¿Uy, qué miedo?

El resultado de un panel de resolución de controversias seguramente sería contrario al gobierno mexicano.

Enrique Quintana

julio 21, 2022

https://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/opinion/enrique-quintana/2022/07/21/uy-que-miedo/

“Que me echen a los norteamericanos (y ahora habría que agregar a los canadienses), que tengo para todos”, pareció querer decir ayer el presidente López Obrador en la mañanera, cuando puso la cumbia de su paisano Chico Che.

Una de las estrategias del presidente es desestimar los riesgos. Quitar importancia y minimizar asuntos que son graves y pueden afectar seriamente al país.

Tal vez el más célebre de todos los casos fue cuando expuso en esa misma conferencia a sus ‘protectores’ del covid, sus estampitas, mofándose de los riesgos reales del contagio.

Obviamente, cuando los fallecidos sumaron ya cientos de miles, se ha cuidado de ya no burlarse de quienes advirtieron de las graves consecuencias de no tomar en serio la pandemia.

Un panel de solución de controversias en el marco del Tratado entre México, Estados Unidos y Canadá (TMEC) parece ser, en su perspectiva, una cosa menor.

“Le hablo a mi cuate Biden y el tema queda resuelto”, pareciera sugerir.

Desde el gobierno mexicano se insiste en que no se ha violado ningún compromiso establecido en el tratado.

Cualquier experto razonablemente informado sabe que esto no es así, y que el resultado de un panel de resolución de controversias que se constituyera, seguramente sería contrario al gobierno mexicano, así se tarde un buen número de meses en resolverse.

El asunto de fondo es que, al no poder cambiar la Constitución para modificar las reglas del juego en materia energética, lo que el gobierno mexicano ha hecho es cambiar leyes secundarias y adoptar medidas administrativas, que al beneficiar a Pemex y a la CFE, ponen la cancha de juego dispareja, violando varios preceptos del TMEC.

Cualquier estudiante de leyes sabe que un tratado internacional, suscrito por el gobierno mexicano y ratificado por el Senado, tiene una jerarquía jurídica superior a la de una ley secundaria o a las disposiciones administrativas.

En junio de 2019, el actual Senado (no el de Peña) ratificó el TMEC por una votación de 114 votos a favor, tres en contra y cuatro abstenciones.

Así que no pueden decir que el instrumento jurídico que tenemos y que ha dado lugar a los reclamos de Estados Unidos y Canadá, es algo heredado de administraciones anteriores.

Si, al final de cuentas, México pierde la controversia, podría darse el caso de que hubiera sanciones comerciales que perjudicaran a los exportadores mexicanos al ponerse aranceles a una serie de productos mexicanos que se exportan a EU.

El costo sería para toda la economía, pues eso implicaría afectar el crecimiento del país.

Pero, además, se agregarían elementos a la incertidumbre que hoy existe y que es un factor que limita las inversiones.

Hoy, de acuerdo con los datos del Inegi, la inversión privada se encuentra 7.6 por ciento abajo del nivel con el que cerró el sexenio anterior.

Las posibilidades de que México pueda aprovechar las oportunidades de la relocalización de actividades económicas, producto de la crisis de suministros que hemos vivido en los últimos años en el mundo, se ve hoy limitada, entre otros factores por problemas con la energía.

En particular, hay zonas del norte de la República en las que algunas plantas que exploran la posibilidad de instalarse para abastecer a la cadena productiva en Estados Unidos, no lo han hecho ante la falta de certeza en el suministro eléctrico seguro y confiable en los siguientes años.

Me he encontrado cada vez con más empresarios cuya decisión de instalar una planta en esa zona o en el Bajío o en algunos otros puntos tiene todas las ventajas respecto a hacerlo en EU o en otro sitio… salvo que no están seguros de contar con la electricidad que requieren, sea porque no tengan la certeza de contar con abasto confiable en el largo plazo, o bien porque requieren de energía proveniente de fuentes renovables, y consideran que en México no está garantizada esa oferta.

Sí, los litigios que eventualmente van a emprender Estados Unidos y Canadá en contra del gobierno mexicano son para dar miedo y no para mofarse de ellos.

Decline Personified

Biden’s Israel trip didn’t accomplish much, but it symbolized the increasingly passive US role in the region.

