Here, Have Potent Implications for International Affairs

“Today we use the term ‘the world’ with what amounts to brash familiarity. Too often in speaking of such things as the world food problem, the world health problem, world trade, world peace, and world government, we disregard the fact that ‘the world’ is a totality which in the domain of human problems constitutes the ultimate in degree of magnitude and degree of complexity. That is a fact, yes; but another fact is that almost every large problem today is, in truth, a world problem. Those two facts taken together provide thoughtful men with what might realistically be entitled ‘an introduction to humility’ in curing the world’s ills.”

— President Emeritus John Sloan Dickey, 1947 Convocation Address World Outlook An Undergraduate Journal of International Affairs at Dartmouth College

Editors-in-Chief Charles Bateman ‘22 Ben Vagle ‘22

Senior Editors Caleb Benjamin ’23 Jesse Ferraioli ’23 Ian Gill ’23 Sam LeLacheur ’23 Kristabel Konta ’24 Adam Salzman ‘24

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The Editors of World Outlook would like to express gratitude to the John Sloan Dickey Center for its encouragement and assistance. Founders Timothy E. Bixby ’87 Peter M. Lehmann ’85 Anne E. Eldridge ’87 Mark C. Henrie ’87 Peter D. Murane ’87 About the Journal: World Outlook is a student-run journal of international affairs that publishes papers written by undergraduate students. In addition, the journal features interviews with major global thinkers and opinion pieces written by our own staff. Our name and missions are motivated by the words of late Dartmouth President John Sloan Dickey. Please visit our website at http://sites.dartmouth.edu/worldoutlook.

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World Outlook at the John Sloan Dickey Center 6048 Haldeman Dartmouth College Hanover, NH 03755 Spring 2021 Issue 59 Contents

Essays

Public Diplomacy, Soft Power, and Global Public Perceptions of the United States Karin Y. Kitsuda...... 7

Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia: Chinese Foreign Interference through Cyberwarfare, Influence Operations, and Coercion Adam Foster...... 18

Unavoidable Aspects of Migrant Labor: Analysis of Race, Gender, and Class in the Kafala System in Contemporary Middle East Warisha Siddiqui...... 39

Between a Canal and a Hard Alliance Jacob C. Lefkowitz...... 47

Saying Bye to Binaries: The Transformative Potential of Trans Studies in Interna- tional Relations Arin Yost...... 66

George W. Bush and the Darfur Genocide: An Application of Prospect Theory Gabrielle Levy...... 87

Anatomy of Catastrophe in Cuba: Defective Decision-Making Structures and President Kennedy’s Authorization of Operation Zapata Annie Farrell...... 95

Building Blocs: BRICS Coalition Making and Their Impact on the WTO Sylvia Lorico...... 110 Editor’s Note The past year has been characterized by intense change—the COVID pandemic has had a transformative impact on people around the globe; competition between great powers, such as the U.S., China, and Russia, has intensified; and domestic political shifts, in the U.S. and elsewhere, have potent implications for international affairs. Such a chaotic environment demands new objectives and policies from all nations. This issue of World Outlook explores some of the changes affecting the world and examines theoretical frameworks and past events that can explain how foreign policymakers may navigate them.

“Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia: Chinese Foreign Interference through Cyberwarfare, Influence Operations, and Coercion,” by Adam Foster; “Unavoidable Aspects of Migrant Labor: Analysis of Race, Gender, and Class in the Kafala System in Contempo- rary Middle East,” by Warisha Siddiqui; and “Building Blocs: BRICS Coalition Making and Their Impact on the WTO,” by Sylvia Lorico, examine two key issues in international affairs: the re-emergence of great power competition and the multifaceted, vexing impacts of globalization. Collectively, these papers are a reminder of how changes in international structure can combine with worldwide cultural and economic integration to create today’s challenges.

Crucially, the trends outlined above don’t just impact states, they affect people too. In “Say- ing Bye to Binaries: The Transformative Potential of Trans Studies in International Rela- tions,” Arin Yost outlines how a trans IR framework can allow scholars to more authentically center individual backgrounds and motivations when studying foreign policy.

Lastly, this issue explores how foreign policymaking mechanisms—specifically those of the U.S.—can offer lessons for navigating today’s challenges. In her paper, “Public Diplomacy, Soft Power, and Global Public Perceptions of the United States,” Karin Kitsuda analyzes the impact of U.S. public diplomacy expenditure on U.S soft power, highlighting the importance of international engagement to positive global perceptions of the U.S. Next, Gabrielle Levy, in “George W. Bush and the Darfur Genocide: An Application of Prospect Theory,” examines how political considerations caused the Bush Administration to declare a genocide in Darfur. Finally, Jacob Lefkowitz’s “Between a Canal and a Hard Alliance” and Annie Far- rell’s “Anatomy of Catastrophe in Cuba: Defective Decision-Making Structures and President Kennedy’s Authorization of Operation Zapata’’ examine the causes of President Eisenhower and Kennedy’s great foreign policy failures, and, in the process, suggest ways in which to avoid future crises.

We chose these papers because we believe they offer important lessons on the foreign policy challenges of our time and demonstrate how today’s policymakers may respond to them. Selecting these articles was an incredible intellectual experience, and we hope that you find them as enjoyable to read as we did.

Sincerely, Charles Bateman ‘22 and Ben Vagle ‘22 Editors-in-Chief 7

Public Diplomacy, Soft Power, and Global Public Perceptions of the United States Karin Y. Kitsuda

Soft power is defined as the ability to influence favorable outcomes through attraction, and is critical for the United States’ ability to pursue its interests abroad. As a key tool for promoting soft power, public diplomacy is used by governments to attract the publics of other countries. This paper examines public survey and government spending data to analyze trends in global perceptions of the United States and public diplomacy spending by the United States government under presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Findings indicate that global attitudes toward the United States have fluctuated under each president, with global confidence and favorability being the highest under President Obama. Although public diplomacy spending has increased over time, it falls short of accommodating the concurrent growth in the global audience. A significant positive correlation is found between public diplomacy spending per foreign citizen and global favorability rates of the United States when comparing trends under Bush Jr., Obama, and Trump’s presidencies. A weak relationship was found between public diplomacy spending per foreign citizen and global confidence in the current United States president, however this may be explained by a lack of available data and the relatively shorter amount of time that Trump has spent in office. To prevent the further decline of American influence abroad and to recover American soft power, the United States government should recommit to public diplomacy and increase its public diplomacy appropriations.

Introduction Soft power, as defined by Joseph S. Nye Jr., is the ability to bring about desirable outcomes through the means of attraction rather than payments or coercion (Nye 2008, 94). A country’s soft power grows out of the attractiveness of its culture, political values, and policies. This has significant implications on the foreign policies of a country such as the United States, as the attractiveness of the United States to other countries has ramifications for their willingness to cooperate with and make concessions to it. If the United States can influence other countries to want the same outcomes that it does, then it does not need to spend as much on “carrot-and-stick” diplomacy, or the hard power of coercive threats and payments. Therefore, soft power enhances Amer- ican interests abroad and is critical for the United States’ ability to achieve its desired outcomes (Rugh 2004; Nye 2004, 256–260). Public diplomacy is an important tool for exercising soft power. Broadly defined, public diplomacy is a “government’s efforts to conduct foreign policy and promote national interests through direct outreach and communication with the population of a foreign country” (Nakamura and Weed 2009, i). Its potential was first demonstrated during the Cold War, when it played a critical role in the American

Karin Y. Kitsuda was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan and graduated in September 2020 from the Uni- versity of California, Los Angeles with a major in political science and a minor in global studies. Her academic research focused on sustainable development and global affairs, and she is now pursuing a career in these fields. 8 Karin Y. Kitsuda victory by enhancing perceptions of the United States, reducing tensions, and undermining faith in Communism among the Soviet public (Nye 2008, 98). In foreign policy, governments use public diplomacy as an instrument to attract the publics of foreign countries rather than solely their governments. Through various types of public diplomacy, a government can draw a foreign public’s attention toward the values expressed in its culture, the examples it sets through its policies and practices, and the relations between itself and other countries (Nye 2008, 95). Notable public diplomacy strategies include broadcasts, subsidized cultural exports, educational and cultural exchanges, and the Peace Corps (Nye 2004, 267). A study comparing the voting habits of 191 United Nations member countries with the annual volunteer rates in the United States Peace Corps between 1961 and 2010 found a positive correlation between the placement of citizen diplomats in recipient countries and those countries’ support for U.S. foreign policy preferences, as measured by voting in the United Nations General Assembly (Magu 2018, 57–81). As the world becomes progressively more interconnected and technology and information continue to develop and spread, the United States’ soft power—its ability to attract and persuade, as well as its credibility— is increasingly important (Nye 2019). Over time, though, international perceptions of the United States have fluctuated. Given the significance of soft power, it is in the United States’ interests to respond to these fluctuations in international perceptions, and to enhance its attractiveness throughout the rest of the world. This paper explores and analyzes trends in international perceptions of the United States and public diplomacy spending by the United States government under presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. In particular, it analyzes changes in the level of government subsidization for public diplomacy programs. It argues that although global attitudes toward the United States have fluctuated under each president, the global favorability of the United States, and hence American soft power, are greater when it invests more in public diplomacy. These findings have important implications for contextualizing international perceptions of the United States since the turn of the century, explaining the significance of American soft power strategies in today’s political environment, and contributing potential policy suggestions for the United States. In particular, under the Trump administration, the United States has seen a turn away from public diplomacy, with potentially detrimental implications on global perceptions of the United States.

Global Perceptions of the United States, 2001–2020 Global public attitudes toward the United States have varied under each president. As displayed in Table 1, at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency in 2008, 22% of respondents across 23 countries surveyed by the Pew Global Attitudes Project said they had confidence in President Bush to do the right thing in foreign affairs (Pew Research Center 2019). In contrast, during the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, a median of 64% across 37 countries surveyed said they have confidence in Public Diplomacy, Soft Power, and Global Public Perceptions of the United States 9 President Obama to do the right thing regarding world affairs (Wike 2017). In the spring of 2019, the Global Attitudes Survey found that a median of 29% across 32 countries have confidence in President Donald Trump to do the right thing in world affairs (Poushter 2020). At the end of Bush’s presidency in 2008, a median of 46% across 23 countries held favorable views toward the United States (Pew Research Center 2019). In contrast, a median of 64% across 37 countries viewed the United States favorably at the end of Obama’s presidency in 2016, compared to a median of 54% across 33 countries in 2019 under Trump (Wike 2017; Poushter 2020). In short, global confidence and favorability were the highest under President Obama and the lowest under President Bush. Most recently, under the Trump administration, global confidence in President Trump is relatively low, however a majority of countries still view the United States favorably.

Table 1. Global Attitudes under Each President from 2001–2020 President Term Global Confidence in Global Favorability of the President the United States Bush 2001–2008 22% 46% Obama 2008–2016 64% 64% Trump 2016– 29% 54% Sources: Pew Research Center 2019; Wike 2017; Poushter 2020

By the end of Bush’s presidency, global attitudes toward the United States were considerably low. The Pew Research Center reported that widespread global dis- content with American foreign policy over the course of Bush’s presidency contributed to concerns over the United States exerting its power on the global stage with little regard for other countries’ interests. Although the United States received sym- pathy after the September 11 attacks in 2001, its global favorability steadily declined throughout the period between 2001 and 2008. Many people, particularly those in the most economically developed countries, blamed the United States for the financial crisis of 2007–08 and negatively viewed the economic influence of the United States. In Muslim countries, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq severely harmed views of the United States. In Europe, Western Europe showed widespread opposition toward key elements of American foreign policy, and views of the United States dropped dramat- ically among many of its European allies. While some countries in Asia and Latin America displayed positive views toward the United States, these were typically by declining margins. Sub-Saharan Africa was the only region with uniformly favorable views (Pew Research Center 2019). Thus, global perceptions toward both the United States and the president were consistently low across various global regions during Bush’ presidency. Among the administrations of Bush Jr., Obama, and Trump, that of Obama enjoyed the most global popularity. After perceptions of the United States declined 10 Karin Y. Kitsuda heavily under President Bush, the United States’ global image improved significantly with Obama’s election in late 2008, and such favorability lasted through the end of his presidency. Among ten EU countries surveyed at the end of Obama’s presidency, a median of 77% had confidence in Obama to do the right thing in global affairs. In the Asia-Pacific, majorities in Japan, Australia, India, and China viewed President Obama and the United States favorably (Wike and Poushter 2019). In Sub-Saharan Africa, overwhelming majorities were confident in President Obama, similar to Bush. In the Americas, there was some variability in views among the countries surveyed, as majorities in Canada, Brazil, Peru, and Chile were confident in Obama while less than half of those in Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina were confident. Obama’s popularity fell sharply in Israel during his last year as president following issues in U.S.-Israe- li relations, including disagreements over negotiations with Iran. Obama was least popular in Russia, where only 11% expressed confidence in his leadership and 15% perceived the United States favorably. In particular, 90% of Russians disapproved of how Obama dealt with the Ukraine crisis of 2013–14 (Wike 2015). Thus far under Trump’s presidency, views toward the United States and Presi- dent Trump have varied around the world. As previously mentioned, while favorability of the United States remains relatively high, global confidence in President Trump remains low, albeit not as low as in 2017 when he first took office. Despite the overall global favorability of the United States, favorability is particularly low at below 40% in Mexico, Tunisia, Lebanon, Russia, Turkey, and Germany. On the other hand, while global confidence in President Trump is generally low, he receives support from a handful of countries, including majorities in Poland, Kenya, Nigeria, and India, and overwhelming majorities in Israel and the Philippines. In Europe and Latin America, most people have little confidence in President Trump. In spite of the different trends between views toward the United States and those toward President Trump, the Pew Research Center found that people who have more trust in President Trump to do the right thing in world affairs tend to hold more positive views toward the United States (Poushter 2020). Most recently, the 2020 Best Countries report found that global trust in the United States has dropped by over 50% since 2016, with a score of 16.3 on a 100-point scale. Possible explanations included President Trump’s impeachment, the recent trade wars, the United States killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleima- ni in January, Trump’s open criticism of other world leaders, and the withdrawal of American troops from Syria in 2019 (Drew 2020).

Public Diplomacy Spending, 2008-2018 The public diplomacy appropriations under each president were examined while taking their respective global contexts into consideration. Table 2 displays public diplomacy appropriations under Bush Jr., Obama, and Trump: the data for Bush and Obama reflects the final years of their presidencies, and the data for Trump is coming from the Fiscal Year 2018. The United States Department of State public diplomacy budget includes Educational and Cultural Exchange Funding as well as funding for Public Diplomacy, Soft Power, and Global Public Perceptions of the United States 11 other diplomatic and consular programs (Walker and Baxter 2019, 4). Educational and cultural exchange programs have been identified as major public diplomacy strategies for soft power, so their specific funding allocations are displayed in a separate column (Nye 2004, 267). The Peace Corps is an independent government agency. Therefore, its funding is not included in the Department of State’s public diplomacy budget. Instead, it is separately appropriated by Congress (Peace Corps 2020, 5). As displayed in Table 2, government spending on overall public diplomacy has increased over time throughout Bush, Obama, and Trump’s presidencies except for Peace Corps appropriations which have not changed between 2016 and 2018. However, the population growth of foreign citizens reveals a different picture. As displayed in Figure 1, under President Bush in 2008, the United States government spent the least on public diplomacy per foreign citizen (21.65 cents each) which included the Peace Corps. The government spent the most on public diplomacy per foreign citizen under President Obama, at 36.38 cents per foreign citizen. The United States government spent slightly less in 2018 under President Trump than it did under Obama (35.60 cents per foreign citizen). Therefore, while overall public diplomacy spending has increased over time, this growth has not matched the growing foreign audience. According to the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, the U.S. government spent $2.10 billion (adjusted for inflation) on public diplomacy programs aside from the Peace Corps) in 1986. 32 years later, public diplomacy spending had only risen by $85 million to arrive at a total of $2.19 billion. This means that the public diplomacy spending only increased by approximately 4% despite the global audience growing by an estimated 36% (over 2.5 billion people). Globalization and advancements in information technologies have transformed public diplomacy by making necessary competition for audience engagement and understanding increasingly costly and complicated (Walker and Baxter 2019, 3; World Bank 2019). How- ever, it seems that the American government has not adequately developed its public diplomacy programs to the extent necessary to meet contemporary growth, needs, and conditions.

Table 2. Public Diplomacy Appropriations under Bush Jr., Obama, and Trump (USD in thousands, adjusted to 2020 dollars) President Fiscal Year Educational and Total Public Diplo- Peace Corps Ap- Cultural Exchange macy Budget propriation Funding Bush 2008 602,348.5 1,070,367.7 333,500 Obama 2016 636,971.0 2,187,920.9 410,000 Trump 2018 646,100 2,190,000 410,000 Sources: Nakamura and Weed 2009, 26; Powers et al. 2017, 13; Walker Baxter 2019, 4; Peace Corps 2020, 5 12 Karin Y. Kitsuda Figure 1. Public Diplomacy Spending Per Foreign Citizen

Sources: Nakamura and Weed 2009, 26; Powers et al. 2017, 13; Walker and Baxter 2019, 4; Peace Corps 2020, 5; Multipl 2020; Worldometer 2020a; Worldometer 2020b.

Public Diplomacy and Global Favorability Greater public diplomacy spending per foreign citizen is associated with increased global favorability. As displayed in Figure 2, there is a significant positive correlation (R²=0.735) between public diplomacy spending per foreign citizen and global favorability rates of the United States during George Bush Jr., Barack Obama, and Donald Trump’s presidencies. On the other hand, Figure 3 reveals a weak relationship (R²=0.442) between public diplomacy spending per foreign citizen and global confidence in the United States president. However, the global image of the United States as a whole is arguably more important than that of the president. The United States and its government are more than one individual. One can still have faith in a country as a whole and its policies without feeling the same way about its president. This weaker relationship could potentially be explained by the fact that Presi- dent Trump had only been in office for a relatively short amount of time at this point. He was only halfway through his first term in the Fiscal Year 2018 which is the period from which this data originated. For instance, according to The Washington Post, it was only after Bush’s reelection in 2004 that global perceptions of the United States began to converge to his lower favorability levels (Drezner 2020). Perhaps once data is available from 2019 and 2020, a stronger relationship between public diplomacy spending per foreign citizen and global confidence in the United States president may be revealed. Public Diplomacy, Soft Power, and Global Public Perceptions of the United States 13 Figure 2. Public Diplomacy Spending per Foreign Citizen and Global Favorability of the United States under Bush Jr., Obama, and Trump R²=0.735

Figure 3. Public Diplomacy Spending per Foreign Citizen and Global Confidence in the President under Bush Jr., Obama, and Trump R²=0.442

In a time when soft power is increasingly important to American interests, President Trump has only weakened it. In the Soft Power 30, an annual index that ranks countries based on their soft power assets, the United States dropped from first place in 2016 to fifth place in 2019 (Portland 2020a). A major component of this shift is a decline in public diplomacy under President Trump. According to the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, given “the widespread increase in 14 Karin Y. Kitsuda extremist and foreign government propaganda and the complexity of the contemporary media ecosystem,” far more resources should be prioritized by the United States government for its public diplomacy programs (Walker and Baxter 2019, 3–4). Rus- sian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have both kept the transmission and manipulation of information central to their diplomatic strategies. In spite of this, as American Ambassador Paul Hare argues, these “competing views of the world order are increasingly unchallenged by any systematic U.S. [public diplomacy] strategy.” Furthermore, President Trump has made it clear that the individuals that make up targeted foreign audiences of public diplomacy are “irrelevant to his cal- culations” (Hare 2020). As shown, American public diplomacy spending per foreign citizen has decreased since Trump came into office. Moreover, President Trump has actively pushed for further cuts in spending for key public diplomacy programs. In the Trump Administration’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2021, the Department of State’s Educational and Cultural Exchange programs face a funding decrease of nearly 58% (McNamara 2020). For the same year, President Trump has proposed a $9.3 million reduction in baseline funding for the Peace Corps, marking “only the second time in the nearly 60-year history of the Peace Corps in which a president has proposed cutting agency funding for four consecutive years” (National Peace Corps Association 2020). As key sources of American soft power, these programs are critical to American interests, and their importance toward enhancing American influence must not be overlooked. Furthermore, as greater public diplomacy spending per foreign citizen is associated with increased global favorability, the continued turn away from public diplomacy may lead to a further decline in global favorability toward the United States. Thus, cutbacks on essential public diplomacy programs under Trump’s leadership will likely only further hinder America’s global positionality.

Discussion The findings presented indicate that when the United States spends more on public diplomacy per foreign citizen, it enjoys more favorable views from the rest of the world. Therefore, there is evidence to suggest that the international public is receptive to public diplomacy efforts by the United States. As Joseph S. Nye argues, when the United States is more attractive to others, countries are more willing to cooperate, make concessions, and act according to the interests of the United States. Further- more, the most effective communication often occurs through face-to-face contacts, and the “best communicators are often not governments but civilian surrogates” (Nye 2004, 257). Thus, these findings suggest that the soft power of public diplomacy does indeed work to the advantage of the United States, and, moreover, that public diplomacy is a worthy investment for American interests.

Conclusions and Areas for Further Research The findings may be limited by their small sample size and the fact that they are based on existing data. Thus, a causal relationship cannot be concluded. Furthermore, the Public Diplomacy, Soft Power, and Global Public Perceptions of the United States 15 effect of public diplomacy spending could not be isolated from that of other potential confounding variables. As previously discussed, global perceptions of the United States are affected by their political contexts, American domestic and foreign policies, and external events such as conditions of the economy. People’s perceptions of a given country’s foreign policies have been found to be the primary driver of public opinion on that country (Portland 2020a). These factors and contexts likely had various effects on global perceptions. Suggestions for future research include the examination of a wider range of years, particularly given that the use of public diplomacy as a foreign policy strategy by the United States government dates back to the Cold War. In addition, whereas this paper focuses on public diplomacy, future research could be conducted on other strategies and forms of soft power such as cultural outputs, digital diplomacy, and business enterprises (Portland 2020b). In conclusion, since the turn of the century, global perceptions of the United States and its presidents have varied over time, depending on each president and their respective global contexts. Throughout this period, however, when the United States government has spent more on public diplomacy per foreign citizen, it has enjoyed increased global favorability. Thus, as public diplomacy is an essential source of Amer- ican soft power, it is in the United States’ best interest to invest in its public diplomacy programs to enhance its attractiveness abroad and adequately accommodate the growing foreign audience and increased development of technology and information. Thus far under the Trump Administration, the United States has shifted away from public diplomacy strategies. Concurrently and consequently, American soft power as a whole has been undermined. To prevent the further decline of American influence abroad and to recover American soft power, the United States government should recognize the importance of public diplomacy and recommit to such programs. A greater investment in public diplomacy will produce greater returns to American power. 16 Karin Y. Kitsuda

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Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia: Chinese Foreign Interference through Cyberwarfare, Influence Operations, and Coercion

Adam Foster Recently, China has increased its foreign political interference operations and developed cyber-strategies to hedge against threats from both state and individual actors. Since 2016, IR scholars have recognized Russian attempts at foreign interference in advanced democracies and US allies. Investigation as to how the Chinese government has developed and deployed foreign interference tactics, however, have largely gone unnoticed. Through the examination of case-studies in Chinese cyberwarfare, influence operations in Australia, and economic and diplomatic coercion in Taiwan, this paper aims to determine how the CCP uses foreign interference tactics to address its regime security concerns. This paper will argue that, as a safeguard against threats to its regime security, China has increasingly deployed interference in domestic economies and politics as part of its statecraft. Cyberwarfare efforts to promote pro-PRC business leaders and elected officials in Australia and to influence Taiwan’s media have had some success in promoting pro- PRC views. However, overt electoral interference by the CCP almost inevitably leads to negative media coverage and backlash against the PRC.

Introduction As China asserts itself as a global superpower, the Chinese Communist Party endeav- ors to pursue legitimation of its rule via reinstating the historical norm of Chinese political, economic, and cultural dominance in East Asia. Whereas prior to the Xi Jinping era, the CCP was content to live within an international system centered around US hegemony, its surge in both economic and political capital has encouraged the CCP to increase foreign political interference operations and develop cyber-operations strategies to hedge against risk from both state and individual actors that the CCP perceives as a threat to regime security. These policies are designed with the intent to change behavior and subvert organized opposition to Chinese interests, regardless of the target’s diplomatic or economic relationship with the US. To that end, how exactly does the CCP use foreign interference tactics to address regime security concerns? While the list of entities that China considers to be a threat to its national interests continues to grow, there are only a select number of actors that methodically criticize Chinese behavior or pose a threat to ongoing core CCP policies or national security. These policies include the One China Two Systems policy, the One China Policy, and, under Xi Jinping, the One Belt One Road Initiative. The DPP in Taiwan,

Adam Foster is a rising senior at Tufts University pursuing a double major in International Relations and Chinese with a concentration in Security. He currently works as the Lobbying Coordinator for One Day Seyoum, and his publications have appeared in the Tufts Daily and the 2001 Magazine. Due to his past advocacy and research efforts, he was recently awarded the 2021 Anne E. Borghesani Memorial Prize. His other interests include a passion for reading, skiing, and ballroom dancing. He plans to study in Beijing for the fall of 2021. Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia 19 and more recently both major political parties in Australia, pose an active threat to current or future CCP policy initiatives. Action taken by the CCP against these actors provide repeated, visible examples of Chinese foreign political interference. The tendency of CCP party officials to divide the world into friends and enemies is a reflec- tion of the harsh retaliation that awaits those who publicly question how it chooses to exercise power (Schrader 2020, 1). The efficacy of such political interference is measured in two outcomes: whether or not the CCP has successfully removed threatening parties or actors from power. To safeguard against threats to its regime security, China has increasingly deployed interference in foreign domestic economies and politics as part of its statecraft. Cyber-warfare efforts to cultivate and promote pro-PRC business people and elected officials in Australia and influence Taiwan’s media, have had some success in promoting pro-PRC views. However, overt electoral interference (to change election outcomes or fund/support pro-PRC politicians) almost inevitably leads to negative media coverage and backlash against PRC.

