Remuneraciones de paisanos en EU, 350% superiores a las de México

Braulio Carbajal

Periódico La Jornada

Domingo 31 de julio de 2022, p. 13

https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/07/31/economia/013n2eco

La masa salarial, es decir, el total de las remuneraciones de los trabajadores de origen mexicano, nativos e inmigrantes en Estados Unidos, es 350 por ciento superior a lo que perciben todas las personas con un trabajo formal en México, revelan cifras del Centro de Estudios Monetarios Latinoamericanos (Cemla).

De acuerdo con el organismo, la masa salarial anual de los mexicanos en EU asciende a 722 mil 689 millones de dólares, mientras que en México, la de los trabajadores afiliados al Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS) es de únicamente 158 mil 78 millones de dólares.

El mayor volumen de remuneraciones totales en EU se da pese a que en ese país el número de trabajadores de origen mexicano es menor que aquí.

Datos del Cemla indican que en el país vecino laboran aproximadamente 17 millones 300 mil mexicanos, ya sean inmigrantes o que nacieron allá siendo hijos de éstos; en cambio, en México, la cantidad de trabajadores formales, es decir, los registrados en el IMSS, son alrededor de 21 millones.

Lo anterior significa que en EU, 17 por ciento menos trabajadores obtienen aproximadamente 4.5 veces más ingresos que todos los que laboran en México.

De acuerdo con datos del organismo, incluso si se toma en cuenta únicamente a los trabajadores inmigrantes mexicanos que laboran en EU, la diferencia es sobresaliente, pues 7.3 millones en esa condición generan una masa salarial de 282 mil millones de dólares, es decir, 79 por ciento más que todos los registrados en el IMSS.

Los mexicanos que habitan en EU han enviado a México recursos por 22 mil 413 millones de dólares en los primeros cinco meses del año; sólo en mayo pasado las remesas sumaron 5 mil 172 millones de dólares, ambas cifras sin precedentes.

Superan el PIB de varios países

De acuerdo con los datos del Cemla, la masa salarial de los trabajadores de origen mexicano, nativos e inmigrantes, en Estados Unidos, es equivalente a 55 por ciento del producto interno Bruto (PIB) de México, que actualmente asciende a un billón 295 mil millones de dólares.

Las remuneraciones de los mexicanos en EU (722 mil 689 millones de dólares) son inclusive más altas que el PIB de varios países.

Por ejemplo, superan los 674 mil millones de dólares del PIB de Polonia, los 627 mil millones de Suecia, los 599 mil millones de Bélgica, los 491 mil millones de Argentina, así como los 482 mil millones de Noruega, 317 mil millones de Chile, 314 mil millones de Colombia y 223 mil millones de Perú, entre otras.

Entre los países de América Latina, la masa salarial de los mexicanos en EU sólo es superada por el PIB de Brasil (un billón 608 millones de dólares) y México (un billón 295 mil millones); aunque está muy lejos del PIB de las principales economías del mundo: EU (23 billones de dólares) y China (17 billones 700 mil millones de dólares).

De acuerdo con datos de la Oficina de Censos de Estados Unidos, entre los 62 millones 647 mil personas hispanas que habitan ese país, los mexicanos son el principal grupo, pues suman 36 millones 537 mil, lo que equivale a 61.6 por ciento.

Luego sigue la población puertorriqueña, con 5 millones 699 mil, equivalente a 9.6 por ciento de los hispanos; la cubana, con 2 millones 332 mil, que representa 3.9 por ciento, y la salvadoreña, con 2 millones 244 mil, que son 3.8 por ciento del total.

Does Anyone Still Understand the ‘Security Dilemma’?

A bit of classic IR theory goes a long way toward explaining vexing global problems.

By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

JULY 26, 2022, 

https://archive.ph/3uSzY

The “security dilemma” is a central concept in the academic study of international politics and foreign policy. First coined by John Herz in 1950 and subsequently analyzed in detail by such scholars as Robert Jervis, Charles Glaser, and others, the security dilemma describes how the actions that one state takes to make itself more secure—building armaments, putting military forces on alert, forming new alliances—tend to make other states less secure and lead them to respond in kind. The result is a tightening spiral of hostility that leaves neither side better off than before.

If you’ve taken a basic international relations class in college and didn’t learn about this concept, you may want to contact your registrar and ask for a refund. Yet given its simplicity and its importance, I’m frequently struck by how often the people charged with handling foreign and national security policy seem to be unaware of it—not just in the United States, but in lots of other countries too.

Consider this recent propaganda video tweeted out from NATO headquarters, responding to assorted Russian “myths” about the alliance. The video points out that NATO is a purely defensive alliance and says it harbors no aggressive designs against Russia. These assurances might be factually correct, but the security dilemma explains why Russia isn’t likely to take them at face value and might have valid reasons to regard NATO’s eastward expansion as threatening.

Adding new members to NATO may have made some of these states more secure (which is why they wanted to join), but it should be obvious why Russia might not see it this way and that it might do various objectionable things in response (like seizing Crimea or invading Ukraine). NATO officials might regard Russia’s fears as fanciful or as “myths,” but that hardly means that they are completely absurd or that Russians don’t genuinely believe them. Remarkably, plenty of smart, well-educated Westerners—including some prominent former diplomats—cannot seem to grasp that their benevolent intentions are not transparently obvious to others.

Or consider the deeply suspicious and highly conflictual relationship between Iran, the United States, and the United States’ most important Middle East clients. U.S. officials presumably believe that imposing harsh sanctions on Iran, threatening it with regime change, conducting cyberattacks against its nuclear infrastructure, and helping organize regional coalitions against it will make the United States and its local partners more secure. For its part, Israel thinks assassinating Iranian scientists enhances its security, and Saudi Arabia thinks intervening in Yemen makes Riyadh safer.

Not surprisingly, according to basic IR theory, Iran sees these various actions as threatening and responds in its own fashion: backing Hezbollah, supporting the Houthis in Yemen, conducting attacks on oil facilities and shipments, and—most important of all—developing the latent capacity to build its own nuclear deterrent. But these predictable responses just reinforce its neighbors’ fears and make them feel less secure all over again, tightening the spiral further and heightening the risk of war.

The same dynamic is operating in Asia. Not surprisingly, China regards America’s long position of regional influence—and especially its network of military bases and its naval and air presence—as a potential threat. As it has grown wealthier, Beijing has quite understandably used some of that wealth to build military forces that can challenge the U.S. position. (Ironically, the George W. Bush administration once tried to tell China that pursuing greater military strength was an “outdated path” that would “hamper its own pursuit of national greatness,” even as Washington’s own military spending soared.)

In recent years, China has sought to alter the existing status quo in several areas. As should surprise no one, these actions have made some of China’s neighbors less secure. They have responded by moving closer together politically, renewing ties with the United States, and building up their own military forces, leading Beijing to accuse Washington of a well-orchestrated effort to “contain” it and of trying to keep China permanently vulnerable.

In all these cases, each side’s efforts to deal with what it regards as a potential security problem merely reinforced the other side’s own security fears, thereby triggering a response that strengthened the former’s original concerns. Each side sees what it is doing as a purely defensive reaction to the other side’s behavior, and identifying “who started it” soon becomes effectively impossible.

