Category: Foreign Affairs

If there’s one thing that fires up Bernie Sanders supporters—and makes his detractors roll their eyes—it’s his call for a “political revolution.” To his base, it’s the very point of his anti-establishment, anti-elite candidacy. To his critics, it’s the very embodiment of his campaign’s naïve impracticality and vagueness.

But now that voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have spoken, it’s time to take the idea of political revolution more seriously—more seriously, indeed, when Sanders himself appears to have. It’s time to ask: What exactly would it take?

It starts with Congress. And here it’s instructive to compare Sanders and Donald Trump. Both rely on broad, satisfying refrains of “We’re gonna”: We’re gonna break up the big banks. We’re gonna make Mexico build the wall. We’re gonna end the rule of Wall Street billionaires. We’re gonna make China stop ripping us off.

The difference is, Trump’s refrains are more plausible. That’s because today’s Congress is already willing to enact many of his proposals, whether repeal of Obamacare or severe restrictions on immigration. And if Trump became president, the 115th Congress would very likely be more conservative than the 114th.

For Sanders to deliver on his “We’re gonna” pledges, he needs an entirely different Congress. How to get it? Thus far, Sanders has laid out a theory of action that is basically, “If I come, they will build it.” That is, if he electrifies enough voters to win, then presumably those voters will have upended Congress as well. He’s banking on an electoral flood tide à la 1980, 1964, or 1932.

That’s possible, but it’s not a plan. If he’s serious about political revolution, the first priority for Sanders now should be to cultivate a crop of Democratic candidates who can oust Republican incumbents. House Democrats, at their lowest numbers since 1947, need 30 seats to regain a majority. If Sanders launched a “Bernie’s 30” effort, to persuade his formidable base of small donors to give money and time to a slate of candidates who can win a targeted set of seats now held by the GOP, that would help effect the actual institutional change his presidency would depend on.

A second step for a true revolution would be a common policy agenda for all these candidates. Here he could take a page from Newt Gingrich’s playbook and issue a progressive Contract With America that prioritizes 10 easy-to-digest legislative goals (Wall Street reform, campaign reform, single-payer health care, and so forth). Historians and commentators differ on how much the Contract truly caused the tectonic 1994 GOP takeover. But it did nationalize, and standardize, congressional campaigns in a way that Sanders would need to do.

Third, Sanders should also take a page from the Obama 2008 playbook. That campaign organized young people more systematically than any presidential campaign in history. Across the country, it held “Camp Obama” trainings, in which young people taught each other Marshall Ganz’s story-centered methods of community organizing. Sanders has the young people; now he needs the machinery to amplify their force.

Fourth, Sanders would have to learn from Obama 2008 how to catalyze culture makers. Every presidential campaign knows enough now to enlist celebrity musicians or artists. But Sanders could invite artists from all around the country, famous or not, to create work that spreads the message of his campaign. Culture shapes norms: about inequality,  racism, violence. And culture that isn’t made by the campaign but by the people packs a punch.

Fifth, Sanders would have to link up to other organic movements that are arising in parallel with his own campaign. The Democracy Awakening coalition, led by the NAACP and Public Citizen with dozens of other progressive organizations, for example, is planning a national rally in Washington for this spring. But Sanders should look beyond obviously progressive movements. If he wants a revolution, he needs also to invite in the segment of Trump supporters who aren’t racist xenophobes but who simply feel left behind by a changing country. That would be revolutionary.

Sixth, the Sanders campaign should study the Tea Party closely and learn from it. It’s too easy for progressives to dismiss the Tea Party as a creation of the Koch brothers. The more complex and instructive reality is that, especially early on, there were many thousands of Americans self-organizing on conference calls and Facebook and in person. What was their leadership structure? How did they communicate? What lessons do their grassroots leaders have about dealing with the party establishment?

Seventh, Sanders should be building a web of city leaders—elected and not—who will push policies in sync with his national agenda. Cities are increasingly the locus of civic innovation, whether on the sharing economy or living wages or criminal-justice reform. A true political revolution would activate citizens in every city of scale to provide the foundation from which federal reforms could arise.

Of course, Hillary Clinton could adopt some of these strategies, too. But her disadvantage is that she does not have many young voters. More crucially, she does not seek transformational change. The only other candidate who wants such change, Trump, sees his voters as an audience, as customers, as fans. Not so much as citizens. He loves them the way Il Duce loved his people. He wants to exercise power in their name, not to empower them to shape their own futures.

