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ARTICULATE
The tragedy is playing out on live broadcast
and people cannot plead ignorance.

April 2024 \ Volume 1

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Articulate | April 2024, Volume 1

HOT READINGS INSIDE

1. Injustice is everywhere, so what are our moral duties?

2. Pakistan’s startup and venture landscape
3. Understanding Hisbah, its roles and implications in Islamic society
4. Civilisational clash - a fallacious hoax
5. Shifting conflicts hit key energy routes
6. Climate policy around the globe: Status and future challenges
7. Food security & climate change: Perspectives and prospects
8. South Asia’s path to sustainable energy
9. Understanding China’s foreign policy
10. Understanding China’s political economy
11. South Asia’s regional integration: Lessons from Europe’s experience
12. Semblance of peace across many regions
13. Introducing Neo-politics
14. The Muslim World stands voiceless
15. The fantasy of reviving Nuclear Energy
16. Rethinking of Pakistan's renewables
17. Does Pakistan still matter to India?
18. How democratic states are regulating digital platforms
19. Can we trust the polls? How emerging technologies affect democracy
20. America’s competition with China must be won, not managed
21. AI, Sovereignty and Isaac Asimov’s warning
22. UN Security Council reform is a song in a loop
23. The war on Gaza and America’s paradoxical role

Compiled and Edited by Aamir Mahr | CSS Exam Dask

Articulate | April 2024, Volume 1
INJUSTICE IS EVERYWHERE, SO WHAT ARE OUR MORAL DUTIES?
(Kieran Setiya is a professor of philosophy at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This write-up was published in the BBC on November 3, 2022)
Our world is unjust and replete with suffering – what
can an individual possibly do about it? As the
philosopher Kieran Setiya writes, there are far better
options than capitulation or despair. Chances are,
before you clicked the link that brought you here, you
were doomscrolling: skimming from headline to
headline in a daze of horror. Click once to see energy
prices spiraling; click again for the faltering of
democracy; a third time for glaciers melting as climate
chaos worsens. Scanning the news can leave you
feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the world's crises.
What choice do we have but to deaden our emotions?
The alternative would be guilt and shame for carrying
on our lives without doing much to make a difference.
We are not alone, and we are not the first. Exiled from
Germany to the US during World War Two, the
philosopher Theodor Adorno mourned: "What would
happiness be that was not measured by the
immeasurable grief at what is? For the world is deeply
ailing." And yet what good does grieving do? It's of no
use to anyone, least of all ourselves. "The almost
insoluble task," Adorno wrote, "is to let neither the
power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy
us." How should we face up to the injustice of the
world? That's a question I tackle in my new book Life
is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way –
along with adversities more personal to us: infirmity,
loneliness, grief, and failure. There is no cure for the
human condition, but after 20 years teaching and
studying moral philosophy, I believe that it can help.
Philosophers ponder the nature of reality and of
human life, constructing abstract theories, and
trading in thought experiments that make the familiar
strange. But moral philosophy also has a practical
purpose. As Plato wrote in the Republic, circa 375BC,
"the argument concerns no ordinary topic but the way
we ought to live". In 19th Century Britain, for example,
this aspiration fueled the moral theory known as
utilitarianism. According to the "principle of utility",
we should always strive to produce the "greatest
happiness of the greatest number". It was a radical
idea. Traditional institutions could no longer be taken
for granted, and were held to a new moral standard:
do they contribute to human happiness? If not, they
must change. Utilitarians argued for universal
suffrage, prison reform, aid to the poor and better
treatment of animals – and they made progress
towards these goals. There are downsides to
embracing utilitarianism wholeheartedly, however.
Utilitarians say that one should give as much weight
to the happiness of strangers as one does to one's own
happiness or that of loved ones: they advocate almost
total self-denial. And they argue that the end always
justifies the means: if you can save a thousand lives
by murdering a hundred people, then other things
equal, you should.
A potentially more palatable response to human
suffering comes from "Effective Altruism", a
philosophical movement that has become highly
influential over the past decade. It encourages its
followers – including billionaires – to donate a
significant portion of their income to important-but-
neglected causes, such as tackling disease in the
developing world. According to one estimate, Effective
Altruists currently raise $420m (£370m) a year.
Effective Altruism often draws on the principle of
utility, but brackets its more troubling implications.
As Effective Altruists point out, it's right to prioritise
your own life and the lives of those you love, and
Compiled and Edited by Aamir Mahr | CSS Exam Dask
wrong to promote the greatest happiness by violating
human rights. But we still end up with a substantive
moral view. Altruism may not be the whole of morality,
but it's surely part. We can meet our altruistic
obligations, while respecting people's rights, by giving
away part of what we have. And while there are limits
to how much we are required to give – Effective
Altruists often urge a tithe of 10% – we should give
what we can to the most effective causes, ones that
have the biggest positive impact on aggregate
happiness. The attractions of this approach are
evident: it is simple, pragmatic, and apparently
backed by data. Effective Altruists devote considerable
acumen to rating the effectiveness of different
charities by measures such as "quality-adjusted life
years" saved. For example, mosquito nets and malaria
medicines save more lives per dollar than other
charitable interventions. Effective Altruism offers a
concrete vision of what to do instead of doomscrolling.
Who would deny that wealthier citizens should give
away more of what they are privileged to have? And
who would plead for inefficient, wasteful giving? These
questions put the critic of Effective Altruism in an
awkward spot. And yet the truth is that the movement
doesn't really answer the question we began with: how
should we respond to the injustice of the world? As its
name suggests, the focus of Effective Altruism is on
philanthropy, not justice. It's a theory of how to spend
one's money and time as an individual, not how
society should be organised or transformed.
The Effective Altruist's problem with justice shows up
everywhere. For instance, when we measure the
effectiveness of charities in terms of "quality-adjusted
life years", we discount years of life impaired by
disability, giving them less weight in our calculations.
To do that in public policy or charitable giving is to
treat the lives of disabled people as less worth saving
than the lives of the able-bodied. Another issue is
Effective Altruism's attitude to politics. The objection
isn't just that political interventions, rather than
charitable ones, might be a more effective means to
greater aggregate happiness. It's about the division of
moral labour. Imagine we carved the world into
nation-states in order to discharge our altruistic
obligations more efficiently, each state responsible for
its own citizens. In that case, it would be double-
counting to make citizens of one country take up the
slack when another government fails. That doesn't
mean we should do nothing, but our individual
obligations would be limited, and might have more to
do with political reform than direct intervention. Of
course, the real world doesn't match this just-so story;
the history of nation-states and their altruistic roles is
more complex. But there's no way to assess the scale
of our actual obligations, or how we should respond to
them, without asking how the cartoon differs from
reality – addressing questions of global politics
Effective Altruists neglect. Finally, the problem of
justice shows up in how much of the harm we see in
the world is collectively caused. When a Westerner
looks at drought or famine in post-colonial countries,
they can't ignore the history of colonial exploitation.
And when they look at climate change, they can't
ignore its human causes, or the fact that its harms
will disproportionately burden those who are least
responsible for it. Addressing such harms is not a
matter of altruism – like helping the victims of a
natural disaster far away – but a question of injustice
and one's complicity in it. By treating this as charity,
Articulate | April 2024, Volume 1
Effective Altruists let the wealthy world off the moral
hook.
Responsibility for justice Is there a better framework
for thinking through our moral obligations – and a
better alternative to doomscrolling? I think we find
one in the work of Iris Marion Young, a pioneering
political theorist who died of cancer at the age of 57.
Young developed the concept of "structural injustice" –
injustice that is not localised in unjust attitudes or
actions, but emerges interactively – and proposed a
new model of responsibility to go with it. Effective
Altruists treat all human needs alike, but we are more
responsible for some than others. In short, our moral
relation to human suffering is more urgent when we're
caught up in its causes or effects. Young contends
that we're responsible for structural injustice. At the
root of her argument is a contrast between, on one
side, culpability or blame, and on the other,
responsibility for change. To take an example: while
it's unfair to criticise present-day Americans for their
nation's racist history, they are often implicated in
systems that sustain its legacy now. Consider
education. American cities are de facto segregated and
since schools are supported by local taxes and Black
communities are disproportionately poor, their
schools are on average less well-funded than schools
in wealthy neighbourhoods. Equality of educational
opportunity is a myth. While the structures are not
my fault, I was caught up in them when I bought a
home in the affluent town of Brookline,
Massachusetts, partly for the good public schools.
"The social connection model of responsibility says
that individuals bear responsibility for structural
injustice," Young writes, "because they contribute by
their actions to the processes that produce unjust
outcomes." She is looking at me. Young's point is not
about guilt or shame, but the obligation to act. This is
what she means by "responsibility". I may not be
wrong to want a good education for my child or to
blame for the way schools are funded, but I should
advocate reforms that redress the injustice to which I
contribute. We can extend Young's model not just to
those who participate in social practices that
perpetuate injustice but to those who benefit from an
unjust past, as many of us benefit from the legacy of
slavery and colonial oppression.
In the face of such complicity, what are we to do?
Young holds that our responsibility "is not primarily
backward-looking". It's a matter not of blame but of
agency: "Taking responsibility for structural
injustice … involves joining with others to organise
collective action to reform the structures." The
obligation is daunting, Young admits: "If I share
responsibility … for every social injustice that results
from structural processes to which I contribute by my
actions," she writes, "then this makes me responsible
in relation to a great deal. That is a paralysing
thought." But the proper response to paralysis is not
inaction; it is to take the first step. Do one thing. Let
me admit – or rather, insist – that I am not a model to
emulate here. I have not done much: occasional
marches and political campaigns, voting regularly,
talking politics with friends. All good, but none of it
likely to make much difference. Young confronts
bystanders like me with "the question of the agent of
change". It's not enough to identify injustice, nor to
PAKISTAN’S STARTUP AND VENTURE LANDSCAPE
With a growing population, a youthful workforce, and
a surge in technology professionals, Pakistan can be
vote for politicians you prefer, who will often be
indifferent or obstructive to the change you want to
see; and it is typically futile to act alone. Our task is
to find collective agents – movements, unions, interest
groups – that have the power and will to make things
happen. I am not much of an activist, let alone a
leader, and I feel routinely crushed by the injustice of
the world. If that resonates with you, my advice is to
pick a single issue – mass incarceration, poverty,
voting, women's rights – and find a local group that
you can join. For me, the issue was climate change
and the group was Fossil Free MIT, whose 2014
campaign led to MIT's first Climate Action Plan. Since
then, I've given talks about climate justice and
addressed the issue online. Four years ago, I
developed a class on the ethics of climate change with
a colleague at MIT. I am sure it's not enough, and I
feel some guilt about the fact that I'm not doing more.
You may share that guilty feeling, directed at the
issues that disturb you most. Are we doing all we can
to fight injustice? Who can say they do enough?
Writing in the wake of World War Two, Adorno warned:
"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly." He meant that we
cannot live well in conditions of injustice that sully
every aspect of social life; we cannot even know what
flourishing would be. But there is a more mundane
truth in his aphorism.
We know that there are limits to what we can ask of
ourselves in "living rightly", given who we are. What
we are capable of doing turns on our psychology and
social circumstance, our partial grasp of the social
world, the need to maintain our equilibrium. But
though we know that we have limits, we don't know
where those limits are. The result is that, when I ask
myself whether I am doing enough to meet my
responsibility for justice, it would be an awfully neat
coincidence if the answer were yes. What are the odds
that I've hit the mark precisely, the most I can expect
of myself? Close to zero, I would think. The result is
that I am virtually certain that I am falling short.
Perhaps it's obvious that I am. But the same
reasoning applies to almost anyone, even those who
do much more, people whose lives are devoted to
social change. Even lifelong activists can't be sure
they've done enough. In conditions of widespread
injustice, we are compelled to doubt that we are living
well. There's instruction and reassurance to be found
in this. We shouldn't feel too bad that we feel bad: our
guilt is not a mistake. More importantly, we shouldn't
let it put us off, condemning our own efforts as too
small. They may be small – but it's perverse to deal
with that by throwing up our hands and doing less.
There is value in a single step towards justice, and
one step leads to another. While it's hard to make a
difference on one's own, the march of millions is made
up of individuals. Collective action exists at every
scale, from local unions to protests and political
campaigns. Confronted with the scope of human
misery, some despair: "It doesn't matter what I do,"
they say, "since millions will still suffer." But this
thought is confused. We may not do enough, but the
difference we make when we save a life is the same
whether we save one of two, or one of two million. A
protest may not change the world, but it adds its
fraction to the odds of change. It's wrong to disregard
the increments.
fertile ground for corporate ventures and corporate
venture capital. Handicapped by a lack of capital,
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Articulate | April 2024, Volume 1
misalignment of financial incentives, and regulatory
constraints, however, Pakistan has seen missed
opportunities. As market dynamics shift and the
foundations for a thriving venture ecosystem form,
large Pakistani companies can embrace venture-
driven growth, shaping this ecosystem and reaping
the benefits of Pakistani entrepreneurship – or risk
falling behind in a world racing towards progress.
Pakistan is known for its unbelievably chaotic cricket
team, which forms one-half of the greatest sporting
rivalry on the planet. Not to mention colourful textiles
and embroidery, and dishes like Burn’s Road Nihari,
Student Biryani and Seekh Kebabs. What Pakistan is
not known for? A vibrant startup and venture
ecosystem. In my conversations with Pakistani
entrepreneurs, investors, and executives, I heard a lot
of scepticism about the future of venture-driven
growth in Pakistan. That's despite Pakistan having, in
my opinion, the foundational elements for a thriving
entrepreneurial ecosystem. For starters, the nation
has the fifth largest population in the world. And that
population is both overwhelmingly young (with a
median age of 22) and bilingual – Pakistan has the
fourth largest number of English speakers in the
world. Add to that one of the fastest-growing middle
classes, more than 100 million mobile broadband
subscribers, and a growing cohort of technology
professionals, and you have the seedlings of a fertile
market for new ventures. And yet, Pakistan lacks the
startup success stories of its Middle Eastern, North
African, and South Asian peers, such as India, the
UAE, and Saudi Arabia. It ranks 76th among the 100
economies featured in Startup Blink’s 2023 Global
Startup Ecosystem Index, and until recently, venture
capital funding deployed in Pakistan was a trickle
compared to similar developing economies in the
Middle East, North Africa and other parts of Asia.
Despite the scepticism displayed by my contacts in
Pakistan’s business community, I believe that the
country holds tremendous promise for
entrepreneurship and venture-driven growth. Many of
the historical barriers that have hampered
advancement are slowly but surely falling to the
wayside. The technology talent pool and infrastructure
is maturing, and Pakistan’s corporate giants are in
dire need of new avenues for growth. The
advancement of startup activity and venture capital in
Pakistan has historically been limited by: political and
economic instability; an unsupportive regulatory
environment; shortages of high-quality talent
(exacerbated by brain drain); and large Pakistani
corporates not participating. The latter is perhaps the
most concerning.
Instability at the highest levels of government has
resulted in inconsistent policies. Coupled with
dramatic currency fluctuations, this has hurt investor
and business confidence, thereby discouraging
venture growth. Local taxation frameworks
unfavorable to investors have further exacerbated the
issue and limited the capital available to Pakistan’s
startups. Weak enforcement of intellectual property
rights has made it difficult for the country's upstarts
to safeguard their ideas and inventions effectively.
Pakistan has also struggled to develop and retain top-
tier technical talent. Pakistanis who have had the
means to do so have historically left the country. They
find work in the West or growing MENA economies
like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Many Pakistanis
studying abroad at US and UK universities have also
chosen to remain abroad. The Pakistani diaspora is
now one of the largest immigrant populations in the
world, the majority based in the Arabian Gulf. This
has led to a brain-drain for Pakistan, while also
creating a potential expat market for Pakistan’s
startups. Finally, the very large family-run
conglomerates that have long dominated the Pakistani
economy with captive business models, have focused
more on incremental growth and short-term income
than on pursuing exponential growth and
transformation. These local market behemoths have
not been forced to consider or invest in transformative
endeavors, so far. But market dynamics are changing.
The industries that have traditionally sustained the
Pakistani economy, face impending declines. Much
like Brazil in the early 2010s, Pakistan is at an
inflection point. Pakistani corporates need to embrace
entrepreneurship and venture-driven growth or they
will miss coming opportunities and fall behind.
In many ways, Pakistan’s venture ecosystem can be
compared to that of Brazil’s a decade ago. The early
2010s saw the founding of Brazilian tech startups like
Gympass, Loggi, QuintoAndar, and the minting of
Brazil’s first tech unicorns. 99, a ride-sharing unicorn,
was acquired by Didi Chuxing in 2018, while Nubank,
a fintech unicorn, went public in 2021. At the time of
their inception, Brazil’s startups and investors were
dealing with unfavourable taxation policies, shortages
in technical talent, and regulatory barriers. VC
funding in Brazil amounted to almost $310M. In the
years that followed, this number rose dramatically as
the Brazilian government introduced new policies and
programmes to promote entrepreneurship. The push
by government organizations to support new ventures
in Brazil was accompanied by an expanding middle
class, greater consumer spending, and increasing
internet and mobile penetration. The parallels with
Pakistan are obvious. Brazil also experienced shifts in
cultural attitudes toward entrepreneurship and risk-
taking, as Brazilians saw the success of American
upstarts and homegrown unicorns. Brazil attracted
both local and foreign Venture Capitalists looking to
fund ventures, such as Monashees, Kaszek Ventures,
Redpoint eventures, and Valor Capital Group. VC
funding more than doubled, from almost $310 million
in 2012 to $746 million in 2015. And by 2021, VC
investment in Brazil reached almost $9 billion. While
the regulatory and tax environment in Brazil is by no
means optimal, and the country still faces limitations
around technical talent and infrastructure, there have
been undeniable improvements on all fronts in the
past decade. Brazil’s venture investors, family offices,
large corporations and entrepreneurs have taken
advantage of these changes. Brazil has developed a
thriving venture ecosystem that has produced 25
unicorns. In addition, Sao Paulo has cemented its
status as the startup hub of LATAM. While there are
obvious differences between Brazilian and Pakistani
markets, there are also many parallels. Those
parallels suggest Karachi and Lahore could rival
Riyadh and Dubai to become a startup hub in the
region. Regulatory bodies are in the early days of
implementing policies and programmes designed to
foster a conducive environment for new ventures,
mirroring the regulatory reform seen in Brazil. Notably,
in February 2021, Pakistani companies were
permitted to establish holding entities abroad while
retaining their operating company in Pakistan. This is
key to attracting foreign investors. The State Bank of
Pakistan also changed policies regarding the
repatriation of investment, removing the requirement
of obtaining prior approval before repatriating.
Moreover, the State Bank regularized the issuance of
convertible debt, making it easier for startups to raise
funds through debt financing that can be converted
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Articulate | April 2024, Volume 1
into equity. And they have created a framework to
streamline cross-border digital banking. Elsewhere,
the Ministry of Information Technology and
Telecommunications announced its intention to invest
in local startups through the government-funded
Pakistan Startup Fund. While much more regulatory
change is needed for Pakistan’s technology and
entrepreneurship ecosystem to thrive, this is a good
start. It's a signal that historical regulatory barriers
are slowly falling. These changes provide Pakistan’s
venture investors, corporations, family offices, and
entrepreneurs with the opportunity to replicate
something akin to what Brazil’s venture ecosystem
has created.
Today, Pakistan is in a similar position to Brazil circa
2012, and regulatory changes in the country have
already created progress when it comes to new
venture creation and investment. Venture investment
in Pakistan grew almost tenfold from $36 million in
2019 to $350 million in 2021. A key catalyst for the
growth in domestic startup activity was the success of
Careem – a ride-hailing platform acquired by Uber for
$3 billion in January 2020. The company’s rapid
success created what is known as the 'Careem Mafia'
(resembling the PayPal Mafia). This group of former
employees and founders have gone on to found and
invest in other Pakistani startups. The successful exit
of Careem, the rise of upstarts like Daraz, Zameen,
and Dawaai, and the balloon in VC dollars invested in
the country, has already inspired aspiring
entrepreneurs and motivated technical graduates,
educated abroad, to return home. They're sensing new
opportunities. Pakistan’s startup and venture
landscape is very much in its infancy. Only in the last
decade have networks of formal early-stage investors
started to form. The most active VC firms in Pakistan,
including Fatima Gobi Ventures, Indus Valley Capital,
Zayn VC and Sarmyacar, were all founded in the last
five years. Between 2018 and 2021, total VC funding
in Pakistan increased more than 20-fold to reach an
all-time high of $350M, according to Magnitt, an
emerging market data platform. The majority of
funding has gone to e-commerce and fintech start-ups,
including Karachi-based online marketplace Bazaar
Technologies, salary advance app Abhi and Lahore-
based e-commerce platform Jugnu. Both investors
and the business community have expressed
apprehension after VC funding in Pakistan fell in
2022. Investors pulled back in light of a
macroeconomic slowdown and after getting burned by
unsustainably inflated valuations and the eventual
correction. Pakistan was not alone in experiencing
such a drop in VC funding. The market is
recalibrating, as investors show more discipline in
assessing deals. The Corporate Venture Capital (CVC)
is becoming more important globally and will be
critical to the next evolution of entrepreneurship in
Pakistan. Since 2015, roughly 1000 CVCs were
created globally, and more than 25 per cent of global
VC investment in the last three years has come from
corporate investors. The Corporate venturing unlocks
inorganic growth opportunities and can power a
reputational and cultural shift within large
organizations.
To quickly turn back to Brazil, many industry leaders
from the South American country have recognized the
importance of corporate engagement in venture
building and venture investing and set up corporate
venture capital funds, incubators, and accelerator
programmes. Most of these CVC units were set up in
the past three years. Though the funds are still
relatively small, they already play an outsized role in
the Brazilian startup economy – participating in 59
per cent of all funding rounds in Brazil in 2023. To
fully unlock Pakistan's startup and venture potential,
it's imperative that the large corporate players that
have traditionally dominated the country's economy
actively participate in the creation and growth of new
ventures. For the most part, these established
corporate entities have historically not felt the need to
innovate or take risks. Of course, there have been
some efforts from Pakistan’s industry leaders to
explore startup engagement, investment, and even
creation. Yet by and large, these endeavours have
been informal or haphazard, yielding neither the
financial nor the strategic returns to generate
enthusiasm about corporate venturing in Pakistan. As
a result, the vast majority of Pakistan’s corporates
have opted for more conservative investments. They
seek incremental growth and greater consolidation of
their already dominant market position. A big reason
many corporate venturing efforts have failed in
Pakistan's corporations is the culture of, and need for,
control. This has created an environment that is not
conducive to the growth and scale of new ventures.
