Stanford University Press Blog

Tempting Fate in Northeast Asia

Fear of instability in Northeast Asia mounts as US intentions in the region remain unclear.

by THOMAS FINGAR

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping before their bilateral meeting in Beijing, China, on March 19, 2017. Photo by the U.S. State Department. Public domain.

To depict President Trump’s rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as the functional equivalent of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union would be an exaggeration, but because trade is the primary instrument of regional integration in Northeast Asia, its implications are more worrisome than those of Brexit. While Europe has cultivated a system of shared values and made conscious efforts to overcome historical animosities and reduce the risks of war by building interlocking institutions and fostering a “European” identity, Northeast Asia has eschewed integrating mechanisms and the dilution of national identities. What integration has been achieved is the result of market-based economic decisions and American engagement. Trump’s rejection of TPP and repudiation of Obama’s “rebalance” to Asia undercuts both pillars of regional stability and prosperity.

Trump’s actions would be cause for concern under any circumstances, but they are especially worrisome because the region is more unsettled than it has been for several decades. North Korea is adding to its nuclear arsenal. China’s economy is slowing but Beijing’s military buildup and use of economic and political leverage to pressure its neighbors have intensified. South Korea’s president has been impeached and imprisoned; her approach to North Korea and “Comfort Women” agreement to reduce tensions with Japan might be repudiated after the upcoming special election. Japan’s modest adjustments to military policy in response to threats from North Korea and Chinese pressure over disputed islands have unsettled domestic constituencies and enraged Chinese and Korean politicians.

Trump’s actions would be cause for concern under any circumstances, but they are especially worrisome because the region is more unsettled than it has been for several decades.

Great Father Rising

From Jackson to Trump, American conservatism is animated by a paternalistic logic.

by JEFFREY R. DUDAS

Donald Trump in the Oval Office, January 2017. Public domain.

From the perspective of political stagecraft, the 2016 Republican National Convention was a catastrophe. The presumptive nominee was the subject of continuing opposition from party officials and luminaries, including the sitting governor of the state in which the convention was held. In spite of the nominee’s boasts that the event would feature high-wattage star power, the best that he could offer audiences was the endorsement of an aged thespian best known for portraying a male nanny on a decades-old sitcom. Worst of all, his fiercest rival for the party’s nomination was given a prime-time speaking slot—and then not only refused to endorse the nominee but intimated that American conservatives would do well to withhold their support as well. By contrast, his opponent’s nominating convention the next week was a masterclass in political messaging.

But in hindsight it is clear that the Republican National Convention accomplished for its nominee precisely what it intended. For the point of the event was not to display Donald Trump’s devotion to conservative principle but instead to envelop the candidate in the particulars of conservative identity. The goal, after all, was to portray Donald Trump as a great biological and national father—a singular figure who would rescue the nation from what is, for a great many Americans, the nightmare of multicultural politics. And, at that, the convention was a manifest success.

Modern American conservatism is obsessed with the influence of American fathers past and present.

Indeed, modern American conservatism is obsessed with the influence of American fathers past and present, with the legacies of both the nation’s historical “founding fathers” and its actual, biological fathers. As Raised Right argues, this obsession manifests, in practice, as a paternal rights discourse that emphasizes that American democracy exists for “good” American citizens, who can be trusted to exercise their rights to self-governance and autonomy in responsible ways. Conversely, those Americans who, lacking the influence of paternal authority (whether biological or historical) never learned self-discipline and cannot be trusted to exercise their rights in mature ways. Thus does modern American conservatism employ the standard of paternal authority to cast citizens as either virtuous and worthy of governmental support or vicious and worthy of governmental discipline, of law and order. And, apropos for a multicultural nation, these categories of virtuous and vicious tend to be inflected with gender and race-based dynamics.

What’s Wrong with Paid Family Leave?

Without broader cultural changes paid family leave is only a Band-Aid—or worse yet, a stigma.

by SARAH COTE HAMPSON

Public domain via Pixabay.

