Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 105

Learning to Forget, Forgetting to Learn

In the Lake of the Woods

Tim O’Brien

1994

Reminded that the 50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre looms on March 16, I decided to reread Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. The novel’s title might recall for many readers the story “On the Rainy River” from his now classic collection, The Things They Carried. The wide river separating Minnesota and Ontario is the site of the protagonist’s crisis of conscience in the summer of 1968: Obey his draft notice or flee to Canada.

The protagonist’s name is Tim O’Brien, but beware of identifying character and author in these first-person stories. “This is one story I’ve never told before,” he announces in the first sentence. “For more than twenty years I’ve had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper, I’m hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams.” Another caveat: Necessary though storytelling and remembrance may be to survival, they are not necessarily curative.

O’Brien’s works ply the uncertainties of fact and fiction, identity and persona, memory and invention, survival and salvation. In Going After Cacciato (1978), episodes of Paul Berlin’s unit in Quang Ngai province in the months after My Lai and his fragmentary ruminations during a solitary night watch are braided together with the story of the pursuit of the AWOL Cacciato. The Cacciato story begins realistically but steadily becomes implausible and ultimately fantastic, a compound of wish-fulfillments and anxieties woven from Paul Berlin’s need to imagine a “possibility” to replace the raw fact that in a fit of panic he blindly killed Cacciato. His lieutenant covers up the event by reporting Cacciato MIA.

O’Brien’s first work, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1975), details his experience in a unit patrolling Quang Ngai province and Pinkville, the area that included the My Lai villages, in the same months that Paul Berlin prowled the territory. Much of the short fiction in The Things They Carried (1990) also takes place there. Fiction grew from memoir for O’Brien, as though memoir could not exhaust memory. Even as certain events in If I Die in a Combat Zone recur with little or no alteration in later short stories and novels, the writer’s stance changes. Rather than recounting his own experience, he now projects it into his characters’ life experiences and gives it new contours and ramifications. In the Lake of the Woods (1994), written a quarter century after My Lai, shifts from the atrocity to its reverberating aftermath.

John Wade is a Vietnam veteran and telegenic politician who is poised to win the 1986 Democratic primary in Minnesota for the U.S. Senate only to see his career collapse three weeks before the election, when it is revealed that he participated in the My Lai massacre and later altered military records to expunge evidence that he was even there. He and his wife Kathy retreat after election night to a cabin in northern Minnesota. She disappears. Is it a boating accident? Her flight from her disturbed, disintegrating husband? A conspiracy hatched between them to escape into new identities? Or, the most likely possibility, did he murder her?

The unnamed narrator is a writer, a blend of journalist and novelist. He reconstructs events and tries, as a journalist would, to solve the mystery after John Wade too disappears; he fabricates possible narratives—“conjectures” he calls them—from an archive of documents, interviews, and evidence, as a novelist would.

The archive itself combines historical and fictional records. In half a dozen footnotes the narrator elaborates on the meaning of his act of writing in light of his own experience in 1969 of patrolling, burning, and killing in the same cluster of villages and fields where the fictional John Wade and the historical Lieutenant William Calley were on March 16, 1968. Calley directed a four-hour operation of murdering old men, women, and children. Many were raped or mutilated. Between 350 and 500 villagers died. The American soldiers present encountered no enemy fire.

John Wade avoids the action until the moment he turns and kills an old man, believing—or afterwards convincing himself he believed—that the old man’s hoe was a gun. Near the end of the butchery, he looks up from the irrigation ditch filled with bodies and sees a smiling PFC Weatherby, who has energetically participated in the killings. John Wade shoots him point-blank in the face. The press uncovers that he shot the old man and altered his military records. No one ever learns that he killed his comrade in arms.

The narrator invents John Wade’s dissociated memories and forgetfulness to recover something of his own past. Every angle of Wade’s motives, as a child, soldier, husband, politician, is investigated only to dramatize how elusive truth can be and often is. The grimmest of war crimes is detailed in order to confront the blurred line between duty and atrocity. Two dramas are intertwined in the novel, Wade’s and the narrator’s. Both are dramas of denial and invention:

We moved like sleepwalkers through the empty villages, shadowed by an enemy we could never find, calling in medevac choppers and loading up the casualties and then moving out again toward the next deadly little ville. And behind us we left a wake of fire and smoke. We called in gunships and air strikes. We brutalized. We pistol-whipped. We trashed wells. We kicked and punched. We burned all that would burn. Yes, and these too were atrocities—the dirty secrets that live forever inside all of us. I have my own PFC Weatherby. My own old man with a hoe. And yet a quality of abstraction that makes reality unreal. All these years later, I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. . . .  On occasion, especially when I am alone, I find myself wondering if these old tattered memories weren’t lifted from someone else’s life, or from a piece of fiction I once read or heard about. My own war does not belong to me. In a peculiar way, even at this very instant, the ordeal of John Wade—the long decades of silence and lies and secrecy—all this has a vivid, living clarity that seems far more authentic than my own faraway experience. Maybe that’s what this book is for. To give me back my vanished life.

There again is the redemptive thirst, that hope to restore the self through invention or memory. As in O’Brien’s other works, the sought-after redemption is hard to come by.

In the months after John Wade’s My Lai “the whole incident took on a dreamlike quality, only half-remembered, half-believed.” Getting wounded helps his psychic survival. “In a peculiar way the pain was all that kept body and soul together,” and he volunteers for a second combat tour, hoping that some show of valor will expiate his deeds in My Lai. When he removes his name from Charlie Company’s rolls, he finds that it “helped ease the guilt.” Ten years later, as his political star is rising, Vietnam scarcely touches his consciousness: “He genuinely wanted to do good in the world. In certain private moments, without ever pondering it too deeply, he was struck by the dim notion of politics as a medium of apology, a way of salvaging something in himself and in the world.”

In the Lake of the Woods eerily forecast the Bob Kerrey story. In April 2001, as the Clinton scandal was fading away and George W. Bush was enjoying his uneventful pre-9/11 presidency, the story broke that on the night of February 25, 1969, Lieutenant Kerrey led six other Navy SEALs on a raid on the hamlet of Thanh Phong in the Mekong Delta where they slaughtered as many as 20 women and children. Late in 1998 the journalist Gregory L. Vistica confronted Kerrey with the implicating documents he had gathered for Newsweek. Soon thereafter the charismatic Nebraska Democrat, a veteran who lost a leg in Vietnam, decided not to challenge Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 primaries. If Newsweek had hoped to boast of Senator Kerrey’s fall, it had robbed itself of the chance with an inadvertent knockout punch before the opening bell. Newsweek dropped the project. Kerrey decided not to seek reelection to the Senate.

Vistica’s investigation migrated to the New York Times and CBS’s 60 Minutes II. As the Times Magazine prepared to publish the story in the spring of 2001, Kerrey, by then president of New School University, gave his version of events in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute, a news conference at the New School, and an ill-fated interview with Dan Rather. Was he remembering the truth or parrying his conscience? He told Vistica that the rules of engagement he followed in the Mekong Delta considered crossfires and human shields irrelevant. “Standard operating procedure was to dispose of the people we made contact with. . . . Kill the people we made contact with, or we have to abort the mission.” His memory of what happened in Thanh Phong was, in his words, “clouded by the fog of the evening, age, and desire.”

Like Tim O’Brien’s protagonist, Kerrey may have no longer known exactly what happened, even as he knew himself to be “a man who killed innocent civilians.” Like O’Brien’s narrator, he may not have known the difference between his own experience and some movie he saw. His account, contradicted by another SEAL and a Vietnamese witness, resembles the firefight in Born on the Fourth of July, Oliver Stone’s film based on Ron Kovic’s memoir, where Americans kill women and children who shield the Viet Cong.

The accuracy of any of these real and fictional warriors’ memories cannot be known. What can be known is that any sense of moral equivalence is false. Neither the enemy’s tactics nor the war-is-hell mantra balances American responsibility. There’s the rub: American responsibility. Elected Presidents and Congresses, the CIA, Pentagon intellectuals, and layer upon layer of military commanders and soldiers made the war in Vietnam what it was. After the fall of Saigon there was little national reckoning. Instead the Vietnam Syndrome raised its Janus-faced head. The one face shouted, avoid all military conflict. The other, never fight without overwhelmingly superior might and certain swift total victory.

Bob Kerrey’s story and John Wade’s are compelling because they are politicians—not indeed those who designed and prosecuted the Vietnam War and might have been held accountable, but those whose lives and careers were shaped in its aftermath. The most charismatic politicians of their generation, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, all avoided serving in Vietnam. The symbolic tie between citizen-soldier and statesman—an ideal originating in the Athens of Pericles—invigorated the public imagination in the political careers of World War II veterans like Dwight David Eisenhower, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, George Herbert Walker Bush, and Bob Dole. The Vietnam War shattered the symbolism. John Kerry, Al Gore, and John McCain served with distinction, but neither Democrats nor Republicans were ever able to connect a leader’s experience in Vietnam to a coherent understanding of the war or a new vision of American foreign policy. Kerry, a decorated veteran and activist in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, was shamelessly attacked in the 2004 election with the scurrilous Swift Boat fabrications, and McCain was mocked by Donald Trump in 2016 for having been, of all things, a prisoner of war! Trump, of course, did not serve at all.

The ghostly presence of Vietnam hovered over President-elect Bill Clinton’s first meeting with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Colin Powell, according to his autobiography, My American Journey, was ready to give frank advice to “a young President, shaped by the Sixties . . . , this first nonveteran American President since FDR.” Two weeks earlier he had spent the weekend after the election at Camp David consoling George H.W. Bush, “a man who had been the Navy’s youngest fighter pilot in the war years of the forties.”

Clinton and Powell discussed a volatile issue regarding democracy and the military; it was not the nation’s defense but homosexuality. Clinton had promised during the campaign to end the ban on gays and lesbians in the military. The promise was unequivocal. Facing the Joint Chiefs’ opposition, Clinton failed his first test as Commander-in-Chief: He did not hear them out and then order them to lift the ban but opted, instead, for “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Powell himself was not a Vietnam hero, nor did he ever claim to be. He served on the ground for just seven months in 1963 as an “adviser” leading and training a battalion of 400 South Vietnamese troops. In those months his battalion burned villages, killed livestock, and destroyed crops; seven of his men were killed and thirty wounded. The battalion had only two “confirmed kills,” one a Viet Cong killed in an ambush and the other represented by a pair of ears delivered to Powell by a South Vietnamese lieutenant, prompting the American adviser to clarify the rules: “A kill meant a whole body, not component parts. No ears. And no more mutilation of the enemy.”

Powell left the jungles and hamlets of the A Shau Valley wounded after he stepped into one of the punji traps the Viet Cong buried along the trails. The dung-encrusted wooden spike pierced all the way through his foot. By the time he returned for another tour in 1968 he was already a lieutenant colonel and assigned to the command staff of the Americal Division rather than the battlefield. Four months before his arrival a unit of that division carried out the My Lai massacre. Powell did not learn of it until the public did, after his tour ended. Other officers and officials engaged in the cover-up, discomforted no doubt by how closely Charlie Company’s mayhem hewed to its search-and-destroy mission in a designated Viet Cong stronghold.

The politicians “shaped by the Sixties,” whether veterans or draft resisters, draft dodgers or Vietnam Veterans Against the War, gun-ho special forces or terrified grunts, never adequately voiced their lived experience of the Vietnam era in their political discourse. A hollowness lay at the core of their visions and debates so long as their public image masked their youthful experiences and actions. By the same token, the unspoken irony underlying In the Lake of the Woods is that the polity that righteously, and rightly, repudiates John Wade had played its own “masterly trick of forgetting,” and one at least as extensive as his.

The novelistic imagination jumps into the breach. Novels wrench a paradox from the clear distinction of fiction and nonfiction. We know more about the inner life of fictional John Wade than we will ever know about that of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Bob Kerrey. John Wade’s life in politics is underpinned by a desperate need to be loved and a fascination with deception that goes back to his childhood obsession with doing magic tricks. Among his fellow soldiers he is known as Sorcerer, and his ultimate illusion is making himself disappear from the records of Charlie Company. The mental magic of his fantasy life in adolescence lies in making his father reappear, an alcoholic, half-absent father who commits suicide when John is 14. He wants to bring him back to life so he can kill him for abandoning him. The impossible yearning for the lost father’s love is answered by the magic shows he performs at school and parties:

It was a surprise to find that the applause seemed to fill up the empty spaces inside him. . . .  He liked being up on stage. All those eyes on him, everybody paying close attention. Down inside, of course, he was still a loner, still empty, but at least the magic made it a respectable sort of emptiness.

