Many journalists are all too familiar with the rinse-and-repeat routine of content distribution: Wrap up edits, create a search-friendly headline, publish, and promote the sh** out of it on social media.

There has been major pushback recently against this relentless strive for traffic, which bolsters ad revenue. The publishing platform Medium announced last week that it would move away from an ad-based business model. In a new post fortifying Medium’s decision, Sean Blanda writes that “The methods used to fund modern journalism simultaneously undermine trust in the news outlets.”

While we normally think about editorial as independent from business, Blanda shows that they are systemically related. Respected news sources have been forced by necessity into hosting sponsored content—undermining credibility. And the most important journalism, Blanda writes, is not financially viable. The Mother Jones investigation on private prisons, for example, cost roughly $350,000 and brought in $5,000 in ad revenue.

The New York Times, too, reaffirmed its commitment to a subscription-based model in its new 2020 report: “Our ambitions are grand: to prove that there is a digital model for original, time-consuming, boots-on-the-ground, expert reporting that the world needs.” The Times’ ad revenue dipped below consumer revenue just before 2012.

The Times believes that it can continue to grow subscriptions by providing journalism that is unavailable elsewhere, rather than smaller, “incremental” stories: “We are not trying to win a pageviews arms race. We believe that the more sound business strategy for The Times is to provide journalism so strong that several million people around the world are willing to pay for it.”

Will this mean the end to the era of pageviews as the dominant metric? It can’t come soon enough…

• Facebook is going to stop paying publishers for live videos—a reminder of how much power the platform wields in controlling revenue streams. (Recode)
• Ever wonder about “those creepy web ads that learn your preferences and follow you around”? Floodwatch is a new tool that collects and aggregates information on them. (Nieman Lab)
• Reason for hope: In 2015, CJR spoke to then-Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile, who created the company to think creatively about web readership metrics and move away from clicks and toward attention. (CJR)
• CJR Editors

Michael Walzer ▪ January 2, 2017

Nothing like the title of this article has ever appeared in Dissent. It is a line frequently used by Joseph Stalin, and according to all the transcripts of his speeches, it was always followed by “Prolonged Applause.” But this seems the right historical moment to take it back. It originally was the beginning of the sentence that came in response to the question: “What ought to be done?”

So, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory, when populist nationalism and brutal xenophobia threaten the liberal order in Europe, when democracy is on the defensive everywhere (and social democracy more so), when immigrants and minorities are at risk in every European country and now in the United States too, when neoliberal economics is dominant and the working class is pinched more severely than it has been since World War Two—what is the historical task of the left?

I have friends who are ready to put their bodies between the police and the first immigrant they try to arrest. All of us are planning to register as Muslims if there ever is a Muslim registry. One city after another is declaring itself a safe haven for the undocumented. Some liberals and leftists are wearing safety pins—and others are calling this much too small a gesture. But right now all this is gestural. It is important to imagine ways to resist the far-right momentum of a Trump government. But nothing that I have read about “resistance” points to a serious political strategy. Some good and not-so-good tactical suggestions have appeared online, but they don’t answer the “historical task” question.

I don’t think the question is easy; nor do I have an overall strategy to offer. But there are three historical tasks that we should be thinking about.
1) We need a sharp leftist analysis and critique of what is going on. The 836 accounts of why Hilary Clinton lost the election don’t count as the needed analysis. For one thing, center-left parties everywhere are in the same kind of trouble, so the particularities of Hilary’s loss are chiefly of local interest. They are not entirely unimportant: the interference of the FBI in an American election, the extreme naiveté of the Democrats about Russian hacking, and the rapid spread and apparent effectiveness of fake news should serve as lessons for leftists everywhere. But we need to attend to material, political, and psychological factors at work internationally.

We already have some excellent analyses and critiques of neoliberal economics, and these have been followed more recently by strong journalistic accounts of the harms done by austerity policies to the most vulnerable people. But we still need a better understanding of the political and psychological responses to those harms. Neoliberalism is no longer just an economic doctrine. It is the ideology of a triumphant capitalism. What is “new” is the extent of the triumph; we’ve been surprised by that, and our intellectual response has been slow. We’ve also been slow to recognize the dangers of populism—think of British Labour before the Brexit vote or of American liberals and leftists before November 8.