Literature Review Investigation as to how the Chinese government has developed and deployed foreign interference tactics are hampered by lack of covert operations evidence, modest amounts of scholarship for China as opposed to the former Soviet bloc, as well as the uniqueness of Chinese operations. By late 2016, most of the Western world became aware of the devastation of foreign influence campaigns, effectively demonstrated by Russian attempts at tampering in the US presidential election. These cost-effective methods involved relatively few hackers, classified information leaks, and bot farms based on social media platforms (Mohan and Wall 2019, 110–119). These methods successfully eroded trust in the voting and justice systems of one of the world’s foremost democracies, demonstrating both the inherent advantage of authoritarian regimes in political interference and the weakness of advanced democracies (Lahmann 2020, 189–224). Though the US and other Western powers had been previously aware of the power of psychological operations as a military tool, this was the first instance that foreign interference operations had used the medium of technology and succeeded in influencing a large civilian population. As such, 2016 prompted the re-evaluation of cyberwarfare and influence operations as authoritarian tools for democratic political interference. For most scholars, this was limited to an in-depth study into how the Rus- sians interfered with the US elections (Mohan and Wall 2019, 110–119; Ambrosio 2007, 49–57; Bader 2012, 49–57), the validity of electoral interference in international law (Lahmann 2020, 189–224; United Nations 2015), the benefits of electoral interference (Borzyskowski 2019), or how the Soviet Union and WWII-Great Powers used electoral interference to their benefit (Levin 2019; Bubeck and Marinov 2019). An even smaller subset of these scholars actively investigated the history of political interference of other authoritarian regimes outside of Europe (Allison 2008, 185– 20 Adam Foster 202), and an even smaller subset attempted to identify modern attempts at foreign interference in other authoritarian regimes such as China (Diamond and Schell 2018, 145–154). Scholars were initially deterred by the intrinsic difficulty of investigation of covert operations which were compounded by the plausible deniability, stealth, and anonymity inherent to the Internet. In addition, the absence of evidence that China in the mid-2010s had the capabilities or political will to achieve these political influence operations, limited the dataset of Chinese foreign interference to papers published later than 2018, when China was first discovered assisting the KMT in local elections in Taiwan (Templeman 2020, 85–99). The motivations for China to pursue such political interference are obvious in hindsight: in recent years China has expressed a strong interest in not only severing US ties to the East Asian region as well as undermining the legitimacy of national governments or anti-CCP parties (Schrader 2020, 1–6, 10– 14). Moreover, the CCP under Xi Jinping has shown a strong preference for low-in- tensity confrontation below the level of armed conflict. Plus, the unique inherent advantage of authoritarian regimes in having no legitimate elections, the weakness and susceptibility of democratic to foreign influence campaigns, and the innovations in technological influence successfully deployed against the US by other authoritarian regimes, indicates a strong Chinese incentive to establish their own foreign interference programs (Diamond and Schell 2018, 145–154). Since then, international relations experts and domestic governments alike have attempted to decipher the multi-faceted structure of the Chinese intelligence system to uncover Chinese political interference in their own countries (Faligot and Lehrer 2019). Some, like Australia and Taiwan, have emerged with concrete evidence of Chinese attempts at cyberwarfare, influence operations, and diplomatic and economic coercion efforts. These explosive developments were covered in depth by many contemporary news articles but have yet to be digested by the small field of East Asian International Relations Scholars. As such, while most experts studying China agree that the Xi Jinping’s CCP has increasingly come into conflict with Western-aligned countries in the late 2010s and early 2020s, they disagree as to the scope of political interference, the goals that China is pursuing via its political interference, and by extension how China will focus its efforts in conjunction with Western-aligned powers in the future. Based on analysis of Chinese strengths and weaknesses, experts attempt to determine how the CCP uses their perceived strengths to extrapolate how China will favor certain political interference methods. These arguments on the strengths and uniqueness of Chinese foreign interference are diverse and include topics on: cyberwarfare, influence operations, and economic and diplomatic coercion—including subsets of these topics such as the development of aggressive Chinese diplomatic posturing (Gill 2020), IP theft techniques (Hannas et al. 2013), technological infrastructure (Kania 2019), cyber-espionage, infiltration of foreign media outlets (Templeman 2019), political bribery and em- bezzlement (Reuters 2019), the use of Chinese communities abroad for intelligence purposes (Joske 2020), economic and financial foreign policy, deteriorating bilateral Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia 21 relations in East Asia, Chinese domestic affairs, and analysis of traditional espionage tactics. Interestingly the efficacy of certain political interference strategies employed by China are never questioned, most experts recognize that no one case is similar and the fields are constantly changing as governments react and implement new legislation to prevent foreign influence tactics.

Cyberwarfare The rise in Chinese cyberwarfare has coincided with change in the East-West relationship, caused by massive trade wars, political instability, and uncertainty in an international relations system threatened by a global pandemic. Cyberwarfare and digital influence operations are drastically increasing in the modern age and also provide relevant examples of Chinese revisionist tendencies through their campaigns on states such as the US, Taiwan, and Australia, who are targeted with cyber-attacks in tandem with other foreign interference strategies. Effective analysis of cyberwarfare involves looking at both Chinese domestic regime-security threat perceptions and retaliations on foreign entities via cyber-theft, cyber-espionage, and electoral interference. The development of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy is an example of Chinese attempts at safe-guarding regime security through aggressive technological posturing on social media. This new posture is reflected perfectly through the following government tweet, “China is angry. If you make China the enemy, China will be the enemy,” this tweet came as a response to criticisms of trade policies and the deterioration of bilateral relations with its Asia-Pacific neighbor, Australia (Kearsley 2020). A rise in the confidence of Chinese authorities and the spread of uncensored social media platforms in the West have spawned a new form of reprisal to any and all criticisms of Chinese government policy (Mulvenon 2020). These reprisals have risen to hitherto unseen levels and have been coined Wolf Warrior Diplomacy by the Global Times, a Chinese Newspaper. Wolf Warrior Diplomacy gets its name from Chinese block- buster nationalist films of the same name in which special forces operate abroad, and reflects the jingoist nature of American films in the 1980s such as Rambo (Gill 2020). Ironically the platform of choice to make these aggressive reprisals is Twitter, a social media platform that is banned for the general population of China. Examples of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy include the Chinese response to actions taken by the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing pact made up of the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Britain. After the group criticized China’s recent targeting of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy lawmakers, a Chinese spokesperson warned that China might “gouge and blind” the Five Eyes nations in retaliation. In addition, as recently as last month, a mid-level Foreign Ministry official tweeted a doctored picture of an Australian soldier holding an Afghan child at knifepoint, as a response to the Australian government criticizing the policies of the government in Xinjiang and insinuating the culpability of the Chinese government in origins of the coronavirus (Gill 2020). Though Wolf Warrior Diplomacy is a relatively recent development, the CCP has adopted more revisionist tendencies, translating Chinese regime-security concerns into long-term 22 Adam Foster policy and foreign interference initiatives. Examples of long-term regime security initiatives are cyber-theft and cyber-espionage, which primarily attack technologically advanced democracies, targeting key industries or valuable government infrastructure. This cyber-theft is most prominently practiced in the US and Australia, and through IP theft and industrial espionage China has acquired a competitive edge in technological innovation and research. Cy- ber-theft and industrial espionage allow China to reduce the cost of basic research and shore up its power domestically and abroad—without running the risks borne by liberal societies as a basis for their creative developments (Puglisi, Mulvenon, and Han- nas, 2013). The initial push for the establishment of industrial espionage programs in developed countries was derived from CCP concern in the early 2000s that there were no multinational Chinese brands, resulting in the Chinese government putting together the Science and Technology Plan (S&T), with the goal of putting greater pressure on foreign multinational companies via illicit means (Mulvenon 2020). In recent years, Chinese information and IT infrastructure have been exported abroad via corporations like Huawei to distort international markets, encourage global path dependency on China, and facilitate both industrial and cyber-espionage (Hannas and Tatlow 2020). Cyber-espionage since 2016 has been the PRC’s preferred method of operation, allowing them to hit targets from a distance. The logistics of cyber espionage are much more manageable and create less vulnerability than in-person operations. Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, cyber espionage is more relevant than ever. The Chi- nese firm APT10 successfully targeted 45 US companies across all industries and US government agencies, stealing records from JPL, Navy, and NASA, with it eventually being attributed to a contractor in China acting at the behest of the PRC National Security (Hannas and Tatlow 2020). The sophistication of such attacks have only increased after Xi’s promise in the White House Rose Garden in 2015, which swore a sharp decline in Chinese cyber espionage. Instead we saw a dramatic increase in cyber sophistication to obfuscate the origin of Chinese cyber-attacks. Chinese cyber-attacks have evolved to target larger populations in addition to valuable government infrastructure and key industries. The FBI has recorded over 1000 ongoing investigations of cyber-theft or IP theft with a Chinese nexus in at least 60% of the trade theft cases on a host of different actors (Wray 2020). The US Department of Justice has devoted more resources to these cases over the past seven years after they peaked in 2013, and beneficiaries of these cyber-thefts and espionage include universities who coordinate information collection in return for CCP-government funding, Chinese State Owned enterprises and CCP government ministries (Mulvenon 2020). The US Justice De- partment is increasingly focused not on cyber-espionage as a criminal enterprise but on non-traditional technology collection and fraud: where people are being co-opted for technological and corporate transfer that are injurious to National Security, such as economic espionage and trade secret theft (Puglisi, Mulvenon, and Hannas, 2013). Over two dozen laws have been created in the US to prevent Chinese technological Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia 23 transfer, and the National Health Institute and National Science Foundation are continually cracking down on inappropriate behavior of scientists, charging them with fraud and lack of disclosure of conflicts of interest as in the case of Harvard Professor of Chemistry Charles Lieber (Department of Justice 2020). Ultimately, experts in the field of cyberwarfare believe China’s foreign technology acquisition and “hybrid” system of legal, illegal, and extralegal import of foreign technology has helped its rapid rise to superpower status. Finally, the CCP has increasingly adopted digital disinformation tactics to achieve electoral interference and regime change in enemy states. The most obvious example of this is in Taiwan, where the CCP used targeted attacks on both the media and the local social media platforms to interfere with the Taiwanese presidential election in early 2020 (Templeman 2020, 91–92). Whereas the Russians have a clear pattern of pitting right-wing parties against left-wing parties to delegitimize centrist political institutions within the country, Chinese attempts at electoral interference have fallen into two categories. One category plays into Wolf Warrior Diplomacy and loudly refutes criticism of China, e.g. Xinjiang, Hong Kong, with the goal of present- ing China in the best possible light. The other category demonstrates the increasingly subversive and obstructive elements of Chinese digital disinformation operations via social media platforms. For example, in the Taiwan presidential election, the Chinese Military’s 311 Base conducted operations on Facebook, disseminating pro Han Kuo- yu propaganda and seeking to reduce support for the DPP candidate, Tsai Ing-wen. The 311 Base even managed operations on Taiwan-specific, Telnet based PTT forums, particularly the #Hatepolitics forum, in order to push the pro Han message (Mul- venon 2020). Additionally, Reuters reported in August 2019 that the PRC had been secretly paying journalists and editors to place positive stories about the mainland in Taiwanese papers (Lee and Cheng 2019). Many misleading online stories and false social-media rumors in recent years have been traced to mainland sources (Lee and Cheng 2019). These claims verify the testimony of William Liqiang, a Chinese spy who defected to Australia. In his testimony to the ASIO he added another example of digital disinformation with the use of “cyber-armies” as a technological content farms for disinformation on the mainland to influence the Taiwanese election, with fake stories showing President Tsai and the DPP in a negative light airing on the internet and by pro-CCP media outlets only for them to be later debunked (Schmitt and Mazza 2019). The rise in Chinese cyberwarfare and digital disinformation operations provide examples of Chinese revisionist tendencies against states such as Taiwan and Aus- tralia. The CCP’s adoption of cyber-theft, cyber-espionage, and electoral interference operations as well as its signature methods of criticism and subversive digital disinformation show the CCP’s commitment to the removal of the parties that it dislikes from power. These tactics clearly demonstrate China’s constant use of cyberwarfare as a tool to protect itself from perceived threats. 24 Adam Foster

Influence Operations: Australia Influence operations are the most common examples of Chinese political interference and are arguably the most effective at changing political behavior of enemy states. While traditionally categorized with traditional espionage and covert methods, influence operations are more cost-effective, easier to implement, and harder to detect. In tandem with a funding and technological advantage, they can target both individual actors and large populations by looking for social, political, or ethnic divisions. Actors working on behalf of the US Department of Defense, define influence operations as the collection of tactical information about an adversary in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an opponent (Schneier 2019). Clearly, China has used influence operations to target potential adversaries in the US, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Australia. While recent elections in Taiwan and the Hong Kong protests have provided key in- flection points to understand the CCP’s evolving and complex approach to influence operations, China’s influence operations in Australia demonstrate the future of CCP involvement in westernized countries and illustrate Chinese tactics (Department of Defense 2020; Diamond and Schell 2018). The first step towards any successful influence operation involves the infiltration of covert agents. Australia’s recent political bribery scandals, statements regarding Chinese influence campaigns, and recent change in the country-wide Chinese threat assessment, provides the ideal case study for the outcomes of influence operations by the Chinese Communist Party. Furthermore, it sheds light on how the CCP is currently seeking to undermine parties in both Taiwan and the US. The first claims of foreign interference within mainland Australia came from China’s consulate-general in Sydney, Chen Yonglin, who defected in 2005 and admitted “[The CCP] has begun a structured effort to infiltrate Australia in a systematic way” (Hartcher 2019). This systematic and structured method of covert infiltration would only be revealed later through the defection of a Chinese spy in late 2019. Wang “William” Liqiang sought political asylum and offered up a trove of intelligence documents involving political interference in Australia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in return for asylum (Kelly 2019). His knowledge of senior Chinese intelligence officials, bank account transaction history of several significant political donors, and covert operations within Australia allowed the Australian Security and Intelligence Organ- isation to verify his testimony, grant him protection, and political asylum, despite Beijing’s vehement denials and dismissal of both Mr. Wang and his claims (South China Morning Post 2019). Of what has been made public, the influence operations within Australia involved Beijing-sponsored legally listed companies funding intelligence operations, surveillance of officials and profiling of dissidents, and the co-opting of media organizations (McKenzie, Sakkal, and Tobin 2019). This pattern established by Mr. Wang reinforces a distinctly Chinese approach of infiltration and surveillance of dissidents and funding “China-friendly” politicians as a method of influence operations. This method, in addition to Australia, is evident in Taiwan and the covert CCP sponsoring of future-presidential candidate of Taiwan’s KMT Han Kuo-yu in his Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia 25 mayoral election, where he rose out of obscurity to become the KMT presidential candidate in less than 3 years. The Australian government reaction to both Chen Yonglin and William Liqiangs’ testimony would change the bilateral relations between Chi- na and Australia and prompt further investigation into possible influence operations within the state (Westcott 2020). Mr. Wang’s testimony prompted a statement from both the current and former directors of the ASIO, current ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said: “Hostile foreign intelligence activity continues to pose a real threat to our nation and its security” and claimed that the current threat of foreign interference is “unprecedented” followed up with an official statement from the ASIO that the number of foreign agents currently operating in Australia is higher than during the Cold War (Diamond and Schell 2018, 147–151). Former chief of the ASIO Duncan Lewis, who said the Chinese government is seeking to “take over” Australia’s political system through its “insidious” foreign interference operations (Hartcher 2019). While the recognition of Chinese influence operations from the highest levels of government is important, influence operatives can establish covert infrastructure to bribe public officials, lure talent to China, and establish an entire diaspora community that has strong ties with the home-government. Again, all of these indicators are evident within Australia, whose government in 2018 launched investigations of individuals and communities with strong language, cultural, or political ties to the CCP, leading to the discovery of a CCP-sponsored bribery operation of Australian public officials, the CCP connection to the Chinese diaspora community, and CCP efforts to establish pro-China programs and lure talents from Australian universities. The first instance of bribery involved Huang Xiangmo, a Chinese billionaire, who served a dual role as a large political donor on behalf of the CCP but also as a liaison with Australian universities, with the intent to disseminate pro-China policies. In this latter role, he is the principal investor of the Australia China Relations Institute (ACRI), which worked in tandem with the University of Technology in Sydney to publish papers primarily involving the benefits of the Australian-China relationship (Sharma 2016). As for his role in the nation-wide bribery scandal, in February 2019, Huang Xiangmo found his Australian residency revoked based on ASIO and intelligence community recommendations, and in Australian court for tax fraud. Huang got caught as the central figure in the downfall of the Labor senator Sam Dastyari, who was forced to resign from parliament after revelations he had asked Huang for money to pay personal legal bills and warned the tycoon he was under surveillance (ABC News 2017; Reuters 2019). This, along with Huang’s tax fraud and his long-running involvement with the Australian Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reuni- fication of China, which has been accused of being a front for Chinese government efforts to expand its global influence, led to the cancellation of his residency and subsequent fleeing of the country. Sam Dastyari was not alone in accepting donations from Chinese sources, however. Chinese-Australian MP Gladys Liu, NSW-State MP Ernest Wong, and State MP Shaoquett Moselmane all have had allegations of bribery, corruption, and treason in relation to China-sourced political donations, with Austra- 26 Adam Foster lian Authorities finally raiding the home and office of Shaoquett Moselmane in June 2020 (Cave 2020). Other indicators of the degree of Chinese foreign interference are intelligence activities present in the Chinese diaspora communities, which are used as a method of advancing Beijing’s interests. A unit in China’s Communist Party known as the United Front Work Department employs thousands of local organizations to collect intelligence, encourage technology transfer, counter dissident movements, and generate support for other Beijing objectives. The department focuses its influence operations overseas on universities, Chinese diaspora communities, and foreign elites (Joske 2020). Other programs that use the diaspora to influence local populations include the Chinese government Talent Programs otherwise known as the 1000 Talent Program within the US, which recruits foreign researchers to help indigenous growth to bring them to China and use their foreign education (Mulvenon 2020). The reaction to these diaspora programs by the Australian government have been swift and harsh, with legislation that would revoke the privileges of State governments making agreements with foreign powers if they are “against the interests of the state.” This has extended to agreements made by universities, the plethora of diaspora intelligence communities, and establishment of talent programs as recently as December 2020. Overall, influence operations are the most common type of Chinese foreign interference and arguably the most effective at changing political behavior in tandem with other methods. Through infiltration, bribery, and contact with universities and diaspora communities, China has effectively established a foothold within Australia with which it can influence economic and political policy or even implement electoral interference.

Economic and Diplomatic Coercion: Taiwan Economic and Diplomatic Coercion policies are typically large-scale government policies that are more easily traced to the Chinese government, but are designed to actively put pressure on the regime in power. Economic and Diplomatic Coercion tactics are normally short-term solutions to insubordinate parties or countries, and are saved for the countries that China perceives as great threats. This tactic is often combined with attempts at media manipulation to disguise interference attempts and avoid backlash (Cole 2019; Templeman 2019, 6–9; Lee and Cheng 2019). As such, the country experiencing the greatest incidence of Chinese economic and diplomatic coercion efforts is Taiwan. Taiwan, which in addition to its proximity to China, has been the focus of Chinese reunification designs, has persistently chal- lenged mainland rule. The continued defiance of Taiwan and attempts by the CCP to subjugate it are part of an ongoing struggle to definitively resolve the outcome of the Chinese civil war. During this time, the CCP not only developed most of their political interference tactics against Taiwan, but also have attempted to deny their existence to the majority of the international community under its One China Policy. Given Taiwan’s consistent resistance to reunification, it has proven to be an Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia 27 ideal case study of more direct CCP coercive tactics of political interference, such as diplomatic isolation, economic leveraging, and major media manipulation. That being said, the quantity of such attacks does not imply their effectiveness, especially on a well institutionalized hyper-polarized partisan system. Taiwanese democracy developed under the shadow of China, making it resistant to CCP tactics that have proven more effective in contexts such as Hong Kong, where China can operate with less awareness and scrutiny, or Australia, where China can operate with virtually no political pushback (Templeman 2020). The heavy-handed tactics used by the mainland, while effective in the short-term, combined with other factors such as Covid-19 and the Hong Kong Protests to hinder the CCP’s goal of removing Tsai Ing-wen from power. Indeed, they lifted Ing-Wen, a DPP incumbent and anti- Beijing candidate, from a projected loss to an 18-point win in the course of a single year. Whereas, other candidates who do not receive overt support from Beijing tend to do better; threats and overt endorsements have usually only strengthened CCP-skeptical voices (Tem- pleman 2019, 6–9). This realization has not stopped the CCP from attempting to undermine governments who oppose the One-China Policy via overt diplomatic coercion. During President Tsai Ing-wen’s inauguration on May 20th, 2016, Beijing attempted to use diplomatic isolation in a show of force to demoralize and lessen her political impact. These policies included the suspension of the cross-strait hotline and other high-level communication channels that had been set up under President Ma Ying-jeou, Tsai Ing-wen’s KMT predecessor. The CCP officially blocked Taiwan from its observer role in international bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the In- ternational Civil Aviation Organization, and continued to block their access throughout the influx of Covid-19 (BBC News, 2020). It revitalized historic efforts to strip Taiwan of its remaining formal diplomatic relations with other major world governments, eventually succeeding in changing seven of the twenty-two states that had previously recognized Taiwan to non-recognition (Shattuck 2020). The PRC has reduced tourism visas to Taiwan, and later suspended the previous-regime’s traveler program under which mainlanders had been making cross-strait visits. Further encouraged by a provincial KMT resurgence in Taiwan, in January 2018, Beijing opportunistically began upping the ante in an attempt to coerce the Tsai administration on its reunification plans. The CCP unilaterally introduced a new civil-flight route over the Taiwan Strait and forced the East Asian Olympic Committee to rescind Taichung City’s right to host the 2019 East Asian Youth Games (Templeman 2020, 87). These diplomatic coercion tactics, encouraged by a rapidly expanding military strength, graduated to outright intimidation tactics as proponents in the CCP perceived Taiwan as weak and the United States as uninterested. More recent years have shown that the CCP has been willing to detain Taiwanese nationals on deliberately-vague national-security charges without notifying Taiwanese authorities, a policy predecessor of detainments as a means of retaliation to Western criticisms of the CCP (Hernández 2021). The CCP has also used fly-overs of the main island and invasions 28 Adam Foster of Taiwan’s territorial waters and airspace to both intimidate and express their dissat- isfaction with DPP policies. On March 31st, 2019 there was an intrusion of Taiwan’s airspace, as two PLA fighter jets began to encroach across the central channel over the Taiwan Strait, the first such violation in over two decades (Templeman 2020, 87). These attempts at diplomatic isolation and intimidation were not isolated incidents, but rather worked in tandem with greater economic leverage and coercion, given Tai- wan’s decades-long shift towards economic dependence on the mainland. The last two decades of trade and China’s rapid economic rise contributed to Taiwan’s dependence on the mainland, with heavy investment in Chinese businesses and China becoming Taiwan’s biggest trading partner. At the individual level, China actively encouraged unification via their One China Policy by keeping open cross- strait trading pathways as a method of encouraging a brain drain, with generous pay and benefits for the island’s best and brightest on the mainland (Templeman 2019, 5–8). Legal codes and protections for Taiwanese living on the mainland were strengthened to provide a sense of security, and free permanent-residency visas were given in addition to free schooling and medical insurance to any Taiwanese with six months of residency on the mainland in an effort at reunification from a grass-roots level (South China Morning Post 2018). As for corporations, China loosened restrictions on Taiwanese investments on previously sensitive industries, including entertainment, energy, finance, and infrastructure. Cultural and civic exchanges with the DPP were frozen, but importantly, the CCP continued to allow other cross-strait economic groups and businesses to interact on the condition that they avoided saying anything favorable about independence. This concept of favorable treatment and economic benefits by omission, or selective engagement allows Beijing to refuse to do business with companies who will not disavow independence, but ultimately have failed to make Taiwanese public opinion or corporate opinion drastically more favorable to unification (Bush 2019, 3–4). Given the previous failures of diplomatic isolation and economic coercion as behavior or policy changing tactics for the Tsai-administration, the CCP began a campaign of media manipulation and outright electoral interference to criticize the DPP party, promote pro-Beijing narratives, and disrupt the electoral integrity of Taiwan in both 2018 and 2020. This media manipulation, alongside influence operations, is a mission critical to the Chinese method of political interference, and as such, is present in many Chinese interference operations. Such examples include the Australian Chinese Relations Institute (ACRI) paying for pro-Beijing pieces from top Australian journalists, and the take-over and abduction of pro-democracy newspaper staff in Hong Kong (Reuters 2019; Ramzy and Yu, 2020). The scale of media manipulation in each case is an effective indicator of Chinese threat perceptions, with heavier investments in bribing journalists, cyber-attacks, creating pro-Beijing think-tanks, and purchasing large news agencies, indicating the prioritization of the issue within the PRC’s regime security agenda. Taiwan’s status as a high-priority threat to the CCP national security agenda Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia 29 and shared cultural knowledge of the “pressure points” of Taiwanese society, as well as its plethora of hyper-partisan media outlets, allow heavy CCP investment in Tai- wanese media manipulation as a form of political interference (Templeman 2020). Though Taiwan has had strong partisan media outlets since its democratic transition of the late 1980s, since 2009 after the purchase of The China Times Group, which includes two TV stations and Taiwan’s newspaper of record, there has been a shift in both tone and political-moderation tendencies. The China Times Group’s outlets dropped their traditional moderation and eventually pivoted toward the pro-Beijing extreme. Critical coverage of CCP politics drastically decreased as reporting took on a strong pro-CCP tone, and by 2016 the audience controlled by the China Time Group had become reliably pro-Beijing. Stories that showed the mainland in a negative light were ignored, while the DPP and the broader pro-independence agenda received hostile scrutiny. Actions such as the scrubbing of the online archive of the atrocities of Ti- ananmen Square, and largely no mention of the 2019 protests in Hong Kong revealed the extent of CCP influence over the paper. A Financial Times report in 2019 revealed that editors and staff at the China Times Group were in regular contact with CCP officials at Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office (Hille 2019). These Western media reports prompted general suspicion within the Taiwanese population as to the ambiguous and rapid political rise of KMT’s Han Kuo-yu and the subsequent flood of Taiwanese media coverage, the China Times Group devoted more than half of their 2018 election coverage to him, enabled the populist candidate to flip a historically DPP stronghold to gain the mayorship. Kuo-yu later would rise to become Tsai Ing-wen’s opponent in the 2020 presidential election (Shan 2019; Huang 2019). His populist movement in 2018 enabled over 15 of the 22 local seats up for election to go the way of the KMT party, and gave Beijing the impression that a resurgence of the KMT was not only possible, but within reach, and was assisted by the media manipulation onslaught before the election. Notably, the 2020 presidential elections within Taiwan did not follow the result in the same success for Beijing as in 2018, mostly due to macro-scale events largely out of control of the CCP government, the resiliency of the Taiwanese population and election institutions, and the DPP majority quickly recognizing the growing cross-strait power imbalance and moving to impose legislation to prevent political interference operations. Han Kuo-yu’s dramatic win plus China Times Support fueled rumors of Beijing covertly supporting his candidacy and directing monetary resources to his campaign, rumors that increased when he was received warmly by Beijing on a state visit in March of 2019 (Templeman 2020, 91–92). Han’s threat caused a re-unification of a previously divided DPP, and after a hard-fought primary, Tsai Ing- wen emerged victorious with multiple former-DPP candidate endorsements. Han’s primary run and tendency to promote exaggerated, sometimes politically incorrect, remarks alienated him from party veterans, weakening overall KMT support on top of the Beijing-support rumors (Templeman 2020, 91–92). This was about the time that William Liqiang defected to Australia, prompting an even further shift away from Bei- 30 Adam Foster jing, with the DPP capitalizing on the security-centric narrative with a representative saying, “we solemnly appeal to the Taiwanese public to face up to the fact that whether it is the Chinese internet army or the Chinese government, it is using the democratic system of Taiwan to infringe upon our democracy” (Kelly 2019). Though Economic and Diplomatic Coercion tactics are typically saved for the countries that China perceives as the greatest threat to its regime-security, in the case of Taiwan the PRC has been unable to avoid a massive backlash that could revert all previous achievements in foreign interference. Taiwan’s recent presidential elections illustrate the commitment, if not the efficacy, of Chinese Economic and Diplomatic Coercion, intimidation tactics, and media manipulation, as well as what effective resiliency to these tactics looks like. Though Beijing will undoubtedly attempt to interfere again should the DPP continue to pose an active threat to its regime security, the sweeping reforms implemented in reaction to Chinese foreign interference will shield Taiwan better than before.

