Regional Organizations

Let’s be clear. Anyone who thinks that President Obama could leave Washington, DC, to travel to Asia for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and the East Asia Summit (EAS) in the midst of a virtual collapse of the U.S. government doesn’t understand the U.S. political system. The president would have been skewered—by the media, by the Republicans, and in private, by his own party. But why not send Vice President Biden? The vice president is the one person who can effectively stand in for the president, whether at home or abroad. Sending him to Asia in the president’s stead would have stilled the worried voices of our Asian allies and quelled the naysaying voices of our critics. The White House did send U.S. Trade Representative Mike Froman and Secretary of State Kerry, but in this case the sum of the parts is less than the whole. USTR Mike Froman is well respected within Asia. His efforts to advance the Trans-Pacific Partnership are Herculean (although some might say Sisyphean), and no one doubts his talent and fortitude. Still, he represents one narrow slice of the U.S. foreign policy pie and is not a realistic stand-in for the president. Secretary Kerry is still earning his Asian stripes. He held a useful set of meetings in early October in Bali, where he reinforced security ties with Australia and Japan. However, early slips, in which he questioned the importance of the pivot to Asia and appeared less committed to Asia than to the Middle East, have not been forgotten within the region. Vice President Biden would have been the natural and best alternative to President Obama. He has strong foreign policy credentials and a personality that is well suited to the mix of serious diplomacy and equally serious socializing that Asian summits demand. Recent news reports have him eating a sandwich with President Obama, dedicating a hall at the University of Delaware to honor a civil rights activist, and sending congratulations to a ranger who stood up to a Republican congressman. No doubt behind the scenes the vice president is also trying to use his deep ties within Congress to try to make progress in resolving the current political meltdown. However, given the current state of Republican play, a quick trip to Asia is unlikely to have made much difference. Like my colleague Josh Kurlantzick, I don’t believe—as many media reports have suggested—that the failure of President Obama to travel to Asia has permitted Chinese President Xi Jinping to undo five years of Chinese missteps and two years of strong U.S. initiatives in the region. In part this is because Xi is not taking any positive steps to address what concerns Asian countries most—rising Chinese military assertiveness. And in part, this is because while President Xi touts China’s role as an engine of economic growth, the region’s leaders are fully aware that China runs a trade surplus with a number of their countries. Even as a source of much-needed foreign investment in Asia, the European Union and Japan far outrank either China or the United States. Yes, the United States missed an opportunity, but the opportunity wasn’t to send President Obama to wave the American flag in Asia, it was to send Vice President Biden. Let’s hope the next time the president needs to be in two places at once, he remembers that his number two is a more than adequate stand-in.

Most of the attention paid to China these days focuses on Beijing’s efforts to change things on the home front. Targeted arrests of officials on grounds of corruption, a crackdown on prominent Internet and human rights activists, and the establishment of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone are just some of the many policy (re)innovations that Xi Jinping and his team are advancing. Yet pieces are also in play on the foreign policy front, suggesting that China may be entering a new phase in its regional diplomacy. Over the past decade, China’s foreign policy toward Southeast Asia has evolved from the positive refrain of “peaceful rise,” “win-win cooperation,” “rising tide lifts all boats” of the mid-2000s to the more bullying “China is a big country and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact” mantra that emerged by the end of the new century’s first decade. Now, newly selected President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang appear to be trying to marry the two, selling China as a positive economic force within the region, while continuing to play hardball