Foreign Affairs: World Order 2.0

But an approach to international order premised solely on respect for sovereignty, together with the maintenance of the balance of power necessary to secure it, is no longer sufficient. The globe’s traditional operating system—call it World Order 1.0—has been built around the protection and prerogatives of states. It is increasingly inadequate in today’s globalized world. Little now stays local; just about anyone and anything, from tourists, terrorists, and refugees to e-mails, diseases, dollars, and greenhouse gases, can reach almost anywhere. The result is that what goes on inside a country can no longer be considered the concern of that country alone. Today’s circumstances call for an updated operating system—call it World Order 2.0—that includes not only the rights of sovereign states but also those states’ obligations to others. [...]

A new international order will require an expanded set of norms and arrangements, beginning with a commonly agreed-on basis for statehood. There cannot be an unlimited right for any and all communities to achieve political self-determination. Reaching a consensus on how to limit such a right will not be easy, but it is necessary lest unilateral actions trigger conflict. A good start would be to amend the concept of self-determination so that it is regarded as something that has to be not only asserted but also granted. (The 1978 Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel, for example, did not extend the principle of self-determination to the Palestinians but rather supported the notion that “representatives of the Palestinian people should participate in negotiations on the resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its aspects.”) [...]

American policymakers must also face up to the reality that any world order will constrain U.S. choices as well as the choices of others. For although it is true that the United States has a special role in the world and unique responsibilities that sometimes call for bold unilateral actions, whenever it demands more of others than it does of itself, it appears hypocritical and forfeits authority and trust. In the South China Sea, for example, Washington has criticized Beijing for not following the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—even as Congress has refused to ratify that very treaty. (Other similar cases, such as the U.S. refusal to join the International Criminal Court, can be managed through work-arounds, such as allowing for tribunals to be created to handle specific historical events.) Similarly, the United States’ ability to persuade other countries to help refugees more is hampered by obvious limits on what the United States itself is prepared to do in this sphere. The United States must also take care to be transparent: it did little for the cause of R2P when its 2011 intervention in Libya quickly morphed into one of regime change; humanitarian interventions should be narrow in scope.

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The Conversation: Children learn empathy growing up, but can we train adults to have more of it

Empathy is an interpersonal skill that can be viewed as part of emotional intelligence. Psychotherapist Carl Rogers wrote that empathy could enhance relationships and recommended it for ordinary people and therapists.

Studies support its value. Health professionals who show high levels of empathy tend to get better adherence to treatment from their patients and better patient outcomes. And beyond health care, empathy is associated with better personal relationships and more successful social behaviour. [...]

To actively teach children empathy, parents can explain their own emotions during significant events. They can also discuss the emotions of the child as well as those of others. They can point out the connection between events and emotions. [...]

So we do not know for sure whether we can increase empathy in ordinary people through formal training. We also do not know whether it is possible to help anyone make a long-term gain in empathy.

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Foreign Policy: Putin and Erdogan’s Marriage of Convenience

It has been a remarkable turnabout. In November 2015, then-Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proudly took credit for ordering the shooting down of a Russian warplane that had violated Turkish airspace for a grand total of 17 seconds. Russian retaliation in the form of stinging economic sanctions swiftly followed. Eventually, Erdogan was forced to apologize to Russia and concoct a new narrative assigning blame to the two hapless Turkish F-16 pilots who shot down the Russian jet. The rest of the job fell to the Turkish press, mostly controlled by Erdogan and his allies, which then propagated the notion that F-16 pilots had taken their orders from Fethullah Gulen, the controversial cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania. [...]

These episodes are emblematic of the changing nature of the Russian-Turkish relationship. Frustrated by the Syrian opposition’s loss of ground against President Bashar al-Assad, and fearing the empowerment of the Syrian Kurds, Erdogan began to tack toward Moscow and away from its Western alliance partners roughly a year after Ankara shot down the Russian warplane. Turkey is now one of the parties in the Syrian cease-fire negotiations, along with Russia and Iran; its equities are the armed Sunni opposition groups that depend on Ankara. By contrast, the United States, Turkey’s traditional ally, was excluded from the negotiations and the pending conference in Astana. [...]

The resulting chain reaction brought Turkey closer to Russia. Overnight, America had transformed the Syrian Kurds into a legitimate actor, enabling them to consolidate territorial gains adjoining Turkey. For Ankara, however, this was nothing short of a victory for the hated Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which had been instrumental in the creation of the YPG and waged a decades-long guerilla war against the Turkish state.

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CityLab: How Norwegians and Americans See Inequality Differently

A group of Scandinavian researchers recently did an experiment trying to tease that out. Their goal: to find out how social attitudes towards inequality in the U.S. and Norway differ, in an effort to explain why the two countries have such different redistribution policies. The difference, they discovered, hinges on how people think about luck and fairness.

“In Norway, people very much disapprove of inequalities that are due to bad luck,” Bertil Tungodden, a professor at the Norwegian School of Economics, and one of the paper’s authors, told me. “People in the U.S. are more willing to accept inequality, even if it reflects pure good luck for some and pure bad luck for others.” [...]

