New Zealand government and opposition back US war in Syria

Tom Peters

New Zealand’s National Party government joined the chorus of US allies hailing President Donald Trump’s missile strike on Syria and beating the drum for increased US military intervention in the war-torn country.

Prime Minister Bill English told the media on April 7 the US decision to launch 59 cruise missiles against the Shayrat airfield was a “proportionate” response to Bashar al-Assad’s regime’s “chemical weapons” attack in Idlib. He said “we would consider” sending troops to Syria if a US request was made. The US actions increase the danger of a catastrophic war against not only Assad but his government’s allies, Iran and Russia.

Last week the Trump administration, joined by the Democrats and the corporate media, seized on video footage of children allegedly killed in the Idlib attack as the pretext for military action. The claims are unsubstantiated and dubious. The Assad regime, which is on the verge of defeating the US-backed “rebel” groups, has no motive for using chemical weapons.

Foreign Minister Murray McCully described the actions of the Assad regime as “outrageous” and “horrific,” adding: “It is critical that the international community emphatically demand an end to this violence, and that the Syrian government be held to account.”

The professions of horror and outrage, echoed throughout the media, are entirely hypocritical. Needless to say, there have been no similar statements about the victims of thousands of US and allied bombs in Iraq and Syria, or the slaughter of civilians by US and Iraqi troops in Mosul, which New Zealand’s government fully supports.

Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee revealed he was informed “an hour or two” in advance of the impending US missile attack. New Zealand is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance led by the US. The ruling elite has depended on its alliance with US imperialism, since the Second World War, to advance its own neo-colonial interests in the Pacific and throughout the world.

There are currently around 140 New Zealand soldiers stationed in Iraq, ostensibly in a non-combat capacity, training Iraqi forces. According to some reports—denied by the government—New Zealand Special Air Service (SAS) commandos have been involved in combat operations in Iraq.

New Zealand has also played an active role in the Afghanistan war, under both Labour and National Party-led governments. Prime Minister English has brushed aside recent revelations that an NZSAS raid on two defenceless Afghan villages in 2010 resulted in 21 civilian casualties, including the death of a three-year-old girl.

Opposition Labour Party leader Andrew Little echoed the government’s support for aggression against Syria, saying: “We cannot let the use of chemical weapons in violation of international law happen without consequence.” His only reservation was that any action “should comply with UN resolutions and we do not want a repeat of what happened in Iraq.”

In fact, the 1999–2008 Labour government supported the Bush administration’s war in Iraq by sending 60 New Zealand army engineers to assist the occupying forces.

Labour’s ally the Greens criticised the US airstrike for being “hasty” and “unilateral.” Its foreign affairs spokesman Kennedy Graham stated: “No wrong has ever been righted, no child has ever been protected and no conflict has ever been solved by launching missiles.” The same statement, however, made clear that the Greens would support a “multilateral” intervention approved by the United Nations. Graham attacked Russia and China for vetoing UN Security Council resolutions designed to pave the way for intervention in Syria.

There is widespread anti-war sentiment in the working class. A Facebook poll by TVNZ, asking whether New Zealand should join US action in Syria, found after the first four hours “3,429 had answered ‘no’ with just 336 saying ‘yes’.”

One comment on the poll referred to “the litany of lies” used by the US to start previous wars. The commenter, Frank, listed the Gulf of Tonkin attack used as a pretext for war in Vietnam, false reports of babies “thrown from incubators” in Kuwait in the lead-up to the first Gulf War in 1991, and fabricated claims of “weapons of mass destruction” used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

On the other hand, the middle class pseudo-left organisations, orbiting the trade union bureaucracy, academia and the opposition parties, are increasingly open in their support for imperialist war.

Syrian Solidarity New Zealand, a pro-intervention group heavily promoted by the media, supported Trump’s missile strike. Its spokesman Ali Akil told Radio NZ the attack was “one step in the right direction six years late. On its own, it’s not really going to do anything. If it is followed up then it might have an effect.”

Syrian Solidarity NZ is also promoted by the pseudo-left groups Fightback, Socialist Aotearoa and the International Socialist Organisation.

None of these groups has published a statement denouncing Trump’s missile strike and the New Zealand government’s support for it. All of them have instead lined up behind the US war for regime change and threats of war against Russia.

Prominent Fightback member Daphne Lawless wrote on Facebook on April 7 that Trump “going after Assad would be like Joe Stalin going after Hitler—a good thing, on balance, done by a disgusting monster.”

She followed this absurd analogy by declaring that opponents of US intervention were “in the red-brown camp alongside the fascists and Vlad Putin. It remains to see what any Trumpist intervention in Syria would look like—it may be sensible and relatively successful like Libya or a clusterf..k like Iraq. But I doubt the father of the twin toddlers who were chlorine-gassed in Idlib by their own government is opposed to rolling the dice.”

One could hardly give a more explicit endorsement of US imperialism and denunciation of its opponents. For years the pseudo-lefts have falsely promoted the anti-Assad “rebels,” which are dominated by Al Qaeda-linked forces and funded by the US and its allies, as leaders of a “revolution.”

A genuine anti-war movement must be built based on internationalism and socialism, to stop the drive toward a Third World War. This can be done only in opposition to the entire capitalist political establishment, including the pseudo-left cheerleaders for imperialism.

US drops largest non-nuclear weapon on Afghanistan: A crime against humanity

Bill Van Auken & David North

The US military’s dropping of the largest non-nuclear weapon in its arsenal on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border Thursday is a crime against humanity. Even as the US government and the mass media were engaged in a lying propaganda campaign denouncing Syria and Russia for the use of poison gas, the American military was positioning the monstrous weapon—the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB)—for use in Afghanistan.

While the Pentagon has released few details about the impact of the bombing, one can be certain that the total number of deaths resulting from the dropping of the MOAB is a massive multiple of the number killed in the alleged Syrian gas attack, assuming—and this is by no means certain—that the gas attack even took place.

Seventy-two years after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American imperialism has proven once again that it is the most ruthless and criminal force on the planet.

The use of the MOAB has implications that extend beyond Afghanistan. It demonstrates—and this is, in fact, the principal aim of the attack—that there are no restraints on what the US military is prepared to do in pursuit of the interests of American imperialism.

In the context of mounting military tensions from the Korean peninsula to Syria to eastern Europe, the detonation of the massive bomb over Afghanistan represents a warning to Russia, Iran, North Korea and any country that dares to challenge Washington’s interests that there is no limit to the level of violence that US imperialism will unleash against them.