“All those eyes on him”—the future politician’s first feeling of the thrill of public life. The source and fuel of charisma is to be found in being looked at by an admiring crowd. Just before going to Vietnam, at 22, he tells Kathy “his ambitions and dreams.” Law school, party politics, “something big. Lieutenant Governor, maybe. The U.S. Senate”—but she doubts him:

“I don’t know, it just seems strange, sort of. How you’ve figured everything out, all the angles, except what it’s for”

“For us,” he said. “I love you, Kath.”

“But it feels—I shouldn’t say this—it feels manipulating.”

John turned and looked at her. Nineteen years old, yes, but still there was something flat and skeptical in her eyes, something terrifying. She returned his gaze without backing off. She was hard to fool. Again, briefly, he was assailed by the sudden fear of losing her, of bungling things, and for a long while he tried to explain how wrong she was. Nothing sinister, he said. He talked about leading a good life, doing good things for the world. Yet even as he spoke, John realized he was not telling the full truth. Politics was manipulation. Like a magic show: invisible wires and trapdoors.

His first response—“For us . . . I love you, Kath”—is not untrue, for in his own mind his political success is the one thing he has to offer to capture Kathy’s love. On returning from Vietnam he has even less sense of “what it’s for,” except perhaps atonement. Deception and manipulation prevail in his political vocation because he strives to atone for something he cannot acknowledge, cannot allow to be known, to become public. Therein lies this politician’s separation of persona and person.

His growing charisma quells his filial rage, and his steady rise to power reins in his intense marital jealousy. Politics feels like salvation. His wartime deeds are held at bay by “layers of forgetfulness,” and the more he shows himself in public, the more his psychic “box of mirrors” lets him disappear into his empty inner life. The My Lai revelations wreak havoc across this entire landscape of his love, rage, jealousy, amnesia, charisma, and power. John Wade cracks. The reader, like the investigating-conjecturing narrator, never learns what happened in the Lake of the Woods. Even the motives for murder are conjectural. He might have killed Kathy because she is the most intimate witness of his shame and failure, or because she scarcely disguises her relief that their life in electoral politics is now over, or because as soon as his rage is no longer contained by public adoration and private amnesia he must, again, kill someone.

Deep currents of contemporary history and political life register in O’Brien’s novel. It warns that an inner hollowness and bottomless need for recognition are becoming part of the psychological aptitude for electoral politics. Politicians are called upon to craft images of their youth, their marriage and family, and their personality; perhaps underneath it all they also yearn to be authentic. They are in any case daring to be unmasked, and our media are eager to oblige. Yet the forms and enjoyments of unmasking are themselves somehow false. In the Lake of the Woods questions the judgments, political and aesthetic, required to penetrate the inner reality and private lives of public figures. While novelistic truth looks behind the mask, it also thwarts the pleasures and certainties of unmasking. In a final novelistic paradox, we know the fictional John Wade better than we know our actual politicians because O’Brien carefully etches the limits of our knowledge, bringing us face to face with what is unfathomable and impenetrable in motives and actions.

By fusing in a single character the soldier who commits atrocity and the politician who slips the yoke of responsibility, O’Brien shined a harsh light on our country a quarter-century after the Vietnam War. As a people and a polity, we Americans are prone to shun memory. Seldom do memory and moral reflection touch in our political life. On the 50th anniversary of My Lai, can the recollection of that event loosen even a bit the hold that tricksters and illusionists have on our body politic?

The post Learning to Forget, Forgetting to Learn appeared first on The American Interest.

Partisan Mirroring and Difficult Choices

There are several reasons for Democrats to be optimistic about their prospects in the 2018 Midterm Elections. Historical patterns regularly favor the out party over the governing party in off-year contests. Donald Trump is a historically unpopular President who continues to dig himself into an ever-deeper political hole. The Republicans in Congress have only one major legislative achievement to date and are divided on issues of trade, immigration and limiting assault weapons. But despite all of this, most Democrats are at best cautiously optimistic. Many are anxious about their party’s unity and uncertain about how to win back the voters who either stayed home or defected to Trump in 2016.

Some of their uncertainty derives from circumstances beyond their control. The economy continues to hum along with low unemployment, a strong stock market (despite occasional dips in reaction to Trump policies) and adequate levels of GDP growth. Trump’s base sticks with him even as he acts ever more recklessly because he defends their values and voices their mistrust of over-educated coastal elites. And while the tax bill Trump signed does more for the rich than for his base, it at least does not burden his core supporters financially in the short term.

Democrats are uncertain about how to campaign given all these mixed circumstances. Should they move left to appease the Sanders wing, hoping to draw in new young and nonwhite voters with bold policy pledges like single payer health care, higher minimum wage or loosened Federal marijuana restrictions? Or instead, should they broaden their coalition to encompass more right-to-lifers and NRA supporters? And is it better to nationalize the election a la Newt Gingrich in 1994 or localize it as they did in 2006 when Rahm Emmanuel ran the DCCC’s operations, actively seeking out cops, military vets and the like to run in the moderate to conservative swing seats? So far in this election cycle, the DCCC appears to be taking a more hands-off, wait and see approach in the emerging Democratic primary contests.

There is nothing new about “left and lefter” tensions within the Democratic Party ranks, but they have become more complex due to broader changes in the political ecosystem. In the immediate post-WW II era, the professional operatives uniformly preferred winning over ideology while the grassroots amateurs favored principles over electoral expediency. The difference between the professionals and the amateurs has lessened. The battle over the DNC Chair revealed that even the official party ranks are ideologically divided.

Also, with the proliferation of public polls and social media forums, the professionals no longer have a distinct advantage over the grassroots in information and data. The districts in serious play are common knowledge thanks to sites like Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball and other online resources. As a consequence, there are more amateurs at the district level and in the political nonprofit world playing the targeting and mobilizing game at a sophisticated level. Meanwhile many professionals from the TV ad era struggle like amateurs as social media, interactive software, and big data have transformed what consultants do. It is simply not clear who knows best in the party, even when everyone agrees that winning is paramount in the Trump era.

Another complication is that the Rovian revolution has reached Democratic shores. Karl Rove turned conventional wisdom around in 2004 when he focused the Bush campaign on mobilizing the party base rather that attempting to woo undecided voters. While independent voters are on average more moderate, or at least more inconsistently partisan, they are also less likely to turn out, especially in primaries and mid-term elections. The success of the Tea Party and now the Trump base in controlling the Republican party’s message has made a strong impression on Democratic progressives. The consequence of this partisan mirroring of the Republican base-oriented strategy is that many progressives now sincerely believe that there is no tradeoff between ideological purity and winning elections—“lefter” policy, they claim, is also smarter politics.

Lastly and most importantly, the party system’s fracture due to recent campaign finance rulings means that there is no recognized final arbiter of party strategy and tactics. Because independent spending individuals and nonprofit entities control valuable resources, they cannot be pushed aside easily. Self-financed candidates, free to spend as much of their own money as they please, can effectively decide on their own what they will run on. The consequence is that absent anyone being in charge, there are lots of affiliated groups and individuals trying to figure it out for themselves and only sometimes in consultation with one another.

While some of this Democratic disarray can plausibly be blamed on the Supreme Court’s recent campaign finance decisions that created these many outside spending entities, the Democrats have also made their own institutional contribution to political disorder. California is ground zero for the Democrats’ chances of taking the House. They have at least 7 Republican House seats plausibly in play. They also have many candidates—in fact too many—in several of the potentially winnable seats.

That would not be a problem under the primary rules that most states have adopted, but California has a system that only allows the top two vote getters to go forward into the November election regardless of party. This means that in certain competitive districts the Democrats could fail to field even one candidate in the November contest if the too many candidates split the vote and achieve fewer votes than two Republican candidates. Early polls suggest this is a real possibility in at least two seats.

Why does California have such a system? Basically, California Democrats are predictably attracted to any proposal that is described by the press as “reform” and makes the voting process more “open.” Many Democrats actually voted for this concept twice, first for a blanket primary system that the Supreme Court eventually threw out and then for this current top two version that passed judicial scrutiny. Were the Democrats warned that this process might result in the majority party being excluded from running in November or that it would mean spending money inefficiently to re-run a primary contest between two candidates from the same party? Yes, but to no avail.

Will this necessarily hurt the Democrats in November? A lot will depend upon whether the losing factions in these contested primaries stay home or flock to the polls to oppose the President and his policies. In general, it is easier in politics to rally around the negative (i.e. opposing Trump) than the positive (i.e. defining your own agenda). The only realistic goal for Democrats in 2018 is negative: even if the Democrats win both the House and the Senate, they will not have enough votes to overcome a Presidential veto or a Senate filibuster. They will need an answer to their “left and lefter” divide eventually, especially if they obtain a so-called trifecta in 2020. In the meantime, their goal will be to block what they don’t like while they figure out what they do.

The post Partisan Mirroring and Difficult Choices appeared first on The American Interest.

The Succession Dilemma

While Russians have yet to cast their votes in the March 18 presidential election, Vladimir Putin’s victory is already a foregone conclusion. Putin, with near certainty, will prove both his critics and supporters right by winning an essentially uncontested election that will keep him in the Kremlin for another six years. With consistent approval ratings of over 80 percent and no viable political opposition, the election will confirm Putin’s hold on Russia’s political system, which he has dominated for 18 years. His impending victory will also cap a series of political shifts across some of the world’s most geopolitically consequential states, in which autocrats are tightening their control to the detriment of internal and international stability. Despite President Trump’s affinity for strongman rulers, these dynamics should cause concern within the Administration.

Putin is one of several autocrats demonstrating that he has little interest in loosening his grip on power. In a near-unanimous vote this week, the Chinese National People’s Congress approved a constitutional amendment to remove presidential term limits, essentially paving the way for Xi Jinping to stay in power indefinitely, if he chooses. This move was foreshadowed at the Communist Party Congress in October, when “Xi Jinping Thought” was enshrined in China’s constitution. Xi also broke from tradition by not indicating a potential successor at the beginning of his second five-year term.

2017 saw other important political leaders attempt to cast off political constraints. This past April, a slim majority of Turkish voters supported the increasingly autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan by passing a referendum that abolished the office of the Prime Minister, created an executive presidency, and empowered the President to issue decrees and appoint high-level judges. In November, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (better known as MBS), made a series of sweeping arrests of cabinet ministers and senior princes in a risky drive to consolidate power. MBS framed his efforts as part of a broader movement of reform and anti-corruption, a similar theme used by President Xi Jinping in removing hundreds of Chinese political and military officials from power.

These leaders’ drives to consolidate power are not unique. Personalist leaders are on the rise globally. As Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz have pointed out, 30 years ago, 23 percent of all autocracies were ruled by personalist leaders; today 40 percent are. In these systems, a powerful individual dominates all elements of the state apparatus and keeps the support of his peers and followers through a “cult of personality.” This form of autocratic rule differs from two distinct types of autocracies: single-party states, in which a party organization exerts control over political leaders and the country’s military, social and economic life; and military autocracies, in which one or a group of high-ranking military officials holds centralized power and exerts significant influence on policy.

Trends toward personalist rule indicate a regime’s strengths as well as its weaknesses. On the one hand, this trend is a sign of autocratic strength, as leaders prove that they have the muscle to overwhelm their political systems. On the other hand, an autocrat’s reluctance to transfer power through political institutions—whether in popular elections or through party protocols—indicates that he has something to fear in giving up power and influence. This hesitancy could weaken the very political systems they sit atop, and influence their countries’ international trajectories for the worse. 

Enhanced Domestic Volatility 

One of the greatest threats to personalist regimes’ stability is succession. Systems governed around a cult of the individual set up a self-defeating incentive structure. Once power has been consolidated, the leader will seek to eliminate able and ambitious competitors who could threaten his rule. This strategy, while effective in the short term, hollows out the leadership funnel in the long term. Unlike in autocracies run by strong parties, in which leaders rise within the party’s hierarchy, personalist systems have no institutional structure for preparing the next generation of autocrats.

Both Putin and Xi, while operating in vastly different political systems, have decided that grooming eventual candidates is too dangerous to their own political ambitions and could jeopardize their control. There is also the question of whether Xi is taking cues from Putin’s consolidation of control, or if Putin is looking to Beijing as an example of how one carries out indefinite rule. Regardless, both Putin and Xi have taken away decision-making power from institutions and placed it firmly under their control. Contrary to their intentions, this could lead to greater internal volatility in both countries over the medium to long-term.

