Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 107

The Loveless Russia of Andrey Zvyagintsev

Loveless

Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev

Sony Pictures Classics (2017), 128 minutes

Leo Tolstoy famously opened Anna Karenina with the aphorism that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. To judge by his latest film, Andrey Zvyagintsev would beg to differ: In Loveless, the latest Oscar-nominated import from the Russian auteur, every unhappy family is alike, while happy families are nowhere to be seen at all. That bleak assessment of modern-day Russia lies at the heart of Zvyagintsev’s stark, often powerful vision in Loveless—yet it is also the source of the film’s shortcomings.

No one familiar with Zvyagintsev’s work should be surprised by the film’s gloom; over the past 15 years, Zvyagintsev has carefully built a reputation as the cinematic chronicler of Putin-era malaise. He first burst onto the scene with The Return in 2003, a Bible-tinged parable of fathers and sons, centering on the mysterious return of an absent patriarch. The film instantly earned Zvyagintsev comparisons to the late Andrei Tarkovsky and his brand of spiritual cinema, but his later films gradually moved toward more temporal concerns. Elena (2011) is a chilly Hitchcockian thriller that doubles as a searing look at class tensions in modern Moscow, probing the marriage between a working-class matron, cut straight from Soviet cloth, and her nouveau riche, Westernized oligarch husband. And 2014’s Leviathan was Zvyagintsev’s most pointedly political film yet: Transposing the book of Job to a desolate stretch of the Barents Sea, Zvyagintsev dramatizes the losing battle of a local mechanic against the scheming authorities intent on expropriating his land. One shot in particular may be the best encapsulation of Putin’s Russia yet put on film: a handshake between a local Orthodox bishop and a corrupt mayor, sealing an unholy alliance between church and state that is approvingly presided over by the President whose portrait hangs above.

There are traces of all these films throughout Loveless, which preserves the director’s spare and unsentimental style, his thematic interest in fractured families, and his sly critique of the contemporary Russian state. Yet Loveless may be the first film in which Zvyagintsev’s ambitions exceed his reach. As a rigorously controlled exercise in technique, or a moody tone poem about family breakdown, Loveless is effective enough. But when Zvyagintsev aims to pin a profound social statement on this material, he falters, and the strain shows.

On the face of it, Loveless is a straightforward domestic drama, focusing on the travails of a particularly unhappy Russian family. Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) and Boris (Aleksey Rozin) are a thirtysomething couple on the verge of divorce, seeing other people when apart and squabbling whenever together, each trying to foist the custody of their 12-year-old son Alyosha (Matvey Novikov) on the other. From the start, it is clear that their parental relationship is as loveless as their marriage: Boris shows no interest in Alyosha, while Zhenya casually berates and belittles him, even in front of strangers. Both parents are too caught up in their mutual loathing (and in Zhenya’s case, her smartphone) to pay any mind to the silent, solitary Alyosha, who is himself something of an enigma.

Zvyagintsev’s film is structured around Alyosha’s absence: his literal absence, eventually, since the child soon disappears into thin air, forcing his parents to reluctantly join forces in an attempt to find him. Yet even when physically present in the early scenes, Alyosha barely registers as an individual. This is not a fault so much as a deliberate distancing strategy on Zvyagintsev’s part, designed to highlight Alyosha’s isolation from the social fabric in which he is ostensibly embedded. He hardly speaks a word in the whole film, casting angry or fearful glances at his parents but rarely articulating his feelings aloud. We get only a vague glimpse of his private life in the winding, woodside road he takes on the way back from school, where he hides discarded trinkets in the base of a tree and hoists a long piece of discarded tape on a branch like a banner, denoting his private sanctum. Within the apartment, Zvyagintsev’s compositions serve to isolate Alyosha: TV screens and iPhones compete for his mother’s attention, and in one haunting image, she slams a door and enters the hallway to scream at her husband, while Alyosha—hidden from her view, but visible to us—lets out a silent, primal howl of anguish.

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Maryana Spivak as Zhenya and Matvey Novikov as Alexey
© Anna Matveeva – Non-Stop Production, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

These early stretches are as accomplished as anything in Zvyagintsev’s oeuvre, working as harrowing drama and showcasing his consummate command of craft and mood. Yet the film’s limitations are foretold here as well. Alyosha is not the only cipher in the film; virtually all the film’s characters are not human beings so much as avatars for various social pathologies. Zvyagintsev clearly sees in this broken family a larger disease ailing modern Russia, which he gradually teases out as the film unfolds.

The scenes at Boris’s workplace are a case in point. Boris works at what looks like a sleekly modern sales company, but we soon learn that the big boss is a devout (and domineering) Orthodox Christian who insists that his employees adhere to his own moral codes, including a prohibition on divorce, on pain of being fired. When Boris confides in a colleague about his marital troubles and the looming divorce, he is told that he can fool the boss by simply hiring actors to play his family, as another co-worker did at a past Christmas party.

It is easy to see in this scene Zvyagintsev’s indictment of the hollow religiosity emanating from the Russian state. The social contract of the workplace, he suggests, is fraudulent, based on a simulacrum of piety enforced from the top down. And the ultimate outcome is alienation, an environment where workers walk on eggshells to avoid publicly transgressing the tenets of a faith they do not actually believe. Zvyagintsev, always a master of unease, conjures the workplace ennui in cinematic terms, holding an uncomfortably long take in the elevator where each worker stares ahead silently, each an atomized drone rather than members of a healthy community.

Where Boris must affect religious observance to keep his job, Zhenya’s work imposes no such demands. A hair salon manager who spends much of her screen time getting spa treatments and snapping selfies, Zhenya is a creature of pure narcissism who carries on with an older man and seems to lust after his upscale apartment as much as the man himself. In this she is not alone: the film’s margins are populated with similarly attractive and self-absorbed young women, who revel in their own beauty and, in one amusing scene, toast “To love and selfies” at a posh restaurant. These are the two options for coping with the deprivations of contemporary Russian life, Loveless seems to be saying: either a dishonest embrace of “traditional values” or a decadent, postmodern materialism.

That is not such a bad insight in itself. The problem is that Loveless fails to develop it much further, instead issuing endless variations on the same theme by filling the screen with proxy Borises and Zhenyas. When we meet Zhenya’s estranged mother, for instance, we quickly learn that the apple did not fall far from the tree: She is a nasty piece of work, as casually cruel to her daughter as Zhenya is to her son. There is a point here, about parents handing on misery to their offspring, but it is an obvious and familiar one, made only more so through repetition.

The same holds for the film’s depiction of romance and sex, which is invariably sordid. Both parents carry on affairs that seem as doomed to fail as their marriage. Boris’s pregnant mistress, the childlike Masha, fawns over him in ways that plainly grate; Zhenya is wined and dined by Anton, an elegant older man who by film’s end already seems to tire of her. All unhappy families are alike, indeed: in the world of Loveless, men are inevitably oversexed and immature, constantly pursuing the pleasures of the flesh; women are flighty and naïve, pinning their hopes for happiness on older men; while mothers are hardened and callous.

And children, invariably, are lost: neglected, abandoned, ignored, disdained. In the film’s context, Alyosha is just one casualty of a society that fails to care for its children. In their quest to find him, his parents encounter more such casualties: one 12-year-old runaway who waits unclaimed at the local hospital, another whose disfigured body is presented to Alyosha’s parents at the morgue. The latter scene is a particularly harrowing one, in which the parents are faced with an ugly reality they would prefer to ignore. The child on the slab is not Alyosha, but he might as well be, and the sight causes Zhenya, uncharacteristically, to break into open weeping. A woman who had casually voiced regrets about not aborting her child is here confronted with a dead child in all its gruesome reality, and only wants to look away.

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Aleksey Rozin as Boris
© Anna Matveeva – Non-Stop Production, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

It hardly counts as a spoiler to reveal that Loveless comes to no tidy resolution. Like Antonioni’s classic L’avventura, which surely served as an influence, this is a film about a character’s disappearance that frustrates the audience’s wish for answers, instead using that plot device to explore how others move on in his absence. They do so all too readily. By film’s end, Alyosha’s room is being renovated, his possessions taken away, as the camera sadly tracks forward to look out the window at the wintry landscape he once gazed upon. And a film that began in 2012, with rumblings about the Mayan apocalypse on Boris’s car radio, ends in 2014 with its protagonists looped in to a Kremlin echo chamber, vacantly tuning in as Dmitry Kiselyov rants on Russian television about the war in Ukraine. One of the final shots aims to pithily encapsulate the state of the nation, as Zvyagintsev sees it: Zhenya, suited up in a bright Team Russia tracksuit produced for the Sochi Olympics, running on a treadmill on her balcony, staring straight ahead and going nowhere fast.

As to the impact of that scene, well, your mileage may vary: It is at once a clever visual metaphor for Russia’s dead-end future and a little too obvious. Much of Loveless is like that: Zvyagintsev has a clear talent for embedding social themes into his narrative, but the ideas themselves are familiar and well-worn. So, too often, are the cinematic tropes he uses to realize them. Loveless is far too enamored of dimly lit shots of industrial decay or ravaged landscapes. Few can compose such shots as beautifully as Zvyagintsev, but when used so frequently, they come to seem like an artistic crutch, deployed to conjure a dreary mood but ultimately conducing to ponderousness.

It may be that Zvyagintsev’s reputation has finally caught up with him, that he feels burdened by his status as the profound cinematic truth-teller (and doomsayer) of today’s Russia. Zvyagintsev has always been an uneasy representative of his homeland. His films are resented and repressed at home—Leviathan was partly censored for its domestic release and denounced by the Minister of Culture, while Loveless was made without state support—but released to rapturous reception abroad. The filmmaker plays a complicated double game to stay in the business, earning Western plaudits for his underhanded critique of modern Russia while rejecting political labels and insisting that his concerns are universal, so as not to fall too foul of the authorities. That dynamic has dogged the director on the film’s foreign press tour. In an interview with The Guardian, he pointedly rejected the “dissident” label and mused that he was “more like a clown.” And in a profile by the Financial Times, Zvyagintsev disclaimed any political messaging: “I didn’t have the objective to criticize the state in this film. It was not at all what I was going for.”

The state, for its part, has seen little reason to criticize Zvyagintsev this time around. Whereas Leviathan riled up conservative passions and precipitated a new law against films that “defile” Russia’s national culture or “threaten national unity,” Loveless has been warmly received. Prime Minister Medvedev sent his regards when the film won the Jury Prize at Cannes, praising Loveless as a “film that poignantly and honestly tells a family history with its difficult relations, feelings and emotions that concern everyone.”

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Director Andrey Zvyagintsev
© Anna Matveeva – Non-Stop Production, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

One could endlessly debate whether Zvyagintsev is pulling his punches in Loveless, making a more muted criticism of the Putin regime either due to a general sense of self-preservation or an actual threat of censure by the state. In an era when the authorities can arrest a celebrated film director on trumped-up charges, the latter possibility is not so far-fetched. And if Zvyagintsev made some slight, discretionary compromises to preserve the best of his art and still maintain an audience at home, he would hardly be the first. (Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak would certainly understand.)

On the other hand, the film does not feel obviously compromised. Its critical subtext, whatever you think of it, is unmissable—I came away believing that the filmmaker had said everything he meant to say. And for his part, Zvyagintsev has insisted that he exercised no self-censorship. He has pointed out that his reliance on foreign funding for Loveless made him, if anything, less subject to the whims of national censors than when making his previous films, which were partly financed by the Ministry of Culture. If Loveless is less politically incendiary than Leviathan, more focused on widely applicable themes of family crisis, it may simply be because that is the story Zvyagintsev wanted to tell at this moment.

Whatever Zvyagintsev’s motivations, it seems clear that Loveless was more warmly received by the authorities than Leviathan precisely because it lacks the earlier film’s gut-punch honesty about Russia specifically. The social critiques leveled in Loveless, with few exceptions, could apply to any other modern country that suffers from frayed families and empty sex and social media-engendered isolation. The same cannot be said of Leviathan, which is laser-focused on the maladies of contemporary Russia. In Loveless, Zvyagintsev wants to have it both ways. The film is vague enough that Russians can read it as a general statement about family breakdown in the modern world, and not be perturbed. But it has enough specifically Russian reference points that naive Westerners can perceive it as some definitive statement about The Way Russians Live Now and how terribly bleak things are over there. As Andrei Kartashov put it in a review at MUBI, “For foreign audiences, Russia is a country that is always in the news but remains obscure, and a film that claims to explain everything in two hours is consequently as welcome as a Lonely Planet guide.”

Deftly though it tries, Loveless ultimately fails to sustain this balancing act. Zvyaginstev’s first film (The Return) is more emotionally resonant and richer in its portrait of the human condition; his previous one (Leviathan) is a more fully realized indictment of the Russian state. Loveless sits uneasily between these two, aspiring to be both a searing human drama and a trenchant commentary on Russian life, and fulfills neither mandate completely.