Populist nationalism is not the same thing as neoliberalism; it may even challenge some neoliberal orthodoxies. But the two are nonetheless closely related. Populism today is a politics made possible by austerity and neglect—by the indifference to men and women in trouble that neoliberalism has fostered. Populist demagogues claim to uplift those people, but since they do nothing to alter the power relations of the neoliberal economy or its colonized states, there is no genuine uplift. Populism can, however, be frighteningly effective in degrading the supposed enemies of the people, the scapegoated “others”: immigrants and minorities.

All this needs to be, as they say in the academy, “theorized.” But the current theoretical debate about the relative importance of identity politics and class struggle isn’t terribly helpful. There is nothing like the classic “working class,” neglected by Democratic politicians, waiting to be mobilized. The people we need to reach are a radically mixed group. They are economically mixed: they include unemployed men and women, old people without adequate pensions, part-time workers, rust belt workers with new jobs that pay much less than they once earned, workers without union protection and with few benefits, and the rural poor—all of them frighteningly vulnerable, watching anxiously for the next downturn. And they are mixed in their identities: black and white, Hispanic and Asian, men and women, gay and straight. These people could form what Charles Mills (in the Fall 2015 issue of Dissent) called “a transracial coalition of the disadvantaged.” But first they must come to see that their difficulties are not theirs alone. Think of them as a class in formation—or, in the old language, a class in itself but not yet for itself. How can we advance the formation? That is the question we should be debating.
2) Theory is hard, but the practical political work of the next few years is all too obvious; it is the defensive version of standard left activism. We have to defend what’s left of the gains of post–Second World War social democracy. The right-wing attack is extraordinarily ambitious: against immigrants, unions, public schools, health care, welfare generally, and the still inadequate constraints on environmental damage. In resisting these attacks we obviously need to join any coalition that offers some chance of success. But we also need to muster a specifically left defense of what was, however incomplete, a specifically left achievement. Our reasons for defending the existing health care system, for example, should also be arguments for its radical improvement. The defense of public education requires also an expanded account of the public and of the meaning of democratic citizenship.

We should promote a militancy all our own, identifiable as leftist, social democratic, or socialist in form and content. Think of this as the continuation of Bernie Sanders’s primary campaign—though we cannot depend on the energy and unexpected charisma of one old man. We need bench strength, which we haven’t had in a long time: many Bernies or, even better, many Michael Harringtons, Norman Thomases, Dorothy Days, and Eugene Debses. In any case, we need men and women speaking the language of the left at meetings, rallies, demonstrations, and marches.

Though I hope defense isn’t our permanent posture, there are advantages in defensive politics (as in defensive warfare). We are defending values that are more widely held than our numbers suggest. We have strong positions from which to fight, and when we fight for the nearby public school, or the teachers’ union, or the immigrant family down the block, or for city air that we can breathe, we will find allies. And some of these allies, in the course of the battle, will come to recognize themselves as leftists. In recent decades, social democratic and welfarist politics has been called boring; the defense of social democracy against a ferocious assault won’t be boring at all.
3) But fighting from the left isn’t all we have to do. The dangers we face today are not dangers only to the achievements of the left—to the welfare state and the multicultural society. Constitutional democracy is also at risk. I can’t say how great the risk is; talk about “fascism” seems reckless to me right now. But we are facing a moment of the sort that William Butler Yeats described in a famous poem:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed…

One of the historical tasks of the left in the present period is to help hold the center.

Some of our comrades won’t find this congenial work. I have friends who had to hold their noses to vote for Hilary Clinton—and a few who couldn’t stand the “stink” and refused to vote for her. But I also have a wiser friend who explained why he found the vote easy. Don’t think, he said, of your own scruples; think of the welfare of the most vulnerable people in the country. And then vote, gladly, for the candidate who minimizes their vulnerability. That maxim should guide our politics today. What the most vulnerable people need right now is the protection afforded by a strong constitutionalism. The defense of civil liberties and civil rights in the name of the constitution—this is a centrist politics. So whatever else we do, we have to work with other Americans to rebuild what Arthur Schlesinger years ago called the “vital center.”

Are there other Americans to work with? The “responsible” Republicans who, some of us thought, would hold the center by rejecting Trump turned out to be few in number—and those few not exactly courageous. But I still believe that there are men and women, liberal and conservative, ready to defend the constitution when it is directly attacked, as it will be. We may need to buck them up—and then stand with them.