Pakistan’s family-run conglomerates and industrial
giants have historically focused on creating larger,
more market-dominant companies and maximizing
their share of the pie. Their venture-building efforts
have also focused on control and domination.
Venture-driven growth, however, requires creating and
investing in ecosystems that increase the overall size
of the pie itself. By relinquishing their need for control
and embracing a mindset of shared winning,
Pakistan’s corporate giants can unlock previously
unimaginable growth opportunities. And in the
process play a pivotal role in nurturing the growth of
startups, as well as the broader entrepreneurial
ecosystem in Pakistan. As companies shift from a
narrow-minded and self-serving approach to a
synergistic ecosystem approach to growth, startups
and investors also need to shift mindsets. Pakistan’s
entrepreneurs and VC investors have looked at the
population of Pakistan and seen a massive market
opportunity. What they fail to consider, however, is
the massive disparity in behavior and characteristics
between different groups in the country. Instead,
many of them use the characteristics or behaviors of a
minority of the population but use the entire
population size in their business plans and pitch
decks. The real addressable market for many startups
in Pakistan is limited. To successfully scale,
Pakistan’s startups must bring their inventions and
innovation to the surrounding region, treating
Pakistan like an incubator for regional transformation.
Just like Brazil’s startups look to serve Colombia and
Bolivia, so too Pakistani startups must look to other
parts of the Middle East and South Asia – like the
UAE, Egypt, Turkey, and Iran. Venture-driven growth,
done correctly, allows corporates to take advantage of
promising opportunities by systematically placing
small bets, learning, moving quickly and doubling-
down. Pakistani corporates can benefit tremendously
by embracing systematic venture-driven growth. They
can grow Pakistan into an entrepreneurial hub and
then reap the rewards of ventures both inside
Pakistan and in the broader region. If they remain
inactive, however, they will miss a huge and arguably
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. In fact, as Pakistan’s
largest companies have been slow to act, international
corporations are already benefiting from Pakistani
entrepreneurship. Chinese tech giants, for example,
have invested in or acquired Pakistani tech companies.
For example, Alibaba acquired e-commerce startup
Daraz in 2018 and Ant Financial took a 45 percent
stake in fintech Easypaisa soon after. The
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Articulate | April 2024, Volume 1
consequences of "doing nothing" go beyond missing
out on potential growth opportunities. Lack of
technology adoption and entrepreneurship in some of
Pakistan’s largest sectors, like agriculture and textiles,
could altogether shrink those industries. Significantly.
Take agriculture, which accounts for 22.25 per cent of
Pakistan’s GDP and 40 per cent of the nation’s
employment. Almost 70 per cent of Pakistan’s exports
are derived from agriculture. While Pakistan is
categorized among the largest agricultural countries,
its crop yields are much lower than international
benchmarks. According to the recent The State of
Pakistan's Agriculture 2023 report by the Pakistan
Business Council, the growth of the agriculture sector
now approaches stagnation. The rapid pace of climate
change poses a threat to Pakistan as a whole and
specifically to the agricultural sector. Extended
heatwaves and flooding events are likely to
significantly impact crop yield and worsen the existing
crisis. Domestically, with a rapidly growing population,
Pakistan faces the challenge of feeding a projected 403
million people by 2050. Agriculture has historically
served as the backbone of the Pakistani economy. Yet
if Pakistan wants to maintain its level of agricultural
exports and feed its growing population, significant
advancement in agritech and foodtech is necessary.
Agricultural production globally has undergone a
period of rapid digital transformation driven by digital
connectivity, data systems, AI and analytics, Internet
of Things (IoT), robotics, sensors, and imagery devices.
However, almost none of these technologies are used
in Pakistani agriculture. Earlier this year, the
Pakistani government advanced its Corporate
Agriculture Farming initiative which allocates unused
public land to corporate farming, with the intent to
revolutionize the agriculture sector. Large Pakistani
corporates have a tremendous opportunity to fund
and partner with agritech startups applying new
technologies to develop modern farming methods. Not
to mention startups that develop new low-cost
machinery required for modern-day agriculture. The
textile industry also plays a pivotal role in Pakistan's
economy, accounting for 8.5 per cent of GDP, 46 per
UNDERSTANDING HISBAH, ITS ROLES AND IMPLICATIONS IN ISLAMIC SOCIETY
Within societies profoundly influenced by Islamic
customs and traditions, the principle of Hisbah
occupies an essential position in the framework of
social governance and ethical stewardship. Deriving
from the Arabic verb “ḥasiba,” which translates to
holding an individual accountable, Hisbah embodies
an Islamic institution whereby designated authorities
bear the responsibility of promoting public well-being
and ensuring compliance with religious norms within
the community (Quran chapter 3 verse 104). In the
context of global interconnectivity and evolving
international legal systems, the application of Hisbah
has emerged as a point of considerable contention.
Opponents of Hisbah contend that its application may
at times be at odds with contemporary standards of
human rights, whereas its advocates uphold it as an
indispensable apparatus for sustaining social justice
and preserving moral values. Such discussions
underscore the complex task of integrating traditional
norms with the modern societal fabric.
This article endeavors to examine the origin and
development of Hisbah and its influence on personal
liberties. The treatise will dissect the ongoing
controversies pertaining to its function in the present-
day context and ultimately appraising how these
deep-rooted doctrines may be reconciled with, or
conceivably contribute to the contemporary quest for
justice and the well-being of the community. Hisbah is
cent of the industrial output, 54 per cent of the total
export earnings and 38 per cent of the country's
workforce. However, like the agriculture sector,
obsolete technological infrastructure has stifled the
advancement of the textile industry in Pakistan. The
need for technological advancement is severe. If
manufacturers are unable to keep pace with evolving
technology, they risk going bust. Once again, there is
an opportunity for established corporations in
Pakistan to invest in, or partner with, startups
developing modern machinery and applying robotics,
analytics, and AI to the textiles industry. Whether it is
in agriculture, textiles, financial services, real estate,
or any other industry for that matter, corporate
venturing needs to be one of the arrows in the quivers
of Pakistani corporates. Corporate venturing can
involve strategic partnerships, minority investments,
and/or acquisitions of startups. Developing robust
Invest / Partner / Acquire strategies is incumbent on
the C-suite of Pakistan’s established corporations.
These firms need to design and execute world-class
VC funds, launch compelling accelerator programs,
develop impactful venture acquisition capabilities, and
forge mutually beneficial strategic partnerships with
startups in Pakistan and in the broader region. This
will allow them to support and enhance existing
capabilities while also diversifying and expanding
their portfolios. It will enable large corporations to
gather knowledge and insights on emerging
technologies and business models, facilitating
horizontal expansion into new markets and vertical
expansion across the value chain. The foundations for
a thriving entrepreneurial and venture ecosystem are
forming in Pakistan. Pakistani corporates have a
tremendous opportunity to shape this ecosystem, and
more importantly to reap the benefits of Pakistani
entrepreneurship. Staying on the sidelines will prove
detrimental. Brazilian companies have recognized this
opportunity for what it is, and many have set up
corporate venturing units to invest in startups.
Pakistan’s corporate behemoths should follow suit.
(Kamil Hussain, Published in The News in April 2024)
a fundamental Islamic concept ordained by God in the
holy Quran Chapter 3 Verse 104. Historically, Hisbah
officers are called Muhtasibs, where a group of people
appointed during the period of the holy Prophet
Muhammad S.A.W. to monitor market activities,
regulate commercial transactions, and address moral
and ethical infractions within the framework of the
Islamic society. The concept of Hisbah focuses on
promoting social justice, ethical behavior, and well-
being, with a comprehensive approach to regulating
individual conduct and societal interactions. In
contemporary Islamic contexts, the practice of Hisbah
continues to involve individuals and organizations in
roles similar to those of historical Hisbah. Hisbah
varied among different Islamic dynasties and empires,
showing diverse approaches to governance, legal
administration, and social regulation within Islamic
societies. For example, during the Abbasid Caliphate,
Hisbah officers known as Muhtasibs oversaw
marketplaces, regulated trade practices, and ensured
fair treatment of merchants and consumers and
expanding their role in overseeing economic activities.
Similarly, in Al-Andalus (Spain) Hisbah was
implemented to enforce legal, ethical, and social
norms, contributing to the regulation of economic
activities and the maintenance of public order within
the context of Islamic governance. In the Ottoman
Empire, Hisbah officers, or Muhtasibs supervised
marketplaces, addressed commercial disputes, and
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ensured compliance with ethical and religious
standards in trade practices and demonstrating the
enduring influence His in regulating economic and
social affairs within Islamic governance structures.
Furthermore, in the Mamluk Sultanate in Cairo,
Hisbah played a crucial role in overseeing market
activities and ensuring fair treatment of merchants
and consumers, while in the Safavid Empire, Hisbah
was integrated into the administrative and legal
infrastructure to regulate economic activities, uphold
ethical standards, and maintain public order based on
the principles of Shia.
The concept of Hisbah has triggered a myriad of
controversies, with discussions revolving around its
role in upholding moral standards, its potential
impact on individual liberties, and human rights. Here
are some of the key debates surrounding Hisbah:
1. Religious Enforcement and Individual Freedoms:
One of the primary disputes surrounding Hisbah
focuses on the imposition of Islamic law, or Sharia,
by Hisbah officers. This has sparked conversations
about the equilibrium between religious
enforcement and personal freedoms. Critics argue
that Hisbah’s involvement in regulating personal
behaviors, such as attire, social interactions, and
ethical conduct, may encroach upon personal
liberties and rights, particularly for those who do
not subscribe to the same religious beliefs.
2. Misuse of Authority: Another contentious issue
concerns the possibility of Hisbah officers abusing
their authority to uphold moral and ethical
standards, potentially resulting in discrimination
or harassment. Critics express concerns about the
potential for Hisbah to be utilized as a means of
controlling individuals, stifling opposition, and
targeting marginalized groups within society.
3. Civil vs. Religious Jurisdiction: The intersection of
civil and religious jurisdictions has been a source
of controversy. The establishment of Hisbah boards
in certain regions has prompted inquiries about
the appropriate delineations between religious
governance and civil administration, sparking
debates about the extent to which state sanctioned
religious enforcement should be permitted and
CIVILISATIONAL CLASH - A FALLACIOUS HOAX
When his 1993 essay The Clash of Civilizations, later
made into a book with the title The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, took
readers across the globe with a sense of unease and
excitement (provocation as well), it was not clear
whether Samuel Huntington was trying to sell his
'theory of clash' on purpose -- based on premeditated
thinking and not on sound empirical research. The
question still remains, and the key element of his
thesis continues to trigger a strong feeling of
disharmony in his understanding and defining of
people along the lines of their ethnicities and faith.
One of America's greatest political thinkers, Samuel P.
Huntington argued in his book that the days of
nation-state rivalries over the likely issues such as
trade, territory or ideology have ended, and that
causes of future animosity would erupt over
differences in religion, history, language and tradition.
He made his statement quite pointed while saying that
cold war antagonisms were relatively minor compared
with 'the continuing and deeply conflictual relation
between Islam and Christianity.' This, he termed
civilisational conflict in the post-cold war world. Not
only in Christianity and Islam, the seeds of discord,
he mentioned, is potentially alive in other faiths as
whether it could infringe upon the separation of
religious and civil authorities.
4. Impact on Minority Rights: The implementation of
Hisbah in regions with religious or ethnic minority
populations has raised concerns about the
potential marginalization and discrimination of
these groups. Critics argue that Hisbah’s
enforcement of Islamic law may disproportionately
affect minority communities and individuals who
do not share the same religious beliefs.
5. Gender Equality and Women’s Rights: The
application of Hisbah in certain contexts has
sparked discussions about its impact on gender
equality and women’s rights. Critics argue that
Hisbah’s intervention in regulating women’s attire,
behavior, and interactions may perpetuate gender-
based discrimination and limit women’s agency
and autonomy.
6. Economic Impact: Hisbah’s role in regulating
economic activities and commercial transactions
has also sparked discussions about its impact on
business practices, market dynamics, and
economic freedoms. Critics express concerns about
the potential for Hisbah’s oversight of economic
affairs to hinder free enterprise, impede market
competition, and create uncertainty for businesses.
7. Modern Legal and Governance Frameworks: The
compatibility of Hisbah with modern legal and
governance frameworks has been a topic of
contention.
In conclusion, integrating Hisbah into modern Islamic
societies is a complex endeavor that requires a careful
balance between tradition and contemporary values. It
is essential for Hisbah officials to operate within clear
guidelines and maintain accountability to ensure their
functions align with Islamic teachings. Constructive
dialogue among scholars, legal experts, human rights
advocates, and the broader community is vital to
address the evolving challenges of application. Hisbah
is an instrument of social change and harmony.
However, this should be done while respecting the
diversity and personal freedoms of individuals in
contemporary societies. (Dr Salisu Zigau. Published in
Daily Nigerian on March 4, 2024)
well. However, he excluded Judaism from any of the
civilizational groups. Huntington's observations on the
conflict between what he calls Islamic civilization and
the Western world appears to be too straightforward (if
not sweeping) as though mingled with an air of
prophesy. The Islamic civilization, he wrote, is the
most troublesome. People in the Arab world do not
share the general suppositions of the Western world.
Their primary attachment is to their religion, not to
their nation-state. Their culture is inhospitable to
liberal ideals, like pluralism, individualism and
democracy. He observed that these regimes could fall,
but he did not believe that they would modernise in
the Western direction. They would follow their own
trajectory. This observation, though not totally
unfounded, led him to drastically conclude that there
would be a fundamental clash of civilizations between
Islam and the West. The Western nations would do
well to keep their distance from Muslim affairs. The
more the two civilizations intermingle, the worse the
tensions will be. One has reasons to consider such
observations too rash and to a great extent,
impulsively drawn. As a matter of fact, animosity of
the Islamic world is more pronounced within its own
boundaries, not just in very recent times; it did
register its presence in the past too, though things got
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worse in recent times than ever. According to
Huntington world politics has entered a new phase
where we are noticing a new paradigm in international
politics towards a "civilization-based world order"
which stresses categorisation of nations based on
culture. States of the same culture will more likely
"cooperate" with each other than with states of
different "civilizations". Huntington suggests "that
culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest
level are civilization identities, are shaping the
patterns of cohesion, as well as disintegration and
conflict in the post-Cold War world".
Huntington defines civilisation as "a cultural
entity…in which villages, regions, ethnic groups,
nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct
cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity."
He says although numerous villages within a country
may be different, they nonetheless share a common
national identity. A civilization is therefore the highest
cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of
culture people belong to.
In his book Huntington argues that the post-Cold War
world is made up of eight, perhaps nine major
civilizations: Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, Japanese,
Latin American, Sinic, Slavic-Orthodox, Western, "and
possibly African". Critics take issue with such
categorization, terming it simplistic and highly
problematic. Some suggest this classification as
"arbitrary", because Huntington does not clearly
define the attributes of what defines a state under a
particular civilization. There are others who find
"inconsistencies" with the categorisation of different
civilizations. For example, Huntington is unsure
whether there is an African civilization although he
begrudgingly includes it in his list of major
civilizations. Curious enough, he does not label
Judaism as its own civilization. Huntington expands
his argument by suggesting that religion will be the
"most important" component distinguishing one
civilization from another. According to Huntington,
religion is taking the place of the nation-state in terms
of identity. Citizens are looking more to religion in the
face of globalisaation and modernisation. "As people
define their identity in ethnic and religious terms", he
said, "they are likely to see an 'us' versus 'them'
relation existing between themselves and people of
different ethnicity or religion…Differences in culture
and religion create differences over policy issues,
ranging from human rights to immigration to trade
and commerce to the environment."
Now why does he think that the clash set off by the
differences in civilizations is so easily predictable?
Huntington offers the following explanations:
1) Differences among civilizations are too basic in that
civilizations are differentiated from each other by
history, language, culture, tradition, and, most
importantly, religion. These fundamental
differences are the product of centuries and the
foundations of different civilizations, meaning they
will not be gone soon.
2) The world is becoming a smaller place. As a result,
interactions across the world are increasing, which
intensify 'civilization consciousness' and the
awareness of differences between civilizations and
commonalities within civilizations.
3) Due to economic modernization and social change,
people are separated from longstanding local
identities. Instead, religion has replaced this gap,
which provides a basis for identity and
commitment that transcends national boundaries
and unites civilizations.
4) The growth of civilization-consciousness is
enhanced by the dual role of the West. On the one
hand, the West is at the peak of power. At the
same time, a return-to-the-roots phenomenon is
occurring among non-Western civilizations. A West
at the peak of its power confronts non-Western
countries that increasingly have the desire, the will
and the resources to shape the world in non-
Western ways.
5) Cultural characteristics and differences are less
mutable and hence less easily compromised and
resolved than political and economic ones.
6) Economic regionalism is increasing. Successful
economic regionalism will reinforce civilization-
consciousness. Economic regionalism may succeed
only when it is rooted in a common civilization.
There is a definite fault line in these observations
although there are elements that may not be ignored,
except of course the core issue of civilization defined
largely by religion. The idea that religion as a binding
tool among a group of people unites them under a
common identity, and even transcends national
boundaries does have a basis but assuming this
cohesion as a potentially threatening force to global
peace is simplistic. In fact, such cohesion is not a new
or post-cold war phenomenon. The post-9/11 scenario
followed by the rise of Islamic terror groups must not
be deemed as the defining factor of such clash theory.
True indeed, in recent times, religion, especially Islam
is seen more as an identity badge by many of its
followers living in both Islam-predominant states as
well as in the West. The same, though not necessarily
in a comparable way, applies to the upsurge of
Hinduism in secular India as a poster of nationalism
under current the BJP rule. The Buddhist Myanmar
has already demonstrated what it is capable of for the
sake of religion by way of ruthless ethnic cleansing
and driving around a million Rohigya population out
of the country.
Coming to the idea of clash, one may tend to view
Huntington's notion of clash or war as highly flawed.
He rejected the possibility of war in the post-cold war
world over issues such as trade, among others.
Contrary to his prediction and understanding of geo-
political dynamics, there is, in fact, a war currently
raging between America and China, and no wonder it
is trade at the centre of the conflict. This war unlike
the conventional kind need not employ military
arsenal, and can be more effective, albeit destructive,
by levying high tariffs to block imports from the other
party. Huntington's thesis has provoked controversies
in the past two decades over several of his
assumptions, suppositions and predictions that
scholars like Edward Said and Amartya Sen found
impossible to reason out. Through out the book it is
clear he had been trying to put America as a solid
proxy for the West and it is his way of looking at
things that made him sound outlandish when he says,
"The American multiculturalists … reject their
country's cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to
identify the United States with another civilization,
however, they wish to create a country of many
civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging
to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History
shows that no country so constituted can long endure
as a coherent society. A multi-civilizational United
States will not be the United States; it will be the
United Nations." It appears from many of such
statements that it is the cultural fabric of the United
States that worried him most, and indeed it is the
undefined American culture as a proxy of the West
that he considered critically vulnerable to
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multiculturalism. Is there an American culture
distinctly apart from the confluence of various
cultures for hundreds of years in that country of
immigrants? Far from addressing the issue,
Huntington raised his fears about not only
multiculturalism but even universalism-the
'vacuousness of universalism' as he termed it. Where
then is the bottom line, or is there any? As a botched-
up solution to world peace and harmony, Huntington
in the concluding lines of the book said, '… an
international order based on civilizations is the surest
safeguard against (future) world war.' Sadly, this
makes no sense. He has failed to define the
SHIFTING CONFLICTS HIT KEY ENERGY ROUTES
As global conflicts worsen, energy infrastructure and
shipments from Europe to the Middle East to Asia are
increasingly coming under attack. But the energy
sector is also shaping the conflicts themselves—and
the diplomatic efforts to manage and mitigate them.
With the future of clashes such as the Russia-Ukraine
war or the Israel-Hamas conflict deeply uncertain,
energy acts as a key weather vane. Perhaps no
geopolitical hot spot has highlighted the importance of
the energy sector more than the Russia-Ukraine
conflict. The start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of
Ukraine in February 2022 prompted a major rewiring
of global energy flows as the European Union has
accelerated efforts to diversify away from Russia,
which made up 40 percent of the bloc’s natural gas
imports prior to the war. Now that number has been
drastically reduced, with imports falling by more than
50 percent in 2023. Russia, meanwhile, has ramped
up energy exports to non-Western countries since the
start of the war, most notably China and India. The
Kremlin has pursued politically motivated energy
cutoffs to Europe while the United States and EU have
ramped up sanctions against the Russian energy
industry. But the fight for energy has also taken on
new battlefield significance—Russia has attacked
critical energy infrastructure in Ukraine through
drone and missile strikes, and now Ukraine is utilizing
similar tactics against Moscow. Ukrainian drones have
targeted energy facilities throughout western Russia,
damaging and disrupting Russian oil refineries and
prompting the Kremlin to institute a ban on gasoline
exports for a period of six months. Attacking enemy
supply lines and logistics is not unusual during times
of war, but this strategy is becoming a key feature of
the conflict because revenues from energy exports are
a major source of funding for Russia’s war efforts.
Kyiv has decided to directly target that source in a bid
to shift momentum in the conflict. These attacks are
likely to be an increasingly important feature of the
war moving forward, particularly as Ukraine has
struggled thanks to contentious politics inside the
country and delays in Western support. As Russia
pressures Ukrainian forces in the east of the country,
Kyiv has shifted its strategy to expand the scope of the
war deep inside of Russia proper in order to increase
its own pressure on Moscow. And with Ukraine
bolstering its own drone capabilities, this element
could be a defining feature of the broader conflict in
2024. As such, Ukraine can be expected to target
energy and military sites ever deeper inside of Russia
and become more assertive in the size and scope of its
attacks over the course of this year.
The Middle East has seen as a similar spate of attacks.
The Israel-Hamas war has led to an intensification of
the proxy war between the United States and Iran, a
conflict that has manifested most clearly in attacks by
the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen on Western
commercial ships transiting through the Red Sea,
international order. Huntington saw civilisation
through the lens of religion. It is, however, not difficult
to assume that had he written the book as an
academician, he could have avoided being over-
simplistic. As an advisor to the US government, he
was more drawn to the usefulness of his thesis to the
policymakers rather than attempting to examine the
veracity of his thesis, which needless to say, was
premediated. So, one should not hesitate to call it a
project document meant to provide guideline to the US
foreign and defence policymakers. (Authored by Wasi
Ahmed. Published in The Financial Express
Bangladesh on December 10, 2023)
which accounts for 14 percent of all global oil exports
and 8 percent of global liquefied natural gas cargo.