Conclusion: The Results of Foreign Interference in Australia and Tai- wan Rapid deterioration of bilateral relations is not uncommon in targets of political interference, and, once discovered, can even lead to entire social movements or political parties using domestic sovereignty as their rallying cry to gain supporters. In Taiwan, this has become a core of the DPP campaign platform. Whereas Australia had been buffered from the majority of CCP political interference campaigns up until recently—primarily due to its proximity to China, CCP focus on reunification of the Tai- wan Strait, and lack of direct threat to the CCP itself—recent developments show the reaction on both sides to an increased threat perception. The reaction of Australia to these influence operations has been swift and harsh, and led to the spiraling deterioration of the Sino-Australian relationship. The ban on agreements that are against the interests of state legislation is indicative of the Australian government holding its ground in criticizing China on a range of political issues, including Beijing’s meddling in Australia’s internal government affairs. The high-profile corruption scandals and warnings from the ASIO prompted severe counter-measures from the Turnbull administration (Turnbull 2017). These included tougher penalties for influence operations and traditional espionage activities—such as leaking classified information and interfering with public infrastructure—along with sweeping provisions aimed at combating foreign interference and a registration scheme for agents of foreign political actors. The effectiveness of said legislation -re mains to be seen, as the ASIO still warns of foreign influence on future elections and legislation (Diamond and Schell 2018, 148–149). What the legislation has accomplished is the freezing of bilateral relations between China and Australia, with journalists being arrested and evacuated, tariffs imposed, and even the boycotting of the China-hosted Olympics being considered (Griffiths and Hollingsworth, 2020). In response, in October of 2020 the Chinese government publicly leaked a 14-point Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia 31 list that outlines its grievances with the Australian government. It included gripes as varied as Australia’s decision to ban Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from its 5G network, “spreading disinformation imported from the US around China’s efforts of containing COVID-19,” as well as general “antagonistic” reporting on China by the Australian press (Kearsley 2020). Beijing also cited Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s call earlier this year for a global investigation into China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and it hit back with a series of tariffs on Australian goods like wine, beef, barley, and coal that threaten about $20 billion worth of Australian exports (Debinski and Santamaria 2020). China in November of 2020 has declared Australia must take the blame for “a sharp downturn” in relations between the two countries, with a Foreign Ministry spokesman saying all responsibility is on “some people in Australia (who) tend to regard China’s development as a threat,” citing the Australian crackdown on alleged foreign interference in its domestic politics as one of the main reasons (Westcott 2020). The Australian crackdown, while worsening, has been tame compared to Taiwanese responses. Following claims of electoral interference, media manipulation, and economic and political coercion, the domestic political response was instantaneous from both the population and the Tsai administration. The DPP used its majority to pass amendments to the Political Parties Act, which required all registered parties to issue annual financial statements. The new Foundations Act created a regulatory framework to oversee private foundations who took public money. Most controversial of all the changes, less than two weeks before the 2020 elections, the ruling party passed an Anti-Infiltration Act barring Taiwanese citizens from accepting money or taking instructions from foreign “hostile forces” to lobby for political causes, make political do-nations, or disrupt political processes, enabling local prosecutors to charge for voter fraud, and investigate allegations of vote-buying and CCP spying (Associated Press 2019). There was a blanket ban on government acquisition of Chinese communications technology from companies like Alibaba, Lenovo, and Huawei, audits on media outlets, and fines on companies for evasion of the review process for economic investment from the mainland (Yang 2019). Importantly, it preserved the freedom of speech precedent for media outlets, and monitored, but did not close, any media outlets for slanted reporting and failing to fact-check news reports that proved false. Further political mistakes by Han and the geopolitical situation in Hong Kong shifted the discussion to sovereignty and favored the Tsai-administration, after which no amount of media manipulation would secure the election for the KMT. Overall, the 2020 foreign interference campaign followed a pattern: Beijing’s hard line and diplomatic isolation tactics proved detrimental to the future of cross-strait relations and anti-CCP protests in Hong Kong overwhelmed whatever soft-power economic attraction or intimidation weapons Beijing tried to wield. Beijing’s foreign interference operations via cyberwarfare, influence operations, and economic and diplomatic coercion have indicated its willingness to intervene in foreign countries as a safeguard against perceived threats to its regime security. 32 Adam Foster In the coming years China will continue to pursue foreign interference strategies in the US, Australia, and Taiwan, and should these governments fail to implement new policies designed to counter Chinese interference, the CCP may succeed in both their short term goal of removing direct political threats and their long term goal of changing widespread population behavior. Authoritarian Influence Operations in East Asia 33

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Unavoidable Aspects of Migrant Labor: Analysis of Race, Gender, and Class in the Kafala System in Contemporary Middle East

Warisha Siddiqui

Millions of migrant workers from Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia operate in the Middle East. In 2019, women made up 35% of the migrant workforce which accounts for 52% of the total female population in the region (World Bank). Most of these women are domestic workers or are employed in low/unskilled jobs under the Kafala or Kefala system. Given these patterns in the racial, class, and gender composition of workers, the Kafala system is a microcosm of the global economy as an international network of goods and services exchanged. Furthermore, this system, compounded by numerous reports of abuse, demonstrates the exploitative and gendered nature of foreign labor and how it operates within the global economy. To frame my analysis of the Kafala system, I will examine the ways globalization and neoliberalism emerge in governing foreign labor in the Middle East. Additionally, I will focus on the intersections of race, class, and gender that operate together to produce the feminized global south. By applying feminist and post-colonial lenses, I argue that the Kafala system is an example of how race, class, and gender operate within the global economy.

Introduction Millions of migrant workers from Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia operate in the Middle East. In 2019, these women, 52% of the total female population in the region, made up 35% of the migrant workforce (World Bank). Most of these women are domestic workers or employed in low- or unskilled jobs under the Kafala or Kefala system, the legal sponsorship system for foreign laborers to work in one of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Ara- bia, and the United Arab Emirates—as well as Jordan and Lebanon. Female migrant workers function in these particular spaces due to the demand for low-wage service laborers in high-income countries. Given these patterns in the racial, class, and gender composition of workers, the Kafala system is a microcosm of the global economy as an international network of goods and services exchanged. Furthermore, this system, compounded by numerous reports of abuse, demonstrates the exploitative and gendered nature of foreign labor and how it operates within the global economy. To frame my analysis of the Kafala system, I will examine the ways globalization and neoliberalism emerge in governing foreign labor in the Middle East. Addi- tionally, I will focus on the intersections of race, class, and gender that operate together to reproduce the feminized global south. I reflect on the complex classification of countries such as Global North versus South; developing, developed, or transitioning economy; high, middle, or low-income nation; and how these classifications produce power imbalances between the nations involved. By applying feminist and post-colo-

Warisha Siddiqui is a junior at Tufts University where she studies International Relations with a minor in Arabic. Her research interests focus on the role of gender in the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. Currently, she is the Young Global Professional with the New American Engagement Initiative team in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. 40 Warisha Siddiqui nial lenses, I argue that the Kafala system is an example of how race, class, and gender operate within the global economy and its reliance on the exploitation of women.

Classifying Countries With different countries interacting for political and economic purposes, various country classification systems emerged to distinguish and group nations. Some are considered antiquated such as the First/Third world category and have been replaced by the Global North/South division. The United Nations (2014, 143) classifies countries by their economic status in two different ways: development status, either developed, transitioning, or developing; and gross national income, either high, middle, or low. The Global North/South division relies on the development status of nations as defined by the UN and is a completely political, not geographical, grouping of states. Post-colonial scholars assume the Global North operates in the Global South as a colonizing or imperial force through the use of its economic and military power. Furthermore, it applies in the realm of gender; however, as a category, Global North/ South does not accurately characterize relations between countries in the same group and therefore minimizes the exploitative practices that occur in the Global South such as in Saudi Arabia, a high-income developing economy extracting labor from a low-income developing economy like Ethiopia under the Kafala system. These para- doxical groupings render the Global North/South dichotomy insufficient in capturing the way neoliberal values play out in the globalized economy.

Defining Globalization Traditional definitions of globalization describe the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, flows of investment, people, and information. Political reconstructions of this term refer to “internationalization, liberalization, universaliza- tion, or westernization” (Scholte 2005, 85), but such conceptualizations fail to analyze the social dynamics at play or consider the implication of gender. Liberalization implies globalization is part of neoliberalism which assumes meaning from economic activity, growth, financial transaction, and human behaviors that are presented as uni- versal and neutral but are intrinsically gendered (Griffin 2007, 229). Post-colonial theorists are particularly concerned by globalization as the “recolonization” of men and women in the Global South (Mohanty 2003, 515) because it imposes Western values and extracts labor from those that experience the consequences of globalization such as the deregulation of government, environmental hazards, dismantling of welfare, etc. TheKafala system is an example of extracting and transplanting women within the Global South for their labor without regard for the origin country. While conventional theorists argue globalization brought women into the global economy, feminist scholars construct globalization as a gendered process that perpetuates certain gender patterns and disrupts others (Peterson 2014, 177). In the Kafala system, women remain in the gendered space of unskilled domestic labor while their own families Unavoidable Aspects of Migrant Labor 41 are raised by men or other women.

Structure of the Kafala System Early forms of the Kafala system in oil-rich Gulf countries during the 1940s employed primarily Arab migrants, but the oil boom of the 1970s expanded the labor market to include migrant workers from other parts of the world. The sudden arrival of foreign laborers from different countries at the start of the oil boom caused many GCC states to formally institute Kafala systems to regulate incoming and existing migrant workers. Typically, the employer of a migrant worker acts as a guarantor or sponsor (kafeel) and assumes full legal and economic responsibility for the worker he or she has hired. This applies to the whole contract period until the worker leaves the country or enters a new contract with another kafeel. There is no legal provision for foreigners to stay and work in the GCC without a sponsor. Legal frameworks differ from country to country and also change, but usually, workers arrive under fixed-term contracts for a period of two or three years. Sponsors of migrant workers may be individual nationals or companies. The influx of wealth to Gulf Arabs and increased urban development in the region heightened the need for labor and the types of employment options beyond construction and oil production. Globalization in developing countries leads to new economic centers where specialized services are concentrated, in other words, “global cities” (Parreñas 2000, 563). As a result, professionals or, in Doha or Dubai, wealthy Arab individuals demand low-wage domestic labor to maintain their lifestyles. This form of migrant domestic labor is common in developed economies such as the US or the EU where women from developing low-income countries similarly migrate to provide that form of reproductive labor. Thus, theKafala system results in millions of migrant domestic workers to the GCC region. TheKafala system is a neoliberal approach to immigration in which the government takes a hands-off approach in regulating the migrant and sponsor. It has been described as “essentially an employer-led, large-scale guest worker program that is open to admitting migrant workers, but at the same time restrictive in terms of the rights granted to migrants after admission” (Ruhs 2013, 98). Recruitment agencies further exemplify how privatized the sponsorship process is as recruiters are private companies operating in predominantly Asia and Africa. Furthermore, the method of recruitment is reminiscent of colonial forces extracting labor from port colonies in India and China through indentured labor contracts. Similarly, migrant domestic workers are bound to their sponsors and must pay the sponsor for the recruitment fee causing many to be indebted throughout their employment (Ngeh and Pelican, 2018, 172). Because the legal power is in the hands of the sponsor while the migrant is placed in a structurally vulnerable position, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International consider the Kafala system as exploitative and abusive. Female migrant domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to abuse as reproductive labor rarely gets regulated and mistreatment that occurs in the private sphere is rarely open to scrutiny 42 Warisha Siddiqui in Middle Eastern society.

Employer-Employee Dynamic Over the past forty years after the initial oil boom, Asian foreign labor rose in numbers and was eventually preferred over Arab migrants. The prevailing attitude among Gulf sponsors was that Asian migrants were less expensive and easier to lay off. Asian migrants were less likely to attempt settling in the Gulf by bringing their families compared to Arab laborers who intended to settle for long periods of time (Khalaf 2015, 47). Furthermore, to avoid pan-Arabism penetrating the working class in the Gulf, Asian workers would not claim citizenship and were expected to remain disen- franchised (Khalaf 2015, 49). Citizenship in the Gulf does not guarantee equal rights to all; one’s rights are determined by their religion, tribal affiliation, gender, and class. For example, one’s ability to travel in and out of a GCC depends on their citizenship status. In Saudi Arabia, foreign workers are not allowed to leave their host country without permission from their sponsors, as was the case in Qatar until 2015. Addi- tionally, it is common practice for employers to withhold the passports of domestic workers. The movement of female workers is regulated and monitored more than men for fear that they will become pregnant after leaving the employer’s home, reducing the economic value of the domestic worker and the amount of labor that could be extracted. Moreover, confiscated passports serve as a blackmail tool to forcibly deport and intimidate domestic workers to labor beyond their contractual obligations (Am- nesty International 2019, 18). Female migrants operate within the “international transfer of caretaking,” re- ferring to the three-tiered transfer of reproductive labor between two nations: women in receiving countries, migrant female domestic workers, and poorer domestic workers from the migrant worker’s host country (Parreñas 2000, 561). Therefore, women migrants under the Kafala release their employers from their reproductive labor while escaping aspects of their own back home by relegating it to other women. Women in the Kafala countries are dependent on foreign domestic workers and the culture has adapted to perceive this development as a logical consequence of globalization. This dependence also factors into the poor treatment of female domestic workers because no legal framework governs their rights. Amnesty International reported migrant domestic workers in Lebanon received no payment, delayed payment, or salary cuts that were in violation of their contracts, but each had no outlet for legal recourse. One Ethiopian domestic disclosed: “I did not get paid the first three months. When I asked [my employer] about my salary, she said, ‘What if you run away?’” and another said her contract was ripped up in front of them (Amnesty International 2019, 16–20). Furthermore, domestic workers regardless of their race reported some form of verbal, physical, and/or mental abuse. The ways in which these female bodies are commod- ified is reminiscent of the effects of slave labor and indentured servitude. The globalized economy is not liberating the world from colonial systems of power and control but is instead repacking them beyond the Global North/South dichotomy. Unavoidable Aspects of Migrant Labor 43

Responsibilities at Home Migrant domestic workers enter the Kafala system due to the lack of economic opportunity in their home countries and the relative ease of finding work in the GCC region. Many work in the Gulf states while supporting their families back home and often are the sole breadwinners for their household. Remittance outflows fromKafala countries that totaled over $114 billion in 2018 (World Bank) and other informal transfers of money from low-income laborers are essential to the economies of origin countries (Khalaf 2015, 48). As a result, they are treated as saviors and those who die of abuse are martyrs who sacrificed for their families and countries, but they are not allotted any protections. Only select categories of foreigners are allowed to sponsor dependents or domestic workers under the Kafala system (Ngeh and Pelican, 2018), forcing domestic workers to relegate the rearing of their own children to the rest of their families while they earn money raising their sponsor’s children. In the Philippines, the gendered division of household labor is reconstructed when mothers leave their families to provide financially. Filipina migrants, which are among the top ethnicities of domestic workers in the region, must renegotiate their household labor with spouses and extended relatives, even hiring other lower-wage Filipina women to take care of their own children (Parreñas 2000, 576). As a result, the Kafala system hollowly subverts the gender patterns of reproductive labor in origin countries while reinforcing them in host countries.

Power Imbalance between Host and Home From 1976 onwards, rates of migrants from Asia to the GCC region rose significantly while Arab migration rates dropped in response. (ESCWA 2007, 4). With South and Southeast Asia producing most of the labor supply to Gulf states, an unequal relationship has developed between the regions. Gulf countries refrain from becoming dependent on one country which makes bilateral and multilateral negotiations regulating migrant’s working conditions, wages, and social benefits futile (Khalaf 2015, 48). Therefore, embassies offer little support to domestic workers fleeing abuse and hoping to return home. Additionally, remittances from Kafala countries serve as a vital source of income for migrant-origin countries. In contrast to the colonial mindset to invade and formally control a country for economic gain, host countries incentivize the migration of labor from poorer countries through the powers of globalization as a form of control, establishing dependence, and extracting resources. GCC countries have the power to cripple the economies of migrant countries by stopping remittance outflows. As a result, there is no incentive to treat domestic workers humanely and pay them for their reproductive labor. Despite both being part of the Global South, there is a stark contrast in income between countries with the Kafala system and the Asian countries from whom they extract labor. Therefore, migrant countries and migrants are in structurally vulnerable positions. Migrant-origin countries have received heavy criticism for not protecting their citizens working within the Kafala system as reports of abuse and deaths make 44 Warisha Siddiqui headlines on a daily basis. Countries such as India, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka have learned through trial and error that stringent regulation and oversight of recruitment, trained consular staff, and bilateral negotiations and agreements are key strategies to prevent and respond to abuse, but Tanzania fails to follow that model for its domestic workers. Tanzania began requiring a standard contract with minimum employment conditions for migrant workers, creating contract verification procedures in their embassies in Oman and the UAE in 2011 in an attempt to provide some protection to overseas domestic workers. However, standard contracts still require workers to pay back 1.5 months of their salaries if they leave before 12 months of employment (Hu- man Rights Watch 2017). Human Rights Watch also reported Omani police offer employers a large degree of impunity for abuse and exploitation by not appearing at resolution dispute sessions and not believing abuse victim’s stories. The labor laws female migrant domestic workers operate under do not adhere to international doctrines of human and labor rights that these countries have all agreed to, such as The Conven- tion on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The lack of a framework for Tanzania and its peer countries to hold GCC countries accountable for the treatment of migrant domestic workers is a failure on the part of both parties for not valuing the work and the lives of these women and their families. This continues to go unanswered and the longer that happens, the greater that dependence grows. Like a tree growing around a bullet, it shapes the future trajectory of globalization.

Conclusion In examining the Kafala system we see that there is a heavy reliance on women from low-income countries in the Global South. The reproductive labor of this system exists in the context of gendered definitions of what is productive for the global economy, using women of the Global South as the cost necessary for the “development” of wealthier nations in the Global South. As Farris wrote, “precisely as neoliberalism colonizes more and more domains of human life, pushing to convert middle-class aspirational women into human capital, neoliberal feminism also operates—at the moment—as a peculiar pushback to this total conversion by paradoxically and coun- terintuitively maintaining reproduction (alongside professional development) as part of the normative trajectory for upwardly mobile women” (Farris 2017, 99). The Kaf- ala system seeks to produce reproductive labor for sponsors in the host country and then for migrants in their home countries. The classifications of the global economy only partly explain the ways neoliberal capitalism and a new form of imperialism are governing the lives of women in the Global South, recreating a class system of low- wage laborers without rights who are exploited by wealthier and more powerful host countries. The Kafala system exists as an embedded colonizing and neoliberal system within the Global South that is reinforced by globalization, revealing a more complex web of power and control across countries that is strongly founded on the commodi- fication of female bodies. Unavoidable Aspects of Migrant Labor 45

Works Cited Amnesty International. 2019. “‘Their House is My Prison’ : Exploitation of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon.” Lonon: Amnesty International. 1–67.

Dimitra Dermitzaki, and Sylvia Riewendt. 2020. “The Kafāla System: Gender and Migration in Contemporary Lebanon.” Middle East - Topics & Arguments 14: vol.14. 105– 118.

(ESCWA) Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. 2007. “International Migra- tion and Development in the Arab World: Challenges and Opportunities,” Population and Development Report, no. 3, 1–47.

Farris, Sara R. 2017. “Integration Policies and the Institutionalization of Femonationalism.” In In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Durham; London: Duke Uni- versity Press: 78–114.

Griffin, Penny. 2007. “Sexing the Economy in a Neo-liberal World Order: Neo-liberal Dis- course and the (Re)Production of Heteronormative Heterosexuality.” British Journal of Politics & International Relations 9, no. 2: 220–38.

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Scholte, Jan Aart. 2005. Globalization : a Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 84–91.

Khalaf, Abdulhadi. 2015. “The Politics of Migration.” In ransitT States: Labour, Migration and Citizenship in the Gulf, edited by Khalaf Abdulhadi, AlShehabi Omar, and Hanieh Adam, London: Pluto Press. 39–56.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. “’Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs 28, no. 2. 499–535.

Ngeh, Jonathan, and Michaela Pelican. 2018. “Intersectionality and the Labour Market in the United Arab Emirates: The Experiences of African Migrants.” Zeitschrift Für Ethnologie 143, no. 2. 171–94.

Parrenas, Rhacel Salazar. 2000. “Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor.” Gender and Society 14, no. 4. 560–80.

Peterson, V. Spike. 2014. “International/global political economy.” In Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations. London: Taylor & Francis Group. 173–185. 46 Warisha Siddiqui

Ruhs, Martin. 2013. “Regulating the Admission and Rights of Migrant Workers: Policy Ra- tionales in High-Income Countries.” In The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. 91–121.

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World Bank. 2019. Population, Female, electronic dataset. 47

Between a Canal and a Hard Alliance

Jacob C. Lefkowitz

The most critical period of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s tenure as President came in October, 1956 during the Suez Crisis. Less than two weeks before a presidential election, Eisen- hower was faced with an invasion of Egypt by Israel, which was working with France and Great Britain to free the Suez Canal after it had been nationalized by Egyptian President Gamal Nasser. Conventional wisdom holds that Eisenhower’s deft handling of the crisis at the height of the Cold War avoided a third World War in which the United States and the Soviet Union would have supported their respective proxies in the Middle East. This article argues that Eisenhower’s decision-making was short-sighted and ultimately counterproductive to the long-term interests of the United States. Specifically, the author argues that Eisenhower’s decision to act as an “honest broker” between Egypt and the United States’ traditional western allies had lasting negative effects on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. The article examines the flawed assumptions that underpinned Eisenhower’s approach, including his misapprehension of Soviet aims and intentions, as well as his conviction that the U.S. would gain goodwill in the Arab nationalist world by distancing the U.S. from the “taint” of Western colonialism. In actuality, Eisenhower’s conduct during the crisis had significant repercussions that harmed U.S. interests in the Middle East for decades to come, including elevating Nasser into a Pan-Arab nationalist hero and inciting a wave of radical anti-Western nationalism. In short, this article argues that Eisenhower picked the wrong partner at a critical moment in U.S. history.

I. Introduction When Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal on July 26, 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower faced a stark choice—to support Egypt’s increasingly popular president, who had emerged as the embodiment of Arab nationalism, or to side with America’s traditional global allies, Britain and France, as well as one of its newest friends, Israel. Driven by his desire to avoid an escalation with the Soviets and limit their influence in the Middle East, Eisenhower tried to adopt an “honest broker” approach to the conflict, though when war broke out, he sided with Egypt, pressuring America’s NATO allies and Israel to withdraw their forces from the canal and confirming Egyptian sovereignty over the waterway. This paper asks whether Eisenhower’s decision to back Nasser and work against the interests of America’s traditional allies was strategically wise. Most scholarship on this issue falls into two basic camps. The first camp argues that Eisenhow- er employed thoughtful and pragmatic decision making, effectively leading the U.S.

Jake Lefkowitz is a member of the class of 2022 at Dartmouth College majoring in Government Mod- ified, with a focus on international relations. Jake attended Ramaz High School in New York City, as well as The Mountain School, in Vershire, Vermont, where he spent a semester working and living on a self-sustaining farm. He has worked as a foreign affairs intern at the office of the Mayor of Jerusalem and as an intern at 25 Madison, a venture capital firm in New York City. Jake is planning on attending law school after graduating from Dartmouth in 2022. In his free time, Jake is an avid rock climber and skier and has scaled routes in Yosemite, Nepal, and throughout the East Coast. Jake enjoys spending time hiking and climbing with friends and exploring the Upper Valley. 48 Jacob C. Lefkowitz through a challenging diplomatic imbroglio and expanding its influence in the Mid- dle East while avoiding an escalation with the Soviets, who were also seeking to expand their influence in the region.1 The second camp argues that Eisenhower, bogged down by flawed assumptions about the potential of Arab nationalism to be a bulwark against communism, backed the wrong horse and both weakened America’s Cold War allies and undermined America’s regional interests in the long term.2 I will evaluate the evidence and demonstrate that Eisenhower’s decision making during the crisis was short-sighted. Instead of turning Egypt into an ally of the U.S. and a partner in its effort to repel the spread of communism, Eisenhower’s strategy promoted increased nationalism throughout the Arab world and led to greater instability and Soviet influence in the region. Eisenhower picked the wrong partner at a critical moment.

II. Literature Review The first school of thought asserts that despite the enormous challenges -Ei senhower faced during October 1956 (including the Soviet reprisal against the Hun- garian uprising, the hospitalization of his trusted Secretary of State, and the upcoming 1956 Presidential election), Eisenhower controlled the crisis masterfully, acting as an honest broker among Cairo, London, Paris, and Tel Aviv (Nichols 1956, 81, 231). Reflecting this view, David Nichols writes that Eisenhower’s conduct during the crisis “was a virtuoso presidential performance—an enduring model for effective crisis management” (Nichols 1956, 285). Peter Hahn writes that “the overriding objective during the crisis was containment of the Soviet Union, a strategic imperative, and not satisfaction of Egyptian aspirations,” and applauds Eisenhower for keeping the U.S. out of war (Hahn 1945–1956, 247).3 Scholars in this camp maintain that Eisenhower’s handling of the crisis significantly fortified the United Nations and the use of peacekeeping forces, put to rest the age of European imperialism and colonial rule, and brought about an age of unprecedented American dominance as the leader of the Western world order.4 For example, Rose McDermott writes that a “profound impact of the crisis was the shift in power in the Middle East,” and that “prior to the crisis, Britain had been the main outside force in the Middle East,” but “after the crisis, the United States emerged as the dominant outside power.” (McDermott 1998, 163). In the words of Professor Randall Fowler, the Suez Crisis “permanently changed the way the Middle East is articulated to the American public,” and enabled Eisenhower “to provide a new basis for U.S. engagement in the Middle East—the role of guardian and guarantor of liberty—which broke from previously articulated rationales for American engagement in the region, such as supporting the British Empire or providing aid to the Zionist project” ( Fowler 2017, 56.) The opposing camp in this debate argues that by siding with Egypt in 1956, Eisenhower not only weakened Britain and France’s global influence, but also embold- ened Nasser, making him a hero to the Arab world, which led to rising nationalism in the region and the overthrow of governments in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq by Between a Canal and a Hard Alliance 49 Nasserists.5 They further maintain that despite Eisenhower’s hope that being seen as an honest broker would keep the Soviets from gaining influence in the region, Soviet influence in the Arab world expanded rapidly following the Suez War. Historian and former NSC staffer Michael Doran writes that “Eisenhower handed Nasser [a] political victory—the greatest of his career” and “helped transform the Egyptian leader into a pan-Arab hero of epic proportions,” without ever receiving the strategic payoff, in the form of widespread Arab goodwill, that he expected (Doran 2017, 11). And Gail Meyer writes that “American policy unified and strengthened Arab nationalist resistance while ignoring its tremendous popular appeal” (Meyer 1980, 194). These historians criticize not only Eisenhower’s conduct during the crisis but also his underlying rationale for trying to act as an honest broker. Robert McMahon points out that Eisenhower underestimated the damage to the U.S.-Egyptian relationship caused by his promotion of the Baghdad Pact and the U.S.’s withdrawal of support for Nasser’s Aswan Dam project (McMahon 1986, 465).6 And as Robert Stook- ey argues, Eisenhower’s honest broker approach led the U.S. into “actions that, far from shielding the Near East from the Cold War, actually tended to draw it into the confrontation and lent substance to Communist assertions, eagerly adopted by Arab nationalists, that the United States had become the leader of Western imperialism opposed to Arab freedom and progress” (Stookey 1975, 157). More recently, Dennis Ross, another former NSC staffer who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents and who has been intimately involved in U.S.-Middle East affairs for decades, writes that “Eisenhower failed on most of the objectives he set for himself in the Middle East, [as] he was unable to keep the Soviets out of the area, [weakened] U.S. and Western influence … [and] made no headway on peace” (Ross 2015, 5).

III. Research Design In the remainder of this paper, I demonstrate how evidence gathered from confiden- tial communications among the key participants in the Suez Crisis as well as contem- poraneous memoranda summarizing key meetings by the government officials most deeply involved support the critique that Eisenhower’s strategy during the war was shortsighted and harmed U.S. interests long-term. I make this argument in two parts. First, I evaluate the assumptions that guided Eisenhower’s honest broker strategy and conclude that many of them were flawed based on the facts on the ground at the time. Second, I look at Eisenhower’s actual conduct during the crisis and the state of affairs in the Middle East in the following years and explain how Eisenhower’s strategy backfired.