More than this: we should work closely with anyone who believes in civil discourse, who respects the truth, and who is ready to live with political and religious disagreement. Does she defend the social hierarchy? Does he think that free enterprise is the be-all and end-all of economic life? Are they more ready than we are to use force abroad? Those are arguments we need to have and should not give up, but we still have to join with people like these wherever we find them—so that the center holds.

In fact, of course, the survival of a vital center is also the precondition of an active left. Never think that “the blood-dimmed tide” is a threat only to immigrants and minorities. It is a threat to all of us: dissidents of every sort, union organizers, left intellectuals, feminists, peaceniks, men and women of conscience, students discovering Marx, teachers who don’t like standardized tests, and journalists who write about the misdeeds of the rich and powerful. We all need constitutional protection; we all need a center that holds. We have to stand in the center and on the left at the same time. That may be complicated, but it is our historical task.

Michael Walzer is editor emeritus of Dissent.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/historical-task-of-left-present-period-trump

Joanne Barkan ▪ January 17, 2017

Milton Friedman, patron saint of the free market, died in 2006, but his ideas about public education live on in the thought and deeds of Betsy DeVos, likely the next U.S. Secretary of Education. The two are ideological soulmates—a fact that justifiably panics supporters of public education.

In a 1955 essay called “The Role of Government in Education,” Friedman laid out his plan for K-12 schooling, which boils down to this: taxpayer funded but privately run. The government would provide each child, through parents or guardians, funds in the form of a voucher to pay for what the government considers the mrinimum adequate education. Parents and guardians would then choose what education services to purchase on the free market. For Friedman the choices included private for-profit schools, private nonprofit schools, religious schools, and “some even” run by the government. Today Betsy DeVos and other free-market education reformers add home schooling and private online schooling to the mix. They also support privately run charter schools, financed directly by the government, not by student voucher money.

It’s a wealth of privatized choices meant to squeeze out, as much as possible, the least appealing alternative for free-market ed reformers: neighborhood public schools.

Taxpayer funded but privately run is how “privatization” of the public sector works in the United States. In countries where the government owns major companies or industries—for example, Aeroflot in Russia or the UK’s National Health Service—privatization means selling off enterprises to new owners in the private sector. In the United States, the government hands over control to private entities, but the taxpayers keep on paying. The most familiar U.S. example is the privatization of federal prisons.

In 1996 Milton Friedman and his wife Rose (also an economist) launched the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice as “the nation’s only organization solely dedicated to promoting their concept of educational choice.” “Choice” is the ed-reform movement’s euphemism for privatization. All the tools used to create choice—vouchers, charter schools, tax credits for private school tuition, tax credits for individuals and businesses that create private school scholarships, “education savings accounts” (usually government-funded debit cards used for various private-school expenses, not just tuition)—siphon tax dollars out of the public school system and into private hands. DeVos has worked with and donated to the Friedman Foundation, recently renamed EdChoice.* Their visions for the future of K-12 education coincide.

Born in 1958 into what would soon become an extremely wealthy family, DeVos grew up as a member of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, attended a Christian high school and college, and married the multibillionaire heir to the Amway fortune, Dick DeVos. Active in the Michigan Republican Party since her college years, her political resumé includes state party chairwoman, Republican national committeewoman for Michigan, and finance chairperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Hard-line conservative politics and rigorous Christian faith run through the extended DeVos family. Members often coordinate their political contributions. Together they’ve given about $14 million at the federal and state levels in the last two years. The family has long partnered with Charles and David Koch on political funding projects.

For almost twenty-five years, Betsy Devos has arguably been the most dogged political operative in the movement to privatize public education. Under the banner of choice, she founded, funded, and/or led a mind-numbing list of organizations: the American Federation of Children, Alliance for School Choice, Foundation for Excellence in Education (Jeb Bush’s operation), All Children Matter, American Education Reform Council, Children First America, Education Freedom Fund, and Great Lakes Education Project. As secretary of education, DeVos will be indefatigable.

