Reads of the Week: Qualified Immunity, Chinese Expansion, and America’s Middle East Presence

Each week, we’ll be featuring opinion pieces from the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. Do you dream of having bylines like these? Learn more about how the Writing Fellows Program can help boost your writing career!

A Qualified Immunity Compromise is Crumbling, You Can Thank the Law Enforcement Lobby by Billy Binion (Spring 2018) in Reason

Police accountability—once seldom-discussed among national politicians—has become a topic of constant conversation in Washington, D.C., as lawmakers attempt to bang out a compromise on criminal justice reform. Central to that debate is qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that makes it onerously difficult to hold government officials accountable in civil court when they violate your constitutional rights.

The doctrine was once obscure. Yet qualified immunity reform is now the flashpoint of those negotiations. After months of parleying on Capitol Hill, a compromise that once looked promising is now in jeopardy. Some Republicans are reportedly proposing an alternate option: Instead of reforming qualified immunity, they want it to be codified in the law…

Sri Lanka’s Sweet Deal with China Underpins the Belt and Road Initiative by Georgia Leatherdale-Gilholy (Spring 2021) in the National Interest

The Colombo Port City Economic Commission Bill came into force in Sri Lanka on May 27, 2021. The bill lays out the country’s legal framework regarding a flagship project scheduled to transform the seafront of its bustling capital city into a new port. Many have speculated that this plan will pave the way for the island nation—strategically located at the crossroads of major shipping routes to South Asia, the Far East, Europe and America—to blossom into the next Singapore or Dubai.

The bill will establish a Colombo Port City Special Economic Zone under a $1.4 billion deal. That will mean handing over those 660 acres from Sri Lankan to Chinese state entities. Thus, it was no surprise that the bill faced a great deal of opposition before it passed. The Sri Lankan Supreme Court even urged the Rajapaksa administration to amend it, after it heard eighteen petitions filed against the bill by opposition parties and civil society groups who had even proposed an unprecedented national referendum on the topic…

The US should rethink its military presence across the Middle East by Tyler Koteskey (Fall 2015) in the Washington Examiner

After nearly 20 years, the last U.S. troops have finally left Bagram Airfield, America’s hub of operations in Afghanistan. President Joe Biden was right to bring our troops home — the war in Afghanistan no longer served our core interests and was opposed by the vast majority of Americans. As we end America’s longest war and consider our deployments elsewhere during the Global Force Posture Review, the president should recognize the declining importance of the Middle East to American interests and scale back our military presence.

Despite the $6.4 trillion we’ve spent in the Middle East in the past two decades and the more than 7,000 U.S. service members we’ve lost, America has few vital interests in the region. These include preventing major disruptions to global energy supplies, preventing the rise of a regional hegemon, and countering terrorism. None of these objectives require us to continue our mission in Iraq or to keep tens of thousands of troops on bases across the Middle East. In some cases, our large troop presence undermines those interests…