In
April 2012, a watershed broke in American Foreign Policy, and as typical in the
bureaucratic halls of the National Security State, it came from the Council on
Foreign Relations. A blue-ribbon panel
headed by Madeline Albright and Steven Hadley, the influential National
Security Advisor in the second Bush term, released a 90 page report titled
"U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership." It urged that U.S. policy
makers "make every effort to develop U.S.- Turkey ties in order to make a
strategic relationship a reality."
This is an interesting statement, as any student of recent history would
think that the U.S. and Turkey already held a longstanding "strategic
relationship," of some sixty plus years.
And yet in this conundrum lies the current fulcrum of U.S. foreign
policy over the past two decades, the elusive quest for control over the
resources and populations of the planet.
What
follows is a two-part article looking at the United States, China, and
super-power competition in today’s Eurasia.
It is a story of the making, and the losing, of a military empire. Of
bases occupied and soldiers trained and American boys sent halfway around the
world for reasons that nobody can understand. It is also the story of
industrial economic development, of high-speed railways and natural gas for
electricity, and nuclear plants too; a story of high-speed capitalism, or maybe
still communism, as China finally develops their western frontier and the
eventual path to Europe across the border.
Lets
start in Turkey, the great land-bridge connecting Asia to Europe, and after China,
one of the booming economies of todays world.
But first some history. We begin
with Harry Truman's decision to start
the Cold War in 1947 by announcing that he would furnish military aid to Turkey
and Greece, both in the underbelly of the USSR. Within a decade, Turkey
had joined the newly born North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), despite
having a littoral rather far from the North Atlantic, and had hosted a number
of two-thousand boat NATO military drills, Operations "Grand Slam"
and "Deep Water." Most
consequentially, Turkey agreed in 1962 to host a battery of U.S. ballistic
missiles, equipped with nuclear warheads, near the coastal city of Izmir. Moscow, in a typical turn of Cold War logic,
felt that they needed a similar capability, and set up their own nuclear
missiles in Fidel Castro's new Communist Cuba, setting off the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Thankfully, this was resolved
diplomatically, and both the US and USSR respectively removed their missiles
from Turkey and Cuba.
During
the Reagan years, the U.S.-Turkey relationship grew stronger still, under the
cunning eye of Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupe, one of Washington’s original
cold warriors. Strausz-Hupe, influenced
by the horrors witnessed in his native Europe in the first half of the
twentieth century, was of the breed that preached a hardline American foreign
policy, seeing the Cold War to be a constant global battle against ideological
extremes. His pulpit was the Foreign
Policy Research Institute, and its journal Orbis,
founded in 1955 at the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School
of Business, and still around today. Strausz-Hupe laid his ideology bare in Orbis’s inaugural issue, published in
April 1957.
“The
American Universal Empire,” he wrote, was to be “the coming world order,” and
one that would “mark the last phase in a historical transition and cap the
revolutionary epoch of this century.” “The mission of the American people is to
bury the nation states, lead their bereaved peoples into larger unions, and
overawe with its might the would-be saboteurs of the new order who have nothing
to offer mankind but a putrefying ideology and brute force.” He saw this, however, not as an eternal
Pax-Americana, but an effort that would “exhaust the energies of America,” and
“shift the historical center of gravity to another people.” But “for the next fifty years or so” the
“American empire and mankind will not be opposites, but merely two names for
the universal order,” one where “man may still destroy himself, but then he
will do so by means other than international war.”[i]
It
is rare that one is able to participate in the beginning, middle and end of
such a dream, but that is what Strausz-Hupe was able to. In its early years, the FPRI assembled among
its staff of “associates” the old guard of the Central Intelligence Agency, men
like William Kinter, head of the Army planning staff, and William Elliot,
director of Harvard University’s Summer School and original CIA deputy. Through Elliot, the FPRI also cultivated
future generations of top officials, such as Henry Kissinger and James
Schlesinger. Meeting at dinners under
the sarcophagi at Penn's museum of history and at Washington's elite Cosmos
Club, the FPRI held long-winded salons where they would discuss the making of
the new "American Universal Empire."
