#RIPUSA Obama’s Achievement: Whitewashing Permanent Warfare With Eloquence

Judging from how the mainstream media has characterized the legacy of Barack Obama so far, the outgoing president will be most remembered for his many rousing aspirational speeches and well-timed shows of emotion.

His talent as a persuasive public communicator and the strength of his personal brand, bolstered by years of apple-shining from liberal magazines and newspapers, has been Obama’s most valuable asset.

This perception of Obama that has been propagated from the top, the view that he is essentially a benevolent figure with deep integrity or the personification of a modern liberal-statesmen, is a stunning smokescreen.

The contradiction between the high-minded rhetoric of the president in contrast to the actual policies pursued by his administration has been stark and utterly scandalous.

To hear Obama wax poetic about ‘the politics of hope’ and ‘how ordinary Americans can steer change’ feels deeply perverse coming from a figure that has institutionalized a vast, unaccountable permanent warfare state.

In the face of Obama’s global covert assassination program, his numerous secret wars without congressional approval, a mass electronic surveillance capability unprecedented in history, the speeches reveal themselves as little more than banal platitudes and vapid sloganeering.

As the sun sets on Obama’s presidency, to say the press has given him a pass is a grand understatement. Some outlets have occasionally run criticism of Obama’s drone policies or inconvenient relationship with Saudi Arabia.

Other voices invert reality altogether, chastising Obama for his reluctance to militarily engage Syria, despite the US dropping over 12,000 bombs on the country in 2016 alone.

Contrary to his predecessor, Obama had a firmer grasp on the political risks inherent in the large-scale deployment of US troops in sustained military campaigns, but his strategic objectives differed little, and his belief in American exceptionalism was total.

Rather than ‘shock and awe,' Obama proffered ‘leading from behind,' culminating in NATO support and air power for insurgents that toppled the Libyan government on the pretext of defending human rights, turning the country into a cauldron of rival fiefdoms and lawlessness.

The Obama administration and the CIA fueled a proxy war in Syria with arms and training for insurgents, many of whom took up arms with ISIS or Al-Qaeda affiliated groups. The US military’s presence in Syria and support for non-state actors abjectly violates international law, and John Kerry’s leaked comments make clear how the administration cynically leveraged the threat of ISIS against the Syrian government.

Not only did Obama fail in his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay torture facility, he effectively replaced enhanced interrogation with an unaccountable covert assassination complex, endowing himself with the roles of judge, jury, and executioner.

By virtue of his suave and benevolent public persona, top-tier entertainers and figures of the liberal intelligentsia were largely willing to acquiesce to the precedent set by Obama’s unrestrained executive powers, exercised in near-complete secrecy.

They believed Obama would use the entrenched military and surveillance capacities of the US government judiciously. They swallowed the Democrats’ rhetoric of social inclusion and focused their political energies largely on identity issues.

Liberal figures didn’t protest against the president’s ability to spy on countless Americans suspected of no crime, nor did they organize against the president’s extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens and non-Americans without trial or due process.

Liberals hardly spoke out against the thousands of civilians killed by Obama’s drone bombings. Oddly enough, many seemed more outraged at Trump’s campaign rhetoric against Muslims and Mexicans than the reality of President Obama engaging in military hostilities against seven Muslim countries and deporting more people than any president in history.

Frankly, far too many Americans have been utter cowards in the face of the outgoing Democratic presidency. Obama will soon leave office as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms at war.

Despite his tense relationship with the Israeli prime minister and token opposition to the expansion of settlements, Obama signed the single largest pledge of bilateral military assistance to Israel in history, enabling the cancerous Israeli occupation and further brutalization of Palestinians.

As the Saudi military ceaselessly bombarded towns and cities across impoverished Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, in a botched attempt to reinstall an ousted proxy government, the Obama administration offered muted criticism and a $115 billion arms deal.

Obama’s administration has in fact brokered more arms sales than other since the second world war. Despite campaigning on the building of ‘the most transparent administration in history,' he has waged war against whistleblowers and official leakers, invoking the 1917 Espionage Act more than all previous presidents combined.

