Did a Discrete Event 200,000 to 100,000 Years Ago Produce Modern Humans? By Timothy D. Weaver.

Omo 1 skull. At 195,000 years old it is the earliest known remains of Homo sapiens.

Did a discrete event 200,000-100,000 years ago produce modern humans. By Timothy D. Weaver. Journal of Human Evolution, Vol. 63, No. 1 (June 2012).

Abstract:

Scenarios for modern human origins are often predicated on the assumption that modern humans arose 200,000–100,000 years ago in Africa. This assumption implies that something “special” happened at this point in time in Africa, such as the speciation that produced Homo sapiens, a severe bottleneck in human population size, or a combination of the two. The common thread is that after the divergence of the modern human and Neandertal evolutionary lineages ∼400,000 years ago, there was another discrete event near in time to the Middle–Late Pleistocene boundary that produced modern humans. Alternatively, modern human origins could have been a lengthy process that lasted from the divergence of the modern human and Neandertal evolutionary lineages to the expansion of modern humans out of Africa, and nothing out of the ordinary happened 200,000–100,000 years ago in Africa.

Three pieces of biological (fossil morphology and DNA sequences) evidence are typically cited in support of discrete event models. First, living human mitochondrial DNA haplotypes coalesce ∼200,000 years ago. Second, fossil specimens that are usually classified as “anatomically modern” seem to appear shortly afterward in the African fossil record. Third, it is argued that these anatomically modern fossils are morphologically quite different from the fossils that preceded them.

Here I use theory from population and quantitative genetics to show that lengthy process models are also consistent with current biological evidence. That this class of models is a viable option has implications for how modern human origins is conceptualized.

Neanderthals Left a Genetic Burden to Modern Humans.

A reconstruced Neanderthal with a modern human girl.

Neanderthal Left Humans Genetic Burden, Scientists Say. Sci-News.com, June 6, 2016.

Neanderthal Mutations Could Still be Affecting Humans. By Daryl Worthington. New Historian, June 7, 2016.

Here’s why human women probably struggled to have babies with Neanderthal men. By Rafi Letzter. Tech Insider, June 6, 2016.

The Divergence of Neandertal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes. By Fernando L. Mendez et al. American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 98, No. 4 (April 7, 2016). PDF.

The Genetic Cost of Neanderthal Introgression. By By Kelley Harris and Rasmus Nielsen. Genetics, Vol. 203, No. 2 (June 2016). PDF.

Abstract:

Approximately 2–4% of genetic material in human populations outside Africa is derived from Neanderthals who interbred with anatomically modern humans. Recent studies have shown that this Neanderthal DNA is depleted around functional genomic regions; this has been suggested to be a consequence of harmful epistatic interactions between human and Neanderthal alleles. However, using published estimates of Neanderthal inbreeding and the distribution of mutational fitness effects, we infer that Neanderthals had at least 40% lower fitness than humans on average; this increased load predicts the reduction in Neanderthal introgression around genes without the need to invoke epistasis. We also predict a residual Neanderthal mutational load in non-Africans, leading to a fitness reduction of at least 0.5%. This effect of Neanderthal admixture has been left out of previous debate on mutation load differences between Africans and non-Africans. We also show that if many deleterious mutations are recessive, the Neanderthal admixture fraction could increase over time due to the protective effect of Neanderthal haplotypes against deleterious alleles that arose recently in the human population. This might partially explain why so many organisms retain gene flow from other species and appear to derive adaptive benefits from introgression.



Sci-News.com:

The genome of Neanderthals contained harmful gene variants that made them around 40 percent less reproductively fit than modern humans. And non-Africans inherited some of this genetic burden when they interbred with our extinct cousins, say genetic researchers.

Several previous studies revealed that Neanderthals were much more inbred and less genetically diverse than modern humans. For thousands of years, the Neanderthal population size remained small, and mating among close relatives seems to have been common.

Then, between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, anatomically modern Homo sapiens left Africa and moved to the homelands of their distant cousins.

The two groups interbred, mingling their previously distinct genomes. But though a small fraction of the genome of non-African populations today is Neanderthal, their genetic contribution is uneven. Neanderthal sequences are concentrated in certain parts of the human genome, but missing from other regions.

“Whenever geneticists find a non-random arrangement like that, we look for the evolutionary forces that caused it,” said Dr. Kelley Harris of Stanford University.

Dr. Harris and her co-author, Dr. Rasmus Nielsen from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Copenhagen, hypothesized that the force in question was natural selection.

In small populations, like the Neanderthals’, natural selection is less effective and chance has an outsized influence.

This allows weakly harmful mutations to persist, rather than being weeded out over the generations. But once such mutations are introduced back into a larger population, such as modern humans, they would be exposed to the surveillance of natural selection and eventually lost.

