Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 101

Less Than Meets the Eye

While the U.S. mulls how to calibrate its policy in response to the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad last week, a set of leaders are hoping that President Trump stays the course and decides to withdraw from Syria. The past week saw Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani and Vladimir Putin sharing the stage in Ankara with their host Tayyip Erdogan. It was not an unprecedented meeting: the power trio already met once in Sochi last November. And there will be, without a doubt, more such get-togethers.

The subject of discussions was the same as before: how to carve up Syria into zones of influence. Turkey has enlarged the territory under its control as a result of Operation Olive Branch against the Kurds in the northwestern enclave of Afrin. The Assad regime, backed by Iran and Russia, is on the cusp of taking over Eastern Ghouta, a suburban area outside Damascus that has been under opposition militia control since the outset of the conflict, and is turning its attention to the largest remaining rebel stronghold, the city of Idlib and its surrounding district. Following the chemical attack against Douma, the Turkish Foreign Ministry blasted the Syrian regime but shied for naming and shaming Russia.  Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin faulted “The entire international community, primarily countries that have an influence on the Syrian regime.”As the war grinds on, there will be a great deal of horse-trading in the weeks and months to come. And America, the trio of leaders hope, will be watching from the sidelines.

Are we bearing witness to a post-American order dawning in the Middle East? At the Moscow Conference on International Security earlier this month, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu boasted about the Russian-Turkish-Iranian “alliance” having sorted Syria. If the late Evgeny Primakov, Russia’s influential and knowledgeable foreign minister (and Middle East hand), were still around, he would rub his hands with glee at the sight of Russia effectively balancing against the global hegemon in league with regional allies. Turkey’s estrangement from its Western partner-patrons and the rise of Iranian influence, from Baghdad to Damascus to Beirut, appears to be a harbinger of a permanent shift to multipolarity not only in the Middle East, but also in Eurasia.  History and geography both bind Turkey and Iran to the Caucasus and Central Asia (including Afghanistan). If the “alliance” Shoigu extolled proves enduring, perhaps we could see it continue its work beyond Syria.

The critical question is whether relations within the Russia-Iran-Turkey triangle are purely transactional, or if there is a longer-term realignment at play.

Russia and Iran may well not be able to transcend their shared pasts. The Iranians harbor long memories of first the Russian Empire and then the Soviets invading, occupying, and annexing their territories. More recently, Moscow has repeatedly used Iran as a bargaining chip in relations with the U.S. In June 2010, the Iranians remember that Russia backed UN economic sanctions in response to Iran’s nuclear program. (Turkey, a nonpermanent member of the Security Council at the time, voted against). Furthermore, the Kremlin dragged its feet on an order of S-300 surface-to-air missiles first placed in 2007, finally delivering them only in late 2016. Finally, the Russian Federation has positive ties with the Islamic Republic’s bitterest rivals: Israel and, lately, Saudi Arabia.

Yet the coordinated intervention in Syria from 2015 onwards, where Russia has been providing the airpower and Iran the boots on the ground, has arguably moved the relationship past old grudges, perhaps even elevating it beyond the merely transactional. The standoff between Moscow and the West and the prospect of the Trump Administration ripping up the Iranian nuclear deal is likely to bring Russians and Iranians even closer.

And then there’s Turkey. Among all the violent convulsions in the region, it’s easy to lose sight of remarkable Erdogan’s pivot in 2016-2017 has been, going from a competitor to a partner of Russia and Iran. Partly this is because Erdogan downscaled his ambitions in Syria. He now grudgingly accepts that Assad will retain power in Damascus and that a Muslim Brotherhood-led regime reminiscent of Egypt under Mohammed Morsi is not in Syria’s future. His goal is to keep the Syrian Kurds in check—a goal that Iran, home to a sizeable Kurdish community, also happens to share. Last fall, Ankara and Tehran pushed back jointly against the Kurdistan Regional Government in Northern Iraq after it held an ill-advised independence referendum. And Turkey’s military campaign against the Kurdish YPG in Afrin also favors Iran, as it is a blow to U.S. prestige in the region. The message is that America is an unreliable ally.

Undercutting the U.S. seems to have shaped Russia’s calculus, too. Moscow green-lighted Olive Branch by opening Syrian airspace and pulling out its military police from Afrin, where they had previously been embedded with the YPG. Having taken over Afrin city and much of the surrounding area, the Turkish military and its allied Free Syrian Army are now focusing on areas further west, which the Kurds hold alongside U.S. and other Western troops. The mounting tensions over the town of Manbij, where an American and a British soldier were recently killed by an improvised explosive device (likely planted by the FSA), are a delight to analysts in Russia’s foreign ministry.

The Ankara summit was not just about the carve-up, though it was about that too. With Assad already making gains in both Eastern Ghouta and Idlib (where his loyalists seized a strategic airport in January), the time appeared to be ripe for a more comprehensive deal on who is getting what in Syria. But beyond this, energy issues were clearly on the agenda. During his visit to Ankara, Putin and Erdogan oversaw, via video conference, the groundbreaking ceremony of the $20 billion nuclear power plant to be built by Rosatom at Akkuyu, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Finally, the meeting yielded a target delivery date for the S-400s missiles Turkey is procuring from Russia: July 2019.

So what are the longer term strategic implications of this emerging “axis”? Turkey’s long-term trajectory will determine a lot. Ankara may well be abandoning the West to join Russia and Iran in some kind of longer-term resistance to Euro-Atlantic hegemony. Erdogan’s refusal to expel Russian diplomats over the Skripal poisoning, Turkey’s continued non-participation in the Western sanctions against Moscow, the confrontation with the U.S. in northern Syria, and unending squabbles with key EU members, suggest some kind of more permanent realignment could be in the offing.

A more conservative interpretation is that Turkey is charting its own course, and is thus pushing aggressively for what it considers its national interest by balancing between East and West. By that read, Ankara won’t pull the plug on NATO, its ultimate insurance policy, nor will it cut bridges to Europe, still its main trade and investment partner. Though it did not produce much, the recent mini-summit between Erdogan and Donald Tusk, president of the EU Council, and the European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker in Varna, Bulgaria, suggest that the conversation is ongoing. And despite his penchant for bashing the U.S. (it goes down well with voters) and the widespread belief among his loyalists that America was  involved in the failed coup in July 2016, Turkey’s strongman is, in all likelihood, still open to doing business with Trump’s team.

In a situation as fluid as the one in the Middle East today, it would be foolish to make long-term bets, one way or another. But Erdogan’s double game is indicative of a lingering, inherent weakness of the Russia-Iran-Turkey grouping. The three have ultimately come together as a result of U.S. policy choices. As a result, America still has the means to co-opt at least one, and possibly more, of the players, should it choose to do so.

Turkey is hopeful that the U.S. would ultimately drop the Kurds and come to an arrangement in northern Syria letting its troops and their Sunni Arab and Turkmen allies to extend the buffer zone well west of the Euphrates. Ankara is waiting to see what kind of policy incoming Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton push for. There certainly will be cheers in Turkey should the U.S. launch fresh strikes against the Assad regime in the coming days. No doubt, Erdogan will also be privately hinting that Turkey could help in containing Iran as the strategy on the JCPOA develops.

Whether the hawks on Trump’s foreign policy team buy that is another matter. Bolton is sour on the Turks’ flirtation with Putin and their drift away from NATO. In 2016, right after the failed coup in Turkey, he denounced Erdogan for seeking to establish “an Islamic caliphate”. And Turkey is unlikely to let go of its relationship with Russia either, continuing to hedge its bets. So if it happens, it will not be a natural melding of the minds between the Trump administration and the Turks. The art of the deal is getting much tougher these days.

The post Less Than Meets the Eye appeared first on The American Interest.

China Sets Its Sights on South America

China’s 15th-century explorer, Admiral Zheng He, led seven voyages between 1403 and 1433, traveling with a 60-ship, 30,000-man fleet as far afield as the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. Intended to collect tribute and demonstrate Chinese power in South Asia and the Near East, Zheng He’s fleets established trade and diplomatic relations with numerous kingdoms and principalities in China’s political sphere. These ensured a Chinese monopoly on Pacific trade despite potential challenges from various Indian states and the Timurid Empire. Had the voyages not been cancelled in 1433, it’s reasonable to ask whether Chinese trading posts would have been established in Hawaii and California, or Chinese settlers and military garrisons in what is now Mexico and Chile.

Western preeminence in Latin America was guaranteed absent Chinese competition. Advanced military technology and European diseases enabled the rapid conquest and colonization of the continent. After the great European powers weakened their grip on their Latin American colonies, U.S. power filled the vacuum. Through a combination of big-stick diplomacy, economic inducements, targeted politico-military support, and in many cases shared values systems, the United States has maintained its role as the primary external power in Latin America. The consistency of this position has led U.S. policymakers and academics, along with the general public, to assume that America’s previous actions will preserve its regional status.

Such assumptions are false. If the past indicates anything about political interactions, it is that changes in the balance of power lead to competition between great powers. China’s rise has ramifications for the global balance of power—ramifications that will directly challenge the U.S. position in Latin America.

Understanding China’s Latin American engagement requires examining Chinese strategy, particularly since the early 2000s. Although the Sino-American thaw began during the Nixon Administration, and the Reagan Administration established a significant military relationship with China to pressure the Soviet Union, the most consequential shift in Sino-American relations occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, China found itself the potential target of American concern, with its sizable GDP, nuclear arsenal, and future power projection potential.

Particularly after Tiananmen Square, China’s leaders feared Western retaliation in the form of sanctions and, potentially, military action. In order to allay American suspicions, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) embarked on a policy of targeted integration into the global economy, opening markets to major Western companies, ostensibly privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises, and trumpeting grassroots liberal reforms. This strategy succeeded in binding American business interests to Chinese growth, while offering hopeful U.S. policymakers the tantalizing prospect of Chinese reform through economic and political liberalization.

However, China’s political leadership remains skeptical about global economic integration. The CCP has always been immensely concerned about its legitimacy amongst its subjects. Externally, the government based in Taipei stands as a constant alternative—a government that, in recent decades, has transformed Taiwan into a liberal capitalist democracy with a GDP per capita that is triple mainland China’s. In addition, China’s western regions contain multiple ethnic groups clamoring for greater autonomy. The continued existence of China’s current regime is predicated its ability to satisfy the economic needs of 1.4 billion citizens. Sensitivity to global economic shocks, therefore, is a significant threat to the regime’s security. Hence, China has retained a distinctively mixed economic model, using state-owned enterprises and other companies under CCP control to retain a grip on the economy.

More important, escalating tensions with the United States could lead America to use its command of the global commons to deny China the imports its economy and population require. China has been a net energy importer since the mid-1990s—despite domestic coal production and the increasing employment of nuclear power, China remains 60 percent import-dependent for its oil consumption, and hit import volume highs this past December.

Additionally, China’s massive population, combined with the pollution of arable land and dietary improvements engendered by rising living standards in urban areas, has made it one of the world’s largest food importers. Any sustained Sino-American economic tensions would inflict significant damage on the U.S. economy. But considering U.S. domestic food and energy resources, and its lower reliance on trade in its GDP (30 percent for America compared to 40 percent for China), a Sino-American trade war would favor America. China’s imports are particularly vulnerable to American naval power: 80 percent of its oil imports pass through the South China Sea alone. Considering the consistent potential for large-scale unrest, particularly in western China, a sustained Sino-American trade war could lead to a localized rebellion against the CCP, or worse, a popular movement that rejects today’s state capitalist social contract.

In response to this critical vulnerability, the CCP has designed a hedging strategy to mitigate the internal ramifications of international economic fluctuations and blunt the coercive politico-economic instruments the U.S. could wield against it. The most visible economic elements of this strategy include the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative, designed to link China, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe, and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Both bolster Chinese security by ensuring overland access to markets despite U.S. economic pressure, and maintaining a sea line of communication that circumvents the South China Sea’s major chokepoints.

More subtly, Chinese shipping expansion and the acquisition of energy and food resources at the point of production increase China’s insulation from shocks and hostile coercion. China’s naval expansion represents the military dimension of these efforts, enabling Chinese power projection in the worst of circumstances.

China’s attempts to expand its influence in Latin America represent a critical, if understated, portion of this policy of hedging against the U.S. threat. Indeed, Latin America represents a glowing opportunity for Chinese planners to undermine U.S. power and reduce their own vulnerabilities. Latin American farms produce 11 percent of global food and agriculture production value. Moreover, Latin America retains immense resource wealth: The region’s mines extract significant portions of the world’s copper, silver, molybdenum, zinc, and lithium supplies. Additionally, Latin America can serve as an alternative energy supplier for China, given Venezuela’s sustained oil reserves and the increasing discovery of harder-to-extract resources like shale and oil sands.