There were some differences in which demographics in each country were willing to redistribute the bonuses. Conservatives in both countries accepted inequality (resulting from either chance or effort) and did not redistribute. Higher-education Americans were more meritocratic than lower-education Americans, though in Norway, educational background did not make a difference in someone’s willingness to redistribute. Women in the United States were less likely to accept inequality resulting from either source, according to the experiment.

The experiment did not look at questions of race, which may be one reason the countries have differing views on welfare. As I’ve written before, white Americans tend to be more withholding when it comes to welfare if they believe the money is going to black Americans. It would be illuminating for another, similar study to be performed that looks at whether white people perceive luck as more or less fair if the beneficiary (or loser, as the case may be) is black.

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Politico: Return of prodigal Spain

It is a reversal of fortune for Spain, and comes at a time when the other weighty European players are off kilter, distracted by coming elections (Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands), wobbly economies (France, Italy), domestic political upheavals brought on by referendums (the out-of-EU-heading U.K) or the ascendance to power of anti-EU, anti-liberal governments (Poland).

But Spain, which last played a prominent role on the larger European stage in the first years of the 21st century, returns to a different kind of Europe, riven by crises and doubts. It is hardly clear what domestic stability and any renewed influence could be used to accomplish at the European level, beyond making a stronger play for top jobs in Brussels and strengthening the ranks of firmly pro-EU countries. The cloud of a Catalan push for independence later this year could also prematurely end a period of relative domestic tranquility. [...]

Spain is almost alone in Europe in having no anti-EU political forces in parliament, and Rajoy doesn’t have to call an election until 2020, though his Popular Party only has a third of the seats in parliament, potentially limiting his ability to negotiate in Brussels. [...]

The most obvious symptom of its declining influence in Brussels is the lack of Spanish officials in key EU posts — quite a come-down for a country that had three presidents of the European Parliament between 1989 and 2007, not to mention Javier Solana in the post of EU foreign policy chief from 1999 to 2009 and Pedro Solbes and Joaquín Almunia in top economic jobs in the Commission from 1999 to 2014. Spain’s current representative on the Commission, Miguel Arias Cañete, is the more junior of two commissioners dealing with the energy portfolio.

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The New York Times: Assad Has Won in Syria. But Syria Hardly Exists.

Let’s take a look at the numbers. (While the following statistics are estimates, they will, if anything, get worse with the continuing matrix of wars in Syria.) More than 80 percent of Syrians live below the poverty line. Nearly 70 percent of Syrians live in extreme poverty, meaning they cannot secure basic needs, according to a 2016 report. That number has most likely grown since then. The unemployment rate is close to 58 percent, with a significant number of those employed working as smugglers, fighters or elsewhere in the war economy. Life expectancy has dropped by 20 years since the beginning of the uprising in 2011. About half of children no longer attend school — a lost generation. The country has become a public health disaster. Diseases formerly under control, like typhoid, tuberculosis, Hepatitis A and cholera, are once again endemic. And polio — previously eradicated in Syria — has been reintroduced, probably by fighters from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Upward of 500,000 are dead from the war, and an untold number of Syrians have died indirectly from the conflict (the price for destroying hospitals, targeting health care professionals and using starvation as a weapon). With more than two million injured, about 11.5 percent of the prewar population have become casualties. And close to half the population of Syria is either internally or externally displaced. A 2015 survey conducted by the United Nations refugee agency looking at Syrian refugees in Greece found that a large number of adults — 86 percent — had secondary or university education. Most of them were under 35. If true, this indicates that Syria is losing the very people it will most need if there is to be any hope of rebuilding in the future. [...]

In order to survive, the Syrian regime has had to rely to an extraordinary degree on Russian and Iranian forces, and their proxies, like Hezbollah. It really wasn’t the Syrian Arab Army that retook Aleppo. Indeed, the Syrian military is stretched so thin by geography and attrition that last month it lost most of the city of Palmyra (again) to the Islamic State while pro-government forces were shifted to the north. And although Mr. Assad still maintains some independence, Moscow and Tehran, and even Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, will have much to say in Damascus moving forward. Not only will Mr. Assad have to listen, he will probably have to withstand the pressure of his patrons’ urging him to step down at the end of his presidential term in 2021.

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CBC Radio: Vatican expert says homophobia in Catholic Church due in part to high numbers of gay priests

The ban on gay men from entering the seminary came as a surprise to no one close to the Vatican.  First introduced in 2005 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (before he became Pope Benedict XVI), it was part of his attempt to purge the priesthood of homosexuality (both the act and the orientation), in part, as a misguided response to the sex abuse crisis.

Yet many Vatican observers, such as Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and National Catholic Reporter columnist, did not hide their dismay it remains in the manual. [...]

Yet longtime Vatican expert Robert Mickens says euphemisms such as "homosexual tendencies" are just one of the many ways the Catholic Church avoids facing the issue of gayness in its midst. [...]

"The church wants to keep this issue a taboo so that those pious young men will continue to think of the priesthood as the noble way, rather than, 'I'm gay and maybe that's how I should lead my life as a gay man.' If we allow people to live openly their homosexuality, we lose a great pool of our resources for ministry."

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