In Russia, Putin has no clear successor. The presidential elections on March 18 will simply rubberstamp Putin’s continued rule at least until 2024. In part, Putin’s consolidation of control is a matter of personal wealth. Putin is believed to have amassed an incredible personal fortune that could be at risk if he transfers power and influence on to a successor. The wealth accumulated by Putin and the Russian elite is another reason why Russia has not enacted much-needed economic reforms. In this corrupt environment, the Russian people have not been presented with the economic opportunities they deserve, nor alternative candidates that can contest Putin’s power in any meaningful way. Instead, there is only a reshuffling of power among the elite. Putin’s recent changes to his cabinet and the governorships have replaced many in the old guard with new, younger unknowns. It is possible that one such cultivated loyalist will be chosen as Putin’s handpicked successor, but it is unclear whether Putinism will survive without Putin.

In China, succession planning has been a strength of Communist Party since Deng Xiaoping reformed the Party’s system of collective leadership in the 1980s. Often, giving up power in dictatorships can mean imprisonment, exile, or death for the departing leader and his inner circle. Deng’s model lessened this fear with mandated term limits, meritocracy-based promotions for officials, and protocols on retirement. Deng also implemented a series of checks and balances that inhibited total control by one individual. The system ensured that a “runaway leader” could not enact disastrous policies as Mao did in the Cultural Revolution.

Xi’s failure to indicate a potential successor at the Party Congress followed by the constitutional amendment to end presidential term limits both indicate that the post-Mao succession planning system has ended. This will lead to greater uncertainty, and perhaps volatility, within the Party when Xi’s second term expires in 2022. We are already seeing some domestic unease: the Communist Party heavily censored the internet and social media following the move to end term limits, suggesting that many in China are unhappy with the direction Xi is moving.

The West and the Rest     

These internal changes have important consequences for the United States and its European allies. Historically, research shows that personalist regimes are more likely to carry out volatile and unpredictable foreign policies. They also make for difficult allies. This is particularly true for the United States in its relations with Russia, China, and Turkey, whose leaders rely on nationalist rhetoric laced with overt anti-Western and anti-American sentiments that boosts their own internal legitimacy. They are also drawing support from parties, movements, and leaders around the world who view the liberal democratic West as hypocritical and, at worst, threatening to their own power.

In Russia, Putin projects his country as a conservative pole in Europe. This is an ideology that appeals to populist parties across Europe, including Austria’s Freedom Party and Hungary’s Fidesz Party, who see Europe as an increasingly liberal, postmodern, and post-Christian entity. These parties, along with others such as Italy’s Five Star Movement and Greece’s Golden Dawn, harbor anti-Western views and support closer ties between their countries and Russia, express skepticism about NATO, or favor ending EU sanctions on Russia. As Bill Galston writes, Putin’s ethno-nationalist leadership style is admired by populist figures rising in the polls across European capitals, thereby enhancing Russia’s influence on the continent.

In China, Xi Jinping is projecting national confidence at a time when the West is diminishing in relative power and influence. As Xi’s grip on power tightens, the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia are dealing with a leader who faces few internal constraints at home and is empowered to carry out decisions that he alone believes are necessary. While this may not translate directly into more aggressive action in the South China Sea or toward Taiwan, Xi has thus far carried out far more assertive foreign policies than his predecessors. Xi invests more in China’s maritime capabilities and has taken a more proactive stance on China’s territorial claims. Economically, Xi has expanded the scope of China’s global ambitions through initiatives such as One Belt One Road, leading U.S. and European officials to grow increasingly skeptical of the political and security implications of China’s extensive investments.

As strongmen leaders build more repressive autocratic states, they tend to see one another as convenient and like-minded partners in their shared distrust of the democratic West. This dynamic is playing out between Russia and Turkey under Erdoğan and Putin. In Turkey, Erdoğan’s embrace of political Islam and his crackdown on civil society has elicited condemnation from democratic leaders in the United States and Europe. Erdoğan also believes that U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen was behind the July 2016 attempted coup aimed at removing him from power, which has heightened tensions between the two countries. Similarly, Putin sees Western democracy promotion and support for civil society activities on Russia’s periphery as directed against his own regime.

Through their shared skepticism of Western intentions toward their internal orders, Erdoğan and Putin have entered a closer partnership, albeit a lukewarm one. Despite diverging national interests on a range of issues, the two finalized a deal for Turkey to purchase Russia’s advanced S-400 air defense missile systems, and another in which Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation (Rosatom) will build a $20 billion nuclear power plant in southern Turkey. Erdoğan has used his relationship with Putin as leverage against his European and NATO partners. Meanwhile Putin sees Turkey as a wedge he can drive into Transatlantic solidarity. Their cooperation has created divisions within NATO on how best to deal with its errant ally.

These developments highlight the ways in which tightening control across powerful autocracies is creating problems for U.S. foreign policy around the world. Domestically, the succession dilemma facing autocrats makes their systems more prone to volatility and infighting among elites. Moreover, internal decision-making processes, the influence of powerful individuals, and their ability to consolidate control away from institutions all shape a nation’s foreign policy. These dynamics are even more important in states that have the ability to affect regional and global stability. In an era of renewed great power competition, understanding these power shifts within autocratic states should be a high priority for policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The post The Succession Dilemma appeared first on The American Interest.

A Vatican-China Deal—But at What Cost?

Nearly 70 years after Mao Zedong expelled Pope Pius XII’s representatives from the People’s Republic of China, the Vatican and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are now reportedly on the verge on signing a deal that could end the decades-long religious and diplomatic staredown. While the specifics of the deal remain private for now, a source within the Vatican said that it lays the groundwork for collaboration between the Vatican and the CCP in the selection and appointment of bishops on the Chinese mainland. It is unlikely that the agreement would re-establish formal diplomatic relations between the two sides, but even the simplest deal would be an historic moment, possibly paving the path to full diplomatic relations.

A Long Road to This Moment

After the Vatican and the Party severed ties in 1949, Chinese Catholics (as well as those of other faiths) who continued to practice their religion became easy targets for the new regime, especially during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Catholics and other Christians were labelled as “enemies of the people,” stripped of property and imprisoned for their beliefs. Party officials insisted they could not be true to communist ideology if they believed in religion.

But for Mao and his successors, the problem was a much more fundamental question of who ought to have final authority. The one-party state could not tolerate any sort of external check on the party’s ability to dictate ideology. For faithful Catholics, for instance, to take their cues, spiritual or otherwise, from the pope and not the chairman, could potentially disrupt the political order. Moreover, although it was until recently extremely rare for non-Italians to become pope, anyone, from any country, could sit in the chair of St. Peter. Could Mao—or President Xi Jinping, for that matter—afford to have Chinese citizens obeying a foreigner (or perhaps even worse, albeit unlikely, a Chinese pope)? And what if someday the pope were an American?

The mistrust of foreign-controlled or -influenced religious movements isn’t just a product of Chinese communist ideology, either. Suspicion of upstart religious movements runs deep in Chinese history. Indeed, in the mid-19th century—only a short while ago in historical terms—the Qing Dynasty put down the Taiping Rebellion, a mass uprising led by a failed civil servant who came to believe he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ who had come to rid China of idolatry. The faith-based rebellion, which claimed as many as 30 million lives all told, joined with others in leaving an indelible mark on China and its leaders.

From the Catholic Church’s perspective, the ultimate authority of appointing bishops—at least since the Investiture Controversy— has rested with the pope. The 1965 Christus Dominus, a decree passed by the Second Vatican Council, further emphasized that the authority of appointing bishops does not rest with governments: “For the purpose of duly protecting the freedom of the Church and of promoting more conveniently and efficiently the welfare of the faithful, this holy council desires that in future no more rights or privileges of election, nomination, presentation, or designation for the office of bishop be granted to civil authorities. The civil authorities, on the other hand, whose favorable attitude toward the Church the sacred synod gratefully acknowledges and highly appreciates, are most kindly requested voluntarily to renounce the above-mentioned rights and privileges which they presently enjoy by reason of a treaty or custom, after discussing the matter with the Apostolic See.” Thus the CCP’s refusal to allow the pope to carry out one of his core duties has been a sticking point since 1949. Clearly, neither Xi nor his predecessors heeded the “kind request” from 1965.

The Global Times, a generally aggressive and hawkish party-aligned newspaper in China, has pointed to one historical precedent for a deal that would supposedly satisfy these seemingly intractable positions. In 1996, the Catholic Church struck a deal with Vietnam in the selection of bishops in which “bishops [must] gain approval from both the Vatican and the Vietnamese government.” Notwithstanding the arrangement, Vietnam and the Vatican still have not reestablished diplomatic relations—which Vietnam severed in 1975—despite ongoing negotiations since 2007.

Oddly enough, it was in the same Global Times article mentioned above that Francesco Sisci, a senior researcher at the Center for European Studies at Renmin University, succinctly explained the controversy over the deal and the importance that the Catholic Church places on the selection of bishops: “The bottom line for the Vatican is the role of the pope in the appointment of bishops: Without this there is no Catholic Church. How this role can be defined then will be in the negotiations.”

A Big Deal?

There are currently two Catholic “churches” in China: an underground one that is loyal to the papacy and a Party-sanctioned one known as the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA). The underground church is led by Vatican-appointed bishops and recognizes the authority of Pope Francis as the head of the Church, while the CCPA does not. The CCPA is run by CCP-appointed bishops, who are sometimes excommunicated by the Holy See for accepting the position without papal approval.

The much-hyped—and much-maligned—deal reportedly under discussion would create some sort of collaboration between the Vatican and the CCP in the appointment of bishops, with the pope granting final approval to (or withholding it from) all candidates. On the surface, the CCP would get what it wants from such a deal—party-approved picks for bishops, as well as the international prestige of working with the Vatican—and the Vatican would also get what it desires—rapprochement with China and legal status for the church. This seemingly simple workaround should unite the illegal underground church with the state-sponsored one.

China’s “Religious Affairs Regulations,” which took effect in 2018, added additional reasons for the Catholic Church to renew its search for a compromise with the CCP. Under Xi’s rule, the CCP has cracked down on groups that could potentially threaten the party, passing a 2017 law constraining non-governmental organizations, as well as laws restricting freedom ostensibly designed to combat threats from terrorism and in cyberspace. Religion was just another obvious area that the state needed to regulate—the next natural step in what is rapidly becoming a turbocharged Orwellian surveillance state.

The religious regulations essentially give the CCP carte blanche to crack down on religious practice, and since the underground Catholic church is technically illegal, priests and worshipers are all at risk of imprisonment. Article 63 of the law states, “Using religion to harm national security or public safety, undermine ethnic unity, divide the nation . . . impeding the administration of public order . . . where a crime is constituted, criminal responsibility is pursued in accordance with law.” The vagueness of what any of these terms mean gives the CCP the ability to control the affairs of any religion as it sees fit. The CCP similarly uses the vagueness of its laws regarding “national security” to imprison anyone outspoken on sensitive issues. Signing a collaboration deal with the CCP might therefore offer Catholics in China a measure of protection from this law. It is worth noting that as recently as last May Peter Shao Zhumin, an underground bishop, was detained for seven months by the CCP without charge. The detention of Shao came before the religious regulation took effect, so this could be a harbinger of things to come for more priests in China if some sort of deal is not reached.

A Controversial Deal?

The deal, however, is not without controversy within the Catholic Church. Two “underground” bishops would reportedly be moved into different positions as a result of the deal. One bishop, Bishop Zhuang Jianjian, was asked to retire by the Vatican’s team in Beijing during negotiations. He would be replaced by Huang Bingzhang, who was excommunicated by the pope in 2011 for accepting his episcopal appointment without papal consent. Huang is also a member of China’s National People’s Congress—a political office—even though the Church’s canon law specifically states, “Clerics are forbidden to assume public offices which entail a participation in the exercise of civil power.” To complicate this particular matter, Zhuang refused to retire after meeting with a papal delegation, which was travelling to China to negotiate terms of the deal, in Beijing in December 2017.

Another bishop, Guo Xijin, essentially would be demoted to be an assistant to Zhan Silu, “a government-appointed bishop whose consecration the Vatican had previously declared illegal.” Also, as a part of the deal, five CCP-appointed bishops will ask for a pardon from Pope Francis and rejoin the Catholic Church. Having these bishops re-enter the church would be a boon for China, and the retirement and demotion of the “loyal” bishops removes two problems for the CCP.

After being asked to retire, Bishop Zhuang gave a letter to his friend, Cardinal Joseph Zen. Zen, the retired archbishop of Hong Kong, has been a vocal critic of any rapprochement between the Vatican and China for many years. Troubled by the Vatican’s actions, Zen travelled to Vatican City for an audience with Pope Francis in hopes of addressing whatever the Vatican had been negotiating with China.

