The growing protests in China against the PRC regime's draconian Zero-COVID policy are significant. How significant is too early to tell.
If the Chinese authorities respond with violent repression and loudly blame the protests on foreign forces, this could ignite even larger demonstrations, and ones directed against the regime in general. Slogans of “CCP step down,” and “Xi Jinping step down,” have already been heard on Chinese streets. Equally important, even if the regime weathers this outbreak of protest, the Chinese New Year is coming up in late January, a time in which Chinese traditionally visit their families. If the draconian Zero-COVID policy is still in place at that time, and travel and homecomings are obstructed, it is extremely likely that protests will reemerge in even greater force.
Washington needs to be very careful in responding to these events. If it overtly lauds or encourages the protests, it will only feed the paranoia of the PRC regime and strengthen the inevitable accusation that the demonstrations are a creation of outside forces. This will almost ensure violent repression. If the U.S. says too little, however, it undermines its simplistic narrative of the world being divided between democracy and authoritarianism.
The best response at this point would be to take note of the large protests as an indication of the pressures that Zero-COVID have produced in Chinese society, and offer to work with Beijing ASAP to distribute vaccines within the country.
The Chinese got themselves into this mess by stressing how effective their independent, non-Western handling of the virus has been, by resisting the importation of more effective Western vaccines, and by not vaccinating the elderly at sufficient levels. The West should not strengthen the disastrous PRC policy by adopting an ideological approach to the events in China. This will just cause the Chinese authorities to double down.
One can expect several Members of Congress to attempt to use the protests — and any repressive Chinese government response — to argue for even greater levels of containment and pressure on Beijing. While criticizing its draconian COVID policies and repressive response is justified, trying to use events in China to deepen the rift between the two countries would be feckless and irresponsible, resulting in an even more unstable, polarized global environment.
Michael D. Swaine is a Senior Research Fellow on East Asia at the Quincy Institute and is one of the most prominent American scholars of Chinese security studies.
Protesters chant slogans in support of freedom of speech and the press, amid broader nationwide unrest due to COVID-19 lockdown policies, in Chengdu, China in this still image obtained from undated social media video released November 27, 2022. Video obtained by REUTERS
Top image credit: Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump is joined by Massad Boulos, who was recently named as a 'senior advisor to the President on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs,' during a campaign stop at the Great Commoner restaurant in Dearborn, Michigan, U.S., on November 1, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo
As the war between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and allied militias against the Rwandan-backed M23 rebel group continues, the Trump administration is reportedly tapping Massad Boulos as the State Department’s special envoy to the African Great Lakes region.
In this capacity, Boulos will be responsible for leading the American diplomatic effort to bring long-desired stability to the region and to end a conflict that has been raging in the eastern DRC for decades.
Other than serving as an adviser on Middle East policy for President-elect Trump’s team during the transition period between the election and inauguration, Boulos has no U.S. foreign policy experience.
Much of his previous work was in the private sector, where he most recently worked at a small automotive conglomerate for a West African company, called SCOA Nigeria, whose profit was less than $66,000 last year.
Boulos also has familial connections with the first family. The president’s daughter, Tiffany Trump, is married to Massad Boulos’ son, Michael.
In an email to Responsible Statecraft, the State Department would not provide comment on Boulos’ reported appointment.
Since the early days of the most recent incarnation of this conflict in late 2021, two major peace processes have been running in parallel. In one, Kenya brought together many of the 120 disparate armed groups fighting in the eastern Congo, successfully reaching a truce between some of these groups and the Congolese government. However, the most powerful of these groups, the Rwandan-backed M23, was absent from the talks and remains the major threat to the DRC.
In a separate peace track, Angola had been serving as the leading mediator, attempting to set up negotiations between M23 rebels, their backers in Rwanda, and the DRC government. But exhausted and disheartened following numerous failed mediation efforts, Angolan President Joao Lourenco announced in mid-March that he will no longer lead this mediation process.
In an interview with Responsible Statecraft, Onesphore Sematumba, a senior analyst on the DRC and Burundi at the International Crisis Group, said that “peace efforts have been further complicated by the involvement of multiple state actors, each with their own interests.”
Burundi, Rwanda’s southern neighbor, has provided direct support for the DRC and Congo-backed armed groups seeking to attack Rwandan assets. Uganda, which borders Rwanda to the north, has also sent troops to the region. Although Uganda’s involvement is more enigmatic, the United Nations found that Uganda has supported M23 rebels in the eastern Congo.
Mediating an end to such a long and complicated war with numerous state and non-state actors is a difficult task. Just launching negotiations has proven to be a challenge, with each side at times refusing to accept the basic parameters set forth by mediators before negotiations even begin. In December, Rwandan president Paul Kagame refused to attend Angolan-initiated mediation efforts if M23 rebels were not also present, something DRC president Felix Tshisekedi, who discredits M23 as an unserious armed group whose entire financial and military strength rests on Rwanda’s support, refused to allow.
