An Israeli patrol on the border with Syria. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

It all happened within ten days – Syria’s civil war fought metres away from Israeli orchards abutting the ceasefire line; Austrian peacekeepers hastily evacuating the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that separates Israel from Syria; fears of a total collapse of the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF). All while the cherry-picking season is at its peak.

Staff Sergeant Heinz Brandl of the 378-strong Austrian UNDOF battalion deplored last week’s evacuation. “Our government decided that it became too dangerous here. Most of us are unhappy to leave. Unfortunately we must follow the rules of our politicians. There’s no way back.”

The Austrian pullout came in the wake of the short-lived capture on Jun. 6 of the Syrian town Quneitra by rebel Free Syrian Army forces. Four hours later, Syrian army forces loyal to President Bashar el-Assad dislodged the rebels. The 911-member UN force was caught in the crosshairs of the fighting. Two peacekeepers were wounded.

“Austria go home, return to the Anschluss!” railed an Israeli as he witnessed the sudden pullout from the Ein Zivan lookout, comparing the admission of powerlessness by the peacekeepers to the capitulation of Austria to Nazi Germany’s annexationist demand in 1938.

At the Quneitra border crossing where the UNDOF headquarters are located, the loyalist Syrian flag flies again on the masthead opposite the Israeli flag.

From kibbutz Ein Zivan’s lookout, smouldering fields attest to the battle, the fiercest in the area since the start of the civil war.

Who controls which part of the Golan Heights is now easily identifiable. The charred fields are in Syria. The lush trees are on the Israeli side. This is the height of the cherry season.

Ein Zivan’s community chairman Ronen Gilboa witnessed the fighting. “At 5am, we heard gunshots and explosions while we were picking cherries. Within minutes, the army asked us to leave the orchards.”

Gilboa points out that during the clash, Syrian tanks outflanked the rebels from the area adjacent to the ceasefire line, preferring to fire towards their own territory lest Israel retaliates. “The whole area is a north-south passageway for the rebel.”

Israel nonetheless lodged a customary complaint to the UN because it said five Syrian tanks and four Armoured Personal Carriers had entered the DMZ.

Over the past year, Syria’s civil war has leaked across the ceasefire line. Errant mortar shells occasionally land on the Israeli side. Israel then returns fire towards the source of fire.

Croatia withdrew its force after a UN convoy was held hostage in March by Syrian rebels.

Damascus is a mere 60 kilometres from the Israeli side of the ceasefire line, and 243 kilometres from the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, where Benjamin Netanyahu sounded the alarm.

“The disintegration of the UN force in the Golan makes trenchant the fact that Israel cannot lean on international forces for its security,” Netanyahu told his cabinet.

UNDOF chief Herve Ladsous told a closed emergency session of the United Nations Security Council that the latest incident brought Israel and Syria on the brink of the most direct military confrontation on the Golan Heights front in 40 years.

The 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement between Israel and Syria formally ended the 1973 war. UNDOF has since been operating in the buffer zone, supervising the ceasefire.

“We cannot entrust our security to UNDOF; yet, we cannot entrust our security to Syria’s commitment to the 1974 ceasefire agreement without UNDOF,” Gilboa reasons. “We appreciate that UNDOF is part and parcel of the agreement.”

Rhetoric aside, Netanyahu shares this opinion.

Every six months, the Security Council must extend UNDOF’s mandate for a further six months. The current mandate expires by the end of the month.

In a recent report to the Security Council, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recommended the renewal of the UNDOF mission for six more months, until Dec. 31, calling it “essential”.

This is a view shared by both Netanyahu and Assad. Ban announced that Israel and Syria have given their approval to the proposed extension.

Fiji is expected to somehow fill the UNDOF vacuum by sending 170 military and medical personnel to the Golan at the end of June.

Just kilometres away from the UN border crossing around which the recent clash took place, an Israeli reserve artillery battalion prepares for what a soldier calls “a long-planned military exercise.”

In a compound not far from what now looks more like a frontline than a ceasefire line, Israeli tanks trundle by, discharging plumes of exhaust fumes and dust. There’s no need for a smokescreen to hide from the Syrian line of sight, says Gilboa, himself a former armoured regiment commander.

Armoured warfare is often practised on this swath of territory. During the 1973 war, Israel and Syria fought one of the largest tanks battles since World War II on the Golan as Syria tried to recapture the territory conquered by Israel in 1967, to no avail.

“As long as Assad is in control, we’re not that concerned,” says Gilboa. “The civil war doesn’t affect our daily lives. We train our people to be alert, that’s it.”

Syria’s civil war may have reached the fence. Yet, on the Israeli side 50 metres away from the border, visitors have fun insouciantly reaping the fruit of their own labour. Self cherry-picking is a major touristic attraction in this area. Just last weekend, 6,000 tourists flocked to Ein Zivan’s orchards.

Naftali Ashkenazi, a resident of Holon in central Israel, is unfazed by the rising tension: “I’ve been through much worse during the 1973 war.”

“It’s all a little surreal when you hear bangs and booms just across the border,” says kibbutz member Neta Bahat. “But our main concern is to prevent the birds from eating the cherries from the trees. Our livelihood depends on it. I hope nothing will change here. And, may calm prevail.”

By the end of the month, the kibbutz will have produced 100 tons of cherries. That’s half of last year’s harvest. The winter was too hot, the farmers say.

Peace talks between the United States and the Taliban are due to begin later this week in Qatar. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

Nearly 12 years after the United States ousted the Taliban from power, the White House announced Tuesday that the United States will begin formal talks with the militant Islamist group in Qatar later this week as part of Afghanistan’s national reconciliation process.

The announcement, which coincided with ceremonies marking the formal transfer of primary security responsibility from U.S.-led NATO forces to their Afghan counterparts, preceded a statement issued shortly afterwards by the Taliban itself in which it implicitly disassociated itself from Al-Qaeda.

The Taliban “would not allow anyone to threaten the security of other countries from the soil of Afghanistan”, Muhammad Naim, a Taliban spokesman, said in a televised broadcast from Doha. In addition, he pledged that the group seeks “a political and peaceful solution” to the conflict.