The weapon, officially known as the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, designated by the Pentagon as MOAB, or “mother of all bombs,” detonates nearly 20,000 pounds of explosives in mid-air, igniting the atmosphere and creating a massive concussion that obliterates everything within a radius of 1,000 yards. Its shock waves are capable of killing people within a radius of up to 1.7 miles. The impact of the explosion is the equivalent of a nuclear weapon for those caught in the target zone.

Designed for use in the “shock and awe” campaign unleashed with the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, it was never utilized in combat over the course of 14 years. Even as the Pentagon carried out a war and occupation that claimed some one million Iraqi lives, the weapon was seen as too destructive to serve US strategic purposes.

Planning for the use of this horrific weapon in Afghanistan began under the Obama administration.

According to the Pentagon command, this genuine “weapon of mass destruction” was dropped for the first time on a remote district of Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar Province in order to obliterate alleged caves and tunnels used by elements of the Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

There is no immediate tactical, much less strategic, justification for the dropping of such a massive weapon on a small, poorly armed band of Islamist guerrillas—a Pakistan-based group that merely adopted the ISIS logo. Instead, the attack has all the earmarks of a calculated demonstration of American military might, the most terrifying one that could be staged short of a nuclear attack.

The bombing comes just one week after Washington carried out a naked act of military aggression against Syria, firing 59 cruise missiles into a government airbase and killing at least 15 Syrians, the majority of them civilians.

That attack was justified in the name of retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons attack blamed on the Syrian government. Damascus denied using any such weapon and, the endless lies of the Western media notwithstanding, all objective evidence points to a provocation staged by the CIA and the Al Qaeda-linked fighters that it supports in Syria.

Even as the US government and media churned out war propaganda over the fabricated “chemical weapons” attack in Syria, Washington was preparing to drop its largest non-nuclear weapon on Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has claimed that it “took every precaution to avoid civilian casualties with this strike.” Such promises, made repeatedly as the US military has killed millions across the Middle East, are utterly worthless. According to initial reports, there are several villages near the target area and, in all likelihood, civilian deaths and injuries will be massive.

At this point, no one knows what the real toll from this attack is, and, if left to the US media, no one will ever be told. The same editorialists for CIA house organs like the New York Times, and television news talking heads who have parroted the government’s denunciations of the Assad regime over the chemical weapons provocation in Syria, are completely indifferent to the loss of life caused by the massive US bomb dropped on Afghanistan.

Similarly, the media largely ignores the ongoing carnage inflicted by US bombs and missiles upon the people of Iraq and Syria. On Wednesday, a US airstrike in western Mosul killed 13 civilians while injuring another 17, most of them seriously. On the same day, a UN agency described the devastation wrought by the US siege of the Iraqi city, where hundreds, if not thousands, of men, women and children have died: “Homes are being destroyed. Schools and health centers are damaged and crucial public infrastructure including electricity and water stations are in ruins,” according to the report, with the destruction turning over 300,000 people into homeless refugees.

Meanwhile, in northern Syria, US warplanes carried out a “friendly fire” airstrike that killed 18 Kurdish fighters, while the Syrian government reported that a US bomb hit an Al Qaeda weapons depot, spreading chemical agents that may have killed hundreds of civilians. None of these incidents are given any significant coverage; much less do they provoke the moral outrage of those crying crocodile tears over the victims of the alleged chemical attack for which the Syrian government has been framed.

Who are these people to lecture anyone on “human rights,” much less to posture as opponents of “terrorism?” Once again, US imperialism has demonstrated to the world that it is bound by absolutely no constraints of international law, much less morality. Its violent and predatory actions on the world stage are a direct expression of the criminal and parasitic character of the American capitalist ruling class, personified in the loathsome figure of Donald Trump.

This latest atrocity comes fifteen and a half years after the US invaded Afghanistan, toppling the Taliban government, installing its own puppet regime and carrying out a bloody war and occupation ever since. Conservative estimates put the Afghan death toll since 2001 at some 200,000, with hundreds of thousands more wounded and millions turned into refugees. From the outset, the purpose of this intervention was to subjugate the Afghan people to semi-colonial American domination and to further US imperialism’s drive to assert its hegemony over the energy-rich region of Central Asia.

The timing of the bombing was significant. It came on the very eve of talks called for April 14 in Moscow on a peace settlement in Afghanistan. Russia has called the meeting together with China and Pakistan, with the participation of nine other countries, including India and Iran. The Taliban has indicated that it may join the talks. While invited, Washington failed to confirm whether it will attend, and US military commanders have made repeated baseless allegations of Russian support for the Taliban.

Whether an armed confrontation takes place between US and Russian warplanes in the skies over Syria, in a military strike against North Korea or in a provocation on Russia’s western borders, the next step from the weapon dropped on Afghanistan is the launching of nuclear missiles.

Workers and young people in the US and internationally must respond to these ominous events with utmost seriousness and a determination to stop US and global capitalism from engulfing the planet in a third, nuclear world war.

Protests must be organized across the United States and around the world against the latest US atrocities in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq as part of the struggle to build a mass antiwar movement based upon the working class and the program of socialist internationalism. At the very center of this struggle lies the need to build the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International—the only consistent political opponents of world imperialism—as the revolutionary leadership of the working class.

Spectrum of anti-hydrogen observed

Joe Mount 

The ALPHA-2 (Anti-Hydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) experiment has made the first observations comparing the light emitted from hydrogen atoms made of antimatter to the light emitted from hydrogen atoms made of ordinary matter. The results indicate that the underlying characteristics of matter and antimatter differ by at most 200 parts per trillion, a significant milestone for research into antimatter and particle physics in general.

ALPHA is one of many international scientific collaborations operating out of the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) laboratories near Geneva, Switzerland. It generates and traps atoms of anti-hydrogen, the antimatter counterpart of the simplest atom, hydrogen, to allow for precision comparisons between the two in order to more fully understand the underlying physics governing antimatter.

The ALPHA-2 apparatus at CERN. Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN

The exact nature of antimatter is one of the outstanding questions in modern physics. Antimatter was first hypothesized by Paul Dirac in 1928 and worked through more carefully by Dirac and Robert Oppenheimer in 1931. They predicted that certain physical processes would produce particles identical to the well-known electron or proton, except that they would have an opposite electric charge. While the idea was met with some scepticism in the physics community, the existence of the “anti-electron” (more commonly known as a positron) was experimentally verified in 1931 by Paul Anderson. Since then, antimatter equivalents have since been observed for all known fundamental particles.