Obama spoke of his dramatic commitment to building a nuclear weapons-free world on the campaign trail. Once in office, he committed the country to a trillion-dollar modernization of US nuclear production facilities and weapons, including warheads with adjustable yields that, according to the New York Times, make the weapons “more tempting to use.”

One of the most consequential international developments to occur under Obama’s watch was the deterioration of US-Russia relations and the revival of Cold War antagonisms, marked by the covert American role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine that brought to power a crude, corrupt and pervasively anti-Russian regime.

The largest military build-up on Russia’s borders since the second world war has unfolded under Obama’s watch, and the White House has moved in lock-step with the US intelligence community to propagate the anti-Russian line that has now captured American politics.

His administration’s pivot to Asia policy aimed to transfer 60 percent of the US naval presence to the Asia Pacific region by 2020, while the now-botched Trans-Pacific Partnership sought to – in the words of Senator Charles E. Schumer – “lure”other countries “away from China.”

On the domestic front, there have hardly been any clear-cut achievements for President Obama. He has overseen an obscene transfer of wealth from the middle class to the billionaire class, becoming the first two-term presidency that has failed to post a three percent GDP growth on an annualized basis over two terms.

The much-touted streak of job recovery rests on the proliferation of insecure part-time and temporary jobs with the low protection characteristic of the gig economy, while the share of workers in temporary jobs has risen from 10.7 percent to 15.8 percent under his watch.

Wall Street banks hoarded funds fueled by the quantitative easing policies of the Federal Reserve to triple the size of stock values. Corporate profits reached an 85-year peak under Obama while the total compensation of employees’ wages and salaries slipped to levels last recorded in 1929.

The wealth of the richest 400 Americans increased from $1.57 trillion in 2008 to $2.4 trillion in 2016.
The market-driven Affordable Care Act, Obama’s primary domestic initiative, did extend medical coverage to segments of American society, while millions of others were forced to pay higher premiums for substandard care. This shifted health care costs from employers and the state to working individuals in a move that effectively amounts to a bailout for private insurers.

And finally, there is the obscene proliferation of police brutality that has unfolded under Obama’s watch, with offending officers rarely held to account for their actions. African-American males were found to be nine times more likely to be killed by police officers in 2015 than white men of the same age.

But despite Obama’s troubled and deeply hypocritical track record, he remains a figure that many Americans continue to admire and respect, especially as the country moves rapidly toward a new and highly divisive political era.

A great deal of Americans, especially those in African-American communities, desperately and sincerely wants to believe in the hope that Obama inspired in them. Unfortunately, Obama’s key achievement has proven to be his skillful usurpation of progressive rhetoric in the interest of an extremely militaristic and pro-corporate political agenda.

While many fear the specter of Donald Trump’s incoming presidency and the new forms of authoritarianism and state violence that will inevitably accompany it, none should forget that it was President Obama who set a precedent for the extreme executive authority that President Trump will soon enjoy.

#RIPUSA,#AmericaHangsItsHeadinShame Donald Trump intends to tear up Pax Americana #ImpeachHimNow

Donald Trump is proposing to dismantle the global architecture established by the US after the war
You hear two things about the US in national capitals around the world. The first is that America is no longer the superpower it was; the second that they have put everything important on hold until they see the outcome of the US presidential election. Now add a third: a Donald Trump presidency is beyond their worst nightmares.

American declinism has long been overdone. The US remains the sole superpower: the only nation with the capacity to intervene just about everywhere. It stands at the apex of a formidable system of alliances. What has changed during the past decade or so is that there are now some checks — shifting power balances internationally and the political mood domestically.

That said, there is no one else to match the US. It will be decades, if at all, before China equals its military reach and technological prowess. Washington remains an indispensable guardian of global order. So yes, it is for Americans to decide who they want in the White House, but the choice matters hugely for everyone else.

Never more so now that Mr Trump has become the the 45th President Elect. Lots can be said about his triumph in the primary race: about how the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln became the author of its own destruction; about how a real estate developer turned reality television star tapped into rising anxiety and anger about stagnant living standards and cultural dislocation that for many Americans has become the story of globalisation; and, sadly, how the media half-conspired in the process by treating him for much of the time as lucrative box office entertainment.

