ANALYS: På mötet i Davos nämns inte Trump – men han är ändå överallt

Ännu är det för tidigt att fira segern över inflationen, men målet kommer att nås. När Europeiska centralbankens chef Christine Lagarde talar på World Economic Forum i Davos konstaterar hon att räntetoppen är nådd.

Ännu är det för tidigt att fira segern över inflationen, men målet kommer att nås. När Europeiska centralbankens chef Christine Lagarde talar på World Economic Forum i Davos konstaterar hon att räntetoppen är nådd.

Det är inte första gången Islands kvinnor går i nationell strejk. Senast de gjorde det var 1975, då gällde kampen just löneskillnader mellan kvinnor och män. Omkring 90 procent av landets kvinnor gick inte till sina arbeten under strejken – och det gav resultat. Året därpå antogs en lag om lika lön för lika arbete. Men 2023, 48 år senare, är det dags igen. Mest jämställda landet i världen För trots att Island toppar listan som det mest jämställda landet i världen enligt World Economic Forum, så tjänar kvinnor fortfarande 21 procent mindre inom vissa sektorer, och 40 procent av kvinnorna har upplevt våld eller sexuellt våld. – Jag tänkte först – är det så viktigt? Jag har det bra, jag har en bra make som hjälper till hemma. Men jag demonstrerar för de som inte kan, för jag kan, säger Gudrún Rútsdottír. ”Det tredje skiftet” Förutom löneglapp och våld demonstreras det alltså mot "det tredje skiftet". Gudrún Rútsdottír förklarar: – Det första skiftet är ditt arbete som du går till och får betalt för. Andra skiftet är att skjutsa till träning, handla mat, laga mat. Men, vem ska planera det? Det ska planeras att handla mat och det ska planeras om vem som ska hämta, var är barnen nu och så vidare. Den planeringen kallar islänningarna alltså för "det tredje skiftet". – Och vem är det som gör det? Jo, det är vi kvinnor till största del. Och i dag lägger vi ner första, andra och tredje skiftet, säger Gudrún Rútsdottír. Håller stängt Strejken blir väl synlig i det isländska samhället. Många skolor och förskolor tvingas nämligen hålla stängt då kvinnorna alltså inte går till jobbet. Även icke-binära är inbjudna att strejka – det är nytt sedan 1975.

Till skillnad från flera andra ryska ledare genom historien har Vladimir Putin hållit sig för god för att hemfalla åt antisemitism. Men på senare tid har han använt anti-judiska stereotyper för att attackera så väl tidigare allierade som den ukrainske presidenten. Putin har nyligen liknat Volodymyr Zelenskyj vid en judisk intrigmakare som han säger fått de ryska och ukrainska broderfolken att döda varandra. Att Putin nedlåter sig till att ta till antisemitiska stereotyper kan tyda på att han håller på att tappa greppet om makten, skriver Rysslandsexperten Leon Aron i Foreign Affairs. His recent rhetoric targeting Jews suggests that his grip on power may be loosening. By Leon Aron 24 September, 2023 After Joseph Stalin died in 1953, an underground joke from my Moscow youth declared, the Politburo found three envelopes on the Soviet dictator’s desk. The first, inscribed “Open after my death,” contained a letter telling his successors to place his body next to Lenin’s in the Red Square Mausoleum. “Open when things get bad,” read the second envelope, and the note inside said, “Blame everything on me!” The third envelope, marked “Open when things get really bad,” commanded, “Do as I did!” Things must be really bad for Russian President Vladimir Putin, because he is resorting to one of Stalin’s preferred ways of holding on to power: appealing to anti-Semitism. Recently, Putin has made a series of remarks dwelling on the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. And in a discussion at an economic forum earlier this month, Putin mocked Anatoly Chubais, a half-Jewish former Kremlin adviser who fled Russia after its invasion of Ukraine last year and is reportedly living in Israel. “He is no longer Anatoly Borisovich Chubais,” Putin said, using his former aide’s first name and patronymic. “He is Moshe Izrayilevich, or some such.” As a scholar who has been studying Soviet and Russian politics for decades; who discusses that subject regularly with friends, family members, and professional colleagues; and who keeps tabs on what Putin’s critics say about him, I cannot remember him publicly trafficking in anti-Semitism before now. Indeed, his seemingly benevolent attitude toward his Jewish subjects made him unusual among Russian leaders. For more than a century until 1917, Jews in the Russian empire were confined to the Pale of Settlement, mostly in what today is Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Lithuania, and were terrorized by periodic pogroms. Early in the 20th century, the czar’s secret police propagated (and are widely suspected of sponsoring) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a vicious anti-Semitic forgery that purported to expose a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and has inspired generations of violent anti-Semites. Stalin capitalized on that history to consolidate his own control of the Soviet Union. Beginning in the late 1940s, after 20 million Soviet citizens had died in World War II and millions more were starving and homeless, he unleashed a national anti-Semitic campaign, complete with the frenzied unmasking of “rootless cosmopolitans”—whom everyone understood to be Jews—in newspapers. Well-known members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, formed during the war to organize international support for the Soviet military effort, were arrested, tortured, and executed. In what became known as the “Doctors’ Plot,” a predominantly Jewish group of physicians ministering to the Kremlin leadership was accused of poisoning or deliberately mistreating patients; the medics were tortured, some to death, to extract “confessions.” During that period, tens of thousands of Jews were fired from their jobs, and even graduates of prominent educational institutions became unemployable. (My mother, just out of the Moscow Medical Institute No. 2, was among them.) Putin’s recent rhetoric has been jarring because, despite everything else he has done, he has not tried to whip up public sentiment against Jews. During his 2005 visit to Israel—the first ever to the Jewish state by a Soviet or Russian leader—Putin had an emotional reunion with Mina Yuditskaya-Berliner, his high-school German teacher, and bought her an apartment in central Tel Aviv. He made Arkady and Boris Rotenberg—two brothers of Jewish heritage who have been among Putin’s judo sparring partners—into billionaire oligarchs. Although he spoke at the unveiling of two monuments to Russia’s penultimate czar, Alexander III—a notorious anti-Semite who encouraged pogroms—Putin not only refrained from wielding Judeophobia as a political tool but upbraided those who did. He ordered the head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, to retract a statement by an agency aide who had described the Chabad-Lubavitch ultra-Orthodox movement as a “sect” whose adherents believed in their “supremacy over all nations and peoples.” (The offending official was fired a few months later.) The Russian president apologized in a phone call with then–Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov opined that some Jews were notoriously anti-Semitic. And even as Russian television and social-media outlets have abounded with mad-dog chauvinists and warmongering propagandists since Russia invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin appears to have embargoed anti-Semitic themes. At every turn, Putin seeks to legitimize his war in Ukraine by linking it with Russia’s triumph over the perpetrators of the Holocaust. That Zelensky is Jewish obviously complicates that story. In a discussion at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, the moderator Dimitri Simes invited Putin to explain the issue away. Putin replied that many of his childhood friends are Jewish, and that they all think Zelensky is not a Jew but a disgrace to the Jewish people. He then recounted, from notes, the details of the execution of a Jewish Ukrainian family during World War II, and showed video clips alleging massacres of Jews and ethnic Poles by Ukrainian nationalists of that era. Earlier this month, though, Putin’s allusions to Zelensky’s Jewishness grew sharper. The “Western sponsors” of the Ukrainian government, he told an interviewer, had deliberately chosen a Jewish president of Ukraine to camouflage the “antihuman” essence of the Kyiv regime. It’s “utterly despicable,” Putin concluded, to see a Jew covering up the “glorification of Nazism and those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine.” While still purporting to be ridding Ukraine of Nazis, Putin is zeroing in on a flesh-and-blood culprit: The Russians and the Ukrainians are killing one another because of a Jewish schemer. Last week, Putin found another target: Chubais, his former special envoy to international organizations, who walked off his job a month after the invasion of Ukraine. After some meandering, Chubais, whose mother is Jewish, landed in Israel (which does not require entry visas for Russian citizens), along with tens of thousands of other Russian immigrants. Initially, his departure caused nary a ripple. Yes, Chubais quit on his own accord, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in March 2022, adding, “As to whether he left Russia or not, that’s his personal business.” Not anymore. Why did Chubais run off to Israel? Putin mused last week, employing a derisive word, udral, that translates to something like “absconded.” Why is he “hiding” there? And by the way, Putin went on: Although no criminal charges have been brought against Chubais, “a huge financial hole” has been uncovered in the state nanotechnology corporation, Rusnano, which Chubais headed until 2020. Russians steeped in anti-Semitic tropes could effortlessly read between the lines: A cowardly and probably thieving Jewish bureaucrat had bolted, abandoning the motherland in its hour of tribulation. Political anti-Semitism—that is, the kind promulgated and encouraged by the authorities—is never just about Jews. It portends rot and insecurity at the top of a government, signifying the need to distract, obfuscate, shift the blame. By twisting Zelensky’s Jewishness into a cause of war and portraying Chubais as a craven deserter, Putin is also revealing the Kremlin’s growing anxiety about its grip on power. He keeps sinking deeper into the quagmire of a war he cannot win and cannot walk away from. The Wagner mutiny debunked the official myth of national unity in the face of the alleged “Western aggression” against the motherland. To the extent that Putin has a genuine personal aversion to stirring up anti-Semitism, his political needs are now urgent enough for him to overcome it. In the mosaic of militaristic tyranny that Putin has been assembling, one major tile had been notably missing. He has now begun putting it in place—reviving not only a defining feature of the Stalinist state but also a distinctly ugly part of Russian history. © 2023 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

I takt med internets framfart har även ny teknologi vuxit fram och det i en rasande fart de senaste åren. 