What has puzzled scientists for nearly a century, however, is the imbalance between the amounts of normal matter and antimatter in the universe. The Standard Model, the most advanced understanding of fundamental physics to date, predicts that there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the moments after the Big Bang, and thus in the rest of the cosmos. This contradicts the entirety of human experience on Earth and every astronomical observation, which all show that everything seems to be made solely from one half of this primordial material, ordinary matter.

Moreover, when a particle of matter meets its antiparticle, they both annihilate, demonstrating Einstein’s equivalence between mass and energy as both particles transform into radiation. Given that, the Standard Model also predicts that no astronomical structures should have developed, with everything constantly changing from particles to light and vice versa, ad infinitum.

The current explanation is that while the physics underlying the Big Bang produced an equal proportion of matter and antimatter, a hypothesized and as-yet-unexplained phenomenon caused a slight imbalance in this process, so that after wholesale annihilation one particle per billion of ordinary matter survived. These remnant particles are what we now call matter, with antimatter existing only as an exotic particle observed in cosmic rays, nuclear fusion and other high-energy phenomenon.

ALPHA provides a new tool to examine the root cause of the matter-antimatter asymmetry by examining the wavelength of light emitted from a trapped anti-hydrogen atom as the atom’s electron transitions between energy levels. This wavelength (analogous to colour) has been used to learn about the internal structure of normal hydrogen for decades and has now been used by the researchers of the ALPHA collaboration to begin similar studies of anti-hydrogen.

As ALPHA spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst explained, “Using a laser to observe a transition in anti-hydrogen and comparing it to hydrogen to see if they obey the same laws of physics has always been a key goal of antimatter research.”

The ALPHA-2 magnetic trap that confines antihydrogen atoms. Credit: Niels Madsen

To produce anti-hydrogen, ALPHA takes 90,000 antiprotons produced by CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator and mixes those with 1.6 million positrons, yielding approximately 25,000 anti-hydrogen atoms per mixing. From this, an average of 14 anti-atoms are captured for study. While the number of anti-atoms captured per mixing may seem small, it is an order of magnitude greater than what has been achieved in previous studies. This enables such high precision in the measurements.

The main technical challenge facing ALPHA is keeping the anti-hydrogen from interacting with any hydrogen and being converted to energy, as described above. To avoid this, the atoms are stored in a vacuum and suspended in a strong magnetic field generated by powerful electromagnets, using techniques that have been refined since CERN first produced anti-hydrogen in 1995.

The anti-hydrogen atoms are then manipulated using precisely tuned laser beams inserted through the windows of the vacuum chamber. By observing how the anti-hydrogen reacts to the laser and the magnetic field, physicists are able to work out the internal properties of anti-hydrogen, which so far have not shown any fundamental difference from those of hydrogen.

While this does not shed any new light on the difference between matter and antimatter, it does provide a promising new way forward. Even now, the ALPHA collaboration is developing a number of upgrades and new techniques to increase the precision of their measurements in an attempt to find and measure any matter and antimatter asymmetries. The work occurs alongside other collaborations at CERN, including ASACUSA and BASE, all of which are working to penetrate this peculiar mystery.

Video: The ALPHA experiment observes light spectrum of antimatter for the first time

Australian prime minister visits India to boost strategic ties

Mike Head

Enhanced military and strategic collaboration, clearly directed against China, was the central agenda discussed when Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull made a four-day state visit to India this week.

While Turnbull and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid lip service to forging closer economic ties, Turnbull ended his trip by conceding that there was little prospect of finalising a long-delayed trade pact between the two countries. Instead, the focus was on establishing a formal strategic partnership and joint military exercises.

The outcomes were in line with the ongoing push by Washington, initiated under the Obama administration’s “pivot” to the Indo-Pacific to confront China, for US allies throughout the region to strengthen their military relations with each other, as well as with the Pentagon.

The visit proceeded in the shadows of the global uncertainty produced by the even more aggressive “America First” policy of the Trump administration. The illegal US missile attack on Syria and Trump’s threats to strike against North Korea have heightened the dangers of war across the Asia-Pacific region, with the US targeting both Russia and China.

The trip also followed India’s elevation to “frontline” status in US war plans against China by becoming a major service and repair hub for the US Seventh Fleet, under an agreement announced in February. The Seventh Fleet would play a crucial role in any US war against China, which would include blocking China’s key trade routes from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.

The basing agreement marks an intensification of India’s integration into US military and strategic arrangements, a drive pursued by successive US administrations since the beginning of the century. In return for lining up against China, the Indian ruling class is seeking to assert its geo-strategic sway over the sub-continent and the Indian Ocean.

Turnbull hailed India as an “enormously important” emerging “superpower” whose strategic interests dovetail with those of Australia, which he asserted was “already a significant Indo-Pacific naval power in its own right.” He declared that the two countries need “to engage our friends and partners” to “shape the entire region’s common strategic outlook.” Turnbull said “trilateral engagement” between Australia, India and Japan was a “good example” of this, as were “our respective bilateral engagements with the United States.”

In a remarkable speech at the National Defence College, the Indian military’s most prestigious officer training institution, Turnbull boasted: “We have one of the largest and most sophisticated naval forces in the region, with nearly 50 commissioned vessels and more than 14,000 personnel. And we have just embarked on Australia’s largest peacetime investment in national security.” His government is spending $195 billion on new weapons systems and other military hardware over the next five years.

Turnbull went further, defining the relationship between the two countries by invoking “more than a century” of “Indian and Australian soldiers, sailors and airmen” fighting alongside each other. This harks back to World Wars I and II, in which millions of Indian soldiers were sent to defend the interests of the British Empire, and at least 150,000 died.

In response, Modi raised India’s security ties with Australia to a level previously established only with Japan, another key US ally against China. The two prime ministers announced they would later this year convene their first “2+2 strategic dialogue”—a meeting of their defence and foreign ministers.

India and Australia will also hold their first bilateral army exercises in 2018, as well as the second edition of joint maritime exercises they launched in 2015. Special forces from the two countries will also hold their second exercise later this year, following the first conducted last October.

In a press statement Modi and Turnbull “underscored the importance of respecting the maritime legal order based on the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).” This was a reference to last year’s tribunal ruling that rejected China’s territorial claims over parts of the South China Sea, providing a potential pretext for US action to block China’s access to its islets in the strategic sea.

Australia’s previous Labor government backed closer strategic ties to India as part of the US “pivot,” while also seeking to open up India’s markets to exploitation by Australian-based companies. A particular signal was a decision to permit the export of uranium to India, which has a nuclear weapons stockpile but is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Turnbull and Modi expressed confidence that uranium sales would shortly commence, effectively enhancing India’s nuclear war capacity.

