Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 10

Political Correctness Threatens American Higher Education

By some measures, American higher education is in the midst of a golden age. It enjoys a worldwide reputation as the best in the world. Global rankings of universities consistently put American institutions at the top. Students from virtually every country compete to gain entry to both their undergraduate and graduate programs. Faculty often enjoy both great prestige and impressive salaries.

Yet higher education in the United States has serious problems. The tuition its institutions charge students encumber many of them with career-distorting debt. For other young people, the price of enrollment places higher education out of reach altogether. Rising costs, along with the decline in the college-age population, is forcing some colleges to reduce sharply the number of faculty members and even to cease operations entirely. In addition, research has shown that a painfully large fraction of students demonstrate no discernible improvement in either the command of information or the capacity for thinking and reasoning over the course of their college years. They have, in effect, spent a great deal of money without getting what they paid for.

Among the most disturbing, and damaging, problems afflicting higher education is the widespread imposition within its institutions, by students, faculty, and administrators using both formal and informal methods, of a particular set of political ideas, beliefs, and values that are found on the left side of the Western political spectrum and have come to be called, collectively, political correctness. Three episodes at Yale University, beginning in 2015, illustrate its scope and impact.

In the first, the head of one of Yale’s residential units, known as colleges, announced that he would no longer be called the “master,” as had been customary and uncontroversial for more than eight decades. The word, he said, conjured up unacceptable associations with the plantations of the pre-Civil War south—although in academic life it has always had an entirely different meaning. There it stems from the Latin word “magister,” which historically denoted someone qualified to teach in a medieval university.

Then, under pressure from students, the university removed from one of the residential colleges the name it had borne since 1930, that of John C. Calhoun, a Yale graduate of the class of 1807 who served his country as a congressman, senator, secretary of state, secretary of war, and vice president. The name had become unacceptable to the students because of Calhoun’s support, two centuries earlier, for slavery.

Finally, in 2015, the head of a different residential college was surrounded and verbally assaulted by hostile students who were furious that his wife had, in response to a university email warning against wearing “inappropriate” Halloween costumes, ventured the opinion that Yale students were capable of deciding for themselves what costumes, if any, to wear. If a student encountered a costume that gave offense, she said, it might be a good idea for him or her to engage the wearer in a calm discussion of the reasons for this reaction. The video of this event, which was widely viewed on the internet, brought to mind the student-led “struggle sessions” in China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, in which adults (many of them Communist Party officials) were viciously harassed by bands of students known as “Red Guards” and often suffered serious, even fatal, injuries.

Anthony Kronman holds two graduate degrees from Yale and has spent four decades there as a professor in its law school, serving from 1994 to 2004 as its dean. (The present writer—full disclosure—spent four happy years as a Yale undergraduate from 1964 to 1968.) Kronman has written a book explaining and exploring the surge of political correctness at Yale and other universities, subjecting it to searching and scrupulous criticism, and enumerating the costs it has exacted. In The Assault on American Excellence, he has produced an account that is cogent, alarming, persuasive, and, considering the gap between the author’s views and those that prevail where he teaches, courageous.

All of philosophy, it has been said, is a series of footnotes to Plato. It might, in this spirit, be said with only some exaggeration that all commentary on American society, customs, and beliefs is a series of footnotes to Tocqueville, a statement that applies here. Kronman takes his principal theme from the Frenchman’s 1837 classic Democracy in America. Tocqueville considered the America he visited to be the pioneer in a trend toward social and political equality that he believed, correctly, was destined to spread beyond the United States, sweeping away the aristocracies of Europe. He appreciated the virtues of equality as a governing principle but worried about the social costs of its triumph.

Similarly, Kronman imputes the surge of political correctness on campus to the embrace of a militant egalitarianism that, while conceivably justified in the political sphere, is incompatible with one of the virtues that universities, almost uniquely, can and should cultivate: what he calls “excellence.” By excellence, he means not the mastery of a particular skill or body of knowledge but rather the superior development of character, a “greatness of the soul,” which he identifies as historically, although not necessarily, an aristocratic feature of Western societies.

All apart from its deleterious impact on excellence as Kronman defines it, and which he highly values, political correctness has done substantial damage to American colleges and universities, as he documents in the book’s three central chapters. One of them deals with the meaning, in theory and practice, of diversity, which he terms “the most powerful word in higher education today.” (The University of California system, for example, has announced that all potential appointees to its faculties will have to demonstrate a firm commitment to diversity.) The academy defines diversity exclusively in terms of race, ethnicity, gender identification, and sexual orientation. Diversity of ideas and viewpoints is not included and usually not welcome. Another chapter of The Assault on American Excellence documents the negative consequences of summarily removing from buildings the names of people whose political and social views do not accord with those that now dominate American institutions of higher education. A third considers the status of speech, which is no longer entirely free on campus.

Tocqueville, and even more his British contemporary, John Stuart Mill, in his 1853 essay On Liberty, were concerned about the tyranny of the majority, to which they feared social equality would lead and that would suppress unpopular views. That is precisely what has occurred in American institutions of higher learning. The expression of ideas concerning the approved building blocks of diversity that depart from what has become campus orthodoxy risks intimidation and public vilification by the university community and even punishment by the university’s administration. Students censor themselves in class and prospective speakers holding (or thought to hold) forbidden views are often disinvited or, if they do speak, shouted down and even physically assaulted.

Besides violating the spirit (and perhaps in some cases the letter) of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the suppression of speech subverts the two basic missions of the university. One of them is the discovery and production of knowledge, which requires free inquiry. The other is the education of students. At its best, this involves what the great sociologist David Riesman called “deprovincialization”—taking the individual beyond the boundaries of the familiar and exposing him or her to ideas, customs, and beliefs previously unknown and sometimes disorienting when first encountered. The demand, widely articulated on campus, that students be protected from exposure to ideas that distress them runs directly counter to one of the central purposes of the institution.

All of this is having an impact on the way Americans view universities. Political correctness of the kind that Kronman analyzes is fostering skepticism about, disapproval of, and even outright hostility toward institutions of higher learning in the wider public. That, in turn, poses a major threat to higher education in the United States. Its institutions, like all institutions, require public acceptance in order to survive. Indeed, colleges and universities need more than acceptance: They require active support. Public ones need appropriations from state legislatures; private ones depend on donations from individuals, often alumni. The collapse of support for them, which militant political correctness is fostering, would present American higher education with an even more serious problem than those it already has.

The post Political Correctness Threatens American Higher Education appeared first on The American Interest.

Putting the Lie to an Iranian Fable

For more than four decades, Iran has claimed that four of its diplomats kidnapped in Lebanon in July 1982 are being held in captivity in Israel. The claims have been trumpeted by Iran’s Foreign Ministry, published in state-run media, and used as a diplomatic club against Israel in international fora. However, an Iranian journalist close to the Revolutionary Guards who has been probing the kidnapping for more than 25 years has now concluded, based on conversations with an Iranian official in a position to know the truth, that this is a lie.

But before revealing the identity of the journalist’s source and why he is credible, it helps to know the identities the four Iranian diplomats and the circumstances of their disappearance. One was Seyyed Mohsen Mousavi, Iran’s official representative in Beirut. Another was Col. Ahmad Motevasseliyan, whom the Iranians presented as a military attaché in their embassy in Beirut but who was in fact the commander of the 27th Brigade of the Revolutionary Guards, the head of the Iranian expeditionary force in Lebanon, and the top Revolutionary Guards commander in Lebanon. The others were Taqi Rastegar Moqaddam, a journalist of the IRNA news agency, and Kazem Akhavan, a driver for the Iranian embassy.

In early July of 1982, Mousavi, Moqaddam, and Akhavan traveled in a car from Beirut to meet Motevasseliyan, who was then at the Zabadani base on the Syrian-Lebanese border. They wanted to discuss with him how to respond to the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in general, and what to do with the secret materials at the Iranian Embassy in Beirut in particular, in light of the possibility that Israel would take over Beirut. The three came to Motevasseliyan’s headquarters in Zabadani, where Mousavi demanded to meet the Revolutionary Guards commander without delay. Mousavi explained what he wanted and tried to convince Motevasseliyan to come with him to Beirut. He stressed that his car had a diplomatic license plate and that the Lebanese gendarmerie’s security unit for diplomats would escort it.

For security reasons, however, the top Iranian command at the base did not want Motevasseliyan to go to Beirut. Mansour Koochak Mohseni, who was Motevasseliyan’s deputy and slated to take over his post in a few days, said that travel by the force commander would be dangerous and tried to convince him to stay at Zabadani. Mohseni claimed that, after Mousavi strongly insisted, it was agreed that Motevasseliyan could leave for Beirut.

On July 5, 1982, these four were making their way from the Revolutionary Guards headquarters in Zabadani, Syria, through Tripoli to Beirut, when they were seized at a roadblock north of Beirut (known as the “Barbara roadblock”) by the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia of the Phalange Party. After that, they disappeared, and definitive news of their whereabouts or fate remained obscure in the ensuing decades.

The day after the kidnapping came the telephone call saying the four had not reached Beirut and had been kidnapped on the way. Mohseni went to Baalbek and met there with members of the Lebanese Shiite organization that formed the nucleus from which the Hezbollah leadership grew. There it was decided to kidnap Lebanese Christians belonging to the Phalange and bring them to Zabadani, where the Revolutionary Guards had headquarters. According to Mohseni’s testimony, a total of 70 were seized and brought there.

In the decades since the kidnapping, Iran has made the incident a staple of its propaganda war against Israel, accusing Jerusalem of holding the four diplomats in one of its secret prisons ever since they were brought there by the Lebanese Christian militia that kidnapped them in 1982.

The disappearance of a group that included Iran’s official representative and Revolutionary Guards commander (who, as noted, was given a false identity as a military attaché in Iran’s embassy in Beirut) sparked outrage in Tehran. In an effort to force their release in the immediate aftermath of their disappearance, the Iranians embarked on a series of kidnappings of foreign citizens in Lebanon; the first was David Dodge, president of the American University in Beirut, who Iran claimed was a CIA agent. The Iranians put Imad Mughniyeh in charge of the kidnapping campaign. Mughniyeh was head of Hezbollah’s special-operations unit, which was called Islamic Jihad and worked closely with the Iranian intelligence services. Collaborating with him was Seyyed Ahmad Mousavi, the brother of the kidnapped Mousavi and a mysterious operative based in Beirut.

By the early 1990s, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Chairman of the Iranian Parliament and a man who wielded great influence over the leadership in Tehran, initiated the “smile policy” of openness with the West. Tehran decided to stop the kidnappings of foreigners in Lebanon, ordering Mughniyeh to free all the foreign detainees. Mughniyeh was also told to make a special effort to thwart Israel’s growing intelligence penetration of Hezbollah. One of the important casualties of Iran’s new policy in Lebanon, including the restructuring of Mughniyeh’s and Iran’s operational mechanisms in the country, was Seyyed Ahmad Mousavi, who had to leave his operational position without having discovered any clear information concerning the fate of his brother.

In the more than two decades since Iran ceased its campaign of kidnapping foreigners in Lebanon, Iran has continued to use the search for the four missing diplomats as part of its ongoing campaign against Israel. Its officials have ignored all disclosures of their ultimate fate, including testimony by Lebanese Forces members who were involved in the kidnapping and in the killing of the four. Instead it has continued to assert, with the aid and support of relatives of the four, that Israel is holding them in a secret prison in its territory.

It is at this point in our story that Hamid Daudabadi, an Iranian journalist close to the Revolutionary Guards who has been probing the kidnapping of the four Iranians for more than 25 years, steps in. He recently reported that he believes the four were killed by members of the Lebanese militia. He bases this conclusion, among other things, on a conversation he held with the notorious Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani before he was assassinated in Iraq earlier this year. Soleimani reportedly confirmed to Daudabadi that, just a few hours after the kidnapping, the four were no longer alive. To Daudabadi’s question as to why Iran continues to claim that the four are being held in a prison in Israel, the senior Revolutionary Guards commander said the claim was baseless.

A fair-minded observer might conclude that Daudabadi’s report is as close to a final, official verdict as we are ever likely to get: Qasem Soleimani himself believed that Iran’s long-standing, mendacious, unsubstantiated claim that the four are being held in Israel is a lie.

The post Putting the Lie to an Iranian Fable appeared first on The American Interest.

The Case for Liberal Nationalism

“. . . modern liberalism arose from national political frameworks. The modern nation-state . . . is, in fact, a product of the marriage of liberal democratic and nationalist values.”

—Yael Tamir, Israeli political scientist and author of Why Nationalism

The last few years have exemplified the reasons why national identity is an attractive item to offer voters at election time.

The first is quite simply that there is a natural human need to belong. Beginning with Robert Putnam’s classic Bowling Alone, books on the contemporary crisis of hyper-individualism and its attendant loneliness are almost as ubiquitous as those on the threat to liberal democracy. Globalization, mass communication, and the newer phenomenon of social media have created what Thomas Friedman has called “the super-empowered individual.” But this individual has not lost that yearning for the familiar, and the comfort and sense of security it provides. Nationalism offers a way for people to feel anchored and tethered in an increasingly globalized world.

Besides, not everyone has benefitted from the breaking down of national boundaries and the exponential growth in globalization. This includes the frequently invoked “white working-class” who voted for Donald Trump and Brexit to voice their opposition to cheap foreign goods ruining their businesses and immigrants allegedly committing violent crime and taking their jobs. But not only them. As James Kirchick points out in his apocalyptically titled The End of Europe, the rise of these illiberal populists “has as much, if not more, to do with ‘values’ issues like national identity and social cohesion as it does economic disruption.” For many, globalization has meant the imposition of a fuzzy cosmopolitanism, diluting or even canceling out ways of life that have rooted people, connecting them to community, town, or country. Nationalism matters to such people, and it doesn’t make them bigots or xenophobes. It means they want to feel that that they have a connection to the people they call their fellow citizens.

A second way in which national identity has been an appealing electoral slogan is as a counterforce to the societal disruption of identity politics, which, as many have noted, was partly responsible for the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election. Her Democratic Party had come to be seen as the party representing only a variety of minority groups, neglecting both the self-perceived “mainstream” population (white, straight, American-born men) and the idea of one united American nation. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens identified a commonality among populations of different countries electing illiberal governments. They were all protesting “the ideology of ‘them before us’: of the immigrant before the native-born; of the global or transnational interest before the national or local one; of racial or ethnic or sexual minorities before the majority . . .”

And then, finally, we have the perception of transnational “elites” working to empower and enrich each other, at the expense of “ordinary people.” Certainly, many British supporters of Brexit feel that that is a fair description of the EU—as do French supporters of Le Front National, Austrian supporters of the Freedom Party, and Italian voters who back the League. It is a perception eagerly fed by populist leaders selling illiberal nationalism: “Brussels cares about perpetuating its own bureaucracy; it doesn’t care about you, the indigenous, hard-working Brit/Frenchman/Austrian.” A variation on the same theme was enlisted by Trump’s successful Presidential campaign. In this case, the message was that traditional politicians of both parties (Trump’s initial triumph was over his fellow Republicans in the primaries) put “the elites” first; Trump would put “America First.” Here, “the elites” include Wall Street bankers, the “Washington establishment,” and a network of multinational organizations which take from the United States and exploit its generosity without giving back (note, for example, Trump’s attack on NATO—unprecedented for a U.S. presidential candidate).

In both the European and the American cases, much of this (admittedly winning) rhetoric was overblown, historically selective, or just plain dishonest. And specifically what worked was its appeal to a kind of populist nationalism. Here is Trump at his inauguration: “January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.” And here is Viktor Orban’s “State of the Nation” address earlier this year, enjoining Hungarians to “stand up again for our Hungarian identity, for our Christian identity, protect our families and communities, and also protect our freedom.” “Protect” from whom? From the EU’s decadent supra-nationalism and from sinister liberal globalists like George Soros (a Jew, of course).

Of all the new populist nationalists, Orban has been the most explicit in rejecting liberalism. He has himself defined his project as creating an “illiberal new state based on national foundations.” For him, as for others of his ilk, the “illiberal” and the “national” go together. Liberalism is the ideological weapon of the hated cosmopolitans, identity politics-pushers, and those dastardly “elites.”

And these associations—illiberal with nationalist, liberal with internationalist—are also parroted by many on the other side of the debate. It’s a sentiment that has gone mainstream. But it obscures a possible way out of our current political quandary. Instead, a liberal nationalist politics is possible—an approach that looks to transcend identity politics whilst safeguarding the civil rights of every individual, protecting against racial, gender, religious, or any other “group” inequality. Tony Blair, for example, has been an outspoken advocate for a second referendum on Brexit, decrying nationalism in the process. However, as prime minister, he was hugely successful at marrying liberal principles to an unapologetic British national pride. He would have called it patriotism rather than nationalism, but for our purposes, it is a distinction without a difference.

Liberalism and nationalism are distinct ways of thinking about politics and society. Today they are more often than not presumed to be opposing ideologies; the more nationalist one is, the less liberal, and vice versa. Liberal nationalism rejects this as a false dichotomy.

It does this first and foremost by recognizing that politics is not theoretical. Real politics is about tradeoffs and living with the tension of sometimes competing values. Every government must, for example, choose how to balance freedom and security; the freest societies in the world also restrict individual freedom through laws enforced by police to protect the lives and property of their citizens. Similarly, in market economies, tax policy usually boils down to where the line is drawn between two fundamental desires of the state: to ensure that working citizens can earn a fair reward for their labor and do with their earnings as they wish; and to collect taxes to fund public services and welfare provision. The balance between more nationalist and more liberal policies works the same way. Liberal nationalism does more than claim that the two concepts can co-exist; it argues that they should, that both are strengthened and given added value by the other.

In 1993, Professor David Miller, a British defender of nationalism, set out three useful propositions with which to define it in an effort to counter the prevailing notion of nationalism as inherently illiberal.

First, he posits that national identity is a legitimate, natural, and understandable component of personal identity: “A person who in answer to the question ‘Who are you?’ says ‘I am Swedish’ or ‘I am Italian’ . . . is not saying something that is irrelevant or bizarre.”

Next, he explains how nations are “ethical communities.” That is to say, national boundaries are legitimately ethical boundaries. There is nothing unnatural or unethical (and therefore decidedly not racist or xenophobic) about feeling a particular responsibility to, and connection with, one’s fellow national citizens or kinfolk. (More recently, the philosopher Kwame Appiah referred to something similar in his description of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” a universalist moral disposition that nevertheless recognizes the power and utility of “belonging.”)

Miller’s third proposition is that “people who form a national community in a particular territory have a good claim to political self-determination”—whether through a sovereign state or some other political arrangement that recognizes their distinctiveness and allows for a degree of autonomy.

What of liberalism? At the heart of liberal nationalism is the idea that nations are made up of individuals with absolute, inherent rights (or, to quote a somewhat seminal political document, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”). A liberal national state, therefore, combines an unapologetic preservation of, and reverence for, national symbols and traditions, with an absolute commitment to liberal democratic principles.

This is important particularly when we are juxtaposing it with the illiberal nationalism of Hungary or Poland—or indeed of the American alt-right ideologues who promoted Donald Trump. These “liberal democratic principles” can be broadly defined as

regular free and fair elections;
protections for minority rights anchored in a constitution (or equivalents, like Israel’s Basic Laws);
the rule of law including an independent judiciary; and
freedom of speech, worship, press, and association guaranteed to all citizens.

In Hungary and Poland, the two EU member states whose governments have moved furthest from these ideals, items (3) and (4) have been undermined (more decisively in Hungary, but Poland is moving in the same direction quite deliberately, with its principal ideologue Jaroslaw Kaczynski declaring as early as 2011 that he was “convinced that the day will come when we will have Budapest in Warsaw”). The courts have been packed with judges loyal to the regimes; journalists critical of their governments have been fined financial penalties or fired; media companies have been bought out by regime loyalists. As we will no doubt see, free and fair elections and minority protections will also suffer as part of a domino effect. Other political parties will not be able to compete fairly in the new regime-dominated media environment; minorities will not be able to rely on the protection of the judicial system or on NGOs, which have also been under assault in both countries.

The importance of an independent judiciary in a liberal democracy cannot be overstated. It stands as perhaps the single greatest obstacle to a populist overthrow of liberal democracy. Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin (a self-described liberal nationalist), writing 25 years before he ascended to power, described this scenario with impressive precision:

An elected parliamentary majority could be a tool in the hands of a governing clique and a cover for its tyranny. Therefore, a people that chooses free elections must establish its rights vis-a-vis the parliament lest a majority tramples those rights. This can only be achieved through the supremacy of the law—that is by enshrining civil liberties in a basic or higher law and granting a panel of judges the authority to revoke the validity of any law that runs counter to the basic law and contravenes civil liberties.

The populist claim against a judiciary is that it is unelected and therefore “undemocratic”—a definitional sleight-of-hand that ignores the need for a branch of government that is necessarily not dependent on the popular will, and that can render judgments according to the values of individual equality and civil rights without having to consider majority opinion. Nowhere is this more important in fact than in democratic nation-states where the will of the majority will inevitably at times impinge on the rights of minority citizens who are not part of the nation in question (for example, Arabs in Israel, Turks in Germany, or Russians in almost every former post-Soviet country). Their rights can only be protected by the unelected guardians of a liberal constitution.

So if we are looking to liberal nationalism to answer the question posed by illiberal nationalism, must a liberal nationalist state be a liberal democratic state? The short answer is that liberal nationalism requires democracy in order to function as it should. Liberalism itself is at its best and at its most effective in concert with democracy. The nationalism that liberal nationalists are looking to promote can only really operate in a system where citizens of a nation-state feel involved in civic life and empowered to influence politics.

Contrast this with illiberal nationalism, which manifests as an authoritarian populism. The leader presents himself as representing “the people” (“I am your voice,” Trump told his supporters at the Republican Convention in 2016). But only the leader can channel their needs and desires, and only he will determine what is the truth and what is “fake news.” “The people” meanwhile is never all the people. Those who don’t support the leader are “them,” not “us,” and specific groups in the society will be scapegoated as the archetypal “other”—ethnic minorities, opposition voices.

Further down the road, illiberal nationalism can descend into something closer to out-and-out dictatorship: The purveyors of “fake news” are the enemy and so must be closed down, independent bodies like courts and cultural institutions are perverting “the popular will” and so must be brought to heel and follow the dictates of the leader. What begins as illiberal democracy, with the leader—at least ostensibly—fulfilling the will of the masses who elected him, will become authoritarianism once the leader decides that the people who elected him will not allow him to go as far as he wishes towards his goals. By this point, the checks and balances that would have protected the people’s civil and democratic rights in the face of a lawless government no longer exist.

