Bull in a China Shop: Trump's Frightening Take on Asia

Taylor Yu

Videos like this are why the internet is a great, great thing. For those of you too lazy to click the link, it’s a three-minute clip of Donald Trump - the billionaire/reality TV star/’politician’ whose unbearable personality and equally unbearable hairdo have somehow propelled him into the forefront of the US elections race – just saying the word ‘China’. Over and over again.

I’ve no shame in saying that I found this way funnier than I should’ve, but it did get me thinking: what does this man actually want from China? Beyond all the jokes and the weirdly hilarious video-compilations that currently constitute the only media coverage of Trump that I actually care about, was there much substance or practicality behind Trump’s very much explicit dislike for China? Would China-bashing make America great again?

No, not really. In fact, it’s so unlikely to help the United States that the China Press, a Chinese-language newspaper based in the States, recently referred to Trump as ‘China’s secret agent in America’.

Let’s start with the 45% tariff on exports that Trump has proposed as part of his campaign. In theory, this would protect American jobs and promote American business; in reality, the implementation of such a drastic measure would set in motion an avalanche of global economic consequences. Basic economic intuition suggests that higher import taxes equate to higher prices, especially in a large open economy like that of the United States. Shrinking sales of Chinese products would not only hurt the average American consumer, but also damage American businesses who are actually heavily involved in the production and distribution process of goods that are ‘made in China’. Hufbauer and Lowry at the Peterson Institute for International Economics studied the impact of a 35% tariff imposed on Chinese tire imports by Washington in 2009 and discovered that for American consumers had to spend $900,000 dollars more on tires for every job saved - a trade-off scary enough to keep policymakers up at night.

If Trump’s wish is to strengthen the United States by weakening China, then this policy might work in an alternate universe in which the major economies weren’t connected in any way – one only needs to look at the relationship between the recent performance of the financial markets and China’s declining growth to comprehend the influence that China’s economic downfall may have the global economy. All of this, in addition to the fact that there would be nothing to stop the notoriously impulsive and unpredictable Chinese government to set up tariffs of its own on American goods and services, clearly suggest that Trump’s proposed tariff would only serve to undermine the United States.

What about in the wider context of the Wild Wild East arena? As a recent article in The Diplomat suggested, ‘the United States simply cannot be made great again by defining its closest global relationships purely in transactional terms or by insisting on going it alone while making others pay’. For years, Trump has argued for colder relations with Japan, who currently serves as the United States’ fourth-largest trading partner’, as well as South Korea, claiming that the United States should consider withdrawing its troops if Japan and South Korea don’t pay more for their upkeep. I don’t know what’s more concerning: the fact that the $2 billion Japan pays annually toward the upkeep of U.S. troops isn’t enough, or the fact that Trump cannot see that withdrawing from Asia would only play to China’s favour, giving it more leverage in future negotiations and allowing it to dictate terms in the Asian sphere.

The United States have spent years trying to build up a strong presence in Asia – with Trump at the helm, all of this may potentially vanish for the sake of ‘making America great again’ and at the expense of stability between two of the world’s great powers. It’s a thought that makes the video linked above a little less funny and a lot more frightening.

Photograph: Donald Trump via photopin (license)

Sudan: ongoing international repercussions

Sophie Dowle

Sudan’s internal conflicts were splashed across the front pages of leading international newspapers in 2011 when the country split in two, becoming Sudan and South Sudan. The tensions that produced this split are far from resolved, even if they no longer make front page news. 

Sudan has long suffered conflict. In 1955, just prior to Sudan gaining independence, the South began a war for liberation. The South, predominantly Christian and Animist, fought for independence from the Arab Muslim North in a war that lasted 17 years. Civilians were caught in the violence and thousands were killed, raped, and enslaved. Juba, now the capital of South Sudan, was set alight. Peace followed in the 1970s, but in 1983 the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) and its military wing, the SPLA, rekindled the fight. Soon after, an Islamist military junta took over in Khartoum, the northern capital. The junta aimed to subjugate the South, and full scale civil war resumed from 1983 to 2005. By the time peace was secured, at least 1.5 million people had died in fighting or resulting displacement, famine, or disease. Many thousands of others fled to neighbouring countries or the West. 

But the North-South divide was not the only conflict to manifest itself in Sudan. In the South there was bitter fighting between Dinka and Nuer factions, and it is this that led to the further fighting in South Sudan once the country split away. These ethnic tensions culminated when in 2013 the Dinka president of South Sudan, Salva Kiir Mayardit, sacked his entire cabinet and accused vice-president Riek Machar, a Nuer, of instigating a failed coup. This led to the 2013-2015 civil war in the South, which displaced another two million people, and saw further bloodshed and famine from disrupted agriculture. 