If confirmed as special envoy, Boulos and the American delegation would have the advantage of coming to the table with a relatively fresh voice. Recent news that Trump is considering agreeing to a deal offered by the DRC to grant critical minerals access to the United States in exchange for military support through the provision of military resources and training to the Congolese military risks violating American neutrality, consequently hindering its influence to broker a peace agreement.
Agreeing to such a deal, which the Trump administration is reportedly considering, would immediately collapse American credibility in the eyes of Rwanda, hurting U.S. efforts to bring about a lasting peace deal. According to Sematumba, funnelling more weapons into the arena and tilting the military scales in favor of one side would only intensify the fighting and exacerbate the conflict. The U.S., Sematumba said, “should not come to the region with a plan centered around adding to the violence.”
In a major surprise, Tshisekedi and Kagame united in Doha on March 18 for peace talks hosted by Qatar, opening a third track of peace negotiations.
Although Sematumba is skeptical that any major player, including the U.S. government, will be able mediate an end to such a complicated war anytime soon, he says that any American effort to do so should “consider all the existing peace initiatives,” rather than adding yet another one to an already “incoherent” peace effort.
Attaching itself to Qatar’s negotiating track might be the way to go, seeing it is the only peace initiative so far that has successfully brought together the heads of state of both the DRC and Rwanda to discuss the conflict face-to-face.
U.S.-ties to each country can help contribute to an end to the conflict. Both the DRC and Rwanda have close economic and diplomatic relations with the United States. Both have also benefited from large amounts of U.S. foreign aid over the decades, with the U.S. budgeting $990 million for aid to the DRC and $188 million to Rwanda in 2023, the most recent year with complete data. Although a recent analysis finds that Trump’s policies will cut 65% of aid funding directed towards Rwanda and 34% directed towards the DRC, the U.S. is still a major contributor of aid to the region, and through it has the requisite soft power to influence peace negotiations.
Any successful and lasting peace agreement is likely to require Rwanda to end its support for M23 and remove Rwandan troops currently stationed in DRC territory. The challenge to Boulos will come if Rwanda remains intransigent on that issue.
American sanctions remain a more extreme option. The United States last month sanctioned a senior Rwandan government official as well as a member of the larger rebel group of which M23 is a part. Sanctions were a key part of the United States’ strategy to ending the less severe incarnation of this crisis in 2012, the first time M23 threatened regional security. Donors back then froze $240 million in aid to Rwanda, and President Obama used American diplomatic and economic leverage to successfully pressure Kagame to end his support for the rebellion. This, however, proved to only be a temporary reprieve, with M23 returning more powerful than ever in 2021.
Sematumba expressed doubt that sanctions would lead to a lasting peace, saying that sanctions are “more likely to hurt villagers than the country’s leadership,” and that the numerous sanctions already in place against Rwanda, including by the EU and the UK, have failed to move the needle, and have quite possibly made the conflict worse. Once the EU implemented its sanctions on Rwanda on March 17, M23 pulled out of peace talks just a day before they were scheduled to be held in Angola as a form of protest against the EU’s new sanctions policy.
Although the power of the U.S. dollar and the sizable levels of American foreign aid funnelling into the region give the U.S. some leverage to implement economic sanctions against Rwanda, in 2022, the last year with full data, the U.S. was only Rwanda’s tenth-largest export market and eleventh-largest source of imports. Rwanda, therefore, has plenty of alternative trading partners it could turn to if the U.S. were to implement sanctions.
Despite the complexity of this conflict and the difficulty facing Boulos and his team once they take the helm, using American soft power and leverage can help them mold peace talks and incrementally move the conflict towards a resolution.
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Top photo credit: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) (Gage Skidmore /Creative Commons) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) )( USDA photo by Preston Keres)
Senators Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) have co-written a letter to the White House, demanding to know the administration’s strategy behind the now-18 days of airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen.
The letter calls into question the supposed intent of these strikes “to establish deterrence,” acknowledging that neither the Biden administration’s strikes in October 2023, nor the years-long bombing campaign by Saudi Arabia from 2014 to 2020, were successful in debilitating the military organization's military capabilities.
“Rather, these campaigns only served to embolden the Houthis and rally their recruiting base,” the senators said in the letter. “U.S. military action must have a clear strategy that advances our country’s long-term national security objectives and is compliant with the law of armed conflict.”
In addition, “Congress should be briefed about the recent strikes against the Houthis and the total cost expected to be incurred by this campaign at the American taxpayer’s expense.”
Rand and Merkley also correctly connect the Houthis’ recent attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea with the collapse of the Gaza ceasefire, pointing out that no such Houthi attacks took place while the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas (brokered by the Trump team ahead of the presidential inauguration) had been in place.