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is “Be Bold for Change”—a premise that is as much a call to action as it is a reminder that change still needs to happen, that women’s equality is still not a reality in our world. As I write this, a bill is making its way through the legislature in my state that aims to address at least one of the challenges women face in establishing equality with their male peers: if passed, the bill would establish a public insurance scheme to fund paid family leave. Indeed, Washington State is not alone in this effort. Over 20 other states, and an even greater number of municipalities, are actively considering or have recently passed some form of paid family leave legislation. California was the first state to pass such legislation in 2002, and its insurance scheme to help fund paid family leave for both women and men has been in place since 2004.

Numerous scholars and others have pointed out just how inadequate the Family and Medical Leave Act is for meeting the needs of working parents.

State, municipal, and employer-level family leave policies have bubbled forth in the vacuum left by an absence of a robust federal family leave policy. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is currently the only federal policy governing the rights of men and women who need to take time off work to care for new children or sick family members. Introduced in 1993, the FMLA allows workers who have been employed for more than one year to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off for the purposes of supplying this family care. However, numerous scholars and others have pointed out just how inadequate this policy is for meeting the needs of working parents. Because the leave is unpaid, most of the leave-eligible workers who do not take it report not being able to do so because they are unable to afford unpaid time off work. Additionally, even if they could afford to take unpaid time off, more than 40 percent of American workers are not even covered by the policy, since it only applies to employers with 50 or more workers.

The Language of Nowhere

Divisive rhetoric has hijacked our judgment, intervening between us and reality.

by BAHIYYIH NAKHJAVANI

British Prime Minister, Theresa May, and US President, Donald Trump, meet at the White House. Photo by Jay Allen. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

Last October, as we woke up in the autumn gloom of a Disunited Kingdom after the summer referendum, and groped our way to the tea pot in order to Keep Calm and Carry On, we heard the voice of Theresa May announcing the death of the English language: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world,” she said, speaking to a supportive audience, “you are a citizen of nowhere.”

Words can be deployed to all kinds of illogical ends. They are a shifty lot.

Well, that woke us up pretty quick. We are more inclined by nature to support than undermine, much prefer to acquiesce than oppose but here was a definition of words that raised too many questions before breakfast. A citizen of the world is a citizen of “nowhere”? The entire planet, pace Butler, is Erewhon? And where does that place modern Britain? On Mars?

To be accused of having no link to this planet and its peoples may be a surprise for a fair number of us who have been born in one country, raised in another, educated in a third, married, had children, and buried family members in a fourth, fifth and sixth, lived and worked in seven or eight other countries, and might now be obliged to request naturalization in a ninth, because of Brexit. It may also be news for all those of us who had been forced to flee in desperation from our homelands as a result of war, famine, plague, terrorism, persecution and/or natural as well as financial disasters. It can even be a shock to learn that “rootless cosmopolitans” as some of us were called in a previous age, are actually part of a “global elite” in this one, even though we cannot afford London housing. Was our Prime Minister really suggesting that only those who believe in Being First deserve to be British? Can people with a world-embracing vision really not “understand what citizenship means?”

Populist Times

It’s time to rethink how we define and describe contemporary populism.

by BENJAMIN MOFFITT

U.S. President (then the Republican nominee) Donald Trump holds a rally in Newtown, Pennsylvania in October 2016, weeks before the election. Photo by Michael Canedelori. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

We are seemingly living in populist times. The effects of the Global Financial Crisis drag on, the Eurozone sovereign-debt crisis continues to threaten the very existence of the European Union, and more broadly, it is alleged that we are suffering from a crisis of faith in democracy, with political party membership falling dramatically and citizens finding themselves more and more disillusioned with mainstream politics. The anger, fury and disgust targeted at members of “the elite”—whether the bankers of Wall Street, the bureaucrats of Brussels, the politicians of leading parties, or the cultural warriors of the op-ed pages—is palpable, with calls for layoffs, imprisonment or even all-out revolution to change the status quo. The time is ripe for canny political actors who can speak effectively in the name of “the people” to make great political gains.

The time is ripe for canny political actors who can speak effectively in the name of “the people” to make great political gains.