To quantify this effect, the scientists used computer programs to simulate mutation accumulation during Neanderthal evolution and to estimate how humans were affected by the influx of Neanderthal genetic variants.

“To assess the fitness effects of Neanderthal introgression on a genome-wide scale, we used forward-time simulations incorporating linkage, exome architecture, and population size changes to model the flux of deleterious mutations across hominin species boundaries,” the scientists said.

The results, published in the journal Genetics, suggest that Neanderthals carried many mutations with mild, but harmful effects.

The combined effect of these mutations would have made Neanderthals at least 40 percent less fit than Homo sapiens in evolutionary terms.

The team’s simulations also suggest that humans and Neanderthals mixed much more freely than originally thought

Today, Neanderthal sequences make up approximately 2 percent of the genome in people from non-African populations. But the scientists estimate that at the time of interbreeding, closer to 10 percent of the human migrants’ genome would have been Neanderthal.

Because there were around 10 times more humans than Neanderthals, this number is consistent with the two groups acting as a single population that interbred at random.

Although most of the harmful mutations bequeathed by our Neanderthal ancestors would have been lost within a few generations, a small fraction likely persists in people today.

The team estimates that non-Africans may have historically had approximately 1 percent lower reproductive fitness due to their Neanderthal heritage.

This is in spite of the small number of Neanderthal gene variants thought to be beneficial today, including genes related to immunity and skin color.

Worthington:

Breeding with Neanderthals may have had a heavy price for early humans, according to a new study published recently in the journal GENETICS.

Harmful mutations present in the genome of Neanderthals made them up to 40% less fit reproductively than modern humans, according to the study. Although most of the effects have since been lost to time, these mutations likely passed to non-African humans when they interbred with Neanderthals. It is suggested that the mutations could still be affecting the fitness of some populations today.

The study was led by Kelley Harris of Stanford University, along with her colleague Rasmus Nielse, from the University of California Berkley and Copenhagen University.

“Neanderthals are fascinating to geneticists because they provide an opportunity to study what happens when two groups of humans evolve independently for a long time–and then come back together,” Harris explained. “Our results suggest that inheriting Neanderthal DNA came at a cost.”

It is now widely accepted that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, our closest extinct genetic relatives, with between 2% and 4% of genetic material in modern, non-African human populations having a Neanderthal origin. A study published earlier this year suggested that anything from the risk of depression to nicotine addiction could be connected to the mixing of human and Neanderthal genomes.

Due to their smaller, more concentrated population, inbreeding was much more common among Neanderthals than modern humans, leading to their decreased genetic diversity.

Harris and Nielsen were particularly fascinated by the fact that the Neanderthal genetic contribution to the modern human genome is uneven, but not random. Neanderthal sequences tend to be concentrated in certain areas, but totally absent elsewhere.

“Whenever geneticists find a non-random arrangement like that, we look for the evolutionary forces that caused it,” Harris remarked.

They hypothesised that the explanation could be found in natural selection. In small populations, like the Neanderthals, natural selection is less effective, allowing mutations to persist and have a larger influence. If such a mutation is introduced back into a larger population (such as modern humans) however, it’s quickly lost in the march of natural selection.

To understand this process, Harris and Nielsen used computer programs to simulate mutation accumulation during Neanderthal evolution and estimate how humans were affected by the influx of Neanderthal genetic variants. They concluded that Neanderthals would have carried many mild, harmful mutations, combining to make them 40% less fit than humans in evolutionary terms.

Their results also suggest that humans and Neanderthals had actually interbred much more freely and frequently than previously believed. The findings suggest that thousands of years ago, when both humans and Neanderthals inhabited the earth, closer to 10% of non-African humans’ genomes would have been Neanderthal.

Shockingly, Harris and Nielsen suggest that a fraction of the harmful Neanderthal genetic mutations could still be present in modern human populations. They estimate the result could be a 1% lower reproductive fitness in modern day non-Africans.

Letzter:

Imagine a couple living between 39,000 and 45,000 years ago. She’s a human. He’s a Neanderthal. Their families aren’t thrilled with the union, but they’ve learned to deal with it.

Their union isn’t all that unusual after all – enough humans and Neanderthals made babies together in the 5,000-plus years that the two species coexisted that modern humans now owe about 4% of our DNA to our extinct nonhuman kin.

As this human-Neanderthal couple moves through life, like many couples, they have children. A daughter, and then another daughter, and then another. And they notice something funny: All their Neanderthal man/human woman couple friends keep having daughters as well.

That mystery may have puzzled them, and its genetic legacy has puzzled modern scientists as well. While traces of all sorts of Neanderthal DNA show up in the human genome, scientists haven’t found any Neanderthal Y-chromosomes – the chromosomes fathers pass to biologically male children. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Neanderthal Y-chromosome is extinct, but it makes it likely.