Starting
in 1968 as Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Strausz-Hupe began directly participating
in the U.S. drive into the Middle East, replacing a British Empire finally too
broke to fly the Union Jack from the mast of a free-trading gunship east of the
Suez Canal. In 1975, as ambassador to
NATO, he led negotiations with London over U.S. use of a military base at Diego
Garcia, an Indian Ocean island that the British had just finished eradicating
of it native Chagos population through forced migration. And when he was appointed Ambassador to
Turkey in 1980, Strausz-Hupe tellingly chose a young version of himself to
serve as his top assistant, Washington's famous Prince of Darkness, Richard
Perle.
Both
think-tank scholars and bon vivants,
Strausz-Hupe and Perle shared a hardline view of world affairs. As a
State Department ambassador, Strausz-Hupe subverted normal government
operations to bring on Perle, who was at the time working in the Pentagon and
would normally have no connection to diplomatic negotiations. Perle himself
told an FPRI audience in 1997 of the rarity of an "American ambassador to
invite a Defense Department official to take charge of a sensitive negotiation
that would normally be handled by the Department of State, yet that is
precisely what Ambassador Strausz-Hupe did."
As
point man for negotiating with the new military government in Ankara, Perle ran
a scenario straight from the textbook of Empire building. With
simultaneous negotiations taking place over both its massive external debt and
its military acquisitions, Turkey was transformed into the prototypical
neo-colonial outpost. While Washington based international lenders like the IMF
and World Bank imposed strict financial dictates on government spending and
export laws and enforced the privatization of state-run industries, the
Pentagon and State Department colluded to negotiate US arm sales and basing
rights. At the close of the decade,
Perle, who had led the negotiations with Ankara on the basing and defense
agreements, then went into private-practice in order to profit off his new
closeness with the Turkish security establishment. He opened a consulting
firm, International Advisors Inc, with his associate Douglas Feith. Their
major customer? The Turkish government.
At
the time, with the USSR disintegrating around them, Turkey saw itself as a new
regional power, and as such initiated a policy to bring under their influence
the newly independent states of the Caucasus and Central Asia.
“Pan-Turkism,” an Ottoman-era ideology that imagined one united people
stretching from the Mediterranean into Western China, was reintroduced into
official language as the Soviet Union collapsed. As the decade turned, official
discourse in Turkey heavily featured the theme of a united community of states
stretching from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China, based around
historical, cultural, and linguistic bonds.[ii] In the fall of 1991, Turkish president Turgut
Ozal held a meeting in Ankara featuring and the presidents of all five
republics plus Azerbaijan. Here, Ozal “pledged to support their declaration of
sovereignty and emergence of a Pan-Turkic world.”
Washington
was very supportive of this policy, as a "Pan-Turkic World" also
served as a geopolitical wet dream, a march of hard and soft power straight
into the energy rich heart of Eurasia. On February 12th, 1992, President
Bush met with the Turkish Prime Minister in Washington. Afterwards, Bush
stated “Turkey is indeed a friend, a partner of the United States, and it’s
also a model to others, especially those newly independent republics of Central
Asia. In a region of changing tides, it endures as a beacon of stability.”[iii]
Meanwhile
in the Pentagon, Dick Cheney ruled over a clique of empire-builders who only
saw “beacons of stability” as fresh ground for military conquest. These are the
“defense intellectuals” and apparatchiks, paper pushers and agenda writers like
Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad, men who played huge roles
in facilitating the recent U.S. drives to war. They were Cheney’s aides
and assistants during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush, where they witnessed
the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union. A decade
later, they attempted to replicate this experience in the Middle East under
H.W. Bush’s son George. And when asked to produce their own national
security doctrine for a post Cold War world, they infamously planned for world
domination. In an article published in Harpers Magazine at the start of
George W. Bush’s fall 2002 “marketing campaign” for an invasion of Iraq, David
Armstrong spelled out their beliefs:
The
Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism,
but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to
maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from
rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over
friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more
powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.