In a Facebook post, Zen claimed that the pope was not on the same page as negotiators in Beijing. He said that Francis told the negotiators, “not to create another Mindszenty case,” referring to József Mindszenty, a Catholic bishop in Hungary who spoke out against the communist regime there. Mindszenty was imprisoned in 1949 for a laundry list of crimes and was freed during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he lived in the American Embassy for another 15 years before being allowed to live in exile in Rome.

In response to Zen’s allegations that the deal sells out Chinese Catholics, the Vatican released a statement indirectly criticizing Zen for his comments, saying that some within the Church were “fostering confusion and controversy,” and that the pope is aware of all facets of the negotiations. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, said, “The Holy Father personally follows current contacts with the authorities of the People’s Republic of China. All his collaborators act in concert with him. No one takes private initiatives. Frankly, any other kind of reasoning seems to me to be out of place.”

A source within the Vatican explained the rationale for the deal in quite simple terms: “It is not a great agreement, but we don’t know what the situation will be like in ten or 20 years. . . . Afterwards we will still be like a bird in a cage, but the cage will be bigger. . . . It is not easy. Suffering will continue. We will have to fight for every centimeter to increase the size of the cage.” This somber admission demonstrates the importance that the Church is placing on making life for Catholics in China as safe as possible. The situation is not the best one, but it is more important, from the Vatican’s perspective, to get a foot in the door than to be shut out completely.

After Beijing’s implementation of the new religious regulations, Catholics across the country will be in danger of arrest and the future of the Church in China will be at stake if the Vatican cannot cooperate with the CCP on the selection of bishops. Following the “Vietnam model” is perhaps the best compromise available for the Vatican—if it feels that it must compromise in order to slightly open the door in China. An editorial in the Global Times claims that full restoration of diplomatic ties will eventually occur, but if the Vatican has not been able to do so with Vietnam, there’s no strong reason to think it likely to occur in the short term with China.

The deal’s scope is quite limited, and cooperation on the appointment of bishops will only help to protect Catholics from rampant persecution under the new laws. However, even a minor compromise on the Vatican’s part will trigger protests from Catholics from across the world. Many will see any deal as evidence that the Pope and the Vatican are ceding their moral authority by cooperating with a totalitarian regime that persecutes millions of its citizens; meanwhile the CCP would receive the international prestige of having successfully worked with the Catholic Church. And in an open letter, prominent Catholics warn the Vatican of Xi’s duplicity and reputation for breaking deals: “We are worried that the agreement would not only fail to guarantee the limited freedom desired by the Church, but also damage the Church’s holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity, and deal a blow to the Church’s moral power.”

One of Pope Francis’ goals during his papacy has been to try to foster a better relationship with China. This deal would seem to accomplish that goal, uniting the two Catholic churches in China, comprised of an estimated 12 million Chinese, and paving the way for normalization of relations between the two countries—but at what cost?

The post A Vatican-China Deal—But at What Cost? appeared first on The American Interest.

Seriously: A U.S.-Nork Summit Revisited

The punditocracy is still abuzz with the prospect of a summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The buzzing slightly quieted as the new workweek began, in contrast to the mood this past Friday, when the White House appeared to have attached conditions to a meeting that made one less likely. So things are in limbo, or at best uncertain—but that is the way things usually are in this pale imitation of an Administration, whether it comes to foreign policy, or gun control legislation, or hastily prepared tax legislation. Don’t like how a policy sounds? Wait a few hours.

Given the attention-deficit disorder that seems to afflict many Americans these days (largely on account of the coherence-destroying power of addictive information technology gadgets), many may not realize that the idea of a U.S.-Nork summit is not new. It first erupted in early May of last year, remember? At that point it seemed to be the President’s idea alone, rather than something hatched in Korea and conveyed to the White House from Seoul.

I wrote about it at the time. I thought the idea had real potential if handled right, and I explained why. Since the subject is back in the news, I thought I would just repeat the basic analysis, about which I have not changed my mind. It appears below, bracketed by asterisks—after which I have appended a few notes to bring us back to present tense.

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Monday’s presidential news tended to the personal and Asian: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte brushed off President Trump’s invitation to visit him in Washington, but Trump surprisingly extended his hand for yet another face-to-face meeting, this one with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “under appropriate circumstances.”

When word broke of Duterte’s brushoff, one may be sure that the President’s political handlers (and both Diplomatic Security and the Secret Service, as well) breathed deep sighs of relief. When word broke of the tentative tender to Kim, it took only minutes for several U.S. Asia-policy “hands” to engage their mouths in ridiculing the President. Thus spoke Ambassador Chris Hill, once in charge of the fruitless Six-Power Talks: “Kim Jong-un would be delighted to meet with President Trump on the basis of one nuclear leader to another. If I were Trump I would pass on that.”

But that need and ought not be the precondition of a direct meeting. The idea of a U.S.-North Korean summit, which is novel coming from the mouth of the President of the United States, bears more thoughtful scrutiny.1 That said, it remains unclear if the President’s remark is just another random tweet-from-the-hip verbal ejaculation connected to no strategic thought at all, or if this time, since the Administration has formed an approach to North Korea, it may be more deliberate than it might seem. But however it got started, if handled well, the President’s idea (let’s give him the benefit of deserved doubt and call it that) could turn out to be brilliant.

How so? It could be the first step toward a potentially useful transaction in which U.S. diplomacy trades something Kim desperately wants for domestic purposes—recognition as a legitimate interlocutor by the most powerful state on earth—for a reduction in his outsized paranoia and, hence, some benefits down the road. The basic idea is that if we stop treating him as a pariah, it may reduce his incentives to act like one.

The beginning of wisdom in understanding the Korea tangle is the acknowledgement that Kim believes the United States seeks regime change in Pyongyang, for he knows that, if positions were reversed, that is what he would do. That is why we cannot, and never could, end or significantly curtail the nuclear program without using force: It is the regime’s last resort against dangers of the existential sort, and there is nothing we or any other power can give or promise that will balance off against that perception of an ultima ratio.

Regime change in Pyongyang would be nice, of course, and it will happen one day of its own accord. But no compelling reason exists for the United States to actively pursue it now, since none of our allies—notably South Korea—wants to deal anytime soon with the mess it would cause. So why not tell Kim so, directly but privately?

If that, along with the recognition that will flow from a summit, will calm Kim down, we too need to calm down long enough to recognize that, if North Korea ever resorts to nuclear first-use, anywhere, it would lose the ensuing war, its regime would be destroyed, and Kim personally would end up an irradiated cinder. If Kim is nuts, he’s murderously nuts, not suicidally nuts, so I lose no sleep worrying about an unprovoked North Korean attack on the U.S. homeland. Panicky public rhetoric on our part in that regard is unhelpful in every way. In other words, if both nations’ worst fears could be bounded and a bit assuaged, it would establish new parameters for deal-making: That is the promise of the President’s idea, if it is properly handled.

But, of course, it might be handled badly; as that famous 20th-century philosopher, the Wicked Witch of the West, once put it: “These things must be done delicately.” So what’s the difference between a properly delicate handling and a bad one?

There are two main ways to think about a U.S.-North Korean summit: a way in which we explicitly attempt to link it to the North Korean nuclear program, and a way in which we avoid explicitly linking it, the better to implicitly link it. The former is the wrong way to proceed; the latter is the shrewdly delicate one.

The summit message from the President to Kim Jong-un should be as simple as possible: “I respect you as a national leader, and my Administration does not intend to undermine your regime.” Leave implicit, or for other, lesser officials to say, that North Korea’s conventional and unconventional military programs must never threaten its neighbors, or, as has been the case for decades, the United States and its allies will respond at a time and in a manner of their choosing to restore international peace and security. And then shut up, arm up, and let Kim figure out what it all means. Deterrence flows from deeds implied by power more than it does from declarations. So he will figure it out.

This dual-track approach is preferable to linkage because Kim will likely conclude that any attempt to suffocate his nuclear program is just a prelude to an attempt at regime change, whatever we may say. If we avoid putting the nuclear program front and center, perhaps later, with Kim’s ego suitably inflated and his arse feeling more secure, a differently shaped negotiating proposal designed to contain the nuclear program (not end it—it’s too late for that as long as the regime endures) might be possible.2

That is anyway as much as we can expect to accomplish anytime soon, for every other option we can think of is either unavailable or dangerous to excess. Let us count the ways.

Consider what we cannot do. We cannot negotiate our way to ending or even moderating significantly North Korea’s nuclear program. Leverage the Chinese to do it for us, since they have material leverage? We tried that in 2005, arguing that China would suffer most from a regime implosion in the North and suffer from the regime’s endurance, as well, because its behavior works as a goad to Japanese nuclearization. The prospect of a permanently denuclearized reunified Korea under the aegis of the democratic South, in the context of a revised U.S.-ROK relationship that would significantly reduce the U.S. military presence in and near Korea (and hence near China), struck some as a bowl full of tasty carrots from the Chinese perspective. Yet the effort got close to nowhere: The Chinese Communist Party’s worst fear concerning Korea is a unified democratic state lying astride its border, not the U.S.-ROK treaty relationship.

That most likely remains the case. When Xi Jinping “explained” to Trump at Mar-a-Lago last month that China could not press North Korea on account of several tons of historical baggage, he was not being entirely honest. The weight is there, true enough, but that’s not all that’s there. China does have decisive leverage over North Korean regime survival, but it fears to use it because China is a kind of hostage to North Korea at the same time. The tighter the Chinese pull the noose, the more the fallout from incipient regime collapse threatens China with multifarious mayhem: a refugee crisis, for certain, but, even more portentous, a scramble for who picks up the pieces in a melted-down Pyongyang. Beijing likely has other motives as well for not helping us.

So if we can’t negotiate our way out of the problem, wait for regime collapse, or directly impress Chinese power on our behalf, can we intimidate the North into backing its nuclear program down under threat of a preemptive war? That seemed to be the policy gist of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s message, speaking in Seoul on March 16, when he ruled out new negotiations and declared that, “The policy of strategic patience has ended.”

It was brilliant of Tillerson (or his speechwriter), and very generous too, to describe the futile policies of the past quarter century as a sagacious “policy of strategic patience.” But what he said still frightened people, including people in the very (politically roiled) city in which he uttered the remark. Worse, it seemed to relegate U.S. policy choices to feckless passivity, leaning on Beijing, or preemptive war. But we’d have no allies in such a war—neither South Korea nor Japan, for different reasons, would ever be publicly complicit in a military action that killed lots of Koreans—even as we unleashed unknowable but certainly very bloody consequences. It’s foolish to bluff such a course as a means of intimidation. And it won’t work as intimation anyway.

It is in the context of our poverty of promising options that the President’s offer of a direct meeting figures to reshuffle a bum deck. It could thaw the frigid psychological environment we face to possibly useful ends.

Of course some will object that to recognize Kim as an interlocutor, even if done in a way that does not reward the existence of the nuclear program, would constitute a human rights atrocity—essentially a pass from the United States for the North Korean regime to do whatever it wants to its own people. Let me be twice blunt here.

First, within limits, the principle of the non-interference of states into the internal affairs of other states remains a wise predicate of the Westphalian system, because it dramatically reduces the sources of conflict and war among states: Cuius regio, eius religio makes as much sense in our ideological age as it did in a more religious one. If some people cannot discover the moral value of that consequence, I am sorry for them.

And second, the unfortunate truth is that there is very little the U.S. government can do to ameliorate human rights violations in North Korea, so to argue that symbolic verbal protests should have pride of place over a policy that might do some palpable good is to embarrass moral logic itself.

And if, after all, Kim rejects the invitation to a summit, he would look weaker and even more isolated than he already is. And Trump would look more magnanimous than he surely is. So come on, let’s do it.

*          *          *

A fair bit has happened in the past ten months with respect to U.S. policy toward Korea. Without going into detail, for a while it looked like the Administration was considering a so-called punch-in-the-nose military option. This seemed to me to be a crazy idea, a split-the-difference notion between a major preemptive attack and no attack. But it had, or would have had, most of the downsides of a much larger military action—specifically, the potential to touch off a disastrous war.

It is not often mentioned, but in all the years since the 1953 armistice the U.S. government has not so much as fired a single shot at or toward North Korea, notwithstanding all of the nasty and even deadly things the Norks have done to us and to others. So we have absolutely no idea how they would react to a punch, a kick, or even a sideways fart. Partly in response to what I considered to be a dangerously irresponsible drift toward war, I wrote a piece here, on January 10, that aimed to substitute a bold diplomatic initiative for a counterproductive violent spasm. It argued a controversial view, but one that I thought was supported by a fundamental logic.

