The New York Review of Books: Reckless in Riyadh

America’s delicate treatment of the Saudis persisted: for example, while the two countries were targeting terrorists, Washington said little about the enormous Saudi NGOs that spread their ultraconservative Wahhabi Islam around the globe. As the scholar Will McCants remarked, when it comes to Islamist extremism, “the Saudis are both the arsonists and the firefighters.” Still, the burgeoning ties among spies produced real benefits. At least two plots that could have killed significant numbers of Americans during the Obama administration were disrupted because of Saudi tips. American officials murmured approval when the Saudis took small steps to alleviate the plight of the country’s Shia minority or to promote women’s education and participation in the workforce, but their criticism of human rights abuses—torture and other mistreatment of government critics, harsh punishment of migrant workers, and mass beheadings, whether of Shia “terrorists” or common criminals—remained muted at best. [...]

At first, Vision 2030 gave MBS a real sheen. Donald Trump broke with tradition and made the first overseas trip of his presidency to Riyadh instead of visiting democratic allies. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, “I never thought I’d live long enough to write this sentence: The most significant reform process underway anywhere in the Middle East today is in Saudi Arabia.” He praised MBS for rolling back the power of the country’s clerical establishment and proclaimed, “Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for [his] anticorruption drive.” During a visit to the US in April 2018, MBS was feted by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and, at a dinner party hosted by Rupert Murdoch, entertained by the actors Michael Douglas and Morgan Freeman, before having an audience with Oprah Winfrey.

The sheen faded quickly, though, as it became clear that MBS’s notion of reform owed less to Western norms than to Xi Jinping and the Chinese policy of pushing for economic growth without permitting the expansion of political freedoms. There has been a degree of limited liberalization, but in MBS’s view, reforms must be granted by the crown, not elicited, let alone demanded, by his subjects. Hence the imprisonment of women who pressed for the right to drive and for a relaxation of the “guardianship laws” that give men control over the lives of the women in their families—the very measures that MBS had endorsed and, to some extent, enacted. Despite the reforms, there has also been an increase in the pace of executions. Several are now planned for well-known Sunni clerics who, though previously incarcerated for opposing royal policies, were viewed as too popular to be treated more harshly. [...]

Equally astonishing has been the kingdom’s open embrace of Israel. In 2015 a retired Saudi general, Anwar Eshki, participated in a discussion of Israeli and Saudi mutual interests with Dore Gold, a right-wing Israeli former diplomat, at the Council on Foreign Relations’ office in Washington; in 2017 Saudi media broadcast a lengthy interview with then Israeli chief of staff Gadi Eizenkot. In November 2018 Israeli media leaked a diplomatic cable from the country’s foreign ministry instructing its embassies worldwide to advocate for Saudi foreign policy objectives, especially vis-à-vis Iran. And Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has defended MBS for his involvement in Khashoggi’s murder—in which the Saudi go-between with Israel, General Ahmed Asiri, was implicated. It has also been widely reported that the Trump administration expects the Saudis to fund an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement; according to MBS, the Palestinians should either accept it or “shut up.”

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The New York Review of Books: Sierra Leone, 2000: A Case History in Successful Interventionism

A paradox of this claim is that the scope and success of the intervention depended less on deliberate policy and careful planning in Downing Street or Whitehall than on a daring degree of improvisation by the commanding officer on the ground. “Operation Palliser,” which began in May 2000, was led by General Sir David Richards, then a brigadier, later appointed chief of the British general staff and NATO commander in Afghanistan. Without official sanction from London, Richards protected the capital Freetown from rebel attacks and prevented it from falling. In so doing, he made a remarkable unilateral decision to go beyond his mandate in order to save a civilian population from the overwhelming likelihood of an all-out slaughter. The military historian David Ucko, writing in the Journal of Strategic Studies in 2015, calls Richards’s action “A rare success story, but… a poorly understood and little studied case.” [...]

The carnage they inflicted was unspeakable. In these raids on villages, according to interviews I did later, pieced together with testimonies from human rights investigators, soldiers forced parents to choose which of their children would be taken as fighters and which would be killed on the spot. Teenagers in gangsta-style baggy pants raped and plundered, taking girls as young as nine as their “bush wives.” Rebel soldiers asked adult villagers whether they wanted “long sleeves” or “short sleeves,” then hacked off their limbs with machetes. [...]

From their headquarters at Lungi Airport, Richards’s force quickly retook the road that the RUF had earlier cut, and then established a good intelligence network. A few days later, using tips from locals, British soldiers with support from a government commander who went by the name Spider succeeded in capturing Sankoh. It was a significant win—not only boosting the morale of government forces and securing popular support for Richards’s presence, but also opening the way for negotiations to secure the release of the Jordanian UN soldiers being held hostage (all eleven of them were later freed).[...]

Having watched the horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda in the early 1990s—and the failures of intervention—Blair himself became an advocate for humanitarian intervention on principled grounds. In 1999, during the seventy-eight-day NATO-led military operation in Kosovo—a short, sharp war that drove Bosnian Serbs out of Albanian Kosovar territory—he delivered a speech at the Chicago Economic Club. In this “Doctrine of the International Community,” he spoke of the need to balance national interests with “moral purpose” in foreign affairs.