Joshua Leifer

July 19, 2022

https://jewishcurrents.org/decline-personified

DAZED AND DISORIENTED in his public appearances, President Joe Biden has often seemed to embody American decline, and that was certainly the case during his two-day visit to Israel last week. Israeli media zeroed in on Biden’s low approval ratings and seized on the fractiousness and instability of domestic American politics. Beneath the surface-level pomp with which the Israeli government received Biden—the general enthusiasm about warming ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and about the success of the Trump administration’s “Abraham Accords” normalizing relations between Israel and several Arab governments—there was also certain anxiety. From the beginning, the Biden administration has telegraphed a disinterest in the Middle East and expended little energy on articulating a detailed vision for the region, especially when it comes to Israel/Palestine; Biden is the first US president in more than two decades to lack any peace proposal, even an aspirational one. What, then, might it mean if the current US hiatus from leadership in the region becomes permanent?

Of course, the US withdrawal from the Middle East did not begin with Biden. Over the last half-decade, the United States has gradually decreased its active military presence there, and the amount of attention paid by policymakers in Washington has decreased with it. This has been a bipartisan policy commitment, part of a broader strategic reorientation toward a burgeoning great power conflict with China and, more recently, with Russia. In the fall of 2019, Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of US troops from Syria. In August 2021, the last US troops left Afghanistan in a chaotic and ill-managed evacuation. In December 2021, Biden declared the end of the US combat mission in Iraq, marking ten years since US forces began their withdrawal under Barack Obama in 2011. While small numbers of US soldiers remain in all three countries, the purview of their activities is much narrower than it once was.

Although the idea for a broad US-backed military alliance among Middle Eastern countries—even talk of an “Arab NATO”—is not new, it has taken on new significance against the backdrop of the reduced US military footprint in the region. Last month, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced that Israel is building an air defense alliance aimed at combating Iran, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Jordan. “The idea goes all the way back to Condoleezza Rice,” explained Ksenia Svetlova, a senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former member of the Knesset. While the US cannot maintain the troop levels it once had in the Middle East, Svetlova continued, “Biden understands that it would be impossible for the US to totally leave and that the vacuum would be filled by other rival powers.” Put differently, the deepening cooperation between Israel and the Arab Gulf states is a near-term strategy for the managed decline of the US empire.

Indeed, for some on the Israeli right, the broader framework for understanding the heightened collaboration between Israel and a growing number of Arab states is “the declining stature of the United States in world affairs,” as Yossi Shain, a member of Knesset from Yisrael Beiteinu, told me. “The alliance between Israel and the Emiratis, for example, or with Morocco, hopefully now with Saudi Arabia,” Shain said, shows that “people now understand they need to hang on each other” in the absence of a more robust US presence in the region. To be sure, the US has not ceased to play a role there; it has been both the financial underwriter and mediator in the diplomatic and military initiatives shared between Israel and the Gulf states. But what Biden’s visit signaled, Shain, said, “was a shift in American foreign affairs.” With the possibility of a Republican presidential victory in 2024, whether by Trump or another candidate, there is little expectation—in Israel, as well as in the Gulf states—that the US will return to articulating a more comprehensive, ambitious moral vision for the region.

During Biden’s visit, this lack of vision was felt most palpably on the issue of Israel’s military rule over the West Bank and the ongoing siege of Gaza. The president made only a few tepid rhetorical nods to the two-state solution—“even though I know it’s not in the near-term,” he said. Biden did not call directly on Israel to return to negotiations with the Palestinians, and he made no mention of Israeli settlements during his time in Israel. “As a member of the peace camp, I would’ve appreciated if there was any kind of roadmap, any kind of vision for the future,” Svetlova told me. “I understand the sensitivity and the desire not to put pressure on the current administration,” she added, referring to the caretaker government currently headed by the centrist Yair Lapid, who faces a tough electoral battle with former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud Party in November. “But it’s a shame that nothing was said,” Svetlova added, about the need to restart the peace process. It has been eight years since Israeli and Palestinian leaders last sat around the negotiation table: the longest stretch of time since before the start of the Oslo talks in the 1990s.

Yet Biden’s blank check to the Israeli government and his bromides about the “bone deep” connection between the US and Israel reflected much less a break with US policy than “an unmasking,” Hagai El-Ad, the executive director of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, stressed. “And there is value in unmasking.” Biden’s approach to Israel is “a continuation” of Trump’s, El-Ad said. Like his predecessor, Biden has no interest in holding Israel accountable for its violations of international law. Unconditional support for the Israeli policies that B’Tselem describes as apartheid has long been the US norm. “But it’s not about the previous or the next administration,” El-Ad told me. “It is so much easier to kick the can down the road with the empty rhetoric of two states.” If there is an upside to Biden’s fundamental lack of interest in putting pressure on the Israeli government, El-Ad said, it’s that it will illuminate to the broader public that “this is where the US stands.”