The
document in question is the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, a biannual planning
document charting the future of Pentagon policy. In charge of writing
this strategy was Paul Wolfowitz’s Pentagon Policy office. In a November
2003 article published in The New Republic, Spencer Ackerman and
Franklin Foer wrote of the Saturday mornings, when “Wolfowitz’s deputies
convened a seminar in a small conference room in the Pentagon’s E Ring, where
they sat Cheney in front of a parade of Sovietologists,” many of whom “were
mavericks who believed the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse.”[iv] Zalmay Khalilzad led the meetings, according
to James Mann, author of the book Rise of
the Vulcans, and participants included Wolfowitz, his deputy Scooter Libby,
and long time military strategists like Andrew Marshall, Albert Wohlstetter,
and Richard Perle.
In
March 1992, when a polished draft of the strategy was circulated among the
Pentagon, it was leaked to New York Times reporter Patrick Tyler, by an
anonymous individual who believed that “this post-cold war strategy debate
should be carried out in the public forum.” And the individual’s concerns
were justified, as Tyler wrote that “the classified document makes the case for
a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by
constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or
group of nations from challenging American primacy.” When the draft was covered in the press, it garnered uproar from all
angles. Senator Joe Biden, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee,
characterized it as an attempt by the Pentagon to erect a “Pax Americana, a
global security system where threats to stability are suppressed or destroyed
by US military power.” Even within the
Pentagon the leaked paper elicited cold shoulders. Khalilzad felt that
even Wolfowitz “didn’t want to be associated with it,” leaving Khalilzad to
feel ostracized for a number of days. That is, until he was approached by
Secretary Cheney, who told Khalilzad that his paper had “discovered a new
rationale for our role in the world.”
While
Cheney may have had dreams of unilateral American power, it was through Turkey
and the NATO alliance that the U.S. managed to extend its military tentacles
into Eurasia. Fittingly, the story begins in American oil country,
in Stillwater, Oklahoma, on the campus of Oklahoma State University. It was graduation day, and President George
HW Bush was in town to deliver the class of 1990 a preview of what the coming
decades would look like. “We are
entering a new age of freedom,” Bush proclaimed, in a world “where our enemy
today is uncertainty and instability.” [v] NATO was the answer to this “enemy,” and
Bush called for a summit to be held where the US led powers would “join
together to craft a new Western strategy for new and changing times.”
Two months later, in July 1990, NATO leaders met in
London, where they began the project of transforming themselves from a military
alliance to “a political alliance building East-West structures of peace,"
as diplomats quoted in the New York Times
put it. Following the meeting, NATO released what was known as the "London Declaration,"
celebrated as "historic" and "the birth of a
new NATO" by Brussels. “Our Alliance must be even more an agent of
change,” it read, one that must “reach out to the countries of the East which
were our adversaries in the Cold War, and extend to them the hand of
friendship.”[vi]
If there was any doubt as to how gung-ho Washington
and London apparatchiks were stick out their “hands of friendship,” one has to
only read their press quotes from the time.
John Weston, London’s ambassador to NATO, stated in an interview that he
considered his job purpose to be securing “the maximum amount of tolerable change,”
and George Bader, a director of European and NATO policy in Paul Wolfowitz’s
top Pentagon policy office, was quoted as “one of many” Pentagon staffers who
“argued that the traditional definition of ‘out of area’ theaters for NATO
operations must be radically revised.”[vii]
It took barely a year for a new structure to be
proposed by NATO, the "North Atlantic Co-operation Council," designed
to include the states of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union. In November 1991,
NATO ministers assembled for an historic meeting in Rome, where they released
for the first time ever a public document, a new "Strategic Concept."
