Picture Michal Kosinski. Courtesy of Kosinski. By Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus. Aegean theatre of the Antique Greece was the place of astonishing revelations and intellectual excellence – a remarkable density and proximity, not surpassed up to our age. All we know about science, philosophy, sports, arts, culture and entertainment, stars and earth has been postulated, explored and examined then and there. Simply, it was a time and place of triumph of human consciousness, pure reasoning and sparkling thought. However, neither Euclid, Anaximander, Heraclites, Hippocrates (both of Chios, and of Cos), Socrates, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Democritus, Plato, Pythagoras, Diogenes, Aristotle, Empedocles, Conon, Eratosthenes nor any of dozens of other brilliant ancient Greek minds did ever refer by a word, by a single sentence to something which was their everyday life, something they saw literally on every corner along their entire lives. It was an immoral, unjust, notoriously brutal and oppressive slavery system that powered the Antique state. (Slaves have not been even attributed as humans, but rather as the ‘phonic tools/tools able to speak’.) This myopia, this absence of critical reference on the obvious and omnipresent is a historic message – highly disturbing, self-telling and quite a warning.” – notes Prof. Anis H. Bajrektarevic in his luminary book of 2013, ‘Is there like after Facebook? – Geopolitics of Technology’. Indeed, why do we constantly ignore massive and sustain harvesting of our personal data from the social networks, medical records, pay-cards, internet and smart phones as well as its commercialization and monetization for dubious ends and disturbing futures. Professor Bajrektarevic predicts and warns: “If humans hardly ever question fetishisation of their own McFB way of life, or oppose the (self-) trivialization, why then is the subsequent brutalization a surprise to them?” Thus, should we be really surprise with the Brexit vote, with the results of the US elections, and with the for coming massive wins of the right-wing parties all over Europe? Putin is behind it !! – how easy, and how misleading a self-denial.   Here is a story based on facts, if we are only interested to really grasp the Matrix world. The Iron Cage we constructed ourselves.   On November 9 at around 8.30 AM., Michal Kosinski woke up in the Hotel Sunnehus in Zurich. The 34-year-old researcher had come to give a lecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) about the dangers of Big Data and the digital revolution. Kosinski gives regular lectures on this topic all over the world. He is a leading expert in psychometrics, a data-driven sub-branch of psychology. When he turned on the TV that morning, he saw that the bombshell had exploded: contrary to forecasts by all leading statisticians, Donald J. Trump had been elected president of the United States. For a long time, Kosinski watched the Trump victory celebrations and the results coming in from each state. He had a hunch that the outcome of the election might have something to do with his research. Finally, he took a deep breath and turned off the TV. On the same day, a then little-known British company based in London sent out a press release: “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communication has played such an integral part in President-elect Trump’s extraordinary win,” Alexander James Ashburner Nix was quoted as saying. Nix is British, 41 years old, and CEO of Cambridge Analytica. He is always immaculately turned out in tailor-made suits and designer glasses, with his wavy blonde hair combed back from his forehead. His company wasn’t just integral to Trump’s online campaign, but to the UK’s Brexit campaign as well. Of these three players—reflective Kosinski, carefully groomed Nix and grinning Trump—one of them enabled the digital revolution, one of them executed it and one of them benefited from it. How dangerous is big data? Anyone who has not spent the last five years living on another planet will be familiar with the term Big Data. Big Data means, in essence, that everything we do, both on and offline, leaves digital traces. Every purchase we make with our cards, every search we type into Google, every movement we make when our mobile phone is in our pocket, every “like” is stored. Especially every “like.” For a long time, it was not entirely clear what use this data could have—except, perhaps, that we might find ads for high blood pressure remedies just after we’ve Googled “reduce blood pressure.” On November 9, it became clear that maybe much more is possible. The company behind Trump’s online campaign—the same company that had worked for Leave.EU in the very early stages of its “Brexit” campaign—was a Big Data company: Cambridge Analytica. To understand the outcome of the election—and how political communication might work in the future—we need to begin with a strange incident at Cambridge University in 2014, at Kosinski’s Psychometrics Center. Psychometrics, sometimes also called psychographics, focuses on measuring psychological traits, such as personality. In the 1980s, two teams of psychologists developed a model that sought to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the “Big Five.” These are: openness (how open you are to new experiences?), conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), extroversion (how sociable are you?), agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative you are?) and neuroticism (are you easily upset?). Based on these dimensions—they are also known as OCEAN, an acronym for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism—we can make a relatively accurate assessment of the kind of person in front of us. This includes their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. The “Big Five” has become the standard technique of psychometrics. But for a long time, the problem with this approach was data collection, because it involved filling out a complicated, highly personal questionnaire. Then came the Internet. And Facebook. And Kosinski. Michal Kosinski was a student in Warsaw when his life took a new direction in 2008. He was accepted by Cambridge University to do his PhD at the Psychometrics Centre, one of the oldest institutions of this kind worldwide. Kosinski joined fellow student David Stillwell (now a lecturer at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge) about a year after Stillwell had launched a little Facebook application in the days when the platform had not yet become the behemoth it is today. Their MyPersonality app enabled users to fill out different psychometric questionnaires, including a handful of psychological questions from the Big Five personality questionnaire (“I panic easily,” “I contradict others”). Based on the evaluation, users received a “personality profile”—individual Big Five values—and could opt-in to share their Facebook profile data with the researchers. Kosinski had expected a few dozen college friends to fill in the questionnaire, but before long, hundreds, thousands, then millions of people had revealed their innermost convictions. Suddenly, the two doctoral candidates owned the largest dataset combining psychometric scores with Facebook profiles ever to be collected. The approach that Kosinski and his colleagues developed over the next few years was actually quite simple. First, they provided test subjects with a questionnaire in the form of an online quiz. From their responses, the psychologists calculated the personal Big Five values of respondents. Kosinski’s team then compared the results with all sorts of other online data from the subjects: what they “liked,” shared or posted on Facebook, or what gender, age, place of residence they specified, for example. This enabled the researchers to connect the dots and make correlations. Remarkably reliable deductions could be drawn from simple online actions. For example, men who “liked” the cosmetics brand MAC were slightly more likely to be gay; one of the best indicators for heterosexuality was “liking” Wu-Tang Clan. Followers of Lady Gaga were most probably extroverts, while those who “liked” philosophy tended to be introverts. While each piece of such information is too weak to produce a reliable prediction, when tens, hundreds, or thousands of individual data points are combined, the resulting predictions become really accurate. Kosinski and his team tirelessly refined their models. In 2012, Kosinski proved that on the basis of an average of 68 Facebook “likes” by a user, it was possible to predict their skin color (with 95 percent accuracy), their sexual orientation (88 percent accuracy), and their affiliation to the Democratic or Republican party (85 percent). But it didn’t stop there. Intelligence, religious affiliation, as well as alcohol, cigarette and drug use, could all be determined. From the data it was even possible to deduce whether someone’s parents were divorced. The strength of their modeling was illustrated by how well it could predict a subject’s answers. Kosinski continued to work on the models incessantly: before long, he was able to evaluate a person better than the average work colleague, merely on the basis of ten Facebook “likes.” Seventy “likes” were enough to outdo what a person’s friends knew, 150 what their parents knew, and 300 “likes” what their partner knew. More “likes” could even surpass what a person thought they knew about themselves. On the day that Kosinski published these findings, he received two phone calls. The threat of a lawsuit and a job offer. Both from Facebook. Only weeks later Facebook “likes” became private by default. Before that, the default setting was that anyone on the internet could see your “likes.” But this was no obstacle to data collectors: while Kosinski always asked for the consent of Facebook users, many apps and online quizzes today require access to private data as a precondition for taking personality tests. (Anybody who wants to evaluate themselves based on their Facebook “likes” can do so on Kosinski’s website, and then compare their results to those of a classic Ocean questionnaire, like that of the Cambridge Psychometrics Center.) But it was not just about “likes” or even Facebook: Kosinski and his team could now ascribe Big Five values based purely on how many profile pictures a person has on Facebook, or how many contacts they have (a good indicator of extraversion). But we also reveal something about ourselves even when we’re not online. For example, the motion sensor on our phone reveals how quickly we move and how far we travel (this correlates with emotional instability). Our smartphone, Kosinski concluded, is a vast psychological questionnaire that we are constantly filling out, both consciously and unconsciously. Above all, however—and this is key—it also works in reverse: not only can psychological profiles be created from your data, but your data can also be used the other way round to search for specific profiles: all anxious fathers, all angry introverts, for example—or maybe even all undecided Democrats? Essentially, what Kosinski had invented was sort of a people search engine. He started to recognize the potential—but also the inherent danger—of his work. To him, the internet was a gift from heaven. What he really wanted was to give something back, to share. Data can be copied, so why shouldn’t everyone benefit from it? It was the spirit of Millenials, entire new generation, the beginning of a new era that transcended the limitations of the physical world. But what would happen, wondered Kosinski, if someone abused his people search engine to manipulate people? He began to add warnings to most of his scientific work. His approach, he warned, “could pose a threat to an individual’s well-being, freedom, or even life.” But no one seemed to grasp what he meant. Around this time, in early 2014, Kosinski was approached by a young assistant professor in the psychology department called Aleksandr Kogan. He said he was inquiring on behalf of a company that was interested in Kosinski’s method, and wanted to access the MyPersonality database. Kogan wasn’t at liberty to reveal for what purpose; he was bound to secrecy. At first, Kosinski and his team considered this offer, as it would mean a great deal of money for the institute, but then he hesitated. Finally, Kosinski remembers, Kogan revealed the name of the company: SCL, or Strategic Communication Laboratories. Kosinski Googled the company: “[We are] the premier election management agency,” says the company’s website. SCL provides marketing based on psychological modeling. One of its core focuses: Influencing elections. Influencing elections? Perturbed, Kosinski clicked through the pages. What kind of company was this? And what were these people planning? What Kosinski did not know at the time: SCL is the parent of a group of companies. Who exactly owns SCL and its diverse branches is unclear, thanks to a convoluted corporate structure, the type seen in the UK Companies House, the Panama Papers, and the Delaware company registry. Some of the SCL offshoots have been involved in elections from Ukraine to Nigeria, helped the Nepalese monarch against the Maoists, whereas others have developed methods to influence Eastern European and Afghan citizens for NATO. And, in 2013, SCL spun off a new company to participate in US elections: Cambridge Analytica. Kosinski knew nothing about all this, but he had a bad feeling. “The whole thing started to stink,” he recalls. On further investigation, he discovered that Aleksandr Kogan had secretly registered a company doing business with SCL. According to a December 2015 report in the Guardian and to internal company documents given to Das Magazin, it emerges that SCL learned about Kosinski’s method from Kogan. Kosinski came to suspect that Kogan’s company might have reproduced the Facebook “Likes”-based Big Five measurement tool in order to sell it to this election-influencing firm. He immediately broke off contact with Kogan and informed the director of the institute, sparking a complicated conflict within the university. The institute was worried about its reputation. Aleksandr Kogan then moved to Singapore, married, and changed his name to Dr. Spectre. Michal Kosinski finished his PhD, got a job offer from Stanford and moved to the US. Mr. Brexit All was quiet for about a year. Then, in November 2015, the more radical of the two Brexit campaigns, “Leave.EU,” supported by Nigel Farage, announced that it had commissioned a Big Data company to support its online campaign: Cambridge Analytica. The company’s core strength: innovative political marketing—microtargeting—by measuring people’s personality from their digital footprints, based on the OCEAN model. Now Kosinski received emails asking what he had to do with it—the words Cambridge, personality, and analytics immediately made many people think of Kosinski. It was the first time he had heard of the company, which borrowed its name, it said, from its first employees, researchers from the university. Horrified, he looked at the website. Was his methodology being used on a grand scale for political purposes? After the Brexit result, friends and acquaintances wrote to him: Just look at what you’ve done. Everywhere he went, Kosinski had to explain that he had nothing to do with this company. (It remains unclear how deeply Cambridge Analytica was involved in the Brexit campaign. Cambridge Analytica would not discuss such questions.) For a few months, things are relatively quiet. Then, on September 19, 2016, just over a month before the US elections, the guitar riffs of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” fill the dark-blue hall of New York’s Grand Hyatt hotel. The Concordia Summit is a kind of World Economic Forum in miniature. Decision-makers from all over the world have been invited, among them Swiss President Johann Schneider-Ammann. “Please welcome to the stage Alexander Nix, chief executive officer of Cambridge Analytica,” a smooth female voice announces. A slim man in a dark suit walks onto the stage. A hush falls. Many in attendance know that this is Trump’s new digital strategy man. (A video of the presentation was posted on YouTube.) A few weeks earlier, Trump had tweeted, somewhat cryptically, “Soon you’ll be calling me Mr. Brexit.” Political observers had indeed noticed some striking similarities between Trump’s agenda and that of the right-wing Brexit movement. But few had noticed the connection with Trump’s recent hiring of a marketing company named Cambridge Analytica. Up to this point, Trump’s digital campaign had consisted of more or less one person: Brad Parscale, a marketing entrepreneur and failed start-up founder who created a rudimentary website for Trump for $1,500. The 70-year-old Trump is not digitally savvy—there isn’t even a computer on his office desk. Trump doesn’t do emails, his personal assistant once revealed. She herself talked him into having a smartphone, from which he now tweets incessantly. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, relied heavily on the legacy of the first “social-media president,” Barack Obama. She had the address lists of the Democratic Party, worked with cutting-edge big data analysts from BlueLabs and received support from Google and DreamWorks. When it was announced in June 2016 that Trump had hired Cambridge Analytica, the establishment in Washington just turned up their noses. Foreign dudes in tailor-made suits who don’t understand the country and its people? Seriously? “It is my privilege to speak to you today about the power of Big Data and psychographics in the electoral process.” The logo of Cambridge Analytica— a brain composed of network nodes, like a map, appears behind Alexander Nix. “Only 18 months ago, Senator Cruz was one of the less popular candidates,” explains the blonde man in a cut-glass British accent, which puts Americans on edge the same way that a standard German accent can unsettle Swiss people. “Less than 40 percent of the population had heard of him,” another slide says. Cambridge Analytica had become involved in the US election campaign almost two years earlier, initially as a consultant for Republicans Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. Cruz—and later Trump—was funded primarily by the secretive US software billionaire Robert Mercer who, along with his daughter Rebekah, is reported to be the largest investor in Cambridge Analytica. “So