Still, for anti-occupation and Palestine solidarity activists, the shift in US policy in the Middle East toward a more passive mode of status-quo maintenance presents a real challenge. Disengagement from any semblance of a peace process is unlikely to translate into the US placing conditions on aid to Israel; this would, in fact, demand the investment of greater political energy, not less. And while public opinion in the US is slowly becoming more critical of Israel and more attuned to the apartheid reality on the ground, “it’s a long trajectory between public opinion shifting and shifting policy,” El-Ad said. “That doesn’t diminish how important that trajectory is.”

For the Israeli left and human rights advocates, it was long an article of faith that the international community would eventually coalesce to pressure Israel into ending the occupation and withdrawing from its pre-1967 boundaries. Now, however, the chances of any such pressure materializing in the foreseeable future are slim. With the Abraham Accords and military cooperation, the Gulf states and other Arab governments have demonstrated their willingness to ignore the issue of Palestinian rights in exchange for advanced weapons technology. In Europe, the war in Ukraine has eclipsed almost any other issue. In the US, each passing week seems to deepen the crisis of democracy. The occupation continues, and the world looks away.

It’s time for a US push to end the war in Ukraine

With a long, bloody stalemate on the horizon, the conflict’s negative ripple effects worldwide will continue to mount.

JULY 18, 2022

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/07/18/its-time-for-a-us-push-to-end-the-war-in-ukraine/?

Written by
Mark Hannah

Two months after Ukrainians impressively repelled Russia’s attack on Kyiv, the war is taking a different course.

Russian troops are consolidating their gains in Donbas as up to 1,000 Ukrainian fighters are killed or wounded daily. This puts the war on track to be among the bloodiest in modern history. Despite the delivery of heavy weaponry from the West, Ukraine is outmatched by Russian artillery —  for each shell or rocket fired by Ukraine, Russia fires about ten. The war has been difficult to predict, but time is not on Ukraine’s side.

So the time for aggressive diplomacy in Ukraine is now, and the recent G7 and NATO summits, and the G20 foreign minister's meetings last week, were colossal missed opportunities to restart the peace process. Rather than strategizing about how to extract the best terms from a Russia that appears ready to negotiate, leaders of the most powerful democracies have worked to “starve” Russia of oil money and further “weaken” the Russian military, and even resorted to schoolyard taunts to Putin. This is during a moment when we most need the adults in the room to help de-escalate the conflict.

There is still time — and leverage — to achieve a diplomatic settlement, after all. The United States could make clear that, while it supports Ukraine’s fight, it has different stakes. Washington has a definite interest in curbing Russian aggression in Europe but it’s not as invested in restoring Ukraine’s pre-invasion borders as, well — Ukraine is. Kyiv has nothing to lose (and potentially a lot to gain) if the war escalates into a wider confrontation between NATO and Russia. But NATO countries, including the United States, would have a lot to lose — especially if this escalation turns nuclear. 

None of us wants to live in a world where “might makes right” and where Ukraine feels compelled to make concessions after Russia’s illegal invasion. But all of us do live in a world where national leaders face real and intensifying domestic political pressure to rapidly end this war. 

Gas prices have surged globally and in the United States, President Biden is seeming to recognize that Americans may rather have lower gas prices with “Putin’s iron fist in Europe.” as he pushes for a suspension of the federal gas tax. In Germany, leaders have declared a “gas crisis” and may look to rationing as Russia cuts exports to western Europe. This problem will only become more pronounced as winter approaches. 

A new poll by my organization, the Eurasia Group Foundation, suggests the U.S. response to the war in Ukraine has broad international support but that this is primarily because it has avoided a direct confrontation with Russia. Asked about the most important U.S. goals, avoiding a U.S.-Russia war and preventing Ukrainians’ suffering were the two most frequently chosen answers. (The two least frequent were: defending democratic countries from the threat of autocratic ones and weakening Russia.) A diplomatic settlement would better ensure the success of these two internationally popular goals. 

A push for diplomacy is consistent with President Biden’s commitment to curb escalation. He repeatedly commits to limiting U.S. intervention against Russia’s invasion. He privately called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to tone down their talk of weakening Russia by proxy. If war between Ukraine and Russia were an indispensable part of a global contest between democracy and autocracy, the United States would not limit the types of weapons it sends nor abstain from putting its troops in harm’s way.