Numera är artificiell intelligens mer eller mindre en del av vår vardag på ett eller annat sätt. Inom flera yrkesbranscher har man även börjat implementera AI som ett verktyg. 

För många är redskapet ett smidigt sätt att utveckla både sig själv i det privata men även i sin yrkersoll. Men det finns även en viss risk för att mängder med jobb i framtiden inte kommer behöva ockuperas av oss människor utan istället av just artificiell intelligens, något som många varnat för kan bidra till arbetsbrist i flera sektorer.  Här är 14 jobb till dig utan utbildning – där du får anställning direkt Här är 10 jobb som kan försvinna Sajten World Economic Forum har listat tio yrken där framtidsutsikterna ser mer mörka ut än för andra. Flera områden kommer med tiden och AI:s fortsatta utveckling minska i efterfrågan, menar de.

Handläggare för datainmatning Sekreterare och administratör Administratör inom lön, bokföring och redovisning Revisor Industriarbetare Chefer inom företagstjänster och administration Kundtjänstpersonal Verksamhetschefer  Mekaniker och maskinreparatörer Administratör inom lagerhållning 

De vanligaste misstagen på arbetsintervjun – enligt rekryteraren

Exxon Mobil drev länge en strategi för att spela ner klimatförändringar och bolagets påverkan och ansvar. Det visar läckta dokument som The Wall Street Journal har kommit över. Strategin bedrevs dessutom medan bolaget hade en helt annan kommunikation utåt. Nu står företagen inför dussintals rättsprocesser över hela USA, där det anklagas för att ha vilselett sina intressenter och allmänheten. En av stämningarna kommer från styret på den brandhärjade Maui-ön på Hawaii där bränder dödade över hundra personer i augusti. Redan 2020 anklagade ön Exxon och andra oljeföretag för att utsätta platser som Maui för klimatrisker – bland annat för allt farligare skogsbränder. Internal documents show what the oil giant said publicly was very different from how it approached the issue privately By Christopher M Matthews and Collin Eaton

The Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2023 Exxon Mobil issued its first public statement that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change in 2006, following years of denial. In public forums, the company argued that the risk of serious impact on the environment justified global action. Yet behind closed doors, Exxon took a very different tack: Its executives strategized over how to diminish concerns about warming temperatures, and they sought to muddle scientific findings that might hurt its oil-and-gas business, according to internal Exxon documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former executives. Exxon’s public acceptance in 2006 of the risks posed by climate change was an early act of Rex Tillerson , an Exxon lifer who became CEO that year. Some viewed him as a moderating force who brought Exxon in line with the scientific consensus. The documents reviewed by the Journal, which haven’t been previously reported, cast Tillerson’s decadelong tenure in a different light. They show that Tillerson, as well as some of Exxon’s board directors and other top executives, sought to cast doubt on the severity of climate change’s impacts. Exxon scientists supported research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science, even after the company said it would stop funding think tanks and others that promoted climate-change denial. Exxon is now a defendant in dozens of lawsuits around the U.S. that accuse it and other oil companies of deception over climate change and that aim to collect billions of dollars in damages. Prosecutors and attorneys involved in some of the cases are seeking some of the documents reviewed by the Journal, which were part of a previous investigation by New York’s attorney general but never made public. One of the lawsuits is from Hawaii’s Maui County, where wildfires killed more than 100 people in August. The lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleged the island faced increased climate-related risks, including more dangerous wildfires, caused by fossil-fuel companies. Some of the lawsuits may go to trial as soon as next year. “I know how this information looks—when taken out of context, it seems bad,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in response to the Journal’s inquiry about the documents. “But having worked with some of these colleagues earlier in my career, I have the benefit of knowing they are people of good intent. None of these old emails and notes matter though. All that does is that we’re building an entire business dedicated to reducing emissions—both our own and others—and spending billions of dollars on solutions that have a real, sustainable impact.” Under Woods, who became CEO in 2017, Exxon has committed to spend $17 billion over five years on emissions-reducing technologies. Exxon didn’t address detailed questions sent by the Journal. Tillerson declined to comment through a representative. Exxon turned millions of pages of documents over to the New York attorney general during that office’s yearslong investigation, announced in 2015, into whether the company misled investors about the impact of climate regulation on its business. The Journal reviewed summaries of the documents that Exxon’s lawyers had determined were the most significant. After the attorney general narrowed the focus of the case, the documents weren’t made public. The documents summarize emails between top executives, board meetings and Tillerson’s edits of speeches, among other things. After a nearly three-week trial in 2019, Justice Barry Ostrager of the New York State Supreme Court ruled the New York attorney general failed to prove its case. “Nothing in this opinion is intended to absolve Exxon Mobil from responsibility for contributing to climate change,” Ostrager wrote. Throughout Tillerson’s tenure between 2006 and 2016, Exxon executives in their internal communications attempted to push back against the notion that humans needed to curtail oil and gas use to help the planet—despite the company’s public statements that action was needed. In 2012, after the pre-eminent scientific authority on climate change warned of global calamity if carbon emissions continued unabated, Tillerson disagreed and directed Exxon researchers to “influence” the group. As pressure mounted to stop drilling in the Arctic due to rapid glacial melting and other environmental impacts, Exxon fretted about a key project in Russia’s far north and worked to “de-couple climate change and the Arctic.” “The general perception is that Tillerson was softer and stopped funding the bad guys” that were espousing climate change denial, said Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a charity that partly focuses on environmental issues. “This is the first X-ray into Tillerson’s head and shows he wanted to throw climate mitigation off the rails. It’s obituary-changing.” The fund has issued grants financing litigation and other support for around two dozen cases against Exxon, whose predecessor, Standard Oil, was founded by family patriarch John D. Rockefeller . The fund has invested millions of dollars in a broader campaign against big oil companies. A study published earlier this year in the journal Science determined Exxon’s climate modelers had predicted warming temperatures with precision since the 1970s, in line with the scientific consensus. The study was funded, in part, by a grant from the Rockefeller Family Fund. In the summer of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen issued what’s now seen as a seminal warning on climate change when he testified before Congress that Earth was warming dangerously and humans were causing it. Frank Sprow , then Exxon’s head of corporate research, sent a memo to colleagues a few months later articulating what would become a central pillar of Exxon’s strategy. “If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur,” wrote Sprow. “Any additional R&D efforts within Corporate Research on Greenhouse should have two primary purposes: 1. Protect the value of our resources (oil, gas, coal). 