O fracasso final dos acordos de Oslo, Israel-Palestina - Ishaan Tharoor with Mikhail Klimentov (The Washington Post)

 

By Ishaan Tharoor with Mikhail Klimentov  Email

The gloomy failure of the Oslo accords President Bill Clinton stands between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Sept. 13, 1993, at the White House. (J. David Ake/AFP/Getty Images) It’s one of the most iconic images of the 20th century. On a sunny day outside the White House, President Bill Clinton stands open-armed before Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The latter duo — representatives of two national movements that by definition were existential threats to the other — clutched palms for the first time. The handshake that shook the world happened on Sept. 13, 1993. It followed months of complex, clandestine backchannel negotiationsbetween the two parties in Oslo, the Norwegian capital. The “declaration of principles” that came that day at the White House was the first of a series of interim agreements clinched during the 1990s, aimed at building cooperation between the Israeli government and Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. What was dubbed the Oslo accord (later to become plural after subsequent agreements) provided for the creation of the Palestinian Authority, among other things. That political body, the thinking went, would enable the expansion of Palestinian self-rule throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip while “final status” issues were ironed out. The concept of the “two-state solution” — separate, sovereign Israeli and Palestinian states existing side-by-side — was not explicitly enshrined 30 years ago, but the Oslo accords became its driving logic and laid out a road map for a lasting peace. At the time, the diplomatic breakthrough seemed a landmark moment after years of strife and bloodshed in the Holy Land. “The children of Abraham … have embarked together on a bold journey,” Clinton said with biblical solemnity. But three decades later, invoking “Oslo” in the context of the Middle East conjures up a feeling of defeat. A viable Palestinian state seems even more improbable now than it may have been in 1993. In violation of international law, Israeli settlements have expanded throughout much of the West Bank, carving up Palestinian lands with new roads and jurisdictions maintained for Jewish settlers. Below ground, aquifers are being diverted to the settlements, imposing chronic water shortages on Palestinians. East Jerusalem, the putative capital of a future Palestinian state, became home to more than 200,000 Jewish settlers; many Palestinian residents there face a tacit campaign to evict them from neighborhoods where they’ve lived for generations. Israel’s entrenched military rule over millions of Palestinians shows little sign of abating, and has prompted the world’s leading human rights organizations in recent years to determine that conditions of apartheid prevail over the occupied West Bank. The flaring of the second intifada in 2000 and spikes in Palestinian terrorist attacks soured the Israeli public on the project of peace. Then, the steady political victories of the Israeli right — which always balked at Rabin’s initiative — put further distance between the spirit of Oslo and the realities on the ground. The current far-right Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasts members in its ranks who subscribe more to the ideology of Rabin’s extremist assassin than the Labor Party prime minister himself. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority is weak and increasingly unpopular. Far from a temporary body animated by the spirit of the Palestinian national movement, it’s a sclerotic institution, riven with corruption. Its leader, Arafat’s aging successor Mahmoud Abbas, has presided over his rump of a fiefdom like other Arab autocrats in the region, stifling civil society and repeatedly dodging calls for fresh elections. Arrayed against his Fatah ruling party is the Islamist outfit Hamas, which holds sway in the beleaguered Gaza Strip and maintains a constant militant threat against Israel. “The conceptual hope for Oslo was that moderates on both sides would engage in reciprocal concessions to expand the political space for further accommodations,” wrote the Washington Institute’s Dennis Ross and David Makovsky — the former once a key U.S. negotiator in these proceedings — in a Washington Post op-ed. “Sadly, the reverse happened, with achievements too slow in coming and extremist actions undermining the process.” Israel has decidedly gained more from what the Oslo accords ushered in than the Palestinians. The agreements precipitated a flood of foreign investment into the country, helping kick-start the tech boom that pushed Israel’s per capita gross domestic product above that of most European countries. At the same time, under the illusion of an established process for peace, Israel entrenched its de facto control over the Palestinian territories. The Oslo accords gave us what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently described as “the shared fiction that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was only temporary.” That fiction was embraced by successive U.S. administrations, which prioritized Israel’s security interests while helping keep afloat the unpopular Abbas, who some Palestinians see as a handmaiden to the occupation. (Netanyahu tellingly stressed to his colleagues in a Cabinet meeting this summer that Israel needed collaboration with the Palestinian Authority, but also needed to crush Palestinian aspirations for statehood — the PA’s supposed raison d’être.) It’s not clear how sustainable this post-Oslo status quo is. There is no current platform for meaningful peace talks, yet there’s little external pressure on Israel to revert to some of the earlier understandings of the 1990s. The diplomatic opening to a handful of Arab states — and potentially a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia — may be the most significant chance yet to move the needle, but most analysts aren’t convinced that such a breakthrough can take place given the pro-settler proclivities of Israel’s hard-line government. And so the Oslo illusion churns along, buttressed by the international community. “To this day, European governments and institutions pour money into the fabled ‘people to people’ component of the Oslo paradigm,” wrote Israeli analyst Dahlia Scheindlin. “While Palestinians and Israelis talking isn’t bad in itself, the idea that this feel-good dialogue could withstand the juggernaut of Israeli expansion, the grinding daily injustices of occupation, or tidal waves of military campaigns, was dead wrong.” But a tipping point may be around the corner. “Thirty years on, it is doubtful the charade of Oslo can continue much longer; certainly not after apocalyptical fanatics have taken power in Israel and are doubling down on Judaizing every corner of historic Palestine,” wrote Palestinian commentator Marwan Bishara. “But apartheid cannot be the alternative to the two-state solution; certainly not in the long run.”