And iron-willed. One recent vignette captures the DeVos working method: In an effort to shape up Detroit’s scandalously under-regulated, poorly performing charter schools and rectify a shortage of school places in the city’s neediest neighborhoods, a coalition including some charter school advocates, business and labor representatives, Republicans, and Democrats proposed a nonpartisan oversight body to be called the Detroit Education Commission (DEC). With Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s endorsement, the Republican-controlled state senate approved the DEC in March 2016 as part of a Detroit emergency funding bill. When the Republican-controlled House took up the bill in May, the charter school lobby (generously funded by the DeVos family) launched a massive offensive to quash the DEC. Oversight, they argued, only adds another unnecessary level of bureaucracy. The House Republicans acquiesced on May 5. When the bill returned to the Senate for reconciliation, the question remained: would the Senate gut its own bill by killing the DEC? Under threats from major donors, the Republicans caved on June 8. While the senate was still considering the bill, DeVos money began pouring in. In the fifty-six days between June 2 and July 28, nine DeVos family members contributed a total of $1.45 million to Michigan Republican Party organizations and candidates.

“[A] filthy, moneyed kiss to the charter school industry at the expense of the kids who’ve been victimized by those schools’ unaccountable inconsistency,” concluded an editor at the Detroit Free Press in September.

Denunciations like this have rolled off Betsy DeVos’s back for decades. As she wrote in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call in 1997, “I have decided . . . to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return.”

From her federal perch, DeVos will no doubt aim to expand privatization, especially vouchers, which are the most powerful tool. But how to do it requires some finesse, since the federal government has a relatively small role in K-12 education policy. State governments overwhelmingly determine how schools operate, sometimes overruling the wishes of local districts. To get the states to implement new policies, the federal government has just one effective tool—money.

A useful model for DeVos comes from the outgoing ed-reformer-in-chief, Barack Obama. He allocated $4.3 billion from the 2009 “stimulus package” to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who used it to create the controversial Race to the Top program. More than thirty states competed for RTTT grants by committing to a detailed list of K-12 reforms—reforms that often required changing state laws. In exchange for money, resource-strapped states agreed to evaluate teachers, at least in part, according to student scores on standardized tests; raise or eliminate any caps on the number of charter schools; and “turn around” low-achieving schools by turning them into charters, replacing the teachers and principals, or closing them. Many states found that implementing the reforms cost more than they received in grant money. Much worse, the reforms undermined public school teachers, robbed many neighborhoods of their most stable institution, and introduced into the public system less accountable, often poorly performing schools and financial malfeasance by private operators. But the free-market ed reformers were thrilled. By opening the way for rapid charter school expansion, the Obama administration made the nation’s first significant progress toward privatization.

DeVos has the opportunity to achieve the same kind of breakthrough for vouchers. Many Americans oppose vouchers, knowing that they transfer taxpayer money to private and religious schools to the detriment of the public system. But DeVos doesn’t need to convince the public; she needs to convince state legislators and governors. Right now, Republicans control thirty-three governorships and both chambers of the legislatures in thirty-two states. They will be her greatest asset. Moreover, DeVos’s job will be easier today than it would have been six or seven years ago because ed reformers have made headway in substituting the appealing word “choice” for vouchers and privatization. “All parents should be able to chose the school that’s best for their children” is a winning platform. Equally good is “Why shouldn’t low-income parents have a choice of schools just the way wealthier parents do?” In January 2016, DeVos’s American Federation for Children released the results of a poll that affirmed the ed reformers’ choice of language: among likely voters, 70 percent supported the concept of school choice, whereas only 53 percent supported “school vouchers.”

Free-market ed reformers deny or dismiss the inevitable outcome of vouchers: an even more unequal K-12 system than we have today. Middle-class parents will add as much money as they can to their vouchers in order to get their kids into the best possible schools. The wealthy will spend whatever it takes to create an elite strata of schools that insure their kids’ advantages. Lower-middle-class families will scour the system for decent schools they can afford; they’ll find that the more decent the school, the higher the demand for it, and the higher the price. And the poor? They will go to “government schools”—a term that market ed reformers have long used to describe what everyone else calls public schools.

