Archives for July 2019

A Water Crisis in Chennai, India

One of the largest cities in India is running out of water. Is this our climate future?

Monsoons typically provide the bulk of water for Chennai, which is one of the largest cities in India. It is on the south eastern coast of the country, in the Tamil Nadu province.  This is a region that relies on seasonal monsoons to supply the bulk of water.

But last year’s monsoons were exceptionally weak, causing aquifers and other water sources to run dry.

Now in some neighborhoods if taps run at all, only a trickle comes out. Many neighborhoods are reliant on water trucks — if they can afford it. Meanwhile many people are fleeing the city while this crisis persists.

The proximate cause of this crisis is poor rains. But according to my guest today, Meera Subramanian, deeper political and social factors have exacerbated this crisis. This includes poor city planning and a focus on massive infrastructure projects of limited utility.

Meera Subramanian is a freelance journalist and independent author. She is the author of a book about water issues in India titled: A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka.

In July she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times which makes the case that disaggregated water resource management could be far more effective in combating crisis like the one we are seeing in Chennai today.

If you have 20 minutes and want to learn the implications of the fact that one of the largest cities in one of the most populous countries is running out of water, have a listen.

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What’s up first?

My father is from Chennai, so I have a huge extended family there. It is a quickly growing city at about eight million currently and one of India’s largest. It is right on the beach and has a lot of issues going on with water.

Why is Chennai running out of water?

They are very dependent on monsoon rains. This is a condition across South Asia. Monsoons deliver up to half of their water in a very short amount of time. You can’t just depend on rivers to tap into anytime.

The most recent monsoon season was far weaker than historical averages.

That’s right. It came late and the numbers for the peak monsoon in autumn was 55% less than usual. When that is half of your water, you’re down to a quarter of your demand being reached. The rain stopped by early December and they went 200 days without rain.

How are your friends and family dealing with this?

They said it changes depending on where you are in the city. Their primary reservoirs are virtually dried up, though. They are getting rain as we speak, so there is hope of recharge. Piped water has been out in some parts of the city for upwards of four months. A lot of people in India do not have dependable, 24/7 piped water like we have the luxury of in the U.S. Many of my upper middle class cousins get water from a variety of sources. With the advent of the crisis of the past month, one of my cousins said the water tanker deliveries were coming in sporadically and the price had doubled. One cousin said they actually drilled a second borewell, and he had to go down 170 feet. Ten to fifteen years ago that would have been 120 feet. So, even if there is water, people are having to reach farther to get it which is not sustainable.

If you aren’t middle class, how do you deal with that?

That is the terrifying part. There are places that are dependent on water not just for daily life and sanitation, but for their livelihood. Those are the people impacted most and those are the people we often do not hear from. For example, in Chennai the places that used to be wetlands have been encroached upon by development. These are unplanned settlements so they are vulnerable in terms of access to water and vulnerable for when heavy rains do come.

In your reporting in Chennai and places where there have been water shortages, have you observed a gender dynamic?

Absolutely. Women are the ones who are responsible for water for the most part. Think about how much we need water for cooking and cleaning. Those chores are primarily done by women, and not just in India. The New York Times had a picture of a man, but it is mostly women doing this work.

Can you describe what investments are being planned in terms of giant infrastructure around water?

India is a major player in building mega dams. Throughout the country, there are areas that are more water abundant or water poor. Because the northern monsoon and the southern monsoon come at different times, there is this idea that we can just move water where we have it, to where we need it, when we need it. India has been working on these major infrastructure projects to connect rivers. Once it is done, it will be the greatest engineering feat on the face of the Earth. The tricky part is that water goes where it wants. It is fighting nature in that way. There are also huge questions around displacement of human communities and around the fracturing of ecosystems.

In Chennai, desalination plants are at the next frontier as well.

That’s right. India is working really hard to get all of its population on the grid in the first place. There are huge areas of the country that do not have dependable electricity. To their credit, the government is really pushing renewable energy. But India feels like they have every right to get power to their people in any way possible, so they are also building coal plants. Either way, desalination plants take a lot of energy. The suck up saltwater, extract drinking water, and then what goes back out is briny water along with the chemicals from the process. It is not a sustainable answer.

You identify some potentially sustainable solutions that seem to be more localized.

In my book, I focused on an area in Rajasthan. I met a fellow who was a good hearted, young activist. He wanted to be a doctor or a health care worker, but what the locals emphasized that what they really needed was water. The landscape had been left fallow because they didn’t have water to sustain it. An older man said they used to have dams and asked for help just building these small scale dams across the landscape in a cascading effect to catch the rain going downhill. It makes the water pause long enough to seep down and recharge the aquifer. Within just a couple years of him building these dams, the wells started to come back to life. They did this across the entire district and built thousands of dams.

A big argument of my book is that India is a place of small scale. The farmers are all working on two or three acres, and life in general is small scale. When we think about reviving these historical water resource methods, we still need big scale projects, but we should look at the two methods in conjunction with one another.

