Book Review: JASTA and a Third World War

October 24, 2017

How a US act could trigger a nuclear conflict. By Kamil Idris. UK Book Publishing, Hard Cover, 176 pp. with index

By John Berthelsen@www.asiasentinel.com

 In May of 2016, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act allowing victims of bombings or other terrorist acts to sue the governments of countries where the terrorists had originated. It was subsequently passed unanimously by the Senate. Both houses then overwhelmingly overrode a veto by then-President Barack Obama.

The act was aimed at Saudi Arabia, the home of 15 of the 19 hijackers recruited by Osama bin Laden who on September 11, 2001 brought down the World Trade Towers in New York and ushered in an era of vulnerability to terrorism that has continued to this day. Using the act, known universally as JASTA, 1500 injured survivors and 850 family members of 9/11 victims filed a class action lawsuit against Saudi Arabia, alleging the government had prior knowledge of the attack and that some of its officials and employees were al Qaeda operatives or sympathizers.

Obama suffered the first and only veto override of his presidency out of a very real fear that allowing such lawsuits against not just Saudi Arabia but other countries could trigger escalating confrontations that would lead to a nuclear conflagration. Prior to passage of the act, such suits were possible only if the US Department of State designated such a state as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Now, virtually any citizen can initiate such a suit.  And, as Obama feared, it could trigger retaliation in which the citizens of, say, Yemen or Afghanistan or Pakistan or any of several other countries could sue the United States government for the deaths of their relatives in the myriad drone strikes the US has delivered that have killed large numbers of citizens by accident.

The result could be a tit-for-tab worsening of relations with any number of countries as any of their citizens become plaintiffs to take on such demands for reparations. This whole situation is deeply troubling to Kamil Idris, the ex-director general of two United Nations agencies and now a member of several other organizations including the United Nations International Law Commission.

Idris is hardly alone. A long list of legal scholars have questioned the wisdom, even the sanity of the act. But Idris raises deeper concerns, saying that, given the fanatical motivation of terrorists who have anyway complete contempt for international law or boundaries, the act is unlikely to discourage any terrorism, or play a role in efforts by other countries to contain terrorism within their bothers.

“My chief concern, however,” he writes, “is that JASTA will seriously affect the carefully established and sometimes precarious goodwill and understanding between the US and other nations by attempting to undermine their legitimate sovereignty.”

 

President Obama was a chief executive whose caution in his dealings with other nations was praised by his supporters and decried by his opponents.  The President of the United States is now Donald J Trump, a loose cannon who, although Idris never says it, shows no qualms whatsoever – or takes any advice – in firing off condemnations of other countries.  JASTA in his hands is a potent and frightening weapon.

JASTA, Idris argues, is a violation of the sovereignty of foreign states, has no standing in international law, violates the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act passed in 1976, which holds that individuals do not have standing to sue in such cases and protects a foreign state from being liable for damages.

“JASTA is likely to lead to other countries adopting similar acts which would lead to the US itself facing lawsuits from all over the world,” Idris writes. “This is why President Obama himself was so critical of JASTA during the last few months of his administration.”

Obama’s fear of reciprocal claims, Idris says, is no joke. Indeed, According to several different sources, even as long ago as 2011, hundreds of civilians have died in drone strikes. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found at least 15 percent of the total killed by drone strikes were either known civilians or unknown.  At least 160 children have been killed in Pakistan. The New American Foundation estimated that the non-militant fatality rate was 20 percent between 2004 and 2011. “Collateral damage,” the euphemism for such killings, has taken the lives of hundreds in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan, according to former President Jimmy Carter.

So far, Saudi Arabia is the only country to come under a lawsuit inspired by JASTA. But, Idris writes, if it is fully implemented, “I am arguing that there could be a consequent retreat into a hardening form of nationalism as a protective measure.” Certainly in the United States, the retreat into nationalism has been marked under President Trump, leading US Sen. John McCain, in a dramatic speech on Oct. 16, to refer obliquely to the administration as retreating into “some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems (which) is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”

Idris’s reasons for raising questions over rising nuclear tensions, he said “is because I believe we are now close to mirroring conditions that eventually led up to the First World War. It is imperative that we learn and apply the lessons of history and we ignore the facts at our peril.”

In sum, Idris has written a disturbing and important book. It is an irritating one – he has a habit of citing dozens of cases only by title with no explanation of what the cases are about. The index is little more than a list of single names, with no indication of what the cites deal with. But within the pages of this book he lists a long litany of specific cases in countries that could trigger JASTA.