on the security front. In his appearance before the ASEAN nations in early September at the China-ASEAN Expo and China-ASEAN Business Investment Summit in Nanning, Premier Li Keqiang sounded like his predecessor Wen Jiabao in the early days, claiming that China’s policy toward ASEAN was win-win. Calling for the next decade to be a “diamond decade” between China and ASEAN, Li proposed to ratchet up economic integration by upgrading the China-ASEAN free trade area in order to achieve a record bilateral trade volume of one trillion dollars; pushing Chinese infrastructure investment throughout Southeast Asia to promote connectivity in roads, railways, water transport, telecommunications, and energy; and developing a China-ASEAN maritime partnership, among other initiatives. At the same time, “win-win” under Li and Xi does not appear to apply equally to everyone. Noticeably absent from the September gathering was the Philippines. In the immediate run-up to the meetings, China disinvited President Benigno Aquino even though the Philippines was designated as the country of honor for this year’s expo. China is punishing the Philippines for the latter’s decision to appeal to the United Nations for arbitration over the two countries’ dispute regarding the South China Sea. Such behavior is reminiscent of China’s 2011 ban on the export of rare earths to Japan in the wake of a dispute in the East China Sea. Moreover, in a visit the previous month to four Southeast Asian countries, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi blamed the failure of multilateral talks over the South China Sea on outside interference—namely the United States—an analysis with which few outside China would concur. He called for the Southeast Asian claimants to the South China Sea to have “realistic expectations” and take a “gradual approach” to the development of a code of conduct. Within the region, however, such talk is not necessarily falling on receptive ears. While calling for patience, Beijing, itself, is continuing to push its own expansive security agenda at the expense of the rest of the region. At least one senior ASEAN member official, for example, pointed out privately in late September that Beijing is not only still promulgating its redrawn passport map of 2012 (which incorporates vast areas of disputed territory into the PRC) but also actively working to make it a reality.  Without real actions to support its positive words, China’s diamond decade is unlikely to glitter very brightly.

Later this week, President Obama will embark on a six-day trip to Southeast Asia, visiting Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei, to attend the East Asia Summit, the annual ASEAN leaders summit, and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, along with a global entrepreneurs’ meeting in Malaysia. It might seem surprising that the president would leave the United States at such a critical time in federal budget negotiations, but these are the biggest leaders’ meetings in Asia, and since 2009, the White House has committed to increasing the presence of the president and other top Cabinet officials in Asia. Certainly, face time is critical in Southeast Asia, and the president’s presence at these summits is a sign of the continued U.S. commitment to the region, a sign further burnished by the launch earlier this year of the comprehensive partnership with Vietnam. But what about the substance of these meetings? The White House has pledged to finalize the Trans Pacific Partnership(TPP) by the end of this year, and this will be the top subject at nearly all the summits Obama attends. But the TPP negotiations held in Washington two weeks ago did not make substantial progress on many sectors, and most major U.S. business trade groups are pressing Obama not to make the kinds of compromises on intellectual property during his trip to Asia that most of the other TPP countries demand for talks to be finalized. And even if they did actually finalize TPP, the White House has almost no chance of getting fast trade track authority from Congress again, despite pledges by the Office of the United States Trade Representative to work for it. Without fast track, and with so many concerns in Congress over the vast scope of the TPP, it would likely be dead on arrival on the Hill. Later in the week, I’ll take a look at how Obama should, during his trip, address concerns over the state of political freedom in Southeast Asia, particularly in Malaysia, Myanmar, and Cambodia.  

