“The fundamental premise of feminism is that women should have equal opportunity and equal rights with every other citizen.” Eleanor Roosevelt 1935.

For women, all forms of progress are reversible

BY ELIZABETH COBBS, PH.D., OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 04/05/23 

Last weekend, the Taliban closed the only woman-run radio station in Afghanistan, another sharp drop in a downward spiral. Before attacking women’s free speech, the Taliban targeted education. In 2022, they banned women from universities, and in 2021, they banned girls from attending high school.

At the time of the American Revolution, women in the 13 colonies had approximately the same status as women in today’s Afghanistan. The first right they gained, advocated by Abigail Adams, was the right to attend high school. The second, for which abolitionist Angelina Grimké fought, was the right to speak publicly. Afghanistan is dismantling these exact rights in reverse.

Sadly, there is little we can do for women there, but we can try not to follow in their cobbled footsteps. The right to use birth control in the United States, guaranteed in 1965, and to obtain an abortion, won in 1971, are among the most recent rights American women have won over the course of two centuries. Access to abortion has now disappeared in many states (along with maternity care), and birth control is under serious attack.

How much farther might American women have to walk back? Before we get cavalier about the stability of progress, it’s worth reviewing the goals of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who dined with former President Donald Trump shortly before Thanksgiving last year. Fuentes advocates a future in which “women don’t have the right to vote,” where “women are wearing veils at church,” and “women [aren’t] in the workforce.” Fuentes tells followers it is not enough to be against trans people, “you’ve got to be against women’s rights, too.”

There is a simple way of preventing this kind of decline. It is not hard, but it is critical, lest American women find themselves with bags over their own heads in 50 years.

According to the Pew Research Center, 91 percent of citizens consider it “very important” for women to have the same rights as men. That’s good news. Now, each of them needs to tell everyone they know that they are a feminist, since the first step in defending common values is to name and teach them.

The label “feminist” has acquired some tarnish, but it is our only universal word for the global effort to achieve equality between the sexes. Eleanor Roosevelt’s sterling definition, penned in 1935, is worth polishing up.

“The fundamental premise of feminism is that women should have equal opportunity and equal rights with every other citizen,” wrote the First Lady of the United States.

In Roosevelt’s era, women had just won the right to vote. But many other rights that we take for granted today — at the risk of losing them — had not yet been established. In the 1930s and 40s, many states still banned women from juries. Pay discrimination was entirely legal. Schools fired female teachers who married. Girls could not wear trousers. Husbands remained entitled to demand sexual services from their wives by force.

Each step in our nation’s upward ascent followed upon the one before. Citizens should know the trajectory of women’s rights — a trajectory shared by many nations — so that we can avoid traveling in reverse.

The right to education came right after the Revolution of 1776, followed by the right to speak in public before the Civil War. The right to lobby government, established by Susan B. Anthony above all others, came in the mid-19th century, followed by the right to vote in the early 20th.

Next came the right to earn — for decades women could keep their wages only if husbands permitted them — followed by the right to equal protection under the law. In 1973, Ruth Bader Ginsburg — who would later become a Supreme Court justice — won the first sex discrimination lawsuit establishing the principle of equal treatment under the Fourteenth Amendment. Laws should be gender-neutral unless there was a compelling reason for them to be gender specific.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, women won the right to compete economically with men. Pioneers like stockbroker Muriel Siebert, the first woman to sit on the New York Stock Exchange, made access to corporate boardrooms a test of free enterprise. Tennis phenom Billie Jean King literally leveled the playing field.

In the 21st century, the right to physical safety has taken center stage. The #MeToo Movement raised consciousness about the degree to which women’s bodies remain in peril. Olympic gymnasts like Simone Biles and Aly Raisman enjoyed an indisputable right to get an education, speak publicly, lobby government, vote, earn money and compete athletically. But as they told the U.S. Senate in 2021, what their government had failed to guarantee them was the sanctity of their own bodies, unmolested.

Why rehearse this sequence? Why should citizens, regardless of political party, proudly claim the label that Eleanor Roosevelt defined nearly a century ago?