“These are two statements which we’ve long called for and together, they fulfil the requirements for the Taliban to open…a political office in Doha for the purposes of negotiation with the Afghan government,” said a senior official in a background teleconference for reporters.

“These statements represent an important first step towards reconciliation, a process that, after 30 years of armed conflict in Afghanistan, will certainly promise to be complex, long and messy, but nonetheless, this is an important first step,” said the official, who spoke on condition of not being identified.

He also called on the Taliban and the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai to begin direct negotiations “soon”.

Speaking at the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland, President Barack Obama also described the opening of the Taliban office an “important first step towards reconciliation” but stressed that “there will be a lot of bumps in the road”.

He also said Washington remained “fully committed to our military efforts to defeat Al-Qaeda and to support the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF)”.

Critics of the U.S. military effort hailed Tuesday’s announcement as signalling a major change in policy in advance of the deadline at the end of 2014 for the withdrawal of virtually all foreign troops from Afghanistan.

Most experts in Washington believe that at most 10,000 U.S. troops – plus about 4,000 more from other NATO countries – are likely to remain beyond that date as trainers for Afghan forces and as counter-terrorist units focused on preventing the return of Al-Qaeda forces.

“The U.S. and Karzai know they have to cut a deal with the Taliban and that the Taliban cannot be defeated militarily,” said William Goodfellow, director of the Centre for International Policy (CIP) here.

“The problem for the last 11 years is that it’s the (U.S.) military that’s been running the show, and to the military, negotiations equals defeat. We’re now shifting away from a policy of wanting to defeat the Taliban militarily to one of finding a political solution,” he said.

Tuesday’s developments – both the transfer of security responsibility to Afghan forces and the announcement of U.S.-Taliban talks – come amidst indications of eagerness by both the White House and Congress to wind down Washington’s commitment to Afghanistan as quickly as possible.

Just last week, a majority of the Republican-led House voted for the first time to approve a bipartisan amendment to the defence authorisation bill in favour of accelerating Washington’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The amendment, which was adopted by a 305-121 margin, also deleted a provision of the bill that had supported a continued U.S. military presence after 2014, replacing it with a call for the administration to seek explicit Congressional approval for retaining any U.S. troops there after that date.

About 66,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan – down from a high of around 100,000 two years ago following two “surges” sent by Obama as part of an ambitious counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy overseen by General David Petraeus.

The administration is currently engaged in a major internal debate over the pace of withdrawal for the remaining troops before the 2014 deadline and how many troops Washington will retain in Afghanistan after that date.

The latter question presumes that Karzai – or whoever succeeds him after the 2014 presidential election – wants them and provides the necessary guarantees, including the thorny issue of immunity from criminal prosecution, to keep them there.

The Pentagon and its supporters want to keep as many troops there for as long as possible, including next year’s “fighting season”, which lasts from late spring into the fall. They believe that that U.S. forces can still deal major blows to the Taliban – thus weakening its position in any negotiations – and are still badly needed to back up the ANSF.

Though 352,000 strong and more battle-tested than two years ago, the ANSF suffers serious weaknesses in a range of areas, including air support and an annual attrition rate of about 30 percent. The United States and its allies have said they will continue spending more than 4 billion dollars annually to help maintain, supply and expand the ANSF after 2014.

Obama, who had described the Afghanistan conflict as a “war of necessity” during his 2008 presidential campaign, initially deferred to Petraeus but reportedly became increasingly disenchanted with COIN’s effectiveness.

As early as two years ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the administration’s support for direct negotiations with the Taliban.

But despite a series of informal meetings with Taliban representatives hosted by various European countries and Qatar, the State Department proved unable to wrest control of policy from the Pentagon and its supporters in Congress.

Other key actors, including Karzai himself, the Pakistani military, which is believed to exert considerable influence if not outright control over key Taliban leaders, and more hard-line factions within the Taliban, also opposed talks at various times.

U.S. officials who briefed the press said they believed that the Taliban Political Commission in Doha is fully authorised by all factions of the movement and its leader, Mullah Omar, to conduct negotiations.

The officials also stressed that talks between the United States and the Taliban would likely be limited in scope and that negotiations between the Taliban and the Karzai government, as represented initially by the High Peace Council, were far more important. They said they expected the Council to send representatives to meet with the Taliban several days after the U.S.-Taliban talks.

“I think that given the level of distrust among Afghans, it’s going to be a slow process to get that…intra-Afghan dialogue moving,” said one. “The United States will encourage and help facilitate that, but the talks are largely going to be paced by the success or failure in that dialogue, and so I wouldn’t be looking for early results.”

“There is no guarantee that this will happen quickly, if at all,” added another.

In addition, Washington, they said, would only sign a final accord if the Taliban met three conditions: “First, that they break ties with Al-Qaeda; that they end the violence; and that they accept Afghanistan’s constitution, including its protections for women and minorities.”

While the Taliban’s statement about not permitting Afghan territory to be used to threaten the security of other nations moved partway toward meeting the first condition, they said, the Taliban would have to be more explicit to fully satisfy it.

Both have good reasons: Colombia has witnessed the longest lasting violence in any contemporary country: from 1949, with some interruptions, then on again from 1964 with the notorious guerilla group, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

The U.S., with its conviction that evil is lurking around every corner, domestic and global, believes it better have the arms to handle those bad guys.

Both countries have among the highest rates of structural violence, and the most unequal distributions of economic wealth, in the world.

There is a difference, though: one country submits its problem to third party mediation, of all places in Havana, facilitated by Cuba and Norway; the other submits its problem to nobody, nor does anyone seem to offer their services.

Colombia admits openly to the world that it does not have sufficient capacity for self-regulation; from the U.S. no such admission has been forthcoming.

Recently there was news from Havana: a breakthrough in the peace negotiations about a rather basic economic issue: land, and land reform – a redistribution of land, and of better land, to small impoverished peasants.

There are four other problems on the agenda: political participation (the problem being real democracy), ceasefire, drugs, and the rights of the victims and the bereaved in a country where four million have been displaced and thousands kidnapped and killed.

Reasons to celebrate? Wait. The class differences in a country ruled by the triumvirate of landowners, the military and clerics (like three brothers in many families – the Iberian heritage) force upon us a sad prediction: there will be one more military coup in the chain of coups, supported by the Church.

