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Foreign Affairs The Return of the Kaiser-e-Rum The rise of a Turkish-led order is a historic development in a region beset with perpetual chaos, and marks the end of four hundred years of European influence.  “When Troy shall overturn the Grecian state, And sweet revenge her conqu’ring sons shall call, To crush the people that conspir’d her fall,” John Dryden translated a prophecy in Virgil’s Aeneid. That power (for Virgil) was Rome, founded by a legendary Trojan. When the Ottoman Sultan Fâtih Sultan Mehmed conquered Constantinople in 1453—in no small part thanks to Central European tech transfer, incompetent Eastern Europeans squabbling, and Western European buck-passing—he took the the title of Kaisar-e-Rum (Caesar of Rome) and founded what he considered a tolerant and multiethnic if not necessarily liberal empire similar to the original, a second founding of the empire by another traveler from the East.  At the time of writing, the Turkish air force and drones are apparently strafing the assorted and unsupported Kurdish forces holed up in Manbij as the battle for Syria is reaching its conclusion. The secular authoritarian Assad has fallen, and, if rumors are true, has fled Damascus for Moscow. Turkish-supported rebel forces are victorious from Damascus to Northern Syria, from the coast to the desert. Much has been made about the fall of Assad. It marks the end of a certain chapter of history, and also particularly marks the end of the Global War on Terror–era of American statecraft. After all, the Islamists won in Afghanistan and the Middle East. It also marks the formal end of Baathism, a strange, incoherent ideology that dominated the region from the 1940s and reached its apex during the peak Soviet power in the 1970s. The deaths of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi and the collapse of the secular civilian leadership in Egypt meant that Syria was the only formally Westernized and secular country in the region. While they outlasted their Soviet masters, Baathist powers were beset by the same perpetual incompetence and infighting, and the ideology couldn’t stand the test of time. It is now one of those several malformed and subsequently defunct ideas that will be studied and marveled at by curious students of niche history in the future—an ideology that somehow managed to rule over a region culturally incompatible with democracy, secularism, or peace by sheer terror and force.  The fall of Damascus came faster than the last time it collapsed without a fight, in 750 AD. Reuters reported that the Syrian army command quietly notified the rump forces defending the capital that the republic had collapsed and the rebels were at the gates. There was social media footage of soldiers discarding their kit and camo and quietly changing into jeans and tee-shirts before slowly melting into the crowd.  The future of Syria doesn’t look promising. It will either go the way of Libya, a never ending civil war between various factions, or undergo a de facto partitioning by Israel and Turkey. The Israelis, as we observe, have already moved up to buffer and form a militarized zone to stop any future rebel push or ISIS resurgence. Syria might also face a long insurgency. People forget what happened in Iraq, when hundreds of thousands of Baathists melted and disappeared after the collapse, only to take up arms and start an insurgency against whoever was ruling from the center. It also marks the end of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance.” Hamas is destroyed, Hezbollah is decimated, Iran is isolated, and Russia is absent from both Africa and the Middle East.  Syria has fallen (for the moment) to someone who still has millions of dollars of U.S. State Department–issued bounty on his head. “The leading rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is a Sunni Muslim organization once affiliated with Al Qaeda. It has since renounced Al Qaeda, but the U.S. government classifies it as a terrorist group,” an indifferent New York Times casually noted—a fitting end to the revolutionary quarter-century of the GWoT, which marked the formative years of my youth and sent a generation to die in the desert for nothing.  In an interesting way, everyone understands that, even if one might not say it out loud. A great power that is less than 250 years old and only reached its stature in the last hundred years tried to reshape a region which has seen the rise and fall of some of the greatest empires in history. The Trojans and Greeks would both have understood what hubris and nemesis meant.  There is nothing that America can do, nor should she try. As President Donald Trump said, “this is not our fight”: a prudent realism that more statesmen should follow. The Middle East is a region we cannot shape nor should we try; the best option is perhaps detachment, allowing a local equilibrium to form organically.  But with the collapse of Syrian secularism, the victory of Turkish-backed Azerbaijan against Armenia, the rollback of Russian power and influence in both Ukraine and Syria partly on the strength of Turkish drones, and the utter destruction of the Axis of Resistance throughout the Levant, Turkey is now the central power (so to speak) of the region.  