These attacks have redirected shipping and trade
flows away from the entry points at either end of the
Red Sea, leading to a 64 percent decrease in trade
volume through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and 46
percent decrease through the Suez Canal, while
prompting a 75 percent increase around the Cape of
Good Hope in southern Africa. If the Israel-Hamas war
or other regional conflicts were to intensify, this could
impact other crucial energy chokepoints, such as the
Strait of Hormuz, which accounts for around 20
percent of global oil transit and supply. This would
have significant implications for major energy
producers and exporters—including Saudi Arabia, the
United Arab Emirates, and Qatar—not to mention its
impact on global energy prices and the broader
economic implications for countries throughout the
world. While conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza are actively
disrupting energy production and transit today,
tensions between the United States and China have
the potential to further impact the energy sector in the
future. Like the Strait of Hormuz, the South China
Sea contains major chokepoints for global energy
supplies, accounting for another 20 percent of global
oil transit. Tensions have been rising between the
Washington and China over this crucial corridor,
prompting outreach from the Philippines to the United
States to provide economic and security backing for
energy exploration in the South China Sea.
One important lever that China holds over Taiwan is
energy. Taiwan has a 97 percent dependence on
imports for its energy consumption, and those
supplies could be vulnerable to potential disruption by
China, either through interdiction or through legal
and political pressure backed by economic and
diplomatic statecraft. With the constraints to a
Chinese military intervention or outright blockade of
Taiwan still quite high, expect gray zone tactics by
Beijing around the Taiwan Strait or increased
diplomatic outreach to some of Taipei’s more China-
friendly energy suppliers, such as Russia or Qatar.
Energy has become intimately intertwined with each
of these three geopolitical hot spots, experiencing
disruptions from attacks and contention over resource
exploration and extraction. But the energy sector has
also shaped these conflicts in a more constructive
manner via diplomacy. For example, energy-rich
Persian Gulf states such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and
the UAE have all served as mediators in the Russia-
Ukraine conflict, using their energy-fueled economic
and diplomatic ties with both Kyiv and Moscow to
negotiate agreements such as prisoner exchanges.
Qatar has also been a primary mediator in the Israel-
Hamas conflict, while China recently mediated a
diplomatic normalization agreement between Iran and
Saudi Arabia, both of which serve as major energy
suppliers for Beijing. Taken together, these
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developments indicate that the energy sector will be
increasingly impacted by these geopolitical hot spots
yet can also provide more momentum for diplomatic
efforts by various players (and in particular,
nonaligned energy-producing states). The
CLIMATE POLICY AROUND THE GLOBE: STATUS AND FUTURE CHALLENGES
The origin and development of climate change policy
have been shaped by scientific discoveries, political
negotiations, and societal shifts in understanding the
impact of human activities on the global climate. In
fact, the foundation for understanding climate change
began in the 19th century with scientists like John
Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius, who identified the
greenhouse effect and the role of carbon dioxide (CO2)
in regulating the Earth’s temperature. Further,
throughout the 20th century, advances in
atmospheric science led to a better understanding of
the climate system. The mid-20th century saw the
development of computer models that could simulate
climate, leading to more accurate predictions of global
warming. The first major international conference on
climate change was held in 1979 (the First World
Climate Conference), which led to the establishment of
the World Climate Programme. In the 1980s, the issue
of global warming gained more visibility, leading to
further scientific investigations and the formation of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization
(WMO) and the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP). In the 1990s, the framework
Convention and Kyoto Protocol paved the way for the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC) which was established in 1992
during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, setting
the stage for global efforts to combat climate change.
The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, setting
legally binding emission reduction targets for
developed countries. It was a significant step forward
in international climate policy, emphasizing the need
for global cooperation to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. In the 21st Century Paris Agreement and
Beyond the Copenhagen Accord (2009) and the
Cancun Agreements (2010) laid the groundwork for
further negotiations, leading to the landmark Paris
Agreement in 2015. The Paris Agreement for the first
time brought almost all nations into a common cause
to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate
change and adapt to its effects. The Paris Agreement
set out a global framework to avoid dangerous climate
change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C
and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. It also aimed
to strengthen countries’ ability to deal with the
impacts of climate change and support them in their
efforts. In line, the climate policy landscape in 2024 is
shaped by a combination of ongoing commitments,
new initiatives, and the pressing need for action in the
face of escalating climate impacts:
1. COP28 COMMITMENTS: The World Wildlife Fund
highlights the importance of actualizing the
pledges made during COP28, including the launch
of a $11 billion Loss and Damage Fund,
commitments to significantly increase renewable
energy and energy efficiency, and efforts to
incorporate greenhouse gas emissions from food
systems into climate mitigation plans. The focus is
on transitioning away from fossil fuels towards
clean energy, with an emphasis on the need for
countries to implement their Nationally Determined
Contributions (NDCs) effectively to achieve
significant emissions reductions in line with the
Paris Agreement goals.
2. GLOBAL CLIMATE ACTIONS AND CHALLENGES:
The World Resources Institute outlines four key
interconnectedness of the energy trade is both a
military vulnerability and a potential opportunity for
peace. (Eugene Chausovsky. Published in The Foreign
Policy on March 22, 2024)
areas to watch in 2024: the positioning of climate
action within political campaigns, the enactment of
ambitious policies to limit warming, ensuring
equitable benefits from the low-carbon economy,
and increasing support for climate action in
emerging economies. Food sustainability, energy
grid modernization, and protection against extreme
heat are also highlighted as critical issues needing
attention and action.
3. RENEWABLE ENERGY AND EMISSIONS TRENDS:
Yale Climate Connections notes the mixed record of
2023, with it being the hottest year on record yet
also a year of significant progress in reducing
climate pollution in some regions. The USA and
European Union saw reductions in emissions,
attributed in part to policy measures like the
Inflation Reduction Act and increased clean energy
deployment. However, emissions increases in
China and India offset these gains. The outlook for
2024 is cautiously optimistic, with the potential for
global heat-trapping pollution to begin declining.
4. EUROPEAN GREEN DEAL INITIATIVES: The
European Commission continues to push forward
with its Green Deal, introducing a range of
proposals aimed at promoting repair of goods,
securing critical raw materials, achieving net-zero
industries, and reforming the EU electricity market
to boost renewables and enhance industrial
competitiveness. This comprehensive approach
reflects the EU’s commitment to leading in the
transition to a sustainable, climate-neutral
economy. These updates underscore a global
climate policy environment that is both ambitious
and fraught with challenges. The emphasis is on
translating commitments into tangible actions,
addressing systemic issues within food and energy
systems, and ensuring that climate policies are
inclusive and equitable.
Effective climate change policies are multifaceted and
require a comprehensive approach that encompasses
both mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and
adaptation to climate impacts.
Based on insights from various sources, the key
requirements for climate change policy include:
5. INTEGRATION OF SOCIAL SCIENCE INSIGHTS:
Effective climate policies should incorporate
findings from social science research to address
consumer behaviours, political polarization, and
misconceptions about public opinion. This can
help create policies that are more likely to be
accepted and adopted by the public, leading to
meaningful change in behaviours and attitudes
towards climate-friendly practices.
6. REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES OF SUCCESS: Learning
from successful climate policies implemented
globally can provide valuable insights. The World
Bank’s report on 25 effective climate policies from
diverse countries highlights the importance of
designing and implementing policies that take into
account local contexts and compromises. These
examples demonstrate tangible progress in various
sectors and geographical locations, providing a
blueprint for other nations.
7. ADDRESSING ADAPTATION LIMITS: There are
both hard (physical) and soft (institutional or
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Articulate | April 2024, Volume 1
economic) limits to adaptation, and climate policies
need to balance between mitigation and adaptation
efforts. Policies should aim to minimize conflicts
between these limits and target adaptation
expenditures towards manageable risks without
hitting near-term limits. This requires a deliberate
approach to adaptation, fundamentally shifting
assumptions about risk and integrating climate
considerations into socioeconomic systems.
8. VALUING ECOSYSTEMS AND INCLUSIVE
PARTICIPATION: It’s crucial for policies to fully
value ecosystems and their services, ensuring
broad and inclusive participation in the
policymaking process. This includes engaging with
Indigenous and local community institutions,
establishing sustainable benefit-sharing
mechanisms, and enhancing transparency.
FOOD SECURITY AND CLIMATE CHANGE: PERSPECTIVES AND PROSPECTS
As impacts from prolonged droughts to extreme heat
worsen, climate change is threatening the world’s
ability to produce enough nutritious food and ensure
everyone has access to it. At COP28 in Dubai, more
than 130 country leaders called for global and
national food systems to be rethought to address
climate change - the first such official recognition at a
UN climate summit of growing worries about food
security and planet-heating emissions from
agriculture. Here’s how global food systems and
climate change affect each other, and what might be
done about rising risks:
1) How is climate change threatening food security?
As fossil fuel emissions heat the planet, they are
driving more extreme weather - from heavy rains
and droughts to heatwaves - as well as gradual sea
level rise. All can affect crops, ruin farmland and
make it harder for farmers to work. A warming
climate also is bringing crop diseases and pests
into new locations or making infestations more
severe, ruining more harvests and reducing yields.
Such problems, combined with other pressures on
food systems - from growing conflict to crop export
restrictions by food-producing countries and
speculation in markets - mean food is becoming
less affordable and more people are going hungry.
The UN World Food Programme estimates that 333
million people face “acute” food insecurity in 2023
in the 78 countries where it works - a huge boost
from about 200 mn prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Crop failures are not a new phenomenon, with
surpluses in some regions long making up for
shortfalls in others, but scientists fear stronger
climate impacts could drive simultaneous failures
across major global “breadbaskets”, resulting in a
swift rise in global hunger.
2) What is being done to address these threats?
Around the world, many farmers are adapting to
climate extremes in a variety of ways, from digging
irrigation ponds to trap floodwater and store it for
dry times, to adopting new climate-smart seeds
and bringing back hardy traditional crops. But
some challenges - such as more frequent and
extreme heatwaves that can make it difficult for
farmers to work outside - are harder to counter.
Money to help small-scale farmers - who supply
about a third of the world’s food - adapt to climate
risks is also falling dramatically short. In 2021,
they received only about US$2 billion, or 0.3 per
cent of total international climate finance from
public and private sources, according to
Amsterdam-based think-tank Climate Focus. With
little outside help available, many such farmers -
who have contributed little to the emissions
9. FOCUS ON NATURAL CLIMATE SOLUTIONS:
Policies should prioritize natural climate solutions,
such as conservation, restoration, and improved
management of ecosystems. These solutions not
only help in reducing greenhouse gases but also
provide additional benefits like conserving
biodiversity, creating sustainable livelihoods, and
improving human health outcomes.
10. BUILDING CLIMATE RESILIENCE: Developing
and implementing climate resilience policies is
essential to prepare for and adapt to the adverse
effects of climate change. Incorporating these
elements into climate change policies can help
nations effectively tackle the challenges posed by
climate change, making progress towards a more
sustainable and resilient future. (Rajkumar Singh.
Published in Pakistan Today on February 13, 2024)
heating up the planet - are paying the costs of
climate adaptation themselves. The Climate Focus
survey of 13 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin
America found nearly 440 million small-scale
farmer households now spend about US$368
billion annually on adaptation costs, or about
US$838 each per year. Analysts say efforts to
shore up global food security also need to reach
well beyond farms, to try to rein in speculators in
food markets, discourage export clampdowns and
revamp increasingly overwhelmed humanitarian
aid systems.
3) Can we find ways to grow more food to make up for
the losses? Expanding the amount of land being
farmed - or boosting the use of fossil-fuel-based
fertilisers and developing new crop varieties - have
long been accepted ways to grow more food. But
agricultural land expansion often comes at the
expense of forests and other natural ecosystems
that are critical to conserve because their
vegetation absorbs and stores climate-heating
carbon dioxide emissions in order to grow, helping
to curb climate change. For example nearly 20 per
cent of the vast Amazon rainforest has now been
lost, largely to soybean farming and cattle ranching.
Scientists fear additional deforestation could over
time turn the forest into a dry savanna, imperiling
rainfall for agriculture across South America - and
sabotaging the world’s climate and biodiversity
protection goals. Efforts to intensify the amount of
food grown on a set land area have shown some
success but often require large amounts of
expensive fossil fuel-based fertilisers. In recent
years, however, more environmentally friendly
farming methods are gaining new adherents, from
the United States to India. But food analysts say
the best way to increase global supplies is not to
grow more but to reduce the huge amount of food
wasted each year. While the world produces
enough food for everyone, about a third of it is lost
or wasted along the supply chain from field to fork,
according to the UN, which says the average
person wastes 74 kg (163 lb) of food each year.
(Published on the Thomson Reuters Foundation
website on December 11, 2023)
Food security and climate change are deeply
interconnected issues that pose significant challenges
to global sustainability and human well-being.
1) IMPACT ON AGRICULTURE: Climate change
affects agricultural productivity through changes in
temperature, precipitation patterns, and extreme
weather events. Heatwaves, droughts, floods, and
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Articulate | April 2024, Volume 1
storms can damage crops, reduce yields, and
disrupt food supply chains.
2) SHIFTS IN GROWING CONDITIONS: Climate
change alters the suitability of land for different
crops, leading to shifts in growing conditions. Some
regions may experience benefits, such as longer
growing seasons or increased rainfall, while others
face decreased productivity or even crop failures.
3) RISING FOOD PRICES: Climate-related disruptions
in food production can lead to price volatility and
increased food prices, impacting vulnerable
populations’ access to nutritious food.
4) EXTREME EVENTS: Extreme weather events
linked to climate change, such as hurricanes,
floods, and wildfires, can destroy crops, livestock,
and infrastructure, leading to food shortages and
humanitarian crises.
5) ADAPTATION CHALLENGES: Farmers and food
systems must adapt to changing climate conditions,
requiring investments in resilient agricultural
practices, improved infrastructure, and access to
climate information and technologies.
6) FOOD DISTRIBUTION AND TRADE: Climate
change can disrupt food distribution networks and
international trade routes, affecting food access
and availability globally. Vulnerable regions may
become increasingly reliant on food imports,
heightening food security risks.
7) NUTRITIONAL IMPACTS: Changes in agricultural
productivity and food availability can affect dietary 7) RESILIENCE TO SHOCKS: Food security promotes
diversity and nutritional quality, potentially
exacerbating malnutrition and related health
problems.
8) POLICY RESPONSES: Addressing the complex
interplay between food security and climate change
requires coordinated efforts at local, national, and
international levels. Strategies may include
promoting sustainable agriculture, investing in
climate-resilient infrastructure, improving social
safety nets, and mitigating greenhouse gas
emissions to limit further climate change impacts.
Food security in the context of climate change
requires comprehensive approaches that consider
the interdependencies between agriculture, the
environment, and socio-economic factors, with a 10) SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS: Food
focus on building resilience and ensuring equitable
access to food resources for all populations.
Food security is crucial for several reasons
1) BASIC HUMAN NEED: Food is a fundamental
human need. Access to an adequate, nutritious
diet is essential for maintaining health, supporting
growth and development, and ensuring overall
well-being.
SOUTH ASIA’S PATH TO SUSTAINABLE ENERGY
Amid escalating climate concerns and pressing
environmental challenges, South Asia stands at a
critical juncture. Recent initiatives, such as
commitments forged at COP28 and ongoing efforts to
combat air pollution, underscore the region’s steadfast
commitment to steering toward a sustainable future.
Internationally, endeavors persist to ensure coherence
between last year’s COP28, this year’s COP29 in
Azerbaijan, and next year’s COP30 in Brazil. Notably,
the recent intensified collaboration between the
International Energy Agency (IEA) and the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) exemplifies the concerted efforts toward
monitoring energy-related outcomes, fostering
consensus on aligned energy transitions, and
supporting the formulation of Nationally Determined
Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement. As
2) POVERTY ALLEVIATION: Food security plays a
central role in poverty alleviation efforts. Without
access to sufficient and nutritious food, individuals
and communities cannot break out of the cycle of
poverty.
3) HEALTH AND NUTRITION: Adequate food security
is essential for good health and nutrition.
Malnutrition, including both undernutrition and
overnutrition, can have severe consequences for
physical and mental health, as well as cognitive
development, particularly in children.
4) ECONOMIC STABILITY: Food security contributes
to economic stability at both the individual and
national levels. Access to sufficient food enables
people to engage in productive activities, pursue
education and training, and contribute to economic
growth.
5) SOCIAL STABILITY: Food security is closely linked
to social stability and resilience. Inadequate access
to food can lead to social unrest, conflict, and
migration as communities struggle to meet their
basic needs.
6) ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY: Achieving
food security in a sustainable manner is essential
for preserving natural resources and mitigating
environmental degradation. Sustainable
agricultural practices can help protect soil health,
conserve water, and reduce greenhouse gas
emissions.
resilience to shocks and stresses, including natural
disasters, economic downturns, and conflicts.
Communities with strong food systems are better
equipped to withstand and recover from crises.
8) HUMAN RIGHTS: Food security is recognized as a
basic human right. The right to food implies that
every person should have physical and economic
access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to
meet their dietary needs and preferences.
9) GLOBAL STABILITY: Ensuring food security is
essential for global stability and peace. Addressing
food insecurity can help prevent conflicts over
scarce resources and promote cooperation among
nations to address common challenges.
security is integral to achieving several Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs), including those related
to poverty eradication, zero hunger, good health
and well-being, quality education, gender equality,
and climate action. In summary, food security is
not only a matter of fulfilling basic needs but also a
critical component of sustainable development,
human rights, & global stability. (Rajkumar Singh.
Published in Pakistan Today on April 19, 2024)
nations navigate the challenges of transitioning energy
sources and promoting regional cooperation, a
promising perspective emerges – one defined by
collaboration, innovation, and collective responsibility.
Citizens across South Asia, particularly in Pakistan
and India, are eager for their governments to explore
the diverse landscape of the region’s journey toward a
cleaner energy future. This entails scrutinizing crucial
initiatives, navigating obstacles, and seizing
opportunities that influence the trajectory towards
greater environmental sustainability and prosperity.
The urgent challenge of air quality facing South Asia
is starkly evident in major cities like Delhi, Dhaka,
and Lahore, where levels of particulate matter (PM2.5)
consistently exceed World Health Organization
guidelines. Swift collective action is crucial to address
the root causes and protect public health. The haze
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Articulate | April 2024, Volume 1
enveloping South Asian cities originates from various
sources, including industrial emissions, vehicle
exhaust, agricultural burning, and energy
inefficiencies. These factors exacerbate health issues
and contribute to climate change. Incorporating
climate change mitigation strategies into national
policies and promoting sustainable practices are
crucial steps forward. Both India and Pakistan persist
in using coal, despite the suffocating air quality in
their major cities, as both nations are grappling with
developmental challenges and energy deficits.
Addressing air pollution requires a comprehensive
strategy that gives priority to climate resilience and
addresses related inequalities. Despite geopolitical
tensions, fostering dialogue and mutual
understanding can create a foundation for
collaborative efforts. Strong political determination is
essential for overcoming logistical hurdles and
implementing effective solutions. Recently, significant
developments have unfolded regarding longstanding
energy initiatives in South Asia. Pakistan has at long
last authorized the construction of its segment of the
Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline. Initially proposed in 1995
as the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline to transport
Iranian natural gas to the region, the project faced
numerous challenges. These obstacles included
India’s withdrawal in 2008 due to security concerns
and regional tensions. Despite reaching an agreement
with Iran in 2009, construction on Pakistan’s portion
has only recently commenced. Given the looming
deadline and potential penalties, completing the
project by September 2024 is crucial. However,
persistent challenges, such as external factors like
U.S. sanctions on Iran, continue to impede progress.
Similar challenges confront another significant energy
initiative in the region: the Turkmenistan-
Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline,
stretching over 1,800 kilometers. Launched in 2015,
the TAPI pipeline aims to facilitate the transportation
of natural gas. However, security concerns in
Afghanistan and the logistical intricacies of the project
have led to delays. Despite these challenges, efforts
continue to advance this vital energy initiative, which
holds significant potential for enhancing regional
energy security and fostering economic development.
Much like the Gulf Cooperation Council and European
Supergrid, the potential of an electricity grid linking
South and Central Asia is immense for both regions.
Such an interconnected system would have the
capability to revolutionize regional collaboration and
enhance energy security. Picture a future where
cleaner energy sources are plentiful, reducing the
dependency on fossil fuels. This vision encompasses
goals such as decarbonization, improved energy
efficiency, and the transition toward a sustainable,
low-carbon energy system. This diversification of
energy sources offers increased security and reliability
for all nations involved. Through collaborative efforts,
more efficient energy demand management can be
achieved, alleviating power shortages and fostering
sustainable regional development. Moreover, the
establishment of trade routes among Iran, Central
Asia, Pakistan, and India presents significant
opportunities. These routes could become bustling
conduits for goods, opening new markets and
stimulating economic growth across diverse regions.
By expanding trade horizons, this network would
UNDERSTANDING CHINA’S FOREIGN POLICY
When I talk with foreign friends in Beijing, some of
them mention that they are increasingly confused
about China’s foreign policy. Does China want to
contribute substantially to overall economic
development among participating nations. In addition
to the advantages provided by the power grid and
trade routes, improved connectivity offers benefits
that reach beyond the realm of electricity.
Strengthened relationships can promote increased
regional integration, leading to closer diplomatic ties
and collaboration across diverse sectors, such as
infrastructure development and security. These
endeavors not only tackle air pollution directly but
also stimulate economic growth and promote regional
integration. By nurturing new markets and enhancing
cross-border trade, they contribute significantly to the
region’s economic development.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative serves as a model for
successful South-South cooperation, providing a
platform for knowledge sharing and joint efforts
against climate change. South Asian nations can
glean valuable insights from China’s experiences in
renewable energy development and green technology
implementation. In turn, South Asia can offer
expertise in areas like sustainable agriculture and
waste management, fostering a mutually beneficial
exchange of knowledge. The international community
plays a pivotal role in unlocking South Asia’s clean
energy potential. By providing technical expertise and
resources, they can expedite the region’s transition to
sustainable practices. This collective endeavor against
environmental challenges underscores the
interconnected nature of our world and necessitates a
global approach transcending borders.