In a place like Chennai, is there pushback against this rapid development?

Yes, this is the part that is most frustrating. India as a democracy is vulnerable to campaign slogans. Big projects are sexier to get people voting. “We are going to fix leaky pipes” is not a good slogan. It is hard to get politicians to embrace that and to get citizens to support them if so.

If there is another monsoon season as dry as the last, do you expect a significant out migration?

I imagine that will have to happen. When I spoke to my family, some of them with kids in multiple cities had decided to leave. Those are people who have the option to leave, but people will have to face some hard questions about where they can live and survive comfortably.

Going forward, I hope that we can figure out how to tap into these natural systems instead of just pretending we can build big. That interlinking river project only works to move water from one place to another if there is water there to begin with.

Shownotes by Lydia DeFelice

The Trump Administration’s Assault on Refugees and Asylum Seekers Enters a New Phase

Since taking office the Trump administration has taken unprecedented steps to sharply reduce both the number of refugees who are resettled in the United States and also the number of people who can claim asylum.

This has included significantly lowering what is known as the “ceiling” on refugee admissions to the smallest number ever and placing onerous restrictions on exactly who can be admitted as a refugee. Meanwhile, the administration is implementing several policies of dubious legality that would effectively make it impossible for people entering the southern US border to claim asylum.

The Trump administration’s restrictive policies toward refugees and asylum seekers are reaching a new phase.

In this episode one of the world’s leading experts on refugee and asylum policies is on the line to both discuss the mechanics of what the Trump administration is doing.

Eric Schwartz is the president of Refugees International and also served as Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration in the Obama administration. He has deep experience working on humanitarian and refugee issues, which he summons in our conversation to help put this administration’s assault on refugees and asylum seekers in context.

We also discuss the very real global implications of the fact that the United States can not be meaningfully relied on to advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers around the world.

If you have 20 minutes and want to learn the implications of the Trump administration’s increasingly hostile approach to refugees and asylum, have a listen.

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What’s up first?

There are two ways that the U.S. has enabled the entry of refugees, refugees being people with a well-founded fear of persecution. The first way is via the Refugee Admissions Program, which is when we look around the world and identify refugees who are outside of their countries of origin but who have not been firmly resettled in the country where they are residing. Each year the U.S. determines how many of those people will come into the country, which is ultimately a presidential determination. By the end of the Obama administration, the president had decided to resettle about 110,000 of those each year. That is a discretionary act. There are upwards of 25 million refugees in the world, so nobody has the illusion that they will all be resettled in their countries. But this is an opportunity for the most vulnerable of refugees.

The second way the U.S. resettles refugees is through our asylum process. People are either at our borders or come into the U.S. on visitor permits and apply to the U.S. for protection saying they are in fear of persecution. Then they go through an adjudication process. As we said, in the final year of the Obama administration, the president made a decision to resettle 110,000 refugees. With the advent of the Trump administration, all of that changed dramatically.

Can you describe the trajectory of the Trump administration?

In the first year, the administration reduced the number to just over 50,000. For the fiscal year 2018, the number was around 45,000. But they ended up resettling only around half of that number. The White House and Stephen Miller would rather have the program grind to a complete halt, which is a tragedy.

When will we know what the ceiling will be for the next fiscal year?

You would hope and expect that the number would be revealed before the start of the fiscal year, which is October 1st. The administration comes up with a proposed number which is then debriefed to Capitol Hill, and then they reveal the final number. In some years, this process does not end until a couple days into October.

There are rumors that they would cut it down to around 1,000.

It is important to take a step back and give you a sense of why this program is so important. This program is a critical component to provide refugees with a solution. Some refugees get to return home, others can flee to other countries to be locally integrated, and for others their only alternative is resettlement in a third country. The U.S. has traditionally been a leader in this effort. That has been important to establish and sustain U.S. leadership on international humanitarian issues. You have to realize as well that the overall number of 110,000 is a very small percentage of overall annual immigration to the United States. This is a very important program and it is successful, so why is it at risk? Unfortunately, the president has decided to politicize this issue. I have serious concerns that given the politics we are witnessing the final number will be very low.

There is an unrelenting assault on U.S. asylum law. The most recent iteration would ban people crossing the southern U.S. border from applying for asylum.

They are beginning to implement this policy, yes. You have to understand this in the context that our president essentially wants to end asylum completely. This latest measure, reflected in an interim rule, essentially says to anyone seeking asylum at our border that they cannot apply if they have transited another country after they have fled their own. That is signatory to the Refugee Convention and Protocol, in other words a country that says we will consider asylum claims. The obvious problem is that this in violation of U.S. law on asylum, which provides that people who show up at our borders should have their claims considered.