There are a number of theories as to why the Neanderthal Y has vanished, the most popular until recently being the vagaries of random chance. That is, that male children were born to Neanderthal-human couples, but their genes were rare enough not to survive through the ages.

But a study published recently in the American Journal of Human Genetics suggests an alternate explanation: Human women may have been unable, or at least struggled, to carry male half-Neanderthal fetuses to term. That’s because of three genes found on the Neanderthal Y-chromosome that are known to trigger immune responses in human beings. Those genes could have caused human mothers’ immune systems to attack male half-Neanderthal fetuses, triggering miscarriages.

Even if half-Neanderthal baby boys with human mothers were born occasionally, that genetic incompatibility could have weeded out enough of them to eventually remove their traces from the gene pool.

The paper’s authors caution that their results are not conclusive – they’ve identified a possible cause, not shown it to be the case. But for bemused parents at ancient play groups full of little half-Neanderthal girls (as well as modern scientists) this result might have sated some curiosity.

The New Israel and the Old. By Walter Russell Mead.

The New Israel and the Old. By Walter Russell Mead. Video. Tikvah Fund, June 2, 2016. YouTube. Also at The American Interest.

The New Israel and the Old: Why Gentile Americans Back the Jewish State. Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 4 (July/August 2008). Also here, here.

The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. By Walter Russell Mead. New York: Knopf, 2017. Publication date April 4, 2017. Amazon.com.

The Revenge of Tribalism. By Ben Shapiro.

The Revenge of Tribalism. By Ben Shapiro. National Review Online, June 8, 2016.

Shapiro:

Americans reject Locke and embrace Hobbes.

Last week, President Obama became the target of mockery when he descended into Porky Pig protestations at the divisiveness of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. After tripping over his words while trying to gain his footing, Obama finally settled on a line of attack: “If we turn against each other based on divisions of race or religion, if we fall for a bunch of ‘okey doke’ just because it sounds funny or the tweets are provocative, then we’re not going to build on the progress we started.”

Meanwhile, across the country, likely Obama supporters rioted at a Trump event in San Jose, Calif., waving Mexican flags, burning American ones, assaulting Trump supporters, and generally engaging in mayhem.

The same day, Trump labeled a judge presiding over his civil trial as unfit for his job. “I’m building a wall,” said Trump. “It’s an inherent conflict of interest.” What, pray tell, was that inherent conflict of interest? Trump said that the judge was “Mexican” (he was born in Indiana, to Mexican parents).

Two days later, Trump told Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, “Barack Obama has been a terrible president, but he’s been a tremendous divider. He has divided this country from rich and poor, black and white — he has divided this country like no president in my opinion, almost ever . . . I will bring people together.”

So, who’s right?

They’re both right. Obama, like it or not, leads a coalition of tribes. Trump, like it or not, leads a competing coalition of tribes. The Founders weep in their graves.

The Founders were scholars of both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes argued that the state of nature — primitive society — revolved around a war of “every man against every man.” In such a state, life was awful: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The only solution to such chaos, said Hobbes, was the Leviathan: the state, which is “but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.”

Hobbesian theory has prevailed throughout human history: Tribal societies either remain in a constant state of war with each other, or they are overthrown by a powerful government. Jared Diamond writes that “tribal warfare tends to be chronic, because there are not strong central governments that can enforce peace.” Those strong central governments often arise, says Francis Fukuyama, thanks to the advent of religion, which unites tribes across family boundaries. The rise of powerful leadership leads to both tyranny and to peace.

But in Western societies, such tyranny cannot last. After generations of tyranny — after tribalism gives way to Judeo-Christian teachings enforced through government — citizens begin to question why a tyrant is necessary. They begin to ask John Locke’s question: In a state of nature, we had rights from one another; what gives the tyrant power to invade those rights? Is prevention of violence a rationale for full government control, or were governments created to protect our rights? Our Founders came down on the side of Locke; as they stated in the Declaration of Independence, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

But the Founders still feared tribalism. They called it “faction” in The Federalist Papers, and were truly worried about the seizure of the mechanism of government in order to benefit one group over another. They may have agreed with Locke over Hobbes about the proper extent of government power, but they never believed that tribalism had disappeared. That is why they attempted to create a government pitting faction against faction, cutting the Gordian knot of tyranny and tribalism with checks and balances. As James Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

It was a brilliant solution to an intractable problem — so long as it worked.

It no longer does. Tribalism has had its revenge.

It began with the decline of American religion in the 1950s. As religion declined, Americans looked for new sources of community — and in the 1960s, the Marxist Left provided Americans communal meaning in ethnic and racial solidarity. Even as America began to move beyond its historic racism, the Left hijacked the conversation around race and divvied Americans up into subgroups of ethnic haves and have-nots. City governments became playgrounds for racial factions taking control of government and expanding their power. Student groups divided along racial and sexual lines. The social fabric frayed.