The North has also failed to create a peaceful state following the decision to let the South split away. Violence continues in the western region of Darfur, which has displaced two million people and killed over 200,000 people. Human Rights Watch describes the ongoing conflicts in the North as “characterised by unnecessary and avoidable civilian deaths and injuries; sexual violence against women and girls; unlawful destruction of civilian property, and have forced hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee their homes.” President Omar al-Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes in Darfur and was re-elected in 2015 in a poll that, according to Human Rights Watch, did not meet standards for free and fair elections.

Furthermore, the split has not enabled the two countries to settle their differences. Tensions continue over issues such as border demarcation and shared oil revenues. It was only in January of this year that Sudan first opened its border with South Sudan.  

This conflict has not only left a trail of destruction across the two countries, but also has ongoing international consequences. There are over 5.5 million Sudanese refugees worldwide. Nearby states, such as Chad, Uganda and Egypt, are struggling with the increased pressure that thousands of refugees place on their resources and fragile political systems. 

Some Sudanese refugees travelled to places such as Jordan. However, Jordan, already struggling with the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees combined with Iraqi and Palestinian refugees, decided to forcibly deport hundreds of Sudanese refugees in January this year. More than 100 of these deportees were detained by the Sudanese authorities upon their return, and some are still missing.  

This issue has impact yet further afield. Many of the inhabitants of the refugee camp in Calais are Sudanese. While the French and British authorities leave those in the camp in limbo, while they try to decide how to deal with the residents in the camp, the numbers of people arriving, having fled war-torn Sudan, ever increases, and the hope of being able to repatriate them to a safe Sudan dwindle rapidly. Many in the West congratulated themselves for brokering the peace in 2011, following the creation of South Sudan. However, with the resumption of fighting and sustained tensions in both the South (where the 2013-15 civil war has supposedly ended) and the North, the congratulations have quickly turned to panic among the international community, as famine looms and further bloodshed and another generation lost to war looks evermore inevitable.

Brazil’s Political Upheaval: Too many greased palms makes for one sticky situation

Leo House

Black and white, good and evil. Corrupt president Dilma Rousseff and her crooked communist cronies at the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) cling to power in the face of mass protests calling for her impeachment. Mainstream coverage of the Brazilian political crisis has been overly simplistic, and some even argue that this is purposeful misinformation, not naïveté.

Brazil is undergoing its worst financial downturn in decades, but it’s important to understand that crises of all sorts are piling up.

In March the World Health Organisation revealed that in Brazil a suspected 6,480 babies had been affected by the Zika epidemic.

Meanwhile fraudulent state oil giant Petrobras is beginning to crumble under the weight of its own Wolf of Wall Street-esque scandal. The company’s officials have pegged the overall total bribes given at nearly $3 billion. The anti-corruption investigation, named ‘Operation Car-Wash’, has revealed that bricks of cash were delivered with extravagant gifts of ‘Rolex watches, $3,000 bottles of wine, yachts, helicopters and prostitutes’. Petrobras has lost more than half its value over the last year. It was one of Brazil’s largest financial products, sold worldwide in emerging-market bonds, and its downfall has caused a huge international loss of faith in Brazilian market stability. Operation Car-Wash has also revealed that $200 million of those bribes were pocketed by members of the ruling PT. Thus the economic crisis feeds the flames of political scandal, just months before the global spotlight is turned to Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympics in August.

If we take a second look, it becomes clear that the loudest cries for impeachment come not from the masses, but the élite and upper middle class. Brazil’s strongest business lobby, the São Paulo Federation of Industries (FIESP), currently has its headquarters flashing the national anti-Dilma colours yellow and green, and the message ‘Resign now!’ Polls showed that the people who have gathered beneath to protest are significantly older, whiter and richer than the wider population; 40% were over 51 years old, 77% had higher education and 37% earned over £2,200 per month.

It should also be noted that FIESP’s vast sphere of influence covers media conglomerate Globo Group, and the two biggest newspapers in São Paulo. Dilma and the PT are now feeling their full smearing power. People are even avoiding wearing red, afraid being attacked as pro-government socialists.

It could be argued that historical processes are at work here; South America has recently seen a string of political upheavals that ousted long-standing left-wing leaders and brought the centre-right into power. In Venezuela Hugo Chavez’ successor Nicolas Maduro and his United Socialist Party lost control of the National Assembly for the first time in 17 years, to a landslide centre-right opposition victory. Last year in Argentina, president-elect Mauricio Macri pledged that, after the first change in power in 12 years, he would erase Cristina Fernández’s centre-left legacy. In Bolivia, Evo Morales and the Movement for Socialism party lost a referendum to amend the constitution and extend presidential terms. After 13 years of PT supremacy, this generational shift seems to be catching up with Brazil.

The key difference, however, is that in Venezuela and Argentina these transitions occurred via elections. In Brazil this change threatens to happen undemocratically, as Dilma’s opponents are agitating for the dramatic and extralegal means of impeachment. FIESP has a history of anti-left sentiment and political intervention. Adriano Diogo, chairman of the Sao Paulo Truth Commission, explains that: 

“The same way that back in 1964, FIESP financed coup-mongers to organise and throw down elected president Joao Goulart, with arms, buying union leaders and organising free trips for Armed Forces officers, now FIESP is allied with the speaker of the Lower House Cunha in his attempt to throw down Dilma Rousseff”

In 1964 FIESP’s media and business tycoons helped usher in a 21-year military dictatorship, under which Dilma Rousseff was captured and tortured for revolutionary guerrilla activity. 52 years later Brazil’s moneyed right-wing interests are once again wading into the political scene, to challenge a political opponent that has always come out on top in elections. This time they have armed themselves not with soldiers, but with newspapers and Twitter accounts - this change in political weaponry reveals much about how Brazilian democracy has matured.

The crux of the matter is that Dilma seems to be the lesser of innumerable evils; nearly all alternative leaders are embroiled in the same, or an even greater, level of corruption scandal. There is currently no solid evidence of her direct involvement in the Petrobras kickback scheme. If she were impeached, however, her Vice President Michel Temer could not serve as a replacement – he too is allegedly involved in the Petrobras bribery. The leader of the opposition and the impeachment movement, the evangelical and anti-abortion Eduardo Cunha, is even more unfit to govern by these standards. He is subject to multiple active criminal investigations, and has been found to have multiple secret Swiss bank accounts holding alleged bribe money. 

The hypocrisy is laughable: five members of Cunha’s impeachment commission are being criminally investigated themselves, most notably Paulo Maluf. He has been unable to leave Brazil due to an Interpol arrest warrant and a sentence to 3 years in French prison for money laundering.

So, predictably, things are not as black and white as they first seem. Corruption seems to have infected every organ of the Brazilian state, to the point that one is barely fit to judge another. One thing is for sure: Dilma’s impeachment would be a serious subversion of Brazilian democracy, orchestrated chiefly by the ruling classes.

Who Benefits from the International Arms Trade?

Oliver Ramsay Gray

The arms trade is big business, with global military spending last year totalling just over $1.5 trillion. Although the (legal) international arms market was only a fraction of this, at $83 billion, this still represents a significant market for potential profits. But who really benefits from the international arms trade, and what about the non-financial costs and benefits?

The clearest beneficiaries of the arms trade are, unsurprisingly, arms companies themselves; last year, the largest ten in the US and Europe had revenues of $203 billion (excluding non-military sales), the lion’s share of the international arms business. These international revenues, as David Cameron never fails to insist, contribute jobs and economic prosperity to the exporting country. For instance, the 1985 Al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia has brought the UK $45 billion already and could bring in another $40 billion. However, the picture is not as simple as that. A shift in resources and demand over the long-term towards non-military economic sectors would likely bring about greater increases in standards of living. Although a challenging aim, this holds the greatest potential benefits to any exporter and can be seen in the past, for example when military spending fell by over 1% of global GDP in the years following the end of the Cold War. We must recognise that although the arms industry will always benefit from the international arms trade, the idea that the exporting nation inevitably benefits as well, as David Cameron persistently argues, is flawed in the long-term view.

Arms exports can also be used as a political tool, another means by which a state can strengthen strategic relations, bring others under its sphere of influence and project its power into other parts of the world. This is visible in Russia’s relationship with Syria, which has been tied up with the sale of missile defence systems and fighter jets – in part, a means to increase Syria’s dependency on Russia. Recent years in Syria serve to show how these exports have also helped Russia secure its strategic aims in the country by buttressing the Assad regime and so have worked as a type of limited intervention (though this was of course escalated last year). Clearly the exporter benefits in numerous ways here, as does the does the direct recipient, though the picture muddies when wider considerations are taken into account. Was Assad’s strengthening a “beneficial” development?

Arms sales are well known to increase the frequency and intensity of conflict. Even the legal international arms trade is closely tied up in this damaging situation and the costs of conflict are huge in both human and economic terms. This hurts not only those directly involved in conflict but has damaging knock-on impacts around the world. Although war might benefit its few victors politically, its costs are huge to everyone else involved. However, with the current international arms trade system the actions of one state can do little to affect the legal supply or demand for arms. Thus, in terms of the benefits to the exporter laid out above it makes sense for arms exporters to not take a unilaterally moral position. Of course, in the longer term, the benefit shifts towards a situation in which the supply of arms is restricted. However, this can only be achieved at a multi-state level rather than by one state taking it upon themselves.