Within its dry and exhaustive prose is confirmation that NATO had already begun moving eastward: “The
Alliance has established regular diplomatic liaison and military contacts with
the countries of Central and Eastern Europe as provided for in the London
Declaration.” [viii]
By
1995, this structure had expanded into a NATO controlled "Central Asian
Battalion" between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Large-scale military training drills soon
followed, such as Cooperative Nugget 95, held over 18 days in August 1995 at
Fort Polk Louisiana. One in a series of
training missions held at U.S. bases, 970 officers from over 14 Eastern
European and Central Asian states were drilled by American, British, and
Canadian officers in the finer arts of NATO militarism. Turkey was the central node in this effort,
as a report by the Arms Control Monitor
noted that between 1989 and 1999, Turkey was the world’s largest recipient of
U.S. military training through the State Department’s IMET program, adding on
to the 23,000 Turkish officers who have been trained by the U.S. since 1950.
Subsequently, these Turkish officers then trained their Central Asian
counterparts. Cevik Bir, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Turkish Army,
stated in a 1996 address to the Washington Research Institute that “2,000 army
officers from Central Asian nations such as Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are studying in Turkish military schools and
academies.”[ix]
Another
main conduit for U.S. military influence in the region was the National Guard’s “State Partnership Program,” that
matched up National Guard units to individual state training missions. It began
in early 1993 in the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, but was
quickly expanded to Central Asia.
Interestingly enough, the SPP, and specifically the use of National
Guard units, grew out of a more covert European Command Program, the “Joint
Contact Team Program” started in 1992, which was made up of active duty
personnel, including Special Forces units.
This plan, however, did not sit well politically, as there were many
questions as to why the Pentagon was sending such heavy duty “trainers” into
Russia’s tiny neighbors, and as such a more defensive, “reserve-centric” policy
was devised using the National Guard Units. By 1995, the Arizona National Guard
was paired with Kazakhstan, and by 1996 the Louisiana Guard was paired with
Uzbekistan. The other Central Asian Republics soon followed suit, with the
Montana Guard paired with Kyrgyzstan and the Nevada Guard with
Turkmenistan. The late, great sociologist
Chalmers Johnson referred to this policy as “the militarized version of the
‘sister city’ relationships so beloved by municipal chambers of commerce.[x]
Starting
in 1997, the U.S. began holding military exercises directly in Central
Asia. The largest U.S.-Central Asian exercise yet, featuring 1,300 assembled
U.S. and foreign troops, was held that September, the first of three such
exercises held over the next four years. For the drill, 800 troops assembled, a
ragtag mix of Turks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs, Georgians, and Russians. Most significantly, the exercises begun with
the longest flight in human history, a potent reminder of the global
hinterlands U.S. foreign policy was now engaged in. On the morning of September
14th, 500 paratroopers from the 82nd airborne packed their bags in Fort
Bragg N.C. and flew for 19 hours straight (with two in-air refueling hook ups,
and a cost of $5 million), landing 8,000 miles away on the arid steppes of
Kazakhstan. Upon arrival, the division,
led by Marine General John Sheehan, leaped out of the plane for the assembled
audience of Central Asian soldiers and press. “There is no nation on the face
of the earth that we cannot get to,” as the General put it.
NATO,
the Cold War "defensive" military alliance, was now immediately being
turned into a structure to take over the Eurasian continent, a land-grabbing
machine that aimed to build bases as far as the mountainous hinterlands of
Central Asia. Within a decade, conflicts had led to the construction of
new American military bases in the Balkans, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and
Afghanistan, as well as the massive militarization and base construction in the
Persian Gulf that followed the 2003 Iraq war. As it was put by Thomas
Donnely, a director of the Project for a New American Century, in an email circulated
among military analysts, the United States "Imperial Perimeter" was
expanding into the heart of Eurasia.
But
in Turkey, as in the rest of the world, the 2003 Iraq War was a prime example
of the emperor having no clothes, as the unbridled militarism of Cheney’s plan
did not sit well with the Turkish public.
As a result, they left him shivering naked atop his tank, forcing the
Turkish parliament to reject U.S. requests the use the country and its military
bases as a staging ground for the invasion.