Precise advice for DeVos on how to open the way for further privatization comes from Andy Smarick, president of the Maryland State Board of Education and resident fellow at the free-market stronghold, the American Enterprise Institute. (DeVos family members are major donors to AEI, and Betsy sits on the board of trustees.) In a December 2016 AEI report, Smarick counsels the new administration to model its approach on the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP), created by the Clinton administration in 1994. Clinton, like other neoliberal-leaning Democrats, embraced market-based ed reform early on. The CSP makes three-year grants available to states on a competitive basis for the purpose of opening or expanding charter schools according to each state’s existing laws. Thus the program subsidizes charter expansion without micromanaging policy. According to Smarick, more than 60 percent of all charter schools that have opened received CSP money. In 2016 the CSP received a $333 million appropriation through the federal government’s ongoing Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

For strategically thinking privatizers, the beauty of the CSP is that it avoids the curse of federal overreach. Relatively small, out of the national limelight, it has steadily increased the scope of charter schools without producing much of a backlash. Tip-toe through this process, Smarick advises, because “some school choice antagonists are especially opposed to private school choice; they would vigorously fight any supportive federal efforts.” Note the use of “private school choice.” The phrase includes the various tax-credit schemes and “education savings accounts” as well as vouchers. It also allows Smarick to avoid the offending v-word.

Betsy DeVos hasn’t done much tip-toeing in her career, and it’s certainly not the style of her boss-to-be. On September 8, Trump renewed his pledge to redirect $20 billion in federal funds to state-run block grants for subsidizing school choice for low-income children. He didn’t say which budget items would be cut to come up with this immense sum. Trump made his speech at the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy, a for-profit charter school that received failing grades in key categories in its most recently published report from the Ohio Department of Education: F in achievement indicators met; F in annual measureable objectives; and a 23.3 percent chronic absenteeism rate. Trump began his remarks by thanking Ron Packard, the CEO of the school’s parent company and former CEO of the notoriously shoddy online for-profit education company, K12 Inc. Packard also works with the right-wing American Legislative Education Council (ALEC). No one explained why Trump or his team chose this site for an education policy speech. Perhaps Packard was the draw. No matter. Trump and DeVos have the wind at their backs for K-12 privatization.

When did Americans stop talking about public K-12 education as the keystone of a strong democracy, as the incubator for citizenship, shared values, and social cohesion in a diverse nation, as the only educational institution obligated to serve every child who appears on the doorstep? Conservatives don’t bear sole responsibility for changing the conversation. The Clinton and Obama administrations reduced K-12 education to little more than the required stepping stone to a college degree that leads to successful competition in the global economy. That’s a meager sales pitch, making it all too easy for K-12 schooling to be chopped up into products sold on the market.

The only counterweight to “choice” is excellent public schools, and so the only way to save public education (which is largely very good in the United States) is to improve it where it needs improvement. Hundreds of thousands of public school teachers and administrators commit themselves to the task everyday. The job also belongs to everyone who sees the need to rebuild American democracy. In the face of privatization, we are all stakeholders in the public good that is public education. 

Joanne Barkan has been writing about the privatization of public education and the relationship of “big philanthropy,” democracy, and education reform for the last six years. Her articles have appeared in the Guardian, Washington Post, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Nonprofit Quarterly, Jacobin, HistPhil, and Philanthropy News Digest as well as Dissent. Barkan’s other Dissent articles can be found here.

 © Sputnik/ Alexey Vitvitsky

POLITICS 11:01 17.01.2017(updated 11:03 17.01.2017) Get short URL273528294 The European Union plans to hold a conference on the future of Syria in spring 2017, which is expected to focus on the political transition in and donors’ assistance to the war-torn country. Political analyst and former Turkish MP Dr. Oya Akgonenc Mugisuddin told Sputnik that Brussels is unhappy with Russia and Turkey’s achievements in Syria. “They say that a potential donors’ conference on Syria could be on the agenda. This is clearly a positive initiative. However, European nations should stop sending weapons to various armed groups in Syria and then genuinely focus on providing humanitarian aid to the country,” he said. Dr. Oya Akgonenc Mugisuddin was commenting on Monday’s meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council (FAC). Following the summit, EU High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini announced that the EU and the United Nations will hold a conference in the coming months. ​The political analyst pointed to the timing of the meeting, tying it to recent developments in Syria, which have seen Moscow and Anakra broker a nationwide ceasefire. Many hope that this step will pave the way for a peace process in the country devastated by nearly six years of war. “Russia and Turkey are currently the key stakeholders when it comes to the Syrian conflict. The European Union is not happy about it. This is why they have held their meetings,” he said. Dr. Oya Akgonenc Mugisuddin mentioned that it remained unclear what the EU was doing for Syria at the moment. “We have seen the European Union adjust its stance on Syria. EU member states were very active during the early years of the Syrian conflict. They have become less active when it became obvious that their policies towards Syria were flawed,” he observed. The political analyst further said that the European Union does not care about Syrians.

© SPUTNIK/ MAKSIM BLINOV Russia’s Deal With Turkey on Flights Over Syria is More Than Meets the Eye “Instead we have seen the rise of Islamophobic and xenophobic sentiments in Europe, although many of the Syrian refugees are Christians. We have seen … refugees denied basic medical assistance. Europe does not care about the fate of the Syrians. Europeans don’t view them as people in need of help, but rather as enemies [affecting their livelihood]. In these circumstances one cannot count on comprehensive assistance from Brussels,” he suggested.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/politics/201701171049665912-eu-russia-turkey-syria/

by Helena Sheehan

International relations and geopolitics are not synonymous… at least, not the way we understand them at Geopolitical Futures. “International relations” is a descriptive phrase that encompasses all the ways countries behave toward one another. “Geopolitics” is the supposition that all international relationships are based on the interaction between geography and power.

Our brand of geopolitics takes this a step further and asserts that a deep understanding of geography and power enables you to do two things. First, it helps you comprehend the forces that will shape international politics and how they will do so. Second, it allows you to identify what is important and what isn’t.

This makes maps an extremely important part of our work. Writing can be an ideal medium for explaining power, but even the best writer is limited by language when it comes to describing geography. So this week, we have decided to showcase some of the best maps our graphics team (TJ Lensing and Jay Dowd) made in 2016… not just because these four maps are cool (though they are), but because we think they go a long way in explaining the foundations of what will be the most important geopolitical developments of 2017.

Map 1: Russia’s Economic Weakness

Click to enlarge

This map illustrates three key aspects of Russia that are crucial to understanding the country in 2017. First is the oft-overlooked fact that Russia is a federation. Russia has a strong national culture, but it is also an incredibly diverse political entity that requires a strong central government. Unlike most maps of Russia, this one divides the country by its constitutive regions. There are 85 of these regions… 87 if you count Crimea and Sevastopol. Not all have the same status—some are regions, while others are autonomous regions, cities, and republics.

The second aspect is that there is a great deal of economic diversity in this vast Russian Federation. The map shows this by identifying regional budget surpluses and deficits throughout the country. Two regions have such large surpluses that they break the scale: the City of Moscow and Sakhalin. Fifty-two regions (or 60% of Russia’s regional budgets) are in the red. The Central District, which includes Moscow, makes up more than 20% of Russia’s GDP, while Sakhalin and a few other regions that are blessed with surpluses produce Russia’s oil.

The third aspect follows from combining the logical conclusions of the first two observations. Russia is vast, and much of the country is in a difficult economic situation. Even if oil stays around $55 a barrel for all of 2017, that won’t be high enough to solve the problems of the many struggling parts of the country. Russian President Vladimir Putin rules as an authoritarian. This is, in part, because he governs an unwieldy country. He needs all the power he can get to redistribute wealth so that the countryside isn’t driven to revolt.

Russia is making headlines right now because of Ukraine, Syria, and alleged hacking. But the geopolitical position of Russia is better described by studying the map above.

Map 2: China’s Cage

Click to enlarge

Maps that shift perspective can be disorienting, but they are meant to be. Our minds get so used to seeing the world in one way that a different view can feel alien. But that is even more reason to push through the discomfort. The map above attempts to do that by looking at the Pacific from Beijing’s perspective.

China’s moves in the South China Sea have received a great deal of attention. In a Jan. 12 confirmation hearing with Congress, nominee for US Secretary of Defense James Mattish identified Chinese aggressiveness as one of the major reasons he believes the world order is under its biggest assault since World War II. But we believe the Chinese threat is overstated. This map helps explain why.

China’s access to the Pacific is limited by two obstacles. The first is the small island chains in the South and East China Seas. When we look at this map, China’s motive in asserting control over these large rocks and molehills becomes clear. If China cannot control these islands and shoals, they can be used against China in a military conflict. (If there were small island chains off the US coast in the Pacific or the Atlantic, US strategy might look like China’s.)

The second obstacle is that China is surrounded by American allies. Some such as Japan (and to a lesser extent South Korea and Taiwan) have significant military forces to defend themselves from Chinese encroachment. Taiwan sticks out as a major spur aimed squarely at China’s southeast coast. Those that don’t have sufficient military defenses, like the Philippines, have firm US security guarantees. China is currently at a serious geographic disadvantage in the waters off its coast.

