Saudi-Iran Pact Brokered by China points to a New Era of Peace and Budding New Global Order

By Mosh Israel

During Modi-Putin heart-to-heart talk held on the on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s Summit in Samarkand last year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed to the Russian president that ‘today’s era is not of war…’ This comment was made in an effort by India to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine. Sadly, war hawkers in some Western Capitals and the Media hysterically ran with the phrase and used it to reprimand Russia over Ukraine Crisis.

However, it is naïve to believe that this reaction came out of an honest aversion to war, rather than a grand opportunity to virtue signal against the wars that do not serve Washington’s interests. However, it didn’t take long before Washington’s embrace of a ‘war free era’ came to a screeching halt once China put the ‘not an era of war’ mantra into practice by brokering the Saudi-Iranian deal to restore diplomatic relations between the two countries. Both countries have had no diplomatic relations for seven years after Iranian protestors stormed the Saudi embassy in Teheran following the execution of a Shi’ite cleric in Saudi Arabia in 2016. The two rivals have since fought a proxy war in Yemen and brought a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in the region. Therefore, a pact promising peace between the two heavy weights in the middle east is a step in the right direction.

This agreement goes further than just the normalization of relations between the two, and also includes a drive towards enhancing regional and international peace and security. To any layman who is neither a political bureaucrat nor a media propagandist, the deal presents a historic milestone towards the stabilization of the middle East, a region that has suffered innumerable conflicts that have cost the lives of many innocents. Furthermore, the involvement of Iraq and the Sultanate of Oman is an indication of an inclusive peace. No peace is long lasting without the input of well-wishing neighbors. The two states also agreed to re-open their embassies within two months. Furthermore, Iran and Saudi Arabia will restore a 22-year-old security pact that requires them to cooperate on issues of terrorism, drug smuggling and money laundering. A renewal of the 1998 trade and technology deal was also agreed upon.

It is not helpful to jump the gun and declare that the middle east shall be all roses and no guns from now on. The road to a peaceful middle east is long and winding. Fortunately, China has decided to be the adult in the room and start walking the road to peace. The brokering of this deal should be a pointer to the significance of a multi-polar world and the urgent need for powerful countries to champion peace and put an end to the destructive war machine. China’s pursuit of win-win partnerships maybe scoffed at in several western capitals, but that means nothing if the strategy is yielding undeniable results.

Many in Washington hold the wrong view that the Saudi-Iran pact is a challenge to US hegemony because it was brokered by China. This mindset needs to drastically change among certain circles in Washington. A peace deal is a peace deal and should be praised. So far, it is a good sign that the European Union has welcomed the resumption of ties between the two countries. It is important that regional powers possess an independent foreign policy that serves the interests of their respective regions rather than have other countries dictate to them foreign policies that only bring destruction.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping observed while advocating for China’s proposal of Global Security Initiative (GSI), for the world to attain sustainable peace, “we need to work together to maintain peace and stability in the world. The Cold War mentality would only wreck the global peace framework, hegemonism and power politics would only endanger world peace, and bloc confrontation would only exacerbate security challenges in the 21st century.” Therefore, as President Xi emphasized, all efforts that focus at creating conducive environment for harmony must be supported by all peace-loving people of the world and firmly “oppose unilateralism, and say no to group politics and bloc confrontation; stay committed to taking the legitimate security concerns of all countries seriously, uphold the principle of indivisible security, and oppose the pursuit of one’s own security at the cost of others’ security; stay committed to peacefully resolving differences and disputes between countries through dialogue and consultation.”

While Saudi-Iran peace deal is a diplomatic victory for China in the gulf region, instead of painting it as anything else, all other countries should observe and embrace the correct order of conducting international relations. Perhaps, the next step should be to involve Israel in a daring middle eastern peace framework that would suspend hostilities in the region for the next 100 years. If any country can achieve this, it is China under the current CCP and president Xi Jinping’s objective of playing a ‘constructive role in appropriately handling hotspot issues in today’s world in accordance with the wishes of all countries’ and demonstrate China’s ‘responsibility as a major country.’ This very sentiment was expressed by China’s State Councilor and top diplomat Mr. Wang Yi who was deeply involved in the entire process.

African countries should keenly observe the events in the middle east and seek to learn from them. One of the major takeaways, is the fact that China is here to advance peace and cooperation within the framework of a multi-polar global order. The other lesson is that any hostilities between nations can be resolved diplomatically if the parties involved do not allow countries with harmful ulterior motives to take part in a peace-seeking process. Finally, African countries should make it clear to Washington, Paris, and London that the continent is not a playground for political games, Africa values genuine partnerships based on mutual respect and the continent’s embrace is large enough for both the west and China. Therefore, our cooperation with one bloc is not a rejection of the other but rather an indication of goodwill politics in a new multi-polar world order.