Regardless, Zvyagintsev’s weaker efforts are more interesting than most filmmakers’ best ones. And if he wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film come Sunday, he will surely be generously funded to make many more films. He could even regain the financial favor of the Russian state, which warmed to his latest offering and is eager to trumpet the achievements of its artists abroad.

If it happens, a win would present a bitter irony for Russia itself: a confirmation of Russia’s capacity to produce world-renowned filmmakers, yes—but also a confirmation that the bleak, despairing view of the country Zvyagintsev offers is all too plausible to the rest of the world.

The post The Loveless Russia of Andrey Zvyagintsev appeared first on The American Interest.

Who Has the Best Nukes?

Vladimir Putin delivered his annual Address to the Russian Parliament yesterday. Billed as a campaign statement directed at Russian voters, it instead turned out to be a militaristic diatribe addressed directly at Washington.

Putin devoted forty two minutes of his two hour long speech to describing brand new Russian military technology meant to intimidate the West. The statement has been proclaimed by experts as the start of a new arms race. That Cold War comparison necessarily casts Russia’s current President in the role of Leonid Brezhnev—an unflattering parallel largely unnoticed by American Russia-watchers.

Putin boasted about high-speed underwater nuclear drones that move “several times faster than submarines, the most up-to-date underwater torpedoes, and even the fastest above water vessels.” “This is just fantastic!” Putin gleefully added, sounding a little like an excited Donald Trump. He seemed most proud to announce a nuclear-powered and nuclear-tipped cruise missile that could be actively steered on a flight path to avoid U.S. anti-ballistic missile defense systems. He said this missile had been successfully tested and that “no one else in the world” has such a weapon.

How credible is it that Russia has leapfrogged the world? The Director of Russia’s Institute for Space Policy Ivan Moiseev sounded skeptical that nuclear-powered engines could be deployed on cruise missiles. “There is a megawatt-class nuclear engine currently under development, but it is intended for use in outer space,” he said. “And no tests were conducted in 2017. We’d be lucky to have such a system tested by 2027.” The Soviet Union worked on these issues, Moiseev admitted, but all attempts to put nuclear-powered engines on airplanes and cruise missiles were abandoned in the 1950s. The U.S. was developing similar technology in the 1960s, but the project was officially canceled in 1964.

Unnamed U.S. officials, for their part, seemed to confirm that Russia was once again working on the project, but that it was still very much in the research and development phase. A test missile had recently been observed crashing in the arctic, they told Fox News.

Putin’s presentation was designed to hype the capabilities, and for the first time, his speech was accompanied by video—an animated clip of a Russian cruise missile evading defenses and slamming into what looks like Florida. (Why Florida? It might have something to do with Putin’s own frustrations: SpaceX recently launched its Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral. Russia’s own commercial space program is at least ten years behind, with recent test launches spectacularly failing as Putin looked on.)

The missiles themselves were not shown off at all, but the quality of the video provoked ridicule among Russian pundits. Maxim Trudolyubov, editor at Vedomosti, called it “a big, flying, unverifiable Tsar Cannon, as illustrated by a C-minus graphic designer.” The clip was widely ridiculed on the Internet as well; intrepid journalists even tracked down the original video, which was used on a 2007-vintage documentary on Russia’s Channel One television station. (As if anticipating some of the mockery, Putin went out of his way to insist that he was dead serious. “You need to comprehend this new reality, and understand that everything I just said is not a bluff. I am not bluffing, trust me.”)

Stanislav Belkovsky told MBK media that he doubted that the technology Putin was boasting about was real. He went on to note that the philosophy and psychology of war is both the last means left for Putin to consolidate the nation around him, and his only way to relate to the world’s elites. In that sense, his speech was a refinement of a trend that had been going on for more than a decade. Putin’s infamous 2007 address in Munich was the start of the trajectory. Putin is a president of war, resentment and revenge, Belkovsky said.

The New Times’ Yevgenia Albats more or less agreed. Putin was announcing the start of a new arms race with the Unites States—to the death. Keeping the national consciousness in a warlike state was very useful for the upcoming Presidential elections, Albats went on. Putin needs to be seen first and foremost as the Commander-in-Chief of the country.

Putin’s tough talk comes at an opportune time for his campaign given two recent embarrassments his government has had to endure. First, anywhere between a few dozen to a few hundred Russian mercenaries fighting for Assad were wiped out by U.S. troops as they attempted to seize an oil factory in Syria. And second, officials at Russia’s embassy in Argentina were caught smuggling 850 pounds of cocaine using the airplane of the chief of the Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev.

But though Putin’s bellicose speech did manage to push these two stories off Russian voters’ minds for the time being, it’s unlikely that it was crafted with this goal in mind. It’s more plausible that the saber-rattling was in response to enduring Western sanctions. Putin explicitly addressed the issue, calling the sanctions illegal and illegitimate from the standpoint of international law. He boasted that the sanctions were meant to contain the development of the country, including its military capabilities. The “fantastic” rockets were proof, Putin was saying, that the policy had failed.

And although the Trump Administration isn’t rushing to impose new sanctions on Russia—in fact, the U.S. Treasury announced it would not try to stop the buying of Russia’s state bonds—the absence of any new efforts is not enough for the Kremlin. Putin needs existing sanctions to be lifted, especially those imposed on the financial sector. Since this is not likely to happen any time soon, Putin is resorting to all he has left: nuclear blackmail.

As Andrei Soldatov noted, blackmail is Putin’s paradoxical way of calling the U.S. to negotiate. But of course, it can’t possibly work. “We can assume that [Putin] sees no political, economic, or diplomatic means of establishing a dialogue with the rest of the world. All these ballistic missiles only come into play when the dialogue has ended. And that’s the contradiction: you can’t call for a dialogue, when there’s already no dialogue,” he said.

Gleb Pavlovsky called the speech politically misguided, the product of an echo chamber of advisors. “The mistaken political signaling is due to an absence of serious criticism in Putin’s inner circle. Apparently, there’s just nobody who dares to say what’s good and what’s bad. Putin has surrounded himself with the kind of people where there’s nobody to copyedit him,” he said. Or, perhaps, as Vladimir Frolov suggested, the lack of accountability and transparency has allowed military advisors to convince Putin to invest money in a corrupt boondoggle to counter a security threat from the United States that does not really exist.

Whatever the thinking behind the speech, the only response Putin has thus far received has been little more than a shrug of the shoulders, delivered by a low-ranking official rather than by someone like General Mattis. The Pentagon’s press secretary said U.S. officials were “not surprised” by Putin’s comments, and reiterated an obvious point: U.S. missile defense has never been directed at stopping Russia’s existing nuclear arsenal. Making those nukes more resilient to missile defense doesn’t change America’s calculus on missile defense at all.

Like Brezhnev, who stayed in power 18 years until his death in 1982, Putin probably thinks he needs to be seen as embarking on an arms race. Unlike Brezhnev, Putin has to know that his comparatively backward country can’t possibly prevail in the long run. So instead of building high-tech missiles, Putin wants Russia itself to be seen as a missile with an unpredictable path. If so, the opening gambit of his bluff thus far has not been very convincing.

“Это просто фантастика” can also literally be translated as “this is just science fiction”. As we shall see, Putin was perhaps being unintentionally honest in his assessment of Russia’s new military capabilities.

The post Who Has the Best Nukes? appeared first on The American Interest.

The Collapse of Racial Liberalism

This past month the Washington Post ran an article about a literal sign of the times.

The story turned on Cox Farms, a family operation and local institution located just south of Dulles Airport, which has long had the very American habit of posting political nostrums on their roadside sign. In the case of the Coxes—self-described hippies who have been there since 1972, when Northern Virginia was a different place, politically speaking, than it is today—the postings have always had a slightly pixie-ish quality, recently promoting socially liberal causes such as gay rights and pro-immigration messages.

But the motive for the Post story was the furor that erupted over the Coxes’ posting earlier that month. Reflecting on the American Nazis who marched in Charlottesville six months before, the Coxes offered a simple message: “Resist White Supremacy.” As one of the Coxes explained, one would think that only a white supremacist could object to such a message.

Perhaps, but the Coxes nevertheless found themselves the subject of an angry campaign by locals, who deemed the sign “divisive” and “non-inclusive.” After all, the logic of those angry locals seemed to go, if this nation is to embrace its multitudes, then how can it justify excluding white supremacists? Don’t exclude those who are defined by their passion for excluding others? Well, that’s where we’re at, evidently.

To read this story is to hold, as Blake said, infinity in the palm of your hand. The story contains today’s racial politics in a grain of sand, for it captures the signal political event of our time, and perhaps the most ironic consequence of the Obama presidency: the collapse of the racial liberal consensus—what Walter Russell Mead in these pages five years ago referred to as the Compromise of 1977.

By racial liberalism, I mean the basic consensus that existed across the mainstream of both political parties since the 1970s, to the effect that, first, bigotry of any overt sort would not be tolerated, but second, that what was intolerable was only overt bigotry—in other words, white people’s definition of racism. Institutional or “structural” racism—that is, race-based exclusions that result from deep social habits such as where people live, who they know socially, what private organizations they belong to, and so on—were not to be addressed. The core ethic of the racial liberal consensus was colorblind individualism.

The racial liberal consensus emerged from the post-1960s struggle over racial integration, in particular through the debates over school busing and affirmative action. One of the Civil Rights movement’s most undisputed successes was in establishing the norm that overt expressions of racial animus were no longer politically or even socially acceptable in the United States. Despite grumbles about political correctness, new forms of racial etiquette and sensitivity training proliferated across the American educational and corporate landscape. At the same time, however, resistance to school busing and the eventual roll-back of affirmative action programs resulted in clear limits on redressing system-level structural exclusions based on what was typically referred to as “the legacy” of racism and slavery.

Emblematic of this post-Civil Rights Movement racial liberal consensus was the late Reverend Billy Graham, as David Hollinger recently explained in the New York Times. To his credit, Graham made a show of integrating his religious revivals and rallies at a time when such a move was considered “provocative” in much of the South. On the other hand, he offered only weak challenges to ongoing prejudices and injustices, choosing “to represent anti-black racism as a sin of the individual human heart rather than a civic evil to be corrected by collective political authority.” In this estimation, intentions rather than outcomes were the proper basis for measuring racial progress.

While there were always dissenters from the racial liberal consensus in the post-Civil Rights era, mainstream politicians from both sides of the political divide respected its norms, if only in the breach. While racial animus persisted beneath the surface of U.S. civil society, the consensus was not only that overt expressions of bigotry against people of color and celebrations of white supremacy were no longer acceptable, but also that attempts to name and dismantle the institutional bases of white privilege were a political bridge too far. Mainstream politicians were expected to police defectors from their respective “extreme” flanks.

A notorious moment of such policing took place during Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for the presidency: his “Sister Souljah moment,” when the Democratic candidate publicly condemned the remarks of Sister Souljah, an African-American activist and rapper with the group Public Enemy, who had declared in the wake of the Rodney King riots that spring that, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton, appearing before Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, declared, “If you took the words, ‘white’ and ‘black’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.” Characteristic of the clever triangulator, Clinton was clearly marking out the limits of acceptable centrist racial discourse, equating over-the-top rhetoric by a black entertainer with a former Republican State Representative from Louisiana infamous for refusing to accept the civic and political equality of African-Americans.

On the other side of the aisle, the policing of the racial liberal consensus took aim at expressions of white supremacy coming from the Right. Not only were overt racists like Duke personae non gratae within the Republican Party establishment, but even coded expressions of doubt about the results of the Civil Rights era were beyond the pale.

Consider what happened in 2002 when Mississippi Senator and Majority Leader Trent Lott declared at fellow GOP Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party that, concerning Thurmond’s 1948 run for the presidency: “We voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”

Of course, Thurmond hadn’t run as a Republican, but rather as the head of the “Dixiecrat” ticket whose central plank was an overt rejection of African-American civil rights and the defense of de jure segregation in the South. While the GOP tried to ignore the story, bloggers kept it alive, and within a week Lott found himself compelled to appear on Black Entertainment Television (BET) to repudiate Thurmond’s former views. But in 2002, the strength of the racial liberal consensus meant that even overt self-abasement was not enough to make nostalgia for white supremacy forgivable: A week later Lott was forced to step down from his leadership position (though he remained in the Senate for five more years).

Guardians of the racial liberal consensus took events like this as a sign of progress: proof that the arc of the moral universe, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, bent toward justice. The original racial sin of the nation was slowly but surely being overcome. Heck, some dared to whisper: Maybe one could even imagine a black President!

In virtually every way, it is now clear that Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency in 2008 was the apotheosis of this model of racial liberalism. A central part of Obama’s political appeal was that his biography was an ideal expression of what racial liberals wanted to believe about the progress of American race relations. A biracial son of a black man and a white woman, Obama appeared to be the perfect product of the educational meritocracy, from his polishing at Punahou School in Honolulu to his further education at Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. There were of course some complications to this uplifting tale, for example that Obama’s father was not African-American but Kenyan, and that Obama had grown up not in the black community but mainly in various Pacific islands; but overall his personal story was deeply appealing to proponents of the racial liberal consensus.