The rise of populism has as much, if not more, to do with national identity and social cohesion as it does with economic issues. Liberal nationalism answers the clear need for recognition of national identity as a force for communal solidarity. You do not have to be a Brexit supporter to appreciate that many Europeans reject the assumption of a pan-European identity at the expense of their national one. The Greeks do not see themselves as superior to the French, and they may well greatly value a close relationship with France, but they don’t want to be told that there is nothing unique and precious about Greek heritage, history, and language. They don’t want to be told that they are essentially indistinguishable from the French as a people.

What is critical is that liberal nationalism can foment an inclusive nationalism, one in which citizens of a country are encouraged to feel part of a shared future in a social and political project (liberal democracy), united by values rooted in their nation’s tradition. It means that Polish liberal democracy will not look exactly like Indian liberal democracy. Their traditions are different. They will celebrate different holidays; there will be differences of emphasis in the way their societies function; religion will play a different role in national life; the messy compromises that typify democracy will be resolved in different ways. But both will have free and fair elections; both will observe the rule of law; both will have constitutional protections guaranteeing equal individual rights for all citizens; and both will have freedom of speech including a free press with the right (and indeed the responsibility) to criticize the government and all elected officials.

This inclusive nationalism will not only answer the impulses associated with the right, but the identity politics coming from the left, which seek to divide citizens into their component social groups based on ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexuality. The liberal nationalist tells them that they do not need to dissolve the bonds of national identity in order to achieve equality and justice. If we look to the United States, where this response from the left is most prevalent, earlier generations of civil rights activists teach the liberal nationalist lesson rather well. One can go back 60 years to Martin Luther King, or 160 years to Frederick Douglass, and find American national values invoked as the solution to the problem of racism and (in Douglass’s case) slavery. Both men chose not to adopt the separatism of Linda Sarsour or Black Lives Matter, which in important ways helped feed the resentment of sections of the white majority that voted in significant numbers for Trump. Both men saw in the foundational document of the country, the Declaration of Independence, the founding liberal idea of equality which should be and could be the heart of an American national identity that insisted on social justice and civil rights.

If we look at Europe, where the rise of authoritarian nationalism is tied so closely to questions of immigration and the rejection of the open borders policy of Angela Merkel, liberal nationalism makes two important promises. Firstly, it acknowledges that the nation is a geographically-bounded community, and that control of borders is a very real, very legitimate part of national sovereignty. Secondly, whilst it guarantees equal rights for minorities it also demands from them that they sign up to the national values of the state in question. This latter point is crucial in the European context, where fears about the “Islamification” of European cities are stoked not just by rightwing provocateurs and white nationalists, but also by a complacent political mainstream for whom “multiculturalism” sometimes means a disastrous tolerance for bigotry and violence in the name of minority rights.

The attitudes of Muslims in Europe are frequently at odds with mainstream, western liberal positions on issues such as free speech, women’s rights, gay rights, and anti-Semitism. In Britain, one survey found that 52 percent of Muslims believe homosexuality should be illegal, 39 percent believe women should always obey their husbands, and 35 percent believe “Jewish people have too much power in Britain.” This compares to 22 percent, 5 percent, and 8 percent respectively of non-Muslim British citizens. All too often, the only politicians sounding the alarm about this anti-liberal culture within European societies are authoritarian populists—the Orbans and Le Pens claiming to be protecting “western civilization” from Islam. In Germany, voters worried about Merkel’s open-door asylum policy have turned en masse to the far-right AfD Party—particularly after the events of New Year’s Eve 2015, when mobs of immigrants and refugees from the Middle East perpetrated mass, coordinated sexual assaults on hundreds of women across the country. The AfD, previously inconsequential in German politics, it is now leading the polls in certain parts of the country. The reason is crystal clear: Many ordinary Germans feel deeply uneasy about Merkel’s decision and no one from the mainstream right- or left-wing parties had been willing to criticize it.

Contrast Germany with its northwestern neighbor Holland, where Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte successfully defeated his country’s resurgent illiberal nationalist party, the Party for Freedom, in 2017 by refusing to go along with this appeasement of anti-western cultures. He stated in the election campaign that immigrants who “refuse to adapt, and who criticize our values,” should “behave normally, or go away.” Liberal nationalism insists on precisely this kind of contract between the nation-state and citizens from minority communities. The “liberal” element means that citizens who are not part of the national majority receive all of the same individual rights and protections as everyone else in the state. The “national” element means that there is a national identity that defines the state and informs certain values and societal norms, and all citizens are required to respect those values and norms.

Nationalist leaders promise that they will “put our country first.” There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this notion. But the danger is that illiberal nationalists are selling an extremely narrow definition of the national interest—one that is necessarily defined against an external threat. The nationalism of European politicians such as Orban in Hungary, Marine Le Pen in France, or Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland has a hatred of the European Union at its very center. Their “put our country first” is explicitly a rebuke of the EU’s alleged interference in their sovereignty. Nowhere has this line been more successful than in Britain, where it was pushed way beyond the limits of fact and accuracy by skillful rabble-rousers like Nigel Farage.

Meanwhile, Trump’s “America First” campaign slogan was an echo of earlier American isolationism. It posits globalization as the enemy of American interests, with foreign relations presented as zero-sum interactions, where if the United States “gives” its resources, someone else is doing all the taking, and the U.S. inevitably loses out. An Economist essay published shortly after Trump’s election victory contrasted “America First” with the “civic nationalism” of earlier U.S. Presidents:

At its best, [nationalism] unites the country around common values to accomplish things that people could never manage alone. This “civic nationalism” is conciliatory and forward-looking. . . . Mr Trump’s populism is a blow to civic nationalism. Nobody could doubt the patriotism of his post-war predecessors, yet every one of them endorsed America’s universal values and promoted them abroad. . . . Mr. Trump threatens to weaken that commitment even as ethnic nationalism is strengthening elsewhere.

In the American system, the President wields great power as the exclusive holder of executive authority. But even in parliamentary democracies, the leader of a country can choose to follow the whims, wishes, and all-too-human prejudices of those who elected them, or to follow, in the arresting phrase of perhaps America’s greatest President, the better angels of their nature.

As we have seen in recent years, populists whip up resentment and bigotry ahead of elections, and then inevitably look to enact the policies that will please their voters. By contrast, liberal nationalist leaders will appeal to national pride, revering the customs and memory that unite the nation, whilst ensuring that certain red lines are not crossed in the name of nationalism. This may mean standing against the will of the majority, supported by the institutions that protect the liberal values of the state, such as the judiciary (not incidentally, the same institutions demonized by the populists as “the establishment elites”).

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the quintessential liberal nationalist Zionist, believed that a country should be composed of free individuals, who might choose (and it would have to be a free choice) to surrender part of their individual freedom for the sake of their country in certain circumstances. But the individual came first. Human freedom and dignity were paramount.

What Jabotinsky also understood instinctively was that liberal countries worked best when citizens felt a sense of kinship with each other, and that therefore the ideal liberal state was a nation-state. The wisdom of this truth has become ever more pertinent since the establishment of the modern welfare state—which was perhaps also in Jabotinsky’s thinking, as he was an early advocate for universal state provision of fundamental services like healthcare and education. He would doubtless have appreciated that such a concept relies on citizens being willing to hand over a portion of their income each month in order to assist fellow citizens that they have never, and in most cases will never, meet.

Jabotinsky, like Theodore Herzl before him, was active at a time when nationalism was a profoundly progressive idea. It was the engine liberating peoples from the yoke of foreign rule and empire, and it was the unifying force that gave the freedom of sovereignty to diffuse or dispersed communities that shared a history, a language, and much else besides. But by the time the 20th century had entered its fourth decade, nationalism was becoming illiberal, exclusivist, and aggressive. What followed was unimaginable brutality perpetrated in the name of nationalist ideologies. The enshrining of liberal values by international institutions and many a national constitution in the post-war period was done with the horrors of fascism and Nazism in mind. The return of intolerant, chauvinistic nationalism in our own time, in Europe in particular, is a sign that memories are far too short. We have seen this play out before and we would do well not to underestimate the danger of the moment.

Nevertheless, that earlier, progressive phase of nationalism was liberal in the classical sense. We can best fight against resurgent authoritarian nationalism, not by rejecting nationalism itself, but by embracing nationalism’s liberal heritage. Liberal nationalism is not the contradiction in terms that it may sound to modern ears. It is the most effective manifestation of liberal democracy; it answers the clear human need for connection and solidarity, embracing the history, customs, and culture that unite a people, while guaranteeing that all citizens have individual rights. It is a rebuke to the populist nationalists of today who seek to divide their societies into “our people” and “the other,” and it denies them their authoritarian goals by insisting on independent national institutions that act as checks and balances on the governing majority, protecting essential liberal values such as free expression, the rule of law, and minority rights.

We know we must protect liberal democracy, not only because it has produced previously inconceivable prosperity and freedom (though it has), and not because it is perfect (it is not). We know we must protect liberal democracy because we have seen the alternatives offered by both right and left. And they led humanity into the abyss. There is no panacea for the new strain of authoritarianism currently plaguing so many democratic states. But a substantial dose of liberal nationalism could be the decisive element in defeating the disease.

The post The Case for Liberal Nationalism appeared first on The American Interest.

Imagined Ideologies

Recently, I came across an unexpected item in an artsy and hip San Francisco store. It was a lapel pin shaped like the state of California. Laying among the store’s many quirky curios, the pin seemed to be a response to the American flag lapel that has become a symbol of national politics, a sartorial signifier of spiritual secession. If California is emblematic of the coastal resistance to Trump’s White House, this pin was a literal emblem of blue state anti-federalism. There were only three left in a dish that must once have contained dozens. 

Conventional wisdom would see the California lapel pin as a symptom of ideological polarization. I suspect it symbolizes both much less and much more. Less, because Americans—whether in San Francisco or South Carolina—are not especially ideologically polarized. More, because we are deeply divided, not in terms of ideology or policy preferences, but in terms of how we conceive of and identify our political communities. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, Americans are not especially ideologically polarized because most Americans are not especially ideologically committed. All, apart from a handful of professional theorists and propagandists, are ideologically eclectic, especially with respect to the stylized left-right ideological spectrum of partisan politics. Hence the need to complicate the assignment of stereotypical ideological views with endless hyphenations: the socially conservative-economically liberal rust-belt labor union member; the socially liberal-economically conservative Silicon-Valley venture capitalist. 

Indeed, partisan divisions do not reflect coherent ideologies but rather contingent and opportunistic coalitions. There is no ideological logic that joins, for instance, environmental activism and support for an expanded welfare state, sexual liberation and support for organized labor, a commitment to conventional sexual morality and opposition to the regulation of firearms, resistance to immigration and opposition to abortion. Far from being ideologues, most Americans are a combination of pragmatic and sentimental. This makes for an eclectic, often unpredictable and occasionally volatile blend of ideas and commitments. In the pragmatic mode, Americans are results-oriented and impatient with abstractions, favoring the straightforward path to a goal and the uncomplicated solution to a problem. This explains the willingness of many voters to abandon the ideal of free trade for the expedient of punitive tariffs, to reject the ideal of a fiscal austerity and balanced budgets in favor of tax cuts and ballooning deficits, and to sacrifice the abstract and too-often unrealized virtues of market competition in favor of the directness of state-run universal health care. In the sentimental mode, Americans put affective satisfaction above practicality and conceptual or moral coherence, which is why the often maudlin character of conservative anti-abortion activism can coexist with callous disregard for human lives destroyed by poverty or cut short by unwarranted police violence—and why liberal sympathy for the homeless coexists with an adamant resistance to new housing construction.

Our polarization is not ideological in the sense of reflecting deep-seated and considered differences in policy preferences or true philosophical conviction; instead, it is largely imagined. This is not to say it is imaginary: What I mean rather is that Americans differ markedly in how they imagine the world, their affective communities, and their place in them. It is increasingly commonplace to remark that American politics resembles a team sports rivalry, with raucous rallies, mascot names (Bernie Bros v. Trump’s Deplorables), group colors (red and blue, of course), branded gear (the MAGA hat was, in retrospect, a masterstroke), and, most of all, extra-rational, emotional investments. But what accounts for these affiliations? In sports, the answer is usually a geographic or institutional affiliation, which we can imagine stands in for more substantive connections: I root for Stanford, the Giants, and the 49ers because I am a Stanford alumnus and Professor and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. These connections join me in an imagined community with thousands of other people I have never met and know nothing about. To the extent I feel affinity for them, it is because I am given information—or what seems like information—about them indirectly, through media reports and through institutional rituals that encourage me to focus selectively on the traits that resonate with my own experience, and ignore what doesn’t appeal to me. 

The same is true for national communities. The historian Benedict Anderson points out that European national consolidation in the 19th century involved the active creation of imagined communities. Nationalism taught people who were embedded in distinctive local customs and spoke disparate regional dialects that they were all citizens or subjects of a larger nation-state. It did so through the dissemination of maps that depicted the territory of the nation (today we can recognize the territory of California in a lapel pin as a direct consequence of this cartographic signaling), through national media that informed citizens of the affairs of state and events in distant parts of the nation, through museums that displayed artifacts of national significance, telling a story of the nation and creating the elements of a unified national culture, and through standardization of languages, which demoted quotidian regional dialects and elevated a formal, unified “mother tongue.” When the project was successful, the Patriot was born—someone with primary allegiance to the nation-state, not from self-interest and not even because of principled agreement with any given policy or governmental arrangement, but because the nation had become a constitutive force in personal identity. “My country, right or wrong” is an exaggerated version of this ideologically indifferent patriotism; a less extreme version is on display every time a citizen feels morally bound by laws or political processes he or she disagrees with. 

Lawyers and political philosophers often suggest that a commitment to “the rule of law,” rights, or a specific political system defines national communities. For Americans, this might be a dedication to the Constitution, a Republican form of government, the Bill of Rights, or representative democracy. But most Americans are remarkably ignorant of these commitments. When the President claims an “absolute right” to control the Department of Justice or defy a Congressional subpoena, one needs to have a good sense of the importance of the separation of powers and the independence of administrative agencies operating within the Executive Branch to assess the claim. Few people have such knowledge, and absent this, most will accept an answer that corresponds to their partisan prejudices. Norms don’t determine loyalties; loyalties determine norms—a fact that Trump has aggressively exploited. 

Worse yet for a national community based on shared political ideals, many Americans are ignorant of even well-established core ideological values and actually reject them when queried: For instance, numerous surveys demonstrate that many Americans do not know what the Bill of Rights consists of and oppose many of its specific provisions. Moreover, even where there is awareness of ideals and agreement on them in the abstract, because political ideals are abstract and vague, they are subject to multiple interpretations and profound differences in emphasis. Most Americans venerate “the Constitution,” but for some it stands for divided and limited government; for others, a progressive interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of Equal Protection or rights of reproductive freedom; and for others still, a specific and controversial interpretation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Widespread ignorance of institutional arrangements combined with multiple interpretations of—and in some cases outright opposition to—foundational political ideals suggest these cannot be what joins a nation. Instead, what unites is a more visceral sense of connection—one that, tragically, can include race in its most retrograde form, or culture in its more inclusive variations. A shared cultural imagination is the most promising alternative to an ideology of racial exclusion. Indeed, a long-standing strategy of racial justice—one which President Barack Obama epitomized—has been to replace racial solidarity with a sense of shared values, norms, sensibilities, and aesthetics. Sometimes, this strategy involves what some on the left now imprudently deride as “the politics of respectability:” For instance, civil rights protestors in the 1960s wore their Sunday best in order to confound racial stereotypes and signal that they shared the values and norms of American society. Other times, it involves evoking widely embraced multiracial cultural expressions such as jazz, which diplomats and the military have made into a global ambassador of American culture since World War I, or, more recently, hip-hop, as when Obama responded to an insult by brushing off his shoulder, a wry reference to a gesture popularized by Jay-Z. An obligatory citation here is the musical Hamilton, which reimagines the birth of America as a multiracial and multicultural story, centering the action in the quintessentially cosmopolitan city of New York instead of the more culturally provincial New England that features most prominently in conventional histories. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s New York City is the cradle of an imagined America, an alternative myth to that of the heartland or the frontier that still informs the worldview of many Americans. 

One could, of course, dispute whether or not America has a shared culture, and if so what it consists in. But this is beside the point because no one ever encounters the totality of a national community—we experience only tiny, selected fractions of it, through our limited social and professional interactions and through the curated images of the press, the culture industries, and, increasingly (often disastrously), social media. As Anderson insists, national communities are to be judged, “not by their falsity or genuineness but by the style in which they are imagined.” 

Of course, shared ideals and policy preferences matter, but they must always come clothed in the less abstract and less analytical garb of cultural and aesthetic practices that can inspire us to imagine a community we can never really know or experience. This is more than propaganda; it is an indispensable part of any national project and no one serious about politics can afford to eschew it as trivial. Whether MAGA Hats, pussy hats, Sunday go-to-meeting suits, or Black Power Afros, symbols and images can unite or divide more effectively than any political philosophy or ideal. Liberals sneer at Trump’s Space Force uniforms or plans to promote neo-classical architecture to their peril—he understands the power of imagined community better than anyone currently in national politics, and his mastery in this respect may well outweigh his profound faults and misdeeds on election day. Our current division is not ideological; it is imagined. That does not make it any less consequential, but it does suggest that the way to heal it lies as much in the domain of the symbolic and expressive as in the world of principle and policy. 

The post Imagined Ideologies appeared first on The American Interest.

Will Capitalism Survive Bernie—and Democracy, Trump?

TAI’s Jeffrey Gedmin and Charles Davidson recently sat down with William A. Galston and William Kristol  to discuss the 2020 election and the future of American politics . This interview has  been edited for length and clarity.

Charles Davidson for TAI: A primary focus of ours at The American Interest is to contribute to the renewal of a broad, healthy political center. Do you think this is possible in the context of our current polarization? How would we advance such an agenda?

William Kristol: As John McCain liked to say, “It’s always darkest before it turns pitch black.” It’s dark and getting darker, but dawn really could be over the horizon. We might need a shock—like the 2020 election campaign—to teach Americans the importance of having a real center. I’m actually with the optimistic side. I think it’s not at all hopeless.

The one caution I would make is that we can’t merely go back to something that was. We might therefore think about constructing a new center as opposed to renewing it. There are important reforms to be made, but I’ve become somewhat radicalized over the last few years in believing that we need to think anew. We need to take a fresh look at the parties, at Congress, and at our civic institutions and the media. And maybe people will be spurred to that by this bad situation we now find ourselves in.

William A. Galston: I would add to the sources of hope. There’s a lot of evidence for the proposition that although the American people are more polarized than they used to be, they are not as polarized as the political parties have become. Our institutions now have the effect not of mirroring the sentiments of the country, but of exacerbating them at the expense of the center, which continues to exist. I am hopeful that with appropriate leadership, there could be a very different thrust to our politics in the years to come. It’s not going to happen instantaneously, but American history suggests that when the majority of the American people want something, eventually, they get it.

Jeff Gedmin for TAI: What’s broken in America, fundamentally? Is it chiefly culture, or is it a problem with our institutions?

WAG: We have cultural divisions, there’s no question about that. But we may also be in a Madisonian moment where artful institution redesign could make a significant difference. Congress is by far the weakest of our public institutions. And the weakness of Congress has had the effect of inducing the other branches of government to expand their power beyond due constitutional bounds. So, job number one is to ask, given the limits imposed by public opinion and by our party system, what can be done to renew Congress as a functioning institution?

I’ll give you an example. The budget process is clearly broken. We are operating with a Budget Act that was passed in 1974. It was extremely effective in dealing with the problems of its day, but new problems have arisen, and we haven’t revisited the way we make fundamental fiscal decisions in this country. We should, and we can.

Here’s another example. After a period in which new media were in effect functioning in a Wild West legal environment, where people made their own rules, there’s been a growing realization—including among the Big Tech companies—that the unregulated market has had negative economic and political consequences. I noted with interest that Facebook recently came out with a proposed framework for content regulation, which was not a topic they were willing to broach at all a few years ago. Change is afoot, and it’s not occurring as quickly as anybody would like, but I think it will be positive.

WK: Bill and I are both political scientists, so maybe we have an interest in asserting that politics can make a fundamental difference. But I do think that’s the case. There’s too much cultural, economic, and sociological determinism floating around. Obviously a lot of intelligent things have been written about the economic dislocations of globalization, automation, and the technological revolution, and those things are awfully important. But I think the intelligent political design of institutions, as Bill said, and flat-out leadership, matter a lot.

The public’s always going to have mixed views, different anxieties and resentments. But I don’t know that the public is much worse than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. In some ways it may be better. It’s leadership that’s been failing.

TAI: Why are we producing such poor leaders, then?

WK: Some of it’s just bad luck and chance. One can get too deterministic about this. I mean, look at Britain in the 1930s: Sometimes, fantastic leadership only emerges when the bad leaders are stuffed aside by events.

I do think the primary process is an obvious problem. Demagogues have always became senators and governors in American history, but there were a lot of checks to prevent them from becoming the actual nominee of one of the two major parties. In that respect, it’s the primary system combined with celebrity culture combined with media incentives combined with some fluke of bad luck, in terms of Trump having unique name recognition and a particularly advantageous candidate to run against, which together produced this situation. It needn’t have happened in 2016. The same system was in place in 2012 but it produced Romney and Ryan on the Republican side and Obama and Biden on the Democratic side.

I do think if we get a Trump-Sanders matchup in 2020, that really is a moment when you can see both parties going down a European path, where the normal establishments have utterly lost control. It hasn’t really happened before in American politics where the two parties nominate someone—Trump in 2016, Sanders in 2020—who has such little support from elected officials in the party. I’m not even making a value judgment, I’m just saying that analytically it’s kind of unbelievable. No governor supports Sanders, for instance.

WAG: I’ve believed for a long time that we were playing with fire when we converted our primary system to one in which the votes of a relatively small slice of the electorate would determine the choices available to Americans in each presidential election. Now the inherent flaws of that system have become even more apparent. This is another institutional “reform” like the 1974 Budget Act that was devised at a particular time in our history to address a particular set of circumstances, which are a half-century old. We now face new problems and our system of presidential selection has developed new pathologies and we have to respond to them with real institutional creativity.

Many of my colleagues are thinking about ways of introducing a greater measure of what they call “peer review” into the system. This, obviously, challenges the retreat of the Democratic Party from superdelegates. It is entirely possible that the changes to the system in recent years have all headed in the wrong direction.