One exception is if the U.S. enters an agreement with another country, which the asylum seeker may have passed through, in which that country accepts the obligation to hear the asylum seeker’s claim. The only country with which the U.S. has that agreement is Canada. The obvious assumption is that the country you make this agreement with is safe. The U.S. has been pressing Guatemala to agree to a safe third country agreement. But, the notion of Guatemala as a safe country is ridiculous. The country has very little capacity to process asylum seekers and is not a safe place for Central Americans to be returned. So, the same day that the government of Guatemala indicated they were not ready for this agreement, the Trump administration issued this interim rule that says if an asylum seeker passes through a country that has signed the Refugee Convention and Protocol, they cannot apply for asylum. The most important point here is that this will create enormous suffering for thousands of Central Americans who will be denied asylum and will have to return to their country at risk of persecution.

There is a provision that enables people to overstay their visa in the U.S. if their country comes under some form of threat.

The provision essentially states that if you are in the U.S. and all hell breaks loose in your country, a temporary protective status designation would allow every person that arrives in the U.S. after a certain date to remain here until conditions permit their return.

You have a more global perspective on these issues. Are you seeing this anti-refugee rhetoric exported abroad?

Yes. I think this occurs in a variety of ways. First of all, high level U.S. voices on refugee protection have always been important. So, when you see European governments returning migrants to Libya, where they were subjected to incarceration in awful conditions, in any other administration, Democratic or Republican, U.S. officials would be engaged to press European governments on these basic human rights issues. A lot of immigration policies we see are emboldened by the practices and policies of the Trump administration. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of the changed U.S. policies. Think of the final years of the Obama administration. They came forward with this commitment to 110,000 refugees and leveraged that effort to secure much greater commitments to refugee settlement from many other governments around the world. But if you look today, those numbers have plummeted.

In your role of Assistant Secretary of State, you were the one doing that leveraging. Can you take us through your role?

I was Assistant Secretary through October 2011. The commitments I am discussing are from 2015. I can tell you what the exercise of humanitarian diplomacy looks like. You, as a senior U.S. official, with the endorsement of the Secretary of the U.S., can engage with foreign officials even at the head of state level. You can make arguments for refugee protection and willingness not to forcibly return people. You can argue that your government does not condone or participate in such practices. I made that argument to the President of the Dominican Republic. You cannot press that case if you don’t have the high level support or are explicitly prevented from doing so.

Finally, in your observation of media coverage is there any nuance you believe is missing from these conversations?

First, I think that despite the stories you read from time to time, I do not know that Americans fully appreciate the depth of the suffering and anguish that the policies of this administration have created for the lives of tens of thousands of people from the Northern Triangle. And on the other side, Americans need to hear more stories about the resilience and strength of refugee families who are prepared to give up everything to seek a better life in circumstances where they are fleeing the most horrendous kinds of abuses.

Secondly, on these issues the notion on behalf of policies of welcome the stranger, inclusion, honoring diversity, that consensus has always been a fragile one. We have always had challenging experiences around these issues. What is different now is that our president is articulating and promoting some of these terrible perspectives. That makes the challenge that much greater for those who care about these issues. It also underscores our obligation to persevere.

Shownotes by Lydia DeFelice

How North Korea Smuggles Luxury Cars and Evades Sanctions

Mercedes-Maybach S 600 Guard

North Korea is under the world’s most stringent set of international sanctions. This includes, since 2006, a ban on exporting of luxury goods to North Korea. So how is it that Kim Jong Un has amassed fleet of high-end cars?

A new report in the New York Times offers a glimpse into the complex ways that North Korea is able to evade international sanctions to import luxury cars — and perhaps also smuggle illicit goods and materiel into the country.

Reporters from the New York Times teamed up with researchers at the non profit Center for Advanced Defense Studies to track two Mercedes Maybachs from their manufacture in Germany to the streets of Pyongyang. The route was a circuitous one, involving multiple shipping vessels docking in at least five countries over the course of several months. But using open source data and satellite imagery, the reporters and researchers were able to paint a pretty clear picture of how those cars ended up in NorthKorea. And in so doing, they reveal how the North Korean regime is able to evade some sanctions.

On the line with me to discuss his reporting is one of the journalists on the story, Christoph Koettl. He is a visual investigations journalist with the New York Times video team, specializing in geospatial and open-source research.

We discuss the step-by-step journey of these cars and in so doing, the story he tells reveals a weakness in international sanctions in general and on North Korea in particular.

If you have 20 minutes and want to learn how North Korea evades sanctions, and what the international community can do to more robustly enforce those sanctions, have a listen.

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Can you describe these automobiles?

The most important feature is that these are bulletproof cars. They are expensive for the average customer, starting at half a million dollars. They are marketed to business leaders and world leaders. I do not think Mercedes is selling a lot of these. One of the questions we had for Daimler when investigating was, how many do you sell per year? They were not forthcoming.

You were unable to determine who the purchaser from Daimler was of these two Mercedes-Maybach S 600’s, right?

I looked into how this journey began. In Germany, who is Mercedes selling these to and who is buying them? How did they get to North Korea? We contacted Mercedes and they gave us the standard, five bullet response.

