Talking Geopolitics

Kamran Bokhari and Jacob L. Shapiro discuss where IS came from, the history and politics of radical Islam, and what happens if IS is defeated in Raqqa. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

JS: Hello, my name is Jacob Shapiro, I’m broadcasting today from Avignon, in the south of France. I’m joined by Kamran Bokhari, who I believe is in Washington, D.C. Is that right Kamran?

KB: Yes I am.

JS: I’m joined by Kamran Bokhari who is our senior analyst and who focuses on the Middle East, and we’re going to be talking a little bit about ISIS. Thanks for joining us Kamran.

KB: Pleasure to be here.

JS: So, Kamran, I thought instead of talking about every single battle and every single report that seems to indicate ISIS is imminently falling, we might take a broader look at the subject for our listeners. So, how about we just start with a rather broad question – tell me about how ISIS started. How did ISIS come to be in the middle of Syria and Iraq?

KB: Well if you recall, Jacob, this happened in the wake of regime change, or regime collapse, in Iraq, when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled the Saddam government and has since been unable to form a viable state. And it was not just the lack of a state, but it also brought to the fore forces that were until then very much contained under the autocratic leadership of the Baathist regime.

And so what we had was the disenfranchisement of the Sunnis, the rise of the Shiites and of course the rise of the Kurds, in the form of regional autonomy. ISIS did not exist, in fact, there were hardly any Islamist groups of any shade in Iraq, but in war, especially when you have the sectarian problem in the Middle East where the Sunnis and the Shia are struggling with one another – yes, the Sunni government came down, but it’s not like the Shiites were able to establish their own government.

There was a window of opportunity in which the founders of ISIS, particularly Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who founded what used to be called al-Qaida in Iraq, laid the foundation for ISIS. And as the years rolled on, ISIS continued to gain strength from the conflict that was brewing. It was a complex conflict. There were Shiites fighting Shiites, Shiites fighting Sunnis, Sunnis fighting Kurds and Sunnis fighting the United States. So in that complex warlike scenario, that’s where we find the birth of ISIS.

JS: Yes, well, as usual in the Middle East, everybody is fighting everybody and it’s all complicated. But so there’s a lot there to unpack. So how about we start with this: You mentioned that the original name of ISIS was al-Qaida in Iraq and you also said that ISIS began, or really, its generation point came in 2003 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. How about we go back a little step further, and can you talk about the relationship between al-Qaida and between ISIS and what the relationship was and how it’s developed?

KB: If we go back to the aftermath of 9/11 and after the United States invaded Afghanistan and destroyed the infrastructure of al-Qaida, disrupted its operations, forcing al-Qaida, the original organization, to disperse and relocate largely in northwestern Pakistan. Al-Qaida had basically very little power projection capability at that point. I’m talking between 2001 and 2003. And at that point in time, it seemed like al-Qaida’s purpose for staging the 9/11 attacks, which was to bait the United States into militarily acting in a very large way in the Middle East, in the heart of the Muslim world, that didn’t succeed.

The United States sent in a small force, largely special operations forces and intelligence operatives and later NATO forces came in, but originally it was Afghan forces on the ground who toppled the Taliban regime. That didn’t produce the kind of effect that al-Qaida was hoping for. But then when the United States invaded Iraq, that was an opportunity. But al-Qaida didn’t have any horses in this race. Al-Qaida could not reach Iraq. But Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who ran his own jihadist training camp in Afghanistan pre-9/11, was able to make his way from Afghanistan between 2001, and by the time the United States invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, he had set up his shop in the Sunni areas in northern Iraq. And he was able to take advantage of that vacuum that was created with the fall of the Saddam regime and he began an insurgency.

But at that point in time his group used to be called something like Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad and it wasn’t even called al-Qaida. But this individual and this outfit were on the ground, al-Qaida was at a distance. Both needed each other.

Zarqawi’s outfit was not getting the kind of coverage or the kind of support, financially or otherwise, because it was an unknown quantity. Al-Qaida was a brand at the time and therefore it was a marriage of convenience. Bin Laden and Zawahiri and al-Qaida, the original organization, or what was left of it, did not have the ability to act in Iraq. These guys were acting, so they formed an alliance and Zarqawi became the leader of what became the al-Qaida branch in Iraq. And that’s sort of where these guys started to work together.

Operationally, Zarqawi was his own guy, he didn’t have to report on a daily basis, he did what he thought was right and he was essentially following strategic guidance from Bin Laden and the top leadership, to the extent that he cared to do that. But it was an arrangement that worked for a while. But effectively, Zarqawi became more and more powerful and at one point, he didn’t really need to report back. He never rebelled, in his lifetime, he was killed in 2006, and by that time his group was institutionalized to the point where his successors were able to take the group to the next level. And as the years rolled on, until the United States in 2007-2008 were able to get the Sunnis to turn against Zarqawi and his al-Qaida in Iraq, these guys had put down quite a bit of roots inside the country. And therefore, I think that’s where the foundation was laid. Now, everything that’s happened since is sort of building upon this foundation.

JS: Well if I can – I’ll stop you there and I’ll just say, one of the interesting things that you’re saying is that Zarqawi wasn’t in Iraq. But you also said that one of al-Qaida’s original goals was to draw the United States into the Middle East. Another of al-Qaida’s goals was to try and demonstrate to much of the Islamic world, especially the Arab world, that all of these secular dictatorships, or dictatorships that had been propped up by the West, had no legitimacy.

They thought if they could bring the United States in and if they could show the people of the Middle East that their regimes had no legitimacy that there would be some kind of popular revolt. So they didn’t – they weren’t able to bring the United States into the Middle East right away, but the fact that Zarqawi was able to get himself to Iraq and found there a very fertile ground for recruits indicates that perhaps Bin Laden, and al-Qaida in general, had a much better assessment of the level of discontent in that part of the world than anybody else. Would you agree with that characterization?

KB: I would, but I would also say that this wasn’t sort of – this was one of those things that they, al-Qaida, the original organization led by Bin Laden, intended to do, but had it not been for Zarqawi and his efforts and his ability to implant himself in Iraq at a time when the United States was going to war in that country, I don’t think we would’ve come this far.

