Tag Archives: Politics

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The Spectacle of Transaction

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Though many claim otherwise, last week’s televised and unprecedented Oval Office clash did not signal a new insistence on transaction politics or recognition of American greatness.  Instead, President Trump’s performance (and VP Vance’s, if not the broader US government’s) shocked by laying bare a demand for politics as transaction and genuflection.  Gone was the facade of values, ideals and wink-wink partnerships.

Minerals for protection – humanitarians have seen this before. Nonetheless, as the US government pops one normative bubble after another, this disruption creates both urgency and opportunity to explore humanitarian action from different perspectives. Humanitarians should take note. Here are three areas to focus on.

A call for principles?

      My first instinct – almost a genetic predisposition – is to launch an impassioned call for a renewed commitment to values and principles, distinguishing our humanitarian character from the base self-interest of material gain. However, the call for principles can veer into self-serving supremacy (even if I remain convinced that humanitarians should prioritize implementing the principles, values and ethics they have enshrined).

      Too often, humanitarians wield the principles as tools of transactional self-interest. They have used neutrality and independence to stall localization or have invoked neutrality as a talk-to-the-hand insistence upon silence on Gaza. This crude instrumentalization not only undermines a genuine embrace of the principles but also invokes counterarguments for the blockage to be removed altogether. Many humanitarians now argue that neutrality should be cast out. This dynamic creates an uneasy politics of strange bedfellows, where humanitarians angrily critique Western states for abandoning their own principles (e.g., IHL prohibiting the deliberate slaughter of civilians) while simultaneously deciding that they, too, possess the power to dismiss principles when they constrain ‘right-thinking’ ambitions.  

      Is there room for a middle ground? A liminal space to be carved out from current practice? One that transcends supremacy, othering and finger-pointing? One that resists both righteous indignation and corporate algorithmic amplification of our extremities? The former Red Cross official Alisdair Gordon-Gibson outlines just such a place to begin exploring those questions.

      Framing is reality (How Zelensky missed his chance to play ball)

        In arguing for Ukraine’s survival, President Zelensky mistaken believed the transaction at hand involved Ukraine’s minerals for future U.S. commitments. But as a natural Repo Man, Trump was not looking to establish a quid pro quo, he was calling in a debt, and the goon squad came to play.  In his view, Ukraine already owed the minerals to the US for past services rendered.  Zelensky should have expressed gratitude and, in keeping to the rules of the game, demanded the U.S. thank him and the Ukrainian people.  In Trump’s house, transaction must be met with transaction; charges of ungratefulness should be countered with the same.

        Zelensky could have taken cues from our sector. InterAction reminded us how the U.S. government’s foreign aid spending is transactional, a downpayment on advancing U.S. policies and interests overseas.[1]  Put bluntly, Trump was reneging on an established bargain. This is not about defending freedom or American values – secondary commodities to President Trump. Instead, Zelensky should have used the Oval Office to remind the U.S. government that Ukrainians have done more to weaken archrival Red Skull than the USA’s Captain America has managed in decades.

        Ukraine’s sacrifices – spilled blood and treasure (along with significant contributions from its allies) – have served the West by (i) depleting the Russian army , forcing it to rely on convicts and North Koreans mercenaries, draining Russia’s treasure and tarnishing Putin’s strongman image, and (ii) weakening Russia’s global capabilities and influence, as seen in Syria, where its ally collapsed, costing Russia its strategically vital important Mediterranean base. Put a number on it. How much should Americans pay for services rendered?  Of course, beyond the thought exercise, the question of brute power imbalance remains, as today’s news makes clear.

        Reframing beyond the usual borders?

        As a sector we have dragged our countless feet on reform. As for transformation, asking the sector to lead foundational change is like asking the clergy to dismantle a religion. Nonetheless, some have advocated for tearing it all down, clearing the forest (though not overnight) so that humanitarianism can be replanted. The rapid collapse of Western institutional funding, spearheaded by the demise of USAID, has expanded discussions of reimagining humanitarian action beyond the usual reimaginers. Are we in a pivotal moment – what consultants like to call an inflection point?

        How and what are we going to think and do differently?  What might this reframing look like?  

