Foreign Policy 2021 03 Summer

TIBET AUTONOMOUS REGION (CHINA) Kula Khari Beyul Menchuma Khenpajong Valley (Baiyu) (Minjiuma) Dramana Sinchulungpa Chagdzom (Zhuomoma) and (Senqionglong) and Shakhatoe the Langmarpo (Xiabu) (Langmapu) Valley Pangda Yak chu (Lulinqu) BHUTAN and Charithang chu Sakteng (Qiaertangqu) (Molasading) valleys Doklam (Donglang) INDIA Areas Claimed by China in Bhutan China claims four areas in the west of Bhutan, three in the north, and Sakteng in the east. Since 1990, China has been offering to give up approximately 191 square miles of its claims in the north if Bhutan yields some 104 square miles of its territory in the west to China. Bhutan relinquished its claim to the Kula Khari area (often written as Kulha Kangri) in the 1980s or soon after, attributing its earlier claim to a cartographic error. no response from the Chinese government, which rarely ago, stone huts for shepherds, and perhaps three basic shel- comments on stories before publication. After publication, ters or campsites used by Bhutanese frontier troops. Entering Chinese state television accused the article of being disinfor- the Beyul from Tibet, now part of China, involves a journey mation but provided no rebuttal to any of the claims, aside across passes the height of Mont Blanc; few other than moun- from pointing to the Bhutanese government’s lack of action. taineers would normally attempt it. The second enclave now The Indian government said it had no comment. The Bhu- being settled by China in northern Bhutan is even higher: tanese government did not respond to multiple inquiries. The Menchuma Valley, 1.2 miles to the east of the Beyul and 19 square miles in size, is at an altitude of 14,700 feet at its In the face of raw Chinese power, Bhutan appears to have lowest point, apart from one ravine. Like the Beyul, it lies chosen to maintain what the Bhutanese political commen- inside the Kurtoe subdistrict of Lhuntse and until now has tator Tenzing Lamsang has previously characterized as a never had settlements, roads, or buildings. “disciplined silence.” As a “small country stuck between two giants,” he said, Bhutan’s strategy is “to avoid unnec- Bhutan’s border guards are posted in the Beyul each essarily antagonizing either side.” summer, but their task is primarily to defend Bhutanese herders in encounters with their counterparts from Tibet. Apart from wandering ascetics, seasonal nomads, and a From the mid-1990s onward, these encounters became handful of refugees from Tibet in the late 1950s, the Beyul more aggressive: The Bhutanese accuse the Tibetans of has been uninhabited for centuries. At an average altitude of cattle rustling; collecting timber; constructing shelters; 12,000 feet, until now it has had no buildings, roads, or set- driving huge, consolidated flocks of yaks across traditional tlements apart from two small temples abandoned decades 49F O R E I G N P O L I C Y.C O M

Left: The first road built by China just south of Bhutan’s northern border runs from Lagyab in Lhodrak (Luozha) county in Tibet to Mabjathang (Majiatang) in the Beyul in Bhutan, as seen in a Jan. 8 satellite image. Right: The village of Gyalaphug, 2.5 miles south of the Chinese border and shown in a January satellite image, has been key to China’s settlement of the Beyul. Bhutanese grazing lands; and demanding that Bhutanese China has not publicly explained or even mentioned its GOOGLE EARTH herders pay taxes to them for grazing there. claim to the Menchuma Valley, but since the 1980s it has spo- ken volubly of its claim to the Beyul. At that time, according By 2005, this led Bhutanese herders to withdraw to the to a number of Chinese writers and activists, Chinese offi- south of the Beyul, and the Bhutanese soldiers posted there, cials discovered a ruling by the Jiaqing Emperor (reigned who depend on the herders for supplies, went with them to the 1796-1820) granting grazing rights in the Beyul to herders south, where neither they nor the herders would have known belonging to the monastery of Lhalung in western Lhodrak of the construction work in the northern Beyul. In Thimphu, in southern Tibet. This document has yet to be seen pub- officials probably assumed that these clashes between herd- licly and has not so far been found in Tibetan records. It may ers were minor provocations by Beijing. Such incidents had exist, but reciprocal cross-border grazing was the norm in become commonplace in all the areas of Bhutan claimed by the Himalayas and in the Beyul before the Chinese invasion China, and there was no precedent suggesting they might and annexation of Tibet in the 1950s. escalate to major construction, still less settlement; it could hardly have been imaginable that China would take such a step. China has long renounced the 19th-century claims by Qing emperors—repeated by Mao Zedong in the 1930s—to sover- Today, all of the Menchuma Valley and most of the Beyul eignty over Bhutan and other Himalayan states. Relations are controlled by China. Both are being settled. Together, between China and Bhutan have been amicable since the early they constitute 1 percent of Bhutan’s territory; if it were to 1970s, when Bhutan supported China’s entry into the United lose them, it would be comparable to the United States los- Nations. As one Chinese official put it recently, the two coun- ing Maine or Kentucky. If Bhutanese troops try to reenter tries are “friendly neighbors linked by mountains and rivers.” these areas, they will have to do so on foot and, given the But as with China’s other Himalayan neighbors, the legacies of lack of infrastructure on their side, would be immediately colonialism and conflict have left behind uncertain borders. beyond the reach of supplies or reinforcements. The Chi- Since 1984, China and Bhutan have held 24 rounds of talks to nese troops would have a barracks close at hand, would be settle their disagreements over those mountains and rivers, motorized, and would be only three hours’ drive from the and this April they agreed to hold the 25th round “at an early nearest town in China. date.” (The 24th round was held in August 2016, just before the main construction work in the Beyul began.) Bhutan has CHINA’S CLAIM TO THESE AREAS IS RECENT. Both the Beyul and the shown remarkable flexibility in these talks—early on, prob- Menchuma Valley were shown as parts of Bhutan on official ably in the 1980s, Thimphu quietly relinquished its claim to Chinese maps until at least the 1980s. They still appeared as the 154-square-mile Kula Khari (sometimes written as Kulha parts of Bhutan on official Chinese tourist maps and gazetteers Kangri) area on its northern border with China, describing published in the late 1990s. Still today, even the maps published that claim as due to “cartographic mistakes.” on China’s official national mapping site vary widely as to which parts of the Beyul are claimed by China and which are not. In December 1998, China signed a formal agreement 50 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1

Lagyab (Lajiao) TIBET AUTONOMOUS REGION Bod La pass Chinese administrative (CHINA) Menchuma center for the Valley settlement project (Minjiuma) Namgung La pass AREA OF DETAIL Upper Jakarlung BHUTAN Valley Pagsamlung Jakarlung Valley Valley Beyul Khenpajong BHUTAN (Baiyu) Chinese Settlement and Infrastructure in Northern Bhutan Since 2015, China has established three villages, seven roads, and at least five military or police outposts (four shown here) in the Beyul and the Menchuma Valley. These are documented in official Chinese reports and videos. The other sites shown here are visible on satellite images and are possible security infrastructure or outposts but have not been conclusively identified. Official Chinese maps until at least the 1980s showed its border with Bhutan as running through the Namgung La and Bod La passes but now include the Beyul and the Menchuma Valley as parts of China. (Most official Chinese maps also claim the Chagdzom area.) Bhutan’s definition of the border, which is generally accepted internationally, runs about 2 miles north of the Namgung La. with Bhutan, the first and so far only treaty between the landlocked position between the two giants of Asia, has two nations. In that document, China recognized Bhutan’s continued to avoid opening full relations with any major sovereignty and its territorial integrity and agreed that “no power apart from India, with which it has long been allied. unilateral action will be taken to change the status quo on the border.” The construction of roads, settlements, and But China’s principal aim in the Beyul is clear from its stance buildings within the Beyul and the Menchuma Valley is in talks with the Bhutanese government: Ever since 1990, clearly a contravention of that agreement. China has offered to give up its claim to 495 square kilome- ters (191 square miles) of the Beyul if Thimphu will give China China’s interests in the Beyul are not primarily about 269 square kilometers (104 square miles) in western Bhutan. its relations with Bhutan, which Beijing appears to view Those areas—Doklam, Charithang, Sinchulungpa, Dramana, in terms of opportunities it can offer China in its strategic and Shakhatoe—lie close to the trijunction with India and are rivalry with India. In part, Beijing wants Bhutan to open of far greater strategic importance to China than the Beyul, full relations with China, which would allow it to have a offering China a foothold only 62 miles from India’s geographic diplomatic presence in Thimphu. This would offset India’s weak point, the 14-mile-wide Siliguri Corridor, which connects influence in Bhutan, an aim that China has largely achieved the Indian mainland to its northeastern territories. in Nepal. Bhutan, however, conscious of the fragility of its Bhutan initially accepted in principle the Chinese offer of 51F O R E I G N P O L I C Y.C O M

a deal over the Beyul. But negotiations stalled over the details village called Lagyab, 4 miles north of the border with Bhutan, TIBET NEWS BROADCASTING VIDEO SCREENSHOT; MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES; of territory China wanted in the west, and Chinese pressure and their families had grazed in the Beyul in summers before VIA TIBET DAILY AND CITED BY BAIDU AS FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE OF THE TAR began to increase. In 2004, the incursions escalated: A top China annexed Tibet in the 1950s. Since then, as with millions Bhutanese official said Chinese soldiers had come to Tshoka of other Tibetans, their lives, education, and economic pros- La at the southern tip of the Beyul. That summer, the Chinese pects have been determined by the Chinese state, and in 1995, began building six roads close to Bhutan’s western borders; they agreed when called on by their village leader to dedicate four of the roads crossed into Bhutan. When Bhutan protested, themselves to the motherland: They were to go and live year- China replied that it was “overreacting” but agreed as a ges- round in the Beyul. Together with 62 yaks, they walked over ture of goodwill to stop the road-building; it resumed a year the passes and set up camp at a site called Mabjathang on the later. For three years from 2006, there were no border talks northern bank of the Jakarlung, one of the two major valleys between the two governments. During this time, there were at in the Beyul. Scores of articles, interviews, and photographs least 38 incursions by Chinese soldiers across Bhutan’s west- have since appeared in the Chinese press celebrating the four ern borders and seven formal protests by Thimphu to Beijing. nomads’ dedication to recovering what “has been the sacred land of our country since ancient times.” They were to remain Chinese officials knew the Beyul to be of great spiritual in the Beyul for the next quarter century, as China tried and significance to the Bhutanese. Despite offers from China of failed to get Bhutan to accept the border trade-off. substantial economic aid, however, Bhutan did not accept the trade-off: It could not afford to prejudice relations with India. In following summers, other herders joined them to carry In 2013, before it began construction work in the Beyul, China border markers up to peaks and to paint the Chinese national arranged a joint survey of the valley by Chinese and Bhuta- flag, the hammer and sickle, or the word “China” in Chinese nese experts. But this, too, did not lead Thimphu to accept the on prominent rocks within the Beyul. On one occasion in 1999, deal. China stepped up pressure in the western sector further, 62 of the herders came together and drove 400 yaks down to leading to the Doklam standoff in 2017. Today, China’s offer to the far south of the Beyul to reinforce China’s claim to the trade the Beyul for the western border areas still stands. But area. These actions were the basis of China’s initial pressure with little likelihood of Bhutanese concessions, the Chinese on Bhutan to accept its offer of a package deal. presence in the Beyul could well become permanent. In 2012, China sent a team to carry out the first survey of IN CHINESE, THE TERM for so-called salami-slicing tactics—slowly land and resources in the Beyul. “Since history,” the survey- cutting off piece by piece of other nations’ territory—is can ors wrote in a report for China’s State Forestry Administra- shi, or “nibbling like a silkworm.” It’s serious business: The tion on arriving in the Beyul, “no one knows the status of its belief that India was gnawing at fragments of China’s territory resources; it has been shrouded in a veil of mystery.” A week drove Mao to launch the 1962 Sino-Indian War. And the con- later, when the survey was completed, they declared that the verse of the phrase is jing tun, or “swallowing like a whale.” Beyul was “no longer a mysterious place.” The settlement of The small bites of the silkworm can turn into crushing jaws. the Beyul was about to begin. For 20 years, China’s nibbling in the Beyul was carried out IN OCTOBER 2015, WORKERS WERE BROUGHT IN from Tibet and parts not by soldiers but by four Tibetan nomads. They were from a of China to begin building the road that by mid-2016 would 52 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1