It is true also that populist politicians of right and left across the democratic world are playing similar tunes. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front, promotes the same Islamophobia, as does the rightwing Alternative für Deutschland party. In Britain, the pro-Brexit camp is relying on popular hostility towards the political elites to wrench the country out of its own continent.

Politics tends to accommodate itself to events. The temptation now is to say that, well, maybe it would not be quite as bad as all that. Candidates always play to their base during the primaries before tacking back to the centre. Mr Trump would be no different. The point, though, is that this candidate is different. The presumptive nominee is not a conservative, nor even a Republican. His platform mixes leftwing economic populism with a singularly ugly rightwing nationalism. What passes for his foreign policy can best be described as bellicose isolationism. Walling off Mexico and barring Muslims from the US — these are not policies that can be easily unsaid.

Ah, you hear old-school Republicans respond, he cannot win in November. He has alienated 70 per cent of women and still higher proportions of Hispanics and African Americans. His personal disapproval ratings are off the scale. So the basic arithmetic condemns him to defeat. What really worries the Republican establishment is that he will bring down the rest of the party with him. The Democrats already have a fair chance of taking back control of the Senate. Mr Trump could surrender the House of Representatives.

True enough, it is one thing for Republicans to choose him as nominee, quite another for Americans to put him in the White House. And yet. If there has been another lesson from the primary race it is that opponents have consistently underestimated Mr Trump.

It is striking also that Republicans — those most confounded by Mr Trump — seem rather more certain than their Democrat opponents that he will blow up on the road to the election. Hillary Clinton would be a well-qualified president. Democrats know that does not make her a good candidate.

So to Mr Trump’s foreign policy. The bumper sticker says it is all about making America great again. There would be no more pussy-footing around. Enemies, notably Isis, would not know what had hit them. Unpredictability, in Mr Trump’s book, is a strength. Mostly though, he would attach unapologetic nationalism to old-fashioned isolationism.

He wants America’s allies in Europe and Asia to pay up or watch the US ship its forces back home. He is relaxed if nations such as Japan and South Korea respond to insecurity in East Asia by building their own nuclear bombs. He is an admirer of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. Trade agreements deemed damaging to US business and jobs — that means almost all of them — would be torn up, and new tariffs slapped on imports from China.

Put this all together and Mr Trump is proposing in effect the dismantling of the global architecture established by the US at the end of the second world war. The underlying assumption is that the Pax Americana has been an entirely altruistic venture, an international order gifted by a generous US to an ungrateful world.

The hard-edged reality, of course, is that these rules and institutions have embedded US national interests in the international system. American prosperity and security cannot be separated from its preponderance of global power. This is why China and other rising states are now demanding a stronger voice in managing the system. Upending all this by packing up and going home would serve greatly to diminish US power. The decision lies with Americans, but such a choice would be bad for everyone.

#RIPUSA, #AmericaHangsItsHeadInShame ‘Strange New Land’: America in a Time of Trump #ImpeachHimNow

Donald J. Trump with Gov. Mike Pence at his victory speech on Tuesday night.CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

 A Trump presidency will plunge the United States into an era of unknowns that has little parallel in the nation’s 240-year history.

While Donald J. Trump has been vague about his position on many issues, he has been explicit about several that would fundamentally change America’s direction.

If his campaign promises become reality — and it is not clear how many he will actually pursue — the Affordable Care Act could be repealed with the help of a Republican-dominated House and Senate whose leadership had virtually given up hope of recapturing the White House. Mr. Trump said he would replace the act with something better, but he never offered a plan.

The Supreme Court would veer right – perhaps eventually far to the right of where it was before Justice Antonin Scalia’s death created a vacancy that Mr. Trump will now fill, and there is the prospect of several more openings during his tenure. The wall he promised along the Mexican border would be built, and the prospect of immigration reform may be buried beneath it.Continue reading the main story

The torture of terrorism suspects, something that President Obama explicitly banned, would return — interrogation techniques the current C.I.A. director recently said his officers would never return to.

Although Mr. Trump will not be able to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, he can legally ignore its provisions, in keeping with his questioning of the existence of man-made climate change. He could proceed with what he once called a ban on Muslims’ entering the country, but later amended – after being accused of racism – to a ban on visitors from a list of troubled nations, almost all of which are Muslim-majority.

