Socialist or Capitalist: What is China’s Model, Exactly?

Richard Wolff

Near the end of his life Lenin gave a speech that referred to the USSR as a transitional society. He explained that socialists had taken state power and could thereby take the post-revolutionary economy—which he labeled “state capitalism”—further. The socialists’ state could achieve transition to a genuinely post-capitalist economy. He never spelled out exactly what that meant, but he clearly saw that transition as the revolution’s goal. In any event, conditions inside and outside the USSR effectively halted further transition. Stalin’s USSR came to define socialism as state power in socialists’ hands overseeing an economy that mixed private and state enterprises with market and state planning mechanisms of distribution. The state capitalism originally conceived as a transitional stage en route to a socialism different from and beyond state capitalism came instead to define socialism. The transition had become the end.*

The “different from and beyond” faded into a vague goal located in a distant future. It was a “communism” described by slogans such as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” It named a party with communism as its goal, but socialism as its present reality.

The hallmark of capitalism, what distinguished it from feudalism (lord/serf) and slavery (master/slave), was the employer/employee relationship structuring its enterprises. In Stalin’s USSR and since, the employer/employee relationship became, instead, a necessary, unquestioned presumption common to any and all “modern” economies, capitalist and socialist alike (rather like machinery or raw materials). That Stalinist view of the universality of the employer/employee relationship was also the view of all major strains of economic thought in the capitalist world outside the USSR.

China’s Communist Party largely replicated the USSR’s history in terms of constructing a state capitalism overseen by the party and the government it controls. One key difference from the USSR has been China’s ability to engage with the world market in ways and to degrees the USSR never could. China also allowed a far larger component of private enterprises, foreign and domestic, alongside state-owned and operated enterprises than the USSR did. Yet China today, like the USSR a century ago, faces the same transition problem: transition to a post-capitalist society has been stalled.

In China since at least the 1970s, the Communist Party and the government it controls have managed state-owned and supervised private enterprises. Both kinds of enterprise exhibited the same employer/employee structure. Chinese state capitalism is a hierarchy with the party and government at the top, state and private employers below them, and the mass of employees comprising the bottom. Western private capitalism has a slightly different hierarchy: private employers at the top, parties and government below them, and the mass of employees comprise the bottom.

China’s economy has grown or “developed” much faster over recent decades and now rivals the United States and EU economies. China was better prepared for and better contained the damages flowing from the 2000 dot-com crisis, the 2008-09 Great Recession, and the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. The party and government in China mobilized private and public resources to focus on prioritized social problems that also included reduced dependence on exports and massive infrastructural expansion.

China’s party and government have produced a huge, well-educated labor force working for private and state enterprises, foreign and domestic. Popular support for China’s existing economic system seems widespread notwithstanding considerable criticism and some opposition. Rising labor productivity yielded rising average real wages (also rising far faster than in the West). Across these years, no Chinese troops fought in any foreign wars. Housing, education, health care, and transportation received massive investments; their supplies often grew ahead of Chinese demand for them.

A key lesson of Chinese development is that economic objectives are better met faster if a dominant social agency prioritizes achieving them and can mobilize the maximum resources, private as well as public, to that end. China’s party and government were that agency.

In Western capitalism, no comparably empowered social agency possessed that power. Private and public sectors stayed separate. Ideology and politics generally kept the public subordinate to the private. The private employers’ differing particular interests and profit-driven goals discouraged many kinds of coordinated behavior among them as did their system’s structures of competition. Party and state apparatuses depended on corporate donations and corporate media supports. Thus, in Western capitalism, no social agency played the national resource-mobilizing role that the party and government played in China.

Some Western capitalist countries embraced social democracy (as in much of western Europe). There states provided major social supports (national health insurance, subsidized schools, transport, housing, etc.) that enabled some state-mobilized national resources for social priorities. The less capitalist countries embraced social democracy—the more committed to laissez-faire ideology and private-sector dominance—the less they could mobilize national resources. The United States and UK are prime examples of such countries; hence their poor preparations for and containments of the COVID-19 pandemic and the capitalist crash of 2020.

A second lesson China offers the world concerns the relationship between the basic structure its private and public enterprises share and the nature of its socialism. Almost all enterprises in China have an employer/employee internal structure; they differ in who the employers are. In state owned and operated enterprises, state officials occupy the employer position. In private enterprises, the employers are private citizens; they occupy no position within the state apparatus.

China’s economic system differs sharply from a Western capitalist system. First, it has a larger sector of state owned and operated enterprises than what Western capitalisms display. Second, it accords a dominant political and social role to the party and government. The latter together direct the economy’s development and coordinate how economy, politics and culture interact to achieve its goals.

China’s economic system is also clearly not a communism in the sense of having overcome the employer/employee structure or mode of production. To the extent that such overcoming once occurred during the era of communes early in the history of the People’s Republic of China, it mostly vanished. Employer/employee structures of enterprises are today’s Chinese norm. China is not post-capitalist. China is, as the USSR was, socialist in the sense of a state capitalism whose further transition to post-capitalism has been blocked.

There is an alternative way of drawing a second lesson from China’s remarkable history over the last half-century. We could infer that by socialism with Chinese characteristics, China means its system of a socially dominant party and state directing a mix of private and state-owned enterprises, both organized in the typically capitalist structure of employer and employee. Western European “socialisms” (Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, etc.) would thus also, like China, fall somewhere in the blocked transition from capitalism to post-capitalism. Despite Europe’s different politics and multiple-party system, most of its parties accept and reinforce a commitment to a kind of state capitalism.

The socialisms of the USSR, China, and western Europe were and are transitional. They all embody a process that got stopped or stalled en route to a post-capitalist society barely imagined. “Actually existing socialisms” were actually state capitalisms ruled, more or less, by persons and associations who wanted to go somewhere further, beyond, to a society much more different from capitalism. Hence the gap felt deeply by so many socialists and socialist organizations (parties, etc.) between what motivates their commitment (socialist ideals) and what they can and must do in their practical lives.