Let us not pray. Let us hope for disarmament of the FARC and the other guerrillas (particularly the reactionary paramilitary) and control of the army, lest we end up with Nepal: disarmament to the left, not centre-right.

To produce food, not only land, but also water, seeds, manure and some technology are needed. Water and seeds may become privatised – by Monsanto – so where does the credit to buy these inputs come from? And at what price?

What’s needed is collective, cooperative farming on communal land with direct democracy for decisions, not corruptible multi-party national elections. And can farming compete with drug commissions when drugs change hands until finally traveling via submarines to the U.S.? Or on the long road to the Mexican border?

Small farms cannot compete; cooperatives would do better. Well, let’s hope.

Expand the zones of peace, have them intersect, and aim at all of huge Colombia.

The U.S.: On May 23, President Barack Obama concluded that he should pull back the drones, and close the Guantanamo prison. Does he have the guts to do so, by executive orders, using vetoes?

There will be no military coup in the U.S. There are permanent, structural links between the Pentagon, Congress, the military industry and the media (owned by the former, and for whom news of peace is bad news) designed to keep the war industry going.

That industry has one major purpose: to stamp out any initiative to eliminate the special status of the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency” – like by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, by Iran, now by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) – so that the U.S. can pay by printing money, and even get the naive to buy U.S. bonds, meaning lending the U.S. petro-dollars or China dollars.

Alas, the U.S.’ efforts are self-defeating. The more wars against terror for U.S. security, the more insecurity and terrorism; the more wars to save the dollar, the closer the collapse of the currency of that bankrupt country: by inflation, by stock exchange crashes, by serving debts rather than people.

May still last a couple of years, but the synergy of these three factors will catch up with the economy. In the meantime Monsanto is at work, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the National Riffle Association (NRA) and other lobbies threatening anyone whose voting is not to their liking that they will not be reelected.

The finance industry is at work forcing the administration to withdraw one step behind the other from the tiny measures introduced after the Grand Repression to control the finance industry.

The U.S. Supreme Court did its part of the job granting money to politicians under “freedom of expression.”

And Obama did his job, offering to cut Social Security entitlements in return for some compromise with Republicans, the average retirement package in the U.S. now being only 40 percent of a salary as opposed to 70 percent in developed countries.

Montesquieu’s plan of separating legislative, executive and judiciary power so that they check each other does not work. In the U.S. today all three powers are on the same course set by the finance industry, to which the dollar status is key.

Politicians are bought and cowed and the president once again betrays those who elected him. Democracy does not work. The U.S. blessing – the Occupy Movement – was itself occupied: by armies of FBI agents.

All of this and worse was Colombia’s fate; the answer was FARC, armed revolt. Will there be a similar armed revolt in the U.S., given that the guns are well distributed?

For Anglo-American global direct violence, yes. As the suspected Boston bombers said, an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims, an eye for an eye – except when it comes to domestic structural violence.

Let us hope for the revival of Montesquieu and democracy or, if not, submission to outside mediation.

Since 2008, militants in Pakistan have torched over 5,000 vehicles carrying NATO supplies to Afghanistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

The United States is laying meticulous plans ahead of its 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, but it has clearly overlooked how its continued drones strikes on the tribal areas of neighbouring Pakistan will affect the much-anticipated pullout.

Last week, a group of militants belonging to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) torched three containers stuffed with supplies for NATO troops in Afghanistan, as they trundled along the stony mountain pass known as Torkham Road in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.

The militants claimed the attack on the convoy of 12 containers was payback for the drone strike on May 29 that killed TTP Deputy Leader Waliur Rehman in North Waziristan province, one of seven zones comprising the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

The incident last month brought the total number of drone strikes on the region to over 355 since 2005. But while the U.S. government has hitherto been happy to turn a blind eye to various forms of protest against its campaign of remote warfare – from civilian marches, to government statements – the burning of NATO-bound vehicles might signal a turning point in its controversial foreign policy.

Muhammad Mushtaq, an office-bearer of the NATO Suppliers Association – a local collective of drivers, cleaners and vehicle owners involved in the transport of supplies across the border – told IPS, “Since 2008, more than 5,000 NATO vehicles have been burnt down in Peshawar and the Khyber Agency, all of them en route to Afghanistan to replenish the forces engaged in a war against terrorism since 2002.”

In the process, he said, not only have roughly 10 million dollars worth of equipment and supplies been reduced to ashes, but more than 500 people, including drivers and cleaners, have lost their lives.

In December 2008, 160 NATO vehicles carrying Humvees destined for Afghanistan were burnt in a single attack near Peshawar, capital of the KP, Mushtaq said. The militants later paraded triumphantly amid billowing flames that blackened the sky.

Most of the vehicles heading to Afghanistan carry military equipment, food, and other logistical supplies for the roughly 100,000 foreign troops stationed there, Retired Major Anwar Khan, a security analyst, told IPS.

“This same route will also likely be used for the withdrawal of heavy military hardware as well as soldiers,” he said. Thus, if drone strikes continue, the U.S. risks leaving its main access and exit route vulnerable to attacks.

Khan says that the U.S. and its coalition partners in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ must revisit their military strategy if they are determined to stick to the 2014 date. “Otherwise, the chances of their withdrawal and peace in Pakistan and Afghanistan will remain a dream.”

An eye for an eye 

When U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in Kabul in 2001, it signaled the beginning of a war that would drag on for over a decade.

Members of the deposed regime, along with their supporters, fled en masse into the mountains that form the rugged 1,200-kilometre-long border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, prompting the latter to throw in its lot with the U.S. in the hopes of preventing the militants from taking root in its own, volatile tribal zones.

But promises to destroy the Al Qaeda network charged with carrying out the bombing of the U.S.’s twin towers on Sep. 11, 2001, have failed to bear fruit, with many commentators observing that the militants are stronger than ever.

Last May, against the backdrop of rising costs, a mounting death toll and loud public opposition to the war, U.S. President Barack Obama signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, agreeing to withdraw forces by 2014 and hand over power to the locally elected government.

But experts like Pervez Jamal, professor of political science at the University of Peshawar, believe this plan will fall flat unless immediate measures are taken to appease the TTP.