He would pull back the troops that the United States has stationed around the world to keep the peace – unless America is paid for the protection. He would tell NATO that the United States will live up to its post-World War II security commitments only if other nations first pay their fair share. He repeatedly dismissed the idea that those forward deployments are in America’s own interests, that they prevent Chinese or Russian adventurism and keep open the trade routes for American goods.

As the president-elect, Mr. Trump will soon be briefed on how to use America’s nuclear codes – the codes Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama said he could never be trusted to hold. And within the first year of his presidency, it should become clear whether Mr. Trump meant it when he said that he was comfortable with the thought that Japan and South Korea, both signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, might abandon its longtime commitment and build weapons of their own.

If the United States “keeps on its path, its current path of weakness, they’re going to want to have that anyway, with or without me discussing it,” Mr. Trump said.

Perhaps the most unpredictable matter is how Mr. Trump will deal with Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, whom he has repeatedly praised in terms that shocked even his own party. Would he lift the sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea – a move that Mr. Trump seemed to suggest was justified – and its harassment of Ukraine? Would he back off from the Obama administration’s decision to bolster the American military presence off Russia’s borders?

There has been a growing bipartisan consensus in the foreign policy and intelligence leadership that Russia must be both constrained and contained, its harassment of the new members of NATO halted, its cyberattacks deterred. But Mr. Trump never once argued for Russian containment – once a staple of his party’s foreign policy – and repeatedly argued that he, and he alone, could negotiate with authoritarians like Mr. Putin.

“My administration,” he said recently, “will work with any country that is willing to partner with us to defeat ISIS, and halt radical Islamic terrorism. And that includes Russia.” On Wednesday, Mr. Putin seemed to return that sentiment, sensing his opportunity and saying he looked forward to restoring “fully fledged” relations with the United States.

Mr. Trump dismissed Russia’s human rights violations, its jailing of journalists and political opponents, its rigged elections. He would measure the country, he said, solely by its willingness to chip into American projects.

“If they want to join us by knocking out ISIS, that is just fine as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “It is a very imperfect world, and you can’t always choose your friends. But you can never fail to recognize your enemies.”

Mr. Trump has been consistent in some areas. Since the late 1980s, he has nurtured a set of preoccupations, chiefly that America’s allies – Japan and Saudi Arabia among them – are ripping America off. He maintained that position even as Japan faded from the scene as a major world power and as Saudi Arabia emerged as one of America’s most critical allies in a region of the world where Mr. Trump sees little reason for the United States to remain.

In an interview in March, he had no compunction about threatening the kingdom’s survivability. “If Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection,” Mr. Trump said during a 100-minute conversation, “I don’t think it would be around.”

The mystery is how much of that kind of talk arises from deeply held beliefs, and how much is an opening bid by the author of “The Art of the Deal.”

“He sees himself as a dealer, a negotiator who knows that you get nowhere unless you threaten,” said Graham Allison, a longtime Harvard professor who has begun a new project in “applied history,” taking lessons from past moments to inform America’s current strategic choices.

Indeed, the world is about to discover whether the most outlandish promises Mr. Trump made in his campaign about rethinking the international order – thoughts that often seemed at best off the cuff – are about to become reality.

Financial markets abroad panicked on Tuesday night, fearful that a Trump presidency would instantly send the country into uncertain economic territory that investors had discounted as wholly improbable just 24 hours ago. But there was a far more mild decline as Wall Street opened, suggesting that investors here saw other possibilities. Mr. Trump, who never argued with the notion that he is a protectionist, time and again vowed to punish companies that move jobs abroad, a task that would begin with the abolishment of Nafta, the trade agreement that once was envisioned, by President Bill Clinton, as the first step unifying the Western Hemisphere. To Mr. Trump, it is “a disaster.”

The Trump vision, in fact, is an America unbound by a half-century of trade deals, free to pursue a nationalistic approach in which success is measured not by the quality of its alliances but the economic return on its transactions. “We will not be ripped off anymore,” he said in the interview in March. “We’re going to be friendly with everybody, but we’re not going to be taken advantage of by anybody.”

He bristled at the suggestion that his wall-building, trade-deal-canceling views would take America back to an era of isolationism, arguing that he was simply freeing the United States from the binds of international rules that are not in the nation’s interests.

“Not isolationist, but I am America first,” he said when he was asked whether his own policies had echoes of the movement by the same name championed by Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s.

“I like the expression,” he said of “America first.” From that moment on, he began using it at his rallies, and it became the stuff of bumper stickers and chants.

He is also unabashedly business first, and that extends to his tax proposals, which also leave the markets deeply uncertain.

Starting with the day he descended the long escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015 to begin a quest almost no one thought would succeed, Mr. Trump laid out an agenda of tax cuts – modest for families, and sharp for businesses – that he argued would be the stimulus a sluggish economy needs.

But he also paired those cuts with a major plan to rebuild America’s dilapidated airports and collapsing bridges, with $137 billion in federal tax credits as an incentive for private industry to spend upward of a trillion more. While privatization is hardly a new idea, Mr. Trump has described an approach few have ever tried before – and it is far from clear how it would work. Presumably, users of that infrastructure would ultimately pay for it, in tolls and usage taxes, through a mechanism few understand.

No one knows how much of this agenda, largely thrown together rather than the product of deep study and debate, is for real. His policy office in Washington, created to lay out the position-papers common to most campaigns, was gradually disbanded. He is famously volatile, capable of changing his mind in an instant if he sees new avenues for profit, all the while denying he had ever suggested another path.

In Mr. Trump, Professor Allison sees a revolution in approach reminiscent of the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson, another populist who rode to power rebelling against what amounted to America’s first Establishment.

“My God,” Professor Allison said on Tuesday night, as the results veered toward Mr. Trump. “We are in a strange new land.”

Curse of Sykes-Picot Still Haunts the Middle East and a lesser extent Zion

In the Middle East, few men are pilloried these days as much as Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Sykes, a British diplomat, travelled the same turf as T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), served in the Boer War, inherited a baronetcy, and won a Conservative seat in Parliament. He died young, at thirty-nine, during the 1919 flu epidemic. Picot was a French lawyer and diplomat who led a long but obscure life, mainly in backwater posts, until his death, in 1950. But the two men live on in the secret agreement they were assigned to draft, during the First World War, to divide the Ottoman Empire’s vast land mass into British and French spheres of influence. The Sykes-Picot Agreement launched a nine-year process—and other deals, declarations, and treaties—that created the modern Middle East states out of the Ottoman carcass. The new borders ultimately bore little resemblance to the original Sykes-Picot map, but their map is still viewed as the root cause of much that has happened ever since.

“Hundreds of thousands have been killed because of Sykes-Picot and all the problems it created,” Nawzad Hadi Mawlood, the governor of Iraq’s Erbil Province, told me when I saw him this spring. “It changed the course of history—and nature.”

May 16th will mark the agreement’s hundredth anniversary, amid questions over whether its borders can survive the region’s current furies. “The system in place for the past one hundred years has collapsed,” Barham Salih, a former deputy prime minister of Iraq, declared at the Sulaimani Forum, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in March. “It’s not clear what new system will take its place.”

The colonial carve-up was always vulnerable. Its map ignored local identities and political preferences. Borders were determined with a ruler—arbitrarily. At a briefing for Britain’s Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, in 1915, Sykes famously explained, “I should like to draw a line from the ‘E’ in Acre to the last ‘K’ in Kirkuk.” He slid his finger across a map, spread out on a table at No. 10 Downing Street, from what is today a city on Israel’s Mediterranean coast to the northern mountains of Iraq.

“Sykes-Picot was a mistake, for sure,” Zikri Mosa, an adviser to Kurdistan’s President Masoud Barzani, told me. “It was like a forced marriage. It was doomed from the start. It was immoral, because it decided people’s future without asking them.”

For a century, the bitter reaction to the Sykes-Picot process has been reflected in the most politically powerful ideologies to emerge—Nasserism, in Egypt, and Baathism, in Iraq and Syria—based on a single nationalism covering the entire Arab world. For three years, Egypt and Syria, despite being on different continents, actually tried it, by merging into the United Arab Republic; the experiment disintegrated after a 1961 coup in Damascus.

Even the Islamic State seeks to undo the old borders. After sweeping across Syria and Iraq in 2014, Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced, “This blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy.”