IV. Evidence A. Assumptions Underpinning Eisenhower’s Honest Broker Approach Several key assumptions led Eisenhower to posture the U.S. as an honest broker during the Suez Crisis. First, Eisenhower’s paramount concern was to avoid war with the So- viet Union.7 He believed that if the U.S. opposed Egypt during the crisis, it would 50 Jacob C. Lefkowitz push Egypt firmly into the Soviet orbit and could potentially bring the Soviet Union directly into the conflict as Egypt’s protector.8 Second, Eisenhower was concerned that an Egyptian blockade of the canal could have devastating effects on Europe’s access to oil and make the Europeans more dependent on the Soviet Union.9 Third, he believed that distancing the U.S. from European colonialism and Israel would help the U.S. forge a closer relationship with Nasser and expand the U.S.’s influence in the Middle East.10 Finally, he had a steadfast belief that the shared monotheism of Christianity and Islam made the Arabs more natural allies of the U.S. than the Soviet Union.11 I will evaluate each of these assumptions. There is no question that concern about war with the Soviet Union influenced Eisenhower during the crisis. As early as April 1956, CIA Director Allen Dulles reported to Eisenhower that “Russia is prepared to support Egypt all the way, even risking World War III.”12 As British and French forces approached the Canal Zone in November of 1956, Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin even sent letters to Prime Min- isters Eden, Mollet, and Ben Gurion containing veiled threats of nuclear annihilation (Nichols Eisenhower 1956, 244).13 To be sure, the specter of war was not something Eisenhower could take lightly, and any critique of Eisenhower’s conduct that does not take this threat seriously does not do justice to the issue. A 1956 Net Evaluation Subcommittee report on the implications of a nuclear war with Russia concluded that nuclear war would result in the death of approximately 40% of the U.S. population, the serious injury of another 13%, and the total disruption of the political, social and economic structure of the U.S.14 Based on these catastrophic predictions, scholars view White House Chief of Staff Jim Hagerty’s statement on October 8, 1956 that “peaceful settlement must be the only answer in these days of nuclear weapons” as evidence that Eisenhower’s key priority was avoiding a nuclear escalation with the Soviets.15 A closer inspection of the evidence, however, suggests that Eisenhower did not actually deem the risk of such a war with the Soviets to be very serious. On July 28, 1956, only two days after Nasser’s move to nationalize the Suez, Eisenhower said he felt it was “very clear that the Soviet Union was not going to get into a major war” over the Suez Canal.16 Even during an NSC meeting on November 8, at the most critical period of the conflict, Eisenhower stated that he “couldn’t help believing that the Russians would play their game short of anything which would induce the United States to declare war on them.”17 Eisenhower’s intuition about Soviet intentions was rooted in the CIA’s estimation that the “main Soviet emphasis would be on keeping the pot boiling,” but that Russia would stop short of any actions that “they believed likely to induce general war.”18 Indeed, the very same Net Evaluation report that projected dire consequences for the United States in the case of a nuclear war determined that “the massive nuclear retaliatory capability of the United States is an indispensable deterrent to Soviet attack.”19 And a diary entry by Eisenhower on January 23, 1956 indicates that U.S. intelligence projected the damage resulting from a U.S.-Russian nuclear war to be three times greater for the Soviet Union.20 Thus, it’s clear that the spec- Between a Canal and a Hard Alliance 51 ter of nuclear war, though a serious matter, was not something Eisenhower deemed a realistic threat, as many scholars in the pro-Eisenhower camp argue.21 Soviet actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, only 6 years after the Suez affair, bolster Eisenhower’s assumption that the Soviets were just as fearful as he was of a nuclear confrontation.22 Oil was also on Eisenhower’s mind, and that was certainly a legitimate concern. Though the U.S. was far less dependent on oil from the Middle East than was Western Europe, the U.S. would have been harmed if it no longer had access to Mid- dle Eastern oil (McDermott 1998, 137)23. As Dulles observed at an NSC meeting on July 31, 1956, “rationing of oil would be an immediate result, with curtailment of automobile production, and a severe blow to the United States economy.”24 The more serious concern to Eisenhower, however, was the impact closing the canal would have on Europe. As Henry Brands points out, “[t]he whole point of worrying about Soviet penetration of the Middle East was to ensure that Middle Eastern oil continues to flow to Britain and the other European allies” (Brands; Justice 2013).25 Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff Sherman Adams recalls that Eisenhower spoke directly to this concern when he remarked in a meeting that “[a]ny outbreak of major hostilities in the region would be a catastrophe for the world. . . . [A]ll of Western Europe had gone to oil instead of coal for its energy, and that oil comes from the Mideast” (Adams 1961, 286). What was foremost on Eisenhower’s mind, and played the most important role in shaping his decision to try to act as an honest broker, was his desire to keep the Soviets from gaining influence in the region. Importantly, a section of a CIA National Intelligence Estimate issued five days before Eisenhower’s first inauguration, entitled “Obstacles to U.S. Influence in the Middle East,” provides support for some of Eisen- hower’s other assumptions. The NIE states that the “U.S. association with Israel is a continuing irritant in U.S.-Arab relations and [is] the major obstacle to the acceptance of U.S. influence in the Middle East.”26 The report further recognizes that the “U.S. alliance with the U.K. and France, the most important former colonial powers in the area, also arouses Arab distrust.”27 Several months later, on May 29, Secretary of State Dulles returned from a trip to the Middle East and confirmed both views, writing to Eisenhower that “the Israel factor and the association of the United States in the minds of the people of the area with French and British colonial and imperialist policies are millstones around our neck.”28 Although Eisenhower tried to act as an honest broker when it came to the Middle East from the start of his presidency, it should have been evident to him by 1956 that the U.S. and Egypt were unlikely allies and that his approach might not succeed. Following the Egyptian revolution of 1952, Egypt viewed the evacuation of British forces from Egyptian territory as a necessary step to free itself from the yoke of colonial rule and establish complete independence. In the first meeting between Sec- retary of State Dulles and Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Fawzi in 1953, Fawzi leveraged Dulles’ fears about the Soviets to incentivize the U.S. to support Egypt in its efforts to oust the British from the Canal Zone. Fawzi stated that “perhaps we are not Communist now … but this situation might change.”29 He further warned 52 Jacob C. Lefkowitz that “delay in solving the problems in the Middle East … is one of the best ways to make Communists.”30 Following this meeting, Eisenhower pressured Britain to show deference to “the very strong nationalist sentiments of the Egyptian government and people,” even going so far as to threaten to supply Egypt with military aid (Foreign Relations of the United States 1952–1954, vol. IX). The British agreed to withdraw their troops, but only one year later, Nasser announced a massive arms deal between Egypt and Czechoslovakia, a Soviet satellite state. Clearly, Eisenhower’s honest broker policy during the Suez base negotiation had failed to bring Egypt under American influence. The years leading up to the Suez Canal crisis also produced two instances in which the U.S. clashed with Nasser—first regarding the Baghdad Pact and then during negotiations over funding the Aswan Dam project. The Baghdad Pact was the U.S.’s effort to create a regional alliance of countries along the northern tier of the Middle East, “stretching from Pakistan to Turkey,” who felt “the hot breath of the So- viet Union on their necks.”31 Because of the “constant friction” between the Egyptians and the British, Dulles said he “foresaw a lot of problems in making Egypt the military center of a defense pact.”32 The U.S. instead chose to focus on Iraq, Turkey, and Paki- stan, countries that were “more alert to the same danger the United States and United Kingdom feel and [were] less preoccupied with the colonialism aspects of the past and the existing feud with Israel.”33 Nasser viewed the Baghdad Pact as a great affront to his prestige,5F and U.S. Ambassador Parker Hart later recollected in an interview that the Baghdad Pact caused Nasser to be “absolutely furious with the United States” and created a “cloud” over American-Egyptian relations that “never dissipated” (Hart 1989).34 If the first straw was the Baghdad Pact, the second was the Aswan High Dam project, which was one of Nasser’s signature initiatives in 1956 and would have enabled Egypt to irrigate 1.3 million acres of arid Egyptian land and produce enough electricity to sustain half of the Egyptian population (Caruthers 1956). The Eisenhow- er administration, in conjunction with Britain and the World Bank, initially set out to fund the project in an effort to bring Egypt back into the fold after the 1955 arms deal with the Soviets. But when a majority in the U.S. Congress opposed the plan, due to “a feeling that the Egyptian Government was working closely with those hostile to [the U.S.],” an implicit reference to the USSR, the U.S. rescinded its support.35 Not only did this further alienate Nasser and push him decidedly in the direction of the Soviets, but it also provided him with the pretext to nationalize the Suez. Exactly one week after the U.S. formally withdrew its offer to finance the Aswan project, Nasser announced his intention to nationalize the Suez Canal.36 Finally, there was the issue of Israel. Eisenhower saw the Middle East as the testing ground for U.S.-Soviet relations (Ross 2015, 27). And from day one of his tenure, he sought to create some distance between the U.S. and Israel in order to appeal to the Arabs. In his first years, he reduced the total amount of aid the U.S. gave Israel, and even suspended assistance when the Jordanians complained that Israel Between a Canal and a Hard Alliance 53 was diverting water from the Jordan River to create hydroelectric power (Ross 2015, 29). He refused to lift the U.S. arms embargo to Israel even after the Egyptian-Soviet arms deal, explaining to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in April, 1956, that arms sales to Israel would not “serve the cause of peace and stability.”37 But with the U.S. arms depot closed to Israel, Ben Gurion turned to France for the very weapons and aircraft that would be used to attack Egypt later that year (Ross 2015, 53). Once again, Eisenhower’s efforts at being an honest broker failed; indeed, they promoted the military cooperation between France and Israel that months later Eisenhower con- demned during the Suez Crisis.

B. Eisenhower’s Honest Brokerage During the Suez Crisis and its Effects Despite the failure of Eisenhower’s honest broker approach during the previous few years and the widening fissure between the U.S. and Egypt, Eisenhower remained committed to his approach throughout the Suez Crisis. Instead of recognizing the increasing level of collaboration between Nasser and the Soviet Union, Eisenhower continued to pursue a partnership with Nasser. He rationalized the 1955 Egyptian-Soviet arms deal by accepting Nasser’s justification that refusal to accept the arms package would have resulted in his overthrow by the weak Egyptian army, desperately in need of weapons and aid at the time.38 He also turned a blind eye to the clear interest Nasser and the Soviets shared in undermining the Baghdad Pact, which positioned them as natural allies (Doran 2017, 245). One explanation for Eisenhower’s continued faith in a relationship with Nasser is that the President simply could not conceive of a lasting strategic partnership between the Islamic, monotheistic Nasserites and the atheistic communists, as some scholars argue (Justice 2013, 3; Morrison 2009, 4; Inboden 2008, 290). Indeed, in a private letter Eisenhower wrote to his religious advisor, Reverend Edward L.R. Elson in 1958, the President noted that “I never fail in any communication with Arab leaders, oral or written, to stress the importance of the spiritual factor in our relationship. I have argued that belief in God should create between them and us the common purpose of opposing atheistic communism.”39 Regardless of the impetus for Eisenhower’s miscalculation, he proceeded with his honest broker approach, betting that it would strengthen the U.S.’s influence in the region and hold the Soviets at bay. Once Nasser nationalized the Suez, Eisenhower sought to settle the issue dip- lomatically. When the proposals resulting from the First and Second London Confer- ences during the summer of 1956 failed, war became a more likely possibility. Then, in a press conference on October 2, Dulles doubled down on Eisenhower’s honest broker policy by asserting that while the U.S. would stand by its traditional allies (Britain and France) in the North Atlantic arena, “any areas encroaching in some form or manner on the problem of so-called colonialism, [will] find the U.S. playing an independent role” (Eden 1960, 483–484). When Israel invaded Egypt later in the month and Britain and France followed suit less than a week later, Eisenhower denounced the military action as being irreconcilable “with the principles and purposes 54 Jacob C. Lefkowitz of the United Nations to which we have all subscribed.”40 Eisenhower continued to work through the U.N. to force a cease-fire and the withdrawal from Egypt of foreign forces, and applied pressure on Britain and France in the form of economic sanctions and a refusal to supply them with oil (McDermott 1998, 139).41 On November 29, Britain, France and Israel officially ended the war and announced their intentions to withdraw their troops from Egypt. The depth of Eisenhower’s Suez miscalculation becomes clear when one analyzes Middle Eastern affairs in the years following the crisis. The U.S. never received the strategic payoff it expected in the form of increased Arab goodwill, and Arab nationalists became even more entrenched in the Soviet sphere. A 1957 NIE observes that “[t]he role of the U.S. in the passage of the [Suez Canal Crisis] Cease Fire Reso- lution in the U.N. was widely appreciated, but Soviet threats against the U.K. made an equal or greater impression on the Arab public.”42 The report recognizes that in the prior two years, “the Soviet bloc has established itself as a power with direct interests and influence in the Near East” and takes note of Nasser’s “steady drift toward the Communist Bloc.”43 The NIE also predicts (accurately) that the radical Arab nationalist states (Egypt, Syria, and to a lesser degree Yemen), which constitute “the most significant indigenous regional force in the Near East” will “persist in attempts to use the USSR as a counter to real or imagined Western pressure” and that “Sino-Soviet influence will expand” in the region.44 Eisenhower sought to address the troubling trends identified in the NIE by articulating the “Eisenhower Doctrine” in a Special Message to Congress on January 5, 1957, in which he pledged to defend and provide aid for any country seeking protection “against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism.”45 Asserting that he had “no intention of standing idly by to see the southern flank of NATO completely collapse through Communist penetration and success in the Mid-East,” Eisenhower sought, through his Doctrine, to fill “the existing vacuum that must be filled by the United States before it is filled by Russia.”46 But the very vacuum that Eisenhower was lamenting was a product of his own handling of the Suez Crisis. In the end, the rapidly rising tide of Arab nationalism in the Mid- dle East, spearheaded by Nasser, led to the demise of the Eisenhower Doctrine. And Eisenhower’s policies helped to establish Nasser as the undisputed “spokesman and symbol of radical Pan-Arab nationalism.”47 The Eisenhower Doctrine suffered its first loss when Arab nationalists over- threw the U.S.-friendly leader of Saudi Arabia, King Saud. Eisenhower initially had high hopes for the King, whom he sought to “build up … as a prospective leader of the Arab world—in the thought that mutually antagonistic personal ambitions might disrupt the aggressive plans [of] Nasser.”48 But when Nasser revealed in a March 1957 speech that he had foiled a conspiracy, formulated by King Saud, to murder the Egyp- tian President and dismantle the UAR, Arab nationalist members of the Saudi royal family forced Saud out and replaced him with his brother, Crown Prince Feisal (Dor- an 2017, 224). A special NIE on the implications of the Saudi regime change states Between a Canal and a Hard Alliance 55 that Feisal’s “coming to power will be construed throughout the area as a repudiation of Saud’s open anti-Nasser, pro-West policy, and as a victory for Nasserism,” and by extension, Arab nationalism.49 A second blow to the Doctrine came when Syria and Egypt formed the Unit- ed Arab Republic (UAR) on February 1, 1958 (Hahn 2006, 43).50 The Egyptian-Syr- ian merger spelled trouble for the Western-aligned Arab states, such as Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel, as it served to further bolster Nasser’s status and provided him with a strategic base of operations in Syria, “the heart of the fertile crescent” (Doran 2017, 222). Yet, despite the strategic threat that the UAR represented to U.S. interests, American Ambassador James Moose reported that popular Arab nationalist Syri- an support for the merger was so energetic that the U.S. “would be wasting its prestige … [by] openly opposing so popular a cause.”51 Thus, on February 25, Eisenhower acquiesced and the U.S. formally recognized the UAR. The political upheaval of Iraq, which Eisenhower referred to as “the country that [the U.S. was] counting on heavily as a bulwark of stability and progress in the region” in his memoirs, was likewise detrimental to U.S. regional interests (Eisen- hower 1965, 265). On July 13, 1958, two Iraqi army officers launched a macabre coup, murdering the royal family and dragging the defiled corpse of the Crown Prince Abdel Ilah through the Baghdad streets. In place of the Western-aligned Hashemite regime, the Iraqi officers, who identified as Nasserite “Free Officers,” proclaimed the rise of a new Arab nationalist republic modeled on the Egyptian regime. A briefing by CIA Director Allen Dulles the morning after the coup notes that “Radio Cairo [and] Damascus are hailing these developments” and predicted that the revolution would “set up a chain reaction which will doom the pro-West governments of Lebanon and Jordan, and raise grave problems for Turkey and Iran.”52 The situation that developed in Lebanon that same month, and Eisenhower’s response to it, serve as perhaps the best evidence that his Suez strategy had failed. Fol- lowing the establishment of the UAR, Eisenhower decided to send troops to Lebanon to help defend Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, who was under attack from pro-Nasserites in Lebanon. Dulles noted at the time that U.S. involvement would bring “very threatening gestures” by the Soviets, “a very bad reaction through most of the Arab countries,” and that “most of Asia [would be] against it” too.53 But Eisen- hower concluded that the U.S. “must act, or get out of the Middle East entirely,” and judged that “to lose this area by inaction would be far worse than the loss in China, because of the strategic position and resources of the Middle East.”54 Eisenhower thus repudiated the very assumptions that had motivated his Suez policy, deciding to shore up one of America’s regional allies instead of appeasing Arab nationalists and trying to avoid escalating tensions with Russia. As Michael Doran notes, only two years after Eisenhower formulated a Suez policy that focused on appeasement of Nasser in an effort to gain influence over the Arab world, “the only Arab actors willing to work against Egypt were King Hussein of Jordan and President Chamoun of Lebanon – embattled leaders of diminutive and internally divided countries” who “hardly consti- 56 Jacob C. Lefkowitz tuted a solid foundation for a regional strategy” (Doran 2017, 231). The evidence thus shows that Eisenhower’s Suez strategy did not bring him the benefits he anticipated but instead undermined the very interests he sought to promote.55

V. Conclusion This paper has argued that Eisenhower’s Suez policy was shortsighted and gave the Soviets an opportunity both to expand their scope of influence in the Middle East and create greater instability in the region, outcomes that Eisenhower had sought to avoid by coming to the aid of the Egyptians. While it is certainly true that Eisenhower avoided what could have been a catastrophic war with the Soviet Union, one can only defend his policy on that score if one assumes, contrary to the weight of the evidence, that this was a serious risk. I have focused in the first evidentiary section of this paper on showing that several of Eisenhower’s honest broker assumptions were faulty and in the second section on demonstrating that his strategy actually harmed long-term U.S. interests. An intriguing post-script that provides even further support for my conclusion is that it appears Eisenhower even acknowledged later in life that he regretted his Suez policies. President Richard Nixon revealed in 1988 that Eisenhower confided in him shortly after the Six Day War that his Suez decision was “his major foreign policy mistake” (Nixon 1987, 16). As Nixon related their conversation, Eisenhower admitted that “saving Nasser at Suez didn’t help as far as the Middle East was concerned,” and resulted in “Nasser [becoming] even more anti-West and anti-U.S” (Nixon 1987, 16). He further lamented to Nixon that “the worst fallout from Suez was that it weakened the will of [America’s] best allies, Britain and France, to play a major role in the Middle East or in other areas outside Europe” (Nixon 1987, 16).56 If this paper is correct that Eisenhower’s Suez policy was shortsighted and ultimately created more problems for the United States than it solved, this has important implications for presidents and policymakers navigating other conflicts. Eisen- hower based his decision-making on a set of assumptions about the Soviet Union, the rise of Arab nationalism, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. When viewed in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, his policy appeared to have been successful. He waged peace, was easily re-elected, and elevated the United Nations. But the damage he caused by turning against the U.S.’s traditional allies did not only affect those nations. It also affected the standing of the U.S. among a wider audience. An interaction in 1959 between Lebanese Prime Minister Rashid Karami and President Eisenhower reveals one of the other costs of Eisenhower’s ill-fated approach to the Suez Crisis and has implications for preventing similar mistakes in the future. As Eisenhower recounted in his memoirs, Karami told Eisenhower that the U.S. response during the conflict led him to believe that it would never “resort to force to support friends” (Eisenhower 1965, 290). Dennis Ross notes that Eisenhower included this perspective in his memoirs to demonstrate how his decision in 1958 to intervene in Lebanon corrected this impression (Ross 2015, 49). But Karami’s observation serves as a powerful reminder Between a Canal and a Hard Alliance 57 of the collateral damage that can be caused when the U.S. doesn’t stand by its friends. Eisenhower’s conduct during the Suez crisis sent the wrong signals to leaders in the Arab world at precisely the wrong time. Far from demonstrating that the U.S. was principled and could be trusted by its allies, Eisenhower instead proved that America could not be relied upon as a dependable partner. At a moment when both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were seeking to expand their influence in the Middle East and offering significant assistance to would-be allies, Eisenhower’s conduct was clearly seen as a red flag by Karami. This is a lesson well worth learning by future presidents and policymakers. Twenty years after the Suez War, the U.S. helped to facilitate a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, and Egypt became a close ally of the U.S. and a recipient of billions of dollars in military aid. Importantly, that relationship developed not after the U.S. turned its back on its closest allies in the region, but rather after the U.S. re-armed Israel during its 1973 war against Egypt and helped it triumph. An important lesson from the Suez Crisis is that U.S. interests are often better served when it stands up for its principles and stands by its allies. 58 Jacob C. Lefkowitz

Endnotes 1. See, e.g. Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace (New York: Harper, 2016); David A. Nichols, Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis – Suez and the Brink of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012); Herbert Parmet, Eisenhower and the American Crusades (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1972), 574; Peter Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt 1945–1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 247; Robert A. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 154–55; Rose McDermott, Risk-Taking in International Politics: Prospect Theory in American Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 164; William I. Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

2. See, e.g. Dennis Ross, Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); Gail E. Meyer, Egypt and the United States: The Formative Years (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), 194; Michael Doran, Ike’s Gamble: America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East (New York: Free Press, 2017); Steven L. Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America’s Mid- dle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 85–86.

3. See, e.g. R. Gordon Hoxie, “Eisenhower and Presidential Leadership,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1983): 604, where he writes that Eisenhower believed that “unless the Anglo-French and Israeli invasion at Suez were checked, the Russians, already in Egypt, would emerge as the protectors of the oil-rich Arab states and the whole Third World would turn against the West.” See, e.g. Rose McDermott, Risk-Taking in International Politics, 164, where she argues that “a major [nuclear] war was averted because of firm and consistent pressure by Eisenhower against his Western allies.”

4. See, e.g. Nichols, Eisenhower 1956, 262, where he writes: “the second [component of Ei- senhower’s Suez approach] was his commitment to principle, upholding the United Nations.”

5. See infra, at p. 15–17 of this paper, for a discussion of the ways in which Eisenhower’s Suez policy helped lead to government overthrows in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq.

6. See infra, at p. 10–11 of this paper, for a discussion of the impact of both the Baghdad Pact and the Aswan Dam on U.S.-Egyptian relations.

7. See, e.g. Nichols, Eisenhower 1956, 286, where he states that “Ike’s paramount concern was that a Suez-type crisis might escalate into a nuclear holocaust.”

8. See, e.g. David Justice, “Communication Breakdown: The Eisenhower Administration, An- thony Eden, and the Suez Crisis,” North Alabama Historical Review 3, no. 7 (2013): 3, where he writes that “[t]he worst case scenario for Eisenhower and Dulles was for the Soviet Union to move into the Middle East and influence the Arab nations to join their cause.”

9. See endnote 23 for a more complete discussion of this concern. Between a Canal and a Hard Alliance 59 10. Adams, 1961, 286 vindicates this assertion.

11. See Ross, 2015, 32 for a list of scholarly articles that discuss this belief more comprehensively.

12. Notes from Bipartisan meeting, November 9, 1956, “Nov 56 Misc (3),” Box 20, DDE Diary-Whitman, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library.

13. Soviet Premier Bulganin’s letters equated the Israeli, French and British attacks on Egypt with hypothetical attacks on Britain and France by “more powerful states possessing all types of modern weapons of destruction,” including “rocket weapons.”

14. Memorandum of Discussion at the 306th Meeting of the National Security Council, December 20, 1956, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, vol. XIX, National Security Policy, eds. William Klingaman, David S. Patterson and Ilana Stern (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1990), doc. 100.

15. Memo, Hagerty to Eisenhower, October 8, 1956, “Dulles, F Oct 56 (2),” Box 7, D-h-Whit- man, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library; see, e.g. Rose McDermott, Risk-Taking in International Politics, 158, for an example of a scholar using Hagerty’s statement to support such a claim.

16. Memorandum of a Conversation with the President, July 28, 1956, FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. XVI, Suez Crisis, ed. Nina J. Noring (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1990), doc. 16.

17. Memorandum of Discussion at the 303d Meeting of the National Security Council, No- vember 8, 1956, FRUS, vol. XVI, doc. 554.

18. Refer to previous endnote.

19. Memorandum of Discussion at the 306th Meeting of the National Security Council, December 20, 1956, FRUS, vol. XIX, doc. 100.

20. Diary Entry by the President, January 23, 1956, FRUS, vol. XIX, doc. 53.

21. Indeed, in O. M. Smolansky, “Moscow and the Suez Crisis, 1956: A Reappraisal,” Political Science Quarterly 80, no. 4 (1965): 587–588, he notes that “The USSR had in fact no choice but to back Cairo. This is not to say that Moscow would have risked its annihilation for the sake of Egypt but that the Soviet government would seek by means of diplomatic and moral pressure to prevent the Western powers from crushing Nasser.” See also, Michael Peck, “In 1956, Russia Almost Launched a Nuclear War against Britain, France and Israel,” The Nation- al Interest (January 8, 2017), which notes that “the Soviet Union’s ICBM force was mostly a propaganda at th[e] time.”

22. See, e.g. Mark L. Haas, “Prospect Theory and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” International Studies Quarterly 45, no. 2 (2001): 265–266 for an assessment of how prospect theory and 60 Jacob C. Lefkowitz risk-aversion explain Khruschev’s ultimate decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis to return the missiles to the Soviet Union.

23. Rose McDermott, Risk-Taking in International Politics, 137; “About 1.5 million barrels of oil a day transited the Canal, about 1.2 million of which were destined for Western Europe. This figure amounted to about two-thirds of Western Europe’s total oil supplies. About a third of the ships that passed through the Canal at the time were British and about three-fourths belonged to NATO countries. Relatively few vessels that passed through the Canal, however, were of American registry. American vessels only accounted for 2.7 percent of the total net tonnage that transited the Canal in 1955.”

24. Memorandum of a Conference With the President, July 31, 1956, FRUS, vol. XVI, doc. 34.

25. “Communication Breakdown: The Eisenhower Administration, Anthony Eden, and the Suez Crisis,” North Alabama Historical Review 3, no. 7 (2013): 6, where he writes that if the Soviets were to become involved in the crisis, “possibly by influence of Nasser and his Arab nation following, they would have control over oil that was being used to assist in the economic recovery of Western Europe.”

26. National Intelligence Estimate, January 15, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. IX, part 1, The Near and Middle East, eds. Paul Claussen, Joan M. Lee and Carl N. Raether (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1986), doc. 114.

27. Refer to previous endnote.

28. Dulles to Eisenhower, May 29, 1953, Dulles Papers, Box 73, Mudd Library, Princeton University.

29. Memorandum of Conversation, Prepared in the Embassy in Cairo, May 11, 1953, FRUS, vol. IX, part 1, doc. 3.

30. Refer to previous endnote.

31. Memorandum of Discussion at the 153d Meeting of the National Security Council, July 9, 1953, FRUS, vol. IX, part 1, doc. 144.

32. Beale Minutes, July 11, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. V, part 2, Western European Secu- rity, eds. John A. Bernbaum, Lisle A. Rose and Charles S. Sampson (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1983), doc. 301.

33. Refer to previous endnote.

34. Telegram from the Secretary of State to the Department of State, February 24, 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. XIV, Arab-Israeli Dispute, ed. Carl N. Raether (Washington: Govern- ment Printing Office, 1989), doc. 29; Nasser viewed the Baghdad Pact as a threat to his pursuit Between a Canal and a Hard Alliance 61 of a “position of leadership in the Arab world.”

35. Memorandum of a Conversation, Department of State, July 19, 1956, FRUS, 1955– 1957, vol. XV, Arab-Israeli Dispute, ed. Carl N. Raether (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1989), doc. 478. See, e.g. William J. Burns, Economic Aid and American Policy toward Egypt, 1955-1981 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 214, where he explains that the U.S. justified its decision publicly by framing Egypt as a credit risk and questioning “the ability of Egypt to devote adequate resources to assure the project’s success.”

36. Editorial Note, FRUS, vol. XVI, doc. 1; Nasser asserted that the money Egypt would collect in the form of transit fees from ships passing through the canal would be reallocated to fund the construction of the Aswan Dam.

37. Letter From President Eisenhower to Prime Minister Ben Gurion, April 30, 1956, FRUS, vol. XV, doc. 315.

38. Telegram From the Embassy in Egypt to the Department of State, September 21, 1955, FRUS, vol. XIV, doc. 293; Nasser subdued Eisenhower’s apprehension of the 1955 Egyp- tian-Soviet arms deal by cunningly deceiving him into believing that, in light of the recent Israeli raid on Gaza (in February, 1955) and the disparity in arms between the Egyptian and Israeli militaries, his rejection of the Soviet arms offer would have led to military revolt. For a more complete explanation of Nasser’s deception, see Doran, Ike’s Gamble, 106–122.

39. Dwight D. Eisenhower to Reverend Edward L. R. Elson, July 31, 1958, in The Nation- al Security Archive, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB78/propaganda%20133. pdf.

40. Address delivered to the Nation over radio and television on October 31, 1956 (White House press release).

41. At the time of the Suez nationalization, both Britain and France only had access to about a six-week supply of oil. By mid-to-late November, the oil shortages in these countries were becoming severe and their economies were deteriorating at an alarming rate.

42. National Intelligence Estimate, February 30, 1957, FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. XII, Near East Region; Iraq; Iran, eds. Paul Claussen, Edward C. Keefer, Will Klingaman, and Nina J. Noring (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1991), doc. 266.