And gain they have. Over the past two decades—but particularly in the last decade or so—populists across the world have made headlines by setting “the people” against “the elite” in the name of popular sovereignty and “defending democracy.” Europe has experienced a groundswell of populism in the form of leaders like Silvio Berlusconi, Geert Wilders, Jörg Haider and Marine Le Pen, and populist parties throughout the Continent have enjoyed significant and prolonged political success. Latin America has seen influential left-wing populist leaders change the region irrevocably, with Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa all gaining the highest office in their respective countries. In the Asia-Pacific, populists like Thaksin Shinawatra, Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada, Pauline Hanson and Winston Peters have left indelible marks on their respective countries, while Africa has experienced its own share of heavy-handed populist leaders, witnessing the presidencies of Yoweri Museveni, Michael Sata and Jacob Zuma. In the United States, the Tea Party ostensibly caused the 2013 government shutdown, and figures like Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have shaped the new face of American conservatism.

In other words, populism is back—and it is back with a vengeance. What was once seen as a fringe phenomenon relegated to another era or only certain parts of the world is now a mainstay of contemporary politics across the globe. In order to account for this situation, some scholars have spoken of a “populist Zeitgeist,” a “populist wave,” and a “populist revival.” Populism has also been at the center of recent debates within political theory, with key figures like Laclau, Mouffe, Rancière, and Žižek having engaged with the concept, tackling populism’s sometimes paradoxical relationship with democracy.

A Wandering Alien

There is no "us" and "them"—we're aliens when we can't identify with others.

by BAHIYYIH NAKHJAVANI

"Refugees Welcome." Photo from Dulles International Airport in Virginia, capturing crowds protesting the Trump administration's executive order on immigration. Photo by Geoff Livingston. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

I first came across the word “alien” in a non-stellar context when I had to sign a card identifying myself as one, soon after the Immigrants Act of 1962 was passed in the UK. Even though my family had been the only Persians living in Uganda, I had never felt like an alien growing up there. But the sense of being one came home to me forcefully in cozy Rutland. I walked into the local constabulary of the small market town thinking I was a fourteen year old human being; I left, duly registered, feeling as though I had just been dropped out of a flying saucer from outer space.

I first came across the word “alien” in a non-stellar context when I had to sign a card identifying myself as one, soon after the Immigrants Act of 1962 was passed in the UK.

Like many other adolescents, I wandered in elliptical orbit after that till marriage transformed me from one of “them” into one of “us,” and I graduated from being an Iranian student to becoming a UK-citizen-by-marriage. And my induction into this select club happened once again in Kampala, Uganda, the town of happy childhood, the place where my grandfather would be buried soon afterwards, his Jewish Iraqi bones enriching forever the blood-red soil of the high Kikaaya hill.

But Uganda was to haunt me some years later, as I stood in a queue at Pearson International Airport, waiting to pass through Canadian immigration. By then, although the passport had stuck, the marriage had not, and having entered the US on one visa, I was obliged to leave it to apply for another, as a divorcée. However, as bizarre as American logic seemed to me, even then, it was nothing compared to the Canadian sequel waiting for me on the other side of the border.

By a stroke of fate, my arrival in Toronto coincided with that of some two thousand Indians fleeing Uganda from Idi Amin. And given my links to that country, the immigration officer behind the desk, whose nametag clearly announced Polish ancestry, was understandably suspicious. So I was hauled to one side and subjected to a cross-examination. Who was I? Where was I coming from, and where did I really belong? Was I an illegal immigrant?

The School Choice Agenda

Betsy DeVos believes charter schools and vouchers will improve education—but will they?

by STEVEN BRINT

A still capture from Betsy DeVos's Senate confirmation hearing, via C-SPAN. Public domain.

The express commitment of the incoming Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, to expand school choice options for American schoolchildren has thrust charter schools and voucher programs to the fore of education debates in the U.S. Over the years the DeVos family charitable foundation has donated some $10 million to organizations promoting the school choice agenda, both through the expansion of charter schools and the introduction of school vouchers to allow students to spend public funds on any school that would take them, whether public or private. While in the United States, voucher programs remain rare (the voucher campaign the DeVos family supported in Michigan lost resoundingly), charter schools have many advocates and have gained a lot of traction in recent years.

The DeVos family is only one of many wealthy families promoting charter schools (and school vouchers) as antidotes to what they perceive as a failing public system.

Publicly funded, but privately managed, charter schools are so named because they negotiate charters with local school districts that specify agreements about requirements, funding, curriculum, and oversight. Many of the original charter schools were organized by parents in school districts who were dissatisfied with the education their children were receiving. Today, school districts may sponsor an expanded role for charter schools by encouraging charter school expansion and making funds available to those who wish to run them.