What do we know about how those two cars made it to their first stop?

We got two specific container numbers, which allow you to track their journey. The numbers belonged to Cosco Shipping, the fourth largest shipping company in the world. The tracking shows that the two containers were handed to Cosco on June 14th, 2018, were transported via a truck to a shipping terminal in Rotterdam, and on June 20th were loaded onto a ship called the Cosco Spain. That ship left the terminal on June 20th around 4 p.m. There was a satellite image from 2 p.m. that day, which was a pretty powerful visual.

What is the next step of their journey?

It then takes 41 days and the containers reached the port of Dalian in China. There was another satellite image of when the ship docked there. The containers were unloaded and stayed there for several weeks, which is a little unusual.

Why do these containers then go to Osaka, Japan?

It is not entirely clear how or why they got to Osaka, but it appears that something may have gone wrong. We talked to someone who stated they got pulled in last minute and the plan had changed to ship to Osaka and then try again to deliver in  China to Shanghai.

What is interesting is that I did some tracking of a ship that received the cargo at a later point and it was exactly at these locations. It seems to us that a few things went wrong, but it is helpful to ship through a few different countries. All you see on the shipping description is two Mercedes-Maybach S 600 Guard, which in itself is not suspicious or a crime.

Can you describe what you revealed in South Korea?

The research group we worked with figured out that the last ship that had these two containers was implicated in North Korean sanctions violations. So, why do these two guarded vehicles end up on this ship? This ship changed ownership in July, just a few days/weeks before the cars arrived in China. This ship was transferred to a new company that is registered in the Marshall Islands, which is a traditional secrecy jurisdiction. Additionally, the man behind this company is a Russian national. This company owns two ships, which both got seized by South Korean authorities for sanctions evasions. So, there is a clear connection to North Korean sanctions evasions. Furthermore, as soon as the ship picked up the cars, it turned off its transponder signal. All ships have this signal as a requirement under international law for safety reasons. However, the signal disappears and only comes back 18 days later, which is highly unusual.

And 18 days later, the signal is back on in South Korean waters full of coal, correct?

Yes. The cars are gone and it is carrying coal.

What do you think happened?

Well, we looked at the last signals the ship was transmitting and I talked to maritime experts. The last signal transmits the location and its last destination, which is a coal port in Vladivostok. It must have gone to Russia to pick up the coal and unloaded the cars on the way.

You also had evidence that Air Korea flights landed in Vladivostok and picked up these cars?

The theory is now that the container went to Vladivostok. On October 7th, several North Korean transport cargo planes made a landing in Vladivostok. Cargo planes had only flown from Pyongyang to Vladivostok once in the years before, so that is not a normal route for a cargo planes. Further, what cargo planes do very often, and we have seen this repeatedly, is when Kim Jong Un goes abroad, he brings his armoured motorcade. Four months after the cars to missing, North Korean News spotted the same model of cars in Pyongyang and Kim Jong Un was using them. The cars go missing in October and three/four months later he has one. One more thing, the Russian owner of the ship that picks up the cars in South Korea happens to be based in Vladivostok.

What has your reporting revealed about the breakdown in the ability to enforce these sanctions?

 I think there are a couple things to highlight. The UN resolutions that enact the ban on luxury goods to North Korea allow member states to define what a luxury good is, so there is no accepted definition. That means it is up to customs officials or shipping agents to figure out what qualifies as luxury. Once these cars get to South Korea and the local shippers realize these are two armoured vehicles that are going onto a ship connected to North Korean sanctions violations, that is a defining moment. My impression while interviewing people involved, was that many individuals were a bit careless. Some of them asked if this matter was North Korea related, which means they had some suspicions already. But, this is a business so they earn money from it.

Does your reporting suggest if there is South Korean corruption?

No, we don’t have information in this regard.

Is this just an opportunistic businessman?

Our reporting does not suggest that the Russian government is involved or that this Russian businessman is politically motivated. This businessman is registered as a co-owner of a car shop in Vladivostok. This is interesting because when you ship cars, you have to disconnect the batteries so you need specialists to reconnect the batteries before you can start using them. Further, there was a tax evasion case against him a couple years ago because he did not report his income or pay tax on his shop. So, it is more of a profiteering question.

The point is, it is a difficult and specialized operation to get these cars to North Korea. This requires skills, context, and a trusted network. The same techniques could be used to smuggle something else, like weapons.

Shownotes by Lydia DeFelice

A Progress Report on the Sustainable Development Goals

Four years ago, in 2015, the world adopted the Sustainable Development Goals. These are 17 goals around improving health, welfare and the environment that members of the United Nations agreed to achieve by 2030. The SDGs, as they are known, built upon a previous set of global goals, called the Millennium Development Goals, which expired in 2015.