On the economic front, the pair held up the prospect of more Indian students enrolling in Australian universities and colleges. After coal, education is Australia’s most lucrative export to India, currently worth $2.3 billion a year, with more than 60,000 Indian students studying in Australia last year, although this is far less than the $5.7 billion made from Chinese students.

Despite the intensifying military ties, economic tensions were evident. When Turnbull’s predecessor Tony Abbott visited India in September 2014 and Modi toured Australia in November that year, the two governments claimed that a Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement could be struck by the end of 2015.

Turnbull, however, said an agreement “may not be possible.” He blamed India’s heavy protection of its domestic economy, particularly its agricultural sector, while Modi publicly pushed for greater access to Australia for Indian workers. Turnbull lamented that Australia’s two-way trade with India was only about $20 billion, compared to “$150 billion-plus” with China.

There were indications of the disarray produced by the Trump administration’s junking of the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which the Australian capitalist class had hoped would break down barriers to its penetration of Asia-Pacific markets. In an evident concession to India’s own economic aspirations, Turnbull said the “big agenda” in the region was now the Chinese-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which includes India.

In an effort to court Indian investors, Turnbull held a private meeting with Gautam Adani, a mining magnate whose company will soon decide whether to construct the world’s largest open-cut coalmine in central Queensland. Despite vehement support by Turnbull’s Liberal-National Coalition and Queensland’s state Labor government, the $21 billion project has been delayed by Aboriginal land claims and legal challenges triggered by its damaging impact on the environment, including the offshore Great Barrier Reef.

Turnbull claimed India had an “enormous need for more electrification” which the Adani mine would help meet. After decades of importing coal, however, India’s domestic output has surged, making it a net exporter. And although about 300 million Indians still lack access to electricity, India’s draft national electricity plan, released last December, said there would be no need to build more coal-fired power stations until at least 2027.

Turnbull reportedly gave Adani assurances that native title law changes would clear the way for the project, and left open the possibility of meeting Adani’s demand for a concessional $900 million government loan to finance a planned rail line to connect the mine with a port on the coast.

Billions of pounds more in welfare cuts are enforced in Britain

Dennis Moore

The start of the UK’s new financial year saw the introduction by the Conservative government of some of the most severe and punitive welfare benefit cuts seen for decades.

In its 2015 summer budget, previous Chancellor George Osborne declared the government’s intention to make savings of £12 billion from the welfare budget, with £7 billion of this for the period 2015-2016 and 2019-2020.

The cuts will hit every aspect of millions of people’s lives, including young people trying to claim housing benefit, families with children, the disabled and those dealing with bereavement, having to face the costs of paying for a funeral and the loss of income of a family member.

It is estimated that the new benefit changes will push 200,000 more children into poverty. The Child Poverty Action Group and Institute for Public Policy Research said that some families would be almost £3,000 a year worse off under these new rules.

The new rules affecting Child Tax Credits (CTC), a benefit paid to families with children, hits all those families who have more than two children, affecting children born after April 6. Under previous rules, all children in a household qualified for this benefit, as part of benefit entitlement.

A further cut to CTC will affect all families who claim after April 6, the family element of the benefit (£10.50 a week). This element was included as part of the calculation for CTC benefit, and will no longer be paid.

The latest figures show that in 2014-2015, 872,000 families with more than two children were claiming tax credits, families likely to lose out under the new changes.

These figures include 65 percent of families who were working, with 68 percent having no more than three children. It is estimated by researchers that once this policy is fully implemented, a further 100,000 adults and 200,000 children could face poverty.

The changes come at a time when there are record levels of poverty among working families. More than two-thirds of children living in poverty in the UK live in a family where at least one parent is working, according to official figures.

Since the financial crash of 2008, there are now more than four million children living in poverty, with figures showing that since 1996-1997, it has gone up from 43 percent, to the current 67 percent. The rise is largely down to the huge increase in the numbers of the working poor. As a result, the most common form of child poverty is a product of “in-work” poverty.

Access to Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), a benefit paid to all those claiming benefit as a sick person, is being restricted, with the Work Related Activity Group (WRAG) component being abolished. Prior to the changes, ESA was paid at two rates of payment, the Support Group, and the WRAG.

This will mean a cut in benefits of £29.05 a week for new claimants in the WRAG.

Until now, there had always been an underlying acceptance that those who were sick required more money than the standard Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) rate to live on, as sickness often incurred extra costs. Claimants receiving JSA, paid to all claimants who are claiming as unemployed, receive a pittance of £73.10p a week to live on.

Those who were sick and placed in the WRAG were paid at a higher rate than standard JSA.

These changes are a precursor to the ongoing denial of access to welfare benefits to millions of people. As of May 2016, just under 2.4 million people claimed ESA in the UK, including 429,000 in the Work Related Activity Group.

Significant changes have come into force affecting 18- to 21-year-olds claiming housing costs. The new rules will mean that those claiming Universal Credit—a new benefit that supposedly covers living and housing costs in one benefit—will no longer be entitled to the housing costs component.

There are several categories of people excluded, however. The Centrepoint charity—which works with young people—estimates the change will put at least 9,000 young people at risk of homelessness.

The bereavement benefit, introduced to relieve the financial pressure following the death of a loved one, is to be drastically curtailed. This benefit is the successor to the Widow’s Pension, first introduced in 1925 and predating the introduction of the post Second World War welfare state.

Bereavement benefit is paid to families with children where one parent died. The family is eligible to a one-off, £2,000 lump sum payment, and then a taxable benefit of £112 a week until the youngest child leaves full-time education.

Depending on the age of the children in the bereaved family, this could mean payments being paid for up to 20 years.

The new rules mean that though the lump sum payment rises to £3,500, the overall payments fall to £350 a month, a loss of over £30 a week in benefit. Although the new payments are tax-free, the period in which the new benefit will be paid is dramatically reduced to 18 months, leading to a cut of tens of thousands of pounds.

Speaking to the Guardian newspaper under the pseudonym of Alan, a 51-year-old man from Barnet in London, spoke out against the benefit cuts.

Alan lives with his wife and two children, and was diagnosed with terminal cancer in December 2016.

“Based on the ages of our children and on my probable death—I would imagine this year—I had calculated that we would be entitled to about £58,000.” He added, “The new calculation shocked me. My life is now deemed to be worth £6,300.” After years of paying into the system, he described the changes as “daylight robbery.”

The latest cuts are on top of a four-year freeze on benefits and tax credits, in place since April 2016. This lowers the benefit value of all welfare claimants, as rising inflation pushes up the cost of essential items such as food and fuel.