So there’s a bit of luck if you think from al-Qaida’s point of view. Now obviously, ever since, al-Qaida has taken sort of the backseat, and now ISIS as we know it, or the Islamic State, it’s essentially a different organization. It has its roots in al-Qaida, in many ways it took al-Qaida’s original view and ideas and really operationalized them in a way that al-Qaida could not because of the lack of capability and the fact that Bin Laden and his top associates traded away day-to-day operational control for physical security of the leadership of the movement, they thought if the leadership was killed then al-Qaida would collapse, and therefore, the price was that you allow these groups to operate on their own. Now they didn’t think that al-Qaida in Iraq would become not just an independent organization but one that would eclipse al-Qaida itself.

JS: That’s true, too, but you made another interesting point that I want to take you back to, which is that you mentioned that Zarqawi was the right man in the right place at the right time. That’s an important point because when we’re dealing with geopolitics and especially when we’re dealing with state actors, the role of the individual, generally speaking, is not that important. We put less emphasis on the individual. Maybe with a sub-state actor it has a little bit of difference. But I guess the question I would pose to you then, is, was it really Zarqawi that was that special or was there going to be a Zarqawi anyway? And was the situation going to mushroom into that anyway, or did it really require someone who had that connection to al-Qaida, who had that experience, who had that training, who had that world view, who knew how to operationalize it, who knew how to put it together, to go to Iraq and to take advantage of the situation?

Or would it have been, when the United States went in and when things started going wrong in Iraq, that this kind of movement would’ve sort of organically sprouted up anyway?

KB: I think that this was bound to happen. If it was not Zarqawi it could’ve been someone else, because in reality, Zarqawi the personality could only do so much unless the ground realities allowed for it, and there were enabling factors, the disenfranchisement of the Sunnis, created a lot of leaders.

Back in the day, I’m talking 2003 to 2005-6 I remember that Zarqawi was just one of many militia leaders, one of many factions. At the time, the group had yet to distinguish itself. So there were no shortage of outfits and organizations. I think probably what did make a bit of a difference was the fact that this individual had experience in running training camps, in running an organization going back to the late ’90s and I think that experience came in handy. But it’s not that Zarqawi was so important to all of this.

Now, the insurgency may have taken a different route, but the fact that there is a Shiite-Sunni struggle going on at the time, that didn’t require Zarqawi. That was going on independent of any personality per se. And so I think that the ground was fertile. It required an individual and an outfit that had the experience.

If you fast-forward just a little bit to 2012, and when the Syrian uprising morphed into a full-scale civil war, again it was Zarqawi’s outfit – because of its experience – that was able to take advantage of the vacuum that was created in eastern Syria and was able to take over places like Raqqa and Deir el-Zour and the oil fields. And it became the biggest militia and really eclipsed the rebels who started the war.

So I think there’s something to be said about institutionalization. I’m not a big fan of personalities, I think that there were many others, and the fact that Zarqawi only lived for three years as the leader and we are now in year 14 of this entity, says a lot. I mean, there are a lot of leaders who had come by and taken over the same group and really moved on, so you know, there’s institutionalization and there are ground realities that sustain these type of entities.

JS: I want to talk about the sectarian part of all this and I also want to fast forward to the present day, but before we do that I want to ask you one more question that goes back a little bit and sets the stage, which is that, so we have now identified that there was a fertile ground there for recruitment for Zarqawi and for these other heads of militias to recruit for al-Qaida, to recruit for the general mission and this may be an impossible question for you to answer, but we specialize in impossible questions, so when do you think this moment in the Muslim world started happening? When did the discontent get to such an extent that people were so upset that they would be open to this kind of ideology?

When did it start to move away from secular nationalism or any of the other things that were peoples’ identifying political ideology, particularly Arab nationalism too – when did it go from that to Islam being one of the major things, and this radical version of Islam being something that could be used as a tool to create these organizations?

KB: I think if I had to put my finger on a date, I would say right after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, in which Egypt, Syria and Jordan suffered a major defeat at the hands of Israel. And I think that was sort of the turning point. But having said that, I will also point out that these are not, sort of, on-and-off switches. Things are taking shape in parallel. So a new movement is operating parallel to an older movement and at some point the new movement overtakes the pre-existing movement, in terms of its popular appeal.

I think that the crisis essentially allowed, the devastating defeat of the Arab states really allowed for the Islamists to come out and say, what have the secularists given to this region, to the people of this region, to the Arabs, to the Muslims? And they were able to really craft a narrative, or take an existing narrative to the next level and say, it is because we have left the ideas that made us great in the past. We have abandoned that, that has led us to this kind of lull, and if we were to go back to Islam, then this region can regain its lost glory.

I think that’s the really turning point, but groups, if you were to measure Islamism in the form of groups, I would say that by the mid-’70s, these groups had started to come out, and I think by the end of the 1970s, Islamism had exploded onto the scene.

We had the revolution in Iran, albeit a Shiite Islamist regime took over from the monarchy of the shah, but nonetheless, it had a real impact, a psychological impact on the majority Sunni Islamists. There was also the taking over of the Kaaba in 1979 in November by radical Salafis trying to overthrow the Saudi regime, and then I think that really the incubator that really took Islamism to the next level, was the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan that allowed for different Islamists from different parts of the Arab Muslim world to come together and have a shared experience for a decade and really become battle hardened and not just ideologically advance themselves, but acquire capabilities that make political change a bit more, if you will, realizable.

JS: Would you say that though – I mean, yes, so Afghanistan was that ground where they all met, but I’m struck by the fact that most of the examples you use are Arab. Would you describe radical Islam and this particular strain of jihadism as an Arab phenomenon or a Muslim phenomenon?

KB: I would say it’s an Arab phenomenon. One of the things to note is that Egypt is the cradle of all ideologies that have spread across the Arab Muslim world. Secularism in the Arab world began in Egypt. Islamism, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, began in Egypt. Jihadism, what later was made transnational by al-Qaida and more recently by ISIS, has its roots in Egypt. So definitely it is – and then of course the Salafism of Saudi Arabia and its input into the making of this broader phenomenon. So yes, there is no doubt that it is an Arab ideology at its core, at its root. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take other shapes, though the Chechens have Islamism in a different direction and have emerged as leaders, for lack of a better term, in the Caucasus region. We have Central Asian jihadists, Southeast Asia has their own jihadists. But really, jihadism and the entire Islamist project is very much Arab at its core.

JS: It also seems to be very Sunni. So you brought up Iran a little earlier, but I guess we could talk about Hezbollah and I guess we could talk about some of these groups, but how do you account for the fact that the majority of these groups are Sunni? Is there something within Sunni Islam or within their particular interpretation of Sunni Islam that leads to this kind of ideology?