Developed nations, especially, must reassess past
approaches that may have inadvertently hindered
progress in South Asia. Focusing solely on ideological
differences has proven insufficient in fostering long-
term stability and prosperity in the region. A more
nuanced approach, emphasizing diplomacy and
multilateral cooperation, presents a promising future
for South Asia. Through mutual respect and
understanding, nations in the region, with
constructive international support, can make
significant progress in addressing air pollution and
ensuring a healthier environment for all citizens. This
collaborative endeavor will not only foster regional
stability and prosperity but also pave the way for a
more sustainable South Asia. In summary, the
profound health and environmental crisis gripping
South Asia underscores the urgent need for a unified
regional approach that transcends political divisions.
Despite historical conflicts, cooperation on critical
issues like air pollution is indispensable. South-South
collaboration emerges as a viable solution, facilitating
the exchange of knowledge and best practices.
Establishing a regional air quality monitoring network
and harnessing international support are pivotal steps
toward achieving a cleaner energy future.
Through collective action to address shared challenges,
South Asia can pave the way for a healthier
environment, enhanced stability, and economic
development. Ultimately, it is through collaboration
and innovation that the region can secure a
sustainable and prosperous future. Strong political
resolve is paramount for surmounting logistical
obstacles and implementing effective solutions. (Abdul
Waheed. Published in The Diplomat on April 11, 2024)
change the status quo in the Asia-Pacific? Is China
using Europe as a bargaining chip with the United
States? How did “wolf warrior” diplomacy come about?
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Their questions are interesting and universal.
However, it is difficult to get introductions from
experts in China because some are reluctant to talk to
foreign media. As a relatively independent journalist, I
think it is necessary to make a brief summary of my
observations of China’s foreign policy over the past 10
years. I do not speak for the Chinese government, and
so my view is certainly not 100 percent correct, but I
hope it will be helpful for foreign analysts to
understand China’s diplomacy.
1. Global South Diplomacy: It is a diplomatic
tradition for China to maintain good relations with
small countries, poor countries, and what is now
called the Global South. For instance, the Chinese
foreign minister must go to Africa on his inaugural
trip of every year. Why? It is not only an means of
emphasizing that China is a member of the
developing world, but also China’s diplomatic
preparation for the present and future. In addition
to Africa, strengthening ties with the Muslim world
is another manifestation of China’s Global South
diplomacy. For decades, in multilateral forums,
China has taken care not to contradict the
collective stance of Muslim countries. Nowhere is
this attitude more evident than in the current Gaza
war. Muslim countries have not condemned Hamas,
so China will not do so in the United Nations and
other international conferences. If the Muslim
world changes their stance one day, China will
change with them accordingly. Africa and Muslim
countries are the two largest voting blocs in the
United Nations, with more than 50 votes from
Africa and more than 40 from the Muslim world,
accounting for almost half of the U.N. membership.
China must rely on their support on many issues
in order to better safeguard its interests. Whenever
issues like Taiwan, the South China Sea, Xinjiang,
human rights, and others are brought up by
Western countries for discussion in the U.N.,
China’s relations with African and Muslim
countries will be effective. That no Muslim country
in the world today supports the Western stance on
Xinjiang is a triumph of this diplomatic tradition.
For similar reasons, Yemen-based Houthi rebels
have declared that they would not attack Chinese
vessels. Therefore, China’s foreign policy highlights
Global South diplomacy, which is why China is
always very polite to small countries. China’s
foreign policy in Africa or its outreach to Muslim
countries is not just symbolic nor is it motivated
only by economic interests. Actually China has a
long-term plan.
2. Great Powers Diplomacy: Foreign policy starts at
home, which involves not only politics but also
economics. Foreign policy should provide a sound
external environment for economic development,
which is an important aspect of understanding
China’s diplomacy. Thanks to the reform and
opening policy that began in the late 1970s, China
has been keeping sustained economic development.
This policy is an opening to the West, not to the
Global South. Since the founding of the People’s
Republic of China in 1949, it had opened to Asia,
Africa, and Latin America, but China has not
gained enough economic benefits to promote
development, and the Chinese people remained
very poor. Since opening to the West, China
implemented a market economy and attracted
foreign investment, the whole economy has
transformed in an astonishingly short time.
Therefore, in developing relations between China
and Western powers such as the United States,
Europe and Japan, one of China’s priorities is to
maintain an open economic environment, which is
the key to ensuring sustainable development. For
example, China is seeking to sign a Comprehensive
Agreement on Investment (CAI) with Europe and a
Science and Technology Agreement (STA) with the
United States. I am very much in favor of this kind
of “Great Powers Diplomacy,” because these powers
can have a direct impact on China’s economy. Even
if there are political problems between China and
the West, China will try its best to maintain steady
economic relations. By contrast, China’s relations
with Russia are more about political support for
each other. Of course, there is economic and
energy cooperation, but China is pursuing this
mostly in preparation for the future. If there is a
war in the Taiwan Strait, the diplomatic and
economic relations between China and Western
countries will change dramatically, and China can
hardly bear the consequences alone. Russia’s
energy and agriculture products will be a reliable
backstop for China. Some Western analysts have
posited that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran
are forming a new axis. I always respond China is
different from the other countries, which are really
anti-Western; it is a core part of the survival
strategies of Russia, North Korea, and Iran. China
is a different story. It must maintain an open policy
with Western powers to ensure the livelihoods of
1.4 billion people and social development. China’s
diplomacy with the United States, Japan, and the
EU is not politically expedient, but government
behavior is guided by the needs of the ordinary
people. China will never turn into North Korea, and
the Chinese people will never support foreign policy
that severs relations with the West. No matter how
anti-American a Chinese person seems to be, he
would not want to live in North Korea.
3. New Style Diplomacy: At present, some Western
countries are most worried that China will
unilaterally change the status quo, including in the
South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. This is
really a problem because both sides think they are
right and there is a lack of consensus. The Chinese
government believes that some Western countries
have encircled China by interfering in regional
territorial disputes, which is a violation of the
United Nations-led international order. In Beijing’s
eyes, China’s territorial claims are meant to
safeguard its own sovereignty and territorial
integrity, not to occupy any land of others.
However, the West also believes that China’s
stance violates the international order led by the
United Nations and changes the status quo. In
their view, China seeks to occupy territory that
does not belong to it. Viewed in that light, the
Western countries’ presence in the region is about
keeping international order and peace. With this
background, the so-called wolf warrior diplomacy
appeared on the international stage. I don’t like
this style, personally, but I understand the reason
for it. It stems from the fact that China’s diplomacy
is under great pressure from the West. Think of it
through an individual metaphor: a person who
often loses their temper must be anxious and
nervous on the inside. The reason behind China’s
worry is obvious: It has territorial or maritime
disputes with at least seven neighbors, and in each
one the West is increasingly involved – and always
on the side of China’s rival.
This certainly deepen China’s sense of insecurity vis-
a-vis the outside world. China is hedging against the
risk in two ways: preparing for military struggle and
seeking a breakthrough on diplomacy. Wolf warrior
diplomacy is reflection of the latter; you can call it
“new style diplomacy,” which is about competing with
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Articulate | April 2024, Volume 1
the West for the right to speak internationally.
Another aspect of this strategy – one that has received
less attention – is for China to provide the global
community with more international public goods. In
this way, Beijing hopes that more countries can
realize that China’s friendly intentions and dismiss
the “China threat” theory. For instance, the Belt and
Road Initiative (BRI) proposed in 2013 is an example
of China’s “new style diplomacy.” It is China’s attempt
to provide an international public good, similar to
Japan’s Official Development Assistance (ODA). In
addition, China is also making efforts in Middle East
diplomacy, such as mediating the relations between
Iran and Saudi Arabia, and preparing for a Middle
SOUTH ASIA’S REGIONAL INTEGRATION: LESSONS FROM EUROPE’S EXPERIENCE
Regional integration fosters socioeconomic
development through economic collaboration between
member countries. It assists countries in eliminating
impediments to the free movement of capital, products,
services, ideas, and individuals. In developing nations
like South Asia, divisions in these areas act as an
impediment to economic progress. The European
Union (EU) serves as an inspiring example of regional
integration; however, the situation in South Asia
greatly differs. It is the “least integrated region” of the
world, and most countries are not performing
exceptionally well in economic, social, and political
development. As a result, it is hoped that these
countries achieve a similar level of integration to the
EU to become an economically stable and relatively
peaceful region like Europe. The EU is widely viewed
as a successful example of postwar regional
integration. The integration of Europe has experienced
numerous changes before becoming the most
compelling example of regional integration today. The
EU’s success resulted from years of thought and
discussions following the region’s destruction from
devastating European conflicts. The EU shares a
common currency and promotes the free flow of
services, capital, commodities, and individuals across
borders. It also shares a similar foreign and security
policy. The European community did experience
numerous hurdles while working towards these
significant milestones. Delving into history, the
framework for regional cooperation was signed in
1949, establishing the Council of Europe. In May
1950, French diplomat Jean Monnet and foreign
minister Robert Schumann proposed the
establishment of a coal and steel community, which
was a critical step towards Europe’s integration. The
two devastating world wars taught European leaders
the significance of unifying their economies and
communities and preventing the reoccurrence of
similar catastrophes. It became clear that merging
economic resources could yield more significant
outcomes than individual operations. As a result, the
EU achieved substantial economic progress by
adopting shared laws and enhancing cooperation
between regional and national powers. The EU also
collaborated strongly on domestic affairs and foreign
and security policies. Arguably, the fear of
communism and American support unified the war-
torn economies of Western Europe, resulting in the
establishment of the European Coal and Steel
Community (ECSC) in 1950 and the European
Economic Community (EEC) in 1957. Therefore,
Europe’s distinct history and foreign support play a
role in the present regionally integrated Europe.
In the case of South Asia, in 1980, the President of
Bangladesh, Ziaur Rahman, advocated for
establishing regional cooperation in South Asia. Nepal,
Sri Lanka, and Bhutan readily supported the idea of
regional cooperation, whereas India and Pakistan
East peace conference. In recent years, China has also
proposed the concept of a Community with a Shared
Future for Mankind; these have not departed from the
international order led by the U.N. Charter. The West
may not be comfortable with China’s “new style
diplomacy,” which is understandable; the main goal is
to counter the West’s narratives about China.
Meanwhile China’s military growth is fueling their
tension and hostility. I really don’t know how to
defuse these tensions and deal with the territorial
disputes, but I think it always makes sense to
maintain diplomatic engagement for deep
understanding. (Mu Chunshan. Published in The
Diplomat on March 28, 2024)
initially showed reluctance. There were concerns
among Indian officials that Ziaur Rahman’s idea for a
regional unified body would enable smaller states to
regionalize bilateral disputes and unite against India.
Similarly, Pakistan viewed it as India’s objective to
unite other states against Pakistan and establish a
regional market for Indian exports, solidifying Indian
supremacy in the region. Nevertheless, the South
Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC)
was established in 1985 to promote cross-border
economic cooperation. However, its progress
dramatically lags behind the EU. It is important to
note that Europe and South Asia exhibit significant
differences in economic progress, levels of wealth,
human development, free trade, industrial and urban
development, tackling poverty, and level of integration
in politics. Barry Eichengreen argues that following
the two disastrous world wars, nationalism in mid-
century Europe had weakened and European leaders
sought political unification to prevent similar
catastrophes. However, it led to decolonization in Asia,
which promoted, rather than diminished, nationalism.
As a result, political integration and establishing
global institutions of economic governance in Asia
remain restricted due to the continued prevalence of
nationalism. The prosperity of Europe’s democratic
nature, free market economic policies, and political
issue resolution have fueled its long-term success of
integration. On the other hand, South Asian states
experience significant geographical, cultural,
economic, and military disparities, making
cooperation challenging. South Asia has been
embroiled in interstate disputes over land and natural
resources, security, culture, and religion. As a result,
these countries prioritize development in the military
field, with less attention on regional trade and
economic and regional cooperation. More importantly,
regional integration has been impeded by the effects of
British colonialism and the internal dynamics in the
post-independence era, affecting cross-border
interactions. The tensions between Pakistan and India
have been ongoing since their partition, undermining
prospects for regional cooperation. Logically,
European integration is an exceptional model of
regional integration. However, it cannot be fully
adopted by South Asian states, keeping their
prominent dissimilarities in view. The EU model,
however, could provide some lessons the South Asian
states could adopt. Firstly, South Asian states must
possess a strong political will to integrate. Secondly,
like the European nations, South Asian states need to
foster peaceful relations, leaving behind hegemonic
pursuits and adopting a dispute-resolution framework
in order to promote regional integration. Thirdly, there
is also a need to develop a strong institutional
framework for efficient decision-making and policy
implementation. The EU was successful in regional
integration as it adopted these factors. Therefore,
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Articulate | April 2024, Volume 1
these factors serve as valuable lessons for South
Asia’s regional integration.
While the EU is a prominent regional partnership,
South Asia strives to achieve primary economic
integration. The EU was successful in integration due
to the strong political will of the leadership and the
citizen’s realization of the significance of integration.
Unfortunately, South Asia experiences the most minor
integration and has been embroiled in disputes. The
disagreements over geography, resources, culture,
SEMBLANCE OF PEACE ACROSS MANY REGIONS
Seldom has a concatenation of circumstances across
the world led to this degree of concern about the
future. Many factors are responsible for this. Reckless
leaders such as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who are at the centre of
the ongoing conflicts, have neither the desire nor the
understanding to try and end the conflicts they are
involved in. Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, shows
equal disregard for the eventual outcome of the war in
Ukraine, and displays intense myopia as to what can
be done to achieve his end objective. The United
States, which initially hoped that by strengthening the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) it could
inflict a decisive defeat on Russia, and restore the
immediate post-1945 world order in Europe, finds
itself in a serious dilemma. In the meantime, Mr.
Netanyahu, caught napping by the massive Hamas
attack in October 2023, has reacted to it in a manner
typical of his general reputation, and is venting his
frustration on the citizens of Gaza — which virtually
approximates to genocide. This has inflamed opinions
across the world, but more specifically in West Asia,
and is further widening the political and religious
divide. An unexpected fallout of this has been Iran’s
reemergence as a key player in determining the ‘roll of
the dice’ in the affairs of this region.
Growing chaos, an absent leadership Since 2022,
geo-politics has been in various stages of disarray.
While the ‘rules-based international order’, basically a
creation of the West, is virtually dead today, it did
succeed for a time in maintaining a semblance of
peace across many regions. As the West seemed to
weaken, and alongside the rise of China, new alliance
patterns emerged. None of them, however, possessed
sufficient heft to sustain a peaceful global order.
Today, large parts of the world are in chaos, though
‘shooting wars’ are limited to a few pockets such as
Ukraine and Gaza. What is more disconcerting is the
absence of leaders with a sober mien, who command a
degree of influence across nations and continents,
whether it is Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin or Joe Biden.
The vast majority of other western leaders clearly lack
the qualities needed to sustain a peaceful
international order. Many increasingly face problems
in sustaining their fiefdoms. Meantime, the march of
history and the progress of current technologies
threaten to confine most of them to the detritus of
history. The situation is only about to worsen. The
stalemate in Ukraine continues with Mr. Zelenskyy,
Mr. Putin, and the West all unwilling to consider a
reasonable compromise. The year 2024 will, thus, see
a repetition of what has been taking place in Europe
for the past two years. Whether a continued stalemate
will force leaders of these countries to consider the
‘unthinkable’, viz., use of battlefield nuclear weapons,
is again a matter for debate. The situation in West
Asia is, meanwhile, turning critical. Israel has been
acting more and more, inflicting unpardonable
casualties on the citizens of Gaza. It now confronts a
direct threat from Iran, which has already fired
religion, and concerns about security impede these
states from pursuing regional integration. More
importantly, the Indo-Pak rivalry has hampered efforts
to promote economic integration and regional stability.
Therefore, to enable economic and political integration
in South Asia, there is a need to establish
consolidated democracies like that of the EU and
foster reliable human interactions while embracing
free market economic policies. (Malaika Afridi.
Published in Modern Diplomacy on February 24, 2024)
opening ‘shots across the bow’ at Israel, for the attack
on its consular premises in Damascus and the killing
of Iranian personnel recently. All indications point to
the spectre of a resurgent Iran, thereafter, taking over
the leadership of militants directed against the West.
The implications of an all out Iran-Israel war are dire
indeed.
A new set of alliances Today, great power rivalry
seems a little more than a shadow play, which has
hardly any meaning. Outside war-torn Ukraine, and
the time bomb that West Asia resembles at present,
the U.S. and China are indulging in feints, using
proxies to try and achieve their objectives. The U.S.
has yet to overcome its hubris following the series of
setbacks it has been facing since Afghanistan in 2020,
which has removed much of the sheen attached to its
being touted as a superpower. In the case of Europe,
having leaned on NATO to protect itself from Russia’s
offensive, it has little to offer. Europe again has little
influence on Mr. Zelenskyy, notwithstanding the huge
cost to their exchequers. Seldom has the situation
across the region seemed less propitious. In the east,
China’s economic ‘woes’ have stripped it of the
afterglow of being a near superpower, one well
positioned to challenge the U.S. and the West,
militarily and economically. Over the past several
months, China has been compelled to operate under
the radar and its image as a superpower has
diminished. Nevertheless, this has not prevented it
from forging many new alliances across West Asia.
Currently, the China-Russia-Iran axis has put a
question mark on the predatory tactics of the U.S. and
the West across much of West Asia. There is a well-
known aphorism that stipulates that ‘wisdom lies in
knowing when to stop’. Even as global power politics
appear to lose all meaning, we are witness to a whole
new set of alliances that makes little sense. What is
missing in the thought processes of world leaders,
however, is that it is the economy and technologies
today that are the main ‘drivers’ and ‘spoilers’ in
today’s world. Most world leaders are not paying
adequate attention to forecasts about the future of the
world economies, more specifically when they include
the economies of the more developed countries as well.
For instance, experts warn that the U.S. economy is
set to face problems sooner rather than later, while
the economies of the United Kingdom and much of
Europe are already in a parlous state. China’s
economy, despite Xi Jinping’s efforts, is again not
improving and it has had to cut back on many of its
intended plans.
The disruptors
The politics of oil again is something that the world
cannot ignore for much longer. The growing proximity,
and the axis between China-Russia-Iran, indicate that
military alliances apart, the politics of oil is set to roil
the world in the near future. In such a milieu, today’s
sanctions have ceased to have any meaning. The
world, according to economists, should, hence, be
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prepared for a major slowdown. The implications of
this could be far more disruptive than the current
wars in Ukraine and Gaza or a potential conflagration
in the Pacific. Next, technology is all set to become the
ultimate disruptor. Manifest attempts are being made
by several leading countries to enhance their national
security by protecting vital technologies, over which
they possess a near-monopoly today. Artificial
Intelligence is already a potential threat as far as
conventional war methodologies are concerned, but
while the U.S. and China are touted as militarily the
most powerful today, smaller nations are beginning to
pose a challenge, employing Artificial Intelligence, to
level the playing field. This dimension needs to be
better understood, alongside the havoc being caused
in the battlefield in Ukraine by the military
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR)
revolution, and the relentless stare of visual infrared
INTRODUCING NEO-POLITICS
At the outset, let me explain the term ‘Neo-politics’
because, in an era of ever-green geopolitics and
evolving geoeconomics, it will be difficult to digest yet
another new terminology. Neo-politics is a hybrid
employment of geopolitics, geostrategy, and
geoeconomics. States successfully employed their
geography in international politics over the centuries
even when the term geopolitics had not been in use.
While each element of geography merits great
consideration, but location and size of the state stood
tall when it came to asserting regional or global
politics in international relations. New Zealand, one of
the most advanced states in the world is unable to
play a significant role in international affairs primarily
due to its remote location. Whereas a much smaller
state in the Gulf, Qatar effectively plays its role as a
peace facilitator among the warring nations and
groups. Geopolitics, which, in essence, applies the
precepts of realism when it comes to power, security,
and interest, based on the essential elements of
geography, will perhaps continue to dominate
international relations, even if geoeconomics has
gained a lot of ground. However, what neo-politics
does is different in terms of geography.
States, in the 21st Century, are not relying on
geography alone anymore, but looking for
opportunities to maximize gains in terms of economic
benefits, security, and political stature. Unlike the era
of the Cold War where the lines were drawn,
adversaries were known, and states had taken a
certain position for political and strategic reasons. In
the realm of neo-politics, states are more pragmatic,
open, decisive, and undeterred by any force to make
their own decisions. Barring a few smaller and weaker
ones in the economic domain, states exercise their
options more freely than before. Europe has been at
war since Russia decided to enter Ukraine on
February 24, 2022, and two years on the ongoing war
is likely to expand both horizontally as well as
vertically. Likewise, the Middle East has not rested
since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, and wars and
conflicts in the region have reached the Red Sea with
more and more extra-regional players joining the
arena. Africa has also started to assert itself and
revolted against its colonial master, France. China,
under the banner of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI),
has entered Africa in a big way with money alongside
Russia which will provide the much-needed muscle
with its arms and ammunition, if required.
and electronic sensors carried by drones, aircraft, and
space assets. Finally, it is also necessary to recognise
that with most arms control agreements having frayed,
new nuclear warheads and cruise missiles are
possibly, if not already, being designed, and also,
possibly, being kept in readiness for use. A nuclear
makeover is already in the making and it is only a
matter of time that demands are raised by countries
that possess them to seek their use. An intense debate
is already on as to whether in response to the possible
use of low-level battlefield nuclear weapons by Russia,
the U.S. and the West should not raise the nuclear
threshold by employing nuclear weapons of lower
magnitude. Doomsday predictions are perhaps nearer
than what many believe. (M K. Narayanan. Published
in The Hindu Newspaper on April 19, 2024)
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), BRICS,
and Group of 77 are seriously challenging Europe’s
supremacy in geopolitics, geostrategy, and
geoeconomics. Because neo-politics is giving states an
option to choose the path that is best suited to their
interests. The Bretton Woods arrangements that have
exploited the Global South for over seven decades are
likely to lose their grip in the coming decades because
China has enough liquidity to support the needs of
these nations through investments in much-needed
infrastructure and public utility projects that were
long denied by the colonial masters. Moreover, China
and Russia are encouraging states to do their
business in local currencies or exchange of
commodities to gradually reduce the demand for the
dollars. The process of de-dollarization has already
started but certainly will take more time before the
dollar loses its colour in essence.
