Politics and Governance

Due to the limited progress being made towards a peaceful solution to the conflict in Yemen, the country’s humanitarian outlook remains increasingly dire. This is evidenced in the 2018 Humanitarian Needs Overview for Yemen, published in December 2017 by the United Nation’s Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA). The international community estimates it requires USD 2.96 billion to address current humanitarian needs.

The dreadful situation partly reflects Yemen’s long-term weaknesses, which include an excessively steep population growth, poor employment prospects, inadequate water management,  and long standing intra- and international historical grievances. To that unfortunate list, the ongoing war between Houthi rebels and groups supporting Yemen's internationally recognised government has added layers of increased insecurity, severe damage to strategic infrastructure and public institutions, the loss of livelihoods as well as difficulties to obtain or finance much-needed vital commodities.

While the long-standing structural weaknesses cannot be removed overnight, a good number of the humanitarian challenges that Yemen currently faces are man-made and as such lend themselves as areas in which immediate to short-term actions can improve the humanitarian situation. These include the following:

• Increased food and water insecurity and the risk of famine: 60 percent of Yemen’s population is believed to be food insecure. The causes include supply disruptions due to import restrictions, transportation issues due to war and security issues, a lack of fuel, diminishing purchasing power due to inflation and the authorities’ inability to pay public salaries, as well as difficulties with financial transactions due to liquidity problems.  

• Spread of communicable diseases such as cholera and diphtheria. The lack of nutrition, clean drinking water and health care services has made Yemenis vulnerable to infectious diseases. Risk factors include a lack of public sanitation works, contaminated water and a scarcity of medicines, vaccines and fuel.

• Internal displacement due to fighting and insecurity. Since the onset of the conflict, a large number of internally displaced people (IDPs) has been added to the pre-existing mix of refugees and migrants. They need emergency shelter and access to vital food and health services, while social tensions between displaced people and host communities need to be contained.

• Collapsing public institutions and disruption of basic services: Foreign exchange reserves have decreased significantly, the local currency has lost value and public employees are owed back salaries. The (central) state lacks income due to an economic collapse and localization of tax receipts, while the politicization of neutral institutions such as the Central Bank has had additional negative effects.

The above-mentioned issues all come with their own specific elements to tackle. However, to generate positive momentum and immediate-to-short term impact, international donors and implementing agencies on the ground in Yemen should focus on the interlinkages between these issues and focus efforts around the following three areas of cooperative action:

• Enabling and improving access and distribution of vital goods throughout Yemen. This can be done by easing the flow of commercial goods and humanitarian aid through the port of Hodeidah, which would need to go hand-in-hand with increasing robust security guarantees through the UN Verification and Inspection Mechanism, minimizing delays for ships that have passed inspection and with repairing conflict-related damage to the port. In addition, international donors could directly sponsor and facilitate humanitarian airlifts as well as facilitate distribution via overland routes, including providing for mobile storage units and creating secured land corridors. Increasing the mobility of civilians enabling them to reach marketplaces is another seemingly logical – but high impact – measure.

• Stabilising Yemen’s financial system and ensuring indiscriminate basic service provision. To ease the effects on basic services stemming from a decrease in state income, currency depreciation and inflation rates, international donors can provide financial assistance supporting the payment of public sector salaries. In addition, donors are ideally placed to provide technical assistance to the Central Bank and other vital financial institutions, increasing liquidity in the financial system through cash injections, unfreezing assets or expanding cash-based assistance for basic goods. These are all measures that would help increase the populations’ purchasing power and overall liquidity in Yemen’s economy.

• Scaling up assistance and living up to aid pledges. Despite the 2 billion USD in humanitarian aid provided in 2017 and the 2 billion USD already pledged for 2018, the outlook for Yemen keeps deteriorating. The scaling up of aid should go hand-in-hand with attempts to improve the accountability and capacity of local authorities to absorb aid and work in close coordination with international donors to maximize  effectiveness and value. In this context, investments should also be made to help minimize bureaucratic hurdles, such as facilitating permits and negotiating local access, as well as by engaging in effective partnerships across donors and grass roots organizations on the ground at the community level.