Is it really just that the political and geographic circumstances in countries that were Sunni and were Arab were bad enough and were the right mix of things that it really wasn’t anything embedded within Sunni Islam itself? It was just that there was a situation in those countries and Sunni Islam was the religion that they practiced and therefore that was how it got manifested? So how do you – and I know we’re going to talk about sectarianism a little more because it’s so important, especially for the rise of ISIS, particularly in Iraq, but how do you account for the fact that most of these groups when we talk about them are all Sunni?

KB: So I think that the easy way to understand this is simply that Sunnis have always been the majority sect in Islam. And the overwhelming majority. Even today, there aren’t real good, if you will, we don’t have a reliable census that we can say – OK, you know what, this is how many percentage of Shiites and Sunnis per country. But it’s fair to say, I would say, that a good 80 percent of the Arab Muslim world is Sunni.

Therefore, you know, the ideology of jihadism or any other ideology that came before, has always been dominated by the Sunnis. And so it’s demography, it’s sectarian demography, but it’s also geography. If you look at the history of the expansion of Islam, and how over time, it gets factionalized and geography imposes its limits, and creates problems and leads to the rise of new regimes and new ideas, it becomes very clear that it’s not something inherent in Sunni Islam, necessarily.
Yes, there is this crisis of what does it mean to be a Muslim in the here and now in a collective sense. And the Muslim world has not seen, has not really come far beyond the old imperial age, that for the rest of the world, is now a good – you know it’s in its second century, that was 200 years ago that the rest of the world, or the Western world in particular, really left the imperial form of governance for a modern nation-state based on a secular order and a commitment to self-determination and democracy. I think that evolution has not occurred in the Muslim world and therefore there is this crisis. But I don’t think it’s necessarily something in Sunni Islam. If Shiites had been the majority, in a counterfactual reality, I think we’d be facing the same problems.

JS: I think I agree with you, but I’ll play devil’s advocate for a second, which is to say that I think you’re right generally and this is not so much a Muslim issue especially in the Middle East, but it goes beyond the Middle East. But Iran is the Islamic Republic, right? You talked about the Iranian Revolution and Iran is really the center of Shiite Islam in the world. And we could say that there is a much more mature political, or at least a much more mature idea, about what the relationship is supposed to be between politics and between religion in Iran. It’s not necessarily all settled.

There are obviously large disagreements within Iran itself, but we might say that Turkey is another example that is fighting through this right now. It’s not stable, but there’s a much, much more mature sense of what that relationship is between politics and religion. So how do you account for a country like Iran, which went through its own turmoil and it has its own pressure, or a country like Turkey, which is currently doing it right now, how do you account for those countries developing the way they’re developing versus the Arab world, which is essentially cannibalizing itself right now?

KB: So there are a number of factors with it. The first one is that Sunni Islam has been preoccupied for, you know, over a millennia with orthodoxy. Orthodoxy has been its obsession. What are the boundaries of justifiable behavior and thought? That’s what Sunni Islam – and I think that there is a certain logic here, that if you are the majority, you’re not worried about existential issues. You’re worried about the, you know, legitimacy, authenticity in terms of religious ideas. And so I think that is something that the Sunnis have been preoccupied for a very long time.

And, therefore, they were not open to experimentation, for a lack of a better term, or to, you know, what the noted Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush will call “extra-religious ideas,” in other words moving beyond the religious text and borrowing from other civilizations. Not to say that that did not happen, but I think that by and large, that kind of borrowing or attempt to borrow from other civilizations and advance your social and political discourse, that’s something that the Shiites were much more open to from the very beginning. I mean, for them, it wasn’t the orthodoxy. It was much more about the sect itself.

Being a minority, you know, issues of survival, that force you to innovate and force you to look beyond, if you will, your own belief. And so I think that the Shiites have had a head start in social, political and economic development. And keep in mind, it’s not just Shiites. It’s the idea that, we have to keep in mind that there is Iran. Persian nationalism is also at play here. So it’s the interplay between the Persian ethno-linguistic civilization that flourished for a very long time, predating Islam.

So, I think that when we look at Iran, its Islamism – the Islamic Republic – is a blend of a lot of ideas that are not necessarily Islamic in origin. So I think that’s why you have Iran looking very different and far more healthy than the Arab world.

And jumping over to Turkey, I think Turkey – although a Sunni power – does not come from the orthodox core, i.e. Arab core of Islam. I mean, the Turks came from Central Asia. And they went from Central Asia to Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) and they set up shop over there. And before they did that, I’d like to add, they were in Europe (in Eastern Europe) and they were a European power well before they became a Middle Eastern power. And the Islam that is practiced over in Turkey is very different, or at least was very different. There has been a lot of blending and spillover of Salafism and these jihadi ideas and Islamic ideas, even in Turkey. But by and large, Turkey has had a different trajectory.

And then, of course, secularism. And here I don’t mean just Atatürk – Mustafa Kemal – the founder of the modern Republic. He didn’t come out of nowhere. What he instituted, the Westernization of Turkey, the Europeanization of the Ottoman Empire and the building of the Turkish Republic along European lines, that didn’t happen all of a sudden. It was built on the reforms that Sultan Mahmud II, (the Ottoman Emperor in the early 19th century), something he began and borrowed from Europe.

So, you have very different trajectories here. And, of course, the geography of this region – I mean anybody who controls the Anatolian plateau, and anybody who is headquartered in Persia, is very secure. It’s a strategic location from which you can build civilizations.

The Arab world, if you go back to history, the Arabs really lost power and leadership of Islam, I would say, by the late 800s, mid-800s. They had lost the leadership of Islam because Turkic and Persianate dominions began to emerge and challenge the Arabs for leadership over Islam. And I’m not talking Shiite Islam, I’m talking Sunni Islam.

JS: This is all interesting, and we’re going a little bit over time, but I think it’s worth it because this is an interesting conversation. I’d also just like to point out to our listeners that we didn’t exactly plan this little divergence in the conversation. You can already see one of the reasons we appreciate Kamran, because he’s a veritable encyclopedia for everything that has happened in the Muslim world ever.

But one thing I want to ask you that is based on that, I want to take it a little away from what we were talking about before and then come back to ISIS to finish it of, is that I’m currently in southern France for some meetings, and for some conferences and for some other things, and obviously one of the main issues here and throughout most of Europe is the migration issue.