The Cold War waged against the USSR added to the pressures that blocked transition from going beyond state capitalism. A cold war now against China will do the same. Even without cold wars, internal pressures in the USSR and China likely sufficed then and suffice now to stall any transition beyond state capitalism. And so it is as well with western European-type socialisms. The only way the transition can be resumed would be if some force within the private and/or state capitalisms emerged that defined its project as precisely that resumption.

Global capitalism today exhibits historic difficulties: pandemic closures, global depressions (in 2008 and worse in 2020), extreme and deepening inequalities within nations, unsustainable government, corporate and household debts, and collapsing coordination among blocs (the United States, China, the EU, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, etc.). Long-deferred social problems (global warming, racism, labor migration, and gender inequality) are exploding as partial effects and partial further causes of those difficulties. Everywhere social movements are emerging or struggling to emerge in response to the difficulties and problems besieging modern societies.

All those movements share the problem of defining just what they will do to solve the problems motivating them. Many will yet again see government as the solution. Their program will give the state more power to oversee, regulate, control, and spend for the solution. Those people may or may not label their views as “socialism.” Either way, their proposals advocate for or sustain another blocked transition: from a private to a state capitalism or from a lesser to a greater degree of state capitalism.

Over the last century, many attracted to socialism have come to understand that blocked transitions did not and do not suffice to solve the problems created by modern capitalism. Those people can now become the new social force to unblock the socialist transition. From below, they can demand an end to the employer/employee structure of enterprises, public as well as private.

That end would help define the new society to which an unblocked socialist transition can and must now proceed. That society would be post-capitalist: different from and beyond all actually existing socialisms. It will have displaced the employer/employee structure of enterprises in favor of the democratic, worker cooperative structure.

In the late 18th century, the French and American Revolutions marked the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Leaders of those revolutions believed that they would bring into being a new society characterized by liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy. But that transition also stalled: it did achieve the change from lord/serf to employer/employee, but it did not achieve the further changes to that desired new society. Socialism mostly represented the continuation of the drive toward those further changes.

But the socialisms of the USSR, China and western Europe stalled too. Their advocates and leaders had believed that a transition from private to state capitalism would bring those further changes that capitalism never did. The lessons of Soviet and Chinese socialisms offer a profound critique of stalled socialism, their own and others’. The completion of the passage from capitalism and beyond socialism as a transitional stage requires a micro-level economic revolution. The dichotomous employer/employee relationship inside enterprises must give way to a democratically organized community of workers who collectively employ themselves as well as direct the enterprise. That economic foundation—what communism concretely means—offers us a better chance to realize the goals of liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy than capitalism or socialism ever could.

40 Acres and a Mule: the Plight of Black Farmers

Evaggelos Vallianatos

The most deleterious of the effects of the industrialization of farming in the United States is the drastic decline of the small white family farmers and the near disappearance of the black family farmers.

Rise and fall

In 1900, there were 746,717 black farmers in the United States. In the next ten years, by 1910, black farmers increased by 19.6 percent, becoming 893,377. The next decade, black farmers increased by 3.6 percent, reaching in 1920 their highest number ever: 925,710.

Then white racism triggered an unstoppable decline and fall. White society, its government, and large farmers hit the landed black farmers with a ton of bricks. Most black farmers abandoned farming.

The government waged an invisible war of cheating the former slaves of their promised forty acres and a mule. Large white farmers, agribusiness, and government agencies at the county, state, and federal level scared black farmers, giving them the wrong information, denying them loans, harassing them out of their land.

When black Americans started demanding civil rights in the 1950s, the wrath of the large white farmers boiled over. Black farmers ran away from the countryside to the northern cities as fast as they could. The legacy of slavery, the failure to distribute land to black Americans after the Civil War, and the racism of the federal land grant universities and extension service had had their terrible impact on black farmers as well.

Joel Schor

This story became alive in the writings and discussions of a colleague: Joel Schor. I met him in Washington, DC, where he was a historian with the US Department of Agriculture. We used to have lunches together and speak on the phone. We shared our concerns. I kept talking about corruption at the EPA, and he complained about racism at USDA.

He was courageous enough he reminded his supervisors of the destructive policies of USDA toward black farmers.

He gave me an unpublished paper he had written for USDA (“Black Farmers / Farms: The Search for Equity,” Spring 1995), in which he said that, by 1995, the vanishing black farmers were, at the most, one percent of the country’s farmers. Agriculture for blacks was becoming “a cultural memory.” It was no longer a way of life or a source of employment. The number of black farmers told their tragic history: They declined by 51.3 percent in the 1950s, 50.8 percent in the 1960s, and 57.3 percent in the 1970s. By 1997, the brave new rural world of America had cleansed itself of black farmers. Less than 18,000 black farmers were still farming in the year 2000, their numbers hitting the catastrophic level of 98 percent decline in the twentieth century.

Protesting racism at USDA

I remember walking with a few black farmers protesting the discriminatory and racist policies of USDA. The silent protest took place in Washington, DC on September 28, 2004. We were walking from the headquarters of USDA to Capitol Hill where the Constitutional Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee was preparing to have a hearing about the legal problems of the black farmers suing USDA.

What startled me was that there were so few people in the protest march, and those who marched, were overwhelmingly old and black. The Congressman who chaired the hearing, Steve Chabot, captured the tragedy of the black farmers, saying:

“When slavery was ended in the United States, our government made a promise – a restitution of sorts – to the former slaves that they would be given 40 acres and a mule…what is clear is that promise was intended to help freed slaves be independent economically and psychologically, as holders of private property rights. What also is clear is that the very government that made this promise, the “People’s Agency” [US Department of Agriculture] established in 1862 under President Abraham Lincoln, has sabotaged it by creating conditions that make sovereign and economically-viable farm ownership extremely difficult.”

Justice and support for black family farmers

It’s never too late to undo wrongs. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are potentially moving into the White House this November. They can finally fulfill the promise of the government to the black farmers: assist them with enough land and agroecological knowledge to become successful small family farmers. Those of the black farmers wishing to have 40 acres and a mule, give them 40 acres and a mule.