2. Preserve Exxon’s business options.” Sprow’s memo was adopted by Exxon as policy, he said in a recent interview. Exxon stopped most internal climate research, instead funding it through university and research organizations, Sprow said. Exxon’s corporate research division was redirected from broader scientific study to focus on “science to support our business.” Sprow said he and former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond acknowledged the climate was changing but questioned to what extent human activity was causing it and how serious and rapid the impacts would be. The January study in Science said that Exxon’s climate modelers mostly attributed the changes to humans. Martin Hoffert, who worked as a consultant to Exxon on climate science in the 1980s, said Sprow’s memo sent another message: “It’s an oblique way of saying we’re in the oil business and we’re not going to get out of the oil business, and we’ll do everything we can to make money on the oil business.” By the time Tillerson became CEO in 2006, Exxon’s positions on climate change had become a public-relations nightmare, according to Sprow, who retired from the company in 2005. Exxon’s public shift on climate change came after the Royal Society, a British scientific academy, criticized the company for spreading “inaccurate and misleading” views on climate science in 2006. Exxon responded in a letter that it recognized “the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere poses risks that may prove significant for society and ecosystems.” An Eagle Scout and a civil engineer by training, Tillerson spent his entire career at Exxon before becoming CEO in 2006. He left in 2017 to become then-President Trump’s Secretary of State. His views on climate change were influenced by the previous generation of Exxon executives, said former company executives who worked with him. During his tenure, Tillerson took little action to curb the company’s emissions and instead believed the onus was on governments to push companies to address climate change, they said. In 2011, scientists working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, convened by the United Nations, warned of global calamity if carbon emissions caused temperatures to rise more than 4 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2100, its worst-case scenario. Tillerson told a top Exxon climate researcher the scenario was “not credible,” the documents show. Tillerson was “dissatisfied with media coverage,” the researcher, Haroon Kheshgi, told colleagues in a 2012 email about the findings. Further, Tillerson wanted to engage with IPCC “to influence [the group], in addition to gathering info.” Chris Field was the co-chair of an IPCC working group during Tillerson’s tenure at Exxon. He rejected Tillerson’s criticism that the worst-case scenario laid out by the group wasn’t credible. Though emissions reductions are preventing the worst case, Field said, the science has held up over time. “I’m honestly flattered that he thought IPCC was consequential enough to want to influence it,” said Field, who is now director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He added that the IPCC process is structured to prevent undue influence from individual businesses or other entities and that the Exxon scientists he’d dealt with were professional. While Tillerson and others played down the risks posed by climate change, Exxon’s scientists were themselves modeling alarming increases in carbon emissions without dramatic reductions in fossil-fuel consumption. “It’s almost reluctantly that we address C02 emissions,” Scott Nauman, a corporate planning manager, wrote in a January 2009 email as the company was preparing its annual energy outlook. “It is not a positive story. Global emissions continue to rise throughout the outlook timeframe – that’s clearly a cause for concern.” Exxon routinely pushed back against the idea that dramatic curtailment of fossil-fuel consumption was necessary. Instead, it suggested that technological solutions, including making cars and other machines more efficient, were the most effective measure to halt global warming. Fossil fuels are responsible for more than 75% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the IPCC. Before giving a speech at an event hosted by Stanford University’s Global Climate & Energy Project in February 2009, Tillerson appeared to make edits to avoid embracing positions that would hurt Exxon’s business. In one part of the draft speech he crossed out “oil, natural gas and coal will not meet all of the world’s needs to the year 2030.” Later, he added, “the most cost effective steps we can take to address this energy and environmental challenge is to extend our energy efficiency gains.” Weeks earlier, Nauman had concluded in his January email that emissions would increase through 2030 despite such gains. “We would like them to be lower, but given the state of technology, given the need for energy, given the practical choices for energy, emissions rise despite aggressive efficiency gains,” Nauman wrote. In 2008, Exxon announced it would stop funding think tanks and other groups that questioned climate science, saying their positions “could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.” Exxon researchers continued to support scientific research that cast doubt on climate science and its impacts, documents show. Later in 2008, Gene Tunison, a manager of global regulatory affairs and research planning, said Exxon should direct a scientist to help the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s influential lobbying group, write a paper about climate science uncertainty.’ “I support [Exxon] co-authoring a paper on uncertainty in measuring GHGs,” Tunison wrote in an email. Tillerson also pushed back against some of the dire consequences of rising temperatures predicted by climate scientists. After a 2011 meeting, Tillerson’s chief of staff, William Colton, emailed colleagues about the CEO’s feedback on a draft disclosure about carbon emissions. Tillerson wanted the words “weather extremes and storms” deleted. “His view was that even mentioning a possible connection between climate change and weather was possibly giving the notion more credibility than he would like,” Colton wrote. During a 2012 board meeting about “Developments in Climate Science and Policy,” Exxon board member Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said there was “still uncertainty in predicting future climate changes and impacts.” “Money and effort spent on climate change is misplaced,” said Brabeck-Letmathe, the former CEO of Nestlé. In December 2015, Exxon publicly stated its support of the just-signed Paris climate agreement, a nonbinding United Nations treaty that commits countries to work to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Climate scientists have warned that if Earth warms more than 2 degrees it could cross irreversible climate tipping points. During his Senate confirmation hearing to become Secretary of State in 2017, Tillerson said he supported staying in the agreement. Months before the treaty was signed, Tillerson had expressed skepticism about its aims. Following a presentation on climate science to Exxon’s board of directors in April 2015, Tillerson called the 2 degrees target “something magical,” according to a summary of the meeting. “Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough,” said Tillerson, noting that it was “very expensive” to cut the emissions needed to meet such a target. “When people like Tillerson argue that 2 degrees is magical, it’s in the context of how you try,” said Field, the former IPCC co-chair. “Two degrees can be affordable with the right costs and benefits globally, even if it is not the right costs and benefits for Exxon.” Last week, the United Nations warned countries are far from meeting the Paris agreement’s goals. Exxon said in August that the world isn’t currently on track to reach the targets of the agreement, which it continues to support publicly. Shortly after replacing Tillerson in 2017, Darren Woods spread the word that he was in search of transformative new ideas. A plan to invest in offshore wind projects made its way to the most senior levels of the company, according to people familiar with the proposal. Karen Hughes, a former top official in the George W. Bush administration and an adviser to Exxon, said she counseled that investing in renewable energy would be good for the environment and improve the company’s reputation. To date, Woods hasn’t invested in renewable energy, arguing it’s a low-return business outside Exxon’s skill set. Instead the company has vowed to spend about $3.4 billion a year on average through 2027 curbing its emissions and helping other companies do the same, and investing in areas including carbon capture, biofuels and lithium mining. It also recently struck a deal to buy Denbury , which operates a large network of pipelines that move carbon dioxide, for about $5 billion. Exxon currently plans to spend as much as $25 billion a year in capital expenditures through 2027, mostly on oil and gas.