You have, I wouldn’t say a large number, it’s a large enough number that the European Union is not able to organize itself to bring them in, in absolute terms it’s not a huge number. But there are Muslim immigrants to Europe who are looking to find a place to live and to start a new life. And one of the concerns, especially here, especially in other places in Europe, is that they won’t be able to assimilate, that they’ll want to have their own culture, their own sense of law, and what is right and wrong, and that this presents a major challenge for the nation-states of Europe. Because how do they integrate them in? They don’t want to just turn them away, but they don’t want to lose the basic facts of their national identity.

So you’re talking about especially Sunni Islam and about the concern with orthodoxy and all these other things. I know that for instance in Jewish religion there is a rule in the religious text that is the law of the land is the law. It’s supposed to supersede religious law.

So, I’ve thrown a bunch of different issues at you off the cuff when I bring all those things up, what do you think about the migration crisis in general, and what do the things that we’ve talked about relating to Islam here say about the ability of Muslims who are coming to Europe or who are coming to the United States to assimilate? Do you think that Islam presents a major optical for them, or do you view those Muslims as any other group that has emigrated from one place to another and has to go through certain growing pains but will eventually assimilate?

KB: I think it’s a bit of the latter. But there are concerns, and I do have concerns that there are issues. And it’s not because of Islam. Islam is what you make of it, if we are to borrow from Reza Aslan, the prominent author of the book on Jesus recently, and he now has a show on CNN.

But really, I do think that Islam inherently is not something that prevents assimilation. I mean, we’ve seen this before, and I’ve just talked about how Persians and Turkic peoples and others, Chechens, took Islam in their own direction. I think that that’s very much possible. But the question is, what is the geopolitics that we’re dealing with when we talk about migration from the Middle East, particularly Syria, to Europe?

In places like France, particularly, where there is sort of this if you will pre-existing strong, secular tendency and this desire by French people to have those who come to their country embrace that secularism with the same fervor. I think that’s going to create some problems, and then of course, economic issues. So, there will be a lot of Syrian refugees for whom these issues are not really important. Because for them the first thing is, how do I get my family to safety? How can I escape war, get to a place where we’re not going to be killed, and then of course, we have opportunities of livelihood.

But I think that while they do that, a good chunk of them are still concerned about losing their religion in the process. And when that happens, and then you have this overarching, if you will, dynamic of ISIS and political Islam that these people can’t ignore, then you’re looking at a real recipe for conflict in these countries. And therefore, I think that the European states are justified in their fear.

I don’t buy the idea that this has something to do with religion, but I think that it’s the geopolitical expression of religion that is the problem, and how immigrants are going to be welcomed or not, and how they see secularism. We say that there has to be moderation on the part of those who come from these areas, there has to be Islamist moderation. But I think at the same time that that’s only possible if the European states also have a role to play in this. If they expect that these people will just say, oh you know what, I’m French now, and that’s the way to go, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

So there has to be a bit of give and take on both sides. And that give and take in the current geopolitical climate is really not possible where you’re having terrorist attacks, there’s the ISIS threat that’s not going away, and economies are not doing well, there’s not enough money to go around, and people are worried about losing their jobs to immigrants. And so in this atmosphere I think we’re looking more at conflict rather than the ability to assimilate.

JS: I’m afraid I agree with all of that. But to get us out of here, the question, and I’ll take us back, we started all of this by talking about ISIS, and we sort of wandered around the Islamic world, even stepped our foot a little bit into Europe.

I think one of the points we wanted to make in this podcast was that there’s a lot of talk about the Islamic State is about to collapse. People have been saying the Islamic State is about to collapse for well over a year, a year and a half now. It’s true that the Islamic State is facing a lot of pressure, a lot more pressure than it has previously on a lot of its borders. But I think the issue that you’re really driving at here is that this isn’t about one group, and it isn’t just about a group in a particular state. It’s really about a broader phenomenon, and it’s a game of Whack-a-Mole.

Sure, you might be able to hit the Islamic State and you might even be able to dislodge them out of Raqqa. It’ll take a lot of casualties, but maybe you’ll be able to get rid of the caliphate in that way. But the general ground, the fertile ground that Zarqawi came to after 2001 and was able to build this group into what it is today, I think what you’re saying is that the ground is still fertile. The basic problems that we’re talking about have not been resolved and perhaps have even been exacerbated because there’s even less opportunity than there was before. Is that an accurate characterization of what you think?

KB: Absolutely. I totally agree with you Jacob. I think that what we have to keep in mind is that we’ve been here before. So the predecessor organizations of ISIS, or IS, they were defeated at one point in time. But then they came back. And I’ll give you a very clear example.

In 2008, a large segment of Iraqi Sunnis had turned their guns away from fighting U.S. soldiers to fighting al-Qaida in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIS. And that group had been weakened. It wasn’t completely uprooted, but it had been sufficiently weakened, and we saw respite. If you go back to between 2008 and 2011, the frequency of bombings had dropped, and things were looking better. But this group came out of the woodwork in 2011 when the United States left Iraq and the Shiite-dominated government basically double-crossed the Sunnis.

They did not want to share power with the Sunnis fearing that the Sunnis had decades of experience, and if we let our guard down, it’ll only be a matter of time before this Shiite-dominated republic falls, even before it’s taking root. And so, that allowed for ISIS to come out. And then, on top of that, you had the Syrian civil war emerge and that created far more time and space for ISIS.

And so, I think moving forward, if ISIS at the time, the predecessor of ISIS, which was muck weaker, much smaller, was able to revive itself in very difficult circumstances, I think that now they have far more opportunity to revive themselves, because that war that was confined to Iraq is now expanded. It’s in Yemen, it’s spilling over into Turkey, we see it playing out in Egypt and North Africa, and Syria is a mess.

So, I think that maybe ISIS will be decimated as we know it today. Maybe the remnants of ISIS will form a new group that will eclipse ISIS of today, some other organization. We mustn’t forget that al-Qaida is still there in Syria. And it’s changed a few names, it used to be Jabhat al-Nusra, then Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, and now they have a new coalition in Idlib. There are plenty of forces to take this caliphate project and take it to the next level, because the underlying political problems are still there, Shiite-Sunni conflict is still there, both in Syria and Iraq and the wider region, Iran and Saudi Arabia are at each other’s throats, and there is no viable political-economic model that we’re seeing in the Arab world.

So, this hollowing out of the Arab world that you’ve written about, I mean that is not going away. And I suspect that the problem that we’re dealing with, which we today call ISIS, will be with us, but with a different name in the years to come.

JS: Well, thanks Kamran, and thanks for staying overtime a little bit with us to talk about this issue. I know it’s a complicated one, and it’s a really important one. So, I’m glad we were able to talk about it in some depth.