Any historian can tell you that after the Vandals dismantled the Roman Empire, the recipe for concrete was lost for 1,000 years. Undefended, all forms of progress are reversible. Women in Afghanistan were forced back another step just this week.

Elizabeth Cobbs, Ph.D., is the author of “Fearless Women: Feminist Patriots from Abigail Adams to Beyoncé” and a professor of U.S. foreign relations at Texas A&M.

For women, all forms of progress are reversible | The Hill

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Ukraine’s Children Are Central to Peace Negotiations with Russia

Criminal accountability and the swift return of all Ukrainian children should be set as prerequisites for returning to the negotiation table.

by Sofie Lilli Stoffel Vladyslav Wallace

The International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Russian president Vladimir Putin for the abduction of Ukrainian children is groundbreaking—the issue has not nearly gotten sufficient public attention.

Beyond its relevance for human rights and criminal prosecution, the unlawful removal of Ukrainian children also lays bare Russia’s intention to erase Ukrainians’ identity and eradicate Ukrainian statehood.

Any peace settlement will continue to be a non-starter unless it can guarantee accountability for the abductions and the return of all Ukrainian children. As long as the violence against children remains unaddressed, there is little prospect for sustainable peace.

Russia has targeted children since the very beginning of the war.

According to estimates by Yale researchers and the Ukrainian government, between 6,000 and 14,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly relocated to Russia since February 2022. Harrowing stories of these abductions are easy to find—albeit only for those fortunate enough to have been rescued. One of them is twelve-year-old Oleksandr, who narrowly escaped forced adoption after having been separated from his parents by Russian soldiers, thanks to his grandmother’s rescue mission through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia. Thousands of other children have not been as lucky.

At the same time, the amount of violence against children in Ukraine is astonishing. Infamously, in March 2022, a Russian airstrike on a theater in Mariupol that had “children” written in big red letters on its roof killed around 600 civilians. Nearly one in ten hospitals in Ukraine has been damaged by the Russians, often hitting maternity wards and children’s hospitals. More than 2,500 schools have been damaged or destroyed. Many kids are among the victims of grave sexual violence and executions in the occupied areas, and are deliberately targeted in atrocities like in Bucha.

Children do not suffer by accident, nor are they simply collateral damage—this is a calculated and methodological scheme.

Children symbolize and universally represent the future of a society—in terms of ethnicity, culture, and identity. As such, the abduction, maiming, and slaughtering of children frequently occurs in wars and genocides around the world. The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide explicitly lists the forcible replacement and targeting of children as a genocidal tactic—and for good reason.

What, at first glance, may seem to be strictly a human rights issue in fact shows that Russia is pursuing a grand strategy for the Russification of Ukraine through whatever means it deems necessary, down to genocidal tactics. This effort can be traced as far back as the Soviet Union and the Russian empire. The historical continuity of such a strategy highlights Russia’s commitment to denying the existence of Ukrainians.

The documented patterns of violence against Ukrainian children and systematic nature of the abductions underscore our analysis of strategic intent. Although Russian law prohibits foreign adoption, Putin signed a decree in May 2022 that streamlines the “adoption” process of Ukrainian children; there is even a financial incentive of up to $1,000 for Russians who take in and impose Russian citizenship on a Ukrainian child. In the meantime, Russia holds abducted children in camps, where they are subjected to political re-education—and there is no end in sight.

This all raises an important question: how can Russia be a trustworthy negotiation partner?

Independent of all other valid arguments, Russia’s strategy vis-a-vis Ukrainian children demonstrates that there is more to the issue than just land disputes. The violence against children must be part of any future security analyses, ensuring the full scope of Russia’s actions against Ukraine is captured. In the end, it is Ukraine’s decision when to negotiate—but currently, a workable compromise seems highly unlikely. The Ukrainian government cannot let Russia erase Ukraine, even “just a little bit.”