The idea behind the SDGs was to create an ambitious but achievable set of quantifiable targets around which governments, civil society organizations and the UN can organize their development and environmental policies. These targets include things like eliminating extreme poverty, as defined by people who live on less than $1.25/day; reduce maternal mortality to less than 70 per 100,000 live births; end the aids epidemic; significantly reduce ocean acidification; In all there are 162 targets built around those 17 goals, to be achieved by 2030.

This week at the United Nations there is a major meeting called the High Level Political Forum on the SDGs in which top government officials and civil society participate in a stock taking of where we stand in terms of progress on these goals. A number of foreign ministers and other officials are in New York to discuss progress — or lack there of — on the SDGs, so I thought this might be a good moment to have a conversation that examines where the world stands four years into the Sustainable Development Goals.

On the line with me to discuss progress on the SDGs and how, four years in the SDGs are affecting global affairs and international relations is John McArthur, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and Senior Advisor to the UN Foundation. If you have 20 minutes and want a progress report on the SDGs, have a listen.

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Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, The Podcast Interview

What made former Ash Carter so unique among his predecessors was that by the time he became the Secretary of Defense in 2015, he’d already spent nearly 30 years working at the Pentagon. This includes stints as both the deputy Secretary of Defense and as the number three in the department, a position often referred to as the acquisitions tsar.

Ash Carter, who served as Barack Obama’s Secretary of Defense from 2015 to 2017, is out with a new book Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon. This is not your conventional Washington memoir. Rather, what I found so valuable about the book is that offers a grounds-eye view of how how the world’s largest national security bureaucracy operates. Decisions made at the Pentagon — from the kinds of weapons bought, to the bases that are opened, to personnel decisions — have world-shaping implications. This book takes you inside that decision making process.

We kick off discussing the sheer vastness of the Pentagon. The annual budget of the Pentagon is about half of all discretionary spending in the US —  money spent on government programs excluding things like Social Security and Medicare. This comes to over $700 billion. (For comparison’s sake the budget of the State Department is about $50 billion. And UN peacekeeping budget is under $7 billion.)

We then discuss what he thinks the US–and world–get for that huge investment. We also discuss his views of the role of the United Nations and UN Peacekeeping; and also the significance of the fact that the US has not had a secretary of defense since Jim Mattis left on December 31.

If you have 25 minutes and want to learn some insights on US foreign policy from the leader of the world’s largest national security bureaucracy, have a listen.

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Your book almost offers a user/executive guide.

That is exactly how the book is supposed to function. It is an executive guide for future leaders for the Pentagon. It is not a Washington memoir, it is different.

What are we talking about when we say the Department of Defense?

Firstly, employees. It has more employees than Amazon, FedEx, McDonalds, Target, and GE combined. It does more R&D than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined. It has the largest real property ownings than any institution in the world. Its budget is larger than the GDP of all but very few countries. It is the largest enterprise in the world. Most people think of the Secretary of Defense as a policy maker, but they are also the manager of the world’s largest enterprise.

Taking a step back, what does US foreign policy get for its return on that investment?

The opening chapters of the book are about spending money on high-tech systems. It is necessary for the leadership to do that in a way that there is not the waste and abuse that discredits the enterprise. As Secretary, I would be embarrassed to ask the taxpayer for that much money if I knew it was being wasted.

During the time I was Secretary, we never got a budget at the beginning of the fiscal year except for once. What was happening was a big concern over deficit. That is what drove the size of the defense budget. Dick Cheney, my predecessor and friend, presided over the largest decrease ever. Not because he wanted to, but because the Soviet Union ended, so the budget wasn’t supported. So there is a lot of history that comes with this. If you ask me if the budget needs to be that big, I would say we can make use of that money because we have five major competitors – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and terrorism. We are all they think of, but we have to think of all five of them.

If the budget were cut by 10%, over 70 billion dollars, is the world a meaningfully different place?

I wouldn’t go that far, but I will stress the consequences of what seems like a modest reduction of the budget. If you did that in one year, how would you take that much money out? A lot of the funding is locked into how many troops you have and it is illegal to just kick them out. You can’t change their retirement and health care expenses. So then that 10% is reflected in “principal readiness”. So if you suddenly impose that cut, it turns out to be inefficiently deployed. If you ease into cuts, we can plan for that and minimize damage. You have contracts and people that you cannot just throw overboard.

Suppose it is gradually reduced, is international relations affected? Is there a guns vs. butter argument to be made?

I think what would happen is that we would prioritize our commitments more than we do now. Our current guidance is to be able to dominate any potential threat to the US. If you want less than that, you pay for less than that. It might also mean that we invest less in the long term to stay safe in the short term, which is what many governments do that do not invest enough in themselves. It catches up with you over time. It is not the end of the world, but it is less security for the US and maybe less wisdom in how we deploy budget cuts.

When you say guns vs. butter, it is important to me to clarify one thing. I have never argued my budget at the expense of another – and I was invited to repeatedly. Other kinds of government spending are important parts of our long term national strength. That is the larger mission that I was charged with, so I would not argue that my mission was more important than another.