Left: The village of Gyalaphug in late 2018. Center left: A presumed military base or barracks just east of where a road enters the upper Jakarlung Valley is seen in a Nov. 9, 2020, satellite image. Center right: Construction work in Mabjathang in 2020 in front of the building where four Tibetan nomads once lived after they were sent to stake China’s claim to the Beyul in 1995. Right: In April 2020, Wu, Tibet’s party secretary, inspects the security teams stationed on the Ngarab La pass. Footage of his visit indicates that there are two outposts there—one manned by police and another by People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers. become the first known instance of construction across Bhu- just within China’s borders. Official rhetoric requires their tan’s northern border and first road to enter the Beyul. Linking residents to make “every village a fortress and every house- Lagyab with Mabjathang, the 29-mile road crossed a 15,700-foot- hold a watchpost” and terms their residents “soldiers without high mountain pass called the Namgung La into Bhutan. It uniforms”—their primary task is to guard China’s borders. took two years to complete and cost 98 million yuan ($15 mil- Satellite images and media photographs show that Gyalaphug lion), according to the Tibet Daily, but cut the journey time is dominated by two double-storied administration buildings, from nine hours on foot or horseback to two by car or truck. In the largest of which has been purpose-built for Communist 2016, a communications base station was built in Mabjathang. Party meetings and village assemblies, following an oblig- That same year, work began on the construction of buildings atory design across the Tibetan Plateau. The one in Gyala- at a site 1.2 miles upriver from Mabjathang and 2.5 miles south phug has a signboard on the roof with a hammer and sickle of the Bhutanese border with Tibet. Officials named the site in yellow and the words “The Party and Serve-the-Masses Jieluobu in Chinese. They seemed unsure what it should be Center” in Chinese and, in much smaller lettering, Tibetan. called in Tibetan, writing its name sometimes as Gyalaphug A giant painting of China’s national flag covers the endwall and at other times as Jiliphug. By 2017, as the first houses at of one building; a flagpole, perhaps 40 feet high, stands in Gyalaphug were completed, the number of residents rose to 16. the center of the village; and a large red banner says, “Reso- lutely uphold the core position of General Secretary Xi Jin- In January 2017, China’s then-ambassador to India, Luo ping! Resolutely uphold the authority of and centralized Zhaohui, visited Thimphu. “I bring a deep appreciation from and unified leadership by the Party Central Committee!” the Chinese people,” he said. “I am so happy to see the talks on the border have made progress. We maintained peace and The actual population of the village is higher than shown in tranquility on our border area, and the discussion is going official figures because of temporary residents. They include on.” Some 112 miles to the northeast, the road to the Beyul an estimated 50 construction workers, technical advisors, and was nearing completion, and Chinese construction crews security forces, many of them Chinese rather than Tibetan. had started work on building Gyalaphug. In 2017 alone, the A special unit from the police agency overseeing borders is Chinese government spent 45 million yuan ($6.9 million) on based in or near the village. The most important task of this infrastructure construction in the village, where the remote- police agency, one officer stationed on the western Tibetan ness makes everything hugely expensive; getting a single bag border told a Chinese news agency, is to catch “illegal immi- of cement to Gyalaphug costs 450 yuan ($69). grants”—meaning Tibetans trying to flee to India or Nepal. In October 2018, the village was formally opened, and four The village residents are required to form a joint defense new residents arrived, bringing the total to 20. By January 2021, team, probably with the border security police, that carries out four more blocks had been built for residents, each containing patrols of neighboring mountains. A village-based cadre lives five identical homes, with 1,200 square feet per household. in the village, with teams posted there for a year or more at a Another 24 households were due to move in during 2020. time, to provide “guidance” to the residents’ village commit- tee and the village branch of the Communist Party. The cadre Gyalaphug was one of more than 600 new villages being carries out political education of the villagers and helps with built as part of a 2017 policy of “well-off border village con- practical needs, such as improving techniques for growing struction” in Tibet, though as far as is known the others lie 53F O R E I G N P O L I C Y.C O M

mushrooms and vegetables in greenhouses in the village. An armed PLA soldier stands guard behind TIBET NEWS BROADCASTING SCREENSHOT Gyalaphug is not the only site of cross-border settlement. Wu during his visit to the military outpost on the Ngarab La pass on April 15. This image The Menchuma Valley, known as Minjiuma in Chinese, lies from a video of his visit is the only one so far to south of a 16,200-foot-high pass known as the Bod La, or show armed troops on duty in the Beyul. “Tibet Pass,” which, as the name indicates, has for centuries been regarded as the frontier between Bhutan and Tibet. foot. But work has nearly been completed on a strategic road Today, Chinese maps place the border 4 miles to the south of heading southwest from Gyalaphug across the Ngarab La. A the pass. This puts the new border just 3.7 miles from Singye second road from the upper Jakarlung leads southwest across Dzong, another historic site within Bhutan. the mountains to what some unofficial Chinese sources say is a military outpost next to the deserted temple of Lhalung In mid-2017, China built the first road across the Bod La Lhakhang, also on the bank of the Pagsamlung, 9 miles south and into the Menchuma Valley. By 2019, 20 households had of the Bhutanese border. These roads will provide the Chinese already taken up residence, according to the Indian defense with motorable access to the Pagsamlung, allowing them to analyst Jayadeva Ranade. As of this January, 50 units of hous- get troops and construction crews down to the far south of ing were visible on satellite images of the village, and the the Beyul; once that is done, we are likely to see permanent third phase of the construction work had begun. On Feb. 9, border posts along China’s claim line. None of these roads or an article in the Tibet Daily praised the new residents: They military sites existed five years ago. There is little that Bhutan are insistent, it said, on carrying out regular border patrols. can do, given that the 1998 agreement, in which both sides undertook not to alter the status of disputed areas, has been Another village is under construction in the Beyul beside the shredded by Beijing’s actions on the ground. military outpost at Dermalung, 6.8 miles southeast of Gyala- phug, just after the Jakarlung takes a sharp turn to the south. It is hard to fathom China’s rationale for its shift from nib- Like Menchuma, it will be a “beside-the-border relocation vil- bling at a neighbor’s territory to swallowing portions of it lage” that will be paired with a nearby outpost for border guards. wholesale. If Bhutan declines to risk its ties with India and rejects China’s package deal, this shift by Beijing will have seri- By August 2020, as a new road was being built eastward along ously damaged a previously amicable relationship for very little the upper Jakarlung, an unidentified compound appeared gain. Indian convictions that China aims to acquire its border on satellite imagery 5.6 miles to the east of Gyalaphug. The territories will be strengthened; people throughout the Hima- compound has seven dormitory-style single-story buildings layas, faced with the seizure of one of Bhutan’s most sacred with red roofs arranged around a square, which could house areas, will be skeptical of Chinese promises and intentions; 100 or more people—a characteristic pattern of Chinese bar- and anxiety will percolate within the international commu- racks. Chinese media have so far given no details about the nity as to China’s ambitions regarding other nations’ territory. military units in the Beyul, but this compound is likely to hold troops from China’s Second Border Defense Regiment, which In the past, annexation has not worked well for China as a is responsible for guarding the borders in Lhokha (Shannan solution for territorial disputes, especially when deep-seated in Chinese), including Lhodrak. Only in April 2020 did evi- cultural and religious values are at stake, as the case of Tibet dence appear in Chinese media of troops on active duty in has shown. If not reversed, the ongoing annexations of the the Beyul—a soldier with a rifle standing guard beside the Beyul and the Menchuma Valley look set to add yet more costs TAR party secretary, Wu Yingjie, at the military outpost on to China of its attempts to project power across its borders. the Ngarab La, the pass just to the south of Gyalaphug that leads to the western part of the Beyul, the Pagsamlung Valley. ROBERT BARNETT is a writer and researcher on modern Tibetan history and politics and a professorial research ELSEWHERE IN THE BEYUL, smaller military or police outposts can associate at the University of London. be identified from satellite images or Chinese media photo- graphs. Two are on the Ngarab La (in tents rather than build- ings); one each at Gyalaphug, Menchuma, and Dermalung; and two others are believed to be in the Pagsamlung, as well as two larger compounds on the north bank of the upper Jakar- lung. High on a ridge overlooking Gyalaphug from the north, a giant structure of some kind, possibly a signals tower, has been erected. Some 1.9 miles southwest of the Ngarab La, what appears to be a satellite receiving station has been built, the first instance of security infrastructure in the Pagsamlung. So far, Chinese troops cannot reach China’s claimed bor- der with Bhutan at the southern tip of the Beyul except by 54 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1

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REVIEW Stabs in the Dark A new book on Rome depicts a state built on death. By James Palmer 73F O R E I G N P O L I C Y.C O M

W A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome EMMA SOUTHON, ABRAMS PRESS, 352 PP., $27, MARCH 2021 ashington is a they could help it,” even when they were murdered. Roman town. From the Senate at its heart to the columns If you were an emperor, though, everyone was interested in adorning every building and the giant commemorative obe- lisk and the city’s (sketchy) claim to be built on seven hills, the who killed you—and emperors got killed a lot. No reputable capital imitates Rome. So does Moscow, boasting of its status firm would issue life insurance on any wearer of the purple. as the “third Rome.” So does London, a provincial backwater The average reign of a Roman emperor was 7.8 years—“half in Roman times. The European Union’s motto, adopted in as long as the global average for monarchs and a third as 2000, is in Latin, as are over half of U.S. state mottos—and long as all other European monarchs,” Southon writes. Some the inscription on U.S. currency. Rome remains an image to 49 percent of all emperors were murdered or executed, be looked to, a symbol of a great past stamped on the West. another 9 percent took their own lives to avoid being mur- dered, and 9 percent died from unknown circumstances. But Rome was also a nightmare, a slave state topped by a tiny class of the very rich and horrible. The genius of Partially that’s because of the chaos of the later empire— Emma Southon’s new book, A Fatal Thing Happened on but only partially. Not even counting Julius Caesar, who was the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, is that it a dictator in the death throes of the republic, of the first 11 simultaneously humanizes the Romans and alienates us emperors, four were murdered (Caligula, Galba, Vitellius, from them, portraying a society that is at once a familiar and Domitian), two killed themselves (Nero and Otho), and ancestor and a rabid monster. one, Claudius, was probably poisoned. Compare that to the 12 official emperors of the roughly contemporaneous East- Around a quarter of the Roman Empire’s residents were ern Han Empire in China, which saw just one known murder. slaves, born or captured. Legally, they were nonpersons: property that could be tortured, mutilated, sexually abused, The extreme stabbiness of Roman politics, Southon argues, or killed by their masters at will—and frequently were. The was a byproduct of the Roman notion of liberty. At its core, main form of public entertainment was going to the arena, the idea was quite simple: It was the right of powerful men either to gasp at very famous, very skilled gladiators trying to do what they wanted—as Southon puts it, “the freedom to to kill each other or to watch the certain doom of captives, fight among one another, according to the rules, to achieve criminals, and Christians. A jaded public demanded new political power.” When populist leaders from their own class and innovative ways to see people killed, from imitation started to challenge the rich and powerful toward the end naval battles to being raped to death by bulls. of the republic, the response was direct violence—begin- ning with the beating to death of the land reformer Tiberius The fate of women was not much better than slaves. The Gracchus in 133 B.C. on the floor of the Senate itself. That only reason why the death of Apronia, most likely thrown unleashed more than a century of regular violence between from a window by her husband, Marcus Plautius Silvanus, politicians and their followers. Even after Octavian and his in A.D. 24, was investigated was because she was the daugh- successors took power, the Roman elite liked to maintain ter of a senator and famous general—and because Emperor the idea that the emperors were just first among equals, men Tiberius Caesar Augustus decided to play detective. Roman who happened to have been given absolute power—and who writers, Southon notes, “tried to avoid naming women if stood to be murderously corrected. 74 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1