When discussing the critical situation in Yemen, or any conflict, political will is the most important component. Long-term, all-encompassing solutions for Yemen’s humanitarian predicament are currently unavailable, and due to the country’s structural weaknesses, will remain unattainable for the foreseeable future. In addition,  for the above listed short-term initiatives intended to alleviate the suffering of the Yemeni people, the security situation will need to improve dramatically and parties to the conflict will need to agree on a sustainable political settlement that benefits all involved.

Bringing order to the country and alleviating the suffering of the Yemeni people are indeed a matter of political will. And for that political will to be found amongst the parties to the conflict, humanitarian-inspired actions need to be applied in tandem with increased security guarantees. If that combination can be found, the international community could quickly make a difference and help stave off a looming famine, contain the outbreak of a health and humanitarian disaster. Here, the onus falls on those global and regional powers able to significantly alter the dynamics at play in Yemen.

Dr. Saskia van Genugten is a Senior Research Fellow at the Emirates Diplomatic Academy. Follow her on Twitter at @svgen.

The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Emirates Diplomatic Academy, an autonomous federal entity, the UAE Government, or the EastWest Institute.

Photo: "Yemen" (CC BY-ND 2.0) by World Humanitarian Summit 2016

Ukraine is fighting wars on two fronts. While facing Russian aggression on its soil and separatists in the East, it wrestles with systemic corruption that impedes serious reform. Both constitute threats to its sovereignty, prosperity and its Euro-Atlantic aspirations. “It serves no purpose for Ukraine to fight for its body in Donbas if it loses its soul to corruption,” warned then U.S. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson during his visit to Ukraine last year.

The conflict in Donbas and the annexation of Crimea have had the positive unintended consequence of supporting nation building, and fostering a strong sense of Ukrainian national identity. On the flip side, weak governance, rampant corruption and a lopsided economy dominated by oligarchs undermine the clear choice of the Ukrainian people to integrate into a Western-European value-based system.

Since the Euromaidan protests in 2014, the reform process underway in Ukraine has been a rocky one. Of course, it is challenging over a short period of time to move on from the disastrous post-independence legacy of a quarter century of self-inflicted bad governance. Moving up a few ranks from the 142nd position in 2014 to the 130th place in 2017 in the ranks of Transparency International indices should be no reason for celebration.

Granted, Ukraine has made progress towards becoming a more functional state. The new electronic public procurement system has won international acclaim. Decentralization is succeeding, and energy sector reform has proven relatively effective, ensuring Ukraine is no longer purchasing natural gas directly from Russia. The new patrol police is more efficient and less corrupt. Also, progress has been made in introducing new legislation and new structures to curb corruption at local levels, but unfortunately these measures have been overshadowed by the less serious struggle against corruption in the higher levels.

As such, observers note the existence of a “dual state” in Ukraine, with the façade of official government institutions being restructured and a secondary oligarchic patronal structure, created in the 1990s, with outsized influence in politics and business—all operating in a fragile political context. The biggest challenge is the underlying architecture of governance, which has not changed much, allowing the existence of the basic preconditions for corruption to flourish.

The current scenario sees a struggle between reformists and post-soviet, corrupt governance leadership practices. Corruption is also being leveraged by Russia as a subversive weapon to bring Ukraine closer into its orbit, weaken resilience in the country, curtail the prospect of Euro-Atlantic integration and damage the image of Ukraine internationally.

At the Core, It’s About the Economy

Ukraine is the second poorest country in Europe, after Moldova, with about 2,500 USD per capita income in current prices in 2017. This is only 7 percent of the EU-28 average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita. While the Ukrainian economy returned to growth in 2017, the dire economic situation has led to a drop in living standards, exacerbating disparities and deepening inequality.

At the beginning of the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ukraine and Poland, two neighboring countries, with populations about the same size, had similar incomes. Today, the GDP per capita in Poland is 13,800 USD, five-times that of  Ukraine.

Ukraine’s economic growth model has been an extractive one, mainly dependent  on imports, driven on the exploitation of natural resources and public property, and on the artificial accumulation of financial capital. The large-scale privatization process of the state-owned enterprises has not been effective, favoring market monopolies and fueling widespread corruption. In absence of real structural reforms, the role of innovation in the economy is limited. In contrast, the shadow economy is significant, and sovereign debt is skyrocketing, reaching 75 percent of GDP in 2017 according to IMF data. All these challenges have seriously impaired economic competitiveness.

