Author: pstaniland

I recently received this email from Nate Cavanaugh, listed as the “Acting Chairman and President” of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP):

It cancelled a contract for a special report I’d been working on with USIP. The report was mostly finished and very little money remained to be paid, so few savings will go to the taxpayer. But it was a tiny part of the much broader destruction of the USIP by DOGE and the Trump administration. This contest is still locked up in legal battles, but regardless seems to have cut a broad swath through the institution. Even the website has been taken down.

Now the Wilson Center is being de facto eliminated as well; it’s announced that it is shutting down its programming and activities. In addition to firing the vast majority of its staff, I assume it will end the Cold War International History project that provides fascinating insights from translated primary documents, archive or delete the website and its publications, etc, just like USIP.

As a result of these moves, a number of most publicly engaged Asia policy analysts in the US have been fired (plus other regions/topics of course; I know the Asia side best). USIP had a large and excellent Asia Program, which included a rich roster of people and publications on Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and various other states in the region. I believe – though with the website down it’s hard to count people now, so I could be wrong! – USIP was the single densest concentration of full-time South(-ish) Asianists in DC outside the US government. The Wilson Center has experts on South Asia, Myanmar, and the Indo-Pacific.

In addition to the loss of experienced researchers, these were places where young people would go as RAs, interns, or program officers to build up subject matter skills. USIP also helped to fund doctoral students’ research in the Peace Scholar program (I was a Peace Scholar in 2009-10, as have been a number of my students since).

The freely available publications produced by USIP and Wilson will no longer be produced. The USIP publications have been stripped from the internet already, so no one will be able to benefit from them now or in the future. This is a sample of the kind of work they produced, courtesy of the Wayback Machine – it’s obvious how relevant these topics are.

There’s no point to any of this beyond performative wrecking; the budgetary savings will be minuscule compared to the tax cuts working their way through Congress, and efficiencies obviously could have been achieved without institutional annihilation. DOGE seems to be flailing about for politically-weak things to kill while failing to achieve its broader goals. The result is to destroy much of a crucial layer of analysis and expertise that lies between 1. intra-government work that is not publicly accessible (and apparently controlled by Laura Loomer), and 2. specialized, often niche academic work that primarily speaks to other scholars.

Both government and academic work are valuable, but wiping out much of the in-between space will make both worse-off. Organizations like USIP and Wilson provided real expertise to both official and non-official audiences, could support projects with a longer time horizon than is often possible within the government, and were far more accessible to the public than most scholarly research.

Combined with eliminating or reducing social science and area studies research funding in other contexts (plus slicing the State Department), the administration seems intent on limiting home-grown American knowledge about the rest of the world. Policymaking shouldn’t be handed over to experts; the “best and the brightest” get plenty wrong, and choices often come down to hard judgment calls rather than clear technocratic answers. But it’s generally better to have more information and analysis rather than less. Administration officials talk a big game about waging major power competition with China – and then gut the places that produce data and analysis and eliminate the programs that could be sources of influence.

Former CIA deputy director of operations (1959-62) Richard Bissell noted in his posthumous memoir – quoted in William Rust’s excellent Before the Quagmire about Laos – that if he and other government leaders had “shown more open-mindedness . . . the advice and perceptions of experts on Laotian politics, history, and culture might have received more attention,” and the US government could have avoided a set of huge policy mistakes. It’s rare that in retrospect US foreign policy failures turn out to be the result of listening too carefully to area specialists. Avoiding rule by experts doesn’t imply destroying all expertise, nor does pursuing efficiency require gutting valuable institutions for a pittance of savings.

Nepal recently experienced deaths as a result of pro-monarchy rallies. The Nepali monarchy was abolished as part of Nepal’s post-civil war transition to a secular republic. While monarchist sentiment in the 21st century is not especially common around the world (Thailand and a few others being exceptions), Nepal’s political and economic struggles, the various political cleavages that endure within the country, and spillover from Hindu nationalism in India (the Nepali monarchy was Hindu) all have sustained a constituency in Nepal for monarchism.