how did he do this?” Up to now, explains Nix, election campaigns have been organized based on demographic concepts. “A really ridiculous idea. The idea that all women should receive the same message because of their gender—or all African Americans because of their race.” What Nix meant is that while other campaigners so far have relied on demographics, Cambridge Analytica was using psychometrics. Though this might be true, Cambridge Analytica’s role within Cruz’s campaign isn’t undisputed. In December 2015 the Cruz team credited their rising success to psychological use of data and analytics. In Advertising Age, a political client said the embedded Cambridge staff was “like an extra wheel,” but found their core product, Cambridge’s voter data modeling, still “excellent.” The campaign would pay the company at least $5.8 million to help identify voters in the Iowa caucuses, which Cruz won, before dropping out of the race in May. Nix clicks to the next slide: five different faces, each face corresponding to a personality profile. It is the Big Five or OCEAN Model. “At Cambridge,” he said, “we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.” The hall is captivated. According to Nix, the success of Cambridge Analytica’s marketing is based on a combination of three elements: behavioral science using the OCEAN Model, Big Data analysis, and ad targeting. Ad targeting is personalized advertising, aligned as accurately as possible to the personality of an individual consumer. Nix candidly explains how his company does this. First, Cambridge Analytica buys personal data from a range of different sources, like land registries, automotive data, shopping data, bonus cards, club memberships, what magazines you read, what churches you attend. Nix displays the logos of globally active data brokers like Acxiom and Experian—in the US, almost all personal data is for sale. For example, if you want to know where Jewish women live, you can simply buy this information, phone numbers included. Now Cambridge Analytica aggregates this data with the electoral rolls of the Republican party and online data and calculates a Big Five personality profile. Digital footprints suddenly become real people with fears, needs, interests, and residential addresses. The methodology looks quite similar to the one that Michal Kosinski once developed. Cambridge Analytica also uses, Nix told us, “surveys on social media” and Facebook data. And the company does exactly what Kosinski warned of: “We have profiled the personality of every adult in the United States of America—220 million people,” Nix boasts. He opens the screenshot. “This is a data dashboard that we prepared for the Cruz campaign.” A digital control center appears. On the left are diagrams; on the right, a map of Iowa, where Cruz won a surprisingly large number of votes in the primary. And on the map, there are hundreds of thousands of small red and blue dots. Nix narrows down the criteria: “Republicans”—the blue dots disappear; “not yet convinced“—more dots disappear; “male”, and so on. Finally, only one name remains, including age, address, interests, personality and political inclination. How does Cambridge Analytica now target this person with an appropriate political message? Nix shows how psychographically categorized voters can be differently addressed, based on the example of gun rights, the 2nd Amendment: “For a highly neurotic and conscientious audience the threat of a burglary—and the insurance policy of a gun.” An image on the left shows the hand of an intruder smashing a window. The right side shows a man and a child standing in a field at sunset, both holding guns, clearly shooting ducks: “Conversely, for a closed and agreeable audience. People who care about tradition, and habits, and family.” How to keep Clinton voters away from the ballot box Trump’s striking inconsistencies, his much-criticized fickleness, and the resulting array of contradictory messages, suddenly turned out to be his great asset: a different message for every voter. The notion that Trump acted like a perfectly opportunistic algorithm following audience reactions is something the mathematician Cathy O’Neil observed in August 2016. “Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix remembers. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team tested 175,000 different ad variations for his arguments, in order to find the right versions above all via Facebook. The messages differed for the most part only in microscopic details, in order to target the recipients in the optimal psychological way: different headings, colors, captions, with a photo or video. This fine-tuning reaches all the way down to the smallest groups, Nix explained in an interview with us. “We can address villages or apartment blocks in a targeted way. Even individuals.” In the Miami district of Little Haiti, for instance, Trump’s campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. This was one of the goals: to keep potential Clinton voters (which include wavering left-wingers, African-Americans, and young women) away from the ballot box, to “suppress” their vote, as one senior campaign official told Bloomberg in the weeks before the election. These “dark posts”—sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles—included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example. Nix finishes his lecture at the Concordia Summit by stating that traditional blanketMy children will certainly never, ever understand this concept of mass communication.” And before  advertising is dead. “My children will certainly never, ever understand this concept of mass communication.” And before leaving the stage, he announced that since Cruz had left the race, the company was helping one of the remaining presidential candidates. Just how precisely the American population was being targeted by Trump’s digital troops at that moment was not visible, because they attacked less on mainstream TV and more with personalized messages on social media or digital TV. And while the Clinton team thought it was in the lead, based on demographic projections, Bloomberg journalist Sasha Issenberg was surprised to note on a visit to San Antonio—where Trump’s digital campaign was based—that a “second headquarters” was being created. The embedded Cambridge Analytica team, apparently only a dozen people, received $100,000 from Trump in July, $250,000 in August, and $5 million in September. According to Nix, the company earned over $15 million overall. (The company is incorporated in the US, where laws regarding the release of personal data are more lax than in European Union countries. Whereas European privacy laws require a person to “opt in” to a release of data, those in the US permit data to be released unless a user “opts out.”) The measures were radical: From July 2016, Trump’s canvassers were provided with an app with which they could identify the political views and personality types of the inhabitants of a house. It was the same app provider used by Brexit campaigners. Trump’s people only rang at the doors of houses that the app rated as receptive to his messages. The canvassers came prepared with guidelines for conversations tailored to the personality type of the resident. In turn, the canvassers fed the reactions into the app, and the new data flowed back to the dashboards of the Trump campaign. Again, this is nothing new. The Democrats did similar things, but there is no evidence that they relied on psychometric profiling. Cambridge Analytica, however, divided the US population into 32 personality types, and focused on just 17 states. And just as Kosinski had established that men who like MAC cosmetics are slightly more likely to be gay, the company discovered that a preference for cars made in the US was a great indication of a potential Trump voter. Among other things, these findings now showed Trump which messages worked best and where. The decision to focus on Michigan and Wisconsin in the final weeks of the campaign was made on the basis of data analysis. The candidate became the instrument for implementing a big data model. What’s Next? But to what extent did psychometric methods influence the outcome of the election? When asked, Cambridge Analytica was unwilling to provide any proof of the effectiveness of its campaign. And it is quite possible that the question is impossible to answer. And yet there are clues: There is the fact of the surprising rise of Ted Cruz during the primaries. Also there was an increased number of voters in rural areas. There was the decline in the number of African-American early votes. The fact that Trump spent so little money may also be explained by the effectiveness of personality-based advertising. As does the fact that he invested far more in digital than TV campaigning compared to Hillary Clinton. Facebook proved to be the ultimate weapon and the best election campaigner, as Nix explained, and as comments by several core Trump campaigners demonstrate. Many voices have claimed that the statisticians lost the election because their predictions were so off the mark. But what if statisticians in fact helped win the election—but only those who were using the new method? It is an irony of history that Trump, who often