Obama announced himself on the national political stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He began his speech by reflecting on his own biography, talking about the “hard work and perseverance” that got his Kenyan father “a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that’s shown as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before him,” and about how his mother and father, despite coming from very different backgrounds, shared “a common dream.” When he got around to discussing policy, Obama emphasized that Americans didn’t expect the government to overcome social challenges for them: “Go into any inner-city neighborhood,” Obama explained, and “people don’t expect government to solve all their problems.” In all this, Obama perfectly articulated the credo of the racial liberal consensus: that everyone in the United States shared the same colorblind ideals, and that “with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all.”

Even the biggest crisis in Obama’s 2008 campaign turned into a victory for racial liberalism. Almost exactly ten years ago, on March 13, 2008, a video came to light featuring Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Obama’s church in the Washington Heights neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, condemning America’s history of racial injustice and declaring that blacks should not sing “God Bless America” but instead “God damn America.” Before the video, Obama was on the verge of wrapping up the Democratic nomination, but Wright’s speech threatened to derail Obama’s campaign by tagging him as the follower of a “black militant.” Could a man who followed a preacher who declared 9/11 the result of America’s “chickens coming home to roost” really serve as a suitable representative of the racial liberal consensus?

Facing potential political oblivion, Obama responded five days later in Philadelphia with his celebrated “A More Perfect Union” speech on race. This speech will doubtless be read for decades as the high point of the racial liberalism I have been describing here—a bookend to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision 54 years earlier.

Obama began his speech by noting the “nation’s original sin of slavery,” but declared that the aim of his campaign was to continue “the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.” Although “we may have different stories, we hold common hopes,” Obama averred. “We may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place,” he continued, “but we all want to move in the same direction.” That there might exist people in this country who desire very different things from a racial perspective was out of the question; instead, Obama observed everywhere “how hungry the American people were for this message of unity.”

The speech was widely declared a rhetorical and political triumph, and from there Obama cruised to the Democratic nomination and eventual victory over John McCain in the November 2008 election. When Obama was sworn into office in January 2009, many across the country and indeed the world took his assumption of the highest office in the land as the ultimate sign of America’s astonishing capacity not only for self-reinvention but also for overcoming the sins of its past. The mainstream media heralded Obama’s election as a glorious triumph, with pundits as different as Daniel Schorr and Lou Dobbs declaring that Obama’s election signified the arrival of a “post-racial” America.

In retrospect, however, the problem with this narrative of racial liberalism triumphant was already clear even during the 2008 campaign, which witnessed the emergence of the “birther” controversy. A conspiracy theory led by none other than Donald J. Trump, so-called birtherism questioned the citizenship of the Hawaii-born Obama, demanding to see his birth certificate and then doubting the authenticity of the documents that were produced. Likewise, rumors proliferated across right-wing media to the effect that Obama, in addition to being the follower of a radical Christian minister, was also a secret Muslim. For people in the racial center, these campaigns were not only barely veiled racial bigotry, but also a disturbing sign of things to come, as significant fractions (and in some polls large majorities) of the Republican Party seemed to lend credence to these falsehoods.

In other words, like many an apotheosis before, Obama’s election marked at once the high point and the end of a particular historical cycle: a moment when the realization of a particular ideal reveals the limits of that ideal. Indeed, as a testament to racial liberalism, Obama’s presidency could hardly have been more self-refuting. It brought the tacit compact of the racial liberal consensus to an end by exposing the contradictions and limitations of that consensus in ways that became impossible to ignore. Positions previously dismissed as “fringe” now entered the mainstream of the Left and Right respectively.

Even as Obama attempted to reign as the perfect embodiment of racial liberalism, some of the worst racial tensions in decades roiled the country. First and foremost, police shootings of unarmed black men, often captured on video and distributed virally via social media, created an ongoing loop of Rodney King-like incidents, only worse. Black Lives Matters protests against these shootings, and the often para-militarized response of various urban constabularies to these protests, presented a dire political iconography. Social media, in particular internet websites such as 4chan/pol and 8chan, also created a space for white nationalists to find each other. These spaces, as well as Twitter, also witnessed the rise of anonymous actors who were perhaps less ideologically serious than amused by the prospect of baiting and provoking outrage by poking at social sore points. Racial incitement inevitably became an favorite subject for such so-called trolls.

These tensions gave the lie to the narrative that Obama’s election was the culmination of the long march toward, if not equality, then at least racial reconciliation. On the one hand, his very presence in office, his blackness in the whitest of houses, was a daily affront to those who still prefer to see the United States as a white man’s country. On the other hand, Obama’s presence in the Oval Office in itself did little to nothing to end the stark disparities in life outcomes facing African-Americans.

For people on the racial Right, the Obama presidency was essentially intolerable from day one, and “massive resistance” was the again order of the day. While a full recitation of the return of overt racism to political acceptability would require a book-length disquisition, suffice to say that the nomination and subsequent election of Trump is its most obvious manifestation. Indeed, one reason the mainstream media did not treat Trump as a credible candidate for the presidency, right up to the moment of his election in November 2016, was that he so obviously flouted the conventions of the racial liberal consensus that for the previous four decades had seemed to define the window of acceptable political opinion.

Meanwhile, the arrival of Obama in office, even as the incarceration crisis and shootings of black men continued, made the limits of meritocracy as a solution to racial inequality stark for the racial Left, and they were no longer going to be silenced. Obama infuriated the racial Left by echoing the line of people like Bill Cosby and Denzel Washington by telling African-Americans that they should stop “blaming the system” and instead take “personal responsibility” for confronting the problems in their own communities—a line that prompted Cornel West to declare Obama “a sellout.” Even for those less aggrieved by Obama, the reaction of the right-wing racial revanchists to Obama, who was graciousness and meritocracy personified, revealed the limits of respectability politics, and made clear the necessity of direct confrontation.

The Black Lives Matter movement is a central manifestation of this leftist rejection of racial liberalism. How did the presence of a black man in the presidency make any difference when unarmed black men were being shot across the country at a higher rate than anyone else? How was the meritocratic march through educational institutions supposed to change the fact that blacks are incarcerated at higher rates and for longer terms than whites for the same crimes? Half a century after the Civil Rights Act, the country remains far from equal, and the system continues to treat blacks and whites differently, with black lives consistently less valued than white ones. Whether a cop or white vigilante who shoots an unarmed black man is personally a bigot is irrelevant, BLM activists insisted: What was important was to make clear that it was unacceptable for him to do so. Obama could emote that “Trayvon Martin could be my son,” but this did nothing to prevent Martin from being shot, or his shooter from being acquitted.

The most important intellectual voice of post-racial liberalism is without question Ta-Nehisi Coates, who over the past decade has emerged (to his own surprise and perhaps discomfort) as America’s most vital public intellectual. The central thrust of Coates’s writings is that the reconciliation promised by the racial liberal consensus has turned out to be a sham. His rise to national prominence took place in direct parallel with Obama’s installation in Washington, when he was given a regular perch at The Atlantic after his May 2008 publication dissecting the “audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism.”

Coates has gone on to write a series of essential articles declaring the unmeltability of structural violence against black people, breaking a huge taboo of racial liberalism by making “the case for reparations” for black people on the basis not so much of slavery itself as for the ongoing legacies of racism in housing and educational opportunities. Most recently, he declared that Trump’s whiteness “is the very core of his power. . . . Whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.” Whatever else one may make of such pessimistic assessments, this is certainly the language of racial liberalism scorned.

The central tenet of racial liberalism, which Obama articulated and embodied better than anyone ever has—namely that everyone wants the same thing when it comes to racial justice—has been exposed as false. To a very large extent, both Right and Left have now dropped the pretense to racial liberalism, and the nation now faces a stark choice.

For its part, the racial Right, where it does not actively embrace white supremacy, now makes no apology for white privilege and demands, as in Northern Virginia with the Cox Farms protestors, that white supremacist views be treated with respect. Conversely, the racial Left is no longer willing to tolerate the structural exclusions and violence that are the ongoing de facto legacies of centuries of de jure white supremacy, first in slavery and then in southern Jim Crow. Bringing down Confederate statues across the South reflects a firm rejection of the idea that racial reconciliation must mean tolerating public symbols of injustice. It is hard to see how two such radically different views of the nation’s racial future can be reconciled.

Nor is it at all clear that we should wish for a return to the racial liberal consensus. While a politics of ethno-racial identity have roared into the mainstream of both the Democratic and Republican parties, this parallelism by no means entails moral equivalence. For one side the goal is to complete the march through the institutions in order to end the four-centuries-long legacy of white supremacy. For the other it is about a last-ditch defense of the longstanding privileges associated with that history. What the collapse of racial liberalism means is that Americans of every race no longer can defer the choice between those two visions of the country’s racial future.

Historians often trace the origins of racial liberalism to Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), which was a key scholarly source behind Brown v. Board of Education (1954). See Lani Guinier, “From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the interest-divergence dilemma,” Journal of American History 91:1 (2004), pp. 92-118.

While this essay focused on black/white racial issues, the hegemony of racial liberalism National Origins Formula that had been in place in the United States since the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. On the broader connection between the coeval rise of multiculturalism and so-called neoliberal political economy, see Will Kymlicka, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism?” in Peter A. Hall and Michele Lamont, eds., Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

For a review of critiques of racial liberalism from the Left, see Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back to Move Forward,” Connecticut Law Review 43 (2010). The most widely read conservative intellectual dissent from racial liberalism during its heyday was Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles J. Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Free Press, 1994). The relative mildness of Murray and Herrnstein’s dissent, and the vitriol of the reactions against it, provide a good indication of just how hegemonic the racial liberal consensus was during its heyday.

Enid Lynette Logan, “At This Defining Moment”: Barack Obama’s Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race (NYU Press, 2011).

Michael C. Dawson and Lawrence D. Bobo, “One Year Later and the Myth of a Post-Racial Society,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 6:2 (2009): 247–249.

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The Case for Democratic Optimism

There’s no lack of pessimism these days about democracy’s future.

“Democracy faced its most serious crisis in decades in 2017 as its basic tenets—including guarantees of free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press, and the rule of law—came under attack around the world,” warns the latest survey by Freedom House. The organization reports a 12th consecutive year of decline in global freedom.

Many tyrannies today fit a traditional pattern: autocratic regimes ruling over impoverished, resentful people. But now some analysts see something even more alarming: a capacity for dictatorships to build prosperity for their populations and, without political freedom, still win public support.

This observation has led to new “end of history” fears: a belief that the world’s experiment with democracy has already reached its zenith, and that even countries thought to have “consolidated” democracy may well lose it.

History, however, never fails to surprise. Whenever mankind has felt the future was clear, unexpected events have arrived to uproot our expectations. Armed conflict, it turns out, did not end in 1918. Russia recovered from the Soviet collapse and restored itself as a world player far more quickly than many expected. The Arab Spring, for all its excitement, failed to create a democratic Middle East.

Given our poor record of foreseeing history’s march, it’s quite a stretch to extrapolate from recent data points the inevitable decline of democracy—the system that has accompanied more liberty and prosperity than any other.

Democracy comes in cycles, and anticipating its next appearance can be a long game. We’ve been there: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty spent four long decades keeping a window of communication open to people behind the Iron Curtain before Soviet power fell. But fall it did, to the astonishment of those who had bought into the conventional wisdom about the Soviet Union’s enduring strength.

The paranoia today of many authoritarian states—their desperation to block outside ideas, their mania for social controls and surveillance—show they, too, are hardly convinced that democracy is on the ropes. For them, the main lesson of the Arab Spring or the latest demonstrations in Iran is not that the protesters lost, but that there’s certain to be a next time.

In fact, there are many features of the world today that suggest that democracy is far from finished as a successful and compelling force.

What are those characteristics? How can they be strengthened by those of us who communicate directly with people living without freedom?

The argument that democracy is in long-term decline stems from two major causes. The first is the tapestry of economic, social, and political woes in democratic countries. They have plunged many citizens of these nations into such a vortex of pessimism, self-doubt and mal du siècle that telling any good story about democratic values feels like espousing half-truths or propaganda.

The second is the perceived successes of non-democratic countries, particularly the galloping economic accomplishments of China and the military and cyber power of Russia.

The Russian and Chinese systems do not require non-stop repression. Their citizens do not live in daily fear of Siberia or re-education camps. Rather, Western analysts fear the systems work through a new grand bargain: populations willingly accept having no political input so long as the regime provides the outputs they consider essential. These include public order, an uplifting national narrative (true or not) and some measure of prosperity, at least for the countries’ dominant ethnic and social groups.

The current success of these regimes is not a happy trend, but it is also not an unstoppable one. While it’s hard to know when Western democracies will recover from their current malaise, other trends are unfolding before our eyes that will put heavy pressures on the authoritarian regimes that look so redoubtable today.

The first is communication. The ability of oppressive elites to compartmentalize information, whether about conditions in the country or their own corruption, is fading. So, too, are efforts to block citizens from communicating among themselves.