The key insight is that aggressive behavior—such as the use of force—does not necessarily arise from evil or aggressive motivations (i.e., the pure desire for wealth, glory, or power for its own sake). Yet when leaders believe their own motives are purely defensive and that this fact should be obvious to others (as the NATO video described above suggests), they will tend to see an opponent’s hostile reaction as evidence of greed, innate belligerence, or an evil foreign leader’s malicious and unappeasable ambitions. Empathy goes out the window, and diplomacy soon becomes a competition in name-calling.

To be sure, a few world leaders have understood this problem and pursued policies that tried to mitigate the security dilemma’s pernicious effects. After the Cuban missile crisis, for example, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made a serious and successful effort to reduce the risk of future confrontations by installing the famous hotline and beginning a serious effort at nuclear arms control.

The Obama administration did something similar when it negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran, which it saw as a first step that blocked Iran’s path to the bomb and opened up the possibility of improving relations over time. The first part of the deal worked, and the Trump administration’s subsequent decision to abandon it was a massive blunder that left all the parties worse off. As the former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo has observed, Israel’s extensive efforts to convince then-U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw from the deal was “one of the most serious strategic mistakes since the establishment of the state.”

As the writer Robert Wright recently pointed out, then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision not to send arms to Ukraine after the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014 showed a similar appreciation of security dilemma logic. In Wright’s telling, Obama understood that sending Ukraine offensive weapons might exacerbate Russian fears and encourage the Ukrainians to think they could reverse Russia’s earlier gains, thereby provoking an even wider war.

Tragically, this is pretty much what happened after the Trump and Biden administrations ramped up the flow of Western weaponry to Kyiv: The fear that Ukraine was slipping rapidly into the Western orbit heightened Russian fears and led Putin to launch an illegal, costly, and now protracted preventive war. Even if it made good sense to help Ukraine improve its ability to defend itself, doing so without doing very much to reassure Moscow made war more likely.

So, does the logic of the security dilemma prescribe policies of accommodation instead? Alas, no. As its name implies, the security dilemma really is a dilemma, insofar as states cannot guarantee their security by unilaterally disarming or making repeated concessions to an opponent. Even if mutual insecurity lies at the core of most adversarial relationships, concessions that tipped the balance in one side’s favor might lead it to act aggressively, in the hopes of gaining an insurmountable advantage and securing itself in perpetuity. Regrettably, there are no quick, easy, or 100 percent reliable solutions to the vulnerabilities inherent in anarchy.

Instead, governments must try to manage these problems through statecraft, empathy, and intelligent military policies. As Jervis explained in his seminal 1978 World Politics article, in some circumstances the dilemma can be eased by developing defensive military postures, especially in the nuclear realm. From this perspective, second-strike retaliatory forces are stabilizing because they protect the state via deterrence but do not threaten the other side’s own second-strike deterrent capability.

For example, ballistic missile submarines are stabilizing because they provide more reliable second-strike forces but do not threaten each other. By contrast, counterforce weapons, strategic anti-submarine warfare capabilities, and/or missile defenses are destabilizing because they threaten the other side’s deterrent capacity and thus exacerbate its security fears. (As critics have noted, the offense-versus-defense distinction is much harder to draw when dealing with conventional forces.)

The existence of the security dilemma also suggests that states should look for areas where they can build trust without leaving themselves vulnerable. One approach is to create institutions to monitor each other’s behavior and reveal when an adversary is cheating on a prior agreement. It also suggests that states interested in stability are usually wise to respect the status quo and adhere to prior agreements. Blatant violations erode trust, and trust once lost is hard to regain.

Lastly, the logic of the security dilemma (and much of the related literature on misperception) suggests that states should work overtime to explain, explain, and once again explain their real concerns and why they are acting as they are. Most people (and governments) tend to think their actions are easier for others to understand than they really are, and they are not very good at explaining their conduct in language that the other side is likely to appreciate, understand, and believe. This problem is especially prevalent at present in relations between Russia and the West, where both sides seem to be talking past each other and have been surprised repeatedly by what the other side has done.

Giving bogus reasons for what one is doing is especially harmful because others will sensibly conclude that one’s words cannot be taken seriously. A good rule of thumb is that adversaries will assume the worst about what you are doing (and why you are doing it) and that you must therefore go to enormous lengths to persuade them that their suspicions are mistaken. If nothing else, this approach encourages governments to empathize—i.e., to think about how the problem looks from their opponent’s perspective—which is always desirable even when the opponent’s view is off-base.

Unfortunately, none of these measures can fully eliminate the uncertainties that bedevil global politics or render the security dilemma irrelevant. It would be a more secure and peaceful world if more leaders considered whether a policy they believed was benign was unintentionally making others nervous, then thought about whether the action in question could be modified in ways that alleviated (some of) those fears. This approach won’t always work, but it should be tried more often than it is.

Emperor unclothed? Why we can’t expect ‘big change’ from the president

Something much bigger than POTUS — call it the MIC or the deep state — has de facto veto power on all matters related to national security.

JULY 28, 2022

Written by
Andrew J. Bacevich

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/07/28/emperor-unclothed-why-we-cant-expect-big-change-from-the-president/

Writing in the New York Times, veteran foreign correspondent Edward Wong reports that the Biden “administration’s approach to strategic priorities is surprisingly consistent with the policies of the Trump administration.”

What ought to be surprised at this juncture is Wong’s surprise. 

Its source?  It derives from the bizarre notion that when it comes to foreign policy, the President of the United States, commonly referred to as the “most powerful man in the world,” is a free agent who wields quasi-imperial authority. Going at least as far back as the days when Franklin Roosevelt occupied the Oval Office, this has been a staple of American politics, relentlessly promoted by the media. On the global stage, the U.S. president is an unrivaled kingpin.

Candidates for the presidency routinely play along with this conceit. If elected, they promise that Big Change will follow in short order. When Donald Trump vowed in his Inaugural Address that “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” his choice of vocabulary may have raised eyebrows, but the basic sentiment was supremely presidential. The nature of the carnage to which he referred was (to put it politely) hazy. But as president, he was willing to cease and so it would.

But it did not. Nor did the Big Change promised by his several immediate predecessors or by his successor occur. Especially in matters related to America’s role in the world, the status quo has proven stubbornly persistent.

In practice, the power wielded by the most powerful man in the world turns out to be quite limited. Factors at home and abroad constrain presidential freedom of action. True, POTUS flies around the world in a very big airplane and everyone stands up when he enters the room, but as a practical matter, presidential authority is circumscribed. 

Should there be any doubt on that score, consider the Manchin Effect:  a single sitting U.S. Senator — of the president’s own party, no less — making mincemeat of the current president’s domestic agenda. And foreign capitals are filled with Manchin clones who delight in complicating, obstructing, and otherwise frustrating the will of the U.S. president. 

Sometimes it’s subtle — a fist bump, say, as a way to mend fences with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Sometimes it’s overt and gratuitous: Remember the delight that Benjamin Netanyahu took in humiliating President Barack Obama during the Israeli prime minister’s appearance before Congress in 2015?  It turns out to be not all that difficult to get away with scoring points at the expense of an American president. 