43. Refer to previous endnote

44. Refer to endnote 42.

45. The Eisenhower Doctrine, 1957, FRUS, 1953–1960, Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations.

46. Message From the President to the Secretary of State, December 12, 1956, FRUS, vol. 62 Jacob C. Lefkowitz XVI, doc. 650; Memorandum of a Meeting, January 1, 1957, FRUS, vol. XII, doc. 182.

47. National Intelligence Estimate, February 2, 1957, FRUS, vol. XII, doc. 266.

48. Diary Entry by the President, March 28, 1956, FRUS, vol. XV, doc. 226.

49. Special National Intelligence Estimate, April 8, 1958, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. XII, Near East Region; Iraq; Iran; Arabian Peninsula, ed. Edward Keefer (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1993), doc. 315.

50. This union occurred against the backdrop of mounting U.S.-Syrian tensions, as Eisenhow- er had recently sent the Sixth Fleet to the Eastern Mediterranean and stationed NATO planes in Turkey in response to rising signs of Communist influence in Syria. Nasser responded by sending Egyptian pilots and soldiers into Syria to fortify Damascus, which eventually led to the establishment of the UAR.

51. Telegram From the Embassy in Syria to the Department of State, January 15, 1958, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. XIII, Arab-Israeli Dispute, eds. Suzanne E. Coffman and Charles S. Sampson (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1992), doc. 183: In this telegram, U.S. Ambassador to Syria James Moose classifies the formation of the UAR as “obviously far from attractive” and notes the “increased pressure” that the “domination of Syria by Nasser” would impose on “west-oriented neighbors of Syria.”

52. Briefing Notes by Director of Central Intelligence Dulles, July 14, 1958, FRUS, vol. XII, doc. 110.

53. Memorandum of a Conference With the President , July 14, 1958, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. XI, Lebanon and Jordan, ed. Louis J. Smith (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1992), doc. 124.

54. Refer to previous endnote; the reference to China is to the fall of mainland China to communism in 1949.

55. In an interview that I conducted with Michael Doran, author of Ike’s Gamble, on Novem- ber 27, 2020, Doran suggested that Eisenhower should have advocated for a cease-fire in place resolution in the UN, rather than the calling for unconditional retreat by Britain, France, and Israel that he achieved. This, according to Doran, would have allowed the U.S. to negotiate with Egypt from a position of strength, given the threat of nearby Western-aligned forces, and might well have resulted in additional concessions from Nasser, which would have dampened the impression that he emerged from the Suez Crisis having smitten the West.

56. Notably, Eisenhower historian Stephen Ambrose questions Nixon’s account of the conversation (in Stephen E. Ambrose, “Review of Nixon: A Life by Jonathan Aitken,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 4 (July/August, 1994): 168). But even if the veracity of Nixon’s account cannot be corroborated by other sources, Eisenhower’s actions with respect to Lebanon certainly make it clear that by 1958, he had adopted a position very much at odds with his Suez strategy. Between a Canal and a Hard Alliance 63

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Saying Bye to Binaries: The Transformative Potential of Trans Studies in International Relations

Arin Yost

“Saying Bye to Binaries: The Transformative Potential of Trans Studies in International Relations” demonstrates the utility of trans studies to address the limited scope of analysis and insufficient responses to change in the field of international relations. As world politics fluctuate rapidly in an age of globalization and growing inequality, trans studies offers a perspective equipped to handle power shifts, transnational crises, and material impacts through its interdisciplinary approach to knowledge production. “Bye to Binaries” begins the disruptive and distinctly trans and feminist project of transing past, present, and future international relations scholarship, describing this work as “trans/ed/ing international relations.” Expanding the notion of “trans” beyond “transgender,” this paper extensively develops a trans international relations framework that can be used to examine many international political issues. To demonstrate this utility, “Bye to Binaries” turns its trans international relations on the United States of America’s practice of exporting criminal punishment systems, a policy that is not relevant to transgender rights or issues on the surface. Ultimately, this paper provides a window into the myriad of ways that trans feminist epistemologies can empower international relations scholars of all genders to produce more politically effective and liberatory scholarship.

Introduction Within the last year, world politics have proven themselves to be consistently in flux, nearly totally out of the control of individual states or their collective organizations, and reliant on far more than traditional notions of power. In 2020, a pandemic swept across the world. First identified in Wuhan, China, COVID-19’s reach was no doubt hastened by the complex transport networks that crisscross oceans, continents, and borders. In 2020, the population of forcibly displaced people reached a new record, with 30.2 million people leaving their home country to become refugees or asylum seekers (UNHCR 2020). These people are the faces of separate, almost innumerable, refugee crises all around the world. In 2020, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that track star Caster Semenya would have to artificially lower her testosterone levels to compete in international middle-distance track events (Worden 2020). The South African runner had become a national hero, awarded the Order of Ikhamanga in Bronze, but the CAS decision forever changed international sport—and corresponding national politics. Though each of these examples impact different groups with varying levels of severity, they all demonstrate the futility of an international relations framework that fails to grasp the importance of change, non-state actors, and political motivations.

Arin Yost (ze/hir or they/them) is a senior at Agnes Scott College studying international relations and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. While in their undergraduate degree, their research interests have included surveillance capitalism, trans epistemologies, and trans embodiment in carceral spaces. Upon graduation, Arin intends to pursue a graduate degree at Georgia State University, where ze will study human geography and continue hir research along similar lines. Saying Bye to Binaries 67

In 2020, however, the field of international relations (IR) was still largely abiding by the following assumptions: 1) that sovereign states are both self-evident and the most important international actors, 2) that domestic politics are largely irrelevant to foreign policy and international issues, and 3) that material inequalities only matter so far as they impact the security dilemma. Given the events of just a single year, it is nearly a miracle that even entertaining the thought of entering the discipline has not been thoroughly denounced by an op-ed writer at The Princeton Review or U.S. News & World Report for its irrelevance, inability to adapt, and the inevitable result of an unemployment check each month. IR has long been criticized even by its own proponents for its slow (or even nonexistent) response to change. This year has only proven how static many of the discipline’s main tenets are. In stark contrast, trans studies have only recently begun to spread outside past the same handful of organizers, professors, and artists who have been trans theorizing for decades. In 2019, the very first introductory transgender studies book was published. Trans studies has been the site of wide-eyed possibility as young scholars stitch together memoir, creative writing, and critical theory in the pursuit of answer- ing “questions of embodied difference” (Stryker 2006, 3). The discipline is focused primarily on driving and understanding political change, with a gendered lens care- fully attuned to the experiences of trans and gender non-normative people. As such, it exists in a separate, yet entangled, space with other disciplines. This project draws attention to the spaces where trans studies and IR cross into each other. These combinations are not as far-fetched as they seem—the nature of IR is to analyze transnational issues, lending the discipline to “trans” scholarship. IR scholars have been theorizing about these topics for decades, generating multiple approaches and discourses within the field. However, many of these approaches rely on the same basic assumptions about world politics and important actors, which is where trans studies, with less rigid tenets and more flexible methods, can provide a meaningful departure from the canon. Compared to IR, trans studies occupies a more interdisciplinary role in academia. Many trans scholars come to the field from other disciplines, using their varied experiences to enhance the analytical potential of trans studies. I myself came into trans studies through IR and feminist work, which influences how I approach scholars in both disciplines. This project is an effort to bring these two disparate fields together, drawing trans studies into the vision of IR’s future. While trans studies may not initially seem to have much in common with IR, I believe that the two can be combined, effectively transing international relations. Using a trans/ed/ing approach1 in international relations scholarship offers both a conceptual and material point of departure from widely accepted binaries and normativities in the field. After outlining the key contributions and foundational ideas of a trans/ed/ing international relations, I will apply this approach to the exportation of criminal justice models to demonstrate its usefulness. This case study was chosen for two reasons: 1) I am deeply interested in issues of policing and incarceration, and, 2) because this is a topic that has deep, but not immediately obvious connections to 68 Arin Yost transgender rights or issues. This choice was to demonstrate that transing IR poses considerable conceptual difficulties to an IR analysis of practically any international issue, challenging the discipline to produce stronger, more robust scholarship.

Scholarly Background and Previous Attempts to Further Trans Studies The field of international relations operates from several different assumptions about world politics. Overall, the discipline considers states to be the primary actors in the international sphere and splits political affairs into a domestic/foreign binary (Guzz- ini and Leander 2001; Rochester 2010; Light and Groom 2016; Dunne, Kurki, and Smith 2013). Its most conservative adherents prioritize discussions of constancy over change, which has historically influenced the discipline’s focus (Waltz 2000). As a result, critical IR theorists have criticized traditional approaches for failing to account for change (Checkel 1998; Sjoberg 2012, 23). However, even these scholars, who often adhere to constructivist approaches, have consistently been critiqued for failing to develop a framework that explains political change/makers and appropriately appreciates the power of hegemony and material inequality (Flockhart 2016; Guzz- ini and Leander 2001, 334; Hofferbeth and Weber 2015; and Mearsheimer 1995). Constructivists also fail to question the discipline’s reliance on many of the tenets mentioned above, particularly regarding state actors (Guzzini and Leander 2001, 320, 332). However, constructivist IR is useful for my project because it focuses on identity and norm creation, two subjects important to trans scholars (Finnemore and Sikkink 2001; Jung 2019). Additionally, constructivism does not claim to be a general theory, but rather, an approach for theoretical study in IR, which is how I wish to position trans studies within the discipline. (Finnemore and Sikkink 2001; Ruggie 1998). For these reasons, I will argue for the legitimacy of trans studies within IR because it has much in common with the constructivist approach, while meeting many of the discipline’s shortcomings and offering a point from which scholars can begin to depart from impractical and inaccurate assumptions. Trans (or transgender) studies is a young and robust field which philosophers, legal scholars, artists, activists, anthropologists, geographers, and many others find themselves brushing against, wrestling with, or flourishing in. Trans studies can be loosely characterized as concerned with anything that breaks the hetero- (and homo-) normative relationships between gender, sexuality, and the body—this includes, but is not limited to, the study of transgender people and experience (Haefele-Thomas and Combs 2019; Martinez-San Miguel and Tobias 2016; and Stryker 2006). Overall, the discipline seeks to denaturalize and disrupt false binaries and connections between embodiment and social roles, as well as to confront the material impacts of those link- ages (Haefele-Thomas and Combs 2019; Martinez-San Miguel and Tobias 2016; and Stryker 2006). Trans studies can be situated in a postmodernist tradition in its pursuit of what Foucault termed “subjugated knowledges,” its dedication to subjectivity, and departure from strict or stable identity categories (Foucault 2003; Stryker 2006). The field is incredibly interdisciplinary, but there are certain methodological approaches Saying Bye to Binaries 69 and styles that are characteristic of trans scholars.2 Of particular note to this project is trans studies’ attention to political action and change. Activism and academia are not separate for trans scholars, especially those of us who are transgender, as globally trans people are subject to injustice and violence (Chess, Gordon, and Fisher 2020; Stryker 2006). As a result, trans scholars are concerned with what their work is going to do politically to limit or eliminate these harms. Researchers in trans studies (who are often themselves transgender, and if not, usually have a gender, and thus are con- nected to their research), explicitly refuse to feign the expected “scholarly” objectiv- ity or apathy about their research (Haefele-Thomas and Combs 2019; Spade 2006; Stryker 2006). This can be accomplished through a positionality statement, though many trans scholars’ postmodern approach to writing does not lend itself to section headers or sharply divided arguments, and/or inclusion of one’s own experiences as a legitimate source of knowledge in research (Haefele-Thomas and Combs 2019; Spade 2006; Stryker 2006). Trans studies is also noted for requiring incredibly rigorous and technically precise scholarship, as the project of de-subjugating historically subjugated knowledges requires expert research, (re)contextualization, and writing skills (Haefe- le-Thomas and Combs 2019; Stryker 2006). There have thus far been a few examples of research that combine elements of trans studies and IR, with differing levels of success. Third World feminists and Black feminists—who have drawn from postcolonial traditions as much as feminist thought—have long understood the political impacts of international discourse, and their work on transnational feminism is imperative to any politically-focused international work (see Mohanty 2003; Narayan 1998; Spivak 1988; Sudbury 2004). Though not all of these scholars may identify as either trans or IR researchers, understanding their contributions is important to this project. Ondrej Císar, an IR scholar, has produced work that points to the potential usefulness of a trans framework. His research involves destabilizing binaries between rationalism and constructivism, and he argues that researchers should attend to both social and political realities in their work (Císar 2003). Though his framework is not explicitly trans, it does incorporate some of the hallmarks of the field, showing where a trans IR could expand on conventional practices. Císar poses the question: “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Trans- gender?” which asks the reader to consider the implications of using trans as a way to examine who is considered a civic participant and who is afforded full personhood in a gendered state with equally gendered justice systems (Berman 2017). Berman’s focus is not on political science (she is a Literature and Gender Studies professor), but her work combines international scholarship and trans studies, providing some insights on how “trans” can be expanded past “transgender” (see also Musto 2019). Most notably, Laura Sjoberg attempted to “Trans-Gender International Relations’’ in a 2012 article, but her framework is markedly different from what I propose. Sjoberg suggests that trans politics in IR might open interesting avenues towards exploring visibility, which is a compelling intervention, but also posits that, due to cis perspectives on the trans experience, trans theorists focus on liminality and change, which is disappointedly 70 Arin Yost cis-centered (Sjoberg 2012, 24).3 Sjoberg’s work proposes that IR theorists learn from trans work to examine cis-privilege, change, and (dis)identification, while I argue for a more destabilizing conceptualization of trans IR. Working with and beyond Sjoberg’s vision, transing IR should include a deep interrogation of the discipline’s theoretical tenets and political motivations. These diversions will be further elaborated in sections “Limitations of Trans Representation, or A Note of Caution for Well-Meaning War- hawks” and “Disagreements and Departures.”

Transing IR Though it is in need of the intervention that trans studies could provide, IR also offers its own unique strengths to this potential combination. IR is already focused on transnational issues, policies, and relationships. Though the discipline dictates that foreign and domestic politics are largely separate, IR scholars have an intuitive understanding that domestic issues do not stop at border crossings. Otherwise, why would they bother examining phenomenons such as globalization, international migration, the impacts of climate change agreements, and many others that stretch conventional IR tenets while maintaining its scholars’ focus for decades? This is one of the most interesting offerings of IR; few other fields embrace such complex, interdisciplinary issues, because it is admittedly true that it is remarkably difficult to develop a set of theoretical guidelines that explain any of the topics IR scholars delve into everyday. As a result, transing IR will not result in a new theory with rigid absolutes about the security dilemma or human nature. Rather, similarly to constructivist scholars, trans scholars within IR may find themselves utilizing a trans approach to answer questions a bit differently than prevailing approaches (or asking altogether different questions).

Limitations of Trans Representation, or A Note of Caution for Well-Meaning Warhawk As I referenced briefly earlier, “Towards Trans-Gendering International Relations?” attempted to establish a trans IR framework in 2012. The writer, Laura Sjoberg, has published multiple papers on gender and security studies and has spurred research on queer populations in IR. In this seminal work, Sjoberg (2012, 12) argued that trans work offers feminist IR scholars expanded understandings of sexes and genders and their corresponding power dynamics that go beyond fully ontological or biological factors. This intervention provides feminist IR scholars with a more robust framework to examine gendered questions in IR. As Sjoberg eloquently articulates, cis IR feminists have much to learn from trans theorizing; many of them fall into essentializing tropes that rely on a binary view of masculine and feminine characteristics (e.g., Tickner 2015). Let it first be said that this is a valuable and necessary intervention. In a discipline that often attempts to remove itself from the political implications of its work, acknowledging dynamics of privilege and oppression is an important step. Urg- ing relatively privileged people (in this case, cis folks) to consider more marginalized people’s perspectives on their work is an important part of expanding academics’ and Saying Bye to Binaries 71 activists’ capacity to improve the lives of others. It is also equally important to name the harm that many cis feminists have perpetuated on gender non-normative people, which Sjoberg does detail (2012, 9). At the risk of dismissing Sjoberg’s seminal work, which does offer some tru- ly compelling points, I would like to articulate my trans hesitation4 to embrace her proposal as the primary potential intervention of trans IR. Firstly, it is important to note that trans lives, trans bodies, trans experiences, and trans scholarship do not exist for the betterment of cis people. Put simply, trans people do not exist to enhance cis women’s feminism. Building coalitions across identity groups is necessary for survival and liberation struggles, but marginalized people should never be valued only for their contributions to the development of their oppressor. A trans IR that positions trans theorizing as an informant to (cis feminist) IR runs the risk of perpetuating this harm, and possibly demarcates trans scholarship as “other” and “lesser than” fields that only need pieces of trans work to achieve their own, loftier goals. As previously noted, trans scholars do not just study transgender experiences, bodies, or people. To claim to incorporate their many, often contradictory, often interdisciplinary interventions into IR by simply diverting the latter’s focus to “trans people, too” is lazy scholarship.5 A second problem that Sjoberg’s trans framework produces is a failure to confront IR’s many shortcomings, despite becoming more inclusive on the surface. IR scholarship has been used to make foreign policy decisions that have exposed countless people to premature death through sanctions, military maneuvers, and funding decisions, particularly folks outside of the West. Simply incorporating trans people into work that produces such violence is not the intervention that some well-meaning warhawks may purport it to be. Trans scholars hold a diverse range of political commitments, identities, and positions, but their work is necessarily devoted to making the world a safer place for people of all genders (Stryker 2006, 3). This interest group necessarily includes people of all genders living in the subaltern, on less than $1.90 a day,6 or in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, or any of the other countries regularly subject to U.S. drone strikes and sanctions (Currier 2013). As a result, transing IR cannot rely on hollow notions of representation or inclusion without actively interrogating the processes of knowledge production that enable international violence. This would be not just lazy, but actively harmful. Some of the shortcomings of international relations previously identified include its fixation on state actors without interrogation, its inability to explain change, and its inattention to the political impacts of its work. Here, I will expand on these criticisms and compare how trans studies might answer them, strengthening IR as a result, even when the subject matter is not transgender people. Trans studies transcends identity-based research and brings new foundations, questions, and methodologies to IR.

Disagreements and Departures IR’s primary unit of analysis is sovereign states, which is not always the most practical or useful approach. Even scholars who have attempted to depart from many of IR’s 72 Arin Yost most basic assumptions fail to do so when it comes to states. Within the discipline, countries are considered the most important actors, and their decisions are split neatly between domestic and international concerns (see Light and Groom 2016; Dunne, Kurki, and Smith 2013). These assumptions can become a hindrance to analyzing transnational phenomena and non-state actors. Conducting analysis only through the lens of sovereign state actors makes it difficult to fully understand many issues, such as the examples introduced at the beginning of this paper. In order for its scholarship to meet the needs of a globalized world with a myriad of mutually constituted subjects, IR must adapt. Simply asserting that the state is socially constructed, as constructivism does, is not enough. Constructivists rarely sufficiently interrogate the material impacts of hegemonic power, and often take the state’s existence for granted as a starting point in their research (Guzzini and Leander 2001, 334; Hofferbeth and Weber 2015). Trans scholars are likely to have a very different perspective on sovereign states and international actors than IR scholars. In trans studies, the state is posited as an actor, but its primary role is seen as regulating norms and distributing life chances through disciplinary mechanisms (e.g., Spade and Juang 2006). Trans IR studies analyses do not start with the state; they start with the lived and embodied experiences of those who have been deemed non-normative, then trace that experience back to the institutions that create those norms. The focus is not on these vehicles of repression. Where trans scholars engage with the state, it will primarily be as a critique; the state is not essential and the state is not inevitable, it is a social construction that serves to administrate gender, often violently (Spade 2011). Trans studies challenge the existence of the state on a theoretical and material level, questioning its conceptual role in creating norms and its corporeal role in violently enforcing them. Furthermore, because of trans scholars’ focus on groups and people that defy norms, they are likely to draw attention to organizing coalitions and marginalized communities, for example, in their attempts to understand international issues. As a result, trans studies has the potential to expand IR’s perspective on actors in the international sphere. Beyond its potential for enriching the discipline’s understanding of actors, trans studies also offers IR a new way of evaluating their actions. IR has been heavily criticized for its seeming inability to predict changes in international policy, conflict, and relationships. In the past century, the makeup of the international landscape has been consistent nearly only in its shifting. Both critical and more traditional scholars have struggled with how to account for these changes. Despite this trend, IR scholars remain generally “uncomfortable dealing with questions of liminality and unrest” (Sjoberg 2012, 23). Sjoberg argues that IR work on change is primarily focused on the respective start and end points, not the process by which this shift occurs (Sjoberg 2012, 23). This can be seen in the discipline’s roots: the field of IR was developed after World War II to study conflict resolution (Ramsbotham, Woodhouse, and Mi- all 2016, 38). Bringing an end to upheaval was a central focus of IR studies from its inception. Though IR scholars, from realists to liberals to critical constructivists, have attempted to understand these changes through sweeping claims about human nature, Saying Bye to Binaries 73 the democratic peace theory, or processes of norm construction, the fact remains that the discipline is rarely praised for its predictive capabilities. Though trans studies does not position itself as a field focused on prediction, it has been proposed as a potential answer to this failure of IR (Sjoberg 2012, 24). Sjoberg (2012) posited that this strength is due to the (cis-determined) trans experience of transition and trans comfort with liminality (24). Within this second explanation is a particularly strong intervention, one that can be linked not only to the trans experience of being seen as in-between or wholly outside of normative genders, but to trans studies’ scholarly commitment to subjectivity and shifting understandings of social relations. Because trans work is markedly postmodernist, it gives its scholars the permission to recognize and embrace the unpredictable, multiplicious nature of international politics. Just as Trans Studies utilize transcendence, transition, and transformation, IR scholars can do the same in the international sphere. This opens up endless possibilities for trans IR scholars to better analyze international phenomena that have previously escaped understanding but may provide valuable insight into the varied experiences of actors and their responses. IR is an inherently political discipline, and yet many of its branches, especially those that attend more specifically to subjectivities and norm construction, have been criticized for ignoring the material implications of their work. Most famously (and perhaps most influentially), realist scholar Hans Morgenthau (1985) maintained that the political sphere is totally autonomous from economics, law, and morals. While IR scholars and policymakers might consider ethical concerns in their decision-making, realist IR maintains that their ultimate decision should be based on what serves the state’s own self-interest. While this is clearly deeply rooted in an understanding of material implications, this line of thought produces a lack of attention to how these decisions impact other people, states, and entities. In contrast, constructivism and other more poststructuralist approaches have been criticized as so theoretical that they lose sight of material realities (Hofferbeth and Weber 2015). Feminist IR scholars have attempted to solve this tension, arguing that knowledge production is already always political (Tickner 2015, 24). While distancing themselves from their subject matters and universalizing their perspectives, IR scholars have historically produced a consistently masculinist and Eurocentric body of work that denies lived experiences that do not align with their “objective” accounts. Moreover, “a feminist perspective rejects the possibility of separating moral command from political action” (Tickner 2015, 30). As a result, feminist IR scholars understand that the political impacts of IR research have material impacts on the lives of many. Much of these interventions are aligned with trans scholars, who are similarly attentive to the political impacts of their work. However, few feminist IR interventions point to what exactly one is to do about the politicization of their academic work. Trans studies offers a way forward. As Stryker states, “the field... concerns -it self with what we—we who have a passionate stake in such things—are going to do, politically, about the injustices and violence that often attend the perception of 74 Arin Yost gender non normativity and atypicality, whether in ourselves or in others” (Stryker 2006, 3). By refusing to distance themselves from academic pursuits, trans scholars acknowledge that they have such an active role in shaping their work, as do we all. Realist scholars may have a passionate stake in assuring their own self-interest, while liberal feminist scholars may have a passionate stake in including feminized subjects in political processes and discussions. To pretend that they do not have these motivations is intellectually dishonest. Trans studies begins with a shared understanding of what each person’s “passionate stake” is, and seeks to actualize a world where everyone can flourish, particularly gender non-normative folks. Transing IR offers a political orientation (not just understanding) to the discipline, allowing IR scholars to explore and articulate their own political commitments and produce better, more transparent, more focused scholarship. These commitments need not be solely centered on gender diversity, but it should be incorporated into a trans IR analysis. When both of these issues are attended to, trans IR becomes both more diverse and inclusive, understanding how issues impact trans and GNC people, and more politically honest and robust, focused on limiting harm and interrogating violent processes of knowledge production. This balance addresses the potential pitfall discussed earlier in “A Note of Caution for Well-Meaning Warhawks,” and provides a way to unite the best of identity-focused and issues-focused organizing, writing, and research.

Putting Theory Into Practice Having put forth these theoretical interventions, one can conclude that trans IR scholarship will do more than just transplanting trans studies methodologies onto international issues, or diverting IR scholars’ attention to transgender people. Rather, there are a few ways that a trans/ed/ing IR framework could enhance the IR tradition, which can serve as a benchmark for those interested in identifying such an approach in past scholarship or adopting it in their own work. Firstly, trans IR scholars will question the essentialism of most IR presuppositions like rationality, the foreign/domestic binary, and state actors. Transing IR will require a significant departure from the field’s historical reliance on broad claims about the essential nature of humans or states. Ideas of inherent rationality, sovereignty, and self-interest govern many IR scholars’ assumptions about behavior, which limits their ability to understand more complex, ontological explanations. Trans IR might look similar to some constructivist work, using norms to understand how the state produces and administers sexed and gendered forms of subjecthood. However, trans IR scholars may choose to forego the state altogether in their analysis, or adopt an explicitly anti-state position, depending on what kinds of issues they intend to examine and if they believe the state’s role is relevant. Regardless, other actors will no doubt be considered, and the “inherent” nature of them will not be. Trans IR scholars will also draw heavily from trans methodologies in their use of lived experiences as legitimate sources of knowledge. The most pertinent source of knowledge may not be their own experience, but trans IR scholars will never forgo Saying Bye to Binaries 75 the importance of their own perspectives, nor will they pretend to be objective about their material. This attention to lived experience may lead to a more material focus, as trans studies are particularly interested in issues of embodiment and corresponding social relations. Trans IR work would likely engage with issues such as the surveillance of traveling trans bodies, geopolitics, refugee resettlement, the disparate impacts of war on differently gendered and racialized populations, the process of decolonization, and other matters related to embodiment. This is not to say that IR scholars have not previously studied these issues, but that a transed IR framework will be more drawn to these topics. Ultimately, there will be no firm absolutes to a trans IR framework; this approach will, as its prefix suggests, exist across, between, and outside of international relations constraints. I am not suggesting a new IR theory. I am putting forward a list of ways that the field of IR could be transed, which could feasibly take place from within (or, outside of, and across) almost any theoretical tradition. Transing IR has much to offer, but it is not without its potential pitfalls. Due to the particular subject nature of IR (e.g., international matters), using a trans/ed/ ing framework runs the risk of perpetuating colonialism and overriding indigenous gender-variant epistemologies in a quest for Western liberation. When Western trans scholarship has attempted to cross borders, it sometimes relies on its own metrics to define what issues of non-normativity are of interest. “Trans” is a Western construct that serves as a “site of subject formation as well as subjugation,” and to deploy it onto non-Western genders is discursive colonization (Essig 2008, 862). There are people all over the world who utilize a gendered grammar that denies Western trans understanding. Attempts to stabilize these categories replicates colonization, but so do attempts to stabilize one’s own identity through these practices. The common practice of trans Westerners pointing to “third genders” in other cultures, such as the Indian hijra or Dominican guevedoche, to justify why their gender practices are “natural” is fraught with imperialist tendencies (Towle and Morgan 2002). This is not an inherent fault of trans scholarship or activism, but it is a mistake that many have made and must thus be addressed in this attempt to expand trans theorizing to IR. In efforts to analyze international issues using trans studies, there is the potential to exacerbate this historical weakness in global trans analyses. Transing IR opens up a potentially fraught avenue of exploration, where Western cis and trans scholars erase the nuances of gender expression and cultural practices in other societies in order to make their subjects “fit” into a trans framework. It is of utmost importance that trans IR scholars, especially those positioned in Western society, ensure that they are not inadvertently perpetuating this harm. This is where trans studies’ postmodern leanings may shield it from its own worst traits. At its best, trans IR will necessarily examine differing experiences across embodiment, borders, and cultures without adhering to strict, stable identity categories. Similarly, trans IR scholars must be exceedingly aware of how the language they use to describe their subjects, research topics, etc., constructs and enforces political realities that impact resource allocation, subjecthood, and (in)visibility (Dutta and Roy 2014). Liberation 76 Arin Yost and solidarity are not found within exactly identical identities; rather, trans scholars embark on a messy, fraught attempt to produce glimpses of a world safe for all to flourish, not an objective or stable reality predicated on inflexible identity categories.