TAI: It seems to us that there’s a split among anti-Trump analysts. One group says that while Trump is ghastly, our democratic institutions are fundamentally still strong and holding; the other thinks the assault on democratic norms and institutions is taking its toll. Where do you both come out on this?

WAG: It’s my view that the past three years have represented a stress test for our institutions. So far, they are mostly intact. But I’m not alone in worrying what they would be like if the system had to endure eight years of Donald Trump and not just four. We’ve already seen what happens when the President feels unbound and vindicated. And getting re-elected, I think, would be the ultimate liberation for President Trump.

He clearly has a very expansive view of executive power. He believes that the Madisonian lines separating the different branches of government are not lines that he is bound to respect. James Madison famously defined tyranny as the concentration of all powers—legislative, executive, and judicial—in a single set of hands. I don’t think that Mr. Trump would be able to achieve that in full measure, but it’s clear that that’s where he would like to go. You can see that not only by observing his actions, but also by paying attention to what he says, particularly when he enviously praises foreign leaders who’ve achieved a greater measure of concentration than he has.

I think there is cause for deep concern. The rule of law matters. The integrity of the judicial system matters. Respect for legislative prerogative matters. What we’re discovering is that our constitutional system is actually a lot more loose-jointed than we often suppose it to be. Many of the practices that we take for granted were forms of self-restraint never written into law or regulation, let alone the Constitution. We are discovering the hard way what happens when there’s a chief executive who really doesn’t care much about customary restraints, sometimes called norms, and who looks at the powers at his disposal and asks himself, “How far can I push things in order to get what I want?”

The answer is pretty far. We’ve found out, for example, that over the past four or five decades Congress has made more than 100 grants of emergency power to the Executive Branch. Many of them have long outlived their usefulness; others should never have been granted in the first place. We’re discovering that a sufficiently determined chief executive can use them, for example, to redeploy funds over the objection of the Congress of the United States, which is supposed to have the sole power of appropriation. These are all troubling signs.

WK: I think that’s right. Let me just add, one could have imagined a happy scenario when Trump first got elected. He doesn’t have respect for norms, doesn’t understand institutions, assumes he can run America like a private business, but in this scenario he comes to realize that the White House is different from Trump Tower, that the Oval Office has its own set of responsibilities. He has people around him who enforce a lot of norms, both informal and formal, and he accepts that and learns from it. That would be the story of someone who runs as a demagogue, but is moderated by the office, by his staff, and by Congress. That is not what has happened, but it wasn’t entirely crazy, in November 2016, to think that could happen, and a lot of people explicitly hoped it would.

The other extreme scenario, of course, was that Trump would be able to totally run roughshod over everything—no pushback from the military when he wants the brass to go after an individual officer, no pushback from the Justice Department, in terms of firing Mueller or now intervening in individual criminal prosecutions. We’re not in the worst case. There was a fair amount of pushback and there remains a fair amount of institutional resistance to Trump. But there’s less than there was three years ago, especially in the Executive Branch, and much less in Congress than we could have expected. Much, much, much less in the Republican Party than one could have expected.

Luckily in America, the head of the Executive Branch of the federal government is not all powerful. But I do think that things are getting worse, not better. A lot of these institutional restraints have been chipped away and the people now running these institutions don’t believe in them much, if at all. And I very much agree with Bill that eight years will make it much worse.

WAG: Let me just add a word to that, looking beyond our shores. Everything I read confirms what I hear privately, especially from Europeans: If Mr. Trump is re-elected, they will be forced to conclude that postwar America no longer exists—that they’re in a totally new situation where they’re not going to be able to rely on American leadership, where they will disagree with us at least as frequently as they agree, where they will have to think about fending for themselves in a context in which they’re not very strong, frankly, and will probably end up making all sorts of compromises with the Chinese on the economic front and the Russians on the political front. The White House’s belief that we don’t need friends, that the world can be run as an endless series of bilateral transactions, will end by leaving us alone in the world at precisely the time when we need all the help we can get to counter a rising China. This is deeply worrying.

TAI: Bill Kristol, you mentioned that there’s too much determinism in our analysis of Trump. But, overall, in terms of the mentality in our country, is there some sort of authoritarian temptation we’re suffering?

WK: I think so, yes. The good news is that people have recognized that temptation many times in the past. It can be beat back and overcome.

I don’t mean to minimize it. The weakening of various institutions that used to curb that temptation is pretty striking. On the one hand, one can say, “it’s not the Great Depression, it’s not Vietnam . . . why is this happening now, when we’re enjoying relative peace and prosperity?” On the other hand, between globalization, automation, and cultural transformation, I don’t think a sociologist would be that surprised, if he or she came down from Mars after 20 or 30 years, to be told, “You know what, it’s going to be disruptive and people are going to fall for various false, simple solutions to their problems.”

The heartening aspect of it, to me, is that we’ve been through things like this before and other countries have too. And it’s not clear how much we have an American problem as opposed to a Washington problem. I don’t fall into the trap of thinking everyone inside the Beltway is terrible, and outside it’s all wonderful. But state and local government do seem healthier than the Federal government. It doesn’t feel like the 1850s inside of many civic and religious institutions. Which isn’t to say, of course, that if the political institutions continue on the path they’re on, they won’t drag down state and local institutions as well.

WAG: One of the things that worries me most at this point is the growing alignment between politics and geography. This isn’t confined to the United States. Throughout the advanced democracies you have a widening gap between metropolitan areas and their suburbs—most of which are doing pretty well—on the one hand, and small towns and rural areas, most of which are stagnating and some of which are in outright decline (including demographically). This geographical cleavage, unfortunately, maps onto our political divisions. It’s not healthy when more and more people in our society feel completely uncomfortable unless they are living cheek-by-jowl with people who agree with their political ideas and preferences. That’s where we’ve been heading pretty steadily over the past 30 to 40 years.

It’s reached a point now where there really are two Americas with specific geographic locations. They don’t particularly like each other and they don’t even particularly understand each other. I don’t think it’s healthy if one political party aligns with one part of the nation’s geography and the other with the rest of the nation’s geography. The last time we had that, we ended up with the election of 1896, which at least for three decades resolved the tension. It’s not clear to me how we would get another election of 1896, but I think we need one.

TAI: If we end up with a Trump versus Sanders election, what are the biggest risks, and why? And then a footnote about the changing Democratic Party today: Some voices in its progressive wing have developed views toward Israel that might alarm some of us. What do you make of that trend?

WAG: First of all, Gallup just published a series of polls asking, “Would you vote for an X for president?” where they filled in the blank about 20 different ways. “Socialist” was the most unpopular option. A solid majority of the country said it would not vote for a socialist candidate. I think that has the ring of truth, so I don’t expect it to come to that. When the Democratic Party last went down this road in 1972 with George McGovern, the consequence was a defeat ringing enough that the next Democratic nominee was the most conservative Democrat to be nominated for President since the end of the 19th century. So I’d caution against linear thinking here.

Clearly, we are in difficult times for both parties. I can say with confidence that the forces are more evenly balanced in the Democratic Party. That said, there’s obviously a problem in the Democratic Party and part of it has to do with generational replacement. We have many young Democrats who have no memory of the Cold War, who were not alive during the near-death experience that Israel had in the Six-Day War, and who see the situation in the Middle East entirely through the prism of the Civil Rights struggle in the United States and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. That those are flawed lenses through which to see the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is not to gainsay their popularity in power. So, yes. There is a real problem.

WK: Yeah, I agree. The problems are different in both parties, but you look at Trump and Sanders and it does feel like something is going on that is analogous. It may fall short in one party, and that makes a huge difference: It matters whether you get 51% or 49% of the vote, and whether you win a nomination or lose a nomination. This is where I’m not too deterministic. But, on the other hand the fact that Sanders has such massive support among younger voters in general and younger Democrats in particular is pretty astonishing to me.

WAG: I actually disagree with that. I recently wrote a Wall Street Journal piece explaining why so many young people are supporting Bernie Sanders. If you simply ask the question, “If you’re 30 years old today, what have your formative experiences been?” the question almost answers itself. Because everything that’s happened to them since they were born has had the effect of preparing them to support somebody like Bernie Sanders.

WK: I’ll read the piece, but I don’t quite agree with that. The college-educated and non-college educated had very different experiences, for example. A lot of what’s happened since they were born might have told them that technological innovation is a pretty impressive thing, and probably happens more often when there are free markets, even if that has its own bad side effects. I wouldn’t have predicted, despite wage stagnation and poor prospects for the non-college educated, and even if they don’t remember the Cold War, that young people would be quite as enamored of Sanders’s message.

It’s also just that he’s a funny champion, right? In a way, AOC is a more obvious one, a young person emerging to speak for young people who’ve been neglected. But we are where we are. We have half of young Democrats loving Sanders and 90 percent of older Republicans loving Trump. So, two parts of our country are pretty enamored of people who are far from the mainstream.

TAI: What about Mike Bloomberg in all of this?

WK: Well, we’ll know more when people have a chance to vote for or against him. In a way it seems kind of crazy that a billionaire who’s been a Republican most of his public life suddenly gets in late and can possibly take the Democratic nomination. On the other hand, he was a good mayor of our largest city for 12 years. I think some of the coverage of Bloomberg is really unfair. I was struck by the messaging on TV the other day: “Well, another billionaire is showing up.” He’s not just another billionaire. He turned to public service—even leaving aside his philanthropy, which is quite impressive—and actually ran our largest city in challenging times in a very impressive way. So he’s not Tom Steyer, he’s not Howard Schultz. I’m not beating up on them, but they are literally billionaires who thought being a billionaire qualified them to run for office. It’s not fair to put Bloomberg in that category, I think.

WAG: I agree with that completely. But it is really striking: Each of the three people with the best chance of being inaugurated President on January 20th of next year has an ambiguous relationship with the party he’s vying to represent. Donald Trump is nobody’s idea of a lifetime Republican. Bernie has been a Democrat for about 10 percent of his adult life, and it’s always a fleeting attachment. And as for former Mayor Bloomberg, I’m not sure this is the first time he’s going to think of himself as a Democrat, but it might well be. It’s hard to interpret this as a sign that our two-party system is in good working order.

TAI: On foreign policy, is it fair to say that a much less interventionist consensus is emerging on the right and the left—or is this a blip? And second, it is now in fashion to talk about great power competition with China, Russia, and to some extent Iran. What are we getting right and what are we getting wrong?

WK: The American public is not crazy about foreign interventions, obviously. But I think the caricature that they’re wildly isolationist or ignorant is not fair either. They expect their leaders to know more than they do about these challenges, to think ahead and inform them about what they have to do. And in some ways they’ve been amazingly patient with leaders. If you think of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, not all these wars have gone so well. They’ve turned on those leaders to some degree, but less than one might have thought.

I think this is a case where you’ve had two presidents in a row who really ran against an interventionist foreign policy, and even against bipartisan foreign policy tradition. Obama did so in a qualified manner, while Trump was completely unabashed. I mean, he won the Republican nomination running against Bush and Romney, the most recent Republican president and nominee. That’s pretty unusual, actually. Parties usually produce a leader who is more or less in sync with the previous people that led the party. That really wasn’t the case with Trump, and somewhat wasn’t the case with Obama. It much more isn’t the case for Sanders.

For me, it’s a leadership issue. If you have presidents and nominees that don’t remind people of obligations and the consequences of acting and not acting, that has an effect on public opinion and on younger politicians. The incentive structure today is not what it was when Dick Luger or Sam Nunn were young politicians. Even Bill Clinton, as Governor of Arkansas, knew that you really couldn’t be president unless you showed an interest in foreign policy, so he educated himself and picked a VP nominee who had the credentials.

I don’t know how hard it will be to turn this trend around. But reality can wake us up pretty quickly, unfortunately.

WAG: On the one hand, all of the survey research that I’m aware of suggests that Americans understand viscerally that our alliances make us stronger, not weaker. Most Americans are not eager to stand alone in the world.

On the other hand, the experience of the past 20 years has certainly undermined American’s willingness to support land wars that seem to have no end—and in the case of Iraq, no rationale. To put it slightly differently, Americans are perfectly comfortable with the idea that almost seven decades after the war on the Korean Peninsula, we would still have tens of thousands of troops there. Similarly, although the dangers to Europe seem more remote, Americans have never seriously objected to the idea that we would have a continuing presence in Europe since the end of World War II.

But they are not willing to see their young men and women fight and die in what appear to be endless, pointless wars. My breath was taken away when Donald Trump the candidate started attacking his own party for its role in creating these wars. I really thought the party would rise up against him. It turns out he understood better what people were thinking than those who had been studying public opinion for a long time.

If someone other than Donald Trump takes office on January 20th, I don’t think that it will be difficult to persuade Americans that we need to return to our alliances with a renewed sense of purpose. I don’t think it will be that difficult to persuade Americans that staying out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was not the smartest thing we’ve ever done. I think more broadly, it will not be difficult to persuade Americans that the era of great power competition, which never completely went away, has now returned with somewhat different dramatis personae and that the need to address the challenge of a rising China, which is an economic challenge, a diplomatic challenge, and a military challenge, is unavoidable.

So, I’m not pessimistic, under the right kind of leadership, about the persistence of American foreign policy as a force for good in the world.

TAI: If you were advising 2020 candidates or the next Commander-in-Chief, how would you identify, let’s say, three to five top-line strategic priorities? And what about the domestic reform agenda?

WAG: Believing, as I do, that coming up with a comprehensive strategy to address the challenge of a rising China is job one, I’ve reached the conclusion that there’s nothing we can do through trade negotiations or other forms of diplomatic pressure to persuade the Chinese to abandon their aspiration to seize the commanding heights of the new technological economy, and to do so in very short order.

Therefore, we need something like a national defense economic mobilization which would create a strategic investment plan to allow us to be fully competitive with the Chinese in the next decade. I think it’s pretty clear that the market, left to its own devices, has not produced a plan for keeping us competitive. How is it possible that not a single American company seems to be able to compete with Huawei? I think the next Commander-in-Chief may have to enter the White House with a national investment plan that he or she is prepared to carry out.

That’s one top priority. It means, by the way, rethinking the defense budget in light of that overriding challenge. What are our aircraft carriers really worth in the context of this new, highly technologized military competition with China? It also means thinking through some really tough questions. If China increases military pressure on Taiwan, how far are we really prepared to go?

One of the things that attracts me to a national defense economic mobilization is that it also provides a new organizing principle for a substantial portion of domestic policy, because it puts the United States government in the position of affirmatively sponsoring, jump starting, capitalizing, and accelerating the processes of innovation which will not only enable us to be much more competitive at home, and shore up our defenses, but also provide a new generation of opportunity in the economy.

WK: For me, there are both great power challenges and what I’d call the challenge of chaos. In addition to focusing on how to deal with China and Russia, there’s a separate challenge in reminding Americans that a world in which chaos is kept to a minimum is a much better world, and much better for America, than one in which the institutions that check chaos—whether military, diplomatic, economic, or health institutions like the World Health Organization—are allowed to atrophy. We don’t want a world in which things are falling apart, because eventually that will have its effect at home.

I think there’s a need for the next President to remind America that we’re privileged to have the chance to shape this order, and it’s a burden but also a really great thing for the country—sort of a John Kennedy sense that this is something Americans can be proud of. I don’t think that’s likely going to happen in the next few years, unfortunately. It’s not “America First,” and it’s definitely not a Sanders foreign policy. It could be a Bloomberg or Amy Klobuchar or Pete Buttigieg foreign policy, though.

To close on an upbeat note, I do think that the worse things get, the more chance there is for fresh thinking institutionally. How does one regulate these new technologies, or use markets to shape them for the better rather than the worse? Or how do they influence markets for better and worse? As worrisome as things might be, it’s not a bad moment, intellectually, to be thinking about these fundamental challenges.

WAG: Let me return to the second half of your question. Apart from the commander-in-chief challenge, there’s a more exclusively domestic challenge which goes to the heart of the kind of country we want to be. There’s a widespread sense that the United States has become a less fluid society than it used to be: It has fewer opportunities for social and economic mobility; the circumstances of your birth are a little bit stickier and more determinative of where you end up. Some have charged that the upper-middle class has become a self-perpetuating meritocracy where advantage is passed down from one generation to the next.

Similarly, at the other end of the spectrum, you have the reproduction of disadvantage and poverty from generation to generation. I think these are serious concerns. The promise of America, after all, is the promise of being able to improve your circumstances through your own efforts and to provide better prospects for posterity, including your own children. If we’re not attending to that promise of American life, and if we’re not doing what we need to do in order to make sure that the mechanisms of mobility are alive and well, then I think we’re in danger of exacerbating the sort of social discontent and antipathy that we’ve seen so much in evidence through much of the 21st century in this country.

That’s a lot more food for thought, and it has implications for everything from early childhood education and training to acceptance patterns in our elite institutions of higher education. We have to rethink all this, I believe, quite comprehensively.

The post Will Capitalism Survive Bernie—and Democracy, Trump? appeared first on The American Interest.

No Time to Die

In April, the new James Bond movie will arrive upon a no doubt grateful world. Getting No Time To Die to release has been a convoluted process, involving multiple changes of director, writers, and plotlines, as well as painful accidents to the lead actor. An anachronism to some and part of the national landscape to others, the franchise is at an inflection point. An exercise in bespoke nostalgia whose future is opaque, the brand is torn between fidelity to an old but successful formula and embracing a transformation (a black or female Bond) that risks epic failure for contemporary relevance. As a metaphor for Britain’s contemporary geostrategic neurosis and the moment of reckoning we have reached with our oldest friends, the timing is exquisite.

Despite that regrettable disagreement in 1776, and subsequent conflicts and crises, Americans and Brits tend reflexively to downplay our divides. Charming eccentricities, the narcissism of small differences, shared values and visions have cemented the closest of relationships. Even if this conventional wisdom is more conventional than wise, it persists. But the moment may be upon us when gaping fissures suggest fundamental revision. Whatever sentimental attachment underpinned cold calculations of respective national interests is fast receding. A relationship in decline is about to be recast by a Britain deprived of European Union ties and a U.S. administration devaluing the Transatlantic alliance.

Despite Boris Johnson’s pledge to “get Brexit done” by formally leaving the European Union on January 31, 2020, the promised land of sovereign independence remains a work in progress. The transition period of “Phase II” is revealing less a buccaneering Global Britain than a diminished and divided union. Moreover, London and Washington appear ever more riven. In its core dimensions, the bilateral is tottering on a precipice. As Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) succinctly summarized the UK rejection of U.S. entreaties to exclude the People’s Republic of China from compromising its 5G network: “Here’s the sad truth: our special relationship is less special now that the UK has embraced the surveillance state commies at Huawei. During the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher never contracted with the KGB to save a few pennies.”

But it is not just Huawei forcing rethinks. Multiple pressures, some structural, others contingent, are at work. Unless one or both parties change direction fast, atrophy beckons—to the delight of our mutual adversaries. The ultimate irony is two-fold. First, increasing Anglo-American conflict is reminding Brits of their European affinities just as London is severing its continental bonds: philosophically “Anglo-Saxon,” operationally European. Second, hopes that Boris and Donald might salvage the partnership appear misplaced. Instead, the erstwhile conservative saviors are hastening its demise. Britain is slowly but steadily retreating from the global stage—neither Martian nor Venusian but directionless—adrift in the geostrategic ether betwixt and between what Robert Kagan once termed “paradise and power.” And an America trapped between leading and withdrawing from international order is left with one less dependable ally on which it could rely. Washington can plausibly afford that. But without the twin pillars of a strong relationship with America and EU membership, the world is looking a much more inhospitable place for Britain.

The Sources of British Conduct

Since World War II, the principal drivers of the bilateral were clear. For the United States, the UK offered a major, if declining, asset to amplify its global influence. London joined with Washington in New York (at the United Nations Security Council), Brussels (at NATO and the EU) and the U.S. capital itself (in the IMF, GATT and the WTO). Vietnam aside, the UK was typically at America’s side in the wars Washington fought, providing valuable political cover even when its forces were surplus to American requirements. In intelligence sharing through GCHQ and MI6, nuclear cooperation, diplomacy, trade, foreign direct investment, and multiple expressions of cultural exchange, the partnership achieved a breadth, depth and resilience with few precedents.

For Brits, the dynamics were self-evident to successive Conservative and Labour governments. Empire was done. The United States was dominant. In managing decline, London needed Washington for security, diplomatic, intelligence, and financial ballast. The British recognized that “if you aren’t at the table, you’re probably on the menu.” Unreconciled to Europe and nostalgic for its former strength, the UK took the only logical route forward. Although the least pro-American Prime Minister, Edward Heath, enthusiastically took Britain into the European Union in 1973, mainstream opinion never entertained drawing away from the United States. The mere suggestion was the province of cranks and extremists. If accommodation riled some as resembling sycophancy, such was the price of being chief deputy to the U.S. sheriff.

Despite antagonisms petty and profound, each partner proved more an asset than albatross to the other, calculations eased by the shared external threat of the Soviet Union. After the Cold War’s end, though, the foundations splintered. The notion that the UK could provide a “bridge” between Washington and Brussels eroded as the U.S. and EU pillars weakened. As Brexit showed, millions of Brits dislike the EU, if not Europe, while Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya left a distaste for interventionism. The UK now possesses neither the will nor wallet to project power, with its armed forces a shadow of their former selves. These trends pre-dated Johnson and Trump. But the two leaders are adding impetus to what historians may record as an inevitable parting of the ways.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Boris

On December 13, 2019, the British general election result saw Jeremy Corbyn, the most dim-witted but dangerous candidate for the highest office, comprehensively rejected in the Labour Party’s fourth consecutive defeat and its worst result since 1935. With the Tories winning 365 seats to Labour’s 203, Johnson secured an 80-seat House of Commons majority, larger than that of any Conservative PM since Margaret Thatcher in 1987. The greatest threat to U.S.-UK partnership was seemingly routed.

But hopes for revived Transatlantic comity have been rapidly and rudely disabused. Several distinct but overlapping instances of Anglo-American tension have rocked the partnership. U.S. rejection of a UK extradition request—for Anne Sacoolas, suspected of causing the death of British teenager Harry Dunn in a traffic accident outside a U.S. military base in Northumberland in August 2019—highlighted what Johnson conceded was an “imbalance” between the allies. British proposals for a digital sales tax on U.S. corporations such as Google, Apple, and Facebook, prompting U.S. threats of retaliatory tariffs on UK exports, provided another rift. London’s muted endorsement of the Trump Administration’s Iran strategy, when the UK was not notified in advance of the extrajudicial killing of Qassem Soleimani, offered another instance of growing discord. Reviving the partnership was always going to be a Sisyphean task. But, at a time when push is coming to shove over a trade deal, such tensions double down on disharmony. Ricky Gervais’s Golden Globes monologue was a wonderfully rich British contribution to American life but, as a template for British diplomacy, it was not ideal. In making a concerted effort to distance his government from Trump, Boris risks alienating a Washington that has bigger strategic fish to fry without being rewarded by a Brussels that also has more urgent geopolitical priorities than Britain.