Once again, I’m Jacob Shapiro, I’m the director of analysis for Geopolitical Futures. I was just talking with Kamran Bokhari, he is a senior analyst at Geopolitical Futures. We’ll be doing another podcast next week. Please feel free to send us feedback on these podcasts by emailing us at [email protected], and for analysis on how ISIS is going to develop, and how all the things we have talked about are going to develop over time, you can check out our analysis in GeopoliticalFutures.com. Thanks.

GPF analysts Jacob L. Shapiro and Antonia Colibasanu talk about attending a conference on geopolitics in the Italian city of Genoa and explore the future of Europe after President Donald Trump's election. Learn how nationalism is impacting the future of Europe. Go here: hubs.ly/H06zhKq0

TRANSCRIPT:

JS: Hello everyone, I’m Jacob Shapiro, I’m the director of analysis for Geopolitical Futures. I’m joined today by our senior Europe analyst, Antonia Colibasanu. We’re coming to you from the Hotel Bristol in Genoa, Italy. Both Antonia and I have been on panels here presenting at a conference organized by Limes, which is a well-known geopolitical magazine here in Italy. So Antonia, thank you for taking the time out of the busy weekend to join us.

AC: Thank you for having me.

JS: So Antonia, I know that you were speaking on a panel that was about the future of Europe. Can you tell me a little bit about what your panel was about specifically and what some of the speakers on your panel were talking about?

AC: Sure. So, the panel was about the challenges that Europe currently faces as we see multiple crises arising in the EU, one of them being the euro crisis, the other one being related to Russia and the third one being related to the refugee crisis. The three panelists that were there – one from Germany, the other one from France, and myself, representing Geopolitical Futures as well as the Romanian view – were talking about the different perspectives on the European future that we are seeing from our own chairs.

JS: And tell us a little bit more about the chair that you’re sitting in.

AC: Well, basically, it was all about Eastern Europe and how we see challenges in Eastern Europe and how that affects the future of Europe. Basically I was saying that considering the current divides in Europe, Eastern Europe is seeing Russia to be the main threat and is looking at that as the main security problem that it faces. The secondary threat that it sees is related to the economics of the EU and the fragmentation of the union. However, my colleagues from France and Germany were looking at the refugee crisis to be more important for them on a security level than anything related to Russia. Or, let’s say, Russia was secondary to them.

JS: I think – I was sitting in and listening to your panel and I thought one of the interesting threads that connected a lot of the events here this weekend that we’ve been going to is really the strategic ambiguity around Germany and what Germany’s foreign policy posture is. Our readers of course know that we follow Germany very closely and in particular we’re following the German economy very closely, but I think that people are perhaps less familiar with the general unsuredness of some European countries about Germany’s direction. Did you feel like that came out during the panel? Do you think that that fits in terms of Geopolitical Futures’ model?

AC: I did certainly see that was coming from the panel. First of all, that ambiguity is coming from the fact that Germany is taking the leadership of Europe and everyone in Europe is expecting that to happen. However, Germany is not necessarily sure on how it wants to lead Europe. On one hand, it has the economic problems of a fragmenting EU, which means less market for its own exports. On the other, it has Russia and the refugee crisis to deal with – Russia being both a partner and a competitor in the East and the refugee crisis being an internal political problem. This is why everyone is having a question to ask Germany and Germany finds it difficult to answer.

JS: What does that mean for the future of the European Union and the future of NATO and the future of Europe generally?

AC: Well basically, the future of the European Union means more divides than union in itself because you have an undecided Germany, you have the division between the West and the East, but you also have the division between the North and the South. Therefore, it is difficult to see how all states are going to come together and share their same vision and discuss the same policies on how to tackle all the multiple crises they are going through. Particularly because their electorate are just not on the very same page.

A German does not have problems as a Romanian has, and therefore it is difficult for a German politician to get along with a Romanian politician or a Polish politician, because they do not share the same concerns.

On the NATO issue, that is another big challenge that people in the East look more worried about than the ones in the West. The West sees a possibility for countries to come together and actually form a European security because they see the Western Europeans being concerned about the refugee crisis and with that challenge they think that they can cope – they have a common goal.

The East, however, sees Russia as the primary threat and they do not see the West sharing that. Therefore, they see a NATO that no longer has a common goal. They see the U.S. being also interested in having more into the eastern front, having more from the Europeans themselves because basically the U.S. is asking for the Europeans to come on board to spend for their own security, which is not happening, particularly in the Western countries.

This is why we are going to see a trend that we’ve talked about at Geopolitical Futures. The Eastern countries are going to secure their position through the partnership with the U.S., through bilateral partnerships in the region and through cooperation even within NATO, with the countries that share the same goal. This may happen in Western Europe as well. And this poses the question of how united NATO will be in the future.

JS: That’s interesting, and just following up on that, sitting through some of these conferences I’ve noticed that, of course, there is a lot of attention given to President Donald Trump and the new U.S. administration – I feel like that’s almost a horse that has been beat to death, it’s the thing that everybody can’t stop talking about but nobody really wants to talk about anymore – but I thought that one of the other topics that came up continually throughout the course of this weekend was the role of China in Europe. So could you maybe speak a little bit about the role of China in Europe and whether there’s any Western and Eastern divide on that?

AC: Sure, so China is seen as an opportunity for Europe. Everyone believes that China is going to invest a lot of money in Europe and create a lot of jobs through infrastructure investment. That may be true if China would actually have the money to spend in Europe and would have less problems at home. However, one of the issues that it is important to notice is the fact that China regards, and wants to see a leadership coming up from the European perspective. So I believe that China is also wondering what is going on with the European Union.

One thing that caught my attention was the fact that the only Chinese participant in the conference was speaking in German during the conference. That says a lot about the perception of China towards Europe. Basically it says that China sees Germany as a leader and it ultimately comes to how Germany and China will get along.

JS: That’s interesting, but do you think that that’s possible? Do you think the things that people believe are actually possible with China or do you think that’s sort of a road to nowhere?

AC: Well, I believe that it’s not possible in the short term. It may be possible if China would indeed grow and would indeed have the promise of economic development that everyone in Europe hopes to have. However, we’ve been saying at Geopolitical Futures a lot about the problems that China is facing, and therefore Europe can only hope that things are going to get better. But at the same time, they will see that it is ultimately up to how the global economy is coming together – whether China is going to actually be able to do what it promises to do, or what it wants to do. And at the same time, we also see competition within Europe for China’s investment, even if the investment is not there. That says a lot about European problems currently. It all comes down to how well the economy is doing.