The basic logic is that U.S. declaratory threats to use force against North Korea lack credibility because our South Korean ally will not permit it. Every time we raise the noise level, North Koreans just rings the sunshine bell and the South Korean government salivates like Pavlov’s dog. What that means is that the 30,000 U.S. troops in South Korea no longer act mainly as a tripwire to raise the price of a North Korean attack on the South, as they did during the Cold War; under changed circumstances they mainly amount to hostages to any outbreak of violence, which in turn reduces further the credibility of American declaratory policy. The only way to change that is to radically reconstruct the U.S.-ROK relationship so that the tripwire is removed, and the South Koreans take full responsibility for the ground dimension of their own defense.

I explain in the essay that merely freeing U.S. declaratory policy to give it more credibility will probably not suffice to drive the U.S.-North Korean relationship into a negotiation that has any chance of denuclearizing the North. But there are lesser benefits to be gained, so long as—and I stress—care is taken to make sure that the change is not perceived as a retreat of American power from the Indo-Pacific, but a refurbishing and strengthening of it, and that it is therefore not set in motion too rapidly.

I’m sure my essay did not change the Administration’s mind, but some testimony before Congress in late January may have helped do so. After Mike Green and John Hamre both poured icy water on the punch-in-the-nose option, it seemed pretty much to disappear—thank God. At least I hope it has disappeared.

And now? We’re pretty much where we were before. There is no viable military option that’s worth the cost in blood, and let us remind ourselves, too, that any U.S. use of force that the South Korean government does not wish would destroy the relationship rather than recast it, as I have proposed. That would be unwise, not least because it would transform in a negative way Japanese perceptions of U.S. reliability and wisdom.

Then there is the eternal if forlorn hope that somehow we can get the Chinese to fix the problem for us. As I explained in the January 10 essay, that is just not going to happen. I put forth some reasons, but, as I hinted then, there is more to say. It’s not just that the Chinese are afraid of what the collapse of North Korea might mean in terms of refugee flows and other annoyances. And it’s not just that the Chinese do not want to see a unified democratic Korea along their frontier, even if it is a denuclearized Korea by international guarantee. Something more fundamentally strategic is at play.

It is safe to say, I think, that the long-range Chinese geostrategic objective is to drive the United States away from the Asian mainland. There is nothing mysterious or even necessarily sinister about this objective: If a major power were breathing down our neck just off the coast of California, we would not feel much differently. But what this means in practical terms as far as Chinese aims are concerned is what experts call decoupling: The Chinese would like to drive a very large wedge between the United States and all its Asian littoral allies, and that includes South Korea and especially Japan. But how to do this?

It is possible that, for all the trouble North Korea causes China, the North Korean nuclear program has the potential to create a decoupling of South Korea from the United States that clearly serves Chinese interests but does not bear Chinese fingerprints. Indeed, it has a potential that even China’s own nuclear weapons does not have, because the latter implicate China in a war should deterrence fail, whereas North Korea’s weapons do not. The logic is simple: If North Korea can destroy targets in the continental United States, then the U.S. nuclear shield over South Korea becomes less credible. It’s the old extended deterrence dilemma that we saw in Europe throughout the Cold War: Would Washington sacrifice a major American city in order to protect Paris? Now it may soon be: Would Washington sacrifice Los Angeles to save Seoul?

For a variety of reasons that transcend geopolitics narrowly construed, the answer to the Cold War question was “yes,” or at least enough people believed that the answer was “yes” to serve the purpose. Asia in the post-Cold War context poses a different and more difficult problem for extended deterrence. Many believe that decoupling is inevitable now that North Korean capabilities are nearly to the point where they can credibly threaten North America. I do not agree that decoupling is inevitable; I do agree that it is threatened and that we need to respond by making some changes to our strategic posture.

So in a way, the Chinese are sitting pretty in a win-win situation. If the United States does not destroy North Korea nuclear arsenal in a preemptive strike, then the capabilities of that arsenal could portend decoupling, but if the United States does destroy North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, or tries to, then decoupling takes place anyway because that act would almost certainly destroy the U.S.-South Korean alliance, and that in turn would represent a clear degradation of Japan’s strategic circumstances. If that is an accurate assessment, then the Chinese obviously have no reason on earth to help us out of our lose-lose dilemma.

Two things can change the strategic vector: a North Korean regime collapse, and a U.S. policy that responds effectively to changes in the strategic environment (as outlined in my January 10 essay). If the North Korean regime does collapse, predictions get difficult; a lot depends on how and over what kind of timeframe a collapse would take place. But a policy predicated on U.S. active efforts to undermine the North Korean regime would have predictable consequences: It would terrify the South Koreans, and it could create such a level of panic in Pyongyang as to touch off the very behaviors we want to deter. So that approach, too, would be unwise. In this light, the Obama-era policy of so-called strategic patience doesn’t look all that bad, despite its obvious imperfections.

All of which is to remind us that the North Korea nuke problem is truly a problem from hell, a problem so hard that successive administrations of both major parties over four decades have not been able to figure a way around, over, or through it. And as already indicated, it is a problem that has not stood still, but that has gotten progressively worse.

This is another way of saying that it is a serious problem, serious because the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are at stake, and serious because how it gets resolved may presage the future of American power, not just in Asia but in the world. With this in mind, let us now return to the events of this past week with which we began.

Sunday’s New York Times, in a front-page story entitled “With Snap ‘Yes,’ Trump Rolls Dice on North Korea,” describes how cavalierly the President acted upon being presented with an invitation to a summit delivered by Chung Eui-yong, the South Korean national security adviser carrying a message from the North. According to the article, the President’s closest national security advisers were stunned and dismayed by the President’s instantaneous, seat-of-the-pants reaction.

As well they should have been. Maybe the President remembered his own statement from May of last year, or maybe not—one never knows with this man. But what the President’s closest national security advisers, and others in and around the White House, have no doubt figured out by now is that it is in the nature of a narcissist to care so much for himself that there isn’t much room for caring about anyone else. That is the basis upon which a man like Donald Trump can make deeply portentous decisions without even considering the consequences for others.

Yes, we have known for a long time that Donald Trump lacks any experience in foreign and national security policy. Yes, we know he doesn’t read, and so has a very limited potential to grasp such issues. Yes, we have evidence that on issue after issue he changes his mind because he believes whatever the last person he spoke with said to him—gun control is the most recent example, but there are dozens anyone can cite. But it’s not clear that most of us have figured out what is really at the bottom of all this. What is at the bottom of all this is that the man has no convictions or considered views about most policy areas because they don’t really directly affect him.

It is therefore easy for the President to dismiss the tortured history of an issue like Korea. As someone who distrusts experts—and for that matter who distrusts science when it tells him something he doesn’t want to hear—he can say that his policy instincts, however untutored, are just as good as anyone else’s. That the experts have not fixed the problem does not mean that the problem is hard, in his view; it just means that they’re not good experts, not bold, not “winners.” So any decision might work, just as any decision might not work. As far as he’s probably concerned, it’s close to random; so why bother taking it seriously enough to wrack one’s brain over it?

What does matter to him is that he appears to be in charge, to be a winner, to be able to yank everyone’s attention toward him—not that he’s made a decision that will work to solve a problem. If a decision turns out badly he’ll just blame someone else. He doesn’t really understand or care about the problems themselves, which is another way of saying that he doesn’t take them seriously. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

So what is the prospect that a U.S.-Nork summit, if it happens, can do any good? I still think there is a useful deal to be had—if serious people can get and keep their hands on the major decisions to be made, and keep the Flip-Flopper-in-Chief away from the table for as long as is necessary to make and implement them.

It looks like this: We agree to recognize provisionally the North Korean regime, establish diplomatic relations with it first at the DCM level, and come to some formal legal agreement to end the Korean War; and as a part of the deal we pledge no active regime change efforts—which is giving away nothing because we are not pursuing that course now anyway, for reasons already noted. We can also pull back on the sanctions throttle as we deem necessary.

In return we will not achieve a verifiable denuclearization of the country, and we should not insist on that as the make-or-break point of a deal. That is because their nukes are their last-resort weapons: They will never give them up in a negotiation, and any initial negotiation that insists on it is doomed to fail from the get-go. But if we pledge no active effort toward regime change, they will then have less incentive to pursue their military options at breakneck speed, and we might get in return a freeze and partial rollback of the program, to include both weapons, missiles, and the testing of both. That would break the present momentum of their programs, calm our nerves and war-planning velocity, and cool the decoupling fever on the loose in the region. That may be the best we can get for the time being.

Perhaps most important, if we devise a more flexible objective than impossible full denuclearization, we will cause all sorts of problems for the North Korean internal propaganda machine, which has been ceaselessly demonizing the United States for decades. Indeed, in the past, as with the Six-Party Talks, the North Korean agitprop authorities had huge difficulties reconciling that episode of face-to-face diplomacy with the image they had created of the West, in particular of the United States. If diplomatic relations are set up and there is an embassy in Pyongyang, with real live Americans in it, these guys will have a problem from hell, too.

Might that lead in due course to regime change without our really trying actively to bring it about? Stranger things have happened. I’m serious.

1As it happens, a U.S.-DPRK summit meeting is not an entirely new idea: A few of us informally kicked it (and other ideas) around the Seventh Floor of the State Department about a dozen years ago. So I was amused to see it raised anew in brief side-letters in the mainstream press following the Tillerson trip to South Korea—which may be where Trump came up with the idea in the first place.

2By differently shaped, I mean a Great-Power concert assembled in two stages: First the United States would assemble Japan, Russia, and South Korea, and second, that group adds China. See my “Power Play: How to Overthrow Pyongyang—Peacefully,” New Republic, November 4, 2002, for details.

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Globalization’s Pioneer

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

Maya Jasanoff

Penguin Press, 2017, 400 pp., $30

Is it possible that a Polish sea captain who died nearly one hundred years ago should serve as the right guide to the modern world? That is what Maya Jasanoff proposes in The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. The Dawn Watch takes Conrad out of the English department and into relevance for all kinds of readers interested in the problems, questions, and origins of globalization. For a simple reason: to read Conrad, to know Conrad, is to watch the modern world in its formation. His life and travels spanned Europe, Africa, and Asia, and his work is known to most American readers. His influence was felt by master writers from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway to Jorge Luis Borges and T.S. Eliot. Jasanoff shows us that there is still more to Conrad than his enduring works and impact on literature. The Dawn Watch has already been celebrated by critics as innovative, combining genres from biography and literary criticism to modern history. What is more is Conrad’s relevance today.

One of our great problems is how few reliable guides there are to where the world is now, and to where the world is going. After at least one hundred years of globalization, why would it be so complex and difficult to foresee major events and historical shifts? From the election of Donald Trump, to the alleged retreat of Western liberalism, from the return of Russian aggression and subversion, to the rise of an ambitious, irrepressible China, a world once explained by hopeful certitudes such as “The World Is Flat” and “The End of History” is coming undone. And yet, we have, from the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, a master writer whose depth of experience of his own world is perhaps unmatched in our time, and whose understanding of his world and of its future is regarded by some as prophetic. What can we learn from this man? And why has someone gone to such great lengths to bring him to us, intact and modern, for our consideration at the turn of this century, one hundred years after the turn of his own?

Conrad’s work took shape when high technology meant the advent of the steamship and the laying of undersea cables for telegraph communications. The world was already growing smaller, and yet, as his novels memorialize, many of its places were far less connected than they are today. Conrad lived his life at the frontiers, and saw firsthand on multiple continents the competition between European empires for wealth and power. He began his life as an exile, in a family of Polish revolutionaries, whose hopes of independence had been crushed by Czarist Russia.

And Conrad chose to see the world for what it was. He remains best known for his writings on the Belgian Congo in Heart of Darkness, and for his novels of Southeast Asia, Lord Jim, and South America, Nostromo. In the course of his life he traveled globally, spending extended periods at sea, in ports and countries far from his chosen home in London, and even further apart from his birthplace in the Russian Empire. As his literary stand-in, Charles Marlow, explained in a passage that sings of the author’s own life, he had “returned to London after a lot of Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas…” Jasanoff shows that he is rather less the wayfarer and much more the connoisseur of understanding. While Conrad is usually known for his exploration of the human condition, it is Jasanoff that reveals him as the man of experience.