True, some regimes have become adept at technologies like web blocking. But information networks are so porous and fast-changing that this is a risky long-term strategy.

In 1978, with no internet at all, Iranian revolutionaries successfully spread their message by handing cassette tapes hand-to-hand. Today, a half-dozen nations try to block Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on radio, satellite, or the internet. Their effectiveness is mixed at best. Trying to cut every means of communication in the modern era is a Sisyphean task.

The real enthusiasts in defying controls on communication are often the young. Young people are not necessarily advocates of democracy as a matter of principle. But they have never before been so empowered to connect with each other and to judge, on the basis of personal experiences, the difference between authoritarianism and liberty.

While modern authoritarian governments may look good enough to older generations who remember when things were worse, young citizens today want to live world-class lives right now. Many are highly entrepreneurial, requiring at least some degree of economic freedom. They are also increasingly plugged into even broader worldwide trends that threaten the whole basis of authoritarian power.

Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms identified some of these currents in an important article several years ago in Harvard Business Review. They noted that “old power” leaders have traditionally based their authority on hierarchies that own, know, or control something in limited supply—like capital, factories, or data. The hierarchies have plenty of these assets, and no one else does.

By contrast, “new power” is open, participatory and peer-driven. It creates ever more resources and products, with a premium on collaboration and sharing. Its virtues are transparency, teamwork, flexible alliances, and a “do it yourself” ethic, Heimans and Timms say. Together, these trends represent a nightmare scenario for regimes built on secrecy, rank and control.

New power challenges old power, or simply ignores it. The rise of cryptocurrencies is an example of large-scale collaboration to create an entire financial system that once would have been unthinkable without government involvement and control.

Certainly, authoritarian states dabble in the tools of new power themselves, manipulating social networks to sow chaos with bots and trolls and using cryptocurrencies to launder money. But fundamentally they remain defenders of hierarchical, closed systems.

The task for democracy advocates is to encourage new-power trends in the interests of freedom. That means championing developments that allow for greater civic participation and information sharing, while seeking to mitigate the potential downsides that new power can bring. As the HBR authors themselves acknowledge, the disappearance of traditional authority can all too often lead to destructive mob mentalities.

In short, friends of democracy need to promote not only trends that help people collaborate and unite, but also the values that will lead people to work together with reason, compassion, and tolerance.

RFE/RL is a news company that focuses on local news inside the countries we serve. We are required by U.S. law to be professional and objective in our reporting, which can stand up to rigorous journalistic scrutiny. At the same time, we seek to promote political freedom, free markets, and tolerance. We see no contradiction in this mandate. We don’t feel that journalistic objectivity requires being indifferent to what happens in the world, and we maintain a particular editorial focus on interests and values that are important to democracy.

This mission animates our work throughout all of our coverage area, which includes the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Our reporting, whether in English or one of the 24 local languages used in our bureaus, promotes constructive new power trends and democratic values, while seeking to hold the powerful to account.

Consider just a few of the topics we cover:

Corruption. Few abuses by governments upset populations more than corruption. From explaining how money laundering works in Azerbaijan to covering anti-corruption demonstrations in Russia that official media ignore, we emphasize the importance of honest government.
Charity. We promote kindness and charity, regardless of nationality or politics. Our subjects include a selfless Russian doctor in Guatemala, a disabled Kyrgyz boy finally getting a motorized bike, a man who gives bread to the poor near Moscow and a blind man who finally got his own apartment thanks to our reporting.
Entrepreneurship. We encourage creativity and imagination in business, whether it’s an innovative way to share cows or an imaginative product creating jobs in the countryside.
Government accountability. We expose child abuse in Uzbekistan and cover anger at authorities over pollution in Kosovo and road taxes in Russia.
Internet and culture. We report on threats to free use of the internet—a key pillar of new power—and limitations on creative freedom.
Women’s rights. We report on forced virginity tests in Tajikistan, women in Iran daring to take off their headscarves and brutality against fashion models in Afghanistan.
Sexual minorities. Many nations where we operate outlaw or barely tolerate LGBT people. We cover the issue broadly, even in Chechnya, one of the worst places for sexual minorities and notoriously hard to report from.
The toll of extremism. We report on how extremism tears families apart, the case for religious moderation and how local groups, in the absence of government support, take fighting extremism into their own hands.

We also fight vigorously against false news. We produce video explainers on how to identify false narratives. With the Voice of America, we operate sites in Russian and English to fact-check controversial claims.

But as RAND Corporation researchers argued last year, it’s essential to offer positive narratives in addition to combating falsehoods. That’s why we try to emphasize positive results that come from democratic and humanistic values. Though we cover those who speak out against authoritarian regimes, our goal is not to just be the voice of dissidents, but to focus on what a democratic future might look like.

How do we know if our work is helping to move the needle? If “new power” forces are trending up anyhow in the long term, does American-financed encouragement make a difference?

One indication of our value is the size of our audience. We estimate that we reach 15 million people every week in the countries of the former Soviet Union. In Iran alone, we reach nearly 10 million. Last year our websites in 25 languages got nearly a billion page views. On social media, the number of interactions with our content—likes, comments and shares—topped 50 million. Audience comments consistently show that we bring them information and ideas that they can’t get from local media.

We are also proudly transparent about our American funding. U.S. international media have consistently supported democratic ideals since the 1940s. Networks supervised by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, including RFE/RL, the Voice of America and three others, now operate in a total of 61 languages.

Some of our target populations are broadly favorable toward the United States. Others are not. Regardless, clarity about America’s values is essential. It is better for America to enunciate its principles and let people judge how well we live by them, rather than let unfriendly actors define what we stand for.

That’s why we constantly seek out stories inside our coverage area that show the importance of the best American and universal values. We believe this reporting resonates with young populations, advances new power, and, despite what the pessimists say today, will ultimately serve the interests of a coming democratic renewal.

The other BBG entities are Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia and Radio/TV Marti, serving Cuba.

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The Syria Chemical Weapons Portfolio Thickens

Yesterday’s front-page New York Times article by Michael Schwirtz, entitled “Horror in Syria Has Secret Ties to North Korea,” begins a new public chapter in what is already a very sad and disturbing story. The yawning duplicity of the Syrian regime and its Russian lawyers grows wider, and the irresponsible claims of the Obama Administration become more obvious than ever.

The New York Times article doesn’t say so in so many words, but it is now clear that even as the United States and others were acting as hazmat garbage collectors, ridding Syria of years’ worth of militarily useless but still toxic chemical weapons precursors (and paying the bill for it!), the Syrian regime was importing new and powerful chemical weapons matériel from North Korea—most certainly with the knowledge of Russian officials, and probably Chinese officials, too. Out the front door went the bad stuff, in through the back door came more of the worse stuff.

In that light, it is worth reviewing a few choice past statements as they have piled up over time.

“. . . we struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out.”

Secretary of State John Kerry,

Meet the Press, July 20, 2014

“We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.”

Susan Rice, Obama NSC Advisor,

NPR interview, January 16, 2017

“If the Syrian government carried out the [April 2017] attack and the agent was sarin, then clearly the 2013 agreement didn’t succeed. Either [Assad] didn’t declare all his CW and kept some hidden in reserve, or he illegally produced some sarin after his stock was eliminated—most likely the former.”

Robert Einhorn, State Department Special Adviser for Nonproliferation and Arms Control,

New York Times, April 9, 2017

“Certainly what we tried to do in the last Administration is dismantle the entire chemical weapons program, which we know they never did.”

Mallory Stewart, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Emerging Security Challenges and Defense Policy, 2015-17,

quoted in the New York Times, February 28, 2018

The new revelations may tempt other former Obama Administration officials to claim that they did get rid of all the Syrian CW, and that the prohibited substances used in April 2017 had been newly introduced into the country from North Korea. That would be just another falsehood, however. The evidence is clear, just as Ms. Stewart says, that the Syrian government never declared all of its chemical weapon stocks. The evidence is now clear that they have been adding to those stocks in recent years.

This is a sore subject for me. I was very much alone when I claimed in writing, in public, as early as September 30, 2013, that the Syrians were lying about their chemical weapons stocks. It became even clearer to me that the evidence for their lying was growing two years before the revelatory April 2017 sarin attack that clarified for the obtuse the truth about what the Obama Administration had failed to achieve.

I beat on this drum repeatedly in the fall of 2013 and for months and even years beyond in hopes of getting some company in calling the Obama Administration’s claims to the carpet. One reason I did so was because of the shadows cast by the Syria deception on the Administration’s sales pitch regarding the Iran nuclear deal—and thanks to an excessively candid interview that Ben Rhodes gave to David Samuels in 2016, it turns out I was right to be skeptical. I got no company whatsoever on the Syrian CW business, not even from Republican staffers who had a clear partisan interest in helping out. It was a frustrating experience.

Only around 2015 did I get any company at all, none of it mentioning my early warnings. For example, a Wall Street Journal investigation published on July 23, 2015 showed that the Assad regime hid nerve agents, relocated stockpiles to complicate the work of verification inspectors, and kept weapons-research facilities up and running even after the main mission to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons ended in 2014.

With yesterday’s revelations, things look even worse. I quoted Mallory Stewart above. Here is how the Times article describes the situation back in 2013 and beyond:

. . . Western officials and nonproliferation experts have long suspected that Mr. Assad retains some chemical weapons. . . . Mallory Stewart, a former State Department official who was involved in the Obama administration’s efforts to dismantle serious chemical weapons program, said that there were always concerns that the Assad government had not listed all of its chemical weapons stockpile on its declared inventory of what it gave up. The [UN] report, she says, “confirms everything we’ve been saying.”

“Everything we’ve been saying”? Everything who has been saying? And saying to whom? Apparently no one told John Kerry anything before midsummer 2014, because otherwise it is very hard to reconcile his claim of 100 percent success as anything other than a bald-faced lie. I have been following this issue fairly closely for years, and, before yesterday I cannot recall seeing anything that Mallory Stewart said on the record about this matter, even in the time since she left the State Department. Maybe I missed it.

Just one final note, for now. Yesterday’s Times article says nothing about what the U.S. intelligence community either did or did not know about the Syria-North Korea chemical weapons connection, and when it did or did not know it.  But a hint as to the answer resides in something that the current National Security Advisor said after the U.S. cruise missile strike on Syria in April of last year, following the Syrian chemical weapons attack that provoked it. On April 6, H.R. McMaster said as follows at a news conference held in Florida:

. . . the one thing that I will tell you though, there was an effort to minimize—to minimize risk to third-country nationals at that airport—I think you read Russians from that—but that—and we took great pains to try to avoid that. Of course, in any kind of military operation, there are no guarantees. And then there were also measures put in place to avoid hitting what we believe is a storage of sarin gas, so that that would not be ignited and cause a hazard to civilians or anyone else.

In other words, reading ever so slightly between the lines, at least as of April of this past year the U.S. intelligence community knew there was sarin gas still in Syria, they knew where at least some of it was, and they knew that the Russians knew where it was, too, in their complicity with the Syrian regime. I find it difficult to believe that this was new knowledge at the time, and even more difficult to believe that intelligence sources available to the United Nations were superior to and independent of those available to the U.S. government. I suspect the U.S. intelligence community has known about this for quite some time, going back fairly deep into the tenure of the Obama Administration.

Draw your own conclusions.

 See my “Resolutions, Resolutions Everywhere,” The American Interest Online, September 30, 2013.

 It’s all here: see https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/05/11/assad-still-has-sarin-gas/, and https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/04/07/more-questions-for-obama-on-syria/.

David Samuels, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru,” The New York Times Magazine, May 5, 2016

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Putin’s Strategy of Chaos

Late last year, Vladimir Putin met with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Sochi. On the agenda was a political settlement to end the war in Syria. Russian observers framed this summit a “new Yalta without Americans,” as it revived memories of the 1945 meeting between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin to establish the postwar order in Europe. Leaders in Moscow relish memories of Yalta, recalling a bygone era when great powers cut sweeping deals at the expense of little ones. Putin even praised the Yalta Conference before the UN General Assembly in 2015, claiming that it laid a “solid foundation for the postwar world order.” That same year, State Duma speaker Sergei Naryshkin specifically cited the 1945 meeting of the “Big Three” as an ideal solution to international problems. In their respective speeches, both Putin and Naryshkin indicated that they still saw Washington as a useful partner. However, the implication of Sochi was clear: The United States was no longer wanted. Pro-Kremlin commentators even described the Sochi meet-up as the “axis of order.” It was undoubtedly a dig at George W. Bush’s “axis of evil”—and the sacrifices the West has made to uphold the principles of international law and state sovereignty. Putin was sending a message.

Kremlin leaders still regard themselves as players in a great-power competition with the United States and Europe. And they harbor a grudge: They believe that the international system treats them unjustly, even though Russians have benefited from the international order that both sides—East and West—helped to establish after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. They see the pillars of the post-1991 order—universal human rights, democratic norms, and the rule of law—as a pretext for foreign meddling in Russia’s internal affairs. And they fear that such ideas could undermine the legitimacy of Putinism and threaten its survival. The Putin regime already appears to be in long-term internal decline, and the Kremlin is increasingly willing to take risks—sometimes recklessly—to prove that it deserves a seat at the great-power table. Risk-taking is a dangerous business for any state, declining or otherwise. But what if the Kremlin is indeed stacking the odds of survival in its favor?