Case study: The Exportation of Criminal Punishment Models To explore the potential usefulness of this approach, I will conduct a cursory trans analysis of the exportation of criminal justice models, noting where a trans/ed/ing IR framework might seek to intervene and what could be learned from such an examination. However, my analysis of this topic will necessarily be marked by both my lived experience and political commitments. I am a white, trans masculine, U.S. citizen whose first language is English. I have never been incarcerated, but I have faced ha- rassment and violence from police as a result of my gender presentation and political expression. I am committed to actualizing total police and prison abolition within our lifetimes, which has certainly influenced my choice of case study. In line with these beliefs, I follow the linguistic choices of Dean Spade and other radical thinkers in choosing to refer to the network of surveillance, criminalization, incarceration, and death as a “criminal punishment system,” because there is no justice in the process used by the state to disappear our community members. I grew up in so-called Texas, on unceded Tonkawa and Karankawa land, near the Southern border of the continental US. The majority of this paper was written on unceded S’atsoyaha (Yuchi) and Tsalaguwetiyi (East Cherokee) land, also within the U.S. empire, in the foothills of Appalachia. As a result, my ability to research criminal punishment exportation will be influenced by the fact that I have never experienced this practice firsthand, and I have been shielded from the worst impacts of neoliberalism and the carceral state by a myriad of class, race, and citizenship privileges. Using a trans/ed/ing IR lens to examine criminal punishment exportation practices yields several key insights. Instead of asking how different states are interacting over this process, this analysis will commence with examining how the practice of criminal punishment exportation produces legitimate and illegitimate forms of subjecthood. This analysis will find that the U.S. prison industrial complex (PIC) administers gender by violently enforcing carceral normativities that govern people’s movements, presentation, and access to resources (Vitulli 2014). These disciplinary mechanisms are not limited to trans and gender non-conforming (GNC) people, however. Bodies that otherwise present a threat to the values and norms institutionalized by the PIC are also a threat to the U.S. empire. Using a trans/ed/ing framework to examine the exportation of criminal punishment models allows one to understand the domestic/foreign binary as an illusion that enables such violence, develop a gendered understanding of what and who is considered a threat to institutional security, and advocate for limits on this harm. This advocacy must take place within an expanded community of global solidarity, focusing on the abolition of violent systems that regulate gender, migration, and behavior. The exportation of criminal punishment models is a complex practice with Saying Bye to Binaries 77 many historical iterations. In order to explore this policy, one must understand the different forms this practice takes and its varied effects. As Roland Paris (1997) notes, Western liberalism mandates that peacebuilding “involves transplanting western models of social, political, and economic organization” (236). IR scholars generally agree that this transplant process is a more amenable option than traditional peacebuilding efforts, which often require explicit intervention. Unsurprisingly, strengthening a state’s ability to enact law and order is one of the first “soft” approaches that many actors consider (Lupel 2014). Allegra McLeod wrote a thorough examination of the U.S.’s role in this process in 2015, surveying how and why exportation of criminal punishment models became an integral part of their foreign policy. She posits that this practice is global multi-level governance through crime, aimed at “stopping crime before it reached U.S. shores” (McLeod 2015, 89). Rather than increasing safety in countries abroad, U.S.-style criminal punishment reform asserts American interests abroad by dictating transnational crime priorities (McLeod 2015, 90). Though she primarily focuses on International Law Enforcement Academies (ILEA) and Offices of Overseas Prosecutorial Development Assistance and Training (OPDAT), several other scholars have written smaller works on how different pieces have been exported. Krishnan (2005), Andreas and Nadelmann (2006), and Chinyere Oparah (Sudbury 2004)7 researched attempts to model an Indian legal center after the American Law Institute, transatlantic policing cooperation, and prison construction and economies, respectively. These scholars offer further evidence for both the sweeping range of this practice and the diverse forms that it takes, though McLeod’s work most prominently situates this project in global governance. Trans studies have produced groundbreaking scholarship interrogating the role of the state and the prison industrial complex (PIC) in institutionalizing and ad- ministering gendered forms of subjecthood. (In contrast to conventional IR approaches, this work begins with the lived experience with incarcerated trans people, rather than the state itself.) Not only are trans people “administratively impossible” within a system that presumes an essentialist gender binary, but they also pose a “threat to institutional security” (Spade 2011, 32; Vitulli 2014, 4). Gender ambiguity or non-conformity challenges a system that is predicated entirely on the stability of normative gendered behavior. In response to this threat, the PIC utilizes violent carceral racialized gender logics to uphold their norms by punishing gender non-normativity. A key feature of trans studies and trans experience is the destabilization of institutionalized norms that link sex, gender, and behavior, and the goal of the American criminal punishment system is to stabilize those norms (Spade 2011; Stryker 2006, 3; Vitulli 2014). When exported, this goal becomes even more explicit; McLeod iden- tifies institutionalization of U.S. procedures as a primary objective of criminal punishment model exportation (McLeod 2015, 95). The U.S. uses ILEA and OPDAT to ensure that U.S.-approved policies and procedures are utilized in police stations, courtrooms, jails, and prisons around the world. These same policies and procedures strip trans people of their full humanity, making it nearly impossible for trans and 78 Arin Yost gender non-conforming people around the world to survive under a gendered regime of carceral normativities. When queer and trans people are viewed as a threat to the institution, expanding that institution to other places only serves to further endanger queer and trans people. Just as the U.S. uses the PIC to conceal trans subjects by locating them “beyond the jurisdictional boundaries of justice,” the process of criminal punishment exportation extends those boundaries across borders and similarly excludes other populations (Berman 2017). Understanding how this practice impacts trans and GNC folks is imperative to understanding the full violence of criminal punishment exportation, but this is not the end. (Recall that trans studies does not focus only on how certain issues impact transgender people, but also on how those practices produce subjectivities and subjecthoods.) Beyond just institutional procedure, McLeod expos- es that the U.S. uses the exportation of criminal punishment models to dictate crime priorities in other countries. Many of these transnational crime concerns—human, drug, and arms trafficking, terrorism, etc.—are founded in a U.S. fear that those outside of its borders will threaten their way of life (McLeod 2015, 110). As McLeod explains, defining transnational crime allows the U.S. empire to transform the complex outcomes of multiple social and economic needs into “a phenomenon driven by certain bad actors’’ (McLeod 2015, 109). These actors are constructed as illegitimate subjects in a carceral system, ungoverned by American institutions. Behaviors that would be only the concern of their host government’s sudden- ly become of great interest to the U.S. empire the moment that they enter a slightly different geographical space, or merely threaten to do so. U.S. immigration agents gather biometrics data on Guatemalan migrants deep in Southern Mexico, fearing that “criminals, gang members, and potential terrorists” may eventually make their way to their own borders (Partlow and Miroff 2018). These people are not even close to reaching the empire, but U.S. anxieties demand their surveillance. The U.S. Pres- ident conducts an annual review of “drug source” countries along the Andes Moun- tains to determine if they are making sufficient efforts to stop supplying American consumers with illicit substances, threatening to withdraw aid if their criminalization is not complete (McLeod 2015, 115). Leveraging American wealth to dictate the drug laws in other states ensures the continuous, deep-seated institutionalization of U.S. drug laws. The North American Free Trade Act contains provisions requiring participant states to criminalize intellectual property appropriation (McLeod 2015, 115). These policies work to protect American capital from those who would circumvent the “appropriate” capitalist channels. Each of these examples, developed through both state and non-state actors, is a piece of a globally exported PIC. It is not necessary for one to commit a crime within the empire to feel its wrath. It is merely necessary for one to pose a threat, or rather a potential threat, to be constructed as a transnational criminal in a system largely dictated by U.S. interests. These U.S. interests are protected by exportation systems that seek to regulate gender, migration, and behavior. To exist in any way that challenges the empire’s borders means that one is a threat to Saying Bye to Binaries 79 institutional security. To accept this border (and the domestic/foreign, or more accurately us/them, binary it is predicated on), is to be complicit in American violence against those who happen to lie outside of it. For those of us who exist in bodies on only one and always the right side of the empire’s barbed wire, this realization should expand our understandings of community and solidarity. One can simultaneously reject the legitimacy of borders while recognizing the material impacts that they create in certain inhabitants’ lives.8 As Chinyere Oparah (2004) argues in her work on globalization and the PIC, being seated in the heart of the empire creates immense responsibility to make connections with “radical social movements” that exist across issues, identity groups, and false borders (27). This is difficult work; it requires American activists to include an international framework in their analysis of the criminal punishment system.9 Moreover, it requires a critical reckoning with how one’s own comfort is built on exclusion and violence. Engaging in internationally-focused activism from within the U.S. is not simple—it is easy to fall into the trap of essentializing and improp- erly speaking over others, a problem eloquently articulated by feminist scholar Uma Narayan—but it is our responsibility as those in the seat of the empire. While organizing against the PIC in the U.S., many activists have argued that the criminal punishment system separates communities, disappearing those who the state constructs as disposable. An international analysis recognizes not only these systems within the U.S., but concludes that mechanisms that dictate citizenship and (il)legal migration produce similar effects. As a result, U.S.-based organizing against the PIC not only is strengthened by, but has an obligation to include, a recognition of the harm that U.S. borders perpetuate and organizing strategies that align with those already developed by the recipients of exportation.10 A trans IR framework drastically shifts the way one approaches the issue of criminal punishment exportation. Rather than asking “does transplanting Western models increase security in post-conflict societies?” or “is transnational crime an indicator of regional conflict?”, as the IR scholars cited in this paper previously did, trans scholars establish their framework by focusing on those most marginalized by the institutional constructions of crime and security. Centering the lived experiences of those who are criminalized, as Vitulli did with their work on carceral normativities, reaches a depth of understanding that cannot be reached by IR scholars who rely on the state to understand international interactions. By using a trans approach, one develops a deeper understanding of not just who and what is criminalized, but how that criminalization is upheld by the domestic/foreign split that so many IR scholars accept without hesitation. Transing IR may offer extensive conceptual interventions, but it must always be linked to material realities. As a result, an analysis of criminal punishment exportation using this framework would be remiss without attention to its political impacts. The violence of the PIC against bodies that threaten its security has already been thoroughly examined by Vitulli, Spade, Chinyere Oparah, and many other radical thinkers. Trans scholars are interested in how this academic work can 80 Arin Yost disrupt that violence. Choosing to use the terms criminal punishment, rather than criminal justice, and criminalized, rather than criminal, is one way that I have sought to accomplish this. Imagining a world without concrete closets, cages, borders, and binaries is another. It is my hope that this analysis has offered a glimpse of how one could build that world, or at the very least, offered a clearer view of the obstacles that must be burned down in our quest to clear the rubble.

Conclusion IR is a robust, diverse discipline with its own set of shortcomings, and I have attempted to demonstrate the utility of using a trans studies approach by outlining its primary potential contributions and how these might strengthen IR’s weaknesses. Transing international relations offers both compelling theoretical interventions—a new analysis of actors, a questioning of its fundamental assumptions, and enhanced political understanding—and fresh insights on the direction that academia (and the discipline) should follow. As demonstrated in a brief analysis of the exportation of criminal punishment models, transing IR can even result in a deconstruction and destabilization of the foreign/domestic binary that guides much of the discipline’s assumptions and approaches. This produces new insights about the practice of exportation, its gendered violence, and the norms that enable both institutionalized transphobia and border violence. This framework conceptually departs from traditional IR, giving scholars a new way to think about cross-border issues by utilizing the ability of trans to produce scholarship that moves across, within, and outside of traditional political structures. It also departs by giving scholars a political orientation and an effective way to analyze change agents, especially those that are not states, that attends to material impacts. These more corporeal interventions, namely, incorporating positionality statements, looking to a variety of transnational communities rather than state actors, and utilizing different methodologies than traditional political scientists’ markedly positivist approaches, could tangibly change the way that IR scholars research and write. By combining both new theoretical approaches with a renewed attention to embodiment, material conditions, and ontological social relations, trans/ed/ing IR meets many of the most outstanding criticisms of IR. These interventions can be fruitfully applied to a variety of international issues; while those impacting gender non-normative populations might particularly benefit, there are many seemingly un- related topics that could effectively be “transed”. A trans/ed/ing IR framework such as I have attempted to develop in this all too limited argument has the potential to offer not just better academic work, but an attempt at building a better world. This is a far broader project than can be developed in this thesis paper, but as we—the same “we” invoked by Stryker (2006), which is those of us with a passionate stake in harm reduction for gender non-normative people around the world—struggle together, I believe trans epistemologies will play an integral role in crafting such a future. A trans/ ed/ing IR framework offers one way for IR scholars to improve their understanding of the complex issues that are so important to our discipline while acknowledging their Saying Bye to Binaries 81 inextricable role in this world-building process. 82 Arin Yost

Endnotes 1. I am choosing to use the term “trans/ed/ing” in my thesis to note that trans work in IR can be useful both for its past-tense potential (what can be learned from transing previous scholarship?) and its ongoing/future potential (what can be learned from continuing to trans IR work? How can we ensure that this project of disruptiving normativities is continually ongoing?) I may also refer to this as a “trans,” “transing,” or “transed” IR approach for ease of writing/reading, but will occasionally revert to trans/ed/ing when I feel its disruptive potential is most salient.

2. Not all scholars who identify as transgender are trans studies scholars. In this paper, unless otherwise noted, I will use the term “trans scholar” to refer to researchers or writers who con- tribute to the field of trans studies. Similarly, I will use the standalone prefix “trans” to describe work that is marked by trans methodologies, conclusion, or other hallmarks of the field, not just work that focuses on transgender issues.

3. “Cis” is a prefix used to delineate those whose gender identity and assigned sex at birth are in congruence with one another.

4. This hesitation stems from identity, political commitments, and research practices.

5. Let me clarify here that I am not accusing Laura Sjoberg of being lazy when she published “Towards Trans-Gendering International Relations?” but arguing that some of her interventions may enable such work.

6. See infra, at p. 10–11 of this paper, for a discussion of the impact of both the Baghdad Pact and the Aswan Dam on U.S.-Egyptian relations.

7. This author has previously published under the name Julia Sudbury but now goes by Julia Chinyere Oparah, hence the difference between her name in the citation and her name in writing.”

8. Just as trans scholars reject oppressive understandings of sex and gender while confronting their effects.

9. A shining example of this understanding is Da’Shaun Harrison, Eva, Bisan, and Osama’s joint essay, “From Atlanta to Palestine: Our Struggles Are Intertwined.”

10. See the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) as an example of a robust anti-imperialist grassroots movement based in El Salvador. Saying Bye to Binaries 83

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George W. Bush and the Darfur Genocide: An Application of Pros- pect Theory

Gabrielle Levy

This paper examines the question of why President George W. Bush pronounced the Dar- fur crisis of 2004 to be a genocide, given that the U.S. had historically avoided defining mass killings as genocides. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, the U.S. avoided labeling crises as genocides in order to absolve itself from the legal obligation to intervene and justify its own inaction (e.g., President Clinton and the Rwanda Genocide, President Carter and the Cambodian Genocide, and President Reagan and the genocide in North- ern Iraq). Although President George W. Bush pursued a non-interventionist policy in Darfur, consistent with the approach taken by prior presidents, he officially declared the events to be a genocide – the first time that an ongoing genocide had been defined as such in modern American history. Using the political psychology framework of Prospect Theory, this paper argues that the domestic and international contexts of the day led Bush to evaluate himself as operating in a domain of loss and thus pursue the risk acceptant strategy of declaring the Darfur crisis a genocide.

The United States has a questionable track record in responding to genocides. Throughout the twentieth century, the U.S. avoided labeling crises as genocides in order to absolve itself from the legal obligation to intervene and justify its own inaction (e.g. the Cambodian Genocide under the Carter administration and the genocide in Northern Iraq during the Reagan administration) (Mayroz 2008). Most notably, President Clinton purposefully failed to define events in Rwanda in 1994 as a genocide in order to avoid American involvement. The American response to the Darfur Genocide of 2004, the first of the twenty-first century, was paradoxically anomalous and consistent. Although President George W. Bush pursued a non-interventionist policy in Darfur, he officially declared the events to be a genocide—the first time that an ongoing genocide had been defined as such in modern American history. If the U.S. had historically avoided defining mass killings as genocides, why then did Bush pronounce the Darfur crisis a genocide? I will apply a framework of Prospect Theory to argue that domestic and international political contexts led Bush to define the events in Darfur as genocide. Specifically, Bush considered himself as operating in a domain of loss and thus pursued the risk acceptant strategy of declaring the Darfur crisis a genocide. In this paper, I will outline both the framing (i.e. the positioning in a domain) and evaluation (i.e. the weighing of the riskiness of options) of President George W. Bush’s decision to use the rhetoric of genocide in describing

Gabrielle Levy is member of the class of 2022 at Dartmouth College from Hillsborough, California. Gabrielle is a Government major and is minoring in Biology as well as Public Policy. She is interested in health policy, both domestic and globally, as well as humanitarian aid/intervention. On campus, Ga- brielle is Opinion Editor for the Dartmouth, a War and Peace Fellow, and Associate Editor of the Dart- mouth Law Journal. She also conducts research in the Government Department as a Presidential Scholar on topics such as vaccine misinformation, economic mobility, and voter fraud. Gabrielle is intending to pursue a career in law after graduation. 88 Gabrielle Levy the events in Darfur. Previous scholarship has drawn on the role of shifting norms of humanitarian intervention to explain the U.S. adoption of a noninterventionist policy in response to the crisis in Darfur. Williams and Bellamy (2005) argue that the norm of humanitarian intervention remained “weak and strongly contested” after the Iraq War. Less has been said, though, about the decision to define the Darfur crisis as a genocide. Heinze (2007) compares the American response to the Darfur and Rwanda genocides, arguing that prevailing political realities rendered the declaration of genocide politically expedient for the Bush administration. My argument thus builds on Heinze’s, using Prospect Theory to expand on why the definition of genocide was seen as politically advantageous. The Darfur Genocide refers to the mass killing and rape of Darfuris in West- ern Sudan beginning in February 2003. The slaughter of Darfuris was the product of two intersecting conflicts with deeply rooted ethnic tensions—a civil war between the government in Khartoum and rebel groups in Darfur, and a civil war in South- ern Sudan between the Arab-dominated government in the north and black, animist Christian southerners (Straus 2005). When rebels in Darfur began a revolt against the rule of the Islamic government in Khartoum, the government enlisted a militia group of Arab tribesmen (the Janjaweed or ‘devils on horseback’) to carry out a bloody counterinsurgency, resulting in the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Darfuris (Heinze 2007). Analyzing Bush’s response to the Darfur conflict using Prospect Theory requires determining the domain in which Bush was operating at the time of decision-making (i.e. the framing of the situation), in order to assess whether Bush was risk-averse or risk-acceptant (McDermott 1992). Prospect Theory provides that actors operating in the domain of gains are known to be risk-averse, whereas actors operating in the domain of losses are often risk-acceptant (Ibid.). Several factors suggest that Bush was operating in a domain of losses, explaining why he would pursue the risk-acceptant foreign policy of defining the Darfur crisis as a genocide. In particular, Bush was faced with increasing public disdain as a result of a struggling U.S. economy and the ongoing war in Iraq, a floundering reelection campaign, and ever-increasing domestic and international doubts of American moral authority. In 2004, Bush’s popularity was declining, which did not bode well for his reelection campaign and contributed to his situation in the domain of losses. Bush enjoyed overwhelming support early in his presidency because of his tough stance against terrorism after the September 11 attacks (Nagourney and Elder 2004). None- theless, Bush lacked American public support in 2004. In June 2004, three months before Secretary of State Powell declared Darfur a genocide and five months before the U.S. presidential elections, polls revealed that Bush’s job approval rating had fallen to the lowest level since his presidency began in January 2001—a meager 42% (Ibid.). These statistics would have made Bush deeply concerned about his prospects for re- George W. Bush and the Darfur Genocide 89 election. Indeed, The New York Times reported that in the prior 25 years, presidents with job approval ratings below 50% in the spring of election years had usually lost (Ibid.). Polls also showed Kerry and Bush in an extremely tight race with 45% of voters supporting Kerry and 44% supporting Bush in the summer of 2004 (Ibid.). Put simply, Bush’s reelection campaign did not look exceptionally promising. Part of the reason for Bush’s declining public approval, and subsequent evaluation of himself as being in the domain of losses, was the state of the U.S. economy. Since Bush had taken office in February 2001, over two million jobs had been lost (“Bush” 2004). In 2004, the U.S. economy was steadily recovering from the worst recession since the Carter administration era at the beginning of Bush’s presidency. Nonetheless, major growth in the job market failed to materialize and unemployed Americans grew increasingly restless (Berenson 2003). Along with high unemployment levels, Bush’s lack of public support and corresponding placement in the domain of loss can be traced back to American resent- ment over the ongoing war in Iraq. The New York Times reported that Bush’s decision to go to war was “proving to be the most fateful of his presidency” (Nagourney and Elder 2004). In June 2004, polls indicated that a majority of Americans believed the war in Iraq “was not worth its cost in American lives” (Ibid.). Americans were especially concerned that involvement in Iraq would both catalyze the radicalization of new terrorists and increase the chances of domestic terrorist attacks (Ibid.). Many Amer- icans also doubted that the Bush administration had been fully transparent about crimes and abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison (Ibid.). As a result, Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq overshadowed his counterterrorist policies, which had generated him great support at the start of his presidency (Ibid.). American involvement in Iraq served to place Bush in a precarious position, not only domestically but internationally, by calling the moral legitimacy of the Unit- ed States into question. This further solidified Bush’s perception of himself as losing in reference to the prior status quo. Mayroz (2008) argues that the Bush administration’s failure to substantiate its two major justifications for the invasion of Iraq, namely Iraqi possessions of weapons of mass destruction and a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, coupled with their attempt to portray the invasion in a humanitarian light, led to “considerable loss of US moral authority and standing.” Moreover, as asserted in 2004 by Lorne Craner, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, issues surrounding the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib “threatened to strip the administration’s voice of legitimacy on human rights issues” (Totten 2006). From diminishing popular support at home to wavering perceptions of American morality abroad, Bush was clearly operating within the domain of losses. So, what was to be done? The second stage of a Prospect Theory analysis requires an evaluation of options, of which Bush had several (McDermott 1992). In order of increasing risk he could: take the lead from President Clinton and essentially do nothing (i.e. a non-interventionist policy entailing the provision of minimal support to the United Nations and other organizations), define the crisis as a genocide and then 90 Gabrielle Levy pursue inaction, or define the crisis as a genocide and take decisive military action (i.e. an interventionist policy). I do not include the option of undertaking military intervention without defining the events in Darfur as a genocide as the mandate of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide would have been used to justify any military action. Bush’s least risky option would have been to avoid defining the crisis as a genocide and attempt to save face by providing limited diplomatic support. If Bush did not invoke the word genocide, he would face no legal obligations. Indeed, this was the logic used by President Clinton in his response to the Rwanda Genocide. The Clinton administration had “tied itself in semantic knots” to avoid invoking Article I of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide which requires states to “take measures to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide” (Ham- ilton 2011; “United Nations Office”). For Bush, the potential risks associated with inaction were backlash or conflict spillover. In reality, these risks did not seem high. Clinton had not faced much backlash for his inaction as evidenced by trends in his approval ratings, and conflict spillover did not seem likely given the ethnic targeting that defined the Darfur conflict (Gallup 2019). Due to his desire to leave the domain of losses, President Bush did not see the merit of inaction. In her evaluation of the Iranian Hostage Crisis using Prospect Theory, McDermott (1992) asserts that President Jimmy Carter “was not willing to define the new status quo as an acceptable reference point because that concession might cost him his reelection.” The same can be said of President Bush in 2004. Bush was evidently concerned that inaction would negatively impact his election campaign, as well as the integrity of his presidency, leaving him in a domain of losses. As a result, Bush was willing to forego his least risky option. There was strong domestic pressure to intervene in Sudan by evangelical Christian groups, who made up Bush’s core constituency, and the Black Congressional Caucus (Heinze 2007). Both groups had transferred their interest in Sudan’s civil wars to the new crisis occurring in Darfur. Additionally, the coinciding of escalating events in Darfur with the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda Genocide left Bush in a vulnerable position; UN Secre- tary-General Kofi Annan had drawn a direct comparison between the Darfur crisis and the 1994 situation in Rwanda, calling for “swift and appropriate action” (Heinze 2007). Even without these external pressures, Bush was personally invested in ensur- ing that his administration would not suffer the eventual backlash that Clinton’s had. Soon after being elected, Bush famously scribbled ‘NOT ON MY WATCH’ in the margins of a memo on the failures of the Clinton administration in Rwanda (Black and Williams 2010). Although Bush was determined to act in some capacity to escape the domain of losses, the Bush administration was not willing to take the highest risk strategy of defining the Darfur crisis as a genocide and conducting an outright military intervention. Historically, U.S. military interventions in the case of genocides had not been successful. Bush’s own father, President George H.W. Bush, had learned as much in George W. Bush and the Darfur Genocide 91 Somalia in 1993 when a humanitarian mission to deliver food turned into the 15- hour long Battle of Mogadishu which left 18 Americans dead and 73 injured (NPR Staff 2013). In the Darfur case, several factors compounded to make a military intervention especially risky. For one, there were logistical challenges posed by Darfur’s size and lack of supply sources—Darfur did not have any roads, railways, modern air bas- es, or guaranteed supplies of fuel (Mayroz 2008). A military intervention could have also spelled disaster for Darfuris by causing suspension of humanitarian aid. Addition- ally, there were concerns that an American intervention could spark a religious crusade in response if it were portrayed as a direct attack on Muslims (Ibid.). The U.S. was also overstretched financially and militarily because of the war in Iraq (Ibid.). As such, the Bush administration was concerned that it did not have enough troops on hand to effectively stop the slaughter and that the deployment of more troops would prevent Bush from winning over potential voters who opposed the war in Iraq. Overall, the chances of a military operation succeeding were determined to be low and any sort of military intervention was deemed far too risky (Ibid.). Ultimately, Bush pursued the moderately-risky option of formally acknowledging the ongoing genocide in Darfur but adopting a non-interventionist approach. In July 2004, the U.S. House of Representatives declared the violence in Darfur to be a genocide and in September 2004, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell affirmed this on behalf of the Bush Administration. Powell also insisted, however, that no further action was required by the 1948 Geneva Convention (Williams and Bellamy 2005). Instead, the US simply called “upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate” (Mayroz 2008). The formal recognition of genocide was thus viewed by some to have been used a substitute for a stronger response involving military intervention. Nonetheless, I argue that the decision to brand the Darfur crisis as a genocide was still risky. The decision to define the events in Darfur as genocide was risky, in line with the determination that Bush was operating in the domain of losses. By defining the Darfur crisis as a genocide, Bush accepted the risk of invoking responsibility to intervene as outlined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. And he did so at a time when there was “little appetite” at home for “humanitarian intervention, nation building, or other military involvement in Darfur” (Heinze 2007). Also, unlike in the case of previous genocides, Heinze acknowledges that it was not blatantly clear whether a genocide was occurring. Although the situation in Darfur was perceived as a genocide by the main- stream media, legal technicalities meant that it was unclear whether the definition of genocide applied to events in Darfur, rendering the official declaration of genocide risky. To be legally defined as such, genocides must show signs of specific intent. In other words, it must be evident that “atrocities are carried out with the intent to destroy all or part of the victim group” (Hamilton 2011). Importantly, Secretary of 92 Gabrielle Levy State Powell’s legal adviser, William Taft IV, questioned whether the acts of slaughter in Darfur were specifically intended to destroy non-Arab groups of Darfuris. Powell himself later recalled that Taft advised “others could argue against the genocide determination with a strong legal basis,” but that the application of the term genocide was “legally supportable” (Hamilton 2011). Thus, the decision to pronounce the events in Darfur a genocide was risky because it threatened to legally mandate the U.S. to intervene in Darfur, even though it was not explicitly clear whether a genocide was taking place. Despite the moderate risk involved with defining the Darfur crisis as a genocide, Bush was willing to choose this option as he saw the opportunity for significant gain that would allow him to edge back toward a pre-Iraq status quo. Bush believed that showing leadership in international policy towards Sudan would allow him to regain some semblance of authority on moral issues. He also saw the opportunity to curry favor with evangelical Christians who made up a large portion of his support base and who had advocated for the U.S. to investigate the events in Sudan. Addi- tionally, Bush saw the declaration of genocide without any military commitment as a way to win over voters who were not in favor of more U.S. intervention abroad. There is reason to believe that these suppositions were right. Mayroz (2008) concludes that the Bush administration succeeded in its contradictory goals of “avoiding engagement in conflicts that posed little threat to narrowly defined American interests, and at the same time containing the political costs and avoiding the moral stigma associated with allowing genocide.” Some might argue that Bush’s decision was not risky, as defining the Darfur crisis as a genocide did not actually force the Bush administration to act. I argue, however, that there was no way of guaranteeing the international community would agree with the U.S.’s evaluation that it was not legally obligated to act. In fact, there is strong reason to believe that Bush, via Powell, formed his belief that the U.S. would not be obligated to act based off of a single memorandum Taft wrote in June 2004. In this document, Taft stated that “a determination that genocide has occurred in Dar- fur would have no legal - as opposed to moral, political, or policy - consequences for the United States” (Hamilton 2011). If Taft had determined otherwise, experts have hypothesized that it is unlikely the word genocide would have been used (Hamilton 2011). Thus, even if the other indicators of risk are to be refuted, Bush’s choice was risky as it was based on the determinations of one man. Bush’s decision to define the events in Darfur in 2004 as a genocide was risky. Using the analytical framework provided by Prospect Theory, Bush’s evaluation of himself as operating in the domain of losses can be seen as the catalyst for his risk-acceptance and willingness to take a moderately risky approach. While the declaration of genocide allowed Bush to regain moral authority and improve his image before election day, it could just as easily have ended in disaster, leading to international and political demand for the deployment of U.S. troops in Darfur—a messy undertaking with little chance of success. George W. Bush and the Darfur Genocide 93

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Anatomy of Catastrophe in Cuba: Defective Decision-Making Structures and President Kennedy’s Authorization of Operation Zapata Annie Farrell

The U.S.-directed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba is considered by many scholars and experts to be a “perfect failure” of U.S. foreign policy (Draper 1962; Higgins 1987; Janis 1972). What drove President John F. Kennedy’s failed decision to authorize the invasion, codenamed “Operation Zapata,” has been a grand source of scholarly debate. Utilizing a combination of evidence gathered from informative memoirs by key Operation Zapata participants, declassified CIA documents, report and testimony from the Board of Inquiry on the Bay of Pigs, and internal memoranda, this paper argues that Kennedy’s decision was primarily driven by his faulty decision-making structure. A better decision-making structure would have allowed Kennedy to understand the operation’s flaws. This argument implies that lamentable decisions similar to Kennedy’s can be avoided by maintaining formal decision-making structures in the early days of a president’s administration, and that informal decision-making structures are risky for foreign policy planning.