As Khan pointed out, “The burning of vehicles has already made the war against terrorism more expensive for the U.S. and its allies.”

Currently, 70 percent of supplies for Western forces in landlocked Afghanistan come through Pakistan, where they arrive by ship at the Arabian Sea port of Karachi before travelling 3,000 kilometres to the Bagram Airfield in Kabul.

In November 2011, the Pakistan government ordered the closure of this supply route when U.S. forces attacked a Pakistani security post in FATA’s Mohmand Agency, killing 24 soldiers.

Deprived of a land route, the U.S. was forced to explore alternative, aerial routes through Russia and the former Soviet republics that border Afghanistan. During this time, the cost of transporting supplies went from 17 million dollars to 104 million dollars.

Unable to sustain these costs, the U.S. government issued an apology for the attack, and the supply route was re-opened in 2012, with the understanding that it would remain functional until 2015, to facilitate a smooth withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But this agreement is now in jeopardy.

The burning of supplies also spells danger for the 10,000 troops tasked with remaining on the ground to assist the 350,000 Afghan National Security Forces with the political transition.

The local security force currently lacks training and military equipment; without the promise of reinforcements, some experts say they will be no match for an attempted power grab by the militants.

Javed Hasham, an Afghan war analyst based in Peshawar, told IPS that the Taliban are capable of destroying convoys very easily. Torkham Road is an exposed mountain pass, with no security outposts along the way. The Taliban, familiar with the terrain, have hideouts in hills and houses that overlook the winding road.

Attacks on supply convoys had recorded a massive decrease over the past four months but have recently picked up again, keeping pace with increased drone strikes.

Hasham believes it unlikely that even the Pakistan government, which is loathe to support the Taliban, will not chastise the militants for these attacks, as it, too, sees the drone strikes as a severe encroachment on national sovereignty.

“The only way forward is for the U.S. to put its drone strikes on hold,” Hasham said.

While most Iran specialists fall into the former category, neo-conservatives and other pro-Israel forces insist that even if the president-elect wanted to be more forthcoming on western demands to curb Tehran’s nuclear programme and other concerns, he would still be overruled by the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and other powerful hard-line interests.

Echoing concerns voiced by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the latter also expressed worry that Rouhani’s more “moderate” image – especially in contrast to the belligerence of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – may lull western governments into making undesirable concessions.

“The search for a ‘moderate’ Iranian leader has beguiled every American president since the revolution of 1979,” according to the Wall Street Journal’s neo-conservative editorial board. “But the hunt for the unicorn seems destined to begin again with the breathless reporting that Iranians have elected 64-year-old cleric Hassan Rohani as their next president.”

President Barack Obama himself no doubt added to those concerns Monday when, after a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-8 Summit in Northern Ireland, he told reporters that the two leaders “expressed cautious optimism that with a new election [in Iran], we may be able to move forward on a dialogue that allows us to resolve the problems with Iran’s nuclear program”.

Rouhani’s first-round victory, with just under 51 percent of the vote in a field of six candidates, came as a surprise to all but a few analysts here. Most expected a candidate, notably Tehran’s current nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, with the hard-line views that are believed to reflect those of Khamenei, to triumph whether by the actual vote tally or by the kind of ballot rigging that many believe occurred in the contested 2009 election.

While Rouhani, who has several degrees including a doctorate from Caledonian University in Glasgow, has held senior foreign-policy positions in the regime – among them, the nuclear file under reformist President Mohammad Khatami – he was openly critical of Tehran’s recent diplomacy, particularly over its nuclear programme, during the election campaign.

“We have to calculate our national interests,” he said shortly before the election. “It’s nice for the centrifuges to run, but people’s livelihoods have to also run, our factories have to also run,” a reference to the impact of U.S. and western sanctions aimed at “crippling” Iran’s economy.

Rouhani, who will assume the presidency in August, gained the strong backing of both Khatami and former President Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, a centrist whose own candidacy had been disqualified by the Guardian Council. Both leaders had also called for major changes in Iran’s foreign policy, including the regime’s handling of negotiations with the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China plus Germany) over the nuclear programme.

Most Iran experts believe Rouhani’s victory offers a major opportunity for progress in those negotiations. They note that he persuaded Khamenei to go along with a voluntary suspension of Iran’s enrichment-related and reprocessing activities while trying to negotiate an accord with the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany).

In 2006, in his capacity as Khamenei’s representative on the regime’s Supreme National Security Council, he published a detailed offer in TIME magazine that included accepting strict limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment and enhanced International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) oversight of Iran’s nuclear-related facilities – only to be rejected by the administration of former President George W. Bush.

A key Rouhani subordinate when he headed the nuclear file, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, has worked continuously on the terms of a nuclear accord ever since he was accused of treason by the Ahmadinejad government and fled the country to accept a post at Princeton University. Most recently, he has emphasised that Iran must accept “the maximum level of transparency in cooperation with the IAEA” – a theme that Rouhani also stressed during a press conference in Tehran Monday.

“It’s not too outrageous to suspect that Mousavian will return to Iran,” according to Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University, who described Rouhani’s tone and style as the “anti-Ahmadinejad”. “There’s a continuity that is very real. Mousavian has argued there’s a deal to be made; it just takes some goodwill on both sides.”

Other Iran experts agree that Rouhani’s election makes a deal substantially more possible than it would have been had Jalili, whose platform stressed “resistance” to western demands, been elected.

But they argue that Washington must also be prepared to make concessions in order to persuade Khamenei to go along, especially in light of the fact that the United States has previously rejected Rouhani’s overtures.

“Rouhani’s election presents the United States and its partners with a test – of our intensions and seriousness about reaching an agreement,” wrote Paul Pillar, a CIA veteran who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East from 2000 to 2005, the period of Rouhani’s greatest influence over Iran’s nuclear policy.

“Failure of the test will confirm suspicions in Tehran that we do not want a deal and instead are stringing along negotiations while waiting for the sanctions to wreak more damage,” he wrote on his nationalinterest.org blog.

“Passage of the test will require placing on the table a proposal that, in return for the desired restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities, incorporates significant relief from economic sanctions and at least tacit acceptance of a continued peaceful Iranian nuclear program, to include low-level enrichment of uranium,” according to Pillar.