China’s Xi fights fires at home and abroad - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (The Washington Post)

 Passou o tempo da China virar um hegemon de verdade? Aparentemente não, ainda é possível, mas ela vai ter de abandonar essa pretensão de ser novamente um Celeste Império...

The Washington Post, September 5, 2023

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall    China’s Xi fights fires at home and abroad By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  The Washington Post, Sept 5, 2023   On a host of fronts, China’s domineering leader seems to be fighting fires. Abroad, President Xi Jinping is confronted by a hardening consensus against Beijing in the West, as well as ever-present friction with regional powers and neighbors. At home, Xi presides over a hinge moment for the Chinese economy. Its meteoric growth has slowed, a brief post-pandemic surge petered out, and analysts point to profound structural issues undermining China’s future prospects. Xi and the ruling clique are struggling to address the new challenges posed by China’s maturing economy. The country’s population is both shrinking and aging, and questions loom over the potential productivity of a graying workforce. At the same time, youth unemployment has reached such striking levels that the government suspended publishing the relevant data this summer. China’s economy once seemed the new engine of the world — and the country remains a juggernaut in global trade — but a sense of stagnation is creeping in, one that can be seen in the macroeconomic dataas well as the waning optimism of a younger generation that knew only the boom times. China’s one-party state can’t repeat the mammoth stimulus for infrastructure projects and property construction that powered China out of the 2008 global financial crisis and allowed Xi and his allies to crow about the superiority of the Chinese model compared with the West’s crisis-hit democracies. A decade and a half later, cash is tighter, the wounds of the pandemic’s draconian lockdowns are still raw, and China’s overheated real estate sector is extra laden with debt, with some major developers teetering on the brink of collapse. Xi’s ever-tightening authoritarian grip over virtually all facets of life in China is arguably making the situation worse. “The government’s pursuit of total control has set the country on a path of slower growth and created multiplying pockets of dissatisfaction,” wrote Ian Johnson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a longtime China watcher. There are ripple effects on the world stage, too. “The current slowdown underscores a shift in China’s global image,” explained my colleague David Lynch. “For years, China’s vast domestic market beckoned multinational corporations with the promise of enormous profits. And it seemed certain to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy.” But now, “the outlook is less rosy,” Lynch wrote, with China posting aconsiderably sluggish performance in the second quarter given the pace-setting dynamism of its economy over the past three decades. This may not be a blip, as Beijing weathers considerable geopolitical head winds. On a trip to China last week, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned that the prevailing uncertainty, stoked also by the tough actions taken by the Chinese government against foreign businesses, is making China “uninvestable” in the eyes of U.S. investors. “China needs to recognize that they can no longer rely on the sheer mass of their market to attract that type of foreign investment,” Naomi Wilson, vice president of policy, Asia and global trade at the Information Technology Industry Council, told my colleague Meaghan Tobin. “Even among Chinese companies, there have been efforts to relocate outside of China.” Recent surveys of global public opinion find largely negative views of China’s influence in international affairs, including in some middle-income countries outside the West. In Asia, the United States has steadily bolstered a web of alliances and partnerships with China’s neighbors, bonds being strengthened directly out of concern for China’s increasingly aggressive behavior. Chinese officials resent the implication that their state — rather than what they see as the overweening U.S. hegemon — represents a threat to stability and order. But Beijing can’t seem to help itself. The recent state publication of a map that claims chunks of territory in neighboring nations, including India, triggered a diplomatic spat with New Delhi that preceded news that Xi will not attend this week’s meeting of the Group of 20 major economies, hosted in the Indian capital. Xi’s apparent approach to the moment has been to double down on his hard-line nationalist instincts. Long gone are visions from a decade ago, when some experts imagined that China’s leaders would steer the country’s economy to a more liberalized, market-oriented future. Instead, Xi, an aloof supremo with the license to rule for life, has embarked upon rounds of radical purges and crackdowns that have affected the ranks of China’s political elites and its private sector. Chinese tech companies hemorrhaged hundreds of billions of dollars in value in recent years. Capable technocrats in prominent posts were replaced with Xi loyalists. Managers and business executives in state-run companies are compelled to study and expound upon the virtues of “Xi Thought,” in a nod to the more doctrinaire, Maoist past. For Xi, centralized authority and control is paramount. That reflects Xi’s weakness. “Whereas Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping enjoyed prestige from their revolutionary pedigree and exploits in establishing the ‘New China,’ Xi has no personal legitimacy independent of the Communist Party,” Chun Han Wong, author “Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China’s Superpower Future,” said in a recent interview. “His right to rule is inextricably linked with the party’s legitimacy, and his power cannot be separated from the party’s political machinery.” But what may be good for the party may not be good for the country. “These economic problems are part of a broader process of political ossification and ideological hardening,” Johnson wrote in an essay in Foreign Affairs. “For anyone who has observed the country closely over the past few decades, it is difficult to miss the signs of a new national stasis, or what Chinese people call neijuan. Often translated as ‘involution,’ it refers to life twisting inward without real progress.” That malaise may have profound implications in the years to come. “So far nobody can challenge [Xi] politically,” Ling Chen, an assistant professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, told my colleague Christian Shepherd. “But economic performance is always the very core of the regime’s legitimacy and that affects how well he can govern the country.” “Things always fail slowly until they suddenly break,” William Hurst, a professor of Chinese development at the University of Cambridge, told Reuters, warning of potential financial crises to come that may have steep social and political costs. “Eventually there’s going to have to be a reckoning.”

