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Canada’s Trudeau Choses Low Key Approach to New US President

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is opting a low-key approach to dealing with United States President Donald Trump – seeking to avoid clashes while indirectly signalling the two leaders’ difference to a domestic audience.

Insiders have acknowledged that the cautious strategy could anger progressives whose support helped bring Mr Trudeau to power in 2015, however they say that for now, he has no choice but to maintain a low key approach, as Canada sends 75 percent of its exports to the US and could suffer if it were to be targeted by Trump’s administration.

While Mr Trudeau maintained a close friendship with former President Barack Obama, Canadian prime ministers have not always had close ties with US presidents. Insiders however have noted that few in Ottawa have experienced anything like Mr Trump. While Canada regards the US as its closest ally, Mr Trudeau has yet to visit Washington to meet with Mr Trump. According to people familiar with the matter, a visit tentatively scheduled at the beginning of this month was cancelled after a shooter killed six Muslims in a Quebec mosque. No new date has been set.

According to Michael Kergin, a former Canadian ambassador to Washington, Mr Trudeau’s caution has been wise, stating “he’s been playing it pretty well by restraining the temptation to be publicly critical of the president.” Kergin went on to say that Mr Trudeau was also right not to follow British Prime Minister Theresa May in rushing to Washington to push for closer ties only to watch President Trump make an unpopular move on immigration after she left.

Mr Trudeau however has taken indirect shots – when Mr Trump signed orders banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries, Mr Trudeau tweeted that Canada was open to those fleeing war. Furthermore, while his chief spokeswoman blasted US network Fox News late last month for a tweet falsely claiming that the Quebec gunman was of Moroccan origin, she said nothing publicly when Trump’s spokesman said that the attack on Muslims showed why it was important to suspend immigration from Muslim nations. This approach however has angered many in Canada, including the opposition New Democrats, who have called on the Prime Minister to denounce Mr Trump’s “racist” immigration policy. In turn, members of Mr Trudeau’s team have acknowledged that over time, the Liberals could lose support before a 2019 election if the prime minister is deemed not tot be standing up for Canadian values, such as inclusiveness.

Chinese Cyber Espionage Against the U.S. Non-State

Allegations of Chinese cyber attacks on U.S. interests, both state and non-state are not new phenomena. Each red dot in the above map shows a successful alleged Chinese attempt between 2010 and 2014 to steal U.S. corporate and military data. Some of the U.S. victims of these attacks have been Google, Lockheed Matin, the U.S. government and the U.S. miitary. Over 600 dots are peppered across the U.S. industrial centers in the northeast and the west coast as well as other places in the country. Nearly 50 cyber attacks have occurred in California alone. Some examples of the kind of data the U.S. has lost to cyber espionage have been specificiations of hybrid cars, formulas for pharmaceutical products, data on critical U.S. infrastructure such as electrical power, telecommunications and internet backbone, and details including U.S. military and civilian air traffic controls systems.

As cyber espionage has been a persistent threat to U.S. enterprises, perhaps, looking at the problem in monetary terms could provide an easily understandable perspective on the magnitude of the matter. Studies show that cyber crime will be a $2.1 trillion dollar problem by 2019. Also, the U.S. dependence on global supply chain and business outsourcing leaves it highly vulnerable to cyber attacks. In 2014, cyber attacks, alone, have cost on average the following to U.S. companies:

• $8.6 million per company in U.S. retail;
• $20.8 million per company in U.S. financial services;
• $ 14.5 million per company in U.S. technology sector
• $12.7 million per company in U.S. communications industry

While this may already look bad enough for U.S. businesses, what could make it worse is the new Chinese cyber security law, which will be effective in June 2017. In the midst of some degrees of ambiguity in the law, the following surface as critical concerns for the U.S. enterprises operatiing in China:

• The law requires that the Chinese government investigators be given full access to companies’ data if wrong-doing is suspected;
• The law requires that business information and data on Chinese citizens be kept in domestic servers and cannot be transferred overseas without prior permission;

Some analysts judge that foreign companies being required to store data in domestic servers leave potentials for the Chinese local industries to gain competitive advantage over their foreign rivals. Although the U.S. and China have struck up a cyber security agreement that forbids theft of intellectual property and economic espionage, analysts cannot entirely dismiss the possibility that the U.S. military will continue to be an attractive target of Chinese cyber espionage.