Mosh Israel is a Research Fellow with Development Watch Centre.

It’s time to end senseless, endless sanctions.

By George A. Lopez

Thirty years ago this week the United Nations Security Council responded to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with mandatory, comprehensive economic sanctions. By 2000 the UNSC, led by the United States, had imposed powerful embargos in 11 other cases of threats to international peace and security. Despite developing more targeted “smart sanctions” aimed primarily at group and national leaders, elongated sanctions episodes continued to wreak disastrous consequences on civilians through the present day. The Trump Administration’s use of maximum pressure sanctions, which some see as targeted, plus trade sanctions on steroids, have devastated civilians in North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela, thus solidifying wide acceptance that sanctions constitute economic war.

Just as U.S. policy should end our endless wars, sanctions as part of protracted war — as in Iraq and Afghanistan — or sanctions that make war on general populations should also end. Whoever wins the presidency in November must rethink how sanctions can be an essential, yet prudent, tool of U.S. economic statecraft. Such a reformulation should rely on lessons learned from sanctions research and include reconstructing the U.S. government vision and architecture for sanctions policy.

When, why, and how do sanctions work

Sanctions work best when they are one of a number of diverse tools employed to achieve a clearly defined and consistent set of policy goals. Sanctions must not only bite and enrage the targeted group or nation, but actually engage them in continued diplomacy focused on the behavior needed to lift the sanctions. At best, sanctions achieve compliance from their targets in about one-third of cases, with that compliance occurring within two and a half years. Short of full success, the greater the active diplomacy accompanying sanctions, the stronger the constraints stifling the target’s goals.

Historically, multilateral sanctions are more successful than unilateral. Recent decisions by the U.S. to maximize implementation through expanding targeted designations and imposing crippling banking sanctions has led to greater negative impact on civilians, thus eroding international cooperation. Sanctions fail in various ways but most often when the policy goals are diffuse, unrealistic in making multiple demands, or when obsession with adding more sanctions lead sanctions to become the policy, rather than a means to policy.

Understanding the nuances of sanctions success in issue areas important to the U.S. is critical to improving their effectiveness in future U.S. policy. Regarding human rights, neither unilateral nor multilateral sanctions have ever toppled a brutal dictator. Nor have sanctions, by themselves, ever forced rights violators to desist in their worst acts. Most effective, however, are two sanctions strategies. The first lies in the standard mantra, “follow the money,” which most often applies to sanctions concerns with terrorist networks or when U.S. banking and currency markets are in jeopardy. But as organizations like the Sentry Project have demonstrated, sanctions policy actions can identify brutal rights abusers for the kleptocrats that they are, freeze their worldwide assets, and hold them to full account.

Second, as pre-atrocity indicators increase in a society, sanctions can play a significant prevention or mitigation role through asset seizures and travel bans on a range of mid-level economic and political enablers who strengthen and shield brutal dictators. These include bankers, industrialists, and police and military networks in and outside a rights abusing regime. U.S. leaders must mobilize anew the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act as the strongest mechanism for action against kleptocrats and enablers.

To constrain nuclear non-proliferation, the U.S. needs a similar new awareness and agility. Sanctions cannot bludgeon a nation into giving up what it considers as its most powerful security protection. But nuclear reversal has occurred in Iran, Ukraine, South Africa, Brazil, and Libya when sanctions deny money and material critical to the development of arsenals, while new security guarantees are forged from intense problem-solving diplomacy. In addition, these agreements are accompanied by a versatile array of economic inducements from a number of nations which motivates and sustains the target renouncing nuclear development.

Creating a “whole of government” approach to U.S. sanctions

To launch a new, diplomacy-dominated sanctions era, future U.S. presidents must create a new architecture featuring a whole of government approach to ensuring sanctions success. This entails reinvigorating some agencies and redefining the roles of others to improve sanctions design and impact assessment.

Such restructuring begins with re-establishing the key role of the State Department in policy formulation and negotiation by restoring its Office of Sanctions Policy that was dissolved in 2017. A similar re-injection of sanctions expertise will be needed in the National Security Council and in the Policy Planning Staff at State. These reforms, in turn, must lead to a rebalance of power with the Treasury Department where the Secretary’s Office and the Office of Foreign Asset Control has had extensive sway over the politics of sanctions.

In this reorganization, OFAC and Treasury will still have important but different roles to play. The more than 8,000 entries on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List in Treasury results from the discovery of networks trading in prohibited materials, money laundering, and establishing shadow banks and financial institutions as sanctions evasion strategies employed by targeted governments or groups.

