Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1409324
15 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 12 SEPTEMBER 2021 NEWS eignists who like dictators that can keep migrants away. No wonder Donald Trump praised the Saudi monarchy ("a magnif- icent kingdom"), Al Sisi ("a fan- tastic guy") and even the Taliban ("good fighters who are really smart"). Even regional powers like Tur- key, the Saudis, Qatar, the UAE and Pakistan have their own links with radical groups like Isis and Al Nusra in Syria and the Taliban, pursuing their own stra- tegic interests. In 2015 the Turks looked away as Isis advanced in- to the Kurdish border towns in Syrian; ironically, the Americans gave cover to the communist Kurds, until they succumbed to pressure by Reccep Erdogan. The Taliban resurgence again puts a difficult question to the anti-war movement: should the west withdraw after unleashing hell, to see Afghanistan relapse into the dark ages? As Joe Biden came to realise, staying on may well have meant keeping dig- ging in a swamp from which new monsters were likely to emerge. 4. Terror threats enabled the surveillance complex, deprive human rights and clamp down on whistleblowers Under George W. Bush, the United States waged their gener- ic "war on terror" without Con- gress's approval but also used it to amass more intel on citizens. The Patriot Act made it easier to use surveillance against its own citizens. Torture was disguised as 'enhanced interrogation tech- niques'; hundreds were detained in Guantanamo Bay to evade in- ternational law; U.S. allies were bullied to assist in secretive 'ren- dition flights' for interrogation and torture. While the war on terror was nominally fought in the name of western democrat- ic values, it eroded these same values to the extent as illustrat- ed by the cases of Chelsea Man- ning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who faced American wrath simply for revealing the ugly truths of the war. Indeed it was the images from hell-holes like Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq which dealt a fatal blow to U.S. humanitarian pretensions. 5. After setting the world on fire, the U.S. is in retreat as Chi- na is on the rise After over-extending itself in the occupations of Afghani- stan and Iraq, the U.S. is in full retreat. Now an assortment of regional powers and an emer- gent China want to set the tune, such as China's Silk Road diplo- macy across Central Asia. Less squeamish on human rights but sharing an interest in keeping Islamic terrorism at bay due to fears of Muslim insurgency at home, China seems to have a freer hand in dealing with des- potic regimes. Vladimir Putin's Russia also carved out its own foreign policy in hotspots like Syria, where it backs the mur- derous Assad regime. Bush's unilateralism contributed to an unstable and violent world; but the absence of a multilateral al- ternative, and a durable system of global governance bound by respect of human rights, has left a vacuum, now increasingly being filled by an assortment of nasty tyrants. 6. Europe bluffs its way on the international stage but remains impotent France and Germany did dis- tinguish themselves from the U.S. during the invasion of Iraq by refusing to support the war. But with Tony Blair's Britain actively joining the invasion and other countries like Poland supporting it, the war deepened rifts within the EU. Since then the EU has struggled to build its own common foreign and defence policy, which has been further destabilised by Putin's support for the European far- right through social media ma- nipulation. 7. Malta remains neutral but more exposed to migration flows, while global checks on fi- nancing of terrorism has caught up with its economic miracle One of the consequences of the 9-11 attacks was greater con- cern on funding to terrorist or- ganisation and organised crime through elaborate financial transactions, which exploited loopholes in the global capitalist economy. Although the FATF greylisting was more the result of Malta being put under the spotlight as a result of Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination, the mechanisms set in place to police financial transactions was a direct consequence of 9-11. The international climate was also at odds with the Labour government's golden passport scheme which raised fears of in- filtration of the Schengen area by unsavoury groups. The great- er instability brought about by the war on terror, particularly the spillage of the monsters un- leashed by Iraq into neighbour- ing Syria and chaos in Libya, also contributed to a greater influx of migrants across the Mediterra- nean. This has increased the tempta- tion to entrust the policing of the EU external borders in the hands of coastguards like Libya's, who are not bound by the strictures of international law. Malta also came under in- creased pressure from the U.S. to sign a SOFA agreement ex- empting U.S. military personnel from local jurisdiction which would further erode the coun- try's constitutional neutrality. And while Malta has had an ac- tive role in supporting the emer- gence of a stable government in Libya, for most of the past 20 years its foreign policy has been relegated to an after-thought of commercial and energy deals. Even hallmarks of Malta's for- eign policy like its support for a Palestinian state have been side- lined, resulting in an erosion of the country's 'soft power' and influence. Yet these have also been fa- tally wounded by reputational problems arising from corrup- tion and the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, which was in its own way Malta's own mini "9-11 moment". Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden have suffered imprisonment, forced exile, trumped-up charges, and the threat of extradition to the United States for having blown the whistle on the United States' human rights abuses and their surveillance-state complex