‘It is a sobering thought that any of these areas of conflict could quickly ignite and set off a chain reaction in the wider world. Once again it is aggressive nationalism that is the main contributing factor to the tensions and if JASTA becomes a reality, then the problem will only intensify.” A deeply respected jurist, Idris has delivered a clear-headed warning that a tense world – and the President in Washington – needs to heed.

 

Najib-Trump meeting under the spotlight

September 9, 2017

Malaysia’s embattled premier will seek to reset bilateral relations with America’s leader while avoiding any commitments that may irk his financial patrons in Beijing.

By Nile Bowie Singapore, September 9, 2017 5:10 PM (UTC+8)

 

http://www.atimes.com/article/najib-trump-meeting-spotlight/

Heading for The White House to pay homage to Emperor Donald J Trump, and hoping to do an Obama on the 45th POTUS

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, long embroiled in a multi-billion-dollar money laundering scandal now under investigation in at least six countries, hopes to have cause to rejoice after meeting with US President Donald Trump.

On September 12, Najib will be the second Southeast Asian leader to visit Trump’s White House, a highly anticipated meeting that could reset bilateral relations after a diplomatic downturn driven largely by the still unfolding 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal.

The US Department of Justice has filed dozens of civil lawsuits seeking to seize dozens of US-based properties and other assets tied to 1MDB, a state fund Najib created and until recently oversaw. The charges claim Malaysian officials and their associates conspired to fraudulently divert US$1.7 billion from 1MDB to purchase assets in America.

Media reports have widely speculated that Najib is the unnamed “Malaysian Official 1” mentioned in the charge sheet. US investigators believe more than US$3.5 billion was illicitly siphoned from the state fund. The DoJ recently asked to stay its civil proceedings to avoid prejudicing an ongoing US government criminal investigation into the charges.

Najib’s 1MDB troubles extend beyond the US. Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund gave 1MDB five days to make a US$600 million payment owed to its International Petroleum Investment Company. Malaysia had vowed to make the payment from proceeds collected in a 1MDB asset sale rationalization plan. Switzerland and Singapore have also opened probes into alleged financial irregularities involving the fund.

 

The Malaysian leader appears keen to leverage the Trump visit as a diplomatic opportunity to deflect attention from his 1MDB troubles, emphasizing to his critics that he has been invited at the highest level of the US government while the DoJ-led cases and Federal Bureau of Investigation probe are ongoing.

US-Malaysia relations had improved significantly under former US President Barack Obama, but notably cooled after the 1MDB probe was launched, opening the way for China to steal a march. Najib has leaned heavily on China, now Malaysia’s largest trade partner and foreign investor, for financial sustenance amid a sluggish domestic economy.

Chinese state enterprises have stepped in to acquire a power generation business and other distressed 1MDB assets to relieve pressure on the indebted fund, adding further impetus to the strategic importance of bilateral ties while pulling Najib’s beleaguered administration closer to Beijing.

Najib also secured US$34 billion in economic and investment agreements with Beijing last year, including the first major defense deal between the two countries involving the purchase of four Chinese-made naval vessels. The two sides held their first joint military drill, involving more than 1,000 Chinese troops, in September 2015.

Those drills, including joint search and rescue, hijacked vessel rescue, and disaster relief were held partly in the Strait of Malacca, a strategically crucial waterway where as much as 80% of China’s energy imports pass. Strategic analysts predict the US would bid to block China’s passage through the narrow waterway in any conflict.

Hillary Clinton returns to Wellesley College

June 2, 2017

America listen  to Hillary  Clinton. You now realise what a colossal mistake you made when you put Donald J. Trump into The White House. Your 45th POTUS is not making friends.  To us who are not citizens, he is a disaster. But we are wondering what you and Congress what going to do about his conduct of public affairs? –Din Merican

Trump was right about health care for most of his life

March 31, 2017

Trump was right about health care for most of his life–Go Back to Basics

by Dr. Fareed Zakaria

https://www.washingtonpost.com

Since becoming POTUS, DJT is under pressure

The recent Republican debacle on health care could prove to be an opportunity. It highlighted, yet again, the complexity of the U.S. system, which continues to be by far the most expensive and inefficient in the advanced world. But President Trump could actually use the legislative collapse to fix health care if he went back to basics and to his core convictions on the topic, which are surprisingly intelligent and consistent.