What I am suggesting is that several Cold War
terminologies need a serious review by academics and
practitioners because the international system is
undergoing rapid change, and the world will not be
the same again as it was during the Cold War or in
the post-9/11 phase. The US-led dominance of
international organizations and institutions is coming
to an end, if not immediately, shortly, for sure. For
this purpose, I am introducing neo-politics to generate
a debate. The hybrid employment of all the previous
terminologies, methodologies, and techniques is
paving the way for more prudent options for the states
and reducing the dependency syndrome to make more
independent decisions. One might argue that the
developing states were dependent on their colonial
masters who had now led by the US since the end of
World War II, and now they will be dependent on
China so how will it change for them?
The short answer is that it will not be so, because, at
the global level, it’s a clash of two philosophies: the
Chinese view of ‘development through cooperation’
and the Western view of ‘with us or without us.’ Since
more and more states are joining the Chinese Camp
for want of development through cooperation, there is
a higher probability that neo-politics will replace
geopolitics, geostrategy, & geoeconomics into a single
term which denotes hybrid employment of all other
elements of geography to maximize their gains in
terms of economy, security, & politics. (Dr Zia -ul
Haque. Published in Daily Times on April 15, 2024)
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THE MUSLIM WORLD STANDS VOICELESS
The Muslim Ummah is in a shambles. The civil wars
in Yemen and Syria have not yet ended. Though an
uneasy calm and peace characterizes the Arab-Iran
relations after Saudi Arabia and Iran moved to
reconcile, the war in the occupied land of Palestine
has jolted many Muslim capitals exacerbating their
security concerns. The genocidal killings of tens of
thousands of Palestinian people by Israel would keep
haunting the Muslim kings and Emirs for years to
come. Israel is hell-bent on dragging Iran into the
conflict. The apathy of the Muslim leaders was
shocking. None of the Muslim countries did more than
lip service to the just cause of the Palestinians and,
despite the bloodbath, no Muslim country dared to
suspend its diplomatic relations with the Jewish State.
All cowered under fear for their security or were
reluctant to incur the anger of Washington DC. Israel,
with the support and abetment of the USA, has long
emerged as the dominant power in the Middle East
with a robust kinetic power and poses an ultimate
threat to any Muslim country.
The global political and strategic scenario will
certainly change after the forthcoming US Presidential
elections. Former President Donald Trump has
emerged as the Republican candidate to face President
Joe Biden. There are seasoned analyses that he would
be re-elected as the leader of the USA if no
extraordinary global event takes place to turn the
swing vote in favour of President Biden. Nevertheless,
it makes no difference whether Joe Biden or Donald
Trump is in possession of the White House. All the US
leaders have been unabashedly abetting the atrocities
of Israel against the Palestinians. However, Donald
Trump had gone a whole hog to brazenly harm the
Muslim Ummah. Joe Biden too did not lag in
supporting the blood-thirsty Israeli leaders in the
genocidal killings of the Palestinians. This would be
an ugly blot on his legacy. President Donald Trump’s
bile and rage to give bloody cuts to the Muslim world
at the behest of Prime Minister Netanyahu is etched in
our memory. Unfortunately, some Arab monarchs, in
their shallowness of vision, undermined the only
broader platform of the Organization of Islamic
Conference at the altar of the expedient-ridden and
pliable Arab League aggravating their vulnerability to
manipulation by the global powers. They are more
culpable for the current plight of the Ummah.
Today, the Muslim world stands voiceless; its protests
are taken in stride and rulers ridden roughshod in
world politics. Remorse, Jean Jacque Rousseau says,
goes to sleep when our fortunes are prosperous, and
makes itself felt more keenly in adversity. What more
enormous adversity do the Muslims need to move
their leaders for introspection? The Palestinian issue
engaged the rapt attention of the Muslim world and
the comity of nations for many decades. Though the
Muslim leaders could not put enough pressure on the
USA and the Western world to compensate the
Palestinians for the injustice slapped upon them by
establishing the Israeli state in their land in 1948,
they were successful in keeping this issue alive in
international forums. The Muslim world was
dominated by tall leaders who, though autocrats but
hardcore Arab nationalists, wielded influence in world
politics. Besides the precious resource of oil which the
world needed most after the Second World War, the
Muslim leaders maintained their influence in world
politics by the sheer force of bilateral and multilateral
diplomacy, and as a collective mass within the fold of
the OIC. Gradually, the Muslim world lost its lustre
and influence because of a lack of vision. The events
triggered by the so-called Arab Spring proved a
debilitating blow. The leaders got frightened and
nervous running helter and skelter in the pursuit of
major powers to save their thrones from the avalanche
of spontaneous public protests and bring down those
leaders whom they perceived a threat to their
kingdoms and Emirates. No longer than the overthrow
of Bin Ali in Tunisia, the Muslim world presented a
chaotic scene leading to civil wars in many Muslim
countries.
In their search for security, the Arab leaders lost the
sense of Muslim fraternity trotting as pawns in the
mayhem wrought on the most important Muslim
countries from Iraq to Libya, Syria and Yemen. The
frontiers collapsed and the armies disintegrated into
armed groups; the sovereign territories were
bombarded; the leaders were hunted down by
mercenary troops or executed by agents of death and
destruction; the traditional equilibrium so assiduously
maintained between sectarian populations was
destroyed. Sectarian groups and private were trained
and financed to go on a killing spree. All this
devastation of the Arab world was tempting for Israel
to advance its vicious designs to become the mini
superpower of the region with almost all the Arab
monarchies and emirates looking forward to having
some sort of security arrangement with it.
President Donald Trump had more plans up his
sleeves to help Israel. It looked as if he was in a hurry
to finish his agenda of reversing the decades-old policy
decisions of his predecessors about the Arab countries.
Goaded by the pro-Israel trio of his advisors, Jared
Kushner, Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, he
started unfolding his plans step by step recognizing
Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December 2017,
moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to the sacred
city in May 2018 and exiting from the UN Human
Rights Council in June 2018 accusing it to be biased
against Israel. In September 2018, he closed the
representative office of PLO in Washington. Followed
in quick succession was his proclamation of
recognizing the illegal annexation of the Golan Heights
by Israelis. This proclamation also owed a great deal
to the persuasive intervention of the above extremist
trio who, as reports then suggested, were also against
the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. Would Donald
Trump have a different policy this time around? I
doubt it. The security situation in the Muslim world
would remain in a state of flux.
The mirror review of the Trump’s last year in the
While House shows his advisors had persuaded him
he had been anointed by God to help the Jews regain
their epic land and glory. He looked the other way
while Prime Minister Netanyahu was unabashedly
expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and
provocatively declaring the Israeli sovereignty and
control over the united Jerusalem and any piece of
Palestinian territory west of Jordan River. While
Donald Trump was on rampage, the Arab leaders
seemed paralyzed. They met in a summit under the
banner of the Arab League in Tunisia in March 2020
to register their protests particularly over his
proclamation recognizing the legitimacy of the Israeli
occupation of the Golan Heights. The Final
Communiqué issued at the end of the session was
littered with the usual clichés and repeated the well
beaten stand of the Arab countries on Palestine and
the occupied Arab lands.
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The hostility of the US leaders including Donald
Trump and Joe Biden against Iran owes much to the
perceived security threat from Iran to Israel and some
Arab allies. During the turmoil of the Middle East,
Iran undoubtedly strengthened its sphere of political
and strategic influence from Yemen to Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon and Hamas-ruled Gaza. The Iranian
entrenchment in the Middle East posed a security
challenge to some Arab monarchies and emirates
impelling them to embrace Israel in a joint endeavour
to isolate this common adversary. Their joint pressure
on President Donald Trump resulted in the US exit
from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)
in May 2018, and reintroduction of economic
sanctions on Iran. We recall, three countries of Israel,
Saudi Arabia and UAE had opposed JCPOA. To
ratchet pressure on Iran, the US leader declared
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as terrorist
organization and, to further squeeze Iran economically,
refused to extend the sanctions waiver for buyers of
Iranian oil that included Turkey, India and China. The
latter is the biggest Iranian oil importer. The Iranian
oil exports dipped from 2.5 million barrels a day to
less than 1.3 million. The US presented Iran some 12
tough conditions for the renegotiation of the JCPOA
which amounted to total surrender to the American
diktat. These demands notably called on Iran to
dismantle all nuclear programmes, withdraw forces
from Syria, terminate support to armed groups like
Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Quds and Houthis, stop the
destabilizing policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gulf
region and supporting Al-Bashar in Syria, Noori Al-
Maliki in Iraq, and many more demands. All analysts
knowing the Iranians hastened to conclude that they
would prefer to perish in a war than surrendering so
ignominiously to the US. Hence, the situation in the
Gulf region remained in a flux with every possibility of
war which would have been the last nail in the coffin
of the Muslim world. Given the Iran’s strategic
location and military capability with all medium and
long range missiles, the war would have set alight the
entire Gulf region.
President Joe Biden followed his predecessor’s policy
in the Middle East blindly supporting Israel. His open
support to Israel in the wanton killing of the poor
Palestinians in Gaza despite protests all over the
world proved his callousness and cruelty on one hand
and the helplessness of the Muslim countries on the
other. Protesters gathered in hundreds of thousands
in the Western capitals to condemn the US support to
the Israeli brutality in Gaza. The Muslim countries
didn’t allow their people to vent their anger over this
bloodbath. So is pervasive the fear of the wrath of the
USA and Israel. Ambassador K.K. Ghori writes
somewhere that Pakistan was a silent spectator
THE FANTASY OF REVIVING NUCLEAR ENERGY
World leaders are not unaware of the nuclear
industry’s long history of failing to deliver on its
promises, or of its weakening vital signs. Yet many
continue to act as if a “nuclear renaissance” could be
around the corner even though nuclear energy’s share
of global electricity generation has fallen by almost
half from its high of roughly 17 percent in 1996. In
search of that revival, representatives from more than
30 countries gathered in Brussels in March at a
nuclear summit hosted by the International Atomic
Energy Agency and the Belgian government. Thirty-
four nations, including the United States and China,
agreed “to work to fully unlock the potential of nuclear
energy,” including extending the lifetime of existing
reactors, building new nuclear power plants and
deploying advanced reactors. Yet even as they did so,
during all the years of turmoil in the Muslim world
and the Gulf war. It was a challenge knocking at
Pakistan’s door for over a decade and crying out for
responses that would safeguard its vital national
interests. Pakistan was caught between the devil and
deep blue sea during the short lived ‘Arab Spring’ and
no-hold-barred game of one-upmanship between two
important Muslim countries- Saudi Arabia and Iran –
the contenders for regional domination in its
neighbourhood.
Pakistan saw such situations in the past, but it was in
a position to navigate safe through the explosive
minefield by playing its cards well. But the ground
reality within Pakistan, then, was different from today.
The past regimes were in a position to parry the
pressure from rival states because Pakistan wasn’t
beholden to either, which isn’t the case today. The
governments of Imran Khan and his successors were
too deeply beholden to the rich Arab countries which
bailed them out of tight economic straitjacket through
generous support.
Ambassador Ghori further writes Pakistan’s economic
dependence on rich Muslim countries and the western
financial institutions has since increased. This
hamstrings bold initiative or policy move not kosher to
rich Arab countries and the USA. It also makes it a
mute spectator of, if not a hostage to, the sectarian-
based ideological conflict between the Arabs and the
Iranians notwithstanding its own fragile sectarian
fault-lines. The Pakistani leadership’s failure to attend
the Kuala Lumpur Summit or implement the gas
pipeline agreement with Iran is a glaring case in point.
The country has suffered badly from the sectarian
warfare and has to be ever extra-vigilant to ensure it
doesn’t get caught on a wrong footing particularly
when the militant organizations of a particular
political and religious hue are active from across the
western borders. These organizations have been
undermining its relations with immediate neighbours
and its security as well. The independent foreign
policy experts forcefully argue that Pakistan would be
compelled to follow regional and international policies
disadvantageous to its long-term geo-strategic interest
if it remains shackled to its economic handicaps. To
break these economic shackles, Pakistan needs to
increase its revenue and drastically cut expenses.
However, no plan of belt-tightening is in sight. We feel
no shame in borrowing money and spending lavishly
and living ostentatiously. It is stupidity of the highest
order. (Muhammad Alam Brohi. Published in Daily
Times on April 10, 2024)
there was an acknowledgment of the difficulty of their
undertaking. “Nuclear technology can play an
important role in the clean energy transition,” Ursula
von der Leyen, the president of the European
Commission, told summit attendees. But she added
that “the reality today, in most markets, is a reality of
a slow but steady decline in market share” for nuclear
power. The numbers underscore that downturn. Solar
and wind power together began outperforming nuclear
power globally in 2021, and that trend continues as
nuclear staggers along. Solar alone added more than
400 gigawatts of capacity worldwide last year, two-
thirds more than the previous year. That’s more than
the roughly 375 gigawatts of combined capacity of the
world’s 415 nuclear reactors, which remained
relatively unchanged last year. At the same time,
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investment in energy storage technology is rapidly
accelerating. In 2023, Bloomberg NEF reported that
investors for the first time put more money into
stationary energy storage than they did into nuclear.
Still, the drumbeat for nuclear power has become
pronounced. At the United Nations climate conference
in Dubai in December, the Biden administration
persuaded two dozen countries to pledge to triple their
nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Those countries
included allies of the United States with troubled
nuclear programs, most notably France, Britain,
Japan and South Korea, whose nuclear bureaucracies
will be propped up by the declaration as well as the
domestic nuclear industries they are trying to save.
“We are not making the argument to anybody that this
is absolutely going to be a sweeping alternative to
every other energy source,” John Kerry, the Biden
administration climate envoy at the time, said. “But
we know because the science and the reality of facts
and evidence tell us that you can’t get to net zero
2050 without some nuclear.”
That view has gained traction with energy planners in
Eastern Europe who see nuclear as a means of
replacing coal, and several countries — including
Canada, Sweden, Britain and France — are pushing
to extend the operating lifetimes of existing nuclear
plants or build new ones. Some see smaller or more
“advanced” reactors as a means of providing electricity
in remote areas or as a means of decarbonizing
sectors such as heat, industry or transportation. So
far most of this remains in early stages, with only
three nuclear reactors under construction in Western
Europe, two in Britain and one in France, each more
than a decade behind schedule. Of the approximately
54 other reactors under construction worldwide as of
March, 23 are in China, seven are in India, and three
are in Russia, according to the International Atomic
Energy Agency. The total is less than a quarter of the
234 reactors under construction in the peak year of
1979, although 48 of those were later suspended or
abandoned. Even if you agree with Mr. Kerry’s
argument, and many energy experts do not, pledging
to triple nuclear capacity by 2050 is a little like
promising to win the lottery. For the United States, it
would mean adding an additional 200 gigawatts of
nuclear operating capacity (almost double what the
country has ever built) to the 100 gigawatts or so that
now exists, generated by more than 90 commercial
reactors that have been running an average of 42
years. Globally it would mean tripling the existing
capacity built over the past 70 years in less than half
that time in addition to replacing reactors that will
shut down before 2050. The Energy Department
estimates the total cost of such an effort in the United
States at roughly $700 billion. But David Schlissel, a
director at the Institute for Energy Economics and
Financial Analysis, has calculated that the two new
reactors at the Vogtle plant in Georgia — the only new
reactors built in the United States in a generation —
on average, cost $21.2 million per megawatt in today’s
dollars — which translates to $21.2 billion per
gigawatt. Using that figure as a yardstick, the cost of
building 200 gigawatts of new capacity would be far
higher: at least $4 trillion, or $6 trillion if you count
the additional cost of replacing existing reactors as
they age out.For much less money and in less time,
the world can reduce greenhouse gas emissions
through the use of renewables like solar, wind,
hydropower and geothermal power, and by
transmitting, storing and using electricity more
efficiently. A recent analysis by the German
Environment Agency examined multiple global climate
scenarios in which Paris Climate Agreement targets
are met, and it found that renewable energy “is the
crucial and primary driver.”
The logic of this approach was attested to at the
climate meeting in Dubai, where more than 120
countries signed a more realistic commitment to triple
renewable energy capacity by 2030. There’s a certain
inevitability about the U.S. Energy Department’s latest
push for more nuclear energy. The agency’s
predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, brought
us Atoms for Peace under Dwight Eisenhower in the
1950s in a bid to develop the “peaceful” side of the
atom, hoping it would gain public acceptance of an
expanding arsenal of nuclear weapons while supplying
electricity “too cheap to meter.” Fast forward 70 years
and you hear a variation on the same theme. Most
notably, Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary under
President Barack Obama, argues that a vibrant
commercial nuclear sector is necessary to sustain U.S.
influence in nuclear weapons nonproliferation efforts
and global strategic stability. As a policy driver, this
argument might explain in part why the government
continues to push nuclear power as a climate solution,
despite its enormous cost and lengthy delivery time.
China and Russia are conspicuously absent from the
list of signatories to the Dubai pledge to triple nuclear
power, although China signed the declaration in
Brussels. China’s nuclear program is growing faster
than that of any other country, and Russia dominates
the global export market for reactors with projects in
countries new to commercial nuclear energy, such as
Turkey, Egypt and Bangladesh, as well as Iran.
Pledges and declarations on a global stage allow world
leaders a platform to be seen to be doing something to
address climate change even if, as is the case with
nuclear, they lack the financing and infrastructure to
succeed. But their support most likely means that
substantial sums of money — much of it from
taxpayers and ratepayers — will be wasted on
perpetuating the fantasy that nuclear energy will
make a difference in a meaningful time frame to slow
global warming. The U.S. government is already
poised to spend billions of dollars building new small
modular and “advanced” reactors and keeping aging
large ones running. But two such small reactor
projects based on conventional technologies have
already failed. Which raises the question: Will future
projects based on far more complex technologies be
more viable? Money for such projects — provided
mainly under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs
Act and the Inflation Reduction Act — could be
redirected in ways that do more for the climate and do
it faster, particularly if planned new nuclear projects
fail to materialize. There is already enough potential
generation capacity in the United States seeking
access to the grid to come close to achieving President
Biden’s 2035 goal of a zero-carbon electricity sector,
and 95 percent of it is solar, battery storage and wind.
But these projects face a hugely constrained
transmission system, regulatory and financial
roadblocks and entrenched utility interests, enough to
prevent many of them from ever providing electricity,
according to a report released last year by the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Even so,
existing transmission capacity can be doubled by
retrofitting transmission lines with advanced
conductors, which would offer at least a partial way
out of the gridlock for renewables, in addition to
storage, localized distribution & improved
management of supply and demand. What’s missing
are leaders willing to buck their own powerful nuclear
bureaucracies and choose paths that are far cheaper,
less dangerous and quicker to deploy. Without them
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we are doomed to more promises and wasteful
spending by nuclear proponents who have repeatedly
shown that they can talk but can’t deliver. (Authored
RETHINKING OF PAKISTAN'S RENEWABLES
WHY is renewable energy in the doldrums in Pakistan
despite annual oil import bills of $27 billion? There
are many explanations, but most common is the lack
of finance. No one wants to invest. Consider the case
of Pakistan’s flagship 600MW Muzaffargarh solar
power plant. In 2022 the government acquired over
2,500 acres of land, set a tariff, and invited
international investors to bid on a capital-friendly
Build, Own, Operate and Transfer basis. Not a single
bid was received despite multiple rounds, contractual
sweeteners, and an international roadshow to court
investors. Recently, Shehbaz Sharif directed that the
project be put up for auction yet again, and it remains
to be seen if anyone bites this time round. Why has no
one wanted to put their money in this project?
Analysts cite reasons ranging from the tariff being set
too low (which it was) to policy and political instability
and the ballooning circular debt. If even China can’t
get paid on time despite sovereign guarantees, why
would others feel secure? These explanations make
sense, but they do not go nearly far enough. The
problem is much deeper than tariffs and Pakistan’s
specific economic woes. A recent book (The Price is
Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet) by
Brett Christophers offers some perspective on why
wind and solar are unlikely to replace fossil fuels
anytime soon unless radical changes are made.
The argument is simple: while the cost of renewable
power is now lower than that of fossil fuels,
renewables are not a profitable business. The
particularities of the technology and consequent
market structure are the causal factors here. Barriers
to entry in solar and wind are significantly lower than
oil and gas because of the decentralised and variable
scales at which these technologies can be deployed.
Renewables, therefore, do not lend themselves to
monopoly power and protected high profits like oil and
gas do. Also, capital investments for renewables are
heavy upfront, with investors having to wait years —
even decades — to turn a profit. The private sector is,
therefore, unlikely to avert planetary crises unless
incentive structures are transformed through
extensive regulation or companies are ordered to serve
national objectives like during periods of war. This
should be a wake-up call for those who are expecting
private finance to play a major role in managing and
mitigating climate change. So far Western
governments have been wooing private finance with
subsidies and various ‘treats’ on the understanding
that once at scale, costs will come down, subsidies
will be phased out and private companies will then get
on with it. Christophers shows, however, that this is
definitively not happening. Where subsidies have been
wound down, capital has either stopped taking an
interest or exited. Additionally, while the rate of
renewable installation is at an all-time high, it is
nowhere near what it needs to be to meet even the
two-degree warming limit issued by the
DOES PAKISTAN STILL MATTER TO INDIA?
Among the many issues that will confront the
government that emerges from India’s upcoming
general election — running from April 19 through
June 1 — one of the most important will be what to do
about the country’s frayed relationship with its
troubled neighbor, Pakistan. The answer may be
simple: Not much. Until recently, there was some
by Stephanie Cooke. Published in The New York Times
on April 18, 2024)
Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change. It is
also highly geographically uneven. Sixty-four per cent
of renewable capacity installed last year was in China.
The G7 countries only accounted for 7.6pc between
them. Interestingly, China also happens to be the only
country in the world where private capital is not in
charge of energy infrastructure. Is that a coincidence?
Not quite. The profit motive is important for the state-
owned companies and state-owned banks running the
Chinese power sector, but it is not dominant. The
order of magnitude shift that we see in China’s
renewable capacity is the direct result of a radically
different mode of organisation, one in which the state
directs production and the private sector and profits
do not play the major role. Despite our ‘brotherly’
relationship with China though, we in Pakistan
remain in thrall to the idea of private sector-led
development. International development star Stefan
Dercon’s recent article in these pages repeated the
same tired advice that we have been hearing for 40
years. But no matter how rotten the public sector is
today, the task has to be to make it better. This is not
because public sector ownership guarantees better
social outcomes, but because it at least allows for the
possibility of socially responsive and socially
determined development.