REVIEW Left: A political cartoon shows South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks, a slaveholder, beating Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner, an abolitionist, in the U.S. Senate chamber in 1856, an example of Rome’s long liberty-as-violence lineage. Opening page: A depiction of Julius Caesar’s assassination at the Senate in Rome on March 15, 44 B.C. OPENER: ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY PHOTOS; THIS PAGE: BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES That idea of liberty-as-violence didn’t fall when Rome and courtyards. They didn’t have public funerals; everything did. It was still current among the British aristocrats who about it was private and domestic and quiet. Sometimes, over birthed the Virginia planter class in the 16th century and the centuries, those courtyards and gardens became acciden- among their descendants in the Confederacy. When the tally full of buried babies, not because of mass slaughter but slaveholder Preston Brooks, a South Carolina congress- because babies are fragile and centuries are long.” man, nearly beat the abolitionist Charles Sumner to death with a cane on the Senate floor in 1856, he was exercising a She is also a very funny writer and a highly colloquial very Roman privilege—as was John Wilkes Booth when he one, and at first, that can seem flippant. “There’s also some shouted “Sic semper tyrannis” after fatally shooting then- dreadfully tedious medical arguments about the use of nails U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. and different types of foot bone that are incomprehensible to me and therefore seem very convincing indeed, so I’m But the book isn’t just about the privileged class whose mur- working here on the basis that people were mostly being ders were most well-documented. The vast bulk of the victims nailed to crosses because that’s more fun,” she writes. But of violence have been, as Southon puts it, “swallowed up by she repeatedly, and sharply, reminds the reader that she’s the murky blackness of the past,” save for a few like 10-year- discussing real lives and real suffering. old Julia Restuta; her killing on the streets of Salona for her jewelry was memorialized in stone by her grieving parents. “In practice, Roman soldiers, who were probably nice young Most of them would have gone unnoticed and unavenged men who were good to their mums and had lovely wives and at the time, save by immediate family; the state’s interest in a few kids and maybe some had a dog and enjoyed a nice murder was distant and prosecutions almost entirely private. game of dice in the evening, would routinely hold a wriggling, bleeding beaten person down, a person probably begging Southon is very good on the forgotten and the ignored. Peo- for mercy, and line up a nail against the heel of their foot.” ple whose babies died or who killed their babies, she writes, “buried them quietly, often in small pots, in their gardens Yet one thing that’s missing is a consideration of the most potent form of Roman violence: the army. For all of The extreme stabbiness of Rome’s indifference to human life and brutal elite politics, Roman politics, Southon argues, the appeal of the Pax Romana was real. As Southon wrote was a byproduct of the Roman in her first book, “Peace meant the elimination of most notion of liberty. At its core, threats to life during travelling or going about one’s day- the idea was quite simple: to-day business and the placement of a standing army to It was the right of powerful protect you from external threats like angry Germans.” That men to do what they wanted. peace, though, was built on a body of very mean men with javelins and swords and a willingness to exercise absolute brutality against anyone who threatened it. But that may be a topic for another book—one I hope Southon writes soon. n JAMES PALMER is a deputy editor at FOREIGN POLICY. 75F O R E I G N P O L I C Y.C O M

His Own Tailor-Made Chronicle ISRAELI GOVERNMENT PRESS OFFICE/GETTY IMAGES; DENVER POST VIA GETTY IMAGES/HISTORICAL ARCHIVE PHOTOS The Netanyahus is a parable of nationalism disguised as a hilarious family drama. By Jessi Jezewska Stevens “F orgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation,” wrote the French philologist Ernest Renan in 1882. One would have thought history is about remembering, but it’s thanks to Renan and his disciple Benedict Anderson that nations are today widely under- stood to be “imagined” into being. And as every novelist knows, fiction is an art of selection—the legerdemain of leaving things out. None of this is news to Ruben Blum, the unassuming professor and bumbling father at the center of Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus. Chatty, Jewish, and “an historian” (though not “an historian of the Jews”), he considers himself to be above the fictionalization in which both nationalists and novelists indulge. “I’d like to think my profession has made me more attuned than most,” he assures the reader, “to the selective use of facts and the way that each age and ideologi- cal movement manages to cobble together its own tailormade chronicles.” The announcement arrives both as a Renanian echo and as an immediate cue for narrator unreliability: The shared origins of fiction and history, and the dangers 76 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 Illustration by FOREIGN POLICY

REVIEW therein, are in large part what this very funny, very serious Netanyahus suggests, may not be so much that history is novel—based on true events—is about. forgotten or manipulated but that it leaves history behind all together, taking on the hubris of a religion. The cardinal American literary fiction of the past five years could be tenet of America’s own civic evangelism, as Blum suggests, divided, broadly speaking, into two main categories: real- has been that the world “would continue to improve illim- ist, seemingly autobiographical fiction set in the present itably, so long as every country kept trying to be more like day (novels by Ben Lerner and Jenny Offill; Garth Green- America and America kept trying to be more like itself.” It is well’s What Belongs to You; Brandon Taylor’s Real Life) and this same America that invaded Iraq back in 2003. prizewinning historical fiction (Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground AS A NARRATOR, BLUM HAS MANY CHARMS, chief among them the Railroad and The Nickel Boys, which won the Pulitzer Prize history-making knack for being in the wrong place at the for fiction in 2016, 2017, and 2020, respectively). A smaller wrong time. The novel begins when a certain Benzion Net- category of acclaimed novels is set in a dystopic near-future anyahu is invited to interview for a joint appointment in the (Ling Ma’s Severance; Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible). The History Department and Seminary (a dangerous combina- logic of Donald Trump’s presidency suffused many of these tion) at Corbin College, a rural campus just outside New York books, lending an atmosphere of crisis. City. (It does not qualify as “upstate.”) As the only Jewish professor on campus—as patriarch of the only Jewish family Published five months after Trump’s ousting, The Net- in all of Corbindale—Blum is pigeonholed into hosting the anyahus, set in the 1950s, marks a turn by another prominent Israeli candidate and his family. The contrast between the American writer toward historical fiction with contempo- two becomes the novel’s primary source of conflict and com- rary resonance, shoehorning the major issues of the Trump edy. The year is 1959, and the recent founding of a nascent years—nativism, nationalism, and national borders—into the Jewish state casts a long shadow from offstage. framework of a hilarious suburban family drama. By histori- cizing the rise of Israel’s own right-wing politics, the novel also Blum specializes in tongue-in-cheek Taxation Studies. But bypasses the intranational navel-gazing that consumed U.S. with teaching awards to his name spanning the years 1968- political discourse following the 2016 presidential election. 2001 (it’s suggested that he’s writing to us from the present day, following this accoladed career), he is also an unofficial Israelis and Palestinians have reached a cease-fire follow- historian of the short century of U.S. domestic identity poli- ing the outbreak of war in May; Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel tics. Those politics are today the bane of pro-Trump Ameri- was widely regarded to have been the aggressor. The 11-day can conservatives who argue that the battle for the nation’s conflict was only the most recent iteration of perpetual strife in the Palestinian territories that supranational organizations The Netanyahus: An Account like the United Nations have been unable to resolve, as well of a Minor and Ultimately Even as a display of the kind of emboldened “forgetting” in which Negligible Episode in the History all nations, per Renan, engage. Critics of Israel increasingly point to how selective versions of the recent past are lever- of a Very Famous Family aged to justify the country’s present-day hegemonies and cultural paradigms. JOSHUA COHEN, NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS, 248 PP., $16.95, JUNE 2021 Are all nations really doomed to such manipulations of history, as Renan suggests? Blum reminds us that America is Opposite page: Benjamin Netanyahu with supposed to be the “most exceptional exception,” a state built an unidentified friend at the entrance to his on civic pluralism rather than on the ethnocultural narra- family home in Jerusalem in 1967, and his tives of the European nation-state to which Renan originally father, Benzion Netanyahu, when he was a referred. It was Trump’s open attack on these civic values— professor at the University of Denver in 1968. and, therefore, on the viability of America’s national story as an exception—that made his promise to “make America great again” so offensive to so many. This domestic program, a coded allusion to a whiter, less socially progressive era, went hand in hand with his belligerent America First policy abroad. But it wasn’t until a few years into his tenure that the American left began to wonder whether Trump, how- ever disastrous to social progress at home, wasn’t in the end a macabre upgrade for the international scene when com- pared with a hawkish interventionist like George W. Bush. The problem of nationalism in today’s world, The 77F O R E I G N P O L I C Y.C O M

soul is currently being played out on college campuses. The and Harold Bloom, Cohen has also earned a reputation for novel—especially the sections detailing Netanyahu’s cri- esoteric maximalism and provocation that has narrowed his tique of Blum’s assimilationist America—can be read as readership in the United States. an exposé of the logic of those in the business of nativist or civic nation-building and of the real and perceived costs of Embracing a narrator capable of self-deprecation seems cultural pluralism to these projects. crucial to this shift toward accessibility: Gone is the twitchy swagger of the multiple Joshua Cohens who populated Book Part of the game of The Netanyahus is guessing which parts of Numbers, replaced here with the bourgeois aw-shucks of are true: The actual Benzion Netanyahu was himself a zeal- a middle-aged dad who struggles to light a fire, forever for- ous scholar emeritus of the Spanish Inquisition at Cornell getting to open the flue. University. His long-winded magnum opus, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, argued fallaciously It would be hard to overstate the comedy this recalibra- (or, at the very least, uniquely) that the Inquisition’s persecu- tion of Cohen’s skills achieves. The first hundred pages of tion of converted Jews marked the birth of modern racism. campus parody and in-law feuding serve as buildup for Ben- zion Netanyahu’s arrival. When he finally does appear, in a For all intents and purposes, Cohen’s novelized counter- borrowed car he has already managed to crash and with an part seems one of the least fictional parts of the book. Like unruly family in tow, it’s with the satisfaction of a punch- the real Netanyahu, he’s unable to land an academic job in line; the key to situational comedy lies in the timing. At the Israel; he has spent some time at a small theological seminary level of the sentence, Cohen’s puns include characteristic in Pennsylvania; and at Corbin (read: Cornell), his on-campus winks to the digital age. Blum is in the habit, for example, lectures espouse exceptionalist views of Jewish history that of checking his faculty “mailbox” with the frequency of a a bit of Googling can neither confirm nor deny as the kind of Gmail addict. Soon enough, that mailbox begins to fill with thing the actual Netanyahu would have extemporized. That increasingly absurd, polarized letters of recommendation said, it’s no secret that Netanyahu was sympathetic to revi- (spam mail?) for the candidate of the hour, carving out an sionist Zionism, which married the religious ideal of a Jew- efficient mechanism for dispatching backstory: Even in the ish homeland to a concrete political program. It is a view that novel, Netanyahu’s reputation precedes him. Benzion’s son Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu also shares, along with its attendant territorial expansionism. Recently deposed It’s here that the reader begins to flag certain irregularities as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, in the novel an in Netanyahu’s views and scholarship. As one overweening adolescent Bibi is depicted with equally gleeful irreverence; recommender explains of the “gaps” in Netanyahu’s résumé, last we see him, he’s a lecherous pest, sprinting stark-naked “I might cite, in this regard, such luminaries and American through the snow. In other words, one wouldn’t be surprised patriots as Dr. Albert Einstein and Dr. Hannah Arendt. Do if Cohen’s publisher’s legal department has prepared itself for we hold against these folks a ‘gap’ in their CVs between 1933 complaints. But the lawyer’s headache is the reader’s delight. and 1945? … Of course not! That would be lunacy!” In his previous book Moving Kings (2017), Cohen analo- The false comparisons inscribed in this statement include gized race relations in the United States to the Israeli mil- the fact that Netanyahu was not himself a refugee of the Holo- itary-industrial complex: Two Israeli ex-soldiers come to caust. Born in Poland in 1910, he immigrated to British Man- New York to work as movers, where they’re charged with date Palestine 10 years later. Nor did Netanyahu ever clinch evicting mostly Black residents from their homes. Like many the academic laurels or cultural eminence of Jewish émigrés novels published under Trump, it is not the author’s most like Einstein and Arendt. Though The Origins of the Inquisi- uproarious. The book was also received as controversial for tion in Fifteenth Century Spain received modest praise for its the comparisons it drew between evictions in Brooklyn and novelty, the work was ultimately sidelined for pooh-poohing evictions in the Palestinian territories. (The May escalation traditional academic standards for citation and cross-refer- was instigated, in part, by Israeli evictions of Palestinians in encing. Reading between the lines of these criticisms, one East Jerusalem.) Cohen’s earlier, bestselling Book of Num- wonders if the actual Netanyahu, like Cohen’s fictional- bers (2015) was met with greater acclaim; here, Cohen took on ized version, even engaged in a bit of historical cherry-pick- the rise of the internet and the decline of literature through ing. This is where the novel takes a more serious turn. That wordplay, structural puns, and metafictional pyrotechnics. Cohen has earned a reputation It seems safe to say that The Netanyahus finds a balance for esoteric maximalism and between these two precedents, taming the polemics of the provocation that has narrowed his first and the abrasive style of the latter. As a result, it likely readership in the United States. leaves Cohen poised to win over a broader audience. Named one of the best young American novelists by Granta in 2017 and garnering the admiration of critics like James Wood 78 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1