Även om väst har dragit tillbaka sina trupper från landet pågår fortfarande ett kulturellt krig mellan talibanerna och väst. Det skriver två analytiker i Foreign Affairs. USA och dess allierade vill se ökade rättigheter för kvinnor, samtidigt som talibanerna vägrar acceptera vad de anser vara en feministisk agenda. Ju längre Afghanistan isoleras, desto sämre blir landets chanser att återhämta sig från den ekonomiska och humanitära kris som råder, skriver artikelförfattarna. För miljontals afghaners skull, menar de, måste västerländska aktörer finna gemensamma vägar för att förbättra relationerna med talibanerna. Annars, varnar vissa, kan talibanerna bara bli ännu svårare att ha att göra med. How to Help Afghanistan Without Normalizing Relations By Graeme Smith and Ibraheem Bahiss August 11, 2023 It has been two years since the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan. But earlier this summer, in a government office in Kabul overlooking a well-tended garden, a mid-level Taliban official lamented that the country remains locked in a political standoff. Regional and Western actors cannot agree about how to deal with the Taliban, he complained; even after the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan, the West is still fighting a culture war. The United States and its allies want the Taliban to lift their restrictions on women’s rights, but the Taliban will not accept what they see as a feminist agenda. Governments from Beijing to Washington, meanwhile, have demanded that the Taliban form an inclusive government. At peace talks in Doha before August 2021, Taliban representatives offered to share power with opposing Afghan factions for the sake of ending conflict. But since winning the war, they have reserved the right to exclude politicians not in the Taliban from the cabinet. Taliban leaders complain that “inclusivity” is little more than a vague talking point that could mean anything from broader participation in governance (which they are willing to consider, at least for men) to inclusion of political figures from the defeated government (which they are not). And so Afghanistan remains at an impasse, with no realistic pathway for the government to shake off its pariah status, escape sanctions, and take a seat at the United Nations. The Taliban refuse compromises that undermine their standing with core supporters and, in their view, corrupt their moral values. For their part, Western officials argue that it would be against their own values, and politically damaging, to accredit diplomats from a regime that so flagrantly discriminates against women. Even sending a U.S. envoy to Kabul remains a controversial idea in Washington, and the Biden administration has refrained from doing so. Formal diplomatic recognition of the Taliban could take years, if it ever happens. These years cannot be wasted. Sanctions, asset freezes, and other economic restrictions that isolate Afghanistan have crippled its chances of recovering from an economic crisis that, for the last two years, the United Nations has called the world’s largest humanitarian disaster. Banking, aviation, and other critical sectors are hobbled. More than half the country’s people cannot satisfy their basic household needs. Pledges of humanitarian aid have fallen as donors turn away. For the sake of millions of Afghans, regional actors as well as Western governments and institutions must work to establish more functional relationships with the Taliban. After spending several months in Afghanistan speaking to Taliban officials and the foreign dignitaries who negotiate with them, we concluded that, even though Afghanistan’s reentry into the community of nations remains a distant prospect, there are substantial practical steps that the outside world can take in the service of peace, stability, and security. Diplomats should move quickly to break the current paralysis. The situation reminded the Taliban Foreign Ministry staffer of a local parable about a cow and its butchers: “The butchers disagree about how to carve up the animal. They bicker for so long that the cow dies of old age and nobody gets to eat.” The Taliban regime may be a pariah government, but Afghanistan does not exist in isolation. It anchors a region with neighbors who badly need it to recover; if Afghans continue to suffer, so will millions of others nearby. The Taliban are trying to cement their power with displays of state building: they have been improving dams around the country, flying drones over water projects, and filling social media with the footage of their works in progress. Whatever the world thinks, the Taliban now run a country, with aims and urgent needs. Afghanistan’s region cannot wait in a holding pattern for the world to strike a grand bargain with the Taliban on diplomatic recognition. Most of Afghanistan’s neighbors wanted the departure of foreign troops and were pleased when the U.S. withdrawal ended an extraordinarily deadly war. But now that American forces are no longer combating transnational militants in the region, Afghanistan’s neighbors worry the Taliban cannot, or will not, fill the gap. China, for its part, wants the Taliban to hand over Uyghur militants based in Afghanistan, but the Taliban have adopted a softer policy of resettling them far from the Afghan-Chinese border. Central Asian countries have similar security concerns and get identical responses. Pakistan, which has supported the Taliban since the group’s inception in the 1990s, wants Kabul to crack down on the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a jihadi group intermittently at war with Islamabad since 2007. The TTP has a presence in Afghanistan, despite Taliban denials, and TPP-related incidents in Pakistan have increased since mid-2021, resulting in three times as many fatalities than in the two years before the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul. Also deeply troubling for most of the neighbors, and for Western countries, is the ongoing presence in Afghanistan of the Islamic State Khorasan Province, an affiliate of the group known as ISIS. Taliban security forces have become adept at killing ISKP leaders, sometimes with the apparent assistance of foreign intelligence agencies. But the Taliban have been unable to subdue the group entirely, and neighboring states remain worried that ISKP could still use Afghanistan as a base from which to threaten other countries. Information-sharing remains limited because the Taliban have not established much trust with regional and international security agencies. Part of the problem lies with the Taliban: they deny that some militant threats exist. Meanwhile, other governments in the region—Russia, especially—stoke paranoia among the Taliban by claiming, absurdly, that ISKP and other militant groups are backed by the United States. But it does not help that UN monitoring teams, which used to visit Afghanistan to research and publish analyses of terrorist threats, have not returned since the Taliban takeover. Those monitors are unlikely to return any time soon, because they accept information only from UN member states—and the Taliban do not sit in Afghanistan’s UN seat. But in the meantime, other multilateral forums could serve as a stopgap. Afghanistan has observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which was founded by China and Russia in 2001 and includes all of Afghanistan’s neighbors. The Taliban want to join its discussions about security. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization appears reluctant to welcome the Taliban, and authorities in Kabul might have to settle for the kind of regional meetings hosted by Uzbekistan in recent years. But regardless of the forum, the countries surrounding Afghanistan need to sit down with the Taliban and talk about their mutual security needs. Kabul has legitimate concerns about anti-Taliban militants sneaking across its borders, and its neighbors need to prevent illegal immigrants, drugs, guns, and jihadis from crossing into their territory from Afghanistan. These kinds of practical conversations seem unlikely to harden the Taliban’s stances on big issues that foreign governments care about—and they would have many possible benefits. Regional security forums could push the Taliban toward regularizing border management, or at least keeping their fighters away from the edges of neighboring countries unless they are uniformed guards. The Taliban might accept help professionalizing their border forces with better training and equipment, and they and their neighbors could together install new technologies for border screening and customs integration. Neighboring countries might also agree to give back Afghan aircraft stranded in their territory since 2021. All the security interventions in the world cannot make the lives of Afghans or their neighbors better without economic improvements. Here, too, there are many possible collaborations that do not entail formal diplomatic recognition. The Taliban want their highways—and, eventually, railways—to serve as trading connections with South Asia. Kabul dreams of electrical corridors and gas pipelines linking the region. But as the world heats up, the most urgent regional cooperation efforts should focus on water management. Afghanistan is mostly upstream from countries next door, but it has fewer dams and irrigation systems. Decades of war have smashed infrastructure and stalled development. Climate change is exacerbating flooding and droughts. The Taliban’s flagship water project is a new canal system in the north called Qosh Tepa, which would divert water from the Amu Darya, a large river, for irrigation. The Taliban’s desire to manage water resources is understandable and necessary, but they are plowing ahead without regard for their neighbors. The Amu Darya also irrigates vast swaths of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and officials in those countries worry about their cotton fields, and their exports, withering. Tehran, for its part, complains that the Taliban are taking too much water from the Helmand and other rivers that flow into Iran. Disagreements over water rights have almost surely contributed to deadly clashes between Taliban and Iranian security forces. Coordination and investment by both Afghanistan and Iran is necessary not only to forestall violent conflict over water; both countries also need it to grow. Iran cannot afford to let its rivers dry up, and business in landlocked Afghanistan cannot flourish without access to Iranian ports such as Chabahar, which could be threatened if border tensions escalate. A blueprint for better cooperation already exists in the form of a 1973 water treaty between the two countries, which guaranteed Iran fixed amounts of water. Negotiations at the time included discussions about increasing Afghan trade through Iranian seaports. That treaty was never implemented because of political upheaval in both countries, but the old deal could serve as the basis for today’s negotiations. New infrastructure is also required to measure river flows and, especially, to use water more efficiently. Iran and Afghanistan