Chaos for Strategic Effect

For all of Russia’s weaknesses as a great power, the Kremlin thinks it possesses one key advantage in long-term competition with America and the democratic West: Russia is more cohesive internally and will thus be able to outlast its technologically superior but culturally and politically pluralistic opponents. In recent years, Putin, his chief military strategist Valery Gerasimov, and other Russian leaders have employed disinformation to spread chaos for strategic effect. The Kremlin’s goal is to create an environment in which the side that copes best with chaos (that is, which is less susceptible to societal disruption) wins. The premise is Huntingtonian: that Russia can endure in a clash of civilizations by splintering its opponents’ alliances with each other, dividing them internally, and undermining their political systems while consolidating its own population, resources, and cultural base. Such a strategy avoids competition in those areas where the Kremlin is weak in hopes of ensuring that, when confrontation does come, it will enjoy a more level playing field.

Strategies of chaos are not new; other great powers in history have sought to sow instability in neighboring states to enhance their own security. Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Haushofer all advocated the use of what we would now call information warfare to confuse and weaken a foe before attacking him militarily. In Russian strategic history in particular, there is a tradition of stoking chaos on the far frontier to keep rivals divided and feuding internally—and thus unable to combine forces against Russia.

But there are disadvantages. Chaos strategies tend to backfire: Efforts to sow instability in a neighbor’s lands can ricochet, eventually affecting the initiator. In the lead-up to World War I, for example, the Russian Empire employed an aggressive information warfare campaign aimed at splintering Austria-Hungary. The effort increased the instability of Russia’s own western regions and contributed to a surge of Bolshevism that forced the Russians out of the war. Indeed, in today’s war against Ukraine, Russia has sealed its borders against returning fighters lest they cause trouble at home.

Another problem with chaos strategies is that they involve a tactic—the purposeful use of disinformation—that tends to become more extreme with time. Methods of spreading disinformation that are initially surreptitious become more recognizable with use, so new and more drastic ones must be invented. In addition, since they are ultimately acts of war, it is hard to know when disinformation campaigns are preludes to kinetic operations. And by provoking counter-moves by their targets, they can trigger tests of strength, which these tactics were designed to avoid in the first place. Despite these potential pitfalls, the Kremlin is gambling that the West won’t recognize its strategy of sowing chaos or organize a sufficient response. It may be right.

Prometheanism

During the first half of the 20th century, Poland’s famed statesman Józef Piłsudski executed one of the more innovative nonlinear chaos strategies in the history of statecraft. He dubbed it “Prometheanism” in homage to the mythological Greek hero who rejected the authority of the more powerful Zeus. Prometheanism was Piłsudski’s answer to the enduring question: How can a relatively weak power successfully compete against a much stronger one? In Piłsudski’s case, the solution was to exploit the vulnerabilities of neighboring Russia by creating divisions and distractions across his rival’s territory. Compared to Russia, Piłsudski’s Poland was relatively weak. However, he could level the playing field by stoking that troublesome legacy of the former czarist empire: Russia’s nationalities problem. By supporting potentially disruptive independence movements across Russia, Piłsudski intended to keep his rival off balance. Chaos was his strategy. Fostering disorder inside Russia was his goal. But Piłsudski’s Prometheanism may have had unintended, adverse consequences: It probably informed the USSR’s own subsequent strategy of exploiting its opponents’ vulnerabilities.

During the interwar period of the 20th century, Soviet policy in the Baltics represented a form of Prometheanism in action, especially the Kremlin’s use of disinformation and political subversion. By this point, Russian leaders had learned much from grappling with Piłsudski’s original Promethean gambit against the fledgling Soviet Union. Russia’s Promethean campaign against the Baltics underscored an important aspect of the strategy: It need not be an end in itself, but can also be preparation for more kinetic forms of warfare. Upon the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, which divided the territory between Germany and the USSR into respective “spheres of influence,” the Soviet Ambassador to Tallinn reported with satisfaction that Estonians were left “bewildered” and “disoriented.” The Kremlin’s subterfuge was complete. The use of disinformation disguised Moscow’s true hostile intentions in the run-up to war, leaving its neighbors strategically off balance.  Prometheanism had worked.

In the early phases of the Cold War, the Soviet Union again used Prometheanism against West European states—creating fifth columns and intentionally pitting discrete factions against one another. Weakening the West had a number of purposes: to prevent rearmament in Germany; to discredit pro-British and American leaders in Italy; to engender beneficial political chaos for local communist parties; and to win de facto recognition for Moscow’s consolidation of power in the eastern half of the Continent. The postwar era likewise revealed an inherent danger of Prometheanism: blowback. Soviet policy in Europe eventually backfired dramatically, by becoming a major stimulus for the Marshall Plan. Prometheanism carries a cost.

In the 21st century, Russian leaders are now employing a modern variant of the Promethean strategy as a power balancer against the West. Just as Piłsudski once attempted to balance Poland’s weakness by exploiting Russia’s vulnerabilities, today’s Kremlin-backed efforts to manipulate the information space use the openness of Western systems against them. Unlike during the Cold War, today’s Russian propaganda does not crudely promote the Kremlin’s foreign policy agenda. Instead, it is designed to confuse, distract, and disrupt Western states.

Russia enjoys some superficial advantages in creating chaos. First, the Kremlin does not need to beat its Western competitors outright—only to keep them confused, uncoordinated, and off balance. Second, Russia’s leaders believe that their authoritarian system grants them a natural competitive advantage in managing the politics of disorder. A third advantage is technology. Russia’s disinformation (and associated cyber) operations—prime vehicles for seeding division and distraction—leverage the anonymity, immediacy, and ubiquity of the digital age. Finally, there is surprise. As seen in recent Western elections, Russia regularly catches the West off guard.

Examples of Russia’s strategy in action are many. In the Baltic States, modern Russian disinformation campaigns try to exploit fears of U.S. abandonment, while simultaneously stoking feelings of alienation among local populations. In Romania, Russian-backed media foment animosity toward Western “meddling” and eat away at public faith in NATO. In Ukraine, Moscow has exploited ethnic and linguistic divisions to create opportunities for land-grabs. It is Russian disinformation that has inflamed anti-Ukrainian sentiments among the Polish population, and widened divisions in Lithuania over energy diversification policies. Facts have become distorted. Policy debates have been hijacked. NATO has become the enemy in some quarters, and Euro-Atlantic solidarity is eroding. Ordinary citizens are left dismayed, suspicious, or disillusioned. This is what a successful 21st century disinformation strategy looks like—and chaos is its aim.

A great deal of recent Western attention has been dedicated to granular considerations of the “who” and “how” of Russia’s techniques for creating disorder and distraction. We now know, for example, how Moscow makes use of Russian-language and foreign-language media outlets and social media networks to sow doubt about Western security structures like NATO. We also understand now how Russia’s military doctrine has incorporated “information confrontation” into its methods of warfare. And thanks to multiple analyses of Russian General Valery Gerasimov’s writings on the use of “indirect and asymmetric methods” for defeating an enemy, our awareness of Moscow’s “nonlinear” methods for manipulating information and political systems is expanding.

Meanwhile, comparatively little work has been devoted to fitting these necessary pieces into a holistic framework that includes the “what for” and “what’s next” of Russia’s efforts. Consequently, Western leaders are perpetually playing defense against Russia’s latest toxic narrative or remarkable cyber operation. All too often, they are surprised by the Kremlin’s next moves.

Part of the problem is our misunderstanding of Russia’s strategic behavior. Prior to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia was generally viewed as a weak actor with declining power in the global arena. Mired in economic crises, social problems, and plummeting population growth, Moscow’s ambition of achieving regional hegemony and global influence seemed to be things of the past. As far as Western leaders were concerned, Russia did not have the wherewithal to support a military or geostrategic rivalry. Western relations with Russia were subsequently premised on assumptions of a “win-win” situation rather than on zero-sum calculations of “us-versus-them.” These assumptions have now been shattered. From its incursions into Georgia and Ukraine to its bending or breaking of treaties (among them the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and the Helsinki Final Act) to its militarization of the Black Sea and Kaliningrad enclaves, Russia has ramped up its hostility to the existing Transatlantic security order. In the process, it has also demonstrated that even a weakened competitor can be highly disruptive.

Combatting Chaos

To counteract Russia’s behavior, the West must understand the Kremlin’s use of information warfare as an example of a chaos strategy in action, and detach itself from its current focus on social media and IT-heavy analysis. In particular, Western analysts must consider how the concept of a bloodless “disordering of the far frontier” has figured in past Russian political-military strategy. Using both historical and contemporary assessments of Russian thinking, they can improve the West’s own competitive strategies.

Indeed, the Kremlin’s chaos-seeding strategy shows us what its leaders fear: Western power. Yet to date the West has not fully considered how its power can be brought to bear against the Kremlin’s vulnerabilities. Every strategy has a weakness. For example, there are disadvantages as well as advantages to our instantaneous modern communications: The interconnected nature of the modern information space makes it harder to achieve effects in a geographically targeted way, heightening Russia’s own susceptibility to a “boomerang effect.” What unintended consequences are beginning to occur as a result of its chaos strategy? How aware are Russian leaders of these problems and how willing to address them? How vulnerable are they to blowback? These are questions that Western policymakers must ask.

The stakes are high: Russia’s chaos strategy has a potentially far-reaching impact on bilateral relations and on the efficacy of our treaties and agreements with Russia (old and new). It may increase the risk of unwanted military escalation and threaten the future stability of frontline states in Central and Eastern Europe. It should also prompt caution about the prospects for agreements on Ukraine, Syria, and North Korea.

In light of these risks, U.S. policy must remove the predictable and permissive conditions that enable a chaos strategy in the first place. Second, it must conceive of and work toward a sustainable end state in which Russia returns to “normal” strategic behavior patterns. Here are four key actions that policymakers must take if they are to accomplish both goals:

Realize that Russia sees the international system very differently than we do, even though our interests on specific issues may coincide (for example, counter-terrorism).
Approach our dealings with Moscow with the understanding that its use of terms like “international law” and “state sovereignty” are quite different than ours, and that Kremlin leaders evoke these concepts for ad hoc advantage—not as ends in themselves.
Understand that Russia’s use of information warfare has a purpose: reflexive control. (Such control is achieved by subtly convincing Russia’s opponents that they are acting in their own interests, when in fact they are following Moscow’s playbook.)
Prioritize the sequencing of the “carrots and sticks” offered to the Kremlin. Sticks first. This means initially increasing the penalties imposed on Russia for continued revisionist behavior and sowing of chaos (for example: tougher sanctions, wider travel bans, greater restrictions on access to the global financial system, financial snap exercises).

Unfortunately, we in the West—particularly in the United States—have been too predictable, too linear. We would do well to consider ourselves the underdog in this contest and push back in nonlinear ways. The only thing that Kremlin leaders perhaps fear more than Western power is the rejection of their rule by Russia’s own people. While our final goal should be to ensure that Moscow becomes a constructive member of the Transatlantic security community, our responses for now should serve the shorter-term goal of forcing Russia to play more defense and less offense against the West. For this purpose, we should dispense with concerns about “provoking” the Kremlin. It is hardly a basis of sound policy to prioritize Putin’s peace of mind. The Russian government will work with the West if that path suits its goals. Otherwise, it will not. We should do the same.

The post Putin’s Strategy of Chaos appeared first on The American Interest.

Don’t Rehabilitate Obama on Russia

Last week, President Trump, pushing back against persistent accusations of collusion, ignited yet another controversy on Twitter by claiming he had been “much tougher on Russia” than President Obama. The White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders doubled down on those comments by saying that President Trump “has been tougher on Russia in the first year than Obama was in eight years combined.” This comment was widely ridiculed in the media; CNN ran one of its cheeky fact-checking chyrons: “He isn’t”.

Not so fast.

Whatever the results of the Mueller investigation, the Special Counsel’s bombshell indictment last week erased any doubts about the reality of Russian interference in the U.S. elections. This attack deserves a strong and decisive response. And beyond that, much still needs to be done to shore up our vulnerabilities ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. American citizens of all political persuasions ought to be concerned that their President, focused on preserving his own electoral legitimacy, has appeared largely complacent in the face of such brazen provocations. The fact that Trump, as candidate and then as President, has consistently heaped praised on Russian President Vladimir Putin is peculiar, to say the least.

But not everything is relative; we should not slip into collective amnesia over the Obama Administration’s weak and underwhelming response to Russian aggression. Throughout his presidency, Obama consistently underestimated the challenge posed by Putin’s regime. His foreign policy was firmly grounded in the premise that Russia was not a national security threat to the United States. In 2012, Obama disparaged Mitt Romney for exaggerating the Russian threat—“the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Obama quipped. This breezy attitude prevailed even as Russia annexed Crimea, invaded eastern Ukraine, intervened in Syria, and hacked the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Obama’s response during these critical moments was cautious at best, and deeply misguided at worst. Even the imposition of sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by so much propitiation and restraint elsewhere that it didn’t deter Russia from subsequent aggression, including the risky 2016 influence operation in the United States. Obama, confident that history was on America’s side, for the duration of his time in office underestimated the damaging impact Russia could achieve through asymmetric means.