From the neutrality that history allows us, one can claim that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has consolidated his position as one of the most powerful and far-sighted men of his generation. The man who took over Hagia Sophia and turned it back over to the word of God has his eyes firmly set on dominating the Aegean in the west and the Levant in the south.  Turkey is now at the peak of its regional influence in perhaps over a century, having defeated Russia in Armenia and Iran in Syria. The sons of Troy are eyeing glory again. With the fall of Assad and the collapse of Baathism, it is also curtains for secularism in the region, as well as the end of over 400 years of European influence, British, French or Russian.  A new and very different order is about to rise as a very old power returns to form. The region will not be the same again in our lifetime.  The post The Return of the Kaiser-e-Rum appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Whither the Department of Education? Some conservatives want to cut it entirely; others have more radical ideas. (maroke/Shutterstock) What is to become of the Department of Education (DOE)? Trump promised to get rid of it, and Elon and Vivek say they will follow through and “delete” it. What does the Department of Education do, anyway? And will it be missed? First off, what does the DOE not do? It does not choose textbooks or curricula, and it does not hire teachers. That has for a long time been done on the local or state level. What DOE does, broadly, is administer various entitlement and grant programs, passing down federal funds to local schools and the states. That those funds are often contingent on schools following various social justice dictates, such as Title IX on discrimination in school sports and activities by sex, is where the rub lies. (See Project 2025, below.) A good place to start in understanding what DOE does is with Sen. Mike Rounds’s (R-SD) Returning Education to Our States Act (S. 5384), which seeks to eliminate the DOE and “redistribute all critical functions under other departments.” Rounds said the department has moved beyond its mission.  “The Federal Department of Education has never educated a single student, and it’s long past time to end this bureaucratic department that causes more harm than good,” Rounds explained. “Local school boards and state departments of education know best what their students need, not unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.” Under his plan, DOE programs and presumably some of its 4,200 employees would be spread across the departments of Interior, Treasury, Justice, State, and Health and Human Services as follows: Relocate all functions, programs, and authorities of the Secretary of Education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to the Department of Health and Human Services. Relocate each authority and program of the DOE’s Office of Indian Education to the Department of the Interior. Relocate the Fulbright-Hayes program to the State Department. Relocate each Impact Aid program to the Department of Health and Human Services. Relocate the Federal Pell Grant program, the Federal Family Education Loan Program, the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program, Health Education Assistance Loan program, the programs under the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, the Educational Technical Assistance Act, and the Federal Perkins Loans Program to the Department of the Treasury. Further, the Secretary of the Treasury would make allocations to states to support elementary and secondary education, including career and technical education, based on the number of kids enrolled in public, private, and home schools. States can use this funding for any purpose relating to early childhood, elementary or secondary education. Treasury would do the same for college and university money allocated by in-school population. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice would become responsible for enforcing civil rights laws applicable to the grant programs. (DOJ enforces civil rights through litigation, not through the threatened nonjudicial withholding of education funds, as is the case with DOE.) “For years, I’ve worked toward removing the Federal Department of Education,” said Rounds. “I’m pleased that President-elect Trump shares this vision, and I’m excited to work with him and Republican majorities in the Senate and House to make this a reality. This legislation is a roadmap to eliminating the Federal Department of Education by practically rehoming these federal programs in the departments where they belong.” Critics, particularly in Heritage’s Project 2025, see efforts like Rounds’s as doing too little to change the philosophy behind a federal role in education. Some might see Rounds’s rehoming bill as something akin to shuffling the deck chairs around on the Titanic. Trump himself says he has bigger plans: “On Day One, we will begin to find and remove the radicals, zealots and Marxists