For a peace settlement to be feasible, the children’s issue must be incorporated at the forefront of negotiations. Criminal accountability and the swift return of all Ukrainian children should be set as prerequisites for returning to the negotiation table. Without properly addressing Russia’s abduction of children, the chances of a sustainable peace agreement are likely to be diminished by the partial success of Russia’s genocidal tactics and ensuing opposition from the Ukrainian people and civil society.

Sofie Lilli Stoffel is a McCloy fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Non-resident fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. She works on foreign and security policy and specializes in children in conflict.

Vladyslav Wallace is a Belfer Young Leader Student Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Fellow at the U.S. Department of State. He works on U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy and specializes in matters related to Eurasia such as human rights and democracy.

Ukraine’s Children Are Central to Peace Negotiations with Russia | The National Interest

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Is the Chinese Dream Turning into a Chinese Nightmare for Beijing?

Far from being astride the globe, the “China Dream” globally—China’s economic power, political attraction, and standing—are all eroding.

by Ronald H. Linden

The question “are the United States and China in a new cold war?” is not particularly challenging. The answer is yes. A more intriguing question might be, “can the United States and China avoid the mistakes of the previous Cold War?”

One of these mistakes was a fear-driven credulousness; a tendency to take all boasts and claims of the rival power (think Nikita Khrushchev’s pronouncement of “We will bury you!”) as accurate, and in doing so, miss a chance to craft sensible, non-escalatory responses. Currently, after Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow and boasts about China being ready to “stand guard over the world order,” it might be worth taking a closer look at China’s foreign policy environment. Do its boasts match reality, or is China’s global position weakening like a seaside home at high tide?

Far from being astride the globe, the “China Dream” globally—China’s economic power, political attraction, and standing—are all eroding. Several key indicators reveal that, in the epic clash with the United States and the “collective West,” China is weaker than at any time in the last ten years.

Consider the economic dimensions for starters. A key instrument of great power influence has long been foreign direct investment (FDI), something that is also crucial for China’s own economic health. Spurred by its 2001 “Go Out” policy and supercharged with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, Chinese outward FDI grew steadily, from $10 billion in 2005 to more than $170 billion by 2017. Since then, four of the last five years have seen drops in outward FDI—including a 15 percent fall in 2022, according to the American Enterprise Institute. Chinese investment into Europe, previously a choice location because of its high value-added manufacturing capacity and weak regulation, fell sharply as well. Once eager partners like Germany, Italy, and the EU itself have adopted or strengthened investment screening mechanisms and blocked key Chinese acquisitions. A mutual investment treaty that is supposed to address chronic business complaints about Chinese practices and restrictions has stalled in the European Parliament due to widespread Chinese human rights violations and tit-for-tat individual sanctions. Viewed in the other direction, European investment into China dropped steadily after 2018 until rebounding last year. But as Rhodium Group figures show, FDI inflow to China has become concentrated to the point where almost 90 percent of European FDI in China comes from only four countries. During the coronavirus pandemic, the Rhodium report notes, “virtually no European investors that were not already present in the country have made direct investments.” The impact of European investment, which had in 2018 accounted for 7.5 percent of Chinese GDP, fell to 2.8 percent three years later.

The most serious challenge to Chinese economic clout has come from the United States. Heightened tariffs and restrictions put in place during the Trump administration have continued under Joe Biden. Reviews of foreign (read: Chinese) investments have broadened, as have policies blocking the sale of high-tech goods to China—not only from the United States, but also from companies in other countries whose goods have U.S. components. Washington redoubled its efforts to block Huawei and TikTok, along with passing legislation to subsidize U.S. production of high-tech goods at home and direct “friendshoring” investments to reliable allies and partners.

As an economic colossus, China has alternatives, especially in Asia, Africa, and other places where it claims to offer an alternative development model. But here, too, China’s presence has run out of steam.

Annual investments in the countries of the BRI, once the flagship vehicle for the extension of Chinese influence, are today less than half of what they were only five years ago. And most of that is in countries with serious debt issues. As a report in Foreign Policy put it, “China can make friends or break legs. It can’t do both.”