The trajectory of increased cuts to the welfare budget will lead to millions being driven into poverty and destitution, as the very existence of the welfare state as a safety net is dismantled and got rid of.

This is not just the outcome of the policies of the Tory-led governments in office since 2010. The cuts now being enforced are effectively joint Conservative/Labour policy.

The Labour Party introduced the Welfare Reform Bill in 2008, instigating regressive changes to sickness benefit with the introduction of ESA and the much-criticised work capability assessments. These have resulted in some of the most sick and disabled being found fit for work.

In 2015, following Labour’s defeat in the General Election, Labour aided the Tories as they introduced the raft of cuts to welfare benefits now being imposed.

In July of that year, 184 Labour MPs refused to vote against the second reading of the Conservatives’ Welfare Reform and Work Bill. This included measures reducing the household welfare cap from £26,000 to £23,000, cuts to child tax credits, cuts to Employment and Support Allowance, cuts to housing benefit for young people and abolishing legally-binding child poverty targets.

Just 48 Labour MPs (20 percent of the total) voted against the Bill.

BBC documentary exposes Bank of England’s role at centre of Libor-fixing scandal

Jean Shaoul 

BBC TV’s flagship Panorama programme broadcast tapes revealing how the Bank of England not only knew of, but repeatedly pressured commercial banks to reduce, the London Inter-bank Offered Rate (Libor) during the 2007-08 financial crisis.

Libor is the rate, set in London by the banks themselves, at which banks lend to each other. It then provides the benchmark for domestic mortgages, personal and commercial loans, municipal bonds and a wide range of financial derivatives worth $350 trillion.

In 2012, the US authorities fined leading banks including UBS, Barclays, RBS, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan, for systematically rigging Libor—both to increase their profits on a regular basis and to conceal the extent of their financial problems during the global financial crisis.

The banks’ actions amounted to grand larceny. They collectively defrauded hundreds of millions of people who pay interest on mortgages, credit cards, student loans and car loans, institutional investors such as pension funds and state and local governments, and countless millions of retirees who rely for income on fixed investments. Many homeowners were bankrupted and their homes repossessed as a result of mortgages inflated by the bankers.

The amounts involved are colossal. To cite one example: The city of Baltimore and other US cities filed a class action lawsuit against the banks claiming that the systematic rigging had cost them at least $6 billion, in addition to $4 billion they had paid to unwind interest rate swaps.

Yet under sweetheart deals, the banks were required to pay modest fines that totalled less than Baltimore and the other cities’ losses in exchange for being let off without serious repercussions. No senior officials were charged and the banks did not have to plead guilty to any crime. The authorities chose not to pursue criminal charges against the banks for fear of “endangering their stability.” Instead, they sought to portray the settlements as a stinging rebuke to the banks, uttering sanctimonious statements about not tolerating misconduct on Wall Street.

These fines followed an article and study in the Wall Street Journal some four years earlier, in 2008, that some banks were understating their borrowing costs reported for Libor during the credit crunch. It has since been revealed that it was common knowledge that Libor had been rigged since the early 1990s.

The scandal revealed not only the criminality of the global financial system centred on London, but the massive web of corruption and complicity involving governments and financial regulators the world over, all of whom denied any market rigging by the banks.

While it was known that Bank of England Governor Mervyn King and his deputy, Paul Tucker, knew about the Libor-rigging operation in 2007-08, it was presented as though they had looked the other way and done nothing. The BBC’s revelations are the first publicly available evidence showing that Britain’s central bank actively encouraged the banks to fix the rate to disguise the extent of the crisis engulfing the system, limit the cost of the government’s near £1 trillion subventions and boost bank profits.

In July 2012, Tucker told a parliamentary committee investigating the scandal that until just weeks before, “We were not aware of allegations of dishonesty” in setting the Libor rate.

This was a barefaced lie.

Just a few months later, the Times and the BBC revealed leaked court documents showing that Bank officials had been at least aware of, if not complicit in Libor manipulation since 2007.

According to the Panorama tapes, a senior Barclays manager, Mark Dearlove, told a Libor submitter, Peter Johnson, to lower his Libor rates. He said, “The bottom line is you’re going to absolutely hate this... but we’ve had some very serious pressure from the UK government and the Bank of England about pushing our Libors lower.”

When Johnson objected, saying that this would mean breaking the rules for setting Libor, Dearlove replied, “The fact of the matter is we’ve got the Bank of England, all sorts of people involved in the whole thing... I am as reluctant as you are... these guys have just turned around and said just do it.”

That phone call took place the same day that Tucker, at that time an executive director of the Bank of England, phoned Barclays boss Bob Diamond and discussed Barclays’ Libor rate.

Diamond was forced to resign after Barclays received a £290 million fine for massive Libor-rigging, mainly from the US rather than the UK authorities. In response to a question from the BBC, he said, “I never misled parliament and… I stand by everything I have said previously.”

Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England at the time, subsequently left the Bank after failing to get the top job in November 2012 and was rewarded with a knighthood for “his services to central banking.” He did not respond to the BBC.

Last year, Johnson, the Barclays Libor submitter, was jailed after pleading guilty to accepting requests from two traders to manipulate Libor, Jay Merchant and Alex Pabon. The two traders and another submitter, Jonathan Mathew, were also jailed, while two others were acquitted last week after a retrial.

In 2015, Tom Mayes, a former UBS trader, was sentenced to a 15-year jail term, reduced to 11 years on appeal, while six other who were accused of aiding him were acquitted. This brings to an end all the Libor-related cases brought by the Serious Fraud Office.

It has also emerged that Sir Jeremy Heywood, the head of the civil service, who held senior positions under the last Labour government before taking a job in investment banking, attended meetings where Libor-setting was discussed, alongside, it is thought, then Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling.

Panorama had nothing to say about the broader implications of the Bank of England’s active involvement in criminality that had gone on for years, robbing millions of public institutions and ordinary people all around the world of hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. It merely pointed out that the involvement of senior people from the Bank of England and Barclays demonstrated that the “little people” were carrying the can for the people at the very top of the ladder, and called into question the jail sentences received by the traders. Indeed, it quoted Diamond supporting jail terms for the Barclays traders on the grounds that they had broken the rules!

The BBC noted that these tapes had only emerged as a result of a private suit brought by a small businessman, Paul Holgate, against Barclays, which had provided him with a loan conditional on an insurance policy, a financial product tied to Libor, which bankrupted him and cost him his home. Barclays agreed to pay him compensation in return for secrecy on the terms of the deal.