Yet the premise of American policy (and of every other outside power) today—in stabilizing fractious Iraq, ending Syria’s gruesome civil war, and confronting the Islamic State—is to preserve the borders associated with Sykes-Picot. Since August, 2014, the United States has invested more than eleven million dollars a day in military operations, including almost nine thousand airstrikes on Iraq and more than five thousand on Syria. For the world’s worst humanitarian refugee crisis, which is now spilling out of Syria across countries and continents, Washington has pledged seven hundred million dollars in 2016, with more promised. The rest of the world—from Europe to the Gulf sheikhdoms, Russia to Iran—has poured billions into perpetuating the borders, even as they vie for different political outcomes.

In its final months in office, the Obama Administration is intensifying that strategy. Since April 8th, senior officials—Vice-President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Defense Secretary Ash Carter—have made surprise visits to Baghdad to prop up Iraq’s increasingly fragile government. Baghdad’s political crisis predates its war with ISIS. Recent debates in parliament have disintegrated into brawls and water-bottle fights; dozens of lawmakers held a sit-in this month to demand the resignation of their Speaker. Tens of thousands have demonstrated in several provinces for months to demand political and economic reforms, as well as an end to rampant corruption. On Saturday, protesters breached fortified blast walls around the Green Zone—bringing down a section as if it were the Berlin Wall—and stormed Parliament. Reuters reported that the demonstrators waved flags, danced in the aisles, and chanted, “The cowards ran away!” of fleeing lawmakers, who had once again failed to reach a quorum for a vote on a new Cabinet of technocrats to replace the current top officials, who were chosen according to quotas based on sect and ethnicity. Iraq declared a state of emergency and closed all roads into the capital. The U.S. Embassy, the U.N. mission, and other embassies inside the Green Zone were on lockdown.

“Now is not the time for government gridlock or bickering,” President Obama said earlier this month. Biden’s visit “focussed on encouraging Iraqi national unity,” the White House said. But Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi increasingly risks becoming Iraq’s Humpty Dumpty.

The United States is upping its military footprint, too. On April 18th, President Obama announced the deployment of Apache helicopters, sophisticated mobile rockets, and another two hundred troops to Iraq. The total is now around five thousand American forces. Airstrikes are up sixty per cent this year over the same period last year.

The situation is even worse in Syria, as the United States ratchets up its role there, too. The peace talks launched in January are precarious, at best, after three unsuccessful rounds. The ceasefire collapsed in an explosion of fighting this week, especially around Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and its former commercial capital. On Monday, Obama called for another two hundred and fifty U.S. Special Forces to be sent to Syria to boost the fifty already there and “keep up the momentum.” It’s the largest expansion in the U.S. role since the civil war erupted, in 2011.

The United States claims progress in the military campaign against the Islamic State. Since November, ISIS’s pseudo-caliphate has lost forty per cent of its territory in Iraq and ten per cent in Syria, as well as tens of thousands of fighters, tons of arms, and hundreds of millions of dollars stored in warehouses that have been bombed by the U.S.-led coalition. Pentagon officials said last week that the number of new ISIS recruits in Iraq and Syria has plunged—from fifteen hundred a month last year to two hundred a month now. ISIS fighters are dying faster than they can be replaced. For the first time, ISIS no longer seems invincible.

The region is now beginning to peer nervously beyond both the political chaos and the challenge from ISIS. There’s a well-rooted fear that both Iraq and Syria—an area stretching from the Mediterranean to the Gulf—have become so frail that they may not be sustainable, regardless of whether ISIS is defeated. It’s the subject of political debate, media commentary, teahouse chatter, and academic conferences.

“Can Iraq remain the same as it was the day before ISIS attacked? No, I believe not,” Jan Kubis, the U.N. representative for Iraq, said at the Sulaimani Forum. “People must understand that something was wrong when ISIS was able to sweep through the country. And something is wrong when part of its territory has been liberated, but people know that things are not yet right to return.”