Which brings me back to the Sanders opportunity—and what I think of as an American opportunity. I supported Obama in 2008, and I’ve supported Clinton this time. But I am genuinely excited about the energy Sanders has activated, and I believe it’s good for the country if that energy gets converted to productive civic action.

So the message now to Bernie Sanders from Americans of every stripe should be this: You say you want a revolution? Help us make one.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), who is trying to save his failing campaign in New Hampshire after finishing sixth in the Iowa caucuses, had to beg an audience in New Hampshire to clap for him.

“I will be a commander in chief that will have the back of the military, I won’t trash talk, I won’t be a divider-in-chief or an agitator-in-chief. I won’t be out there blowharding talking a big game without backing it up,” Bush said at a town hall in New Hampshire on Tuesday. “I think the next president needs to be a lot quieter but send a signal that we’re prepared to act in the national security interests of this country to get back in the business of creating a more peaceful world.”

When Bush’s comments were met with silence, he asked the audience to “please clap,” which they did.

According to HuffPost Pollster, which aggregates publicly available polling data, Bush trails Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas), Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) in New Hampshire.

The Democratic and Republican Iowa Caucuses, the first step in nominating a candidate, will take place on February 1. Iowans defend the caucus as an exercise in real grassroots democracy, given the extent of politicking and discussion that goes on.

On February 1, the first voting contest in the presidential nominating process kicks into gear in the US state of Iowa. Because it is the first state to do so, candidates invest heavily there, whether by holding debates or canvassing.

Iowans vote in caucuses, which are small political meetings held throughout 1,681 locations scattered around the state. They are similar to primaries in that residents cast ballots for their preferred party candidate, and whoever garners the most votes wins. But people do not just show up and vote – the process is essentially a meeting of friends and neighbours in high school gyms and church basements, where discussions about candidates are held.

Representatives for the candidates are present and, at one point, attempt to persuade undecided voters. This is what makes caucuses different from primaries. The Iowa caucuses, which have represented the nation’s first ballot-marking since the 1970s, is also different for Democrats and Republicans.

The caucuses: Republican vs Democrat

In the US, elections take place like this: Citizens elect delegates, delegates elect nominees, and nominees become presidents.

On the Republican side, the caucuses are straightforward: Voters turn up, listen to speeches, and then cast their vote by a secret ballot. Votes are tallied statewide. A winner is subsequently declared.

On the Democratic side, the process is more convoluted and time-consuming. The number of people in the room are counted, and any candidate who does not get a certain percentage (a threshold set at the beginning of the night) in the first round, is eliminated.

Those who voted for losing candidates are then coaxed by the others to join their side and to vote for their candidate of choice. At the end, the results are collated across the state in all precincts.

Despite the hoopla surrounding the Iowa caucuses, the real impact of this process happens further down the line, when results are eventually translated into votes for delegates, who represent their states at their respective party conventions. These delegates are the ones who vote for a candidate to run in the national election.

Why are the Iowa caucuses significant? 

Iowans defend the caucus as an exercise in real grassroots democracy, given the extent of politicking and discussion that goes on. However, some argue that the lengthy and complex caucus is archaic and should be changed.

One of the problems with placing so much weight on Iowa is that it is not demographically representative of the US, with a population that is approximately 90 percent white versus 77 percent nationwide.

“The importance of Iowa is enshrined in tradition. It’s not practical,” said Jason Johnson, a professor of political science and communication at Hiram College in Ohio.

“Other states are more demographically and economically diverse and are a better indicator of how you would do nationally. It’s just that we have been doing it for so long that no one wants to advocate its change,” Johnson, who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats as a campaign manager, told Al Jazeera.

If this state is small and unrepresentative, why does it have such an impact on the race? In a nutshell, it is because it is the first contest for people to get their party nomination. If a candidate does not do well in those early states, like Iowa and New Hampshire, financial and electoral support eventually begins to dry up. This gives Iowa the power to narrow down the playing field.

“Because it is the first, a large number of voters within the two parties and a large number of the press and party elites in [Washington] DC choose to make it an important contest,” Johnson said.

“Your success in Iowa is perceived to be an indicator for your ability to organise, to get people on the ground and to have voters enthusiastically support you.”