could in theory achieve such climate adaptations themselves. But they are both saddled with foreign sanctions, and the barriers to securing expertise and funding for such ventures are multiplied. Getting help from organizations such as the World Bank is not only a matter of technical assistance; it could help with the politics of water. A cautionary tale of what happens if the Taliban are left to their own devices is unfolding on Afghanistan’s northern border. Uzbekistan has offered technical support for the Qosh Tepa project to help the Taliban avoid the risk of routing a river into an improperly engineered trench, but the Taliban have resisted what they see as foreign meddling in their flagship project. The neighbors have leverage—Afghanistan imports most of its electricity from Central Asia—but their bilateral outreach to the Taliban on water issues has not worked so far. Still, there is room for agreements or tacit understandings that address the concerns of the Taliban and other countries. The Taliban could make deals in multilateral discussions on watershed management and climate adaptation. For example, the hosts of the COP28 climate summit, which starts in November, could invite the Taliban to attend. The United Arab Emirates, the organizers of the event, will need to weigh the opprobrium that hangs over the Taliban against the much greater benefit of including all regimes in talks about how to survive a worsening climate. These regional, piecemeal solutions might provide international actors a template for how to deal with the Taliban in the short term. More than a few Western leaders just want to forget Afghanistan. Ignoring the country allows them to avoid the shameful topic of a lost war. Some prominent voices, including in these pages, are demanding that more pressure be put on the Taliban and holding out hope for regime change, although the Taliban show no signs of collapse. Others may nurture a hope that undermining the Afghan regime will leave a mess on the doorsteps of China, Iran, and Russia. And others who want to negotiate a better future for ordinary Afghans, especially women and girls, may believe that withholding money and help will give them leverage if and when negotiations begin over the normalization of diplomatic relations. When formal negotiations begin, this theory goes, Western officials could use promises of future support to extract concessions from the Taliban—although in the past, the Taliban have rarely been swayed by such incentives. But there are more ways to support Afghanistan than many acknowledge. And regional solutions often need international backing, whether that be a Western government’s OK to send equipment for Taliban border guards or a yes vote from the World Bank to go ahead with water infrastructure projects. Financing through the Global Environment Facility, the Green Climate Fund, and the Adaptation Fund could substantially help defray infrastructure costs, but Afghanistan’s access to these funds has been suspended since the Taliban’s takeover. Regional diplomats are trying to deal with the Taliban on security, economic, and environmental concerns. But an official at an understaffed embassy in Kabul admitted to us that the to-do list feels daunting. Day-to-day engagement with the Taliban now mostly falls to officials like him, who draw on limited budgets that do not match the size of the problems. Western sanctions also constrain local actions. For instance, it is hard for regional governments or private investors to get loans to build infrastructure in Afghanistan; grants from international donors used to provide much of the financing for such projects. And many of the problems facing Kabul—for example, its lack of budgeting, banking, and development-strategy expertise—are the kind of development challenges typically financed by Western countries. But Western donors are withholding development assistance and offering less humanitarian aid, which has fallen to about 25 per cent of last year’s humanitarian funding so far in 2023. “If your engagement is mostly based on humanitarian assistance and that assistance is declining, then your ‘engagement strategy’ is really a disengagement strategy,” a Western official in Kabul told us. Afghanistan’s economic and security troubles cannot be ignored indefinitely, not least because the people who suffer most from instability and deprivation are often women and girls. The neighborhood cannot simply “stop and wait,” a regional diplomat told us. He said that regional actors “on the frontlines” need international backing. Two years after the Taliban’s ascent to power, it is worth listening to the nearby countries that now spend substantially more time talking to Kabul’s new leadership than do Western diplomats, and who have the most to lose if the country crumbles. They are saying that the world cannot let Afghanistan become a failed state and that global isolation will only make the Taliban more difficult to work with. Pursuing and supporting regional cooperation does not mean giving up hope for talks between the Taliban and the world about achieving recognition. Diplomats must keep chipping away at the hard positions that block progress toward a full normalization. One modest step forward occurred earlier this year in Doha, when UN Secretary-General António Guterres convened a meeting of international envoys to Afghanistan. The envoys agreed that the conditions are not right for recognition of the Taliban—even if they did not spell out the conditions. But in his public comments, Guterres concluded that such gatherings should continue, to fight terrorism and drug trafficking and promote inclusivity and women’s rights. And earlier this year, the UN Security Council mandated an independent review of all international engagement with Afghanistan; that report will be delivered in November. In many ways, Western countries remain Afghanistan’s gatekeepers. Someday, a Taliban regime that respects human rights might be fully welcomed into the club of nations. That day, however, is distant. The West cannot stand around and wait for the cow to die. The region is struggling, and both Afghans and their neighbors deserve to eat. © 2023 Council on Foreign Relations, publisher of Foreign Affairs. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. Read the original article at Foreign Affairs.

Småbarnsmamman Courtney rökte marijuana för första gången när hon var 17 år – två decennier senare kämpar hon för att bli kvitt sitt missbruk. Hon säger till Washington Post att hon ofta tappar tråden mitt i en mening och har svårt att koncentrera sig när hon leker med sin son. – Det har varit så frustrerande för jag tas inte på allvar. Folk säger bara att det inte är lika farligt som metamfetamin eller alkohol, de tror inte att det är ett riktigt beroende, säger 37-åringen. Samtidigt uppskattar myndigheterna att minst 16 miljoner amerikaner är beroende cannabis, vilket skulle göra det till landets näst största missbrukargrupp. (Svensk översättning av Omni). By David Ovalle and Fenit Nirappil 31 July, 2023 Courtney took her first marijuana puffs at 17. Two decades later, she was raising a toddler son and hiding her dependence from most family members. She would light her pipe more than a dozen times a day, sneaking to the garage of her Missouri home while her son napped. She still loves the earthy smell. But weed long ago stopped making her giggly. It was not unusual for the 37-year-old to lose her train of thought mid-conversation or zone out while playing with her son. Many times, Courtney said, she tried to quit, flushing her stash and dumping her pipe to no avail, except for the nine months she was pregnant. Courtney felt she was addicted. "It's been frustrating because you're not taken seriously," Courtney said. "People say it's not as severe as meth, or alcohol, that it's not that bad. They think it's not an addiction." At a time when marijuana has been legalized for recreational and medicinal use in more than 20 states - and the potency of the drug has been increased - many experts believe that most people can use it without significant negative consequences, not unlike enjoying occasional alcoholic drinks. But for users like Courtney, the struggles to quit are real and complicated by the powerful cultural perception that marijuana is natural and therapeutic, not a substance that can be addicting. Courtney's story reflects broader tensions about marijuana's health consequences. For decades, weed's deleterious health effects were exaggerated, experts said, leading to excessive criminalization. But as legal recreational sales have expanded - Maryland in July became the latest state to permit sale of marijuana products for recreational use - the suggestion that marijuana is addictive has often met with derision, especially because science isn't always clear on the benefits and harms. There can be reluctance to seek treatment. And other substances stir deeper fears and greater attention: Opioids are driving an overdose crisis killing more than 100,000 people each year in the United States. "Because there are so many mixed messages in our society about cannabis, I think it's very easy for people to minimize and rationalize problematic use of cannabis," said Aaron Norton, a Florida mental health counselor who supports legalization of recreational and medical marijuana but believes it should be more tightly regulated. Courtney and other marijuana users interviewed by The Washington Post spoke on the condition that only their first name or initials be used because they fear being stigmatized or because relatives or employers are not aware of their use. Twenty-three states and D.C. have legalized recreational marijuana, and all of those states except for Virginia and Minnesota have recreational sales up and running. Medical use is lawful in 38 states. The number of regular users has increased. According to a 2019 federal government survey, an estimated 31.6 million people age 12 or older used marijuana within the past month, up from 22.2 million five years earlier. The estimate rose to 36.4 million in 2021, although the numbers are not directly comparable because researchers changed how they collect data. Medical experts and even many proponents of legalized marijuana acknowledge it can be addictive - akin to alcohol or some prescription drugs. Estimates vary on the prevalence of what is known as cannabis use disorder. One study from researchers at Columbia University and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that nearly 3 in 10 users in 2012-2013 experienced cannabis use disorder. "The majority of people who use cannabis products in general can handle it," said Adrianne Trogden, a Louisiana addiction counselor. "But there are still people who cannot - and they need help." Darren Weiss, president of Verano, a cannabis company operating in 14 states, agreed that public health and industry officials should not dismiss the potential for cannabis to be abused, but maintained that concerns are often overwrought. "Addiction is a fact of life," Weiss said. "There are folks who are addicted to caffeine, to sex, to all