Not only does Latin America provide an effective resource hedge—its markets will also become increasingly important as Chinese leaders attempt to change the country’s internal economic profile. Newly confirmed President-for-Life Xi Jinping has indicated that the next step in China’s development will be an attempt to change its economy from a low-skill, labor-intensive export juggernaut to a more balanced system, in which medium and high-skill exports are coupled with growing material imports, especially in China’s megacities. China’s departure from the ranks of producer-exporter nations will leave a significant gap in the global economy’s structure, as Chinese firms increasingly seek to compete with American refined goods producers rather than support the high-skill U.S. economy.

Latin America is poised to fill China’s void. Its high levels of income inequality and nearly 600-million population can support increasing economic industrialization, thus enabling China’s economic transition by serving as a base for Beijing’s increasingly sophisticated economy. Moreover, Latin America’s markets will become increasingly attractive to Chinese producers. Not only will Chinese medium-skill refined goods find their way to Latin America, but Chinese companies will also rely on the Latin American upper class to consume an expanding set of high-skill products.

The CCP has already begun working toward these long-term objectives. Chinese firms have purchased Chilean and Peruvian copper mines and obtained major stakes in Venezuelan oil fields. Between 2015 and 2019, China’s leaders plan to invest $250 billion in the region and reach trade levels of $500 billion. China’s investment is aided by its lax environmental and ethical standards, and the willingness of Chinese companies to accept higher levels of risk and extend more secure lines of credit.

The willingness to accept higher risk offers China a great deal of leverage. Sri Lanka’s experience serves as an example—the island nation had to surrender the major port of Hambantota to China on a 99-year lease in order to repay its debts to Chinese firms. Additionally, it is easy to envision the CCP supporting the small, elite classes of Latin American states to increase its regional influence, at the detriment of democratic governance throughout the continent. Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, and Panama are particularly vulnerable to these actions, due to present income disparities within each country.

By slowly decreasing its export relationship with the United States, China’s leaders can steadily strengthen its political position and nullify the diplomatic and economic instruments that the United States possesses to counter China. Given Chinese naval expansion projections over the next two decades, it is essential to consider the possibility that Chinese aircraft carrier battle groups will project naval power across the Pacific to Latin American coastlines, forcing the U.S. government to accept the loss of global sea control, and by extension, the elimination of the international system it has cultivated for the past 70 years.

Growing Chinese influence in Latin America poses not only economic and security threats to U.S. interests, but an equally dangerous political one. China lacks the ideological commitments of the Soviet Union, as shown by its willingness to support North Korea’s totalitarian system, former President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwean military dictatorship, and the explicitly Muslim Pakistan and Iran. Authoritarian regimes are more pliable than democratic ones, especially when it comes to Chinese economic interests. They lack the ethical scruples that limit representative governments, allowing fundamentally predatory economic practices that benefit the ruling elite but harm all others. Over time, absent a counterbalancing force, Chinese pressure could progressively reverse Latin American democratization, creating states hostile to America in its geopolitical backyard.

During the first years of the 20th century, the U.S. government gained control of the Panama Canal. In his characteristic manner, President Theodore Roosevelt combined targeted displays of American power with inducements to local authorities to obtain a prize arguably unparalleled in U.S. history. Much like its cousin in Egypt, the Panama Canal greatly shortened transit times between hemispheres. This facilitated international trade, and more important, enabled U.S. warships to travel between the Pacific and Atlantic fleets, giving America undisputed sea control over the Western Atlantic and Eastern Pacific. This forced Britain to accept America’s growing power, however begrudgingly, setting the stage for the steady rise of the United States to global preeminence.

China has abandoned its attempts to construct a Nicaraguan Canal to compete with its Panamanian counterpart. Nevertheless, the episode, combined with growing Chinese investment in Latin America, is illustrative. Equally revealing is China’s $65 billion investment plan in Latin America and the Caribbean states called the “Forum of China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States,” an important Chinese vehicle for controlling the region’s natural resources and raw materials. Surrendering control of these valuable commodities will diminish the independence of participating nations and prove antithetical to their interests, but the allure of Chinese investments may be too strong.

For the moment, Chinese political pressure is most apparent in the CCP’s attempts to shrink the pool of states that diplomatically recognize Taiwan. Out of the 20 states that maintain full diplomatic relations with Taiwan, 11 of them are in the Caribbean, Central America, or South America. There is a clear link between Chinese investment in Panama over the past decade and Panama’s recent decision to recognize Beijing rather than Taipei. China is a major trading partner for Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, four of the five Central American states that recognize Taiwan. Several states, including the United States and the majority of its allies, maintain unofficial diplomatic relations with Taiwan. However, by chipping away at Taiwan’s official pool of partners, China seeks to isolate Taiwan further. In the event of a military confrontation, Taiwan’s strategic partners, particularly the United States, will need to justify defending a state that lacks UN recognition and is only recognized by fewer than 5 percent of states.

China’s involvement in Latin America will thus prove extremely useful, for its long- and short-term goals, and in both its own region and America’s.

Washington policymakers, whether elected or appointed, political or military, have safely assumed that the United States is secure from foreign powers’ adventures to its south. International communism posed an intermittent challenge to this proposition throughout the Cold War. Nevertheless, the Western Hemisphere has been viewed as a secondary, or even tertiary, theater of great-power competition.  Aside from infrequent applications of military force, law enforcement agencies have been the major implements of American power in Latin America since 1945. This demonstrates the security of America’s regional position. Or at least, it did up until now.

China’s moves threaten to transform Latin American nations into strategic liabilities for Washington. The United States has not faced a serious threat in its own hemisphere since the 19th century. Beijing’s diplomacy and expanding economic influence in Latin America also seek to isolate Taiwan further, thus extending the threat of Chinese power at strategic junctures on both sides of the Pacific.

The Trump Administration’s national security strategy correctly identifies China as a global power that seeks to realign the international balance in its favor. Substantially greater U.S. engagement in Latin America equaled by significantly increased diplomatic and military assistance to Taiwan are two parallel steps that would back up the U.S. Administration’s words with action.

The post China Sets Its Sights on South America appeared first on The American Interest.

The King of Masks

The Chinese film director Wu Tianming was born in 1939, but because of the times that he lived through, he did not achieve prominence until the early 1980s, when he was made head of the Xian Film Studio in Shaanxi Province. In that position Wu became a mentor to younger directors such as Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zhang Yimou, and Chen Kaige, who created a body of work—The Horse Thief, Red Sorghum, and King of Children, among others—that reconnected the Chinese audience with the pre-communist past, thereby repairing some of the ravages of the Cultural Revolution while also raising China’s international prestige.

That golden age ended with Tiananmen. When the massacre occurred, Wu was in the United States. Labeled a “dissident,” he did not return until 1995. He then directed a brave, beautiful film called The King of Masks, about an elderly street performer in 1930s Sichuan Province, who practices bian lian, a dramatic dance involving incredibly swift changes between brightly colored silk masks. Bian lian (“face-changing”) is an ancient secret art that the old man wishes to pass on. But being childless, he must buy an orphan boy to groom as his heir. All goes well until he discovers that the orphan is a girl…

Far be it from me to spoil the plot of such a lovely film. Suffice it to say that the only remotely controversial thing about The King of Masks is the suggestion that little girls, or at least this little girl, should be allowed to learn bian lian. Yet when Wu’s producers (the venerable Shaw Brothers of Hong Kong) tried to distribute the film in China, their application was turned down. In a glowing review, the American film critic Roger Ebert failed to note that The King of Masks was never released in China. But that only reinforces his astute observation that, “although [the film] has no overt political message, perhaps it is no accident that its hero is a stubborn artist who clings to his secrets.”

Wu Tianming died in 2014, two years after Xi Jinping assumed power. Were he still living, the director might well marvel at the General Secretary’s prowess at bian lian. First up was the reassuring mask of Pragmatic Son of Far-seeing Reformer, followed by the humble mask of First Among Equals on the Politburo Standing Committee. Then came the more assertive Red Aristocrat Defender of the Revolution, followed by Chinese Ayatollah for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue. More recently, the comic relief of twinkly, kindly has morphed into the more ominous Chairman of Everything.

These changes have been followed closely by the Chinese public, and each new mask has prompted debate and concern. It’s hard to gauge public opinion in China, but lately I’ve come across some pretty compelling evidence that no previous transformation has proved as upsetting as the one that occurred on February 25, when it was announced that the Chinese constitution would be amended to remove all term limits on the office of the presidency. This is not as big a change as some might think, because Xi’s weightier titles, such as General Secretary of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, have never had term limits. But for many Chinese, the title of President is highly significant because it sounds modern, civilized, and most important, not totalitarian. This may well explain why Xi’s latest mask—let’s call it Emperor of Everything for Life—seems to have caused an invisible earthquake among ordinary Chinese.

For example, on March 1 the Economist reported an online tsunami of “inventive mockery” that surpassed anything posted during the 19thParty Congress last October. Among the items highlighted was a meme showing Winnie the Pooh hugging a jar of honey, captioned “Find the thing you love and stick with it.” Less family-friendly were the fake condom ads featuring slogans like “Doing it twice is not enough,” and “I like how you’re always on top.” Other postings compared China to Orwell’s Animal Farm; punned on the phrase “board the plane” (which sounds like “ascend the throne”); and made numerous references to Yuan Shikai, the government official who in 1915 attempted to restore the Chinese empire with himself as founder of a new dynasty called Hongxian. (That effort was roundly rejected, and Yuan died the following year.)

I’ve heard similar reports from two young colleagues teaching English in national universities located far from the cosmopolitan centers of Guangzho, Shanghai, and Beijing. One of them, “Jack,” reported that right after the announcement came down, the English-language social media erupted in ways that went beyond mockery. Calling the change “unprecedented,” users alluded to “the Emperor,” confessed to having “no words,” and in one case said, “I’ve never thought about leaving China, but it seems the only hope now.” Jack spent an hour just watching hundreds of these posts appear and then disappear, as the censors did their work.

The other young colleague, “Jill,” knows Mandarin well enough to have followed the debate that broke out on Chinese social media between those who found the change “worrying” and those who insisted everything is fine. This debate, too, vanished almost as soon as it appeared—a reminder that in China, online criticism is immediately scrubbed by algorithms continually updated with the latest “sensitive” words and phrases; while any website hosting criticism is deluged with intentionally mind-numbing propaganda. Online critics who persist are identified and monitored via the latest digital surveillance technology, and if that doesn’t work, they are subjected to a finely graduated series of warnings, reprimands, harassments, threats, fines, and penalties that in extreme cases can lead to arrest, imprisonment, and worse.

Nor is there safety offline. The Chinese system of human spies and informants rivals the efficiency and moral corrosiveness of the East German Stasi. My young colleagues Jack and Jill encounter this daily, as university administrators instruct them not to discuss politics in class, and the majority of students and faculty at their universities remain “silent and fearful” on all but the most banal topics. All the more striking, then, to hear about those same students and faculty breaking their silence after hearing about the “Xi change,” as Jill called it.

In Jill’s advanced English class, the students were discussing the difference between giving personal data to a corporation like Apple and giving it to a government. When Jill pointed out that in China, both corporations and the government must answer to the Party, one student burst out: “Yes, and everything theChinese government does is illegal!” “The student repeated this twice,” Jill told me, “and the others didn’t disagree. In fact, another student asked, ‘Why is it so easy to change the constitution?’” Meanwhile, in one of Jack’s classes, the question “Who are your heroes?” prompted several students to name Deng Xiaoping—a drastic departure from the usual litany of Mao, Mandela, and Churchill. When Jack responded by saying, “Wow, it sounds like you all like Deng,” the students “laughed harshly, as if to say, ‘We like his reforms.’”

To my American professorial ears, these exchanges do not sound unusual. But Jack and Jill assured me that in China they are very unusual. Indeed, both of my young colleagues shared the perception that “the CCP is losing the young people.”

Perhaps the most telling anecdote was about Jack’s Chinese tutor, a very serious young Party member from a poor peasant family, whom Jack described as “a poster child for Xi’s China: first in his family to be educated, first in his graduating class, recommended to me by the Party Secretary of the university, pugnaciously pro-Xi and pro-CCP, and not very sophisticated.” Jack had been working with this tutor for almost two years when the announcement came down about the President no longer having term limits. Here is how Jack described their next session:

At our first meeting after the announcement my tutor seemed dejected, and to my surprise he started explaining the change to me, clearly assuming that I hadn’t heard about it. When I told him that I had heard about the change—that indeed, it was front-page news all over the world—he grew very angry. “No one told us about it!” he exclaimed. “No one explained it to us! I still have no idea why they are doing this!” I didn’t know what to say. He has never said anything remotely like this before. Then finally, he stopped being angry and said sadly, “Living in China is like having a mask on your face. You can’t see the world. You can’t even see China!”