The unrest of the 1960s and 1970s provoked a law-and-order backlash — a desire for a government that would tamp down the unrest and restore order. For three decades, Americans rejected tribalism as a mode of politics (Ronald Reagan believed in universal human freedoms, and Bill Clinton famously rejected Sister Souljah’s race-baiting). Not surprisingly, the rejection of 1960s tribalism ushered in an era of smaller government dedicated toward the proposition that constitutional checks and balances were the best protection against tyranny.

And then came the Obama presidency.

President Obama’s tribal politics have crippled America. Americans hoped that Obama — after campaigning on the notion that he would provide the capstone to America’s non-tribalism — would heal our wounds and move our country beyond racial politics. He, in his own persona, was to be a racial unifier. He represented the hope that America could reject tribalism in favor of American universalism.

Instead, Obama has rejected checks and balances as a matter of principle, and has used tribalism to grow his own power. By cobbling together a coalition of racial and ethnic interest groups, Obama knew he could maximize the power of the government to act on their behalf. And so his Department of Justice has crippled police departments based solely on the race of police officers. He constantly suggests that America has an inborn, unfixable problem with racism. He poses as a rejection of the Founding ideology.

Donald Trump is the counter-reaction. But he is not a Reaganesque or even Bill Clinton-esque counter-reaction. He, like Obama, is tribal. His tribalism is the tribalism of Pat Buchanan, who suggested in 2011 what appears to be Donald Trump’s electoral strategy: “to increase the GOP share of the white Christian vote and increase the turnout of that vote by specific appeals to social, cultural, and moral issues, and for equal justice for the emerging white minority.”

“Why should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded, built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?” Buchanan asked, concluding that “white anger is a legitimate response to racial injustices done to white people.” Instead of attempting to set checks and balances to prevent faction, instead of attempting to educate Americans in our Founding principles, this philosophy focuses on tribalism of a different sort, making the crucial error of linking skin color to culture.

And so we may have reached the end of the era of small government. As tribalism rises, Americans look again to the strongman. We begin the cycle anew. But first, we feel the rage of riots in San Jose and Ferguson, and the spiteful glee of the white-nationalist alt-right. We watch contests between tribal figures like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. We wonder which tribe will win, even as America disintegrates before us.

Mideast Identity Politics Is Here to Stay. By Hisham Melhem.

Could the defeat of ISIS turn to pyrrhic victory? By Hisham Melhem. Al Arabiya English, June 4, 2016.

Melhem:

The recent military setbacks suffered by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and the beginning of attacks by local forces to retake Fallujah, Iraq and Manbij City, Syria, backed by US-led coalition airstrikes, coupled with the steep decline in the number of foreign fighters flowing to Join ISIS, portends the eventual defeat of the Caliphate as a significant military threat maybe as early as 2017. But given the trajectory of the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts in recent years, the corrosive role of most outside powers, and the frightening human toll of identity politics, the defeat of the monstrous Caliphate could turn to a resounding pyrrhic victory.

Since the Second World War, the United States has had a poor record in translating its military victories into political successes. It is very likely that the two longest wars in American history will end with political forces that are either hostile or unfriendly to the United States controlling both Afghanistan and Iraq. The real challenge for the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and in Syria was never military in nature, but rather political. After the eventual military defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria the perennial question of “what’s next politically?” will be asked just as it was asked after the liberation of Afghanistan from Soviet occupation in 1989, the defeat of Iraqi forces in Kuwait in 1991, and after the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq in 2011.

The victory of identity politics

Ironically, the defeat of ISIS, a positive development in and of itself, in the absence of acceptable political scaffoldings to begin healing these societies, could presage the victory of foreign powers like Iran and Russia, a genocidal regime in Damascus and a sectarian corrupt regime in Baghdad both of which are beholding to Tehran. More importantly in the long run, the defeat of ISIS if it is not accompanied or followed by the eventual demise of the Assad regime in the context of an overall political resolution that guarantees the civil and political rights of all Syrian communities, and in checking Iran’s destructive influence in Iraq, will result in the overwhelming victory of “identity politics”.

The fights for Fallujah and Manbij City are raising serious fears not only of massive civilian casualties, but of deepening sectarian and ethnic cleavages leading to more death by identity and the creation of more refugees. The United States is currently providing air power to support the Iraqi government forces attacking ISIS forces in Fallujah, but these conventional forces are augmented by Shiite militias backed and trained by Iran and led by Iraqis who are very loyal to Iran. These largely Shiite militias make up the so-called Popular Mobilization Forces (al-Hashd al-Sha’bi),were created in response to ISIS’ occupation of Mosul in June 2014. These militias engaged in widespread abuse in Sunni cities liberated from ISIS in recent months.

