| | | | How the London Attack Plays Into ISIS's Hands | | Sunday night's attack near a mosque in London is a reminder that radical Islamists aren't the only extremist threat facing Britain. The country is also wrestling with the rise of far-right extremism – and the Finsbury attack will play into ISIS's hands, writes Jack Moore in Newsweek.
"Last year, police arrested the highest number of white people on extremism charges since 2003: Of 260 arrests, 91 people were white, 35 percent of the total," Moore writes.
"This wave of far-right extremism, coupled with Monday's attack, could push Muslim radicals toward violence, say community figures and experts, particularly as anti-Muslim hate crimes have risen after three assaults claimed by the Islamic State militant group in as many months, leaving 35 people dead.
"Within hours, the jihadi group's supporters started using the Finsbury Park attack to build further support for its call for attacks in Western countries, what they refer to as 'crusader' nations. On one pro-ISIS channel on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, supporters shared footage of the attack."
| | Why Everyone Might Be About to Care About the Gulf Crisis | | The days of two Arab worlds – one engulfed in conflict, the other a stable and prosperous global travel and business hub – could be coming to an end, suggests Gideon Rachman. The world may have looked on with "chilling indifference" as Syria and Libya disintegrated, but a security crisis in the Gulf states "would be felt in boardrooms and finance ministries all over the world."
"Although they are tiny places…the Gulf states play an outsize role in the global economy," Rachman writes in the Financial Times, noting that Qatar is the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, while Dubai "has cleverly leveraged its proximity to Europe, South Asia, Africa and Russia to turn itself into the playground of the Middle East."
"For residents and tourists in the Gulf, the wars in the Middle East have been taking place in flyover country -- places that they can glance down at from thousands of feet, as they take their Emirates or Etihad flights to Europe or the U.S. But the Qatar crisis suggests that the days when the tragedies of the Middle East could be kept at a safe distance from the booming Gulf may be over."
| | America's Slippery Slope? | | The U.S. shooting down of a Syrian warplane is a "dramatic escalation" of the conflict. And without a clear U.S. policy for the Syrian conflict, it was also inevitable, writes Gayle Lemmon for CNN Opinion.
Under the Obama administration, the United States "hunted for the Goldilocks strategy on the war in Syria and ended up doing enough to help rebels fighting Assad around to the very periphery, but far from enough to be decisive in the war," Lemmon says.
"[N]ow, as the Trump administration enters its sixth month, the U.S. is being drawn into the very conflict its inaction had been intended to avoid. And as forces the U.S. supports face danger from forces supporting the Syrian regime, the questions will get louder: What is US policy in Syria? And will the fight against ISIS lead the US into a war against Assad?"
| | NATO Isn't the Only Alliance to Worry About: Rubin | | The NATO alliance isn't the only one the United States needs to worry about. The expansion of a potential rival garnered little international media coverage this month, but one new member in particular is significant writes Michael Rubin for Commentary magazine.
"That Pakistan might want to side with China and Russia is no surprise. And, given Pakistan's support for terrorism and groups responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, it's getting the partners it deserves," Rubin writes.
"But India's accession is worrisome, given its status as the world's largest democracy, not to mention its growing weight on the world stage and the assumption among many U.S. policymakers that it is the best counterweight to Russia in the region."
| | America, We Need to Talk About Those Civilian Deaths: Zenko | | The civilian death toll in Iraq and Syria at the hands of the U.S. military has been spiraling as the conflict moves deeper into major population centers, writes Micah Zenko in the New York Times. But it has been accompanied by a striking lack of accountability.
"One reason for the huge increase in noncombatant deaths is that the United States is dropping more bombs -- a more than 20 percent increase from the last four months of the Obama presidency to the first four under Mr. Trump," Zenko writes.
"But even as the civilian death toll ticks upward, the American military has relaxed oversight, investigation and accountability on civilian casualties. Finding out the reasons for these tragic mistakes, seeing what can be learned from them and enforcing the American military's own standards could save thousands of lives."
| | China Gets Cozy with Pakistan | | Disillusioned with the soaring costs of its role in the war on terror, Pakistan is poised to pull away from the United States – and into the arms of a welcoming China, suggests Saeed Shah in the Wall Street Journal.
"Chinese President Xi Jinping has made Pakistan his flagship partner in a program to spread Chinese-built infrastructure -- and Beijing's sway -- across Asia and beyond. Pakistan has so far signed on to $55 billion in Chinese projects, many of them guaranteeing China a high return on its investments and granting tax breaks to Chinese companies," Shah writes.
"Much as the U.S. secured the Pakistan alliance with aid to the country's powerful military, China has made the Pakistani army a beneficiary. Many construction contracts that weren't given to Chinese firms have been awarded to the military's engineering arm. The military has raised a special force, now at 15,000 and set to double in size, to protect Chinese projects."
| | Displacement Crisis Goes from Bad to Worse: U.N. | | More people than ever were displaced in 2016, according to a new report by the U.N. Refugee Agency, with some 65.6 million having been forcibly displaced by the end of the year, up around 300,000 on 2015.
The figure includes an estimated 22.5 million refugees – which the report says is the highest number ever seen. "Syria's conflict remains the world's biggest producer of refugees (5.5 million), however in 2016 the biggest new factor was South Sudan where the disastrous breakdown of peace efforts in July of that year contributed to the outflow of 739,900 people by year's end (1.87 million today)."
| | Brexit negotiations officially began Monday. Unfortunately for Britain, they come at a time when the European Union "has turned a corner, and feels more confident," writes Natalie Nougayrède in The Guardian. "The Franco-German engine is not focusing on Brexit but rather on consolidating the 60-year-old European project through further integration and cooperation. At the heart of this stands an emerging Macron-Merkel deal, intended to act as Europe's new powerhouse."
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi departs for a White House meeting next Monday with President Trump. Bharath Gopalaswamy and Maya Mirchandani write in the Hindustan Times that India's government would do well to manage expectations – "this visit could be more about the optics than any real outcomes."
"Perhaps the best India can hope for when the two leaders meet is holding on to the status quo until there is some stability in Washington. In these times, even that is good."
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