On August 11 Mali conducted the second and final round of its national elections. The results are expected on August 16. The leading contenders are former prime minister Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, often called IBK, and former finance minister Soumaila Cisse. Keita is the favorite, having won 39 percent of the votes in the first round to Cisse’s 19 percent. In the first round, voter turnout was higher than in previous elections, though still under 50 percent. In the secessionist north, voter participation was much lower. The Malian political class, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), France, and the United States look to the success of these elections to put to rest the two year crisis that followed a military coup against the corrupt government of President Amadou Toumani Toure. A democratically elected government will also permit donors to resume the aid flow. The coup provided an opening for the secession of northern, Tuareg-dominated part of the country, which declared its independence as Azawad. However, radical jihadists soon subverted more moderate elements and established an Islamist regime. A jihadist push south was stopped by French intervention. French, Malian, and ECOWAS troops pushed the jihadists out of the cities, though they failed to destroy them. Tuareg disaffection from Bamako appears to continue to be widespread. The roots of the current crisis are a Malian political class that was isolated from the mass of the population and that was increasingly corrupt. That reality was disguised by a serious of well-conducted elections that established for Mali the undeserved reputation of being a model African democracy. However, voter participation continued to fall. In the north of the country, there has been a persistent insurrection by the Tuareg peoples and their allies against domination by Bamako for more than a generation. The Tuaregs want a degree of autonomy or even independence. The Bamako government had repeatedly promised “federalism,” but never delivered. The Tuareg insurrection heated up after the collapse of Quaddafi’s Libya regime and the return of some Tuareg mercenaries. Bamako’s military reverses and general mismanagement led to the coup against Toure, which enjoyed significant popular approval. Mali’s persistent challenges include an unresponsive and corrupt political class and its failure to reconcile with the Tuaregs (and other minorities) in the north. It remains to be seen if these elections will address either of those issues. Keita and Cisse are part of the political establishment that runs Mali. Further, Keita is especially popular in Bamako, less so elsewhere. If he wins, he will need to move quickly to open a dialogue with the disaffected north. Some parts of the north, notably Kidal, participated hardly at all in the elections. It remains to be seen whether the elections will be a first step toward national reconciliation or whether they will further alienate the north. As for the jihadists, they are “just over the hill,” and can reassert themselves at any time, especially if the new government in Bamako missteps. The bottom line is that it is far too soon for France, ECOWAS, or the United States to go into self-congratulatory mode over the success of the Malian elections.

When I was doing research in the mid-2000s for my first book, Charm Offensive, on how China was becoming more influential economically and diplomatically in Southeast Asia, I came into the project wondering whether Beijing was, at that time, benefiting from the U.S. being largely absent from Southeast Asia, focused on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and unable to get any trade agenda through Congress. At the time, I concluded that, although China certainly was benefiting in Southeast Asia from a U.S. administration whose attention was directed elsewhere, the biggest loser in terms of influence in Southeast Asia seemed to be Japan. Despite hundreds of billions in aid spent in Southeast Asia since World War II, Japan was being ignored in Southeast Asia in the mid and late 2000s, written off as yesterday’s news—its diplomatic influence shrinking along with its aid budgets, its companies still major investors but hardly the wave of the future. At that time, Japan had endured more than a decade of economic drift, was slashing its aid budgets, and seemed unsure how to respond to a wave of change in Southeast Asia in the 1990s and early 2000s that ended dictatorships in Thailand and Indonesia and opened up politics in many other states. Japanese diplomats and Japanese corporations, had long enjoyed close ties with powerful autocratic leaders in Southeast Asia, like Suharto, but seemed unable or unwilling to leverage Japan’s role as an established democracy to build ties to new democrats emerging in Southeast Asia.  The Japanese foreign service in particular, always relatively weak because of the power of other ministries in Tokyo, seemed to be almost conceding Japan’s decline in Southeast Asia. On the eve of Prime Minister Abe’s most recent trip to Southeast Asia, I have to admit that many of my conclusions about Japan from the time seem wrong, or at least too premature. (I still believe that the United States’ virtual absence from the region in the 2000s put  permanent doubts into the minds of many Southeast Asians about whether they could trust the U.S. to maintain a long-term presence in the region as a partner and treaty ally.) Although Japan will never regain the influence it had in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, in part because the region has democratized and relations no longer rest on a small handful of Southeast Asian big men, and in part because Japan’s boomiest economic years are not coming back, Japan has leveraged its influence in the region far better in the 2010s. Tokyo has shed the myth, which was seriously hindered its diplomacy in Southeast Asia, that Japan can no longer punch its weight in the region, and its proactive and deep partnerships with countries like Vietnam and Myanmar—deeper than the United States’ ties with those countries—have differentiated it from U.S. policy in Southeast Asia.  