Following the eviction of ISIS from Tikrit last year Human Rights Watch documented the “Ruinous Aftermath” in the city thus: “in the aftermath of the fighting, militia forces looted, torched, and blew up hundreds of civilian houses and buildings in Tikrit and the neighboring towns..” While it is true that the U.S. in the past criticized the sectarian practices of these militias and asked the Iraqi government not to allow them to participate in liberating Sunni cities from ISIS, a request that was ignored by Baghdad, there are ample signs now that Washington has lessened its opposition to some of these militias. In fact last spring US Consul General Steve Walker expressed sympathy with some of the wounded members of the Popular Mobilization Forces during a visit to a hospital in Basra.

Deepening sectarian and ethnic divides

Just as the city of Ramadi was essentially destroyed in order to be “saved” from ISIS, a similar fate could befall Fallujah. There are credible concerns that the decision to attack Fallujah which came after a short notice to the U.S. is in part a political maneuver by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to deflect attention from his domestic travails following a series of deadly bombings in Baghdad, and growing social unrest against corruption and calls for reforms that almost paralyzed his government. Iran, the hidden hand behind major Iraqi decisions, was on display recently when the ubiquitous Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force commander General Qassem Suleimani showed up in photos taken at an operations room outside Fallujah, discussing maps of military operations with senior militia commanders. The absence of a unified countervailing moderate Arab Sunni force to ISIS in Iraq and Syria will guarantee that the defeat of ISIS, will likely lead to the birth of a new form of Sunni radicalism in years to come.

The fight for Manbij City, which is a prelude for a major attack on ISIS controlled Raqqa is raising concerns about potential ethnic conflicts between Kurds and Arabs. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed coalition of armed groups led by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), has been with U.S. logistical support mobilizing thousands of fighters in the countryside north of Raqqa to isolate the city. American Special Forces in Syria have been training and advising and possibly fighting along with YPG fighters. In fact U.S. military personnel have been “embedded” with YPG fighters, as seen in recent photos showing U.S. soldiers wearing emblems of the YPG on their shoulders.

But while the Kurds of Syria have legitimate political and cultural grievances and demands that should be fairly addressed in a post-Assad Syria, nonetheless the YPG which represent the most powerful Syrian Kurdish group has been accused by human rights organizations of engaging in ethnic cleansings and forcing Arabs and Turkmens from their areas and demolishing their homes in areas under YPG control. It is ironic that the YPG, which came into existence with the help of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) of Turkey a group designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group, is also receiving help from the Russians in Syria. If the YPG leads the fight to retake Raqqa and its environ, a region inhabited by mostly Syrian Arabs, the outcome will likely result in new tensions and possibly violence between Arabs and Kurds.

The disintegration of states

In recent years we have witnessed the destructive triumph of identity politics during the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the Sudan or between the Hutu and the Tutsi. Since the beginning of the Arab uprisings five years ago, we have witnessed the collapse of the state system in a number of Arab countries. Many a historian and analyst have had their chance in recent weeks to ponder the legacy or legacies of the Sykes-Picot agreement and the other treaties and arrangements that led to the birth of the modern State system in the Middle East after the First World War. One clear conclusion is that many of those societies failed to develop modern state institutions, good and efficient governance based on fair representations of the components of those societies, a failure that led to the calamitous present in Syria, and Iraq ( the same can be said about Yemen and Libya)..When the uprisings failed to create alternative political structures, the brittle regimes in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen collapsed into chaos or civil wars. (a similar situation occurred in Iraq, with the failure of the invading power to create a functioning and fair governance). With the fears and uncertainties spawned by the collapse of order, particularly in heterogeneous societies, people fell back on their bedrock certainties and identities. When people are threatened as members of a community (a religious sect or an ethnic group) they tend to develop a strong sense of solidarity with other members of the group as a form of self-defense. The identity of the group is almost always exaggerated, and the threat is invariably described as existential. That is one reason why civil wars are the most passionate of wars. It is so because the combatants know each other, and because they have irreconcilable views and visions about their way of life, their future and their very own identity. Extreme identity politics reduce us to mere members of a large tribe.