Describing Rouhani’s victory as a “game-changer”, Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, argued that Washington must be willing to offer substantial sanctions relief in order to strike a deal.

“For the past eight years, U.S. policy has relied on pressure – threats of war and international economic sanctions – rather than incentives to change Iran’s calculus. Continuing with that approach will be counterproductive. It will not provide Rowhani with the cover for a fresh approach to nuclear talks,” he wrote on foreignpolicy.com.

But such thinking is precisely what worries neo-conservatives and leaders of the Israel lobby.

The White House “no doubt will ramp up its beseeching diplomacy to strike a nuclear deal with the Rohani government”, the Journal’s editorial writers warned Monday. “President Obama is desperate to find some agreement to avoid having to launch a military strike. Expect Mr. Rohani to go along for the talks, but mainly to ease Western sanctions and buy more nuclear time.”

The same forces are similarly worried about the replacement of Ahmadinejad by a less bombastic and far more sophisticated Iranian president.

In a blog entitled “Rooting for Jalili”, Daniel Pipes, the president of the Middle East Forum, wrote that the same logic that led him to support Ahmadinejad’s re-election four years ago applied to this election.

It “is better to have a bellicose, apocalyptic, in-your-face Ahamdinejad who scares the world than a sweet-talking (the 2009 moderate candidate Mir-Hossein) Mousavi who again lulls it to sleep, even as thousands of centrifuges whir away”, he concluded.

The least expensive petrol in the world is in Venezuela. Credit: Fidel Márquez/IPS

A shift in U.S. foreign policy towards Venezuela may be pending as a bilateral rapprochement suddenly appears more possible than it has in years.

On the sidelines of talks held earlier this month in Guatemala by the Organisation of American States (OAS), U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elias Jaua, with Kerry’s subsequent statements indicating that relations could be heading in a friendlier direction.

“We agreed today – both of us, Venezuela and the United States – that we would like to see our countries find a new way forward, establish a more constructive and positive relationship and find the ways to do that,” Kerry said following the meeting with Jaua, which was reportedly requested by the Venezuelans.

The meeting happened on the heels of the release of Timothy Tracy, a U.S. filmmaker whom Venezuela had been holding on accusations of espionage. His release was interpreted by many as an “olive branch” being offered by the new Venezuelan government of Nicholas Maduro, whose presidency Washington still has not formally recognised.

Only months ago, before the death of Venezuela’s long-time socialist leader Hugo Chavez, any normalisation of relations between Venezuela and the United States seemed highly unlikely.

In 2002, Chavez was briefly removed from power by a military coup d’état that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had known was imminent. Chavez immediately accused the United States of having played a part in the event. After his suspicions were confirmed partly valid, his rhetoric grew more scathing.

In 2006, he famously told the United Nations General Assembly that then-U.S. President George W. Bush was “the devil himself”.

Following Chavez’s death from cancer in March, however, his hand-picked successor, Maduro, the former vice-president, has not been as vitriolic in his posturing vis-à-vis the United States.

According to Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank, Maduro has offered “conflicting signals”.

“Maduro has so far shifted in his position toward the U.S. between a moderate approach and a more hard-line one,” Shifter told IPS.

The new president’s waffling may be a reflection of his tenuous grip on power. By many accounts, Maduro lacks the political prowess and rabble-rousing charm of Chavez, who enjoyed military backing as well as fervent support from the lower classes.

In addition to a strong anti-Chavista opposition that openly challenges the legitimacy of his narrowly won election, Maduro has had to deal with a split within Chavez’s own former political base.

Shifter pointed out that among the military, which was once a source of significant strength for Chavez, more support is given to Diosdado Cabello, currently head of Venezuela’s parliament and whose supporters believe he was the rightful heir to the presidency.

Maduro’s legitimacy stems largely from his perceived ideological fidelity, the reason for his selection by Chavez to lead in the first place. Shifter said this leads him to “emulate” his predecessor and makes rapprochement with the United States less probable.

Still, ideological concerns may not ultimately decide the issue. Venezuela has inherited from Chavez an economy in difficult straits, which continues to suffer from notorious shortages and high inflation.

Oil economy

Over half of Venezuela’s federal budget revenues come from its oil industry, which also accounts for 95 percent of the country’s exports. Estimated at 77 billion barrels, its proven reserves of black gold are the largest of any nation in the world.

Despite a troubled political relationship, its principal customer is the United States, which imports nearly a million barrels a day from Venezuela.

Venezuela’s oil industry has been officially nationalised since the 1970s, and, as president, Chavez further tightened government control over its production. His government took a greater chunk of revenues and imposed quotas that ensured a certain percentage would always go directly towards aiding Venezuelans via social spending and fuel subsidies.

While these measures may be popular with Venezuelans, who pay the lowest price for gasoline in the world, critics argue such policies hampered growth and led to mismanagement of Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PdVSA), the main state-run oil company.

The same critics also point to increasing debt levels, slowdowns in productions and accidents stemming from faulty infrastructure.

In order to boost production, PdVSA agreed in May to accept a number of major loans. This includes one from Chevron, one of the largest U.S. oil companies, which will work with Venezuelans to develop new extraction sites.

“The oil sector is in deep trouble in Venezuela – production is down and the economic situation is deteriorating,” explained Shifter. “They know they need foreign investment to increase production, and this is in part what has motivated Maduro to reach out.”

If its economy continues to falter, Venezuela may be further tempted to embrace the United States, which has the largest, most sophisticated fossil fuel industry in the world. Kerry’s recent words suggest that the administration of President Barack Obama would be waiting with open arms.

“Venezuela cannot confront its economic crisis and the United States at the same time,” Diana Villiers Negroponte, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank, told IPS, “and we are a pragmatic country which will deal with Maduro if it is in our interests.”

Indeed, Negroponte said she was “optimistic” about the possibility of rapprochement between the two countries within the next six months. She notes a “troika” of issues on which the United States is looking for Venezuelan cooperation: counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics and assistance in ridding Colombia of its FARC rebels.

Nonetheless, major actions remain to be taken if normalisation is to even begin, such as the exchange of ambassadors and official U.S. recognition of the Maduro government. Shifter (who regards the Kerry-Jaua meeting as “a small step”) was not optimistic that these larger requirements will be completed in the short term.