who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education, and that also includes others, and you know who you are. Because we are not going to allow anyone to hurt our children.” Speaking of his secretary of education nominee, Linda McMahon, Trump said, “As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families.” Taking education choices away from the DOE and handing them to parents is also a central focus of Project 2025. Project 2025 is a focal point for DOE reform/elimination and goes further than Rounds. The Project says, “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. Ultimately, every parent should have the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding through an education savings account (ESA), funded overwhelmingly by state and local taxpayers.” Title I is the largest portion of federal taxpayer spending under this federal education law, and the section provides additional taxpayer resources to schools or groups of schools in lower income areas. Over a 10-year period, federal spending should be phased out and states should assume decision-making control over how to provide a quality education to children from low-income families. Some big changes in there, particularly the use of ESA’s to hand control over education directly to parents, given DOE’s poor track record—federal intervention in education, the Project states, has failed to promote student achievement. After trillions spent on the collective programs at DOE, “student academic outcomes remain stagnant.” The ESA’s would be usable at both public and private schools, a major win for religious education and homeschoolers. At its core, Project 2025 wants to reduce the Federal level of involvement in education to zero, especially administratively, and leave the states—if not the parents—responsible for funding and controlling education locally. In addition, the Project wants to treat taxpayers like investors in federal student aid. Taxpayers should expect their investments in higher education to generate economic productivity. When the federal government lends money to individuals for a post-secondary education, taxpayers should expect those borrowers to repay. It says, The [Biden] Administration drastically expanded college student loan forgiveness. The new administration must quickly commence negotiated rulemaking and propose the department rescind these regulations. In fact, the next Administration should completely reverse the student loan federalization of 2010 and work with Congress to spin off FSA and its student loan obligations to a new government corporation with professional governance and management. Project 2025 also gets into more “philosophical” areas, redefining sex in strictly biological terms for Title IX purposes, eliminating any benefits based on race, and establishing a Parental Bill of Rights for Education (“No public education employee or contractor shall use a pronoun in addressing a student that is different from that student’s biological sex without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians,” “Prohibit accreditation agencies from leveraging their Title IV gatekeeper role to mandate that educational institutions adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion policies”) to push back on “woke” ideas in education. There’s a bit of dissonance in Project 2025 regarding education that will need to be resolved; it also remains to be seen whether the incoming administration views Project 2025 as a poisoned well. The primary goal is the elimination of the DOE, but at the same time, secondary goals such as instituting a Parental Bill of Rights are exactly the kind of federal mandates that require a bureaucratic vehicle such as the DOE to push them down into recalcitrant states. It will be interesting to watch how this is resolved, and important to see what effect it has on the education of our children and the future of our country. The post Whither the Department of Education? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs America’s Axis of Misery The U.S. has soaked the Middle East in blood, and for what? Credit: AFP via Getty Images The Axis of Resistance, what Iran calls its political project in the Arab world, is falling apart. After a brief but intense U.S.-backed war with Israel, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah agreed to disengage from the Palestinian issue and vacate southern Lebanon. Almost immediately afterwards, Syrian rebels launched a surprise offensive, bringing down the Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad, whom Iran had invested so much blood and treasure into propping up. The feeling in Washington is that the Axis of Resistance was really (in the words of the Carnegie Endowment’s senior editor, Michael Young) an “Axis of Misery,” built on “fragile, impoverished societies, only there to serve as cannon fodder for Iran.” Before getting too smug, however, it would behoove the chattering class to look in the mirror. U.S. power has established an Axis of Misery in the region no less predatory or tyrannical than the Iranian one. For all the comparisons between this week’s events and the Berlin Wall falling, victorious West Germany was not running torture prisons or bombing Polish territory. Now that Iran has been driven out of the Levant, it is an open question exactly what the U.S.