The region is going through a historic convulsion that will last for years, maybe decades. But the raging sectarian wars and mounting ethnic tensions are recent and the product of power struggles, political decisions and events and not the result of “ancient hatreds”. The Sunni-Shiite wars are unprecedented because they are the product of the last few decades. The 1979 revolution in Iran was a milestone in modern Shi’a assertiveness. Sunni political Islam after suffering crushing blows by the Arab Nationalists in the 1950’s and 60’s began to reassert itself after the Arab defeat in the war with Israel in 1967 by claiming that the return to true Islam is the solution. The disastrous Iraqi decision to invade Iran was a huge blow to Sunni-Shiite coexistence, and it revived Arab-Persian enmity. In Syria, the ascendency of the Alawite minority (an offshoot of Shi’ism) to power and their control of the army and the security agencies deepened the rift with the Sunni majority. This situation led to a low intensity civil war beginning in 1978 and culminating in the massacre of Sunni rebels in the city of Hama in 1982. Finally the American invasion of Iraq, which empowered the Shiites who have been marginalized in the modern state of Iraq and oppressed as a community by the regime of Saddam Hussein, led to the most sectarian bloodletting between the two sects in modern times. The U.S. cannot mediate the Sunni-Shiite divide, but at least it should not pursue policies in Syria and Iraq that will make it irretrievably worse.

In the last fifty years, many groups in the region engaged in crass expressions of identity politics, and outright discourse of exclusion; this is true of Arabs and Jews, Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites and Christians and Muslims. Identity politics and practices have become the norms, even in cities like Alexandria, Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad that were once cosmopolitan. Dissent against the prevailing orthodoxy of the tribe became prohibitive, particularly under autocratic regimes, where the state is unable or unwilling in most cases to help those who dare to challenge the discourse of identity politics. There are few dissenting Shiite and Sunni voices in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and other states were these two sects live, who would oppose publicly the course of the tribe.

Ironically, the digital age which allows the peoples of the region, particularly the youth tremendous opportunities to look beyond the confines of the tribe, to be informed instantly of events and trends, to be exposed to practical and theoretical knowledge, is in fact contributing to the atomization of the region and deepening the attachment to identity politics. Death by identity need not be the future of the region, but until the various tribes are exhausted, and until new uprisings emerge against the sins of both the in-group and the out-group, the scourge of extreme identity politics will continue to devour the region.

Hillary Clinton Is to the Right of Donald Trump on Foreign Policy. By Judith Miller and Doug Schoen.

On foreign policy, Hillary Clinton leans more to the right than Donald Trump. By Judith Miller and Douglas E. Schoen. With video. FoxNews.com, June 3, 2016. YouTube.





Miller and Schoen:

Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have now delivered major speeches on foreign policy. If you are looking for a presidential candidate who favors conservative foreign policy prescriptions and such traditional Republican positions as promoting free trade, strong alliances, and the selective but robust projection of American force abroad, look no further than the presumptive presidential nominee – Hillary Clinton.

That’s right. In most key foreign policy issues, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is to the right of her rival, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Consider the following.

On Russia, while Mrs. Clinton has called Putin a “bully” and has described the relationship between Washington and Moscow as “complicated,” Mr. Trump has floated the idea of establishing a new alliance with Russia, whose cooperation he says is needed to help end the six-year war in Syria, fight terrorism, and diffuse tensions. While he says that more should be done to support Ukraine, which has been battling Russia-backed separatists since Russia annexed Crimea, he has not detailed what specifically he would do to help end Russia’s occupation of Crimea and combat Russian meddling in Kiev’s internal affairs.

Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, has become steadily more critical of Russia since 2009 when she and Mr. Putin famously pushed a red “reset” button on their relationship. By the end of her tenure as secretary of state, The Wall Street Journal reported, she had written a private memo to President Obama declaring the Russia “reset” dead and asserting that relations with Moscow had hit a new “low.”

To combat Russian aggression, Mrs. Clinton, like most Republicans and Democrats, has staunchly supported working closely with the 28-member NATO alliance which helped contain the Soviet Union until it collapsed in 1991. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has criticized the alliance as “obsolete” and too costly for America, saying he would insist that either its members “pay up” or “get out.”

Or consider America’s war in Iraq. While then New York’s Senator Clinton voted in favor of authorizing the use of force in Iraq in 2002, Mr. Trump now claims to have opposed that intervention.  Putting aside the pesky issue of whether that claim is true (and several contemporaneous and recent reports indicate that Mr. Trump once supported the invasion) he now asserts that “From the beginning I said it’s gonna destabilize the Middle East and Iran will take over Iraq…We decimated that country’s military and now the country’s  a mess.”

Mrs. Clinton has said that if she had known then what she knows now, she would have voted differently on the Senate resolution authorizing intervention. But she has not apologized for her action. And she has proposed more intrusive intervention in Syria to stop the civil war than either Mr. Trump or President Obama. A proponent of arming “moderate” or pro-western rebels in Syria and expanding American airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria, she has also pushed for establishing a no-fly zone over Syria to protect refugees. President Obama rejected that option partly because it would put the U.S. in potential direct military conflict with Russia, which has sent military advisers to Syria to protect Syrian president Bashar Assad and bomb not only ISIS but other rebel forces there.