Most important for the longer term, though, is the Huawei dispute—a rift emblematic of the broader Western fissures that Beijing is eagerly exploiting. Regarded as “high risk” because of its intimate links to the Chinese state, the company will be permitted to build “non-core” parts of Britain’s 5G network, infrastructure critical to new technologies that rely on constant connectivity such as driverless cars—with its market share capped at 35 percent. Although the Trump Administration was publicly understated in response, privately it was fuming. At the start of February, a group of congressional Republicans introduced a resolution condemning the UK decision, arguing compellingly that, “Our special relationship with the UK is built on our shared commitment to freedom and security. The CCP—and by extension Huawei—is an affront to these core democratic principles.”

After the Huawei decision, Beijing has recently bid to build a new high-speed rail link from London to the North of England, in addition to providing nuclear power stations to the national grid. Much as David Cameron previously championed the UK joining the Asian Investment Bank against U.S. pressure, so Boris was convinced of the need for a closer trading relationship with Beijing. What he did not count on was having to choose between the United States and China. Quite why he chose as he did remains a mystery. As MP Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, rightly noted, Britain did not “take back control” from Europe in order to then surrender it to the Chinese.

Understandably, buyer’s remorse at the Johnson phenomenon is seemingly growing in Washington. In drawing inexact but insistent parallels between U.S. and UK politics, it was tempting to read into the Boris ascendancy an echo of Trump, with a comparably disruptive impetus to business-as-usual. And while Boris sees himself as a “liberal Tory,” his profoundly unconservative disruption has assumed an increasingly Trumpian-style authoritarian cast, directed more at traditional institutions—the Treasury, the BBC, the press, the courts, the civil service—than anything else.

But Boris and Trump remain dissimilar characters. Insecure opportunists, narcissists, prone to flights of rhetorical fancy and untroubled by personal failings, ambition and personal glory animate both. But whereas Trump remains an outsider with an outsized chip on his shoulder, Johnson is an establishment figure straight out of Evelyn Waugh. Where Trump cares nothing for the party that has proven his vehicle to power, Johnson is a Tory through and through. Whereas Trump’s Faustian bargain was to demand unflinching loyalty in return for endorsement of a conventional Republican agenda, Boris has offered his party electoral success in return for abandoning core tenets of conservative faith. Early indications suggest disenchantment to those for whom conservatism implies fiscal responsibility, low taxation, and limited state intervention. But Johnson’s evident calculus is that the economic damage that a thin trade deal with Brussels will inflict requires looser fiscal policy, to protect the worst-hit sectors that lent him their votes to “get Brexit done” in 2019.

Brexit has been an earthquake that has shaken old orthodoxies to their foundations. But while earthquakes clear the space for rebuilding, earthquakes do not rebuild. Agency is necessary to reassemble structures anew. As far as the global stage goes, it has been an inauspicious start. On February 15, it was announced that a planned visit to Washington had been cancelled, allegedly because Trump had slammed the phone down on Boris in an “apoplectic” rage over Huawei. A visit by senior Australian MPs to their UK counterparts was also cancelled due to their fury at the British Foreign Secretary’s patronizing tone when he was last down under. No senior UK ministerial presence graced the World Economic Forum or, more importantly, the Munich Security Conference, seemingly confirming its theme of “Westlessness” applied to the West itself. U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper explicitly mentioned Britain when noting that allies who did not assist the U.S. in its existential struggle with China will pay a heavy price. Nancy Pelosi also pointedly noted of the UK’s absence, “I hope it’s not an indication of their commitment to multilateralism.” But, as Edward Lucas trenchantly observed of emerging “UK-lessness,” “the real question is not why British government representatives stayed away, but what they would have said had they come.”

Does London Have a U.S. Strategy?  

Ever since its post-1945 decline began, Britain has aimed to “punch above its weight.” That goal now seems increasingly elusive, absent some serious slimming. The return of great power competition was an unpropitious moment for the UK to go it alone. But domestic politics, not geopolitics, decided the 2016 referendum and 2019 election. We are where we are. To craft a sustainable long-term strategy that staves off strategic insolvency and matches capabilities to commitments, the UK must choose between accepting greater international risks, reducing its commitments abroad, or increasing the resources accorded foreign and national security policy. Since there appears minimal prospect of a serious increase in the defense budget, accepting greater risks and reducing what commitments remain offer more politically palatable options. Thus far, London’s indecision seems final.

The Johnson strategy, such as it is, seems premised upon declaring victory first and fighting the battles later. Like the Global War on Terror after George W. Bush and Tony Blair left office, the Brexit lexicon of the past four years—”dynamic alignment,” “level playing field”—has been banished from public discourse. The symbolism of Brexit being “done” can for the time being obscure the dreary substance yet to be delivered. The latter, safely relegated to the business pages, permits Brits to revel in liberty regained—albeit that the nation looks and feels, to quote David Byrne of the Talking Heads, the “same as it ever was.”

UK-EU negotiations commence in March. A trade deal that Parliament has legislated must be complete by the end of 2020, modeled on that of the EU and Canada, will suffice while the details of multiple other dossiers from energy to security are worked out later. But the EU has already ruled out such a deal, fearful of being undercut by a UK that—unlike Canada—is right on its borders. Johnson is working for a truce, not a return to the trenches. Facing a Labour Party finessing its Great Awokening—the transformation from a serious alternative government into a rolling academic sociology seminar of avant-garde zeitgeist-surfers—Boris has few worries from that intersectional quarter. It will be his backbenches that provide such opposition as counts.

But the signals the government offers are far from coherent. On the one hand, Johnson has insisted the United Kingdom will not be a rule-taker—Britain didn’t leave the EU to subsequently slavishly follow every new regulation issued by Brussels to stay aligned. Unlike his predecessor’s Cabinet, the government comprises senior figures who believe in the Brexit project, even if the reclamation of self-government entails economic pain. Even so, it is a measure of the strategic confusion that while some worry his stance is designed to bring about the “no-deal” Singapore-on-the-Thames result that market-oriented Brexiteers long craved, others on the nationalist right fear Johnson is preparing to capitulate and accept a soft Brexit. The UK cannot align with more than one trading system, either the EU or the U.S. one. But whether any stable equilibrium can be reached is moot. Will the UK insist on denying EU access to its fishing waters when Brussels can close the market that consumes 70 percent of British-caught fish? Or drive a harder bargain on financial services in response? Moreover, the bandwidth simply does not exist to allow London to conclude both an EU and a U.S. trade deal in nine months.

As Meghan Markle can testify, British “fairy-tale” stories often end in disappointment. Brexit has reduced the situational awareness that provided London with a rich and rapid source of information exchange and international intelligence. Constant contact with EU partners is no more. The UK government is therefore embarked upon an International Security and Defence Review, to report in the autumn, the latest since 2015 and billed as the most important since 1991. Welcome as this reflection may be, whether it will truly engage first principles—much less reconcile what the UK wants, needs, and can afford with the broadest public support—is uncertain. Neither the referendum nor the election featured a serious debate over Britain’s strategic future.

Caught between the parallel strategic realities of the United States and Europe, London seems to have little in the way of a coherent response to its self-imposed predicament of un-splendid isolation. Few precedents exist for a major industrialized nation departing a larger regional trading bloc. Nor, for Washington, is there an obvious precedent in terms of a core ally whose military utility is much reduced and whose commercial allure is beset by problems aplenty. Whether and how the declension in the relationship can be arrested is doubtful. One path might involve repeatedly getting Trump—the “un-Obama”—hoisted on his own petard. Obama famously declared in 2016 that the UK would be at the “back of the queue” for a trade deal if it left the EU. Would it be imprudent to remind the President that too strong a bargaining stance—his “escalate to de-escalate” approach—might position him, and us, exactly where Obama predicted?

It may be that a downsized world role is eminently acceptable to most Brits, many of whom cannot recall the Cold War, let alone World War II. But that co-exists with a reluctance to abandon the established guarantors of UK security, most notably the United States and NATO. Whether and how that ineluctable tension can be resolved is likely to prove painful. Some concede that the guiding assumptions of British post-Cold War strategy are no longer sound. But that co-exists with a faith—no other word seems adequate—that while London cannot be a superpower like the United States or China, it can still exercise global influence in ways that Japan and Germany cannot. For now, however, the national mood evokes Dunkirk more than D-Day. British delusions of grandeur are inexorably submitting to anxious aspirations for adequacy.

Wherever it ends up, post-Brexit Britain will have to work far harder than so far to get its message across and participate meaningfully in international debates and decision-making. Unless it wishes to compound its worsening global image, London needs to upgrade, not relegate, its engagement. Underlying the current UK non-discussion is a sense that, somehow, the United States could not or would not sever its ties, or that the Trump approach is more aberration than the new normal. Such complacency reflects multiple influences: the left-liberal bias of public life; the lack of rigorous analysis of U.S. politics; and the intellectual rigidity that devalues genuine exchange of political ideas for heated affirmations of rival tribal identities. Whatever its origins, though, the risk is real that London finds itself unmoored. “Global Britain” appears missing in action, a vaunting ambition in recessional, accompanied by a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” as Matthew Arnold put it in “Dover Beach.” Unfortunately, developments in Washington echo such ill-judged short-termism.

Does Washington Have a UK strategy?

Kissinger once observed of his White House years that U.S. relations with the UK were so intimate that he didn’t need to think about whether to consult London. The automaticity was built in. Those were the days. But just as London is having to think anew, so the United States must confront the challenge that a close ally is way out of its comfort zone. At a moment of global disorder and disunited states, how much political capital merits investment in maintaining the partnership is as vexatious a question in Washington as Westminster.

Although the current White House no doubt feels confident that it can prevail in any game of chicken with the UK, Trump risks becoming Exhibit Number One in the “Who lost Britain?” debate to come. The President has said many positive things about Boris and Britain (describing the relationship as “the greatest alliance the world has ever known” during his UK state visit in 2019). But while he has his British admirers, opinion polls showed that only 21 percent had a positive view of Trump in 2019. Barely one in four approved of his job performance. By early 2020, the President’s UK approval rating was minus 49 percent. Outlandish rhetoric and ill-judged interventions in UK politics have backfired. Indulgence of autocrats in Moscow and Pyongyang bemuses as much as a retreat from the Paris climate accord befuddles. Trump’s obsession with the U.S. trade balance threatens to undercut strategic partnerships from the UK to India. Weaponizing tariffs is hardly the stuff of existing or potential allies. Even a conventional U.S. leader would have found the British reluctant deputies now. In an American presidential election year, any British administration worth its salt would hedge its bets. But even—especially—if Trump secures a second term, London cannot fathom what mercurial path lies ahead. Making adversaries uncertain of your intentions is sometimes a wise strategic move. Rendering your allies entirely in the dark is arguably less prudent.

For decades, the stability of the bilateral, and the UK’s folding into “Europe,” made a bespoke UK policy redundant. That is unfortunate since the answer to the inescapable question facing Washington—what price to exact from the UK for continuing close partnership?—would benefit from wise counsel. (Sebastian Gorka doesn’t count.) Trump Republicans who view the UK as a “red state,” able and willing to join the United States in making the special relationship great again, should pause. The UK public is certainly not in the same place as the British intelligentsia, much of which will never be persuaded that unarmed goodwill is useless against armed malice or that peace requires a capacity for violence at least equal to the violence of the looming threats. Nonetheless, Brits are now wary of military adventurism. Moreover, even if the union remains intact—which, given the pressure for another referendum on Scottish independence and the rise of Sinn Fein in Ireland’s most recent election, is far from a given—London cannot offer in security what it once did. Moreover, in terms of public attitudes on health care, abortion, firearms, and so much more, the UK is—in American terms—about as blue as it gets. Politically, Boris is closer to most Democrats than most Republicans.

Trump’s abiding belief in deals over ideals has convinced many that no special relationships with the United States exist any longer. Even among the more fogeyish elements of British public life, a hardening of attitudes is discernible. The distinguished military historian, Max Hastings, for example, counselled his compatriots in January that “We must keep our distance from America”:

The U.S. never does favors in return for services rendered. At every turn of world affairs its behavior is driven by self-interest. There is nothing wrong with this but it remains a truth from which successive British prime ministers flinch. Again and again, they acquiesce in rash U.S. policies through fear of offending the White House or hopes of advantage which are unfulfilled.

Since Johnson probably shares this perspective, it would be foolish for U.S. policymakers to discount entirely the “low risk, high impact” prospect of a dedicated British retreat—even if the PM sees this as a temporary, tactical withdrawal, a bracing few years in which the partnership can benefit from benign neglect and London going rogue. Many British conservatives forget that during the 1970s and 1980s, at the Cold War’s height, Enoch Powell (the more intellectually gifted forerunner of Nigel Farage)—arch English nationalist and populist opponent of UK membership of the European Community—advocated the UK aligning with the Soviet Union rather than the United States, since it was Russia that had been the ultimate guarantee of Britain’s survival as an independent nation-state in 1812, 1914, and 1942. It is one of the more quixotic qualities of unrestrained nationalism that at times of stress it can lead nations to form strange alliances and espy surprising adversaries.

As far as the Trump Administration is concerned, there appears a reluctant acceptance among its principals of a long, slow goodbye. Exactly how best Washington can use its formidable resources to incentivize and forewarn London otherwise is a question for careful calibration. The matter is that much more acute since on both sides of the pond, pressures to de-militarize foreign policy are growing. In the UK, the Brexit rupture is compounding the material underspend and psychological retreat from a proper fighting force. In the United States, millions are being spent to promote “restraint.” We remain some distance from the full flowering of strategic minimalism, but the direction of much intellectual travel is clear.

One way or another, the non-military dimensions of the U.S.-UK relationship are likely to loom much larger in the coming decade or so. Whether for good or for ill depends on the choices—and the frames shaping them—that end up prevailing in Washington and London. The stakes on trade are, therefore, especially high. The United Kingdom is a mature democracy and its people well appreciate our asymmetry: a special relationship does not mean a special trade deal. But any deal that is transparently unbalanced or entails maximal UK concessions for minimal U.S. reciprocity will be an impossible political sell. Although sectoral and state-level agreements may prove relatively unproblematic to conclude, any comprehensive deal will reflect and reinforce the broader shape of the bilateral to come. Since congressional ratification is necessary, not only will core elements implicate powerful domestic constituencies—market access, agriculture, finance, pharmaceutical pricing in the National Health Service—but lawmakers’ responsiveness to other concerns (Northern Ireland, Huawei) will throw yet more potential roadblocks into the mix. Sceptics might suggest that a signed, sealed, and delivered trade deal looks only marginally more plausible than Palestinian agreement to Trump’s Middle East peace plan.

Is it unwise to adopt too Cassandra-like a perspective on a partnership that has endured for decades? U.S.-UK relations will no doubt survive the latest tensions. Both parties have too much to lose to allow the bilateral to collapse into mutual recriminations. Perhaps. But if Johnson is rehearsing for the role of Founding Father, it seems to be of a Disunited Kingdom. The leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party is presiding over the seemingly inevitable break-up of a centuries-old Union. The champion of a special relationship with the United States risks alienating Washington when London most needs its support. The erstwhile liberal Tory who vanquished the far-left statist Corbyn is abandoning fiscal restraint to empower the state and redistribute income to the left behind. For so long as political correctness inhibits the left’s electability, this is probably a winning domestic strategy. As an international gamble in the UK’s national interest, it stretches credulity. Even Machiavelli recognized that politics is as much about persuasion as pugilism.

Shaken, Not Stirred? 

When Nixon flew to China for the first time in 1972, it is said that he wrote a note on the plane that delineated “what are our interests, what are their interests, and where do they overlap?” The overlap was where serious negotiations could begin.

Simple as this sounds, it is perhaps worth re-visiting now exactly what the U.S. and UK share as we look ahead to the 2020s and beyond. If our interests no longer dovetail as they once did, a drawing apart may benefit us both. But if there remains substantial commonality in interests, as well as vision, then the governments on both sides of the Atlantic require some dedicated efforts to renew a partnership that has served both well. There is no time for complacency about just how precarious a once-precious partnership has become. There is, alas, more than enough time for it to die.

The post No Time to Die appeared first on The American Interest.

No Time To Die

In April, the new James Bond movie will arrive upon a no doubt grateful world. Getting No Time To Die to release has been a convoluted process, involving multiple changes of director, writers, and plotlines, as well as painful accidents to the lead actor. An anachronism to some and part of the national landscape to others, the franchise is at an inflection point. An exercise in bespoke nostalgia whose future is opaque, the brand is torn between fidelity to an old but successful formula and embracing a transformation (a black or female Bond) that risks epic failure for contemporary relevance. As a metaphor for Britain’s contemporary geostrategic neurosis and the moment of reckoning we have reached with our oldest friends, the timing is exquisite.

Despite that regrettable disagreement in 1776, and subsequent conflicts and crises, Americans and Brits tend reflexively to downplay our divides. Charming eccentricities, the narcissism of small differences, shared values and visions have cemented the closest of relationships. Even if this conventional wisdom is more conventional than wise, it persists. But the moment may be upon us when gaping fissures suggest fundamental revision. Whatever sentimental attachment underpinned cold calculations of respective national interests is fast receding. A relationship in decline is about to be recast by a Britain deprived of European Union ties and a U.S. administration devaluing the Transatlantic alliance.

Despite Boris Johnson’s pledge to “get Brexit done” by formally leaving the European Union on January 31, 2020, the promised land of sovereign independence remains a work in progress. The transition period of “Phase II” is revealing less a buccaneering Global Britain than a diminished and divided union. Moreover, London and Washington appear ever more riven. In its core dimensions, the bilateral is tottering on a precipice. As Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) succinctly summarized the UK rejection of U.S. entreaties to exclude the People’s Republic of China from compromising its 5G network: “Here’s the sad truth: our special relationship is less special now that the UK has embraced the surveillance state commies at Huawei. During the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher never contracted with the KGB to save a few pennies.”

But it is not just Huawei forcing rethinks. Multiple pressures, some structural, others contingent, are at work. Unless one or both parties change direction fast, atrophy beckons—to the delight of our mutual adversaries. The ultimate irony is two-fold. First, increasing Anglo-American conflict is reminding Brits of their European affinities just as London is severing its continental bonds: philosophically “Anglo-Saxon,” operationally European. Second, hopes that Boris and Donald might salvage the partnership appear misplaced. Instead, the erstwhile conservative saviors are hastening its demise. Britain is slowly but steadily retreating from the global stage—neither Martian nor Venusian but directionless—adrift in the geostrategic ether betwixt and between what Robert Kagan once termed “paradise and power.” And an America trapped between leading and withdrawing from international order is left with one less dependable ally on which it could rely. Washington can plausibly afford that. But without the twin pillars of a strong relationship with America and EU membership, the world is looking a much more inhospitable place for Britain.

The Sources of British Conduct

Since World War II, the principal drivers of the bilateral were clear. For the United States, the UK offered a major, if declining, asset to amplify its global influence. London joined with Washington in New York (at the United Nations Security Council), Brussels (at NATO and the EU) and the U.S. capital itself (in the IMF, GATT and the WTO). Vietnam aside, the UK was typically at America’s side in the wars Washington fought, providing valuable political cover even when its forces were surplus to American requirements. In intelligence sharing through GCHQ and MI6, nuclear cooperation, diplomacy, trade, foreign direct investment, and multiple expressions of cultural exchange, the partnership achieved a breadth, depth and resilience with few precedents.

For Brits, the dynamics were self-evident to successive Conservative and Labour governments. Empire was done. The United States was dominant. In managing decline, London needed Washington for security, diplomatic, intelligence, and financial ballast. The British recognized that “if you aren’t at the table, you’re probably on the menu.” Unreconciled to Europe and nostalgic for its former strength, the UK took the only logical route forward. Although the least pro-American Prime Minister, Edward Heath, enthusiastically took Britain into the European Union in 1973, mainstream opinion never entertained drawing away from the United States. The mere suggestion was the province of cranks and extremists. If accommodation riled some as resembling sycophancy, such was the price of being chief deputy to the U.S. sheriff.

Despite antagonisms petty and profound, each partner proved more an asset than albatross to the other, calculations eased by the shared external threat of the Soviet Union. After the Cold War’s end, though, the foundations splintered. The notion that the UK could provide a “bridge” between Washington and Brussels eroded as the U.S. and EU pillars weakened. As Brexit showed, millions of Brits dislike the EU, if not Europe, while Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya left a distaste for interventionism. The UK now possesses neither the will nor wallet to project power, with its armed forces a shadow of their former selves. These trends pre-dated Johnson and Trump. But the two leaders are adding impetus to what historians may record as an inevitable parting of the ways.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Boris

On December 13, 2019, the British general election result saw Jeremy Corbyn, the most dim-witted but dangerous candidate for the highest office, comprehensively rejected in the Labour Party’s fourth consecutive defeat and its worst result since 1935. With the Tories winning 365 seats to Labour’s 203, Johnson secured an 80-seat House of Commons majority, larger than that of any Conservative PM since Margaret Thatcher in 1987. The greatest threat to U.S.-UK partnership was seemingly routed.

But hopes for revived Transatlantic comity have been rapidly and rudely disabused. Several distinct but overlapping instances of Anglo-American tension have rocked the partnership. U.S. rejection of a UK extradition request—for Anne Sacoolas, suspected of causing the death of British teenager Harry Dunn in a traffic accident outside a U.S. military base in Northumberland in August 2019—highlighted what Johnson conceded was an “imbalance” between the allies. British proposals for a digital sales tax on U.S. corporations such as Google, Apple, and Facebook, prompting U.S. threats of retaliatory tariffs on UK exports, provided another rift. London’s muted endorsement of the Trump Administration’s Iran strategy, when the UK was not notified in advance of the extrajudicial killing of Qassem Soleimani, offered another instance of growing discord. Reviving the partnership was always going to be a Sisyphean task. But, at a time when push is coming to shove over a trade deal, such tensions double down on disharmony. Ricky Gervais’s Golden Globes monologue was a wonderfully rich British contribution to American life but, as a template for British diplomacy, it was not ideal. In making a concerted effort to distance his government from Trump, Boris risks alienating a Washington that has bigger strategic fish to fry without being rewarded by a Brussels that also has more urgent geopolitical priorities than Britain.