JS: One thing that I also noticed was that there was a lot of time spent talking about the United States, a lot of time spent talking about Russia, about China, also a lot of time spent talking about the internal divisions within Europe – but one country’s name that really didn’t come up at all was the United Kingdom. At this time last year everybody was talking about Brexit and the possibility of Brexit, and right after Brexit everyone was talking about what a big deal it was. Were you surprised there was really no discussion of the U.K.? And where does the U.K. fit in with the future of Europe that you described, being so divided?

AC: I think the Europeans got used to the idea that the U.K. is going to be exiting the European Union. However, I do not believe that the Europeans understand what that means, because we do not have a plan for that to happen. At the same time, I believe that the discussions that we had here touched upon the Brexit idea because one of the most important divisions that Europe currently faces is that between the elite and the electorate. That is actually driving the others.

So, in a way, the discussion was about Brexit and considering that the vote was against the elite. The vote came after there was clearly no prosperity promise from the EU. Therefore, there was a lot of talk about Brexit without Brexit being mentioned. It’s also the fear that talking about Brexit may bring something like Brexit in the core of the European Union, considering the euro prices, considering the divide between the north and the south, the problems that Greece and Italy are facing, the divisions and the different views on how the euro crisis should be managed – that Italy, France and Germany have. That is an important question that does not come to the table, just because there is a lot of fear related to that and how the European Union is going to go forward. But that certainly came during the discussions in the hallways.

JS: And I’m glad you brought the discussion a little bit back to Italy, because it allows us perhaps to step away from the conference itself and talk a little bit about Italy, which I don’t think is mentioned enough for how important it is within the European Union. Readers of Geopolitical Futures know that we keep a very close watch on Italy’s economy, especially with the problem of non-performing loans in the system. Like a number of other countries, Italy also a lot of domestic political instability – the Renzi government lost a referendum vote at the end of last year and left and there’s some instability here so, what do you think Italy’s strategic interests are right now? How do you – we’re here in Genoa, which is a beautiful port city on the Mediterranean – what do you see as Italy’s strategic interest?

AC: Well, Italy sees the Mediterranean to be its priority. It looks at the refugee crisis with a great worry – worrying look. It looks at the European Union and the way that that is being handled by the Europeans with priority. At the same time, it also looks toward Germany and tries to understand how Germany is going to lead the European Union because being part of the eurozone means that you are part of the core countries – Italy is a big economy in the European Union – and therefore it is one of their concerns – the eurozone.

The problem that they are currently facing – the non-performing loans and how the banking sector is doing related to that – is actually related to how the German economy is doing and how European stability is going to move forward. It’s both economic and security, again. A secondary issue that Italy is being concerned with is the Balkans, which is less mentioned in the mainstream media but certainly it is worrying for Italy considering that they’re bordering that region where everyone has an interest. Where Russia and Germany and Turkey are all coming together and trying to influence things. Therefore, Italy is in an interesting position moving forward, even if we are only seeing its economic problem, it is more than that.

JS: That’s great. And the last thing I would just close off by asking you about is – obviously people who read Geopolitical Futures know our forecasts and know our model well – is there anything you heard here or anything that you experienced here that made you think that there’s something in Geopolitical Futures’ forecast that needs to be challenged or anything that you found particularly surprising? Or were most of the things that you heard things that confirm the way you thought Europe was going? And do you think that the presentations here were more or less in line with what Geopolitical Futures is seeing?

AC: Well this was a very interesting weekend, first of all, and the discussions have confirmed our model. I believe that it is a challenging time for the European Union and this has been confirmed through all the debates and the roundtables we sat at. And therefore it is certainly a topic up for further discussion.

JS: And I think for me, listening to some of the things that have been said, was that, it seems to me that if you were going to have a discussion about geopolitics in the United States today, you would probably get a fair number of people who would talk about – oh well the U.S. role in the world is declining, the U.S. isn’t sure of what it’s doing, the Trump administration is transmitting all kinds of different messages – I found it striking here that we’re in Europe and at this conference, it was the Europeans who were being self-critical. They were talking about the United States and Russia and China as the major powers and Europe really having no agency. I figure that perhaps that if you were in Russia and China you might get a similarly self-critical view too. There’s something about where you are, both defining your perspective, but also you’re more self-critical about where you are at the particular moment.

AC: Well it is certainly true that we’ve seen a map of how the U.S. is the empire of the world in the 21st century, so that clearly confirms the fact that the Europeans do not see themselves in a positive light nowadays. For a good reason, I would say, because I’m also European and therefore I’m very self-critical about that. But, at the same time, it also confirms one of our views that the 21st century is actually a century of the U.S.

JS: Thank you so much for taking some time to join me Antonia, and thank you to all our listeners. We’ll be back next week with another podcast. Until then, take care and visit us at geopoliticalfutures.com for more analysis.

GPF analysts Allison Fedirka and Jacob Shapiro discuss the geopolitical importance of the Philippines for both the U.S. and China, and whether the Philippines will follow through on Duterte's threats to ally with China. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

AF – Hello, my name is Allison Fedirka, I am a senior analyst at Geopolitcal Futures, and we are giving you today our second podcast. Here with me is our director of analysis, Jacob Shapiro. Jacob, thank you for joining us.

JS – It’s always a pleasure.

AF – Today I want to talk to you about a lesser known country, we’re always hearing about Russia and China and Iran, and it is to the point of becoming dinner table conversation for most of our listeners. The Philippines have come up several times in Geopolitical Future reports, and I’m just wondering why a small island nation like that is of any interest.

