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CRITICAL STATE
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Your weekly foreign policy fix.
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If you read just one thing…
...read about how nuclear technology finds its way to South Asia.
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In theory, it should be difficult for India and Pakistan to expand their nuclear weapons programs. Pakistan faces a range of international restrictions on its ability to buy nuclear-related technology over the table, and India keeps International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors away from a number of its nuclear facilities, which should be a deal-breaker for many suppliers. In reality, a new report shows, the world’s most dangerous nuclear dyad is continuing its arms race just fine. Analyzing 750 million trade records, researchers identified trade networks that allow both countries to effectively launder materials and technology for their nuclear programs, saving themselves and their suppliers from
international scrutiny.
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Mask off
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As the scale of the COVID-19 crisis became apparent, the United States made hundreds of millions of dollars available to help other countries fight the virus. Last week, a new rule from the Trump administration made that money basically useless to many countries by banning recipients from using it to buy masks, gloves, ventilators and other key COVID-19 response equipment.
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The rule, which prompted the otherwise buttoned-up New Humanitarian to print the term “ass-backwards,” prohibits recipients from using aid funds to buy personal protective equipment (PPE) from anywhere, not just the US.
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The US, caught flat-footed by COVID-19, has its own PPE shortages, and the rule seems to be a version of medical mercantilism, in which the goal is for the US to control the most of a scarce commodity. However, given the dominant role the US plays in the health infrastructure of countries like Afghanistan and Haiti, the rule effectively removes those countries’ ability to fight the virus using existing structures.
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DON’T GIVE YOUR TALK SHOW A STUPID NAME
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Newly-released documents offer a tick tock of how repressive regimes find ways to get good public relations with world powers. Back in the late 1970s, when Argentina was controlled by a military junta that disappeared over 30,000 people, the Argentine regime paid the American PR firm Burson-Marsteller to burnish its image. Among the things their money bought them was William F. Buckley.
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Burson-Marsteller organized press junkets for American journalists, including one where Buckley brought his talk show to Buenos Aires to interview regime defenders. That Buckley’s show was called “Firing Line” apparently gave no one involved any pause.
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Buckley later retracted a column he wrote about the experience in which he excused the regime’s violence by saying “it is extremely difficult to fine-tune an anti-terrorist campaign.” By then, however, the junta was out of power and the damage already done.
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This week on Midnight Oil, we speak to Muna Luqman, a Yemeni peace activist, co-founder of the Women Solidarity Network, chairperson of Food4Humanity, and a member of the Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership. Her work focuses on peacebuilding and growing women- and youth-led organizations in Yemen.
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WHAT IS THE HARDEST PROBLEM YOU WORK ON?
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When the war in Yemen started, the thing that most concerned and saddened me was watching the young men and boys joining the fight. They had so much anger, and I wanted to give them an alternative way to use that anger rather than signing up with militant groups. I use humanitarian work to mobilize them to work with me instead of fighting, because it is necessary work that restores peoples’ hope and humanity and eventually works to counteract that anger.
We’ve had success, but there are a lot of challenges to making that strategy sustainable. For starters, when you are removing young men from militant recruiting pools, it angers the warring parties who want to recruit them, and I had warring parties target me. It has also been a struggle, especially at first, to raise the money necessary to do that work, since major international donors have been reticent to support our work.
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HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT TRYING TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?
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At the start, I was trying to do anything to keep the community away from violence. At the time, I was already providing food and water for families who were in the crossfire, and I needed help, so I reached out on Facebook. I already had a strong reputation in the community, and, as I’ve found, young people look up to credible women, so local youth responded and started joining me. Our work kept a lot of people fed in some very difficult circumstances.
Once I had those young people with me, I needed to keep them, so I started following their interests. We began creating and attending conferences and trainings, and, within severe funding restraints, we tried to create youth-led projects. To respond to youth demand, we started trainings on creating awareness about the war and on conflict resolution. Then we added mediation trainings, because we had to find ways to open humanitarian corridors in the conflict zone in order to get supplies to civilians in need. Then we expanded into working with orphans and building houses, and then we opened the first mercy bakery in Yemen to provide free bread to people. All this expansion was driven by what young people wanted to do and were capable of doing, and it gave them worthwhile ways to help their community and respond to the horrors of the war without actually joining the war.
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Tom Carstensen spoke to Danish parents who are concerned that schools in Denmark are reopening too early after being closed due to COVID-19. Elementary and middle schools have been open since mid-April, but some parents are organizing online to slow the reopening process. Their concerns include worries that younger children will have a hard time following safety guidelines and that children who contract COVID-19 in school, even if they are asymptomatic, may infect older, at-risk family members at home. The Danish government appears poised to move forward with more reopenings, however, including high schools.
Catherine Chou explored the geopolitical effects of COVID-19 on Taiwan. Taiwan has managed the virus remarkably well, but has seen its long struggle for international recognition as an independent country take a step back in the face of Chinese pressure. The World Health Organization (WHO) in particular has gone out of its way to deny Taiwan’s independence out of deference to China, leaving Taiwan cut off from WHO assistance during the pandemic. Taiwan has responded with robust contact tracing and domestic mask production, which have kept COVID-19 largely at bay and allowed Taiwanese schools and businesses to stay open.
Mariana Zúñiga reported on the fuel crisis in Caracas, Venezuela. With refineries closed due to COVID-19 and US sanctions preventing fuel imports, oil-rich Venezuela is currently unable to supply enough gasoline to keep many gas stations open. Those that still have fuel to sell are open at certain times only to doctors and other frontline workers in the effort against COVID-19. Black market fuel sales are picking up, but with government fuel subsidies not reaching the black market, prices are often too high for regular Venezuelans to pay.
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The Ghanaian pallbearer meme is everywhere these days, including in the streets of Lebanon as people there protest the government’s economic mismanagement.
Animal Crossing, a game where players gradually work off their onerous debt to an adorable raccoon capitalist, might have a more compelling labor history than you’d expect.
Speaking of labor history, the threat of COVID-19 to underpaid frontline workers like grocery store clerks and delivery people makes this May Day particularly poignant and new examples of corporate motivation-speak particularly egregious.
Wilbur, presumably, is more interested in civil aviation.
These mug shots are art.
Looking forward to the movie version of this poster, with a time-traveling Salah ad-Din fighting Rommel’s Nazi armies in North Africa.
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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX, BBC, and WGBH.
With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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