The truth is that the press pays way, way too much to presidential promises of Big Change. Indeed, Trump himself offers the best example of over-promising. He was going to end America’s endless wars in the Middle East and “take” the oil. He was going to pull the United States out of NATO. He was going to “build a wall” and thereby solve the border security problem once and for all. None of these happened.

It’s important to recognize why he fell short in each instance — and why Biden’s efforts to change course are likewise doomed to fail. Two factors stand out, one structural and the other ideological.

The structural factor refers to the institutions whose wellbeing is dependent upon maintaining arrangements that devolved during the Cold War and survived the Cold War’s passing. Call it what you will — the Blob, the Deep State, the military-industrial-congressional complex — it exercises a de facto veto power on all matters related to basic U.S. national security policy. 

Here’s an illustration of how it works in practice:  A 20-year-long U.S. war in Afghanistan ends in abject failure. Congress responds the following year by increasing the size of the Pentagon budget, with large bipartisan majorities approving. In the executive suites of the MIC and in the E-Ring of the Pentagon, champagne corks pop.

The ideological factor rests on explicit or tacit claims of American Exceptionalism: That it is incumbent upon the United States to lead the world, with leadership tending in practice to become a synonym for global primacy and primacy tending to be expressed in military terms. Such expectations are wildly at odds with the emerging reality of multi-polarity and with a growing agenda of common problems such as the climate crisis to which military power is irrelevant.

Thirty years after the end of the Cold War it becomes increasingly evident that the United States has squandered the position of global dominion that was seemingly ours in 1989. That we need to do things differently is self-evidently the case. But don’t expect solutions to come from the Oval Office. The U.S. president is as much a captive of circumstance as he is an agent of Big Change. 

 PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Imaginary War

July 13, 2022

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/07/13/patrick-lawrence-the-imaginary-war/

What were the policy cliques, “the intelligence community” and the press that serves both going to do when the kind of war in Ukraine they talked incessantly about turned out to be imaginary, a Marvel Comics of a conflict with little grounding in reality? I have wondered about this since the Russian intervention began on Feb. 24. I knew the answer would be interesting when finally we had one.

Now we have one. Taking the government-supervised New York Times as a guide, the result is a variant of what we saw as the Russiagate fiasco came unglued: Those who manufacture orthodoxies, as well as consent, are slithering out the side door.

I could tell you I don’t intend to single out the Times in this wild chicanery, except that I do. The once-but-no-longer newspaper of record continues to be singularly wicked in its deceits and deceptions as it imposes the official but imaginary version of the war on unsuspecting readers.

As Consortium News’s properly suspecting readers will recall, Vladimir Putin was clear when he told the world about Russia’s intentions as it began its intervention. These were two: Russian forces went into Ukraine to “demilitarize and de–Nazify” it, a pair of limited, defined objectives.

An astute reader of these commentaries pointed out in a recent comment thread that the Russian president had once again proven, whatever else one may think of him, a focused statesman with an excellent grasp of history. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Allied Control Council declared its postwar purpose in Germany as “the four D’s.”  These were de–Nazification, demilitarization, democratization, and decentralization.

Let’s give David Thompson, who brought this historical reference to my attention, a deserved byline here:

“Putin’s reiteration of the de–Nazification and demilitarization principles established from the Potsdam Conference is not just some quaint tip of the hat to history. He was laying down a marker to the United States and the United Kingdom that the agreement reached at Potsdam in 1945 is still relevant and valid ….”

The Russian president, whose entire argument with the West is that a just and stable order in Europe must serve the security interests of all sides, was simply restating objectives the trans–Atlantic alliance had once signed on to accomplish. In other words, he was pointing out said alliance’s gross hypocrisy as it arms the ideological descendants of German Nazis.

I dwell on this matter because the imaginary war began with the Biden regime’s and the press’s quite irresponsible misrepresentations of the Russian Federation’s aims in Ukraine. All else has flowed from it.

You remember: Russian forces were going to “conquer” the whole of the nation, wipe out the Kiev regime, install a puppet government and then drive on to Poland, the Baltic states, Transnistria, and the rest of Moldova, and who could imagine what after that. De–Nazification, we can now read, is a phony Kremlin dodge. 

Next Edition

Having lied outright on this score, the next edition of the comic went onto the market. Russia is failing to achieve its imaginary objectives. Low morale, desertions, poorly trained troops with not enough to eat, logistical failures, lousy artillery, inadequate ordnance, and incompetent officers: The Russians were riding for a fall on Ukrainian soil.  

The corollary here was the heroism, courage, and battlefield grit of Ukrainian troops, least of all, the Azov Battalion, who were no longer neo–Nazis.  Never mind the Times, The Guardian, the BBC, and various other mainstream publications and broadcasters had earlier told us about these ideological fanatics. That was then, this is now.

The problem at this point was there were no battlefield successes to report. The defeats, indeed, had begun. In May, roughly when the Azov Battalion, heroic and democratic as it is, was forced to surrender in Mariupol, it was time for — this just had to be — Russian atrocities.

We had the theater and the maternity hospital in Mariupol, we had the infamous slaughter in Bucha, the Kiev suburb; various others have followed. Just what happened in these cases has never been established by credible, disinterested investigators; plentiful evidence that Ukrainian forces bear responsibility is dismissed out of hand. But who needs investigations and evidence when the brutal, criminal, indiscriminately ruthless Rrrrusssians, must be culpable if the imaginary war is to proceed?

My unchallenged favorites in this line come courtesy of CNN, which went long this spring on allegations — Ukrainian allegations, of course — that Russian soldiers were raping young girls and young boys right down to months-old infants. Three such specimens are here, here, and here.  

The network abruptly dropped this line of inquiry after the senior Ukrainian official disseminating these allegations was removed from office because the charges are fabrications. A wise move on CNN’s part, I think: Propaganda does not have to be very subtle, as history shows, but it does have its limits. 

Just after the atrocities narrative had ripened, the Russians-are-stealing-Ukrainian-grain theme began. The BBC offered an especially wonderful account of this. Look at this video and text presentation and tell me it isn’t the cutest thing you’ve ever seen, as many holes in it as my Irish grandma’s lace curtains.

But at this point, problems. Russian forces, with their desertions, antiquated guns, and dumb generals, were taking one city after another in eastern Ukraine. These were not — the fly in the ointment — imaginary victories.

Out with the war-is-going-well theme and in with the brutal Russians’ indiscriminate use of artillery. This was a “primitive strategy,” the Times wanted us to know. In the awfulness of war, you simply don’t shell an enemy position as a preliminary to taking it. Medieval.

Lately, there’s another problem for the conjurors of imaginary war. This is the death toll. The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission reported May 10 that the casualty count to date was in excess of 3,380 civilian fatalities, bumped up in June to 4,509, and 3,680 civilians injured. (And both sides shoot and kill in a war.)

Goddamn it, they exclaimed on Eighth Avenue.  That is nowhere near enough in the imaginary war. Desperate for a gruesomely high death toll, the Times, on June 18, published “Death in Ukraine: A Special Report.” What a read. There is nothing in it other than innuendo and weightless surmise. But the imaginary war must grind on.

The Times’s “special report”— dum-da-da-dum — rests on phrases such as “witness testimony and other evidence” and “the thousands believed killed.” The evidence, to be noted, derives almost entirely from Ukrainian officials — as does an inordinate amount of what the Times publishes. 

