Latest News Clips 2016.07.11

                     

1.  Britain Rattles Postwar Order and Its Place as Pillar of Stability

By New York Times    JUNE 25, 2016

LONDON — Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union is already threatening to unravel a democratic bloc of nations that has coexisted peacefully together for decades. But it is also generating uncertainty about an even bigger issue: Is the post-1945 order imposed on the world by the United States and its allies unraveling, too?

Britain’s choice to retreat into what some critics of the vote suggest is a “Little England” status is just one among many loosely linked developments suggesting the potential for a reordering of power, economic relationships, borders and ideologies around the globe.

Slow economic growth has undercut confidence in traditional liberal economics, especially in the face of the dislocations caused by trade and surging immigration. Populism has sprouted throughout the West. Borders in the Middle East are being erased amid a rise in sectarianism. China is growing more assertive and Russia more adventurous. Refugees from poor and war-torn places are crossing land and sea in record numbers to get to the better lives shown to them by modern communications.

Accompanied by an upending of politics and middle-class assumptions in both the developed and the developing worlds, these forces are combining as never before to challenge the Western institutions and alliances that were established after World War II and that have largely held global sway ever since.

Britain has been a pillar in that order, as well as a beneficiary. It has an important (some would argue outsize) place in the United Nations, and a role in NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — the postwar institutions invested with promoting global peace, security and economic prosperity.

Now Britain symbolizes the cracks in that postwar foundation. Its leaving the European Union weakens a bloc that is the world’s biggest single market, as well as an anchor of global democracy. It also undermines the postwar consensus that alliances among nations are essential in maintaining stability and in diluting the nationalism that once plunged Europe into bloody conflict — even as nationalism is surging again.

 “It’s not that this, in and of itself, will completely destroy the international order,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a former American representative to NATOwho is now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “But it sets a precedent. It is potentially corrosive.”

The symbolism was pointed in China on Saturday morning, two days after the British vote. In the packed ballroom of a Beijing hotel, China’s new international development bank held its first meeting of the 57 countries that have signed up as members. The new institution, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, is designed to give China a chance to win influence away from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

“History has never set any precedent,” the new bank’s president, Jin Liqun, once wrote of the United States and its Western allies, “that an empire is capable of governing the world forever.”

2.  Ruling on South China Sea Nears in a Case Beijing Has Tried to Ignore

New York Times   6 July, 2016

BEIJING — Five judges and legal scholars from around the world presided over a hearing last fall in an elegant, chandeliered room in The Hague. Arranged before them on one side of the chamber were lawyers for thePhilippines, armed with laptop computers and notepads.

On the other side were three empty chairs.

For more than three years, China has refused to participate in the proceedings of an international tribunal considering a challenge to its expansive claims in the South China Sea, arguing that the panel has no jurisdiction to rule on the dispute with the Philippines.

But with a decision scheduled to be announced next week, Beijing seems to be getting nervous. In a show of strength, it kicked off a week of naval exercises in the South China Sea on Tuesday near the disputed Paracel Islands, where the Chinese military has installed surface-to-air missiles.

And in recent months, it has mounted an arduous campaign outside the courtroom to rebut the Philippines and undermine the tribunal, enlisting countries from Russia to Togo to support its claim to waters that include vital trade routes and may hold oil and other natural resources.

The flurry of activity is a sign of how much is at stake in what was once an obscure legal case before an obscure arbitration panel. The outcome could alter the dynamics of the South China Sea conflict, shifting it from a race to establish physical dominance over the waters to a conspicuous test of Beijing’s respect for international law and multilateral institutions.

China has pulled ahead in the physical race, dredging sand to build one island after another over the objections of its neighbors and the United States, and equipping many of the islands with airstrips and radar. But if the tribunal rules in favor of the Philippines on key issues, it could put President Xi Jinping of China on the defensive — or, some worry, push him into a corner.

“This is a matter of wider significance than the South China Sea,” said Bilahari Kausikan, a Singaporean ambassador at large, noting that China has signed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is the basis of the Philippine complaint and the tribunal’s deliberations.

“The importance of the issue is whether international rules will be obeyed,” Mr. Kausikan said. China, he added, “cannot pick and choose which rules to follow or only comply when convenient.”

Sensing an opportunity, the Obama administration has begun a diplomatic push of its own, backing the tribunal and persuading allies to speak out for a “rules-based order at sea” and the use of international law to settle territorial disputes.

Neither Washington nor Beijing paid much attention when the Philippine foreign secretary, Albert del Rosario, began the case before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2013, not long after China wrested control of an atoll known as Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines.

The State Department’s senior diplomat for East Asia, Daniel R. Russel, has said he was unaware of the Philippine case at the time. The Chinese leadership quickly dismissed the tribunal without extensive consultation with the foreign policy establishment, several Chinese scholars said.

     

Beijing’s position has not changed. Because the sovereignty of scattered reefs, rocks and islands in the South China Sea is in dispute, it argues, the tribunal cannot rule on competing claims to the waters surrounding them. The Convention on the Law of the Sea says nothing about the sovereignty of land.

But the Philippines has been careful to frame its complaint in a way that sidesteps the question of who has sovereignty over the islands and reefs.

For example, it has asked the tribunal to declare that nine specific reefs and rocks, including some that China has built into artificial islands, are too small to be used to assert economic rights to the waters around them, regardless of who controls them.

The Convention on the Law of the Sea allows a nation to exercise sovereignty over waters up to 12 nautical miles from its coast, and it grants economic rights over waters on a nation’s continental shelf and to 200 nautical miles from its coast. But the treaty says reefs that are entirely submerged at high tide and artificial islands cannot be used to justify any maritime rights.

3.    The Guardian view on shootings in the US: time to tackle problems shamefully ignored

Deaths at police hands and the killing of officers in Dallas highlight longstanding racial tensions and a stubborn attachment to guns

The Guardian  8 July 2016 

Before Barack Obama went to bed in the early hours of Friday – he had just arrived in Poland for a Nato summit – he delivered a statement about two fatal shootings this week by the police that were caught on video, heightening racial tensions. When the president woke, he had to deliver another statement, about five policemen shot dead in Dallas, Texas. Such is the alarming and dangerous speed of events in America as it confronts some of the most racially charged incidents for decades.

In the years after the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, race in the US dropped down the news agenda, at home and abroad. But the changes won in legislation and court rulings were not matched by conditions on the ground. There were improvements for some in education and employment, but life was not visibly different for the bulk of the African-American and Latino populations. In too many major cities, segregation remained a reality. Even the capital, Washington DC, where politicians spoke grandly of freedom, equality and tolerance, remained deeply divided. It is America’s dirty little secret.

Race went back on to the news agenda in 2013 with George Zimmerman’s acquittal over the fatal shooting of the African-American teenager Trayvon Martin, and it has stayed there ever since. The police shooting of Michael Brown was followed by the deaths of other unarmed black Americans in encounters with the police. There was the appalling shooting of nine black parishioners in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. And this week the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile; and on Friday five policemen shot dead by sniper fire, with a suspect reportedly saying he was upset about recent shootings and wanted to kill white officers.

Such cases risk inflaming racial tensions, with no end in sight until America tackles the underlying causes. It is a terrifyingly huge challenge, dodged for too long. First, there is the segregation in the cities. Second, vast inequality: in Detroit, 10% of white people live in poverty but 33% of black people. And third, the country’s stubborn attachment to guns.

President Obama, in his statement about deaths at the hands of the police, cited statistics showing minorities are more likely to be pulled over, searched or shot by officers. It was incumbent on the country to root out deep-seated racial biases, he said. Last month’s Pew Centre survey on attitudes towards race in the US highlights the gulf in views. It found 88% of blacks said the country needed to continue making changes for blacks to have equal rights with whites, with 43% sceptical that such changes would ever occur. Only 53% of whites said the US still had work to do and only 11% expressed such scepticism.

A White House led by Hillary Clinton offers a better chance of at least attempting change than one led by Donald Trump. The question is whether, against a backdrop of austerity, she has the courage to devote the billions that would be needed to make a start in addressing inequality. On guns, she has been surprisingly outspoken in saying that as president she would seek reforms. There is scope for some restrictions short of the kind of sweeping changes that happened in the UK after the Dunblane school massacre. There could be tighter checks on gun ownership, a campaign to replace the unbending leadership of the National Rifle Association and a ban on powerful automatic weapons. Why did anyone need such guns, President Obama asked on Friday.

In his late-night statement, he referred to the Black Lives Matter campaign in words that seemed prescient next day: “When people say ‘black lives matter’, it doesn’t mean that blue lives don’t matter. But right now, the data shows that black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents.”

The imperative for America is to transform that “data”, tackle problems shamefully ignored after the civil rights movement and try finally to end a centuries-old racial divide.