Abenomics is inspiring to many Southeast Asian countries, which have tried their own versions of domestic stimulus rather than the austerity of Europe. Japanese companies’ massive asset purchases in Southeast Asia, the failure of Chinese outward investment to match promises by Beijing made in the mid-2000s, and Japanese firms’ willingness to stick with promised Southeast Asian investments despite political turbulence (Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar) and climate disasters (Thailand) and serious economic slowdowns (Vietnam) garner appreciation in the region. And Prime Minister Abe, far more than most U.S. diplomats, recognizes a truth that China figured out in the late 1990s and early 2000s—although ASEAN moves slowly, and is mostly a talk shop, you have to show up and be counted to be taken seriously as a player in the region. He has now made three visits to Southeast Asia in his relatively short time as prime minister, and his effort is paying off – in trade deals, in investment, in public opinion, and in Southeast Asian acceptance of a more forceful Japanese stance on regional defense. Yet Tokyo still does too little to differentiate itself from China as a vibrant democracy, and a country whose companies generally have much higher standards of governance than the Chinese firms which have attracted massive backlashes for their investments in Myanmar, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and even tiny Laos. Except for a few exceptions in the foreign ministry, Japanese diplomats, including many ambassadors in the region, tend to focus on Japan’s aid, its infrastructure investment, and strategic ties, but rarely mention corporate governance, democracy, or civil society. (Japanese diplomats and politicians have begun talking much more, during visits to Southeast Asia, about Japan’s commitment to the environment, which plays well in countries like the Philippines and Thailand with strong environmental movements.) Although Japan has rapidly taken advantage of Myanmar’s shift away from China by boosting economic links and strategic ties, it is too quickly following the old paradigm it used with Suharto, Mahathir Mohamad, and others, focusing too heavily on its ties to a few top leaders. Indeed, Tokyo’s willingness to just embrace the Myanmar government without using its debt forgiveness and new aid packages as leverage to push for continued reforms, even as Myanmar is enveloped in ethnic conflict, is resented by many Myanmar ethnic minority groups, and even by many Myanmar activists. Prime Minister Abe emphasizes Japan’s role as a democracy, but his nationalist rhetoric and unwillingness to recognize Japan’s World War II war crimes overshadow his emphasis on Japanese democracy as a partner for young Southeast Asian democracies. Even though feelings about WWII are generally not as heated in Southeast Asia as in Northeast Asia—some countries, like Thailand and Myanmar, remember, were de facto allies of Japan—Abe’s rhetoric certainly does not help.

Alassane Ouattara, president of the Ivory Coast and chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), announced that he received a letter from Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan saying that Nigeria will withdraw part of its peacekeeping contingent in Mali. The ECOWAS and UN force (MUNISMA) was to number 12,600 and replace the French force now in Mali that numbers 4,500. How many Nigerian peacekeepers are in Mali at present is not clear; the official number is 1,200. Nor is it clear how many Nigerians will be withdrawn. One Reuters report states that the Nigerian infantry will leave, but that signals operators and engineers will stay. Another report from the BBC claims that Nigeria will withdraw a full battalion of 850 following the Mali elections on July 28. This would limit Nigeria’s presence in the country “to 140 police, some staff officers, and a field hospital based near the northern town of Timbuktu.” The reality of Nigeria’s withdrawal, however, will become better defined as events on the ground develop further. According to Reuters, quoting the UN peacekeeping department, Nigeria will also withdraw some of its troops from the UN-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur. According to Ouattara, Jonathan said the troops are being withdrawn from Mali “because of the domestic situation in Nigeria.” It is highly likely that this is the reason for the withdrawal from Darfur as well. The “domestic situation” is the Islamic insurgency in the north called Boko Haram. Attempts to quell the insurrection and the state of emergency in three northern states have required the deployment of thousands of Nigerian troops. Up to now, the Abuja government insisted that it has sufficient military force to ensure internal security. However, according to the Nigerian media, a Nigerian Senate investigation concluded that the military is “severely stretched by the fighting with Boko Haram.” The Nigerian media has also carried stories–denied by the government–that Nigerian troops in Mali were ill-fed and not paid. This is not the first time Nigeria has withdrawn troops from Mali to strengthen its efforts against Boko Haram. Immediately following the May 14 state of emergency declaration, Nigeria’s Defense Headquarters ordered a portion of the troops in Mali to return home and participate in the war against Boko Haram. The contraction of Nigeria’s peacekeeping role because of the insurgency in the north should be no surprise. Many–if not most–international observers have questioned the optimistic official reports that Abuja’s efforts to quell the insurrection were succeeding. Nevertheless, the contraction diminishes the country’s international role. Nigeria’s willingness to supply peacekeepers to UN, ECOWAS, and African Union missions over the years was an important source of Abuja’s international prestige and influence.