The debate about Iraq’s future has shifted since Senator Joe Biden wrote a controversial Times Op-Ed, in 2006, proposing three autonomous regions, for Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds to have their own political space. After thirteen years of war, the fabric of the young nation is threadbare. Iraq, in in current form, is less than a century old; Saddam Hussein ruled it for a quarter of its existence. Since his ouster, Baghdad has not devised a political formula to insure that its disparate constituencies feel invested in saving the country as is. The economy—of a major oil producer—has also been hit by a crippling mix: grossly wasteful mismanagement, a bureaucracy bloated by unqualified personnel, escalating greed, a five-hundred-per-cent budget increase since 2004, and plummeting oil prices. Nationalism has unravelled. Iraqis take great pride in their land’s ancient civilization; it’s the connection with their present state that is the existential challenge.

In Syria, the sheer physical and human devastation undermines the prospects of a viable state for years to come. The stats are almost incomprehensible: more than half the population depends on humanitarian aid to make it through the day. Some three million kids are not attending school—in a population of twenty-two million. Besides a staggering death toll, one and a half million people have been injured or permanently disabled. Life expectancy is down fifteen years from when the civil war started, in 2011. Almost one out of five citizens has fled the country altogether. They may have little incentive to return. Physical destruction totals at least two hundred and fifty billion dollars, in a state the size of Washington. And it increases every day.

A century after Sykes-Picot, the dual crises have stripped away the veneer of statehood imposed by the Europeans and have exposed the emptiness underneath. Iraq was managed by Britain and Syria by France, with limited nation-nurturing, before both were granted independence. They flew new flags, built opulent palaces for their leaders, encouraged commercial élites, and trained plenty of men in uniform. But both had weak public institutions, teeny civil societies, shady and iniquitous economies, and meaningless laws. Both countries were wracked by coups and instability. Syria went through twenty coups, some failed but many successful, between 1949 and 1970, an average of one a year, until the Assad dynasty assumed power—in another coup. Increasingly, the glue that held both countries together was repressive rule and fear.

The outside world, led by the United States, has reëngaged to help salvage both countries. After its eight-year intervention, however, Washington is not eager to again assume responsibility for the political aftermath. “We have to have real humility about our ability to affect the course of events,” Brett McGurk, Obama’s point man for the anti-ISIS coalition, told me in Washington last month. “We have to be really careful before we get overinvested. We have to define our interests very narrowly and focus very aggressively on achieving those interests.”

At the Sulaimani Forum, McGurk foreshadowed other dangers undermining prospects of reconstituting the Iraqi state. He recounted an anecdote about an Iraqi leader urging a Yazidi not to focus on revenge after the ISIS slaughter of his people on the mountains of Sinjar, in 2014. The massacre, along with the enslavement of hundreds of Yazidi women, was the flashpoint that led to the original U.S. airstrikes. McGurk said the Yazidi replied, “They took my wife, my daughter, and my sister. All I have left is my revenge.” McGurk warned, “This is something that Iraq will be dealing with for decades.”

In Syria, the death toll is many times higher, the sectarian and ethnic divide at least as deep as in Iraq. The test in both countries is not just finding a way to re-create states more viable than the various formulations attempted since the Sykes-Picot process was launched. It’s also rallying public will in the current environment.

“You can liberate. You can hold. And you can build,” Salman al Jumaili, Iraq’s Minister of Planning, said at the Sulaimani Forum last month. “But you may not be able to sustain.”

Some of the political alternatives may be just as problematic. The reconfiguration of either Iraq or Syria into new entities could be as complicated, and potentially as bloody, as the current wars. The breakups of India, Yugoslavia, and Sudan spawned huge migrations, cycles of ethnic cleansing, and rival claims to resources and territory, which in turn sparked whole new conflicts, some still unresolved years later.

“Civilization started here in the sixth century B.C.,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim Jafari said at the Forum. “We don’t want Iraq without sects or nationalities. But we want Iraq without radicalism. We would like Iraq to be like a bouquet of flowers.” As the chaos mounts by the day in Baghdad, that is surely an illusion.

“We don’t know the fate of the people in this region,” Salih, the former Iraqi deputy prime minister, told me this week. “But, for sure, this time—unlike a hundred years ago, when Mr. Sykes and M. Picot drew the lines in the sand—the people of the region will have much to do with shaping the new order.” The problem, for them and the outside world, is that they only know what they don’t want. They have yet to figure out which political systems—and which borders—will work.