Markets would not work well in Healthcare

There is an understandable impulse on the right to assume that health care would work more efficiently if it were a free market, or a freer market. This is true for most goods and services. But in 1963, economist Kenneth Arrow, who later won a Nobel Prize, offered an explanation as to why markets would not work well in this area. He argued that there was a huge mismatch of power and information between the buyer and the seller. If a salesman tells you to buy a particular television, you can easily choose another or just walk away. If a doctor insists that you need a medication or a procedure, you are far less likely to reject the advice. And, Arrow pointed out, people think they don’t need health care until they get sick, and then they need lots of it.

Every advanced economy in the world has implicitly acknowledged his argument because they have all adopted some version of a state-directed system for health care. Consider the 16 countries that rank higher than the United States on the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. All except Singapore (which has a unique state-driven approach) have universal health-care systems that can be described as single-payer (Medicare for all), government-run (the British model) or Obamacare-plus (private insurance with a real mandate that everyone opt in). Hong Kong, often considered the most unregulated market in the world, has a British-style government-run system. Switzerland, one of the most business-friendly countries, had a private insurance system just like the United States’ but found that, to make it work, it had to introduce a mandate.

While producing a CNN documentary on health-care systems around the globe, I was particularly struck by the experience of Taiwan, another free-market haven. In 1995, 41 percent of its population was uninsured and the country had very poor health outcomes. The government decided to canvass the world for the best ideas before instituting a new framework. It chose Medicare for all, a single government payer, with multiple private providers. The results are astonishing. Taiwan has achieved some of the best outcomes in the world while paying only 7 percent of its gross domestic product on health care (compared with 18 percent in the United States). I asked William Hsiao, an economist who helped devise the country’s model, what lessons they took, if any, from the United States. “You can learn what not to do from the United States rather than learn what to do,” he replied.

Americans often assume that despite its costs, American health care provides better services than others. We often hear about the waiting time for care in other countries. But according to the Commonwealth Fund, among industrialized countries the United States is in the middle of the pack for wait times, behind even Britain . Moreover, one of the world’s leading experts, Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton, has found that Americans use less care than the average for developed countries when it comes to things such as seeing a doctor and spending time in the hospital. The problem with the free market is that there is little profit in prevention and lots in crisis care.

Trump has now taken up the call to repeal Obamacare. But until recently, health care was actually one of the rare issues on which he had spoken out, before his campaign, with remarkable consistency. In his 2000 book “The America We Deserve,” he wrote:

“I’m a conservative on most issues but a liberal on this one. We should not hear so many stories of families ruined by healthcare expenses. . . . We must have universal healthcare. . . . The Canadian plan . . . helps Canadians live longer and healthier than Americans. There are fewer medical lawsuits, less loss of labor to sickness, and lower costs to companies paying for the medical care of their employees. . . . We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing.”

Trump was right on this issue for much of his life. He has now caved to special interests and an ideology unmoored by facts. He could simply return to his convictions, reach out to Democrats and help the United States solve its health-care crisis.

Trump’s Engagement with Asia on America’s Terms

March28, 2017

Trump’s Engagement with Asia on America’s Terms–creating new opportunities for US businesses 

by Mieczysław P Boduszyński and Tom Le

http://www.eastasiaforum.org

Former US President Barack Obama sought to move the United States away from what he saw as costly, distracting and unwinnable entanglements in the Middle East. Instead, he pivoted his foreign policy efforts towards Asia where he believed that US military, political and economic engagement could reap much greater rewards for the country.

Obama championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as part of his signature ‘pivot to Asia’. Obama’s pivot served as a security reassurance for US allies in the region and fortified linkages among those allies, encouraging, for instance, reconciliation between Japan and South Korea. Most importantly, the pivot signalled to Asian allies that they would never be just an afterthought or a region only important when it was useful for US grand strategy. The future lay in Asia and the United States would be a part of that future.

Today, many of the pivot’s achievements are at risk under President Donald Trump’s brand of isolationism and a transactional ‘America First’ approach to foreign policy. The TPP is dead and alliances may be next. Trump has repeatedly stated that the United States is ‘losing’ and has suggested plans to re-evaluate Washington’s security guarantees in Asia. Despite more recent backpedalling, Trump’s apparent affection for Russia and his early willingness to barter Taiwan’s sovereignty for a good trade deal with China has signalled to longstanding US allies that the security reassurances of the Obama era are a thing of the past.

While the ‘liberal internationalist’ tenor of Obama’s pivot may have passed, a Trumpian worldview can and should still build on Obama’s momentum in Asia. If Trump can enhance, repair and deepen alliances without committing to a US-led regional order in the mould of the Obama administration, he could stay true to his worldview by creating new opportunities for US businesses while encouraging Asian allies to play a more active role in their security. The pivot need not be reversed and there are steps Trump should take to ensure it remains.