What do you see as the value of UN Peacekeeping?

First off is the question of why we cooperate with the UN as a matter of security. They fill a niche in the ecosystem that is needed to keep the world safe. It does things that no individual country is incentivised to do. It reflects our higher values of collective good, and it reflects the values of enlightenment, which underlie the founding of this country.

As to peacekeeping itself, it is a type of military operation. So in the context of that clarity, I support UN Peacekeeping. It is most easily accomplished if it is keeping the peace, however, and not making one. I had the miserable experience of  watching Srebrenica in the 1990’s. I was in the Secretary of Defense’s morning staff meeting and CNN was showing UN Peacekeepers surrendering a helpless population to barbarians who were intent on slaughtering at least the males. They were UN Peacekeepers that were meant to be keeping a peace, but there was no peace in Bosnia. If you are going to make peace, you have to go in much heavier and ready for war. I would be wary of putting our people at high risk under a command that we do not control.

A lot of peacekeeping missions these days are a messy balance between the two. For instance, there are a few thousand peacekeepers in the CAR, and perhaps if they were not there, there would be a mass atrocity and the US would feel pressure to deploy troops.

You are describing a situation where you are trying to keep the lid on. Generally speaking, if things break out that are really big, national governments will intervene. When national governments do intervene, there is a natural division of labor. In South Saharan Africa, France has a historic role. It made sense to me in certain contingencies that we support the French and they take the lead, because they had the most local knowledge. However, there is a flip side. The western countries that have the most knowledge of a place tend to be those that colonized the country before.

What is the impact of the absence of a Senate confirmed Secretary of Defense on US foreign policy?

The Secretary of Defense is the counsellor and advisor to the President as he makes policy. Normally, having no Secretary of Defense would be a big loss. However, President Trump has not seemed to listen much to his Secretary of Defense. Things will go okay for a while as the department is very professional. However, without a leader, they cannot move into the future.

Is there a specific example you could cite?

What new technologies should be supplanting and eventually replacing surface combatant vessels? There are big questions which will take time to figure out. That is not possible without a Secretary of Defense.

Who is your ideal embodiment of the Secretary of Defense?

This is not a dodge, but I have known them all and I think we have been pretty lucky. They have all been solid and experienced. The people who have been most helpful to me are Jim Schlesinger, Bill Perry, and James Mattis. One of the reasons I wrote the book is so it can serve future leaders as they helped me. I want to inspire younger people, in part, to join in public life.

Update: Senate confirms Trump’s Defense Secretary.

Shownotes by Lydia DeFelice

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A Secretly Filmed Documentary Exposes A Dystopian Nightmare for Uighur Muslims in China

Credit: Isobel Yeung

Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang province of Northwestern China are living in a police state like no other on earth. Using counter-terrorism as a pre-text, Chinese authorities have rounded up over a million Uighur men and women, forcing them into what they call “re-education centers.”  Men and women are arrested, seemingly for minor offenses like growing a beard, or having foreign contacts, or sometimes for no reason at all. They languish in these detention centers indefinitely.

Outside the prison walls there is also a mass experiment in population control: authorities use facial recognition technologies, spyware and other high tech means to instill fear in Uighurs.

What we know about conditions in those camps and life in Xinjiang has come largely from reports of human rights organizations.

It is extremely rare for a journalist –let alone a western journalist — to access Xinjiang to report on human rights abuses on the ground. But that is exactly what my guest today, Isobel Yeung, did. Posing as a travel blogger, Isobel Yeung, surreptitiously filmed a documentary for Vice News that aired in June on HBO. The documentary provides a visceral sense of the dystopian police state that Xinjiang has become for its Uighur population. It also exposes one consequence of the mass roundups of Ughur men and women, which is the orphaning of children who Isobel Yeoung discovers are placed into their own kind of re-education centers, posing as kindergartens.

Isobel Yeung is on the line to discuss her reporting from Xinjiang, which is a feat of journalism. In our conversation she discuss how she gained access to the Xinjiang, the police state she encountered and how a pervasive sense of fear is being used to oppress a population of millions.

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Xinjiang is incredibly difficult to report on. Journalists have found that you are not able to report freely because you are either followed by government or undercover cops to ensure you do not speak to locals. You are often given access to these dog and pony shows with a curated tour, which the government wants to present. So, we decided to sneak in as tourists and pose as travel bloggers.

How did you avoid suspicion?

Nobody avoids it, but we were able to slip under the radar for a period of time. Most people mistook me for a local, which was good because white people raise more alarm bells. But, it is also a hindrance because all Uighur’s are treated as security threats. The fact that we had foreign passports affords us a degree of protection. At the same time that this massive crackdown on the Uighur community has taken place, the Chinese has been building the tourism industry. So, it is not totally abnormal that tourists would be travelling around.

Can you describe the ubiquity of security cameras and police officers?

