A Warning from the Solomon Islands

I can’t think about the Iran nuclear agreement—which increasingly looks like a lifeless corpse—without getting angry. It’s infuriating that Donald Trump pulled out of it when Tehran was abiding by its terms. It’s infuriating that Joe Biden didn’t immediately offer to lift all nuclear sanctions when he entered office, back when a more moderate Iranian leadership may have been willing to revive the deal. It’s infuriating that Benjamin Netanyahu’s top security aides now admit they knew Trump and Netanyahu’s claim that the US could leave the deal, impose “maximum pressure,” and make the Iranians cave “was all a big lie.” Now they tell us! And it’s infuriating that so many Beltway hawks were so flagrantly wrong yet remain members in good standing of the American foreign establishment.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and to my mind the most insightful Iran expert in Washington, foresaw this catastrophe and tried to prevent it. Here’s an essay he wrote in October on the Biden administration’s failure to move boldly to revive the deal. Trita will join us this Friday, December 10, to discuss whether diplomacy can still resolve this crisis, and if not, whether we’re headed for war.

My grandmother, Adele Pienaar (née Albeldas), of blessed memory, spent part of her youth in the city of Lubumbashi—then called Elisabethville—in the southeastern Congo. It was a stop on her family’s multi-century Sephardic journey: From Spain to the Isle of Rhodes to Alexandria, Egypt, to the Congo, and then, in her case, to Cape Town. And if left me with an enduring interest in the region of the Congo in which she grew up, which is called Katanga.

History buffs may know the story. Days after Congo declared independence from Belgium in 1960, a businessman-turned-politician named Moise Tshombe declared Katanga’s independence from Congo. The Belgians, French, and British—who coveted Katanga’s mineral wealth and feared the leftist leanings of Congo’s new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba—effectively supported the secession. So Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union, which provided him weapons and advisors. This so outraged the United States it helped engineer a military coup. In the ensuing fighting, as many as one hundred thousand Congolese died. The man who carried out the coup, Joseph-Desire Mobutu (later known as Mobutu Sese Seko) ruled tyrannically, with US support, for more than thirty years.

What happened in my grandmother’s hometown is one of countless examples of the way the Cold War fueled bloodshed and dictatorship across the Global South. The good news is that when the Cold War ended, some of that bloodshed did too. According to a 2007 study, “After the end of the Cold War, the number of violent conflicts being waged around the world began to decline rapidly.” In the decades since 2007, the numbers have remained comparatively low. Coups have become less frequent too. The era from the 1960s through the 1980s witnessed between 10 and 20 coups per year. Since 2000, most years have seen under five.

Why did armed conflict decline when the Cold War ended? The University of British Columbia’s Andrew Mack has suggested two reasons. First, the superpowers stopped arming local antagonists because they longer saw their political and ethnic feuds as part of a global, zero-sum struggle between capitalism and communism. Second, the United Nations, freed from its Cold War paralysis, grew far more active in both mediating conflicts before they broke out and deploying peacekeepers to make peace agreements stick. Yes, the United Nations—derided in Washington as useless (and, of course, antisemitic)—likely saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives.

Which brings me to a corner of the globe even more obscure than Katanga: the Solomon Islands. Late last month, the archipelago northeast of Australia witnessed terrifying communal violence. Rioters stormed parliament and burned buildings, especially in ethnic Chinese areas of the nation’s capital, Honiara. Behind the violence lies a rivalry between the country’s prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare, and the premier of the island of Malaita, Daniel Suidani. Residents of Malaita have long felt neglected by the central government. But in recent years, that long-standing resentment has been supercharged and exploited by the two most powerful governments on earth. In 2019, Sogavare withdrew his country’s diplomatic recognition of Taiwan and forged ties to mainland China. Suidani denounced the move and said the island he governs, Malaita, would maintain its relationship with Taipei. And by sticking with Taipei, Suidani also drew closer to its superpower friend, the United States. In 2020, the Trump administration offered the island of Malaita—not the Solomon Islands as a whole—$35 million in aid, an astonishing sum given that in 2018 the US gave the entire country a total of $1.6 million.

The US and China have now chosen their proxies, which is escalating a local feud. Suidani’s supporters are taking out their grievances by attacking Solomon Islanders of Chinese descent. And he is threatening that his island, Malaita, will secede. Which could bring war—with the superpowers on opposing sides. The ghost of Moise Tshombe lives.

What’s happening in the Solomon Islands is a warning of things to come. The face-off between the US and China is not as ideological as the face-off between the US and USSR. Men like Sogavare and Suidani don’t have to quote Adam Smith or Karl Marx to get superpower aid. But for their people, and other peoples caught between the superpowers, the results could be equally disastrous. Remember what reduced violence after the end of the last Cold War: the superpowers lost interest in arming and aiding local adversaries and the decline of great power animosity empowered the UN to make peace. The fiercer the global rivalry between Washington and Beijing gets, the more likely those accomplishments will be undone.

Katanga’s past could be the world’s future.

Other Stuff:

In Jewish Currents, Elisheva Goldberg writes about the precarious state of Israel’s supreme court.    

Here’s the video of my conversation last week, “Palestine-Israel: Where to Look for Hope,” with Diana Buttu, Daniel Levy, and Rebecca Abou-Chedid.

On December 9, I’ll be talking with Dalia Hatuqa, Shibley Telhami, Tariq Kenney-Shawa, and Khaled Elgindy on a panel entitled, “Permission to Narrate: The Shifting Discourse on Israel/Palestine in the U.S.,” sponsored by the Middle East Institute.

Siri, Apple’s automated assistant, has trouble acknowledging that Palestinians exist.

The Democratic Socialists of America considered expelling Representative Jamaal Bowman, one of the foremost champions of Palestinian rights in Congress, for not being supportive enough of Palestinian rights. Then, thankfully, they realized that’s a terrible idea.

See you Friday,

Peter