The DeVos family is only one of many wealthy families promoting charter schools (and school vouchers) as antidotes to what they perceive as a failing public system. Large, politically conservative foundations, including the Walton Foundation (from the Walmart stores fortune), the Charles Koch Foundation, and the Adolph Coors Foundation, have poured millions of dollars into promoting charter schools, as have a number of billionaire hedge fund managers. All claim that they are trying to provide options for families, but many suspect that the real motive of many advocates is to shrink the public sector in every sphere, including education. Over the last three decades, many large school districts, faced with depressing student performance results, have expanded charter school options, including in cities like Cleveland, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

When Ordinary People Get Involved

A return to community work may lie on the horizon for Obama—and should be a goal for us all.

by ERIK SCHNEIDERHAN

 

As President Obama prepares for life beyond the Oval Office, many wonder what he will do next. Will he leverage his fame to become a “super organizer” in Chicago? Teach constitutional law again and hold out for a Supreme Court Justiceship in the post-Trump era? Write another book? It is a moment that is pregnant with possibilities. It is also a moment that is full of tension: How to balance personal needs with the pull of continued public engagement and service? On the one hand, one can imagine that President Obama might feel the need to renew commitments to family and friends, focus more on his personal health (more basketball?), or even just have some time for himself on a regular basis.

As outgoing president Obama will face, to a profound degree, what I call the American’s Dilemma.

On the other hand, he has a unique opportunity to make a difference in communities across the globe His potential to become a change agent is substantial, and undoubtedly, Obama will receive countless invitations to do so—to serve on boards, help raise money, and act as spokesperson, pressures that will be heavy and relentless.

As outgoing president he will face, to a profound degree, what I call the American’s Dilemma. As Americans, we are instilled with competing and often incompatible pressures. We are told to "make a difference" or, as Obama said in his farewell speech in Chicago last week, to "show up." Americans help each other. We are also a nation of do-it-yourself individuals. We believe we are responsible for our own success. How to reconcile these different and competing pressures can leave us frustrated and stuck, unsure how to move ahead. Yet such dilemmas can also become catalysts for action, pushing us to create and find different ways to satisfy our needs. Once we figure out what works, we build it up into something that endures.

A New (Old) Narrative for the Left

In the Trump era Democrats need to revive their critique of the abuse of economic power.

by SOLON SIMMONS

Strikers during the 1933 Dressmakers' Union strike take a break in a diner. Photo from the Kheel Center. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

In the immediate aftermath of the November election, we witnessed what may well be the beginning of a political paradigm shift. Rooted in what might be best described as a literary crisis of political narration on the left, this crisis was exemplified in the reaction to a New York Times op-ed written by Mark Lilla, a political philosophy professor at Columbia. Lilla’s essay marked the demise of what he called identity liberalism, a public intervention notable not only for its argument but mainly for how that argument was received. On the right it produced little more than supportive jibes directed at the difference-based politics often celebrated by the Democrats, which Lilla painted as a failure. But on the left it was greeted with either a shock of realization or the kind of contempt reserved for heretics.

What provided Lilla’s essay with such moral force on the left was not its thesis, that class divisions were coming to replace cultural divisions in the hearts and minds of the people, which had been offered many times before, but the fact that such disastrous failure for their agenda now convinced progressives, for a time, that they truly did not understand how to make sense of recent developments on the political scene. What was increasingly called “the narrative” had shifted against Democrats and progressives, whatever the sanguine demographic predictions promised them.

Trump and the Paternal Heart

On the president-elect and the paternalistic logic of American conservatism.

by JEFFREY R. DUDAS

Donald Trump at a rally in Reno, Nevada, 2016. Photo by Darron Birgenheier. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

A cottage industry of political commentary developed during the 2016 American presidential election. A bevy of commentators and historians agreed Donald Trump would have made the nation’s founding fathers spin in their graves. Trump was: a “threat the founding fathers foresaw”; “the guy our fathers warned us against”; “the demagogue that our founding fathers feared.” Following his victory on November 8, some like-minded commentators hailed the electoral college, the very device that overrode Trump’s nearly 3 million vote deficit to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, as an institutional barrier that was designed by the “founding fathers…precisely for the purpose of guarding against the election of an unqualified demagogue such as Mr. Trump.”