For his part, Mr. Trump has talked tough about defeating ISIS in Syria and Iraq, saying he would bomb the “expletive” out of them and kill families of terrorists, which Mrs. Clinton and others have noted would be a war crime). But he has consistently refused to disclose his plan for defeating the jihadis on grounds that it would deny Washington the element of surprise. Unlike Mrs. Clinton, he has opposed arming Syrian rebels. In his isolationism and reluctance to use force to secure American goals, Mr. Trump resembles Democratic presidential aspirant Senator Bernie Sanders more than he does Hillary Clinton.

Or consider North Korea. While Mrs. Clinton has adopted a tough stance towards North Korea’s brutal young dictator Kim Jung Un, whose abuse of his people and quest for nuclear weapons she denounced yet again in her foreign policy speech in San Diego Wednesday, Mr. Trump has offered to sit down with Mr. Kim and try to negotiate a deal. While Mrs. Clinton would shudder at being praised by the mercurial leader in Pyongyang, Time magazine reported this week that official state media called Mr. Trump a “wise politician” and “farsighted candidate who can reunify the Korean Peninsula.”

Mr. Trump has also threatened to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea if Seoul does not pay more to support them and also to let South Korea and Japan – and even Saudi Arabia – develop their own nuclear weapons (another position he now denies having embraced) rather than depend on American military deterrence. Mrs. Clinton has proposed stiffening sanctions against Pyongyang to force Mr. Kim it to abandon his nuclear program. Plus, she has strongly opposed nuclear proliferation in any region, preferring to rely on American leadership thru traditional alliances to deter Russian and Chinese aggression and to fight ISIS.

On trade policy, too, Mr. Trump sometimes seems to the left of his Democratic rival. While Mrs. Clinton has opposed the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership, she strongly embraced the trade talks that led to the free trade agreement when she was secretary of state. Mr. Trump, by contrast, argues that the trade deals so beloved of fellow Republicans have invariably cost Americans jobs and revenue at home. He vows to tear them up, negotiate better deals, or start a trade war with China if necessary. “We’ve been taken advantage of by globalization because we have leaders that are incompetent,” he says, often sounding more protectionist than his Democratic rival.

On Israel, Mrs. Clinton has been a fierce champion, praising the Jewish state and vowing to defend it yet again in her speech today. Not so, Mr. Trump, who having retracted an earlier desire to be “neutral” in negotiations between Israel and Palestinians, has questioned Israel’s commitment to peace. “I have a real question as to whether or not both sides want to make it,” Mr. Trump said, adding: “A lot will have to do with Israel and whether or not Israel wants to make the deal — whether or not Israel's willing to sacrifice certain things. They may not be, and I understand that, and I'm OK with that. But then you're just not going to have a deal.’”

Staunch support for Israel is among the issues that have led many prominent neo-conservatives, most prominently Bill Kristol, once supportive of Republicans, to embrace Mrs. Clinton and oppose or be skeptical of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump has staunchly criticized Mrs. Clinton for her interventionism – what he calls her mishandling of foreign policy as secretary of state during her 2009-2013. He has been especially harsh on her preference for military interventions in Libya and her handling of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack by Islamist militants on an U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, where jihadists killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. While he has talked tougher than his Democratic rival about the need to make America’s foes “respect” America again and has condemned her embrace of the Iran nuclear deal and recognition of Cuba – two areas where Mr. Trump appears more hawkish than Mrs. Clinton -- there is less practical difference between them than it may seem. Mr. Trump has vowed to renegotiate the nuclear deal, though how he would do that is unclear, and has endorsed toughening sanctions on Iran to secure concessions. But he has not echoed Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s vow to tear up the agreement on “day one.” Nor is he likely to walk back recognition of Cuba.

While Mr. Trump will have to cope with his myriad foreign policy faux pas and flip flops, Hillary Clinton will have her own challenges. Whatever her current views, she has little to show for her years as secretary of state. Perhaps harder, she will have to separate herself from the legacy of President Obama's foreign policy – two still failing wars, over 500,000 dead in Syria, tens of millions of refugees displaced from their homes and flooding Europe, and the disdain of so many Middle Eastern and other allies for America's indifference and lack of leadership.

Small wonder that neither candidate may want to dwell on foreign policy as they head to November.     

Lovable Bernie Whacks Israel. By Charles Krauthammer.

Lovable Bernie Whacks Israel. By Charles Krauthammer. Washington Post, June 2, 2016. Also at National Review Online.

Krauthammer:

Sanders’s anti-Israel sentiment stems from his old-Left roots.

Part of Bernie Sanders’ charm is that for all of his arm-waving jeremiads, he appears unthreatening. He’s the weird old uncle in the attic, Larry David’s crazy Bernie. It’s almost a matter of style. Who can be afraid of a candidate so irascible, grumpy, old-fashioned and unfashionable?