Look at the power sector. Electricity demand dropped
nearly 10pc last year. Prices are such that people
cannot afford to electrify their homes and run their
fans and fridges. In part this is because of high fuel
prices, currency devaluation, and deteriorating plant
efficiencies. These factors are obviously challenging
but do not have to be crisis-inducing. It is the bait to
lure private investment — such as 30-year power
purchase agreements, sovereign guarantees, capacity
charges, and dollar indexation — that turn it into a
crisis. Making sure that capital gets its pound of flesh
has crippled the country. What is needed is massive
public-sector overhaul with a grassroots political
movement shaping the goals of public administration.
And perhaps as globalisation falters and states engage
more selectively with markets and each other, state-
led development could become more viable. Cleaning
up the mess in the power sector will create winners
and losers, just as the operation of the mess itself
does in no uncertain terms. In the clean-up though,
people and the environment need to be on the winning
side. This is not wishful thinking; it is setting
priorities. And renewables, despite their many
problems, have a role to play on the winning side for
economic, political, and environmental reasons. The
history of power sector reform in the country tells us,
however, that private companies will not cough up
money for renewable infrastructure unless the basic
well-being of the population is mortgaged in return. To
expect otherwise is foolish. (Authored by Asha Amirali.
Published in The New York Times on April 19, 2024)
hope that elections in both countries in the first half
of 2024 might create an opportunity for a fresh start.
But any optimism about the bilateral relationship’s
future quickly dissipated after Pakistan’s controversial
February election: With the popular former Prime
Minister Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-
Insaf Party having been barred from running, the new
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government’s legitimacy is widely challenged. A weak
Pakistani coalition government propped up by the
military is unlikely to be able to undertake any bold
diplomatic initiative toward India, especially because
Khan’s supporters, who consider themselves unfairly
deprived of power, are liable to challenge any
significant policy change. Under these circumstances,
India will probably be inclined to maintain its policy of
watchful “benign neglect” toward Pakistan. As it
stands, India and Pakistan maintain diplomatic
relations at the charge d’affaires level (a notch below
the ambassadorial level), but engage on few issues
and speak past each other in the few forums in which
they both participate. The South Asian Association for
Regional Cooperation has been left moribund by their
mutual hostility, having gone years without a meeting.
Moreover, bilateral trade is minimal and exchanges
among ordinary people are limited. Indian citizens
struggle to get visas to visit Pakistan, and vice versa.
Even in sporting events, the two countries rarely
compete with each other outside of international
tournaments. In short, India and Pakistan are next-
door neighbors who are not on speaking terms — and,
in India’s view, that is just fine. India could not always
afford to ignore Pakistan, which is blamed for long a
source of terrorism directed at India. Most notorious,
in November 2008, a terrorist organization from
Pakistan, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, carried out a four-day
shooting and bombing campaign in Mumbai, killing
over 170 people. The bilateral relationship never
recovered. In fact, there have been numerous
moments when a thaw seemed likely — for example,
during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
unplanned stopover in Lahore for then-Pakistani
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s birthday celebration in
2015. But progress has always been disrupted by
another Pakistani-directed terror attack.
As long as Pakistan was unable or unwilling to curb
Islamist terrorism from within its borders, India
concluded, better bilateral relations would remain
elusive. So, in 2019, when Pakistan withdrew its high
commissioner from Delhi in protest of Indian policy in
Kashmir, India did not resist; on the contrary, it
preferred things that way. Today, India has even less
reason to engage with Pakistan. With internal security
challenges — especially in its western borderlands of
Baluchistan (near Iran) and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
(near Afghanistan) — claiming its attention, Pakistan
has little capacity to launch any serious attack on its
neighbor. Instead, Pakistan’s military establishment,
led by Gen. Asim Munir, has been using those
internal security challenges — including those that
have arisen directly from groups Pakistan fostered as
weapons against India — as a pretext to consolidate
its control over the Pakistani state. It was Munir’s
HOW DEMOCRATIC STATES ARE REGULATING DIGITAL PLATFORMS
Digital platforms, including search engines, social
media and messaging apps, are indispensable
infrastructure for today’s democracy. Exchanges on
these digital platforms play a crucial role in setting
agendas and forming consensus within society.
However, at the same time, digital platforms have
been flooded with disinformation, allowing foreign
countries to conduct influence operations and leading
to widened social divides. This situation could
threaten the very foundation of democracy. While
digital platforms have worked as critical infrastructure,
most countries do not exert strict oversight over
digital platforms as they do with the power industry or
financial sector. As a result, solving critical challenges
regarding digital platforms is left to the platform
operators. Democratic states have recently been
predecessor, Gen. Qamar Jawed Bajwa, who in 2018
engineered the “managed election” of Imran Khan as
prime minister. The military was seeking an
alternative to the two main political parties — the
Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim
League — which had alternated in power since the
1970s. (Both had been repeatedly ousted by the
military leaders pulling strings behind the scenes.)
But Bajwa backed the wrong horse. Once in power,
Khan — a charismatic former cricket star with a
playboy image who had transformed himself into a
radical Islamist married to a Muslim religious figure —
was unwilling to play by the military’s rules.
Articulating a fiercely nationalist and Islamist
message, and questioning the military’s authority,
Khan increasingly asserted his independence — and
developed a strong national following.
By April 2022, the military had had enough and
arranged Khan’s dismissal. This was not an entirely
unpopular action abroad, as Khan had alienated
virtually all of Pakistan’s traditional allies. He had
celebrated the Taliban’s return to power in
Afghanistan, publicly accused the United States of
plotting to overthrow him and met with Russian
President Vladimir Putin in Moscow hours after Putin
launched Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Khan had also antagonized China by disparaging its
China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project. And, by
aligning Pakistan with Turkey and Malaysia on some
issues, he was seen as undermining Saudi Arabia’s
leadership of the Islamic world. In removing Khan, the
military seemed to be attempting to restore the old
Pakistan: a military-controlled state with a democratic
facade that maintains close relations with both the
U.S. (on which it depends for military assistance) and
China (which provides mostly civilian aid), while
seeking to profit from their rivalry. The military also
seeks to revive Pakistan’s old role in the Islamic world
as a moderate Saudi tributary and restore its carefully
cultivated image as the last defense against an
extreme Islamist takeover. But the world has changed
since Pakistan last played such games. The U.S. is
much less willing to turn a blind eye to Pakistani
duplicity than it used to be. Its troops are no longer in
Afghanistan, after all, and Pakistan — which is
increasingly a Chinese vassal — is not nearly as
useful a partner as India in America’s rivalry against
China. As for Saudi Arabia, it has embarked upon a
dizzying modernization program that is altering its
identity as a bastion of Islamic conservatism. So, India
can afford to look beyond Pakistan. And with an
economy 10 times larger than its neighbor’s, as well
as broad global ambitions, it is unlikely to rethink this
policy any time soon. (Authored by Shashi Tharoor.
Published in The Japan Times on April 10, 2024)
making efforts to regulate tech firms in order to
address these problems. This article will present a
blueprint and key points that need to be addressed.
Governance of digital platforms
Concerns have often been raised regarding tech
companies' internal control and corporate governance.
This applies not only to unlisted companies such as
SpaceX, at which one person serves as CEO and the
largest shareholder, but also to publicly listed
companies. In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Meta Platforms
temporarily permitted users to make posts that would
normally violate their rules on violent speech,
including those calling for Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s death. The firm reportedly took the step under
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the belief that banning such posts during wartime
would hamper the unity and resistance of Ukrainian
people against Russia. However, it later reverted its
policy closer to its original form after facing
controversy both within and outside the company.
During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, digital
platforms offered a stage for multiple and large-scale
interference by Russia, and in the 2020 U.S.
presidential election, the platforms became a hotbed
for conspiracy theories, including claims of “election
fraud.” Such conspiracy discourse led thousands of
supporters of then-U.S. President Donald Trump to
storm the U.S. Capitol building in January 2021.
Many Big Tech firms, including Twitter (now X),
suspended Trump’s accounts on their platforms as his
posts were believed to have incited the riots.
Media platforms banning an incumbent U.S. president
has major implications. Even then-German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, who had clashed with Trump over the
years, regarded the companies’ move as problematic.
Digital platform operators have not been able to
ensure transparency and foreseeability in their
decision-making process that has significant potential
impact on democracy, and governments are working
to regulate digital platforms under such recognition.
Regulations in Europe
Ahead of other democracies, the European Union
enacted two strict and comprehensive pieces of
legislation to regulate digital platforms. The Digital
Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA)
became applicable to all entities on Feb. 17 and
March 7 this year, respectively. The DSA holds digital
platform operators legally accountable for cracking
down on disinformation, harmful content and illegal
activities on their platforms. Specifically, the law
urges companies to strengthen their content
moderation and protection of users’ fundamental
rights, ensure a high level of safety for minors, and
improve their transparency and accountability. The
DSA is designed in a four-layer approach to
accommodate the various sizes and functions of
different online service providers. The most stringent
obligations are reserved for very large online platforms
and very large online search engines, which have the
greatest influence. Meanwhile, the DMA introduces
rules applicable to digital platforms designated to act
as “gatekeepers” to prevent them from imposing unfair
conditions on businesses and end users. Gatekeepers
are defined as providers of “core platform services” —
including app stores, search engines and social media
— that meet certain criteria based on factors such as
annual turnover, average market capitalization and
the number of active users. The law prohibits
gatekeepers from combining data sourced from
different core services without consent, bans them
from self-preferencing and guarantees the freedom of
smaller competitors to conduct business on digital
platforms. In a word, the DMA is an ex-ante regulation
to encourage competition on digital platforms.
Beijing’s approach to regulating tech firms appears
similar to that taken by Brussels but differs in nature.
The Chinese government adopts various ways to
oversee and control tech companies. One of the most
stringent tools is to acquire so-called “golden shares”
or “special management shares,” which grant the
government decisive voting rights or veto power over
the business decisions specified in the articles of
incorporation, even if the government holds stakes as
small as 1%. Such shares can be held only by the
Chinese government, and Aynne Kokas, an assistant
professor of media studies at the University of Virginia,
argues in her book “Trafficking Data” that Beijing is
pushing “partial nationalization” of such private firms
under the system. It is believed that the Chinese
government has obtained golden shares of Alibaba,
ByteDance, DiDi, Tencent and their subsidiaries to
tighten its grip over them.
Washington's approach
However, we shouldn’t come to the conclusion that
gaps in digital platform regulations are solely due to
the differences in political systems, nor should we
assume that the EU-type regulations represent the
mainstream in democratic states. The situation varies
on both sides of the Atlantic. Washington's approach
is not to create new laws or revise existing ones, but
to cope with issues related to competition brought
about by digital platforms in the process of executing
the laws. U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration
focused on dominant internet platforms in an
executive order on promoting competition in the
American economy issued in July 2021. The U.S.
Federal Trade Commission, led by Lina Khan, and the
Justice Department’s Antitrust Division have filed
lawsuits against Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple for
potentially breaching antitrust laws. The
strengthening of law enforcement is strongly
influenced by the school of thought referred to as the
“New Brandeis” movement. This paradigm emphasizes
citizen welfare and represents a marked departure
from the traditional and mainstream interpretation of
antitrust law focusing on consumer welfare. Yet, the
Biden administration’s law enforcement is limited to
competition policies, and it has taken a laissez-faire
approach to moderating online content. Both
Democrats and Republicans have proposed
regulations for digital platforms regarding content
moderation. However, new rules have failed to be
enacted due to them clashing with rights such as
freedom of expression. What lies behind this is
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and
related rulings that protect digital platform providers
from being held responsible for disinformation and
harmful content posted on their sites. Such an
environment has been what has supported the growth
of U.S. Big Tech firms.
Making digital platforms work for democracy
Tokyo, Washington, Brussels and Beijing are taking
different approaches to regulating Big Tech firms and
digital platforms. Which approach works best depends
on what values are seen as important, including
democracy, freedom and national security. This article
will list some points of discussion.
A list of platforms designated by EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA)
First, maintaining an environment for fair competition
on digital platforms and the issue of content
moderation are somewhat related but are different in
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nature. While the former is agreed upon in many
democracies, the latter causes great controversy. Free
and open societies and information environments are
vulnerable to malicious information manipulation. On
the other hand, excessive government intervention in
content moderation can make societies and
information environments authoritarian. The EU’s
DSA offers one way to balance between freedom and
safety, but it is not a universal model. Taiwan’s Digital
Intermediary Services Act, for which a draft proposal
was released in June 2022, was a Taiwanese version
of the DSA — a copy and paste of the DSA’s outline
and principles — but it was withdrawn, indicating
Taiwanese people’s concerns over the risk digital
platform regulations could pose to freedom.
Second, simply moderating content is not enough.
Needless to say, it is necessary to identify fake content
and the degree of harmfulness in posted videos and
texts, and take necessary actions.
However, today’s information manipulation involves
not only false information, but also malinformation —
accurate but intentionally malicious information —
and opinions for which fact-checking is not an option.
To address such information manipulation, platforms
must take behavior-centric countermeasures to delete
suspicious accounts and restrict unauthorized
activities not solely based on the contents themselves,
but also on the content posters’ authenticity and
methods of dissemination. In other words, they need
UNDERSTANDING CHINA’S POLITICAL ECONOMY
As China grapples with enormous challenges —
including an imploding property sector, unfavorable
demographics and slowing growth — doubts about the
future of the world’s largest growth engine are
intensifying. Add to that China’s geopolitical rise,
together with deepening tensions with the United
States, and the need to understand China’s political
economy is becoming more urgent than ever. A recent
book by MIT’s Yasheng Huang — "The Rise and Fall of
the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and
Technology Brought China Success, and Why They
Might Lead to Its Decline" — can help. Huang
unpacks the “EAST” heuristic from the historical
record of the last two and a half millennia, especially
the last 40 years, to arrive at a clear conclusion:
China must make radical changes if it is going to
realize its full development potential. Huang argues
that the seeds of China’s decline were planted as far
back as the 6th century, with the implementation of
the stifling Keju civil-service examination system. In
his view, this system provides an answer to the
historian Joseph Needham’s “grand question”: Why
did imperial China, with its profound scientific and
technological advantages, fail to launch its own
Industrial Revolution long before Europe did? Before
the Keju system was introduced, China was producing
some of history’s most transformative inventions,
such as gunpowder, the compass and paper. But
Huang’s empirical research suggests that Chinese
creativity peaked between 220 and 581, during the
rather chaotic Han-Sui Interregnum. “The first wave of
technological stagnation in China,” Huang observes,
“coincides with the end of China’s political
fragmentation.”
"The Rise and Fall of the EAST" does seem to overstate
some aspects of the historical record, in order to offer
a “cleaner” narrative than might be warranted. For
example, a dataset of prime ministerial resignations
forms the basis of Huang’s conclusion that, with the
introduction of Keju, checks and balances between
emperors and their bureaucrats disappeared in favor
to respond to what Meta calls “coordinated
inauthentic behavior.” While fact-checking
organizations and citizens can verify the accuracy of
contents, only digital platform providers can conduct
real-time detection and response to anomalies,
suspicious activities or inauthentic behavior. Third,
today’s malicious information manipulation,
particularly foreign interference and influence
operations, does not exploit only one digital platform.
Online propaganda networks across multiple digital
platforms pose severe challenges for tech companies
to cope with on their own. In other words, close
coordination across digital platform operators on an
operational level is indispensable to containing today's
cross-platform information manipulation. Fourth,
stringent regulations can be enforced during times of
crises and extraordinary events, such as wars,
pandemics, huge earthquakes or national elections.
As elections are being held in many democracies this
year, the technological innovations brought about by
large language models and generative artificial
intelligence will once again underscore the importance
and vulnerability of digital platforms. At the same time,
we will have the opportunity to accelerate debate over
how democratic countries make digital platforms
better for democracy. (TAKAHISA KAWAGUCHI.
Published in The Japan Times on April 28, 2024)
of a “symbiotic relationship.” The result is an almost
linear narrative of decline. But that is difficult to
square with the Qing dynasty’s “industrious
revolution,” during which China’s population more
than doubled and its share of global gross domestic
product reached one-third. Huang can also be
extremely perceptive, however, such as when he
challenges David Landes’s judgment that the state
kills technological progress. Instead, Huang argues
that “China’s early lead in technology was derived
critically — and possibly exclusively — from the role of
the state.” Quoting the Nobel laureate economist
Douglass North, he writes: “If you want to realize the
potential of modern technology, you cannot do it with
the state, but you cannot do without (the state),
either.” But what kind of state? In Huang’s view,
autocracy “has deep roots in China because of its
near-immaculate design, absence of civil society and
deep-seated values and norms.” But China’s tendency
toward “unitary rule,” he writes, is fundamentally
cultural, with the “causal direction” of autocracy
running “from culture to politics, not the other way
around.” Similarly, many modern Chinese scholars
blame China’s waning fortunes in the 19th and 20th
centuries on conservative Confucian ideology, which
lacked any spirit of discovery or impetus for risk-
taking. Huang even suggests that, in times when
Buddhists and Daoists represented a larger share of
prominent historical figures, relative to Confucians,
novel ideas were more likely to flourish. But there are
reasons to believe that China’s state structures and
policy preferences are not just cultural in origin, but
also — or perhaps rather — the result of deliberate
institutional arrangements. For example, China’s
business organizations are famously run by
domineering laoban, or bosses. In any case, a narrow
focus on China’s top-down structures can obscure the
bottom-up nature of many aspects of Chinese political
and economic life. As Huang notes, the Chinese
political economy is characterized not only by control,
but also by autonomy. While China has benefited from
state management, in the form of deliberate, top-down
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policies (exemplified by the government’s Five-Year
Plans), private initiatives that are bottom-up and
chaotic (such as entrepreneurial activity) have also
proved vital to its development. Understanding the
balance between control and autonomy is essential to
any assessment of the challenges China faces, from
unleashing “animal spirits” to implementing
institutional reforms.
"The Rise and Fall of the EAST" also considers why
China has so far managed to avoid what he calls
“Tullock’s curse” — the instability or conflict caused
by the bad and misaligned incentives that define
autocratic successions. But it might have benefited
from a deeper analysis of another phenomenon
explored by the economist Gordon Tullock: rent-
seeking. Any country’s economic- and human-
development trajectory is determined largely by
whether the elites use their power to create or to
extract value. Some degree of rent-seeking is probably
unavoidable. One might dismiss the “robber barons”
of 19th-century America as amoral, but the
Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegies and others played
a pivotal role in making the U.S. the world’s most
CAN WE TRUST THE POLLS? HOW EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES AFFECT DEMOCRACY
Do technologies change how democracy works, or do
democratic principles determine how technologies
work? With 2024 being a global election year — voters
having gone to or set to head to polls in more than 60
countries — a great deal of attention is being paid to
the relationship between emerging technologies and
democracy. Needless to say, elections are procedures
that form the cornerstone of democracy. Through
elections, voters select politicians and political parties
that represent their views and interests. If satisfied
with the performances of the politicians, voters may
reelect them in subsequent elections. Information
such as politicians’ manifestos, their
accomplishments during their tenure, their ideologies
and their personalities influence people’s voting
behavior. It has repeatedly been emphasized that the
development of information and communication
technology (ICT) has enhanced individuals’ ability to
gather and disseminate information, thereby
contributing to achieving democracy. However, what is
currently drawing attention is the risk posed to
democratic society by distorted voting behavior.
Who distorts elections?
In the mid-2010s when the concept of emerging
technologies began to come under the spotlight,
concerns arose regarding the unclear outlook of
technological development and the uncertainty
surrounding its social impact. Under such
circumstances, significant discussions began to
emerge regarding the actual risks associated with
rapidly developing and spreading technologies. This
led to rapid progressions in debates over how to
regulate them. The risks posed by information and
communication-related emerging technologies on
democracy can be broadly classified into two patterns.
One is the issue of foreign governments exerting
influence. Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election, targeting Democratic Party
candidate Hillary Clinton, became a prominent case
highlighting how the development of ICT can attract
foreign threats. A threat analysis report released by
Microsoft in September 2023 highlighted China’s
interference in societies and election processes in
other countries through cyberspace. It noted that in
recent years some Chinese influence operations have
begun to utilize generative artificial intelligence (AI) to
produce visual content. Such a situation can indeed
prosperous country. Likewise, the tech monopolies
created by the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg
continue to exemplify American innovation.
Unfortunately, Huang’s account lacks a nuanced
assessment of the relationship between rent-seeking
and value creation. He might have noted that China’s
“elite quality” is much higher than that of other
countries with the same per-capita GDP. Instead, it is
comparable to European Union countries with triple
China’s per-capita GDP. The fact is that sustainable
value creation underpinned China’s double-digit
growth rates for decades. Nonetheless, as Huang
makes clear, the development strategy that propelled
China’s rise over the last few decades has largely
reached its limits. Now, China must harness its
innovative potential and high-quality elites to spur its
animal spirits and strengthen its institutions, all while
pursuing greater liberalization. Whatever comes next
will be based on China’s unique traditional value
system, which, as Huang emphasizes, has
underpinned prosperity and innovation in the past.
And it will reflect the grit — not rigidity — that lies at
the core of China’s political economy. (ZHANG JUN.
Published in The Japan Times on March 14, 2024)
be considered a national security issue, as it involves
the external threat to a political system — essentially,
a country’s unique value. The other trend, which has
drawn even more attention recently, is the
development of emerging technologies leading to
election-related risks within a country.
Distorted information or discourses based on
misunderstanding are not solely spread by foreign
entities, but can also originate within a country and
can be propagated easily through cyberspace.
Furthermore, there are concerns that elections could
be deliberately manipulated not only through
information distortion, but also through digital
gerrymandering — utilizing ICT and digital data to
intentionally redraw electoral districts and generate
biased voting behavior. Discussions over how to utilize
and regulate such technologies also highlight the
issue of how governments should handle their
countries’ political systems and deal with the social
risks created within them.