sorts of different things." The rise in marijuana use among teens has been highly publicized, along with concerns about the effects of more potent products on the developing adolescent brain. In May, the National Institute on Drug Abuse published a study asserting that young men with cannabis-use disorder have an increased risk of developing schizophrenia, although critics have pointed to other studies that cast doubt on the extent of the role marijuana plays in psychotic episodes. Further fueling concerns among some experts: In the 1990s, THC, the psychoactive compound responsible for inducing a high, constituted about 5 percent of a typical joint or smoke from a bong or pipe, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Today, the THC content in smokable marijuana in recreational products can range between 15 and 21 percent, while products popular with young people such as edibles and oils can contain well over 50 percent. Higher THC levels could increase the risk the brain will get conditioned to want more of the high-potency marijuana, said Nora Volkow, NIDA's director. Last year, a study published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry found that higher potency THC was associated with an increased risk of cannabis use disorder. Weiss questioned claims that higher potency marijuana is more likely to cause addiction. Still, he acknowledged that companies market to cannabis enthusiasts who will pay more for higher-potency products - because of the economics of the industry. If marijuana could be sold by pharmacy chains or liquor stores, Weiss said there would be more incentive to sell lower-potency products marketed at casual consumers. More sales of lower-octane marijuana to a broader customer base would equal higher revenue, he said. "There are a lot of people who demonize industry and think we are pushing high potency, similar to what the tobacco industry did, as a way of hooking consumers … and it couldn't be further from the truth," Weiss said. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimates at least 16.3 million people in the United States had a cannabis-use disorder in 2021, putting it behind only alcohol. The agency's yearly estimates rose in 2020 after it incorporated broadened American Psychiatric Association criteria on diagnosing substance use disorders. Most cannabis-use disorder cases were characterized as mild, which means patients experience just two or three of 11 benchmark symptoms, such as increased tolerance, intense cravings or repeated attempts to stop marijuana use. An estimated 26 percent of cases are considered moderate, while 16 percent are severe, according to SAMHSA's National Survey on Drug Use and Health. "It's the second-most common addiction Americans are struggling with, but nobody hears about it," said James H. Berry, a psychiatrist and addiction expert at West Virginia University. Still, experts caution that mild cases of cannabis-use disorder may not fit under what the public generally considers "addiction." The effect on users' lives may be less severe - perhaps marijuana smoking has merely caused friction with a spouse. For those patients, interventions are typically geared toward minimizing the drug's harm, said Trogden, the Louisiana counselor: "Maybe some counseling sessions, [introducing] some coping strategies, or education on how to use responsibly," she said. For people who consume medical marijuana, the risk of being misdiagnosed with a use disorder is a real threat, said Tammy Chung, an addiction researcher at Rutgers University. They can meet criteria for a use disorder, such as developing withdrawal symptoms and a higher tolerance for THC, despite being under the supervision of a medical provider. "The threshold for cannabis-use disorder is relatively low," said Chung, who has recommended revamping how the disorder is diagnosed. E.H., a 44-year-old San Francisco-area schoolteacher, was never formally diagnosed with cannabis use disorder but had a medical marijuana card for years. He believes his decades of smoking marijuana day and night affected his life in profound ways. His habit was costing up to $300 a week, and he obsessed about needing to stay high. E.H. stopped using marijuana for a few years - until California legalized recreational marijuana in 2016. He waited in line at a dispensary for hours to buy a celebratory joint, then quickly spiraled back into daily use. Today, he said he has been sober for nearly a year after joining Marijuana Anonymous. But he's sheepish about telling people about his struggle lest they chide him for betraying the California counterculture cool of his youth. "It feels like if you don't smoke marijuana, you're one of the sellouts," E.H. said. It's not unusual for people to turn to recreational marijuana products, believing they treat assorted ailments - and doing so without a doctor's guidance. Smita Das, an addiction psychiatrist at Stanford University, said she encounters patients who use marijuana to treat anxiety. "But what we know is that actually [the marijuana] is probably worsening their anxiety over time," Das said. People with more serious addiction issues confront challenges in seeking care, including a lack of affordable treatment and few beds in rehabilitation centers, said Eric A. Voth, a retired addiction specialist and member of the International Academy on the Science and Impact of Cannabis, an organization of doctors that educates about the potential harms of marijuana. Voth said that while criminal courts often mandate treatment, for others living on the streets, "there's really no one pressing you to get into treatment." He recalled a 24-year-old man in Colorado living under a bridge and dealing with psychiatric problems exacerbated by marijuana. He was finally accepted into a rehabilitation program that specializes in the intersection of addiction and mental health disorders and improved, but later relapsed on cannabis and then fentanyl. The man's mother said early recovery was complicated by doctors dismissive of THC playing a role in her son's mental health crises. "He gets mixed messages in the recovery world and in society, he sure does, too," said the mother, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her son's privacy. "Young people are being told it's totally safe." Ben Cort, who leads the Colorado center where the man was treated, acknowledged that activists sounding alarms about the health consequences of cannabis have a credibility problem following a history of racially disparate enforcement of drug laws and exaggerated claims about marijuana's harmful effects. "'Reefer Madness' comes out, then the stiff penalties and everybody's like, 'It's weed. What's the big deal?'" Cort said. "You went from this huge overstatement of risk to this dramatic understatement of risk." Unlike with opioids, alcohol and even tobacco use disorders, no medication exists to treat marijuana addiction - although that could soon change. On June 8, French biopharmaceutical company Aelis Farma announced promising research on a drug that blocks harmful signals sent by THC to key receptors in the brain, without disrupting those receptors enough to cause harmful psychiatric effects. Volunteers taking the drug reported marijuana had less of an effect, without experiencing withdrawal, said Meg Haney, director of the Cannabis Research Laboratory at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, who ran the NIDA-funded study. She said the drug could one day help compulsive users. "There's evidence to show if you can go from being a daily smoker down to two, three, even four days a week, you already show important changes in your quality of life," Haney said. For now, treatment revolves around behavioral therapy. The Veterans Health Administration offers patients gift cards for canteen services if they forgo marijuana, a treatment known as contingency management. Health records show the rate of veterans under age 35 diagnosed with the disorder more than doubled between 2005 and 2019. M.B., a 24-year-old from Southern California, credits her recovery to Marijuana Anonymous, modeled after 12-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Even within those groups, M.B. said, people with marijuana addictions aren't always taken seriously. "The problems that come up with cannabis-use disorder are very real. This was not always something that was talked about," she said. "We were sort of laughed out of 12-step spaces." She smoked daily throughout her teen years before she was diagnosed with cannabis-use disorder when she was about 20. At rock bottom, M.B. said, she smoked or used a vape pen roughly every hour, often waking up at night to take hits. M.B. said she believes her habit led to at least one psychotic episode and to the draining of her finances, even as she lived at home with her parents. She spent so much buying weed that she stole money from family to pay bills. M.B. joined the program online in 2020 during the height of the pandemic, although the withdrawals weren't easy. For about a week, she couldn't keep down food, suffered intense headaches and felt so uncomfortable that she showered constantly. "I was really angry, crying all the time," M.B. said. "I had really intense dreams that I was smoking." For Courtney, the young mother from Missouri, quitting wasn't made easier after the state in fall 2022 became the 21st to legalize recreational marijuana. Missouri's nascent weed industry has boomed - combined sales of recreational and medical marijuana could top $1 billion this year. "You smell it in the air when you're sitting at a stoplight," Courtney said. She tried Marijuana Anonymous meetings online, but it wasn't the right fit. She considered an outpatient treatment center, but the nearest was 45 minutes away - too far to drive while raising a toddler. Instead, her group therapy came in the form of a Reddit forum dedicated to supporting people who want to stop consuming marijuana products. The forum is dotted with stories on the effects of withdrawal, including panic attacks, insomnia and bouts of crying, but also triumphs: long anxiety-relieving walks, regular yoga, improved family time. A few days after detailing her struggles to a reporter, Courtney reflected on the future. Did she want her son growing up to see her smoking marijuana so often? So she smashed her glass pipe and flushed her remaining weed. The cravings weren't as bad as she feared. But she has suffered irritability, headaches, a loss of appetite, night sweats and vivid dreams. "I still feel like the worst is ahead of me," Courtney said after five days without using. She and her husband earlier bought tickets to attend a three-day music festival, where the smell of marijuana wafting in the air would be a certainty. They decided to forge ahead with a plan: If she felt uncomfortable, they would leave. The last night of the festival, Courtney relapsed with a smoke. But since then, Courtney says, she has been clean for two months. "I'm doing really well," she said. "I feel clearheaded and more present." © 2023 The Washington Post. Sign up for the Today's Worldview newsletter here.