There is a great quotation:  “People are killed indiscriminately or suddenly or without rhyme or reason.” Wow. Is this damning or what?

But another problem. This observation comes from Richard Kohn, who is an emeritus at the University of North Carolina. I hope the professor is having a good summer down in Chapel Hill.

In late June, Sievierodonetsk fell — or rose, depending on your point of view — and in short, order so did Lysychansk and the whole of Luhansk province. Now come the ’fessing up stories, here and there. The Ukrainian forces are so discombobulated they are shooting one another, we read. They can’t operate their radios and — an artful backflip here — they are running out of food and ammunition and morale. Untrained soldiers who signed up to patrol their neighborhoods are deserting the front lines.  

  

Holdouts

There are the holdouts. The Times reported last week that the Ukrainians, done for in Luhansk, are planning a counteroffensive in the south to reclaim lost territory. We all need our dreams, I suppose.

To the surprise of many, Patrick Lang, the ordinarily astute observer of military matters, published “Unable to even fix its own tanks, Russia’s humiliation is now complete” on his Turcopolier last Friday. The retired colonel predicts the Russians are in for “a sudden reversal of fortunes.” No, I’m not holding my breath.

Have you had enough of the imaginary war? I have. I read this junk daily as a professional obligation. Some of it I find amusing, but in the main, it sickens when I think of what the American press has done to itself and to its readers.

For the record, it is hard to tell exactly what occurs in Ukraine’s tragic fields of war. As noted previously in this space, we have very little coverage from professional, properly disinterested correspondents. But I offer here my surmise, and it is nothing more.

This war has proceeded, more or less inexorably, in one direction: In the real war, the Ukrainians have been on a slow march to defeat from the first. They are too corrupt, too mesmerized by their fanatical Russophobia to organize an effective force or even to see straight.

This is not a grinding war of attrition, as we are supposed to think. It has proceeded slowly because Russian forces appear to be taking care to limit casualties — their own and among Ukrainian civilians. I put more faith in the U.N.’s numbers than in that silly, nothing-in-it “special report” the Times just published.

I do not know why Russian forces approached the outskirts of Kiev from the north early in the conflict and then withdrew, but there is no indication they intended to take the capital. There were battles, but they were certainly not “beaten back.” That is sheer nonsense.

I await proper investigations — admittedly unlikely — of the atrocities that have certainly occurred but without, so far, any conclusive indication of culpability.

Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, remarked recently Russia’s objective remains to take most of Ukraine. In a speech at the end of June in Ashgabat, the Turkmenistan capital, Putin appeared notably at ease and asserted, “Everything is going according to plan. Nothing has changed.” The objective, he said, remained “to liberate Donbas, to protect these people, and to create conditions that would guarantee the safety of Russia itself. That’s it.”

Putting these two statements side by side, there is vastly more evidence supporting Putin than there is for Haines.

Intentionally or otherwise — and I often have the impression the Times does not grasp the implications of what it publishes — the paper put out a story Sunday headlined, “Ukraine and the Contest of Global Stamina.” The outcome of this conflict, it reported, now depends on “whether the United States and its allies can maintain their military, political and financial commitments to holding off Russia.”

Can they possibly not understand down on Eighth Avenue that they have just described Ukraine as a basket-case client? Do they know they have just announced that the imaginary war they have waged these past four and some months is ending in defeat, given there is no one in Ukraine to win it?

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author, and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. 

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

 LA SUCESIÓN PRESIDENCIAL Y MORENA

Este fin de semana el Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena), el partido en el poder en México renovará sus estructuras internas (menos la presidencia y la secretaría general del Comité Ejecutivo Nacional), con objeto de dejar preparado el terreno para las elecciones del próximo año (Estado de México y Coahuila), y especialmente para la presidencial, la renovación del Congreso federal y 9 gubernaturas en 2024.

Ya han surgido diversas inconformidades con el proceso para elegir a los representantes distritales, que a su vez serán quienes representen a sus distritos en el Consejo nacional a celebrarse en septiembre.

El grupo político identificado con el senador Ricardo Monreal, que no es del agrado del presidente López Obrador (AMLO), ha sido marginado de las representaciones distritales; y al parecer, el grupo del ex secretario particular de López Obrador (cuando este fue jefe de gobierno de la Ciudad de México), y famoso protagonista de los “video escándalos”, René Bejarano, incluso ha acudido al Tribunal Electoral, pues fue eliminado de las listas de consejeros, después de que misteriosamente el sistema de cómputo del partido “se cayó” (ahora Morena también realiza las mismas maniobras que el PRI, cuando el sistema de cómputo se cayó en las elecciones presidenciales de 1988 en las que resultó triunfador Carlos Salinas).

El presidente del partido, el “veleta” Mario Delgado, abrió la posibilidad de que grupos políticos no pertenecientes a Morena se afilien de manera colectiva para esta reestructuración, sin importar su pasado, ni con que ideología o partido político hubieran estado identificados, con lo que se promueve una afiliación masiva, con acarreados, sin ningún antecedente de lucha o movilización en favor de las causas que dieron origen a Morena.

El objetivo de Delgado es doble. Por un lado, tiene la intención de acabar de desfondar al PRI y al PRD, abriéndoles las puertas del partido, sin condiciones, a los jefes y líderes locales y estatales de estos partidos, para que se pasen a Morena; y así, sin más, formen parte del “partido ganador”, con lo cual debilitan a dichos partidos, y por supuesto a la alianza Va por México, que quedaría conformada prácticamente con los esqueletos del PRI y PRD, más el PAN.

Por otro lado, los grupos que de esa forma se incorporen a Morena, obviamente le deberán ello a Delgado, y este tendrá así mayoría en los órganos internos del partido y en el padrón de militantes, por encima de los grupos de izquierda y los más veteranos que han seguido a López Obrador desde hace 30 años.

Una vez logrado lo anterior, Delgado tendrá en sus manos un capital político que lo podrá usar para negociar con los dos precandidatos que están peleando la candidatura presidencial, el exjefe y extutor político de Delgado, el canciller Marcelo Ebrard; y la nueva amiga de Delgado, la jefa de gobierno de la CDMX, Claudia Sheinbaum.

Ebrard sabe que lleva las de perder ante Sheinbaum, que ha sido arropada y apoyada públicamente por AMLO, una y otra vez.

Por ello, en los últimos días ha insistido en que si se va a elegir al candidato presidencial por encuesta, ésta tiene que ser realizada con acuerdo en la metodología y en las encuestadoras, por todos los precandidatos, poniendo así en duda la imparcialidad de la actual dirigencia.

AMLO ya le contestó a Ebrard, al afirmar que quienes ponen en duda la encuesta es que dudan del “pueblo”, o sea de él; y por supuesto el “pueblo” nunca se equivoca, o sea AMLO; por lo que Ebrard ya perdió varios puntos más ante el “gran elector”, que usa a Ebrard como un “sparring” de la preferida (Sheinbaum), quien por cierto es bastante incompetente y no tiene carisma.

De esta forma se están planteando claramente dos grupos dentro de Morena para la sucesión presidencial, por un lado el del propio AMLO que impulsa la candidatura de Sheinbaum, y al que se adscribe también el otro precandidato, el secretario de Gobernación, Augusto López Hernández, quien es el “second best” de AMLO, en caso de que se cayera por alguna causa de fuerza mayor, la candidatura de Sheinbaum; y el grupo de los “sparrings”, es decir de los precandidatos que están ahí nada más para hacer “bulto”, Ebrard y Monreal, que no están en el ánimo del “gran elector”, pero que tienen que jugar el juego de la sucesión, para hacer creer a las bases morenistas que sí hubo una “competencia real” por la candidatura presidencial.

La gran pregunta es qué harán Ebrard y Monreal cuando la candidatura recaiga en Sheinbaum y ellos se queden con un palmo de narices. ¿Negociarán con Sheinbaum posiciones para ellos y los suyos en el gabinete próximo, en el Congreso y en las gubernaturas; o preferirán romper con AMLO, Sheinbaum y Morena e irse con la oposición, ya sea la Alianza Va por México (PAN, PRI y PRD ) o con Movimiento Ciudadano?

American Empire is marching into the sunset — can we handle it?

Author Daniel Bessner thinks it’s time for reckoning, and restraint is the way ahead.

JULY 25, 2022

Written by
Tevah Gevelber

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/07/25/american-empire-is-marching-into-the-sunset-can-we-handle-it/?

As the world’s attention focuses on the war in Ukraine, Daniel Bessner, author of Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual, redirects the spotlight towards what he believes will be the major focus of U.S. foreign policy for decades to come: China.  

RS sat down for a Q&A with Bessner about his views on restraint, his recent article in Harper’s, and his vision for the multipolar future. 

Bessner is an associate professor at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, and co-host of the American Prestige podcast. His research focuses on the intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy, left-wing foreign policy, and restraint. 

Bessner on restraint:

Q: How did you come to restraint?

A: I’m mostly a product of my historical experience. I came to political consciousness in the run-up to and then during and after the Iraq War, and the war in Afghanistan. I clearly saw the devastation caused by American hubris in U.S. foreign policy abroad. My research focused on left-wing political thought and I was becoming more involved in debates about socialism and social democracy. I think those two things worked together to make me very skeptical of the United States’ ability to use military power to create good in the world. 

I came to restraint before it was really on the lips of people within Washington, DC. But I think that’s a common story for elder millennials, like myself, who came of age during the War on Terror. Basically, the United States has just been failing for most of our lives, something that was really brought home during the recession of 2008. And I think all those things combined to engender a broader skepticism within me about the United States’s ability to do what it says it’s going to do or to do what was promised in the 1990s. And because I decided to focus on foreign policy, that inevitably led me to restrain or what I’m now calling for myself: restrain and reduce. 

Q: What do you mean by reducing U.S. power?

A: If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail, or if you have a hammer, rather, everything looks like a nail. And I think that as long as U.S. leaders have recourse to using an extraordinary amount of military power, they’re going to use it abroad. So I think that restraint isn’t enough. You just need to do more than restrain the power, but actually, get rid of the United States’s capacity to do things like bomb other countries and or use special forces all over the globe. It’s not just about restricting U.S. power — although that’s an important first step — it’s also about reducing U.S. power, which I also think will have positive domestic benefits, such as redirecting resources from weapons to welfare and things along those lines.

Q: What are some of the pushback that you get when advocating for U.S. restraint and reduction of power?

A: The common pushback that I get is that people think the United States should lead the world, people believe in the American empire. People believe that the United States has done more good than harm. And I fundamentally disagree with those positions. I think if you look at what the United States has actually done in the world, it has oftentimes made things worse, and that a lot of the benefits that the world has seen– in particular more peace in Western Europe and Central Europe– could have been achieved without U.S. imperial action.

In Bessner’s article: “Empire Burlesque: What comes after the American Century?”

Q: How would you explain the premise of your new article?

A: The article is meant to explore a debate that I have been noticing going on between liberal internationalists and restrainers and it attempts to prove why I believe the restraint case is right. It focuses on what people are actually saying today on both sides of the debate and then it goes through the history of U.S. foreign policy — mostly since 1945 — and tries to demonstrate that the United States does cause an enormous amount of destruction abroad. And it also tries to explore what I consider to be the philosophical problems with the liberal internationalist approach to the world: both how they understand the world and how they understand other countries and their actions.

Q: Your article primarily focuses on China but how do you think that the war in Ukraine is affecting the restraint and liberal internationalist camps?

A: What has happened in the aftermath of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is that you see a lot of people who would have otherwise placed themselves in the restraint camp really embrace a more interventionist foreign policy. 

I think Americans really feel a yearning for romantic wars. And I don’t mean romantic, as good, but as something that puts a bad actor against a quote-unquote “good actor” that is defending their own space.

I think that looking from a global scale, the Russian invasion is not nearly as dramatic a breach as people have pointed to.  We could obviously point to the U.S.’ various interventions that have violated international sovereignty, but I don’t think that the invasion augurs a new era of geopolitics. I think it’s bad. I think it’s illegal. And I completely understand and respect Ukraine’s desire and Ukrainians’ desire to push Putin out. But having said that, I don’t think it really changes the global distribution of power in a meaningful way. And that was really what I was focusing on in that piece.

Q: When you wrote the piece, who were you trying to reach?

A: I think any strategy that is meant to promote restraint needs to reach both the American public and politicians. I would say right now, empirically, the public doesn’t have much influence in foreign affairs. But I think it’s almost a moral action within a democracy to educate the public as much as one is able to and build a more democratic base for future foreign policy.

Q: If you were to predict 50 years out, where would you see the world in terms of polarity and power dynamics?

A: It’s always difficult to know because history always throws surprises. But my guess is that China’s going to be roughly hegemonic in East Asia and the United States is not going to be as embedded in the region as it presently is. The United States will still continue to dominate the Western Hemisphere, even if I wish it was otherwise. Now, maybe there are going to be some changes. We’ll see once Millennials begin to enter power positions if their perspective will actually result in new foreign policies. That’s what I can’t predict. And that’s what I hope for– that there will be a shift in how the U.S. approaches the world.

 LA POLÍTICA ENERGÉTICA MEXICANA Y ESTADOS UNIDOS

El gobierno de Estados Unidos ha solicitado el mecanismo de consultas (así como el gobierno de Canadá), al gobierno de México, en el marco del Tratado México-Estados Unidos-Canadá (T-MEC), debido a que considera que las acciones de política pública y regulatorias del Estado Mexicano han impactado negativamente a las empresas estadounidenses del sector energético, para beneficiar a la Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) y a Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), al violar capítulos como acceso a mercado, inversión y Empresas propiedad del Estado.[1]

El presidente de México, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), ha rechazado que nuestro país esté violando el T-MEC en el sector energético, y para ello ha argumentado que el capítulo 8 del mencionado acuerdo, posibilita a México a definir soberanamente su política en materia energética.

“CAPÍTULO 8

RECONOCIMIENTO DEL DOMINIO DIRECTO Y LA PROPIEDAD INALIENABLE E IMPRESCRIPTIBLE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS MEXICANOS DE LOS HIDROCARBUROS.