Paul and Merkley also questioned the Constitutionality of the strikes, given there has been no Congressional declaration of war on the Houthis. Congress wasn’t even consulted.
“We also recognize that any U.S. military response — especially sustained military engagement — must be conducted within the framework of the Constitution,” the Senators said in a release Tuesday. “Although the Constitution assigns the President the role of commander in chief of the U.S. military, it is Congress that is entrusted with the power to declare war — and Congress has not done so with respect to the Houthis.”
The letter comes amidst an escalation of tensions between the United States and Iran. In a post on Truth Social yesterday, President Trump warned that if the Houthis did not cease shooting at U.S. ships in the Red Sea, the real pain would be “yet to come, for both the Houthis and their sponsors in Iran.”
Such rhetoric calls into question whether the strikes on the Houthis are to set the stage for war with Iran itself. Recognizing this possibility in their letter, the senators call on the Trump administration to make clear to Congress and the American public if they indeed intend to strike Iran directly. They conclude the letter by warning of the United States “stumbling into another costly and unnecessary war.”
Bipartisan opposition to military escalation in the Middle East is urgently needed, moving beyond the procedural ‘Signalgate' debacle to a more substantive focus on what the strikes on the Houthis are to realistically achieve, and what they portend for greater regional peace and stability.
In intensifying strikes against the Houthis, President Trump appears to be contradicting his own expressed desire to rein in American military action in the Middle East, risking a broader, regional war, while seemingly failing to identify the Houthis’ strategic calculus tied to the war in Gaza.
While President Trump pledged a legacy of peacemaker in his inaugural speech, continuing along his current path in the Middle East threatens to permanently derail this worthy pursuit, particularly if war with Iran were to break out.
Skepticism from across the aisle to avert this outcome is a welcome development.
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Top image credit: U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks during a press conference regarding legislation that would block offensive U.S. weapons sales to Israel, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., November 19, 2024. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
Will Senate vote signal a wider shift away from Israel?
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz have been roundly criticized for the security lapse that put journalist Jeffrey Goldberg into a Signal chat where administration officials discussed bombing Houthi forces in Yemen, to the point where some, like Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) have called for their resignations.
But the focus on the process ignores the content of the conversation, and the far greater crime of continuing to provide weapons that are inflaming conflicts in the Middle East and enabling Israel’s war on Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of over 50,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians.
As Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies noted in an article in The Nation, the real disgrace in “Signalgate” was not the inclusion of a journalist in sensitive conversations, it is the continued bombing of Yemen without congressional authorization, with all the human consequences it entails:
“[T]he biggest threat—that has already resulted in real lives lost—is being ignored. And that is the threat to the lives of Yemeni people—who, how many, how many were children, we still don’t know—being killed by US bombs across the poorest nation in the Arab world.”
It’s important to put the U.S. battle with the Houthis in context. The Houthi campaign to block shipping in the Red Sea is a reaction to Israel’s war on the people of Gaza. Continued U.S. military support for Israel is the fuel that is sustaining conflicts throughout the region, from Yemen to Lebanon, and, if Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu has his way, in Iran.
Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff has said the U.S. supports resuming ground operations in Gaza, blaming Hamas from rejecting new conditions for continuing the ceasefire.
Only a minority of members of Congress have taken a stand against U.S. military support for Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza or its escalation of the fighting to other parts of the region. Last November, resolutions brought by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) designed to block parts of a $20 billion arms package to Israel received 19 votes in favor — a long way from a majority, but the first time Congress had taken action on the issue of U.S. provision of arms to Israel.
Now Sanders is bringing new joint resolutions of disapproval to block an $8.56 billion sale of bombs and other munitions to Israel. Sanders said he is doing so in order to “end our complicity in the carnage,” adding that “it would be unconscionable to provide more of the bombs and weapons Israel has used to kill so many civilians and make life unlivable in Gaza.”
More than 50,000 people have died from Israel’s military attacks on Gaza. And a paper by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins for the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that at least an additional 62,000 have died from indirect causes like preventable disease and malnutrition.
The United States gave Israel $17.9 billion in military aid in the first year of the war in Gaza — October 2023 to the end of September of 2024. But arms offers since that time — sales beyond the $17.9 billion in military aid, including items that have yet to be delivered — total over $30 billion. These weapons could enable Israeli aggression for years to come. The current deal is particularly concerning because it consists mostly of bombs and missiles of the kind used in Israel’s relentless attacks on Gaza.
While handling of classified information is a real issue, enabling collective punishment and taking military action without congressional approval are far more important with respect to their human consequences abroad and the prospects for restoring democratic input on issues of war and peace at home. The press needs to widen its lens and take on these life and death issues on a more consistent basis.
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