Introduction On April 17, 1961, a force of 1,543 Cuban exiles called Brigade 2506 landed in Cuba at the beaches along the Bay of Pigs. The landing operation, named “Operation Zapa- ta,” was covertly organized by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and formally approved by President John F. Kennedy. Within three days of landing at the Bay of Pigs, the invasion was defeated. Kennedy’s decision to authorize Operation Zapata led to what is deemed by numerous scholars and experts to be a “perfect failure” of U.S. foreign policy (Draper 1962; Higgins 1987; Janis 1972). This paper asks, “What drove Kennedy’s failed decision to authorize Oper- ation Zapata?” The existing scholarship on this question falls into four camps: first, Kennedy employed rational decision-making; second, Kennedy’s own political bias motivated his decision to proceed with an operation doomed to fail; third, Kennedy was misled by the CIA about the operation’s chance of success; and fourth, Kennedy fell victim to his own defective decision-making structure. In the following sections, I use a combination of evidence gathered from informative memoirs by key participants, declassified CIA documents, report and testimony from the Board of Inquiry on the Bay of Pigs, and internal memoranda to argue that Kennedy’s decision was primarily driven by his faulty decision-making structure. This argument suggests that similarly lamentable decisions can be avoided by maintaining formal decision-making structures in the early days of a president’s administration, and that informal decision-making structures are risky for foreign policy planning.

Annie Farrell grew up in Miami, Florida, and is a member of the class of 2021 at Dartmouth College. She is a government major and Spanish minor. After graduation, Annie will be working as a legal assistant at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York City while she applies to law school. 96 Annie Farrell

Literature Review The first camp in the existing literature surrounding Kennedy’s decision to authorize Operation Zapata argues that Kennedy acted rationally in selecting the operation amid a lack of viable alternatives (Kramer 1998; Rusk, Rusk, and Papp 1990; Luis 1981, 176; Luis 1981, 219). For example, in his memoir, Secretary of State Dean Rusk distinguishes Kennedy’s “judgement to proceed” as “razor-edge, a closely balanced decision” in light of the difficulty associated with disbanding the trained -Cu ban brigade (Rusk, Rusk, and Papp 1990, 211; Goodwin 1988, 173; Luis 1981, 12; Luis 1981, 176). Similarly, the Board of Inquiry commissioned by Kennedy to conduct a postmortem of Operation Zapata concluded that “the approval of so marginal an operation” was undoubtedly influenced by the feeling that the “operation was the best way to realize the most” from the Brigade as a waning asset (Luis 1981, 41; Luis 1981, 18; Luis 1981, 219). Additionally, social psychologist Roderick Kramer argues that the Cuba operation “entailed imperfect choice among imperfect alternatives,” and that Kennedy reasonably assessed the operation’s prospects for success in light of similar successful covert operations such as PBSUCCESS in Guatemala just seven years prior (Kramer 1998, 245–46). The “rational” explanation for Kennedy’s decision to authorize Operation Zapata rests on two main assumptions. First, it assumes that Kennedy thought that the mission had a reasonable chance of success. Second, it assumes that Kennedy based that belief on rigorous evidence. It is not plausible to argue that Kennedy employed rational decision-making by authorizing Operation Zapata without validating these two assumptions. The second camp in the literature about Kennedy’s decision to authorize Op- eration Zapata maintains that Kennedy’s own political bias motivated his decision to proceed with an operation doomed to fail (Luis 1981; Kornbluh 1998; Bose 1998; Campbell and Steinberg 2008; Kramer 1998; Luis 1981; Vandenbroucke 1984b). For instance, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified before the Board of Inquiry that Kennedy’s decision was influenced by three political considerations: one, bringing the invasion force back to the U.S. would create the perception that the U.S. would not help others fight communism; two, it was the last chance to overthrow Fidel Cas- tro without using Americans; and three, the Brigade’s guerilla contingency plan meant that the operation could not be seen by the rest of the world as a total defeat for the U.S. (Luis 1981, 201; Jones 2010, 55; Luis 1981, 219; Luis 1981, 42). Political science scholar Lucien Vandenbroucke emphasizes Kennedy’s desire to escape domestic criticism for being soft on communism as being intrinsic to his decision-making process (Vandenbroucke 1984b, 484–85; Kramer 1998, 249). Kramer similarly argues Kennedy’s reluctance to suffer a “blow to his reputation and credibility as a leader” by cancelling the operation dictated his decision more than the political costs of the operation’s failure (Kramer 1998, 245). The “political bias” explanation for Kennedy’s decision to authorize Opera- Anatomy of Catastrophe in Cuba 97 tion Zapata is grounded in two main assumptions. The first assumption is that Kenne- dy understood that the operation had a low chance of success. The second assumption is that Kennedy accepted the operation’s low chance of success due to his own political considerations. If either one of these assumptions is established to be untrue, the political bias explanation collapses. The third camp in the debate about Kennedy’s decision asserts that Ken- nedy was misled by the CIA about the operation’s chance of success (Kirkpatrick 2013; Schlesinger 1965; Sorensen 1965; Luis 1981; Vandenbroucke 1984b; Wilen- sky 1967). For instance, CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick concluded in his Survey of the Cuban Operation that the CIA failed to give the President facts to alert him that the “margin of error” for the operation “vanished” before it even took place (Kornbluh 1998). U.S. foreign policy scholar Piero Gleijeses explains that the CIA insisted on the existence of an impractical guerilla option for the second phase of operation to encourage the President’s approval, when in reality it expected U.S. intervention during this phase (Gleijeses 1995, 38). Kennedy adviser Theodore Sorensen similarly argues that the CIA planned the operation based on an assumption of open U.S. intervention, but answered the President’s questions without revealing this key assumption (Sorensen 1965, 298). The explanation that purports misleading information from the CIA drove Kennedy’s decision to authorize Operation Zapata relies on three main assumptions. The first assumption is that Kennedy thought that the mission had a reasonable chance of success. The second assumption is that Kennedy’s optimism was based on misleading information provided by the CIA. The final assumption is that a better decision-making process would not have allowed Kennedy to understand the flaws in the CIA’s assessments. These three assumptions must be sustained to credibly argue that Kennedy’s decision was a product of misguidance. Finally, the fourth camp in the discussion of Kennedy’s decision to authorize Operation Zapata argues that Kennedy fell victim to his own defective decision-making structure. CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell explains in his memoir that Kennedy’s reformation of the national security apparatus prevented effective communication of essential information between the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House (Bissell 1996, 197). Similarly, public policy scholar Meena Bose argues that Kennedy’s faulty decision-making processes led to his administration’s failure to engage in systematic policy analysis of information central to the operation (Bose 1998, 100). Political scientist David Rothkopf contends that the blurred distinction between planning and operations within Kennedy’s decision-making structure was critical to the operation’s failure (Rothkopf 2005, 85–86). Three main assumptions undergird the “defective decision-making structure” explanation for Kennedy’s failed decision. First, there was information available to suggest the mission would fail. Second, Kennedy’s faulty decision-making structure made it so this information was not subject to rigorous analysis to recognize the prospect of failure. Following from the second assumption, the third assumption is that 98 Annie Farrell Kennedy did not understand that the operation had a low chance of success. Without sustaining these three assumptions, it is not plausible to argue that Kennedy’s defective decision-making structure determined his decision to authorize Operation Zapata. In the remainder of this paper, I demonstrate how evidence gathered from informative memoirs by key participants, declassified CIA documents, report and testimony from the Board of Inquiry on the Bay of Pigs, and internal memoranda support the defective decision-making structure explanation. I make this argument in three parts. First, I explain why Kennedy thought the mission had a reasonable chance of success. Second, I illustrate that there was information available to suggest that Kennedy’s optimism was mistaken. Finally, I demonstrate why Kennedy would have been able to obtain information to comprehend the operation’s flaws if he had a better decision-making structure. I conclude that the evidence suggests that Kennedy’s failed decision resulted from his defective decision-making structure.

Kennedy’s Optimism In this section, I demonstrate why Kennedy thought Operation Zapata had a reasonable chance of success. While Kramer argues that Kennedy accepted risks of failure before political risks, I explain that Kennedy did not believe the planned operation tilted toward failure. First, I show that Kennedy thought that plausible deniability was achievable for the large covert operation. Second, I demonstrate that Kennedy thought that popular insurrection of Cuban civilians was probable. Finally, I explain that Kennedy perceived that guerilla action was a viable option in the event the Bri- gade faced an initial setback. Thus, Kennedy did not understand that the operation had a low chance of success so his decision cannot be explained by political bias. Plausible deniability was an operational requirement for the Cuban operation in order to successfully fulfill Kennedy’s objective of pursuing multilateral cooperation through the Organization of American States (OAS). Kennedy saw OAS cooperation as key to halting the spread of Castro’s influence (Schlesinger 1965, 225). Without plausible deniability in place, U.S. action against Castro would be viewed as a violation of the nonintervention principle in the OAS charter (Poznansky 2020, 110). The U.S. would then face the possibility of being ousted from the OAS. Thus, Kennedy consistently insisted that his authorization of Operation Zapata was con- ditional on the operation’s ability to uphold plausible deniability (Bissell 1996, 169; 1996, 173; Luis 1981, 13; Pfeiffer, n.d., 242; Reeves 1994, 71). Consequently, Kennedy’s approval of Operation Zapata reflects his belief that plausible deniability could be maintained. According to Kirkpatrick, Kennedy thought the “mass infiltration would…through some mystique, become quickly in- visible” to keep the operation quiet and conceal the U.S.’s hand (Kirkpatrick Jr. 1972, 35). Jack Pfeiffer, author of the CIA’s Official History of the Bay of Pigs, maintains that guarantees of the possibility of a “quiet landing” offered an effective “placebo” for Kennedy in terms of his belief about plausible deniability (Pfeiffer, n.d., 182–83). Bissell recalls that “everyone in the Cuban operation,” including Kennedy, “moved Anatomy of Catastrophe in Cuba 99 forward…confident that the fig leaf of plausible deniability was still in place” (Bissell 1996, 174). Assured by Director of the CIA Allen Dulles that Operation Zapata’s chance of success was “even better” than that of PBSUCCESS in Guatemala, Kennedy held the optimistic view that plausible deniability was achievable (Luis 1981, 219– 20). After all, PBSUCCESS was a successful covert operation that maintained plausible deniability. Therefore, Kennedy’s optimism was palpable due to his perception that plausible deniability would be successfully realized as an operational requirement. A high probability of operational success was Kennedy’s second operational requirement for the purpose of thwarting communist intrusion into Latin America. If the operation failed, the Soviet Union would continue to supply arms to Cuba and the U.S. would potentially face backlash from the OAS, the UN and its allies (Luis 1981, 219–20). These consequences of failure would hinder current and future efforts by the U.S. to prevent communism’s encroachment on Latin America. As such, Kennedy wanted the Brigade to spark revolt in Cuba with a successful initial invasion, or else conduct guerilla operations in the Escambray Mountains so that the operation would not be a U.S. defeat (Sorensen 1965, 303). Kennedy was under the impression that the popular insurrection of Cuban civilians needed to spark national revolt was likely. For instance, Dulles notes that Ken- nedy did not realize that changing the Brigade’s landing site from Trinidad to Zapata would negatively affect the likelihood of popular insurrection (Vandenbroucke 1984a, 368). Kennedy’s advisor Arthur Schlesinger claims that the President understood the invasion plan to “assume that the successful occupation of an enlarged beachhead area would rather soon incite organized uprisings by armed members of the Cuban resistance” (Schlesinger 1965, 247). Sorensen similarly maintains that Kennedy believed the operation entailed the likelihood of popular uprisings: “President Kennedy thought he was approving a plan calculated to succeed with the help of the Cuban underground, military desertions and in time an uprising of a rebellious population” (Sorensen 1965, 303). Kennedy’s understanding that rebellion in Cuba would arise directly translated to optimism about the operation’s overall probability of success. The President also thought guerilla action was a viable option in the event the Brigade faced an initial setback. When asked by the Board of Inquiry whether “it [was] a major factor that [the Brigade] could get to the mountains,” McNamara answered, resoundingly: “Yes, it was certainly in the President’s mind” (Luis 1981, 202). He went on to say Kennedy saw the guerilla option as insurance that the press would not view the operation as a total failure (Luis 1981, 202). According to Bissell, Kennedy believed the guerilla option was practical as a result of the CIA’s encouraging support of the contingency plan (Bissell 1996, 172). National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy stated before the Board of Inquiry that Kennedy was “repeatedly assured” that the guerilla alternative “was a real one” (Luis 1981, 178). Pfeiffer maintains that Kennedy was “greatly influenced” by such assurances: “With this alternative to fall back on, the view was held that a sudden or disastrous defeat was most im- probable” (Pfeiffer, n.d., 269). Thus, it is evident that Kennedy’s optimism about the 100 Annie Farrell feasibility of guerilla action as a contingency plan fed his confidence that the operation possessed a reasonable chance of success. Kennedy’s optimistic appraisal of Operation Zapata’s chance of success was built on his beliefs that plausible deniability, popular insurrection and guerilla action were all obtainable goals. He evidently did not understand the operation had a low chance of success. However, as I will demonstrate in the following section, there was information available that could have led Kennedy to render a more pessimistic assessment of the operation’s chance of success.

Evidence for Mistaken Optimism Here, I explain that there was information available to suggest that Kennedy’s optimism was mistaken. First, I show why it was foreseeable that the operational requirement of American plausible deniability was unrealistic. Then, I explain why the operational requirement of a high probability of operational success was impossible for two reasons: one, evidence pointed to the unlikelihood of popular insurrection of Cuban civilians; and two, information indicated the impracticality of the guerilla option in case of setback. Thus, I conclude that the optimism Kennedy exhibited toward the operation was not built on rigorous evidence to render the rational explanation for Kennedy’s decision implausible. Firstly, information available during the operation’s planning indicated that plausible deniability was “a pathetic illusion” (Kornbluh 1998, 55). The American press published numerous stories leading up to the invasion about the U.S.’s involvement in the Brigade’s training (Jones 2010, 64). For example, The New York Times printed an article entitled “U.S. Helps Train an Anti-Castro Force At Secret Gua- temalan Air-Ground Base” three months before the invasion took place (Kennedy 1961). The CIA, specifically, was “freely linked” with the “massive preparations” in Guatemala (Kornbluh 1998, 55). A Guatemalan newspaper published a story expos- ing the CIA’s construction of a $1 million base to train Cuban counterrevolutionaries in the fall of 1960 (Wyden 1980, 46). Moreover, there was evidence that Cuba had intelligence information about the Cuban exiles training in Guatemala under U.S. command. Raúl Roa, Cuba’s Foreign Minister, used intelligence information from Cuba’s security services about exiles “training under the command of North Ameri- can military men” to publicly denounce the U.S.’s “mission to attack Cuba” (Korn- bluh 1998, 276). However, despite recognizing that plausible deniability could not be maintained, the CIA never alerted Kennedy to this fact (Bissell 1996, 173). Therefore, Kennedy’s optimistic assessment of the operation’s chance of success was mistaken due to his uninformed perception that plausible deniability could be successfully realized as an operational requirement. There was also evidence available that pointed to the unlikelihood of popular insurrection of Cuban civilians. For one, there was an insufficient number of Cubans expected to revolt. Approximately 60 of the Cuban Volunteer Air Force returnees observed that “mass arrests throughout Cuba neutralized many of the people who Anatomy of Catastrophe in Cuba 101 would have revolted before these people were aware that an invasion was taking place” (Luis 1981, 157). This observation sharply contrasted with the judgement the CIA relayed to Kennedy that at least a quarter of the Cuban people would actively support the Brigade once it occupied the beachhead (Schlesinger 1965, 247). Additionally, the Zapata area was largely inaccessible to the Cuban population (“Evaluation of the Military Aspects of Alternate Concepts, CIA Paramilitary Plan, Cuba (S)” 1961). The swamp region limited support from the Cuban populace because, as indicated in the revised operation’s plan, “there was virtually no local population from which to recruit additional troops” (Kornbluh 1998, 128). The CIA asserted this meant that popular insurrection could only be “gradual” (Kornbluh 1998) but this assessment was misleading because it suggested there was a sizable portion of the Cuban population ready to revolt. Furthermore, available information about Castro’s political strength cast doubt on the probability of uprisings. Senator-elect Claiborne Pell, upon returning from Cuba, reported in the New York Herald Tribune that the Cuban people were widely satisfied with Castro’s reforms (Wyden 1980, 94). He also reported that “the dispossessed and disgruntled were in jail or in exile” (Wyden 1980, 94). Thus, available evidence showed that the operational requirement of a high probability of operational success was not within reach because Cuban civilians were unlikely to engage in uprisings. Finally, available information signaled that the guerilla option was impractical in case the Brigade faced an initial setback. Eighty miles of impassable swamp lay between the Zapata area and the Escambrays (Higgins 1987, 97; Vandenbroucke 1984b, 476). According to both Pfeiffer and Kennedy’s advisor Richard Goodwin, simply referencing a topographical map would have revealed this fact and the impracticality of the guerilla contingency plan (Goodwin 1988, 175; Pfeiffer, n.d., 240). Moreover, the Brigade was unprepared to operate as guerillas. The Brigade had long ceased guerilla training in favor of conventional tactics. Soldiers were only trained as guerillas until November 1960, when a major influx of 1,000 exiles who never received guerilla training arrived in Guatemala (Luis 1981, 318). In addition, Brigade leaders were never even informed about the contingency plan (Goodwin 1988, 176). The CIA did not create a formal plan – Bissell recalls the operation’s planners “did not have somebody draw up a plan for retreating to the Escambray” (Bissell 1996, 172). If a plan had been created, he maintains that it would have been realized that “there was no easy way to escape to the Escambray from the Bay of Pigs” (Bissell 1996, 172). Nonetheless, at the time the CIA implied the Brigade had undergone guerilla training and that the Escambrays were “an easy escape hatch” from the Zapata area (Schlesinger 1965, 250). Hence, Kennedy’s belief that the guerilla option was feasible to preserve a high chance of success was not informed by rigorous evidence that indicated otherwise. Available information signaling that plausible deniability, popular uprisings and guerilla action were unrealistic suggests that Kennedy’s optimism was misin- 102 Annie Farrell formed. Kennedy did not base his optimistic appraisal of the operation’s chance of success on rigorous evidence, but rather misleading information from the CIA. How- ever, a better decision-making process would have allowed Kennedy to uncover the available information that accentuated the operation’s flaws.

Analysis to Avert Failure In this section, I explain why Kennedy would have been able to obtain information to comprehend the operation’s flaws if he had a better decision-making structure. Though Kirkpatrick argues that the CIA prevented Kennedy from understanding the operation’s low chance of success, I explain how an improved decision-making structure would have allowed Kennedy to better understand the three flaws, as indicated previously, that undermined the mission’s success. First, I show that if Kennedy had not dismantled Eisenhower’s national security structure, the lack of plausible deniability that undermined Kennedy’s objective in Latin America would have been realized. Second, I explain why Kennedy would have been in a position to understand the improbability of mass insurrection against Castro had he not dismantled, specifically, the formal processes of review of intelligence. Finally, I demonstrate how a less informal and collegial decision-making environment would have permitted analysis and skepticism of the guerilla contingency plan to expose its questionable nature. Therefore, Kennedy’s decision to authorize Operation Zapata cannot solely be explained by misguidance by the CIA, as there was ample opportunity for Kennedy to obtain crucial information about the operation’s chance of success had he maintained an effective decision-making structure. Upon his inauguration in January 1961, Kennedy dismantled President Ei- senhower’s national security structure. He disbanded the 5412 Committee, a subcommittee of the National Security Council (NSC) that oversaw covert operations (Daugherty 2006, 151). Additionally, he eliminated the NSC’s Planning Board and Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), essentially cutting the NSC’s staff in half (Bissell 1996, 197; Sorensen 1965, 281). As a result of reducing the number of oversight and analytical functions in place for prospective plans, Kennedy greatly disabled his decision-making structure. If Kennedy had not dismantled Eisenhower’s national security structure, he would have realized that the operation could not maintain plausible deniability. For one, if the 5412 Committee was intact, this body would have rejected the plan for lack of its covert nature. The Board of Inquiry concluded that Operation Zapata “did not fit within the limited scope of NSC 5412/2” because it “could not be prepared and conducted in such a way that all U.S. support of it and connection with it could be plausibly disclaimed” (Luis 1981, 40). NSC 5412/2 was an NSC directive that set forth a definition for covert actions. However, because Kennedy dismantled the 5412 Committee established under this directive, there was no formal body overseeing the covert operations conducted by the CIA. Thus, the operation was never appropriately reassigned to the Department of Defense (Luis 1981, 40). Instead, the CIA contin- Anatomy of Catastrophe in Cuba 103 ued planning despite “obstacles and delays” created by the “insistence on adhering to the formalities imposed by a non-attributability which no longer existed” (Kornbluh 1998, 61). Had the 5412 Committee existed during Kennedy’s decision-making process, he would have recognized that plausible deniability was unrealistic because U.S. action against Cuba would no longer be planned under the guise of a covert operation. Furthermore, if Kennedy had not eliminated the NSC’s Planning Board and OCB, then he would have understood that plausible deniability was unrealistic for the large covert operation. Bissell claims that the elimination of these NSC bodies hampered the “staffing and regular reporting channels that characterized the Eisenhower White House” (Bissell 1996, 197). Thus, communication between the CIA and the Joint Chiefs was incomplete, and their “differences in opinion as to the likelihood of the operation’s success, was not readily apparent” (Bissell 1996, 197). In other words, information was lost as it worked its way up to the President and his Special Group of decision makers because the NSC boards were not there to coordinate departmental evaluations in preparation for policy review. Most notably, JCS reports suggested early on that, (1) the military should play a leading role in the Cuban operation (“U.S. Plan of Action in Cuba,” n.d.), and (2) it was likely that overt military action by the U.S. was needed for the invasion (Pfeiffer, n.d., 187), but were never properly assessed (Pfeiffer, n.d., 239). Had these reports been evaluated by the NSC’s Planning Board and OCB, Kennedy would have been alerted that plausible deniability was regarded as an impractical operational requirement. He did not need to read the newspaper stories that suggested the same idea – his decision-making structure would have warned him. Kennedy also eroded the formal processes of review of intelligence upon entering office. For example, Kennedy abolished the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence, which independently reviewed covert action programs and advised the President accordingly (Daugherty 2006, 152). This action exacerbated the existing divide between the CIA’s operational and estimated arms (Neustadt 1980, 222). Consequently, Kennedy’s decision-making structure was ineffective at recognizing intelligence indicating the improbability of mass insurrection of Cuban civilians. Provided that Kennedy did not dissolve the formal processes of review of intelligence, he would have understood that the probability of mass insurrection was questionable. According to Dulles, he “know[s] of no estimate that a spontaneous uprising of the unarmed population of Cuba would be touched off by the landing” (Dulles 1963). Similarly, Kirkpatrick notes that there was “no intelligence evidence that Cubans in significant numbers could or would join the invaders” (Kornbluh 1998). He goes even further to assert that “there was no controlled and responsive underground movement ready to rally to the invasion force” (Kornbluh 1998, 54). Had formal processes of review of intelligence been in place, Kennedy would have been advised that there was no official intelligence estimate of the number of Cubans expected to revolt. Instead, he relied on judgments from the operations branch of the CIA based on “biased speculation by Cuban exiles anxious to topple Castro and return to Cuba” (Rusk, Rusk, and Papp 1990, 214). Thus, Kennedy’s decision-making 104 Annie Farrell structure, rendered defective by the absence of the formal processes of review of intelligence, hampered his ability to understand that sparking a national revolt was unlikely. Additionally, formal processes of review of intelligence would have allowed Kennedy to understand that Castro was politically powerful, casting doubt on the probability of uprisings. British, French and State Department intelligence indicated that Castro enjoyed both political and military strength (Kirkpatrick Jr. 1972, 40; Sorensen 1965, 305). The Office of National Estimates had available studies on Cuba that suggested Castro was stronger than any internal opposition (Kornbluh 1998; Neustadt 1980, 222). Sherman Kent, chairman of the CIA’s authoritative Board of National Esti- mates, stated in a memorandum to Dulles that internal opposition did not “portend any serious threat to [the Castro] regime which…has established a formidable structure of control over the daily lives of the Cuban people” (Wyden 1980, 99). There- fore, a better decision-making structure that included formal processes of review of intelligence would have informed Kennedy of the unlikelihood of mass insurrection. As a result of dismantling formal decision-making structures from Eisen- hower’s administration, Kennedy created an informal and collegial decision-making environment (Luis 1981, 16; Mosher, Clinton, and Lang 1987, 92; Rusk, Rusk, and Papp 1990, 213; Sorensen 1965, 282; Wyden 1980, 147). According to Sorensen, Kennedy himself called and led ad hoc meetings “regardless of protocol or precedent” (Sorensen 1965, 282). Rusk recalls that these informal meetings produced a collegial decision-making structure by which officials operating at “varying levels of responsibility” were all heard the same (Wyden 1980, 147). Hence, Kennedy’s decision-making environment was unconducive to systematic analysis of the operation. If Kennedy had fostered a less informal and collegial decision-making environment, the guerilla contingency plan would have been sufficiently analyzed to expose him to its questionable nature. Without Kennedy at the center of his informal decision-making organization, the guerilla option would have been more thoughtfully planned. According to Bissell, a formal contingency plan was never drawn up because “Kennedy never pressed” for a decision about what to do after the first phase of the operation (Gleijeses 1995, 31). He further implies that Kennedy’s informal meetings about the operation were intensely preoccupied with the first phase of the operation, so no one in meetings wanted to divert attention away from Phase I by probing Phase II (Gleijeses 1995, 32). Bundy similarly notes that Kennedy, and consequently the CIA, did not focus much on the second phase of the operation (Gleijeses 1995, 32). As a result, specialists in Cuban affairs at the State Department and CIA and amphibious warfare specialists at the Defense Department – experts who could have recognized flaws in the superficially-prepared contingency plan – did not take part in planning for this phase (Daugherty 2006, 154). Thus, a more formal decision-making environment that provided Kennedy indirect leadership of the operation would have promoted systematic planning of the contingency plan to allow Kennedy to comprehend its flaws. Lastly, a less collegial decision-making environment would have prevented Anatomy of Catastrophe in Cuba 105 Kennedy from taking for granted the feasibility of guerilla action. In Kennedy’s collegial meetings, an atmosphere of shared decision-making was prominent (Wyden 1980, 147). However, this atmosphere did not translate to a feeling of shared responsibility for the operation: According to Rusk, the Joint Chiefs did not feel responsible for the CIA operation so they “never looked at the plan as professional soldiers” (Rusk, Rusk, and Papp 1990, 209). Thus, the Joint Chiefs never made an independent study on the suitability of the Zapata area and the Brigade for guerilla action (Luis 1981, 208, 317–18). Instead, they accepted Operation Zapata’s contingency plan solely based on the information they received from the CIA (Luis 1981, 317). Schlesinger notes that the Chiefs’ tendency to go “contentedly along” with the CIA was common, especially at meetings (Schlesinger 1965, 250). Thus, Kennedy was under the impression that the military aspects of Operation Zapata had “the whole-hearted support” of the Joint Chiefs (Schlesinger 1965, 250). Had Kennedy preserved a more formal decision-making structure that limited his direct involvement in covert action oversight, he would have been less susceptible to such impressions. Thus, a combination of systematic planning and indirect presidential involvement due to an improved decision-making structure would have produced skepticism about the guerilla contingency plan to ad- versely affect Kennedy’s level of optimism about the operation. A better decision-making structure would have allowed Kennedy to obtain information to comprehend the infeasibility of plausible deniability, the unlikelihood of popular insurrection and the questionable nature of the guerilla contingency plan. In other words, an improved decision-making structure would have been sufficient to allow Kennedy to understand the flaws in the CIA’s assessments of the operation. Therefore, Kennedy’s failed decision to authorize Operation Zapata was not driven by misleading information from the CIA.