Most important for the longer term, though, is the Huawei dispute—a rift emblematic of the broader Western fissures that Beijing is eagerly exploiting. Regarded as “high risk” because of its intimate links to the Chinese state, the company will be permitted to build “non-core” parts of Britain’s 5G network, infrastructure critical to new technologies that rely on constant connectivity such as driverless cars—with its market share capped at 35 percent. Although the Trump Administration was publicly understated in response, privately it was fuming. At the start of February, a group of congressional Republicans introduced a resolution condemning the UK decision, arguing compellingly that, “Our special relationship with the UK is built on our shared commitment to freedom and security. The CCP—and by extension Huawei—is an affront to these core democratic principles.”

After the Huawei decision, Beijing has recently bid to build a new high-speed rail link from London to the North of England, in addition to providing nuclear power stations to the national grid. Much as David Cameron previously championed the UK joining the Asian Investment Bank against U.S. pressure, so Boris was convinced of the need for a closer trading relationship with Beijing. What he did not count on was having to choose between the United States and China. Quite why he chose as he did remains a mystery. As MP Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, rightly noted, Britain did not “take back control” from Europe in order to then surrender it to the Chinese.

Understandably, buyer’s remorse at the Johnson phenomenon is seemingly growing in Washington. In drawing inexact but insistent parallels between U.S. and UK politics, it was tempting to read into the Boris ascendancy an echo of Trump, with a comparably disruptive impetus to business-as-usual. And while Boris sees himself as a “liberal Tory,” his profoundly unconservative disruption has assumed an increasingly Trumpian-style authoritarian cast, directed more at traditional institutions—the Treasury, the BBC, the press, the courts, the civil service—than anything else.

But Boris and Trump remain dissimilar characters. Insecure opportunists, narcissists, prone to flights of rhetorical fancy and untroubled by personal failings, ambition and personal glory animate both. But whereas Trump remains an outsider with an outsized chip on his shoulder, Johnson is an establishment figure straight out of Evelyn Waugh. Where Trump cares nothing for the party that has proven his vehicle to power, Johnson is a Tory through and through. Whereas Trump’s Faustian bargain was to demand unflinching loyalty in return for endorsement of a conventional Republican agenda, Boris has offered his party electoral success in return for abandoning core tenets of conservative faith. Early indications suggest disenchantment to those for whom conservatism implies fiscal responsibility, low taxation, and limited state intervention. But Johnson’s evident calculus is that the economic damage that a thin trade deal with Brussels will inflict requires looser fiscal policy, to protect the worst-hit sectors that lent him their votes to “get Brexit done” in 2019.

Brexit has been an earthquake that has shaken old orthodoxies to their foundations. But while earthquakes clear the space for rebuilding, earthquakes do not rebuild. Agency is necessary to reassemble structures anew. As far as the global stage goes, it has been an inauspicious start. On February 15, it was announced that a planned visit to Washington had been cancelled, allegedly because Trump had slammed the phone down on Boris in an “apoplectic” rage over Huawei. A visit by senior Australian MPs to their UK counterparts was also cancelled due to their fury at the British Foreign Secretary’s patronizing tone when he was last down under. No senior UK ministerial presence graced the World Economic Forum or, more importantly, the Munich Security Conference, seemingly confirming its theme of “Westlessness” applied to the West itself. U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper explicitly mentioned Britain when noting that allies who did not assist the U.S. in its existential struggle with China will pay a heavy price. Nancy Pelosi also pointedly noted of the UK’s absence, “I hope it’s not an indication of their commitment to multilateralism.” But, as Edward Lucas trenchantly observed of emerging “UK-lessness,” “the real question is not why British government representatives stayed away, but what they would have said had they come.”

Does London Have a U.S. Strategy?  

Ever since its post-1945 decline began, Britain has aimed to “punch above its weight.” That goal now seems increasingly elusive, absent some serious slimming. The return of great power competition was an unpropitious moment for the UK to go it alone. But domestic politics, not geopolitics, decided the 2016 referendum and 2019 election. We are where we are. To craft a sustainable long-term strategy that staves off strategic insolvency and matches capabilities to commitments, the UK must choose between accepting greater international risks, reducing its commitments abroad, or increasing the resources accorded foreign and national security policy. Since there appears minimal prospect of a serious increase in the defense budget, accepting greater risks and reducing what commitments remain offer more politically palatable options. Thus far, London’s indecision seems final.

The Johnson strategy, such as it is, seems premised upon declaring victory first and fighting the battles later. Like the Global War on Terror after George W. Bush and Tony Blair left office, the Brexit lexicon of the past four years—”dynamic alignment,” “level playing field”—has been banished from public discourse. The symbolism of Brexit being “done” can for the time being obscure the dreary substance yet to be delivered. The latter, safely relegated to the business pages, permits Brits to revel in liberty regained—albeit that the nation looks and feels, to quote David Byrne of the Talking Heads, the “same as it ever was.”

UK-EU negotiations commence in March. A trade deal that Parliament has legislated must be complete by the end of 2020, modeled on that of the EU and Canada, will suffice while the details of multiple other dossiers from energy to security are worked out later. But the EU has already ruled out such a deal, fearful of being undercut by a UK that—unlike Canada—is right on its borders. Johnson is working for a truce, not a return to the trenches. Facing a Labour Party finessing its Great Awokening—the transformation from a serious alternative government into a rolling academic sociology seminar of avant-garde zeitgeist-surfers—Boris has few worries from that intersectional quarter. It will be his backbenches that provide such opposition as counts.

But the signals the government offers are far from coherent. On the one hand, Johnson has insisted the United Kingdom will not be a rule-taker—Britain didn’t leave the EU to subsequently slavishly follow every new regulation issued by Brussels to stay aligned. Unlike his predecessor’s Cabinet, the government comprises senior figures who believe in the Brexit project, even if the reclamation of self-government entails economic pain. Even so, it is a measure of the strategic confusion that while some worry his stance is designed to bring about the “no-deal” Singapore-on-the-Thames result that market-oriented Brexiteers long craved, others on the nationalist right fear Johnson is preparing to capitulate and accept a soft Brexit. The UK cannot align with more than one trading system, either the EU or the U.S. one. But whether any stable equilibrium can be reached is moot. Will the UK insist on denying EU access to its fishing waters when Brussels can close the market that consumes 70 percent of British-caught fish? Or drive a harder bargain on financial services in response? Moreover, the bandwidth simply does not exist to allow London to conclude both an EU and a U.S. trade deal in nine months.

As Meghan Markle can testify, British “fairy-tale” stories often end in disappointment. Brexit has reduced the situational awareness that provided London with a rich and rapid source of information exchange and international intelligence. Constant contact with EU partners is no more. The UK government is therefore embarked upon an International Security and Defence Review, to report in the autumn, the latest since 2015 and billed as the most important since 1991. Welcome as this reflection may be, whether it will truly engage first principles—much less reconcile what the UK wants, needs, and can afford with the broadest public support—is uncertain. Neither the referendum nor the election featured a serious debate over Britain’s strategic future.

Caught between the parallel strategic realities of the United States and Europe, London seems to have little in the way of a coherent response to its self-imposed predicament of un-splendid isolation. Few precedents exist for a major industrialized nation departing a larger regional trading bloc. Nor, for Washington, is there an obvious precedent in terms of a core ally whose military utility is much reduced and whose commercial allure is beset by problems aplenty. Whether and how the declension in the relationship can be arrested is doubtful. One path might involve repeatedly getting Trump—the “un-Obama”—hoisted on his own petard. Obama famously declared in 2016 that the UK would be at the “back of the queue” for a trade deal if it left the EU. Would it be imprudent to remind the President that too strong a bargaining stance—his “escalate to de-escalate” approach—might position him, and us, exactly where Obama predicted?

It may be that a downsized world role is eminently acceptable to most Brits, many of whom cannot recall the Cold War, let alone World War II. But that co-exists with a reluctance to abandon the established guarantors of UK security, most notably the United States and NATO. Whether and how that ineluctable tension can be resolved is likely to prove painful. Some concede that the guiding assumptions of British post-Cold War strategy are no longer sound. But that co-exists with a faith—no other word seems adequate—that while London cannot be a superpower like the United States or China, it can still exercise global influence in ways that Japan and Germany cannot. For now, however, the national mood evokes Dunkirk more than D-Day. British delusions of grandeur are inexorably submitting to anxious aspirations for adequacy.

Wherever it ends up, post-Brexit Britain will have to work far harder than so far to get its message across and participate meaningfully in international debates and decision-making. Unless it wishes to compound its worsening global image, London needs to upgrade, not relegate, its engagement. Underlying the current UK non-discussion is a sense that, somehow, the United States could not or would not sever its ties, or that the Trump approach is more aberration than the new normal. Such complacency reflects multiple influences: the left-liberal bias of public life; the lack of rigorous analysis of U.S. politics; and the intellectual rigidity that devalues genuine exchange of political ideas for heated affirmations of rival tribal identities. Whatever its origins, though, the risk is real that London finds itself unmoored. “Global Britain” appears missing in action, a vaunting ambition in recessional, accompanied by a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” as Matthew Arnold put it in “Dover Beach.” Unfortunately, developments in Washington echo such ill-judged short-termism.

Does Washington Have a UK strategy?

Kissinger once observed of his White House years that U.S. relations with the UK were so intimate that he didn’t need to think about whether to consult London. The automaticity was built in. Those were the days. But just as London is having to think anew, so the United States must confront the challenge that a close ally is way out of its comfort zone. At a moment of global disorder and disunited states, how much political capital merits investment in maintaining the partnership is as vexatious a question in Washington as Westminster.

Although the current White House no doubt feels confident that it can prevail in any game of chicken with the UK, Trump risks becoming Exhibit Number One in the “Who lost Britain?” debate to come. The President has said many positive things about Boris and Britain (describing the relationship as “the greatest alliance the world has ever known” during his UK state visit in 2019). But while he has his British admirers, opinion polls showed that only 21 percent had a positive view of Trump in 2019. Barely one in four approved of his job performance. By early 2020, the President’s UK approval rating was minus 49 percent. Outlandish rhetoric and ill-judged interventions in UK politics have backfired. Indulgence of autocrats in Moscow and Pyongyang bemuses as much as a retreat from the Paris climate accord befuddles. Trump’s obsession with the U.S. trade balance threatens to undercut strategic partnerships from the UK to India. Weaponizing tariffs is hardly the stuff of existing or potential allies. Even a conventional U.S. leader would have found the British reluctant deputies now. In an American presidential election year, any British administration worth its salt would hedge its bets. But even—especially—if Trump secures a second term, London cannot fathom what mercurial path lies ahead. Making adversaries uncertain of your intentions is sometimes a wise strategic move. Rendering your allies entirely in the dark is arguably less prudent.

For decades, the stability of the bilateral, and the UK’s folding into “Europe,” made a bespoke UK policy redundant. That is unfortunate since the answer to the inescapable question facing Washington—what price to exact from the UK for continuing close partnership?—would benefit from wise counsel. (Sebastian Gorka doesn’t count.) Trump Republicans who view the UK as a “red state,” able and willing to join the United States in making the special relationship great again, should pause. The UK public is certainly not in the same place as the British intelligentsia, much of which will never be persuaded that unarmed goodwill is useless against armed malice or that peace requires a capacity for violence at least equal to the violence of the looming threats. Nonetheless, Brits are now wary of military adventurism. Moreover, even if the union remains intact—which, given the pressure for another referendum on Scottish independence and the rise of Sinn Fein in Ireland’s most recent election, is far from a given—London cannot offer in security what it once did. Moreover, in terms of public attitudes on health care, abortion, firearms, and so much more, the UK is—in American terms—about as blue as it gets. Politically, Boris is closer to most Democrats than most Republicans.

Trump’s abiding belief in deals over ideals has convinced many that no special relationships with the United States exist any longer. Even among the more fogeyish elements of British public life, a hardening of attitudes is discernible. The distinguished military historian, Max Hastings, for example, counselled his compatriots in January that “We must keep our distance from America”:

The U.S. never does favors in return for services rendered. At every turn of world affairs its behavior is driven by self-interest. There is nothing wrong with this but it remains a truth from which successive British prime ministers flinch. Again and again, they acquiesce in rash U.S. policies through fear of offending the White House or hopes of advantage which are unfulfilled.

Since Johnson probably shares this perspective, it would be foolish for U.S. policymakers to discount entirely the “low risk, high impact” prospect of a dedicated British retreat—even if the PM sees this as a temporary, tactical withdrawal, a bracing few years in which the partnership can benefit from benign neglect and London going rogue. Many British conservatives forget that during the 1970s and 1980s, at the Cold War’s height, Enoch Powell (the more intellectually gifted forerunner of Nigel Farage)—arch English nationalist and populist opponent of UK membership of the European Community—advocated the UK aligning with the Soviet Union rather than the United States, since it was Russia that had been the ultimate guarantee of Britain’s survival as an independent nation-state in 1812, 1914, and 1942. It is one of the more quixotic qualities of unrestrained nationalism that at times of stress it can lead nations to form strange alliances and espy surprising adversaries.

As far as the Trump Administration is concerned, there appears a reluctant acceptance among its principals of a long, slow goodbye. Exactly how best Washington can use its formidable resources to incentivize and forewarn London otherwise is a question for careful calibration. The matter is that much more acute since on both sides of the pond, pressures to de-militarize foreign policy are growing. In the UK, the Brexit rupture is compounding the material underspend and psychological retreat from a proper fighting force. In the United States, millions are being spent to promote “restraint.” We remain some distance from the full flowering of strategic minimalism, but the direction of much intellectual travel is clear.

One way or another, the non-military dimensions of the U.S.-UK relationship are likely to loom much larger in the coming decade or so. Whether for good or for ill depends on the choices—and the frames shaping them—that end up prevailing in Washington and London. The stakes on trade are, therefore, especially high. The United Kingdom is a mature democracy and its people well appreciate our asymmetry: a special relationship does not mean a special trade deal. But any deal that is transparently unbalanced or entails maximal UK concessions for minimal U.S. reciprocity will be an impossible political sell. Although sectoral and state-level agreements may prove relatively unproblematic to conclude, any comprehensive deal will reflect and reinforce the broader shape of the bilateral to come. Since congressional ratification is necessary, not only will core elements implicate powerful domestic constituencies—market access, agriculture, finance, pharmaceutical pricing in the National Health Service—but lawmakers’ responsiveness to other concerns (Northern Ireland, Huawei) will throw yet more potential roadblocks into the mix. Sceptics might suggest that a signed, sealed, and delivered trade deal looks only marginally more plausible than Palestinian agreement to Trump’s Middle East peace plan.

Is it unwise to adopt too Cassandra-like a perspective on a partnership that has endured for decades? U.S.-UK relations will no doubt survive the latest tensions. Both parties have too much to lose to allow the bilateral to collapse into mutual recriminations. Perhaps. But if Johnson is rehearsing for the role of Founding Father, it seems to be of a Disunited Kingdom. The leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party is presiding over the seemingly inevitable break-up of a centuries-old Union. The champion of a special relationship with the United States risks alienating Washington when London most needs its support. The erstwhile liberal Tory who vanquished the far-left statist Corbyn is abandoning fiscal restraint to empower the state and redistribute income to the left behind. For so long as political correctness inhibits the left’s electability, this is probably a winning domestic strategy. As an international gamble in the UK’s national interest, it stretches credulity. Even Machiavelli recognized that politics is as much about persuasion as pugilism.

Shaken, Not Stirred? 

When Nixon flew to China for the first time in 1972, it is said that he wrote a note on the plane that delineated “what are our interests, what are their interests, and where do they overlap?” The overlap was where serious negotiations could begin.

Simple as this sounds, it is perhaps worth re-visiting now exactly what the U.S. and UK share as we look ahead to the 2020s and beyond. If our interests no longer dovetail as they once did, a drawing apart may benefit us both. But if there remains substantial commonality in interests, as well as vision, then the governments on both sides of the Atlantic require some dedicated efforts to renew a partnership that has served both well. There is no time for complacency about just how precarious a once-precious partnership has become. There is, alas, more than enough time for it to die.

The post No Time To Die appeared first on The American Interest.

Challenges and Pitfalls of the Technocratic Art

We come now, as promised, to examples—extant, possible, or claimed—of Singapore’s technocracy overdoing its management missions, with path-dependent, mostly Chinese but also residual Anglophone characteristics. Most fall well short of serious. Some are liable to strike Americans as downright funny, the way un-self-aware anal-retentive human behavior often is (so long as it describes someone else). Some register short of amusing. We start with the few that Americans tend to have heard about and augment from there. The essence we sum in conclusion.

Gum and Caning

So what’s with the chewing gum? Except for specialized nicotine-weening medications, it’s banned. It’s banned, the story goes, because years ago some juvenile delinquents used well-masticated gum to clog MRT train doors. But if that can’t explain a ban continuing on long after said juvenile delinquents reached middle age, what does explain it?

The likeliest explanation is, as usual, the simplest one: Lee Kwan Yew just thought gum chewing was a gross habit, he possessed the power to proscribe it, and so, as with the answer to that eternal question about why dogs lick their genitals, he did it because he could. One can only imagine what he would think of the tattooed, pierced Singaporean youth riding the MRT today, or of the many young women who ape the Western “style” of wearing jeans and jean shorts ripped hither and yon to horizontal shreds from the waist down.

To typical Americans of a certain age, people with orders-of-magnitude greater tolerance for disorder, dissent, and bad taste than typical Singaporeans, the chewing gum ban brings to mind the iconic scene from Woody Allen’s 1971 movie “Bananas,” in which the new dictator of the fictional Republic of San Marcos orders everyone to wear their underwear on the outside—something, in other words, so arbitrary as to seem slightly mad.

But as John Dryden wrote, “Geniuses and madmen are near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” The ban isn’t madness at all, just a manifestation of the Confucian-inflected penchant for orderliness, and its tacit assumption that the social psychology of orderliness is seamless. It’s not just a Confucian conclusion either: The ban makes sense as Singapore’s version of James Q. Wilson’s famous “broken windows” insight.

Then there is caning. Most Americans reject corporeal punishment as part of any civilized legal system, but, Dr. Spock’s legacy notwithstanding, plenty of us privately have potched our kids from time to time—not to hurt them of course, just to get their wandering attention at certain tender pre-linguistic-fluency ages. And that’s exactly the issue here: A government spanking miscreants comes across as way over-the-top paternalistic, and that rankles those wedded to a Western social contract-based relationship between citizens and government.

The infamous 1994 caning case, involving then-18-year old Michael Fay, is all that most Americans know about caning in Singapore. They don’t know that Singaporeans didn’t introduce caning here; the British did. They don’t know that, beyond stealing more than a few road signs and squirreling them away in his room for no particular good reason, Fay said “Fuck you” to the judge during his trial. Had he done that in, say, Texas or Arkansas, he’d have begged for a mere four switch swats on his stupid teenage ass. They also probably don’t know that graffiti and petty vandalism in Singapore pretty much don’t exist.

I’m uncomfortable with caning’s implied paternalism, but not with its results. But it’s really none of my business (or yours, fellow American) since I’m not a Singaporean national. As a general rule, Americans should think twice (or as many times as necessary) before tendering judgments about matters in which they are not vested and probably can’t fully understand for lack of metis. A former Singaporean ambassador to the United States complained to me, recently and in the main justifiably, that Americans often just don’t listen to others, especially others from small countries. She was too polite to add that this rarely stops us from speaking out about the supposed moral deficiencies of said others, whether we know what we’re talking about or not. It’s not one of our more endearing traits.

Drugs, Hookers, and Drunken Dancing

Recreational drugs, which Mr. Fay reportedly took up as a hobby once back stateside, are scarce in Singapore. Marijuana, hashish, uppers, opiates, and other banned intoxicants are rare, but not non-existent. As is well known, the government’s attitude toward them is severe. The death penalty imposed over the years, though much less often recently, has been invoked overwhelmingly for just two offenses: murder and commercial-scale drug dealing. But before Western liberals and other dyed-in-the-wool hedonists rush to judgment, there’s something they need to know.

Part of the prison system in Singapore—the SPS, Singapore Prison Service—involves a drug rehab center (the DRC, the Drug Rehabilitation Center), which is part jail but also part hospital and social engineering program involving addicts’ families, skills trainers, and employers as support systems to minimize drug-related criminal recidivism. Increasingly, the system prefers rehab to plain incarceration: 2019 registered a 65 percent increase in DRC use following changes to the Misuse of Drugs Act.

Out of concern to avoid stigmatizing and humiliating the vulnerable, the government publishes no data on the proportions of the country’s ethnic hearth communities that end up in jail and rehab. It’s a sensitive matter, as are all matters intercommunal, and the reason is that the Malay community, which occupies the statistical bottom of the mean income and education scales, also occupies the top of the incarceration, broken families, delinquent youth, and drug-dependency scales.

For this reason, some American observers jump fast to the analogy that Malays are to Singapore what African-Americans are to the United States. Well, don’t jump; the analogy falls flat on its face even before the first step has landed. Malays were not dragged to Singapore as slaves, their families torn apart and their men systematically emasculated over centuries. And not that it should matter but it does anyway, Malays are not the major hearth community here with the darkest skin tones, so binary “white”/“black” racist tropes one might suppose apply just don’t.

That said, as with the vulnerability of certain human allele-distribution clusters to intoxicating substances—think Native Americans and alcohol, for example—Malays as a group in Singapore seem to be at greater risk of substance abuse than others. If the drug laws here were as “soft” as those of western Europe or the United States, a cultural holocaust among the Malay population might ensue, with dire implications for Singapore’s entire social order. So is the legal regime for substance abuse here best described as retrograde paternalism or as a form of “tough love” intercommunal management? You work it out.

The urge to manage everything that can conceivably be managed is also apparent along a stretch of the Orchard Road shopping district. Singapore truly gleams, except when and where it doesn’t. A modernized remnant of the old days before World War II, when Singapore was infamous for unregulated gambling, prostitution, and opium, still exists as a tiny seedier side of Red Dot life.

Cuppage Plaza, for example, features several floors of small commercial establishments, all wrapped around an unadorned, warehouse-chic atrium, devoted to Japanese subculture—narrowly defined. Some excellent restaurants may be found, though to locate the ones with no signs you need a knowledgeable guide. But there are also several “KTV gentlemen’s clubs.”