Amish Raj Mulmi is one of my favorite analysts of Nepal’s politics, and he has a valuable essay in Himal on this issue:

“Gyanendra and Nepal’s royalists had so far taken pains to maintain civility, but that pretence is now gone. The limited but not insubstantial public sympathy they had gathered – helped by deep popular anger with Nepal’s current political leaders – has dissipated. 

Nepali commentators see the resurgence of royalist forces as a symptom of increasing discontent with the country’s political and economic status quo. Nepal’s economy has not fully recovered from the ravages of the pandemic. Thousands of young Nepalis leave the country every single day for better economic opportunities abroad. None of the country’s political parties – including the main establishment forces currently sharing power, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist) and the Nepali Congress – have shown any inclination for much-needed structural reform. Instead, crony capitalism is rampant, as is corruption. . . .

Yet for all the present anger, on almost every indicator – economic, social or political – Nepal is doing better than it ever did under the monarchy. In 1995, at the peak of the era of constitutional monarchy, 55 percent of Nepalis lived in extreme poverty. That figure had dropped to less than 0.5 percent in 2023. Although Nepal’s economy grew slower between 1996 and 2023 than those of most Southasian countries, personal incomes have risen for all demographics. Local governments have shown a clear preference towards decentralisation. There is freedom of speech on a scale unheard of under the monarchy. 

Why, then, are some sections of Nepali society nostalgic about royal rule?

ONE COULD DIVIDE those leading the call for the monarchy’s return into five categories.”

Read the whole thing to learn about his categorization of the monarchist and monarchist-curious forces in the Nepali political system, their relationship to India, and the state of contemporary Nepali politics.

(for an article about the bee, see this Sun-Times article)

I’m spending a lot of time right now understanding Laos’ fairly quick descent into militarized polarization during the early Cold War, which occurred much faster than in Cambodia. This is not a case I knew anything about prior to starting the work, so it’s been a really rewarding and interesting experience to hit something genuinely new.

Below are a few books I’ve found useful (with deep debts to the H-Diplo roundtable review of Seth Jacobs’ The Universe Unraveling as a guide):

Christopher E. Goscha and Karine Laplante, eds., L’échec de La Paix En Indochine/The Failure of Peace in Indochina: 1954-1962 (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2010)

Martin Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos (Cambridge, U.K. ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

MacAlister Brown and Joseph Jermiah Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries: The Communist Movement in Laos, 1930-1985 (Hoover Institution Press, 1986)

William J. Rust, Before the Quagmire: American Intervention in Laos, 1954-1961 (Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 2012)

Nicholas Tarling, Britain and the Neutralisation of Laos (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011)

Martin Stuart-Fox, Buddhist Kingdom, Marxist State: The Making of Modern Laos, 1st ed, Studies in Southeast Asian History, no. 2 (Bangkok ; Cheney: White Lotus, 1996)

Arthur J. Dommen, Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization, Rev. ed (New York: Praeger, 1971)

Søren Ivarsson, Creating Laos: The Making of a Lao Space between Indochina and Siam, 1860-1945, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series 112 (Copenhagen S, Denmark: NIAS Press, 2008)

Jacob Van Staaveren, Interdiction in Southern Laos, 1960-1968: The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia (Washington, D.C: Center for Air Force History : For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. G.P.O, 1993)

Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Vatthana Pholsena, Post-War Laos: The Politics of Culture, History, and Identity (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2006)

William J. Rust, So Much to Lose: John F. Kennedy and American Policy in Laos, Studies in Conflict, Diplomacy, and Peace (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2014)

Seth Jacobs, The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos, Illustrated edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012)

Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)

Charles A. Stevenson, The End of Nowhere: American Policy toward Laos since 1954 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972)

Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975, First Edition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000)

Ryan Wolfson-Ford, Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024

The National Archives of India has a portal named Abhilekh Patal. It’s become increasingly useful over the years (especially once I learned how to search it properly). While sometimes buggy to use, the quantity of uploaded material has dramatically grown and I really appreciate the access to Indian primary sources it allows. Recently, it seems to be using OCR, which can lead to errors in titles, as you’ll see below, but on balance seems very useful and positive. I’ve very extensively used Indian sources from its Kathmandu embassy in the 1950s and 1960s.

