In a speech in Riyadh ostensibly billed as seeking to unite the Muslim world against terrorism, U.S. President Donald Trump instead further inflamed the Shia-Sunni schism in the region by signaling America’s embrace of the Saudi anti-Iran vision for the Middle East. It was, of course, left unmentioned that the so-called Islamic State, which claimed credit for the truly evil atrocity in Manchester days later, derives part of its fanatic ideology from the fundamentalist Wahhabism strain of Islam that legitimates Saudi Arabia’s monarchy.
One can only imagine how the images of Trump partaking in a traditional sword dance with Saudi officials played to voters who had just gone to the polls in Iran and overwhelmingly returned the reformist leader Hassan Rouhani to the presidency. Rouhani’s re-election was due in no small part to the nuclear and sanctions relief deal he negotiated with the United States and other major powers. That deal was crucial to former U.S. President Barack Obama’s effort to not only curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but to establish a new balance in America’s Mideast policy between Sunni and Shia powers as well. It is a tragic mistake for the Trump administration to reverse that policy at the very moment it was producing results in Iran.
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who once headed the Foreign Relations Committee of Iran’s National Security Council, underscores this shift in Iran. “The Iranian electorate has spoken in its decision between two stark alternatives: strengthening civil society and engaging with the world, or turning inward with economic populism and combative foreign policy,” he writes. “In decisively voting for Rouhani, Iranians have endorsed diplomacy and moderation. And they have done so in direct contrast to U.S. President Donald Trump, who has called for increasing tensions with Iran and championed isolationist foreign policy.”
Abolhassan Bani-Sadr concurs that Iran’s election was a milestone. The first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran told The WorldPost this week that Rouhani’s landslide win marked a level of democratic culture in his country not seen since before the pro-American shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi: “In this election ― for the first time since the early days of the revolution itself and the rule of our democratic Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, back before the shah ― the core debates were about human rights, the rights of citizenship and democracy. I am a good barometer to measure this shift, after all, since I was forced out of office in those early revolutionary days by the ayatollahs for promoting these values. This gives us reason to believe that democratic culture is spreading and deepening in Iran.”
Despite Trump’s anti-Iran remarks in Riyadh, Bani-Sadr’s hope and expectation is that this budding advance of democratic culture in Iran will make it more difficult for Washington to demonize Tehran.
Reza Marashi of the National Iranian American Council expects that, given Rouhani’s victory, Iran will continue to try to engage the U.S.-Saudi alignment and damp down rivalry. But it is a two-way street, he says: “Rouhani’s track record demonstrates that sustained engagement can lower tensions and produce peaceful solutions to conflict. By electing him to a second term, Iran has once again extended its hand. It remains to be seen if the world will unclench its fist.”
Turning to other key events, in an article ahead of the G-7 summit in Sicily, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe highlights the populist backlash against free trade and globalization. “We are approaching the 10-year mark since the start of the global financial crisis,” he writes. “Many countries and regions have made tenacious efforts to ride out the crisis and ensure a growth path. Looking at things globally, however, much remains to be done on issues such as youth unemployment, wage levels and productivity. The key to overcoming these challenges,” he boldly states, “is free trade.” But trade, he goes on to stipulate, must not only be free, but fair. Above all, its benefits must be spread more inclusively both within societies and globally, the Japanese leader says, if the zero-sum alternative of protectionism is to be avoided.
Finally, Singapore’s scholar-statesman George Yeo explains this week why “civilizational states” in Asia, like China and to some extent Japan, are less prone to populism than the West. As he sees it, China’s largely homogenous Han people, not unlike Japan’s even more homogenous population, “bow before the ideal of a common ancestry and destiny” that ties them together more strongly than any factional or individual interests might divide them.
Other highlights in The WorldPost this week:
- Trump Reportedly Called Germans ‘Very Bad,’ Vowed To Stop German Car Sales In The U.S.
- Inside North Korea’s Secret Cyber Warfare Cell
- Climate Change Is Turning Antarctica Green
- Elon Musk Is ‘Cautiously Optimistic’ After Talking To Trump About Paris Climate Pact
- There’s A New Type Of Pollution Invading The Oceans
WHO WE ARE
EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Rosa O’Hara is the Social Editor of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at HuffPost, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost’s news coverage. Nick Robins-Early and Jesselyn Cook are World Reporters.
EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).
VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.
The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.
Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the “whole mind” way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.
ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as theAdvisory Council — as well as regular contributors — to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.
From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
MISSION STATEMENT
The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.
We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
from The Huffington Post | The Full Feed http://ift.tt/2s4m5Qu
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment