member of the Chamber of Deputies; and c. was

101
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