Such a policy should reorder USDA to cease telling family farmers to get big or get out, and, above all, abandon agribusiness and its sick animal farms and return to its original mission of helping small family farmers, no matter their skin color, raise community, democracy and wholesome organic food while protecting the natural world.

The Arithmetic of Avarice

Sam Pizzigati

How much do America’s big-time corporate CEOs make? Such a simple question, right? Not quite. Economist Larry Mishel has been working to get the answer right — for decades. And now Mishel, a former president and currently a distinguished fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, has just released his latest take on the corporate pay universe, a set of newly revised stats that track the past half-century of executive compensation.

Media coverage of Mishel’s dramatic new numbers, prepared with researcher Jori Kandra, has mostly focused on the top exec pay figures EPI is showing for last year.

“Average CEO pay increased 14% in 2019 to $21.3 million,” announced the CNBC headline over the network’s report coverage. The Fox Business lead picked the same numbers: “CEOs at the top 350 firms in the US were paid $21.3 million on average last year, a 14% increase over the year before, as top executives continue to see their compensation skyrocket.”

But the new 2019 CEO pay stats tell only part of the story Mishel and Kandra have to tell. Their most valuable contribution comes from the detailed historical context they provide: CEOs today aren’t just pulling down phenomenal sums. They’re pulling down phenomenally more than top execs used to pocket.

How phenomenally? Between 1978 and 2019, EPI calculates, the CEOs of America’s top 350 corporations realized — after taking inflation into account — an amazing 1,167 percent increase in their compensation. Worker pay after inflation averaged a miniscule 13.7 percent increase over the span of the same 41 years.

The new EPI calculations also reveal that the gap between executive pay decades ago and executive pay today is running even wider than previously thought. What explains this expanding gap? What’s made accurately calculating executive pay so devilishly difficult? A simple structural reality: Top execs today don’t get most of their pay from their paychecks.

Most of the rest of us, of course, do get most of our compensation from our paychecks. Add up the numbers on our paycheck stubs and you have the annual income we earn from our jobs.

Corporate chiefs, to be sure, do get paychecks. They all have fixed annual salaries. But these salaries account for just a small fraction of the compensation corporations bestow upon them. CEOs get the vast bulk of their pay — 79 percent last year — in the form of stock-based compensation. For top execs, this stock-based compensation has worked out wonderfully. For statisticians, this stock-based compensation has created nothing but endless headaches.

The problems come whenever analysts try to pin a dollar value on the stock-based compensation that top execs are receiving.

Some of this compensation comes as stock options. These options give executives the right to buy their company’s shares in the future at the current price, the price at the moment of the option award. If their firm’s share price increases, top execs can “exercise” their option to buy shares at the old low price and then sell them at the higher new one, snatching a tidy personal profit in the process.

So how should analysts value these stock options? The standard accounting practice has been to assign these options a “fair value” at the time companies hand them out. That fair value gets calculated via a formula that tries to forecast what options will eventually help executives clear.

But execs — in real corporate life — regularly clear far more than these “fair value” calculations. So Mishel and other analysts have rejected the traditional accounting route and have instead been including options in a CEO’s annual pay only when the options become “realized.”

Companies, meanwhile, seem to be moving away from awarding stock options. They’re increasingly awarding their execs outright shares of stock. These grants typically only take full effect — “vest” — several years after they initially get awarded.

Stock grants also raise valuation problems. Let’s say a CEO this year gets a grant of 100,000 shares currently worth $100 each. The shares will vest in three years. Before this year, the EPI approach to calculating annual CEO pay figures would have credited the current value of these shares — $10 million — to the exec’s 2020 compensation.

But what if these shares, when they vest three years from now, turn out to be worth $150 each? In that case, the exec will have gained another $5 million that goes unrecorded.

EPI’s new approach to calculating executive pay fixes this problem. The Institute is now only including the “realized” value of both stock options and stock grants in its calculations. And EPI’s new report applies this new methodology to CEO pay figures back over four decades.

This new EPI methodology has produced the stunning 1,167 percent increase in CEO pay noted above, the after-inflation explosion in big-time CEO pay since 1978. Under the previous EPI methodology, this increase would have been a still striking but smaller 1,033 percent.

The gap between the results the old and new methodologies generate has grown more pronounced as stock grants have made up a larger share of annual CEO pay. Under the previous EPI methodological approach, CEO pay at the nation’s top 350 companies rose 36 percent between 2009 and 2019. The new EPI methodology, with its focus on realized pay for both stock options and stock grants, shows that CEO pay increased at almost triple that rate, at 105 percent.

All this talk about methodology, unfortunately, can add to the confusion around executive pay. America’s top execs love this confusion. They can use it to distract attention from the windfalls they continue to receive, even during a pandemic that has the American economy reeling.

One example: This spring, top execs across the United States proudly announced they would be significantly cutting their salaries during the coronavirus crisis. How noble of them, exclaimed corporate PR departments!

Actually, not particularly noble at all. Salaries, remember, make up just a small piece of total executive compensation. Execs can cut their salaries and still end the year with higher total compensation. Disney executive chairman Bob Iger, for instance, has been refusing his salary paychecks since the end of March. For Iger, no big deal. His 2020 salary, the research firm CGLytics reports, equals just 3.3 percent of his total 2019 compensation.

Lawmakers could be doing plenty to end the confusion around executive compensation and discourage executive pay excess, and the new EPI corporate pay report helpfully lists a variety of promising approaches to getting executive pay under control, including tax hikes on companies where the ratio between CEO and worker pay has become clearly excessive.

How many major corporations have clearly excessive chief executive pay levels? Just about all of them. In 2019, the new EPI numbers show, big-time CEOs averaged 320 times more pay their average American workers. The ratio in 1978: 31.4 times.