Conclusion The evidence suggests that Kennedy’s failed decision to authorize Operation Zapata is best explained by his defective decision-making structure. Kennedy was in the dark about the operation’s low chance of success, despite there being ample information available to indicate the mission’s flaws. A better decision-making structure would have allowed him to grasp the operation’s shortcomings in terms of maintaining plausible deniability, inciting popular insurrection, and executing guerilla action. Thus, Kennedy’s faulty decision-making structure was key to his misunderstanding of the operation’s chance of success and his unsuccessful decision. If this paper is correct in claiming that Kennedy’s decision to authorize Op- eration Zapata was driven by his defective decision-making structure, then there are significant implications for preventing similar presidential errors in the future. Spe- cifically, my argument supports Rebecca Friedman Lissner’s argument that abolish- ing formal decision-making structures during a presidential transition is a mistake (Friedman 2011, 329). This implication is not to say that a president should not develop decision-making structures that work for him over time, but rather that formal 106 Annie Farrell decision-making structures are valuable in the onset of presidency to impose rigor on the foreign policy making process. To prevent similar failures of foreign policy going forward, this paper implies that presidents should not be so quick to dismantle the decision-making structures of their predecessors. Instead, presidents should spend their early days familiarizing themselves with the tools and processes available to them for rigorous policy planning. Finally, this paper’s findings also support Bose’s argument that informal processes of decision-making are risky for foreign policy planning (Bose 1998, 102). This implication does not mean that presidents with informal management styles cannot approach foreign policy accordingly, but it suggests that these types of presidents should adapt their decision-making structure in a way that also maintains the many benefits of formality. For instance, Bose recommends presidents with informal management styles should incorporate some form of multiple advocacy into their decision-making process (Bose 1998, 102). To learn from the Bay of Pigs fiasco, this paper implies that presidents should embrace formality in the decision-making process to ensure foreign policy operations are thoroughly examined before a decision is made. One administration’s “perfect failure” lives on as the perfect lesson in the power of formal decision-making. Anatomy of Catastrophe in Cuba 107

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Building Blocs: BRICS Coalition Making and Their Impact on the WTO

Sylvia Lorico

There is a growing body of literature surrounding the rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Rus- sia, India, China, and South Africa) in international relations, especially in International Organizations (IOs). However, such literature is limited to the examination of only the most active and prominent members of the BRICS, usually Brazil, India, and China. This paper comprehensively analyzes the roles of all BRICS in the World Trade Orga- nization (WTO). It shows that the BRICS have demonstrated a fluid and case-by-case convergence in several aspects of the WTO operations including in negotiations and in dispute cases. To their benefit, their collective efforts have shifted hegemony away from the Global North and towards the Global South. Russia and South Africa’s efforts are also examined here in detail. While their convergence is significant, the paper also concludes that the somewhat tenuous link between the nations makes it unclear if the nations will collectively seek to exert much more influence or reform the WTO.

Introduction The relationship of the Global South to the multilateral international institutions (IOs) of the world has often been defined by significant tensions. These institutions, often thought of as the best tools for international cooperation and adjudication, are lambasted as tools of the North and their interests. However, scholars speculate there could be a group of nations, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Af- rica), who offer a real challenge to the Global North’s hegemony. The BRICS, mainly known as an economic group with fast-growing markets, was first speculated by Goldman Sachs in 2001 to eventually overtake the Global North in economic growth (Hopewell 2017, 1377). This has sparked a growing interest in these nations. Could these economically powerful nations collectively shift hegemony in international organizations? This paper comprehensively analyses the role of the BRICS within the World Trade Organization (WTO). It argues that recent developments have positively impacted almost all the BRICS (excluding Russia) in the WTO and has helped solidify their case as both champions for the Global South and as rising competitors to the Global North.

Sylvia Lorico is a master’s student at the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She is currently completing a degree in European Studies with a special focus on Western Europe and European-African relations. Sylvia is a passionate writer on global politics and her published work can be found at the McGill International Review and The Mackenzie Institute. Sylvia is also a dedicated public speaker and debater. She is an Area Director who manages clubs within the Bloor-Yonge area in Toronto and recently spoke at the National Speaking Symposium to students from universities across the Greater Toronto Area. Currently, Sylvia is working with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in Toronto in the Centre for Global Health, help- ing the team develop a podcast around healthy cities and the Sustainable Development Goals. Building Blocs 111

The WTO and the BRICS Countless scholars note the World Trade Organization (WTO) for its bias towards those in the Global North. In particular, the Uruguay Round of talks proved significantly imbalanced for developing countries. For example, Argentina received minimal benefits from the Round. The nation became a target for intellectual property law violations (TRIPS), which resulted in high costs for the nation (Finger and Nogues 2002, 337). In the 2000s, China’s accession helped solidify the convergence of most of the BRICS in the WTO towards a Global South agenda. Brazil and India, two founding members of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) in 1947 and later the WTO, have expanded their influence as vocal and experienced participants due to China’s support (Vickers 2012, 8). On the other hand, South Africa has increased its role as a supporting character in the Global South bloc in the WTO. This convergence, however, is not a permanent phenomenon. It can be lik- ened to a fluid and often difficult coalition-building between the BRICS nations. Collective analysis of the BRICS in the WTO is complicated because, as a rule, the BRICS are cohesive when it comes to getting concessions from the Global North but fail to converge when it comes to individual trade interests (Brink, Orden, and Datz 2013, 201). For example, Brazil is a food-exporting nation whose interests do not necessarily align with the food-importing Global South, nor does it align with India’s tendency to advocate for agricultural tariff safeguard mechanisms (Saurombe and Nk- abinde 2013, 448; Brink, Orden, and Datz 2013, 213). In terms of manufacturing, China wants to reduce trade barriers, while Brazil and India want to protect their markets (Hopewell 2017, 1386). Thus, it is important to stress that while coalitions can and do occur between the BRICS, they are just as inclined to remain individual nations when it suits their agendas.

The BRICS and the inner circle of the WTO The BRICS remain, ironically, a separated yet united force within the inner work- ings of the WTO. Representation within the WTO appears highly democratic. The non-voting consensus is the primary form of decision making, and voting is rarely ever used (Saurombe and Nkabinde 2013, 438). Each member is given one vote, and any member can bring disputes to the Dispute Settlements Board (DSB) (Glenn 2008, 220). Brazil has managed to penetrate the organization’s highest level, with a Brazilian successfully defeating the US-backed Mexican candidate to become the leader of the WTO in 2013 (Hou 2013, 360). China maintains a current representation as one of the Deputy Director-Generals, and India formerly had a Deputy Director-General sitting at the executive level (The World Trade Organization, 2020). At first glance, it seems the nations are adequately represented but separated in the executive levels. However, convergence has occurred at the highest levels through informal groupings within the WTO. Most notably, India and Brazil are members of (along with the USA and the EU) the Quad, an informal group that works on “resolving differences and finding solutions” (Nayyar 2016, 587). These two nations displaced -Ja 112 Sylvia Lorico pan and Canada in 2004, and later China joined the group in 2008 (Hopewell 2017, 1383). The Doha Round of trade negotiations was a catalyst for changes in the inner circle. As a result of negotiations, a series of new groups have emerged in the WTO to replace the Quad, like the Five Interested Parties, the Group of 6, and the Group of 4, all of which have Brazil and India as members (Vickers 2012, 9). The unfortu- nate outlier, however, remains Russia. Russia’s lackluster economic performance in the WTO (an estimated growth rate of 1.5% per year in the medium term) has reduced its status as an economic power, and several coalitions like the Quad seem to view it as unqualified to negotiate with them (Jordan 2017, 455). Thus, convergence is only partial and often only between the most successful of the BRICS. What is remarkable about the new groups is how much the move towards (selective) inclusivity can be accounted for by BICS (Brazil, India, China, and South Africa) actions during the Doha Round. This will be elaborated on in the next section.

The BRICS during the Doha Round The puzzle of the BRICS alliance during the Doha Round is that somehow, despite significant divergences in individual concerns and diplomatic style, most of these nations came together in various blocs to collectively halt the Global North’s efforts. Russia is excluded here, as it was not a member for much of the Round. Its status as an outlier, however, is noted in the work. Each nation of the BRICS has its unique diplomatic style. This divergence is evident when examining the negotiations in detail. South Africa likes to style itself as a mediator between nations. During negotiations surrounding intellectual property law and health in Doha, South Africa helped coordinate consensus among developing countries. It then used this position to foster a consensus with the developed nations (Vom Hau, Scott and Hulme 2012, 191). This nation’s role as a mediator suggests that South Africa recognizes its potential as a supportive but not a dominant member of trade negotiations. Similarly, Brazil likes to seek compromise in its negotiations. During Doha, Brazil sought active compromise with the Global North twice, once by urging its allies to accept the Global North deal regarding special safeguard mechanisms (SSMs) and another time by almost signing the ‘Lamy Package’, a deal “which proposed a compromise on numbers of agricultural and non-agricultural market access” (Vickers 2012, 9). However, both times, Brazil chose to back out of the compro- mises, solidifying its status as a dedicated advocate for the Global South. On the end of the spectrum are India and China. India is an opponent who prefers to “just say no” to the Global North (Vickers 2012, 14). During the Bali Ministerial meeting in 2013, India eventually took up a hardline position on food stockholding (Singh and Gupta 2016, 320–321). Food stockholding was not of any interest for Global North nations like the USA until India used its position to make strong arguments and push for the item to be on the agenda on behalf of the Global South (Singh and Gupta 2016, 321). When the negotiations began, China, the newest member, evolved from a cautious and passive member to one who deliberately Building Blocs 113 chose to align with the Global South. It took a backseat during the formation of coalitions in the early stages of the Round. In 2003, Brazil and India would get most of the credit for the creation of the G-20 group of developing nations, not China (Vickers 2012, 8). The G-20, which sought to increase their bargaining power and shift the agenda towards the “middle ground” position on negotiations, was offered China’s background support (Vickers 2012, 9). In 2008, China effectively chose to align itself with its Global South counterparts when it chose to reject the same Lamy Package that Brazil had considered agreeing to (Vickers 2012, 9). These negotiation styles also tend to clash with individual country interests. For example, there were concerns that Brazil might withdraw support for India’s food stockholding agenda since Brazil has agricultural export interests rather than import ones (Hopewell 2017, 1386). However, it supported its fellow BRICS, a move that one Brazilian negotiator admitted was made to keep the coalition united against the Global North (Hopewell 2017, 1395). Clearly, the BRICS understood that a coalition was needed to stop the agenda of the North. The catalyst for an alliance (or rather alliances) begins with the issue of intellectual property agreements or TRIPS. When the TRIPS agreement was being negotiated, the USA issued sanctions to major opposition countries, including Brazil and India (Yu 2008, 372). Brazil was one of the ten countries that refused to expand the GATT to include intellectual property issues (Yu 2008, 349). India also participated in active lobbying on behalf of the Global South for lower intellectual property protections (Yu 2008, 350). In response to the USA’s sanctions, Brazil and India, with the background support of the WTO’s newest member, China, created the G20 group of nations that, as mentioned above, sought to balance the bargaining scales between the Global North and South. Under Brazil and India’s leadership, with China and South Africa’s support, the developing countries could demand exemptions for WTO intellectual property rules for public health and medicines (Hopewell 2015, 1384). As Doha continued, the G20 group moved from TRIPS to agriculture, pushing back against a Global North dominated proposal and demanding a reduction in Global North subsidies instead (Hopewell 2015, 1383). Thus, began an era of coalitions spearheaded by the BRICS, which sought to fight back against specific elements of the Global North agenda during Doha. China and India, for example, helped form the G33, a group of nations that sought to limit “agricultural market opening in developing countries” and to create a special products exemption and a special safeguard mechanism to allow increases in tariffs when imports surged, which was to be included in the final agreement (Hopewell 2015, 1384). These were some notable accomplishments that created incredible convergence between the BICS. However, they proved fruitless as the Doha Round was later suspended due to Global North and South disagreements (Stephen 2014, 929). Nevertheless, the Doha Round’s failure is testimony to the growth and influence of the BICS in negotiations as both leaders of the developing bloc and as competitors to the Global North. It was in the mind of some scholars that Doha was never going to 114 Sylvia Lorico be about a negotiation that benefitted the developing countries (Bishop and Xiaotong 2020, 768). Nevertheless, despite the expectations of the Doha Round proving to be a repeat of the Uruguay Round, the BICS coalition changed the landscape and proved their importance as players in the Round for the rest of the Global South (Hopewell 2015, 1393). Their sometimes tense but united leadership effectively blocked the Global North’s objectives in areas like manufactured goods, investment, and more (Hopewell 2015, 1392). This evolution of continuing alliances seems to coincide with then-Deputy Director-General Singh’s idea that power is shifting away from the Glob- al North towards the BRICS (or at least, the BICS) (The New Indian Express, 2013). What about Russia? In 2013, Russia proclaimed that it would not adopt all commitments to liberalize its markets but instead work on a case-by-case basis in negotiating with developing and developed nations (Jordan 2017, 465). It ratified only part of the Bali Package, the WTO TFA, which expedites “the movement, clearance, and release of traded goods” but opposed amendments towards large tariff reductions for high- tech products in 2015 (Jordan 2017, 465). It has neither gained a status as an advocate for the developing world nor undertaken any joint initiatives with any of the other BRICS, opting to work individually with nations. This is perhaps to some a signal of Russia’s lack of influence within WTO negotiations. Russia’s problem is twofold. There is disagreement among Russian leaders about the kind of economy they want (Hou 2013, 357–358), and Russia tends to define its interests “in terms of geopolitical security rather than economic integration and well-being” (Jordan 2017, 455). Its compliance record is mixed at best, and this is in no small part thanks to its changing political agenda. For example, the nation was supposed to end export subsidies and decrease other agricultural subsidies when it acceded to the WTO (Jordan 2017, 454). Instead, it pursued an import substitution policy due to a ban on the sale of Russian agricultural goods in Western Europe in response to sanctions (Jordan 2017, 455). This makes an alliance with Russia largely unpredictable.

BRICS and Dispute Resolution In general, the BRICS have been resourceful and prudent users of the WTO’s dispute settlement body (DSB). To be successful participants in a WTO dispute, member states need to have experienced trade lawyers, seasoned bureaucrats, highly efficient institutions, strong market power, and large amounts of staff to examine trade practices, which pose some difficulties for developing countries (Bahri 2016, 643). The key for these developing nations lies in repeated use. Davis and Bermeo (2009) note an effect where developing countries who often manage one trade adjudication can initiate other cases to the DSB because experience in one case gives them the know- how and confidence to file other cases (1047). The BRICS seem to understand this thinking. From 1995–2015, the BRICS were involved in 304 cases out of 501 overall, a 60% average (Svetlicinii and Juan 2017, 58). The BRICS also used the third-party participant option to observe and learn the basics of WTO law, having been involved in roughly 204 cases to learn how to navigate the system (Svetlicinii and Juan 2017, Building Blocs 115 58). An example of an involved BRICS nation is Brazil, which has participated in more than 25% of the WTO cases in one role or another (Bahri 2016, 647). Once again, BRICS actions in the DSB need to be examined individually. South Africa has a dismal record compared to the other BRICS. During the GATT era, South Africa brought a dispute once in 1985 and won the case (Mosoti 2006, 433). In the WTO era, South Africa has only been active in 12 cases as a respondent or a third party and has yet to complain (Svetlicinii and Juan 2017, 59). Scholars have accounted for various factors in South Africa’s absence, including high costs, lack of trust in the government to act on behalf of businesses, and business reluctance to alert the government to trade violations (Lehloenya 2011, 71). Furthermore, there is still a discrepancy for South Africa in that despite its status as a BRICS nation, it, along with other African nations, has a limited ability to retaliate in economic terms against Global North trade violators (Oduwole 2012, 362). The continuing use of the Advi- sory Centre on WTO Law (ACWL) might help South Africa gain more confidence to participate in dispute settlements. However, while helpful, the use of the ACWL seems to discourage private firms from seeking information themselves, and it does not help identify less observable trade cases where losses occurred (Bown and McCull- och 2010, 59). Brazil, India, and China are highly active and the most prolific members of the BRICS. This makes sense, as most disputes involve middle or upper-income countries with the legal capacity and trade retaliatory capacity to act within the WTO DSB (Bouet and Metivier 2020, 12). Unlike South Africa, which appears to struggle with costs and local business reporting, Brazil and China have comprehensive structures in place for DSB disputes. For example, Brazil operates off its “three pillars’’ model for disputes having a specialized department for WTO disputes in-house, coordinating with its mission in Geneva, and encouraging the participation of the private sector (Sharipbekkyzy 2015, 52). China has WTO specific programs, administration, and legal integration training into WTO jurisprudence (Sharipbekkyzy 2015, 53). The BIC countries have a considerable win rate of around 60% of all claims they advanced between 1995–2010, which is on par with the developed world’s overall average rate (Horn, Johannesson and Mavroidis 2011, 1129). Meanwhile, their rate of “interaction” that is, moments when two or more of the BRICS have interacted with each other in disputes, has also increased from an average rate of about 34% in 2009 to about 57% afterward (Svetlicinii and Juan 2017, 62). They tend to interact mainly as third parties working with complainants or respondents. Brazil’s continual involvement with the DSB means it has gained an international profile as a nation experienced in dispute settlement, earning it a place as a leader for developing nations during Doha (Lehloenya 2011, 70). Before 2012, Brazil participated in 104 cases: 25 as a complainant, 14 as a respondent, and 65 as a third party (Vickers 2012, 13). Brazil has won significant cases against developed nations in agriculture, such as the EU on sugar (Vickers 2012, 13). One example of this dispute is found in the cotton subsidies issue in 2002. Brazil and four African producers 116 Sylvia Lorico argued that the USA’s cotton subsidies caused a decline in their prices (Baffes 2011, 1535–1536). Brazil brought the case to the WTO’s dispute settlement body (DSB), while the African producers also took another WTO route and demanded financial compensation (Baffes 2011, 1538). Brazil won its case against the USA, and a framework agreement between the two nations was established, one where the USA would “compensate Brazil’s cotton sector until the subsidies are dealt with, which is what the [African nations] had asked for and never received” (Baffes 2011, 1540). These sanctions were substantial, estimated to be roughly $829 million (Lakatos and Walmsley 2014, 249). However, they never came to pass because the USA signed a deal before sanctions were to be upheld, which granted Brazil $147 million per year for cotton assistance and an agreement to consider imports of beef from Brazil (Lakatos and Walmsley 2014, 256). Such cases mark Brazil as a critical player in the agricultural market. Brazil had never lost a case before 2016 when it came to disputes regarding its agricultural sector (Mahrenback 2016, 247). Brazil has also been a team player in disputes, siding with India against the USA in a case involving India’s restrictions on poultry because of avian influenza (Svetlicinii and Juan 2017, 68). However, it is essential to note that Brazil still maintains its tendency to be a mediator between the Global North and South. During discussions relating to WTO DSB reform in 2001, Brazil actively sought Global North-South convergence on issues (Mahrenback 2016, 245). India is also an active member, having filed 21 WTO disputes while serving as a respondent in 23 and a third party in 114 disputes before 2016 (Andersen and Deep- ak 2016, 4). One of its most prominent cases is the 1996 India-Patents case, which set a precedent for becoming a strong opposer to extensive regulation of intellectual property and pharmaceutical patents (Andersen and Deepak 2016, 56). It remains one of the strongest advocates for TRIPS flexibility. During the Doha Round, there was a declaration on TRIPS and public health, which affirmed that TRIPS should enhance medicine access for developing countries and protect their public health (The World Trade Organization, 2001; Andersen and Deepak 2016, 56). Within the area of TRIPS, it has won some notable cases against developed nations, including against the EU relating to the seizure of generic drugs in transit (Rajeev 2016, 17). In this case, India’s efforts in WTO consultations and discussions effectively forced the EU to scrap the notion of “production fiction” in its Regulation 1383, which presumed that medicines in transit through the EU were treated as if they were produced in the EU (Rajeev 2016, 29). India has been an active coalition member when it comes to siding with other BRICS countries, having joined China in 2013, where it was a respondent concerning exports of raw materials (Svetlicinii and Juan 2017, 67). India is also another voice that advocates for reform within the DSB, precisely where it concerns developing countries’ S&D treatment in dispute resolution (Vickers 2012, 13). It maintains its status as a hardliner in the WTO DSB, making a concerted effort to prioritize its voice on reforms and ensure they were included in the text during the DSB reforms discussions (Mahrenback 2016, 252). Building Blocs 117 China has been an active member since its 2006 auto parts case against the USA, EU, and Canada and is commonly known for filing against foreign trade barriers (Harpaz 2010, 1156). As of 2012, “[China] was a principal party in 35 disputes concerning 24 matters and in 15 panel proceedings” (Kennedy 2012, 557). China has become a significant target for the developed nations with an average of four complaints per year from 2006-2010, putting it on par with the US and the EU as a respondent to cases (Zhuang 2011, 221). This is unsurprising given China’s dominance in the international economy. However, China tends to keep in the background when it comes to the DSB, preferring to settle early on or to participate as a third party (China was a third party in 67 cases between 2001–2010) and filing only a modest number of cases where it acts as a complainant (Zhuang 2011, 229, 239). From 2001–2010, China initiated only seven complaints while Brazil issued a whopping 25 cases between 1995–2010 (Zhuang 2011, 230). When China does file, however, some characteristics are notable. First, Chi- na has exclusively filed against the EU and the US and has never filed against a -de veloping country (The World Trade Organization, 2020). Secondly, challenges are frequently related to the supposedly unjust differentiation of goods of Chinese origin by the Global North (Kennedy 2012, 566). These actions reflect China’s interests as a significant force in the US/EU markets. It also means that China can foster an identity as a champion of the developing world while heavily criticizing its Global North trading partners. China is also unafraid to call out non-compliance, as demonstrated through the multiple times it has urged US compliance to multiple DSB recommendations (Harpaz 2010, 1177). China has also asserted its influence over other OECD nations in the past. In a dispute over the Korean garlic farmers safeguard in 1999, China threatened to retaliate against Korea when it failed to implement an agreement signed by the two nations in the 2000s, resulting in the Korean government lifting the safeguard measures altogether by 2002 (Sohn and Ahn 2010, 407). Furthermore, it has proven to be an ally for developing countries by submitting a proposal for amend- ing dispute rules that would have amended the rules in favor of the Global South in 2003 (Harpaz 2010, 1178). During Doha, China advocated for reforming the DSB in such a way as to limit developed countries’ claims to no more than 2 per year and that developing countries be exempt from this rule to ensure equity (Svetlicinii and Juan 2017, 71). Russia’s WTO dispute record is similar to its BRICS counterparts. Russia has been a complainant in 8 cases, mainly against the EU but occasionally the US and Ukraine, a respondent in 9 cases, and a third party in 86 cases (The World Trade Orga- nization, 2020). The trends suggest that Russia, like China before it, seeks to improve its experience in WTO litigation processes. Its interaction rate with the BRICS has been notable as a third party in many cases involving Brazil, India, and China. Russia’s dispute record, however, has been marred by geopolitical conflicts. The annexation of Crimea by the Putin regime in 2014 proved to signal defiance of the western order. In response, several WTO members, including the EU, USA, and Japan, imposed 118 Sylvia Lorico economic sanctions on the country (Jordan 2017, 460). The Russian government imposed counter sanctions against them and announced it would take these nations to the WTO dispute settlement body (Jordan 2017, 460). Before the annexation, Russia had avoided breaching WTO commitments. With their response to sanctions being characterized by both countersanctions and a threat of escalating disputes, Russian WTO policy seemed to now be in a kind of “disarray” (O’Neal 2014, 417). The EU and even Ukraine initiated a flurry of politically motivated disputes in the following years. The Russian government responded with their disputes against the EU and Ukraine (Jordan 2017, 461). Russia now seems to emphasize that the WTO could offer little in terms of dispute resolution, claiming instead that their economy is improving despite concerns about oil prices and frequent sanctions (Jordan 2017, 464). The Global North had hoped that WTO accession would help Russia adapt to the international order (O’Neal 2014, 418). However, Russia’s attempted use of the WTO as a tool to provoke the West concerning its geopolitical conquests has proven prob- lematic for world order. Therefore, it is unlikely that the BICS will consider aligning itself with an unreliable Russia lest they risk provoking the Global North. What is notable about the BICS performances in the DSB is how frequently they take on the Global North in high profile cases. They can use their knowledge to strategically maintain coalitions and their role as the protectors of the Global South (Yu 2008, 367). Svetlicinii and Juan (2017) note that the BRICS moments of interaction, especially in the context of third parties, could provide more incentive for developed nations to reach a settlement by bargaining rather than relying on the DSB (70-71). While there have been calls for reform amongst the BRICS and clear moments of alliances, they have yet to make these actions norms.

Conclusion Tensions between the Global North nations and the BRICS will remain highly salient in the foreseeable future. It is unlikely that the Global North will be willing to relinquish their leverage in the WTO. The BRICS, however, have demonstrated their crafty and often bold means of demanding change and exerting influence in these organizations, establishing themselves as significant competitors to the Global North. Most of the BRICS have also shown their ability to work collectively to challenge the Global North. Specifically, Brazil, India, and China’s increasing challenges in the DSB and their united front (along with South Africa’s support) during the Doha Round, solidified their identity as advocates for the Global South. However, it is essential to note the differences in their interests from those of other developing countries. As mentioned above, the somewhat tenuous link that keeps coalitions like the G-20 together can be put into question when one accounts for diverging agendas and change in the BRICS nations themselves. For now, at least, the coalition remains secure. The BRICS have serious potential to re-define the WTO negotiations and structure. Time will tell if they work collectively to increase their influence for the good of the Global South. Building Blocs 119

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