Sedan han tog makten 2012 har Xi Jinpings fokus varit regimens säkerhet. Han har rensat ut dissidenter, byggt en övervakningsapparat utan motstycke i historien och tycks till och med beredd att offra ekonomisk tillväxt för trygghet. Det skriver Asienexperten och statsvetarprofessorn Sheena Chestnut Greitens i Foreign Affairs. Men paradoxalt nog kan Xis besatthet av säkerhet sätta Kina på kollisionskurs med andra länder – och skapa stor osäkerhet i omvärlden, enligt Chestnut Greitens. Why China Is Digging In at Home and Asserting Itself Abroad By Sheena Chestnut Greitens July 28, 2023 Since he came to power in 2012, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping has been laser-focused on ensuring the security of his regime. He has purged potential political rivals, restructured the military and internal security apparatus, built an Orwellian surveillance state, and pushed through repressive new laws in the name of national security. Undergirding all these initiatives is what Xi calls the “comprehensive national security concept,” a framework for protecting China’s socialist system and the governing authority of the Chinese Communist Party, including that of Xi himself. In an article in Foreign Affairs last October, I wrote that China’s leadership had begun to project that concept abroad through foreign policy, pursuing a grand strategy centered on regime security. In an effort to ward off external threats to China’s domestic stability and head off any possible challenges to CCP rule, Beijing seeks to weaken U.S. alliances and partnerships and promote its own model of internal security abroad. Much has changed since last October. The CCP abruptly unwound its harsh “zero COVID” policies after a wave of unusual public opposition. China’s post–pandemic economic recovery has faltered, with slow growth, a troubled property sector, and slumping foreign investment—in part because Beijing’s drive for security has led it to clamp down on foreign businesses. And as the war in Ukraine has continued, Beijing’s stance on the conflict has heightened tensions with Europe, one of China’s largest trading partners. But none of this has dented China’s commitment to security, either at home or abroad. Early clues from Xi’s third term as the country’s leader suggest that regime security concerns will continue to drive Chinese foreign policy, heightening tensions with Western countries and with some of China’s neighbors. The paradox at the heart of Xi’s quest to neutralize all threats to CCP rule is that an ostensibly defensive goal at home, protecting regime security, demands that China take increasingly assertive actions abroad. These actions, in turn, invite responses from other countries that only heighten Beijing’s fears—an escalatory cycle with no obvious off-ramp. In his “work report” to the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, Xi reminded listeners that before he became China’s preeminent leader, the country’s ability to safeguard its national security had been “inadequate” and “insufficient.” A decade after adopting his comprehensive national security concept, however, he said that national security had been “strengthened on all fronts.” He called national security “the bedrock of national rejuvenation” and indicated that China would continue to strengthen its “legal, strategy, and policy systems” for national security. Although much of what Xi said in this address repeated what he or other party leaders had said before, giving these remarks a dedicated section in the party work report for the first time codified them at an authoritative institutional level. In so doing, Xi suggested that his approach will shape Chinese security policy for at least the next five years and probably longer. In May 2023, China’s top leaders affirmed their commitment to comprehensive national security at a meeting of the Central National Security Commission, a body tasked with implementing Xi’s concept. Xi called on those present to grasp China’s “complex and severe” national security environment and to speed modernization of the country’s national security system. At the meeting, the CNSC approved documents related to risk-monitoring and early warning as well as public communication and education on national security. These themes have appeared regularly in Chinese documents and speeches on national security throughout the Xi era. China has, for example, celebrated a “national security education day” on April 15 every year since 2015, the first anniversary of the launching of the comprehensive national security concept. That Xi highlighted these issues in his October 2022 report and the CNSC has since approved related documents suggests that the CCP is now pushing forward with implementation of policies around them. Xi’s recent personnel appointments also indicate that the CCP intends to stay the course it has staked out on national security. Experience with internal security has become an important requirement for promotion to the top echelons of China’s political system. Cai Qi and Ding Xuexiang, both new members of the powerful Politburo Standing Committee, previously ran the CNSC’s General Office, a key role for pushing through Xi’s national security priorities. Other top leaders, including Zhao Leji and Li Qiang, who were named vice chairs of the CNSC alongside Cai at the May 2023 meeting, have worked either within China’s political-legal apparatus or in the party’s discipline and supervision system, which Xi reorganized and empowered to ensure that China’s security forces are responsive to party control. Xi has long seen efforts to root out corruption and strengthen party control over the military and coercive apparatus as important to regime security. A national security leadership team that blends experience in public security, party discipline, and Xi’s particular approach to national security suggests that these forces will operate in increasingly tight lockstep to uphold CCP rule. Other senior appointments also hint at Xi’s priorities for his third term. Chen Wenqing, the new chair of the Central Political-Legal Commission, is a member of the Politburo and a former minister of state security—and the first state security official in decades to fill this role. The new minister of state security, Chen Yixin, was the point person for Xi’s recent anticorruption and “education and rectification” campaigns within the internal security apparatus. Their appointments, in October, were followed in April by the passage of a revised Counterespionage Law that significantly broadened the scope of the law’s potential targets, rendering everything from market research to academic inquiry potentially suspect. Xi’s fixation on state security should not come as a surprise. Shortly before he came to power, the Chinese authorities discovered and disrupted a network of CIA informants in China, news outlets including Reuters and The New York Times have reported. One of the first official documents circulated during Xi’s tenure—the infamous Document No. 9—warned that an infiltration of Western values and ideology could destabilize China. And in a resolution on party history in 2021, the CCP Central Committee highlighted the risks of “encirclement, suppression, disruption, and subversion.” As the China scholars Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil have written, Xi’s rule has been marked by an extended anti-spy campaign and continued exhortations to be vigilant about foreign infiltration. That is in part because Xi sees internal and external security as interconnected: in his view, many of the threats to China’s internal stability come from beyond the country’s borders. Even security initiatives that could seem purely domestic, such as the party’s mass repression of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang, have been motivated at least in part by Xi’s fear that external forces might infiltrate China and threaten internal stability. As a result, Xi has methodically tightened control over any organizations that could transmit foreign influence, including religious groups, nongovernmental organizations, and most recently, foreign businesses. But more than fear of foreign infiltration is driving the securitization of China’s economy and society. During Xi’s tenure, the CCP has also fundamentally rethought the relationship between economics and security. Whereas Chinese leaders once elevated economic growth above all else, Xi and other senior officials now talk about security as a precondition for development. In the October 2022 party work report, for instance, Xi mentioned using a “new security pattern” to safeguard China’s “new development pattern,” phrasing that he repeated at the CNSC meeting in May. This rhetoric holds important clues to where China’s foreign policy is headed. The “new development pattern” refers in part to what the CCP sees as a necessary shift toward greater economic self-sufficiency to insulate the country from external “headwinds”—part of an attempt by Xi and other senior party leaders to ensure that foreign powers cannot cripple China’s economic security and stunt its progress toward “national rejuvenation.” Efforts to boost domestic demand, secure supply chains, and bolster scientific and technological innovation all fall under this heading, as does the 2021 Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law. Beijing has said less about its new security pattern than its new development pattern, but officials have hinted at both its importance and its reach. In April, Minister of State Security Chen Yixin called it “the main task of national security work in the present and the future.” At the CNSC meeting in May 2023, Xi called on party officials to “take the initiative to shape a favorable external security environment for China.” Like previous iterations of China’s