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In less than a month, the war in Syria will be entering its fifth year. The conflict has led to the deaths of more than 250,000 people, injured more than a million others, and displaced half of the country’s population. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad appeared headed for defeat in the fall, but the intervention of Russia rescued his regime and has allowed him to reverse the momentum of the conflict. President Barack Obama has refused to provide sufficient support for Syria’s rebel factions, hesitant to get America involved in another sectarian war in the region and despairing that there are no “good” forces to support in the conflict. Experts note that the war has become a proxy battle of American and Russian influence in the Middle East and that a wider war cannot be discounted between Sunni and Shi’ite powers. The United States and Russia have recently agreed to move toward a “cessation of hostilities” later this week, but the agreement excludes attacks on terrorist groups and the tortured nature of that term is likely to help Assad solidify his gains and potentially win the war with significant ramifications for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
This topic brief will provide an update on the status of the conflict, discuss the recent agreements trying to wind down the war, and analyze the conflagration’s potential outcomes.
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The passing of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia last Saturday in Shafter, Texas has thrown the nation’s political scene into turmoil. Shortly after Scalia’s death was announced, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that he had no intention of allowing President Barack Obama to appoint a replacement and that voters in the next presidential election should have a voice in the process. Democrats and liberals decried the statement, arguing that President Obama has a constitutional right to appoint a new justice and that the Senate must give the nominee a fair and proper hearing. Since Scalia was the leading conservative on a divided court, a liberal or progressive replacement would move the Court to the left for the first time in more than thirty years. The calculations surrounding a new nomination battle could significantly affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, but it could also affect cases that are currently before the Court on hot button social issues such as abortion, the Affordable Care Act, affirmative action, and voting rights. As a result, Scalia’s death comes at an inopportune time for a dangerously divided country, and the looming confirmation of a new justice could be the most divisive showdown of a judicial nominee since Clarence Thomas was barely confirmed in 1991.
For American policymakers, Saudi Arabia is deemed as one of the pillars of stability in the Middle East. Despite its export of Wahhabist Islam and its suppression of democratic and gender rights, the kingdom has anchored the interests of Sunni Muslims in the region for the last six decades. Saudi Arabia has also been a reliable American ally, assisting in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991 and offering ideas for solving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The House of Saud’s leadership in global oil markets has been valuable as well, with the country serving as the de facto leader of the Oil and Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel. However, the growing strength of Iran over the last decade has created significant anxieties in Saudi ranks. With the decline of Western sanctions against the Islamic Republic it is possible that the Iranian economy could overtake Saudi Arabia’s in the long-term, and low oil prices are forcing the kingdom to make choices about how it can sustain its social model without provoking unrest in the coming years. These Saudi anxieties could prove harmful for the Middle East, especially if they cause the regime to engage in risky interventions and some of this is already taking place in Syria and Yemen.
More than a year after the Ebola virus terrified the world, a new virus is instilling fear into the hearts of millions of citizens throughout the Western Hemisphere. The culprit this time is the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne pathogen that was ignored by health experts for decades. However, a spike in the number of births of children with microcephaly, a rare condition that leads to babies being born with abnormally small heads, to women that are thought to have been infected with the virus has created a renewed sense of urgency in the global health community. Zika is not native to the Western Hemisphere and it was first found in Africa more than sixty years ago. Its spread is a testament to how the world is increasingly one without borders when it comes to health issues and Zika creates yet another headache for Brazil, a nation facing significant economic problems and that is hosting the Summer Olympics this year.
While Americans take clean drinking water for granted, the residents of Flint, Michigan currently lack such a luxury. The failure of state and federal environmental officials has placed the city’s residents at risk for lead poisoning as a result of an attempt two years ago to save the city money by acquiring drinking water from the nearby Flint River instead of from Detroit. Since 40% of Flint’s residents are poor and more than half are African-Americans, community activists allege that Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder and other state officials turned a blind eye to resident concerns on racial and socioeconomic grounds. The scandal has caused the resignation of the director of Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 5 director and Michigan’s state attorney general and the Department of Justice are looking into the filing of criminal charges. The crisis creates a significant test of Snyder’s leadership as he must solve this problem while also facing a work stoppage by Detroit’s public school teachers over the condition of their schools.