Colombia and ELN Begin Peace Negotiations

Last week, members of Colombia’s ELN left-wing rebel group and government negotiators began talks seeking to end more than five decades of conflict.

The negotiations were launched at a ceremony in the capital of Ecuador, Quito, where the talks will be held. Ecuador is hosting the first round of negotiations, with Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Norway and Venezuela acting as guarantors.   The chief ELN negotiator, Pablo Beltran, has urged both sides to rally around the points that united them and to leave aside their differences.   He further called on the rebels to officially suspend its kidnapping policy during the negotiations. The ELN relies on the ransom obtained from kidnappings to finance its activities. Mr Beltran disclosed that peace would not be achieved through more repression, adding “we need a political solution. We are willing to take responsibility for the mistakes we have made but we expect the other side to do the same.

The top government representative, Juan Camilo Restrepo, meanwhile disclosed that he expected to draw from the lessons of the negotiations with the FARC in order to reach a peace accord with the ELN. Both officials however agreed that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the country to achieve peace.

The ELN, or National Liberation Army, is Colombia’s second largest rebel group.   It was founded in 1964 with the stated aim of fighting Colombia’s unequal distribution of land and riches, which was inspired by the Cuban revolution of 1959.   The talks were initially due to begin at the end of October last year however they were delayed as the Colombian government refused to sit down for formal negotiations while the rebels still held Odin Sanchez, a former congressman. Mr Sanchez was released on 2 February 2017 while on 6 February, the group released a solider it had been holding hostage for two weeks. The soldier, Freddy Moreno, was handed over to delegates from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Arauca province.

The talks come just months after the Colombian government signed a peace agreement with Colombia’s largest rebel group, the FARC. In November 2016, the Colombian government signed a revised peace agreement with the country’s largest group, the FARC, after four years of negotiations in the Cuban capital, Havana. Members of the FARC have ben gathering in “transition zones,” where they are to demobilise and lay down their weapons under the supervision of United Nations monitors. According to government officials, the last of the FARC rebels are expected to reach the designated debilitation areas by 15 February.

CIA Releases 13 Million Pages of Declassified Documents Online

This month, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released about 13 million pages of declassified documents online. The full archive is made up of almost 800,000 files, which had previously only been accessible at the National Archives in Maryland.

The move came after lengthy efforts from freedom of information advocates and a lawsuit against the CIA. Documents that have been released online include the papers of Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as several hundred thousands of pages of intelligence analysis and science research and development.

The more unusual records that have been released are documents from the Stargate Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception. Those include records of testing on celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973, when he was already a well-established performer. Memos detail how Mr Geller was able to partly replicate pictures drawn in another room with varying, but sometimes precise, accuracy, leading the researches to write that he “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner.”

While most of the information has technically been publically available since the mid-1990s, it has been very difficult to access ass the records were only available on four computers located in the back of a library at the National Archives in Maryland, between 09:00 and 16:30 each day.

ELN Announces Readiness to Call Bilateral Ceasefire with Government

Late last month, Colombia’s second largest rebel group, the ELN, announced that it was ready to call a bilateral ceasefire with the Colombian government while they negotiate an end to five decades of war.

According to the National Liberation Army’s (ELN) negotiator Aureliano Carbonell, “we are willing to have a bilateral ceasefire from the beginning…That would help create another climate to the peace process; send the nation a positive message.” He went on to say that the ELN would allow former President Alvaro Uribe’s participation in the talks, adding “we agree that Uribe, or a representative, participates at the negotiating table. Peace is made with adversaries and Uribe leads the biggest war mongering sector.” Uribe is the strongest opponent of the FARC accord and demands that rebel commanders are jailed for their crimes.   Juan Camil Restrepo, chief government negotiator, has said that he will seek a “de-escalation” of the conflict.

The government and the ELN will begin formal peace talks in Ecuador on 7 February, once the insurgent group frees a kidnapped politician and authorities pardon two jailed rebels. The sit down will effectively end three years of back and forth between the two sides. Officials are also hoping that it will stop a conflict that has pitted leftist rebels against right-wing paramilitaries and the military, killing over 220,000.

Any early bilateral ceasefire would contrast with the FARC talks, which stretched for four years in Cuba and which were conducted mostly amidst fighting and bomb attacks. A bilateral ceasefire was only called in the final stages of the talks.