KTV stands for karaoke and television, but these places are mainly brothels. Either that or the sequin-bedecked young Filipina, Indonesian, and mainland Chinese women clotted around the door of every single one of them is some sort of weird coincidence. (Women from Vietnam and Thailand, I’m told, grace the nearby Far East Plaza, while for expats “four floors of whores” await at Orchard Tower across the street.) Just walking out the door of a Cuppage Plaza restaurant to the elevator past one of these KTV places can cause a midnight sunburn.

Singapore isn’t Reno, Nevada, but as a concession to human nature, all this is managed as though it were: Informal but strict zoning and regular medical checks keep matters in bounds. Singaporeans and visitors who aren’t interested are advised, should they wax indignant, “Well, no one is making you go there.”

As for the rowdier bars, a British journalist resident here named Nicholas Walton tells a story in his recent book Singapore, Singapura of the authorities deciding after the 2003 SARS epidemic to reconsider the ban on table-dancing. The idea, apparently, was to lighten the mood a bit by allowing at least some kinds of fun. But instead of just legalizing table dancing, the authorities decided to first study its manifestations in surrounding countries. So they sent bureaucrats—presumably from the prospective Ministry of Table Dancing—to observe. The investigators concluded that table dancing could be dangerous, since drunken people occasionally toppled from tables onto other people en route to the floor. So the authorities ordered relevant establishments to install poles on tables and bar tops to reduce ER visits and other embarrassments.

Fines, Flora, and Food

That’s right: Table dancing was once explicitly banned, along with fireworks, porn, outdoor spitting and urinating, strutting around one’s apartment in the nude, and the list goes on. Just as at Haw Par Villa’s Ten Courts of Hell, there is a punishment in the form of a fine for nearly every non-violent transgression imaginable. Years ago some wag dubbed Singapore “The Fine City,” a double entendre aimed at capturing its star quality and its penchant for legal pedantry all in one phrase. Nice job, whoever came up with it, and nice going whoever slapped it on t-shirts to make some money.

Then there is the excessive but excusable. Lee Kwan Yew envisioned Singapore as a city in a garden, so he spared no available expense—a telltale sign of technocratic excess—to bring plants to the Red Dot from tropical climes the world over. At the time folks here, and not only here, of course, knew little about invasive species and ecological rectitude. The overstory is that Singapore’s imported plant life has damaged native ecosystems. African tulip trees, for example, are beautiful, but they’ve spread at the expense of other trees and the ancient diverse ecosystems dependent on them.

Similar excesses have concerned land use. When Singapore became independent in 1965, local agriculture supplied about 60 percent of basic food needs. But the effort, beginning in earnest in the 1970s, to industrialize Singapore to raise living standards and provide maximum full employment for a growing population drove that number down all the way to about 3 percent. (One eastern island, Tekong, that had been an agricultural area was turned into a military training preserve, its population evicted. Eminent domain is no joke here.)

The resulting food security anxiety has led, for example, to a megadeal with China wherein a chunk of Chinese land is being developed with Singaporean capital for the main purpose of providing foodstuffs to Singapore. The Jilin Project involves 1,450 square miles of land; all of Singapore is only 751.5 square miles. Perhaps sensing belatedly that putting so much leverage in Chinese hands might be unwise, the government subsequently announced the 30/30 challenge, by which Singapore will produce 30 percent of its own food by 2030, largely through advanced vertical hydroponic methods.

Planning and Pressing

If any government can turn on a dime to rectify past misjudgments, Singapore’s is the one. The 30/30 project has an excellent chance of succeeding, and in typical Singaporean fashion, the effort—a government-Temasek-university undertaking—is launching in the form of corporate spinoffs using patents and licensing protocols to also market the state-of-the-art techniques globally.

So deep is the sense of vulnerability that the elite excels at bold planning and taking creative risks. But that puts a premium on the planning being both efficient and prescient. When you trust human artifice to save your posterior, you resign yourself to living on a knife’s edge; one really big goof and you’re kaya toast, no meh? (Pardon my Singlish.) The folks who run the place know that. They just don’t see much choice, and who’s to say they’re mistaken?

One manifestation of the elite’s future-shock anxiety is its “big project” mentality. To insure stability going forward, the government aims to hitch its globe-spanning hub-rentier, service-heavy economy to the big boys on the Asian block. So beyond the Jilin project is the Chongqing Connectivity Initiative (CCI). On September 11, Singapore and China signed 27 memoranda of understanding linking an array of government-owned and operated infrastructure elements—for example, data tie-ups between Singapore’s Singtel and China’s three big telecom companies. Common technological platforms and interoperability will enable Singapore to get a piece of the enormous Chinese market. Other agreements cover media holdings, financial services, aviation, and logistics.

Not all the big-game planning works out. In July a consortium of Temasek companies—which means the government, in essence—signed a deal with the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to build a new gleaming capital city called Amaravati (“abode of the gods”). No one from Andhra Pradesh who sees “smart city” Singapore, especially the showpiece urban marvels of Marina Bay—the Sands mega-hotel, the Flower Dome, the Cloud Forest, the Supertree Grove, and so on—can not want something similar for their own. But in November the Indian side canceled the project, leaving a lot of effort and no trivial planning investment orphaned.

Singapore also engages in demographic planning, mostly quietly. The Chinese elite has believed that for Singapore to be economically successful for the long haul, the ethnic Chinese percentage of the citizenry must remain above 70 percent. Prooftext: In 1989, Lee Kwan Yew said that Singaporean Chinese must maintain a lopsided majority “or there will be a shift in the economy, both the economic performance and the political backdrop which makes that economic performance possible.” Did he mean that for complex historical and cultural reasons Chinese excelled at creating and sustaining wealth, or did he mean that Chinese were smarter and hence “better” in some intrinsic way than South Asians and Malays? Was he speaking as a sociological realist or a garden-variety racist, or perhaps as an indistinguishable mash-up of both?

It’s too late to ask him, but a faint undercurrent of Chinese chauvinism is a fact of life. It’s illustrated in a searing Singaporean noir film called “A Land Imagined” and in the fact that some older Chinese will not take an open seat on the MRT or a bus next to a dark-skinned Tamil.

As far as policy goes, Singapore accepts naturalized citizens, averaging about 20,000 per annum in recent years—the great majority being Chinese, presumably to compensate for the fact that Chinese Singaporeans have the lowest fertility rates, less than half of the standard replacement rate—of the three main hearth communities. But no numbers breaking down new immigrants’ points of origin are published. At the same time, low-skilled foreign contract workers lack most standard labor rights, in part at least because the government wants to quash any ideas some may develop of staying on and applying for citizenship.

Leaving aside what went wrong with the Amaravati project, the failure barely showed up in the local press, any more than immigration policy or contract labor rights attract much open debate. The Straits Times, the main daily newspaper, contains decent political coverage of other countries and doesn’t shy away from their public controversies. But not so much concerning Singapore, where “local” political news reminds one more of press culture in Todor Zhivkov’s Bulgaria than it does of, say, the Washington Post.

A recent book by former Straits Times editor P.N. Balji, entitled Reluctant Editor, tells of Lew Kwan Yew’s efforts to get the press to censor itself so that the government wouldn’t need to. In the main, Yew got his way. Subtle enduring case in point: There’s a terrific magazine stand, with fare from all over the world, in the Holland Village area—a high-rent neighborhood that houses lots of expats. It’s the only one of its kind in the country, for a reason: The government doesn’t censor or ban foreign press sources that might contain copy critical of Singapore; it merely limits the number of copies that may be imported and displays them in places where few typical citizens are likely to cast their eyes. Why use a ball-peen hammer when a nail clipper will do?

So there is no totalitarian “thought control” in Singapore, just a seamless effort to gently minimize potential spikes of pandaemonic irrationality. As ought to be obvious as of late, no society is wholly immune to such spikes, but different societies have different buffering capacities for surviving them. The elite here has judged Singapore’s buffer to be rather thin, so has chosen to err on the side of safety by defining incitement broadly, yet treating it as deftly as they think they can afford. What is not necessary and would never be tolerated in the United States is not a universal formula. What passes for reasonable is context-specific.

Dissent

Alas, one group’s “reasonable” may seem unreasonable to other groups. In that light consider the adventures of Gilbert Goh.

Mr. Goh, an ethnic Chinese, runs a small business helping the unemployed find new jobs. One of the biggest gripes among those most affected by Singapore’s middle-class squeeze (of which more next time) is that the government allows too many immigrants and foreign workers. That, it is averred, raises unemployment among citizens and exerts downward pressure on wages for less well-off Singaporeans. It also increases the overall demand for housing and hence helps push real estate prices up beyond the comfortable grasp of many citizens. (This should sound familiar to Americans who follow the immigration debate in the United States.)

For some reason, Mr. Goh took it upon himself to organize this anti-immigrant sentiment, which seems mainly focused against South Asians. So on November 3 he presided over a protest, reportedly some 300-400 strong, against a proposed Singapore-India Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) at the Speaker’s Corner in Hong Lim Park. (The Speaker’s Corner is an official “soapbox”, as Americans would call it, from which any citizen can hold forth about pretty much anything, so long as it doesn’t threaten or impugn intercommunal and multi-sectarian harmony.)

As it happens, most complaints can be creatively roped into no-no categories if the elite wishes to fling a lasso. More, non-citizens may not hold forth at the Speaker’s Corner unless the program sponsor obtains a license from the police. So the police arrested Mr. Goh on November 3, claiming that one of the rally’s presenters was a non-citizen who spoke in the absence of a license. (Turns out the guy was married to a Singaporean and so was a naturalized citizen. A member of the audience, an Israeli tourist, asked a question after the speeches had concluded; it’s unclear if the moderator’s allowing his question was illegal.) After his arrest the police began asking Goh questions, the answer to one of which apparently implicated him in another law breakage. All this occurred before Goh was allowed to speak to a lawyer.

Now, the government and the ruling party, sensitive to criticism about immigration and foreign labor since the 2011 election elevated the issue to the first rank, have been ratcheting down levels of foreign labor anyway. The basic motive for the aforementioned management of Singapore’s demography aligns with Goh’s concerns, too. But the elite cares more about the prospect of potentially metastasizing dissent than it does about specific arguments, or whether, as it claims, Goh got some of his facts about CECA wrong.

Note in this regard that back in September Ho Ching, the prime minister’s spouse, and Temasek head, shared a Facebook post praising the Hong Kong police for their restraint against unruly protestors. A few days before, a planned Yale-NUS program on dissent in Singapore was canceled just before its opening. So the Gilbert Goh episode, you will understand, is no one-off.

The authorities will probably neutralize Mr. Goh the same way they have neutralized other pesky individuals who were too insistent or charismatic for their circumscribed comfort zone. They don’t throw people in jail. They don’t beat anyone up. They don’t send cops to knock on, let alone knock down, doors at 2 o’clock in the morning. They don’t get a target’s relatives fired from their jobs. They just threaten to fine and sue until the uppity critic is flat-assed broke. The initial fine for what Mr. Goh did? $10,000.

That’s likely just the start. Police claim to have photos of Mr. Goh placing a Singaporean flag on the ground while moving some chairs and props around at the November 3 event. That’s another fine. Even more expensive could be the bill for what Goh said to the press, in this case Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post:

I felt vulnerable giving my statement [to the police] which can implicate me in the future—I told the inspector I feel like a sitting duck providing a statement which I don’t know whether it will legally backfire on me. We need to be read our basic rights before providing sworn police statements so that it is a fair system for everybody. Right now the system weighs heavily in favor of the police and by the time we can have access to a lawyer the case has already passed through the AGC [Attorney-General’s Chambers] and we have to defend ourselves in court.

Had Goh shut up at that point he might still have had a prospect of lunch money. But he added that he might raise the matter before the European Union Representative in Singapore and the UN Human Rights Commission. Oh, poor, poor Gilbert.

Defense and Counterterrorism

So we come last to the military, a domain where press discretion generally is widely accepted as making good, or good enough, sense. Again, you won’t see much grousing in the local press, but some here believe that Singapore overdoes its military activity. Its army of about 300,000 out of citizenry of about 3.4 million—staffed in large part from mandatory 24-month male conscription and augmented by a robust reserve system modeled on that of Israel—is, well, big.

Conscription serves a sociological melding function in Singapore as it has in Israel, so it cannot be judged solely on the basis of narrow defense criteria. But Singapore also spends a lot on high-end procurement items. It has the money, which helps. Yet the country is intrinsically vulnerable. Even short of kinetics, just two or three smallish armed ships from a hostile state, strategically placed to the east and west off Sentosa, could blockade Singapore, preventing commercial freighters and tankers from either coming or going. Just the skyrocketing of the Lloyds of London maritime insurance rates would probably do the trick. For the world’s largest transshipment port that’s an obvious existential threat.

Singapore’s military operates submarines—the most recent four purchased from Sweden—against such contingencies, but sinking enemy ships, if they cannot be deterred from showing up in the first place, would start a war. Absent an aggressive pre-emption strategy for dealing with crazy-state neighbors, which is not Singapore’s declaratory strategy for very good reasons, the best its efforts could probably achieve would be to scorch someone else’s earth en route to defeat. So why, then, the disproportionately large military force? A national Napoleonic complex, the ferocious optic an over-compensation for very small size? A reaction to the trauma of February 1942, when the Japanese inflicted the British Empire’s greatest and most humiliating military defeat? Hard to parse the possibilities.

The elite is particularly terrified of terrorism. It’s easy to see why: Singapore is a densely populated target-rich environment in a Muslim Malayospheric sea within which neo-fundamentalism is still rising. Worse, to get back to basic geography, authorities here know that for an even halfway-competent terrorist group to shoot a missile from Batam Island in Indonesia, 32 kilometers away, through the wicket of the Marina Bay Sands, is not nearly as difficult as they wish it were. (Note: I did not need to imagine this scenario on my own.)

So the problem is real, but at least one aspect of the approach the authorities have taken to counterterrorism is arguable. It makes sense to inculcate resiliency in first-responders, in the hospital/medical structures, and so forth, and the government does that well. Neither is there anything necessarily overwrought about the messaged assumption that it’s not a matter of if but when a major terrorist attack will occur. That assumption, designed to create social-psychological resilience, is justifiably taught in schools at an appropriate age level. But it achieves the reverse effect when pounded incessantly into the heads of the general public.

And it is pounded. The MRT announcements about reporting suspicious persons and packages, just as on the Washington metro, long ago turned into insidious white noise. Instead of building vigilance it more likely inculcates fatalism by reminding people repeatedly, if pre-consciously, that they might at any time become an incidental victim of a mass slaughter. That helps terrorists achieve their key aim of undermining social normalcy and trust in government.

Singapore is all too American in its over-the-top bureaucratized paranoia. A more stoical approach, as deployed in both Israel and the United Kingdom, would be a wiser way for both countries—and stoicism is not something culturally alien to Singaporeans whether of Chinese, South Asian, or Malay culture.

Finally on this score is the ongoing effort by the government to manage the coronavirus pandemic. In my view, the government’s response so far has been professional, measured, efficient, and prudent. But so deep is the ambient sense of vulnerability here that some people have become a bit overwrought. There’s been a lot of panic buying at food stores, which makes Singapore special not one whit. Here on campus at NTU, university authorities have mandated that all students, staff, and employees provide travel-report declarations with regard to travel to mainland China, which again makes perfect sense. But they are also insisting that everyone take and report their temperatures twice a day to the university’s mega-computer system; for those without thermometers, half a dozen points of measure have been established around the campus for the purpose. This is overdoing things; this is, it seems to me, counterproductive.

The uppermost values that guide Singapore’s People’s Action Party elite are social order, communal equipoise, and material progress to support the management of both. And what’s wrong with that? Singapore used to be “the world’s largest slum” for good reason, and social equipoise has never been an easy assumption given the multiethnic, multi-sectarian makeup of its people. What’s wrong with wanting to alleviate poverty and advance social harmony? If anyone can suggest more benign and liberal objectives under the circumstances, go ahead and try.

Ah, but remember the Greeks, as once rendered by Samuel Huntington: “A value that is normally good is not necessarily optimized when it is maximized.” Or as Mae West once put it: “Too much of a good thing can be taxing.” One can overdo things.

The will to order overdone tends to swamp critical thinking along with liberty and dissent. It can degenerate into conformity and soullessness as Henry Adams’s “killing of sympathies” trickles down.

Social harmony methodically over-managed can exaggerate public political correctness norms that can blowback in the form of exacerbated social tensions beneath the surface. It could seed passive-aggressive attitudes waiting for an unpropitious moment to boil over.

Excessive emphasis on material progress can warp educational philosophies, wreaking havoc on childhood innocence and creative imagination. It can also deplete social trust by generating nouveau riche complexes offensive even to the lightest moral sensibilities.

Nothing fails like success. Singapore has been spectacularly successful over the past half-century in achieving the goals its government set out and that the people overwhelmingly endorsed. But having crossed the finish line for victory at high speed, the place doesn’t seem to know what to do next except to keep on driving, pedal to the metal—which amounts to overdoing it on a higher level. Individual and social life both are pocked with unannounced tipping points, after which a productive course becomes counterproductive. Centralizing government management functions, for example, is a great idea until it isn’t, until increased transactional costs more than offset incremental efficiency gains.

So Singapore now faces a classic “Point B” problem. The scene in the rearview mirror is deeply satisfying, but it can’t tell the driver where to head next. The problem with a stiffened corporate-technocratic mentality, especially one vindicated by a stellar record at achieving pre-defined objectives, is that it’s not usually at its best when it comes to designing a new Point B. Don’t get me wrong: This is not so much a criticism as an observation, and Singapore is hardly the only place where the observation fits.

Oh, and one more thing. In Singapore, manhole covers are too abundant and, worse, they’re rectangular rather than round. That’s just wrong.

Such copy continues to be produced. A particularly egregious example may be found in a January 31 Foreign Affairs article, specifically the fourth paragraph. The author here uses the phrase “Singapore-on-the-Thames,” a meme that has been misused by both “stay” and “leave” advocates for years now, to suggest that the UK may adopt beggar-thy-neighbor policies. That’s not the problem; it might. The problem is that the use of this phrase suggests explicitly that Singapore’s environmental, labor, and food safety standards are lower than those of its neighbors. Singapore’s labor standards, at least for citizens, lower than Thailand’s? Singapore’s environmental standards lower than Indonesia’s? Singapore’s food safety standards lower than Malaysia’s? This is fatuous nonsense.

The post Challenges and Pitfalls of the Technocratic Art appeared first on The American Interest.

How A Technocracy Is Overdoing It

We come now, as promised, to examples—extant, possible, or claimed—of Singapore’s technocracy overdoing its management missions, with path-dependent, mostly Chinese but also residual Anglophone characteristics. Most fall well short of serious. Some are liable to strike Americans as downright funny, the way un-self-aware anal-retentive human behavior often is (so long as it describes someone else). Some register short of amusing. We start with the few that Americans tend to have heard about and augment from there. The essence we sum in conclusion.

Gum and Caning

So what’s with the chewing gum? Except for specialized nicotine-weening medications, it’s banned. It’s banned, the story goes, because years ago some juvenile delinquents used well-masticated gum to clog MRT train doors. But if that can’t explain a ban continuing on long after said juvenile delinquents reached middle age, what does explain it?

The likeliest explanation is, as usual, the simplest one: Lee Kwan Yew just thought gum chewing was a gross habit, he possessed the power to proscribe it, and so, as with the answer to that eternal question about why dogs lick their genitals, he did it because he could. One can only imagine what he would think of the tattooed, pierced Singaporean youth riding the MRT today, or of the many young women who ape the Western “style” of wearing jeans and jean shorts ripped hither and yon to horizontal shreds from the waist down.

To typical Americans of a certain age, people with orders-of-magnitude greater tolerance for disorder, dissent, and bad taste than typical Singaporeans, the chewing gum ban brings to mind the iconic scene from Woody Allen’s 1971 movie “Bananas,” in which the new dictator of the fictional Republic of San Marcos orders everyone to wear their underwear on the outside—something, in other words, so arbitrary as to seem slightly mad.

But as John Dryden wrote, “Geniuses and madmen are near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” The ban isn’t madness at all, just a manifestation of the Confucian-inflected penchant for orderliness, and its tacit assumption that the social psychology of orderliness is seamless. It’s not just a Confucian conclusion either: The ban makes sense as Singapore’s version of James Q. Wilson’s famous “broken windows” insight.

Then there is caning. Most Americans reject corporeal punishment as part of any civilized legal system, but, Dr. Spock’s legacy notwithstanding, plenty of us privately have potched our kids from time to time—not to hurt them of course, just to get their wandering attention at certain tender pre-linguistic-fluency ages. And that’s exactly the issue here: A government spanking miscreants comes across as way over-the-top paternalistic, and that rankles those wedded to a Western social contract-based relationship between citizens and government.

The infamous 1994 caning case, involving then-18-year old Michael Fay, is all that most Americans know about caning in Singapore. They don’t know that Singaporeans didn’t introduce caning here; the British did. They don’t know that, beyond stealing more than a few road signs and squirreling them away in his room for no particular good reason, Fay said “Fuck you” to the judge during his trial. Had he done that in, say, Texas or Arkansas, he’d have begged for a mere four switch swats on his stupid teenage ass. They also probably don’t know that graffiti and petty vandalism in Singapore pretty much don’t exist.

I’m uncomfortable with caning’s implied paternalism, but not with its results. But it’s really none of my business (or yours, fellow American) since I’m not a Singaporean national. As a general rule, Americans should think twice (or as many times as necessary) before tendering judgments about matters in which they are not vested and probably can’t fully understand for lack of metis. A former Singaporean ambassador to the United States complained to me, recently and in the main justifiably, that Americans often just don’t listen to others, especially others from small countries. She was too polite to add that this rarely stops us from speaking out about the supposed moral deficiencies of said others, whether we know what we’re talking about or not. It’s not one of our more endearing traits.

Drugs, Hookers, and Drunken Dancing

Recreational drugs, which Mr. Fay reportedly took up as a hobby once back stateside, are scarce in Singapore. Marijuana, hashish, uppers, opiates, and other banned intoxicants are rare, but not non-existent. As is well known, the government’s attitude toward them is severe. The death penalty imposed over the years, though much less often recently, has been invoked overwhelmingly for just two offenses: murder and commercial-scale drug dealing. But before Western liberals and other dyed-in-the-wool hedonists rush to judgment, there’s something they need to know.

Part of the prison system in Singapore—the SPS, Singapore Prison Service—involves a drug rehab center (the DRC, the Drug Rehabilitation Center), which is part jail but also part hospital and social engineering program involving addicts’ families, skills trainers, and employers as support systems to minimize drug-related criminal recidivism. Increasingly, the system prefers rehab to plain incarceration: 2019 registered a 65 percent increase in DRC use following changes to the Misuse of Drugs Act.