Although terrorism is not unknown in Indonesia, it had been seven years since the world’s largest Muslim nation was victimized by a large-scale terrorist attack. On Thursday, terrorists reportedly aligned with the Islamic State fired upon a busy shopping district in the capital of Jakarta, killing two people and wounding more than twenty others. Indonesian President Joko Widodo, also known as Jokowi, was quick to condemn the attacks and stated his nation’s resolve not to succumb to the extremist message that the Islamic State propagates. However, there are fears that the attack may be a sign of bigger aims by the Islamic State in Southeast Asia as the group is reportedly looking into ways to extend its reach to weaken international efforts against it in Iraq and Syria. The attacks have also called into question whether Indonesian authorities are doing enough to fight extremism and the radicalization of young Muslim men.
Since 2013, the European Union (EU) has been worried about the outcome of a referendum on Great Britain’s EU membership. A member of the EU since 1973, Great Britain has often stood for a different set of ideas than its EU counterparts, preferring economic liberalism and less financial regulation than EU bureaucrats in Brussels and rival heads of state in Paris and Berlin. One of Prime Minister David Cameron’s promises upon winning the British parliamentary elections last year was to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership. This was interpreted as a sop to Conservative voters that bolted the party for the far-right United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which is fiercely anti-EU. Although a date for the referendum has not been set, Cameron is hoping that he can secure concessions from the EU on immigrant welfare benefits and economic regulations that he can in turn sell to British voters to make an exit from the EU – termed a “Brexit” – unthinkable. Considering the fact that Britain’s exit from the EU would rob the organization of more than 10% of its population and more than 15% of its economic power and the fact that recent polls show support for a “Brexit” rising, extempers need to consider how they should approach “Brexit”-style questions in the coming months as their likelihood of being asked at tournaments should increase.
2015 was not a good year for Rahm Emanuel. While in the first year of a second term as mayor of one of America’s largest cities, Emanuel continued to spark controversy with regards to his open combat with the city’s teachers’ unions, his perceived unwillingness to confront police brutality, and allegations that he eavesdropped on local news media. Recently, Emanuel has faced calls from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to resign over his mishandling of the Laquan McDonald shooting where the city government refused to release dash-cam footage of the incident until required to do so by a court order. This incident, representing the killing of African American suspects at the hands of the Chicago Police Department, has caused Emanuel to lose support among Chicago’s black residents, who were instrumental in his runoff victory over Jesus “Chuy” Garcia last year. As the former chief of staff to President Barack Obama and a significant fundraiser for former President Bill Clinton, Emanuel is well connected with the nation’s Democrat establishment. However, criticisms of his leadership in Chicago, where he has openly fought some of the most reliable parts of the Democratic base, could soon make him toxic to other national Democrats and thereby imperil his political career.
When it comes to the African continent extempers are used to talking about topics such as South Africa’s economy, the continent’s amazing economic potential in the twenty-first century, Chinese interests in the region, Robert Mugabe’s continued misrule of Zimbabwe, and conflict zones such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. What they have been less used to is talking about smaller African nations such as Burundi, but in light of significant political unrest extempers will probably be talking more about this country in the weeks and months ahead. Last April, President Pierre Nkurunziza announced that he would seek a third term. This would be normal under some democratic systems, but Burundi’s constitution, agreed to in 2006 after the end of a thirteen-year civil war, prohibits a president being elected to more than two terms. In light of Nkurunziza’s decision, opposition groups mounted several public protests and elements of the Burundian military sought to depose him in a coup in May. That attempt failed and since that time international observers have worried that Burundi is becoming a cauldron of political unrest, which could break down along ethnic lines and produce another mass genocide on the African continent reminiscent of what took place in Rwanda in 1994. Observers also worry about the radicalization of Burundian refugees and that the nation’s unrest could ignite a multi-national struggle between Burundi, Uganda, and Rwanda and their allies in East Africa. Additionally, Burundi’s unrest provides a test of the African Union’s (AU) ability to protect civilians populations in its member states and its willingness to prevent future crimes against humanity.
Although growing partisanship has characterized Congress for the better part of the last two decades, there is still one area where members of both political parties find ways to work together and that is education reform. Traditionally, bipartisan coalitions have been instrumental in crafting federal education legislation, whether that be the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the formation of the Department of Education in 1979, or the 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Last week, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate approved a reauthorization of the ESEA that had been left in limbo since 2007. The reauthorization bill – dubbed the Every Student Succeeds Act – will replace NCLB in the fall of 2017 and will give states more flexibility when designing assessments, measuring school performance, and evaluating teachers. In many ways, it is a repudiation of the top-down structure imposed by NCLB, which aimed to use testing to measure American schools and identify troubled ones. However, the bill will retain NCLB’s testing requirements, so the American education system’s culture of standardized testing is not completely going away.