Ukraine’s hopes for maximal victory look remote - Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall (WP)

 

The Washington Post, August 20, 2023

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall   Email   Ukraine’s hopes for maximal victory look remote Ukrainian forces fire toward Russian positions in the Kharkiv region last month. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post) Everyone expected Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russian positions to be tough. But perhaps not as tough as it has been. After more than two months of attritional warfare across a vast front line stretching from the country’s east to the south, Kyiv’s forces have yet to forge any major breakthroughs. While exacting a grievous toll on the invading Russians, they have sustained significant casualties and found themselves bogged down by a thicket of Russian minefields, trenches and other fortifications. Their gains have been only incremental, no matter the billions of dollars in Western aid invested in preparing Ukraine’s push to reclaim lost territory. The difficulties, my colleagues reported at the end of last week, have led the U.S. intelligence community to conclude that the Ukrainian counteroffensive will fall short of at least one of its key goals — reaching the key southeastern city of Melitopol. It is “a finding that, should it prove correct, would mean Kyiv won’t fulfill its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea in this year’s push,” my colleagues John Hudson and Alex Horton wrote. Melitopol, which straddles two key highways and a railroad line, is seen as the gateway to Crimea. Recapturing it would cripple Russia’s ability to reinforce the peninsula and would deliver a demoralizing blow, creating myriad strategic headaches for the Kremlin and opening the door for Ukraine to press further toward Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014. Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, have insisted that their troops will reclaim every inch of Ukrainian land lost to Russia, including Crimea. In public, Western politicians and diplomats have embraced the vision, reiterating that their governments would back Ukraine in its defense for as long as it takes. In private, conversations are darker and more skeptical, with many officials gloomy about Ukraine’s prospects to expel the Russian invaders. The new U.S. intelligence assessment reflects a less-spoken, but emerging consensus. On Friday, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan attempted to play down its significance. “Over the course of the past two years, there have been a lot of analyses of how this war would unfold coming from a lot of quarters,” he told reporters at Camp David ahead of a U.S.-convened summit with South Korea and Japan. “And we’ve seen numerous changes in those analyses over time as dynamic battlefield conditions change.” But U.S. officials and their European counterparts are increasingly more circumspect about what they hope Ukraine’s counteroffensive can achieve. “I had said a couple of months ago that this offensive was going to be long, it’s going to be bloody, it’s going to be slow,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Post last week. “And that’s exactly what it is: long, bloody and slow, and it’s a very, very difficult fight.” “To commit our reserve forces we need to be sure that the pathways are clear,” Yuriy Sak, an adviser to the Ukrainian minister of defense, told my colleague Susannah George. “We would rather go slower and make sure that we preserve the lives of our troops.” An analysis from the Institute for the Study of War published after my colleagues’ report said that “it is premature to make assessments about the overall success of ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive operations occurring along several lines of advance toward several different apparent objectives.” Away from the front lines, the war is intensifying as well. While Ukraine has stepped up drone attacks into Russian territory, Russia continues its indiscriminate campaign of missile strikes on Ukrainian civilian areas. On Saturday, a Russian attack on a public square in the northern city of Chernihiv killed at least seven people, including a child. Zelensky, who was on a trip to Northern Europe in search of further military assistance, vowed to “respond tangibly.” The reality of this difficult fight has led to some unusually blunt admissions. A top NATO official, Stian Jenssen, triggered a Ukrainian outcry after he was quoted at a public event in Norway suggesting that he could see a scenario where Ukraine received membership in the Western military alliance if it accepted some territorial concessions to Russia. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, for whom Jenssen is chief of staff, had to walk back his subordinate’s remarks. “It is the Ukrainians, and only the Ukrainians, who can decide when there are conditions in place for negotiations, and who can decide at the negotiating table what is an acceptable solution,” he said, echoing rhetoric that Western officials have routinely put forward when confronted with questions about the endgame in Ukraine. But Ukrainian concessions appear to be something many in Western countries are willing to countenance. The U.S. role in supporting Ukraine will probably become more polarizing at home as the war drags on and the 2024 elections draw nearer. Some polls now show a majority of American voters, especially Republicans, are skeptical of additional aid to Kyiv. That’s being picked up by some of those vying to be the Republican presidential nominee. “Our goal should not be for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to lose. Our goal should be for America to win,” Vivek Ramaswamy, a surprise dark horse in the race, told CNN on Thursday, suggesting American investment in Ukraine’s fight for survival was pushing Russia and China closer together. “I would freeze the current lines of control, and that would leave parts of the Donbas region with Russia,” Ramaswamy said. “I would also further make a commitment that NATO will not admit Ukraine to NATO.” Such a proposal explains why the Biden administration thinks Putin is invested in fighting this war through to the 2024 election. “Putin knows that the leading Republican candidate for president next year, former president Donald Trump, would end U.S. support for Ukraine, and that there are others like him in Europe,” wrote Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman and U.S. diplomat. “A forever war favors Putin, not Ukraine.” In his op-ed, Malinowski suggested the best pragmatic solution for the Ukrainian endgame would combine supporting Kyiv’s counteroffensive as far as it goes until some point next year before the major NATO summit in Washington. There, the Western military alliance would commit to extending membership and treaty protections to Ukraine over the territory it controls. That would mark an implicit concession of territory to Russia, but make real a strategic nightmare for Putin of converting a nation whose sovereignty he has long dismissed into another strong NATO member on his borders. Talk of endgames in the war, though, remains fanciful. So far, no Russian commitment to good-faith negotiations materialized. “No one is seriously considering or discussing a diplomatic end to the war: a notion that looks to many high-profile Russians like a personal threat, given all the war crimes that their country has committed and the responsibility that the entire elite now bears for the carnage in Ukraine,” wrote Tatiana Stanovaya in Foreign Affairs, referring to the consensus view among the Kremlin elite. “Peace for Ukraine must at some point involve negotiations with Russia,” wrote Brookings scholar Constanze Stelzenmüller in a recent essay. “But given the Kremlin’s implacable attitude, the burden of proof for the credibility of its negotiating offers would be extremely high. An armistice based on a freezing of the status quo in the form of continued Russian occupation of Crimea and the Donbas would reward Putin’s aggression and merely pause hostilities.” To avoid “the risk that an end to the war becomes an interregnum between wars,” she concluded, “only the strongest guarantees — a clear, constructive, and hopefully short path to NATO and EU membership — can satisfy Ukraine’s security interests, and indeed those of the Western alliance.” A total diplomatic victory for Kyiv could help make up for the absence of a total military one.

Ukraine’s war of attrition draws parallels to World War I - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (The Washington Post)