Out of concern to avoid stigmatizing and humiliating the vulnerable, the government publishes no data on the proportions of the country’s ethnic hearth communities that end up in jail and rehab. It’s a sensitive matter, as are all matters intercommunal, and the reason is that the Malay community, which occupies the statistical bottom of the mean income and education scales, also occupies the top of the incarceration, broken families, delinquent youth, and drug-dependency scales.

For this reason, some American observers jump fast to the analogy that Malays are to Singapore what African-Americans are to the United States. Well, don’t jump; the analogy falls flat on its face even before the first step has landed. Malays were not dragged to Singapore as slaves, their families torn apart and their men systematically emasculated over centuries. And not that it should matter but it does anyway, Malays are not the major hearth community here with the darkest skin tones, so binary “white”/“black” racist tropes one might suppose apply just don’t.

That said, as with the vulnerability of certain human allele-distribution clusters to intoxicating substances—think Native Americans and alcohol, for example—Malays as a group in Singapore seem to be at greater risk of substance abuse than others. If the drug laws here were as “soft” as those of western Europe or the United States, a cultural holocaust among the Malay population might ensue, with dire implications for Singapore’s entire social order. So is the legal regime for substance abuse here best described as retrograde paternalism or as a form of “tough love” intercommunal management? You work it out.

The urge to manage everything that can conceivably be managed is also apparent along a stretch of the Orchard Road shopping district. Singapore truly gleams, except when and where it doesn’t. A modernized remnant of the old days before World War II, when Singapore was infamous for unregulated gambling, prostitution, and opium, still exists as a tiny seedier side of Red Dot life.

Cuppage Plaza, for example, features several floors of small commercial establishments, all wrapped around an unadorned, warehouse-chic atrium, devoted to Japanese subculture—narrowly defined. Some excellent restaurants may be found, though to locate the ones with no signs you need a knowledgeable guide. But there are also several “KTV gentlemen’s clubs.”

KTV stands for karaoke and television, but these places are mainly brothels. Either that or the sequin-bedecked young Filipina, Indonesian, and mainland Chinese women clotted around the door of every single one of them is some sort of weird coincidence. (Women from Vietnam and Thailand, I’m told, grace the nearby Far East Plaza, while for expats “four floors of whores” await at Orchard Tower across the street.) Just walking out the door of a Cuppage Plaza restaurant to the elevator past one of these KTV places can cause a midnight sunburn.

Singapore isn’t Reno, Nevada, but as a concession to human nature, all this is managed as though it were: Informal but strict zoning and regular medical checks keep matters in bounds. Singaporeans and visitors who aren’t interested are advised, should they wax indignant, “Well, no one is making you go there.”

As for the rowdier bars, a British journalist resident here named Nicholas Walton tells a story in his recent book Singapore, Singapura of the authorities deciding after the 2003 SARS epidemic to reconsider the ban on table-dancing. The idea, apparently, was to lighten the mood a bit by allowing at least some kinds of fun. But instead of just legalizing table dancing, the authorities decided to first study its manifestations in surrounding countries. So they sent bureaucrats—presumably from the prospective Ministry of Table Dancing—to observe. The investigators concluded that table dancing could be dangerous, since drunken people occasionally toppled from tables onto other people en route to the floor. So the authorities ordered relevant establishments to install poles on tables and bar tops to reduce ER visits and other embarrassments.

Fines, Flora, and Food

That’s right: Table dancing was once explicitly banned, along with fireworks, porn, outdoor spitting and urinating, strutting around one’s apartment in the nude, and the list goes on. Just as at Haw Par Villa’s Ten Courts of Hell, there is a punishment in the form of a fine for nearly every non-violent transgression imaginable. Years ago some wag dubbed Singapore “The Fine City,” a double entendre aimed at capturing its star quality and its penchant for legal pedantry all in one phrase. Nice job, whoever came up with it, and nice going whoever slapped it on t-shirts to make some money.

Then there is the excessive but excusable. Lee Kwan Yew envisioned Singapore as a city in a garden, so he spared no available expense—a telltale sign of technocratic excess—to bring plants to the Red Dot from tropical climes the world over. At the time folks here, and not only here, of course, knew little about invasive species and ecological rectitude. The overstory is that Singapore’s imported plant life has damaged native ecosystems. African tulip trees, for example, are beautiful, but they’ve spread at the expense of other trees and the ancient diverse ecosystems dependent on them.

Similar excesses have concerned land use. When Singapore became independent in 1965, local agriculture supplied about 60 percent of basic food needs. But the effort, beginning in earnest in the 1970s, to industrialize Singapore to raise living standards and provide maximum full employment for a growing population drove that number down all the way to about 3 percent. (One eastern island, Tekong, that had been an agricultural area was turned into a military training preserve, its population evicted. Eminent domain is no joke here.)

The resulting food security anxiety has led, for example, to a megadeal with China wherein a chunk of Chinese land is being developed with Singaporean capital for the main purpose of providing foodstuffs to Singapore. The Jilin Project involves 1,450 square miles of land; all of Singapore is only 751.5 square miles. Perhaps sensing belatedly that putting so much leverage in Chinese hands might be unwise, the government subsequently announced the 30/30 challenge, by which Singapore will produce 30 percent of its own food by 2030, largely through advanced vertical hydroponic methods.

Planning and Pressing

If any government can turn on a dime to rectify past misjudgments, Singapore’s is the one. The 30/30 project has an excellent chance of succeeding, and in typical Singaporean fashion, the effort—a government-Temasek-university undertaking—is launching in the form of corporate spinoffs using patents and licensing protocols to also market the state-of-the-art techniques globally.

So deep is the sense of vulnerability that the elite excels at bold planning and taking creative risks. But that puts a premium on the planning being both efficient and prescient. When you trust human artifice to save your posterior, you resign yourself to living on a knife’s edge; one really big goof and you’re kaya toast, no meh? (Pardon my Singlish.) The folks who run the place know that. They just don’t see much choice, and who’s to say they’re mistaken?

One manifestation of the elite’s future-shock anxiety is its “big project” mentality. To insure stability going forward, the government aims to hitch its globe-spanning hub-rentier, service-heavy economy to the big boys on the Asian block. So beyond the Jilin project is the Chongqing Connectivity Initiative (CCI). On September 11, Singapore and China signed 27 memoranda of understanding linking an array of government-owned and operated infrastructure elements—for example, data tie-ups between Singapore’s Singtel and China’s three big telecom companies. Common technological platforms and interoperability will enable Singapore to get a piece of the enormous Chinese market. Other agreements cover media holdings, financial services, aviation, and logistics.

Not all the big-game planning works out. In July a consortium of Temasek companies—which means the government, in essence—signed a deal with the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to build a new gleaming capital city called Amaravati (“abode of the gods”). No one from Andhra Pradesh who sees “smart city” Singapore, especially the showpiece urban marvels of Marina Bay—the Sands mega-hotel, the Flower Dome, the Cloud Forest, the Supertree Grove, and so on—can not want something similar for their own. But in November the Indian side canceled the project, leaving a lot of effort and no trivial planning investment orphaned.

Singapore also engages in demographic planning, mostly quietly. The Chinese elite has believed that for Singapore to be economically successful for the long haul, the ethnic Chinese percentage of the citizenry must remain above 70 percent. Prooftext: In 1989, Lee Kwan Yew said that Singaporean Chinese must maintain a lopsided majority “or there will be a shift in the economy, both the economic performance and the political backdrop which makes that economic performance possible.” Did he mean that for complex historical and cultural reasons Chinese excelled at creating and sustaining wealth, or did he mean that Chinese were smarter and hence “better” in some intrinsic way than South Asians and Malays? Was he speaking as a sociological realist or a garden-variety racist, or perhaps as an indistinguishable mash-up of both?

It’s too late to ask him, but a faint undercurrent of Chinese chauvinism is a fact of life. It’s illustrated in a searing Singaporean noir film called “A Land Imagined” and in the fact that some older Chinese will not take an open seat on the MRT or a bus next to a dark-skinned Tamil.

As far as policy goes, Singapore accepts naturalized citizens, averaging about 20,000 per annum in recent years—the great majority being Chinese, presumably to compensate for the fact that Chinese Singaporeans have the lowest fertility rates, less than half of the standard replacement rate—of the three main hearth communities. But no numbers breaking down new immigrants’ points of origin are published. At the same time, low-skilled foreign contract workers lack most standard labor rights, in part at least because the government wants to quash any ideas some may develop of staying on and applying for citizenship.

Leaving aside what went wrong with the Amaravati project, the failure barely showed up in the local press, any more than immigration policy or contract labor rights attract much open debate. The Straits Times, the main daily newspaper, contains decent political coverage of other countries and doesn’t shy away from their public controversies. But not so much concerning Singapore, where “local” political news reminds one more of press culture in Todor Zhivkov’s Bulgaria than it does of, say, the Washington Post.

A recent book by former Straits Times editor P.N. Balji, entitled Reluctant Editor, tells of Lew Kwan Yew’s efforts to get the press to censor itself so that the government wouldn’t need to. In the main, Yew got his way. Subtle enduring case in point: There’s a terrific magazine stand, with fare from all over the world, in the Holland Village area—a high-rent neighborhood that houses lots of expats. It’s the only one of its kind in the country, for a reason: The government doesn’t censor or ban foreign press sources that might contain copy critical of Singapore; it merely limits the number of copies that may be imported and displays them in places where few typical citizens are likely to cast their eyes. Why use a ball-peen hammer when a nail clipper will do?

So there is no totalitarian “thought control” in Singapore, just a seamless effort to gently minimize potential spikes of pandaemonic irrationality. As ought to be obvious as of late, no society is wholly immune to such spikes, but different societies have different buffering capacities for surviving them. The elite here has judged Singapore’s buffer to be rather thin, so has chosen to err on the side of safety by defining incitement broadly, yet treating it as deftly as they think they can afford. What is not necessary and would never be tolerated in the United States is not a universal formula. What passes for reasonable is context-specific.

Dissent

Alas, one group’s “reasonable” may seem unreasonable to other groups. In that light consider the adventures of Gilbert Goh.

Mr. Goh, an ethnic Chinese, runs a small business helping the unemployed find new jobs. One of the biggest gripes among those most affected by Singapore’s middle-class squeeze (of which more next time) is that the government allows too many immigrants and foreign workers. That, it is averred, raises unemployment among citizens and exerts downward pressure on wages for less well-off Singaporeans. It also increases the overall demand for housing and hence helps push real estate prices up beyond the comfortable grasp of many citizens. (This should sound familiar to Americans who follow the immigration debate in the United States.)

For some reason, Mr. Goh took it upon himself to organize this anti-immigrant sentiment, which seems mainly focused against South Asians. So on November 3 he presided over a protest, reportedly some 300-400 strong, against a proposed Singapore-India Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) at the Speaker’s Corner in Hong Lim Park. (The Speaker’s Corner is an official “soapbox”, as Americans would call it, from which any citizen can hold forth about pretty much anything, so long as it doesn’t threaten or impugn intercommunal and multi-sectarian harmony.)

As it happens, most complaints can be creatively roped into no-no categories if the elite wishes to fling a lasso. More, non-citizens may not hold forth at the Speaker’s Corner unless the program sponsor obtains a license from the police. So the police arrested Mr. Goh on November 3, claiming that one of the rally’s presenters was a non-citizen who spoke in the absence of a license. (Turns out the guy was married to a Singaporean and so was a naturalized citizen. A member of the audience, an Israeli tourist, asked a question after the speeches had concluded; it’s unclear if the moderator’s allowing his question was illegal.) After his arrest the police began asking Goh questions, the answer to one of which apparently implicated him in another law breakage. All this occurred before Goh was allowed to speak to a lawyer.

Now, the government and the ruling party, sensitive to criticism about immigration and foreign labor since the 2011 election elevated the issue to the first rank, have been ratcheting down levels of foreign labor anyway. The basic motive for the aforementioned management of Singapore’s demography aligns with Goh’s concerns, too. But the elite cares more about the prospect of potentially metastasizing dissent than it does about specific arguments, or whether, as it claims, Goh got some of his facts about CECA wrong.

Note in this regard that back in September Ho Ching, the prime minister’s spouse, and Temasek head, shared a Facebook post praising the Hong Kong police for their restraint against unruly protestors. A few days before, a planned Yale-NUS program on dissent in Singapore was canceled just before its opening. So the Gilbert Goh episode, you will understand, is no one-off.

The authorities will probably neutralize Mr. Goh the same way they have neutralized other pesky individuals who were too insistent or charismatic for their circumscribed comfort zone. They don’t throw people in jail. They don’t beat anyone up. They don’t send cops to knock on, let alone knock down, doors at 2 o’clock in the morning. They don’t get a target’s relatives fired from their jobs. They just threaten to fine and sue until the uppity critic is flat-assed broke. The initial fine for what Mr. Goh did? $10,000.

That’s likely just the start. Police claim to have photos of Mr. Goh placing a Singaporean flag on the ground while moving some chairs and props around at the November 3 event. That’s another fine. Even more expensive could be the bill for what Goh said to the press, in this case Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post:

I felt vulnerable giving my statement [to the police] which can implicate me in the future—I told the inspector I feel like a sitting duck providing a statement which I don’t know whether it will legally backfire on me. We need to be read our basic rights before providing sworn police statements so that it is a fair system for everybody. Right now the system weighs heavily in favor of the police and by the time we can have access to a lawyer the case has already passed through the AGC [Attorney-General’s Chambers] and we have to defend ourselves in court.

Had Goh shut up at that point he might still have had a prospect of lunch money. But he added that he might raise the matter before the European Union Representative in Singapore and the UN Human Rights Commission. Oh, poor, poor Gilbert.

Defense and Counterterrorism

So we come last to the military, a domain where press discretion generally is widely accepted as making good, or good enough, sense. Again, you won’t see much grousing in the local press, but some here believe that Singapore overdoes its military activity. Its army of about 300,000 out of citizenry of about 3.4 million—staffed in large part from mandatory 24-month male conscription and augmented by a robust reserve system modeled on that of Israel—is, well, big.

Conscription serves a sociological melding function in Singapore as it has in Israel, so it cannot be judged solely on the basis of narrow defense criteria. But Singapore also spends a lot on high-end procurement items. It has the money, which helps. Yet the country is intrinsically vulnerable. Even short of kinetics, just two or three smallish armed ships from a hostile state, strategically placed to the east and west off Sentosa, could blockade Singapore, preventing commercial freighters and tankers from either coming or going. Just the skyrocketing of the Lloyds of London maritime insurance rates would probably do the trick. For the world’s largest transshipment port that’s an obvious existential threat.

Singapore’s military operates submarines—the most recent four purchased from Sweden—against such contingencies, but sinking enemy ships, if they cannot be deterred from showing up in the first place, would start a war. Absent an aggressive pre-emption strategy for dealing with crazy-state neighbors, which is not Singapore’s declaratory strategy for very good reasons, the best its efforts could probably achieve would be to scorch someone else’s earth en route to defeat. So why, then, the disproportionately large military force? A national Napoleonic complex, the ferocious optic an over-compensation for very small size? A reaction to the trauma of February 1942, when the Japanese inflicted the British Empire’s greatest and most humiliating military defeat? Hard to parse the possibilities.

The elite is particularly terrified of terrorism. It’s easy to see why: Singapore is a densely populated target-rich environment in a Muslim Malayospheric sea within which neo-fundamentalism is still rising. Worse, to get back to basic geography, authorities here know that for an even halfway-competent terrorist group to shoot a missile from Batam Island in Indonesia, 32 kilometers away, through the wicket of the Marina Bay Sands, is not nearly as difficult as they wish it were. (Note: I did not need to imagine this scenario on my own.)

So the problem is real, but at least one aspect of the approach the authorities have taken to counterterrorism is arguable. It makes sense to inculcate resiliency in first-responders, in the hospital/medical structures, and so forth, and the government does that well. Neither is there anything necessarily overwrought about the messaged assumption that it’s not a matter of if but when a major terrorist attack will occur. That assumption, designed to create social-psychological resilience, is justifiably taught in schools at an appropriate age level. But it achieves the reverse effect when pounded incessantly into the heads of the general public.

And it is pounded. The MRT announcements about reporting suspicious persons and packages, just as on the Washington metro, long ago turned into insidious white noise. Instead of building vigilance it more likely inculcates fatalism by reminding people repeatedly, if pre-consciously, that they might at any time become an incidental victim of a mass slaughter. That helps terrorists achieve their key aim of undermining social normalcy and trust in government.

Singapore is all too American in its over-the-top bureaucratized paranoia. A more stoical approach, as deployed in both Israel and the United Kingdom, would be a wiser way for both countries—and stoicism is not something culturally alien to Singaporeans whether of Chinese, South Asian, or Malay culture.

Finally on this score is the ongoing effort by the government to manage the coronavirus pandemic. In my view, the government’s response so far has been professional, measured, efficient, and prudent. But so deep is the ambient sense of vulnerability here that some people have become a bit overwrought. There’s been a lot of panic buying at food stores, which makes Singapore special not one whit. Here on campus at NTU, university authorities have mandated that all students, staff, and employees provide travel-report declarations with regard to travel to mainland China, which again makes perfect sense. But they are also insisting that everyone take and report their temperatures twice a day to the university’s mega-computer system; for those without thermometers, half a dozen points of measure have been established around the campus for the purpose. This is overdoing things; this is, it seems to me, counterproductive.

The uppermost values that guide Singapore’s People’s Action Party elite are social order, communal equipoise, and material progress to support the management of both. And what’s wrong with that? Singapore used to be “the world’s largest slum” for good reason, and social equipoise has never been an easy assumption given the multiethnic, multi-sectarian makeup of its people. What’s wrong with wanting to alleviate poverty and advance social harmony? If anyone can suggest more benign and liberal objectives under the circumstances, go ahead and try.

Ah, but remember the Greeks, as once rendered by Samuel Huntington: “A value that is normally good is not necessarily optimized when it is maximized.” Or as Mae West once put it: “Too much of a good thing can be taxing.” One can overdo things.

The will to order overdone tends to swamp critical thinking along with liberty and dissent. It can degenerate into conformity and soullessness as Henry Adams’s “killing of sympathies” trickles down.

Social harmony methodically over-managed can exaggerate public political correctness norms that can blowback in the form of exacerbated social tensions beneath the surface. It could seed passive-aggressive attitudes waiting for an unpropitious moment to boil over.

Excessive emphasis on material progress can warp educational philosophies, wreaking havoc on childhood innocence and creative imagination. It can also deplete social trust by generating nouveau riche complexes offensive even to the lightest moral sensibilities.

Nothing fails like success. Singapore has been spectacularly successful over the past half-century in achieving the goals its government set out and that the people overwhelmingly endorsed. But having crossed the finish line for victory at high speed, the place doesn’t seem to know what to do next except to keep on driving, pedal to the metal—which amounts to overdoing it on a higher level. Individual and social life both are pocked with unannounced tipping points, after which a productive course becomes counterproductive. Centralizing government management functions, for example, is a great idea until it isn’t, until increased transactional costs more than offset incremental efficiency gains.

So Singapore now faces a classic “Point B” problem. The scene in the rearview mirror is deeply satisfying, but it can’t tell the driver where to head next. The problem with a stiffened corporate-technocratic mentality, especially one vindicated by a stellar record at achieving pre-defined objectives, is that it’s not usually at its best when it comes to designing a new Point B. Don’t get me wrong: This is not so much a criticism as an observation, and Singapore is hardly the only place where the observation fits.

Oh, and one more thing. In Singapore, manhole covers are too abundant and, worse, they’re rectangular rather than round. That’s just wrong.

Such copy continues to be produced. A particularly egregious example may be found in a January 31 Foreign Affairs article, specifically the fourth paragraph. The author here uses the phrase “Singapore-on-the-Thames,” a meme that has been misused by both “stay” and “leave” advocates for years now, to suggest that the UK may adopt beggar-thy-neighbor policies. That’s not the problem; it might. The problem is that the use of this phrase suggests explicitly that Singapore’s environmental, labor, and food safety standards are lower than those of its neighbors. Singapore’s labor standards, at least for citizens, lower than Thailand’s? Singapore’s environmental standards lower than Indonesia’s? Singapore’s food safety standards lower than Malaysia’s? This is fatuous nonsense.

The post How A Technocracy Is Overdoing It appeared first on The American Interest.

Examples of Overdoing It

We come now, as promised, to examples—extant, possible, or claimed—of Singapore’s technocracy overdoing its management missions, with path-dependent, mostly Chinese but also residual Anglophone characteristics. Most fall well short of serious. Some are liable to strike Americans as downright funny, the way un-self-aware anal-retentive human behavior often is (so long as it describes someone else). Some register short of amusing. We start with the few that Americans tend to have heard about and augment from there. The essence we sum in conclusion.

Gum and Caning

So what’s with the chewing gum? Except for specialized nicotine-weening medications, it’s banned. It’s banned, the story goes, because years ago some juvenile delinquents used well-masticated gum to clog MRT train doors. But if that can’t explain a ban continuing on long after said juvenile delinquents reached middle age, what does explain it?

The likeliest explanation is, as usual, the simplest one: Lee Kwan Yew just thought gum chewing was a gross habit, he possessed the power to proscribe it, and so, as with the answer to that eternal question about why dogs lick their genitals, he did it because he could. One can only imagine what he would think of the tattooed, pierced Singaporean youth riding the MRT today, or of the many young women who ape the Western “style” of wearing jeans and jean shorts ripped hither and yon to horizontal shreds from the waist down.

To typical Americans of a certain age, people with orders-of-magnitude greater tolerance for disorder, dissent, and bad taste than typical Singaporeans, the chewing gum ban brings to mind the iconic scene from Woody Allen’s 1971 movie “Bananas,” in which the new dictator of the fictional Republic of San Marcos orders everyone to wear their underwear on the outside—something, in other words, so arbitrary as to seem slightly mad.

But as John Dryden wrote, “Geniuses and madmen are near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” The ban isn’t madness at all, just a manifestation of the Confucian-inflected penchant for orderliness, and its tacit assumption that the social psychology of orderliness is seamless. It’s not just a Confucian conclusion either: The ban makes sense as Singapore’s version of James Q. Wilson’s famous “broken windows” insight.