REVIEW A young Benjamin Netanyahu is among the children at a scouts event in Jerusalem in 1957. ISRAELI GOVERNMENT PRESS OFFICE/GETTY IMAGES Netanyahu’s résumé and scholarship might seem “unorth- D.C., lobbying Congress to support the foundation of a Jewish odox” by American standards, as the above recommender state whose borders encompassed the entirety of Palestine. admits, is rather the point. (And is such go-it-alone cherry- picking indeed all that unorthodox by American standards? In this way, both men are at once haunted by the past and Bush’s mythical weapons of mass destruction come to mind.) committed to a kind of “common history” that will carry them into the future. They differ starkly, however, in their concep- Following the candidate’s memorable arrival, the Netanyahu- tions of the identitarian boundaries within which that com- Blum foil begins to contrast the two historians’ respective mon history applies—and among whom that history is shared. conceptions of national and group identity. While Netanya- Blum, a professor of U.S. history, is in the contentious business hu’s lectures suggest that “different peoples have such differ- of formalizing a shared national narrative that at the same ent relationships to history as to constitute entirely separate time accommodates his students’ right to differentiate and histories instead of some unified common history that can revise. Netanyahu’s national history flirts with preordination be agreed upon through facts,” Blum is trying his darndest and destiny in which not all Israelis—in particular, non-Jew- to blend in to the “common” American story. ish Israelis—may partake. The difference here is that between “the American condition of being able to choose and the Jew- Born in the Bronx in the 1922, Blum is bent on keeping his ish condition of being chosen.” Either approach, taken to an job, keeping his head down, and keeping up with the gentile extreme, leads to a national-democratic paradox. Joneses. Modest achievements accrue on his “ever-expand- ing accomplishment-belt.” He pegs the discrimination he has This “gap” in expectations for their respective nations (and experienced to the extremes he evaded—the Holocaust, the in the résumés of their own personal histories, Cohen sug- Ku Klux Klan—against which the antisemitic slights he regu- gests throughout, as neither professor directly experienced larly endured as a younger man (“When’s the last time you got Nazism or the Holocaust) is best captured in a charged scene your horns checked?” a car mechanic asked while petting his late in the novel. As the two men trudge through the snow to head) are deemed not so bad. He presents himself as a walk- yet another of Netanyahu’s provocative, unorthodox campus ing, talking counterexample to Netanyahu’s view of Jewish lectures, Benzion says to Blum: “[I]f the situation were reversed history as an eternal return of pogroms—“no one was going and your feet were in my shoes and you came to Israel, I’m not to murder me in this country”—and observes with mild baf- positive I could get you a job, but I’d do absolutely everything flement the proliferation of an increasingly granular identity to find you a good apartment, and in a war, I’d die for you.” politics among his students. Excusing himself from today’s debates over gender and race with the qualified hand-waving This statement—“I’d die for you”—delivered offhand and of older generations, Blum explains that, while he was grow- couched in yet another joke (Netanyahu is literally wearing a ing up, “the most reliable protection was to assimilate, not to pair of Blum’s shoes at the time), lingers long after the book’s differentiate.” He espouses pluralism by striving to meld, as close. It is, in a way, the disquieting, animating principle of inoffensively as possible, with the (white) American majority every nation: Who would you die for if not your compatriots? —a kind of respectability politics. While Blum was fulfilling And as long as the nation remains the basic unit of geopoli- his patriotic duty as an accountant in the U.S. Army during tics, what does it mean to live in America, where the answer World War II, Netanyahu, meanwhile, was in Washington, to that question may very well be no one? No one, Netanyahu argues, is the answer supplied by a 79F O R E I G N P O L I C Y.C O M

country that has taken its position of power and safety for What’s the difference, in the end, granted. As Blum paraphrases Netanyahu’s views in his sub- between a novelist like Cohen sequent talk: “This is what I think of America—nothing. This and a historian like Netanyahu? is what I think of American Jews—nothing. Your democ- Both take license with scholarship racy, your inclusivity, your exceptionalism—nothing. Your and dip into the same pool chances for survival—none at all.” This is the mindset of a of human time. man prepared for permanent war, indeed for “permanent conflict,” the term used to describe Bibi’s reigning attitude wrong in suggesting that Europe’s debates over citizenship, toward the Palestinians. nationalism, and race have often centered on the question The true trick of The Netanyahus is that it can be read on two levels, romp or polemic, and not at once—it’s a bit of a of Jewish rights—in Renan’s own racist framing, on whether duck-rabbit, in the end, flipping between the binary of the story of the founding of a nation and the story of the found- European Jews were part of the “one race, the white race,” ing of a family. (Although, in Renan’s or Anderson’s terms, these are perhaps not such different projects after all.) Taken thus delineating the outer limits of the white supremacist as a “minor and ultimately even negligible episode” from the archives of a “very famous family,” the novel is a lark; taken imagination. We might say Netanyahu was wrong about as a metafictional study of national identity and hegemony, it does most of what Cohen has always done well—word- everything else. In matters of statesmanship, egregiously so. play, polemics, puns, the politics of assimilation, Jewish- ness, innovation in the novel as form—to harrowing effect. What’s the difference, in the end, between a novelist like Either way, The Netanyahus breaks from Cohen’s previ- Cohen and a historian like Netanyahu? Both take license with ous work in offering an escape hatch whenever things get too uncomfortable, too dark, and in giving women the final scholarship and dip into the same pool of human time. In a word. Shortly after Netanyahu’s lecture, Blum’s wife, Edith, cries good riddance. “I’m sick and tired of hearing about final twist, The Netanyahus addresses the overlap in these Jews,” she says. “I’m talking about the two of us.” techniques head-on, breaking the fourth wall to announce AS A SCHOLAR, Renan, today best known for his foundational essay “What Is a Nation?” can only be described, like Ben- that the story we’ve just read is based on true events. We zion Netanyahu, as problematic. The label applies both in the sense that his writings run contrary to today’s progres- learn that Blum is a tribute to the late literary critic Har- sive social values and in the sense that his legacy is a prob- lem—a puzzle—for scholars. An Orientalist philologist, Renan old Bloom, the first Jewish professor ever to be awarded in his early studies of the so-called Semitic race advanced racially essentialist claims rooted in the idea that language tenure by the Yale English Department and who was once structures culture and thought; later, he rejected biological racism and ethnocultural nationalism in favor of the nation likewise obliged to host Benzion Netanyahu for a campus modeled as a “daily plebiscite,” remade each day by the con- tinued, voluntary membership of its citizens. His writings visit. Before his death in 2019, Bloom praised Book of Num- now cut across both sides of the Dreyfus affair and Nazi Ary- anism: Anti-Dreyfusards leveraged Renan’s early writings to bers as one of the greatest American novels of recent years; antisemitic ends; in 1943, the American Jewish Committee in New York began reprinting his essays on a more cosmo- in a conversation with Cohen published by the Los Angeles politan conception of citizenship as anti-Nazi propaganda. Review of Books, he described Cohen’s subsequent Moving The most dangerous ideas are those lies that hold a flint of truth, the most dangerous people, those who send these ideas Kings as a “rather hurtful book.” One imagines that Bloom out into the world not as arguments conceived but discov- ered—God-given, if you will. “God-given” is also the English would find The Netanyahus to be Cohen’s best novel yet, as translation of “Netanyahu,” the surname Benzion’s father adopted on arriving in Palestine in 1920. His son may have well as his sneakiest, his subtlest, possibly even his most taken the namesake too much to heart. Netanyahu was not hurtful, depending on the perspective one brings to bear. Ideologues from across the political spectrum are invited to tease incompatible conclusions from the same set of evi- dence; it is a novel of discordant superlatives. And is this all the novelist is, a disgraced historian? The answer, The Netanyahus suggests, lies in what you make of what you borrowed, in what ends you have in mind. Whether you acknowledge, plainly, that it was fiction after all. But a reader could just as easily be forgiven for throwing up her arms, declaring herself sick of all these self-import- ant men and their damnable history-making, along with the harm it tends to cause. “Are you even listening?” Edith says. “I want to go home.” The answer is as simple, historical, and impossible as that. n JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS is a writer of fiction and criticism. She is the author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q and the forthcoming novel The Visitors. 80 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1

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The Artist at Work C.A. SMITH PHOTOGRAPHY FOR PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH/GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL CENTER George W. Bush still shows an eye for spin. By Diana Seave Greenwald T he first portrait presented in former U.S. President George W. Bush’s second art book, Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants, is probably his best. Depicting Joseph Kim, a young man who came to the United States as a North Korean refugee, the painting exhibits many formal qualities that Bush has shown in his past portraits of veterans and world leaders. The canvas presents a tightly cropped image of the sub- ject’s head rendered with thick, visible brushwork in bright colors. There is, however, a depth in the lavender shading of Kim’s face, the unblended orange of his collared shirt, and the sensitivity of his gaze out of the canvas and away from the viewer that defies the flatness typical of many of Bush’s works in earlier publications and throughout Out of Many, One. Part of the two-dimensionality of the former president’s work can be attributed to process: Despite having met most of his subjects (and in some cases knowing them quite well), he typically paints from photographs. Kim’s portrait is no exception to this approach; however, Bush’s text about the young man hints at why this portrait feels so much more complex: “Joseph’s office is just downstairs from mine at the Bush Institute, where he works as an assistant and expert in residence in our Human Freedom Initiative.” While this proximity made it “easy to get his photo,” it also indicates that Bush, when he has regular access to his subjects, is capable of paint- ing works that show at least a glimmer of engagement with his stated artistic influ- 82 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1

REVIEW ences, which include Lucian Freud and Impressionist artists. The combination of relative moderation, the potential bipar- Ultimately, however, the point of Out of Many, One—an tisan appeal of immigration reform, and brightly colored, ama- teurish, and naturalistic portraiture camouflages the political English translation of the Latin phrase E pluribus unum, the nature of the work. In this sense, Out of Many, One is more suc- founding motto of the United States—is not to show Bush’s cessful than Bush’s last series of portraits and the book cele- artistic prowess, nor is it really about the artworks themselves. brating them, Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s By choosing portraiture—and in particular themed groups of Tribute to America’s Warriors (2017). This group of paintings portraits of world leaders, military veterans, and now immi- featured veterans who fought and were injured in the same grants—Bush is diving headfirst into subject matter that begs controversial, deadly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that Bush for political interpretation. He is, in effect, able to comment started and presided over. The portraits were intended to pay on political issues by selecting his subjects and telling their homage to their subjects—to share their stories of courage, stories. Yet, protected behind an easel, he can simultaneously hardship, and resilience. The painful irony of Bush choos- claim to be simply engaging in a new aesthetic and apolitical ing to paint people he had commanded into the line of fire pastime. It is an elegant solution for a past president who still was lost on no one in the book’s reviews, except possibly the has political opinions (part of his presidential center includes artist himself. Peter Schjeldahl’s reaction in the New Yorker the George W. Bush Institute, which publishes policy recom- sums up many critical responses to the work: “Having obliv- mendations) but wants to appear above the fray. iously made murderous errors, Bush now obliviously atones for them. What do you do with someone like that?” As the art historian Kim Grant carefully documents in a scholarly article, Bush has learned to expertly marshal his Bush has learned his lesson for this new book. He failed retirement hobby into a way to rehabilitate his public image. to reform the U.S. immigration system during his time in He has charmed people with his seemingly naive dedication office. Therefore, the direct impact of his presidential pol- to an aesthetic and gentle pastime unexpected in a president icies on any of his subjects is limited—although Medal of who started two wars and was known for macho activities Honor winner and French American Florent Groberg was like clearing brush on his ranch. However, as Grant writes, severely injured in Afghanistan, and one portrait features “Bush is an amateur painter, but he is an expert in public an Iraqi translator for the U.S. military who participated in relations, image making, and the media.” With this context a deeply flawed visa program that started in 2006. With that in mind, Bush the portrait painter seems to be an extension said, the same translator legally changed his name to Tony of the folksy, misspeaking, nickname-loving persona that George Bush when he became a U.S. citizen. He appears to powered Bush to two terms in the White House. be an unequivocal fan of the former president. The clear links between the 43rd president’s political past The charming earnestness and intense patriotism demon- and his artistic present can be traced even to the origin story strated by Tony George Bush and his mother, Layla, (they he provides about his decision to take up painting. He cred- feature in a double portrait) is really the point of Out of Many, its Winston Churchill’s 1948 book Painting as a Pastime for One. Page after page is full of moving stories of immigrants— giving him the idea. In the book, the famed British prime minister describes how painting can provide both an escape Above: Former U.S. President George W. Bush for a statesman used to living under extreme pressure and a paints in an undated photo. Opposite page, from left: new kind of mental stimulus for someone leaving a position Portraits by Bush of Joseph Kim; Tony George Bush that requires constant processing of information. Churchill argues for making art an ideal retirement project. Accord- and his mother, Layla; and Gilbert Tuhabonye, ingly, his work is decidedly apolitical. The illustrations in all on display at the George W. Bush Painting as a Pastime show anodyne depictions of flowers Presidential Center in Texas. in vases and landscapes with calming features like babbling brooks and the serene waters of Italian lakes. Bush has departed significantly from Churchill’s advice and example. Audiences may be expecting to view Bush’s artwork as an apolitical hobby because they are accustomed to seeing political art from the left rather than the right. As Grant writes, “Social activist art is typically associated with liberal causes and mobilizing opposition to established inter- ests and controls.” However, the former president is engag- ing in precisely this tradition: activist art. It just happens to be from a right-wing position that appears relatively mod- erate in a post-Donald Trump world. 83F O R E I G N P O L I C Y.C O M