Thomson Reuters Reporting on Malaria in Africa 2020

Application Deadline: 26th August 2020

About the Award: Since the turn of the century, the fight against malaria made tremendous progress and global malaria death rates dropped substantially. Developments in disease prevention and treatments have helped to ease the burden of the disease, but obstacles to reducing malaria incidence persist. After decades of improvement, malaria cases are either flat or increasing again, challenging current approaches and interventions. New tools and innovations are being developed and delivered to rise to this challenge.

In 2018, the WHO estimated there were 228 million cases of malaria worldwide and global deaths tallied at 405,000, with pregnant women and young children most vulnerable to the deadly disease. The WHO African Region represented 93% of cases and 94% of deaths that year. 
At a time when the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread rapidly across the world, now more than ever it is crucial that efforts to control malaria are not undermined. Adding to this crisis, widespread mis- and disinformation present a serious challenge to public access to accurate information about public health crises such as malaria.

Type: Training

Eligibility: We are looking for: 

• African journalists, based in sub-Saharan Africa, working as staff journalists or regular contributors to English-language media organisations in their respective countries; 
• Journalists working for a news organisation will need consent from their editor to take part. Freelancers should provide evidence that one or more media organisations will be willing to take their work.
• Journalists able to commit to the full length of the 3-week course and to spending significant time working on malaria stories in the weeks following the end of the course;
• Journalists with at least three years of professional experience;
• It is an advantage if you have health reporting experience, but if you have a strong motivation to learn about malaria and health and report on these issues then we will consider your application;
• Journalists working in any medium or multiple media are welcome to apply (print, online, radio or television);
• Journalists applying must have fluent English (reading, writing, speaking, listening);
• Journalists applying must have access to a minimum internet speed of 1 MB/second. (You can check the speed of your device by logging from it on www.speedtest.net).

Eligible Countries: African countries

To be Taken at (Country): Online

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: Participants of this course will:

• Receive training on ethical reporting and standards in health reporting, working with sources, how to search for trusted information and identify fake news, story pitching;
• Deepen their knowledge of malaria and public health more broadly, covering the current challenges that are hindering progress in the fight against malaria as well as the new and innovative approaches of reducing malaria incidence and their associated challenges and criticisms;
• Be exposed to expert speakers;
• Gain access to story ideas and editorial advice and will be invited to share your own expertise with other participants;
• Propose one or more malaria story ideas that you wish to work on – if you are selected, we will provide experienced journalists to help you pursue your malaria stories right up to publication/broadcast. Selected participants will receive modest funding to help them realise their malaria stories.

Duration of Award:  07 September to 25 September

How to Apply: APPLY

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Should We be More Worried About the Economy?

Dean Baker

We are really in an unprecedented period where the economy is trying to recover from the shutdowns of April and May while being faced with partial shutdowns due to the resurgence of the pandemic in large parts of the country. We are struggling to make sense of data, which often has a substantial lag. We are still getting data from July even as we are in the last weeks of August. Furthermore, when we have large monthly changes, the picture at the end of July could have been very different than the beginning of the month.

The Opportunity Insights program at Harvard University is trying to help navigate the storm with its Economic Tracker. This provides much more current data on a variety of measures by relying on various industry sources. The latest picture is not good.

Starting with the one I find most troubling, their source on job posting shows a huge falloff in August. Nationally, we are almost back to the lows reached in May.

There is the qualification that these are posting at small businesses, so perhaps the story would look different if we included and mid-sized and large businesses, but still, this picture is not encouraging. Their data on small businesses that are open and revenue are also not good.

The other very disturbing item is their data on consumer spending, which is derived from credit and debit card spending.

The data show a healthy bounce back in June, but then spending levels off in July. Then, spending begins to trail off at the end of the month and start of August. Note that this is just as unemployment insurance supplements are ending.

These are new data sources that I and most other economists are not familiar with. That means that there can be quirks that explain the plunge in job postings and falloff in spending that we do not know about. But on its face, these data suggest a recovery that is stalling, with many businesses closing and millions of workers not being able to go back to their jobs.

That should make the case for a new rescue package more urgent and also again remind us of the importance to the economy of bringing the pandemic under control.

The Spanish State’s “Nationalization” of Clinics Resembles Privatization

Chris Gilbert

We hear it throughout the English-language press, both mainstream and progressive: “The Covid-19 crisis led Spain to nationalize its private clinics!” It would be great if it were true. Moreover, since governments like to say that we are “at war” with the coronavirus, shouldn’t a war involve more than just confining people in their houses, while asking them to wear face masks and wash their hands? After all, wars usually involve taking control of the economy – the private sector included – to attain victory over enemies, presumably even viral ones.

On March 15 of this year, Spanish health minister Salvador Illa announced that private health facilities and their resources would be at the disposal of the autonomous regions’ governments. Note that there was no reference to the transfer of property. Rather these resources were to be (potentially) managed by regional governments for a finite period. The Spanish state has 17 autonomous regions, and the impact of Covid-19 would be quite varied among them, as would be the role of private institutions. As it turns out, private sector facilities played an important role in Madrid and Catalunya, the autonomous regions most affected by the pandemic.

It is important to recognize that the public health system throughout the Spanish state has been losing funding for the past two decades. Private sector medicine has been growing, and public health is increasingly outsourcing many procedures and tests. This is, of course, a covert form of privatization. As we will see, the alleged nationalization of the private clinics, because of the hefty remuneration they received, fits with this pattern of outsourcing or the transference of funds from public coffers into private hands.

For example, in Catalunya private institutions received 43,400 euros for every COVID patient that passed through their ICUs. This has reportedly left the ASPE, the private medical association, quite content. In Navarra, the reimbursement was close to 24,000 euros for each patient who spent 21 days in the ICU. In the Basque country, there was a dispute between private medicine and the government who allegedly wants to “underpay” them. There is little information about Madrid. Nevertheless, ASPE said earlier this summer that, in the whole Spanish state, its maximum claim will be 246 million euros, and it understandably looks to Catalunya as a model arrangement.