The next administration should de-politicize this listing procedure and keep them more narrowly defined as the international criminal activity they are. The tasks of “outlawing” actors via sanctions has convoluted the delicate diplomacy needed to produce the compliance the U.S. seeks from national leaders. Sanctions policy benefits if OFAC pursues criminal charges in the legal realm and not in the political lane.

New thinking should also be brought to the role of the Commerce Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in attaining sanctions goals from an inducement perspective. Commerce could build on its recent success in bolstering ventures in Sudan in that nation’s early post-dictatorship era. USAID can inject assistance to areas of a post-sanctions economy in most need of recovery.

The role of Congress in validating a new and vigorous sanctions plan by providing additional funding for such foreign policy priorities cannot be overlooked. So too Congress might finally pass into law a proposal offered 20 years ago by the late Senator Richard Lugar that imbeds a two year sunset clause into U.S. sanctions. To extend sanctions beyond that would require the administration to certify the national security role of the sanctions, state their current effectiveness, and document they were not harming civilians.

Finally, based on past experiences, international relief agencies and the NGO community can claim quite rightly that humanitarian sanctions are an oxymoron. Therefore, a new, nimble and sensible sanctions policy would incorporate their experiences and remedies into the definition of rules governing their travel, delivery of supplies, and additional exemptions they need for preventing and mitigating humanitarian crises. With their guidance, U.S. sanctions design, implementation, and enforcement can reduce dramatically the duration and depth of the negative impact sanctions have on innocent civilians.

However difficult the task may be for U.S. leadership to develop sanctions that “do no harm” to the general population, the time for constructing these tools has come. Such action and the policy goals it would support could end senseless and endless sanctions.

George A. Lopez

Source: Responsible State Craft.

Desperate Measures: The Effects of Economic Isolation on Warrying Powers.

Erik Sand.

Scholars and strategists have long debated whether cutting off an opponent’s trade is an effective strategy in war. In this debate, success or failure has usually been judged based on whether the state subjected to economic isolation surrenders without being defeated on the battlefield. This approach, however, has missed a more important way in which economic isolation affects its target: strategy. Economic isolation constrains a state’s strategic choices and leaves its leaders to choose from the remaining options, which are almost always riskier. As analyses of German decision-making in World Wars I and II demonstrate, these riskier strategies often involve escalating the conflict at hand.

How does a state’s access to the international economy affect its strategy to prevail in war? This question bears on some of the most important international challenges facing the United States today. Economic sanctions have become a frequent tool in American foreign policy — witness the current campaigns of “maximum pressure” against Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela as well as increased economic sanctions against Russia and the return of the embargo against Cuba.1 The United States would almost certainly expand such measures as part of its strategy were one of these disputes to escalate into open conflict. More importantly, perhaps, a strategy of economic isolation is already being explicitly discussed as an option in the event of a war between the United States and China. China is highly integrated into the international economy, and some U.S. strategists argue that blocking the Strait of Malacca to disrupt China’s supply of oil would be a good alternative to the “AirSea Battle” concept, whose advocates call for strikes against sensors and long-range weapons located in mainland China to reduce threats to U.S. forces in the region at the start of a conflict.2 On the other hand, not all potential U.S. adversaries are so well connected to the international economy. North Korea, for example, maintains a national ideology of self-sufficiency and does its best to isolate itself from the world, to avoid being vulnerable to such maneuverings. If the United States found itself at war with either of these countries, what would a strategy of economic isolation accomplish? Would it lead to victory?

The traditional scholarly answer is “no”: Industrial economies are sufficiently robust and economic isolation is sufficiently difficult such that states facing economic isolation can easily adapt, except in extraordinary circumstances.3 This article challenges that claim. While economic isolation alone may not lead directly to defeat, it places important constraints on a power’s strategic decision-making by limiting the options that are available. Economically isolated powers tend to pursue riskier strategies, often launching attacks that expand the conflict at hand. These broader conflicts then frequently end in defeat. Moreover, this effect holds regardless of a state’s prewar level of economic integration.

In the first section of this article, I begin by reviewing the debate surrounding the potential U.S. strategies in the event of a conflict with China, before discussing the principal existing arguments about how prewar economic integration affects wars and the effects of economic isolation during war. In section two, I develop a theory of how economic isolation leads to risky decision-making, identifying two ways in which economic isolation impacts a country’s decision-makers as well as two types of obviously risky strategies. I briefly discuss case selection before exploring two critical examples of economic isolation in sections three and four: Germany in World Wars I and II. I conclude the article with a discussion of the relevance of these two cases today and the implications of my analysis.

Source: Read full article on Texas National Security Review.

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