national security discourse, this one recycles phrases used in the past. In 2017, Xi called on officials to adopt a “global vision” for national security work and stated that China should proactively shape its external security environment. One feature of Xi’s governance is that official concepts sometimes start as vague phrases, with policy details filled in later. (Other times, buzzwords appear and then fade into irrelevance, but the centrality of national security to Xi’s agenda suggests that it is not likely to disappear.) Despite the vagueness of Xi’s directive, China is seeking to strengthen its position abroad even as it justifies its more assertive behavior on defensive grounds. To protect his regime from outside forces, Xi believes, China must make the international realm more favorable to CCP rule. This is the central paradox of Xi’s preventive theory of regime security and of his view of where threats originate: ostensibly defensive ends at home require increasingly assertive means abroad. Xi’s favored vehicle for externalizing the comprehensive national security concept is the Global Security Initiative, announced in April 2022. Early writing on the GSI by Chinese analysts portrayed it as an effort to harmonize China’s “domestic security and the common security of the world.” A GSI concept paper released by China’s Foreign Ministry in February 2023 begins by referring to “Xi’s new vision of security announced in 2014,” a seemingly veiled reference to the comprehensive national security concept. Xi’s October 2022 work report also described political security—that is, the security of the CCP, its leaders, and the system it runs—as “the fundamental task” while referring to international security as “a support.” The goal of the GSI, in other words, is to use foreign policy to bolster regime security. How exactly this will work probably won’t be clear for several years. The concept paper is vague in places, likely to give the Chinese political system time to flesh out specific initiatives. But it echoes some of the core principles of the comprehensive national security concept—the indivisibility of security and development, and of domestic security and common international security, for instance—and then outlines a long list of well-known regional and global security challenges. In a speech marking the concept paper’s release, Qin Gang, then the foreign minister, was more pointed. He emphasized that “external suppression and containment against China keep escalating,” criticized “Cold War mentality and bloc confrontation,” and warned that just as China could not develop without a peaceful international environment, the world could not be secure “without the security of China.” His remarks echoed previous official statements, including China’s February 2022 announcement of a “no limits” partnership with Russia, that highlighted threats posed by the United States’ network of alliances on China’s periphery—threats that Beijing sees not just as traditional external military challenges but also as fundamental threats to China’s internal security and the stability of CCP authority over Chinese society. Through the GSI, Beijing aims to create new forms of global security governance that bypass or reduce the importance of the U.S. alliance system, thereby blunting Washington’s ability to contain China or foment “color revolutions” inside it—something Chinese leaders fear. This new security architecture does not completely jettison the old; the GSI affirms the importance of the United Nations, for example. But it also seeks to construct new regional and global security orders that advance the priorities and interests of the CCP. China has already called for changes to regional security arrangements in the Middle East, such as a reconciliation agreement that it brokered between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March 2023, publicized on the first anniversary of the GSI’s announcement. Beijing has also begun to build new forums and networks to address nontraditional security challenges (such as terrorism and domestic unrest) that are highlighted in the comprehensive national security concept. In November 2022, for instance, China hosted the Global Public Security Cooperation Forum, a gathering of law enforcement officials from around the world. Beijing is also promoting its model of domestic security and social stability to other countries. In 2021, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Public Security hosted representatives from 108 countries at a “Peaceful China” summit to show off Beijing’s approach to policing and surveillance. Such events seek to portray China as a paragon of domestic security and normalize its approach abroad while the GSI works in parallel to offer police and law enforcement training to those who might wish to emulate China’s example. To support these efforts, China’s internal security officials have increasingly become international diplomats. In 2021, for instance, Chen Wenqing, then the minister of state security and now the chair of the Central Political-Legal Commission, participated in a meeting of regional intelligence officials hosted by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. In May 2023, he met with the head of the Russia’s National Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, suggesting that China is making good on its February 2022 promise to increase cooperation to oppose so-called color revolutions and “attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability.” Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong has been even more visible. Since the 20th Party Congress, he has held a videoconference with counterparts from the Pacific Islands, hosted the Global Public Security Cooperation Forum, welcomed the secretary-general of Interpol to Beijing, spoken at a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting, promoted the GSI at the Islamabad Security Dialogue forum, and met with a half-dozen bilateral counterparts. Conventional wisdom suggests that economic headwinds might prompt China to look to the outside world to stimulate growth. And indeed, Chinese authorities have at times tried to portray the new development pattern as compatible with continued economic openness. But because Xi sees securitization, not economic growth, as the guarantor of regime security, he is willing to accept higher economic costs in order to continue tightening control at home and improving China’s security environment abroad. This is a gamble, given that economic woes can themselves pose problems for regime stability, but Xi’s course appears to be set. China’s efforts to externalize the comprehensive national security concept through the GSI pose serious challenges for the United States. Policymakers should not underestimate the potential for Beijing’s approach to gain traction, both because of the strenuous efforts of Chinese officials and because many world leaders perceive a lack of good alternatives. Too often, the United States has portrayed itself as the chief defender of an international security order that others see as either excluding them or simply failing to solve their most pressing problems. Washington has scolded countries for entertaining Beijing’s solutions while failing to put forward viable alternatives of its own. Yet countries care primarily about solving their own security challenges. They will not reject an initiative that benefits them simply because it also benefits the CCP. But the fact that Beijing is concentrating on building new forums and networks in areas where existing international order is weak or absent, such as nontraditional security threats like crime, terrorism, and domestic unrest, also presents an opportunity for the United States. Washington has a chance to identify areas of cooperation with countries that are dissatisfied with the current global security architecture and offer them an alternative to China’s revisionist approach. For example, U.S. security assistance in Asia, which is largely focused on the military realm, leaves a gap in addressing the region’s many nontraditional security challenges—one that China’s Ministry of Public Security and the GSI have offered to fill. In offering alternatives, the United States should manage expectations. In the short term, Beijing will likely succeed in marketing itself as a “security partner of choice” to repressive leaders whose primary perceived security threats come from their own people and who find the authoritarian elements of China’s model appealing. But as the United States learned during the Cold War, security partnerships without broad popular support can be precarious and sometimes backfire. A positive alternative to China’s plan to address nontraditional security challenges wouldn’t win over everyone, but it could have a far-reaching impact on the institutions and norms of the international system—if the United States acts quickly. The Biden administration has thus far focused its coalition-building efforts mainly on strengthening its existing network of allies and partners. It should complement this approach by seeking to shore up relationships with countries that have not always had close ties with Washington, demonstrating that there is an American vision for a new and inclusive security architecture that meets the needs of a changing world—on crime, on climate security, on migration, and on public safety. Unless the United States adopts a more proactive strategy, it will miss key windows of opportunity—and necessity—to build that architecture, even as Beijing pushes for a new security order aimed first and foremost at cementing long-term CCP control. © 2023 Council on Foreign Relations, publisher of Foreign Affairs. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. Read the original article at Foreign Affairs.