In some places, the Chinese “model” proved more destructive than instructive. Beijing’s bullying of Sri Lanka into handing over the Hambantota port that it built with borrowed Chinese money has not exactly burnished Beijing’s reputation as a guardian of a new world order. In fact, according to Pew Research, favorable views of China have dropped sharply around the world—a fall reinforced by China’s “digital authoritarianism” during coronavirus, its draconian and unsuccessful lockdown policy, and its support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In Europe, which is generally less strident than the United States, China is on the verge of trading its once flourishing ties with the world’s most advanced economies for the cheap oil and the desperate embrace of what Alexander Gabuev calls its “new vassal,” Russia.

At the EU-China summit in April 2022, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was blunt: “China, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has a special responsibility. No European citizen would understand any support to Russia's ability to wage war.” She is right. In February 2023, a report by the Munich Security Conference showed that across the globe—including in India and Brazi—two-thirds of those surveyed felt that China’s support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine made them wary of Chinese ambitions.

Among the EU’s new East European members, Beijing’s much-touted “CEE+” framework has foundered on China’s willingness to see Ukraine’s sovereignty ravished and its bullying of states that veer even a little on Taiwan, like Lithuania. China has also forfeited one of its more important European trade and investment partners in Ukraine itself. At one point. Volodymyr Zelensky offered Ukraine as “China’s bridge to Europe,” and Chinese companies began the construction of the largest wind farm in Europe near Donetsk and the refitting of the port of Mariupol, now in ruins.

If weakening the Western alliance structure is one of Beijing’s aims, it is now more distant than ever. Ukraine and Moldova have been advanced to candidate status for the EU, and NATO, the very embodiment of Western global domination in Beijing’s view, has been given new life, strength, and members by the actions of Xi’s “best friend” in Moscow. Worse than that from China’s point of view, the alliance has now incorporated China’s own neighborhood into its security stance. In 2022, NATO formally declared the Indo-Pacific to be part of its “shared security interests.” Under President Joe Biden, the United States has significantly increased the prominence of policy initiatives in this region, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad (composed of India, Australia, Japan, and the United States), and taken actions—like selling nuclear-powered submarines to Australia and adding U.S. bases in the Philippines—that support a more muscular U.S. presence in the region.

Even the EU—which is certainly not a military alliance—has adopted the strategic aim of insuring an “open and rule-based” South China Sea—a direct rejection of China's unilateral claims to virtually all of it—and backed up this rhetoric with action. This month, Italy—the only G-7 country to sign on to the BRI and once the most open to Chinese investment—announced the deployment of one of its two aircraft carriers to the region and confirmed a tripartite deal with Japan and the UK to develop and produce a new generation fighter plane.

Nowhere has the rise of China been greeted with more alarm than in Japan. It was then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who first put forth the notion of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” now widely adopted, as a notion to counter China’s influence. More recently, Japan has doubled its defense budget, reconceptualized the notion of what “defense” means, and opted for new, higher-quality weapons. While some of this comes as a response to North Korea’s menacing actions, Japan’s new national security strategy, adopted in December 2022, makes clear that China represents “the unprecedented and greatest strategic challenge.”

A broader unwelcome development for China is the comparison offered in the United States and elsewhere between Russian actions in Ukraine and possible Chinese actions against Taiwan—a comparison rejected by Beijing. As an alarm bell, the sound could not be clearer. “Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow,” said Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida, who just concluded a high-profile visit to Ukraine.

The news is not all bad for China. Foreign trade is up—including with its number one partner, the United States. Beijing scored a significant coup by facilitating the recent deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Honduras has changed sides, and European leaders still head off to Beijing, with groups of businessmen in tow. But the overall worsening international setting cannot be encouraging for Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, which must at the same time reckon with a dramatically slower growth rate at home, the consequences of a disastrous coronavirus policy, and a population that is both declining and aging.

Brave words and boasts are required when authoritarian leaders need to use nationalism to stay in power at home. But they need not be swallowed whole by outside observers in the face of contrary evidence, nor by policymakers trying to ensure that the new Cold War stays cold.