Opening with the beautiful line from Conrad’s Victory, “I am the world itself, come to pay you a visit,” the book is layered with maps, of Conrad’s travels, of the world as it was changing, alongside photographs and images of his life and time. It largely follows a chronological timeline of his life, but is structured thematically as both Conrad the man and his world evolve. The beginning is “Nation,” then “Ocean,” and then “Civilization,” and then Jasanoff, perhaps best of all, walks us through Conrad’s major works as he wrote them, using major lines from the texts in order to show us how The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo all took their shape as sinews between his life and world. By the end, even if you hadn’t read the man, now you would know the nature of what he was writing.

The historian and the traveler have always been an important combination. Sometimes they are one and the same as in the case of Herodotus. It is unsurprising that throughout the centuries historians have relied on the accounts of travelers to substantiate the places that they aim to understand. And here, for Jasanoff, Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard, the historian has found a guide not to one or two places, but a figure whose life and work is sufficient enough to base upon it a portrait of the entire world and of a phenomenon which began in earnest one hundred years ago, and which continues to this day: globalization, the growing interconnectedness of humanity around the planet.

To be fascinated by Conrad is, as it must be for Jasanoff, to be fascinated not only by the human condition, but by the pure immensity of a world whose roads lead to so many places, and yet a world which can be seen, and even understood. Jasanoff describes London when Conrad arrived there in his youth:

. . . London caught the world in lines of news. Steamers made ready for Calcutta, Adelaide, Buenos Aires, and Yokohama. Arriving ships brought reports of hurricanes in the West Indies, unrest in southern Peru, a plague of locusts in El Salvador. Stevedores packed warehouses with American cotton, Australian wool, and Caribbean cocoa. On the money markets prices ticked up and down in Turkish, Brazilian, and Swedish stocks, Latin American mines, Indian tea, and North American railroads.

This description of the world’s great size evokes America’s bard, Walt Whitman. But what distinguishes Conrad from nearly all his peers in literature is that he chose to go and see it all. What could make such a person possible? And are we lacking or still producing this spirit of voracious curiosity today?

In his lifetime, Conrad struggled financially until near the end of his life. Like Richard F. Burton who, despite extraordinary escapades in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, would walk past the grocery stores of London unable to afford their delicacies, Conrad found fame and financial security mostly in his final years in a country he disliked: the United States. But what makes Conrad so extraordinary is the sensitivity of his vision. To understand this, we must turn not to the Congo, but rather to America.

Conrad never visited the United States while writing about South America in Nostromo. But his understanding of the rise of the United States is almost prophecy in retrospect. Conrad is generally known today for his moral prescience in viewing the barbarities of colonialism in Africa: Where contemporaries like Kipling wrote of “the white man’s burden,” Conrad wrote “the horror, the horror.” What he is less known for is his ability to foresee one of the most epoch-making events of modern history: the rise of the United States of America.

In Nostromo, as Jasanoff explains, Conrad wrote of “competing visions of the world.” As the British Empire reached its zenith, the author captured an ascendant America. It is here that the man of global travels could come to tell us of the future: “by pouring his experience from Europe, Asia, and Africa into Latin America, Conrad turned the past into prologue.” Written as headlines, prose emerged of Teddy Roosevelt’s interventions in Colombia to secure American control of the Panama Canal; the novel was a “prophecy of American dominance,” asserting, in the words of Conrad’s fictional American investor, Mr. Holroyd: “We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not.”

Here, Jasanoff brings the historian’s eye to the subject, drawing in voices from the time:

A new age was dawning in geopolitics, [Halford] Mackinder announced. For centuries, European powers had played out their ambitions in other parts of the world. Now, suddenly, the world was full up. Africa partitioned, the center of Asia staked out, North America bound by coast-to-coast railroads. . . . Almost overnight, international relations had become a zero-sum game.

But, “As Conrad’s peers scribbled frantically about Germany, [Conrad] looked the other way and saw a second rival rising in the west: the United States.” As Jasanoff writes, “Joseph Conrad knew one thing for sure. The future would be American.”

As globalization took shape across all continents, Conrad captured more than one phenomenon with singular understanding. A man who did not live beyond the presidency of Calvin Coolidge could work with headlines in the early 1900s in order to show a changing, moving world with such detail and accuracy that it stands today almost as knowledge of the future. As the collapse of consensus among today’s commentariat shows us: nothing is harder to achieve.

How does one do this? The fortuitous combination of Jasanoff and Conrad may help open our minds to what it takes to know the world. While Jasanoff, like the best biographers of American Presidents, has gone to extraordinary lengths to retrace her subject’s life, the two of them, in the Dawn Watch, function as something of a team: the writer-traveler and the historian. What they bring to us is more than a guide to globalization’s origins. It is a guide to knowledge of the world. And they do this in a time in which such knowledge, such craft and method, is desperately lacking.

Importantly for us, Jasanoff puts her finger on the craft and method that was Joseph Conrad: “He channeled his global perspective into fiction based overwhelmingly on personal experience and real incidents.” It was this immensity of experience that made him possible. As Henry James explained of his literary colleague, “No one has known . . . the things you know, and you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached.” Writing of Nostromo, Jasanoff explains, “It was a novel about every place he’d been.” Even his reviewers understood the work was made of his experience: “a greater range of knowledge . . . of the strange ways of the world than any contemporary writer,” an author who remade “the world in miniature.”

Something else must be said for The Dawn Watch. It is a brave undertaking to make Joseph Conrad a contemporary figure. Arguably the most important piece of writing in the Conrad canon—alongside Heart of Darkness itself—is an essay not by Conrad but by Chinua Achebe: “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’,” which accompanies the primary text in the W.W. Norton Critical Anthology. As Achebe writes:

Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.

Achebe writes of Conrad’s “dehumanization of Africa and Africans,” adding that, “Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it.” In other words, Conrad, rather than being a critic of colonialism’s brutalities, advanced through literature this sense of the world that enabled such brutalities—he was no different from those who could not see the humanity of others.

As a professor at Harvard, Jasanoff is keenly aware of every critique and problem of Conrad in our contemporary discourse. She nods to this throughout the text, and still she presses on. Her fascination and even devotion to this figure shows us on its own that there is more to him for her, and should be more to him for all of us, than even the most withering critiques can strip away. Conrad is not reducible to, as Achebe puts it, “a bloody racist.” His life contains too much, and his experience of so many places, however problematic or even at times misconstrued, makes him, for no less capable a critic than Jasanoff, a true guide to the modern world.

It takes courage to bring this man to our attention. It takes courage to see past attitudes that are not in keeping with our own. As it has been written: “The past is a foreign country.” And the “otherness” that Conrad may indeed have applied to those around him—in his quest to know the world—is no more virtuous when it is applied to Conrad.

So, to bring back to us this extraordinary figure, not for his masterful literary work on the human condition, but for his experience of his time, and to show that he is a guide not only to his world but to ours, is why this book is more than just a strong biography of a major writer. And this matters, because above all a fear, a tension about “otherness,” persists in the modern mind. And yet the world must be explored, and attempts to know and understand the world, both its present and its future, must be made. Conrad shows us what this looked like in his time. Now who will show us what it will look like in ours?

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The Rising Tide of Europe’s Anti-Establishment Rebellion

The results delivered by the recent Italian election should by now feel almost routine: Yet again, a European electorate has handed down a vote of no-confidence in traditional parties, and yet again media headlines speak of elite shock. Italy’s election followed last September’s vote in Germany, which only now, six months later, has finally been able to cobble together a GroKo government. In country after country, voters are continuing to flock to anti-establishment parties, to reject traditional brands, and to demand an end to business as usual. As elsewhere in Europe, the core political drivers in Italy are immigration fatigue and seething public anger over ineffective border policies that have strained the government’s ability to absorb newcomers while maintaining societal and cultural cohesion. In addition to immigration there are also enduring concerns about high unemployment and the anxiety amongst the anti-establishment that the Eurozone as currently structured may ultimately give Italy a starring role in Act Two of the “Greek economic tragedy.”

Anti-establishment politics is gathering speed across Europe. The Five Star Movement and the League were the biggest winners in Italy—their level of public support is a de facto landslide for anti-EU and national political movements, regardless of what kind of coalition government will ultimately emerge. The British vote in 2016 to leave the European Union was a clear signal that the majority of U.K. citizens wanted a radical course correction.  In 2016 Geert Wilders’s Dutch nationalist Party for Freedom won 13 percent of the vote; in 2017 Marine Le Pen’s National Front closed at nearly 21 percent of the vote; and last fall Germany’s upstart Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) took over 12 percent of the vote to become the third largest party in the Bundestag. The current Grand Coalition government reflects the reality that support for the Social Democrats has shrunk dramatically, while the Christian Democrats suffered their worst showing since 1949. Finally, in December 2017, following the fall victory in Austria for nationalist and ant-establishment parties, Sebastian Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) formed a government with the national conservative Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), and has since taken a strong position on securing EU borders and curbing immigration.

Media coverage of election after European election routinely tracks in two directions: either bemoaning “regressive populism” (to quote one of my European interlocutors), or suggesting ways in which the existing electoral rules will ultimately stymie the trend. To be sure, the nature of the electoral system in France did mean that Le Pen’s unprecedented gains were in the end checked by Emmanuel Macron. But what both of these common narrative threads share is that there seems to be precious little reasoned self-reflection as to what is driving the growing tide of anti-establishment voter wrath, or how to generate a new consensus on domestic politics and right the increasingly unsteady EU ship. The European Union is running out of time to sort out not only its own future but also the evolution of democracy in Europe and across the West more broadly. The election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States has shown us that there are larger undercurrents driving the anti-establishment rebellion (although institutional and historical determinants in America are likely to make the country’s Jacksonian corrective moment track differently than in a more ethno-national Europe).

The past three years have revealed a seeming tone deafness among European policy elites when it comes to one issue in particular: immigration. Already in 2015, a Eurobarometer survey showed that worries about immigration transcended concerns over economic security and other issues. But the initial elite response across Europe to the gathering MENA immigration storm was largely in line with Angela Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das!” (We can do it!). And yet what followed was the largest postwar wave of immigrants arriving from and through MENA, with an estimated two million people going through Germany, and approximately one million staying. The impact of this wave on the Schengen borderless system within the European Union and on communities where the newcomers were temporarily settled was profound, straining central and local administrations and, most importantly, degrading public trust in elites’ ability to manage the immigration crisis. And the paltry administrative response was but one side of the coin: More significantly for the current anti-establishment backlash has been the inability, if not also unwillingness, of mainstream parties to address the electorate’s concerns. As a result, the past three years have strengthened perceptions that Europe’s political systems are headed toward what one of my European colleagues has described as a widening voter insurgency against “undemocratic liberalism,” in which the ideological principles of the elite will be ever more vigorously contested in the crucible of public debate.

This deepening voter rebellion has profound long-term consequences for the European integration project.  Regardless of what some analysts claim, the European Union is not an aspiring unitary state but rather fundamentally a treaty-based organization. It provided unparalleled opportunities for Europe to address its postwar security and economic deficits in large part because it brought into mutuality a number of independent nation states whose leaders understood the essential tension between national interests and the larger public good for the entire continent. Today, election after election, Europe’s leaders are being asked to revisit the core principles that have caused ordinary people to persist in the belief that the nation state is the best vehicle on offer when it comes to providing for their security, prosperity, community, and sense of well-being. In fact, there has never been an inherent contradiction between the strong state and an open global economic system, for it is precisely the state that ultimately guarantees the public’s economic security and thereby provides the larger legitimation for liberalized trade. On the contrary, the preservation of national sovereignty remains the sine qua non of active participation in an increasingly globalized world.

Insofar as their concerns continue to fall on deaf ears in European capitals, frustrated electorates will continue to respond by pushing out those who, in their view, have failed to listen. Europe’s traditional political elites are in a race against time, with the central question being whether—or in fact, if—they can offload a number of ideological assumptions about how their countries and the continent as a whole need to be structured and reformed. The longer they wait to respond to their electorates’ concerns, the more the political center will shrink, with new parties and increasingly extreme outliers gaining traction in the public debate on core European issues.

Europe’s voter rebellion will continue so long as the political establishment believes that it can hold the elite line on immigration, national identity, and culture, and that in the end the electorate will somehow come around. The Italian election has shown us yet again what a growing number of the electorate wants from its leaders.

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Multilateralism for a Despotic Age

“I know very well that right now some are trying to isolate Cuba. We Europeans want to show, on the contrary, that we are closer to you than ever,” said Federica Mogherini, the head of the European External Action Service, in a not-so-subtle dig at the Trump Administration. A few weeks later, Carl Bildt, Sweden’s former Prime Minister, pussyfooted on Twitter around Iran’s aggressive posture in the Middle East: “Yes, Iran obviously sent a drone into Israel airspace. Israel regularly violates the airspace of Lebanon and Syria.”