What do the Iowa caucuses achieve?

Because of the sequential system, the results of the ‘first-in-the-nation’ caucuses can affect how people in the next state vote (it helps them adjust their expectations accordingly), give winning candidates more airtime and media attention, and impact the behaviour of donors. More importantly, it narrows down the number of candidates to a manageable size.

“Its most important facet is that it winnows the field,” said Lara Brown, the author of Jockeying for the American Presidency: The Political Opportunism of Aspirants. “It typically brings out two to three candidates who have the media momentum and organisational campaign to go forward.”

The winnowing effect of the Iowa caucuses helps predict the losing nominee. That is because it separates the “starters from the non-starters,” according to Bill Schneider, a political analyst who has covered every US presidential and midterm election since 1976.

“You will see candidates dropping out after Iowa,” Schneider told Al Jazeera. “People who vote in the Republican caucuses tend to be evangelical. They are not representative of the larger party. On the Democratic side, they tend to be very liberal, because it’s people who have the commitment to attend what’s essentially a meeting.”

Since 1972, no Democratic or Republican candidate who finished worse than fourth place in Iowa has gone on to win their party’s nomination, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

Most often, it is those hopefuls who get a top tier spot who continue to do well in their campaigns. Those who do not usually drop out of the race soon thereafter, although there are a few exceptions. A case in point is former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who, in 2008, won the Republican caucus, but dropped out just three months later, without securing the GOP nomination.

What does this mean for this year’s race?

Essentially, pundits, strategists, candidates and people will be using the Iowa caucuses’ results as a litmus test to see how the nation responds to candidates and to set the stage and build momentum for the first primary held in New Hampshire about a week later. It is also a chance for voters and the media to see if the results measure up to their expectations.

In the Democratic contest, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was leading in polls until Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders caught up with her. In Iowa, he recently topped Clinton at 49 percent to 45 percent, according to the latest Quinnipiac University poll, essentially locking both candidates in a tight battle.

While Sanders has positioned himself to seriously compete in this race, Iowa may be a tough win for him, according to some observers.

“Hillary Clinton has long focused on Iowa as essentially a shortcoming of her previous campaign, and I’d be surprised if she doesn’t win there,” Brown told Al Jazeera. “Bernie Sanders has to bring a lot of first-time caucus-goers who may not be as active and knowledgeable as Clinton’s supporters.”

On the GOP side, all eyes will be on billionaire Donald Trump, and whether people will actually go out and vote for him. The celebrity tycoon is leading in Iowa with about 31 percent, compared with 29 percent for Senator Ted Cruz, according to the same Quinnipiac University poll.

“As Trump gains momentum, there will be a lot of caucusers who think he’s going to be the nominee so they say ‘let me get on board’,” said Joe Watkins, a Republican strategist. “They see who’s going to win and they want in. That’s how it works.”

Trump, who won the endorsement of former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, recently exuded confidence at an Iowa rally when he said he “could shoot somebody” on New York’s Fifth Avenue and “wouldn’t lose any voters”.

“With Palin’s endorsement, he’s digging into Ted Cruz’s base, which is the evangelical Christian base,” Watkins, who was a White House aide to former President George Bush senior, told Al Jazeera.

In New Hampshire, Trump has a much larger lead over the other Republican presidential hopefuls there, so if he wins in Iowa, he can bring both contests to South Carolina, which then puts him in a comfortable position on Super Tuesday, a day on which several US states hold primaries.

Schneider explained that there are two ways things can go for Trump: His supporters, many of whom have never voted in a caucus before, may not show up, especially since he has not invested as much time and energy on the ground there.

“A caucus is a meeting. It takes a lot more energy to attend a meeting,” Schneider said. “You need something to pull people out of their beds, find babysitters for their kids, to get them to that meeting. Without that sort of operation, his people won’t show up.”

On the other hand, it is possible that Trump’s supporters will show up without any organisation. “His people are so fired up, they want their voice to be heard. So it could happen. It happened to [Barack] Obama in 2008.”

What happens after the caucuses?

“Just because a candidate wins Iowa doesn’t mean he wins the general election,” Republican strategist Watkins said. “It’s all very fluid and not automatic.”

“It’s possible Trump can win Iowa and even the Republican nomination, but winning the general election is something else; he’d have to win constituents who aren’t Republican, or he has to walk back many of his comments that alienated others.”