About Ronald H. Linden is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. During the spring of 2023, he has been Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science of Sapienza University, Rome. Recent publications include, “Is Moldova Next? Brigadoon in a Tough Neighborhood,” The National Interest, May 22, 2022, and “No Limits? China, Russia and Ukraine” (with Emilia Zankina) Eurozine, May 4, 2022.

Is the Chinese Dream Turning into a Chinese Nightmare for Beijing? | The National Interest

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Why the United States Should Leave Syria

Washington’s insistence on staying in Syria under the pretext of “containing ISIS” is rather weak.

by Ali Demirdas

The Iranian drone strike against the American military base in northern Syria that killed one American contractor and wounded six servicemen has once again called into question the purpose of the American presence, with some 900 troops, in the country. The official reasoning, according to the Pentagon chief, Gen. Mark A. Milley, is “to counter [the Islamic State].” Furthermore, the policymakers in Washington have stated that the United States should stay in Syria to “contain and roll back Iranian influence … also protecting Israel.” Whereas the two objectives may sound legitimate, the ways by which the United States implements them are inherently problematic and will beget more problems, not only for Washington but for the region as well.

Countering ISIS

ISIS has posed a much more immediate threat to the regional states and actors than it has to Washington, which weakens the argument that the United States is in Syria to counter ISIS. By design, ISIS is an extremist Sunni organization that during its reign directed its attacks primarily against the Shia Muslims in Iraq and Syria, explicitly engaging in a Shia genocide. This makes the organization a prime adversary for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Iran and its proxies, who are Shias. The pro-Iranian militias such as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria played a great role in rolling back ISIS. Ironically, Washington has indirectly allowed Iranian influence in the region to strengthen by helping eliminate an anti-Shia group like ISIS, just as it did by removing a staunch anti-Iran figure, Saddam Hussein, and fighting the anti-Iran Taliban in Afghanistan.

ISIS has declared Turkey “the Wilayat Turkey” (a part of its alleged caliphate) and issued a death warrant for the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his cooperation with “the Crusaders” (NATO) in the fight against ISIS. The terror organization is known to have carried out numerous suicide bombings in Turkey that cost the lives of dozens of Turks.

All this considered, Washington’s insistence on staying in Syria under the pretext of “containing ISIS” is rather weak. Every actor in the region considers ISIS an existential threat and has a stake in eliminating it. If anything, Washington should have cooperated with its NATO ally Turkey, a regional power that has formidable economic, political, and military clout, and its proxies. Such a partnership could have maintained U.S. power projection without risking a direct confrontation with regional adversaries such as Iran and the probability of initiating another “forever war” that would have America bogged down in the Middle East. This was seen with the assassination of the Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020, for which Iran retaliated by firing more than a dozen ballistic missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq where more than 100 US troops suffered brain injuries.

However, a series of mistakes Washington made in 2014-2015 not only cost it Turkey, a valuable ally, but also resulted in America’s unjustified presence in Syria. At the height of the ISIS threat, the Obama administration failed to adopt a clear plan for its defeat and the toppling of Assad. The confused U.S. agencies began to support different opposition groups each having different agendas. The CIA began to train and equip the pro-Turkey Sunni opposition, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), whose main goal was to topple Assad and fight ISIS. The Pentagon, in contrast, propped up the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Turkey’s arch foe, whose aim was primarily to fight ISIS and ultimately to gain autonomy, even independence, within Syria. 

By 2015, Washington’s Syrian plan was in shambles such that the FSA and the YPG turned against each other, while at the same time separately fighting ISIS. Eventually, the same year, Washington decided to abandon the Sunni FSA in favor of the YPG, and to relinquish the idea of toppling Assad, an Iranian ally, a decision that coincided with Obama’s Iran rapprochement. Not surprisingly, having seen the American ambiguity and weakness, in the Summer of 2015, Russian president Vladimir Putin descended into Syria to save Russian interests and Assad from being toppled, which resulted in retaliatory genocidal campaigns against the anti-Assad Syrian opposition and the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, including the infamous 2017 chemical attack.

Are the YPG an Asset or Liability?