JS – That’s a good question. The reason that we’re so focused on the Philippines, in particular, is because of geography, it’s because of where it’s located. We are a geopolitical company, and geopolitics is really the intersection of geography and power. The Philippines does not have a great deal of the latter, but it has a great deal of the former. It’s located in a very important, strategic location. So, if you had a map in front of you, or if you were looking at a map, you would see that the Philippines is one of the major countries that makes up the U.S. strategy to basically encircle China to make sure China is not going to be able to extend its influence outward. So, the reason the Philippines has become so important from our point of view, and the reason that you have China and Japan and the United States and everybody else chasing them around and trying to give them nice things is that China is trying to burst out of its cage in the South China Sea, and it can’t do that with its own navy because its navy capability is not up to standards when it comes to the United States. It wouldn’t be able to fight its way out. The thing that China could do is China could try and forge an alliance with the Philippines. So, we’re talking about a country that has been a staunch U.S. ally since the end of World War II, and we’re talking about a country that gives China a great opportunity to burst out of the cage. If China was able to forge some kind of relationship with the Philippines, it would be able to solve a lot of its problems without having to fire a shot. And the reason this has become more relevant is that the Philippines has a relatively new president, Rodrigo Duterte, and Duterte has said some not-so-nice things about the United States and has even said he wants to separate from the United States, and that he wants to embrace China, that he wants China to be a new strategic ally for the Philippines. So you put all of these things together, you put the strategic need that China has, you look at the political opportunity that is offering itself to China and the Philippines, and you look at the one real place where China might be able to cause problems in the region. And so we are very, very focused on the China-Philippines relationship, and on what both sides are doing.

AF – Ok, so I can understand China and the U.S., and we’ll get back to their interests and bilateral relationship and how the Philippines might figure in with that, but you did mention that they have a new president, Duterte, in power. I’m pretty sure we have all seen some interesting comments that he has said, as he is known as the Donald Trump of the Philippines, so he is a bit of a hot wire in terms of media headlines. You’ve also said that the Philippines is a country that does not have much of its own power, and yet with a president like Duterte, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy that, or any president for that matter, that want their country to merely be a pawn in a duel between China and the U.S. So, if you are the Philippines, and you still have your national pride and your national sovereignty that you want to assert and protect their interests, but you’re small, how do you make use of that power that you do have? How do you create a strategy to combat two giant countries like the U.S. and China?

JS – First of all, let’s give a little respect to the Philippines. You said that Duterte could be the Philippines’ Donald Trump, I don’t know why we shouldn’t just call maybe Trump the United States’ Duterte if we want to be respectful to the Philippines. But this gets back to the whole point about, and we write about this all of the time, that individuals, especially individual leaders, are incredibly constrained, so what Duterte says, and what Duterte wants really doesn’t matter. If you want to understand what the Philippines is doing and the greater geopolitical gain that is happening in the South China Sea, and in the East China Sea as well, in the U.S.-China relationship, you should really just ignore everything Duterte says and you should try and discard the things that he wants, and just look at his position. And his position is that he has come to power as a populist president, outside most of the typical centers of power in the Philippines. This is a country that is no stranger to military coups, that is no stranger to instability, also because of its geography, it’s a collection of islands, with a lot of different things going on in it. So, you’ve got someone for whom the chief thing of importance is to make sure his house is in order in the Philippines itself. At the same time, Duterte has ideas about how he wants the Philippines to exist in the world and he is playing a weak hand fairly well. Because there is this rising competition between China and the United States, Duterte realizes that the Philippines has something major to offer. Its strategic location means that both the United States, and China and Japan, all of these countries want relationships with the Philippines. So, what can that give Duterte? On one hand, it can give him – it can’t make the Philippines powerful, it can’t make the Philippines grow a navy that would be able to take back Scarborough Shoal from the Chinese. What it can do is that it can create leverage on both sides. So, the Philippines isn’t exactly happy with the relationship with the United States in some ways. The Chinese took Scarborough Shoal and some in the Philippines are mad that the U.S. wasn’t there to protect Philippine interest. The Philippines, especially Duterte, would like the United States to stop criticizing his domestic issues so much. The Philippines also, the United States is one of the main providers of foreign direct investment into the Philippines and if you are a populist president like Duterte, money is something you’re definitely going to want, because you are going to try and make the economy better, so one of the things that Duterte has done is he has recognized that the United States needs him and needs the Philippines and he’s recognized that for China being able to have some kind of new relationship with the Philippines would also be incredibly important and he is able to play them off of each other. He goes to Beijing last October and signs all of these deals worth tens of billions of dollars, more than China has given to the Philippines probably in the last five years combined. But then the deals don’t get signed and he comes back and either himself, or some of his other protégées walk back some of his comments, or the defense minister comes in and plays bad cop and then the Japanese prime minister comes and he promises aid and it was just revealed last week that the Japanese are going to loan some patrol ships to the Philippine navy to help with that. So all of these things, you shouldn’t take it as an example of “oh Duterte, he’s this mercurial guy who doesn’t understand what’s going on, or he’s a little off center, he doesn’t know what is going on.” He knows exactly what’s going on, he sees that the Philippines is very valuable to some of the biggest countries in the world right now, and some of the most powerful countries in the world right now, and he is trying to preserve as much independence for Philippine foreign policy as he can, and he is trying to get as much out of those relationships as he can.

AF – And, previously in this, we have talked about, a little bit about China and the United States, you just mentioned Japan. How do we factor in Japan with this dynamic, is it as strong a player? Is it truly trying to vie for influence over the Philippines, how does it figure into this dynamic of strategic control in the South China Sea?

JS – We should think about Japan as the main U.S. ally in the Asia-Pacific. It’s the most powerful, it’s the closest. The interests are for the most part aligned, we actually published a piece yesterday about some of the mismatch in the influence, but generally speaking Japan and the U.S. have similar interests. So, Japan is not interested in seeing the Philippines flip sides any more than the U.S. is. In some ways, Japan would be even more concerned by it, because Japan doesn’t have the luxury of being 8,000 miles away from these developments. Japan also happens to be a major trading partner of the Philippines, Japan also happens to be a larger source of foreign direct investment in the Philippines in recent years than the United States, and like I said, Japan is actually loaning some patrol ships to the Philippines and has offered its services to help against piracy and other things like that. Japan, I would say, is not an independent player right now in this particular equation, but Japan is squarely on the side of the United States and on this broader coalition that is pushing back against some of China’s seemingly aggressive moves. The United States by itself in terms of its own economic influence in the Philippines, it’s actually comparable maybe even a little bit less than China, especially when you start taking trade into account, but when you think in terms of not just the United States, but when you think of the United States, and South Korea, and Japan and all of these countries have an interest in the current balance of power in the way it is and that all of these countries would have problems with the Philippines and would try and do things to the Philippines to make sure the Philippines doesn’t switch sides, you begin to see that even though the Philippines offers an opportunity for China, and even though Duterte seems to offer a very enticing opening for China, there are a lot of constraints that prevent the Philippines from actually changing their alliance structure or actually leaving the current alliance structure that they’re a part of.

AF – What would some of those constraints be?

JS – On the Philippines?

AF – Yes.