Clearly these commentators were unpersuaded by the victor’s earlier pronouncement that Clinton’s policies, rather than his own, were the ones that were “direct affronts to our founding fathers, who wanted America to be strong, independent, and free.” Nor did they heed historian Joseph Ellis’s circumspection: we had no idea what the founding fathers would have thought of Trump, claimed Ellis, because “all efforts to transport them into our time zone are misguided, like trying to plant cut flowers.” But historical incongruities notwithstanding, “the urge to” interpret American politics according to the desires of dead American fathers, Ellis correctly noted, “is apparently irresistible.”

Debating Moderate Islam

On the post-9/11 Muslim American experience and the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy.

by ROSEMARY R. CORBETT

Military and civilian personnel attend a Muslim prayer service at the Washington Navy Yard Chapel, Washington, D.C., 2010. Public domain.

 

In December 2009, Feisal Abdul Rauf, a prominent imam, Sufi shaykh, and the internationally recognized leader of the Cordoba Initiative, announced plans to open Cordoba House, a thirteen-story Islamic community center in Manhattan. The proposed center was to be built on a location two blocks from the World Trade Center site. Though designed to educate Americans about the truths Islam shares with other faiths and to exemplify “moderate Islam”—something Rauf had spent nearly a decade promoting—the proposed center was quickly embroiled in debate that eventually became known as the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy.

After 9/11 both local leaders and international elites had widely praised Rauf’s core message, delivered at his mosque, in his public appearances, and in his 2004 book, What’s Right with Islam. That message emphasizes Islam’s place within an ethical tradition originating with Abraham (the biblical patriarch common to Judaism and Christianity). Further, it holds that of all the governments in the world, American liberal democracy best embodies this ethic in social form. Because US multiculturalism, pluralism, and “democratic capitalism” are expressions of the “Abrahamic” ethic, Rauf argues, US laws and institutions comply with Islamic law (shari‘ah). Consequently, non-Muslim American can accept Muslims as Abrahamic siblings, while Muslim Americans can promote American liberal values and social systems worldwide.

Because US multiculturalism, pluralism, and “democratic capitalism” are expressions of the “Abrahamic” ethic, Rauf argues, US laws and institutions comply with Islamic law (shari‘ah).

The Libertarian Alternative

This unconventional election year underscores the merit of the third-party option.

by NIKOLAI G. WENZEL

A "Don't Tread On Me" flag at a rally in 2010. Photo by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

 

With the advent of two unpopular front-runners and the rise of third-party candidate Gary Johnson, libertarianism has factored more prominently in this presidential election than in any other cycle in recent memory. Given the nature of voters’ pronounced concerns over the economy and the credibility and efficiency of the federal government, this is not surprising. Libertarianism is not just an alternative to two unpalatable mainstream parties. Instead of tinkering with details, libertarianism squarely addresses the shortcomings of politics as usual, while also offering an opportunity to reflect on first principles and the proper role of government.

Indeed, libertarianism is not (just) about being left alone, and in the context of the 2016 election cycle it is not (just) an alternative to a tired insider or an erratic outsider.

Indeed, libertarianism is not (just) about being left alone, and in the context of the 2016 election cycle it is not (just) an alternative to a tired insider or an erratic outsider. Rather, libertarianism offers a principled approach to political life. At its core lies the “non-aggression principle,” which rejects the initiation of force against others. Based on this principle, government is limited to the protection of individual rights, and leaves the rest to markets and civil society. If the government attempts to do anything beyond protecting rights, it will—by definition—violate the rights of some to benefit others.

The Trouble with Trumpism

Liberals and libertarians cannot meaningfully counter Trump—but conservatism can.

by NATHAN W. SCHLUETER

Donald Trump speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The conservative movement, which is constituted by a dynamic tension between libertarians, traditionalist conservatives and neoconservatives, now faces the real threat of dissolution. Surprisingly, the cause of this threat does not come from within the movement, but from without. It is the result of an idiosyncratic version of populism called “Trumpism.” A toxic mix of reality show romanticism, resentment, cynicism and paranoia, Trumpism has deeply divided the conservative movement along a fault line that cuts across all three of its traditional divisions. Yet as George Nash points out in a recent issue of the New Criterion, “Trumpist Populism is defiantly challenging the fundamental tenets and perspectives of every component of the post-1945 conservative coalition.” Whether one’s primary concern is free trade, traditional marriage and the family, the protection of unborn children, or a robust foreign policy, one will not find much to cheer about in Trumpism. What is a conservative to do?