We can see that it is overwhelmingly arms companies and, to a lesser extent, exporting states who benefit from the international arms trade. The situation is more complex when looking at recipients and considering the wider world. What does seem apparent, however, is that it would be counter to an individual state’s interests to clamp down on its own arms exports unilaterally when, without multi-state agreement, the benefits would shift to other exporters while the damaging impacts of supplying arms remain.

A Child of Circumstance: the Life, Death and Rejuvenation of Nigeria’s Biafra

Hattie Goldstaub

Today’s title quotes Biafran president Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu’s assessment of the short-lived secessionist state situated in Nigeria’s south-east region from 1967 to 1970, whose existence was dominated by devastating civil war. With a resurgence in pro-Biafran demonstrations throughout Nigeria in recent months, examination of these circumstances and Biafra’s short history seems apt in order to explain the calls for a breakaway state. 

The colonisation and decolonisation of Nigeria by the British created and maintained a patchwork nation, pieced together by an alien will that ignored cultural, religious and ethnic distinctions. Nigeria as we know it is a state beset by divisions: a Muslim majority of Hausa and Fulani people in the north and a Christian majority of Yoruba, Ijaw and Igbo in the south. After its formal independence in 1960, the country was shaken by military coups in 1966. The first of these was viewed as an Igbo operation and killed the incumbent Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, while the second was a direct reaction to the first, led by Muslim officers and resulting in a backlash of pogroms against Igbos in the north where at least 30,000 were brutally murdered. After an attempt by the new head-of-state, Yakubu Gowon – a northerner, albeit not a Muslim and not of Hausa or Fulani descent – to create a Nigerian federation of twelve states, with the Igbo people concentrated in the central east away from control of southern oil, the then south-eastern governor Ojukwu announced the secession of his region from the rest of the country in May 1967. This was the inception of Biafra.

Although Biafra and its predominantly Igbo population of 13.5 million intended a peaceful split, Nigeria could not allow this due to the aggregation of oil in the Niger Delta, then under Biafran ownership. It declared war. Despite its greatly inferior military capability Biafra fought back bravely and held the British and Soviet-supported Nigeria off for the best part of three years. During this time, Biafra was only recognised as a state by Gabon, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Tanzania and Zambia. Much of the rest of the world remained silent over Biafra’s plight, although international aid efforts intensified after a Nigerian blockade created a chronic shortage of food and medicine to the region, aiming to starve it into submission. Nigeria’s Federal Commissioner for Finance, Obafemi Awolowo, stated: “All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war.” This tactic broke Biafra, which surrendered to Nigeria in January 1970, after at least a million deaths of both civilians and combatants. When previously Biafran Igbo citizens tried to return to their pre-war lives in the north, they found their houses and jobs occupied by northerners. A Bank of Nigeria ruling that Biafran supplies of pre-war Nigerian currency were now defunct rendered the savings of many Biafrans worthless. Regardless of pre-war earnings, each Biafran was guaranteed only 20 Nigerian pounds. Despite Gowon’s promise of an equal peace and his use of the slogan "no victor, no vanquished", the post civil war situation did little to appease or even to help those who had fought for Biafra.

So what remains of the Biafran movement now? After decades of official silence, a pro-Biafran secession organisation – the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) – was established in 1999 and regularly calls for the United Nations (UN) to reinstate and recognise Biafra as an independent nation. Despite the non-violent nature of its demonstrations, it has been declared treasonous and aggressive by the Nigerian government, with former President Goodluck Jonathan terming it extremist in 2013, comparing it to Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram. Its leader Ralph Uwazuruike was arrested for treason in 2005; despite bail, his trial is due to continue. Similarly, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) movement, headed by UK-based Igbo, Nnamdi Kanu, has set up a Radio Biafra station and campaigned for the state’s recreation. However, upon a visit to Nigeria in December 2015, Kanu was arrested for treason and is currently detained by the Nigerian government. Peaceful protests calling for his release have been dispersed and violently repressed by the Nigerian police and military: according to the South-East Based Coalition of Human Rights Organisations, 80 members of IPOB were killed by Nigerian forces between August 2015 and February 2016. Such demonstrations have once more led to an aggressive reaction against Igbo civilians, even those not involved in pro-Biafran demonstrations. Despite apparently flagrant human rights abuses by the Nigerian government, its denial of these has been more or less accepted by multilateral organisations such as the UN and the European Union. 

Although the possibility of a renewed Biafran secession in Nigeria remains remote, the tensions and divisions that caused a civil war in the 1960s are clearly still present, as are the motivations for a breakaway Igbo state. The international community, particularly those who are responsible for such a state of affairs, have a moral duty to disregard their economic motivations and pay greater attention to such a volatile and unjust situation.