Artículo 8.1: Reconocimiento del Dominio Directo y la Propiedad Inalienable e Imprescriptible de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos de los Hidrocarburos.

1. Según lo dispone este Tratado, las Partes confirman su pleno respeto por la soberanía y su derecho soberano a regular con respecto a asuntos abordados en este Capítulo de conformidad con sus respectivas Constituciones y derecho interno, en pleno ejercicio de sus procesos democráticos.

2. En el caso de México, y sin perjuicio de sus derechos y remedios disponibles conforme a este Tratado, Estados Unidos y Canadá reconocen que: (a) México se reserva su derecho soberano de reformar su Constitución y su legislación interna; y (b) México tiene el dominio directo y la propiedad inalienable e imprescriptible de todos los hidrocarburos en el subsuelo del territorio nacional, incluida la plataforma continental y la zona económica exclusiva situada fuera del mar territorial y adyacente a éste, en mantos o yacimientos, cualquiera que sea su estado físico, de conformidad con la Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos.”[2]

Para el presidente está más que claro que este capítulo le reconoce a México la facultad de modificar su política energética soberanamente, sin que ello implique una violación del tratado comercial y de inversiones firmado con Estados Unidos y Canadá.

Sin embargo, para los gobiernos de Estados Unidos y Canadá, otros capítulos del Tratado restringen la capacidad soberana de los tres países para decidir sobre sus políticas públicas, si con ello se produce un trato discriminatorio contra las empresas de los otros dos.

Esto es, la política energética del gobierno de AMLO pone a la CFE y a PEMEX por encima de las empresas energéticas estadounidenses y canadienses, con lo que viola diversas estipulaciones y artículos del T-MEC, por lo que el capítulo 8 no puede esgrimirse como justificación para ignorar otras disposiciones del tratado.

Obviamente, para el gobierno mexicano esto es debatible, por lo que las consultas deberían ayudar a clarificar si el capítulo 8 da tanta manga ancha al gobierno mexicano como para ignorar y/o violar otras disposiciones del tratado, en las que se especifica que no se pueden dar ventajas a empresas (sean públicas o privadas) de un país, sobre las de los otros dos firmantes del tratado, sin incurrir en violaciones al mismo.

El problema es de origen, ya que el tratado fue negociado por la burocracia neoliberal de la Secretaría de Economía del gobierno de Peña Nieto, que entonces encabezaba el hoy diputado federal del PRI, Ildefonso Guajardo, y que para complacer a Trump, aceptó una serie de cláusulas y disposiciones ampliamente favorables para los intereses de Estados Unidos, en detrimento de México.

Sin embargo, no toda la responsabilidad cae en el gobierno de Peña, ya que el impresentable e incompetente representante de AMLO (que ya era presidente electo) en las negociaciones con Estados Unidos y Canadá, el hoy embajador en China (incluso condecorado por AMLO), Jesús Seade, dejó pasar todas esas disposiciones contrarias al interés nacional, tanto en el capítulo de acceso a mercado, como en inversión, como en empresas del Estado, como en solución de controversias (en donde se quedaron los nefastos paneles, en los que Estados Unidos y Canadá siempre terminan derrotando a México).

Y peor aún, AMLO, no se tomó la molestia de leer todo el tratado (no lleva más de 2 horas), ni de preguntar sobre lo que no sabía o entendía a diversos especialistas en materia de comercio exterior, una vez firmado por Peña Nieto en el último día de su mandato.

AMLO y la mayoría de su partido Morena, en el Senado tenían la obligación de revisar a fondo el tratado, para decidir si se ratificaba o no; y, seguramente durante un análisis prudente y serio hubieran podido identificarse las contraposiciones entre el capítulo 8 y otros capítulos del tratado, con lo que México hubiera podido exigir una renegociación de los capítulos que pusieran en entredicho su facultad soberana de definir su política energética.

Pero AMLO, en su infinita ignorancia y arrogancia, instruyó al Senado mexicano a ratificarlo en sólo ¡2 días! Ni siquiera lo leyeron los patéticos senadores oficialistas y de la oposición, y por lo tanto el tratado fue ratificado con las disposiciones que anulan el capítulo 8; o que por lo menos lo ponen en duda.

Eso de creerse un sabelotodo tiene serias consecuencias para el país; y lo sucedido en el 2018, cuando AMLO disfrutaba de todas las alabanzas y servilismo que concita la llegada al poder, le están pasando la factura al país en estos momentos, lo que podría provocar que México acabe perdiendo el famoso panel de controversias (o dos paneles, si Canadá abre consultas por su parte) con sus dos socios del T-MEC, que podrían costarle a los mexicanos hasta 30 mil millones de dólares en aranceles punitivos para sus mercancías.

Pero AMLO siempre cree que sabe más que todos y asegura que nada malo pasará, y que a pesar de que él y su patético negociador Jesús Seade han puesto al país en una situación gravísima ante Estados Unidos y Canadá, México no sufrirá ningún perjuicio derivado de esta controversia; que ahora AMLO la quiere explotar políticamente como un asunto de defensa de la soberanía, patrioterismo ramplón y para atacar a sus adversarios políticos internos.

---

[1] https://imco.org.mx/estados-unidos-solicita-consultas-con-mexico-para-dialogar-sobre-su-politica-energetica-en-el-marco-del-t-mec/

 

[2] https://www.gob.mx/cms/uploads/attachment/file/465790/08ESPReconocimientodelapropiedaddirectainalineableeimprescriptible.pdf

 

Otro 19 de julio infame en Nicaragua

Eric Nepomuceno

https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/07/24/opinion/015a2pol

En 1979 el verano estaba especialmente agradable en París. Faltando poco para las 8 de la noche del martes 17 de julio, Martha y yo llegamos al departamento donde vivía Ernesto Gonzalez Bermejo, gran periodista uruguayo exiliado en Francia desde hacía unos ocho años.

Con un buen vino, los tres esperábamos al otro invitado, Regis Debray, figura emblemática desde su cercanía con el Che Guevara en Bolivia, unos 10 años antes. La cena de milanesa, todo un lujo ofrecido por un exiliado en una ciudad cara como París, serviría para que Martha y yo conociéramos a Debray.

Poco después, él llamó por teléfono. Pedía excusas, pero no podría llegar: estaba embarcando de última hora para Nicaragua.

Nosotros tres sabíamos de los avances de los sandinistas en aquel pequeño y hermoso país centroamericano. Imaginamos que Debray tendría algún compromiso de urgencia con sus dirigentes.

Al principio de la noche del jueves 19 de julio de 1979 supimos la razón de tanto apuro del francés: él quería estar presente cuando el Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional tumbase de una vez a la dictadura de la familia Somoza, instalada desde hacía décadas en el poder. El sanguinario clan familiar ya no iba más a sofocar a Nicaragua y a su pueblo, finalmente liberado de las sombras.

Aquel 19 de julio los sandinistas avanzaron sobre León, la segunda ciudad del país, y luego sobre la capital, Managua, fulminando un largo tiempo de expoliación, violencia y corrupción.

Entre los muchos símbolos de aquella victoria histórica había una joven de 23 años, flaca, de boina y cabellos cortos, la estudiante de medicina Dora Téllez, la guerrillera que meses antes había participado de la toma del Palacio Nacional como la Comandante Dos de la operación encabezada por el Comandante Cero, Edén Pastora.