Since the above figure amounts to somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 euros per hospitalized COVID patient in the private sector, we can see that private participation looks like business as usual in a context where privatization and private-sector outsourcing is the norm. So why do people love to repeat that Spain “nationalized” its private clinics? Of course, for the left, it is one way of doing opposition. If you live in a country run by overtly reactionary politicians such as Boris Johnson or Donald Trump, then you might brandish the Spanish government’s exemplary approach as a way of criticizing your own country’s inadequate response.

There is a certain logic to this. Nevertheless, at a time when the pandemic has spurred shortsighted nationalist responses everywhere (and especially a blithe disregard for the responsibility of rich countries of the Global North to the poorer ones of the Global South) it is highly problematic for the left to fall into the same trap, by turning a blind eye to the real situation in the Spanish state. More revolutionary and more internationalist would be to recognize that the logic of privatization and the rush to profit-making off of societal problems pervade in the Spanish state too.

The pattern of how capitalist countries respond to the crisis – namely, by putting private profit over shared well-being and overemphasizing individual responsibility while avoiding controls on profit-making activities that are the key sources of contagion – operates here too. As with so many aspects of the present crisis, the real challenge in this case is not to look for some hidden explanation, but rather to see what is before our very eyes.

Climate change under gender lens

Shobha Shukla

Countries in the Asia Pacific region are in the forefront of bearing the onslaught of climate change. During the last three decades 45% of the world’s natural disasters have occurred in this region, which is vulnerable to floods, cyclones, earthquakes, droughts, storms and tsunamis.

While climate change affects everyone but impacts of climate change related events are not gender neutral. Women and girls are more vulnerable and disproportionately impacted due to pre-existing gender inequalities that are perpetuated by patriarchal beliefs. These inequalities are exacerbated during the times of disasters.

Biplabi Shrestha, Programme Director at the Asian-Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW), cites some of the gendered impacts of natural disasters as revealed by numerous studies done by ARROW: “In Bangladesh, even upon receiving early warning sirens women did not immediately seek refuge at cyclone shelters. Instead they stayed back to manage the household and to safeguard their assets and livestock. There is also the added burden within the households and girls drop out of school to help gather energy, food and water for the family. Early age marriage is used as a coping strategy in many poor communities in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Laos and Nepal, despite child marriage being legally banned in them. During any disaster, sexual and other forms of gender-based violence within family increases. Also, women and girls are more exposed to sexual violence in shelter camps. Gender ascribed rules and household food hierarchy systems existing in most communities lead to food insecurity and malnutrition of women and girls. It also prevents women and girls from accessing healthcare services, especially sexual and reproductive health services. As a result, maternal mortality rate goes up, and so do unwanted pregnancies, because of unmet need of contraception and lack of access to safe abortion.”

Natural disasters adversely impact maternal health and uptake of family planning services. However two studies conducted by Population Council – one in Cambodia and another in Pakistan – show some very interesting results to the contrary.

A study on the 2013 massive floods in Cambodia, done by Dr Ashish Bajracharya, Deputy Director (global country strategy), Population Council, suggests that floods did not affect maternal health and family planning services uptake and outcomes, perhaps because flooding in Cambodia is endemic. So resilience and adaptation is likely high through years of experience. Also maternal health service seeking behaviours might particularly be inelastic to shocks.

Another study done by Dr Zeba Sathar, Country Director, Population Council, Pakistan, on the impact of 2010 floods in 3 districts of Pakistan found that women’s involvement in both agricultural and non-agricultural work increased (as more men migrated in search of work) and they were forced to come out of complete ‘purdah’. Their health-seeking behaviour and family planning use also improved in comparison to the dismal baseline figures. This could possibly be linked with greater exposure and access to health services provided by responding organizations.

In fact unmet need for family planning and maternal mortality ratio are two important indicators of the general status of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) across cultures in the region and give the scale of challenge in each country.

The global targets, that are a part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), are to (i) achieve universal access to family planning services – that is unmet need for family planning should decline to zero by 2030, and (ii) reduce global maternal mortality rate to less than 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030. Achieving these targets will not only contribute to good health and wellbeing for women and girls but also lead to gender equality.

But perhaps it might be more realistic to achieve the goal of reducing unmet need of family planning to 10% instead of zero by 2030, feels Dr Adrian Hayes, Honorary Associate Professor, School of Demography at Australian National University. He shares some interesting data on these two indicators for some countries of the Asia Pacific region: “As per estimates of UN Population Division, the unmet need for family planning target of 10% has already been reached by some countries of the region including China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Iran, New Zealand, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. But others have still a long way to go. In South Asia, only Bangladesh is expected to reach the 10% threshold by 2030, while Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, India, and Maldives are likely to miss it and remain around 20%. Similarly, in South-East Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Myanmar appear likely to just miss the 10% target by 2030. In the Pacific Islands there are many countries with higher unmet need at 20% or more in 2020.”

Then again, at least 12 countries of the region currently have high maternal mortality rates of 120 or more, with Afghanistan topping the list at 638, followed by Myanmar (250), Bhutan (183), Bangladesh (173), Nepal (186), Laos (185), Indonesia (177), Cambodia (160), India (145), Papua New Guinea (145), Timor Leste (142), Pakistan (140) and Philippines (121).

However, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and New Zealand boast of having the lowest maternal mortality rates of 15 or less for the last 20 years. Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam China, Mongolia, Fiji and Samoa too have reached maternal mortality rates of less than 70.

So while progress has been fairly good on these two indicators in some countries of the region, programmes in few South-East Asian countries need a dose of revitalisation to realise them by 2030. However, many countries in South Asia and the Pacific need major reforms in policies and programmes to make family planning services accessible to all women and to also reduce maternal mortality.

Biplabi rues that though sexual and reproductive health and rights and gender find a place in international agreements, there are no accountability frameworks within them to ensure that countries respect, protect and fulfil their commitments to basic human rights, which get further violated in times of crisis. There is lack or absence of gender mainstreaming and sexual and reproductive health and rights in most countries’ climate-related policies and programmes. Women are made invisible in environment and climate-related discourses. This again perpetuates the vicious cycle of inequality for women and girls.