This is the strictest and most sophisticated surveillance state in the world. It is impossible to exaggerate the dystopian nature of what it is like there. Every few meters you have a surveillance camera, voice recognition, facial recognition, and checkpoints to scan bodies and phones to ensure you don’t have anything content that would upset the communist party.

How are these measures used to oppress Uighur people?

The Chinese Communist Party would say this is about national security and that they are preventing future terrorist attacks. There have been a handful of violent riots and attacks within the region in the past decade. These measures are being used to eradicate a religion, culture, ethnicity, and really an entire population.  

For instance, it is a law that all knives and sharp objects are chained to the wall to prevent any potential violent attacks. It is laughable that these extreme measures are taken against the entire Uighur population, yet they are.

What do we know about these re-education centers?

So, the UN has estimated that a million Uighurs that have been placed across the region in these camps. They are put in there for a variety of reasons. Uighur people say they have been placed in the camps for reading the Quran, studying Arabic, speaking the Uighur language, wearing a headscarf, and just insulting the Communist Party in any way they perceive. Further, having visited any foreign countries is also seen as extremist so they can be abducted for that as well.

When people are abducted, there are a lot of kids orphaned. You tracked down some of these “kindergartens”. Can you tell the story of the woman in Istanbul?

This woman left China to give birth. She left five of her children with her parents, thinking her or her husband would be back in a couple weeks. When her husband came back, he was arrested and placed in detention. She has not seen her children or heard from them in three years. Uighur’s living abroad can’t have any contact in Xinjiang. She got one sign of her daughter’s existence via a WhatsApp video in a group chat that the Uighur diaspora have. She spotted her daughter in the back of the video where she believes is at a state-run orphanage. So, she believes her children are being brought up there. We have spoken to many Uighurs whose children have been taken away from them and are being brought up in these institutions.

How did you go about of tracking down some of these institutions?

It began with that video. We were able to track that to a social media profile within a city, and then we looked into the government records and saw the number of state kindergartens had exploded at the same time they were rounding up hundreds of thousands of Uighurs. We looked into satellite imagery that matched the descriptions of what we were reading. We were able to track several locations, so we returned to Xinjiang to see some.

On this second visit, had security around you tightened?

Yes, we were followed from the moment we arrived, and arguably before. Most days there were plain clothed police officers following us, listening to everything, and tracking us wherever we went. In addition, uniformed policeman were looking at our phones and deleting any content they wanted. Despite that, we were able to find some of these institutions. They had security fences around them and they were all in run-down neighbourhoods. We noticed that no kids were really leaving. The locals nearby seemed to think it was common knowledge that the Uighur kids were kept there.

Do we have any sense of the number of children separated from their parents?

No. However, we could see the number of kindergartens had increased by 2.6 times the previous amount in 2016 over just one year. The Chinese justify this by saying they are increasing education.

How does the reporting in Xinjiang compare to past reporting?

There is nothing like going to Xinjiang right now. I have witnessed a lot of real danger, but I have never witnessed this palpable fear that I saw. People are terrified to do, see, or even think something wrong.

How are the Han population affected by these ordinances and state policies?

A lot of the Han people have said these policies are far reaching. One person said his business has collapsed. As a hotel owner, he had to hire extra security personnel, and further, everyone has been sent to these concentration camps so there is nobody to spend money. The economy has collapsed. Other people see these measures as necessary.

What do you want listeners to leave understanding about Xinjiang right now?

This is the greatest human rights atrocity in the world right now. There has never been an abuse of this scale since the Holocaust. This development of a surveillance state means everyone outside of these facilities is in an open prison, fearing what will happen to them and their families. The international community has been largely silent, so hopefully we can educate people about this atrocity.

Shownotes by Lydia DeFelice

Why Municipal Elections in Turkey Have Global Significance

Credit: Erkem Imamgolu

When Reccep Tayyep Erdogan’s party the AKP won a landslide victory in Turkey’s 2002 general elections he became a very different kind of Turkish leader from his predecessors, who were avowedly secular.

For a time, Erdogan presided over a booming economy and was hailed for being a modernizing Muslim leader in a troubled region. His relations with Europe and the United States were strong, and he sought to play a stabilizing role in the Middle East.

But all the while, Erdogan was consolidating his power. It started slowly at first and in recent years the degradation of Turkey’s independent institutions has accelerated. This includes clampdowns on media, the corruption of the courts, and a massive political purge following what Erdogan alleged was an attempted coup in 2016.

Erdogan was become the quintessential example of a new kind of leader around the world–the illiberal authoritarian democrat; someone who is democratically elected, but then systematically uses the power of the state to entrench himself in power.

On March 31, an opposition leader named Ekrem Immoglu won election as Mayor of Istanbul, a position incidentally that Ergoan held before he became Prime Minister. Election authorities, clearly at Erdogan’s request, invalidated those results and called for a re-run of the election and weeks later, Immoglu won again–this time by a wider margin.