Thus, the exposure of criminality at the very top of Britain’s banking and regulatory establishment was the result of a private claim against the bank, and not the actions of the Serious Fraud Office or Financial Conduct Authority. Again, the BBC had nothing to say about the “financial watchdogs”, whose real role is to support and protect the financial institutions.

The financial aristocracy can defraud, steal and plunder with impunity, knowing it will be protected by the thoroughly corrupt political system it controls and uses as its marketing agent around the world. The rampant criminality is not the result of “bad apples.” Illegality and corruption are intrinsic to the system and start from the very top.

Trump administration orders federal agencies to begin cutting jobs and programs

Zaida Green

The Trump administration issued a memorandum Tuesday ordering federal agencies to begin drafting plans to restructure and downsize. The memorandum, written by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), calls for elimination to be considered for “non-essential” programs and “ineffective” agencies.

The creation of the OMB memo was ordered by the Trump administration via executive order on March 13. The memo marks the end of the federal hiring freeze imposed by the Trump in the first days of his presidency, ordering agencies to begin ¨taking immediate actions” to cut jobs and reduce costs to comply with the federal budget for 2018.

The memo does not give estimates of the number of jobs that would be cut from federal agencies. However, the preliminary budget outlined by the Trump administration proposes the elimination of 19 government agencies, cuts billions of dollars from domestic social programs, and would lead to the destruction of as many as 200,000 jobs.

Public employee jobs are already near historic lows, accounting for 1.5 percent of all jobs in the US, compared to 3 to 4 percent in the 1960s.

Federal agencies have until June 30 to submit restructuring plans for fiscal years 2018–2022 in compliance with both the federal budget for 2018 and not-yet-released 2019 budget submission guidelines. The heads of the affected federal agencies would then meet with the federal Chief Financial Officers Council to begin finalizing the plans in July. The memo advises federal agencies to eliminate vacant posts immediately.

Trump’s Director of the OMB, Mick Mulvaney, during a press conference announcing the memo on Tuesday, callously shrugged off the destruction of the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of public employees. “[Downsizing] is the same thing that every one of you has been through in the last couple of years. You all are the last remaining people who actually work in journalism, right? So your entities have gone through this. It shouldn’t be anything new… It’s part of what working in a free economy entails.”

The memo openly advocates the privatization of entire agencies. “Consideration should be given… where there is another entity that may more appropriately fulfill part or all of the role,” and to services that could be “better performed” by private companies.

“We met this morning with CEOs from all across the nation,”Mulvaney explained at the press conference, “and said, look… we’re trying to rebuild the executive branch of government, give us some ideas. By the way, they did.”

The White House is soliciting “suggestions” from the “general public”—that is, industry interests—on both restructuring plans, and the not-yet-implemented Obama-era federal regulations that have been frozen by Trump’s initial executive orders. “If you’ve always had an idea why NASA should be in the Department of Agriculture, now is your time to speak up,” encouraged Mulvaney.

The memo calls for programs and agencies to be slashed, merged, or eliminated outright “[if] the long-term savings from shutting down… are greater than expected costs” to maintain them.

Mulvaney said that this ravaging of social programs in the service of inflating funding for the military was “how you drain the swamp,” referring to Trump’s demagogic pledge to reduce corruption.

If one takes the Trump budget as a guide, one would conclude that the largest sources of filth and grime in the federal government would include the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services and NASA; and that the task of fostering culture and welfare is largely carried out by the Department of Defense.

The Democrats, posturing as opponents to most of the Trump administration’s proposed cuts, have spearheaded the privatization or destruction of education, welfare and unemployment assistance, and other basic infrastructure over the last several decades. Mulvaney expects bipartisan support from both Republicans and Democrats for the new OMB guidelines.

“Wasting money—giving money to people who don’t deserve it, is something that Republicans and Democrats alike don’t care for and want to fix.”

Canada joins Washington in charging Russia with complicity in “war crimes”

Roger Jordan

Canada’s Liberal government, having given its “full support” to last week’s illegal US missile strikes on Syria, is now providing strong backing to the Trump administration’s moves to escalate military conflict in the Middle East and pursue confrontation with Russia—a course that could rapidly lead to a clash between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.

Since Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland have joined Trump officials in insisting that there can be no end to the war in Syria until President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is replaced by one more pliant to Western interests and have called for new measures targeting Russia unless it abandons its longstanding Syrian ally.

Speaking Monday, Trudeau called for the Assad regime to be “held to account” for the April 4 chemical weapons attack in the village of Khan Cheikhoun. Just hours before US cruise missiles struck the Syrian air base at Shayrat Syrain, Trudeau was insisting that the events in Khan Cheikhoun required international investigation. But since the US staged its illegal attack, Trudeau has joined Trump and other Western leaders in proclaiming Damascus guilty of a “war crime” without providing a shred of evidence, and all the while suppressing the fact that Syrian opposition groups, including the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Nusra Front, possess and have used chemical weapons.

In his Monday remarks, Trudeau also lashed out against Russia. “I think Russia needs to be aware, made aware of its responsibility in the bloody actions last week by the Assad regime,” said Canada’s prime minister. He then went on to echo calls from Britain’s Conservative government and the Trump administration for Russia to be punished for its support for Assad, saying that Canada was “open to working” with its “friends, allies, and partners’ allies to send clear messages through sanctions and other means to Russia.”

Foreign Minister Freeland has been no less belligerent. She urged the G7 foreign ministers who met in Lucca, Italy, this Monday and Tuesday to back US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in delivering Moscow an ultimatum, saying that “Russia needs to know that he arrives” in Moscow with the G7’s “support.”

“Russia needs to decide,” declared Freeland Tuesday, “whether it wants to double down on its support for this murderous regime that is committing war crimes or whether it wants to say: ‘We do not want to be associated with this’.”

Freeland has a well-deserved reputation as an anti-Russia hawk. Her appointment as Foreign Minister last January—even as the Trudeau government was otherwise going to great lengths to demonstrate its eagerness to work closely with the Trump administration—underscored the Liberals’ strong support for the push-back from the US military-intelligence apparatus and the Democratic Party to Trump’s plans to seek a temporary accommodation with Moscow, so as to focus on confrontation with China.

For months, the US media, the Democratic Party, and a section of the Republicans led by Senator John McCain have supported this push-back through a neo-McCarthyite campaign, revolving around utterly unsubstantiated claims that Trump is a sap of Russian President Vladimir Putin and that Russia intervened in the US election to torpedo Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The Canadian media and political establishment have been fully on board with this campaign, which has now subsided because its primary objective, pressing Trump to continue and intensify the US military-strategic offensive against Russia, appears to have succeeded.