        Some of these discussions have been ongoing – calls to head back to basics, rethink our relationship with the climate and environment (e.g., Humanitarianism 2.0), embrace mutual aid, or let go of power. Yet, these conversations produced small-scale change (just enough to release pressure without shifting the status quo?) or never move beyond the conference panels.  What about a new lens: transaction?

        Does the concept of transaction offer useful scaffolding for rethinking humanitarian action in significant ways?  Some might argue that the transactional nature of foreign aid, even if masked, has always been ‘hiding’ in plain sight – a jobs program to assuage guilt, project soft power and maintain the status quo. However, transaction could offer a fertile perspective, surfacing how aid is rooted not in charity but in mutual self-interest. As I’ve written before, humanitarian aid delivers to me, and much more than a job.

        We need to talk about this from an ethical perspective: the role played by humanitarian action as the personal champion of my self-image. […]  Among other traits, this is my self-curated individuality and selflessness – my ‘sacrificing’ a more common career that would have brought far greater financial reward.  But how can it be selfless if it goes so far to defining my self?

        Looking at mutual self-interest at the sectoral level, British thinker Randolph Kent has argued crisis response will increasingly require a diverse array of actors, from humanitarians and the private sector to the military, social network systems, and numerous governmental and intergovernmental bodies. This paradigm shift demands a move away from weak and narrow hierarchical coordination toward an understanding of how “interdependence and mutual self-interest” may lead to more effective collaboration.

        [1] As others have noted, given the purpose and principles of humanitarian action, InterAction’s argument produced an own goal.  Hence my shameless milking of it two blogs in a row.

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        Resetting our standards

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        Here is Friday’s Gaza headline: “Israel’s defense chief says military ‘thoroughly planning’ offensive in crowded Gaza border town”.  One might ask: What the hell does that mean?  I don’t know which is more shocking, the idea that it has not been thoroughly planned (aside from those first few days), or that it has. And that is perhaps the point.  We spend an enormous time reading, thinking and arguing about the What.  Is it a genocide? Is it antisemitic? Is it shielding? Was Hamas attack justified? Is this a humanitarian crisis? Has it been sufficiently planned? And so forth.

        Moving beyond what is happening

        I am more confounded by the Why than the What.  On the Israeli side, at least, the Why seems less mysterious: Netanyahu saving his political career or keeping himself out of jail, or Israel obliterating a proximate threat, or the belief in religious destiny, fear + history + racism + hatred, etc.  What I struggle to understand is why the US government (or the West more generally) is so staunchly entrenched on one side of this conflict given Israel’s arguably genocidal and inarguably targeted campaign to destroy civilian life in Gaza.  It would have been relatively easy to support Israel militarily behind the cloak of much more nuanced public positioning.  Ditto for the UK or Germany.

        The US will pay a steep price for this solidarity. Insight from the ever-incisive Nesrine Malik: “When a less safe world becomes an acceptable price to pay for loyalty to allies, the west’s claim to authority as a political and military custodian of law and order looks increasingly tenuous.  Once that authority is gone, the system is rocked from within.”  Certainly, the US position can be explained in negative terms: that these governments are stuck with the fruits of their tortured allegiances, or wedded to the finances of military spending, or that 2024 is a campaign year for embattled President Biden (and PM Sunak), or that the West maintains a double-standard, or that their hypocrisy reveals the inner rot of Western hegemonic power and narcissism.  Certainly these explanations describe influences, but none seems sufficient; none seems reason enough to undermine the West’s own global power and so efficiently gut the very ideals that are so central to wielding this power. Not to mention running the risk of indictments in the genocide cases to come.   

        I want to step out of my depth (read: speculation alert!) and ask, what really is at stake for America? Here, let’s postulate some stakes. And if I get it all wrong, please use the comments to enrich the discussion.

        An assault on IHL

        Violence such as in Gaza today or Mosul in 2016-17 exposes the inherent destructiveness of a military strategy based upon bombardment of densely populated areas, pulverizing alike the people and the social fabric of a people. The mass erasure of the countless details that make us human is not excusable as collateral damage. Is the concussion being delivered to international humanitarian law (IHL) a deliberate strategy to whittle away the safeguards – the rules of war – through which the West has been exercising power, even if also skillfully ignoring these rules when necessary. This time, though, the curtain of hocus pocus surgical strikes has been pulled back. War is messy. That’s why we created rules.