After all, he’s not going to win the nomination, so what harm can he do? A major address at the party convention? A say in the vice presidential selection? And who reads party platforms anyway?

Well, platforms may not immediately affect a particular campaign. But they do express, quite literally, the party line, a written record of its ideological trajectory.

Which is why two of Sanders’s appointments to the 15-member platform committee are so stunning. Professor Cornel West not only has called the Israeli prime minister a war criminal but openly supports the BDS movement (boycott, divestment and sanctions), the most important attempt in the world to ostracize and delegitimize Israel.

West is joined on the committee by the longtime pro-Palestinian activist James Zogby. Together, reported the New York Times, they “vowed to upend what they see as the party’s lopsided support of Israel.”

This seems a gratuitous provocation. Sanders hardly made Israel central to his campaign. He did call Israel’s response in the 2014 Gaza war “disproportionate” and said “we cannot continue to be one-sided.” But now Sanders seeks to permanently alter — i.e., weaken — the relationship between the Democratic Party and Israel, which has been close and supportive since Harry Truman recognized the world’s only Jewish state when it declared independence in May 1948.

West doesn’t even pretend, as do some left-wing “peace” groups, to be opposing Israeli policy in order to save it from itself. He makes the simpler case that occupation is unconscionable oppression and that until Israel abandons it, Israel deserves to be treated like apartheid South Africa — anathematized, cut off, made to bleed morally and economically. The Sanders appointees wish to bend the Democratic platform to encourage such diminishment unless Israel redeems itself by liberating Palestine.

This is an unusual argument for a Democratic platform committee, largely because it is logically and morally perverse. Israel did in fact follow such high-minded advice in 2005: It terminated its occupation and evacuated Gaza. That earned it (temporary) praise from the West. And from the Palestinians? Not peace, not reconciliation, not normal relations but a decade of unrelenting terrorism and war.

Israel is now being asked — pressured — to repeat that same disaster on the West Bank. That would bring the terror war, quite fatally, to the very heart of Israel — Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ben Gurion Airport. Israel is now excoriated for declining that invitation to national suicide.

It is ironic that the most successful Jewish presidential candidate ever should be pushing the anti-Israel case. But perhaps not surprising considering Sanders’ ideological roots. He is old left — not the post-1960s, countercultural New Left. Why, the man honeymooned in the Soviet Union — not such fashionably cool communist paradises as Sandinista Nicaragua where Bill de Blasio went to work for the cause or Castro’s Cuba where de Blasio honeymooned. (Do lefties all use the same wedding planner?)

For the old left, Israel was simply an outpost of Western imperialism, Middle East division. To this day, the leftist consensus, most powerful in Europe (which remains Sanders’ ideological lodestar), holds that Israeli perfidy demands purification by Western chastisement.

Chastisement there will be at the Democratic platform committee. To be sure, Sanders didn’t create the Democrats’ drift away from Israel. It was already visible at the 2012 convention with the loud resistance to recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But Sanders is consciously abetting it.

The millennials who worship him and pack his rallies haven’t lived through — and don’t know — the history of Israel’s half-century of peace offers. They don’t know of the multiple times Israel has offered to divide the land with an independent Palestinian state and been rebuffed.

Sanders hasn’t lifted a finger to tell them. The lovable old guy with the big crowds and no chance at the nomination is hardly taken seriously (except by Hillary Clinton, whose inability to put him away reveals daily her profound political weakness). But when he makes platform appointees that show he does take certain things quite seriously, like undermining the U.S.-Israeli relationship, you might want to reconsider your equanimity about the magical mystery tour. It looks like Woodstock, but there is steel inside the psychedelic glove.

Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy and Anti-Trump Speech.

Hillary Clinton National Security Policy Address. Video. C-SPAN, June 2, 2016. YouTube. Transcript at Time.com.

The Questions Clinton Didn’t Answer in Attacking Trump. By Christopher A. Preble. The National Interest, June 2, 2016.

How Bad Is Trump’s Brand of Authoritarianism? By Christopher A. Preble. The National Interest, May 27, 2016.

A Vote Against Trump Is Not a Vote For Hillary. By Dov S. Zakheim. The National Interest, June 2, 2016.

The Trump Trap. By David Rothkopf. Foreign Policy, June 3, 2016.

How to Save America From Donald Trump. By David Rothkopf. Foreign Policy, May 24, 2016.

We can’t have more of the same: The very real dangers of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy. By Patrick L. Smith. Salon, June 4, 2016.





Transcript excerpt:

Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different – they are dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas – just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies.

He is not just unprepared – he is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility.

This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes – because it’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin.

We cannot put the security of our children and grandchildren in Donald Trump’s hands. We cannot let him roll the dice with America.