Congress does have the ability to prevent either extreme outcome of war or peace, but neither of these seem likely given the current conditions on the peninsula.
The apparent abduction, and probable murder, of the prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 unmasked the ugly despotism behind the reformist image of the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
This is a story that goes back to the 18th century. Then, much of what we call “the Middle East” today, including the more habitable part of the Arabian Peninsula, was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled from Istanbul, then called Constantinople, by a cosmopolitan elite of mainly Turks and Balkan Muslims, including Bosnians and Albanians. The Hejaz, the western region of the Arabian Peninsula that included the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, was revered for religious reasons, but it was a backwater with no political or cultural significance.
In the 1740s, in the most isolated central area of the Arabian Peninsula, called Najd, a scholar named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab emerged with a fiery call for the restoration of “true Islam.” Wahhab soon allied with a chieftain called Ibn Saud—the founder of the Saudi dynasty.
The First Saudi State they established together grew in size and ambition, leading to a big massacre of Shiites in Karbala in 1801 and the occupation of Mecca in 1803. The Ottomans crushed the Wahhabi revolt in 1812 via their protectorate in Egypt, and Wahhabism retreated to the desert.
Another tumult in Hejaz occurred in 1856 when the Ottomans, thanks to the influence of their British allies, introduced another heretical “innovation”: the banning of slave trade, which was then a lucrative business between the Africa coast and the Arabian city of Jeddah. At the behest of angry slave traders, Grand Sharif Abd al-Muttalib of Mecca declared that Turks had become infidels and their blood was licit. As we learn from the chronicles of Ottoman statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, Turks’ sins included “allowing women to uncover their bodies, to stay separate from their fathers or husbands, and to have the right to divorce.”
These were the changes introduced during the Tanzimat, the great Ottoman reform movement in the mid-19th century by which the empire imported many Western institutions and norms. The Tanzimat allowed the Ottoman Empire to ultimately become a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament—something still unimaginable in the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia. It also allowed the rise of the modern Turkish Republic, where secular law became the norm, women gained equal rights, and democracy began to grow.
The agreement includes provisions that foreclose governments’ access to discriminatory protectionism and obligate the parties to refrain from backsliding. It achieves maximum market barrier reduction and enables the fullest expressions of market integration, while simultaneously preserving national sovereignty to legislate and regulate in ways that do not discriminate against imported goods, services, or capital.
Among the agreement’s many liberalizing features are provisions that:
Enshrine the “negative list” approach to liberalization across goods, services, investment, and government procurement, which is conducive to faster, broader, and deeper economic integration
Eliminate tariffs on nearly all goods upon entry into force
Permit free movement of British and American workers, conditioned on an offer of employment
Commit the parties to expedited customs clearance and administrative procedures
Mutually recognize professional qualifications and licenses
Mutually recognize the efficacy of conformity assessment, and equivalence provisions, which would allow companies to sell and operate in both markets by satisfying either Parties’ regulations in areas where there is agreement as to the objectives of the regulations
Are less restrictive on the use of inputs from third countries by lowering “rules of origin” thresholds that must be met to qualify for the agreement’s preferential terms
Preclude application of anti-dumping measures between the Parties
Preclude the use of investor-state dispute settlement
Provide for the accessions to the agreement of other Parties that can demonstrate willingness and capability to meet its market-liberalizing standards
President Trump has rebuked Pakistan, inflaming an already tense relationship when he tweeted about decades of U.S. aid to Pakistan with “nothing but lies & deceit” in return. The Trump administration subsequently reduced security and military aid to Pakistan, campaigned to add Pakistan to an intergovernmental watchlist for terrorism financing, and imposed sanctions on seven Pakistani firms involved in prohibited nuclear activities.
Yesterday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker met with President Trump at the White House to talk about trade. Afterwards, to the surprise of many (including me), they held a press conference at which they said positive things about the U.S.-EU trade relationship. Then later, President Trump had five positive tweets about the meeting. It was more amicable than anything we’ve seen in U.S. trade policy for many months.
Erik Goepner, Cato visiting scholar and retired U.S. Air Force colonel whose assignments included unit commands in Afghanistan and Iraq, rigorously analyzed the impact that 40 years of uninterrupted war has had on the population of Afghanistan.
In order to statistically measure the level of trauma within the country, Goepner created the “Trauma Index,” which takes into account traumatic events in the form of torture, rape, death, and other atrocities associated with war.
Goepner succinctly summarizes the challenges facing Afghanistan, writing that “Thanks to 40 years of uninterrupted war, Afghans suffer from extremely high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental illnesses, substance abuse, and diminished impulse control. Research shows that those negative effects make people more violent toward others. As a result, violence can become normalized as a legitimate means of problem solving and goal achievement, and that appears to have fueled Afghanistan’s endless war. Thus, Afghanistan will be difficult, if not impossible, to fix.”
Recent political tumult and the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency have driven anxious commentators to lament the collapse of a post-1945 “liberal world order.”
Nostalgic for the institution building and multilateral moment of the early postwar era, they counsel Washington to restore a battered tradition, uphold economic and security commitments, and promote liberal values.
It is ahistorical because it is blind to the process of “ordering” the world and erases the memory of violence, coercion, and compromise that also marked postwar diplomatic history. It loses sight of the realities and limits of the exercise of power abroad, the multiplicity of orders that arose, and the conflicted and contradictory nature of liberalism itself.
While liberalism and liberal projects existed, such “order” as existed rested on the imperial prerogatives of a superpower that attempted to impose order by stepping outside rules and accommodating illiberal forces.
He believes that launching a pre-emptive strike against North Korea is legal, the only way to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon is to “bomb Iran,” and the U.N. is irrelevant. He was also in favor of ousting Saddam Hussein, a decision he continues to stand by, and helped build a faulty case of Saddam possessing weapons of mass destruction.
Bolton’s appointment and other changes within the administration indicate three things:
2. The president’s hard-line approach is informed by problematic — and questionable — causal links. For example, the president believes that enhanced interrogation techniques work, and produce useful intelligence. In his first State of the Union address, the president declared that the notorious U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will remain open to ensure that “hundreds of dangerous terrorists” are not released. Yet, “Gitmo” has served as a recruiting tool for al-Qaida and its various affiliates while scientists and interrogators alike agree that torture doesn’t work. Similarly, the president continues to falsely link immigration with terrorism, a view shared by Bolton.
President Trump’s “remedies” are likely to raise production costs for U.S. businesses, diminish U.S. productivity, squeeze real household incomes, reduce the revenues of U.S. farmers and other export-dependent industries targeted by Chinese retaliation, exacerbate tensions with China and other countries adversely affected by the restrictions, and hasten the demise of the rules-based trading system.
President Trump seems to truly believe in his cause, and it may take actual implementation and subsequent failure of a protectionist trade policy to cure him of his misconceptions. Nevertheless, there is still time to push back. As of right now, these tariffs are just words. Trump said some things, but no action has been taken. As a result, it is worth it for everyone to make their case against these actions.
Other governments can make clear to the Trump administration how serious they are by announcing possible retaliatory measures now. Congress can assert its constitutional power over trade, through direct communication with the White House, and even through legislation designed to take back some power it had previously delegated to the executive branch. And the broader business community needs to make clear to the administration how badly it could be hurt by this.
A D.C.-based public policy research organization (or "think tank") dedicated to the values of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.