So far, Washington has succeeded primarily by avoiding unachievable war aims. U.S. shipments of weapons helped thwart the intended encirclement of Kyiv. The United States rallied wealthy European countries to take more responsibility for the continent’s security and to join international sanctions on Moscow. Without firing a shot, Washington has helped Ukraine maintain most of its territorial integrity and all of its political autonomy. 

In comparison, the stated war aims of Vladimir Putin have abjectly failed. He was not able to install a pro-Russian government in Kyiv. Far from stopping NATO enlargement, his invasion prompted long-neutral Sweden and Finland to make a bid to join the alliance. Finally, the Russian military has revealed itself to be exquisitely capable of operational blunders and tactical failures. As one former NATO leader told me, Russia has been exposed as “a medieval pillaging army rather than a sophisticated modern force, more of a mere missile launching army than a deep-strike army.” 

This is hardly a success for Putin. Although he has weathered economic sanctions, enjoyed soaring approval ratings, and might even end up peeling off a Russophilic and Russophonic piece of Ukraine, any diplomatic end to this war will see Putin with reduced military strength, a weakened economy, and diminished geopolitical influence. 

There is little to suggest Ukraine might get better terms through a long proxy war. Analysts are skeptical of Ukraine’s ability to reconquer territory — a problem more weapons shipments won’t solve. Short of an all-out intervention by the United States or European powers, it’s far-fetched to think the West will compel Russia to surrender, or put Putin on trial before the International Criminal Court (however cathartic such an idea is). 

So, what’s to be done? The United States needs to open a diplomatic channel with Moscow to get a clearer sense of what would be an acceptable settlement for all parties. Right before the invasion, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman indicated “possible support” for an approach in which Ukraine would pledge military neutrality and give up its bid for NATO membership. If it will stop the suffering of ordinary Ukrainians, why should the United States not encourage Ukraine to put that back on the table now? Given its ongoing struggles with corruption and undemocratic practices, Ukraine is still far from meeting the democratic criteria of NATO membership anyway.  

Promises of unlimited support only embolden what is starting to be seen as the Ukrainian president’s “reckless stubbornness” in outright rejecting the possibility of territorial concessions. President Biden has repeatedly expressed that there are limits to U.S. assistance — it does not help Ukraine to pretend otherwise. It is rare that war ends in total defeat, and it is not realistic to expect Moscow will fully retreat. U.S. policy must now shift to embrace this reality and plan for the months ahead when deep divisions within the Western coalition grow, and when, in a lopsided war of attrition, Ukraine might lose even more ground.

This Proxy War Has No Exit Strategy

AUTHOR: CAITLIN JOHNSTON

JULY 14, 2022

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/07/14/this-proxy-war-has-no-exit-strategy/

The International Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America has released a statement opposing the US government’s ongoing proxy war in Ukraine, saying the billions being funneled into the military-industrial complex “at a time when ordinary Americans are struggling to pay for housing, groceries, and fuel” is “a slap in the face for working people.” The statement advocates a negotiated settlement for peace, saying continuing to pour weapons into the country will “needlessly prolong the war, resulting in more civilian deaths” and that it “risks escalating and widening the war – up to and including nuclear war.”

In response to this entirely reasonable and moderate position, the DSA is currently being raked over the coals with accusations of Kremlin loyalty and facilitation of murder and bloodshed by blue-checkmark narrative managers on Twitter. This is because the only acceptable positions for anyone of significant influence to have about this war range from supporting continuing current proxy warfare operations to initiating a direct hot war between NATO and Russia.

That’s how narrow the permissible spectrum of debate has been shrunk regarding this conflict: status quo hawkish to omnicidal hawkish. Anything outside that spectrum gets framed as radical extremism. As Noam Chomsky said: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

This spectrum of debate has been shrunk on the one hand by imperial spinmeisters continually hammering home the message that any support for de-escalation and diplomatic solutions is “appeasement” and indicative of Russian sympathies, and on the other by hawkish pundits and politicians pushing for the most freakishly aggressive responses to this war possible. By forbidding the spectrum of acceptable debate to move toward peace while shoving it as hard as possible in the direction of warmongering extremism, imperial narrative managers have successfully created an Overton window wherein the only debate permitted is over how directly and forcefully Russia should be confronted, with calls for peace now falling far outside that window.

This is a problem because both direct NATO hot war with Russia and continuing along the empire’s current course of action in Ukraine are stupid. Direct conflict between nuclear powers likely means a very fast and very radioactive third world war, and the status quo proxy warfare approach isn’t stopping Russia as more and more territory is taken in the east in calm defiance of western claims that Ukraine is bravely vanquishing its evil invaders. Biden administration officials have told the press that they doubt Ukraine will even be able to reclaim the territory it has lost already. Unless and until something significant changes, Ukraine has no apparent path to victory in this war anytime soon.