some of whom survived extreme trauma—finding new, suc- Out of Many, One: Portraits cessful lives in the United States and becoming self-made of America’s Immigrants star citizens. From CEOs such as Indra Nooyi to the Nigerian- born NASA wunderkind Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, they represent GEORGE W. BUSH, CROWN, an ideal of the American dream as providing the chance to seize opportunities and capitalize on talent. 208 PP., $38, APRIL 2021 There are, however, two notable themes that occur through- Many, One. As he writes in the acknowledgments, the proj- out the stories told: God (often, but not exclusively, a Christian God) and Texas. The quote featured across from Texas resident ect began when his former campaign manager asked Bush Kim’s striking portrait sets the tone for the entire book: “The first Bible verse I read was Matthew, chapter eleven, verse twenty- in 2018 to “get involved in the current immigration debate, eight: ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’” There is also, for example, the heartbreak- the tone and direction of which concerned us both deeply.” ing, trauma-filled story of Rwandan American Jeanne Celes- tine Lakin. She has since founded a charity that is dedicated Bush demurred, citing precedent on not commenting on “to carry on her parents’ teaching and support God’s children around the world.” The Burundian American running coach successors’ policies, at which point the former campaign Gilbert Tuhabonye was nearly killed for being the child of a Catholic Tutsi family. He rediscovered God on the 10th anni- manager pivoted and “spoke to the eager painter in me. versary of his surviving the genocidal attack and went on to inspire the president’s daughter Jenna Bush to run a “little bit He suggested that I paint portraits of immigrants to reflect faster” by yelling, “Jenna, God is good!” during morning work- outs. Both Lakin and Tuhabonye live in Texas, like many of the my belief in the positive effects they have on our country.” other subjects, including most of the Muslim portrait-sitters. While the means of the message may be seemingly apoliti- Some of this bias toward God-fearing Texans of all ori- gins is likely because Bush has met many of his subjects. He cal—appealingly naive and cheery paintings—Bush’s ulti- often describes meeting them through events at his presi- dential center in Dallas or, in the case of Mexican American mate goal is to engage with current policy debates. Overall, Paula Rendon, while she worked in the homes of his par- ents, George H.W. and Barbara Bush, for decades. However, he has succeeded. He may even change some hearts and I could not help but feel that these choices of people to fea- ture are—intentionally or not—also politically expedient. minds among those skeptical of immigration who thought In the subjects’ religiosity, geographical location, and patri- otism, the book gives the impression that these inspiring, they were just buying an art book by a cowboy ex-president. resilient individuals represent the shifting demographics that have recently driven Republican gains among more (The book concludes with some policy bullet points under diverse voters. Bush’s roster of subjects seems designed to appeal to a conservative voter who may be prone to dislike the Bush Institute logo and illuminating flowcharts about or distrust immigrants as being too different from them or coming to steal American jobs. These exceptional people’s the byzantine nature of the U.S. immigration system.) stories not only provoke sympathy and admiration but, as they are written, create a sense that the portraits’ sub- Bush’s marshaling of oil on canvas to reinsert himself into jects could potentially be conservatives, as many would describe themselves: God-loving, hardworking, and not political debate appears to be part of a trend for past presi- looking for handouts. (In the entry for Cambodian Amer- ican Thear Suzuki, Bush explicitly mentions that when dents. In addition to creating a policy-focused foundation her family arrived as refugees, they “only needed … food stamps for three months before becoming independent.”) resembling Bill and Hillary Clinton’s, Barack and Michelle Many of Bush’s portrait subjects could be Republican vot- ers in waiting—so why resist making it easier for them to Obama have also recognized that the arts are a valuable vehi- immigrate, naturalize, and vote? cle for spreading messages related to their policy positions. This is the crux of what Bush may be aiming for in Out of While Bush has chosen a decidedly analog artistic medium, the Obamas have gone digital by inking a deal with Netflix to develop fictional and nonfictional films and series. Churchill thought the arts represented the ideal escape for a retired world leader. They may, in fact, be the best way for ex-world leaders to stay relevant. n DIANA SEAVE GREENWALD is the assistant curator of the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the author of Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art. 84 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1

Sponsored Report Data tools drive climate change development The mechanics of drilling a well are Juan Sarlos Riascos, deputy chief of party for USAID Paramos and Forests Activity (P&F), straightforward. Knowing where, how and implemented by Shemonics, meets with members of the Guambiano community in Totoró who whether to drill that well amid extreme are participating in a training on soil carbon. PHOTO BY JUAN CARLOS GOMEZ conditions wrought by climate change poses a whole new challenge. with adequate groundwater and start drilling. activities, social services, and governance of Now, as rainy seasons shift, rivers dry up and wa- ancestral lands critical to their ways of life. International development experts, confront- ter tables become unpredictable, constructing a ing the complexities of rising temperatures, well resilient to climate change requires intricate “We’re always making that link between the shifting rainfall patterns and extreme weather, data analytics that incorporate regional rainfall community and how to create the opportunities are adding new data-driven approaches to their patterns, community crop needs and other fac- for them to do what they do in a sustainable way toolkits to drill that well, plant that sustainable tors to either build the well precisely where it’s and to be able to preserve the resources that are farm or prevent malaria. needed -- or devise a different solution. critical for them,” said Anne Spahr, senior vice president of Chemonics’ Latin America and the Satellites, sophisticated computer modeling Chemonics, founded in 1975, has tested its Caribbean Division and for the Environmental and data analytics will define the future of climate resilience approach across the globe, and Natural Resources Practice. global development, said Chris Perine, an envi- and works collaboratively among its technical ronmental management specialist at Chemonics teams and project managers to share data, best Data-driven, climate-focused development International, an international development con- practices, and lessons learned. work will likely increase now that the Biden ad- sulting firm headquartered in Washington, D.C. ministration has tasked the federal government In Ethiopia, Chemonics data indicated rising with combating climate change, recommitted Chemonics is pioneering data-driven deci- global temperatures would push mosquitoes to to the Paris Agreement and pledged to double sion-making, in concert with its network of 5,800 higher altitudes, giving authorities, donors and financial support for climate change projects in people in 87 countries, to tackle growing chal- international organizations early warning of developing nations. lenges of food and water insecurity, power gen- increased malaria prevalence and an opportunity eration, education, and economic growth in the to increase malaria control efforts. In the Mara While it’s possible a future administration world’s most vulnerable regions. This data-driven River Basin in sub-Saharan Africa, Chemonics could change course, Perine said the “arc of approach allows experts from Chemonics’ global used state-of-the-art climate modeling and an history” on climate change is pointing in only one workforce and from its technical practice areas analysis of existing and anticipated agricultural, direction. Americans are more invested in pre- to analyze climate change impact across the spec- industrial and municipal water use to create serving the planet, and corporations publicize re- trum of economic growth and social development regional water allocation plans. And in Colombia, ducing waste, limiting greenhouse gas emissions, sectors, drawing from satellite imagery, historic Chemonics worked with Afro-Colombian and and establishing an eco-friendly brand, he said. data and on-the ground conditions. Equipped with Indigenous communities to explain how carbon the right information, Chemonics’ experts onsite credits from conserving their rainforests can “I think the trends we’re seeing now are interpret the data to customize solutions that fit provide revenue for investment in livelihood irreversible,” he said. “I’m a pretty pragmatic community and cultural needs and deliver the person, and I really think the horse is out of most effective, climate-resilient approach. the barn and it’s not going back.” Transparent data can help earn the trust of decision makers and communities while locally based staff bring understanding of cultural context, Perine said. Perine, who recalls a time when climate change projects were narrowly framed efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions, said climate change varia- bles now factor into most development work. “We have the ability to integrate climate resilience into all the work that we do, whether our clients have explicitly asked us to do so or not,” said Perine, who recently served as chief of party for the U.S. Agency for International Development-funded Climate Change Adap- tation, Thought Leadership and Assessments (ATLAS) project. Take the example of the well. It’s no longer enough to find a convenient community location

Sponsored report An ideal nearshoring platform in the Caribbean region The Dominican Republic is set for economic prosperity in a post-pandemic world New leadership encourages foreign investment, tax incentives, and a thriving workforce as the Caribbean’s economic powerhouse charts a robust recovery agenda While COVID-19 stalled the Dominican billion, the Dominican Republic’s annual increase productivity. However, in the Republic’s bustling economy, especially growth rate of 6 percent prior to the current international environment, its tourism, the Caribbean nation pandemic was the region’s highest. influenced by geopolitical uncertainty remains poised for an economic recovery Annual inflation remained below 4% generated by the trade war between the as the world returns to a sense of post- from 2014-2019. Prior to the pandemic, United States and China, the impact of pandemic normalcy. tourism brought in $630 million to the COVID-19, and significant supply chain nation’s coffers. The number of visitors disruptions caused, among other things, The International Monetary Fund (IMF) doubled from 2000 to 2018, making it by the blockage in the Suez Canal in expects the Dominican Republic to make the Caribbean’s most popular tourist March, many companies are revisiting or a robust recovery, and the nation’s new destination. But tourism wasn’t the accelerating their reshoring/nearshoring president, Luis Abinader, wants to ensure nation’s chief economic driver. strategy. They are focusing on relocating his nation’s economy is driven by more part of their production facilities closer than tourism. Abinader, 53, has outlined Gold exports garnered $1.61 billion, to consumption markets to reduce a revitalization plan that includes tax medical instruments, $1.4 billion, and operating costs, and mitigate risks incentives and investment opportunities, rolled tobacco, $833 million. Much of associated with increased tariffs and and promotion of his country as an this went to the United States, Canada, logistics delays in their supply chains. ideal location for nearshoring — when India and Switzerland. The Dominican Republic serves as one of businesses move their operations to a the best nearshore alternatives for many nearby country instead of a distant one. Since the early 2000s, multinational companies. companies based in the United States The largest economy in Central America and Europe transferred a significant part The country also has several favorable and the Caribbean with an estimated of their production processes to China trade agreements with strategic partners, gross domestic product (GDP) of $88.94 and Southeast Asia to reduce costs and ranging from smaller economies, such as