The Pentagon’s staunch support for the YPG brought about the question of countering Iranian influence in the region. 

In Syria, the Pentagon heavily relies on the YPG, a majority Marxist Kurdish militant group, which as former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter put it, “has substantial ties with PKK … which is a terrorist organization in the eyes of the US and Turkish governments.” The YPG’s inability to counter Iran’s influence stems from two reasons: first, the YPG and the PKK have had organic ties with Iran due to their aligned regional goals; and second, Washington is making the same mistake in Syria that it did in Afghanistan—nation building. 

YPG/PKK - Iran Ties

Iran, which has historically pursued adverse policies against Turkey, provided the PKK with a safe haven not only in Iran but also in Iraq. Tehran denied Ankara’s request for a cross-border operation into the Iranian Qandil Mountains, where the PKK’s upper echelon is believed to reside.

Likewise, the PKK and Tehran have cooperated against their mutual adversary, Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani and his Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the strongest faction in Iraqi Kurdistan. Therefore, given their long-term strategic goals, the PKK’s top commanders, who also have control over the YPG, want to exert extreme caution to not agitate Tehran. Thus, the PKK’s leaders don’t allow the United States to use their Syrian branch, the YPG, as foot soldiers against Iran’s proxies. Bassam Ishak, then the Washington representative of the Syrian Democratic Council, a political umbrella organization to which the YPG belongs and which represents the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), acknowledged that an all-out war with Iran would wreak havoc on them. Moreover, Nicholas Heras, the Center for a New American Security fellow who talked to SDF members in Syria said, “There is a deep concern within the SDF over the extent to which the United States is looking to use SDF forces as a counter to Iran in Syria.”

Washington’s Futile Effort: Nation Building in Syria

From a social, political, and economic point of view, the YPG autonomy project in Syria is unsustainable. The Pentagon is pouring billions of dollars to train and equip the YPG and facilitate its autonomous rule in northeastern Syria. But the predominantly leftist Kurdish YPG is alien to the region, which is overwhelmingly Sunni Arab with some Turcoman. 

The YPG is known to have engaged in de-Arabization as it gained territory from ISIS, sowing further resentment, and breeding further intra-communal clashes. “By deliberately demolishing civilian homes, in some cases razing and burning entire villages, displacing their inhabitants with no justifiable military grounds, the Autonomous Administration is abusing its authority and brazenly flouting international humanitarian law, in attacks that amount to war crimes,” said Lama Fakih, senior crisis advisor at Amnesty International. Moreover, the YPG’s political wing, known as the Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD), has a reputation of persecuting those Kurds who don’t share their neo-Maoist worldview. Ibrahim Biro, the then-head of Syria’s Kurdish National Council, accused the PYD of being dictatorial. He was kidnapped by the PKK for opposing the YPG in Syria. The World Council of Arameans (WCA) has frequently condemned the YPG for closing their schools and kidnapping and conscripting Aramean Christian teenagers against their wills.

Furthermore, Turkey controls much of the vital water inflow in Syria that is necessary for agriculture and power, as well as trade. A prospective Kurdish YPG state will heavily rely on resources from Turkey, which sees the organization as an existential threat. Currently, the YPG is exclusively sustained by American taxpayers and a small amount of oil export that necessitates a fragile deal with the Assad regime. 

It begs explanation why Washington is so insistent on investing in a pointless Kurdish nation-building exercise in Syria whereas the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Northern Iraq has much more wherewithal, from its own government to the central bank. Ironically, Washington in 2017 rejected Kurdish statehood in northern Iraq by not recognizing the region’s independence referendum. If the purpose is to counter ISIS and the Iranian influence via proxies, why has Washington not been investing in the Erbil government, which is extremely wary of the Iranian influence? Additionally, the Kurdish Peshmerga forces successfully fought against ISIS. To make things worse, by unconditionally supporting the YPG, Washington indirectly consolidates the PKK’s regional presence, which further complicates intra-Kurdish politics. The KRG in Erbil has long considered the PKK to be an existential threat. The friction escalated to the extent that the PKK began ambushing and killing members of the Kurdish Peshmerga forces in 2021.