Conocí a los dos en mi primer viaje a la Nicaragua sandinista, algunos meses después de aquel 19 de Julio. La verdad es que me cuesta el alma recordar aquellas jornadas plenas de esperanza. Todo quedó congelado en un tiempo traicionado.

Pasados 43 años, en este 19 de Julio de 2021 Dora Téllez sobrevive confinada en condiciones inhumanas en El Chipote, la cárcel lúgubre especialmente elegida para ella por la pareja instalada en el poder: el ex guerrillero Daniel Ortega, también dueño de un pasado que él mismo se encargó de ensuciar a más no poder, y su señora esposa, Rosario Murillo.

El Chipote quizá sea el símbolo más concreto de hasta qué punto esos dos supieron hacerse inmundos con su sed infinita de poder.

Dora vive aislada, en la más profunda oscuridad. Todo lo que su familia sabe de ella es que adelgazó de manera asombrosa, que presenta una palidez terrible, pero mantiene una mirada precisa, certera y aguda. Una mirada que quizá sea el símbolo más claro de la traición cada vez más sucia de Ortega.

Detenida desde junio de 2021 junto a otros antiguos guerrilleros sandinistas históricos, además de opositores, periodistas y los candidatos que disputaron las últimas elecciones con Daniel Ortega, Dora sobrevive como uno de los símbolos de la dignidad herida.

Un sinfín de organismos internacionales de defensa de los derechos humanos denuncian sin parar las condiciones extremadamente crueles impuestas a los adversarios de la pareja dictatorial. Son celdas que no tienen luz o quedan iluminadas las 24 horas del día, sin atención médica y con alimentación escasísima.

Uno de los compañeros de martirio de Dora, el histórico sandinista que fue ministro de Relaciones Exteriores, Víctor Hugo Torres, murió en la cárcel.

El general Hugo Torres, Comandante Uno del ataque al Palacio Nacional que liberó, entre otros presos de Somoza, al propio Daniel Ortega, fue despachado hacia un hospital, donde murió luego de sufrir un colapso en la cárcel por no haber recibido atención médica para un grave problema de salud que tenía al ser encarcelado.

A lo largo de un año de cárcel cumplido ahora en junio, sólo fueron permitidas a los presos ocho cortas visitas de familiares. Los 47 opositores han sido condenados a penas que van de ocho a 14 años de prisión, en juicios en que no tuvieron amplio derecho de defensa.

Las más relevantes figuras del traicionado sandinismo murieron, están presas o viven exiliadas.

La desenfrenada y cruel persecución de la pareja dictatorial contra los que no se unieron a su proyecto de toma absoluta del poder empezó en 2018. Desde entonces, Nicaragua vive una tremenda y trágica vuelta a los peores tiempos de la dinastía anterior, la de los Somoza.

Y lo más infame de esa situación es ver a la pareja Daniel Ortega-Rosario Murillo llevando a cabo semejante distorsión, semejante perversidad, mientras hablan a nombre de una revolución que ayudaron a llevar a cabo, por cierto, pero que sepultaron de manera cada vez más abyecta, cada vez más criminal.

Israeli Apartheid: The power of the frame, the shame of the name

BY ROBERT HERBST  JULY 4, 2022

https://mondoweiss.net/2022/07/israeli-apartheid-the-power-of-the-frame-the-shame-of-the-name/

In the last two years, in a carefully researched and documented confluence of reports, UN, Israeli, regional, and international human rights organizations have concluded that the facts on the ground – both in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in the entire land of Israel- Palestine – amount to the crime of apartheid. B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, Yesh Din, and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic have all adopted the apartheid name and framing, concluding that Israel is an apartheid regime, committing an international crime and a crime against humanity in its systematic oppression of Palestinians.

This is no surprise to Palestinians, 65% of whom agree that they are victims of apartheid. Palestinian human rights groups have for years led the way on this understanding, including Al-Mezan, Al-Haq, and Addameer.

This was not a coordinated effort.  These organizations independently decided that this was the time to call apartheid apartheid and to lay out why.  A substantial majority of Middle East scholars now agree, and the apartheid name and frame are slowly making their way into mainstream media –even the New York Times. Last year the United Church of Christ “rejected [ed] Israel’s apartheid system of laws and legal procedures and declared that system a “sin.” Other Protestant churches are heading in the same direction.  

There is clearly a broadening and quickening acceptance of the apartheid name and narrative frame in civil society. 

One of the most interesting things about this development is that we have not seen a consistent effort by Israel or its supporters to challenge the facts or law upon which the charge of Israeli Apartheid is predicated.  Instead, the response has been to label the Apartheid reports and those who wrote them anti-Israel and anti-semitic.

This is a testament to the power of the apartheid frame.  Because it is widely accepted across the globe that apartheid is an international crime, it is difficult for Israel to do what South Africa did for decades in the 1960s, 70’s, and 80s — defend apartheid as a legitimate way to order a multiracial or multi-ethnic society.  Israel cannot defend apartheid and continue to present itself as a legitimate democracy.  The only other response is to say it ain’t so, this is not apartheid, but so far that response is also lacking, for the simple reason that the charge of apartheid is virtually impossible to defend on the merits, as a quick legal primer and the apartheid reports set forth above show.

The 1976 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines “the crime of apartheid” to include inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over another and systematically oppressing them.  These inhuman acts include not only depriving the oppressed group members of life or liberty of a person by killing, wounding and arrest/imprisonment, but also “any legislative or other measures calculated to prevent a racial group from participating in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group’s basic human rights and freedoms,” including the right to education, to leave and return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association; and any measures “designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos, or the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or members thereof.”

Moreover, the convention declares apartheid to be a “crime against humanity,” and it imposes international criminal responsibility on “individuals, members of organizations and institutions and representatives of the State,” whether or not residing in the territory of the State in which the acts are perpetrated, if they “commit, participate in, directly incite or conspire in the commission of the acts” constituting apartheid, or “abet, encourage or co-operate in the commission of the crime of apartheid.”

The Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention added one year after the Apartheid Convention, prohibits the willful commission of  the practices of  apartheid and labels those apartheid practices “war crimes.” In 1998, Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defined the crime of apartheid as a crime against humanity subject to its jurisdiction if it is committed “as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.”

What the recent Apartheid reports do is detail how the facts on the ground meet these legal standards of the crime of apartheid – in spades:  the system of racial, creed or ethnic separation intending to maintain domination by the Jewish group over the Arab Palestinian group, and the legal measures and accompanying inhuman acts that enforce and maintain that separation.  Pick any of the reports and see it whole:  the deliberate fragmentation of the Palestinians by where they live, the military rule over Palestinians without rights, the Wall and checkpoints restricting travel and freedom of movement, the scores of discriminatory laws inside and outside the Green Line, the pervasive arbitrary system of permits and licenses restricting housing and economic development, the extrajudicial killing and maiming of unarmed civilians, the arbitrary detentions, arrests, imprisonments and torture, the collective punishments, and more, all deliberately and systematically engineered. 