Generative AI in elections
The technology that has caused the most concern
regarding its adverse effect on democracy in the past
year is generative AI. Generative AI involves the risks
arising from a user's intentions and behaviors,
alongside the frequently discussed risk of AI
autonomy potentially leading to unintended
consequences beyond human control. At the current
stage, there are cases in which election candidates
and campaigns disseminate information using
generative AI. In April 2023, following U.S. President
Joe Biden’s announcement of his reelection campaign,
the Republican National Committee released a video
on YouTube featuring images suggesting Biden’s
reelection would result in a series of crises relating to
international affairs and financial markets. The
caption underneath the YouTube video read, “An AI-
generated look into the country’s possible future if Joe
Biden is re-elected in 2024,” and the video was still
available at the time of writing. While the video
presents an imagined future scenario rather than
distorting facts, it serves as an example of attempts to
manipulate public opinion using generative AI. Still,
we can argue that the use of generative AI in this
manner represents an extension of negative
campaigning tactics conducted through existing
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media channels. In the context of impact on elections,
a more significant concern is the dissemination of
uncertain information originating from anonymous
sources. For instance, prior to last year's Turkish
presidential election, in which President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan was reelected, a video of his main challenger,
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, which was later found to have
been manipulated using deepfake technology, stirred
controversy. In Slovakia, days before parliamentary
elections in September, a fake recording seemingly
created using generative AI, in which one of the
candidates boasted about how he’d rigged the election,
spread widely online. In January, investigations
commenced in the United States following reports that
an apparent robocall utilized AI to mimic Biden's voice,
discouraging supporters of the Democratic Party from
going to the polls for the primary ballot of the U.S.
presidential election. Trust in elections will be eroded
if voters are to make decisions under the influence of
such information distortion.
Pushing for co-regulation
Although the risk of many people being swayed by
anonymous, sensational information of unknown
origin has been widely recognized, the option of not
using generative AI is no longer discussed due to the
usefulness of the technology. This is why today’s
challenge is focused on how to guarantee the
credibility of information sent out in cyberspace. It is
noteworthy that private companies are embarking on
self-regulation to manage risks, particularly with 2024
being a global election year. This development
represents a significant milestone in considering
future regulations regarding this issue. In early 2023,
companies such as OpenAI and Meta established
restrictions on the use of their generative AI tools in
political contexts. Later, in July, the Biden
administration obtained voluntary commitments from
major AI companies to mitigate the risks posed by AI,
and subsequently, based on this agreement, in
October the administration issued an executive order
on safe, secure and trustworthy AI. The executive
order represents a typical example of a co-regulation
model as it is founded on consensus reached with
private enterprises that implement the regulations.
From a global perspective, it is significant that
discussions regarding regulations are advancing,
including in China. At the global AI Safety Summit
held in the United Kingdom in November, leaders
shared their awareness of the risks posed by
generative AI affecting upcoming elections through
disinformation. This indicates that there is a broad
consensus regarding the necessity for regulations not
only among allies, but also China. The global response
AMERICA’S COMPETITION WITH CHINA MUST BE WON, NOT MANAGED
Amid a presidency beset by failures of deterrence—in
Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Middle East—the Biden
administration’s China policy has stood out as a
relative bright spot. The administration has
strengthened U.S. alliances in Asia, restricted Chinese
access to critical U.S. technologies, and endorsed the
bipartisan mood for competition. Yet the
administration is squandering these early gains by
falling into a familiar trap: prioritizing a short-term
thaw with China’s leaders at the expense of a long-
term victory over their malevolent strategy. The Biden
team’s policy of “managing competition” with Beijing
risks emphasizing processes over outcomes, bilateral
stability at the expense of global security, and
diplomatic initiatives that aim for cooperation but
generate only complacency. The United States
shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it
should win it. Beijing is pursuing a raft of global
to the risks is also made on the private-sector level. In
February, 20 major IT firms signed a voluntary accord
to help stop deceptive AI-generated content from
interfering with global elections. They pledged to
collaborate on measures such as developing
technology to detect and watermark realistic content
created with AI. The group includes not only U.S.
firms, but also TikTok, a Chinese company whose ties
with the Chinese Communist Party have often raised
concerns. At the same time, the U.S. government
announced the establishment of the AI Safety
Institute Consortium, through which more than 200
leading AI stakeholders agreed to cooperate in
developing guidelines for risk management, safety and
security. Governments and the private sector are
working together beyond national borders and
differing political systems to establish regulations on
generative AI.
Varying risks
However, are democratic and authoritarian regimes
facing the same risks? If the use of AI distorts
elections, it would doubtlessly present a major risk,
particularly for democratic political systems. On the
other hand, even China is concerned that technologies
like generative AI could be used as a tool to criticize
authorities, which suggests there is an incentive for
implementing certain regulations. This indicates that
the same technology is perceived as having different
risks depending on the kind of political systems
adopted. If both democratic and authoritarian states
perceive technologies like AI as posing risks, albeit in
different forms, they may cooperate in creating
regulations. However, we must note that due to
differing political systems, benefits from such
cooperation could be asymmetrical. Technological
regulations implemented with the aim of protecting
freedom in democratic states could potentially become
rules to excessively restrict freedom of expression and
media unfavorable for authorities under authoritarian
states. Yet, recognition regarding AI regulation may
vary even within democratic states. While they share a
common understanding that risks posed to democracy
by cyberspace and generative AI must be properly
managed, their perspectives on individual rights and
democracy may differ. If there is a gap between their
interpretations of what should be protected, the
discrepancy — along with differences in the
technological trends and industrial structure of each
country — could lead to friction among countries in
forming specific rules. (KOUSUKE SAITOU. Published
in The Japan Times on April 16, 2024)
initiatives designed to disintegrate the West and usher
in an antidemocratic order. It is underwriting
expansionist dictatorships in Russia, Iran, North
Korea, and Venezuela. It has more than doubled its
nuclear arsenal since 2020 and is building up its
conventional forces faster than any country has since
World War II. These actions show that China isn’t
aiming for a stalemate. Neither should America. What
would winning look like? China’s communist rulers
would give up trying to prevail in a hot or cold conflict
with the United States and its friends. And the
Chinese people—from ruling elites to everyday
citizens—would find inspiration to explore new models
of development and governance that don’t rely on
repression at home and compulsive hostility abroad.
In addition to having greater clarity about its end goal,
the United States needs to accept that achieving it will
require greater friction in U.S.-Chinese relations.
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Washington will need to adopt rhetoric and policies
that may feel uncomfortably confrontational but in
fact are necessary to reestablish boundaries that
Beijing and its acolytes are violating. That means
imposing costs on Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his
policy of fostering global chaos. It means speaking
with candor about the ways China is hurting U.S.
interests. It means rapidly increasing U.S. defense
capabilities to achieve unmistakable qualitative
advantages over Beijing. It means severing China’s
access to Western technology and frustrating Xi’s
efforts to convert his country’s wealth into military
power. And it means pursuing intensive diplomacy
with Beijing only from a position of American strength,
as perceived by both Washington and Beijing. No
country should relish waging another cold war. Yet a
cold war is already being waged against the United
States by China’s leaders. Rather than denying the
existence of this struggle, Washington should own it
and win it. Lukewarm statements that pretend as if
there is no cold war perversely court a hot war; they
signal complacency to the American people and
conciliation to Chinese leaders. Like the original Cold
War, the new cold war will not be won through half
measures or timid rhetoric. Victory requires openly
admitting that a totalitarian regime that commits
genocide, fuels conflict, and threatens war will never
be a reliable partner. Like the discredited détente
policies that Washington adopted in the 1970s to deal
with the Soviet Union, the current approach will yield
little cooperation from Chinese leaders while fortifying
their conviction that they can destabilize the world
with impunity.
. and Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a
BIDEN’S NEW BASELINE
The administration’s China policy initially showed
promise. President Joe Biden maintained the tariffs
that President Donald Trump had imposed on Chinese
exports in response to the rampant theft of U.S.
intellectual property. He renewed, with some
adjustments, the executive orders Trump had issued
to restrict investment in certain companies affiliated
with the Chinese military and to block the import of
Chinese technologies deemed a national security
threat. In a particularly important step, in October
2022, Biden significantly expanded the Trump
administration’s controls on the export of high-end
semiconductors and the equipment used to make
them, slowing Beijing’s plans to dominate the
manufacturing of advanced microchips. Across Asia,
Biden’s diplomats pulled longtime allies and newer
partners closer together. They organized the first
summits of the Quad, or Quadrilateral Security
Dialogue, bringing together the leaders of Australia,
India, Japan, and the United States, and convened
high-profile trilateral summits with the leaders of
Japan and South Korea. Biden also unveiled AUKUS,
a defense pact among Australia, the United Kingdom,
and the United States. As it turned out, however,
aggression would come from the opposite direction, in
Europe. Less than three weeks before invading
Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin had signed
a “no limits” security pact with Xi in Beijing. In a
prudent step after the invasion, Biden drew a redline
by warning Xi in a video call that the U.S. government
would impose sweeping sanctions if China provided
“material support” to Moscow. Xi nonetheless found
plenty of ways to support the Russian war machine,
sending semiconductors, unarmed drones, gunpowder,
and other wares. China also supplied Moscow with
badly needed money in exchange for major shipments
of Russian oil. Chinese officials, according to the U.S.
State Department, even spent more money on pro-
Russian propaganda worldwide than Russia itself was
spending. Beijing was also coordinating more closely
with Iran and North Korea, even as those regimes sent
weapons to help Moscow wage war in Europe. Yet
Washington was pursuing siloed policies—
simultaneously resisting Russia, appeasing Iran,
containing North Korea, and pursuing a mix of rivalry
and engagement with China—that added up to
something manifestly incoherent. Indeed, the
situation that Xi had forecast at the start of the Biden
administration was becoming a reality: “The most
important characteristic of the world is, in a word,
‘chaos,’ and this trend appears likely to continue,” Xi
told a seminar of high-level Communist Party officials
in January 2021. Xi made clear that this was a useful
development for China. “The times and trends are on
our side,” he said, adding, “Overall, the opportunities
outweigh the challenges.” By March 2023, Xi had
revealed that he saw himself not just as a beneficiary
of worldwide turmoil but also as one of its architects.
“Right now, there are changes, the likes of which we
haven’t seen for 100 years,” he said to Putin on
camera while wrapping up a visit to the Kremlin. “And
we are the ones driving these changes together.” If
ever the time was ripe to call out Beijing for fomenting
chaos and to start systematically imposing costs on
the country in response, it was early 2023. Biden,
inexplicably, was doing the opposite. On February 1,
residents of Montana spotted a massive, white sphere
drifting eastward. The administration was already
tracking the Chinese spy balloon but had been
planning to let it pass overhead without notifying the
public. Under political pressure, Biden ordered the
balloon shot down once it reached the Atlantic Ocean,
scheduled trip to Beijing to protest the intrusion.
Press reports suggested the administration had kept
quiet about the balloon in order to gather intelligence
about it. But a troubling pattern of downplaying
affronts by Beijing would persist in other contexts.
In June 2023, leaks to the press revealed that Beijing,
in a remarkable echo of the Cold War, was planning to
build a joint military training base in Cuba and had
already developed a signals intelligence facility there
targeting the United States. After a National Security
Council spokesperson called reports about the spy
facility inaccurate, a White House official speaking
anonymously to the press minimized them by
suggesting that Chinese spying from Cuba was “not a
new development.” The administration also greeted
with a shrug new evidence suggesting that COVID-19
may have initially spread after it accidentally leaked
from a Chinese laboratory. If the virus, which has led
to the deaths of an estimated 27 million people
worldwide, turns out to have been artificially
enhanced before it escaped, the revelation would mark
a turning point in human history on par with the
advent of nuclear weapons—a situation that already
cries out for U.S. leadership to govern dangerous
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biological research worldwide. In the spring of 2023,
as Beijing’s actions grew bolder, Biden initiated what
the White House termed an “all hands on deck”
diplomatic campaign—not to impose costs on Beijing
but to flatter it by dispatching five cabinet-level U.S.
officials to China from May to August. Blinken’s June
meeting with Xi symbolized the dynamic. Whereas Xi
had sat amiably alongside the billionaire Bill Gates
just days earlier, the U.S. secretary of state was
seated off to the side as Xi held forth from the head of
a table at the Great Hall of the People. For the first
time in years, Xi appeared to have successfully
positioned the United States as supplicant in the
bilateral relationship. What did the United States get
in return for all this diplomacy? In the Biden
administration’s tally, the benefits included a promise
by Beijing to resume military-to-military talks (which
Beijing had unilaterally suspended), a new dialogue
on the responsible use of artificial intelligence
(technology that Beijing is already weaponizing
against the American people by spreading fake images
and other propaganda on social media), and tentative
cooperation to stem the flood of precursor chemicals
fueling the fentanyl crisis in the United States
(chemicals that are supplied mainly by Chinese
companies). Any doubts that Xi saw the American
posture as one of weakness were dispelled after
Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel. Beijing
exploited the attack by serving up endless anti-Israeli
and anti-American propaganda through TikTok,
whose algorithms are subject to control by the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Chinese diplomats,
like Russian ones, met with Hamas’s leaders and
provided diplomatic cover for the terrorist group,
vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that would
have condemned Hamas. And there is little sign
Beijing has done anything, despite Washington’s
requests, to help rein in attacks carried out by the
Houthis on commercial vessels and U.S. warships in
the Red Sea—attacks conducted by the Yemeni rebel
group using Iranian missiles, including ones with
technology pioneered by China. (Chinese ships,
unsurprisingly, are usually granted free passage
through the kill zone.) Whether Xi is acting
opportunistically or according to a grand design—or,
almost certainly, both—it is clear he sees advantage in
stoking crises that he hopes will exhaust the United
States and its allies. In a sobering Oval Office address
in mid-October, Biden seemed to grasp the severity of
the situation. “We’re facing an inflection point in
history—one of those moments where the decisions we
make today are going to determine the future for
decades to come,” he said. Yet bizarrely—indeed,
provocatively—he made no mention of China, the chief
sponsor of the aggressors he did call out in the speech:
Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Through omission,
Biden gave Beijing a pass.
THAT ’70S SHOW
The current moment bears an uncanny resemblance
to the 1970s. The Soviet Union was undermining U.S.
interests across the world, offering no warning of its
ally Egypt’s 1973 surprise attack on Israel; aiding
communists in Angola, Portugal, and Vietnam; and
rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal and investing
heavily in its conventional military. These were the
bitter fruits of détente—a set of policies pioneered by
President Richard Nixon and his top foreign policy
adviser, Henry Kissinger, who stayed on and
continued the approach under President Gerald Ford.
By using pressure and inducement, as well as
downplaying ideological differences, the United States
tried to lure the Russians into a stable equilibrium of
global power. Under détente, Washington slashed
defense spending and soft-pedaled Moscow’s human
rights affronts. The working assumption was that the
Soviet Union’s appetite for destabilizing actions
abroad would somehow be self-limiting. But the
Russians had their own ideas about the utility of
détente. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis observed,
the Soviets “might have viewed détente as their own
instrument for inducing complacency in the West
while they finished assembling the ultimate means of
applying pressure—their emergence as a full-scale
military rival of the United States.” Nixon and
Kissinger thought détente would secure Soviet help in
managing crises around the world and, as Gaddis put
it, “enmesh the U.S.S.R. in a network of economic
relationships that would make it difficult, if not
impossible, for the Russians to take actions in the
future detrimental to Western interests.” But the
policy failed to achieve its goals. President Jimmy
Carter came into office in 1977 intending to keep
détente in place, but the policy didn’t work for him
either. His attempt to “de-link” Soviet actions that
hurt U.S. interests from Soviet cooperation on arms
control ultimately yielded setbacks in both categories.
The Soviets became more aggressive globally, and a
wary U.S. Congress, having lost faith in Moscow’s
sincerity, declined to ratify SALT II, the arms control
treaty that Carter’s team had painstakingly negotiated.
Meanwhile, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national
security adviser, had grown increasingly skeptical of
détente. Brzezinski felt that a turning point had come
in 1978, after the Soviets sponsored thousands of
Cuban soldiers to wage violent revolution in the Horn
of Africa, supporting Ethiopia in its war with Somalia.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the following year
was “the final nail in the coffin” for arms control talks,
Brzezinski wrote in his journal—and for the broader
policy of détente. By the time President Ronald
Reagan entered the White House, in 1981, Nixon and
Kissinger’s invention was on its last legs. “Détente’s
been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used
to pursue its aims,” Reagan stated flatly in his first
press conference as president, effectively burying the
concept. Reagan sought to win, not merely manage,
the Cold War. In a sharp departure from his
immediate predecessors, he spoke candidly about the
nature of the Soviet threat, recognizing that autocrats
often bully democracies into silence by depicting
honesty as a form of aggression. In 1987, when
Reagan was preparing to give a speech within sight of
the Berlin Wall, some of his aides begged him to
remove a phrase they found gratuitously provocative.
Wisely, he overruled them and delivered the most
iconic line of his presidency: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear
down this wall.”
THE SMOKELESS WAR
Washington must adopt a similar attitude today and
try harder to disseminate truthful information within
China itself and to make it possible for Chinese
citizens to communicate securely with one another.
Tearing down—or at least blowing holes in—the “Great
Firewall” of China must become as central to
Washington’s approach today as removing the Berlin
Wall was for Reagan’s. Beijing is waging a bitter
information war against the United States—which is
losing, despite its natural advantages. Xi and his
inner circle see themselves as fighting an existential
ideological campaign against the West, as Xi’s words
from an official publication in 2014 make clear: "The
battle for “mind control” happens on a smokeless
battlefield. It happens inside the domain of ideology.
Whoever controls this battlefield can win hearts. They
will have the initiative throughout the competition and
combat. . . . When it comes to combat in the ideology
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domain, we don’t have any room for compromise or
retreat. We must achieve total victory." For Xi, the
Internet is the “main battlefield” of this smokeless war.
In 2020, the scholar Yuan Peng, writing before he
resurfaced under a new name as a vice minister of
China’s premier spy agency, also recognized the power
of controlling speech online: “In the Internet era . . .
what is truth and what is a lie is already unimportant;
what’s important is who controls discourse power.” Xi
has poured billions of dollars into building and
harnessing what he calls “external discourse
mechanisms,” and other Chinese leaders have
specifically highlighted short-video platforms such as
TikTok as the “megaphones” of discourse power. They
aren’t afraid to use those megaphones. According to a
February 2024 report from the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence, TikTok accounts run by Chinese
propaganda outfits “reportedly targeted candidates
from both political parties during the U.S. midterm
election cycle in 2022.” As the CCP seeks to set the
terms of global discourse, what it wants more than
anything from the United States and the rest of the
West is silence—silence about China’s human rights
abuses, silence about its aggression toward Taiwan,
and silence about the West’s own deeply held beliefs,
which contrast irreconcilably with the party’s. It is no
surprise, then, that so much of the CCP’s strategy on
the smokeless battlefield is about drowning out
speech it doesn’t like—both inside and outside China.
It is American silence—not candor—that is truly
provocative, for it signals to the CCP that China is
advancing and the United States is retreating.
REARM, REDUCE, RECRUIT
What U.S. officials need first is clarity about the
contest with China. They have to recognize that rising
tensions are inevitable in the short run if the United
States is to deter war and win the contest in the long
run. Once they have faced these facts, they need to
put in place a better policy: one that rearms the U.S.
military, reduces China’s economic leverage, and
recruits a broader coalition to confront China. Xi is
preparing his country for a war over Taiwan. On its
current trajectory, the United States risks failing to
deter that war, one that could kill tens of thousands of
U.S. service members, inflict trillions of dollars in
economic damage, and bring about the end of the
global order as we know it. The only path to avoid this
future is for Washington to immediately build and
surge enough hard power to deny Xi a successful
invasion of Taiwan. Yet the Biden administration’s
latest budget request sheds badly needed combat
power, proposing the retirement of ten ships and 250
aircraft and a drop in the production goal for Virginia-
class submarines from two per year to just one. It
replenishes only half the $1 billion that Congress
authorized for the president to furnish military aid to
Taiwan. And in its 2023 supplemental request, the
White House asked for just over $5 billion in weapons
and industrial base spending earmarked for the Indo-
Pacific—barely five percent of the entire supplemental
request. Looking at the budget trend line, one would
think it was 1994, not 2024. The Biden
administration should immediately change course,
reversing what are, in inflation-adjusted terms, cuts to
defense spending. Instead of spending about three
percent of GDP on defense, Washington should spend
four or even five percent, a level that would still be at
the low end of Cold War spending. For near-term
deterrence in the Taiwan Strait, it should spend an
additional $20 billion per year for the next five years,
the rough amount needed to surge and disperse
sufficient combat power in Asia. Ideally, this money
would be held in a dedicated “deterrence fund”
overseen by the secretary of defense, who would
award resources to projects that best align with the
defense of Taiwan. The deterrence fund should
headline a generational effort directed by the
president to restore U.S. primacy in Asia. The priority
should be to maximize existing production lines and
build new production capacity for critical munitions
for Asia, such as antiship and antiaircraft missiles
that can destroy enemy targets at great distances. The
Pentagon should also draw on the deterrence fund to
adapt existing military systems or even civilian
technology such as commercially available drones that
could be useful for defending Taiwan. Complementing
its Replicator Initiative, which tasks the services to
field thousands of low-cost drones to turn the Taiwan
Strait into what some have called “a boiling moat,” the
Pentagon should quickly embrace other creative
solutions. It could, for example, disperse missile
launchers concealed in commercial container boxes or
field the Powered Joint Direct Attack Munition, a low-
cost kit that turns standard 500-pound bombs into
precision-guided cruise missiles.
For U.S. forces to actually deter China, they need to
be able to move within striking range. Given the
maritime geography of the Indo-Pacific and the threat
that China’s vast missile arsenal poses to U.S. bases,
the State Department will need to expand hosting and
access agreements with allies and partners to extend
the U.S. military’s footprint in the region. The
Pentagon, meanwhile, will need to harden U.S.
military installations across the region and pre-
position critical supplies such as fuel, ammunition,
and equipment throughout the Pacific. But the United
States could keep the Chinese military contained and
still lose the new cold war if China held the West
hostage economically. Beijing is bent on weaponizing
its stranglehold over global supply chains and its
dominance of critical emerging technologies. To
reduce Chinese leverage and ensure that the United
States, not China, develops the key technologies of the
future, Washington needs to reset the terms of the
bilateral economic relationship. It should start by
repealing China’s permanent normal trade relations
status, which provides China access to U.S. markets
on generous terms, and moving China to a new tariff
column that features gradually increasing rates on
products critical to U.S. national security and
economic competitiveness. The revenue raised from
increased tariffs could be spent on offsetting the costs
that U.S. exporters will incur as a result of China’s
inevitable retaliatory measures and on bolstering U.S.
supply chains for strategically important products.
Washington must also halt the flow of American
money and technology to Chinese companies that
support Beijing’s military buildup and high-tech
surveillance system. The Biden administration’s
August 2023 executive order restricting a subset of
outbound investment to China was an important step
in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough.
Washington must expand investment restrictions to
include critical and emerging technologies such as
hypersonics, space systems, and new biotechnologies.