I also now see that several files from the Indian ambassador in Phnom Penh have been uploaded. India was quite involved in Southeast Asia in the 1950s/1960s (in part because of its key role on the International Control Commission), and there is some fascinating stuff in these files. There are also some reports from Laos in the late 1960s that look really interesting. The thing to search for is “Political reports other than annual” or some version thereof – these tend to be monthly assessments of the country in question’s internal and external politics; the annual reports, by contrast, are data on embassy staffing, activities, budget, etc.

I’ve never figured out how to create a durable permalink to individual records, so I’ve copied screenshots below to help people find them. I’ve also included an excerpt of a summary of a conversation between Prince Sihanouk and Raghunath Sinha, the Indian ambassador to Cambodia at the time, in which Sinha expresses his concerns over his tilt to China.

Parts of a letter back to Delhi from the Indian ambassador:

Some screenshots of the files themselves (note the incorrect title spellings – I think this is the AI/OCR at work, but it also OCRs the entire full text so searches go to the right files)

Akhilesh Upadhyay has a valuable piece in the Hindustan Times on the implications of radical shifts in US aid under the Trump administration:
“America partners with the Nepal government and local organisations on a wide range of programmes—from boosting food security and economic growth, managing natural resources, improving health care and education and bolstering democratic governance and responding to natural disasters. Nepal has been a major recipient of aid from the US, the largest donor globally. In fiscal year 2023, it disbursed $72 billion worldwide. . . .

Already, some organisations have been forced to lay off their staff while many others are bracing for a protracted suspension. The worst-hit are those which are fully funded by American assistance. But all — regardless of whether they are fully or partially funded — now seem pressured to diversify their resources. A senior member of a civil society organisation working on climate change said his office has laid off some of their Kathmandu-based staff, and the remaining members of the team have agreed to take a 20% pay cut to stay afloat. Efforts were now afoot to diversify aid sources.. . . Fast forward to 2022, USAID signed a five-year “strategic plan” with the Nepal government, committing $659 million. The agreement outlines the broad development areas of cooperation and collaboration and supports Nepal’s goal of graduating to a middle-income country, working in partnership with the government, civil society and the private sector. The emphasis is on strengthening democratic governance, enterprise-driven economic growth and increased resilience for communities most at-risk to natural disasters and climate change. But questions have arisen about whether Trump 2.0 has any appetite for these programmes, including the idea of inclusion, a cardinal political pillar of Nepal’s new constitution and polity post-2006.   . . . .

By all accounts, however, the 90-day hiatus will not impact the US-assisted Millenium Challenge Corporation’s (“MCC”) Nepal Compact — the single largest grant Nepal has ever received. The aid is being used for building transmission lines and improving roads. Nepal contributes $197 million to the MCC Compact. If the recent statements from the U.S. government is anything to go by, MCC projects are not in danger. According to a January 26 statement by the State Department, Trump’s executive order “on Reevaluating and Realigning” the foreign assistance only covers those areas “funded by or through the State Department and USAID.” . . . .

For now, however, the suspension of US aid has sparked significant discussion on Nepal’s social media and in the press, reflecting public concern over the potential negative impact on essential services and development projects. Significantly, the recent shifts in American foreign policy have resulted in new small-state anxieties in Nepal, just as in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, that far outweigh the development budget Trump’s move has put on hold. To many in Nepal, the possibility of the aid withdrawal by America, or ‘Third Neighbour,” could lead to even greater reliance on two immediate ones — India and China in the long term. America’s great-power rival, China might even relish this prospect in the South Asian theatre.”