The post The King of Masks appeared first on The American Interest.

Macron’s Thatcher Moment?

In his first year as President of France, Emmanuel Macron has managed to push forward a robust series of reforms with only minimal opposition. He has benefited politically from the highly unusual parliamentary elections of June 2017, which brought about the disintegration of France’s historical political parties, both Gaullist and Socialist. The extreme movements on both Left and Right were unable to capitalize on the opportunity, and that opened the way for a decisive new centrist push. Instead of compromising with the old establishment, Macron used his electoral mandate to poach talent for a government he owns in full. The hard-charging executive thus assembled could rely on an absolute parliamentary majority of amateur politicians assembled at the 11th hour into Macron’s fledgling party, La République en Marche. They all owe everything to Macron, such that the young President now boasts a mandate unseen since Charles de Gaulle took power at the very beginning of the Fifth Republic.

The only locus of power in the country still capable of standing against him are the trade unions, which waited ten months before throwing down the expected gauntlet. The pretext is a reform ending the monopoly of the national railroad, a state-owned enterprise that has historically been a bastion of communist atavism. The rolling strike that the unions have called in order to maximize disruption but minimize lost wages is intended for the long haul. It has been carefully prepared for months, with a preemptive communication campaign challenging the French public’s perception that railroad workers enjoy extraordinary pay and benefits, including retirement with full pension at age 50. The railroad pension plan, a little more complex than that yet unequivocally generous, has required more than €3.3 billion in subsidies from taxpayers each year since 2015.

This strike will cause pain at a time when the French are enjoying long weekends with the advent of spring weather, and it will test the likeability of the President. France has known many aspiring reformers before him, up-and-coming ministers whose names became attached to reform bills, then watched as street protests and traffic blockades shattered their careers. Even when public opinion is not particularly sympathetic to strikers, the government ends up being blamed for the disruption—such, perhaps, is the burden of the Colbertist legacy of the centralized state.

The perfect storm is upon Macron, for the railroad action coincides with a strike at Air France, the national airline, and student-led university shutdowns across the country. It is the long-awaited test. Will he pass it?

In 1984-85, Margaret Thatcher faced down a massive miners’ strike. This seminal event in British history has inspired a flurry of books and movies, and cemented Thatcher’s reputation as a heartless villain. All the same, it broke the power of the unions and forced a deep, market-friendly reformation of the Labour Party, which gave birth to Blairism. Arguably, the new, dynamic, service-sector-centric England of the 1990s only exists thanks to this episode. So many are asking the obvious question: Can Macron be like Thatcher, or, more profoundly, can France be like Britain?

Even more is at stake than France’s future (or Macron’s presidency), because that future will impact Europe and its stuck-between-floors Union. On the one hand, the Brexit process has been very favorable to the European Union, which has had the upper hand throughout the negotiations and stands to gain from the divorce; whereas Theresa May seems perpetually on the back foot as the English public struggles with second thoughts. On the other hand, Macron stands alone on the Continent in his determination to develop Europe as a pillar of strength and stability in a changing world. The ambitious vision he laid out this past September, with programmatic speeches in Athens and Paris, seemed to dissipate quickly after the inconclusive German elections that deprived Europe’s power of reference of a proper government for months. And then, when the Euro-friendly German socialists finally and reluctantly agreed to renew their coalition with Merkel, Italian voters gave a majority of the seats in parliament to parties hostile to Europe. Rather than being the herald of a new era for the Union, Macron today seems more like the orphaned child prodigy of the old European order, cast away in a rising tide of populism and nationalism.

Populism is a catchall word that, in essence, condescendingly describes a political platform that is popular with the masses and abhorrent to the elites of a country. In Europe today, unlike in the United States, there is broad unanimity on issues such as the environment, weapons control, public health, and education. The tension between populists and elites crystallizes instead around issues of neoliberalism.

First and foremost among the points of contention is the free movement of people: Populism is fiercely against immigrants, mainly but not only Muslims. Second in the running, but not by much, is the free market for goods and services. Populists instinctively favor minimal competition and national preference as a way to preserve standards of living widely believed to have been eroded first by a “small” globalization, in the form of European integration, and then by the “big” globalization that somewhat overlapped it. This is why Macron’s attempt to revoke the monopoly on rail transportation, established in 1937 by the hard-Left Popular Front government, is emblematic of the great battle at the heart of Europe today.

Europe has been struggling for a decade now. A financial crisis in the wake of the 2008 stock market collapse was followed by a refugee crisis in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, with both now merging into a nationalist crisis that threatens the unity of Europe and of individual European states. Brexit, the proto-fascist Orbán regime in Hungary, and the Catalan referendum are all manifestations of the same undercurrents.

The disaffection the European electorate feels toward their Union is roughly commensurate with their underestimation of international volatility. It is not for lack of information. The rise of Xi’s China (and of Xi in China) has been widely covered by the media, and the nasty shenanigans of Vladimir Putin are a weekly staple of news reports. Turkey, once a quasi-democracy considered suitable by many for integration into the Union, is far down the road to becoming a Middle Eastern autocracy of the worse kind. The Arab Spring has not much helped the cause of democratization or liberalism in the Mediterranean either, except modestly in Tunisia, but has instead strengthened the forces of repression. And this time, amid all those threats, European nations cannot count on the protection of the United States as they have since Franklin Roosevelt was President.

European leaders and diplomats, whose job it is to monitor global affairs, are transparently running out the clock, confident that the international system as it emerged at the end of World War II will survive until the return of a more conventional American administration. And just as they did during the Cold War, they still count on America to manage Russia and China. As for the populace, it shows a vivid lack of imagination. Just like their forebears in 1912, Europeans are unable to imagine a world at war. They focus only on what they know, on what speaks to them, and for most that is the hazily conjoined specters of Islamic terrorists and Muslim immigrants. The recent resumption of economic growth, itself no more than a mechanical uptick in the business cycle, is helping this shortsightedness along. As things marginally improve, and the worst seems to have blown over, they rush to indulge in a reactionary nostalgia for a world that never was.

Europe before the Union was not the autarchic, egalitarian, sustainable utopia of fellow white farmers and workers that addled populists from Left and Right imagine. What have Germans who support the AfD, or Italians who support Cinque Stelle, known outside of the European Union that deserves to be the object of nostalgia? Russian totalitarianism in East Germany? Fascist warmongering and Nazi rage for plunder and extermination? The Belle Époque, when millions emigrated to the New World to escape abject poverty, or the subsequent slaughter of those who stayed in the trenches of World War I? Or do they miss the anti-Semitism of Dreyfus’s France and Karl Lueger’s Vienna, quieted in the decades since Europe was built, but resurgent as Europe falters? The history of past generations has been cruel: Europe before the Union was a continent torn by internecine wars, prone to profound recessions, host to authoritarian ideologies, seething with class and ethnic hatreds, and invested in competitive and exploitative imperial projects.

The urge to preserve a questionable past is also at the heart of the strikes that challenge the Macron presidency. A victory for the President would only be a reprieve for the cause of free markets; many dozen more battles lie ahead. But a defeat, especially after a long public struggle, could all but crush the liberal model.

But we must take care not to judge events too quickly. The French President is a fine strategist, and if the resistance proves solid, he may well fold quickly in order to quietly live another day—a course he chose recently when he shut down a decade-long and bitterly contested project for a new airport. He may choose a protracted strategy, and he may prevail.

But if Macron decides to face off against the unions for months, Thatcher-like, he has no other option but to break them, whatever disruptions the French may endure during their lovely season of long weekend getaways. And then we will know if France can be like Britain, at least this once.

Le Monde reports that train drivers can retire at 52 for 75 percent of their final salary; other railroad personnel can retire with the same pension at 57. In contrast, the standard retirement age for employees in the private sector is 62 and the pensions are far less generous.

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Donald Trump’s Not-So-Grand Strategy

Folly comes cheap in the era of Trump. In just one week, the President granted the world a twofer: starting a trade war with China, which he has promptly escalated, and promising a pull-out from Syria, which would would leave America’s worst enemies—Iran and Russia—in control of the Levant. Not bad for a few days of tweeting.

The Chinese caper began when Washington slapped a 25 percent tariff on 1,300 Chinese products, totaling $50 billion worth of “Made in China” stuff. The textbook response came a few hours later, with Beijing imposing a 25 percent tariff on American exports to the Middle Kingdom. This is what great powers do. They don’t cry uncle after an opening volley; they want to inflict pain to salve their pride and to deter the next broadside.

So far, so predictable, as was Trump’s second move, raising the ante by threatening tariffs on another $100 billion of imports from China. Why this reckless gambit? Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross sounded like Alfred E. Neuman, the Mad Magazine mascot with the famous motto: “What, me worry?” U.S. exports targeted by China, Ross soothed, “amount to about three-tenths of a percent of our GDP. So it’s hardly a life-threatening activity.” In other words, we are starting a trade war over one-third of one percent? Nations should go to war over weightier matters.

Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer had his own Neuman moment. He insisted that U.S. tariffs on Chinese products will not raise prices for American consumers. There are lots of suppliers on the global market who will fill in for the Chinese. But pray tell, Mr. Lighthizer: How will these substitute imports from other countries reduce America’s towering trade deficit with the world, which has just hit a ten-year high?

Consider this instructive example: In 2009, the United States imposed punitive tariffs on tires made in China. So other nations took up the slack, letting their tires roll into the United States. Imports from China did drop, but those from Mexico, Vietnam, and South Korea rose. Alas, the overall trade deficit did not budge while job gains for the U.S. tire industry rose by a paltry 2 percent. The bottom line? Every saved job cost $900,000 due to rising tire prices for the American consumer.

Now, as we know, Mr. Trump praises himself as a “stable genius.” So let’s put the best gloss on his adventure. His calculation may go like this: We will go to the brink, loosen a few rocks, and see what they hit. So what if the Chinese retaliate? Never mind, as long as they get the message. They depend more on the U.S. market than we do on theirs. Their exports to us are four times higher than ours to them. They’re gonna give, Mr. Trump must be thinking.

Suitably rattled, the Chinese will come to the table and deliver what we really want—above all, serious concessions on what has been irking us for decades: their unremitting theft of U.S. intellectual property. Or their acquisitions by not-so-gentle persuasion. You want to set up shop in China? Then you have to go into partnership with a local firm and throw technology transfers into the bargain—something that is not allowed by the World Trade Organization.

There may well be some give here on the part of the Chinese, especially since they are not just up against the United States. They have been inflicting the same uncouth methods on all Western companies wanting to build production lines in China.

For once, Mr. America First would serve the American interest, along with those of its allies, if he successfully pressed China along these lines. Our allies would even cheer him (albeit very softly so as not to rile Beijing). Regrettably, Donald Trump is not known around the world as a diligent coalition builder. So don’t hold your breath in the expectation of a sudden outbreak of American multilateralism.

The point of this rosy take on Trump’s trade war is that the initial exchange of fire is a signaling game, not necessarily the prelude to real economic warfare. Both sides could still rescind their threats and walk back from the brink.

Not so in the Middle East, where another folly is unfolding. “We will be coming out of Syria, like, very soon,” Mr. Trump told the world at the end of March, and the Washington Post reports that he recently instructed his military to prepare a withdrawal from Syria—though without a date. The maxim is: Let George do it—in this case, our rich Sunni allies. So Trump may be aping Barack “Let’s Go Home” Obama, who drew his infamous “red line” in Syria only to dishonor it.

The difference between the tit-for-tat machismo in the Far East and the abandonment of the Levant is momentous. You can always return to the bargaining table to hash out a trade deal. Yet you cannot reinsert yourself in Syria once you cede the arena to Iran and Russia—except at enormous risk. It is a lot safer and cheaper to stay than to fight your way in again. Iran and Russia are staying for keeps, and they would be delirious with joy to see the United States fold, thus strengthening their hold on the larger Middle East.

Then consider the collateral damage. ISIS or the next incarnation of Islamic terror may sink roots in the oil-rich area east of the Euphrates. As the former U.S. Ambassador in Turkey, Eric Edelman, put it, pulling out now “will likely lead to a revival of the ISIS threat much as Obama’s premature evacuation of Iraq led to a void that was filled by ISIS.”

Will the Sunni Arabs redouble their efforts, making Obama’s failed dream come true? No longer shielded and led by the United States, they are just as likely to sue for peace and to make nice with the new masters of the region, Moscow and Tehran. Don’t balance against the strong, realpolitik whispers to the weak, bandwagon with them.