        One major difference here is the absence of that oldest of survival strategies – flight. There is literally nowhere to seek safety, nowhere to shield your children.  Now 134 days too late, even President Biden expresses his concern over the impossibility of evacuating to a place of safety. The strategy of bombardment is thus the airborne equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel; barrel after barrel for months on end, with the additional stipulation that the Israeli military has claimed it is only trying to shoot the sharks, who happen to be shielding in the same barrels. Welcome to urban warfare against an irregular armed enemy. Welcome to the end of IHL’s doctrine of proportionality. Welcome to the wider public watching, reading and talking about it.

        The strategy is to normalize this type of warfare, to expand the boundaries of justifiable (i.e., legal) or publicly acceptable combat tactics, because urban warfare is the future of an urbanized world.  It’s not just the shelling of civilians, Gaza marks a rebranding of the tolerable when it comes to civilians, where tactics such as cutting off food and electricity or blocking aid are openly declared.

        Shielding – Maintaining the West’s options

        Recall the loud condemnation of Hamas’ practice of hiding among civilians – known as “shielding”. And the quieter explanation that while shielding is a forbidden tactic, IHL does not condone using an enemy’s shielding as justification for indiscriminately and indifferently killing lots of civilians.[1] With global access to making and viewing videos, violations of the law become ever more un-deniable and un-explainawayable; hence the need in an age of asymmetric warfare to normalize previously less public and “necessary” transgressions.  

        Shielding – Protecting soldiers at the expense of civilians

        The heavy reliance on bombardment can also be seen as a strategy of deliberate shielding by the Israelis, as with the US in Iraq. The domestic political imperative in Western democracies now demands sacrificing civilians over there in order to protect military expenditure, popular support, and election votes at home. Israel’s approach in Gaza, like the US’s (and allies) actions in Mosul, shows how this practice forms a more surreptitious form of shielding: one military places “enemy” civilians in the path of violence to protect itself from the enemy military. Bloody and destructive as it might be, invading on foot maintains a much higher level of control over the use of lethal weaponry, reducing civilian casualties/costs but adding steeply to those among the invading soldiers. For Western democracies, this means casualties at the ballot box.

        Looking forward

        Why such unwavering (and carefully worded criticism) US support to Israel? Is it that the US (or the West) needs and wants Israel to be the dirty cop in the region? Is that enough? Or does it reflect a shift in realpolitik thinking, a belief that law and norms like IHL will prove ever more inadequate in a fast-charging future where inequity, brutality and naked self-interest will be both necessary for the securitization of the West’s idealized societies and widely broadcast (when the West is involved, as with Gaza).  The new world political calculation is that widespread demolition from afar thus becomes “necessary” for the defense of democracy and the rule of law. Perhaps this was always the case, but that was never the ideal presented to the public.

        I feel as if I am being prepared to accept tomorrow what constitutes a futurist dystopia of today.  In fact, I think we are being initiated into tolerating it. Seems we as a society are halfway through Niemoller’s poem, and that doesn’t even count our acceptance if not collective ignorance of the war in Sudan, ethnic cleansing in Nagorno Karabakh, mass civilian deaths in Tigray, Rohingya persecution, or the re-education camps in China’s Uighur region (not an exhaustive list). 

        I worked for years on the protection (witnessing and advocacy) side of humanitarian action. I preached the idea that if only we could communicate more powerfully what was happening, it would stop (or, at least, slow), or bring justice. Either times have changed, or I have long been too much of an idealist. A less safe world, as Malik says above.  This is the gambit on which we have now more decisively embarked.  Creating a less safe world, and at the same time one where the costs will be inequitably distributed, imposed upon the have nots in order to create and maintain the safety of the haves.

        [1] In the US or the UK, nobody would support a SWAT team decision to shoot dozens of pedestrians in order to stop the escape of one murderer. Or claim that in a hostage situation it was OK to lob grenades from afar (killing all) rather than take the risk of losing police in storming the location. We expect and police expect to place civilian safety above their own (within limits). IHL is the same. But the home country politics of US soldiers dying on foreign soil increasingly gives rise to a different weighting of lives, where one American non-civilian trumps [fill in the foreign blank of men, women and children].