Noelene Nabulivou, co-founder of Diverse Voices and Action for Equality (DIVA) stresses upon the important linkages between sexual and reproductive health and rights and climate change, between disaster risk and response and elimination of violence against women and protection of LGBTQI human rights. She says that sexual and reproductive health and rights are central to any development response to pandemics (like COVID-19) and all natural calamities like floods and cyclones, because it is the body where the damage and human rights violations are felt most.

All said and done, there is a very clear linkage between climate change and sexual and reproductive health and rights but it is often neglected. For Adrian “the response to climate change should be rooted in sustainable ways. We cannot achieve the SDGs without resolving the looming crisis of climate change. Also as sexual and reproductive health and rights are an essential component of sustainable development, they are directly impacted by climate change.”

All these deliberations took place during the fifth online session of the 10th Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights (APCRSHR10 Virtual). Undoubtedly, improving sexual and reproductive health and rights in Asia and the Pacific region will contribute to not only realising the vision of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, but also help in resolving anthropogenic climate change.

China And The Decline Of US Power

Chandra Muzaffar

Constant attacks by some US elites on China will, according to some observers, diminish and disappear once the US presidential election is over in November 2020. This is unlikely to happen for at least two reasons. One, the issues that underscore the targeting of China are fundamental in nature and go beyond elections and personalities. Two, at the root of some of these issues are questions of power— of dominance and control— whose resolution will span decades if not centuries.

In examining the interface between the US and China, I shall begin with those areas of conflict where the latter has surpassed the former. This will be followed by reflections on manifestations of US power which are not as formidable as they are made out to be.  Conclusions will be drawn from these two categories on the emerging pattern of global power.

Within specific sub-fields of science and technology, China appears to have moved ahead of the US. Maritime surveillance and lunar geography would be two such sub-fields. Chinese advances in electronics and telecommunications have also been breathtaking. It is because China is at the forefront of cutting edge technology that there is so much anxiety in the US and the West today about China’s ascendancy. Those who have dominated the world for so long know that it is mastery over science and technology that endows a nation or civilization with power and strength.

Its mastery over science and technology is one of the reasons why in a few decades China has become the factory of the world manufacturing a whole range of affordable, quality goods for people everywhere. China’s success in penetrating markets has made the nation indispensable to the global economy.  Even in the entertainment industry, a video-sharing platform like Tiktok has become a sensation among the young prompting US authorities to impose curbs upon it .

More than its production of goods and services, it is China’s massive global infrastructure transformation through its Belt Road Initiative (BRI) that is destined to have a lasting impact upon humankind. An endeavor that spans 138 countries, the BRI connects Asia with Africa and Europe through land and maritime routes.  It not only seeks to build highways and ports but also attempts to initiate agrarian projects and accelerate industrial ventures which will raise incomes and increase productivity of many poor countries

Compared to the BRI there are other spheres where US power appears to be overwhelming. But if we probed each of these spheres carefully, we would discover that US power is only a veneer.  Its so-called military prowess is a case in point. Though the US has a huge arsenal and some 800 military bases girding the globe, we forget that it has not won a single major war since the end of the Second World War. Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan testify to this. In fact, its involvement in wars in the last 50 or 60 years have been unmitigated disasters.

Another pillar of US power is the US dollar— the world’s reserve currency. The dollar is no longer as dominant as it once was. In 2015 for instance, approximately 90 % of bilateral transactions between China and Russia were conducted in dollars. By 2019 “the figure had dropped to 51%”

US imposed sanctions against Russia since 2014 following Crimea’s restoration to Russia  contributed to this.  The US also imposed “tariffs on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Chinese goods “ which forced China to de-dollarise.”  Moscow and Beijing reinforced their financial relationship  in June 2019 through a deal “ to replace the dollar with national currencies for international settlements between them.” Russia has also been accumulating yuan reserves at the expense of the dollar.

The US also perpetuates its global dominance  through an extensive propaganda network which projects the US as the greatest nation on earth. It is a portrayal  which has lost its lustre in the last couple of decades.  The US led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 which was unjust as it was immoral tarnished the US’s image in the eyes of the world. Increasingly, it has come to be perceived as a rapacious nation which has no scruples about slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent people in pursuit of its hegemonic agenda.

More than its role in wars and all the sufferings they cause, the US elite’s  failure to govern effectively has shattered and battered its image   The coronavirus pandemic and the economic miseries generated by it, have revealed that compared to some countries in Asia the US elite is incapable of protecting the well-being of its own citizenry. With 176 thousand  fatalities and 5.68 million infections as of the 22ndt of August 2020,the elite stands condemned for betraying and sacrificing  the people. If good governance is the hallmark of a ‘developed nation’ then the US can no longer lay claim to that status.

The coronavirus pandemic with all its dire consequences has also exposed how deeply flawed notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘the rights of the individual’ are in the US When freedom of the individual relegates the collective good of society to the margins, it breeds  a self-centred obsession with freedom which in the ultimate analysis undermines freedom itself. If freedom and the celebration of the individual are the glorious attributes of societies like the US,  the pandemic has shown us all  how ugly their  misconception and misapplication can be.

In a nutshell, it is not just the rise of China which is responsible for the decline of the US. Its own distorted perspective on power , its perverted sense of individual freedom and most of all its lust for global hegemony have all contributed to its fall.  This is why as the American people approach yet another presidential election, they should for their own good reflect upon their own flaws and foibles as a nation. It is humility and honesty of this sort that is the need of the hour.

Corporate Social Media in India: Sell Hate, Enjoy Profit

Subhash Gatade

The bias that social media platforms such as Facebook display reflect their own world-view as much as it does the regimes they support.

A few gave the appearance of being truly psychopathic individuals. The mass of others were ragged and illiterate peasants easily roused to hatred of the Tutsi. Perhaps the most sinister people I met were the educated political elite, men and women of charm and sophistication who spoke flawless French and who could engage in long philosophical debates about the nature of war and democracy. But they shared one thing in common with the soldiers and the peasants: they were drowning in the blood of their fellow countrymen.