It must also put an end to U.S. financial firms’
disturbing practice of offering publicly traded financial
products, such as exchange-traded funds and mutual
funds, that invest in Chinese companies that are on
U.S. government blacklists. Using the current export
controls on advanced semiconductors as a model, the
Department of Commerce should reduce the flow of
critical technology to China by introducing similar
export bans on other key areas of U.S. innovation,
such as quantum computing and biotechnology.
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As China doubles down on economic self-reliance and
phases out imports of industrial goods from the West,
the United States needs to recruit a coalition of
friendly partners to deepen mutual trade. Washington
should strike a bilateral trade agreement with the
United Kingdom. It should upgrade its bilateral trade
agreement with Japan and establish a new one with
Taiwan, agreements that could be joined by other
eligible economies in the region. It should forge an
Indo-Pacific digital trade agreement that would
facilitate the free flow of data between like-minded
economies, using as a baseline the high standards set
by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. To overhaul
its dilapidated defense industrial base, the United
States should turbocharge innovation in the defense
industry by recruiting talented workers from allied
countries. Every year, the U.S. government authorizes
roughly 10,000 visas through the EB-5 program,
which allows immigrants to obtain a green card if they
invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in American
businesses. The program is rife with fraud and has
deviated far from its intended purpose as a job-
creation program, becoming mostly a method for
millionaires from China and other places to become
permanent residents. These visas should be
repurposed as work authorizations for citizens of
partner countries who hold advanced degrees in fields
critical to defense. The U.S. government also needs to
recruit the next generation of cold warriors to apply
their talents to the contest with China. It should start
by reversing the crisis in military recruitment—not by
lowering standards, promising easy pay, or infusing
the force with diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology
but by unapologetically touting the virtues of an elite,
colorblind, all-volunteer force and challenging young
Americans to step up. The intelligence community
also needs to recruit experts in emerging technology,
finance, and open-source research and make it easier
to temporarily leave the private sector for a stint in
government. National security agencies need to
cultivate deep expertise in Asia and in the history and
ideology of the CCP. The curricula of the service
academies and war colleges, as well as ongoing
professional military education, should reflect this
shift. Finally, U.S. officials need to recruit everyday
Americans to contribute to the fight. For all the
differences between the Soviet Union yesterday and
China today, U.S. policymakers’ squeamishness about
the term “cold war” causes them to overlook the way it
can mobilize society. A cold war offers a relatable
framework that Americans can use to guide their own
decisions—such as a company’s choice whether to set
up a sensitive research and development center in
China or an individual’s choice whether to download
TikTok. Too often, however, elected officials on the left
and the right give the impression that the competition
with China is so narrow in scope that Americans can
take such steps without worry. The contest with
Beijing, they would have people believe, shouldn’t
much concern ordinary citizens but will be handled
through surgically precise White House policies and
congressional legislation.
CHINA AS A NORMAL COUNTRY
It is a peculiar feature of U.S. foreign policy today that
the elephant in the room—the end state Washington
desires in its competition with Beijing—is such a
taboo subject that administrations come and go
without ever articulating a clear goal for how the
competition ends. The Biden administration offers up
managing competition as a goal, but that is not a goal;
it is a method, and a counterproductive one at that.
Washington is allowing the aim of its China policy to
become process: meetings that should be instruments
through which the United States advances its
interests become core objectives in and of themselves.
Washington should not fear the end state desired by a
growing number of Chinese: a China that is able to
chart its own course free from communist dictatorship.
Xi’s draconian rule has persuaded even many CCP
members that the system that produced China’s
recent precipitous decline in prosperity, status, and
individual happiness is one that deserves
reexamination. The system that produced an all-
encompassing surveillance state, forced-labor colonies,
and the genocide of minority groups inside its borders
is one that likewise desecrates Chinese philosophy
and religion—the fountainheads from which a better
model will eventually spring. Generations of American
leaders understood that it would have been
unacceptable for the Cold War to end through war or
U.S. capitulation. If the 1970s taught Washington
anything, it is that trying to achieve a stable and
durable balance of power—a détente—with a powerful
and ambitious Leninist dictatorship is also doomed to
backfire on the United States. The best strategy,
which found its ultimate synthesis in the Reagan
years, was to convince the Soviets that they were on a
path to lose, which in turn fueled doubts about their
whole system.
The U.S. victory wasn’t Reagan’s alone, of course. It
was built on strategies forged by presidents of both
parties and manifested in documents such as NSC-68,
the 1950 Truman administration policy paper that
argued that the United States’ “policy and actions
must be such as to foster a fundamental change in
the nature of the Soviet system.” One can draw a
straight line from that document to National Security
Decision Directive 75, the 1983 Reagan
administration order that called for “internal pressure
on the USSR to weaken the sources of Soviet
imperialism.” In some ways, it was the détente years,
not the Reagan years, that were an aberration in Cold
War strategy. Ironically, Reagan would end up
pursuing a more fulsome and productive engagement
with the Soviets than perhaps any of his
predecessors—but only after he had strengthened
Washington’s economic, military, and moral standing
relative to Moscow and only after the Soviet Union
produced a leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom
Reagan could make real progress. Reagan understood
that sequencing was everything. He also knew that the
confrontational first phase wouldn’t be easy or
comfortable. His first directive on national security
strategy, in May 1982, predicted, “The decade of the
eighties will likely pose the greatest challenge to our
survival and well-being since World War II.” It was a
tense and unsettling period, to be sure, during which
Reagan called out the Soviet Union as “the focus of
evil in the modern world” and deliberately sought to
weaken its economy and contest its destabilizing
activities around the world. Yet it paid off. Xi, who has
vilified Gorbachev and fashioned his own leadership
style after that of Joseph Stalin, has proved time and
again that he is not a leader with whom Americans
can solve problems. He is an agent of chaos.
Washington should seek to weaken the sources of
CCP imperialism and hold out for a Chinese leader
who behaves less like an unrelenting foe. This does
not mean forcible regime change, subversion, or war.
But it does mean seeking truth from facts, as Chinese
leaders are fond of saying, and understanding that the
CCP has no desire to coexist indefinitely with great
powers that promote liberal values and thus represent
a fundamental threat to its rule. The current mass
exodus of Chinese people from their homeland is
evidence they want to live in nations that respect
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human rights, honor the rule of law, and offer a wide
choice of opportunities. As Taiwan’s example makes
plain, China could be such a place, too. The road to
get there might be long. But for the United States’ own
security, as well as the rights and aspirations of all
AI, SOVEREIGNTY AND ISAAC ASIMOV’S WARNING
Isaac Asimov’s classic I, Robot (1950) insightfully
explored the ethical and moral implications of robotics
and artificial intelligence. The book’s interconnected
stories about robots guided by the Three Laws of
Robotics highlight the challenges in ensuring AI’s
safety and alignment with human values. Asimov
illustrates the limitations of these laws and AI’s
unpredictable nature, with quotes like, “You can’t
argue with a robot. They’re terribly rational”, reflecting
concerns about AI acting against human interests.
The book forces one to ponder about the dangers of AI
being manipulated by adversaries, potentially turning
against humans. As a fictional yet prescient work, I,
Robot underscores the importance of ethical
standards and security measures in AI development to
prevent it from undermining national sovereignty.
Since algorithms are devoid of national allegiance or
moral judgement, the challenge before the world is not
just to develop this technology but to develop the
frameworks to ensure it serves humanity and not the
other way around. The lack of a unified global
framework for overseeing AI, coupled with the absence
of national-level regulatory measures, poses a
significant risk to national security and sovereignty in
four distinct ways. First, AI is reshaping traditional
notions of sovereignty, challenging the power
dynamics between states, private technology
companies, and individuals. As AI systems become
more autonomous, they are creating new digital
spaces that are not governed by traditional laws or
state control. These digital spaces, defined by code
and data, can be seen as new forms of sovereignty
where power is wielded by those who control the AI
systems. The emergence of AI has ushered in a new
era of digital sovereignty, fundamentally altering the
concept of territorial sovereignty. This transition
impacts how nations control their digital domains and
AI technologies. Countries lacking in AI development
and regulation may find themselves reliant on more
advanced nations, risking their sovereignty across
sectors like defence, infrastructure, and healthcare.
Additionally, the rise of AI shifts power from states to
private tech companies and individuals who dominate
these digital spaces. Though these entities don’t
possess traditional sovereignty, their influence
challenges state authority and could reshape global
political dynamics. Second, AI has the potential to
significantly impact democracy, particularly when
leveraged by foreign powers. It can be used to
manipulate information and influence public opinion,
which is a critical aspect of democratic societies. For
example, AI can generate disinformation and
misinformation at scale, which can trigger tensions
and even electoral-related conflict and violence. Such
AI-driven false information can spread biases or
opinions that do not represent public sentiment,
thereby affecting the democratic process negatively.
Moreover, foreign powers can utilise AI to conduct
influence campaigns that are more sophisticated and
less detectable. These campaigns can exacerbate
divisions within societies, seed nihilism about the
existence of objective truth, and weaken democratic
systems from within. The borderless nature of AI
makes it difficult to control or regulate, and as AI
technology becomes more advanced, it could be used
those in China, it is the only workable destination.
(Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher. Published in
Foreign Affairs on April 10, 2024)
by authoritarian regimes, terrorist groups, and
organised crime groups to cause great harm.
Third, Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS),
often termed “killer robots”, present a profound threat
to national security and sovereignty, raising critical
ethical and technical challenges. From a technical
standpoint, LAWS, equipped with advanced AI
algorithms, can independently search for, identify,
and engage targets without human intervention. This
capability poses a risk of unintended escalation in
military conflicts, as these systems might act based on
pre-programmed criteria, lacking human judgement
and context awareness, potentially leading to
indiscriminate or erroneous targeting. Moreover, the
risk of hacking or malfunctioning of these systems
could result in catastrophic incidents, undermining
national security. Ethically, the deployment of LAWS
challenges the fundamental principles of
humanitarian law and responsibility. The absence of
human oversight in the decision-making process of
life and death raises significant moral questions about
accountability. The principle of distinction, a
cornerstone of international humanitarian law,
mandates the differentiation between combatants and
non-combatants. LAWS, reliant on algorithms for
decision-making, may lack the nuanced
understanding necessary to make these distinctions,
risking civilian lives and violating international norms.
The proliferation of LAWS could lead to an arms race,
destabilising international peace and security. As
these weapons become more accessible, the barrier to
entering conflicts lowers, potentially leading to
increased warfare and undermining national
sovereignty. The lack of regulation and control over
LAWS also presents a threat to the global order, as
non-state actors might acquire and use these systems
for terrorism or insurgency. This autonomy
undermines deterrence theory, which relies on
rational human actors to maintain balance and avoid
conflict through the threat of retaliation. The
unpredictability of LAWS disrupts this balance,
potentially leading to uncontrolled escalations.
Furthermore, the prospect of an arms race in
autonomous weapons technology threatens global
stability as nations prioritise technological
advancement over diplomatic and strategic
equilibrium. Fourth, the integration of AI into
cybersecurity represents a dual-edged sword, where
its potential for sophisticated cyberattacks directly
threatens national security and sovereignty. AI-
enhanced methods, such as advanced persistent
threats and spear phishing, can penetrate and disrupt
critical national infrastructures, undermining the
stability and functioning of a state. Such disruptions
not only pose immediate security risks but also
threaten the economic and social well-being of nations.
These threats extend beyond physical borders, as
cyberattacks can originate from any location, making
safeguarding national interests in the increasingly
interconnected digital world challenging. The
implications for national security are profound,
requiring nations to reassess their cybersecurity
strategies and invest in advanced defences.
Safeguarding against these AI-enhanced threats is
crucial for maintaining national sovereignty, ensuring
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Articulate | April 2024, Volume 1
that states retain control over their critical
infrastructure, information systems, and the
democratic processes that define their governance.
In light of these challenges, it becomes evident that
the world urgently requires a robust global AI
governance body. Such an entity is essential to ensure
UN SECURITY COUNCIL REFORM IS A SONG IN A LOOP
More than three decades after the debate first started
over fundamental reforms at the United Nations (UN),
the issue appears to have resurfaced at the ongoing
General Assembly session of the world body. President
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Türkiye was blunt: “The
Security Council has ceased to be the guarantor of
world security and has become a battleground for the
political strategies of only five countries.” Even the
UN’s Secretary-General, António Guterres, issued a
stern warning: “The world has changed. Our
institutions have not. We cannot effectively address
problems as they are if institutions do not reflect the
world as it is. Instead of solving problems, they risk
becoming part of the problem.” It could not have been
put more bluntly, but we have heard this song before.
Politically, it is untenable that the five permanent
members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom,
and the United States) enjoy their position, and the
privilege of a veto over any Council resolution or
decision, merely by virtue of having won a war 76
years ago. In the case of China, the word ‘won’ needs
to be placed within inverted commas. I was serving at
the UN when then-Secretary General Boutros
Boutros- Ghali declared that Security Council reform
must be accomplished in time for the 50th
anniversary of the world organisation in 1995. But
even as the urgent rhetoric continues to be spoken,
the organisation has missed not only the 50th
anniversary of the UN, but even the 60th, the 70th
and now the 75th. Left to their own devices, member-
states will be arguing the merits of the case well past
the UN’s centenary.
An unjust situation in terms of equity The problem
of reforming the Security Council is akin to a malady
in which a number of doctors gather around a patient;
they all agree on the diagnosis but they cannot agree
on the prescription. The diagnosis is clear — the
Security Council reflects the geopolitical realities of
1945 and not of today. When the UN was founded in
1945, the Council consisted of 11 members out of a
total UN membership of 51 countries; in other words,
some 22% of the member states were on the Security
Council. Today, there are 193 member-states of the
UN, and only 15 members of the Council — fewer than
8%. The one change ever made to the original Charter
was in 1965 when the Security Council was expanded
from 11 members to 15 by adding four more elected
non-permanent members. So, many more countries,
both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the
membership, do not feel adequately represented on
the body. The composition of the Council also gives
undue weightage to the balance of power of those days.
Europe, for instance, which accounts for barely 5% of
the world’s population, still controls 33% of the seats
in any given year (and that does not count Russia,
another European power). In terms of simple
considerations of equity, this situation is unjust: for
starters, to those countries whose financial
contributions to the UN outweigh those of four of the
five permanent members — Japan and Germany have
for decades been the second and third largest
contributors to the UN budget, while still being
referred to as ‘enemy states’ in the United Nations
Charter (since the UN was set up by the victorious
that AI advancements serve humanity’s broader
interests, rather than the contrary. Alongside this,
there is a critical need for evolving national-level
regulations tailored to address AI’s unique threats to
sovereignty and national security. (Aditya Sinha.
Published in Indian Express on February 29, 2024)
Allies of the Second World War). And it denies
opportunities to other states such as India, which by
its sheer size of population, share of the world
economy, or contributions in kind to the UN (through
participation in peacekeeping operations, for example)
have helped shape the evolution of world affairs in the
seven decades since the organisation was born.
Stances by countries So, the Security Council is
clearly ripe for reform to bring it into the second
quarter of the 21st century. But for every state that
feels it deserves a place on the Security Council, and
especially the handful of countries which believe their
status in the world ought to be recognised as being in
no way inferior to at least three of the existing
permanent members, there are several who know they
will not benefit from any reform. The small countries
that make up more than half the UN’s membership
accept that reality and are content to compete
occasionally for a two-year non-permanent seat on the
Council. But the medium-sized and large countries,
which are the rivals of the prospective beneficiaries,
deeply resent the prospect of a select few breaking free
of their current second-rank status in the world body.
Many are openly animated by a spirit of competition,
historical grievance or simple envy. They have
successfully and indefinitely thwarted reform of the
membership of the Security Council. Part of the
problem is that the bar to amending the UN Charter
has been set rather high. Any amendment requires a
two-thirds majority of the overall membership, in
other words 129 of the 193 states in the General
Assembly, and would further have to be ratified by
two-thirds of the member states. Ratification is
usually a parliamentary procedure, so, in other words,
the only ‘prescription’ that has any chance of passing
is one that will both persuade two-thirds of the UN
member-states to support it and not attract the
opposition of any of the existing permanent five — or
even that of a powerful U.S. Senator who could block
ratification in Washington. That has proved to be a
tall order indeed. India’s credentials may seem
obvious to us, but China is none too keen on diluting
its status as the only Asian permanent member;
Pakistan, which fancies itself as India’s strategic rival
on the subcontinent, is unalterably opposed; and to
some extent Indonesia seems to feel diminished by the
prospect of an Indian seat. In Latin America, Brazil
occupies a place analogous to India’s in Asia, but
Argentina and Mexico have other ideas, pointing to
Portuguese-speaking Brazil’s inferior credentials in
representing largely Hispanic Latin America. And
while Africa, given that it accounts for 54 member-
states, insists on two permanent seats, how is one to
adjudicate the rival credentials of the continent’s
largest democracy, Nigeria, its historically largest
economy, South Africa, and its oldest civilization,
Egypt? Another proposal suggests creating a second
category of “semi-permanent members” to
accommodate such states for, say, 10-year electable
terms. It has found no takers among the principal
aspirants.
Continuing gridlock So, while the debate keeps
going round in circles for decades, gridlock continues
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in the Security Council, as most vividly illustrated
recently over the Ukraine conflict, when a Permanent
Member of the Security Council invaded a sovereign
UN member-state and the Council proved powerless to
respond. Russia’s increasing resort to the veto has
blocked resolutions on Ukraine, Mali, Syria and North
Korea. Similar obstructionism by the West has
affected proposals to reform the financial institutions
THE WAR ON GAZA AND AMERICA’S PARADOXICAL ROLE
Over 34,000 people are dead, i.e., nearly 33,000
Palestinians, 1,200 Israelis, 97 journalists and media
workers, and hundreds of aid workers. Most of the
Israeli casualties were the result of the attack by
Hamas on October 7, 2023. And over 100 hostages
still remain unaccounted for. However, the Israeli
attack that has followed since that day of terror, is
one of the worst in humanity. The tragedy is playing
out on live broadcast and people cannot plead
ignorance. It is important to remember that the
conflict did not start on October 7. There has been
growing criticism of Israel for this massacre, but its
western allies are equally culpable, most notably the
United States.
Hypocrisy of neutrality
Historically, the U.S. has been the primary supporter
of Israeli statehood. It was the first country to
recognise it. The U.S. has helped Israel’s survival in
an extremely hostile neighbourhood. Superficially, it
has led efforts for the two-state solution following the
1973 Arab-Israel war in various forms including U.S.
President Jimmy Carter’s Camp David talks, Bill
Clinton’s Parameters for the two-state solution,
George Bush’s Road Map to Peace, and U.S. Secretary
of State John Kerry’s Six Principles. The U.S. may act
as a neutral arbiter but has been the force behind
Israel’s settler colonialism. It has regularly vetoed to
protect Israel from UNSC resolutions claiming the UN,
an organisation designed and dominated by the U.S.
and its allies, is biased against the Jewish state. The
U.S. is Israel’s largest trading partner and its aid
contributes to 16% of Israel’s military expenditure.
The Arab-Israel ties normalisation drive, often
brokered by America, has gradually removed the
Palestinian cause from Arab politics. If Israeli settler
colonialism is a monster, then the U.S. is Dr.
Frankenstein. The American hypocrisy of neutrality
was most visible in President Donald Trump’s ‘Peace
to Prosperity’ plan, a brainchild of Jared Kushner,
which proposed to further take away land from the
Palestinians, hand Jerusalem to Israel, and failed to
provide Palestinians with the right to return or have a
military defence after statehood. It was a completely
pro-Israel plan and rightly rejected by the Palestinian
Authority.
Under the Biden administration
Under the Biden administration, U.S.-Israel relations
have been relatively low due to Benjamin Netanyahu’s
attack on the judiciary, the coalition with the far right,
and the attack on the Al Aqsa mosque. But the work
on the Abraham Accords continued and the
fundamentals of Israel-U.S. ties remained strong.
Therefore, it was no surprise that Joe Biden in his
October 10, 2023 address (“Remarks by President
Biden on the Terrorist Attacks in Israel”) stated that
‘the United States has Israel’s back’. Despite domestic
fiscal pressure, Mr. Biden has bankrolled Israel’s war
established at Bretton Woods in 1944, the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund. And yet this is
the only global system we have got that brings all
countries together on a common platform. Can we
afford to let it fade into ineffectiveness and irrelevance?
(SHASHI THAROOR. Published in the Hindu on
October 12, 2023)
on Gaza. The U.S. is also at the forefront of rallying
western allies such as the United Kingdom, Canada,
and France behind Israel’s right to defend itself while
fuelling a live genocide. It blocked a resolution for a
humanitarian pause early on in the crisis. The
administration even bypassed the Congress to allow
weapons sales to Israel. But Israel’s near absolute
destruction of Gaza and a possible full-scale invasion
of Rafah are testing the American limits as well. Mr.
Biden is facing pressure from within the Democratic
party which is pushing for a ceasefire, provision of aid
for the Palestinians, and conditioning support to Israel.
There is a growing rift between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr.
Biden when it comes to the course of action in the
coming weeks. The U.S. also abstained from voting on
a UNSC resolution calling for a ceasefire. The Houthis’
disruption of Bab el-Mandeb and Iran’s retaliation
after the Israeli attack on its consulate in Damascus
can have a domino effect. The unwillingness of the
West to influence Israel may lead the states to
sleepwalk into a region-wide violent conflict. The
domestic factors are equally important in
understanding Mr. Biden’s policy. With the upcoming
election, the Trump campaign will pursue
grandstanding with an eye on the American Jewish
community and the Evangelical Christians. Mr. Biden,
keen to build a broad voter base, may end in
brinkmanship with Mr. Trump. There is only one
winner in that contest.
On true leadership
The people, like the students in Columbia, have
shown more spine than the American leadership. A
case has even been filed against the Biden
administration in court for its complicity in the
genocide. Globally, countries such as South Africa
and Bangladesh have shown true Global South
leadership, unlike the states that merely seek the title.
In a painful irony, it is not the murder of over 25,000
women and children but the death of seven World
Central Kitchen workers that shook the American
leadership. This grim reality underscores a perennial
truth in global politics: all lives are equal, but some
are more equal than others. Despite its unique
position to influence peace, the U.S. continues to play
a paradoxical role, simultaneously capable of ending
violence and perpetuating the status quo, as
evidenced by its recent veto against full recognition of
Palestine. As the world watches, Israel’s war on Gaza
serves as a brutal reminder of the high costs of
geopolitical manoeuvres and the real-world impact of
normless international diplomacy. (CHETAN RANA.
Published in the Hindu on April 26, 2024)
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