This has set an indelible mark on U.S.-Turkish relations since. Journalist Jim Lobe, Washington D.C. bureau
chief of Inter Press Service and an astute observer of beltway thinking, wrote in May 2012 of how "much of the
news coverage of Turkey here over the past decade has been negative," and
that the recent Turkish-Israeli spats, "sparked a wave of anti-Turkish
acrimony promoted, in particular, by neo- conservatives, who had long been hostile
to the AKP due to its anti-military positions and Islamist roots."[xi]
Enter
the Industrial Dragon
As
Ankara has turned away from its Western partners, the Chinese have moved in to
the power vacuum with their brand of economic diplomacy. The current Turkey-Chinese relationship can
be dated back to an October 2010 visit to Ankara by Chinese Premier Wen
Jaibao. The stage for the visit was set
by an unprecedented occurrence earlier in the month, when China and Turkey held
joint military air exercises, known as Anatolian Eagle, the first Chinese air
force exercises to ever be held in a NATO state.[xii]
Considering that only one year earlier the Turkish leadership had been vocally
angry about Chinese protest crackdowns in the ethnically Turkic Xinjiang
province in western China, these developments signaled a major rapprochement.
On
his visit, Wen’s main topic of discussion was increasing the already large
trade between Turkey and China, which in 2009 amounted to $10 billion. Wen pledged to raise this to $50 billion by
2015, and $100 billion by 2020.
Moreover, he stressed that this trade should use Turkish and Chinese
currency, leaving the U.S. dollar out in the cold. The Turkish message was that increasing trade
between two of world’s booming economy was great, but that an effort needed to
be made to even out the balance, as Turkey was running up large trade-deficits
buying Chinese goods.
Also
of major discussion was Chinese investment in Turkish infrastructure, most
importantly high-speed rail lines, which China has become the worlds leading
producer of. The Chinese Civil
Engineering Construction Corp, with Turkish partners, was already at work
building the second phase of a planned 533km Istanbul-Ankara high-speed rail
line, cutting the travel time between the two metropolis’ down from 7 hours to
less than four. The first phase, which
runs 200km west from Ankara to Eskisehir, was built by a Spanish company,
opening in early 2009. Phase 2, secured
by the Chinese-led consortium in 2006 for $1.27 billion (the majority being
Chinese government loans) runs 158km between Inonu and Kosekoy, over and
through difficult mountainous terrain.
The line climbs from an elevation low of 20m above sea level to 800m,
and features 55km of tunnels, and 10 km of bridges, the longest being 6 and 2
km respectively. It is set to open in
2013.[xiii]
But
this feat of engineering pales in wonder at the other high-speed rail line
being planned between China and Turkey, the Edirne-Kars line, which transverses
the entire 2,000 km breadth of Turkey and connects South and Central Asia to
Europe. The details of Edirne-Kars rail corridor was summed up in the April 13th,
2012 edition of Today's Zaman,
the Turkish English-language daily:
The
line is designed to pass through 29 provinces, connecting the east and west of
Turkey and reducing the duration of travel from the current 36 hours to 12.
With the completion of the planned Edirne-Kars line, the total length of
high-speed rail inside Turkey is expected to reach 10,000 kilometers by 2023.
Under an agreement signed between China and Turkey in October 2010, China
agreed to extend loans of $30 billion for the planned rail network.[xiv]
The
Turkish-Chinese relationship was solidified in April 2012 when a large Turkish
delegation led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited China, the
highest-level visit for the Turkish leadership to Beijing in 27 years. Of significant note, Erdogan began his visit
in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China’s strategic Western
frontier that is home to a large Turkic Uighur presence.
Turkish-Chinese
economic cooperation, led by the Edirne-Kars line, was the main point of
discussion on the visit. Chinese firms are bidding to build two nuclear power
plants in Turkey, at Okay on the Mediterranean Coast and Sinop on the Black
Sea, as well as a major bridge over the Bosporus and a proposed third airport
in Istanbul. All together, 27 Chinese CEOs attended meetings with Turkish PM
Erdogan on his visit to China. But there
is no doubt that solidifying plans for Edirne-Kars was the highlight of the
visit, and rightfully so, as the high-speed rail line would create a
geopolitical corridor with global ramifications.