In short, there is no exit strategy to this proxy war. There are no plans in place to deliver Putin a swift defeat, and the Biden administration remains steadfastly dismissive of even the slightest gestures toward diplomacy with Moscow. Boris Johnson has reportedly been buzzing around admonishing Ukraine’s President Zelensky, France’s President Macron, and who knows who else not to work toward peace in Ukraine. The doors to ending this war quickly by either winning it or negotiating a peace settlement are both bolted shut, all but guaranteeing a long and bloody slog.

Which as it turns out suits Washington just fine. Biden administration officials have stated that the goal is to use the Ukraine war to “weaken” Russia. The US already has an established pattern of working to draw Moscow into costly military quagmires as we saw in Afghanistan and Syria. Continuing to pour weapons and military intelligence into Ukraine while working to cut Russia off from the world stands no chance of ending the war in a timely manner. Still, it does stand a pretty good chance of bleeding and weakening Moscow.

And since this is the course of action that has been taken by the empire, we can only assume that this is its desired outcome: not victory, not peace, but a long and grueling war.

One of the major recurring criticisms of the Iraq invasion was that Bush rushed into it without an exit strategy, without a plan for ending the war once it had been started. This proxy war with Russia not only lacks a strategy for ending the war, it apparently only has strategies for not ending the war. No exit strategy is the strategy.

Whenever you point out the insanity of this approach you’ll get useful idiots of the empire objecting that by criticizing US proxy warfare and supporting a negotiated settlement you are guilty of “appeasement” and exactly the same as Neville Chamberlain, because the only argument empire apologists ever have is to compare every US-targeted government to Nazi Germany.

According to these propaganda-addled empire automatons, having the story of not compromising with Putin-Hitler and not committing the sin of “appeasement” is worth sacrificing everyone in the entire nation of Ukraine for. They will happily throw every Ukrainian life into the gears of this war while they sit safely at home eating Funyuns and tweeting just so they can have that “we didn’t compromise with Putin” story hanging on their mental mantlepiece.

How many more lives are such people prepared to feed into an unwinnable war that the west knowingly provoked? How many more of other people’s children are they prepared to sacrifice? How long does the bloodshed need to drag on before their “no appeasement” story loses value to them? How long until people wake up from their propaganda-induced comas and realize we’ve been manipulated into supporting a proxy war that benefits ordinary people in no real way, and in fact impoverishes us and threatens our very lives?

There is no morally consistent argument for continuing this proxy war in the way it has been going. If you actually value life and peace, the only way out is through negotiation and compromise. I point this out not because I believe it will happen, but to hopefully help a few more people open their eyes to the fact that we are being deceived.

 Tengo otros datos…

Jorge Durand

https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/07/17/opinion/014a2pol

La estrategia de López Obrador para tratar el tema migratorio, en su reciente visita a Washington, no tuvo en cuenta un análisis adecuado del pasado, no conocía bien el presente y, sobre el futuro, no calculó bien la coyuntura política de Estados Unidos.

Rememorar al Programa Bracero (1942-1964) no venía al caso, fue un modelo añejo para tiempos de guerra, posguerra y agricultura estacional; en el presente Estados Unidos tiene solucionado el abasto de mano de obra para el trabajo agrícola que requiere de 1.1 millón de trabajadores, de los cuales 80 por ciento son mexicanos, en su inmensa mayoría indocumentados tolerados; otro 12 por ciento proviene de 170 mil visas, en promedio, de trabajadores temporales H2A y cuando requiere de más, simplemente amplía la cuota; finalmente no previó el futuro político de Joe Biden, que en este momento no puede hacer concesiones de tipo migratorio en vista a las próximas elecciones.

Por otra parte, considero incorrecto ir a ofrecer mano de obra barata. Eso no se hace. Menos aún cuando México ya había ingresado en un proceso claro de transición migratoria y las estadísticas, antes de la pandemia, indicaban que la migración irregular tenía una clara tendencia a decrecer y se había reducido, en la última década, en casi 2 millones. Obviamente, la emigración ha repuntado, como efecto directo de la pandemia, pero el problema mayor ahora no es México, sino la migración que llega de Centroamérica, el Caribe, Sudamérica y otros lugares.