“I don’t think Washington is going to push hard to send an ambassador to Caracas,” he said. “It will probably take more time to observe the new government and see where it is going.”

Some experts advocate a federal future for the European Union. Rock Cohen/CC-BY-2.0

Three different models for regional unification have been proposed by the movement for European integration since its inception. One vision is a league of states that preserve national sovereignty while committing themselves to follow specific policies agreed by consensus.

Then there is the functionalist model, where national states delegate common administration of their shared interests to a supranational authority.

Thirdly, the federalist model proposes conserving and respecting the sovereignty of national states for questions of national scope and character, while transferring to a European government sovereignty over matters of Europe-wide scope and character.

Federalist Altiero Spinelli defined European government as having limited but real powers, democratically controlled by a European parliament and operating in conformity with European laws.

In terms of political relations between communities of men and women there is only one possible reply to the question: “How should shared problems, which require shared, complex and permanent solutions, be faced?”

The answer is simple: entrust the function of addressing shared problems to a shared power.

That power might originate from the imposition of the strongest over the rest. This is the imperial, or hegemonic, response. Between 1945 and 1989, Europe lived in a geopolitical context characterised by the U.S. hegemony and Soviet imperialism.

But it can also arise from free consensus among partner countries and citizens for the creation of a shared power, parallel to their own powers, provided with specific procedures for reaching consensus and for the approval of federal policies, and to which limited competencies are transferred.

That is what federalists propose.

Another option would be the recognition of the existence of common problems which, however, would be identified each time the members decide by consensus that they should be addressed with a common response. In this variant, no transfer of power is required.

But when the achievement of a goal demands complex preparation, consensus-building and execution procedures, or when the goal is long-term and demands long-lasting shared action, this option is not rational and the outcome will almost certainly be unsuccessful.

The experience of the financial crisis that has buffeted Europe in the past few years confirms the irrationality of such a response.

The time has come for a comprehensive project that defines the degree of interdependence among the European Union, its citizens and member states (the creation of the United States of Europe) – a political method to create the necessary consensus (a democratic constituent assembly), and a timetable for the plan to take place within a politically feasible timespan.

Carrying out this project would require not only full enforcement of the Treaty of Lisbon, approved by the bloc in 2007, but also updating it with an agenda that extends beyond the May 2014 European elections. This will be a unique opportunity to resume the path toward a European constitution on a federalist basis.

Obviously, it is not enough for a federal organisation to have intrinsic merits. Building it demands permanent support from tremendous vital forces that feel the need for such an organisation and are prepared to act in order to sustain it. It would be a waste of time to build an edifice at a time when circumstances favour its building, if ultimately it cannot be maintained.

The European Union cannot be reduced to an economic and monetary union; it must also include the dimension of citizenship and human rights, social policies, domestic freedom and security, justice and foreign policy including defence.

The constitutional order must include budgetary issues (which items are the responsibility of national states and which of the European Union?), with a radically innovative focus on the concepts of federal budget costs and revenues. Debate should also be raised about the EU’s borders.

A political and legal solution should also be found for the problem of differentiated union or integration that allows states and citizens who want to advance faster than others to do so.

The initiative should come from the European Parliament and involve national legislatures in an inter-parliamentary conference, as proposed by then French president François Mitterrand (1981-1995) just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The natural goal of the conference is to attribute to the European Parliament the function of a constituent convention, as proposed by Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission, and former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and recommended in a March 2012 manifesto of the European Movement.

It will be the role of political parties and coalitions and civil society organisations to give next year’s election campaign a Europeanist focus.

Strong pressure is expected from populist movements advocating a regression to a Europe divided into separate nations.

All the more reason for innovators to act decisively so that Europeans take a leap forward, toward more democracy and greater solidarity.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Iran's Jun. 14 elections garnered voter participation rates close to 73 percent. Credit: Mohammad Ali Shabani

Iran’s Jun. 14 presidential election results, announced the day after voting was held, were nothing less than a political earthquake.

The Centrist Hassan Rowhani’s win was ruled out when Iran’s vetting body, the Guardian Council, qualified him as one of the eight candidates on May 21.

Furthermore, a first-round win by anyone in a crowded competition was not foreseen by any pre-election polling.

Up to a couple of weeks ago, conventional wisdom held that only a conservative candidate anointed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could win. Few expected the election of a self-identified independent and moderate who was not well-known outside of Tehran, and few expected participation rates of close to 73 percent.

The expected range was around 60 to 65 percent, in favour of conservative candidates, who benefit from a stable base that always votes.

But the move a few days before the election by reformists and centrists – guided by two former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani – to join forces and align behind the centrist Rowhani proved successful. It promises significant changes in the management and top layers of Iran’s various ministries and provincial offices.

Rowhani has also promised a shift towards a more conciliatory foreign policy and less securitised domestic political environment.

The centrist-reformist alliance formed when, in a calculated action earlier this week, the reformist candidate Mohammadreza Aref withdrew his candidacy in favour of Rowhani. But the strong support for Rowhani underwriting his first-round win came from an unexpected surge in voter turnout.

Much of the electorate, disappointed by Iran’s contested 2009 election and the crackdown that followed, was skeptical of the electoral process and whether their votes would really be counted, and they also questioned whether any elected official could change the country’s direction.

Although low voter turnout was the expectation, with the centrist-reformist alliance, the mood of the country changed, with serious debate beginning about whether or not to vote. As more people became convinced, Rowhani’s chances increased. Hope overcame skepticism and cynicism.

The case for voting centred on the argument that the most important democratic institution of the Islamic Republic – the electoral process – should not be abandoned out of fear that it would be manipulated by non-elective institutions and that abandoning the field was tantamount to premature surrender.

Reformist newspaper editorials also articulated the fear that a continuation of Iran’s current policies may lead the country into war and instability.

Syria, in particular, played an important role as the Iranian public watched peaceful protests for change there turn into a violent civil war.

The hope that the Iranian electoral system could still be used to register a desire for change was a significant motivation for voters.

Beyond the choice of Iran’s president, the conduct of this election should be considered an affirmation of a key institution of the Islamic Republic that was tainted when the 2009 results were questioned by a large part of the voting public.