To foster economic development it is imperative to create a business friendly environment. Judiciary reforms, clear property rights, simplification of procedures and an effective fight against corruption are key. Such reforms are necessary to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), crucial for Ukraine’s sustainable development. Despite its strategic location and a market of 42 million consumers, Ukraine has attracted less than 75 USD per capita of new FDI in 2016.  

The benefits of FDI extend beyond capital, job creation and tax collection, to fostering productivity gains in the form of technological know-how, knowledge and managerial skills, access to foreign markets, increased competition and spillover effects for domestic firms. Unfortunately, Ukraine has a serious lack of absorptive capacities to attract and utilize FDI effectively.

A Compelling Narrative

There has been no lack of political, financial and human engagement on the part of Western countries in Ukraine. This is for good reason, as Europe is not stable without a stable Ukraine.

International donors have been throwing large amounts of money to finance the transformation in Ukraine. In 2014-2016, the U.S. provided more than 1.3 billion USD of foreign aid and three billion USD in loan guarantees to support the Ukrainian economy and defense. Since 2014, the EU has mobilized about 3.8 billion euro in macro-financial assistance through three consecutive programmes of low-interest loans, and more than 260 million euro in technical assistance, representing the highest amount ever made available by the EU to a third partner.

Since Euromaidan, there have been four key drivers for reforms in Ukraine: support from the international community; an active and engaged civil society; a small core of strong reform-minded political leaders (mainly women in the government and the parliament); and the Euro-Atlantic integration process.

Reforms in Ukraine are crucial to transform the country economically and politically, to allow Ukraine to improve its international image and rebrand itself with a new narrative different from the existing security consumer’s narrative.

The success of Ukraine is the success of the West. The internal situation in Ukraine should be a common strategic interest, and the West needs to remain united and have a comprehensive long-term strategy. This will only be realized once Ukraine weeds out corruption allowing it to get its house in order.

Dr. Valbona Zeneli is the director of the Black Sea and Eurasia Program at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DoD or its components.

Photo: "Flag" (CC BY 2.0) by Oleksii Leonov

I used to take the train every morning from my village, Lebring St. Margarethen, to the state capital of Styria, Graz, to attend high school in the late 1990s. Every weekday, for three years, a mustachioed major of the Austrian Army, wearing a green beret and carrying a dark brown leather briefcase, would board the train in neighboring Wildon.

One winter morning in 1997, I found myself in the same cabin with the major, a middle-age lawyer and two secretaries in their fifties sporting bleached perm haircuts. At some point, the four adults began chatting about the Austrian Army and debated whether Austria should maintain armed forces.

The major, uncomfortably put on the spot as the only military representative present, described in vivid detail, how the Austrian military during the so-called Slovenian Independence War in June–July of 1991, moved thousands of troops to the Austro-Slovenian border to prevent the fighting between Slovenian militia and the regular Yugoslav Army from spilling into Austria. (There had been multiple border violations and heavy fighting near a number of border crossings). The major at the time was part of the staff at corps headquarters in Graz, which was tasked with coordinating the military operation.

Read the full article on The National Interest.

Photo: "Austria Path Marker" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by flatcap2009

To many LGBT rights supporters who have been fighting for marriage equality, Taiwan’s May 2017 Constitutional Court decision to recognize same-sex unions as a fundamental right was a victory decades in the making. The ruling gave Taiwanese authorities two years to amend marriage laws or pass new legislation to recognize this new reality. While the question of how this legislative change should look remains unsettled, opponents of same-sex marriage submitted plebiscite proposals and took the issue to the Taiwan High Court to overturn the Constitutional Court’s ruling. With political pressure building as the landmark decision reaches its one-year mark, what might the future bring for same-sex couples in Taiwan? Rather than leaving it up to a patchwork of referendums that would compromise legislation, Taiwan should simply amend the Civil Code to best serve the rights of same-sex couples.

Despite the May 2017 ruling, the same-sex marriage debate continues to divide Taiwanese society. A coalition of conservative and pro-status quo groups recently submitted referendum proposals to the Central Election Commission (CEC), the agency responsible for managing elections. Their proposals ask the Taiwanese public if they agree that marriage should be defined as union between a man and a woman and if they support protecting the rights of same-sex couples through alternative unions, instead of marriages. A “yes” vote on either of these would expressly contradict the decision of the Constitutional Court. Their argument is that the public, as opposed to the court, should be the final arbiter of this important issue.

Read the full commentary in The Diplomat.