Fergal Kane, a journalist with the BBC, wrote these chilling lines in his book, Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey, winner of the Orwell prize in 1995. The organised and planned killing in Rwanda, one of the darkest episodes of the 20th century, resulted in the death of eight lakh Tutsi.

It is a strange coincidence that a year and a half before these unfortunate developments, the biggest democracy in the world went through its own cataclysmic moment, when Hindutva supremacist forces demolished a 500-year-old mosque after a long and bloody campaign. Even after the demolition large-scale communal riots broke out all over India, in which thousands died and whose scars are still difficult to heal.

There is at least one thing in common between what Rwanda went through and what India witnessed in 1992: both tragedies demonstrated how the media can prepare and provoke ordinary people into unleashing untold miseries on their neighbours.

Chroniclers of history have noted how the popular press, especially the radio channels, played a divisive, polarising role before the genocide in Rwanda. The infamous RTLM radio broadcasts called for weeding out “cockroaches” as they inflamed Hutu militants to target the Tutsi minority. “Aag musalsal zehan mein lagi hogi, yunhi koi aag me jala nahi hoga—there must have been a fire in the mind already, or else nobody would have been consumed by flames,” as a poet has said.

A large section of the print media, in the vernacular in particular, played a polarising, provocative role and pushed the majoritarian agenda with impunity in the late eighties and early nineties in India as well. The metamorphosis of a significant section of Hindi newspapers into Hindu newspapers is well known. This period was the first occasion of its kind in Independent India, when the news was weaponised on a mass scale. Perhaps the saving grace was that TV was largely under government control at the time, and there few private channels.

Times have changed, however. Today there is the internet, social media and it is clear that digital technology if used unethically can easily further dubious political agendas. It can be manipulated to promote autocracies and anti-people regimes. This is not just in India. For example, media analyst Alan MacLeod wrote about the use of new media technologies to “hijack democracy” during the 2017 elections in Kenya, whose result remains controversial. In Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, published in 2019 by Routledge, which MacLeod edited, the media is said to have manufactured consent for the presidential election through fake news, spreading disinformation and government propaganda on online media platforms.

Advances in technology and easy access to the internet has made it possible even for every individual to bring a city or a region to a halt by making any mischievous piece of news “go viral”. This can result in arson, mayhem and violence… The possibility of exploiting media and digital tools to do harm requires that big data corporations be more diligent, especially when it comes to filtering hate speech.

It is a different matter that they have failed miserably.

Recall the Christchurch attack in New Zealand last year, in which some 50 died and another 50 were wounded. The alleged perpetrator, a White supremacist who spewed hatred of Muslim immigrants in an online manifesto streamed his killing spree live on Facebook. Facebook could do nothing about this toxic video going live.

Facebook was roasted after this incident but it is their profit-centric model and eagerness to be in the good books of establishments that has attracted more ire recently. They are accused of having no qualms in removing or blocking accounts of dissidents or deleting posts critical of the establishment, but turning a blind eye to right-wing posts, even if they are violent in nature and “controversial” enough to demand penal action.

Facebook’s latest India story corroborates the criticism it has received all over the world. Now accused of shielding right-wing leaders and their ideas in India, thanks to a recent expose by The Wall Street Journal, has rekindled the debate about weaponising news. New media might have arrived with a bang, but it is increasingly evident that they are conduits for vast amounts of fake news, violent speech and of spreading hate. And there are far too many instances of mega-corporations in the social media space prioritising their profit over democratic principles and free speech. Of course, the bias they are accused of also reflects their own world-view.

For instance, when the Black Lives Matter movement was at its peak, Facebook was widely condemned for carrying United States President Donald Trump’s statement: “When Looting Starts, Shooting Starts”, which was a provocation to violence. Twitter had, at the time, emphasised that his statement glorifies violence. Facebook’s compromise on race relations prompted more than 1,000 companies to boycott it in July.

Facebook’s world-view can also be gleaned from its position during the last German elections. A media company had aligned with Facebook to get extensive details of German voters and micro-target advertisements to specific voters to try and influence them to vote a certain way. Facebook had provided its own office in Berlin to this company. This project, which was run under guidance and advice from the United States, had supported Alternative für Deutschland, a neo-Fascist party. Details of this campaign are also to be found in the same book, edited by Alan MacLeod.

Facebook has around 300 million Indian subscribers, but finds itself on the defensive for violating its own hate speech rules and for promoting and supporting majoritarianism for pecuniary gain. Yet, broadly, the Wall Street Journal story has resulted in three important reactions: One, there has definitely been a churning within the Facebook organisation. Some employees of Facebook have questioned the company’s actions in India. Additionally, while Facebook India’s senior executive Ankhi Das had disallowed action against right-wing posts, employees in the India office had urged her to stick to company rules and take action. Second, the Congress party has written to Mark Zukerberg, the owner of Facebook, asking him to take action against those who violated company policy in India. And three, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), with the Congress, has demanded a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe. The Delhi government, it is reported, also plans to summon the Facebook India chief to seek explanation.

It is possible that Facebook will be forced to rein in some right-wing elements in future, but would that be the end of this story? Definitely not. The right-wing elements are politically dominant at the moment and have acquired a wide social base, through which they are trying to acquire legitimacy for their world-view. It would seek other avenues to inject poison and toxicity in the social life from, even if Facebook closes the doors, even a little. It is doubtful that the right-wing propaganda can be contained by reining in one or two social media platforms—even if Facebook is extremely influential in India and has a wide user-base.

What this means is that nothing can beat firm and constant public awareness that helps citizens identify the real from the spurious. A degree of inertia seems to have overwhelmed a large section of even the politically literate fraternity in the country. The seductive charms of digital technology are hurting their person-to-person interactions, which are essential at the moment to build a counter-narrative to the right-wing propaganda. Was not it the Independence movement that taught us to take the road less traveled, even if we are alone on it.