the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), unique opportunities, and it has made Sponsored report Central America and Panama, to major significant investments to position itself economies, such as the United States, as a premier logistics hub. The country’s from about 55 million TEUs (20-foot European Union, and United Kingdom. geographical location allows connection equivalent units) to 96 million TEUs These partnerships have allowed exporters with European and North American on the three main East-West container duty-free access to more than 900 million markets in record time. While its logistics shipping routes. This unparalleled consumers in 49 countries, reduced trade infrastructure remains world class, its logistics connectivity ensures the timely barriers, and increased export potential logistics connectivity is what separates delivery of goods, wherever their origin for both local and foreign companies. the country from the rest. Home to the or destination might be. most connected airport in the Caribbean The Dominican Republic also offers region, the Dominican Republic has While inaugurating the Caucedo port one of the most attractive incentive daily flights to the United States and expansion in November, as part of its $600 packages for the free zones sector in the Europe, as well as the third best maritime million investment in the country, Sultan western hemisphere. It boasts a mature connectivity in the region, with the Ahmed Bin Sulayem, CEO and chairman manufacturing ecosystem in sectors seventh largest multimodal maritime port of DP World, said their objective was such as medical devices — eight of the in Latin America. “to promote the Dominican Republic top 30 companies in the world use the throughout the region as an interesting country as a production base — electrical The Dominican Republic boasts the value proposition for multinational components, jewelry, electronics, textiles, second highest container throughput in industries, and for this to help attract new footwear, and many others. the Caribbean, and the eighth highest in investments to develop logistics projects Latin America and the Caribbean region. in the country.” The country’s natural position within This is particularly relevant considering the hemisphere, more specifically as that in 2019, the capacity in maritime He added: “We are focused on leveraging the heart of the Caribbean, provides container transport service increased nearshoring with the United States, within the Caribbean and Central America region, northern South America, and finally around the world.” Nearshoring: A Reality in the Dominican Republic One advantage the Dominican Republic boasts of is its role as an to increase, and the company is considering expanding its workforce industrial hub for major American companies. Eaton, GE Energy, even more. Earlier this year, Jabil built a 60,000 square-foot expansion Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Rockwell Automation, to its healthcare manufacturing plant. Cardinal Health, Baxter, Tiffany, and Hanes all have chosen this Caribbean nation as their industrial hub for the Americas. The decision to begin operations in the Dominican Republic “is in large part due to the high-caliber talent pool and pride of work shown by employees in the island,” said Steve Borges, executive vice president and chief executive officer. President Abinader attends Jabil’s inauguration in the DR Attracting foreign production to its shores is not the only way the government is working to bring in businesses and investment. To But proof the country has much to offer in quality, productivity and promote the country as a viable distribution hub, the Abinader connectivity is evident in its relationship with Jabil, which specializes in administration established that goods stored in logistics centers would outsourcing of manufacturing for such companies as Cisco and Tesla. not be subject to taxes or duties for more than a year. For companies Jabil, which employs more than 260,000 people at 100 locations in 30 running these centers, this reduces costs, increases supply, and provides countries, began its operations in the Dominican Republic in April quicker access to markets. Such initiatives, and the country’s proximity 2020, shortly after the pandemic spread worldwide. to major markets, have attracted multinational companies such as Nestlé, IKEA, and AbInbev to use the Dominican Republic as a regional Jabil also manufactured the first over-the-counter COVID-19 PCR test distribution center. approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The test produces accurate results in about 10 minutes. The high demand for this test led Abinader, who has a business background, has made the advancement the company to hire more than 800 employees. With the world reopening of industrialization a priority, crucial to the growth of his country. His from the pandemic, and crowds expected to return to concerts, sporting national industrialization plan consists of five main pillars: events, theaters and other daily activities, demand for this test is bound Efficient International promotion and Optimization of Education and Strengthening permits improvement of tax regulation the supply chain technical training infrastructure The Dominican Republic “had been one of the most dynamic economies in the region during the last decade in the context of robust growth, macroeconomic stability, a solid external position and a notable improvement in social indicators,” according to the IMF.

Sponsored report The country has worked tirelessly to become a key and trusted manufacturing and logistics hub in the Americas. Between August 2020 and April 2021, the Dominican Republic approved favorable medical device manufacturing ecosystem and a decrease in the installation of 45 new free zone companies and 2 new industrial operating costs for companies. Cosmed Group provides important parks, and has, for the past 10 months, experienced all-time records in opportunities for the logistics center ecosystem because it allows the exports. In the first quarter of 2021, exports from free zones totaled $2.2 attraction of regional cargo that today is transferred to Puerto Rico, billion, representing 60% of total exports during that period. Costa Rica and other destinations to be sterilized and re-exported. The country’s strong, mature and proven manufacturing ecosystem has played a key role in motivating major multinational companies to either expand or relocate production lines, proving that “nearshoring” is already a reality for the Dominican Republic. Notable among these companies are: · Eaton, leader in the manufacture of electrical components, relocated the production line of its variable frequency products to supply the United States and other global markets, increasing its exports by 7%. · Cosmed Group specializes in the sterilization and pasteurization of medical devices through a network of contract processing facilities. It is the first company with this type of experience installed in the Dominican Republic, contributing to the consolidation of a more President Abinader is given a tour of a local production facility · Muebletex, leading producer of leather furniture, relocated to the Dominican Republic to reduce transit times to the United States by 50%, drastically reducing inventory costs and increasing its time-to- market. · Fresenius Kabi mainly produces blood transfusion and handling products. In 2020, it completed a $35 million expansion of its manufacturing plant to increase production capacity and sterilization of plasma kits. Recently, it announced another expansion to add 15 square meters to provide logistics capabilities that further increase the capacity to manufacture and distribute products from these facilities. · Medtronic, a multinational company dedicated to the manufacture of high-tech medical devices, made an investment of approximately $46 million in the new physical plant, where it plans to employ about 450 people in the San Isidro free zone. · Edwards Lifesciences distributes medical devices to the global market. The Dominican Republic’s excellent business climate represents a critical element for this company, which created 700 direct jobs, consolidating the international position of the country in the manufacture and export of world-class medical equipment and pharmaceutical products. · Teleperformance is a leading global group in integrated digital services offering a ‘One Office’ support services model. Its new project will have an investment of $8 million to recruit new talent and create remote jobs through the Off Cities strategy in cities outside the National District, paying equally to the revitalization of the economy in areas with fewer opportunities.

Sponsored report Other major companies, such as Cardinal Health, and B Braun, have already made significant expansions to their production facilities. The experience of various multinational companies that have already trusted in the Dominican Republic to locate or expand their operations in the region constitutes clear evidence that the country offers an important investment destination in the Caribbean. The Dominican Republic has the necessary conditions to continue focusing on the growth of industry, trade, and SMEs (small to medium enterprises). President Abinader’s plan to continue growing the industrial sector aims to promote companies that generate jobs and attract foreign direct investment throughout the territory. To achieve these goals, the government actively fosters: · An incentive program through which companies are allowed an accelerated depreciation of those investments in fixed assets oriented to the implementation of new technologies or modernization of existing industries. · Policies at the sectoral level for the dissemination of innovative Minister of Industry, Trade, and SMEs, Victor Bisonó, is presented with locally technologies. manufactured PPE by Edwards Lifesciences Dominican Republic: A Haven for Nearshoring The effect of the pandemic on the world economy forced many Business leaders also praise the dedication of the high-quality workforce companies to revisit their outsourcing and business strategies. The in the country. “We throw a lot at them, from new products to new Dominican Republic is set to take advantage, given its track record as a technologies, and they are quick to learn and eager for more,” said Chris popular nearshoring location. Dugan, president of Precision Devices, which manufactures components for use in medical, military, and electric vehicle applications. One company that changed its strategy was Hayco, which produces equipment based on injection molding. When considering expansion Other companies also have chosen the Dominican Republic for their plans, Hayco, which operates in the Dominican Republic as a key production facilities, and seen their business grow and costs reduced. supplier for such companies as Clorox, and Procter & Gamble, chose the Caribbean nation to better serve the U.S., instead of expanding Maintaining the country as a leading nearshoring location is a priority its facilities in Hong Kong. This decision proved to be a boon as the for its Minister of Industry, Trade, and SMEs Victor Bisonó. He believes company saw a 25-percent increase in production during the pandemic. his country is an ideal destination, especially for companies looking to better serve the United States more effectively.

Sponsored report President Luis Abinader: A Look at the Leader The Dominican Republic is open for business. It boasts a clear track record of proven examples of nearshoring success stories, currently benefiting from reduced operational costs, enhanced market access to important consumption markets and logistic solutions that have established the country as a safe and secure destination for both international and local investment. In this global context, where health challenges have impacted the security for a country as an investment destination, is the Dominican Republic a safe destination? Absolutely, Dominican Republic is a safe destination. In terms of health safety, the Dominican Republic has shown it has implemented the right protocols which have produced an efficient and exemplary response to COVID-19. As of June 15, nearly 4.3 million Dominicans had received their first dose of the vaccine, while more than 2.1 million have been fully vaccinated. At the current rate, we will be meeting our goal of having immunized the entire country by the third quarter of 2021, for which we have already ordered and paid for the total amount of vaccines needed. Ultimately, we will be one of very few countries in the region to achieve this important milestone. 2020 became a year in which the exception was to find countries Luis Abinader Corona, President of the Dominican Republic whose economies grew and, in 2021, the rule is to find countries with a sustainable economic recovery. What is the How is Dominican industry evolving in this context of economic trajectory in which the Dominican Republic is going? reactivation? In line with all the regional economic forecasts, the Dominican We believe in Dominican industry and have the firm intention of Republic’s economic recovery from COVID-19 has been a positive promoting the required transformations that support the resilient spirit outlier. According to the Central Bank of the Dominican Republic, our demonstrated through the national industrialization plan enacted by Monthly Indicator of Economic Activity (IMAE) registered growth of Decree, which establishes industrialization as a national priority. All 10.6% in March when compared to March 2020. When considering all this, with proper follow up from the “Presidential Working Group sectors included in the IMAE, the Dominican economy grew close to for Industrialization,” which serves as an articulator of public policies 3.1% in the first quarter of 2021. Lastly, validation of this recovery has focused on making free zones and local industries more competitive as a been given by the positive projections of the International Monetary whole. Free zones and local industries will continue to evolve positively, Fund (IMF), which estimates a growth of 5.5% for the Dominican considering our economy’s 7.4% growth, as per the Dominican economy this year. Republic’s Central Bank data for the first quarter of 2021. A Thriving Post-Pandemic Nation As countries come out of COVID-19, the Dominican Republic free trade zones. The rise in exports from free trade zones included a 75 appears well suited to deal with a post-pandemic environment and percent increase in tobacco, 76.7 percent increase in precious stones or revitalize its economy. metals, 63.8 percent increase in apparel and clothing accessories, and 8.3 percent hike in medical devices. Crucial to any return to normalcy is the vaccination rate, and, as President Abinader indicated, the Dominican Republic is well on its The Dominican Republic can lay claim to an attractive geographic way to meeting its goal of having its population vaccinated by year’s end. location, a solid and robust legal framework, and tax incentives aimed at promoting the development of various strategic sectors. It also has Abinader’s business and investment friendly polices, the country’s excellent maritime connectivity and appropriate infrastructure for the knowledgeable workforce and predictions of a return to a thriving development of logistics and industrial platforms that will allow it to tourism sector have already borne fruit. continue increasing its trade flows with the rest of the world. All this makes the Dominican Republic one the most dynamic economies in The g overnment s ays i ts n umbers a lready s how a n ation r ebounding the region, with constant robust growth and a resilient financial system. from the pandemic. Exports for January-April totaled $3.7 billion, a 3 The International Monetary Fund’s forecast of 5.5% economic growth percent increase from the previous quarter and 22.9 percent from the in the Dominican Republic stands in stark contrast to the projected 1.8 same period in 2020 — due mainly to an increase in exports from its percent overall growth of Latin American and Caribbean nations.