Según datos del Homeland Security, para el año fiscal 2019, se habían otorgado 897 mil visas, de las cuales 15 mil eran trabajadores en ocupaciones especiales; 419 mil eran visas H2A para la agricultura; 101 mil H2B para servicios; 8 mil trabajadores con habilidades especiales; 33 mil de atletas y artistas; 35 mil de intercambio de compañías; 43 mil de visas para el acuerdo comercial y 239 mil de otros tipos. Además, hay 175 mil estudiantes o de intercambio y viajaron como turistas unos 20 millones.

Con estas cifras, no tiene mucho sentido la petición de favorecer, con visas, a trabajadores calificados; lo que resulta ser un contrasentido, si al mismo tiempo se solicitan inversiones que requieren de mano de obra calificada. Estados Unidos recluta con mucha facilidad a los especialistas que necesita, y hay decenas de miles de mexicanos, técnicos y profesionales trabajando en ese país. La industria automotriz estadunidense piratea a miles de ingenieros que se formaron en México. La industria de la construcción depende de los trabajadores mexicanos calificados.

Por otra parte, Estados Unidos otorga anualmente un promedio de 170 mil visas de residencia ( green card) a mexicanos, forma parte del proceso legal de reunificación familiar de ciudadanos y migrantes legales que solicitan a sus familiares. Y estas cifras dan cuenta de la solidez y antigüedad que tiene la comunidad mexicana radicada en el exterior, que puede hacer uso de estos recursos legales. Estos nuevos migrantes legales ya no van a volver al país, lo que implica una pérdida considerable.

Asimismo, en 2019 había 21 millones de mexicanos con visas de residencia o naturalizados y todos los años se naturaliza un promedio de 125 mil mexicanos, que obviamente no pierden su nacionalidad, pero sí pierden derechos al ser binacionales, un asunto pendiente en nuestra legislación que no se acaba de resolver y que limita su plena participación en una serie de actividades económicas y políticas.

En vez de pedir el incremento de visas temporales H2, habría sido pertinente evaluar primero su funcionamiento, que del lado mexicano es un caos total, con reclutadores, contratistas, abogados y coyotes que abusan y extorsionan a los trabajadores que quieren acceder al programa. Y en Estados Unidos existen también numerosas irregularidades y abusos, sobre los cuales el gobierno mexicano no tiene manera de intervenir, salvo en casos excepcionales.

Se han dado y documentado muchas situaciones de trata laboral, de discriminación en cuanto a condiciones laborales, salariales y de alojamiento, de engaños y costos excesivos por parte de abogados y tramitadores, de listas negras de trabajadores que se quejan o reclaman ciertos derechos, de condiciones inaceptables e insalubres de vivienda y de días de trabajo que no se remuneran por cuestiones del clima o cualquier eventualidad.

Otro tema tratado en las conversaciones entre los presidentes fue el tráfico de migrantes y la necesidad de trabajar de manera coordinada. A unas semanas de la muerte de migrantes por asfixia, en un tráiler cerca de San Antonio, ya se presentan resultados de cerca de 300 traficantes aprehendidos.

En lo que respecta a México, hace más de seis meses que murieron más de 50 migrantes en el accidente de un tráiler en Chiapas y que se formó un Grupo de Acción Inmediata (GAI) para combatir el tráfico de migrantes, pero no he escuchado de resultados que se hayan comunicado y difundido. Valdría la pena contar con esos datos y tener en cuenta los otros.

How the ‘great power competition’ model leads to costly entanglements

A new book offers insights on how the United States can navigate this new multi-power world without descending into another great war.

JULY 15, 2022

Written by
Daniel Larison

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/07/15/how-the-great-power-competition-model-leads-costly-entanglements/

Defining U.S. foreign policy primarily in terms of “great power competition” is a trap that risks overextending the United States and allowing its foreign policy to be dictated by Moscow’s and Beijing’s actions. Washington needs to recognize the limits of U.S. power as it experiences a relative decline in a world with two major rivals, and it must seek to cooperate with those rivals on issues of global importance for the sake of all concerned while managing tensions with them to avoid the disaster of another great power war.

Instead of being guided by a poorly defined framework of “great power competition,” the United States must chart out its own vision for its foreign policy that does not aspire to counter every move that Russia and China make in the world. These are some of the insights and recommendations that Ali Wyne offers in his valuable new book, “America’s Great power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition.”

 

Wyne has done policymakers and analysts a service by tracking and examining the overuse of the “great power competition” framing in recent years. While the phrase has since become ubiquitous, it was rarely used in government circles until the start of the Trump administration. Since then, it has taken off in popularity and become a regular part of official jargon both within and outside the government.