grumbled about scientific research, used a highly scientific approach in his campaign. Another big winner is Cambridge Analytica. Its board member Steve Bannon, former executive chair of the right-wing online newspaper Breitbart News, has been appointed as Donald Trump’s senior counselor and chief strategist. Whilst Cambridge Analytica is not willing to comment on alleged ongoing talks with UK Prime Minister Theresa May, Alexander Nix claims that he is building up his client base worldwide, and that he has received inquiries from Switzerland, Germany, and Australia. His company is currently touring European conferences showcasing their success in the United States. This year three core countries of the EU are facing elections with resurgent populist parties: France, Holland and Germany. The electoral successes come at an opportune time, as the company is readying for a push into commercial advertising. —————– Kosinski has observed all of this from his office at Stanford. Following the US election, the university is in turmoil. Kosinski is responding to developments with the sharpest weapon available to a researcher: a scientific analysis. Together with his research colleague Sandra Matz, he has conducted a series of tests, which will soon be published. The initial results are alarming: The study shows the effectiveness of personality targeting by showing that marketers can attract up to 63 percent more clicks and up to 1,400 more conversions in real-life advertising campaigns on Facebook when matching products and marketing messages to consumers’ personality characteristics. They further demonstrate the scalability of personality targeting by showing that the majority of Facebook Pages promoting products or brands are affected by personality and that large numbers of consumers can be accurately targeted based on a single Facebook Page. In a statement after the German publication of this article, a Cambridge Analytica spokesperson said, “Cambridge Analytica does not use data from Facebook. It has had no dealings with Dr. Michal Kosinski. It does not subcontract research. It does not use the same methodology. Psychographics was hardly used at all. Cambridge Analytica did not engage in efforts to discourage any Americans from casting their vote in the presidential election. Its efforts were solely directed towards increasing the number of voters in the election.” The world has been turned upside down. Great Britain is leaving the EU, Donald Trump is president of the United States of America. And in Stanford, Kosinski, who wanted to warn against the danger of using psychological targeting in a political setting, is once again receiving accusatory emails. “No,” says Kosinski, quietly and shaking his head. “This is not my fault. I did not build the bomb. I only showed that it exists.” About authors: Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus are investigative journalists attached to the Swiss-based Das Magazin specialized journal.  The original text appeared in the late December edition under the title: “I only showed that the bomb exists” (Ich habe nur gezeigt, dass es die Bombe gibt).

This, English translation, is based on the subsequent January version, first published by the Motherboard magazine (titled: The Data That Turned the World Upside Down) Approved, present is the advanced version of the original Zurich text for the MD. Additional research for this report was provided by Paul-Olivier Dehaye.    

By Barend ter Haar. The centerpiece of Dutch foreign policy has been to promote an international order composed of security alliances, international institutions, and economic openness. The Netherlands chose to define its national interests broadly, not narrowly, and to help build and maintain this order out of a conviction that it both served its long-term interests and the interests of most other states. In 2017, for the first time, the Dutch people might give most votes to a politician who is highly critical of this international order. Foreign policy was not the dominant issue in the election but the popularity of Mr. Wilders demonstrates, like the Ukraine referendum did last year, that many Dutchmen believe they are not beneficiaries of the existing international order. They worry that the Netherlands has lost sight of the national interest. A significant number believe globalization benefits elites at the expense of ordinary Dutchmen. Should the Netherlands therefore no longer prioritize sustaining an international order and instead pursue a narrower, more nationalist approach to foreign policy? We believe that abandoning traditional Dutch support for the international order would be a serious strategic error that would leave the Netherlands weaker and poorer, and the world more dangerous. The best-case outcome would be a spheres of influence system whereby Russia dominates much of Eastern and Central Europe, and the United States is preeminent in its own hemisphere and possibly Western Europe. Russia would have a veto over all major issues of European security. It would also like to weaken the European Union and have it reduced to a customs union with no coherent foreign and security policy, including the exercise of economic power. The greatest strategic threat is that this deterioration will accelerate and worsen, resulting in a fundamental shift away from democracy, cooperation and prosperity and toward nationalism, isolationism and economic stagnation. The Netherlands should encourage its European allies to find a way of keeping Britain formally and fully engaged in these issues, possibly by creating an “EU Plus One” process whereby Britain would continue to sit on the EU’s Political and Security Committee. The Netherlands should also take steps to increase the net levels of international cooperation to tackle shared problems, like climate change, pandemic disease, and economic volatility. This means working within existing multilateral institutions, like the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Paris climate accord, and the United Nations. The United Nations is not perfect and needs reform, but this can best be accomplished through constructive engagement. Stop, I should not fool you. The text above is not mine, but consists of almost direct quotes from Building “Situations of Strength” A National Security Strategy for the United States[1]. The most substantive changes I made are the replacement of United States by Netherlands and President Trump by Mr. Wilders and a reference to the Ukraine referendum. The quotes illustrate how similar both countries are, despite the big differences in size, position and political system. Both have during many decennia invested a lot in international cooperation, convinced that international security and prosperity are the best way to ensure national security and prosperity. Both are now confronted with political movements that threaten to replace international cooperation by antagonistic nationalism. [1] Published last month by Brookings: https://www.brookings.edu/research/building-situations-of-strength/

By Jhr. Alexander W. Beelaerts van Blokland LL.M. On Wednesday March 15th 2017 the Dutch will elect a new Parliament, for the first time since 2012. In the recent weeks many foreign diplomats, judges and other expats frequently asked me about it. I noticed a lot of misunderstandings about these elections. I will mention some of them now. No, the Dutch do not elect both parts of our parliament, but only the 150 members of the House of Representatives (the so called ‘Tweede Kamer’, the Second Chamber). The Senate (the so called ‘Eerste Kamer’, the First Chamber) will be elected in another year and not directly by the people but via indirect elections:  by the members of the so called ‘Provinciale Staten’, the counsillors of the twelve provinces, who themselves are elected directly by the people. No, the Dutch do not elect a Prime Minister. We vote for a party, most people vote for the number one of a party on the list, but one can vote for another person of that list as well. If that party receives for instance ten times the votes a party needs for one seat, the first ten persons of that list will be elected, but it can happen that a person lower on the list gets so many so called preferential votes that he or she will be elected directly in stead of the –in my example- number ten of the list. We have many parties. Never in our history one party won the majority of 50 % plus one or more. In the polls the two leading parties both have less than twenty percent of the voters at this moment, three weeks before the elections. No, the leader of the winning party will not become automatically the Prime Minister. In most cases that leader will try to form a government together with other parties. Together they seek (but that is not obligatory) at least 76 seats in the new Tweede Kamer and a majority in the Senate as well. Although normally the leader of the winning party will become after some months the new Prime Minister, in recent history it happened that the number two in the elections (1977, Mr van Agt) or even the number four (1971, Mr Biesheuvel) became Prime Minister. The government of this moment has only two parties, but that is an exception. Most people expect a coalition of at least four or five parties later this year. No, when the elections do bring another party into power, that does not have as a consequence that Dutch ambassadors, prosecutors, judges etcetera will be replaced by others. Judges have been even nominated for life, nevertheless they will have to retire at the age of seventy. In my case: next year. ——– About the author: Jhr. Alexander W. Beelaerts van Blokland LL.M. is Justice (Judge) in the (Dutch) Court of Appeal and was appointed Special Advisor International Affairs by the Mayor and Aldermen of The Hague. a.beelaerts@planet.nl    