Canada has been at the forefront of US-led provocations against Russia since the Western-orchestrated coup in Ukraine in February 2014, which brought a pro-Western, far-right government to power in Kiev. The Conservative government sent 200 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) troops to Ukraine to train the country’s army and national guard, and deployed fighter jets, ships and soldiers to eastern Europe and the Baltic states as part of NATO’s aggressive military encirclement of Russia.

This policy has been continued under Trudeau and his Liberals. Canadian troops will soon deploy to Latvia, where they will lead one of NATO’s four new “forward” battalions deployed on Russia’s borders in Poland and the Baltic states. Last month, Defence Minster Harjit Sajjan announced a two-year extension of the CAF’s Ukraine mission, which, according to Trudeau, is training Ukrainian forces to “liberate” eastern Ukraine from pro-Russian separatists.

The Canadian ruling elite is firmly opposed to any accommodation with Russia, which it views as a major economic and geopolitical rival. Canada’s energy sector has long hoped to challenge Russian dominance of the European oil and gas markets. The military-intelligence establishment, meanwhile, is stridently opposed to any strengthening of Moscow’s presence in the Arctic, where Ottawa and Moscow have competing territorial claims, or in the oil-rich Middle East.

In 2016, the Liberal government expanded Ottawa’s involvement in the Mideast war in Iraq. Canadian Special Forces, which initially were training Kurdish militia, are now active providing frontline advice and assistance to these forces as they join in the battle for Mosul, a brutal onslaught that has claimed thousands of civilian lives. The Liberals extended the Iraq mission at the end of March for a further three months and pledged to present a long-term plan for the presence of Canadian forces in Iraq—and now possibly Syria—by June.

The implications of Trudeau’s embrace of the Trump administration’s war drive were made even clearer by the fact that he issued his attack on supposed Russian complicity in war-crimes during a trip to France to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. In April 1917, more than 10,000 Canadian soldiers were killed or wounded in the process of capturing a strategically insignificant position from the Germans on the Western Front. Nonetheless, the battle has been mythologized by the nationalist right as the moment Canada emerged as an “independent nation.” Over the last two decades in particular, right-wing Conservatives like former Prime Minister Stephen Harper have used Vimy to rebrand Canada as a “warrior nation” committed to aggressive military interventions, putting paid to the myth—which they viewed as an encumbrance—that the CAF has a “peacekeeping” vocation.

In his remarks at a commemoration ceremony Sunday, Trudeau essentially adopted this right-wing, militarist narrative, declaring that those who fought at Vimy “made their country in its beginnings” and helped to shape Canada as a “democratic” nation committed to “peace.”

He also took up a theme addressed by Harper in a 2014 speech marking the centenary of the outbreak of World War One by noting that Canadian war “sacrifices”—including the slaughter of teenage soldiers—had ensured its emergence as an imperialist power. Trudeau stated that the fighting at Vimy and on the Western Front ensured that Canada had an independent seat at the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles—i.e., a place at the table where the imperialist victors divvied up the spoils of war.

Like last week’s US military strikes, the Liberal government’s provocative anti-Syrian and anti-Russian statements have been almost universally supported by the media and political establishment, although the Conservatives continue to criticize the Liberals for being “weak.”

The NDP, Canada’s social democrats, failed to condemn the unilateral and illegal US air strike on the al-Shayrat air base, claiming that it was unclear where this act of war would lead. Predictably, it has fully accepted the US claims that the chemical weapons attack was mounted by Assad, declaring in an April 7 statement that he “must be held accountable for these crimes.” Needless to say, the NDP statement made no mention of the ruinous, illegal wars that the US, with Canada’s support, has waged across the Middle East during the past quarter-century.

What would a US-European-Russian war look like?

Barry Grey

Tensions between the United States and the major European imperialist powers and Russia are at their highest point since the Cold War. The danger of a military conflict between the two largest nuclear powers has never been greater.

Since the April 6 missile strike, the Trump administration has issued new threats against Syria and new ultimatums to Russia to end its support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad. On Wednesday, President Trump defended the unprovoked strike and called Assad a “butcher.”

The G7 powers over the weekend lined up behind the US strike and its pretext—the totally unproven claim that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town. They endorsed Washington’s renewed drive to topple Assad, Moscow’s only Arab ally in the Middle East.

Russia has responded by stepping up its military support for Assad. Last Friday, it discontinued its coordination with the US aimed at avoiding encounters between US and Russian jets and announced that it would upgrade Syrian missile air defenses, which already include advanced S-400 and S-300 radar/missile batteries. It diverted a frigate with cruise missiles to the Eastern Mediterranean. And it issued a joint statement with the Iranian military warning that it would respond with force to any new act of aggression against Syria.

The recklessness of US policy was highlighted by Defense Secretary and retired general James Mattis, who told reporters on Tuesday that Syria would pay “a very, very stiff price” in the event of another chemical attack, which is undoubtedly already being prepared by the CIA and its Al Qaeda-linked proxies in Syria. Mattis offered assurances that the situation would not “spiral out of control,” based on the assumption that Russia would “act in their best interests,” i.e., back down.

What is most astonishing is the virtual absence of any discussion in the US and European media of the danger of a war between the US and Russia and the consequences of such a turn of events. What happens if a US jet is shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft installation or Russian jet? One can only imagine the frenzied demands for retaliation that will spew out of the press and politicians of both countries.

How many millions will die in the opening minutes of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the US? Neither the New York Times, nor the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Times of London, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Sydney Morning Herald is even raising these questions.

There have, however, been revealing commentaries in certain more specialized publications. The Conversation published an article on April 7 (“Why US air strike on Syria deeply threatens military clash with Russia”) making the point that the danger of a clash between the US and Russia is much greater than in 2013 because Russia has in the interim firmly established a military presence in Syria.

“So, if the new aim of the Trump administration is the removal of Assad from power,” the article states, “this could only happen through a major confrontation with Russia.”

Russia Beyond the Headlines published an article on April 7 outlining three possible scenarios following the US attack on Syria. The first, and presumably most likely, is “Armed conflict between Russia and the US.” Sooner or later, the article notes, the “logic of confrontation will force Russia to respond with force.” It quotes a Russian international security expert who warns that “we cannot fully exclude the use of nuclear weapons.”

An April 7 article on the Defense One web site explains that a US assault on Syria would for the first time in the “decades-old counter-terrorism fight” pit the United States against a “real, modern and well-armed military,” resulting in a war “of exponentially greater scale.”