Photo: "2560px-Rainbow_flag_and_blue_skies" (CC BY 2.0) by suzannademey

China’s economic and energy security is inextricably tied to shipping routes across the Indian Ocean and through the Strait of Malacca, motivating a growing military and commercial footprint in the region, to the dismay of India, and concern of its competitors in the Western Pacific. But while China’s security incentives are understandable, the effects are fraught, as worried rivals begin to balance against it, and Beijing’s attempts to marginally diversify its energy routes increasingly expose it to partners’ internal instability.

China’s One Belt One Road initiative (OBOR) is an amorphous program to leverage trillions of dollars of government loans and state enterprise investments in infrastructure projects to link China with trading centers in south and central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and even into Europe. Along critical energy and trade routes through the Indian Ocean, China has or is building deep-water ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan; a military logistics base in Djibouti (and is seeking control over its ports); and an oil and gas pipeline in Myanmar.

Unable to pay down Chinese loans, Sri Lanka was forced to grant China a 99-year lease for control of its port at Hambantota last year, suggesting that China was using its OBOR initiative for “debt trap diplomacy.” After loading struggling economies with debt they cannot repay, China  leverages its role as creditor to coerce them into ceding control over strategically important ports, resources and commercial routes. In the Indian Ocean region, Djibouti, Pakistan (where it already took control of the port at Gwadar), and Maldives are the most exposed to OBOR-related debt.

Since the Chinese companies involved in the largest OBOR deals are almost always state-backed enterprises, there is concern that facilities that begin as commercial footholds could morph into military ones. Chinese naval deployments in the Indian Ocean have grown over the last several years and it appears to be building up capacity to conduct submarine operations in the region. India was deeply concerned earlier this year that China would use a domestic political crisis in Maldives to establish a military foothold, sparking a pseudo-naval standoff.

Overcoming China’s “Malacca Dilemma”

Driving China’s expanding naval footprint in the Indian Ocean and its emphasis on energy and shipping infrastructure is the vulnerability of its energy imports being dependent on a single chokepoint, the Strait of Malacca at the entrance to the South China Sea. Eighty percent of China’s oil imports come through this vital passage.

Major U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea also depend on the Malacca Strait and South China Sea routes for their energy imports. But a greater share of China’s energy imports travel these routes and, unlike Japan and South Korea, it cannot divert its energy shipments to alternate routes that bypass the region in the event the Strait of Malacca is disrupted.

The only way China can overcome this “Malacca Dilemma” is by building overland pipelines that it’s tankers can offload in the Indian Ocean and avoid going through the Strait altogether.

The first of these pipelines was a long-delayed project opened in Myanmar last year that allows tankers from Africa and the Middle East to offload oil at a terminal on Made Island in the Bay of Bengal, which is then piped across Myanmar to Kunming in China’s Yunnan province.

Another potential port and pipeline project in Bangladesh has thus far failed to make progress, but China has not given up on the venture.

In Pakistan, China had already been building a deep-water port and free-trade zone at the former fishing village of Gwadar, and just ahead of this year’s Boao Forum in Hainan, Pakistani and Chinese officials inked a memorandum of understanding to begin constructing a pipeline to join it with China’s Xinjiang Province.

Growing Strategic Exposure for Declining Advantage

China’s Indian Ocean pipelines may only ever have marginal effect on its Malacca Dilemma. Unless China can reverse the current trends and dramatically decrease its reliance on imported crude oil, the added pipelines will not have the capacity to decrease China’s dependence on the Strait of Malacca, only to slow the rate at which that dependence – and vulnerability – is expanding.

The Sino-Myanmar pipeline can transfer about 160 million barrels a year. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), China imports more than half of the crude oil it consumes, and eighty percent of that oil comes through the Strait of Malacca – almost two-and-a-half billion barrels a year. That means China’s Myanmar oil route can divert a little less than seven percent of the oil that normally arrives through the Strait. But the EIA also estimates that China’s annual oil consumption will continue to increase by around 2.6 percent for the next several decades. This year, that means an increase of over 110 million barrels. By 2030, the annual increase in demand will be greater than the static transmission capacity of the Myanmar pipeline.