Obama’s cautious Russia policy is grounded in three conceptual errors: a failure to grasp the true nature of the Russian threat, most clearly visible in his Administration’s restrained response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014; a “long view” of historical trends which in his view inexorably “bent” toward liberalism; and the perception that formidable domestic political obstacles stood in his way when it came to crafting a response to Putin’s assault on the elections in 2016.

The Obama Administration viewed Russia as a declining economy and, at best, a regional player and spoiler. According to a strict “spreadsheet” analysis of the situation, this was not a crazy read. Despite its sprawling geographic reach, Russia’s GDP is roughly that of Spain (about $1.2 trillion); it contributes less than 1.5 percent to global GDP, compared to the U.S.’ 25 percent. Without a jump in oil prices to shore up its petrostate model, Russia’s economic outlook looks grim. Furthermore, Russia’s population is literally disappearing: the country is facing major demographic challenges due to declining birth rates, low life expectancy (especially for men), and emigration. And while Russia is still a nuclear superpower, its military is no match for the United States and NATO. For all these reasons, the Obama Administration concluded that, despite divergent views on international order, Moscow could still be a potential (junior) partner on areas of mutual interest. This set of beliefs proved incredibly sticky despite Russian actions that should have set off alarm bells.

Obama’s much-ballyhooed “Reset” with Russia, launched in 2009, was in keeping with optimistic attempts by every post-Cold War American administration to improve relations with Moscow out of the gate. Seizing on the supposed change of leadership in Russia, with Dmitry Medvedev temporarily taking over the Presidency from Vladimir Putin, Obama’s team quickly turned a blind eye to Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia, which in retrospect was Putin’s opening move in destabilizing the European order. Like George W. Bush before him, Obama vastly overestimated the extent to which a personal relationship with a Russian leader could affect the bilateral relationship. U.S.-Russia disagreements were not the result of misunderstandings, but rather the product of long-festering grievances. Russia saw itself as a great power that deserved equal standing with the U.S. What Obama saw as gestures of good will—such as the 2009 decision to scrap missile defense plans for Poland and the Czech Republic—Russia interpreted as a U.S. retreat from the European continent. Moscow pocketed the concessions and increasingly inserted itself in European affairs. The Kremlin was both exploiting an easy opportunity and reasserting what it thought was its historic prerogative.

Though Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was the final nail in the coffin of the Reset, President Obama remained reluctant to view Moscow as anything more than a local spoiler, and thought the whole mess was best handled by Europeans. France and Germany spearheaded the Minsk ceasefire process in 2014-2015, with U.S. support but without Washington at the table. The Obama Administration did coordinate a far-ranging sanctions policy with the European Union—an important diplomatic achievement, to be sure. But to date, the sanctions have only had a middling effect on the Russian economy as a whole (oil and gas prices have hurt much more). And given that sanctions cut both ways—potential value is destroyed on both sides when economic activity is systematically prohibited—most of the sacrifice was (and continues to be) born by European economies, which have longstanding ties to Russia. In contrast, the costs of a robust sanctions policy have been comparatively minor in the United States; Obama spent little political capital to push them through at home.

The Obama Administration also sought to shore up NATO’s eastern flank through the European Reassurance Initiative (ERI), which stationed rotating troops in Poland and the Baltics while increasing the budget for U.S. support. Nevertheless, the President resisted calls from Congress, foreign policy experts, and his own cabinet to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine that would have raised the costs on Russia and helped Kyiv defend itself against Russian military incursion into the Donbas. As Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, he viewed any deterrent moves by the United States as fundamentally not credible, because Russia’s interests clearly trumped our own; it was clear to him they would go to war much more readily that the United States ever would, and thus they had escalatory dominance. Doing more simply made no sense to Obama.

This timid realpolitik was mixed up with a healthy dose of disdain. Obama dismissed Russia as a “regional power” that was acting out of weakness in Ukraine. “The fact that Russia felt it had to go in militarily and lay bare these violations of international law indicates less influence, not more,” Obama said at the G7 meeting in 2014. This line has not aged well. Obama’s attitudes on Russia reflected his Administration’s broadly teleological, progressive outlook on history. Russia’s territorial conquest “belonged in the 19th century”. The advance of globalization, technological innovation, and trade rendered such aggression both self-defeating and anachronistic. The biggest mistake for America would be to overreact to such petty, parochial challenges. The 2015 National Security Strategy favored “strategic patience”. But was it patience… or passivity? As its actions in 2016 proved, Russia is very much a 21st century power that understands how to avail itself of the modern tools available to it, often much better than we do ourselves.

The same intellectual tendencies that shaped Obama’s timid approach to Ukraine were reflected in his Administration’s restrained response as evidence of Russian electoral interference began to emerge in the summer of 2016. Starting in June, intelligence agencies began reporting that Russian-linked groups hacked into DNC servers, gained access to emails from senior Clinton campaign operatives, and were working in coordination with WikiLeaks and a front site called DCLeaks to strategically release this information throughout the campaign cycle. By August, Obama had received a highly classified file from the CIA detailing Putin’s personal involvement in covert influence operations to discredit the Clinton campaign and disrupt the U.S. presidential elections in favor of her opponent, Donald Trump. That fall through to his departure from the White House, the President and his key advisers struggled to find an appropriate response to the crime of the century. But out of all the possible options, which included a cyber offensive on Russia and ratcheted up sanctions, the policy that was adopted in the final months of Obama’s term was, characteristically, cautious. Obama approved additional narrow sanctions against Russian targets, expelled 35 Russian diplomats, and shut down two Russian government compounds.

It’s true that Obama faced a difficult political environment that constrained his ability to take tougher measures. Republican opponents would have surely decried any loud protests as a form of election meddling on Hillary Clinton’s behalf. Donald Trump was already flogging the narrative that the elections were rigged against him. And anyway, Clinton seemed destined to win; she would tend to the Russians in her own time, the thinking went.

But just as with the decision to not provide weapons to Ukraine, the Obama Administration also fretted about provoking Russia into taking even more drastic steps, such as hacking the voting systems or a cyber attack on critical infrastructure. In the end, the Administration’s worries proved to be paralyzing. “I feel like we sort of choked,” one Obama Administration official told the Washington Post.

Much ink has been spilled over President Trump’s effusive praise for Putin and his brutal regime. “You think our country’s so innocent?” candidate Trump famously replied to an interviewer listing the many human rights abuses of Putin’s Russia, including the harassment and murder of journalists. Obama, on the other hand, never had any ideological or psychological sympathy for Putin or Putinism. By the end of his second term, the two men were barely on speaking terms, the iciness of their encounters in full public view. For most of Obama’s two terms, however, this personal animosity did not translate into tougher policies.

Has the Trump Administration been tougher on Russia than Obama, as the President claims? Trump’s own boasting feels like a stretch, especially given how he seems to have gone out of his way to both disparage NATO and praise Putin during the course of his first year in office. Still, many of his Administration’s good policies have been obscured by the politics of the Mueller investigation and the incessant furor kicked up by the President’s tweets. As Tom Wright has noted, the Trump Administration seems to pursue two policy tracks at the same time: the narrow nationalism of the President’s inflammatory rhetoric openly clashing with the seriousness of his Administration’s official policy decisions.

These tensions are real, but all too often they become the story. Glossed over is the fact that President Trump has appointed a string of competent and widely respected figures to manage Russia policy—from National Security Council Senior Director Fiona Hill to Assistant Secretary of State for European affairs Wess Mitchell to the Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker. The Trump Administration is, in fact, pursuing concrete policies pushing back on Russian aggression that the Obama Administration had fervently opposed. The National Security Strategy of 2017, bringing a much-needed dose of realism to a conversation too often dominated by abstractions like the “liberal world order”, singles out both China and Russia as key geopolitical rivals. During Trump’s first year, the Administration approved the provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine, shut down Russia’s consulate in San Francisco as well as two additional diplomatic annexes, and rather than rolling back sanctions, Trump signed into law additional sanctions on Russia, expanded LNG sales to a Europe dependent in Russian gas imports, and increased the Pentagon’s European Reassurance Initiative budget by 40 percent. (A President who berated U.S. investments for European defense has actually dramatically increased American military presence on Europe’s threatened borders.) While many of these policies may have been implemented despite rather than because of the President—on the expansion of sanctions in particular, Trump faced a veto-proof majority in Congress—credit should be given where credit is due.

The Trump Administration’s sober policy decisions should not excuse the President’s praise for Vladimir Putin, nor his reckless undermining of America’s stated commitment to enforcing Article 5 during his first speech in front of NATO. But the fact remains that the U.S. is taking concrete steps to strengthen Europe against Russian aggression. And let’s not be coy about it: if the President’s strident complaining about unequal burden-sharing in NATO finally snaps European allies out of their complacency and helps spur military investment on the continent, this won’t be good news for Russia either. Indeed, he will have succeeded in moving the needle on an issue that has frustrated every one of his predecessors since 1989. Has Trump’s bluster, especially on Article 5, been cost-free? Hardly. Nevertheless, talking to diplomats around town suggests that after initial months of uneasiness, most Europeans have learned to deal with the Trump Administration in a dispassionate and pragmatic manner that stands in stark relief with much of the hysteria that passes for commentary in the U.S.

Each Administration should be judged on what it has achieved. At the end of the Obama’s two terms, Putin had elevated Russia to a credible revisionist power on the international stage. Russia annexed Crimea and occupied much of Eastern Ukraine; by successfully propping up the degenerate Assad regime, the Kremlin gained a veto on any possible political solution to Syria, and got a meaningful foothold in the broader region for the first time since Sadat threw Soviet advisors out; and its populist allies and fellow-travelers were on the rise in Europe, fueling both anti-Americanism and illiberalism; and most damning of all, it managed to meddle, almost unopposed, in U.S. politics—all on Obama’s watch.

There is plenty left to criticize in how the Trump Administration has done things in its first year. The Trump Administration’s apparent unwillingness to take steps to deter hostile foreign powers from meddling in American politics is inexcusably irresponsible. And in the Middle East, the Trump Administration seems hell-bent on following Obama’s myopic policy of retreat and narrow preoccupation with fighting ISIS to the exclusion of all else. But despite the President’s campaign promises, his Administration has been the first in the post-Cold War era to not try for a “Reset” with Moscow. If Vladimir Putin wanted to sow chaos and confusion in Washington, he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. If he wanted a pliant ally in America, he has abjectly failed.

The post Don’t Rehabilitate Obama on Russia appeared first on The American Interest.

Beyond the Blobbers

It is tempting for members of the so-called American foreign policy blob—thank you Messrs. Obama and Rhodes for the felicitous term—to think about foreign and national security policy from a fairly close-up perspective. Indeed, if you are a blobber as a day jobber, to coin a phrase, you almost have no choice because following the daily and weekly action is what keeps you busy enough to justify your paycheck.

And that can be a problem. I wish I had a nickel for every punditry session I’ve attended over the years, here in Washington and elsewhere, where the level of analysis was so down in the weeds that the discussion was obsolete before the luncheon leftovers were cleared away.

Not all such discussions are the same in this way. Discussions about the Middle East or East Asia usually feel normal compared to those on Europe. When one sits with Europeans and U.S. blobber experts on Europe, discussions usually tend to the schizophrenic. Complementing the down-in-the weeds discussion about who did or said what to whom last Tuesday is usually a stratospheric discussion so abstract and nakedly moral as to be almost lighter than air. What goes missing most of the time is any sort of practical strategic thinking somewhere in between these two layers.

Speaking of going missing, for quite a while the entire domain of grand strategic thinking went missing here in the United States, at least outside of cloistered academic circles with reality and levels-of-analysis challenges of their own. In general terms, I would date its absence from a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall until maybe a year or three ago. And the reasons for the temporary absence, I think, are fairly clear.

Between the triumphalism of liberalism vindicated and the press of suddenly obvious domestic political dysfunctionality, spending time on grand strategic thinking seemed either unnecessary or a luxury, depending on your point of view. We should add, probably, the fact that we suddenly lacked a single, ideologically defined adversary made the whole business much more complicated and difficult for even well-educated Americans to get their heads around. And it is human nature that the difficult tends to be avoided.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 seemed to promise for a short moment to restore focus to U.S. strategic thinking, but ultimately that did not happen, for two reasons. First, the actual source of the problem evaded the understanding of the political elite of both major parties, leading to all sorts of policy errors both major and minor—and cleaning up after those errors took most of the oxygen out of the relevant rooms. Second, the danger actually posed by salafi terrorism failed to live up to the level of paranoia we generated for ourselves in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

The sum total of that experience served only to further disorient our sense of strategic thinking, and only the so-called return of geopolitics—said geopolitics never having left in the first place, of course—got our attention once again. Once it did, thanks largely to Russian efforts, the number of projects on grand strategy multiplied like grasshoppers in midsummer.