The idea that political dialogue, or engagement on economic and cultural topics, can bridge the gap between countries governed by leaders who are accountable to voters and taxpayers and those pillaged by a narrow predatory elite counts among the worst misconceptions plaguing foreign policy thinking on the political Left and Right. While the two approaches often differ in their prescriptions, Barack Obama’s multilateralism and Donald Trump’s cynical realism are two sides of the same coin, producing much the same effect: to obscure the motivations of leaders of different countries and the particular incentives that they face.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to both. Even though defending Bush-era neoconservatives might not be the most popular of propositions these days, the neoconservative outlook left little space for the illusion that democracies and authoritarian regimes could behave alike in any meaningful respect in the international arena. That insight needs to be re-learned today by both American and European policymakers.

No social scientist would deny that the nature of a political regime—or its institutions—matters a great deal for domestic policy outcomes. Autocracies dependent on natural resource revenue are less likely to supply public goods and be responsive to the wishes of voters and taxpayers than democracies where public revenue comes from general taxation. Governments facing weak political scrutiny will rely on networks of patronage catering to political loyalists instead of providing public goods and a social safety net for the general public. And so on and so forth.

The same logic extends itself easily to foreign policy. When authoritarians engage in “multilateralism” or “dialogue,” they are not doing the same things as liberal democracies. A government that is accountable to voters faces public scrutiny and criticism of its foreign policy decisions. Large and consequential commitments made by liberal democracies—such as EU and NATO membership, for example—do not reflect just the whim of the leaders of the moment but a broader societal consensus, running across political divides. Not even Poland’s Law and Justice Party and Hungary’s Fidesz question the geopolitical decisions that previous governments made after the fall of communism.

Because of a much smaller number of veto players, one should accord a much lower degree of trust to promises made by authoritarians. Not even the staunchest supporters of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action would dare to argue that the deal means a material shift in the long-term ambitions of Iran’s mullahs, who are likely to scrap it the moment it becomes convenient for them. After all, the regime did not acquiesce to the temporary restrictions on its nuclear program in good faith but only because the Iran Deal also empowered it to play a much more aggressive game in the Middle East.

Likewise, once Russia’s economic model started running out of steam in the second half of the 2000s, Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy stance hardened quickly, without being subject to the same public debate and scrutiny that would accompany a similar shift in a democracy. If some hailed China’s President Xi Jinping as a new guarantor of an open globalized world in the Trump era, his emulation of Putin’s political and national security strategy, including the concentration of power in his own hands, suggests a similar hardening and exploitation of foreign policy for domestic political purposes in the years to come. It is unlikely that the West can successfully talk Mr. Xi out of it or offer a bargain that the Politburo Standing Committee could credibly commit to.

Alas, the prevailing orthodoxy of the past decades has assumed that any form of cooperation and multilateralism is good and that essentially any dispute between any regimes can be tackled by using diplomatic tools. The failure of that approach to deliver the goods—in Syria, for example, or in eastern Ukraine—has provoked a backlash, manifested today in the Trumpian, neorealist view of international relations as a Hobbesian zero-sum competition, which sees no value in international structures beyond those reflecting the immediate self-interest of countries.

None of this is to suggest that the liberal faith in diplomacy and multilateralism is completely misplaced. Cooperation between governments can be extremely valuable: GATT and WTO have contributed to keeping global trade open even when individual governments might have been tempted to have recourse to protectionism, as in the aftermath of the crisis of 2008. With no similar structures in place, rampant protectionism in the 1930s greatly magnified the Great Depression. The phasing out of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) under the Montreal Protocol was a clear win for the environment—and for humankind at large—made possible by the cooperation of all countries, democratic and authoritarian.

Alas, other situations are more complicated than the phasing out of CFCs, which imposed only a modest economic cost and enjoyed overwhelming popular support. And in more complex settings, trust between actors trying to cooperate is essential, as any game theory textbook shows. As a result, multilateralism will tend to work best when it takes places between likeminded governments—namely, liberal democracies with market economies. If Americans and Europeans want to work with governments lacking popular accountability, they need a different set of carrots and sticks than those that they use to incentivize cooperation between themselves. And, finally, there are good reasons to be extremely wary of cooperation between authoritarian regimes themselves, even if they come under banners of “multilateralism” and “cooperation,” which seem recognizable to us.

There is, therefore, some wisdom to the Wilsonian imperative of “making the world safe for democracy,” albeit with important caveats about the ability of the West to actually achieve that end. At its heart, however, the idea that a safe and open international order hinges on the character of political and economic institutions of countries that are shaping it is sound. If taken seriously, that insight would shift the focus of foreign policy on both sides of the Atlantic and provide it with a basic compass: to help increase the returns, economic and others, of democratic governance and rule of law—and to push back systematically against authoritarianism, despotism, and kleptocracy.

For one, the West can make it much harder for dictators and their cronies to hide their money in London, Switzerland, or Florida. There are ways of cracking down on North Korean and Iranian business interests and illicit revenue. The European Union could become more circumspect in scrutinizing investment coming from state-owned and state-connected companies in authoritarian regimes—whether it is Rosatom’s contract with Hungary regarding the Paks nuclear power plant or the numerous business activities of CEFC, an opaque private entity with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, in Central Europe.

Second, Western democracies should prioritize trade and visa liberalization with other democracies over other countries, making democratic governance and rule of law not only a goal in itself but also a means to greater prosperity and more opportunities. The European Union, currently negotiating trade agreements with a plethora of countries around the world, should make it clear that the places where people enjoy political freedoms, such as Tunisia or India, are at the front of the queue. Conversely, for as long as they continue with their current practices, economies such as Azerbaijan and Myanmar—or China, for that matter—cannot expect to benefit from a deeper form of trade liberalization and regulatory alignment.

Third, the existing system of international organizations is overdue for a major shake-up, as President Trump has hinted many times. Start with United Nations agencies, where the idea of one country, one vote has produced multiple pathologies—of which the Saudi membership of the Human Rights Council is only the most visible one.

Furthermore, some specialized agencies, especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, treat their mission as purely technocratic, as if economic questions could be separated from political ones. The result has been a disaster, particularly in the area of economic development in Africa, where development assistance has been used by dictators in countries such as Ethiopia—a darling of the development community—as a tool of patronage and political domination.

If some international organizations are inherently unreformable, the West ought to marginalize or wind them down. If necessary, new structures can be built catering to liberal democracies. Regimes such as Russia and China are already busy doing exactly that for their own purposes, through organizations such as the International Investment Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

To be sure, Western policymakers have no choice but to engage with unfree societies around the world and with their leaders. But they need to do so without illusions and with a strategy that takes into account the asymmetry that exists between the behavior of political regimes that are accountable to the public and those that are not. Otherwise, the 21st century might not be too friendly to the political values most of us hold dear.

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What Gorbachev Did Not Hear

On December 12, 2017, The National Security Archive published a study entitled “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard,” drawing from declassified Western and Soviet documents to argue that, in the waning days of the Cold War, senior Western leaders gave their Soviet counterparts explicit assurances—on which the West later reneged—that NATO would not expand. According to the report, “The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and East European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.” The study prompted a flurry of “gotcha!” commentaries about Western bad faith, the legitimacy of Russian grievances, and the role of NATO enlargement in spawning the current tensions between Russia and the West.

What all these commentaries have lacked is context. There are not one, but three elephants in the NATO-enlargement room that many learned analysts appear determined to overlook.

The first important context is at least acknowledged, if minimized, by the National Security Archive study. The vast majority of the documents cited in the study date from 1990 and relate to discussions about post-Cold War European security architecture and negotiations on German reunification. Reading through the documents, one is hard-pressed to identify anything particularly new, let alone sensational or inculpatory. Of course, the National Security Archive study cited multiple documents with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous formulation about no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction or forces “one inch to the east.”

However, this pledge occurred precisely during the negotiations on German reunification and can only be understood in that context. The participants themselves explicitly indicated that the question of NATO expansion, in 1990, had to do with East Germany. For example, Document 19 quotes French President Mitterand as telling Gorbachev in May 1990, “ . . . I always told my NATO partners: make a commitment not to move NATO’s military formations from their current territory in the FRG to East Germany.” In Document 23, Helmut Kohl spoke to Gorbachev in July 1990 of “establishing cooperation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact,” and Gorbachev noted the importance of “the non-proliferation of NATO’s military structures to the territory of the GDR.” I could find nothing in these memcons to support the study’s contention that “discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory.” Participants in the negotiations leading up to German reunification seem to have understood, even if some later commentators do not, that “not one inch to the east” was a pledge with regard to East Germany, and nothing more.

Quite apart from the documents in the National Security Archive study, Gorbachev explicitly refuted the notion of a “no NATO enlargement” pledge in a 2014 interview:

The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either. Another issue . . . was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement . . . was made in that context.

To assert that Gorbachev “heard” something, when the man himself is on record that he heard nothing of the sort, betokens either a disappointing level of scholarly sloppiness or exceptional chutzpah.

Nevertheless, in the same interview, Gorbachev did complain that the West had violated the spirit of the agreements regarding the reunification of Germany. But what exactly constituted the “spirit” of those undertakings? Here we come to the second important context in which the enlargement of NATO occurred.

There is an image, still popular in some circles, of cynical Western leaders ruthlessly exploiting Soviet weakness and compliancy in 1990-91, securing Gorbachev’s cooperation in the dismemberment of the Soviet bloc with sweet promises that the West never had the slightest intention of keeping. However, you will find nothing to support this caricature of reality in the 30 documents examined in the National Security Archives study. On the contrary, the conversations recorded are imbued with a sense of history in the making, of a Europe transfigured and of achieving a level of peaceful cooperation hitherto undreamed of. Alliances were to be transformed, and the Conference on (later Organization for) Security and Cooperation in Europe was to provide an overarching structure that would essentially subsume the existing blocs. Western leaders recognized “the importance of doing nothing to prejudice Soviet interests and dignity” in order to a) cushion the blow to Moscow from the inevitable Soviet withdrawal from East Germany; and b) protect Gorbachev and his reforms from attack by Soviet hardliners.

To the extent that anyone already had an inkling in 1990 that the unraveling of the Warsaw Pact might jump the Oder-Neisse line, no one allowed that disturbing prospect to interfere with the 4+2 negotiations on the reunification of Germany. The formal reunification of Germany on October 3, 1990, appeared to be the successful climax of an extended period of intense diplomacy, after which the two increasingly friendly blocs could bask in the glow of their joint accomplishment and cheerfully take up the task of creating their common European home.

As things turned out, German reunification did not mark the “end of history” after all. What had seemed like the final act was, in fact, only the prelude. On February 25, 1991, the Warsaw Pact was declared defunct and was formally abolished in July. The Soviet Union might well have survived in some reformed, slightly truncated configuration had it not been for the failed August putsch, which led ineluctably to the Belavezha Accords and the formal dissolution of the USSR in December.

The events of 1991 invalidated the assumption on both sides that the reunification of Germany would be a one-off adjustment, rather than the beginning of a wholesale realignment, of Europe’s security architecture. By the end of 1991 Western leaders were confronted with a situation where there was no more Gorbachev to support, no more Warsaw Pact with which to cooperate, and no Soviet Union left to transform. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact did not release NATO from its solemn obligations under the German reunification treaty—and they were in fact met. However, the events of 1991—even more dramatic and transformative than those of 1990—did utterly negate the relevance of those obligations for European security more broadly.

Even then, there was nothing automatic—either conceptually or in terms of the West’s reaction to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union—about NATO enlargement. Among the very few documents from 1991 in the National Security Archive study are records of British Prime Minister John Major and NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner dismissing the likelihood of NATO enlargement and underscoring the lack of support for such a move on the part of the existing NATO members. Of course, these statements were expressions of opinion and were not “promises” by any stretch of the imagination, but they were true enough at the time they were made. In fact, it wasn’t until late 1993 that the idea of NATO enlargement into Central Europe began to build a head of steam. So what changed in the intervening two years?

This brings us to the third crucial context that NATO-enlargement critics neglect to take into account—the overwhelming desire of Central Europeans to join the alliance and the absolute top priority they placed on securing NATO membership. NATO enlargement was driven by demand, not supply. The Central Europeans were not so much invited in; rather, they battered the door down. They were no more content to fend for themselves outside of NATO than they were willing to continue in some reformed, “democratic,” even post-Soviet incarnation of the Warsaw Pact. The reason behind this attitude is a phenomenon that is at best dimly understood by Americans—and seemingly not at all by American detractors of NATO enlargement.