JS – Ultimately what we’re talking about here, we are talking about a country that does not have a relatively strong military when we are looking at some of these other countries in the region. In 2012, when some Chinese ships came to Scarborough Shoal, the Philippines couldn’t do anything about it. If the Chinese wanted to come take Scarborough Shoal tomorrow in force, the Philippines wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. It would have to depend on the United States to protect it, so that’s really the main constraint. The Philippines does not have the ability to project military power itself, and it depends on a mutual defense treaty with the United States for its defense.

AF – And China could not provide that same level of defense?

JS – Well, you have to think in terms of the fact that currently, the Chinese navy in particular is not in the same class as the United States Navy. There’s also the issue of what would China be protecting the Philippines from? China and the Philippines have conflicting territorial claims in the South China Sea, so if there’s going to be an alliance between China and the Philippines, either they have to ignore that territorial disagreement and one of them have to look the other way, or there has to be some resolution on that particular issue. So yes, China would be able to protect the Philippines against a lot of different threats, not as much as the United States, but certainly the Chinese could do some things, especially if they were hypothetically given basing rights there or something like that, but the problem is that China has designs on some Philippine territory, and the Philippines doesn’t want to give up that territory to China. So, on the one hand, sure China could defend the Philippines, but China is not so much interested in defending the Philippines as it is in taking territory that it claims for itself, and then using the Philippines to change the balance of power in the South China Sea, in the region in general, and using the Philippines in order to change its strategic position vis-à-vis the United States. What makes the United States a more attractive ally for the Philippines is the fact, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, it’s 8,000 miles away. The United States does not have any designs on Scarborough Shoal or any other territory that the Philippines claims as its sovereign territory. What the United States wants is to keep the status quo, the United States wants the current alliance structure to stay put, it wants Philippine territorial integrity to be respected to its full extent, all of these things. So these are the things that make the United States a more natural ally, just in terms of the hard interest, than China.

AF – You’ve done a good job for us at outlining the strategic interests of the different power players and countries in that area with the South China Sea, and the strategic role of the Philippines, and you’ve also mentioned how it is important in these types of situations to not necessarily pay as much attention to what leaders say, but more about what they do. Moving forward, what are the types of things that you will be paying attention to, to have a better understanding of how this conflict of interest over the Philippines is unfolding? What are you going to be looking for? People are talking about the buildup of militaries, potential war in the South China Sea, there’s some very alarming ideas that are being thrown around, how do you see this coming to play this year in 2017?

JS – This again gets into our methodology at Geopolitical Futures, which is that we build a model of how we think the world is working, we have a forecast about what we think is going to happen, and then what we’re constantly doing is trying to see if our forecast is wrong. So we spend most of the year attacking our forecast trying to show that it’s wrong. So, what I’m constantly looking for is signs that this model or this forecast is off. It is important not to overreact to any particular thing, but the reason we’re talking about the Philippines today is that the minster of commerce in China abruptly canceled a visit to the Philippines, because the Philippine foreign minister criticized China very publically, at a recent ASEAN conference on Tuesday. And it wasn’t the criticism that was telling, what was different about it was that it was in public, it was at this ASEAN conference, the foreign minister invoked all of the countries that were part of ASEAN as all agreeing that Chinese moves were overly aggressive, and China thought that it had an arrangement that it had negotiated with Duterte that such disagreements would be handled bilaterally and at a more quiet level. So one of the things we were looking at this morning was why did the Philippines decide to shift its position like this, it wasn’t that the foreign minister just woke up this morning and had a bad night’s sleep and decided he was going to say these things. So we’re trying to understand why exactly would the Philippines want to do this. If you look at the very tactical level, we can say that, well the United States released information via unnamed sources to the press that China had increased or had finished a bunch of military buildings and military installations on some of the islands, in the Spratly Island chain in the South China Sea, so perhaps the United States gave advanced warning of intelligence to the Philippines, maybe there is more to that intelligence that wasn’t released to the press that is particularly concerning to the Philippines. If you go a level deeper than that, it gets into some of the interests we’ve talked about. The United States has been relatively not vocal about what the Philippines has been doing. They’ve seen Duterte’s statements, I know that when Obama was president he canceled a meeting with Duterte because of some very not nice things Duterte said about Obama, but generally speaking the U.S. has been steady, it hasn’t overreacted to any of the statements coming out of Manila, and has slowly pushed forward with all of the military and economic cooperation that exists between the two countries. So you might infer from that there was something the United States was seeing or the new administration has made some kind of deal with the Philippines, where they thought it was going too far, they didn’t like some of what they were seeing, and they exerted some of the pressure behind the scenes on the Philippines that they could. I don’t know that for sure, but if we are just making inferences from what is in front of us, I think it is a high possibility. And then on the deepest level, and this is the model and this is the forecast, the forecast is just that China is going to try very hard to change its relationship with the Philippines and to try to build an alliance with the Philippines. And ultimately based on all the constraints that we see, and based on all the different levers that all of the different parties have over each other, I just think that there’s too much constraining the Philippines to make that kind of shift. It’s just too dependent on the United States, and too dependent on the United States alliance structure, and then besides that, has these serious disagreements with China over territory with what one claims and the other also claims. So, what we are watching for is signs that either we are wrong, we are watching for any signs of cooperation between the Philippines and China that challenges this particular model, and on the other hand, we’re looking for things that confirm the model. This past week, we’ve seen a couple major incidents and a couple major statements coming out that seem to confirm some of the things that we’re looking for, but you can’t make a conclusion one way or another just from one thing. So as we go forward, and this is not just going to be a one-year thing, China is going to be growing and is investing a lot in its military capabilities and it’s going to keep thumping its chest in the South China Sea, and for as long as China has those interests, this is going to be an issue, and the Philippines is going to present an opportunity for China. So we’ll be constantly looking at this, and we’ll be constantly looking at whether the model that I’ve talked about here is correct, or whether we’re missing something and whether we need to think about some of the constraints and the actors differently.

AF – Well, we look forward to seeing any updates that you may have on this topic, and appreciate you enlightening us with the Philippines, which again, it’s always very informative to hear about how smaller countries that aren’t always in the headlines, or that don’t always have all of the power can actually play a critical role in how geopolitics unfold, especially between two countries as powerful and influential as the United States and China.

JS – Absolutely.

AF – Thank you very much for speaking with us today Jacob.

JS – Thanks for having me.

AF – It’s our pleasure, and thank you to everyone who listened and we look forward sharing some more of our geopolitical conversations and thoughts with you in our future podcasts.