Below is a guest post by Andrew Reddie, research associate in the International Institutions and Global Governance program. The UN Charter advises that “the Security Council shall, where appropriate, utilize such regional arrangements or agencies for enforcement action under its authority.” The degree to which regional cooperation represents a sine qua non for international action was made abundantly clear in the recent uprising against Muammar al-Qaddafi, as the Arab League sanctioned a no-fly zone over Libya, followed promptly by UN Security Council Resolution 1973. But are regional organizations the future of humanitarian intervention? The answer is complicated. While regional organizations have risen to the fore in recent decades, situations such as the current conflict in Syria appear to be far beyond the capabilities of their respective regional organizations. It is worth reflecting upon the role of regional organizations in past interventions and contemplating their limits, before viewing them as a panacea. The logic embedded in Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, that regional authorities have more at stake in conflicts that are closer to home, is sound; as is the principle that regional players better understand the context of fighting, grievances, and potential pathways to peace. These advantages, however, must be weighed against the potential for states to take advantage of the plight of their neighbors and the varying capabilities of the regional organizations that could be called upon to act in the event of humanitarian crises. Historically, neighboring states have become involved in conflicts that threaten regional instability or spillover. One of the most successful examples of regional, humanitarian intervention took place in the 1990s within Liberia and Sierra Leone, following repeated coups and civil wars in both countries linked to Charles Taylor’s administration of Liberia and the rise of the Revolutionary United Front. The intervention in Sierra Leone—which took place after a ceasefire was brokered and then broken—was led by ECOMOG, the armed monitoring group of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), with the help of British troops in Operation Palliser, and eventually led to elections in the country. The fact that this intervention secured a UN mission that was under grave threat, and solidified a peace in such a way that Sierra Leone has eventually returned to peace, suggested that regional participation could confer legitimacy upon humanitarian interventions. In the years that followed, ECOWAS embarked upon subsequent interventions in the Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea on the grounds of “collective self-defense,” and not always with Security Council approval. The African Union and the South African Development Community also began to play a role in furnishing peacekeeping forces in Lesotho, Burundi, Sudan, Somalia, and the Comoros. Importantly, these interventions have been characterized as legitimate by individual states in the region. This has been important given the skepticism regarding the role of international forces in recent humanitarian interventions by both states and their populations. However the weaknesses associated with African Union-led interventions to date have stemmed primarily from their reliance upon states or organizations for both fiduciary support and human capital—for instance, in Somalia, the African Union’s AMISOM was approved by the UN and received substantial funding from the European Union. As well as funding operations in other regions, the EU was also involved in its own peace operations in Europe and fundamentally altered geopolitics in the Balkans following conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. EU involvement in the peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction of Kosovo, in particular, offers an example of the degree to which a regional organization confers technical assistance and resources that reshape domestic politics and enforce peace. In the past, armed interventions on the basis of humanitarian imperatives have also organically developed among neighboring states rather than being fostered by a regional organization. The best example of this phenomenon is provided by the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) that involved Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and five other Pacific Island states. Intervening in response to increased violence and unrest caused by land-claim disputes in 2003, these neighboring states helped restore law and order and, in the years following, provided peacekeeping and police forces to enforce peace and support elections in 2006. RAMSI is expected to be dissolved in September 2013, after a decade in the country. The Arab League, Organization of American States, and Association of Southeast Asian Nations, for their part, have had little to no interest in intervening in the sovereign states that comprise their respective memberships. These organizations remain primarily interested in external relations between states and harmonizing standards and regulations that reduce transaction costs and ensure sustained cooperation. The role that institutional or geopolitical weakness plays in privileging sovereignty over humanitarian norms also serves to strengthen the notion that regional organizations are not designed to perform humanitarian intervention and instead should be focused on other issues. In Syria, the reluctance of the Arab League to choose sides in the civil war has severely detracted from its ability to influence the conflict. Moreover, the Arab League, unlike the African Union, has no standby force to call upon for peacekeeping should it have decided to intervene earlier in the conflict. The geopolitical realities in the region also overshadow any regional organization’s (whether the Arab League or the Gulf Cooperation Council) ability to serve as an arbiter. Consequently, the Arab League has been limited to calling for peace talks and supporting the halting progress of the UN-Arab League envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi. The simple conclusion from this narrative is that regional organizations have become increasingly important players in humanitarian interventions over the past two decades. But while regional organizations have considerable value in providing context-specific intervention strategies, the continuing debates concerning sovereignty and the appropriateness of regional intervention, alongside institutional weakness, can severely limit their effectiveness. Furthermore, international organizations and states continue to play key roles in mandating, legitimating, and providing resources for peacekeeping missions. Regional organizations, then, do not, by themselves, represent the future of humanitarian intervention.