This disparity suggests that additional pipelines cannot decrease China’s reliance on the Strait of Malacca as an energy route; a shipping disruption there would still be strategically and economically catastrophic. More problematic for China is buying this marginal energy security at the cost of new strategic exposure and risks by tying itself to the caprice and internal security of historically unstable countries like Pakistan and Myanmar, raising the question of whether China would intervene militarily inside the borders of its OBOR partners if its pipelines are threatened by internal strife.

China’s Geographic Challenge

Analysis of the aggregate military balance between India and China rests decisively in the latter’s favor, with China enjoying a three-to-one advantage in major warships and a nearly four-to-one advantage in attack submarines. But the presence of major U.S. and Japanese fleets in the Western Pacific means that the bulk of China’s navy will remain concentrated in its home waters. With few comparable extra-regional security obligations dividing its forces, it is much easier for India to maintain local superiority over Chinese ships deploying to the Indian Ocean which will lack easy logistical support, even with the proliferation of Chinese-controlled commercial ports.

Significant challenges to projecting power in the region would remain even if China is able to negotiate basing rights and access for its forces at some of the those commercial sites. While it might appear that a constellation of potential bases in Djibouti, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh would leave India surrounded, they are also geographically isolated with long lines of communication between them, making it easier for India to concentrate decisive forces to overwhelm sparsely distributed Chinese warships.

China’s expansion into the Indian Ocean is a logical attempt to mitigate its vulnerability to the shipping chokepoint at the Strait of Malacca, but it remains geographically disadvantaged against India, which views its spread with apprehension. This geographic challenge, in combination with the marginal additional energy security it stands to gain from its pipeline projects and the potential for new security obligations those projects could incur, may leave China with more serious problems than the one it set out to solve in the first place.

Steven Stashwick is a writer and analyst based in New York City. He spent 10 years on active duty as a U.S. naval officer with multiple deployments to the Western Pacific. He writes about maritime and security affairs in East Asia and serves in the U.S. Navy Reserve.

The views expressed in this post reflect those of the author and not that of the EastWest Institute.

Photo: "120105-N-JN612-226" (CC BY-NC 2.0) by U.S. Pacific Fleet

While the economic and military dimensions of U.S.-China relations continue to receive the lion’s share of public attention, the role of “soft power” in the relationship between Washington and Beijing should not be underestimated. Although the United States has always maintained its supremacy as a globalization pioneer, China is rapidly intensifying its soft power potential and promises to leave no stone unturned in glorifying its international appeal. The question, however, remains whether China’s impassioned soft power strategy radically challenges the United States’ international position, especially in light of the latter receding from its globalist role, or if the concept will potentially kindle a sense of mutual understanding toward a reshaping of the global order.

Soft power, a term first introduced by Harvard’s Joseph S. Nye Jr., is largely defined as the ability to shape other’s preferences. Since its inception, the concept quickly became recognized as an indispensable component of public diplomacy and strategic communications. The United States was one of the first countries to acknowledge the essence of soft power and utilize it to amplify its global influence, particularly via the Marshall Plan that earned immense international accolade. Over the decades, the United States has successfully tapped all sociocultural mediums, including its prestigious Ivy League education system and its rich multimedia portfolio, in establishing a sweeping universal appeal. American companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft further expanded the country’s outreach and presence, enabling clear inroads into the everyday lives of global citizenry.

Read the full commentary.

Photo: "China Town in Philadelphia" (CC BY-ND 2.0) by Ted Drake

On March 29-30, Dr. Lora Saalman moderated the workshop “The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road: Considering Security Implications,” in collaboration with Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

On the event, Dr. Saalman observed, “In spite of assertions as to the purely economic origins of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), interactions with Chinese experts reveal that there is a growing domestic recognition of its longer-term geopolitical and even security implications. Events in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean have become invariably entangled in discussions on the BRI’s maritime channels. Combined with the resurgence of the term ‘Indo-Pacific’ within the U.S. White House and the grouping of a Quadrilateral Security Dialogue consisting of India, Japan, Australia, and the United States, Chinese debates reveal concerns that  these powers seek to derail the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. Given these misgivings and the centrality of the BRI in China’s longer-term strategy, there has been a steady reduction in the number of channels for foreign entities to meaningfully interact with Chinese experts and officials on the means to mitigate risks and miscalculations along the BRI. This is one of the many reasons that this event was unique and timely.”

Read about the event in Chinese here.

Read about the event on Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung here.

Banner photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maritime_Silk_Road_Museum_of_Guangdong.jpg