So what does this election tell us about Ergodan’s hold on power and the trajectory of Turkish politics? On the line with me to explain the global significance of municipal elections in Turkey is Howard Eisentstat. He is an associate professor of middle eastern history atSt Lawrence University and senior non-resident fellow a the Project on Middle East Democracy.

If you have 20 minutes and want to learn the why city elections in Turkey matter to the world, have a listen.

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What’s Next Between the United States and Iran?

Events are unfolding rapidly between the United States and Iran. At time of recording, it was reported that Trump ordered and then called off a military strike against Iran in retaliation for the downing of a US surveillance drone over the gulf of Oman. Meanwhile, Iran is threatening to take actions that would put it in direct violation of the nuclear deal, otherwise known as the JCPOA and Europe is trying is darndest to hold the deal together.

There are a lot of moving pieces right now, so I wanted to bring you an episode that gives you some context and background for understanding and interpreting events as they unfold in the coming weeks and months. To that end, I could think of no better interlocutor than Laicie Heeley. She is the host of a fantastic podcast called Things That Go Boom. She just wrapped up her second season, which was all about the Iran Nuclear Deal. The podcast tells the story behind the Iran nuclear deal in a really interesting and entertaining way, and I’d urge people to check it out.

In our conversation today, we kick off discussing Europe’s efforts to salvage the deal and the tough position Europe finds itself in. And then we have a forward looking conversation about some of the key decisions that Iran, the United States and Europe will be forced to make that could determine whether this crisis leads to war.

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What’s up first?

The reason why Europe is trying to take steps to address Iran’s concern is because Iran stated, Europe if you don’t do something to bring us some of the benefits of this deal and address some of the sanctions pressure, then we are done and we are pulling out of the JCPOA. Europe has announced a new euro credit line to ease trade between the EU and Iran. This is a last-ditch attempt to keep Iran from leaving the deal.

European companies are the ones being targeted by US sanctions should they do business with Iran. On the other hand, Iran is threatening to enrich uranium above certain thresholds which directly threatens European security. So, Europe is being bullied on both sides.

Europe is in a terrible position. It is tough for them to take Iran’s side fully and cast aside long-standing allies. On the other hand, they could fully side with the Trump administration, throwing out a deal they worked for years to achieve. They did try that second effort at first, and Emmanuel Macron was engaged in trying to come to an agreement with Iran before Trump pulled out. But, it did not come together in time. It is important to remember that Europe negotiated this deal, and put in a great deal of effort to do so.

Iran is deciding whether or not it will enrich uranium above 3.67%, which is the amount allowed in the deal. Can you explain what that really means?

Let’s go back to 2012. We were in a similar position, but Iran’s stockpiles were much larger. People were speculating that Israel might launch an attack on Iran. The reason was, Iran was stockpiling 20% of rich uranium, which is this threshold that experts consider a tipping point. It is hard to go from zero to twenty, because there is a lot of enrichment that has to be done. However, getting from twenty to ninety is a lot easier.

Iran had agreed to ship that uranium out as part of the deal. They have been living with 3.67%, which is what you need for energy. Basically, Iran is threatening to go back to this place where they would go beyond 3.67% or 300 kg. This would take us back to where we were before the deal. Besides bombs, you would need 20% for medical isotopes such as chemotherapy or imaging.

If they start trying to get to 20%, that is when alarm bells go off.

Iran has said that they will need that 20% to power various reactors for energy and medical purposes. This is the same argument they were making before the deal.

How would you predict the world response?

We have two choices. The Trump administration will be driving this train in a lot of ways. The reason Iran is making these moves is as a reaction to the Trump administration. The US raised sanctions as far as they can go. Iran’s economy is hurting and they must do something. There are still things we can do to signal to Iran that we want to negotiate. We are at the point where there are not a lot of additional sanctions the US can enforce. However, we can raise military pressure and threaten military action. If you are for the strategy of maximum pressure, then you take that risk of going to war. Essentially, every military commander and head of the Pentagon has said it is not a good idea to go to war with Iran. So, we either have a war with Iran, or we re-enter something like the JCPOA, or we negotiate a new deal.

War seems like the probable outcome. What are some domestic political considerations in Iran that would suggest that some elements of the regime want to provoke the US?

Iran has an interesting political environment. Folks refer to the Ayatollah as the supreme leader and people assume this is a dictatorship situation and people do not have much say. That is an unfair assumption. Its ecosystem is complicated. For instance, the Washington Post journalist, Jason Rezaian who was held in Iran for 544 days, argued that he was taken captive because the revolutionary guard wanted to scuttle the Iran deal. So, there are competing factions. 

What indicators will you look towards that suggest which outcome is more likely?

We will have to watch the Trump administration. When we see them sanctioning Javad Zarif or the Ayatollah – that is a provocative move. If we don’t want to escalate the pressure, then we want to see the opposite from the Trump administration. Increased pressure means they are willing to risk of war.

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Update: As of July 1st, reports show that Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile tops 300kg.

Shownotes by Lydia DeFelice