Over the past month,Indonesia, the natural leader of Southeast Asia, has often seemed rudderless in its foreign policy, lashing out at other nations in the region over a haze crisis caused primarily in Indonesia, and offering little leadership as the region tries to work toward serious negotiations with China on a realistic South China Sea code of conduct. Does Indonesia have a regional strategy, or even an international one? Does it have a foreign ministry up to the challenge of returning to leadership in ASEAN, and playing a leading role in global organizations like the G-20 and the UN? In an interview with the International Relations and Security Network, I discuss Indonesia’s regional and global foreign policy. Read it here.

Haze continues to spread across Southeast Asia, the result primarily of burn-offs from farming by individuals and agribusinesses in Indonesia, combined with the dry summer weather and urban pollution in the region’s largest cities. As Yanzhong Huang notes, air pollution levels in some parts of penisular Southeast Asia have reached record highs this past week; the more proactive governments in the region, like Singapore, have taken health precautions like pushing nearly all residents to wear masks while outdoors and setting up centers across the city-state for low-income and elderly residents to get free face masks they can use. As Yanzhong notes, Singapore also is vowing to pursue companies that use polluting practices and cause this haze. Overall, countries in the region, like Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, appear to be pointing fingers at each other and engaging in diplomatic recriminations rather than collaborating to address the haze crisis and its causes. It is certainly true that most Southeast Asian leaders are not exactly stepping up to the plate – Indonesia in particular, supposedly the region’s leader, has reacted to the haze crisis with a show of diplomatic pique that is useless – but in fact the countries in the region supposedly have a forum to handle non-traditional security threats like haze – their regional organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Haze has been on the agenda of ASEAN leaders’ meetings and foreign ministers’ meetings and environmental meetings for fifteen years now; I personally have attended at least three major ASEAN meetings where cooperation on reducing haze was discussed at length. More than ten years ago ASEAN inked an agreement on transboundary haze in which ASEAN countries vowed to take measures to reduce haze pollution. Of course, the agreement is vague, has no real enforcement mechanisms, and was not ratified by Indonesia, so it is of little use now. In fact, the transboundary agreement on haze is a perfect ASEAN document: Grand in vision, vague in details and enforcement, and then not acted upon. Indeed, when a crisis actually erupts, the organization’s inherent weakness, which normally can be hidden behind smiling summits and reams of plans for cooperation, is exposed. The organization’s secretariat in Jakarta is badly underresourced, as every ASEAN member knows, and the current ASEAN Secretary-General, Vietnam’s former deputy foreign minister, is a capable diplomat but does not have the tools or the name recognition to push ASEAN members to take any serious action on haze. Of course, this is how ASEAN leaders want it – having a powerful, well-known Secretary General of the organization might diminish individual country leaders’ appeal to being the voice of Southeast Asia, an unofficial post claimed at various times by everyone from Mahathir Mohamad to Thaksin Shinawatra to Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Meanwhile, average people in Southeast Asia suffer, as they have done every hot season for sixteen years now.