What now?

I believe Robert Pape, the renowned political scientist from the University of Chicago, is right: it is not the religious convictions but military occupations that create extremism and suicide bombers. After all, former British prime minister Tony Blair acknowledged that the Iraq War “helped give rise to ISIS.” It is not surprising that we don’t hear any more of those roadside bombs, or suicide bombings, after the United States departed from Afghanistan. 

When examining the consequences of the U.S. actions in the last thirty years, one can argue that by taking it upon itself to destroy Iran’s enemies from Saddam to ISIS, “America has Fought Iran’s Wars in the Middle East.” The weary American public now wonders why Iran, China, and Russia have become ever more influential in the Middle East and the United States is losing clout despite Washington having spent more than $8 trillion and lost more than 5,000 servicemembers. 

As the Ukrainian war rages on and talk of a war with China is abundant, the last thing America would want is to get bogged down in the Middle East by initiating another forever war with Iran. The United State ought to revise its Middle East strategy. Maintaining a small presence in the name of protecting the YPG and “countering Iran” is counterproductive. The Senate has repealed the Iraq War authorization, a move in the right direction. American policymakers should do the same for Syria. Instead of constantly alienating Turkey, a NATO ally and a major local powerhouse, by unconditionally supporting its arch PKK/YPG foe, Washington needs to take advantage of Ankara’s increasing military, political, and social clout not only in the Middle East but also in the Caucasus and the Black Sea.

Ali Demirdas, Ph.D. in political science from the University of South Carolina, Fulbright scholar, professor of international affairs at the College of Charleston (2011–2018). You can follow him on Twitter @AliDemirdasPhD.

Why the United States Should Leave Syria | The National Interest

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Saudi foreign minister meets with Chinese counterpart

• The two sides discussed developments regarding the agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran

RIYADH: Saudi foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan met with Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang during his official visit to China on Wednesday.

During the meeting, both reviewed relations between Saudi Arabia and China, and ways to enhance cooperation in all areas.

The two sides also discussed developments regarding the agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, in a way that achieves common interests and enhances efforts to lay the foundations for peace in the region and the world.

Prince Faisal also expressed his appreciation of the positive role that China played in reaching the Saudi-Iranian agreement.

Saudi foreign minister meets with Chinese counterpart (arabnews.com)

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Saudi, Iran foreign ministers meet in China

• Joint statement: Flights between the two countries to resume, granting of visas for citizens to be facilitated
• Arrangements to reopen respective embassies and consulates to be started

DUBAI: Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud and his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amirabdollahian have issued a joint statement at the end of their meeting in Beijing on Thursday.

This was the first formal meeting of the countries’ most senior diplomats in more than seven years.

 The joint statement mentioned, among other things, the resumption of flights between the two countries and the facilitation of granting of visas for citizens including Umrah visas; the start of arrangements to reopen their respective embassies and consulates Jeddah and Mashhad; as well as the resumption of visits by officials and private sector delegations.

 Videos posted on Saudi state TV Al-Ekhbariya’s Twitter account earlier showed the two diplomats standing side-by-side before greeting each other and shaking hands before their meeting. Subsequent footages showed the countries’ delegations getting ready for their discussions.

Both countries in their statement expressed appreciation to the Chinese government for hosting the meeting, and also thanked the Swiss government for ‘its endeavors and appreciated efforts to take care of Saudi and Iranian interests.’

Saudi Arabia and Iran early last month agreed to reestablish diplomatic relations and reopen their embassies following years of uneasy tension between the two countries, in talks brokered by China.

Riyadh and Tehran also agreed to activate the security cooperation agreement signed in 2001 and the trade, economy and investment agreement signed in 1998, according to the trilateral statement issued on March 10.

The agreement to renew ties was signed by Saudi Arabia’s national security adviser Musaed bin Mohammed Al-Aiban and Iran’s top security official Ali Shamkhani.

Saudi, Iran foreign ministers meet in China (arabnews.com)

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