Steven Starr, a senior scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility and associate with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, who is a noted expert on the life-destroying environmental consequences of “nuclear winter,” explains that once a nuclear exchange between Washington and Moscow gets underway, the death toll will be in the high tens of millions within the first hour, and that will be only the horrific beginning.

The two countries have between them 3,500 deployed and operational strategic nuclear weapons that they can detonate within an hour. They have another 4,600 nuclear weapons in reserve and ready for use. Given these vast numbers of mega-weapons, there is a strong chance that most large cities in both countries will be hit. Starr estimates that 30 percent of the US and Russian populations will be killed in the first hour. A few weeks later, radioactive fallout will kill another 50 percent or more.

Nuclear winter, a new Ice Age caused by the environmental impact of nuclear war, will “probably cause most people on the planet to die of starvation within a couple of years.”

Then there is the possibility of a high-altitude detonation triggering an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that destroys electronic circuits over an area of tens of thousands of square miles. “A single detonation over the US East Coast would destroy the grid and cause every nuclear power plant affected by EMP to melt down. Imagine 60 Fukushimas happening at the same time in the US.”

This is the end-of-world scenario being prepared behind the backs of the American and world population by the power- and profit-mad criminals in the Pentagon and the CIA, with the full support of both parties and the political and media establishment. People living in cities from New York to Boston to Philadelphia to Detroit, Chicago and all the way to Los Angeles and San Francisco will likely be obliterated within minutes of the beginning of such a war.

What preparations are being made? What is the survival plan? There are none. The silence of the media and politicians is not an oversight. They know that should this prospect become a subject of public discussion, the shock will produce uncontrollable social convulsions.

The astonishing recklessness of the ruling elite has an objective source. It is the global crisis of the capitalist system, which finds its sharpest expression in the long-term economic decline of the United States. Even during the Cold War there remained within the dominant sections of the ruling class a certain caution. Now, the relentlessly aggressive tone of the media and constant demonizing of Russian President Putin almost seem calculated to provoke a military clash. There is, in fact, a significant faction within the ruling elite and the state that is prepared to do just that.

This horrifying prospect cannot be averted through appeals to the powers-that-be. The entire history of the 20th century, with its catastrophic wars, shows that the only way to prevent war is through a mass movement of the working class. Workers and youth must confront the urgency of the situation by organizing mass protests directed toward the building of an international anti-war movement based on the working class to put an end to imperialism and capitalism.

Trump Vs Obama: US Policy Towards Adversarial States

Kimberley Anne Nazareth

During the Obama presidency, US policy towards Syria, Iran and North Korea rested on a ‘carrot and stick’ approach with greater emphasis on the carrots. The Trump administration, while following a similar approach, appears to be willing to use more sticks. The recent air strikes on Syria’s Al Shayrat airbase sanctioned by President Trump in response to the chemical attacks by the Assad regime, have demonstrated a clear shift in strategy since the Obama administration. There are also indications of the possibility of US military strikes against North Korea; for instance the deployment of the Carl Vonson carrier, and against Iran in future. The question is: to what extent, and in what forms, will the Trump administration bring with it continuity or change in its dealings with adversarial states, in this case, Syria, Iran and North Korea?

Syria
Obama seemed hesitant of military intervention in Syria. US strategy hinged on a couple of factors, which included the objective of avoiding another Libya, the unorganised anti-Assad rebels, and Russian involvement, to name a few. In spite of the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in 2013, which crossed Obama's ‘redline’, the then US administration refrained from using force. Obama’s policy towards Syria has been considered a failure as Assad is still in power, the civil war continues, and the peace process has become redundant.

On the other hand, the Trump administration seems more decisive in terms of policy. Trump’s rhetoric in comparison to the past has undergone a shift, from avoiding involvement to getting involved. US policy for the moment seems more in tune with action than inaction. This was evident with the recent US strike. The Trump administration responded decisively by ordering 59 Tomahawk missile strikes on the Syrian airfield. The administration has also signalled further action against Syria but has been unclear on the nature of potential action. Having said this, current US policy towards Syria has its own set of problems. Notwithstanding the obstacles, the larger question is, how far is Trump willing to go and what lengths is he willing to cross in his policy towards Syria?

Iran
Obama’s policy towards Iran hinged on ‘engagement’, but more accurately it separated the nuclear deal/Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) from the Iranian ballistic missile programme. That is, the Obama administration found it prudent to impose sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missiles programme while simultaneously lifting sanctions when it came to the JCPOA.

This policy has so far been continued by the current administration. Trump has carried forward the sanctions imposed by Obama on the ballistic missiles programme, which were authorised by UN Resolutions  2231.  In fact, the Trump administration has also imposed sanctions as per the lists drawn up by the previous administration. This strategy makes it clear that both the US and Iran indirectly agree that all the issues that fall outside the JCPOA are fair game. Thus, in considering US policy towards Iran, there seems to be greater continuity.

North Korea
Obama’s carrot and stick policy to rein in the North Korean nuclear as well as ballistic missile programmes was unsuccessful. His policy of ‘strategic patience’, which was successful with Iran was unsuccessful in the case of North Korea.

During the US election campaign, candidate Trump dabbled with the idea of a ‘face-to-face’ meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Recently, there have been back and forth provocations between the two, from the testing of ballistic missiles by North Korea, to the US deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea, which provoked Pyongyang’s ‘nuclear threat’, in turn propelling the US to put the military option on the table. More recently, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and its escorts were diverted to the Korean Peninsula. These appear to be stronger measures against North Korea, and are signs of decisive action by the US to assure its regional allies. Irrespective of campaign rhetoric, the Trump administration seems more willing to not only maintain the status quo but enforce it with greater vigour, thus strengthening the idea of ‘support any friend.’ Although the current US strategy seems to be more decisive than before, is it is a wise choice in terms of future implications?

Conclusion
A comparison of Obama's approach and the Trump administration's still evolving policy towards adversarial states reveals marked changes in US strategy towards Syria and North Korea. Trump seems willing to use more sticks in his strategy towards adversaries. However, in the case of Iran, there seems to be greater continuity in US policy, which could be to avoid getting in the way of the JCPOA.

The down side to this strategy could be in terms of a regional fallout. Given the mounting regional challenges, the question is whether Trump’s strong actions towards Syria and North Korea are a good idea for all the stakeholders involved. The Trump administration will have to tread ahead with caution and carefully evaluate the marked difference in the behaviour of all three countries and the interests of the other stakeholders involved.