Then there is caning. Most Americans reject corporeal punishment as part of any civilized legal system, but, Dr. Spock’s legacy notwithstanding, plenty of us privately have potched our kids from time to time—not to hurt them of course, just to get their wandering attention at certain tender pre-linguistic-fluency ages. And that’s exactly the issue here: A government spanking miscreants comes across as way over-the-top paternalistic, and that rankles those wedded to a Western social contract-based relationship between citizens and government.

The infamous 1994 caning case, involving then-18-year old Michael Fay, is all that most Americans know about caning in Singapore. They don’t know that Singaporeans didn’t introduce caning here; the British did. They don’t know that, beyond stealing more than a few road signs and squirreling them away in his room for no particular good reason, Fay said “Fuck you” to the judge during his trial. Had he done that in, say, Texas or Arkansas, he’d have begged for a mere four switch swats on his stupid teenage ass. They also probably don’t know that graffiti and petty vandalism in Singapore pretty much don’t exist.

I’m uncomfortable with caning’s implied paternalism, but not with its results. But it’s really none of my business (or yours, fellow American) since I’m not a Singaporean national. As a general rule, Americans should think twice (or as many times as necessary) before tendering judgments about matters in which they are not vested and probably can’t fully understand for lack of metis. A former Singaporean ambassador to the United States complained to me, recently and in the main justifiably, that Americans often just don’t listen to others, especially others from small countries. She was too polite to add that this rarely stops us from speaking out about the supposed moral deficiencies of said others, whether we know what we’re talking about or not. It’s not one of our more endearing traits.

Drugs, Hookers, and Drunken Dancing

Recreational drugs, which Mr. Fay reportedly took up as a hobby once back stateside, are scarce in Singapore. Marijuana, hashish, uppers, opiates, and other banned intoxicants are rare, but not non-existent. As is well known, the government’s attitude toward them is severe. The death penalty imposed over the years, though much less often recently, has been invoked overwhelmingly for just two offenses: murder and commercial-scale drug dealing. But before Western liberals and other dyed-in-the-wool hedonists rush to judgment, there’s something they need to know.

Part of the prison system in Singapore—the SPS, Singapore Prison Service—involves a drug rehab center (the DRC, the Drug Rehabilitation Center), which is part jail but also part hospital and social engineering program involving addicts’ families, skills trainers, and employers as support systems to minimize drug-related criminal recidivism. Increasingly, the system prefers rehab to plain incarceration: 2019 registered a 65 percent increase in DRC use following changes to the Misuse of Drugs Act.

Out of concern to avoid stigmatizing and humiliating the vulnerable, the government publishes no data on the proportions of the country’s ethnic hearth communities that end up in jail and rehab. It’s a sensitive matter, as are all matters intercommunal, and the reason is that the Malay community, which occupies the statistical bottom of the mean income and education scales, also occupies the top of the incarceration, broken families, delinquent youth, and drug-dependency scales.

For this reason, some American observers jump fast to the analogy that Malays are to Singapore what African-Americans are to the United States. Well, don’t jump; the analogy falls flat on its face even before the first step has landed. Malays were not dragged to Singapore as slaves, their families torn apart and their men systematically emasculated over centuries. And not that it should matter but it does anyway, Malays are not the major hearth community here with the darkest skin tones, so binary “white”/“black” racist tropes one might suppose apply just don’t.

That said, as with the vulnerability of certain human allele-distribution clusters to intoxicating substances—think Native Americans and alcohol, for example—Malays as a group in Singapore seem to be at greater risk of substance abuse than others. If the drug laws here were as “soft” as those of western Europe or the United States, a cultural holocaust among the Malay population might ensue, with dire implications for Singapore’s entire social order. So is the legal regime for substance abuse here best described as retrograde paternalism or as a form of “tough love” intercommunal management? You work it out.

The urge to manage everything that can conceivably be managed is also apparent along a stretch of the Orchard Road shopping district. Singapore truly gleams, except when and where it doesn’t. A modernized remnant of the old days before World War II, when Singapore was infamous for unregulated gambling, prostitution, and opium, still exists as a tiny seedier side of Red Dot life.

Cuppage Plaza, for example, features several floors of small commercial establishments, all wrapped around an unadorned, warehouse-chic atrium, devoted to Japanese subculture—narrowly defined. Some excellent restaurants may be found, though to locate the ones with no signs you need a knowledgeable guide. But there are also several “KTV gentlemen’s clubs.”

KTV stands for karaoke and television, but these places are mainly brothels. Either that or the sequin-bedecked young Filipina, Indonesian, and mainland Chinese women clotted around the door of every single one of them is some sort of weird coincidence. (Women from Vietnam and Thailand, I’m told, grace the nearby Far East Plaza, while for expats “four floors of whores” await at Orchard Tower across the street.) Just walking out the door of a Cuppage Plaza restaurant to the elevator past one of these KTV places can cause a midnight sunburn.

Singapore isn’t Reno, Nevada, but as a concession to human nature, all this is managed as though it were: Informal but strict zoning and regular medical checks keep matters in bounds. Singaporeans and visitors who aren’t interested are advised, should they wax indignant, “Well, no one is making you go there.”

As for the rowdier bars, a British journalist resident here named Nicholas Walton tells a story in his recent book Singapore, Singapura of the authorities deciding after the 2003 SARS epidemic to reconsider the ban on table-dancing. The idea, apparently, was to lighten the mood a bit by allowing at least some kinds of fun. But instead of just legalizing table dancing, the authorities decided to first study its manifestations in surrounding countries. So they sent bureaucrats—presumably from the prospective Ministry of Table Dancing—to observe. The investigators concluded that table dancing could be dangerous, since drunken people occasionally toppled from tables onto other people en route to the floor. So the authorities ordered relevant establishments to install poles on tables and bar tops to reduce ER visits and other embarrassments.

Fines, Flora, and Food

That’s right: Table dancing was once explicitly banned, along with fireworks, porn, outdoor spitting and urinating, strutting around one’s apartment in the nude, and the list goes on. Just as at Haw Par Villa’s Ten Courts of Hell, there is a punishment in the form of a fine for nearly every non-violent transgression imaginable. Years ago some wag dubbed Singapore “The Fine City,” a double entendre aimed at capturing its star quality and its penchant for legal pedantry all in one phrase. Nice job, whoever came up with it, and nice going whoever slapped it on t-shirts to make some money.

Then there is the excessive but excusable. Lee Kwan Yew envisioned Singapore as a city in a garden, so he spared no available expense—a telltale sign of technocratic excess—to bring plants to the Red Dot from tropical climes the world over. At the time folks here, and not only here, of course, knew little about invasive species and ecological rectitude. The overstory is that Singapore’s imported plant life has damaged native ecosystems. African tulip trees, for example, are beautiful, but they’ve spread at the expense of other trees and the ancient diverse ecosystems dependent on them.

Similar excesses have concerned land use. When Singapore became independent in 1965, local agriculture supplied about 60 percent of basic food needs. But the effort, beginning in earnest in the 1970s, to industrialize Singapore to raise living standards and provide maximum full employment for a growing population drove that number down all the way to about 3 percent. (One eastern island, Tekong, that had been an agricultural area was turned into a military training preserve, its population evicted. Eminent domain is no joke here.)

The resulting food security anxiety has led, for example, to a megadeal with China wherein a chunk of Chinese land is being developed with Singaporean capital for the main purpose of providing foodstuffs to Singapore. The Jilin Project involves 1,450 square miles of land; all of Singapore is only 751.5 square miles. Perhaps sensing belatedly that putting so much leverage in Chinese hands might be unwise, the government subsequently announced the 30/30 challenge, by which Singapore will produce 30 percent of its own food by 2030, largely through advanced vertical hydroponic methods.

Planning and Pressing

If any government can turn on a dime to rectify past misjudgments, Singapore’s is the one. The 30/30 project has an excellent chance of succeeding, and in typical Singaporean fashion, the effort—a government-Temasek-university undertaking—is launching in the form of corporate spinoffs using patents and licensing protocols to also market the state-of-the-art techniques globally.

So deep is the sense of vulnerability that the elite excels at bold planning and taking creative risks. But that puts a premium on the planning being both efficient and prescient. When you trust human artifice to save your posterior, you resign yourself to living on a knife’s edge; one really big goof and you’re kaya toast, no meh? (Pardon my Singlish.) The folks who run the place know that. They just don’t see much choice, and who’s to say they’re mistaken?

One manifestation of the elite’s future-shock anxiety is its “big project” mentality. To insure stability going forward, the government aims to hitch its globe-spanning hub-rentier, service-heavy economy to the big boys on the Asian block. So beyond the Jilin project is the Chongqing Connectivity Initiative (CCI). On September 11, Singapore and China signed 27 memoranda of understanding linking an array of government-owned and operated infrastructure elements—for example, data tie-ups between Singapore’s Singtel and China’s three big telecom companies. Common technological platforms and interoperability will enable Singapore to get a piece of the enormous Chinese market. Other agreements cover media holdings, financial services, aviation, and logistics.

Not all the big-game planning works out. In July a consortium of Temasek companies—which means the government, in essence—signed a deal with the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to build a new gleaming capital city called Amaravati (“abode of the gods”). No one from Andhra Pradesh who sees “smart city” Singapore, especially the showpiece urban marvels of Marina Bay—the Sands mega-hotel, the Flower Dome, the Cloud Forest, the Supertree Grove, and so on—can not want something similar for their own. But in November the Indian side canceled the project, leaving a lot of effort and no trivial planning investment orphaned.

Singapore also engages in demographic planning, mostly quietly. The Chinese elite has believed that for Singapore to be economically successful for the long haul, the ethnic Chinese percentage of the citizenry must remain above 70 percent. Prooftext: In 1989, Lee Kwan Yew said that Singaporean Chinese must maintain a lopsided majority “or there will be a shift in the economy, both the economic performance and the political backdrop which makes that economic performance possible.” Did he mean that for complex historical and cultural reasons Chinese excelled at creating and sustaining wealth, or did he mean that Chinese were smarter and hence “better” in some intrinsic way than South Asians and Malays? Was he speaking as a sociological realist or a garden-variety racist, or perhaps as an indistinguishable mash-up of both?

It’s too late to ask him, but a faint undercurrent of Chinese chauvinism is a fact of life. It’s illustrated in a searing Singaporean noir film called “A Land Imagined” and in the fact that some older Chinese will not take an open seat on the MRT or a bus next to a dark-skinned Tamil.

As far as policy goes, Singapore accepts naturalized citizens, averaging about 20,000 per annum in recent years—the great majority being Chinese, presumably to compensate for the fact that Chinese Singaporeans have the lowest fertility rates, less than half of the standard replacement rate—of the three main hearth communities. But no numbers breaking down new immigrants’ points of origin are published. At the same time, low-skilled foreign contract workers lack most standard labor rights, in part at least because the government wants to quash any ideas some may develop of staying on and applying for citizenship.

Leaving aside what went wrong with the Amaravati project, the failure barely showed up in the local press, any more than immigration policy or contract labor rights attract much open debate. The Straits Times, the main daily newspaper, contains decent political coverage of other countries and doesn’t shy away from their public controversies. But not so much concerning Singapore, where “local” political news reminds one more of press culture in Todor Zhivkov’s Bulgaria than it does of, say, the Washington Post.

A recent book by former Straits Times editor P.N. Balji, entitled Reluctant Editor, tells of Lew Kwan Yew’s efforts to get the press to censor itself so that the government wouldn’t need to. In the main, Yew got his way. Subtle enduring case in point: There’s a terrific magazine stand, with fare from all over the world, in the Holland Village area—a high-rent neighborhood that houses lots of expats. It’s the only one of its kind in the country, for a reason: The government doesn’t censor or ban foreign press sources that might contain copy critical of Singapore; it merely limits the number of copies that may be imported and displays them in places where few typical citizens are likely to cast their eyes. Why use a ball-peen hammer when a nail clipper will do?

So there is no totalitarian “thought control” in Singapore, just a seamless effort to gently minimize potential spikes of pandaemonic irrationality. As ought to be obvious as of late, no society is wholly immune to such spikes, but different societies have different buffering capacities for surviving them. The elite here has judged Singapore’s buffer to be rather thin, so has chosen to err on the side of safety by defining incitement broadly, yet treating it as deftly as they think they can afford. What is not necessary and would never be tolerated in the United States is not a universal formula. What passes for reasonable is context-specific.

Dissent

Alas, one group’s “reasonable” may seem unreasonable to other groups. In that light consider the adventures of Gilbert Goh.

Mr. Goh, an ethnic Chinese, runs a small business helping the unemployed find new jobs. One of the biggest gripes among those most affected by Singapore’s middle-class squeeze (of which more next time) is that the government allows too many immigrants and foreign workers. That, it is averred, raises unemployment among citizens and exerts downward pressure on wages for less well-off Singaporeans. It also increases the overall demand for housing and hence helps push real estate prices up beyond the comfortable grasp of many citizens. (This should sound familiar to Americans who follow the immigration debate in the United States.)

For some reason, Mr. Goh took it upon himself to organize this anti-immigrant sentiment, which seems mainly focused against South Asians. So on November 3 he presided over a protest, reportedly some 300-400 strong, against a proposed Singapore-India Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) at the Speaker’s Corner in Hong Lim Park. (The Speaker’s Corner is an official “soapbox”, as Americans would call it, from which any citizen can hold forth about pretty much anything, so long as it doesn’t threaten or impugn intercommunal and multi-sectarian harmony.)

As it happens, most complaints can be creatively roped into no-no categories if the elite wishes to fling a lasso. More, non-citizens may not hold forth at the Speaker’s Corner unless the program sponsor obtains a license from the police. So the police arrested Mr. Goh on November 3, claiming that one of the rally’s presenters was a non-citizen who spoke in the absence of a license. (Turns out the guy was married to a Singaporean and so was a naturalized citizen. A member of the audience, an Israeli tourist, asked a question after the speeches had concluded; it’s unclear if the moderator’s allowing his question was illegal.) After his arrest the police began asking Goh questions, the answer to one of which apparently implicated him in another law breakage. All this occurred before Goh was allowed to speak to a lawyer.

Now, the government and the ruling party, sensitive to criticism about immigration and foreign labor since the 2011 election elevated the issue to the first rank, have been ratcheting down levels of foreign labor anyway. The basic motive for the aforementioned management of Singapore’s demography aligns with Goh’s concerns, too. But the elite cares more about the prospect of potentially metastasizing dissent than it does about specific arguments, or whether, as it claims, Goh got some of his facts about CECA wrong.

Note in this regard that back in September Ho Ching, the prime minister’s spouse, and Temasek head, shared a Facebook post praising the Hong Kong police for their restraint against unruly protestors. A few days before, a planned Yale-NUS program on dissent in Singapore was canceled just before its opening. So the Gilbert Goh episode, you will understand, is no one-off.

The authorities will probably neutralize Mr. Goh the same way they have neutralized other pesky individuals who were too insistent or charismatic for their circumscribed comfort zone. They don’t throw people in jail. They don’t beat anyone up. They don’t send cops to knock on, let alone knock down, doors at 2 o’clock in the morning. They don’t get a target’s relatives fired from their jobs. They just threaten to fine and sue until the uppity critic is flat-assed broke. The initial fine for what Mr. Goh did? $10,000.

That’s likely just the start. Police claim to have photos of Mr. Goh placing a Singaporean flag on the ground while moving some chairs and props around at the November 3 event. That’s another fine. Even more expensive could be the bill for what Goh said to the press, in this case Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post:

I felt vulnerable giving my statement [to the police] which can implicate me in the future—I told the inspector I feel like a sitting duck providing a statement which I don’t know whether it will legally backfire on me. We need to be read our basic rights before providing sworn police statements so that it is a fair system for everybody. Right now the system weighs heavily in favor of the police and by the time we can have access to a lawyer the case has already passed through the AGC [Attorney-General’s Chambers] and we have to defend ourselves in court.

Had Goh shut up at that point he might still have had a prospect of lunch money. But he added that he might raise the matter before the European Union Representative in Singapore and the UN Human Rights Commission. Oh, poor, poor Gilbert.

Defense and Counterterrorism

So we come last to the military, a domain where press discretion generally is widely accepted as making good, or good enough, sense. Again, you won’t see much grousing in the local press, but some here believe that Singapore overdoes its military activity. Its army of about 300,000 out of citizenry of about 3.4 million—staffed in large part from mandatory 24-month male conscription and augmented by a robust reserve system modeled on that of Israel—is, well, big.

Conscription serves a sociological melding function in Singapore as it has in Israel, so it cannot be judged solely on the basis of narrow defense criteria. But Singapore also spends a lot on high-end procurement items. It has the money, which helps. Yet the country is intrinsically vulnerable. Even short of kinetics, just two or three smallish armed ships from a hostile state, strategically placed to the east and west off Sentosa, could blockade Singapore, preventing commercial freighters and tankers from either coming or going. Just the skyrocketing of the Lloyds of London maritime insurance rates would probably do the trick. For the world’s largest transshipment port that’s an obvious existential threat.

Singapore’s military operates submarines—the most recent four purchased from Sweden—against such contingencies, but sinking enemy ships, if they cannot be deterred from showing up in the first place, would start a war. Absent an aggressive pre-emption strategy for dealing with crazy-state neighbors, which is not Singapore’s declaratory strategy for very good reasons, the best its efforts could probably achieve would be to scorch someone else’s earth en route to defeat. So why, then, the disproportionately large military force? A national Napoleonic complex, the ferocious optic an over-compensation for very small size? A reaction to the trauma of February 1942, when the Japanese inflicted the British Empire’s greatest and most humiliating military defeat? Hard to parse the possibilities.

The elite is particularly terrified of terrorism. It’s easy to see why: Singapore is a densely populated target-rich environment in a Muslim Malayospheric sea within which neo-fundamentalism is still rising. Worse, to get back to basic geography, authorities here know that for an even halfway-competent terrorist group to shoot a missile from Batam Island in Indonesia, 32 kilometers away, through the wicket of the Marina Bay Sands, is not nearly as difficult as they wish it were. (Note: I did not need to imagine this scenario on my own.)

So the problem is real, but at least one aspect of the approach the authorities have taken to counterterrorism is arguable. It makes sense to inculcate resiliency in first-responders, in the hospital/medical structures, and so forth, and the government does that well. Neither is there anything necessarily overwrought about the messaged assumption that it’s not a matter of if but when a major terrorist attack will occur. That assumption, designed to create social-psychological resilience, is justifiably taught in schools at an appropriate age level. But it achieves the reverse effect when pounded incessantly into the heads of the general public.

And it is pounded. The MRT announcements about reporting suspicious persons and packages, just as on the Washington metro, long ago turned into insidious white noise. Instead of building vigilance it more likely inculcates fatalism by reminding people repeatedly, if pre-consciously, that they might at any time become an incidental victim of a mass slaughter. That helps terrorists achieve their key aim of undermining social normalcy and trust in government.

Singapore is all too American in its over-the-top bureaucratized paranoia. A more stoical approach, as deployed in both Israel and the United Kingdom, would be a wiser way for both countries—and stoicism is not something culturally alien to Singaporeans whether of Chinese, South Asian, or Malay culture.

Finally on this score is the ongoing effort by the government to manage the coronavirus pandemic. In my view, the government’s response so far has been professional, measured, efficient, and prudent. But so deep is the ambient sense of vulnerability here that some people have become a bit overwrought. There’s been a lot of panic buying at food stores, which makes Singapore special not one whit. Here on campus at NTU, university authorities have mandated that all students, staff, and employees provide travel-report declarations with regard to travel to mainland China, which again makes perfect sense. But they are also insisting that everyone take and report their temperatures twice a day to the university’s mega-computer system; for those without thermometers, half a dozen points of measure have been established around the campus for the purpose. This is overdoing things; this is, it seems to me, counterproductive.

The uppermost values that guide Singapore’s People’s Action Party elite are social order, communal equipoise, and material progress to support the management of both. And what’s wrong with that? Singapore used to be “the world’s largest slum” for good reason, and social equipoise has never been an easy assumption given the multiethnic, multi-sectarian makeup of its people. What’s wrong with wanting to alleviate poverty and advance social harmony? If anyone can suggest more benign and liberal objectives under the circumstances, go ahead and try.

Ah, but remember the Greeks, as once rendered by Samuel Huntington: “A value that is normally good is not necessarily optimized when it is maximized.” Or as Mae West once put it: “Too much of a good thing can be taxing.” One can overdo things.

The will to order overdone tends to swamp critical thinking along with liberty and dissent. It can degenerate into conformity and soullessness as Henry Adams’s “killing of sympathies” trickles down.

Social harmony methodically over-managed can exaggerate public political correctness norms that can blowback in the form of exacerbated social tensions beneath the surface. It could seed passive-aggressive attitudes waiting for an unpropitious moment to boil over.

Excessive emphasis on material progress can warp educational philosophies, wreaking havoc on childhood innocence and creative imagination. It can also deplete social trust by generating nouveau riche complexes offensive even to the lightest moral sensibilities.

Nothing fails like success. Singapore has been spectacularly successful over the past half-century in achieving the goals its government set out and that the people overwhelmingly endorsed. But having crossed the finish line for victory at high speed, the place doesn’t seem to know what to do next except to keep on driving, pedal to the metal—which amounts to overdoing it on a higher level. Individual and social life both are pocked with unannounced tipping points, after which a productive course becomes counterproductive. Centralizing government management functions, for example, is a great idea until it isn’t, until increased transactional costs more than offset incremental efficiency gains.

So Singapore now faces a classic “Point B” problem. The scene in the rearview mirror is deeply satisfying, but it can’t tell the driver where to head next. The problem with a stiffened corporate-technocratic mentality, especially one vindicated by a stellar record at achieving pre-defined objectives, is that it’s not usually at its best when it comes to designing a new Point B. Don’t get me wrong: This is not so much a criticism as an observation, and Singapore is hardly the only place where the observation fits.

Oh, and one more thing. In Singapore, manhole covers are too abundant and, worse, they’re rectangular rather than round. That’s just wrong.

Such copy continues to be produced. A particularly egregious example may be found in a January 31 Foreign Affairs article, specifically the fourth paragraph. The author here uses the phrase “Singapore-on-the-Thames,” a meme that has been misused by both “stay” and “leave” advocates for years now, to suggest that the UK may adopt beggar-thy-neighbor policies. That’s not the problem; it might. The problem is that the use of this phrase suggests explicitly that Singapore’s environmental, labor, and food safety standards are lower than those of its neighbors. Singapore’s labor standards, at least for citizens, lower than Thailand’s? Singapore’s environmental standards lower than Indonesia’s? Singapore’s food safety standards lower than Malaysia’s? This is fatuous nonsense.

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