All began with the premise that we had regrettably failed to do this kind of thinking in recent years, which was true. But most ended with committee reports, which were something less than scintillating and analytically compelling. But at least we were trying again. We need to try harder, however, for reasons I’ll come to in a moment.

Today, much if not most up-close blob commentary on foreign and national security policy comes down to a debate about the character of the decision-making process, such as it is, that we behold from time to time. Supporters of the Trump Administration, as well as those willing to give it the benefit of much doubt, see careful deliberation in what it does. They take at face value the claim that the President is a master negotiator who may stake out extreme, even outrageous, opening positions, knowing full well that these positions will be yanked back to practical outcomes—regression to the norm, as social scientists call it—once the intended targets have been softened up and rendered ready for negotiating harvest.

This is the way some observers have interpreted policy toward North Korea. This is the way other observers have interpreted policy toward NATO and Europe. Tough talk is how the President got the Europeans to press the Iranians to get us a better nuclear deal than the one Barack Obama left us with. And one can go on, notably with respect to the policy domain the President claims to care most about—trade—although if there are any negotiating successes in this domain thus far, I can’t find them.

Of course there is precedent for this sort of thinking in real existing history. Plenty of Americans and Europeans were sure that Ronald Reagan was going to start World War III during the Euromissile crisis of the early 1980s, but instead Reagan’s posture in facing down the nuclear freeze movement and the cascade of anti-nuclear “peace” demonstrations in Europe resulted in the INF agreement, which not only eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons, but also paved the way for what amounted to, but was never called, détente 2.0. So I would not be the least bit surprised if before long we had articulated for us a Trump Doctrine based on these principles, radically thin though they be, with a nod to Ronald Reagan as a selling point.

Other observers, however, do not see it this way. Several commentators have suggested that the President’s rhetoric—which is mainly to say his tweets—have very little to do with foreign policy despite the apparent subjects at hand. When the President appears to address foreign and national security policy issues, they say, what he’s really doing is signaling to his existing and potential domestic political base in accord with his relentless quest to realign American politics. He is posturing, as some would call it, in ad hoc Jacksonian mode, because that is where he thinks the torque points for realignment are located.

In other words, he has no strategy or plan, just some instincts, mainly about domestic politics. His is a populist convolution of emotions and paragraph-length slogans masquerading as a foreign and national security policy strategy that amounts to making things up as he goes along. That leaves the rest of us to hope that his more experienced staff will save him, and us with him, from the consequences of any truly enormous seat-of-the-pants blunders.

So who is correct? Not being privy to the internal discussions of the National Security Council, I don’t know. The first argument may be accurate from time to time, at least as far as first instincts go, but I suspect that the skeptics of strategic coherence make the better case overall.

But whoever turns out to be correct, this is not a debate at the level of grand strategy. It does not step back and look broadly at the circumstances the United States finds itself in, circumstances that invariably shape all we do and the consequences of all we do. In other words, this kind of analysis is completely within the guardrails of conventional blob thinking, and so its utility is limited.

If we do step back, what do we see? It seems to me that the only sensible way to come to an answer is to review briefly a bit of history for context.

As I have argued in greater detail, the United States has only ever had two grand strategies, and both have been more or less informal since we never have really had a grand strategy tradition of the sort that European and Asian empires of old had.

The first, which had taken at least inchoate shape even before the Revolution and lasted until around the Spanish-American War, was very simple: Seize and hold as much of the North American continent as possible. We did that. Then came Alfred Thayer Mahan, and we created the second grand strategy in our history: Prevent the rise of a hegemon in either Europe or East Asia.

Before World War II, we tried to do that by riding the coattails of the British Navy and by means of self-help, like the building of the Panama Canal, which was a naval toggle switch between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This effort collapsed, of course, in hegemonic war. After World War II, we found ourselves relatively very powerful and forward deployed on the brackets of Eurasia. So as leader in place of a depleted Britain we adopted a forward-deployed method of doing the same thing that Mahan had advised. The only main change, aside from the implications of nuclear weapons, was that before long we added the Middle East as an instrumental area critical to the defense of East Asia and Europe.

The result of this American strategy hitched to its enormous power is that we today have inherited a world based on the implementation of this twin anti-hegemon strategy over a long time—more than 70 years. We are still forward deployed, and we still want to prevent the rise of hegemonic powers (aside, of course, from our own in the Western Hemisphere). So we still want to suppress regional security competitions, limit the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and generally supply global common security goods for both noble and selfish purposes.

The current American political class, however, may not realize that this is what we are doing, because few of our leaders in recent years have been able or have bothered to articulate it. But the habits of the institutions that conduct this strategy, and the budgets that go along with them, testify to the basic consistency of our objectives.

That said, we have acquired several problems as we have continued to implement this strategy in the post-Cold War era. First, consistency without a conscious reason for it asks for trouble. The sleepwalking mode with which the American elite has conducted strategy in recent years was bound to hemorrhage public support. Most people don’t ask why we do the things we do in the world unless or until something goes wrong to bring U.S. actions into problematic focus. But eventually something always goes wrong, even if it is a fairly minor thing; and sometimes, of course, it is not so minor at all, as with the screw-ups of Iraq, Libya, and I think one could fairly add Syria. The result is that an accumulation of querulous attention untethered to any broader understanding of strategy ultimately undermines political support for the strategy.

It did not take the Trump Administration’s advent to make this clear; the erosion of support for an internationalist foreign policy along the lines described above has been ongoing for some time. This is why the observation that many of the current Administration’s policies don’t differ much from those of the previous Administration, except in body language and tone, is correct. But the change in tone is important, because it indicates out loud, so to speak, the lack of support for the strategy on the basis of the earlier rationale.

Second, we have a kind of psychological math problem. Today, the revisionist threats to the mainly made-in-the-USA world order come from three countries, not mainly one, and the threats are not really ideological in nature. This, too, makes it hard to define simply for the American people what it is we are trying to do. We are an ideological people, and if we cannot define the enemy as a singular enemy in ideological terms, it’s tough to get through. It would be easier if we could conjure some argument in which China, Russia, and Iran could all be boiled down into the same basic abstract challenge, but no one has figured out how to do that—at least not yet—because it would require a Procrustean logic of prodigious strength.

Third, it is intrinsically harder to deal with threats to the order when the threats are diffuse; there is more uncertainty, there is more expense involved in spreading out one’s assets, and there is more risk precisely because one’s assets are spread out. Diffusion also tends to magnify disagreement over what is a first-tier concern and what is not, and so it makes the attainment of tactical consensus more difficult within the government and among allies. And it should probably go without saying, but I will say it anyway: When there are more moving parts to managing policy, a more subtle and nuanced approach is required to get it right. The need for diplomatic triage and triangulation is baked into the circumstances. Alas, an ideological people does not so readily produce leaders who excel at subtlety and nuance.

Fourth, we are living at a time when we think we are resource poor for the purpose, which is very different from how things felt 30 or 40 years ago. So not only is the strategy harder to explain and get political support for, and more expensive and uncertain, it also tends to be under- and mis-funded (not just in DOD, but also at the State Department and in the intelligence community), which makes all the other problems worse.

Finally, in this regard, during its duration one could at least imagine the Cold War ending—as it happily did—simply because even the barely tutored person realizes that all empires based on conquest, coercion, and brawn eventually fall. But it is very hard to imagine the “return of geopolitics” in its current diffuse form ever ending. And Americans do not like stories without endings, happy endings if at all possible. LBJ said it best at a November 1967 press conference: “Our American people, when we get into a contest of any kind—whether it is a war, an election, a football game or whatever it is—wanted it decided and decided quickly; get in or get out.” That is not the sort of national temperament best suited for doing geopolitics, which Lord Vansittart described aptly as “an endless game played for joyless victory.”

We have now had two Presidents in a row who do not really believe, apparently, in the post-World War II grand strategy. They have come from two different places along the American political spectrum, so they may well represent a new normal. I hope not, because without American power being put to good purposes, the world of the future is likely to be a far nastier and more brutish place than most of us can imagine today—for very fortunate reasons, we Americans tend to lack a sense of historical tragedy comparable to that of Europeans, Asians, and others.

One final question begs asking, for now: Is the current acute indeterminacy of American strategy, owing to the novel difficulties attending it, solely a consequence of changes in the world that have made the old ways obsolete or too difficult to maintain, or is there something internal to our society that we need to consider as well as part of the explanation?

I think the answer is clear: The changes within are more important even than the changes without. Suffice it to say that no great power succumbs to external challenges alone. Yes, the current President and the one just before him appear not to endorse the strategy that has held us in such good stead since the end of the Second World War; but more important is the fact that neither affirms American exceptionalism, as each and every one of their predecessors did. A people, and especially an elite, that no longer believes in its own virtue (yes, yes, of course it’s a mythic postulate, but they all are in every nation because they have to be) will surely be unable to persuade itself that it has any special role in history, hence in the world—let alone a role that demands exertion, discipline, patience, and studied flexibility.

And without that belief, American foreign policy—whether in its various inward-looking or outward-looking modes over the past two centuries—is truly in uncharted waters. If indeterminacy beyond the blob is truly the watchword of the day, then the sound making of strategy may have become a vision too far.

See for example https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-peril-of-trumps-populist-foreign-policy-1511912230.

For example, in “The Silent Death of American Grand Strategy,” American Review (Sydney, Australia), Spring 2014.

I explain what I mean by Americans being an ideological people in “The Anglo-Protestant Basis of U.S. Foreign Policy: Examples and Evidence,” Orbis (Winter 2017-18).

I have written about this already, and I don’t wish to repeat myself here. So see “The Nadir of Modernity,” The American Interest Online, August 5, 2016 (“Framing the Issues”), August 10 (“Liberalism and Modernity”), August 12 (“The State of the State”), and August 16 (“Anti-Modernity Within and Without”).

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Disinformation All the Way Down

At what point will reality emerge? I don’t mean anything fancy by “reality,” just that moment when you realize there’s a world beyond yourself to contend with; where the stream of bullshit hits something hard and undeniable; where words have some sort of common meaning in a public sphere and not just whatever you fancy them to be.

The Mueller indictment of the Russian Internet Agency’s internet influence campaign in the U.S. captures the drama of unreality and reality which has come to define our hysterical times. On the one hand, the text describes the mechanics of how the Agency used fake online identities to create fake online campaigns geared to help a candidate who has no notion of truth. On the other hand there was the legal language of the indictment, a language where words count, where they can lead to the relentless realness of prison. When the two clashed it made for a delicious read, a Pynchonesque yarn retold in bullet point legalese.

On or about October 16, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the ORGANIZATION-controlled Instagram account “Woke Blacks” to post the following message: “[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.”…. Defendants and their co-conspirators also used false U.S. personas to ask real U.S. persons to participate in the “Florida Goes Trump” rallies. Defendants and their co-conspirators asked certain of these individuals to perform tasks at the rallies. For example, Defendants and their co-conspirators asked one U.S. person to build a cage on a flatbed truck and another U.S. person to wear a costume portraying Clinton in a prison uniform.

But though the indictment itself is an emblematic text of the challenge we face, it does little to resolve it. Jonathan Morgan, a tech guru type, put it best:

When we focus on the bad actor, not the system they gamed, we're giving ourselves an easy out. Now we just suspend ISIS accounts or stop Russians Facebook ads and say the problem is solved.

It's a just band-aid, and yet again we'll fail to addressing the underlying problem.

— Jonathon Morgan (@jonathonmorgan) February 17, 2018

In the Cold War, Soviet disinformation campaigns needed to cleverly, patiently infiltrate Western media with their agents, in order to craftily spread elaborate hoaxes. Now they just use Facebook. In “Digital Deceit”, a new paper from the New American Foundation, Ben Scott and Dipayan Ghosh argue that disinformation campaigns need to be seen not as some sort of perverse use of social media, but as its logical outcome. Behavioral data collection, which tracks users across the internet without them ever being particularly aware of it allows advertisers to know more about potential clients. Similarly, it allows a clever disinformation operation to understand its audience as never before. Segmentation and precision targeting allow advertisers to instantly know which specific audiences react to which messages. They also allow a disinformation campaign to constantly hone its aim.

“Russian targeting efforts,” conclude Scott and Ghosh, “took advantage of the basic tools of today’s information markets that are designed to deliver targeted persuasive messages to tens of millions of people at low cost and with little transparency. Moreover, they benefited from the fact that there were many other domestic political actors doing similar things—running paid and unpaid content on social media to promote salacious, divisive, or emotionally manipulative political messages. Once AI-driven audience targeting has locked onto a successful combination of demographics, messages, and attention-spending user behavior, it will naturally steer all similar content into the same pathways. These platform economics are designed to help advertising succeed.”