For
China, the rail line represented a large step in their Eurasian Land Bridge
Strategy, designed to connect the massive Chinese factory base with the large
markets of Western Europe by high speed rail, cutting the time needed for
freight shipping in half compared to the maritime journey. Edirne-Kars served as the final link in the
mind-blowing third, southern Eurasian Land Bridge connecting the Chinese ports
of Guangdong and Shenzhen to the Atlantic port of Rotterdam, and on the way
hitting all the giant markets of Southern Asia, running through Myanmar,
Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Iran. At this point, the line connects
to Edirne-Kars, and then hooks up with the existing lines to Western Europe. F. William Engdahl, the excellent political
analysts, wrote in an April 2012 report, "the aim is to literally create the
world’s greatest new economic space and in turn a huge new market for not just
China but all Eurasian countries, the Middle East and Western Europe."[xv]
Overall,
the third land bridge would touch 20 countries and have a total length of about
15,000 kilometers, a distance 3,000-6,000 km less than the maritime journey
through the Indian Ocean and the Straits of Malacca. This plan, far from
being complete, was developed in 2009, at China's Pan Pearl River Delta
Cooperation and Development Forum. There is also future hope to build
rail lines from Turkey down through Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, connecting
China directly to the African Continent.
Ankara has found itself once again as a globally important land bridge, and
by all appearances they are taking full advantage of it and developing the
worlds latest infrastructure. As Selcuk Colakoglu, the director of Asia-Pacific
Studies at Ankara-based International Strategic Research Organization, told China Daily, “Turkey has transformed
itself from a security state to a trading state during the past decade. If you
want to be a trading state, you should have a very developed transportation
link."
[i] Robert Strausz-Hupe, “The Balance of
Tomorrow,” Orbis, Vol. 1 No. 1, (April 1957), 26-27.
[ii] Jung & Piccoli, Turkey at the
Crossroads, (London: Zed Books, 2001), 179
[iii] Washington Post, 2/12/92
[iv] “The Radical,” Spencer Ackerman and Franklin
Foer, The New Republic, 11/20/03.
[v]"Remarks
at the Oklahoma State University Commencement Ceremony in Stillwater,"
George H.W. Bush, May 4, 1990. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.
[vi] “Evolution in Europe; NATO leaders gather,
in search of a purpose,” Craig R. Whitney, New York Times, 7/5/90; “20 years
ago: London Declaration marks birth of new NATO,” NATO Press Release, 7/5/10;
“London Declaration on a transformed North Atlantic Alliance,” North Atlantic
Council, London Summit, July 5-6 1990, Paragraph 28.
[vii]“London’s
new Man at NATO packs two hats in his kit,” Hella Pick, The Guardian, January 24th, 1992; “US Seeks Global
Fire-Fighting Role for Revamped NATO,” Hella Pick, The Guardian, May 12th, 1992.
[viii] “European Security, Still Divided,” The
Economist, 10/12/91; “The Alliance’s New Strategic Concept,” North Atlantic
Council, Rome Summit November 7-8 1991.
[ix] “Arming Repression: U.S. Arms Sales to
Turkey during the Clinton Administration,” Tamar Gabelnick, William Hartung,
and Jennifer Washburn, World Policy Institute/Federation of American
Scientists, October 1999;Washington Post, 6/6/96.
[x]“The National Guard State Partnership
Program: Background, Issues, and Options for Congress,” Lawrence Kapp, Nina M.
Sarafino, Congressional Research Service, August 15th, 2011, 2.
(Published online by the Federation of American Scientists); “US and China
Competition for Influence in Central Asia,” Charlie L. Pelham, School for
Advanced Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 2007, 13; Chalmers
Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the
Republic (New York: Owl Books 2004), 175.
[xi] “U.S. Should Forge ‘New Partnership’ with
Turkey, Report Says,” Jim Lobe, IPS News, May 7th, 2012.
[xv] “Eurasian
Economic Boom and Geopolitics: China’s Land Bridge to Europe,” F. William
Engdahl, Centre for Research on Globalization, 4/27/12.
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