The election was conducted peacefully and without any serious complaints regarding its process.

Unlike the previous election, when results were announced hurriedly on the night of the election, the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of conducting the election, with over 60,000 voting stations throughout the country, chose to take its time to reveal the complete results.

Other key individual winners of this election, beyond Rowhani, are undoubtedly former presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani and Khatami who proved they can lead and convince their supporters to vote for their preferred candidate.

Khatami in particular had to rally reformers behind a centrist candidate who, until this election, had said little about many reformist concerns, including the incarceration of their key leaders, Mir Hossein Mussavi, his spouse Zahra Rahnavard and Mehdi Karrubi.

Khatami’s task was made easier when Rowhani also began criticising the securitised environment of the past few years and the arrests of journalists, civil society activists and even former government officials.

Meanwhile, Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose own candidacy was rejected by the Guardian Council, saw his call for moderation and political reconciliation confirmed by Rowhani’s win.

He rightly sensed that despite the country’s huge economic problems, caused by bad management and the ferocious U.S.-led sanctions regime imposed on Iran, voters understood the importance of political change in bringing about economic recovery.

Conservatives, on the other hand, proved rather inept at understanding the mood of the country, failing in their attempt to unify behind one candidate and stealing votes from each other instead.

The biggest losers were the hardline conservatives, whose candidate Saeed Jalili ran on a platform that mostly emphasised resistance against Western powers and a reinvigoration of conservative Islamic values.

Although he was initially believed to be favoured, due to the presumed support he had from Khamenei, he ended up placing third, with only 11.4 percent of the vote, behind the more moderate conservative mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf.

The hardliners loss did not, however, result from a purge. Other candidates besides Rowhani received approximately 49 percent of the vote overall, and so while this election did not signal the hardliners’ disappearance, it did showcase the diversity and differentiation of the Iranian public.

Rowhani, as a centrist candidate in alliance with the reformists, will still be a president who will need to negotiate with the conservative-controlled parliament, Guardian Council and other key institutions such as the Judiciary, various security organisations and the office of Ali Khamenei, which also continues to be controlled by conservatives.

Rowhani’s mandate gives him a strong position but not one that is outside the political frames of the Islamic Republic. He will have to negotiate between the demands of many of his supporters who will be pushing for faster change and those who want to maintain the status quo.

For a country wracked by eight years of polarised and erratic politics, Rowhani’s slogan of moderation and prudence sets the right tone, even as his promises constitute a tall order.

Whether he will be able to decrease political tensions, help release political prisoners, reverse the economic downturn and ease the sanctions regime through negotiations with the United States remains to be seen.

But Iran’s voters just showed they still believe the presidential office matters and they expect the president to play a vital role in guiding the country in a different direction.

The calls come just weeks after the U.S. State Department, which oversees the “state sponsors” list, released an annual report on terrorism. Its section regarding Cuba varied only slightly from that of the previous year, disappointing those who had hoped for a step in the direction of normalisation of U.S.-Cuba relations.

“At a time when the U.S. is best positioned to help facilitate change in the island and to take advantage of the changes inside the country, this continued inclusion is actually an obstacle to taking advantage of that window of opportunity,” Tomas Bilbao, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, said Tuesday at a panel discussion at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank here.

Bilbao noted the continued influence of a “shrinking minority” of anti-Cuba hardliners in the United States who fervently oppose Cuba’s removal from the list, as well as a lack of political will on the part of U.S. policymakers to square off with that minority.

Nonetheless, he asserted that the time is ripe for the United States to take Cuba off the list and prioritise helping the Cuban people over harming the Cuban regime.

President Barack Obama’s administration has overseen some notable policy shifts, such as a relaxation of laws restricting travel by U.S. citizens with family in Cuba. Certain realities have also been changing within Cuba, including the abdication of Fidel Castro from power, which make friendlier policies toward the island nation more feasible.

Sarah Stephens, executive director of the Centre for Democracy in the Americas, a U.S. organisation that promotes reconciliation with Cuba, told IPS that delisting Cuba now would “enable the U.S. to support Cuba’s drive to update its economic model, make it easier to facilitate trade and easier for Cuba to access high technology items”.

“Doing so,” she said, “would in turn help Cubans lead more prosperous and independent lives.”

Debating Cuba’s qualifications

Cuba has been on the State Department list since 1982, but some analysts maintain that the country did not fit the definition of a state sponsor of terror even then. In order to fit that legal definition, a country must have “repeatedly provided support for international terrorism”.

According to Robert L. Muse, a specialist on the legality of U.S. policy toward Cuba, there are currently three ostensible reasons for Cuba’s inclusion in the most recent list: that it has allowed Basque separatists to reside within its borders, that it has dealings with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and that it harbours fugitives wanted for crimes committed in the United States.

Muse, who spoke Tuesday at CSIS, claimed the first two reasons were void because the countries concerned actually condone Cuba’s relationship with their adversaries. Cuba is currently host to negotiations between FARC and the Colombian government, and Spanish leaders prefer that Basque rebels remain in Cuba – and out of Spain.

These interactions with rebel groups, in Muse’s opinion, “can hardly be a basis even for criticism”. It is only the third justification, that Cuba harbours U.S. fugitives, which he said “could fairly bear description as a reason” for keeping Cuba on the list.

Cuba has harboured a number of fugitives seeking refuge from the U.S. justice system. The most prominent is Assata Shakur, an African-American poet and participant in 1970s black liberation movements who was allegedly involved in the killing of a police officer. She was convicted for the murder but escaped and in 1984 gained political asylum in Cuba, where she has remained ever since.

Early last month, Shakur became the first woman to be added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Most Wanted Terrorist list. But Muse notes that this designation was “arbitrary and capricious”, as neither she nor any other fugitive residing in Cuba has been accused, let alone convicted, of international terrorism.

Politics as usual

Both Muse and Bilbao concluded that Cuba’s continued presence on the State Department’s terrorism list arises less from these shaky legal justifications than from political calculations.

Others have arrived at similar conclusions for years. In 2002, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton suggested that maintaining Cuba on the list keeps happy a certain part of the voting public in Florida – a politically important state with a large Cuban exile population – and “it doesn’t cost anything”.