Constant Growth and Stability Sponsored report The Ministry of Industry, Trade and SMEs is focused on implementing Growing Economic Sectors public policy actions that will continue positioning the Dominican Republic as a world-class logistics and industrial hub in the region, with The tourism and services industries weren’t always the largest a clear strategy based on promoting efficiency, en hancing te chnology, economic contributors in the Dominican Republic. Manufacturing processes automation and continually updating its appeal as an led the way until the 1990s, when tourism and the service field investment destination. started to take over. The s hift wa s a bi g bo ost to th e na tion as it became the fourth most popular tourist destination among Latin The Dominican economy is being reactivated, thanks to the confidence America’s 20 nations in 2018. This led to a 39 percent increase in the current administration has proactively offered to all productive total employment in only six years, according to the Organisation for sectors. This sends a clear signal to both local and foreign investors that Economic Cooperation and Development. the country has what it takes to attract and retain successful investments as diverse as medical devices, jewelry, cigar manufacturing, textiles, and The country is the world’s leading exporter of cigars, Latin America’s electric devices. second largest exporter of candles and cotton fabrics, third largest exporter of medical devices, largest supplier of electrical circuit President Abinader’s main commitment is to industrialization. On breakers and switches, fourth largest exporter of medical-surgical Oct. 28, two months into his administration, he enacted Decree 588-20 instruments, top-10 supplier of leather footwear, and third listing industrialization as a national priority. That action sent a largest supplier of wool coats to the United States, as well as clear signal his administration understands that increasing the an important exporter of jewelry and precious metals. competitiveness and productivity of the sector will generate a virtuous cycle of growth and opportunity for free zones, local The Dominican Republic’s strengths in terms of infrastructure and industry, and small and medium sized enterprises, all while generating air, logistics and maritime connectivity, a robust legal framework, quality jobs for Dominicans. Since August 2020, when Abinader was and excellent business climate, and tax incentives in free trade zones, sworn in, his economic strategy has reaped great rewards. The most tourism, film production, and renewable energies make it readily notable example comes from the free trade zone sector, which has available to foreign and domestic investors, guaranteeing legal boasted record export numbers and cemented itself as an certainty of their investments. important engine of the Dominican economy. The latest figures prove the economy continues to fire on all cylinders, reaching historical growth figures of 32.4% in March of this year. Víctor Bisonó Haza, Minister of Industry, Trade and SMEs “We are constantly changing, adjusting and improving as an investment destination. That has been the driving force behind the National Strategy for the Export of Modern Services, which aims to balance our export of goods with the export of services, while also fostering an environment for creativity and innovation in the Dominican Republic ; something that had never been done before. We, at the Ministry of Industry, Trade and SMEs, will continue to promote local and foreign investments in our country, with many success stories that confirm that the Dominican Republic is more than ready to enhance any investor’s competitiveness while facilitating its integration to regional value-chains.” – Minister of Industry, Commerce and SME - Victor. O. Bisonó

Sponsored Report ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA NEW YEAR, NEW AMBITIONS Antigua and Barbuda: the Caribbean multicultural paradise gets back to what it does best With the strictest health protocols and lowest infection rates on the planet, Antigua and Barbuda’s 365 pristine beaches welcome the discerning traveler with arms wide open Now that a partial end is in sight Aerial view of English Harbour, a natural harbor in the far south of Antigua to the global woes of the past year, people are returning to what Charles Fernandez ‘country of 365 beaches.’ Dotted still a formidable start. they know and love best: friends, Minister of Tourism and Investment with natural harbors and lagoons, “In terms of tourism,” Min- family, and beautiful foreign these are one of the reasons visi- climes. With record low cases in Vitamin D and sea and sand.” tors began flocking back to Anti- ister Fernandez told Prisma Re- 2020 and some of the most suc- gua and Barbuda toward the end ports, “we have been able to guar- cessful pandemic-response mea- Paradise regained of 2020. antee the safety of our visitors sures on the planet, the island The minister is not joking. and frontline personnel interact- paradise of Antigua and Barbuda Though its largest island, An- With direct flights from New ing with them.” In talks with ma- is not only open for business; it’s tigua, is merely a dozen miles York, London, Charlotte, Atlan- jor carriers, Antigua and Barbuda welcoming smart travelers and across, the island nation enjoys ta, Miami, and Montreal, North has also been working around remote workers who know how 100 miles of some of the Carib- Americans from across the east- the clock to become a regional to take advantage of a good thing bean’s most pristine beaches. ern seaboard can reach Antigua flight hub. Not only is the coun- when they see it. Not for nothing is it called the and Barbuda within 3-4 hours. try readier than ever to reopen; “We like to think we are very with the lowest crime rate in the With many office places now close to the United States,” says region, a very good climate, and a thing of the ancient past, all Minister Fernandez, addressing arguably the friendliest people, as around the world a new breed remote workers in particular. “If the minister reminds us, the rest of mobile employee is emerging: you had to go back for any rea- of the world is ready to get back the kind who sees the forest for son, it’s a short flight.” there, too. the trees. “Wherever you are,” says Minister of Tourism and For foreigners, the govern- “We could be entitled to brag Investment Charles Fernandez, ment’s extensive protocols have a bit in terms of tourism,” the “you are just a few minutes from maintained an ideal balance be- minister says. “We have one of a beach. You could go for a swim tween fun and safety. You can still the most modern airports in the on your break and return to work go snorkeling with sting rays and region.” And size matters, too. refreshed, having enjoyed some explore offshore islands, but only “We have managed to accom- through certified, Covid-compli- plish that thanks to the small size Top 10 reasons to visit Antigua and Barbuda ant operators. Moreover, every of our island. We are now putting 1 The country’s 95 miles of 5 Highest safety protocols: A&B Wherever you are, you are just a few minutes from a spectacularly pristine shoreline has been praised by the world’s beach. You could go for a swim on your break and return are greatly indented with beaches, leading public health organizations to work refreshed, having enjoyed some Vitamin D and lagoons, and natural harbors for its robust response sea and sand.” 2 The country’s 400-year-old 6 Lowest infection rates: only 5 Charles Fernandez, Minister of Tourism and Investment capital of St John’s is a delightful people died from Covid-19 in 2020 combination of cosmopolitan hotel — even on the luxury pri- the infrastructure in place to en- meets small-town charm 7 Regional air hub: the country is vate island of Jumby Bay — must sure that we have the most mod- fast attracting some of the Lesser abide by the strictest protocols. ern cruise port in the region,” he 3 Barbuda Lagoon: one of the Antilles’ best carriers Vaccinating the country’s popu- added. “We are just completing natural wonders of the Caribbean, lation of 100,000 should not be a our cargo port, which will also this majestic body of water hosts 8 Home to the friendliest people in terrible hurdle, either. It received be amongst the most modern.” one of the largest frigatebird the region 24,000 doses of AstraZeneca/ The government’s vision is for colonies in the world Oxford in early April through Antigua and Barbuda to become 9 The best climate: year-round COVAX and is expected to re- the beating heart and hub of the 4 Mount Obama: the country’s temperatures between 76-82 °F ceive thousands more by the end Caribbean. “All we need to do is highest point, this 1,300-foot of May. Though still shy of the put the ingredients in place,” said volcanic crater offers spectacular 10 The lowest crime rate in the mark for herd immunity, this is Fernandez. views of Antigua Caribbean

ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA NEW YEAR, NEW AMBITIONS Sponsored Report Investing in the © Danielle Jacobsen over the past year. In a welcome right kind of citizenship new addition, as Quinland-Don- ovan points out, the country Charmaine Quinland-Donovan, CEO, Citizenship by has also extended its list of de- Investment Unit, presents the country’s attractive pendents to include unmarried initiatives for investors seeking to open new doors siblings, grandchildren, and children up to the age of 30. Though the world has never visa-free travel to over 150 coun- Charmaine Quinland-Donovan Processing U.S. applications is been a fair place, the arc of the tries worldwide. “However,” CEO, Citizenship by Investment Unit a particularly seamless process, moral universe occasionally says Charmaine Quinland-Don- Antigua and Barbuda Quinland-Donovan told Prisma bends toward openness and ovan, “we go beyond simply is- Reports. “I don’t want to sound flexibility. None of us choose suing citizenship to individuals as the world’s leading Fortune cliché, but we really do live in a where we are born; but with An- in need of greater mobility. We 500 companies, citizenship in paradise. I invite Americans to tigua and Barbuda’s smart in- also have an obligation to the Antigua and Barbuda is as legal- come and do the same. We will vestment initiative, intrepid in- wider community of nations.” ly spotless as it is efficient and welcome you with both hands, dividuals and their families can desirable. “We have a number of readily, willingly, and warmly.” now gain access to the world’s Indeed, the country’s com- certified anti-money laundering 26th most beneficial passport. mitment to transparency, rig- and financial counter-terrorism Taken together, the pro- orous background checks, and professionals on staff,” says gramme is perfectly crafted for Though an increasing num- responsibility are central to its Quinland-Donovan. “I am one foresighted citizens of all na- ber of countries offer similar mission to drum up investment of them.” tions. Not only does it give peo- schemes, few come as close to and give individuals and their ple from the U.S. the opportu- satisfying the smart investor as families a new opportunity to do The initiative has also nity to set up shop somewhere Antigua and Barbuda’s. First business, travel, and even set up streamlined its application pro- with a robust and transparent launched in 2013, this para- shop in Antigua and Barbuda. cedures. By law required to pro- financial regime; it gives able in- disical island nation of 100,000 It is not a gift that’s given out cess every application within 90 dividuals from far less powerful now offers the full benefits of to just anyone, however. Em- days, it has averaged 8-10 weeks nations the chance to travel and Commonwealth citizenship and ploying the same due diligence do business, too. “The advent of these programmes provides flexibility and enhanced lifestyle choices that inevitably lead to happier and fuller lives and free- dom,” CEO Quinland-Donovan candidly told Prisma Reports. Tamarind Hills Development Fryres Beach, Antigua For further information please visit www.prisma-reports.com

Sponsored Report MALAWI SOUTHERN AFRICA’S NEXT INVESTMENT DESTINATION Can Lazarus lead his people to the promised land? Winner of one of Africa’s most celebrated elections in history, Lazarus Chakwera discusses his political and economic vision for the country Looking back, Malawi’s presi- nomic liberation.” But this po- dential election in June 2020 was one of the rare pieces of good litical-economic task falls on the news anywhere in the world that year. Not only did a diverse and shoulders of everyone, he right- inspiring coalition of nine parties come together under Lazarus ly stressed. There’s no sense in Chakwera to gain nearly 60% of the vote — a clear victory for the blaming the failures of the past people’s democratic will — but they did so amidst a backdrop of on those who lost the last elec- President Chakwera takes office with one of his country’s highest popularity ratings extreme political fragility. After the incumbent Peter Muthari- tion. Likewise, there can be no in decades ka, first elected in 2014, was accused of tampering with the progress in putting the burden results of presidential elections in May 2019 to win a second of growth on only those who transforms itself as quickly as This, say the American experts, term, citizens took to the streets en masse. won. This, he writes, is the es- possible from a rain-dependent makes mining far and away the Equally important, the consti- sence of ‘Tonse.’ country to one that can employ country’s most promising sector. tutional court held firm: despite suitcases of bribes, they an- Chakwera won on a colorful “irrigation schemes that guaran- But it is hardly the only with nulled the flawed elections and called for new ones. When that platform for governance that he tee year-round productivity,” the untapped potential. Blessed as was held 13 months later in June 2020, it produced the man of the calls the ‘Chakwera Super Hi- president recently told Prisma the country is “with wonderful people and the ‘Tonse Alliance,’ which President Lazarus Chak- 5’: Servant Leadership; Uniting Reports. “We do not just want to mountains, rivers, lakes, and wera calls his diverse coalition. Appropriately, this means ‘all Malawians; Prospering Togeth- be food sufficient as a nation,” he game,” the president says, not to of us together.’ Not for nothing did the Economist name Malawi er; Ending Corruption; and the stressed, “but to produce crops mention the world’s eighth-larg- its Country of the Year in 2020 — above New Zealand, which Rule of Law. Too vague, say its for export and equip the sector est lake and the Zomba Plateau, defeated the pandemic before it began, and the U.S., which de- critics; all too necessary, say its with value-adding industries.” one of Africa’s ten-most visited veloped a vaccine in record time before electing Joe Biden. places, the country has also huge Winning, as all democrats Malawi is the most robust and stable democracy in Africa tourism potential. “Therefore, know, is merely the first piece of and the best place to do business. We are geared for we want to attract foreign direct a much larger puzzle. Improved business with the rest of the world.” investment and public-private governance and faster growth partnerships in order to build the must come next. As President Chakwera himself wrote for the Lazarus Chakwera, President of Malawi tourism infrastructure. This will Brookings Institute earlier this year, “Malawi’s founders com- generate substantial income for pleted the task of national lib- eration in the 1960s, their sons Malawi and boost its economy,” and daughters achieved political liberation in the 1990s, and now backers. To achieve the foreign This is why particular empha- he told Prisma Reports. As part what remains is the goal of eco- direct investment the country sis is being laid on industries of its broader plan of increasing needs to prosper, this is a tem- that produce fertilizers and other the mining sector’s output from plate that is not only sufficient, inputs that help create agricul- less than 2% to at least 10% of says the president, but necessary tural products for export. GDP in coming years, Malawi too. Only then will he be able to is also seeking to exploit what say with sincerity that “Malawi is Mine the gap could be sizeable stores of ru- the most robust and stable de- The president’s second prior- bies, chromium, lead, zinc, po- mocracy in Africa and the best ity is developing the country’s tassium, and petroleum. place to do business,” the presi- mining industry. Accounting for A third source of opportunity dent wrote. 1% of GDP in 2017, the sector is energy. With a growing popu- For starters, this means im- is still overwhelmingly artisanal. lation of over 20 million — not proving the agricultural economy. This needn’t be the case, says to mention a median age of Not only does Malawi straddle President Chakwera, for the min- merely 17.2 years — only 10% Africa’s third-largest freshwater eral-rich country is thought to of Malawians have access to elec- lake (Lake Malawi); it also has possess considerable deposits of tricity. This, says the president, robust sugar, tea, and tobacco phosphates, bauxite, kaolinitic, makes energy “a potential invest- crops, with agriculture account- coal, kyanite, limestones, urani- ment portfolio worth billions.” ing for a third of GDP and 80% um, rare earths (including stron- Though the country’s rich sys- of exports. While over 38% of the tianite and monazite), graphite, tem of lakes and rivers mean its country’s landmass is arable, an- sulphides (such as pyrite and traditional source of energy has other 34% is forest. For a coun- pyrrhotite), and titanium, ac- been hydro, Chakwera is keen try that is also 80% rural, this is cording to researchers at the on welcoming investments in why it’s paramount that Malawi U.S. Department of Commerce. solar and wind, too. By boosting