Once heralded as one of the strongest emerging economies, Brazil has seen its economic fortunes wane over the past year as a result of corruption scandals, fiscal management, and bureaucratic incompetence. The nation is in the midst of a recession – the longest downturn since the 1930s – and unemployment is nearing double digits. As if this was not bad enough, Brazil’s Congress is moving to remove President Dilma Rousseff on charges that she violated Brazil’s fiscal management laws by manipulating government finances to aid her re-election campaign last year. Congress may also move to look into whether Rousseff played any part in a scandal at the state-owned oil company Petrobras, as she was Brazil’s energy minister in former President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva’s government. While some investors have welcomed the move to impeach Rousseff – viewing her as an obstacle to sound economic management – other analysts worry that the impeachment controversy will be an unwelcome distraction as Brazil attempts to correct its present economic trajectory. Rousseff’s defenders argue that her prosecution is politically motivated and that Speaker Eduardo Cunha only initiated the proceedings after Rousseff’s Worker’s Party (PT) moved to oust him on charges of bribery and money-laundering.
An incident that many commentators had been fearing in Syria took place last week when Turkish forces shot down a Russian aircraft that allegedly violated Turkish airspace. The Russian plane was reportedly flying a mission to bomb rebel positions near the Turkish border, something that Russia has made a common occurrence since deciding several months ago to bolster its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Turkish government claimed that it warned the Russian aircraft before shooting it down, but Russia denies these claims. Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded an apology and has taken economic countermeasures against Turkey in response to the incident. Considering the fact that France is trying to get both nations to take part in an international coalition to fight the Islamic State, the Russian-Turkish incident illustrates how assembling such a coalition will prove difficult. After all, both nations support opposite sides in the Syrian Civil War. Also, the incident sparks questions about what the Western world should do if a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) finds itself in a military spat with Russia.
Starting next Monday, more than one hundred heads of state, climate activists, international officials, and scientists will convene in Paris for negotiations on a new global climate accord that can replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The conference, also referred to as COP21, will aim to install oversight of carbon emission reductions by the developed (and possibly developing world) and create a framework to aid developing nations in climate mitigation efforts. Those following environmental policy are hopeful that this conference, which has been promoted for two years, will not collapse like the Copenhagen talks did in 2009. However, limitations facing U.S. President Barack Obama, who once dreamed of a farther reaching and legally binding climate accord, may constrain the talks since the Republican Party is likely to reject any agreement that obligates the United States to reduce its carbon emissions. According to climate activists, the failure of the Paris talks would set the world on a dangerous path since the world is set to have its hottest year on record this year. According to these activists the time to act on climate change has finally arrived.
Since 1962, Myanmar has been dominated by a military junta. This junta isolated Myanmar from the rest of the world and abused the rights of its citizens, notably those of ethnic and religious minorities. In 1990, the junta flirted with holding national elections, but after the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) won it the junta annulled the result and went about governing as if there was no election at all. In 2011, Myanmar’s generals finally began the process of modernizing their country, making strides toward opening the nation’s economy to foreign investment, trying to reach a ceasefire with ethnic militias, and transitioning to a quasi-democratic system that allows Myanmar’s citizens to elect 75% of the national legislature, which in turn elects the nation’s president. Last week’s elections were the first in more than five decades and once again, the NLD achieved a significant victory behind its Nobel Prize-winning leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Unlike 1990, the military and its political allies publicly announced that it would respect the result, thereby paving the way for Myanmar to return to civilian rule. However, winning an election and governing a country are separate tasks, and there are concerns that Suu Kyi may find it difficult to maintain her popularity and keep her diverse coalition of supporters together.
Off-year elections are an often neglected part of the American political discourse. These elections, which take place in odd numbered years, attract little attention due to the fact that they focus primarily on state and local issues with little national significance. Off-year elections do not involve elections to the House, Senate, or the White House and the states that hold these types of contests – Virginia, New Jersey, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Kentucky – tend to draw a small pool of registered voters. Nevertheless, off-year elections do matter for the voters of the states that hold them as new governors and state officials are elected and ballot measures are submitted for ratification. For example, in 2015 voters in Houston rejected an equal rights ordinance that would have covered homosexuals and transgender individuals, while Ohio voters rejected a proposal to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Furthermore, the recent elections provide continued evidence that the Republican Party thrives in non-presidential contests as they retained control of Mississippi’s governor’s mansion, won the Kentucky gubernatorial election for the first time since 2007, and fought off a Democratic attempt to win the Virginia Senate. It is unclear whether these off-year elections can affect 2016, but politicians on both sides of the aisle would be wise to pick the data apart and see if there is something to be learned from the successes and failures of various campaigns in the recent election cycle.