Muse disagreed with the latter part of that statement, however. He noted that by behaving arbitrarily in what should be a strictly legal matter, the United States was damaging its “credibility on the issue of international terrorism” and diminishing its “seriousness of purpose” in using the term “terrorism” in a meaningful manner.

Proponents of the status quo argue the opposite, saying that by removing Cuba the United States would damage its credibility by effectively making a concession. Bilbao explained to IPS that those such views focus on the “spin” of the Cuban government rather than on the actual consequences of taking Cuba off the list, a move he believes would ultimately benefit the United States.

“I think the priority of the U.S. government should be to determine what’s in its best interests,” he told IPS.

Muse went a step further, saying the list itself is a problem. He noted that even while the list includes countries that don’t deserve to be on it, proven sponsors, such as Pakistan, of international terrorism – albeit those with friendly relations with the U.S. – are absent from it.

His recommendation to solve the problem was simple: “Just scrap the list.”

The report, released this week by the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), stressed that intra-Asian security relationships – such as those that have developed between India and Vietnam or Japan, and Australia and South Korea – are creating a new regional and strategic reality of which Washington should take advantage.

“Strategies defined solely by historical notions of American primacy will fail to garner the benefits of a more networked security environment in Asia,” according to the 47-page report, “The Emerging Asia Power Web”.

“Although traditional bilateral alliances and partnerships will remain the foundation of U.S. strategy in Asia, U.S. policymakers will have to supplement them with approaches that move beyond the hub-and-spoke alliance model,” the report said.

“In some instances, this will mean stepping back and resisting the temptation to assume a leadership role in advancing relations among allies and partners,” it added.

And while Sino-U.S. competition is likely to remain the “predominant driver of security behaviour in Asia”, the development of alternative, indigenous security networks could work to take the “heat off the U.S.-China relationship” and have the added benefit of creating a “stronger deterrent” against more aggressive behaviour by Beijing against its neighbours, the report concluded.

The report, which was co-authored by CNAS’s director Asia-Pacific Security Program, Patrick Cronin, and CNAS president Richard Fontaine, and others, follows last weekend’s two-day summit of Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping at a southern California estate.

The meeting, which was designed primarily to begin to dispel the “mutual strategic suspicion” that has historically arisen between a rising great power and a reigning one as it increasingly appears to have between Beijing and Washington in recent years, reportedly narrowed position on dealing with at least one major regional problem – North Korea’s insistence on being recognised as a nuclear power.

But on other regional points of contention, particularly China’s territorial claims in the South and East China Seas that are a growing source of concern to U.S. allies and partners in the region, it appears that the two sides mostly stuck to their pre-summit positions.

The Obama administration’s support for China’s neighbours in those territorial disputes and its recent upgrading of military ties with them, combined with its much-touted “pivot” or “rebalancing” of its naval and other assets towards the Asia-Pacific region through 2020, has fuelled charges by senior Beijing officials that Washington is adopting a “containment” strategy against China.

The administration has vigorously denied those charges, insisting that it welcomes China as a great power and hopes to work out an increasingly co-operative relationship with it.

It has also repeatedly called for all parties to establish “rules of the road” – preferably in a multilateral context, a suggestion that Beijing has so far resisted – for navigation, exploration and exploitation rights in contested areas that would both reduce tensions and significantly reduce the risks of violent confrontation.

In this context, the CNAS report argued that the rapid growth of intra-regional security ties between China’s neighbours – or the “Asia Power Web” – adds an important new factor in the regional strategic equation.

The report focused in particular on developments in security relations between and among six countries – Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam – both because they are “key allies or emerging partners” of the United States and because they have been “the most active in diversifying their security relationships” in the region.

These new, mostly bilateral relationships range from the Indian Navy’s training Vietnamese submariners to Japan’s recent security agreement with Australia, the first it has signed outside the post-World War Two U.S.-Japan alliance.

They have been marked by high-level military-to-military consultations; increasingly frequent joint exercises; a plethora of formal defence and security agreements; military-training programmes, and intra-Asian arms sales, particularly of systems designed for maritime use, fuelled both by concern over China’s territorial ambitions and rapidly increasing defence budgets throughout the region.

The primary motivation for these new and rapidly growing relationships, according to the report, is “the desire of countries to supplement their ties with the United States and China” .

While Washington remains both a key investor and underwriter of regional security, Asian officials are concerned about U.S. staying power, given likely declines in the defence budget and war fatigue. Similarly, while China has become a “critical engine of economic growth throughout the region.…many states remain wary about the possibility of a heavy-handed Chinese foreign policy.”

“As a result, governments have begun hedging against these uncertainties by deepening engagement with like-minded states to diversify their political, security and economic relationships,” the report said.

These trends, which the authors expect to deepen in the coming years, offer Washington a number of benefits, but it must be careful in navigating the evolving strategic environment, according to the report.

“The diversification of security ties in Asia could have the salutary effect of reducing the prominence of U.S.-China competition in regional disputes,” it argued, noting that recent crises in the East and South China Seas have put Washington’s responses in the spotlight and elevated them to “strategic tests of Washington’s credibility”.

“This dynamic puts the United States in the difficult position of needing to meet its alliance commitments [to Japan and the Philippines] and maintaining regional security without provoking China into a major power war.”

“In addition to taking the heat off of the U.S.-China relationship, stronger bilateral security ties will likely have a broader deterrent effect on Chinese assertiveness,” according to the report, which noted that Beijing has historically “exercised greater caution and moderation in the face of multilateral resistance”.

“These benefits will be undermined, however, if China perceives the United States to be the principal drive of alternative security networks,” it added.

As a result, to the extent that “Washington does take a more active role in knitting together burgeoning security ties in Asia”, it should do so in ways that include Beijing in any multilateral activities that involve Washington, such as the annual U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific exercises to which China has been invited to participate in 2014.

Similarly, it should avoid overly formalised “mini-lateral” security arrangements that can be “perceived as counterbalancing coalitions”.

In addition, Washington must “remain vigilant against threats of entrapment from adventurous allies and partners”, the report recommended.

“U.S. policymakers should be clear in private with allies and partners about U.S. commitments and expectations in the region and should publicly call on all sides to avoid unilateral actions that threaten regional stability.”