The chief problem with defining U.S. foreign policy in terms of “great power competition” is that recognizing the existence of competition does not provide any clear answers for what the United States ought to do in the world. As Wyne says, “interstate competition is a characteristic of world affairs — like the balance of power — not a blueprint for foreign policy.” Acknowledging competition is a necessary first step in crafting an appropriate strategy and in setting the limits of what is possible, but it doesn’t tell us what the content of the strategy should be. Wyne counsels us that “we should not conflate description with prescription,” and that is what the “great power competition” framing encourages us to do.

Because it has been employed so indiscriminately, “great power competition” has become an umbrella concept to cover any number of individual policies and its vague definition allows almost anything to be smuggled in under its label. As Wyne observes, there is no scholarly consensus on either of the constituent parts of “great power competition,” so it is not surprising that no one can agree on what their combination entails. The danger of such a vague and slippery concept is that there is no way to identify proper ends or means, and it becomes an all-purpose justification for whatever anyone in Washington wants to do. As Wyne puts it, “A framework that is at once widely accepted and highly elastic is vulnerable to misappropriation.”

Far from focusing on or disciplining U.S. foreign policy, the embrace of this concept becomes an invitation to a smorgasbord where “great power competition” becomes the official excuse for anything and everything.

A comparison with containment doctrine is instructive. The containment doctrine envisaged by George Kennan was relatively limited, not heavily militarized, and intended mainly for Europe. But within a few years, it had morphed into a militarized global doctrine that was later used to justify all sorts of interventions around the world from coups to wars. Most of the worst U.S. blunders and crimes of the Cold War were the result of pursuing that much more ambitious form of “containment” that treated every country as a potential battleground.

Wyne comments on this aspect of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War: “Washington proved to be incapable of distinguishing between the core and the periphery of the postwar order because it feared that its vital national interests were implicated wherever Moscow asserted itself.”

This is what the fixation on “great power competition” threatens to do to our foreign policy again.

Great power competition can trap the United States into taking on far too many commitments and overstretching itself by trying to counter every action by other major powers. Wyne recommends a more selective approach that is not based on reacting to what the other powers do.

He sees several pitfalls from centering U.S. foreign policy on opposing all Russian and Chinese bids to increase their influence: it risks committing the United States to an expansive strategy that it can ill afford, and it could lead to U.S. overreaction that drives Russia and China more closely together, and it forecloses the possibility of cooperation and locks the United States into open-ended hostility with both states. A foreign policy that is reflexively anti-Russian and anti-Chinese at all times has the perverse effect of letting the Russian and Chinese governments drive U.S. decision-making. It also means sacrificing U.S. interests that might be served by cooperation on specific issues, such as arms control or climate change.

He also warns against treating every region in the world as a potential arena for competition, and he urges Washington to exercise greater discipline and restraint by setting priorities for which regions are most important to vital interests. There is a temptation to use “great power competition” as a justification for maintaining or increasing U.S. commitments everywhere regardless of the underlying interests at stake. He argues that the United States needs to resist that temptation and be willing to reduce its commitments where appropriate, and it should not view every Russian and Chinese initiative as a threat that demands a U.S. response.

Wyne argues that the United States should not expect Russia or China to implode suddenly as the USSR did. Since there is no realistic prospect of inflicting total defeat on another major power in the nuclear age, Washington will have to find some way to live with these other states in what he calls “strained cohabitation.” Therefore, the United States must learn how to manage that cohabitation through diplomacy, and its chief goal must be averting a new great power conflict. Wyne stresses this point several times throughout the book: “The most urgent priority, of course, is to avoid a great power war.” Insofar as the great power competition framing encourages and stokes that great power conflict, it is inimical to both U.S. and international security.

The book concludes with a set of principles to guide policymakers in the context of competition with Russia and China. Several of these focus on the need for America’s internal renewal, or what Wyne calls “becoming a more dynamic version of its best self.” This renewal is not only a necessary precondition for being able to compete effectively, but it is also an important goal that needs to be pursued for the benefit of the country regardless of what other states do.

Another principle calls for recognizing the limits of America’s unilateral influence in order to guard against the mistaken belief that Washington can control or decisively influence all outcomes around the world. One of the last recommendations is to pursue possibilities for cooperation in order to keep competition between major powers from spinning out of control.

A foreign policy of restraint is compatible with Wyne’s recommendations for taking advantage of America’s “great power opportunity.” It should also be much better suited for putting them into practice because advocates of restraint have already been arguing for many of the same things for years.

