In the wake of America’s assassination of Iran’s Qud’s Force commander and regional string-puller Qasem Soleimani, The Intercept went back into their cache of leaked Iranian intelligence reports from Iraq... Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

… read how Iranian intelligence talked about Qasem Soleimani.

In the wake of America’s assassination of Iran’s Qud’s Force commander and regional string-puller Qasem Soleimani, The Intercept went back into their cache of leaked Iranian intelligence reports from Iraq to put together a profile [[link removed]] of the late leader. The cables are not from Soleimani’s wing of Iran’s security apparatus, and their tone reflects the organizational frictions that often crop up between intelligence-gathering operations and paramilitary groups. Iranian spies saw Soleimani, who was famous for having his picture taken on the front lines of the fight against ISIS, as a self-promoter whose brutal tactics could hurt Iran’s position in Iraq in the long run. Though Shiite militias Soleimani supported played crucial roles in defeating ISIS in Iraq, sectarian violence perpetrated by those same militias could create “bitterness” against Iran, one spy warned.

OFAC, we lost

The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) did something last week that it doesn’t do very often: lost [[link removed]] in court. OFAC administers America’s various financial sanctions regimes and within that remit, it has broad powers to investigate and punish individuals and companies that do business with figures the government deems too unsavory. Last week, though, a federal judge ruled that it had overstepped its bounds when it slapped ExxonMobil with a $2 million fine for doing a deal with its Russian counterpart, Rosneft.

Rosneft is not a sanctions target as a company, but its CEO, the oligarch Igor Sechin, certainly is. Sechin signed the deal in question, but the judge said that Sechin’s signature on a deal with a non-sanctioned company doesn’t make that deal a sanctions violation.

According to sanctions expert Richard Nephew, the significance of the case is not so much its specifics as it is that OFAC lost in court on a sanctions fine at all. As Nephew tweeted [[link removed]], the decision is likely to change risk-tolerance calculations among multinational companies and may make OFAC less likely to act aggressively in the future.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] How’s the climate crisis going?

Elizabeth Kolbert, who has taken up the apocalypse beat for the New Yorker in recent years, wrote [[link removed]]a decade-end check-in on humanity’s progress toward making Earth too hot for human life to continue. In case you haven’t been paying attention, we’re still doing great at doing terrible.

Ongoing wildfires that have destroyed over 9 million acres of Australia and killed over 19 people and hundreds of millions of animals are creating so much smoke that the smoke is gathering into clouds, which produce lightning, which starts more fires.

Last month, at the United Nations Climate Change conference in Madrid, it was Australia that joined the US in holding up further action to reduce carbon emissions, even as the bushfires grew.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Fighting to Elect: Part II

Last week on Deep Dive, we examined some of the structural factors that predict violence in the runup to elections. This week, we’ll look at recent research on what happens after a ruling party tries to gain an electoral advantage by assaulting opposition voters.

University of California, Davis political scientist Lauren Young applied a psychological lens to that question in an article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Peace Research. Young noticed that responses to violent state repression during electoral campaigns in Zimbabwe varied widely among Zimbabweans. Violence cowed some people who might otherwise have engaged in opposition politics, but the same violence emboldened others, pushing them to work harder to unseat the ruling ZANU-PF party.

Reasoning that the difference between people who were intimidated by electoral violence and people who were primarily angered by it was something about the mindset of the people themselves, Young interviewed 41 opposition sympathizers in Zimbabwe, who did varying levels of work for opposition political parties. Opposition activists in Zimbabwe face extensive state violence, from public beatings and torture to killings. When Young asked opposition sympathizers how they responded to state threats, she found that one way their answers differed was in the amount of confidence they had in their abilities to deal with violent situations. Some respondents spoke with fear about a range of past atrocities committed against prominent opposition activists, but others chose to showcase their own cool under fire. One opposition organizer said that dealing with violence was just part of the job for “people of [his] caliber,” and an opposition candidate said that they managed risk using their “defensive instincts” to be “able to talk to aggressive people, police or all that sort of thing, and [know] how far you can push.”

To Young, that confidence sounded like a personality trait psychologists call “self-efficacy,” which is a belief in the ability to control your environment even in difficult situations. People with more self-efficacy, she hypothesized, were likely to be more energized by the threat of violence than cowed by it. To test that theory, she ran an experiment. She asked a mix of opposition supporters and activists to predict their responses to a randomized selection of violent state actions, from threats to killings. She also tested participants’ levels of self-efficacy using a set of questions long established in psychology.

Her experimental data matched her qualitative observations: People with higher levels of self-efficacy were both more likely to say they would attend opposition rallies in the face of violence and were more likely to be made angry by state attacks. People with lower self-efficacy, however, were much less willing to consider attending opposition rallies after state violence and tended to respond to that violence with fear rather than anger.

The distinction, Young argues, is important because the kinds of people who are driven to engage in political activism by violent state repression are crucial to creating political change. Without those first movers, it is nearly impossible to build a collective movement that may one day have the strength to protect people who sympathize with the opposition but are too afraid to join. If we know that self-efficacy can produce those first movers, the question for political organizers then becomes: How can we generate self-efficacy in repressive environments?

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Shirin Jaafari profiled [[link removed]] Kataib Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shiite militia that attacked the US Embassy in Baghdad early last week. The group has a very close relationship with Iran, and Kataib Hezbollah founder Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was killed alongside the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, in an American air strike last week. The US government designated Kataib Hezbollah a terrorist organization in 2009 following repeated attacks against US forces in Iraq.

Alex Spire described [[link removed]] the state of US-Iran relations before Soleimani’s assassination. The return of American sanctions on Iran as part of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign has meant economic disaster for Iran and sometimes life-threatening hardship for Iranian civilians. The sanctions are a violation of US commitments from the Iran nuclear deal and Iran has responded with increased aggression in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

Priti Salian spoke [[link removed]] to journalists involved in Amal, Berlin!, a Berlin-based online news outlet that publishes in Arabic, Farsi, and Dari. Amal, founded by German journalists Cornelia and Julia Gerlach, employs refugee reporters who have a hard time finding news jobs in Germany and covers news relevant to refugees in Germany. Germany currently hosts 1.4 million refugees, many of whom read in the languages Amal publishes.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

Turns out you can use it for literally anything [[link removed]].

The only things more darkly humorous than the logos of state organizations dedicated to violence are the logos of state organizations that apparently [[link removed]] wish they were dedicated to violence.

Last week’s largest internet mood was teens [[link removed]] posting about trying to avoid a World War III in which they would do the lion’s share of the killing and dying. If you need a guide to the memes of the draftable (those registered for sLOLective service, the generation who all have one draft number and it’s 69, etc. etc.), Jamie Withorne has you covered [[link removed]] over at Inkstick.

For the nerdier teens, the last couple weeks have also brought the advent of “Nuclear Memes for Atomic Teens,” [[link removed]] one of the truly great Twitter accounts of our time. It’s got the memes you know [[link removed]], the nuclear history [[link removed]] you may not [[link removed]], and the self-awareness [[link removed]] to bring it all together.

The Canadian Armed Forces used [[link removed]] “Adapt to a fad they don’t really understand.” It’s… actually somewhat effective? If nothing else, it gave us this [[link removed]] email for the ages.

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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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