Several prominent American critics of enlargement were redoubtable Cold Warriors back in the day. Their antipathy toward the Soviet Union was largely ideological in nature, and they view post-Soviet Russia in an entirely different light.

Such a distinction is easy to make from across the Atlantic Ocean. It is not terribly compelling when viewed from across the Bug River. The tidy dichotomy between “Soviet” and “Russian,” in the twin contexts of geographic proximity and historical experience, is a distinction largely without a difference. In Central and Eastern Europe, the euphoria of 1991 was not simply about scrapping a bankrupt socialism and corrupt nomenklatura, or even about securing fundamental freedoms and banishing the secret police. It was about national independence – including for those Central European states that had been allotted nominal sovereignty within the Soviet bloc, but whose real freedom of action had been tightly circumscribed.

The Soviet Union was not merely an audacious ideological gambit to create a socialist worker’s paradise, but also the 20th-century incarnation of the Russian Empire—and it was perceived as such by many of the non-Russian subject peoples. It therefore carried more historical baggage for these people than it did for Westerners. The subject peoples’ experience with Russia had by no means been exclusively negative, but for some of them it had been predominantly so. Many of them understood the collapse of the USSR not simply as history’s judgment on the Soviet Union, but also—belatedly—on the Russian Empire. They were determined not to be consigned by some Yalta 2 agreement to a post-Soviet Russian “sphere of privileged interests.”

To discuss NATO enlargement, as its critics invariably do, solely as a question of the West’s relations with Russia is to miss this entire third dimension to the matter—the interests and preferences of NATO’s new members. And precisely because it is only two-dimensional, the anti-enlargement analysis is flat—and it falls flat.

In this connection, I would like to consider one of the less-serious contentions about the evils of NATO enlargement, since the line continues to be propagated by some ostensibly serious people. How would Americans feel, it is argued, if Moscow were working to bring Canada and Mexico into some Russian-led alliance? Would Washington passively acquiesce, or would it fight back?

The silliness of the argument is that, in the real world, the Kremlin could cajole Canada and Mexico from now until eternity, offering every inducement it could contrive, and would nevertheless find them strangely indifferent to its blandishments. Conversely, if it were, for instance, the Canadians who were clamoring to join Russia’s Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), it would speak volumes more about the United States than about Russia. Recalling that NATO enlargement was demand-driven, one might reasonably ask what it would take to propel Canada into the CSTO. Suppose—just for the sake of argument—that the U.S. President had a propensity to claim that Americans and Anglophone Canadians are “really” one people, and that Canada is an artificial state stitched together from territory taken from other countries—principally, as it happens, from the United States. Imagine that American elites consistently ridiculed the very idea of a separate Canadian national state or identity. Under such circumstances, would anyone be surprised if Canadians conceived the idea of allying themselves with Russia? And by what logic would Russia be blameworthy for taking them? Can we seriously imagine the Kremlin reluctantly but firmly turning away prospective allies, saying, “We’d love to have you in the CSTO, but we don’t want to upset the Americans unduly.”

This analogy underscores the fact that NATO enlargement is neither the proximate nor the underlying cause of the current crisis in European security. The underlying causes are complex and certainly open to debate; personally I would point to a certain Russian disinclination to accept the consequences of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a tendency that puts Moscow chronically at odds not only—or even principally—with the United States and NATO, but above all with Russia’s own post-Soviet neighbors. As for the proximate cause, it does, in fact, involve precisely the sort of perfidy and double-dealing invoked by NATO’s critics—a tale to stir the moral outrage of all decent human beings. Like the spurious no-NATO-enlargement narrative, it revolves around a series of broken promises—commitments to respect Ukrainian territorial integrity embodied in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the 1997 Black Sea Fleet Agreement, the 1997 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, and a host of other agreements great and small. Never mind what Gorbachev supposedly heard; consider instead Moscow’s multiple treaty obligations with respect to Ukraine.

The West did not cause the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the collapse of Gorbachev’s authority, or the implosion of the Soviet Union. However, the West did draw the appropriate conclusions from these events, albeit at several years’ remove and only after intense lobbying by the Central Europeans. In enlarging NATO, Western leaders displayed far more realism than their current-day “realist” critics.

And after all, what is the purpose of harping about the wickedness of NATO enlargement? Do analysts of the realist school believe that NATO enlargement somehow justifies the centuries-old Russian reluctance to accept the existence of a Ukrainian state or even a Ukrainian national identity? Does anyone imagine that critiques of NATO enlargement will suddenly prompt a “What on earth were we thinking?” epiphany in Brussels, Washington and various Central European capitals, leading to a reversal of enlargement and—in the best-case scenario—the disbanding of the alliance altogether? Are people holding out the hope of some parallel universe where the Warsaw Pact and reformed, Gorbachevian socialism, like Schrödinger’s cat, still cling precariously to life, to be conjured back into existence by rewinding the tape, so to speak, on NATO? Or do they suppose that the mighty edifice of Soviet power could come crashing down in ruins while leaving the underlying Russian imperial project miraculously untouched? If so, Heaven help them. I won’t reproach them with being on the wrong side of history. But I do take them to task for being on the wrong side of reality.

Memoranda of conversation.

Probably the most thorough treatment of this topic remains Mark Kramer’s 2009 article in The Washington Quarterly, “The Myth of a No-NATO-Enlargement Pledge to Russia.”

I am grateful to Alexander Vershbow and Johnson’s Russia List for bringing this interview to my attention.

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Moldova: Stepping Out of Europe’s Grey Zone

Chisinau, Moldova rarely makes it on to the world stage or the front pages of newspapers, but on March 2, 2018, statesmen and experts from Europe and the United States descended on the city to buck the trend. During a high-level inter-parliamentary security conference held on that day for Eastern Partnership countries, the speakers of parliaments from Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine—Irakli Kobakhidze, Andrian Candu, and Andriy Parubiy—issued a joint statement denouncing Russian aggression in their territories. What binds these three disparate countries—the small, Romanian-speaking Moldova; the war-torn Ukraine, officially the largest European country by landmass; and the mountainous Georgia of the Caucasus—is their geopolitical position. All three have become the 21st century’s captive nations, caught between East and West and seemingly stuck in the grey zone of Europe. And all three are emerging as Europe’s shield against Russian aggression.

Among these troubled nations, the small landlocked country of Moldova, sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, has received the least attention. The Georgian Rose Revolution and the subsequent war with Russia in 2008 put the country high in the minds of American policymakers concerned about the future of the Caucasus and post-Soviet states. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine, which precipitated a downward spiral in Moscow’s relations with the West, likewise garnered Ukraine much attention among Western media and security analysts.

Moldova’s problems are older and have been largely forgotten since 1992, when a ceasefire ended the Transnistrian War and created the separatist region of Transnistria, backed by Soviet (and subsequently Russian) troops. Since then a “frozen conflict” has settled in Transnistria, which has become a statelet frozen in time. On my recent visit to Transnistria, Soviet-era symbols, Lenin statues, Russian flags, and posters calling people to vote in Russia’s March 18th presidential elections dominated the scene. Even the language of “Moldovan” (which is essentially Romanian) is written in Cyrillic as in the Soviet era. The territory has declared its independence from Moldova though it remains internationally unrecognized and de facto controlled by Moscow. A sizable Russian military base now staffed with Russian “peacekeepers” is an ever-present reminder of who is really in charge. The fact that the conflict is frozen does not assuage Moldovans. One middle-aged mother explained to me that she is happy her son is working in Spain, and thus would less likely be drafted into the conflict if violence were to erupt again.

Scenes from Transnistria, Courtesy of Agnia Grigas

Perhaps the only silver lining of the war in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea has been the newfound unity between Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine in the face of common security challenges. During the conference, a number of Moldovan officials noted that only after Ukraine experienced its own crisis of Moscow-stoked separatism did Kyiv start understanding Chisinau’s position with respect to Transnistria. In 2015 Ukraine terminated an agreement with Moscow, which previously enabled the transit of Russian soldiers to Transnistria via Ukraine. Now plans are being implemented for Moldovan border patrols to monitor the flows of goods and people from Transnistria’s eastern border with Ukraine.

The newfound unity will enable Tbilisi, Chisinau, and Kyiv to start tackling their common security challenges together. All three countries have experience defending against the Russian military and its hybrid warfare campaigns. As the Ukrainian Speaker of Parliament Parubiy noted at the conference, the three states of Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine should no longer be called Europe’s “grey zone” but rather “Europe’s shield,” for they are indeed on the frontlines in fighting against Russia’s aggression.

Another key security challenge for Moldova is centered on the energy sector. As Candu, the Moldovan speaker of Parliament, stated, “Energy security is the most costly [kind] to achieve and it is the most geopolitically influenced.” Today Moldova is nearly wholly dependent on Russian gas imports via the pipeline system through Ukraine. Gazprom is the majority shareholder of the country’s national gas supply, transmission, and distribution company, Moldovagaz, which is unlikely to welcome the diversification of Moldova’s imports away from Russian gas. Nonetheless, spurred by the European Union’s Third Energy Package regulation, Moldova plans to “unbundle” the ownership of its gas and electricity providers and distributors by 2020, which will have direct implications for Gazprom’s assets. The interconnective Iasi-Ungheni pipeline between Romania and Moldova’s border has been completed, and its expansion to Chisinau by late 2018 or 2019 would enable Moldova’s diversification efforts. The interconnection is also crucial to ensure Moldova’s supply in the case that Russia stops gas transit via Ukraine by late 2019, as Gazprom has threatened, and in light of Gazprom’s current efforts to cancel all gas contracts with Ukraine’s Naftogaz.

Moldova also bears the burden and risk of the $6 billion gas debt that Transnistria has run up with Gazprom, which provides the breakaway region with “free” gas. Gazprom’s leverage of gas debts has been part of its long-standing acquisition strategy. In addition to acquiring shares of Maldovagaz in exchange for writing off portions of Moldova’s earlier gas debts, Gazprom has resorted to the same tactics in Belarus, Armenia, and Ukraine to acquire energy infrastructure by extortion. In the case of Kyiv, the write-off of Ukraine’s gas debt in 1997 was used to negotiate Russia’s 20-year lease of the Sevastopol naval base and other nearby facilities, which later facilitated Moscow’s takeover of Crimea.

Since Moldova signed an association agreement with the European Union in 2014, the country has been trying to implement reforms. Its proximity to Romania—with whom Moldova shares a language, culture, religious tradition, and even a history as a common country until the 1940 Soviet occupation—is a great advantage for Moldova’s European hopes. At the same time, economic underdevelopment persists and Moldova remains one of Europe’s poorest countries, with an annual GDP per capita of $1,900 in 2016. On a positive note, as the Atlantic Council economist Anders Aslund noted at the conference, Moldova’s macroeconomic conditions have stabilized with help from the IMF. Today the country benefits from Moody’s “stable economy” rating. But to achieve economic growth, as Aslund argued, Moldova needs to raise exports (which should be easier with the EU Association Agreement) and boost investment (which will depend on strong property rights and thus judicial reforms).

Economic growth and judicial reforms are greatly dependent on the country’s ability to tackle its severe corruption problem. For instance, the authorities have still not concluded the case regarding the disappearance of approximately $1 billion from the country’s banks in 2014, which amounted to an eighth of the entire Moldovan economy. Moreover, Russia exports not only “little green men” and disinformation to its neighboring countries but also corruption. From 2010 to 2014, Russia allegedly laundered $20-$80 billion through Moldova and Latvia, particularly exploiting the former’s weak judicial system. Authorities now claim that they have tightened regulations. Overall, corruption and economic struggles challenge societal faith in the country, which is evidenced by Moldova’s massive emigration. By some counts, about 800,000 Moldovans, or roughly a quarter of the population, live abroad.

This November or December, Moldova’s Parliamentary elections will highlight the fissures of the country, but will also be a critical opportunity for the nation to determine its future path. The current pro-EU government led by the Democratic Party of Moldova will be challenged by the pro-EU opposition parties of Action and Solidarity, led by Maia Sandu, and Dignity and Truth, led by Andrei Nastase, in addition to the Russia-friendly Party of the Socialists, whose leader Igor Dodon was elected President in 2016. How Moldova will tackle its security, energy policy, economic growth, and corruption challenges will largely depend on who will win the election. Whether the country will remain in Europe’s grey zone, a captive nation of the 21st century, will depend not only on Washington and Brussels’s engagement and their willingness to stand up to Russia, but also on Chisinau’s self-captivity to corruption and stagnation.

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