-led alternative will look like. The answer in Gaza and southern Lebanon, where U.S. power is now at its most absolute, is corpses and rubble. In most of the American sphere of influence, the options range from violent militia rule at worst to economic stagnation and mass emigration at best. Immediately after Assad was overthrown by a coalition including reformed Al Qaeda, the wolves began to circle, with Israel and our NATO ally Turkey trying to carve out “buffer zones” on Syria’s soil. Just as “rich kids of Tehran” partied while poor youth died in their wars, an upper crust of Israelis and Gulf elites sit atop a pyramid of tyranny and chaos. The most articulate manifesto for the U.S.-led order in the Middle East was written in 2022 by the former U.S. official Alberto Miguel Fernandez, who recently claimed that his essay has been vindicated. The Arabic-language voice of the Bush administration during the Iraq War, Fernandez has since given up “Western-type pipe dreams of democracy.” The real struggle, he writes, is “something more elemental” between a “Middle East of Life” and a “Middle East of Death.” His villain is Iran’s “ongoing, murderous effort to reconfigure countries and societies in the region toward near permanent war and conflict,” and his heroes are Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, the “builders rather than destroyers.” What does it mean to be a “builder rather than destroyer”? In southern Lebanon, it means to demolish every village within reach, including Christendom’s ancient heritage, and to put the population under the semi-permanent surveillance of killer drones. In Gaza, even on paper, Israel’s “day-after” plan is a horror of horrors: starving Palestinians herded into “humanitarian bubbles” and subjected to communist-style brainwashing. In practice, Israeli policy for conquered territory has been and continues to be gangster rule. Israeli soldiers have been filmed (or filmed themselves) shooting unarmed civilians waving white flags, executing the elderly at home, burning down houses, looting women’s lingerie, gang-raping captives, and more. The other members of Washington’s Axis of Misery have been similarly destructive to the societies over which they have power. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates countered “Iranian influence” in Yemen through starvation, terror bombing, mercenary assassinations, and proxy militias no less predatory than Iran’s allies. What finally reigned in the Gulf states’ ambitions there was simply hitting the limits of their hard power. In Sudan, where the Gulf powers do not even have the excuse of Iranian meddling, the United Arab Emirates has profited from its investments in parasitic rapist militias. And as icing on the cake, the Saudi-Emirati coalition has shuttled mercenary units containing child soldiers between Yemen and Sudan. To believe that any of these states are “builders” is to wear ideological blinders that would make Trofim Lysenko proud—or perhaps to see Palestinians, Yemenis, and Sudanese as less human. The suffering of these people is not a case of “faults and missteps,” as Fernandez put it, in an otherwise productive regional order. It is not a temporary measure until the wars are won. It is the regional order, now and in perpetuity. This is the structure that allows people Tel Aviv and Dubai to party in comfort. And this is the life that Washington has offered the societies of vanquished enemies for the past thirty years. Lest we forget, the “Iranian proxy network” in Iraq is itself a result of catastrophic American success. It was the United States that dismantled the Iraqi government, handed over pieces of the state to religious paramilitaries, and unleashed unlimited sectarian war. Iran simply managed to buy off U.S. clients in the country. People whose life’s work was to destroy an independent Iraq now write about promoting “Iraqi sovereignty” for the Washington Institute, simply because they’ve lost control of what they created. Of course, it’s hypocritical on the face of it. Those who thunder with righteousness about liberating oppressed nations and avenging martyred dissidents are happy to condemn thousands like Adnan al-Bursh and Hind Rajab to die at the hands of thugs. But there’s also a more fundamental issue. If U.S.-sponsored violence, unlike Iranian-sponsored violence, is a means to a positive end, then where is the end? To what god have all these lives been sacrificed? It seems that beyond a few parochial interests, the goal is really power for power’s sake, vengeance for imperial humiliation, and the emotional satisfaction of American policymakers. Rome made a desert and called it peace, per Tacitus’ barbarian. A more fitting metaphor for Washington’s peace may be a photo that recently circulated on social media: an Israeli soldier sitting on a beach chair, his pants around his ankles, admiring the rubble below. The post America’s Axis of Misery appeared first on The American Conservative.