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The Atlantic: An Aging Autocrat's Lesson for His Fellow Dictators

The most immediate ramifications of Kazakhstan’s experiment may be in Russia, where Vladimir Putin will need to decide on a path forward before 2024, when he finishes his second consecutive term as president, the maximum allowed by the constitution. According to Kendall-Taylor, Putin’s options are to choose a successor, amend the constitution, or abolish term limits altogether, like Chinese President Xi Jinping. Putin toyed with a division of power in 2008, when he and Dmitry Medvedev switched roles as prime minister and president. The key difference is that the upcoming decision may be Putin’s final play—the Russian leader will be in his 70s by the time his second term finishes. As two former Soviet countries with similar economies, comparable GDP per capita, and personalized political systems, Kazakhstan and Russia share a great deal, making the current transition an important test case for the Kremlin. [...]

Research done by Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz, an assistant politics professor at Michigan State University, found that the scenario in which regimes were most likely to survive was for dictators to die in office. The same data showed that when dictators, especially in personalized regimes like Kazakhstan and Russia, left office by other means, the regime had a high likelihood of collapse. Nazarbayev’s hybrid model, where he has created a new position that allows him to pull the levers of power from the sidelines, is tough to categorize, but it hints at an eventual settled outcome. “My assumption is that this will look more like a death in office in practice,” Kendall-Taylor said. [...]

Beyond protecting his family’s future role, Nazarbayev, 78, is also motivated by securing his own place in history. As Kazakhstan’s first leader since it gained independence in 1991, he has painted himself as the country’s founding father and has often spoken of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s former prime minister who also stepped aside before his death, as a role model for a type of enlightened authoritarianism. While Kazakhstan remains distant from Singapore in nearly every key metric, cementing his legacy is clearly on his mind, Deirdre Tynan, a senior adviser at PACE Global Strategies and a longtime Central Asia watcher, told me: “Nazarbayev knows Kazakhstan must shake off its post-Soviet mantle, and the reputation of its neighbors, and have a succession process that is, at the very least, not embarrassing.”

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TLDR News: What Did Theresa May Actually Do? - Brexit Explained

With May set to leave resign from her position today, we look back on what her government actually achieved. We discuss how she got the role, the progress she made on Brexit and what she actually did besides Brexit.

Financial Times: How Donald Trump and Boris Johnson threaten democracy

FT chief political commentator Philip Stephens says the US president and the Tory leadership favourite share a common politics that ignores truth.

CNN: I was married with 2 kids when I realized I'm gay

There's a price of admission for coming out as gay later in life. Over the course of several months, I paid the price daily. It was like I was watching a movie about myself but unable to control what was unfolding. Everything fell apart. [...]

He felt unsettled and scared about the uncertainty of our future. He asked several times if I was a lesbian. It was a question that felt impossible to answer because I knew what that answer would mean. [...]

By early 2018, my husband and I separated in an effort to give me some perspective. I lost time with my children as we began a shared custody schedule. I was consumed by the pit in my stomach -- the shame of ending my marriage because I was gay was like lugging a sandbag over my shoulders and having a rock in my stomach at the same time. I couldn't eat. My weight dropped by the day. For the first time since I met my husband, we went a full day without speaking. [...]

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg -- who, like me, is in his late 30s and, like me, came out publicly just a few years ago -- put it this way: "It's hard to face the truth that there were times in my life when, if you had shown me exactly what it was inside me that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife. If you had offered me a pill to make me straight, I would've swallowed it before you had time to give me a sip of water."

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Associated Press: From loss to liberation: Germany's evolving postwar attitude

When Chancellor Angela Merkel thanked the Allies for the D-Day invasion and the “liberation” of Germany in World War II, she might have raised some eyebrows internationally. To those at home, the statement was unremarkable. [...]

While the leaders of France, Britain, the United States and Canada went to England to commemorate the troops’ sacrifice and duty on Wednesday, Merkel listened quietly. After the ceremony was over, she told reporters that she considered her invitation “a gift of history.” [...]

“After 1945, Germans first referred to the end of World War II as ‘collapse,’” said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial Center. [...]

In 1985, then-West German President Richard von Weizsaecker called the Nazi defeat Germany’s “day of liberation” in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the war’s end. His words were supported by most Germans, and to this day it is often cited by politicians and taught in schools. [...]

Another key moment came in 2004, when then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder marked the 60th anniversary of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg’s failed attempt to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb. Schroeder called von Stauffenberg a hero — erasing the Nazis’ “traitor” label that had lingered after the war.

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IFLScience: A New Mysterious Virus Is Creeping Across China

A mysterious new virus is slowly but surely creeping through rural corners of China. Up until recently, the cause of the illness was not clear, but a new study may have pinned down the culprit: a nasty blood-sucking tick. [...]

Reporting in the New England Journal of Medicine, their discovery is based on a sample of the virus taken from the blood of a 42-year-old female farmer from Alongshan who became ill with a fever, headache, and nausea. After the virus was isolated from her blood, genome sequence analysis and electron microscopy showed that it was, indeed, a virus that had never been documented before. Importantly, doctors also noticed she had a history of tick bites. [...]

Lo and behold, they discovered the virus was found in the ticks. More surprisingly, evidence of the virus also showed up in mosquitoes collected in the province of Jilin, meaning they cannot be excluded as possible vectors too. While the virus has only been reported in northeastern China so far, the researchers argue it could potentially spread elsewhere as the tick is found across East Asia, Siberia, Eastern Europe, and Northern Europe.

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