 

Is a US-Russia War Becoming Inevitable?

by Patrick J. Buchanan Posted on July 15, 2022

https://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2022/07/14/is-a-us-russia-war-becoming-inevitable/

At the NATO summit in Madrid, Finland was invited to join the alliance. What does this mean for Finland?

If Russian President Vladimir Putin breaches the 830-mile Finnish border, the United States will rise to Helsinki’s defense and fight Russia on Finland’s side.

What does Finland’s membership in NATO mean for America?

If Putin makes a military move into Finland, the U.S. will go to war against the world’s largest nation with an arsenal of between 4,500 and 6,000 battlefield and strategic nuclear weapons.

No Cold War president would have dreamed of making such a commitment – to risk the survival of our nation to defend the territory of a country thousands of miles away that has never been a US vital interest.

To go to war with the Soviet Union over the preservation of Finnish territory would have been seen as madness during the Cold War.

Recall: Harry Truman refused to use force to break Joseph Stalin’s blockade of Berlin. Dwight Eisenhower refused to send US troops to save the Hungarian freedom fighters being run down by Soviet tanks in Budapest in 1956.

Lyndon B. Johnson did nothing to assist the Czech patriots crushed by the Warsaw Pact armies in 1968. When Lech Walesa’s Solidarity was smashed on Moscow’s order in Poland in 1981, Ronald Reagan made brave statements and sent Xerox machines.

While the US issued annual declarations of support during the Cold War for the "captive nations" of Central and Eastern Europe, the liberation of these nations from Soviet control was never deemed so vital to the West as to justify a war with the USSR.

Indeed, in the 40 years of the Cold War, NATO, which had begun in 1949 with 12 member nations, added only four more – Greece, Turkey, Spain, and West Germany.

Yet, with the invitation to Sweden and Finland to join as the 31st and 32nd nations to receive an Article 5 war guarantee, NATO will have doubled its membership since what was thought – certainly by the Russians – to have been the end of the Cold War.

All the nations once part of Moscow’s Warsaw Pact – East Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria – are now members of a U.S.-led NATO – directed against Russia.

Three former republics of the USSR – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – are now also members of NATO, a military alliance formed to corral and contain the nation they had belonged to during the Cold War.

Lithuania, with 2% of Russia’s population, has just declared a partial blockade of goods moving across its territory to Kaliningrad, Russia’s enclave on the Baltic Sea.

To Putin’s protest, Vilnius has reminded Moscow that Lithuania is a member of NATO.

It is a dictum of geostrategic politics that a great power ought never to cede to a lesser power the ability to draw it into a great war.

In 1914, the Kaiser’s Germany gave its Austrian ally a "blank check" to punish Serbia for its role in the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne. Vienna cashed the Kaiser’s check and attacked Serbia, and the Great War of 1914-1918 was on.

In March 1939, Neville Chamberlain issued a war guarantee to Poland. If Germany attacked Poland, Britain would fight on Poland’s side.

Fortified with this war guarantee from the British Empire, the Poles stonewalled Hitler, refusing to talk to Berlin over German claims to the city of Danzig, taken from her at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler attacked and Britain declared war, which lasted six years and mortally wounded the British Empire.

And Poland? At Yalta in 1945, Winston Churchill agreed that a Soviet-occupied Poland should remain in Stalin’s custody.

Putin is a Russian nationalist who regards the breakup of the USSR as the greatest calamity of the 20th century. Still, he is not alone responsible for the wretched relations between our countries.

We Americans have played a leading role in what is shaping up as a Second Cold War, more dangerous than the first.

Over the last quarter-century, after Russia dissolved the Warsaw Pact and let the USSR break apart into 15 nations, we pushed NATO, created to corral and contain Russia, into Central and Eastern Europe.

In 2008, neocons goaded Georgia into attacking South Ossetia, provoking Russian intervention and the rout of the Georgian army.

In 2014, neocons goaded Ukrainians into overthrowing the elected pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. When they succeeded, Putin seized Crimea and Sevastopol, for centuries the home base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

In 2022, Moscow asked the US to pledge not to bring Ukraine into NATO. We refused. And Putin attacked. If Russians believe their country has been pushed against a wall by the West, can we blame them?

Americans appear dismissive of dark Russian warnings that rather than accept defeat in Ukraine, the humiliation of their nation, and their encirclement and isolation, they will resort to tactical nuclear weapons.

Is it really wise to dismiss these warnings as "saber-rattling"?

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.