The results of Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primaries also tend to go hand in hand. “Iowa and New Hampshire are different kinds of tests, but they go together: Iowa is a very restricted electorate. New Hampshire is more open because they allow independents,” Schneider said. “If you fail both these tests, then it’s time to leave.”

VIENNA, Jan 16 — The United States and European nations lifted oil and financial sanctions on Iran and released roughly $100 billion of its assets after international inspectors concluded that the country had followed through on promises to dismantle large sections of its nuclear program.

This came at the end of a day of high drama that played out in a diplomatic dance across Europe and the Middle East, just hours after Tehran and Washington swapped long-held prisoners.

Five Americans, including a Washington Post reporter, Jason Rezaian, were released by Iran hours before the nuclear accord was implemented. The detention of one of the released Americans, Matthew Trevithick, who had been engaged in language studies in Tehran when he was arrested, according to his family, had never been publicly announced.

Early on Sunday, a senior United States official confirmed that “our detained U.S. citizens have been released and that those who wished to depart Iran have left.” The Washington Post also released a statement confirming that Mr. Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, had left Iran.

“Iran has undertaken significant steps that many people — and I do mean many — doubted would ever come to pass,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday evening at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which earlier issued a report detailing how Iran had shipped 98 percent of its fuel to Russia, dismantled more than 12,000 centrifuges so they could not enrich uranium, and poured cement into the core of a reactor designed to produce plutonium.

But Mr. Kerry was clearly energized by the release of the Americans, an issue he took up on the edges of almost every nuclear negotiation, and pursued in separate, secret talks that many involved in the nuclear issue were only vaguely aware were happening.

The release of the “unjustly detained” Americans, as Mr. Kerry put it, came at some cost: Seven Iranians, either convicted or charged with breaking American embargoes, were released in the prisoner swap, and 14 others were removed from international wanted lists. Many of the presidential candidates, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Donald J. Trump, denounced the swap as a sign of weakness, and they have long promised to review or withdraw from the nuclear agreement.

They particularly object to the release of about $100 billion in frozen assets — mostly from past oil sales — that Iran will now control, and the end of American and European restrictions on trade that had been imposed as part of the American-led effort to stop the program. It was not only sanctions that forced Iran to the table: the United States and Israel also developed one of the world’s most sophisticated cyberweapons to destroy the centrifuges that Iran has now been dismantling.

With the start of the so-called implementation day, the day that the accord goes fully into operation, the structures are finally in place for Tehran to re-engage with the world after decades of isolation.

But even in a week that started with the release of 10 sailors who drifted into Iranian waters — the Defense Department still has not provided an explanation of how that happened — and ended with a prisoner swap that seemed drawn from the pages of the Cold War, it was far from clear whether Tehran would choose to re-engage — at least very quickly.

In Tehran and Washington, political battles are still being fought over the merits and dangers of moving toward normal interchanges between two countries that have been avowed adversaries for more than three decades. But Mr. Kerry suggested that the nuclear deal had broken the cycle of hostility, enabling the secret negotiations that led up to the hostage swap. It was far from a sure thing: Just weeks ago, Iran was demanding the release of nearly 20 Iranians convicted or indicted in the United States; an administration official said that number had been whittled down to seven, but even that still rankled some.

“Critics will continue to attack the deal for giving away too much to Tehran,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who started the sanctions against Iran that were lifted Saturday as the No. 3 official in the State Department during the George W. Bush administration. “But the fact that Iran’s nuclear ambitions will be effectively frozen for the next 10 to 15 years is a real advantage for us,” he said, adding that “it was achieved by tough-minded diplomacy and not war.”

Still Mr. Burns, who now teaches diplomacy at Harvard and has advised Hillary Clinton, a Democratic candidate for president, argued that recent encounters with Iran — including its ballistic missile tests and its propping up of President Bashar al Assad of Syria, “demonstrate how complicated our relationship with Iran will continue to be.” He urged President Obama to issue new sanctions against Iran this weekend for the ballistic missile tests — a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions — to demonstrate that he will keep up the pressure.

A copy of the proposed sanction leaked three weeks ago, and the Obama administration pulled it back — perhaps to avoid torpedoing the prisoner swap and the completion of the nuclear deal. Negotiations to win the release of Mr. Rezaian, who had covered the nuclear talks before he was imprisoned on vague charges, were an open secret: Mr. Kerry often alluded to the fact that he was working on the issue behind the scenes.