Multiculturalism is dead? Not quite yet. Recalibrate expectations and travel beyond Europe.   By Alessio Stilo.   Multicultural approaches and policies vary widely all over the world, ranging from the advocacy of equal respect to the various cultures in a society, to a policy of promoting the maintenance of cultural diversity, to policies in which people of various ethnic and religious groups are addressed by the authorities as defined by the group to which they belong. Two different strategies, as recently pointed out by Ms. Camilla Habsburg-Lothringen, have been developed through different government policies and strategies: The first, often labelled as interculturalism, focuses on interaction and communication between different cultures. The second one, cohabitative multi-culti does center itself on diversity and cultural uniqueness; it sees cultural isolation as a protection of uniqueness of the local culture of a nation or area and also a contribution to global cultural diversity. A sort of “third way” between the two above-mentioned strategies has been traditioned and further enhanced by core Asian counties, e.g. Azerbaijan, where state policy has been accompanied, in a complementary way, to a certain activism of intermediate bodies (civil society, universities, think tanks). Multiculturalism is a state policy of Azerbaijan and it has become a way of life of the republic ensuring mutual understanding and respect for all identities. The year 2016 has been declared the Year of Multiculturalism in Azerbaijan, as stated by President Ilham Aliyev on January 10. This decision was made taking into account the fact that Azerbaijan brings an important contribution to the traditions of tolerance and intercivilization dialogue. Its peculiar location between Eastern Europe and Western Asia and its sociopolitical context – where people of various religions and ethnicities have lived together in mutual respect – have allowed Azerbaijan to adopt a multicultural-led agenda as a strategic tool of foreign policy. Despite challenges due to the instability of the area and unresolved armed conflict with neighboring Armenia for the control of Nagorno-Karabakh, Baku has made an effort to create and foster the necessary political and social conditions for developing and strengthening the country’s traditions of multiculturalism and tolerance. From a historical perspective, representatives of many ethnic and religious groups have lived together with Azerbaijanis since the era of the Safavids’ empire and during the XIX-XX centuries, including the period of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic incorporated into the Soviet Union. Today Azerbaijan, a country which established the first secular democracy in the Muslim world in 1918 and offered women the right to vote in 1919, acts as a model for peaceful coexistence of members of different cultures. It hosts one of the oldest mosques in the world, in the city of Shamakhi, dating from 743, and also one of the oldest Christian churches, an Armenian church from the 12-13 century. Not to mention one of the oldest churches in the Caucasus near the city of Sheki – the Church of Caucasian Albania, and a Zoroastrian temple, a temple of fire worshipers, not far from Baku. Azerbaijan has been inhabited by representatives of different religions and cultures throughout history, demonstrating a deep heritage of coexistence among different religions. Indeed, currently there are more than 649 registered religious communities in the Republic of Azerbaijan, among which 37 are non-Islamic. It has 13 functioning churches. The building of the Jen Mironosets Church (built by Hadji Zeynalabdin Tagiyev in 1907) was granted to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1991. Aleksi II, Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’, who was on a visit in Azerbaijan in May 2001, granted the status of church to this temple. Currently there are three Russian Orthodox Churches in Baku, one in Gandja and one in Khachmaz. The Catholic community was registered in Azerbaijan in 1999. A special building for the conduction of religious ceremonies was purchased for the community and it became a church in 2000. According to the agreement between the Azerbaijani Government and Vatican, the Roman Catholic Church has been constructed in 2007 in Baku. It is more than 2500 years that the Jews have settled in Azerbaijan, never suffering religious intolerance or discrimination; currently six Jewish religious communities are registered and seven synagogues are functioning. Azerbaijan contributes also to the world heritage. Restoration of Roman catacombs, Strasbourg Cathedral Church, ancient masterpieces in Versailles (Paris), Capitolini Museum (Roma), Louvre Museum (Paris), Trapezitsa Museum (Bulgaria) etc. by Heydar Aliyev Foundation are typical example of these contribution. Development of multiculturalism and tolerance at the level of State policy in Azerbaijan is based on ancient history of statehood of the country and on development of these traditions. Nowadays, thanks to efforts of the government, this political behavior has acquired a form of ideology of statehood and political practice (state policy), whereas the political bases of these concepts have found their reflection in relevant clauses of articles of the Constitution, legal acts, decrees and orders. Regarding one of the facets of this conception – religious freedom – it is also worth noting that article 48 of Azerbaijani Constitution ensures the liberty of worship, to choose any faith, or to not practice any religion, and to express one’s view on the religion. Moreover, the law of the Republic of Azerbaijan (1992) “On freedom of faith” ensures the right of any human being to determine and express his view on religion and to execute this right. According to paragraphs 1-3 of Article 18 of the Constitution the religion acts separately from the government, each religion is equal before the law and the propaganda of religions, abating human personality and contradicting to the principles of humanism is prohibited. The above-mentioned laws make Azerbaijan a modern de jure secular state, as well as de facto. As a consequence of this public support, expressed through material and financial assistance from the budget of Country and Presidential foundation, there are dozens of national-cultural centers functioning at present. They include “Commonwealth” society, Russian community, Slavic cultural center, Azerbaijani-Israeli community, Ukrainian community, Kurdish cultural center “Ronai”, Lezgin national center “Samur”, Azerbaijani-Slavic culture center, Tat cultural center, Azerbaijani-Tatar community, Tatar culture society “Tugan-tel”, Tatar cultural center “Yashlyg”, Crimean Tatars society “Crimea”, Georgian community, humanitarian society of Azerbaijani Georgians, Ingiloyan community, Chechen cultural center, “Vatan” society of Akhyska-Turks, “Sona” society of the women of Akhyska-Turks, Talysh cultural center, Avar society, mountain Jews community, European Jews (Ashkenazi) community, Georgian Jews community, Jewish women humanitarian association, German cultural society “Kapelhaus”, Udin cultural center, Polish cultural center “Polonia”, “Mada” International Talysh Association, “Avesta” Talysh Association, Udin “Orain” Cultural Center, “Budug” Cultural Center, Tsakhur Cultural Center. Not to mention the club-based amateur societies, national and state theatres, amateur associations and interest-focused clubs in areas with compact minority populations. The State also supports dozens of magazines, newspapers, radio and television programs which are expression of language minorities. Declaration of the Year of Multiculturalism in Azerbaijan took place against the backdrop of religiously motivated ethnic conflicts in the Middle East. This kind of State-led multiculturalism, which could be considered as a form of soft power, is intended to be introduced as a model of multiculturalism elsewhere, especially to states and societies of the Middle East, where radicalism has spread rapidly over the last 20 years. In recent years Baku has hosted numerous international events, starting from the Baku International Humanitarian Forum. The capital of Azerbaijan has hosted this Forum since 2011, which aims to build an authoritative international platform for world scientists and culture figures as well as acclaimed experts to discuss pressing global humanitarian challenges. The Baku International Humanitarian Forum is attended by well-known statesmen, public figures and prominent scientists, including 13 Nobel Prize winners, as well as journalists, representatives of