Israel has been trying to stay out of the Syrian melee, but with Iran safely ensconced in the vast stretch from Basra to Beirut, the strategic threat to Israel soars. So does the probability of war once the United States is no longer in place to deter Tehran and its Hezbollah proxies. Look forward to more millions of refugees trying to escape from round two of the Syrian war, with Israel going all out to decimate the deadly Shi‘a foe on its northern border.

Alexander Pope, the 19th-century English poet, taught: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Change that to: “Only fools rush out where angels never lived”—where power is the ultimate currency of strategy. Next to the Western Pacific, the Middle East will be the most critical battleground of the 21stcentury. To leave it is to lose it. Abandoning the Levant is voluntary self-demotion—the ultimate folly in the affairs of nations.

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The Eternal Otis

The Complete Monterey Pop Festival

Directed by D.A. Pennebaker

The Criterion Collection, Blu-ray, $69.95

At the Monterey Pop Festival on June 17, 1968, Otis Redding, who was then 25 years old, must have surmised that he had reached the apex of his career to date, with future peaks awaiting him.

Not that you would necessarily be able to tell this from the film of his set that has just come out on Blu-ray as part of the Criterion Collection’s souped-up reissue of D.A. Pennebaker’s festival film. I make that qualification because if you had stuck Redding on a stage in an empty bar save for a hobgoblin and a Dorito, I’m pretty sure he would have performed with the same fervid emotionalism and enveloping ardor that he did at his big breakout gig.

That’s how Otis Redding was, and how he surely would have continued to be, had it not been for the plane crash that claimed his life on December 10 of that same year. It cut short what was sure to be a meteoric rise: The music industry is largely a meritocracy, or it was in Redding’s time, anyway. If you were good enough, if you had the songs, the chops, the voice, the killer technique, you would eventually have your day. Maybe your day wouldn’t be as long as it ought to have been—the great rhythm and blues singer, Arthur Alexander, who influenced Redding, comes to mind—but you wouldn’t perpetually be buried beneath leaves hoping and praying that someday you’d see the sun.

That figurative sun was hot on Redding’s back during his Monterey performance, and watching this stunner of a short film now, you realize you’re seeing one of the great moments of the 1960s on the pop culture front.

The bulk of the crowd at Monterey was white, more attuned to guitar-based music than to what Redding was putting forward, with its emphasis on horns, shouted vocals straight out of the Baptist service, and cajoling, mellifluous whispers in the spaces between those full-throated, cascading lunges.

Jimi Hendrix had his breakthrough moment there, too, of course, and that’s another short film in this Criterion package; but Hendrix never really felt black or white. He didn’t even feel earthly, which gave a hint of his own life-shortening tragedy to come. He was someone you could not figure out; the creation that inspired such awe also suspended you in a kind of fear because of how foreign he appeared. You headed without hesitation toward his particular flame, just as unerringly as Hendrix’s hand did toward his guitar—which he had just set on fire.

Redding was more inclusive, which was crucial for making soul and rootsy black music more popular. He was one of music’s greatest unifiers, regardless of era, but his was an era that certainly needed someone like him. Our own current age could do with a Redding-like figure as well, but I can’t think of one. I can’t even come close to thinking of one.

Everything, now, no matter its ostensible purpose, has an element of toxicity, of axe-grinding. Redding strikes me as someone who would be horrified by elements of the Black Lives Matter movement, being wise enough to see that certain roads, if traveled down, produce the same forms of hate that led to a given movement in the first place. What’s always fascinated me about Redding is that he was his own mini-movement—a devoutly black artist, who never shied away from hardcore blues, soul, and rhythm and blues, whose art privileged no color or creed. It was about exploding into new worlds, trusting someone—in this case, the artist—to get you there safely. Redding exuded that vibe of sanctuary and, with it, transformation; I see no other artist doing that in the world right now. Which is, of course, part of the reason why we inhabit a cesspool.

Before Otis, black music was the stuff of the rhythm-and-blues charts, though a few artists, like James Brown and Sam Cooke, had hits that white people were as apt to listen to as black. But if you were white, James Brown’s music couldn’t help but feel like a field trip to a culture not your own, with rhythms off-kilter compared to those you were accustomed to, and sociological concerns that didn’t sync up with what was going on in your daily life. Otis’s world was new. Rhythmically it was a much richer one, more complex, more true-to-life, more contrapuntal and even Bachian.

Meanwhile, there was the often-conflicted Sam Cooke, who toured with one band for the white crowds and another band for the black crowds. His hits were regularly on the safe side—less soulful, and though not less aesthetically pleasing than his late night rhythm-and-blues efforts, tailored to that slumber party a suburban white girl had been pining to throw for her birthday.

Sam Cooke, as one of his biggest hits attested, was going to “send” you—and where he was going to send you wasn’t to the projects or the ghetto or deep into the African-American experience—not for most of his career, at least. He got there in due course, with the 1963 album Night Beat and the live recordings made at Miami’s Harlem Square Club that same year, as well as “A Change is Gonna Come” in 1964. Through it all one of his biggest fans, naturally, was Otis Redding, ten years Cooke’s junior.

Redding’s appearance at Monterey was truly seminal. In a sense, this was the fertilization of pop music with deep-bodied soul and rhythm-and-blues and black music. Redding is the preacher of a musical sermon, who kicks cant aside and pleads with the crowd to put their shared emotions first, joining him as he does so before their eyes by way of example.

“What are you feeling?” Redding’s set seems to ask. The camera closes in on his soaked brow. You wonder how much fluid he is losing, how his voice is not giving out on him as he asks so much of it.

Like Dylan, Redding wasn’t someone who sang with classical technique; the diaphragm is getting a touch neglected here, with a lot of his vocal coming from up top, if you will, rather than down below, the back of the throat rather than the belly. But that just makes everything feel more human, because it’s how you and I would probably sing. He performs Cooke’s “Shake” like a master songster, giving a lesson in emotional calisthenics. The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” is all trumpet-y, brassy, delighted, less about sex, more about the griping we all do, with some laughter mixed in. It makes us feel better and ready to move on to the gripes the next day will bring. That is how we are; we are human, and Otis reflects that reality back to us.

In Monterey Redding became the Soul Everyman. The roots of his set were in those church services, but the House of the Lord had given way to the Domain of the World, a temple that knows no creed, chapter and verse, or race, save the knowledge that we are all under one sky right now but one day we won’t be.

Seeing Redding at Monterey still makes us feel good about the possibilities of existence, all these many years later, in part because he was a virtuoso of energy. We commonly use that as a left-handed compliment: Rather than say someone has real talent, we say they have energy, like the proverbial eager beaver who just tries hard. But the more talent one has, the more energy one possesses to create, the ideas coming nonstop, the artistic creations that will last forever coming shortly thereafter. Schubert had it, Mozart had it, Proust had it, Poe had it, Dylan had it and still has it. Artistic and mental muscle hustles. And Otis Redding had it in spades.

To sit down and create at the highest levels requires something more than brilliance and even genius; it requires emotion and drive that only a few people have. That was a big part of Redding’s gift, and a lot of white people, and some black people, got to see it fifty years ago. Now everyone, regardless of color, creed, denomination, and all the rest, can watch again. If you ever worried that his form of music was not for you, Otis alleviated that, never more openly, cathartically, than at Monterey. I can’t think of any performer in the 1960s, that decade of so much change, who did this to the same degree.

John Coltrane had his version of busting all the doors down, but his music didn’t wrap its arms around you. Redding’s music did. Do you ever stop living when you’re in a film like this? Redding’s genius-drenched coda to “Try a Little Tenderness” will never die. Preach on, Brother O.

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Dealing with the Dignity Deficit

Three weeks ago I found myself sitting in a back room of a hotel in Bischofswerda, a small town some thirty kilometers outside of Dresden in the federal state of Saxony. Before me stood a politician from the populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, a freshly-minted member of the German Bundestag, reporting to his constituents on his experiences in Berlin, where he had been loudly raising issues that, he said, the establishment did not want to face. It was a lively presentation, half speech and half video footage of him performing in parliament. The leitmotif of his presentation was the threat from uncontrolled migration. He repeatedly inveighed against the folly of a nation not having full control over its borders.

The graying audience, mostly men, nodded along. There was only one dissenter. During the Q&A session a man pushed back, arguing that it would make doing business with Poland a nightmare. A nearby town called Görlitz straddles the border. It was split in half by the Oder-Neisse line, agreed to at Potsdam in 1945. Today, however, the border is largely notional, and trade is critical to an otherwise-struggling municipality. The man’s protests, however, did not get much of a hearing in the rest of the room, and the AfD MP held his ground. There are tradeoffs to everything, he said, and if sacrificing some trade revenues was the price for tighter border security, he was fine with that.

I was visiting Dresden at the invitation of Jeff Gedmin, a colleague and friend who has been spending time in Germany researching a book on identity and the rise of populism. A  recent essay gathers some of his early impressions. The AfD politician we were watching that day in Bischofswerda, Karsten Hilse, features prominently in his narrative. Hilse is a 53-year old ex-cop who found his calling as a politician in the wake of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to keep Germany’s borders open in the face of surging migrant inflows in 2015. He comes off as good-natured and charming; though some high-ranking AfD politicians undeniably dog-whistle ugly nationalist and racist themes, Hilse is recognizable as a principled law-and-order conservative. True, his preoccupation with politically correct politicians in Berlin, whose devotion to a totalizing liberal ideology he said was preventing the country from confronting the real issues facing it, has a familiar whiff of conspiracy theory to it. But we heard similar sentiments repeated countless times in our other meetings around Dresden. Hilse wasn’t a source of these ideas; he was merely reflecting and channeling a widely held set of beliefs.

More interesting than Hilse’s performance was its setting. As of 2016, Bischofswerda had a population of 11,169. But as we pulled in to its main square on a Friday night, the town looked mostly deserted. The façades of the buildings were in great shape, and the square itself looked freshly repaved. Besides the hotel in which the town hall-style meeting was set to take place, only a pizza parlor, an ice cream shop, and a döner kebab restaurant were open for business. The liveliest place in town was the hotel, its bar at the front with a handful of people in it, and its small restaurant half-full. The back room where the meeting took place was at capacity, but no one attending was under fifty, and probably very few were under sixty; men far outnumbered  women.

Outside of Central and Eastern Europe, few appreciate how fraught the transition from communism has been. Though living standards have improved across the region, the rate of absolute convergence with west European standards has disappointed. And the improvements have come with a staggering demographic price tag. In the former DDR, between 1991 and 2013, 3.3 million people fled to the west, most looking for jobs as sclerotic communist-era enterprises collapsed in the face of a competitive market economy. The net loss of population was smaller due to a countervailing influx of former West Germans seeking their fortunes in the east, but in total the region has lost more than 10 percent of its population since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Of those leaving, most were young and most were women. Those remaining tended to be less educated. In some rural communities today, the gender balance skews male almost 70/30, and childbirth rates are depressed. Unemployment rates remain 50 percent higher in the former East, and per capita output stands at 73 percent of the rest of the country.

The story is made more complex by the uneven way the economy has been developing. The financial crisis of 2008 highlighted a process already well underway all across the West: deindustrialization and globalization had profoundly “urbanized” opportunity by shifting economic dynamism away from rural communities. This holds true for middle America as it does for eastern Germany. The state of Saxony as a whole is posting near-3 percent growth figures—as good as anywhere else in the country—with its larger cities like Dresden and Leipzig developing into high-tech hubs. But small towns like Bischofswerda are stagnating. The East German tractor manufacturer Fortschritt used to be a major employer here. Nothing comparable has taken its place after the factory closed in 1997. Although Bischofswerda’s gender balance is more-or-less evenly split, only 15 percent of its inhabitants are under 20 years old, while more than half are over 50. Population has declined by almost a third since 1991.

Two days later, I was sitting in my friend’s living room in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, sharing impressions of my brief travels among the Ossis. My friend was an experienced journalist at a German daily who had been based in Washington up through the election of Donald Trump; he was now tasked with following the comparatively dry ins and outs of German federal politics. My wide-eyed excitement seemed to make him a little wistful.

“Though I had read about the difficulties of unification,” I said, “I never imagined to see such pronounced similarities between former East Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe, almost thirty years after the fall of the Wall! I assumed Germany would be much further along…”

He shook his head and smiled. “You know, both Germany and the United States have these ‘economically non-viable communities,’” he said. “In America, you just forget about them and let them wither on the vine—and as a result, you get Trump. We, on the other hand, have poured more than a trillion euros into ours—and for all our trouble, we now have the AfD.”

This jarring and suggestive observation got under my skin. One the one hand, it’s easy to dismiss it as being too glib. Yes, a lot of money has been spent, but it hasn’t necessarily been spent well. “Money seemed to be growing on trees within the federal government and at the European Union,” Germany’s Spiegel noted in 2005. “It is especially telling that staff members who worked for Regine Hildebrandt, the now-deceased former minister of social services for the state of Brandenburg, used to write ‘hooray’ on government and EU subsidy notices as soon as the funds were disbursed.” And the Wessis have been criticized for behaving like unscrupulous carpetbaggers during reunification—for indulging in rank economic opportunism under the cover of lofty, gilded rhetoric about helping their fellow countrymen.

But my friend’s observation has broader implications. It appears that even the world’s most practiced technocrats have little idea how to ensure equitable and broad-based growth in the 21st century. Thriving cities surrounded by a struggling, depressed countryside are evident all across the European continent. American progressives enviously looking across the pond at an imagined social democratic utopia should take careful note: Despite vastly different approaches, Europe as a whole is facing very similar headwinds as the United States.

More importantly, a generous welfare state appears at best to be an inadequate solution to the problems and pathologies of checker-boarded economic dislocation. The pesky question of dignity remains: Despite what boosters of a universal basic income try to tell us, our modern sense of purpose and identity remains closely tied to what we “do” for a living. Making disempowered people more comfortable does not necessarily make them less frustrated.

Some kind of dignity deficit is clearly driving the widespread sense of grievance that is, in turn, transforming politics across the West. But there seems to be no easy resolution to these tensions. Economic privations are not their root cause—people do not appear to be directly resentful of economic inequality, as evidenced by the continuing lack of enthusiasm for traditional Leftist parties advocating vigorous redistribution policies. Instead, people seem to be acting out of a sense that they lack control over their lives. There is an economic component to this panic, but it’s less about material deprivation than about a lack of stories in which people see themselves as happy, fulfilled, useful, or respected. It’s about the personal interpretation of history in the making.

My trip to Germany helped me flesh out something David Goodhart has been writing about for a while now. For example, we might be tempted to see Saxony’s poorer, less-educated, rural voters—those that didn’t flee westward in the 1990s and 2000s—as somehow left behind. But many today pride themselves in being the strong ones who chose to stay on their ancestral lands—their mystical Heimat. These are Goodhart’s “somewheres”, and their own interpretation of the last three decades leads them to a positive set of values. People repeatedly told us they were for fighting for their community, for prioritizing the bonds of citizenship, and against elites who were poor stewards of the national interest. Europe’s post-nationalists—Goodhart’s “anywheres”—have forgotten these basics, they said, and are in thrall to a dangerous universalist ideology that is leading them to ruin.

The fact that so many of these value-claims seem to depend on an interpretation of recent history and economic circumstance should give “anywheres” like me pause. It’s easy (and common) to fall back on cheap Marxian-inflected psychoanalysis to say that these losers of deindustrialization (some might call them “deplorables”) are merely trying to justify their misfortune, and that the culture war they’re waging is a sublimation of more material frustrations. It would be braver to ask why it is we think that we elites chose an urban existence, supposedly leaving behind our rural neighbors. “Openness” (versus “closedness”), cosmopolitanism (versus parochialism), the privileging of diversity (versus cultural assimilation)—we usually view these values in terms of moral progress, as the self-evident product of a teleological Enlightenment of which we are the vanguard. By surreptitiously bringing a sense of agency into our narrative, we have set ourselves up as virtuous heroes in a drama of continuous moral improvement. And as a flourish, we see these specific values as somehow inherent to liberalism itself. Those opposed are by necessity morally stunted, and “illiberal.”

But since when are openness, cosmopolitanism, and diversity intrinsic to a complete definition of liberalism? They make no significant appearance in any of the foundational texts of liberal political thought. They are merely the product of the demands that globalization and urbanization places upon us “anywheres”, which we in turn try to wedge into the liberal canon in order to erase any discomfort we may feel about change pulling the ideological rug out from under our feet. Historical accounts of earlier periods of urbanization are rightly dispassionate in describing people flocking to cities out of economic want. And they correctly identify the emergence of the middle class and its attendant values as the product of complex factors interacting in these new circumstances. We instead now disfigure analysis into a form or moral self-congratulation.

A good first step in dealing with this “populist moment,” therefore, might be to dial down the rhetoric on these questions of values. If these so-called values are more contingent on circumstances than “true” in any meaningful sense, then what amounts to a temporary truce between the “somewheres” and “anywheres” is possible. Globalization and further urbanization may be inevitable, and so cosmopolitanism and demands for diversity may eventually win out over the older, more communitarian approach. But nothing suggests that this will amount to a moral triumph. On the contrary, it portends upheaval and the pains of adjustment for communities that are already feeling threatened. The agony of the “somewheres” is nothing to celebrate.

The good news is that if we become more flexible on the “openness”/“closedness” question, it may turn out that the threat to real liberalism is more modest than we have been led to believe. For example, accepting that those who propose some judicious limits on immigration are not automatically rendered “illiberal” would be a huge first step. Admitting that majoritarian plebiscites are legitimate ways of adjudicating such issues would go far toward diminishing the appeal of larger-than-life strongmen in more established democracies.

Can we get there? I’m not holding my breath given how extreme polarization has become. But a path toward cultural reconciliation in our societies is there; we just need the courage to take it.

 See Bill Galston’s latest book Anti-Pluralism for a brisk and succinct treatment of the phenomenon.

 A complicated word most simply rendered as “homeland” in English, it is a term with roots in both German Romanticism and 19th century nationalism. It was of course later also used in Nazi ideology.

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An Arab Spring Autopsy

The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East

Marc Lynch

PublicAffairs, 2017, 284 pp., $16.99

 

The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East

Marc Lynch

PublicAffairs, 2013, 288 pp., $15.99

 

The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role in the World

Derek Chollet

PublicAffairs, 2016, 262 pp., $26.99

 

Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy After the Arab Spring

Elliott Abrams

Cambridge University Press, 2017, 295 pp., $24.99

Americans pondering the aftermath of the 2010–11 Arab uprisings have largely been asking two questions: What went wrong? And how much of it was President Obama’s fault?

An indispensable starting point for answering these questions is The New Arab Wars, Marc Lynch’s compact narrative of the five years that began with the fall of Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. It would have been hard to find anyone better credentialed to write this book: Lynch offers deep knowledge of the Middle Eastern political scene, high-level access to the Obama White House, and 15 years’ worth of full-body immersion in the new Arab media that have now done so much to reshape the region. Against the “conventional wisdom” that accuses Obama of weakness or disengagement, Lynch lays out a spirited defense of his handling of the Arab Spring. But in 250 pages of impeccable academic reporting, one finds plenty of evidence for an indictment of the Obama policies that Lynch himself continues to (mostly) defend.

Lynch’s book should be required reading for any U.S. policymaker working on democracy promotion, human rights, or the Middle East. Any pleasure in reading its brutal history can come only from the sparkling prose with which Lynch narrates it. (To Americans searching for the near-oxymoronic “moderate rebels” in Syria, for example, he points out that “insurgencies do insurgency things.”) Lynch offers a single, coherent, and gripping narrative by showing how the respective national stories of the Arab uprisings were each driven by larger regional phenomena. “At almost every important point, external players shaped the capabilities and the strategies of domestic political actors. . . . The Arab uprisings began in transnational diffusion, ended in transnational repression, and birthed transnational proxy wars.” From an Egyptian election that became a playground for the UAE-Qatar rivalry, to Kuwaiti and Saudi charities that raised money for Syrian jihad, to the lessons learned by autocrats and activists alike from their counterparts in neighboring countries, practically every page of The New Arab Warstells the largely untold story of the causal links among the recent upheavals in the Arab world.

Lynch intends the book as a step toward “rethinking the assumptions and arguments that shaped” his relatively optimistic 2012 book The Arab Uprising. He shows how the Arab Spring produced a “catalog of horrors” in which “almost everything has gone wrong,” so that “the prospects for the Middle East have rarely looked more grim. . . . There will be more rounds of upheaval, more state failures, more sudden regime collapses, more insurgencies, and more proxy wars.” Lynch’s upbeat defense of Obama in 2012, together with his more fervent defense of Obama in 2016, call to mind the joke about the optimist and the pessimist: In 2012 Obama was doing the best job anyone could expect, and in 2016 that unfortunately turned out to be true. Certainly the earlier book remains not only a rich account of the background and early stages of the uprisings, but also a valuable document of the reasoning that led Lynch—along with many other Americans, myself included—to expect a happier outcome to the Arab Spring.

Lynch’s books can profitably be read alongside two recent memoir-cum-policy-manuals from opposite sides of the political aisle. Derek Chollet’s The Long Gamemostly rehashes the Obama Administration’s standard defenses of its major foreign-policy decisions. More interestingly, Elliott Abrams’s Realism and Democracyattacks what he sees as Obama’s cynical indifference to democracy promotion in the Middle East, claiming outright that George W. Bush would have handled the Arab Spring better and could perhaps have even steered it toward improved outcomes in some countries.

The countries Abrams discusses do not include Syria, which is quite an exception to carve out from a book subtitled “American Foreign Policy After the Arab Spring.” (Lynch spends two out of seven narrative chapters on Syria alone.) Abrams mentions only in passing that Obama spent five years passively “watching as Syria became a charnel house.” Lynch shows considerable irritation at such critiques, which he associates with the new Beltway “conventional wisdom,” and which he attacks for ignoring such basic difficulties as the unfriendliness of Syria’s geography, the fragmentary and often highly anti-American character of its opposition forces, the “grim logic of competitive proxy war” well documented in the political science literature, and the enormous incentives that all parties had to refuse a negotiated settlement both when they were strong (expecting to win on their own anyway) and when they were weak (expecting no mercy from the victors).

Yet Lynch still grants that Obama made serious mistakes on Syria:

By staking out a position that Asad must go, Obama created expectations which shaped political and military behavior on all sides. By failing to restrain allies from arming the opposition early in the crisis, Washington watched seemingly helplessly as the disaster it had predicted unfolded inexorably. By then joining the campaign of arming rebels, it helped to entrench the strategic stalemate without gaining significant leverage over the opposition or defeating the regime. By threatening war in August 2013 and then stepping back at the last minute, it achieved the worst of all worlds. By making public promises for political cover, it raised expectations which were inevitably frustrated at great cost to American credibility and prestige. In almost all instances, the US and the region would have been better served by a more, not less, restrained American policy towards Syria.

These criticisms, for which Lynch’s narrative supplies abundant evidence, would seem to vindicate at least some “conventional wisdom” about the pusillanimity of Obama’s Syria policy. If there really was no way for the United States to intervene helpfully in Syria, then Obama should have kept his mouth shut about Assad’s future and left it to be decided by those for whom it was a matter of life and death. Chollet insists, in Obama’s name, that his empty talk on Assad was necessary to preserve America’s “moral authority.” But this was the authority of a global know-it-all, not the credibility of a great power on whose verbal commitments our allies depend for their security.

And was there no way for the United States to intervene helpfully in Syria? Lynch’s compelling case against merelyarming the rebels never mentions the suggestion, made by Eva Bellin and Peter Krause in 2012, of cutting a deal with Russia inducing Putin to sell out Assad in exchange for our recognition of post-Assad Syria as within his sphere of influence. Since Lynch’s despair at the spiraling escalations in Syria’s proxy war appears to take for granted the inevitability of Russia’s crucial intervention to rescue Assad’s depleted forces in September 2015, one is left wondering what some creative great-power diplomacy with Russia could have accomplished earlier (preferably also before the breakdown of governance in Syria had produced ISIS). But such diplomacy would have stood a greater chance of succeeding had there been a more believable threat of American intervention.

Chollet quotes Secretary Clinton complaining that “diplomacy” on Syria would inevitably “run headfirst into a Russian veto,” which would be more understandable if her job description had been identical to Samantha Power’s. Maybe Obama was held back by his assumption, which Lynch appears to endorse, that “Russia, despite the opportunistic adventurism of Vladimir Putin, remained a fading economic power with few allies or assets in” the Middle East. Or maybe, as Obama Administration officials have begun to admit more recently, they feared that any American action in Syria would upset their hoped-for nuclear deal with Iran, which Lynch does say was their “highest strategic priority” in the Middle East.

We will never know whether Lynch is correct to assert that no better outcome in Syria was possible. But he does more or less admit what everyone could sense at the time: Obama, for his own reasons, was not interested in pursuing the full range of options that might have been available to the United States. And Obama’s half-hearted attempts to pretend he took the Syrian catastrophe seriously only made things worse than simple indifference could have.