This last point means that we have to adapt our thinking from obsessing whether “foreign” campaigns change the “domestic” argument, or whether the “domestic” is more important than the “foreign.”  Instead we have to start thinking holistically about a media system which actively engenders disinformation, and where all campaigns smooth the pathways for each other. Disinformation won’t be curbed until the very model which produces it is altered. The next time “Russia” could easily launch a “domestic” U.S. campaign by using actors registered in the U.S. and funded by friendly U.S. nationals. This is already happening in Europe, where in countries such as the Czech Republic and Italy local actors with close financial or political relations to the Kremlin launch disinformation campaigns which push Kremlin lines, but could in no way be described as “foreign.” Calling them “Trojan Horses” assigns far too much causal power to the Kremlin. They’re more like natural allies. Indeed I wonder if there might be something nostalgically comforting in defining campaigns in terms of “domestic” and “foreign”: allowing one to either assign all blame to a foreign party, or comfort oneself that no foreign party could or should ever influence your “home.” Disinformation, however, doesn’t give a shit about geography.

When I helped run a project monitoring the recent German election, I found disinformation campaigns being coordinated across borders by both U.S. and European alt-Rightists and neo-Nazis, by state and non-state Russian actors, Falun Gong ‘alternative media’ operations and mere enthusiasts. Motivations ranged from political to commercial, often intermingling. Every one of these campaigns reinforced the others, and they all helped the far Right AfD party by focusing on anti-migrant narratives.

The notion that our current media model creates a demand for disinformation has also been extensively explored by Walter Quattrociocci of the University of Venice. In a study on the “Trends of Narratives in the Age of Misinformation,” Quattrociocchi analyzed 54 million comments over 4 years in various Facebook groups and found that the “cognitive patterns in echo chambers tend towards polarization.” It’s this polarization which creates the need for fake news, rumors, and conspiracies to confirm biases. It really doesn’t matter if stories come from dodgy sources: you’re not looking to win an argument in a public space to a neutral audience; you just want to get the most attention possible from like-minded people. Indeed the more extreme position you take, the better. “Online dynamics induce distortion,” concludes Quattrociocchi. “Fake news” is not the cause of the denigration of democratic debate; it’s a symptom of the nature of our new media landscape.

Of course there have always been attempts to manipulate us, whether through advertising or political agitprop. But there’s been some sort of qualitative shift in the quantity of unreality. Before we might see an ad on television, or a billboard, which would have to cleverly reach into our unconscious, to lie there while we went about and interacted in the real world, and then try to influence our behavior when we went into a shop to buy something or express a political opinion. Now the Facebook algorithm is constantly moving anything you might not like out of your way, calculating how long you pause your scroll on every story, filtering out the people or the subjects you scroll past, bringing in more of what it’s worked out you like to tarry on, and then feeding that information back to companies, PR firms, Trumps and Putins—who in return can then easily feed us the image of the world we want. We don’t even need to enter the real world to act. We buy things while online. We make our political statements there too.

Recently I was told about how Far Right groups have started recruiting activists on gaming forums. They motivate them to join groups which use gaming sites to plan online social media campaigns: one moment you’re planning how to win on World of Warcraft, the next you’re using the same infrastructure to plan how to spam hashtags and organize bot-nets to smear politicians. So people dwelling in the virtual world of gaming are lured into online campaigns which use the language of gaming, moving seamlessly from one unreality to another. Perhaps there’s little wonder that the politics that has emerged from it leaves one pinching oneself to check whether it’s all real.

Ghosh and Scott have a bunch of really useful suggestions at the end of their paper about what to do about “digital deceit.” They cautiously propose to introduce regulation—the undeniably “real” language of Mueller—into the spongy ether of social media: regulation that gives people more power and knowledge about how their data is gathered and used, and regulation about transparency for political ads.

This is good, but what does one do with the desire to be misinformed in the first place? One of the most striking videos in the aftermath of the Mueller indictment was the interview of the woman who had been duped by Russian sock puppets but refused to admit it. Quattrociocchi is now at the forefront of thinking about how one can use data science to understand the roots of why people desire disinformation. He is founding a “social media observatory” at the University of Venice, which will analyse how, why, and with what emotion people consume false stories, in order to then find ways to deliver accurate information they are prepared to consume. What sort of sources might they trust? How should stories be framed? Do they prefer visual or narrative forms?

It seems that the only way to cure hyper-targeted deception is a more ethical hyper-targeting. There’s no return of the old, Enlightenment, allegedly evidence-based and supposedly rational “public sphere,” with its related geography of “domestic,” “foreign,” and “global” spaces. Instead there are permutations, some using language more accepting, others more “polarized” and dehumanizing, of that semi-trance like state you enter into when online, where the definitions of public/private, foreign/domestic, and real/unreal fall away.

Something similar can be said of corruption. As the journalist Oliver Bullough has pointed out, in today’s global corruption schemes every link is as important as the next to move the dirty money round, and the whole is made possible through an economic model built around tax havens.

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Counting Cybercrimes

The internet is more dangerous than any of us knows. The New York Times recently highlighted the longstanding problem in figuring out how many and what sort of crimes occur in cyberspace: People largely fail to report them. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, cybercrimes—the ambiguous grouping of illicit activities that includes everything from the facilitation of sex trafficking to comedic Nigerian prince phishing schemes to ransomware attacks targeting hospitals—may only be reported a mere 10 to 12 percent of the time.

The article rightly addresses the need for proper reporting so that those tasked with fighting crime—be they police or the FBI—have the necessary data to understand the scope and scale of crimes committed. Yet what the article fails to mention is that the issue of underreporting should be understood not just as a serious hindrance to combatting domestic crime, but also as an impediment to addressing national security threats.

In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of state-sponsored cybercriminals, such as the notorious Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear hacking groups linked to Russian military intelligence (GRU) and the Lazarus Group tied to North Korea. The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI report that North Korea has been attacking U.S. businesses in the media, aerospace, financial, and critical infrastructure sectors since 2009. While these groups have famously used hacking methods for espionage and to interfere in the U.S. political system, North Korean hacking groups in particular have been linked to cyber theft of foreign currency from banks and businesses. This theft is likely intended to compensate for the economic sanctions on North Korea’s illicit nuclear program.

State-sponsored cyber theft should be a particular cause for concern for those studying the underreporting of cyberattacks. Because such attacks have the same aims, either outright theft or the coercion of users via ransomware demands, a cybercrime that originates from U.S. territory may look the same as one from an adversarial state. As a result, the same disincentives for reporting non-state-sponsored cybercrime also discourage the reporting of state-sponsored cybercrime. For instance, a business seeking to report a security breach would have to reveal its cybersecurity weaknesses, which may lead customers to leave the business for a more secure competitor. This means that by reporting, a business could suffer not just one loss from the original attack, but a second loss from the wave of vanishing customers.

While businesses may have economic reasons not to report, the government depends on security breach reports to develop strategies for combating state-sponsored hacking groups. It needs that information to halt sanctions-evasion schemes, such as efforts by hacker groups to transfer stolen money to North Korea to prop up its nuclear programs. What’s more, having a clear picture of what these state-sponsored groups are doing better equips the U.S. government to undermine them before they escalate to actions with more serious repercussions, such as attacks on infrastructure that result in casualties.

The Federal government already requires banks to report cyber-theft information through the Suspicious Activity Reporting system for fraud that results in losses over $5,000 if a suspect is identifiable, or over $25,000 whether or not there is a suspect. In cases that incur smaller losses, the bank is not required to report the theft. Banks will generally refund money to individuals that suffer bank fraud. In such a case, a victim has little incentive to involve the police or FBI.

Likewise, hospitals also must disclose certain cyberattacks to the Department of Health and Human Services, though they do not have to make ransomware attacks public, as these don’t necessarily result in stolen patient data. Less-than-clear guidance from the Securities and Exchange Commission also calls for publicly traded companies to disclose material cyber risks and intrusions to investors, but the guidance doesn’t define the term “material,” leading companies to underreport cyber breaches. Perhaps most troublesome, there is no clear, general national reporting requirement to disclose cyberattacks against other types of private businesses.

There are potential problems with mandatory reporting. For instance, it may be better for a company to address a cyber breach quickly rather than focus on reporting requirements, and such requirements could impose yet another burdensome mandate on businesses. These drawbacks may make it unwise or politically infeasible to pass mandatory reporting. However, the potential benefits of reporting are such that the government should encourage businesses to regard reporting cybercrimes as a best practice, with the understanding that it will contribute to strong cybersecurity nationwide.

How can the government persuade businesses to voluntarily adopt this best practice? And how can it increase the incentives for businesses to report cyberattacks while reducing the disincentives?

The national security implications of underreporting, while problematic, could actually be a boon in convincing businesses to report cybercrime. By reporting these crimes, businesses may be able to help the U.S. government more effectively undermine illicit groups bent on injuring us. Convincing companies that they have a patriotic obligation to help combat the efforts of adversarial states, even if it sounds a bit hokey to some, may lead businesses to see theft as a larger attack on the country, not just a failing of their own security. The FBI can work with partners at the state and Federal levels, as well as with the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service, to raise awareness among large and small businesses alike of the fact that foreign adversaries are actively targeting them either to inflict damage on the United States or to prop up their own illicit activities.

The FBI can also make clear to businesses why solving the underreporting issue will fortify national cybersecurity. For instance, if businesses were more likely to report cybercrime, the government would be more capable of defining the scope of the problem and the impact of state-sponsored hacking groups. Reporting would also give the government a better idea of the range of cybercriminal targets, any patterns in the types of organizations subject to attack, and any novel methods of cybercrime it hasn’t yet seen. What’s more, the government may be able to better understand whether a given group of cybercriminals is working toward a broader goal of undermining U.S. interests, as the Russian internet trolls were during the 2016 election.

Businesses should be made aware that, as more companies report cybercrimes and give sufficient information to authorities, those authorities will become better equipped to attribute crimes to a certain group or particular cybercriminal. Current victims of cybercrimes may not believe reporting will lead to a solution to the crime, and in the current environment, they may be right—local police are ill-equipped to deal with cybercrimes that span jurisdictions and require technical sophistication. Believing that reporting any crime—including cybercrime—will do nothing to resolve the issue poses a significant deterrent to reporting. Altering that impression may encourage those businesses that are nervous about reporting to change their calculations.

The problem with attributing cybercrimes to certain criminals or state actors is, of course, that the same tools people use to remain anonymous online are the tools that allow bad actors to hide from authorities. For instance, certain tools allow hackers to “spoof” evidence; they can also borrow tools used by other well-known hacking groups to disguise the origin of their attacks. Yet attribution, while difficult, is becoming more feasible for the government, even with regard to sophisticated state-sponsored cyber actors. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in early 2015 that both the government and private sector security companies are making “significant advances” in attribution.

Certainly, attributing a cyberattack to a state or state-sponsored entity could push the attacker to adopt new methods, or attempt to find better ways to conceal its identity in future attacks. This may lead to an arms race of steadily increasing complexity in attacks and the U.S. defenses against them. In addition, efforts to “name and shame” a country for its bad actions could have repercussions for ongoing U.S. diplomatic efforts, so any public attribution requires a fairly high level of certainty and a great deal of forethought. Yet when possible, public attribution may serve to discourage states and state-sponsored entities. Research indicates that “naming and shaming” can positively alter other types of illicit behavior by foreign states.

In the case of cyberattacks, the U.S. government has already seen positive repercussions from its efforts to “name and shame” bad actors when prosecuting state-supported cyber hackers. In the wake of United States v. Wang Dong, where U.S. officials indicted five Chinese hackers for commercial espionage against U.S. nuclear power, metals, and solar industries, China and the United States agreed to forgo the state-supported “cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property.” While this has only partially reduced Chinese efforts to conduct commercial espionage in the United States, it has created a precedent both for developing an international norm against cyber-based commercial espionage and for future criminal prosecutions when the U.S. government detects state-sponsored espionage.

In addition to indicting Chinese hackers for espionage, the U.S. government has publicly attributed cyberattacks to hostile actors a few times in the previous years, including attributing the WannaCry ransomware and Sony Pictures Entertainment attacks to North Korea, the Democratic National Committee attack to Russia, and the Las Vegas Sands Casino attack to Iran. These actions are a step in the right direction, and not only for foreign policy—even small businesses might be encouraged to report cybercrime now that they see the government cracking down on these attacks.

Reporting cybercrimes on the business side, and attributing cybercrimes to specific illicit actors on the government side, may eventually cause cybercriminals to alter their calculations regarding the potential benefits of a cyberattack. And once our cybercrime-fighters are better equipped to understand the patterns and scale of cyberattacks, they will also be more effective at punishing cybercriminals (currently a difficult undertaking). In a deterrence-by-punishment scenario, a cybercriminal may be dissuaded either from committing the crime in the first place or from committing more in the future by the threat of painful or costly countermeasures.

As unappealing as it may be for businesses to report cyberattacks, they will find it less costly once more companies begin to do so. The U.S. government cannot eliminate cybercrime, whether by states or independent criminals. But it can encourage the best practices that will make the pickings slimmer and harder to reach for our online predators.

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