non-governmental organizations and other distinguished guests. Since 2011 Baku has hosted the World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue, in partnership with UNAOC, UNESCO, UN World Tourism Organization, Council of Europe and ISESCO. Through this initiative known as “Baku process”, Azerbaijan acknowledges the power of intercultural dialogue and the possibility to create the conditions for positive intercultural and inclusive relations. At the same time, hosting the first ever European Games in 2015, Azerbaijan will conduct the Islamic Solidarity Games in 2017. This year Baku has hosted the 7th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (April 25-27), which aims to reach a more peaceful and socially inclusive world, by building mutual respect among people of different cultural and religious identities, and highlighting the will of the world’s majority to reject extremism and embrace diversity. With the same purpose, in 2014 was established the Baku International Multiculturalism Center, aimed to preserve ethnic, religious and cultural diversity of the country. It has also been created to introduce Azerbaijan as a centre of multiculturalism to the world, and carried out research into and promoted existing multicultural models of the world. One of the mainstream projects of the Centre is promoting a special University course entitled “Azerbaijani multiculturalism” at local and foreign universities. The promoters already managed to incorporate this course into the teaching programs of some top ranked universities (Sapienza University in Rome, Charles University in Prague, Fribourg University in Switzerland) across Europe, as well as in Russia, Georgia and in Indonesia. The Center has also initiated the publication of a series of books under the title “Sources of Azerbaijani Multiculturalism”. Within the framework of the Year of Multiculturalism, Baku International Multiculturalism Centre launched the Summer School and Winter School programs every year for students and researches interested in enhancing and deepening their knowledge in this issue (theoretical and practical knowledge), and explore new topics regarding Azerbaijani multiculturalism. In a recent visit to Baku (October 2016), Pope Francis  praised Azerbaijan as a place of religious tolerance after meeting with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and after a private meeting with Sheikh ul-Islam, the region’s grand mufti, before the two men held an interreligious meeting at the country’s largest mosque with Orthodox Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders. A significant activism of civil society in this issue is also demonstrated by many initiatives and projects created by Azerbaijani think tanks and academic groups. One of the most interesting and relevant is the International Multicultural Network (IMN) founded and headed by Dr. Khayala Mammadova, which is “an online presence to connect researchers and practitioners with an interest in multiculturalism, aimed at promoting and disseminating research on the multifaceted multicultural agenda and for comprised of scholars, state and community actors specialising in the fields of multiculturalism, intercultural and interreligious relations across diverse disciplines and geographical regions”. It connects researchers from all ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Likewise, it appoints Country Representatives, and promotes publications (books, journal articles, research reports), discussions and events in order to advise, educate and inform on subjects related to multiculturalism and cultural diversity. We can mention, among the most significant international partners of the International Multicultural Network, “The Prisma – The Multicultural Newspaper”, a London-based newspaper which “works for the elimination of racial and cultural prejudices, and is committed to social justice and equality of opportunity”, and is aimed at promoting and defending these values of the multicultural society of the UK, especially in the case of Latin Americans. Using its peculiar way to multiculturalism as a strategic tool of foreign policy and defending itself from religious and political extremism, Azerbaijan represents a country’s success story that could give Europe a contribution in its difficult approach to this issue. Multiculturalism is a divisive subject of debate in almost all European nations that are associated with a single, national cultural ethos. As the latest datas confirm, European Union is facing unprecedented demographic changes (ageing population, low birth rates, changing family structures and migration) which are likely to change the internal structure of its member states over the next 50 years. Despite Europe has always been a mixture of different cultures, unified by the super-position of Imperial Roman Christianity, the ideology of nationalism (XIX-XX century) transformed the way Europeans thought about theirselves and the state. The new nation-states sprang up on the principle that each nation is entitled to its own sovereignty and to engender, protect, and preserve its own unique culture and history. Social unity, according to this ideology, is seen as an essential feature of the nation, understood as unity of descent, unity of culture, unity of language, and often unity of religion. The European nation-state, at least until the mid-twentieth century, constitutes a culturally homogeneous society, although some national movements recognizes regional differences. Bearing in mind this context, during the latest decades some of the European countries – especially France – have tried to culturally assimilate the regional minorities, or any other ethnic/linguistic/religious group different from the national majority, while ensuring them every individual and group right. Nevertheless, after the economic crisis of 2007-2008 and the increasing of migration resulting from riots and civil wars within the Arab-Islamic world, criticism of multiculturalism has become stronger and stronger in the Old Continent. This position questions the ideal of the maintenance of distinct ethnic cultures within a state and sometimes argues against cultural integration of different ethnic and cultural groups to the existing laws and values of the country. Alternatively critics may argue for assimilation of different ethnic and cultural groups to a single national identity. Thirty years ago, many Europeans saw multiculturalism as an answer to Europe’s social problems. Today, according to multiculturalism’s critics, it allowed excessive immigration without demanding enough integration, a mismatch that has eroded social cohesion, undermined national identities, and degraded public trust. However, as argued by Kenan Malik on Foreign Affairs, multiculturalism in Europe has become a proxy for other social and political issues: immigration, identity, political disenchantment, working-class decline. “As a political tool, multiculturalism has functioned as not merely a response to diversity but also a means of constraining it”, writes Malik. “And that insight reveals a paradox. Multicultural policies accept as a given that societies are diverse, yet they implicitly assume that such diversity ends at the edges of minority communities”. In his luminary book ‘Europe of Sarajevo 100 years later’, prof. Anis Bajrektarevic diagnosed that ‘multiculturalism in not dead but dread in Europe’. “There is a claim constantly circulating the EU: ‘multiculturalism is dead in Europe’. Dead or maybe d(r)ead?… That much comes from a cluster of European nation-states that love to romanticize – in a grand metanarrative of dogmatic universalism – their appearance as of the coherent Union, as if they themselves lived a long, cordial and credible history of multiculturalism. Hence, this claim and its resonating debate is of course false. It is also cynical because it is purposely deceiving. No wonder, as the conglomerate of nation-states/EU has silently handed over one of its most important debates – that of European anti-fascistic identity, or otherness – to the wing-parties. This was repeatedly followed by the selective and contra-productive foreign policy actions of the Union over the last two decades.” – writes prof. Bajrektarevic on the most pressing issue of today’s Europe. Thus, as it seems to look for the multiculturalism one has to search beyond Europe.Starting from this theoretical point, the traditional and modern reinvigorated Azerbaijan experience about multiculturalism could teach Europe an important lesson: addressing issues and policies on multiculturalism requires an approach that combines state policies with resourcefulness of civil society and intermediate bodies. An approach which would avoid, on the one hand, the distortion of local peoples and migrants, and on the other hand would waste assimilationism. In other words, a new “foedus” (pact, alliance) which would preserve rights and culture of minorities, while ensuring the values of the majority of the population. —————– About the author: Alessio Stilo, Research Associate at Institute of High Studies in Geopolitics and Auxiliary Sciences (IsAG), Rome, Italy, and Ph.D. researcher at University of Padova, is IMN Country Representative in Italy.