In Libya, Lynch’s narrative draws an even bigger arrow pointing from Obama’s mistakes to the ensuing disaster. Obama led a UN-authorized intervention in Libya that was the first implementation of the new R2P doctrine (under tortured presidential war-powers reasoning that not even Chollet finds plausible). The NATO intervention immediately overstepped its humanitarian mission by actively helping rebel forces overthrow Qaddafi. This encouraged Syrian rebels to provoke Assad’s overwhelming firepower on the assumption that they, too, would receive Western cover. NATO’s overreach simultaneously made that outcome in Syria impossible by ruling out any future cooperation from the Russians and Chinese, who had now confirmed their suspicion that R2P was a mere cloak for Western-led regime change.

In order to maintain his much-touted international coalition in Libya (he’s not George W. Bush! Really, he’s not!), Obama had to ignore the Saudi crushing of the Bahraini protests even as NATO moved into Libya. This American hypocrisy on Bahrain “fatally crippled the administration’s broader regional stance, especially with the young activists who saw the entire Arab uprisings as a unified narrative.” Coalition maintenance also drained an enormous amount of American diplomatic energy during the crucial middle months of 2011, as Syrian protestors were debating their fatal decision to take up arms and the White House was trying desperately to put together a coherent strategy to manage the dozen fires burning in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the intervention eased up the pressure on the Libyan rebels to win their own war: They began prematurely the descent into bickering and infighting that normally waits at least until a war has been won, and so exacerbated the tensions that soon ripped the country apart, with further calamitous effects on neighboring Egypt, Mali, and even Europe. Most fundamentally, by overthrowing a government without putting a new one in place, Obama’s Libya intervention “opened the door to the proxy wars which would shape the fate of the Arab uprisings.” It was the immediate cause of the regionalization of conflict that is the central and terrible story of Lynch’s new book.

Lynch explains that the Administration intervened in Libya because some of its officials, including at least Power and Rice, did not want the “international community” (or at any rate their fellow consumers of the “watchful…international media”) to associate their own names with the “eternal mark of shame” attached to a Rwanda or a Srebrenica. Chollet adds that “it is hard to see how America’s position would have been enhanced” if we had failed to intervene: Obama himself warned their team that “if Benghazi falls, we’ll get blamed.” This would call to mind Thucydides’ Nicias, who preferred to invite a large disaster rather than be unfairly blamed by his peers for a smaller one. But Nicias suffered the larger disaster in person. He did not inflict it on multiple countries 5,000 miles from his own safe (or even “enhanced”) position, and then wash his hands with Chollet’s deadpan lament that “often the best one can hope for is incremental progress.”

Of course, in what Lynch calls “another world—and the one in which many of us in Washington hoped to live,” Libya would have turned out much better. As his 2012 book gamely asserted, it seemed at the time to present a “historically unique opportunity to establish an effective global norm against impunity in killing civilians,” “to reinforce an international norm on crimes against humanity,” or “to build a global norm against impunity for such violence” that “could ultimately be one of the most durable achievements of the Arab uprisings.” This was especially urgent because the Obama Administration also wanted this insta-norm to somehow shape the behavior of the Egyptian, Tunisian, and Syrian governments in these very same months following the uprisings.

None of this was remotely plausible. Middle East experts like Lynch knew all along that any genuine acceptance of the R2P norm by Arab governments, for whom “state sovereignty” had previously been a “foundational norm of Arab politics,” would have been an “almost unbelievable change.” His new book explains that most Gulf regimes supported the Libya intervention simply because they hated Qaddafi and were happy to distract the West from their own similar repressions in Bahrain. And the enormously influential media gatekeeper Qatar, despite what was in fact the unbridgeable gap between the successful nonviolent protests and the “‘do it yourself’ armed rebellion” of the unhappy Libyans, was delighted to mislead al-Jazeera viewers into thinking that Libya was simply the latest in the wave of successful Arab uprisings, since that wave promised to expand Qatar’s influence in the region vis-à-vis its Gulf rivals.

Once Libya’s frail institutions had been swept aside, all these countries turned its rival armed factions into players on yet another chessboard for their regional power games, while the West predictably lost interest. “These are the fruits of metaphysic declarations wantonly made, and shamefully retracted!” thundered Edmund Burke over the wreckage that ambitious new “global norms” had made of France. It is hard to imagine him changing his mind after Libya.

Next time we should also be more skeptical about the claims made within Arab social media, of which Lynch remains the leading American scholar. He emphasized in 2012 that “the Arab publics who . . . called for international interventions [in Libya] appealed to global norms.” But if such norms are ever to become genuinely “effective,” they will have to rest on more solid foundations than the tweeted views of disempowered young Arabs debating R2P.

The Obama Administration’s belief in the salvific power of global norms also led to a possibly fatal mistake in its Egypt policy. “One of the few clear victories for American diplomacy in Egypt in the post-Tahrir period,” says Lynch, was the successful push on the SCAF to accelerate the timeline for Egyptian presidential elections amid unrest in late 2011. Thanks to this American “victory,” Egypt’s presidential election took place before other parties had organized well enough to compete with the Muslim Brotherhood, and even before a new constitution could be drafted. This early election produced President Mohamed Morsi, who used the ongoing constitution-drafting process as an excuse for a power grab that eventually brought millions of Egyptians back out into the streets, giving popular backing to the military coup that ended the 29-month experiment in Egyptian democracy.

What drove the Obama team to pursue such a diplomatic “victory”? They had been “infuriated,” Lynch says, by “scenes of the American-funded Egyptian military viciously attacking crowds of peaceful protestors . . . with impunity” (killing at least 42): It undermined Obama’s “credibility” in “pushing for new regional standards of legitimacy based on nonviolence in Libya or Syria.” In other words, the SCAF had embarrassed Obama by making his support of R2P look even more hypocritical than his indifference to Bahrain had already done. Angered by their “impunity,” Obama apparently decided to force these perpetrators to accelerate what was already a breathless transition of power, thus proving to the world that he shared the R2P norm’s essential preference for punitive justice over constructive statesmanship.

A month after its coup, the same Egyptian military massacred not 42 but 1,000 peaceful protestors, and “the media devolved into state-controlled regime propaganda, whipping up toxic new forms of nationalism and xenophobia alongside a personality cult for the new president.” But by this point the Obama Administration had regrettably exhausted its supply of fury.

Lynch reports that Obama’s Egypt policy was also driven, starting on at latest the sixth day of the Tahrir Square protests, by his unique “conception of the war of ideas against Al-Qaeda, as articulated in his 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslims of the world.” According to this self-aggrandizing conception of “counterterrorism,” Obama expected Arab Muslims to lose all sympathy for anti-American terrorism once they—or as Obama would also have insisted, the tiny minority who actually support terrorism—came to accept his own “powerful counter-vision” to the “clash of civilizations.”

Chollet seems genuinely surprised that this “use of words to create new narratives” was not “sufficient” to create a “change in policy” among our potential enemies. Lynch, by contrast, recognized that Obama’s vision would be “given substance” only when backed up with deeds. Muslims would become more pro-American once they saw that Americans supported Islamic democracy even when it did not “produce pro-American outcomes.” The logic is a bit hard to follow, but it apparently compelled Obama to support nonviolent Islamist parties whenever they won fair elections, including in Egypt.

Of course, George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda had made equally loud anti-Huntingtonian assertions about the universal human yearning for liberty. And as Abrams details and Lynch admits in passing, Bush backed up these words with plenty of deeds that irritated our nondemocratic Muslim allies, including funding some of the pro-democracy activists who went on to lead the Arab Spring. But Bush’s rejection of the duly elected Hamas government in Gaza, and his second-term passivity in the face of Mubarak’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, suffice for Lynch to dismiss the Bush approach as “cheerful hypocrisy,” which Obama was determined to put behind him.

Yet “of course,” Lynch later explains, Obama had no intention of supporting “any real transition to democracy” in Yemen. The rather more concrete aspects of his counterterrorism policy required the cooperation of the Saleh government, or a similarly nondemocratic successor regime, in American drone strikes. And when President Morsi blundered into al-Sisi’s coup against him, “trusting that Washington’s frequent private and public messages of commitment to the democratic process would protect him and deter his enemies,” Obama once again found himself in no position to object. Does Lynch mean to say that Obama’s hypocrisy was at least uncheerful?

I happen to share Lynch and Abrams’s hopes for a greater incorporation of nonviolent Islamist parties into the Arab political sphere. Abrams makes a powerful case that the democratic process, ifsuccessful, will tend either to teach those parties political moderation or to defeat them. But Lynch’s equally powerful warnings about the relative impotence of the United States in the Arab world, along with both authors’ admonition to think of Middle Eastern trends in terms of decades rather than years, prove the folly of Obama’s titanic ambition to “cement the participation of mainstream Islamism in democratic politics” within a six-year period. What Obama intended as a strategy for winning the “war of ideas” has now, we learn from Lynch, made the whole Arab world hate us even more than it already did:

From Egypt and Tunisia to Libya, the public American posture was one of supporting the democratic transition regardless of who won elections. This was an admirable, and, in my view, correct, stance. But it was poorly suited to a networked politics in which every actor wanted a reliable patron, not a neutral referee. In each case, the US ended up hated and publicly lambasted by liberals, Islamists, and regimes. Each side viewed American neutrality as effective alignment with its enemies.

Let us suppose we want to call it “admirable” of Obama to straightjacket himself in a Wilsonian “public posture” until short-term considerations of realpolitikcompel him to break his self-imposed bonds (uncheerfully). Even then, how can Lynch call such a policy “correct” when it is so “poorly suited” to the peoples it claims to serve? His narrative shows repeatedly that “most Arab players took a wholly instrumental view of democracy: a fine thing if their own candidates won, unacceptable if their adversaries won. . . . Most saw little sense in supporting ‘democracy’ in the abstract, rather than supporting one’s allies.” As these pages noted in February 2011, the crowds in Tahrir Square were united not by any commitment to the hard work of self-government, but merely by the desire not to be oppressed. As Lynch often observes, too, the wildly diverse crowds in every Arab Spring country after Tunisia could agree on nothing but that the dictator must go.

In addition, the military coup in Egypt was popular. Assad remains as popular as ever among significant sectors of his population. Many Sunni Iraqis welcomed ISIS as their liberators from Shi‘a “occupation.” And within a short four years of the first protests, “democracy [had] been discredited” and “the surviving autocrats in countries such as Egypt enjoyed more active and assertive public support than aging dictators such as Mubarak could have dreamed of commanding.” Neither Lynch nor Abrams explains how, under conditions like these, a responsible actor could adopt democracy as a goal for the foreseeable future.

This does not mean we should despair of any liberalization of corrupt Arab regimes. Lynch shows us three examples of a (so far) relatively happy outcome to the Arab uprisings. One is still-fragile Tunisia, which enjoyed unique advantages: a more educated populace with few ethnic or sectarian divisions and a large middle class; a dictator who had not yet had the chance to learn from neighboring revolutions how his own fate could be avoided; a few truly patriotic and talented politicians in the right place at the right time; and a relative poverty and obscurity that made it an unlikely arena for the regional power plays of its eastern neighbors, at least when those neighbors were soon distracted by much bigger prizes closer to home. The other examples are Morocco and Jordan, two constitutional monarchies that made significant concessions to the protest movements and have since remained stable (even while absorbing, in Jordan’s case, an unfathomable number of Syrian refugees).

Tunisia shows us that under the right circumstances, the kind of Arab democratic revolution that Obama wanted to support might have a fighting chance, even if its success may be parasitic on others’ failure. Morocco and Jordan show the enduring viability and necessity of the model of incremental liberalization for which Lynch derides George W. Bush. Under this model of “reformation without revolution,” Lynch says with unfair scorn, the U.S. government “pushes its friends for marginal increases in public freedom, which could serve as a pressure valve to stabilize—not undermine—their stability.”

Abrams offers an extensive defense of this model’s partial successes during the Bush years and its continued relevance to the region. He argues that Obama, had he adopted it, could have maintained the trust of our autocratic allies and so extracted greater concessions from them during the Arab Spring. “Even a dog can distinguish between being tripped over and being kicked,” writes Abrams, “and Arab regimes and the people who run them can surely distinguish between efforts to overthrow them and efforts to persuade them to open their political systems, slowly, to a wider aperture with the goal of their long-term stability.”