American conservatism is not identical to Republican Party politics, and it is in deep conflict with Trumpism.

It is important to understand that American conservatism is not synonymous with the conservative political movement. American conservatism is a public philosophy, a form of classical liberalism rooted in the principles of the American founding. Conservatives believe that those principles, furnished by the careful equilibrium of liberty, reason, and tradition, provide for human flourishing better than any competing public philosophy. American conservatism, therefore, is not identical to Republican Party politics, and it is in deep conflict with Trumpism.

Why Manners Matter

Even if only a pretense, staying civil is in Donald Trump’s interest (and ours too).

by KEITH J. BYBEE

Donald Trump speaking in Washington D.C., 2011. Photo by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

During the 2016 presidential election a great deal of attention has been paid to a single question: How should Donald Trump behave?

Even as Trump occasionally acted like a conventional candidate he also continued to flout proprieties.

From the first days of the campaign through much of the primary season, Trump appeared to specialize in defying conventional electoral etiquette. He said many inappropriate things. He called Mexican immigrants rapists, pointedly questioned the intelligence of one of his opponents, and condemned the esteemed veteran John McCain for having been a prisoner of war. Trump also mocked a reporter with disabilities, and he insinuated that the tough questioning he received at a debate occurred because one of the moderators was menstruating.

The outrageous comments and inflammatory insults were, as former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski frequently observed, a result of simply letting Trump be Trump. Trump was his own man. He listened only to his gut, not to pollsters and consultants.

Trump’s authenticity won enthusiastic praise from core supporters. Yet as the prospect of Trump winning the Republican nomination became more certain, pressure mounted on Trump to change his ways. Lewandowski was pushed aside by a new campaign manager, Paul Manafort, a seasoned political professional who promised to pivot Trump toward a more conventionally presidential public style. “You can’t change somebody’s character,” Manafort observed shortly after joining the Trump campaign. “But you can change the way somebody presents themselves.”

The Making of the Syrian Disaster

How state interests stoked radicalism and abandoned the moderates in the opposition. 

by GILBERT ACHCAR

Syrian soldier with a PKM machine gun. Public domain via Wikipedia.

There is a striking symmetry between the foreign policy agendas of George W. Bush and Barack Obama in the Middle East: they produced similar results in opposite ways—military aggression in Bush’s case and denial of assistance in Obama’s. The symmetry does not stop at the devastation of both the countries affected, namely Iraq and Syria. It also concerns one of the dreadful consequences of this devastation: whereas the Bush-run US invasion of Iraq created the conditions that led to the emergence of the “Islamic State of Iraq” (ISI) that al-Qaida proclaimed in 2006, as well as to the expansion of the parent organization across the Arab region, the Obama-adjudicated denial of crucial support to the Syrian opposition created the conditions that allowed the ISI to develop in Syria and mutate into ISIS in 2013. This was followed the year after by the announcement of the “Islamic State” tout court as a successful franchise, opening branches in its turn all over the Arab region and way beyond.

Moderate factions were swiftly eclipsed by more radical elements that were in turn aided, directly or indirectly, by other states.

Robert Ford, who resigned from his position as US ambassador to Syria in February 2014 due to his disagreement with Barack Obama’s Syrian policy, very clearly attributed responsibility for this disastrous course of events to the US president. In an interview on PBS Newshour a few months after his resignation, he even issued a premonitory warning against future attacks on US soil, as was to happen with the ISIS-inspired shootings in San Bernardino and Orlando. Ford maintained that the US was too reticent in lending assistance to the moderate forces in the Syrian opposition who have, he says, “been fighting constantly with arms tied behind their backs, because they don’t have the same resources that either Assad does or the al-Qaida groups in Syria do” and who in Ford’s estimation “frankly, we have much in common with.”