By Nika Salvetti and André Nijhof.   It is remarkable to see how fast the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has become a common language for governments, corporates and not for profit organizations. This agenda was adopted by world leaders in September 2015 at the United Nations. For example the photo illustrates how two people from a public and a private company pose for the 17 SDGs with “Sierra Leone and the World want to achieve these 17 goals by 2030” on top. Before we had the Millennium Development Goals. In 15 years they never had such an impact on the debate between governments, NGOs and companies as the SDGs achieved in just 1,5 years. How come? We believe the main reason is that the “power engine” for the SDGs is different! Standards like the SDGs are delivered with three different engines. A first engine is labelled as compliance. This engine requires the combination the establishment of clear and unambiguous norms, monitoring whether behavior and results are in congruence with these norms and the application of meaningful sanctions or rewards to link consequences to compliant behavior. The OEDC guidelines for multinational enterprises with the complaint mechanism at the national contact points is a good example of this approach. A second engine is labelled as engagement. It requires a sense of responsibility of the people involved, open space to learn how to build upon this responsibility and complete transparency about the progress so all actors involved can ask for justification in order to stimulate continuous improvement. The “We are the World” campaign was a typical example of this approach. However there is also a third engine that is used way too often. It is labelled as the Laissez Faire approach. It basically means that certain intentions are established and that it is left for good faith to see what might come from these intentions. The next figure summarizes the three approaches. The success of the SDGs is in our opinion based on a strong engagement approach. Engagement is not based on “blind trust” – like the Laissez Faire approach. It is based on “deserved trust”. And that requires ongoing dialogue about the 17 principles of the SDGs and why they might be important to the actors involved. It also means space to learn and become more capable. This has to happen in a context with many obstacles like anti-trust legislation while pre-competitive dialogues are crucial for engagement. And a strong engagement approach has to come together with extreme transparency and a culture of justification. That is still largely lacking. At present the transparency about the SDGs is a showcase of good practices but extreme transparency also requires sharing the doubts people have, the projects that failed and a culture that is based on the belief that full transparency will strengthen the development. We believe embassies and other actors in international diplomacy can fulfil a very important role to strengthen the engagement approach around the SDGs in the specific countries and regions. And we know it will be rewarding role because the SDGs envision what might be come possible. Especially if we add an 18th principle that is proposed by our colleague Herman Mulder: “SDG 18 – Leave no SDG behind”. ————— About the authors: Phd Candidate Nika Salvetti, Program Leader Business & Peace. UPEACE Centre The Hague. Email: mailto:nsalvetti@upeace.org(for more information about the Program on Business & Peace please check our website www.upeace.nl)   André Nijhof, Professor in Sustainable Business and Stewardship, Nyenrode Business Universiteit. Email: A.Nijhof@nyenrode.nl

By Corneliu Pivariu, CEO INGEPO Consulting, MG (two stars general – ret.) At the end of the first decade of this February, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, paid an official visit to the USA where she had multiple meetings with important political personalities of the new Administration, the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson included. She was also invited to the Atlantic Council on 10th of February where she had an extended public debate particularly on the prospects of the UE-USA relationship after the inauguration of the new Administration in Washington. The assertion according to which the new Donald Trump Administration “would have mentioned that the European Union is not really a good idea and suggested to dismantle what the Community block succeeded to build and confered Europe not only peace but also economic strength” stood out. “It is nor up to me and neither up to other European to talk about internal political elections or USA’s decisions. The same thing applies to Europe, no interventions”, Mogherini stated. “America First means also you have to deal first with the USA” she went on. She stressed as well that “80% of the foreign investments in the USA come from Europe”. Were really these accents neccesary to be part of the panoply of arguments the high representative of the EU should have displayed at Washington? Or stressing instead that the EU is “still made up of 28 states and we will continue to be 28”. These assertions and others we do not mention here leave the impression – at least to a neutral observer – that Her Excellency Federica Mogherini did not come to the European Union’s most important political partner in order to find common possibilities of developing the relationship between the two sides but to present the strengths and the possibilities to an interlocutor… who doesn’t know the European realities. Or, considering the USA as such a partner is at least a devoid of inspiration attitude, unrealistic or even unfortunate and we could continue the series of the epithets suitable to HE Mogherini’s attitude. Has her position anything to do with president Donald Tusk’s mention in a letter sent to the 28 member countries of the EU where he describes the USA under Donald Trump’s presidency as “an external threat” to Europe’s stability the same way as Russia, China, radical islamism and terrorism are? Or with the UE’s chief negotiator for BREXIT – Guy Verhofstandt (former Belgian prime minister), in a speech delivered at Chatham House, that president Trump has in view to undermine the unity of the Western Europe’s nations? The EU’s unity is best undermined by some member countries and the specific interests of each of them that prevails many times over the Union’s general interest which remained more of a slogan on paper and in which fewer and fewer believe. HE Mogherini is proud of the 60th anniversary of the Union in March, this year but forgets completely that during the last decade the EU witnessed a crisis it didn’s solve yet and which accentuated during her mandate (begining of 2014) at least by the refugees crisis. How could HE Mogherini consider the EU’s inability (not to use another term) to secure at least a limitation of the energy dependency to Russia during the last 15-20 years, the failure of NABUCO being the most telling example in this regard? Is it a signal of unity and of a common action to Europe’s interest? Or how could the more and more frequent signals coming from different member countries concerning setting out more clearly a two-speed Europe even within the eurozone be interpreted? What will happen with the eurozone countries’ debt (as percentage of GDP): Greece around 180%; Italy almost 140%, France almost 100%; around 90% for the eurozone in total or 85% of the 28 countries? If we don’t acknowledge the realities, does it mean they do not exist? At the end we could relieve ourselves: president Jean Claude Junker declared he would not run for a new mandate. As if he was already intensely required to continue leading the EU towards…abyss. For those interested in details concerning the position of the European leader in Washington we reccomend the transcript titled “Remarks by High Representative/Vice-President Federica Mogherini at the public event A Conversation with H.E. Federica Mogherini at the Atlantic Council”, https://eeas.europa.eu (around 16 pages). ————- About the author: Corneliu Pivariu, former first deputy for military intelligence (two stars general) in the Romanian MoD, retired 2003. Member of IISS – London, alumni of Harvard – Kennedy School Executive Education and others international organizations. Founder of INGEPO Consulting, and bimonthly Bulletin, Geostrategic Pulse”. Main areas of expertise – geopolitics, intelligence and security. Photographer: Ionus Paraschiv.