Mr. Rezaian was held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison for practically all of his incarceration, and spent the first several months in solitary confinement. He suffered vision problems and relatives said he lost about 40 pounds. It wasn’t until about a year ago that the Iranian authorities publicly explained the nature of the charges against him.

His mother, Mary Rezaian, who lives in Turkey and went to Tehran last June to be closer to her son, said then that he had only just become aware of the global support for him, including an appeal for his release from Muhammad Ali, the former heavyweight boxing champion. Mr. Rezaian’s mother said she was permitted to visit him only occasionally and said it had become “ever harder” for him to cope.

Then, several weeks ago the Iranians leaked news that they were interested in a swap of their own citizens, which American officials said was an outrageous demand, because they had been indicted or convicted in a truly independent court system.

But behind the scenes, one senior American official said, “it was clear this would be the only way.” There was discussion inside the administration of similar swaps during the Cold War, a practice moviegoers have been reminded of recently in “Bridge of Spies,” about the negotiations to win the release of Francis Gary Powers.

Mr. Kerry insisted that the two sets of negotiations were completely separate, but he acknowledged they were related: The intense diplomatic contact with Iran — Mr. Kerry has spent more time with his American-educated Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, than any other foreign minister — made the prisoner talks possible.

The result was two parallel races underway — one involving implementing the nuclear deal, the other to get the prisoner swap done while the moment was ripe. The Iranians beat, by months, the C.I.A. and Energy Department estimates of how long it would take them to dismantle the far-flung elements of its nuclear empire, a long checklist that occupies scores of pages in the nuclear accord.

“They were highly motivated to get it done,” said one American official who was closely involved, because President Hassan Rouhani wanted money flowing into Iran, and more oil flowing out, before a critical election next month.

But there were last minute hitches. For example, the United States and Iran were struggling late Saturday to define details of what kind of “advanced centrifuges” Iran will be able to develop nearly a decade from now — the kind of definitional difference that can undermine an accord.

The result was that Mr. Kerry and Mr. Zarif veered from the monumental significance of what they were accomplishing — an end to a decade of open hostility — to the minutiae of uranium enrichment.

But Mr. Kerry emerged to tell reporters he had reached the goals he has talked about for two years. “Each of the pathways that Iran had to a nuclear weapon have been verifiably closed down,” he declared. Noting that Tehran has frozen much of its activity during the negotiations, he responded to critics of the deal — including, without naming them, the Republican presidential candidates — who say that Iran will immediately cheat.

“We have now two years of compliance under our belt,” he said. “Obviously, past performance does not guarantee future results.” But, he argued, “we know without doubt that there is not a challenge in the entire region that wouldn’t become much more complicated if Iran had the ability” to produce nuclear weapons.”

But Iran has something it desperately needs: Billions in cash, at a time oil shipments have been cut by more than half because of the sanctions, and below $30-a-barrel prices mean huge cuts in national revenue.

Just how much cash is a matter of dispute. A senior American official said Saturday that Iran will be able to access about $50 billion of a reported $100 billion in holdings abroad, though others have used higher estimates. The official said Iran will likely need to keep much of those assets abroad to facilitate international trade.

The Obama administration on Saturday also removed 400 Iranians and others from its sanctions list and took other steps to lift selected restrictions on interactions with Iran. Another 200 people, however, will remain on the sanctions list under for other reasons, including terrorist activities, human rights abuses, involvement in civil wars in Syria or Yemen or ties to the country’s ballistic missile program.

Under the new rules put in place, the United States will no longer sanction foreign individuals or firms for buying oil and gas from Iran. The American trade embargo remains in place, but the government will permit certain limited business activities with Iran, such as selling or purchasing Iranian food and carpets and American commercial aircraft and parts.

It is an opening to Iran that represents a huge roll of the dice, one that will be debated long after Mr. Obama he has built his presidential library. It is unclear what will happen after the passing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has protected and often fueled the hardliners — but permitted these talks to go ahead.

The president and Mr. Kerry, with a year and four days left in office, are hoping to foster new discussions that will bear fruit in other areas, including ending the war in Syria and moving, slowly, to the eventual restoration of diplomatic relations.

Rick Gladstone and William J. Broad contributed reporting from New York, Peter Baker from Washington and Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran.