What War Knows Not Our Legionnaires?

What War Knows Not Our Legionnaires? Read about postcolonial understanding of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Received this from a friend? [SUBSCRIBE]( CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. [The World]( [INKSTICK]( If you read just one thing … … read about postcolonial understanding of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis weighs heavily on the present as both a historical abstraction and, for those who lived through it like a then-20-year-old Joe Biden, as living memory. The fable of the Cuban Missile Crisis fits into a sentence: the two most powerful countries in the world, ideologically opposed, risked the entire world over the placement of nuclear missiles and warheads, but cooler heads ultimately prevailed. Writing at [The Duck of Minerva](, Itty Abraham presents a reframing of the Cuban Missile Crisis in postcolonial time and space. No historical event happens in isolation, and in Abraham’s telling, it wasn’t just the cool heads of Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev and US President John F. Kennedy that prevented armageddon. It was the eyes and, even more importantly, the actions of the world around it. As a result, writes Abraham, “we cannot revise the conventional account of the Cuban Missile Crisis without bringing in — at a minimum — Ghana, Pan-Africanism, Bandung, civil rights, the war of Algerian independence, and French nuclear testing.” The crisis was followed by the USSR, US, and UK signing the Partial Test Ban Treaty. “The announcement of the French test [in Algeria] effectively saw the emergence of a transnational alliance between anti-nuclear and anti-colonial activists,” writes Abraham. draining the desert The sparsely inhabited Butler Valley in western Arizona is host to farmland with international implications. Since 2015, 3,500 acres in the valley have been leased by a Saudi corporation to grow and ship alfalfa to Saudi Arabia. Some of that water is tens of thousands of years old, put into the aquifer at a time when the climate was wetter, and the terms of the lease mean none of that water is being paid for. At a minimum, [argue]( former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt and former state land commissioner Robert Lane, the lease should be voided, and the company should be forced to pay the market rate for the water, a total of $38 million over seven years. Saudi alfalfa grown in American deserts feels particularly egregious, especially given the terms, but the crop is thirsty everywhere, and it is an integral part of feeding and raising animals like horses and, especially, [cattle](. For now, those animals are subsidized by low water costs, but as the planet warms and water flows shift, growing fodder in one desert to ship to feed cows in another might not make sense. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Department of Repetition Department [• • •] The fate of Haiti is poised to once again be decided in a manner that most especially favors a narrow clique of local elites and outside foreign backers, writes [Jonathan Katz](. Katz walks briskly through the long history of US-led interventions in the country, which includes the 19-year stretch from 1915 to 1934, to set up the current model: other militaries, invited in by local elites in partnership with the US, doing the work of bolstering a government that cannot stand without foreign backing. The present crisis is trifold: The current head of state is the unelected successor to an assassinated leader who stayed past elections. Access to the main fuel port for the country is held by a gangster with the nickname “Barbecue.” And the country is experiencing resurgent cholera, a disease introduced to the population by a long-running UN peacekeeping mission. Writes Katz, “outside force may give a different group access to the fuel port and keep the current clique in relative power a little longer. But it will do nothing to prevent the violence and inequality that drive Haitian society.” [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( DEEP DIVE When Putsch Comes To Shove: Part II In late October, the Associated Press reported that the Russian military has actively recruited former Afghan special forces to fight in Ukraine. The numbers involved are, at most, a few thousand, and in a war where tens of thousands have already died, it’s at most a modest boost to one front. Instead, it highlights the modern iteration of an old phenomenon: foreign fighters, trained in one military, brought in by another state to augment their existing combat strength. In “[Leaning on Legionnaires](,” Elizabeth M.F. Grasmeder examines this kind of foreign fighter in a modern context, especially as it complements and complicates understandings of mass citizen mobilization that became the norm of industrialized warfare ever since the French Revolution. “Legionnaires,” Grasmeder defines, “are uniformed personnel who serve in a state’s armed forces, but who — at the time of their service — are neither citizens of that state nor, in the days of empire, subjects of the government in whose military they serve.” For her study, Grasmeder looks at how militaries from 1815 to 2020 incorporated these kinds of foreign combatants. They are distinct from allied militaries, which operate under at least one parallel chain of command. They are also unlike private contractors or mercenaries, which sit outside the rules and bounds of a formal military structure. Instead, Grasmeder looks at how these foreign legionnaires are added to the formal military of a country, and the kind of needs that might drive such action. “By answering the military’s need for sheer numbers, legionnaires can help states sidestep some of the long-term economic or political ramifications associated with imposing or expanding a citizen draft. In other cases, legionnaires provide an expedited source of battle-tested or skilled soldiers,” writes Grasmeder. Countries at war may seek to increase the number of people under arms for various reasons. This could include fearing battlefield defeat, pressing an advantage, or worrying about a new threat. How a country chooses to do so is balanced against other concerns, like depleting the country’s labor force or antagonizing the citizenry to the point of resistance. “With suspicions about potential citizen-recruits, governments must consider whether new enlistees could be unenthusiastic and poorly execute their military duties, thereby diminishing military effectiveness. Governments may even fear that citizen-recruits could present tangible dangers, such as by seeking to mount insider attacks or by acquiring training for later use against the regime,” writes Grasmeder. If the government’s claim to popular legitimacy is thin, citizen-soldiers can be seen as a risk, potentially even a coup risk. Leaning on foreign fighters, instead, gives a country the capacity to fight its wars without threatening internal political balance. “When states find themselves simultaneously threatened externally and constrained domestically, they are likely to enlist legionnaires as a tool to balance between these political and security pressures,” concludes Grasmeder. “In cases where the state’s very existence is in jeopardy, its demand for troops becomes inelastic, and governments recruit legionnaires as a part of a strategy to maximize the manpower they can field for national defense.” [LEARN MORE]( [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Minna Jaffery-Lindemulder [floated]( loss-and-damage funds as a way for companies most responsible for greenhouse gas pollution to materially compensate for the harms caused by a changed climate. “With [over 6.4 million Pakistanis]( in need of immediate assistance, Pakistan’s economy simply cannot handle the sheer amount of investment needed to rebuild after the floods. Reparations from a loss and damage fund would help meet the urgent demand for cash,” writes Jaffery-Lindemulder. While some nations have pledged for one-off donations, a system that allows wealth to regularly flow to recompense could make a more equitable, sustainable future in the face of widespread disaster. Scott Gurian [watched]( offerings at the FiSahara International Film Festival, held in Algeria by refugees and expats from colonized Western Sahara. “If we just give people food to fill their stomachs, but not food for their minds, they won’t have an identity as a Sahrawi people, and our culture would cease to exist,” director Tiba Chagaf explained. For the festival, international guests are flown in and accept the hospitality of refugees. The festival has built a culture of film-watching, and it lets the people create durable artifacts of their lives and experience for the present and the future. Matt Lyman [examined]( the body politic, almost literally. Taking the complex arrangement of cells that constitute a human organism as a kind of state system, Lyman looks for other extendable parts of the metaphor to human conflict. In this sense, every body is an international system, existing in managed anarchy while vigilant for specific threat through infectious vectors. “Remember, the immune system isn’t supposed to meddle. When it does, the result is erosion of health and chronic pain,” writes Lyman, drawing parallels to the overexertion and harms of long-term illness and the War on Terror. Less Starship Troopers, more Osmosis Jones. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( WELL PLAYED When an elected leader consults with the viruses occupying their body, that’s the [twitching cabinet](. S’more tries to cause [war cries](. For added security, ensure that the new Prime Minister [contains unusual characters and symbolism](. Millions of prime ministers not yet appointed have [already resigned](. [Swift left]( sunsets neoliberalism for [lush Midnights](. Everything is the crisis except the crisis, [which is fine](. The advertisement blended unevenly into the cathedral, a [profane juxtaposition]( suggesting a galaxy flipped in half. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Follow The World: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO THE WORLD]( Follow Inkstick: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO INKSTICK]( Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media. The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH. With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.” Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. [Preferences]( | [Web Version]( [Unsubscribe](