 The Washington Post, August 13, 2023

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall   Email

Ukraine’s war of attrition draws parallels to World War I A Ukrainian soldier in the Zaporizhzhia region on Thursday. (Libkos/AP) The brutal war raging in Ukraine is a profoundly 21st-century conflict. Drones buzz around its battlefields. Hypersonic missiles plunge into unsuspecting targets. Satellites disperse the fog of war. Algorithms generated by artificial intelligence help guide artillery. Footage captured on mobile phones proliferates on social media, giving the conflict an almost visceral, real-time feel to people thousands of miles away. Online armies of partisans catalogue atrocities and circulate evidence of triumphs. And yet for all that’s new about Ukraine’s desperate fight to repel Russia’s invasion, the war is increasingly offering grim reminders of the past. In images that recall battles more than a century ago, soldiers squat in earthwork defenses, surrounded by terrain shelled into a moonscape. For two months, Ukraine’s forces have embarked on their long-anticipated counteroffensive, pushing at Russian positions in the south and southeast of the country. As has been widely reported, the campaign has progressed slowly, with Ukraine’s new Western-furnished mechanized divisions bogged down by layers of Russian defenses, including vast minefields, “dragon’s teeth” concrete barriers, antitank ditches and lines of barbed wire. “You can no longer do anything with just a tank with some armor, because the minefield is too deep, and sooner or later, it will stop and then it will be destroyed by concentrated fire,” Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s military chief, told my colleagues last month in a rare, wide-ranging interview. Ukraine does not publicize its official casualty figures from the war, but it’s understood the body count is rising, while morale flags. A recent report in the Wall Street Journal examined one particularly grisly indicator, suggesting that between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians have become amputees since Russia invaded last year. It’s a startling number for a modern conflict — consider that fewer than 2,000 U.S. veterans involved in the invasion and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan had amputations. “By comparison, some 67,000 Germans and 41,000 Britons had to have amputations during the course of World War I, when the procedure was often the only one available to prevent death,” noted the Journal. Analysts have already observed the shadow of World War Ifalling over Ukraine. They see it in the return of a grinding land war in Europe between the militaries of two states, in the geopolitical folly of initiating the conflict and the elite hubris in believing it could be easily won, in the bleak stasis of a campaign marked in mud-packed trenches and bunkers, and in the lack of meaningful territorial gains even as body bags fill up. The senseless charnel houses of Verdun and the Somme found their match in Bakhmut. Age-old lessons endure. “As World War I indelibly demonstrated, wars rarely go as planned,” wrote the Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan. “Military strategists were aware of the growing importance of trench warfare and rapid-firing artillery, yet they failed to see the consequences. They were unprepared for what quickly became static front lines, in which the opposing sides carried out massive exchanges of artillery and machine-gun fire from fortified trenches.” Those tactics, she wrote, led to high casualty rates with minimal advances. “The first serious war of the third millennium must be fought on the ground — quite a comedown from the ‘post-kinetic’ cyber and information warfare that had been confidently predicted by both Western and Russian generals,” wrote Edward Luttwak, a U.S. author and strategist. “This is a war that must be fought by sheer, grinding, attrition, just like the First World War on the Western Front.” Despite the differences of the age, simple technological imperatives remain. “It has been almost 110 years since the tank was introduced in 1916. Some have argued that the tank is obsolete because of technological improvements in antitank weapons,” wrote Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University. “This argument has been commonplace for over 50 years, or almost half the entire history of the tank,” he added. “Yet in 2023, both sides in Ukraine continue to rely on tanks and are doing everything they can to get their hands on more of them.” Some hopeful experts reckon World War I may prove less instructive in the Ukrainian context than the even greater war that followed. “A better historical precedent to understand the current fighting in Ukraine can be found in the U.S. Army’s experience in the summer of 1944, when it was fighting against Nazi forces in the hedgerows of Normandy in France,” wrote the Rand Corp.’s Raphael Cohen and Gian Gentile, arguing that, while World War I was defined by “strategic atrophy” and “tactical deadlock,” Ukraine, like the Allies in 1944, is systematically working toward a breakthrough with patience and “tactical innovation.” Biddle cautioned against drawing simplistic lessons from either of the great wars. “Like World War I, World War II involved a great deal of variance in outcomes: it was not a simple, uniform story of offensive success,” he wrote. “And in Ukraine, both the war’s offensive successes and its defensive stalemates have occurred in the face of drones, precision weapons, hypersonic missiles, and space-based surveillance. In none of these wars have the tools predetermined the results.” Ukraine’s fight has been defined by the perseverance and courage of a nation battling for its existence, but even then, despair is never far away — so, too, cynicism. On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fired all the heads of the country’s military recruitment centers, citing apparent reports of rampant corruption and officials taking bribes to help potential conscripts dodge enlistment. My colleagues reported from a park in Kyiv where injured soldiers from the front lines are recuperating. Many are permanently maimed and disfigured, coping with their traumas as life in the capital hums as normal around them. Yulia Paltseva, a Kyiv receptionist whose boyfriend was soon bound for the front, looked around in dismay. “All those dancing and smiling people should remember that there are those soldiers like my boyfriend in the trenches without any rotations and being shelled every day,” Paltseva said. As for the counteroffensive, she added: “Our expectations were higher. If it’s going on, it’s going slow.”