Was Qassem Soleimani Killed to Avenge Saudi Oil Installations Attack?

Nauman Sadiq

A joint American-Israeli program, involving a series of short-of-war clandestine strikes, aimed at taking out the most prominent generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and targeting Iran’s power stations, industrial infrastructure, and missile and nuclear facilities has been going on since early this year when commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani was assassinated in a US airstrike at Baghdad airport on January 3.

As the US presidential race is heating up, the pace and sophistication of subversive attacks in Iran is picking up simultaneously. Since June, “mysterious explosions” were reported at a missile and explosives storage facility at Parchin military base on June 26, at power stations in the cities of Shiraz and Ahvaz, a “mysterious fire” at Bushehr port on July 15 destroying seven ships, and a massive explosion at the Natanz nuclear site on July 2 that has reportedly set back Iran’s nuclear program by at least two years.

Besides whipping up nationalist sentiment among America’s conservative electorate on the eve of US presidential election slated for November, another purpose of the subversive attacks appears to be to avenge a string of audacious attacks mounted by Iran-backed forces against the US strategic interests in the Persian Gulf that brought the US and Iran to the brink of full-scale war in September last year.

In addition to planting limpet mines on oil tankers off the coast of the UAE in May last year and the subsequent downing of the US surveillance drone in the Persian Gulf by Iran, the brazen attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia on September 14 was the third major attack in the Persian Gulf against the assets of Washington and its regional clients. That the UAE had forewarning about imminent attacks is proved by the fact that weeks before the attacks, it recalled forces from Yemen battling the Houthi rebels and redeployed them to man the UAE’s territorial borders.

Nevertheless, a puerile prank like planting limpet mines on oil tankers can be overlooked but major provocations like downing a $200-million Global Hawk surveillance aircraft and mounting a drone and missile attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility that crippled its oil-processing functions for weeks could have had serious repercussions.

The September 14 attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility in eastern Saudi Arabia was an apocalypse for the global oil industry because it processes five million barrels crude oil per day, more than half of Saudi Arabia’s total oil production. The subversive attack sent jitters across the global markets and the oil price surged 15%, the biggest spike witnessed in three decades since the First Gulf War when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, though the oil price was eased within days after industrialized nations released their strategic oil reserves.

In order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil in the energy-starved industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves of 265 billion barrels and its daily oil production is 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq each has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day each; while UAE and Kuwait each has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3 million barrels per day each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788 billion barrels, more than half of world’s 1477 billion barrels proven oil reserves.

Not surprisingly, more than 35,000 American troops have currently been deployed in the military bases and aircraft carriers in the oil-rich Persian Gulf in accordance with the Carter Doctrine of 1980, which states: “Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

It bears mentioning that alongside deploying several thousand American troops, additional aircraft squadrons and Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the Abqaiq attack, several interventionist hawks in Washington invoked the Carter Doctrine as a ground for mounting retaliatory strikes against Iran.

The last year’s acts of subversion in the Persian Gulf should be viewed in the broader backdrop of the New Cold War that has begun after the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 when Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula and Washington imposed sanctions against Russia.

The Kremlin’s immediate response to the escalation by Washington was that it jumped into the fray in Syria in September 2015, after a clandestine visit to Moscow by General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force. When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional clients were on the verge of drawing a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Assad government.

With the help of the Russian air power, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by the Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional clients.

Notwithstanding, following the brazen attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia on September 14, orchestrated protests erupted in Iran-allied countries Lebanon and Iraq from October to December last year.

Lebanese American journalist Rania Khalek has documented for The Gray Zone the US-backed political forces spearheaded the “color revolution” in Lebanon, where Iran-backed resistance group Hezbollah was part of the coalition government. Following the massive explosion at the Beirut Port on August 4 killing 180 people and wounding nearly 6,000, the shaky, six-month-long coalition government of Hassan al-Diab resigned on August 10.

Similarly, Iraq has been through the US occupation from 2003 to 2011 and is known to have US sympathizers in the Kurdish-held north and the Shia-majority south of the country, where the Western oil majors operate and dispense largesse among local chieftains of myriad clans and tribes.

Using the patronage network, the US successfully ousted former Prime Minister of Iraq Haider al-Abadi and appointed American stooge Mustafa al-Kadhimi in his stead in May. The purpose of destabilizing governments in Iran-allied countries obviously was to deter Iran from mounting subversive attacks in strategically important Persian Gulf.

Unlike Lebanon and Iraq, though, Iran itself is immune to foreign-backed political demonstrations as it does not have any imperialist collaborators on the ground, besides a fringe militant group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) funded by the US, France and Israel, though it did witness large-scale protests in November last year.

The proximate cause of the November 15 protests in Iran was steep rise in petrol prices by the Rouhani government, dubbed as “sabotage” by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. The worst-hit region was Khuzestan province in southwest Iran which is home to large Arab minority known to have grievances against Tehran and susceptible to infiltration by imperialist stooges.

Finally, a word about the venerated commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani who was assassinated in a US airstrike at Baghdad airport on January 3. Soleimani was the trusted lieutenant of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and the main liaison with Russia. Not only did he instigate Russia to strike at Washington’s Achilles heel in Syria’s proxy war but he was also the main architect of the audacious September 14 attacks at Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

Alongside deploying several thousand American troops and additional aircraft squadrons and Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the Abqaiq attack, Washington also took out its most fearsome nemesis General Soleimani in January, and now it can freely stage subversive attacks in Iran and allied countries without the fear of reprisals.

It’s pertinent to note that Trump initially rejected the Pentagon’s option to assassinate General Soleimani on December 28 due to the fear of full-scale confrontation with Iran, and authorized airstrikes on an Iran-backed militia group in Iraq instead. But after the rocket attack at the US embassy in Baghdad by Iran-backed forces, Trump succumbed to pressure from the American deep state, led by the powerful national security bureaucracies of Pentagon and the State Department, which had a score to settle with General Soleimani for giving the global power a bloody nose in Syria’s proxy war.