At the same time, as his undiplomatic metaphor already suggests, Abrams’s real “goal” for these Arab regimes is hardly “their long-term stability.” He wants the U.S. government to avoid actions that would “strengthen and deepen the dictatorship”; “our medium- and longer-term interests require that we stop helping the autocrats”; “foreign assistance programs that . . . help sustain dictatorships in power should be reconsidered”; “in theory, gradual change toward democracy would work best, but is often unlikely . . . when the mass of citizens wants change now.” Abrams does then, ultimately, share the same goal that Lynch expresses more bluntly. Since Arab autocrats are the ones to blame for “killing” the hopes of the Arab uprisings, says Lynch, “relying on these Arab regimes to fix what has gone wrong with the Arab uprisings is foolish beyond compare.” If we want to fix the broken henhouse, the first step should apparently be to fire our crew of foxes.

But expecting anyU.S. policy to really “fix” the Middle East would be “foolish beyond compare.” What should we do instead?

Lynch prefers that the United States simply “consolidate its retrenchment from the region,” a suggestion that most of the American public obviously finds attractive. Yet he also reminds us that President Obama came to office “determined to reduce the American footprint in the Middle East,” and that even he “could not enduringly reduce America’s military presence” when new conflicts pulled him back in against his will. Obama’s ad hoc quasi-strategy—disengage where we can, engage reluctantly where we think we can no longer avoid it—will need at least some major improvements, either from President Trump or from one of his successors. And could any new Middle Eastern grand strategy avoid relying heavily on, and therefore indeed “strengthening,” autocratic Arab regimes?

Lynch does suggest one alternative. Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, he says, issued from “a grand strategy designed ultimately to reduce America’s” “military and political footprint in the region in order to pivot away from the Middle East.” “Everyone understood” that the JCPOA would “ultimately reshape the regional map.” It “offers the prospect of a more fundamental rewiring of the regional order in which Iran is incorporated into the broader American-structured security architecture,” even as we increasingly abandon our role in maintaining that architecture.

Michael Doran’s warning that the JCPOA was part of a strategic “pivot to Iran” was thus, according to Lynch, overstated but not far from the truth. It is refreshing to see the JCPOA forthrightly defended as part of a fundamental strategic shift, an effort to rehabilitate Iran so that the United States can pull out of the region and cut its alliances with the unsavory Arab regimes it has long supported. Yet as Lynch also documents, our Arab allies saw this change coming a mile away and have reacted with predictable (often counterproductive) desperation. It was their violent reaction to the prospect of “an American realignment . . . towards Tehran” that left the United States unable to prevent the Egyptian coup, stop the ongoing bloodbath in Yemen, or restrain further escalations in the Syrian civil war.

One might have expected something like this, for, Lynch concedes, our allies had been terrified of Iran for many years and so regarded our rapprochement with it as an “existential threat” to themselves. They may have been particularly disturbed to see that the Obama team’s goal in the negotiations, as documented by Chollet, was to get Iran to “prove” something that nobody including Chollet believed to be true: namely, that “its nuclear efforts were for peaceful purposes.”

In any case, Lynch still regards it as a “rather damning indictment” of these allies that they could possibly oppose such “conflict de-escalation and peaceful diplomatic engagement”—that is, the de-escalation of ourconflicts through the empowering of our allies’ greatest enemy. Similarly, Lynch often emphasizes that the regimes challenged by the Arab Spring (many of whom were these same allies) “were fighting for their political lives against newly empowered publics whom they suddenly feared,” and that their fears only increased after Obama so quickly shoved aside a tottering Mubarak. Yet Lynch still condemns as “rapacious power-seeking” these autocrats’ decision to fight for their own survival against the protestors who threatened it.

In both cases, Lynch shows surprisingly little sympathy for the self-preservative instincts of Arab autocrats. He does wish that they had followed Obama’s ever-generous “advice to embrace change and commence democratic reforms.” But why should they have trusted that any advice from the White House was actually aimed at ensuring their stability rather than, say, at extricating the United States from the Middle East in deference to American domestic political considerations? And why, after reading either Lynch’s book or Abrams’s, should any Arab autocrat believe that the U.S. government actually cares about his own “long-term stability”? Abrams at least shows real concern for the plight of these autocrats, but I sometimes get the impression that Lynch (and perhaps also Obama) so much despises these “embarrassing,” “morally offensive” allies that he is disinclined to indulge their desire to remain alive. In Abrams’s too-apt metaphor, Lynch would kick the autocrats while Abrams would merely trip over them.

Whatever one may think of this American footwork, we cannot choreograph our strategy as if the Arab autocrats will sit still for it like a bunch of docile puppies. If we empower Iran, they will not go quietly. If we support protest movements that threaten their existence, they will undermine those movements by force and fraud. If we use the Iranian nuclear program as an excuse for a “fundamental rewiring of the regional order,” they will use the Arab uprisings as a “rare opportunity to revise the regional order in their favor.”

This does not prove, in a phrase Lynch adapts from a conversation with a sharp-tongued senior Obama official, that “America has no real allies in the Middle East.” It proves at most that President Obama had no real allies in the Middle East—because he treated our allies’ interests with contempt whenever these conflicted with his own, equally justifiable, interest in retrenchment. As Lynch might have put it, autocracies do autocracy things. A grand strategy incapable of managing the predictable self-interest of Arab autocracies is not a grand strategy for the modern Middle East.

It seems that a workable U.S. strategy will have to maintain alliances with these autocracies and practice the cautious, case-by-case approach to democracy promotion that Lynch and Chollet misleadingly attribute to Obama. One may share Lynch’s relief that Obama set aside his impatient commitment to near-instant democracy in cases where its calamitous results would have been manifest in even less than 29 months. But the fact remains that Obama treated that commitment as a default whenever the opportunity for an election presented itself, abandoning it only in case of visible need. He thus remained trapped within the same one-size-fits-all approach that Lynch and Chollet claim he had escaped. And unaccountably, Abrams still defends that approach whenever “the mass of citizens wants change now,” while Lynch calls it both “admirable” and “correct.”

One may also be glad that Obama tried to “change the mindset that got us into” the Iraq disaster. He had clearly absorbed many lessons about the dangers of U.S.-led urban warfare in the Middle East. He does not seem to have absorbed a bigger lesson about the enormously explosive potential of regime change as such, although he could have found it articulated in political thinkers from Thucydides and Aristotle to Burke and Kennan. That is, Obama seems to have assumed in 2011 that Iraq would have already been in great shape if, in 2002, the Iraqi people had simply risen up in massive protests and Saddam’s army had refused to fire on them.

We have now learned how mistaken this assumption was and is. Lynch’s harrowing account of the Arab Spring should teach us all that the rule of law—even the oppressive legal code of an Arab strongman with all his “networks of corruption and patronage”—is a fragile barrier to chaos, too precious to be thrown away. Lynch, Abrams, and Chollet each flirt with this conclusion. “The uprisings were unable,” says Lynch, “to replace corrupt, autocratic regimes with stable institutions.” The Administration’s “very misleading optimism” about the Arab Spring, says Chollet, was connected to “Obama’s belief in the power of brave individuals to take control of their destinies and to transform a tired, corrupt political order.” “Knowing that an absolute failure to bend means the system may break, and that slow and steady steps . . . will produce more stability,” says Abrams, “we should use our influence to produce” the slower and more stable outcome. Perhaps, then, institution-building is a task accomplished over generations or else not at all; perhaps we should reexamine Obama’s American optimism about the political omnipotence of determined individuals; and perhaps we really do not want to see an autocratic system “break,” even when a very large and angry mob may demand just that.

There is nothing here to celebrate. Every American I know shared these authors’ palpable admiration for the courage of the Arab protestors, and their corresponding distaste for autocrats who would buy them off or mow them down. But as true friends to such courageous activists, we have to help them channel their energy into projects that do not destroy the civic institutions they ought one day to control. When they protest against our allies’ regimes, as they surely will, we will need to offer tough love to autocratic allies and activist friends alike. For activists of this kind (as both Lynch and Abrams show) have an easier time bringing down an old regime than setting up and governing a new one. And cosmopolitan young activists who (as Lynch says) “self-consciously constructed their political struggle as one which transcended national boundaries and rejected the existing rules of politics,” and who could not unite their compatriots behind a single goal other than angry rejection of the status quo, simply lack the political maturity to lead a nation through the trauma of regime change.

In the absence of the rule of law, not only do sub- and transnational identities crowd out civic allegiance, but an abundance of domestic and foreign actors will seek to profit from the ensuing uncertainty, even at the price of chaos. This will happen all the more easily thanks to the new 21st-century media that helped bring about the Arab uprisings. For these media by their nature foster impatience, self-absorption, and deception. They undermine long-term trust and civic friendship even in mature democracies like our own (as Chollet rightly decries), let alone among peoples barely learning to experiment with governing themselves.

The basic problem of the Arab uprisings was that, in countries where the rule of law existed to some extent, millions of protestors tried to overthrow it—and in several cases succeeded. They have sown the wind, and they have reaped the whirlwind. As long as American elites look at such protestors and see only Minutemen or Freedom Riders, we have not learned the real lessons of the Arab Spring.

The post An Arab Spring Autopsy appeared first on The American Interest.

Will the State Department Rise Again Under Pompeo?

My old colleagues at the State Department are all a-bubble with the thought that a new dawn of relevance is coming to Foggy Bottom. Secretary-designate Mike Pompeo has Trump’s ear—or so it is said—in a way Rex Tillerson didn’t, so many a diplomatist’s heart is beating faster at the thought that his influence will become their influence, too.

As for Pompeo, he must sense the achievement of a triumph. Two years ago, he was an obscure Congressman known—to the extent he was known at all—for his attention-seeking proclamations about Muslims and President Obama’s “real” place of birth. Now, he will be the senior member of the Cabinet in a chair once occupied by Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams.

Well, let both the new Secretary and his shell-shocked subordinates savor the moment; in the cold light of a tweet-filled dawn, the fond hopes of both will likely be disappointed. The diplomats will not become more influential; the long decline of the State Department will not be arrested; and Secretary Pompeo will discover that he has traded some real decision-making authority as CIA Director for a shadow on the Seventh Floor, a central role for a peripheral one.

This prediction is based on two kinds of evidence, one concerning a secular trend that has nothing to do with Donald Trump, and the other a particular observation that has everything do to with him.

As to the former, it has been at least two decades since there was even a pretense that the Secretary of State is the chief foreign policy officer of government, or the State Department its preeminent foreign policy agency. In our time of perpetual war, foreign policy leadership has been assumed by the National Security Advisor, by an increasing sophisticated Pentagon policy operation, and by the leaders of the endlessly proliferating intelligence agencies. There was a time, not so many years ago, when the CIA and the Joint Chiefs would decline to take positions on strictly policy issues on the grounds that these were the business of the State Department and the White House. In those days, the State Department chaired all the interagency groups created to reconcile differing agency views. The NSC chairs them now, and State—rather than being first among equals—has become just another agency scrapping to have its point of view taken into account.  If there really is a “deep state” pulling the strings in Washington, State is very much at the shallow end.

Pompeo won’t change that. The last fully empowered Secretary of State who respected and used the Foreign Service was George Shultz in the Reagan Administration. That was 30 years ago. Since then, incumbents in the job have been either inconvenient individuals parked at State to keep them from under foot, like Colin Powell, or putative political players who have isolated themselves from the Department behind a bristling hedge of loyalists, like Jim Baker, Madeleine Albright, and Hillary Clinton. In this respect, Rex Tillerson was an anomaly only in the bumbling cluelessness of his approach. The others might have neglected the State Department; he set fire to the place as an institution, this despite his more or less sound policy instincts.

There are good reasons for Secretaries of State to stay at arm’s length from the agency they head. The problem with career Foreign Service Officers is that they know too much. They know why your simple-minded plan to invade Iraq and install a democracy won’t work. They understand the tribal, ethnic, and familial loyalties that will frustrate your efforts to consolidate the opposition to the Assad regime in Syria, and why the endlessly trained Afghan military will never win the victory that American generals endlessly promise.

Because they are on the ground, up close and personal, they are the first to sense the damage inflicted by Chinese and Russian expansionism, and to describe the cost of U.S. retreat, not just in Europe, but in countries the Beltway-bound couldn’t find on a map if their next oversized paycheck depended on it. And they want to convey all this to their betters, but these days that’s known as disloyalty. New leadership, in its hubris and innocence, has high hopes; the Foreign Service brings the bad news. It’s all so damned factualand irritating, and it turns diplomats into easily caricatured pariahs to the government they serve. None of this began with Donald Trump, but add a profoundly ignorant President who makes policy by whim, and the dilemma facing any new Secretary of State becomes clear.

So much for recent relevant history. Now for the absurdist histrionics of the current Administration.

Mike Pompeo can represent the views of his experts to the White House and be marginalized; or he can ignore the Department and try to keep his influence at Trump court. It goes without saying that he will choose the latter, easier course, but it still won’t be easy.