For decades, during the rule of the military junta, Myanmar’s numerous internal problems spilled over its borders, sewing chaos along the frontiers with India,Thailand,China, and Bangladesh. Myanmar’s narcotics producers flooded Thailand and other countries with methamphetamines and heroin, Myanmar’s numerous civil wars sent hundreds of thousands of refugees spilling into Thailand and Bangladesh and created a profitable cross-border illegal arms trade in India, and Myanmar’s combination of rape as a weapon of war and massive migration created some of the most virulent strains of HIV/AIDS in Asia, which then spread into China and Thailand. With the reforms in Myanmar since 2010, there has been considerable hope among the country’s neighbors that political change also would reduce the burdens Myanmar’s serious domestic problems placed on them. Thailand hopes to send back thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Myanmar migrants, and to be able to better cooperate with the Myanmar government in shutting down drug production in Myanmar’s wild northeast.  China hopes that the cease-fire between the Kachin Independence Army and the Myanmar government – seemingly the most stable cease-fire with the KIA in decades – will decrease migration into China and keep China from having to play a larger role in the KIA-Myanmar dispute. Overall, the entire Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has hoped that, with Myanmar no longer a pariah, it will be easier for the group to reach consensus on regional issues, and ASEAN will be able to punch at a higher weight internationally. Yet in some ways, the reverse of these aspirations is happening. The cease-fire in Kachin State is a clear step forward. But Myanmar’s inter-religious violence, which seemed confined to Rakhine State last year, now is spreading across the country, even to places, such as Lashio in Shan State, in which there have been few Muslim-Buddhist clashes in modern history and where there are few Muslims living anyway. And now the violence is spreading to other countries in the region, sucking them into Myanmar’s battles; they already are being sucked in by the outflow of Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine State. In the past two weeks, at least eight people have been killed in Malaysia. Buddhist and Muslims from Myanmar have begun attacking each other in Kuala Lumpur. (There are hundreds of thousands of people from Myanmar living in Malaysia, mostly doing low-paying labor.) This comes just after violence between Myanmar Buddhist and Muslim refugees in Indonesia resulted in several deaths. Yet, just as on the issue of how to handle Rohingya refugees, on the broader problem ofMyanmar’s spiraling inter-religious conflict, ASEAN is almost nowhere to be seen. Other than Indonesia, most ASEAN members have not been proactive in trying to help Myanmar tamp down tensions, and the region has no coherent plan for addressing the Rohingya “boat people” turning up in Thailand, Malaysia, and elsewhere.

This article was originally published in the Washington Post on Friday, June 7, 2013. In the past five years, Turkey has veered from what was once a promising path of liberal democracy — and the European Union can pull it back. The recent massive street protests in Istanbul started as a backlash against the government’s plan to develop a beloved park into a shopping mall, but they also reflect popular frustration at the country’s authoritarian turn, made clear in the rise of crony capitalism, intimidation by government forces and the centralization of power in the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was just a decade ago that then-Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told an audience at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that the main reason his government was pursuing wide-ranging democratic reforms was the possibility of fully joining the European Union. But as that prospect has faded, so has the drive toward democracy in Turkey. Even before the AKP came to power in late 2002, the party’s leaders determined that E.U. membership was the best means to resolve Turkey’s perennial culture war between Islamists and secularists. With a legislative majority, the AKP quickly abolished the death penalty, wrote a new penal code, changed anti-terrorism laws to make it more difficult to prosecute citizens on speech alone (though critics claim the changes do not go far enough) and significantly expanded political rights. Continue reading here...