MALAWI SOUTHERN AFRICA’S NEXT INVESTMENT DESTINATION Sponsored Report © Shutterstock: / T.Sahl © Shutterstock: / Gareth Zebron Over 500 elephants were released into the Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve in 2017 Monkey Bay sits on the southern shores of Lake Malawi southeast of Lilongwe industry as well as consump- an accepted way of life… but we President Chakwera is also well- and welcoming population. “We tion, energy investments would have declared war on corruption placed to strengthen the South- are a peace-loving and friendly have important knock-on effects and are enforcing the rule of law.” ern Africa Development Com- people,” Chakwera told Prisma for a wide variety of Malawian This means strengthening insti- munity (SADC), particularly Reports, “and we want to ensure products. tutions as much as rooting out since he is chairing it this year. that whoever comes here not bad practices. only feels at home but will truly “I look forward to having Stable and competitive be at home.” This is yet another great trade relations with our The government’s efforts are Also at the forefront of the coun- reason why the country seeks to neighbors,” President Chakwera already paying off. In addition to try’s efforts to spur investment boost its ties and technological told Prisma Reports. “We want being named the Country of the is the Malawi Investment and and knowledge transfers with to make sure that what Malawi Year by the Economist, in Octo- Trade Centre, established in the partners such as the U.S. “With produces can be sold to part- ber 2020 three of Malawi’s con- capital of Lilongwe to give inves- vast opportunities to learn from ners both near and far.” Beyond stitutional judges were awarded those that have much greater producing critical inputs such as experience in relevant fields,” he fertilizers, the best way to help The political leadership must have the political will to says, “We want people to have farmers reach (new) markets is have zero tolerance towards corruption, which is why we profitable businesses and help better infrastructure. “We aim to have declared war on corruption and are enforcing the Malawians eradicate their pover- rehabilitate the roads and the rail rule of law.” ty in order to take charge of the system, as well as building inter- nation’s path.” national airports and cities along Lazarus Chakwera, President of Malawi the lake,” Chakwera stressed. “Africa is a free trade area,” Landlocked by Mozambique, the prestigious Chatham House tors a one-stop shop to safely Chakwera reminds a world too Tanzania, and Zambia, better Prize for their role in ensuring and efficiently conduct all their often intent on looking inward. rail is particularly important, the integrity of the democratic business transactions. In addi- “We are geared for business especially given the costs of process in 2019-2020 — first by tion to project appraisals and site with the rest of the world.” But fuel imports by truck. This is annulling the results of a deeply identifications, the centre is also Malawi is interested in more why investments in infrastruc- flawed election, and second pav- responsible for all business per- than multilateralism, he says. ture are as welcome as they are ing the path for a stable and suc- mits, joint venture facilitation, “We want to encourage bilater- promising. cessful re-vote a year later, in the and local and foreign business re- alism, too — with Africans in midst of a global pandemic. tention, among others. “Since we our region, across the continent, A house built on rock are fighting corruption through and with the international com- But infrastructure and foreign Part of this institutional the rule of law,” reiterated the munity.” investment are only two parts strengthening hinges upon ties president, “we are confident that of the equation. As President forged at home and abroad with investors will see that their in- Young, bright, optimistic, Chakwera keeps emphasizing, both regional and global actors. vestments are safe here.” conscientious, and hard-work- huge steps are also being made Not only does Malawi enjoy an ing, investors could hardly ask to improve governance and root old and robust relationship with Chakwera likes to stress that for a better population to bet out corruption. “The political the U.S.; it is also forging closer Malawi’s countless intangible on. With a government bent on leadership must have the polit- ties with China and Israel — the benefits mustn’t be forgotten: in transparency, growth, and good ical will to have zero tolerance former of which built its par- addition to its incredible geog- governance — not to mention its towards corruption,” he told liament in 2010 — in addition raphy astride one of the world’s most popular in decades, both Prisma Reports. “Throughout to traditional allies such as the great waterways, the country home and abroad — the time our history, corruption has been U.K. and EU. Closer to home, also boasts a wonderful, warm, to invest in Malawi has never been better. For further information please visit www.prisma-reports.com

Age and the Agbayas One word perfectly captures the clash between Nigeria’s leaders and its booming young population. By Nosmot Gbadamosi A mid the global protests of 2020, describe an educated but selfish adult wielding power. a generation of young Nige- No other word so perfectly captures the clash between rians took to the streets out of frustration with the country’s Nigeria’s leadership and its booming young population. In the leadership. In August, tens of response to the #EndSARS protests, demonstrators saw a glar- thousands of protesters called ing example of elite indifference to ordinary suffering. “The for #RevolutionNow and in Nigerian [government] has turned its back against real issues October to #EndSARS, refer- of human security and become a full blown agbaya—running ring to the Special Anti-Robbery after citizens standing up for civic issues,” Ayo Sogunro, a Squad (SARS) police unit notorious for extrajudicial killings. writer, tweeted in the aftermath. An op-ed in Nigeria’s Guard- President Muhammadu Buhari responded with a violent ian newspaper argued that the “youth may understand how crackdown, deploying the military against the #EndSARS to lead more than those in power.” movement. At least 56 people were killed, and the authorities jailed protesters and froze activist leaders’ bank accounts. Around 70 percent of Nigerians are under the age of 35, but this isn’t reflected in government. Buhari, who entered The mass protests pitted Nigeria’s Generation Z against its office in 2015 after serving as a military head of state in the aging political elite. In August, a presidential aide dismissed 1980s, is 78—meaning he has lived more than 20 years lon- the activists for their supposed youthful inexperience. “A rev- ger than the average Nigerian. Legislators are also dispro- olution is always a mass thing, not a sprinkle of young boys portionately older. Few young people have the financial and girls,” he said. The comments led some people to label capital to run for office, and big donors prefer to back older the aide an agbaya, a Yoruba word that means “bad elder”— candidates. Although the age disparity between elected or an older person who acts like a child—and has come to officials and their constituents isn’t particular to Nigeria, putting older people in power is in line with local custom: 96 S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 Illustration by OSAZE AMADASUN

DECODER Nigerian elders are highly regarded for their wisdom. a short-term fix, and recipients have complained of delayed In Nigeria, it is frowned upon to address someone older payment. “These kinds of issues, they breed resentment and anger on the part of young people. There is so much inequal- by their first name, much less insult them. Until the end of ity, and there is no deliberate attempt on the part of the state military rule in the 1990s, the word agbaya was mostly used to bridge the gap,” Itodo said. among family members. Its derogatory use against political figures reflects the despair of Nigeria’s young generation, Meanwhile, Buhari’s administration has mounted other who have grown up amid a decade of violence and economic legislation to tamp down on youth dissent. A draft law would uncertainty. Lacking representation in government, they are give authorities arbitrary power to limit access to social media, now standing up to seek accountability from their leaders. calling for prison time for sharing so-called fake news. Youth advocates fear the government could use it as another arbitrary Nigeria’s population is on track to surpass the United States’ legal tool against activists. A second bill aims to combat hate by 2050, and there aren’t enough jobs to support this surge. speech, but rights organizations suspect it is directed at dissi- The coronavirus pandemic compounded successive gov- dents. The proposals have unleashed more criticism, with one ernments’ failures to invest in job creation. Rising poverty commenter comparing the government to an “agbaya tyrant and food inflation have exacerbated long-running security who snatches a social media toy from kids because he can.” problems: Boko Haram in the northeast, kidnapping for ran- som in the northwest, and separatists in the south. A 2018 Buhari reinforced this image in June, when he banned survey by the Pew Research Center found that 45 percent Twitter without legal backing. The move came after the of Nigerians planned to move abroad in the next five years. company deleted a tweet by the president that threatened secessionists in the southeast for violating its abusive behav- Fed up with this poor outlook, the young generation sees ior policy. “Many of those misbehaving today are too young older political elites as failing to live up to the sage ideal. “Nige- to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred ria is on its knees because some agbayas took public decisions during the Nigerian Civil War,” he wrote. “Those of us in the … not in the national or public interest,” said Samson Itodo, fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat the executive director of the Abuja-based Youth Initiative for them in the language they understand.” The threat of pros- Advocacy, Growth, and Advancement Africa, which promotes ecution didn’t keep young Nigerians from accessing Twitter youth participation in politics. Democratization and social via virtual private networks to call out the “agbaya adminis- media have enabled citizens to call out officials more brazenly. tration” for moving toward dictatorship. Many young people are disregarding tradition and instead demanding that Nigerian politicians must earn their respect. As young people’s anger against agbaya leaders grows, Nigeria’s political landscape is slowly shifting. A 2018 law THE #ENDSARS DEMONSTRATIONS, which erupted after a video reduced the age limit for presidential candidates from 40 showed police allegedly shooting and killing a man, were the to 35 and for representatives from 30 to 25. Youth candidacy most sustained in Nigeria since 1945. But the large crowds also increased by 63 percent between the 2015 and 2019 elections. illustrated sheer desperation. Looters found pandemic food Itodo, who led the campaign for the law, cites success sto- aid stockpiled in government warehouses and in politicians’ ries such as 29-year-old Cephas Dyako, elected in 2019 as a homes, eroding trust in the government. For the protesters, minority whip in the Benue State House of Assembly in the the misappropriated aid and the crackdown only reinforced central north. But in 2019 young people still made up fewer the image of Nigeria’s political leadership as agbayas: a bul- than 6 percent of elected candidates, even though 51 percent lying older elite unwilling to protect its citizens. of registered voters are between 18 and 35, according to Itodo. “This is not where we want to be,” he said. The protests forced the government to disband SARS, but that didn’t address the root causes of youth discontent. Oil Conditions for young people are only likely to get worse. revenue makes Nigeria Africa’s wealthiest economy, but tax The slump in oil prices caused by the pandemic triggered compliance is low, and the national income has stagnated Nigeria’s second recession since 2016, and government rev- since its peak in 2001. Young Nigerians find themselves enue has dwindled. Buhari continues to blame the youth for paying out of pocket for public services, while agbaya elites the economic troubles. “If they want jobs, they will behave misuse public revenue. As the coronavirus crisis worsened themselves,” he told a local news channel in June. The next last June, the government cut its education budget by 54 elections, in 2023, are still far away. But calls are growing for the percent and health care spending by 42 percent. president to resign. It was young Nigerians who led the coun- try to independence in 1960. The new generation’s discontent Lawmakers’ attempts to address the economic crisis have with agbaya leaders could usher in another era of reform. n only drawn criticism. In January, the government launched a job creation program for 774,000 young people—the biggest NOSMOT GBADAMOSI is a features journalist covering West in Nigeria’s history. But the job placements will only pay $49 Africa. a month, less than minimum wage. Critics say the program is 97F O R E I G N P O L I C Y.C O M

The Lionel Gelber Prize 2021 Winner Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis Yale University Press “Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis tell the gripping story of how economic policies have generated inequality both within and between states and created global tensions and political polarization. Trade Wars are Class Wars combines political and economic analysis with sharp history to argue that domestic policies that advantage the rich at the expense of workers produce not only strife at home but also deepen international rivalries. This book speaks powerfully and directly to one of the biggest challenges of our times.” — 2021 Lionel Gelber Prize Jury CALL FOR The call for submissions for the 2022 Lionel Gelber Prize is now open. SUBMISSIONS Deadline for submissions is October 31, 2021. For eligibility criteria please visit: www.munkschool.utoronto.ca/gelber