Pompeo has risen by cozying up to the President and demonstrating that he thinks like Trump, whatever Trump thinks. He’s been careful not to patronize the Commander in Chief, as nearly everyone does in Washington, whatever their political persuasion. But now he’ll have to do these things at a distance. The morning intelligence briefing, which has been the font and substance of Pompeo’s influence, will now be done by Gina Haspel (if she is confirmed by the Senate). The redoubtable John Bolton, not known as a team player, will be constantly at the President’s ear. Pompeo, by contrast, will often be traveling, and even when in Washington he will be bogged down in Departmental arcana. He’ll become a voice on the phone, another supplicant begging for face time. Meanwhile, he will being undercut by the inevitable whispering campaign that has become the constant background noise in an Administration whose mantra is: Do unto others before they do unto you.

Pompeo may think he’ll keep his close ties to the intelligence community, but that won’t happen either. The common wisdom is that he’s earned their respect in his brief time at the CIA, but once he crosses the Potomac to Foggy Bottom they won’t want to know him. It will be like being traded from the Patriots to the Jets. You’re still in the game, only not in prime time.

Pompeo will begin at State with a great reserve of good will. Just scrapping Tillerson’s antic reorganization plan—as he’s bound to do—will build a lot of credit. He’ll have the pull to get ambassadorships and other senior positions filled, and his screwball proclamations on Muslims and 9/ll conspiracies will be dismissed as the politically motivated ravings of a Congressman on the make.

But it won’t make much difference in the long run. The reality is that Trump despises diplomats—at least,our diplomats– and he now has John Bolton perfectly placed to amplify his prejudice. Trump won’t suddenly see the virtues of a professional diplomatic service because Pompeo is at State. On the contrary, the Presidential nostrils will be quivering for any hint that Pompeo has been “captured by the building.” Whether true or not, the leaks will pour forth and Pompeo will learn that moving from the CIA to the State Department has made him both a more tempting target and much easier to ignore.

This applies particularly to Russia. Experts (and not just at the State Department) think Russia means to disrupt our democracy and destroy our key alliance. Trump doesn’t think so. If Pompeo doesn’t want the public flaying his predecessor received, he won’t be sounding the tocsins against the Russian menace, at least in the President’s hearing—and probably not at all.

Finally, Pompeo has the burden of being seen as influential. That means the first order of business will be to take him down a peg, or possibly two. So it was with Bannon, with Kelly, and with McMaster, and so it will be with Pompeo and eventually with Bolton, too, if he displeases his master: death by a thousand tweets.

To succeed, therefore, Pompeo will need a keen ear for wild changes in Trump’s policy, the wit to seem as if he agrees no matter how sharp the swerve, and a gift for convincing his boss that any idea that leads to success (or, at least, the absence of failure) was Trump’s idea in the first place. That last task will be simple if only because narcissists are easy to stroke; the others will be more difficult. These are diplomatic skills, but Pompeo will have to exercise them while disdaining diplomats. Even that is hardly the greatest of the hypocrisies upon which his continued tenure will depend.

And what of State while all of this plays out? It is generally true that Presidents begin by distrusting the State Department. Distrust of the military (and the intelligence community) is usually learned the hard way. For all of Trump’s wild and aggressive flailing, our country is in retreat around the world. As long as Trump is President, the advance to the rear will continue, swelled by spineless Congressional Republicans and various disreputable relatives and hangers on. Pompeo is only the latest to queue up near the head of the line. The State Department will be left to its facts, its cautions, its infuriating prudence, and its quibbling expertise. Let’s hope that a few professionals have the stomach to trudge forward for three years or even for seven, so that they can be there when we start building an American foreign policy worthy of our great nation from the rubble.

The post Will the State Department Rise Again Under Pompeo? appeared first on The American Interest.

The Post-Election Power Plays Begin

There was no intrigue in the outcome of the Russian presidential election that took place on March 18. Vladimir Putin won with a reported 76.69 percent of the vote; in absolute numbers, he received 55 million votes, equivalent to roughly one third of Russia’s population. And although RFE/RL estimates the number of fraudulent ballots cast for Putin at 10 million, this is considered only the fourth worst electoral fraud rate in Russia’s recent history, after the presidential election in 2012 and the Duma elections in 2011 and 2016.

The only real question mark looming over this election has been who will be Prime Minister thereafter. According to The Bell, a recent op-ed published by former Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin counts as the unofficial start of the fight for the position.

Kudrin’s piece in Kommersant is entitled “Three Goals For Two Years.” In it, the former minister says that the Russian government has two years to implement reforms before the new Duma election campaign kicks off in 2020. Kudrin calls for the main goal to be the reform of Russia’s governing model: The one that exists today, he says, is not capable of reaching the country’s economic goals.

However, the fact that Alexey Kudrin has been striving to return to the government, after he was kicked out by then-President Medvedev, doesn’t mean that Putin’s regime is seriously contemplating any liberal or semi-liberal reforms. The vote shares earned by the so-called opposition representative Ksenia Sobchak (1.68 percent) and the perennial opposition failure Grigory Yavlinsky (1.05 percent) speak volumes: Liberal ideas are represented by a marginal, easily dismissible number of Russians.

But if these numbers, and Kudrin’s diagnosis for liberal reforms, don’t tell us much about the Putin regime’s agenda in the next six years, a recent major arrest does provide a few clues.

On the night of March 30, the Magomedov brothers—Ziyavudin, worth $1.4 billion, and Magomed, the former Russian Senator worth $400 million—were arrested by the FSB.

Soon after, an investigator’s order on criminal charges against the Magomedovs was leaked to the press. The details contained therein were notable on two counts. First of all, the investigator is Lieutenant Colonel Nikolay Budilo, who is sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act. Second, the charges themselves are written in a way that staggers the imagination.

The founders and owners of the Summa Group investment holding, Ziyavudin and Magomed Magomedov, are charged with creating a criminal syndicate under its guise. The charges look more like an excerpt from a court’s decision than an investigator’s order. Specifically, the charges say that the criminal syndicate “is characterized by a hierarchal structure, permanent members, clear assignment of criminal functions among its members…and specializes in the systematic committing of felonies, in particular, stealing funds in large amounts from business entities, federal and regional budgets.” The Magomedovs are charged with stealing and embezzling 2.5 billion rubles ($40 million at the current exchange rate), including while constructing a stadium for the 2018 World Cup in Kaliningrad.

Given the severity of the order, it was no surprise that the Magomedovs were not allowed house arrest. One day after their detention, a Moscow court put them in jail for two months. The bail request was predictably rejected, even though the Magomedovs offered the exact sum of money they are charged with stealing.

A little background is in order. Born in the Republic of Dagestan, Ziyavudin Magomedov became friends with Arkady Dvorkovich, the current Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, while studying in Moscow in the 1990s. Dvorkovich has always been considered Medvedev’s man, and Ziyavudin Magomedov’s rapid financial growth occurred during Medvedev’s presidency as well. Ziya made his first big money on state contracts for the construction of the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline. That notoriously corrupt project helped make the career of Alexey Navalny, the now-famous opposition leader who published an investigation into it in 2010. According to Navalny, $4 billion were stolen through ESPO. The main contractor on the project was Transneft, the state-owned monopolist for pipelines in Russia.

In 2011 Summa and Transneft together bought 50.1 percent of the largest Russian seaport in Novorossiysk, NMTP.

Ziya’s position was jeopardized when his cousin Ahmed Bilalov, the head of the Russian Olympic Committee, was fired in 2013 and charged with financial crimes. The same fate was suffered by Bilalov’s brother, Magomed Bilalov, who also worked on the 2014 Sochi Olympics. The Bilalovs fled Russia and have not returned since.

Despite the peril, Ziya Magomedov found a way to reposition himself and stay in the Kremlin’s good graces. He became a sponsor of one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite organizations, Russia’s Night Hockey League (NHL), while his brother Magomed became its president. The NHL occasionally allows the Russian President to play in its games to entertain himself—where he miraculously manages to score six or seven goal every time he plays, as the goalkeepers literally part before the gifted athlete.

It is hard to say exactly what happened to the Magomedovs and who is behind their arrest. Some experts assume this to be an attack on Dvorkovich, and therefore Medvedev, which sounds plausible considering Putin has yet to appoint a new Prime Minister. The only meaning of this role is to be entirely loyal to Vladimir Putin, and, to become acting President if anything should happen to him. For his part, Dmitry Medvedev proved his unwavering loyalty to Putin by guarding the presidency for the latter in 2012.

On the other hand, there have been increasing rumors that Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin hopes for the job. Whether or not this is his primary goal, the theory that Sechin stands behind Magomedov’s arrest is plausible. The case was developed by the FSB’s Ivan Tkachev, the head of Directorate K, which oversees the financial sector in Russia. Directorate K has been the subject of a deadly power struggle within the FSB in recent years, as I have previously covered.

Tkachev used to head the Sixth Service of the FSB, which was created by Igor Sechin and was known as “Sechin’s SWAT.” Tkachev also oversaw the criminal case against Economic Development Minister Alexey Ulukaev, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for bribery. The sentence is being appealed.

Tkachev’s involvement points to Igor Sechin being the mastermind of Magomedov’s arrest. However, it might not mean that Sechin’s goal was the Prime Minister post. It’s possible that Rosneft has a financial interest in some of Summa’s assets—for instance, the above-mentioned NMTP or energy entities.

An insider familiar with the matter says that Transneft CEO Nikolai Tokarev is soon to be replaced, which the Russian press has likewise been predicting of late. Tokarev has a longstanding conflict with Sechin. Rosneft transports its oil through Transneft’s pipelines, and Sechin doesn’t like the amount of transportation losses Transneft claims.

Nor does Igor Sechin like to pay tariffs under the new currency exchange rates when transporting Rosneft’s oil through NMTP, controlled by Transneft and Summa. This was where Ziya previously picked a fight with Sechin. The amount of payment at stake in the dispute was a mere $1 million. Rosneft’s CEO filed a claim to the anti-monopoly regulator and got a decision to fine NMTP for 10 billion rubles ($166 million). NMTP disputed the fine in court in February. Days later, the Tax Revenue Service claimed 9.6 billion rubles of underpaid taxes from NMTP.

Rosneft is an extremely mismanaged company that bears giant losses because of Sechin’s poor management. To have his own man head Transneft would be a dream come true for Igor Sechin—so Magomedov’s arrest may well be part of this plot.

Whether it’s motivated by a commercial dispute or a fight for the Prime Minister post, the Magomedovs’ arrest is a remarkable example of how Putin’s regime now sees and treats private business. The charges against Summa’s owners are the first of their kind: From now, on any commercial activity can simply be discredited as an organized crime racket. Unfortunately, this is a trend that seems unlikely to go away, given the government’s recent treatment of private business. Three months ago, I explained how the Russian government was systematically destroying private banks and expropriating their assets. Less than a month later, there followed an unexplained transfer of control over the second-largest food retailer, Magnit, from its owner to the state-owned VTB Bank.

Another remarkable feature of this arrest is how it shows that being on personally friendly terms with Vladimir Putin, and even sponsoring a personal pastime of his like the Night Hockey League, no longer suffices to guarantee immunity. The arrest of Magomed Magomedov, who has always been more politically connected than his brother, made it clear that there is no one left who could save the brothers. Jailed with no chance of bail, the Magomedovs were physically restricted from reaching out to political heavyweights to intervene.

Most frightening of all were the comments of Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov on the Magomedovs, who share a history with Putin’s press secretary. When Peskov got married in 2015, Alexey Navalny claims the newlyweds spent their honeymoon on Ziya Magomedov’s yacht in Italy’s Sardinia. Peskov officially denied spending time on the boat, saying he stayed in a hotel in Sardinia. However, his daughter posted selfies and comments from the yacht at the time of the honeymoon.

Perhaps, as a newly born joke has it, Peskov will now be able to enjoy Magomedov’s yacht in his absence. In any case, Dmitry Peskov apparently no longer associates himself with the businessmen. The Kremlin Spokesman’s comments on the case amounted to a thinly veiled warning to private business: “This is not some one-time action. There is a deliberate, severe policy on monitoring the spending of budget funds.”

Peskov should be praised for such honesty. Every Russian businessman, except for the closest circle of Vladimir Putin consisting primarily of the Ozero cooperative members—the Kovalchuks, the Rotenbergs, and Timchenko—should stay tuned.

 The Magomedovs certainly once had friends in high places: in fact, the President of Summa from 2011 to 2014 was Aleksandr Vinokurov, the son-in-law of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He has not been touched by the investigation in any way, strangely enough, even though the investigator alleges that Summa started its criminal activity no later than 2010.

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