This map, though, does not reveal a critical third piece of this puzzle—the US Navy outclasses the Chinese navy in almost every regard, despite impressive and continuing Chinese efforts to increase capabilities. But looking at this map, you can see why China wants to make noise in its coastal waters and how China is limited by an arc of American allies. You can also see why one of China’s major goals will be to attempt to entice any American allies to switch sides. Consequently, China’s moves regarding the Philippines require close observation in 2017.

Map 3: Redrawing the Middle East

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It has become cliché to point out that the Middle East’s current political borders were drawn after World War I by colonial powers like the United Kingdom and France, and that the region’s wars and insurrections in recent years are making these artificial boundaries obsolete. What isn’t cliché is doubling down on that analysis. We’ve drawn a new map of the Middle East based on who controls what territory, as opposed to the official boundaries recognized by international organizations like the United Nations.

The map above reveals what the Middle East really looks like right now. Many will object to some of the boundaries for political purposes, but this map is explicitly not trying to make a political statement. Rather, it is an attempt to show who holds power over what geography in the Middle East.

From this point of view, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya don’t exist anymore. In their places are smaller warring statelets based on ethnic, national, and sectarian identities. Other borders (like those of Lebanon and Israel) are also redrawn to reflect actual power dynamics. Here, a politically incorrect but accurate map is more useful than an inaccurate but politically correct one.

Just as important as redrawing the borders of countries that no longer function as unified entities is noting which countries’ borders do not require redrawing. These countries include three of the region’s four major powers: Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The borders of the other major power, Israel, are only slightly modified. (Egypt is an economic basket case and does not qualify as a major power, even though it has arguably the most cohesive national culture in the Arab world.)

The Middle East is defined by two key dynamics: the wars raging in the heart of the Arab world and the balance of power between the countries that surround this conflict.

Map 4: Imagining 2017’s Brexit

Click to enlarge

Analyzing this map must begin with a disclaimer: This is, first and foremost, an analytical tool and a means of thinking about Europe’s future. It is explicitly not a prediction of what Europe’s borders will look like in the future.

The map identifies areas in Europe with strong nationalist tendencies. Those regions with active separatist movements are not italicized. The italicized regions are those demanding increased autonomy but not independence. In many of these regions, secessionist movements may be favored by a minority of the population. The point here is not their size, but rather that in all these regions, there is some degree of national consciousness that is dissonant with the current boundaries of Europe’s nation-states.

The European Union is a flawed institution because its members could never decide what they wanted it to be. The EU is not quite a sovereign entity, but it claims more authority than a free trade agreement. European nation-states gave up some of their sovereignty to Brussels… but not all of it. So when serious issues arose (such as the 2008 financial crisis or the influx of Syrian and other refugees), EU member states went back to solving problems the way they did before the EU. Instead of “one for all and all for one,” it was “to each their own, but you still have to buy German products.”

Brexit shook the foundations of the EU in 2016. Elections in France and Germany and domestic instability in Italy will shake those foundations in 2017. But Brexit also opened the doors to a deeper question: How will national self-determination be defined in the 21st century? Not all of Europe’s nation-states are on stable ground. The most important consequences of Brexit may end up being its impact on the political future of the United Kingdom. And in Spain, Catalonia already claims it will hold an independence referendum this year.

Brussels, meanwhile, keeps trying to speak with one voice. This map communicates just how hard that is… not just for the EU, but also for some of Europe’s nation-states.

Conclusion

The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words. Maps are worth many more. Our perspective on the world is rooted in an objective and unbiased approach to examining geography and power. Maps like these are foundational components for building that perspective. These four maps are especially helpful in thinking about the geopolitical forces that will shape the world in the year ahead.

And finally…

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve shared some sneak peeks of our 24-page forecast, The World in 2017. If you’ve enjoyed these snapshots, you can now download your free copy of a special report that further illuminates the year ahead. The report, Top 3 Economic Surprises for 2017, contains information on what the future holds for three geopolitically important countries. Simply click here to get your free copy.

Plus, for a limited time only, you can get the full 2017 forecast and one full year of access to everything Geopolitical Futures publishes for just $99… that’s a 60% discount. You’ll gain access to our online library of long- and short-range forecasts, daily reality checks, watch lists, deep dives, weekly graphics, and more, all for less than $2 per week. Find out more about this special offer here.

George Friedman