In lieu of the TPP, Trump could work to build new bilateral free trade agreements in East Asia, modelled on the existing US–South Korea and US–Australia Free Trade Agreements.  The region’s support for the TPP, and its potential replacement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), suggests that Asian countries are willing to negotiate new trade deals. But the Trump administration must be ready to make some concessions. Trump can also capitalise on the positive personal relationships he has with Asian leaders.

Obama had a very poor relationship with Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, who flung insults, threatened to kick out US troops and sought closer relations with China. While Obama was highly critical of Duterte’s bloody anti-drug campaign, Trump’s focus on US business interests presents an opportunity to repair the US–Philippines alliance. Duterte expressed a very positive view of Trump after a brief phone call. The Philippines have longstanding historical ties to the United States and it is a crucial alliance to preserve.

Trump’s budding relationship with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could also serve as his basis for diplomatic success. Although the Obama–Abe relationship improved over time, it was always marred by Obama’s criticisms of Abe’s revisionist tendencies. Yet thanks in part to Obama’s pivot, Japan passed new security laws increasing its ability to defend US forces during times of war directly related to Japan’s security.

Once South Korea chooses a new president, Trump could continue to support the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile defence system and build upon the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) between Japan and South Korea. Both are critical to counter the North Korean nuclear threat. But such actions are likely to draw the ire of China as the United States makes it clear that it is fully committed to its allies and the region.

Vietnam’s Blossoming Relations with Xi’s China

Along with maintaining existing alliances, Trump could work towards forging new relations in East and Southeast Asia. Vietnam has been receptive to a US role in the region as it tries to prevent further Chinese encroachment in the South China Sea. The US–Vietnam relationship is exceptionally pragmatic and there are ample opportunities to build on an already solid foundation. Besides a free trade deal, moving forward with military linkages such as the base-sharing agreement that was announced, and cooperating in areas such as higher education and scholarships should be on Trump’s agenda.

The pivot to Asia was by no means a resounding success. Unfinished business in Obama’s pivot gives Trump the chance to craft his unique brand of foreign policy in East Asia — a willingness to work and trade with almost anyone. This way, the United States can maintain its pre-eminence in East Asia without pursuing a comprehensive security community. Unlike highly politically charged issues such as Russia and immigration, policy in Asia need not be divisive in domestic US politics.

By leading with direction without directing, the United States can influence its East Asian allies to take more responsibility for maintaining regional stability. As the country has long advocated a rules-based order in East Asia regarding freedom of navigation and trade, the Trump administration must be present to help write those rules.

Mieczysław P Boduszyński and Tom Le are Assistant Professors of Politics at Pomona College, California.

From Obamacare to Ryancare to Don’t Care and maybe Trumpcare

March 15, 2017

Twenty-Four Million Reasons the G.O.P. Health-Care Bill Is No Good

 By John Cassidy

http://www.newyorker.com

Is Ryancare the alternative to Obamacare?

For days, the political world had been waiting nervously for the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) ’s assessment of the House Republicans’ Trump-endorsed proposal to replace Obamacare. On Monday afternoon, when the numbers-heavy report finally appeared, one figure it contained dominated all the others: twenty-four million.

This was the C.B.O.’s estimate of how many fewer people would have health insurance if the Republican legislation—which is called the American Health Care Act—passes. In 2018, the first year that many of the bill’s changes would go into effect, fourteen million “more people would be uninsured under the legislation than under current law,” the report said. The difference “would rise to 21 million in 2020 and then to 24 million in 2026.”

By anybody’s terms, twenty-four million is a lot of people. It is far larger than the fifteen million that two economists from the Brookings Institution had suggested last week that the C.B.O. might come up with. “To put the 24 million coverage loss in perspective, that reverses the entire coverage gain from the ACA,” one of the Brookings economists, Loren Adler, said Monday on Twitter.

As recently as January, Trump was promising that his Administration would provide “insurance for everybody.” Even for a President whose acquaintanceship with the truth is a casual one, explaining away the figures in the C.B.O. report could be tricky. It was not surprising, therefore, that the White House quickly dispatched Tom Price, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, to rubbish the C.B.O. analysis. “We disagree strenuously” with the coverage estimates in the report, Price told reporters at the White House. Price insisted that the G.O.P. plan would “cover more individuals at a lower cost.”

Price didn’t provide any numbers to back up this claim. He hasn’t got any. (In fact, on Monday night, Politico reported that the White House’s own internal analysis of the health-care bill projected that twenty-six million fewer people would have coverage over the next decade.) The only thing that the Administration and its allies on Capitol Hill have to fall back on is the vague promise to follow up the A.H.C.A. with a second piece of legislation that would give insurers more freedom to offer cheaper, lower-quality plans, which, in turn, might persuade more young and healthy people to sign up. But that’s a pie-in-the-sky promise. Changing the rules for insurers would require sixty votes in the Senate, which the Republicans don’t have.

The C.B.O. analysis didn’t account for the possibility of insurers being able to offer cheap and lousy plans. The main thing driving its conclusions wasn’t changes to the individual market but the House Republicans’ reckless and deliberate assault on Medicaid, the federal program that provides health care for the poverty-stricken and the working poor. In estimating that twenty-four million people stand to lose their insurance coverage, the C.B.O. said that fourteen million of this total would be accounted for by reductions in Medicaid rolls.

Any Hope for Trumpcare?

It is important to understand how this estimate was arrived at, and why it is reasonable. Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government lifted the income threshold for Medicaid eligibility to nearly a hundred and forty per cent of the poverty line. At the same time, Washington also promised states, which administer Medicaid, that it would pay ninety per cent of any costs entailed in this expansion. Thirty-one states, including sixteen that now have Republican governors, took the feds up on this offer. The G.O.P. bill would end the Medicaid expansion in 2020—sooner, possibly, if the White House accedes to demands from ultra-conservative groups. The legislation would also change the way the rest of the Medicaid system is financed, shifting to a “block grant” model in which Washington would pay a fixed amount to the states for each recipient.

As a result of these changes, the C.B.O. report said that “some states would discontinue their expansion of eligibility, some states that would have expanded eligibility in the future would choose not to do so, and per-enrollee pending in the program would be capped.” The end result would be a big drop in enrollment and also a big drop in spending—eight hundred and eighty billion dollars over ten years. “By 2026, Medicaid spending would be about 25 percent less than what CBO projects under current law,” the report says.

The drop in spending on Medicaid helps explain why the C.B.O. estimated that the G.O.P. reform would reduce the deficit by three hundred and thirty-seven billion dollars—a fact that some Republicans seized upon. But why, you might ask, would the deficit be reduced by just three hundred and thirty-seven billion dollars over ten years when spending on Medicaid would fall by eight hundred and eighty billion dollars? The answer is that the bill would take most of the money that is saved from reducing Medicaid and hand it out to rich people in the form of tax cuts. The legislation would abolish the 3.8-per-cent Medicare tax on investment income and the 0.9-per-cent surtax on ordinary income that the A.C.A. applied to people who make more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. According to the C.B.O., getting rid of these taxes and some annual fees that the A.C.A. imposed on insurers would reduce revenues by five hundred and ninety-two billion dollars over ten years.

If the Republicans really wanted to fulfill Trump’s promise of insuring everybody—or, at least, preventing a big fall in insurance rates—they could have taken the five hundred and ninety-two billion dollars and used them to maintain the Medicaid expansion. Or to enlarge the new tax credits they want to offer for the purchase of individual insurance, which, in some cases, would be much smaller than the subsidies offered under Obamacare.

And I mean much smaller. In a table at the end of its report, the C.B.O. provided some “illustrative examples” of how different types of people might fare under the new system. Take a single sixty-four-year-old with an annual income of twenty-six thousand five hundred dollars. Under Obamacare, after receiving a generous federal subsidy, this person would pay seventeen hundred dollars in annual premiums. Under Trumpcare, or Ryancare, or whatever we want to call it, this person would pay fourteen thousand six hundred dollars. That’s an increase of twelve thousand nine hundred dollars!

To be sure, the way the new system would be set up, not everybody would be a loser. For example, a single forty-year-old with an annual income of sixty-eight thousand two hundred dollars could end up saving more than four thousand dollars a year, according to the C.B.O.’s figures. But, in general, people would pay more, at least in the early years after the measure goes into effect.

In the first few years, as some healthy young people drop their insurance plans because they are no longer mandated to purchase them, premiums would go up fifteen or twenty per cent, the report says. After 2020, average premiums could start dropping, and by 2026 the C.B.O. projects they would be ten per cent lower than under the current law. But that would mainly be because insurers would be offering cheaper, crappier plans to young people, and older people would be dropping insurance because they could no longer afford it. It will be interesting to see how Trump tries to sell that prospect to his supporters, many of whom are older and living on modest incomes.

John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He also writes a column about politics, economics, and more for newyorker.com