The difficulty of defending against the charge of Israeli apartheid can be seen in a recent webinar debate sponsored by the Palestine-Israel Journal on “Israel and the Apartheid Threshold: A Wake-Up Call.” Frances Raday, Hebrew University Emerita Professor of Law, called her to talk “Amnesty’s Tragic Framing of a Tragedy,” and she had plenty of criticisms of Amnesty’s Apartheid report, and of the distortions she claimed are in its conclusions, but she had to acknowledge that, in the West Bank, the report’s portrayal is accurate and amounts to inhumane acts as defined in the Rome Statute, which could properly be characterized as apartheid as well occupation or settler colonialism. 

Dr. Tony Klug, formerly of Amnesty International for 15 years, was unhappy with the apartheid label because he thought the best way to combat the human rights violations was to bring the conflict to a quick end, and he did not see how the apartheid name and frame helps to bring that about.  But he, too, acknowledged that the West Bank and East Jerusalem are ”apartheid by design,” entrenching those human rights violations.  In Israel proper, where “there is an entrenched package of abuses, and a full panoply of rights and privileges (only) for Jewish citizens, and Palestinians serve as members of the government, doctors, and lawyers all within segregated institutions,” Klug questioned where to place the “threshold” between “discrimination” and “the great sin of apartheid.”  But in the whole space between the River and the Sea, with “one space, two peoples, two systems,” like the West Bank, he admitted that “Israel does not have a case against apartheid.”      

Alon Liel, the former Israeli Ambassador to South Africa and former director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, noted that ten years ago, Israeli intentions changed, dispensing with the two-state solution and ending the occupation in favor of annexation. Analogizing South Africa, he noted that rather than recognizing the collective rights of the indigenous black South Africans, the white Afrikaners got it in their minds that they had developed the land, schools, and hospitals, and thought it was the right thing to do dominate the blacks forever.  That was apartheid, Liel said, and so it is with Jewish Israelis, who are overwhelming of like mind with respect to the Palestinians.  The resistance in South Africa did not call it discrimination, they called it apartheid.  It took 45 years for the West to understand the meaning of the word, but when it sunk in, the name had sufficient impact on the international community to bring apartheid to an end.

And there it is, the power of the apartheid framing.  Only two countries in the world besides Israel have been accused of apartheid: South Africa and Myanmar, and in the latter, only in one province, with the Rohingya, not in the nation as a whole.  Today, apartheid is globally recognized as an egregious international crime, a crime against humanity, and a war crime.  The apartheid name and frame, therefore, pack a punch, a wallop, that the human rights frame, the occupation frame, and the settler-colonial frame, do not. 

A widening global acknowledgment of Israeli apartheid inherently comes with the need for immediate action to dismantle the apartheid regime, to stop this crime against humanity.  A few reforms won’t cut it.  Apartheid, therefore, has the capacity to engage the international community in a way that the frames of settler colonialism, human rights, discrimination, and occupation have all failed to do. 

Because of 74 years of American support for Israeli impunity, the arc of the moral universe has barely started to bend toward justice over there, and it may take another 45 years for the apartheid name and frame to achieve the result we are hoping for.  But at least we now have a tool for organizing and persuasion of great potential potency, if we bang the apartheid drum often and loudly.  My old international law professor Richard Falk calls this new flourishing of the Apartheid narrative a huge victory in the symbolic domain of the legitimacy war, the domain where most conflicts since WWII have been won or lost. 

Michael Lynk, whose six-year term as UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory ended earlier this year shortly after he delivered his Israeli apartheid report, wrote last week about the power of the apartheid framing. Calling Israeli Apartheid What It Is (at DAWN). When Lynk started his term, he believed that “using the language of apartheid” would “surely only harden diplomatic hearts and close doors.  My initial strategy was to focus on international humanitarian law – the laws of war and occupation – and international human rights laws” – a “rights-based framework.”  But five years later, “surprised by the utter unwillingness of most member states from Europe to North America to Oceania” to “impose accountability” on Israel, which “has defied more than 30 Security Council resolutions demanding that it undo its illegal annexation of East Jerusalem, end its illegal settlements” and “wind up its occupation,” Lynk “accepted the futility” of relying on the “tools of international humanitarian and human rights law,” which “could no longer adequately capture the new legal and political reality” on the ground, which he now realized was “indistinguishable from annexation and apartheid.”  The number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem had grown in those five years from 620,000 to 715,000, in Jewish-only communities with full citizenship rights, while five million Palestinians live among them are subject to Israeli military law or “under a truncated form of precarious residency rights.”

So Lynk decided to call apartheid by its true name.  And his apartheid report, he noted, received more international media coverage than any of his previous reports on OPT human rights violations.     

That this has happened in the last two years seems to be a result of the widening realization and acceptance of the death of the Two State Solution — that Israel never really wanted, and would never permit, a real legitimate, contiguous Palestinian state like other nation-states, rather than a series of isolated Bantustans that would continue to be subservient to Israel, and would never remove the 700,000 settlers in E Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Manual Kas Hassan, the Palestinian Authority’s Ambassador to Denmark, who also participated in the Palestine-Israel Journal debate, was perhaps the most fervent opponent of the apartheid framing.  “Settler colonialism, discrimination, or apartheid is not the question,” he said. “The issue is the occupation.”  He was very concerned that the apartheid framing would detract from the PA’s focus on ending the occupation.  “Apartheid is not the right terminology to use,” because we don’t “have ethnic domination of one over another.  It is not about Israelis and Palestinians living happily ever after in one land.  It is about ending the occupation.”  Apartheid, like BDS, is “derailing from our struggle as Palestinians ending the occupation.”  Indeed, it does appear that the more one is wedded to the old Two State Solution paradigm and the separation of the two peoples, the less one is anxious to name and frame the oppression as apartheid.  

But if the Two State Solution is dead, then the only choice is between the current one-Jewish ethnostate apartheid reality, run by and for Jews, continuing forever, and some form of one shared democratic state, in which both peoples share sovereignty and citizenship, equal rights and human dignity. And the critical question for the Palestinian liberation and solidarity movements then becomes:  how do we get from here to there?  How do we think about getting from an apartheid regime to One Democratic State  What is the scenario by which one democratic state can be achieved?  And what tactics and strategies do we promote, both for Palestinians and those in solidarity with them?  I think that is the $64,000 Question, and I have yet to hear or read a good answer from anyone.  But we sorely need one. 

With respect to my Jewish brothers and sisters, I’ve written about shame before in these pages, Jewish shame. Four years later, it is time to add another note about shame, this time, the shame of the apartheid name, rightfully affixed to the Jewish State, which purports to represent all Jews, world-wide. That shame should envelope every Jew who cares about Israel, but especially those of us in the United States and elsewhere in the West who have ever tolerated, supported, facilitated or helped finance the Jewish apartheid regime in Israel.  I do the best I can to live that shame down, every day, but when one realizes that Israel is only the country on earth that today commits a continuous crime against humanity by running an Apartheid regime, not just in one province, not only in the West Bank, not only in East Jerusalem but also in the entire space between the River and the Sea, it is hard.  When one realizes that it is getting worse, not better, it becomes harder and harder to live it down.  I hope that the apartheid name and frame will help more of us minimize our tribalism, look more closely at our most important moral and religious principles, and join in solidarity with Palestinians, not just to liberate them, but to liberate ourselves from our roles as oppressors and apartheiders.