By Markus Wauran. There were so many controversial statements made by Donald Trump during the United States Presidential Election, which makes many parties underestimated Trump’s chance to victory towards the White House. One of Trump’s controversial statements was during an exclusive interview with the New York Times on Sunday, 20 March 2016. Trump said if he is elected as US President, he would be open to Japan and South Korea producing their nuclear deterrent. They should not always be depending on the US military to protect themselves from North Korea and China. The US military would not be able to protect Japan and South Korea for a long period of time. He argued that the US cannot always be the policemen of the world. Trump also asserted that there will be a point where the US could not be able to do all that anymore. North Korea probably has their nuclear arsenal, so he would rather have Japan and South Korea having a nuclear capability too, as we are living in a nuclear world right now. This controversial statement alarmed the world and received a strong reaction from various sides. President Obama, during the sidelines of Nuclear Security Summit in Washington on Friday, 1 April 2016, among others stated that all this time the US involvement in the Asia-Pacific region has been important. Because it is also the safeguard key that maintain the peace between the US and countries in that region up until now. Having US presence is very important to withstand any conflicts between each other. Therefore, Obama continued, the person (Donald Trump) who made such comments does not know much about policies, as well as nuclear policy, or the Korean peninsula, or even about the world in general. Japan and South Korea has been considered important as the pillars of US presence in Asia Pacific, as it advantaged the US quite substantially on the trade side, and prevent nuclear escalation and conflict. Japan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fumio Kishida as quoted by CNN, also reacted by expressing his disagreement with Trump’s proposal, saying it is impossible for Japan to build a nuclear capability. Japan is the only country that has experienced a nuclear attack, and if they follow Trump’s proposal, there will be a chance that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki tragedy can happen again. Contradict Jonathan Cristal, a professor and observer from a think-thank agency, the World Policy Institute in New York, also commented by saying that Trump’s proposal is contrary to the government’s commitment to strengthen the alliance with various countries like Japan and South Korea, the two strongest allies in Southeast Asia. Cristal, stated that Japan and South Korea will consider various options if true that the US is no longer protecting them. First option, Japan and South Korea will pay a protection fee to the US, similar to the way Estonia contributed 2% of their GDP to NATO for protection. Second option, Japan and South Korea will develop their own nuclear weapon. Cristal concluded his statement by saying if Trump ignored the US alliance in Asia and triggered Japan and South Korea to produce nuclear weapon, there will be a domino effect following to happen to other countries. Trump’s statements is in fact denying international convention, which regulated in the NPT (Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty) set by the United Nations on 12 June 1968 in New York, and effective from 5 March 1950, and which the US ratified. Basically, the NPT consists of three pillars, namely: first, non-proliferation, i.e. nuclear-weapon states pledge not to add and must reduce as well as revoke/separate their nuclear warheads; second, disarmament, i.e. nuclear weapons eradication which non-nuclear-weapon states pledge not to acquire and manufacture nuclear weapons; third, peaceful use, that is nuclear energy serve only for peaceful purposes. As a matter of fact, the NPT was inspired by President Eisenhower, one of Donald Trump’s predecessors (also from the Republic Party), from his speech in the UN General Assembly session, 18 December 1953, entitled “Atom for Peace”. Almost all states ratified the NPT except India, Pakistan, and Israel. North Korea ratified the NPT on 20 December 1985 and withdrawn from the treaty on 10 April 2003. On the other hand, after the NPT signing, there are only five states recognized as nuclear-weapon states, namely US, Russia, UK, France, and China. We can have a different opinion with the above statement from Trump. But as the new US leader, Trump will do his best for the people of the US, to make US great again as promised in his campaign. Trump’s statement is probably due to some of the following:

• First, US reducing the burden as a country that has been a guarantor of the security of Japan and South Korea if attacked by other countries, and the focus right now came from China and North Korea.
• Second, renegotiating the terms of payment to be received by the US from having their troops on the ground, as many as 54.000 in Japan and 28.500 in South Korea, in which Japan paid USD 1.6 billion and South Korea USD 866 million annually.
• Third, creating a balance of power among nuclear-weapon states in East Asia, which is currently being monopolized by China and followed by North Korea.
• Fourth, if there is a nuclear race, triggered by Japan and South Korea, the US will be very much advantaged as the main supplier, although it would violate the NPT, which the US is one of the signatories. The US weapon industry is allegedly influenced by sympathizers of the Republican Party and many prominent figures from the Party are known to be belligerent. For example when President Nixon, the Vietnam War happened, President Reagan with his Star Wars concept and the bombing of Muammar Kaddafi’s residence, the leader of Libya, President Bush (senior and junior) the Afghanistan War and Iraq War broke out.
• Fifth, diverting or creating East Asia as the new crisis region beside the Middle East, whereas the US will be benefited economically, politically, and militarily; sixth, balancing the military/arms advancement of China as well as to counter the aggressiveness of North Korea.

After the statement and announcement of Donald Trump as the winner of the US Presidential election, there is an interesting development that can be analyzed further. The development is the signing of a nuclear agreement/treaty between PM Shinzo Abe from Japan and PM Narendra Modi from India on 11 November 2016, in Tokyo. The content of the agreement/treaty is that for Japan companies to be able to export nuclear technologies to India. We know that the India and China relation has been hostile for a long time, and just recently the dispute and tension over Senkaku Island is also escalated. The Japan-India nuclear agreement gave a strong indication that both countries are on their way to creating an alliance, in parallel with strengthening the longstanding strategic alliances between the US, Japan and South Korea, to counter the expansive behavior of China and the aggressiveness North Korea. To neutralize the agreement and as not to arouse any suspicions based from Trump’s statement, PM Shinzo Abe stated that the agreement constitutes a legal framework to ensure that India is using its nuclear energy responsibly. After the Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration as the President of the US in 20 January 2017, it is hoped that Trump’s statement will not become his policy. The role of the UN to reassure Trump to comply with the NPT is very much needed, similarly to Japan and South Korea as member states of the Treaty, to adhere with the NPT and not to produce a nuclear weapon. As we know that Japan and South Korea are very advanced and have their grip on nuclear technology, so it will not be hard for both countries to produce a nuclear weapon. If Trump remains on his stance and Japan and South Korea implement the idea, it will create a domino effect where other states in the Asia region will not stay idle. They will definitely take measures to keep and defend their sovereignty. There may be an ASEAN state that will extricate itself from the joint commitment of SEANWFZ (South East Asian Nuclear Weapon Free Zone) Treaty, putting its national interest above all else. On the other hand, China and North Korea will keep on competing to enhance their nuclear capabilities. As a result, the East Asia region, including ASEAN, will be a hot zone and it is not impossible that a Nuclear War may well be started from East Asia. About the author: Markus Wauran, has a Bachelor in Public Administration, he was a member of the House of Representatives of Indonesia (DPR/MPR-RI) period of 1987-1999 and Chairman of Committee X, covering Science and Technology, Environment and National Development Planning (1988-1997). Currently Mr. Wauran is  an Observer of Nuclear for peace.