It was half a century ago that UK Prime Minister Harold McMillan famously noted the “winds of change” buffeting the British Empire. Old verities were crumbling and Great Britain would need to adapt to a new political reality. Something analogous is happening today in the Western Hemisphere, where Latin American governments are rethinking their participation in Washington’s decades-long war on drugs. The latest evidence is a ground-breaking Report on the Drug Problem in the Americas, released May 17 by the Organization of American States (OAS). For the first time, the multilateral body is calling for a sober reassessment of the prohibition strategies the United States has backed since the Nixon administration. Most international reports simply gather dust. This one won’t. It offers the basis for a long-overdue conversation among the thirty-five members of the OAS. Produced at a cost of $2.2 million, the report was commissioned at last year’s contentious Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia. As I argued at the time, the April 2012 meeting revealed fissures in hemispheric attitudes. A new generation of Latin leaders was appealing for new approaches to combating the drug trade, ranging from demilitarization to decriminalization to legalization. Among the most outspoken was Otto Perez Molina of gang-ravaged Guatemala, who warned that he might abandon the anti-drug struggle to save his country from violence. But he was hardly alone. A plea for greater flexibility also came from Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, whose country has received much of the $20 billion the United States has spent in hemispheric counterdrug efforts this past decade. Alas, President Obama, facing a November election against Mitt Romney, rebuffed efforts to discuss the range of potential options between current counterdrug policies and full legalization. The United States will no longer have the luxury of avoiding honest dialogue. In two weeks an OAS assembly convenes in Guatemala to discuss the 400-page report, which OAS Secretary-General José Miguel Insulza presented to Santos last Friday. The document actually has two parts. The first is an “analytical report” describing the scope of drug production, trafficking and consumption in the hemisphere, and the often devastating impact that addiction and drug-related crime and violence can have on the social fabric, economic fortunes, and political stability of OAS member states. The second is a “scenarios report” setting out four possible trajectories for the hemisphere, depending on national drug policy choices and coordination among them. The strengths of the report are its clear-eyed description of the current hemispheric drug problem and its willingness to set out policy alternatives, without endorsing any particular model. As Santos stated on May 17, “Let it be clear that no one here is defending any position, neither legalization, nor regulation, nor war at any cost.” The document’s objective is to provide “the basis for a long-postponed discussion.” Another intellectual breakthrough is explicit recognition that divergent national circumstances warrant “differentiated approaches,” tailored to local contexts and “individual concerns.” This echoes the finding of a 2011 report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy: Namely, it’s crazy to ask all countries to apply “the same rigid approach to drug policy—the same laws, and the same tough approach to their enforcement,” regardless of context. The report also firmly endorses a “public health” approach to the hemispheric drug problem, calling for a greater focus on treatment rather than incarceration of addicts. Predictably, media coverage has focusing overwhelmingly on just one possibility the report raises: the decriminalization and legalization of drugs, “starting with cannabis.” That’s a pity, for the document outlines a wide range of legal and regulatory alternatives, based on what is actually going on in OAS member states (as well as in individual U.S. states)—and the costs and benefits associated with these various strategies. The authors’ most creative decision was to offer four distinct scenarios describing what the hemispheric drug problem might look like in 2025, depending on the choices OAS member states make. They provide these alternative futures as thought experiments, labeling them as follows: “Together”: Under this scenario, OAS members understand the drug problem as a symptom of broader insecurity. They thus work to reform and reinforce state institutions so that governments can “control organized crime and the violence and corruption it generates.” “Pathways”: Believing that prohibition regimes and criminal sanctions are causing more harm than good, OAS states under this scenario experiment with “alternative legal and regulatory regimes, starting with cannabis,” and reallocate resources “from controlling drugs and drug users to preventing and treating problematic use.” “Resilience”: In this scenario, OAS members treat the drug problem as “a manifestation and a magnifier of underlying social and economic dysfunctions that lead to violence and addiction.” Their policy response is to focus on “strengthening communities and improving public safety, health, education and employment through bottom-up programs.” “Disruption”: In this fourth and darkest scenario, producer and transit countries conclude that they are “suffering unbearable and unfair costs” from the war on drugs. In response, they unilaterally defect from hemispheric cooperation, “abandoning the fight” or even “reaching an accommodation” with the cartels. These possibilities show how divergent understandings of the nature of the drug problem could encourage different responses, creating opportunities but also new policy challenges. The bleak “Disruption” scenario, the authors warn, “alerts us to what could happen if we are incapable in the short run of reaching a shared vision that allows us to join forces to address the problem, while respecting diversity in our approaches to it.” Going forward, the price of hemispheric cooperation on illegal drugs is likely to be greater tolerance —not least from Washington—for national experimentation.