Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 108

The True Cost of Trump’s Military Parade

President Trump, the Commander-in-Chief of America’s armed forces, has reportedly directed the Pentagon to begin planning a military parade that would take to the streets of Washington, DC later this year. As critics of the idea have pointed out, the proposed parade is extravagantly wasteful, untethered to any precedent in American history, strikingly reminiscent of tin-pot dictatorships, and a comically transparent example of Trumpian self-absorption masquerading as an effort to “honor the troops,” commingling as it does our President’s vainglorious love of self with his obvious affinity for the foreign strongmen who can command their goose-stepping without regard to cost or public sentiment.

Convincing though such criticisms are, they miss what could be the costliest long-term aspect of Le défilé militaire Trump: the potential for the President to politicize support for the U.S. military and erode U.S. civil-military relations. That’s because, if the parade idea goes forward, Trump is sure to use the inevitable protests against the event to do what he does best: establish a new wedge issue to divide Americans on topics and institutions that previously enjoyed widespread support. Think the military is immune to Trump’s toxic knack for conjuring divisiveness from thin air? Think again. Or, better yet, ask the National Football League (NFL) Commissioner, Roger Goodell.

In an interview with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro on Saturday, Trump argued that parading military equipment and troops down Pennsylvania Avenue would be “something great for the spirit of the country,” and that “the generals would love to do it, I tell you, and so would I.”

While America’s active duty military leaders have, appropriately, remained silent on deliberations with their boss concerning the parade, service members and many other Americans have not. In an informal poll conducted by the Military Times, whose readership skews toward active duty service members, their families, and veterans, nearly 90 percent of respondents declared Trump’s proposal a waste of money and time. A more rigorous survey recently conducted by Quinnipiac University found that three quarters of voters, including a slim majority of Republicans, judge the estimated $10 million to $30 million price tag for the parade a poor use of government funds.

The parade idea has also generated pushback from influential voices on both sides of America’s political aisle. Rob O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL, self-described killer of Osama bin Laden, and Fox News contributor, has called the parade “third world bullshit” that will eat up weeks of service members’ time better spent on training to fight. Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana responded to the idea by noting that “Confidence is silent and insecurity is loud. America is the most powerful country in all of human history, everybody knows it, and we don’t need to show it off.” Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, meanwhile, said that a parade focused on “Soviet-style hardware” is “not who we are” and “kind of cheesy.”

Not to be outdone, Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern has called the proposed parade an “absurd waste of money” sponsored by a Commander-in-Chief who “acts more like dictator than president.” And left-leaning activists have pledged to disrupt any parade, in some cases vowing to place themselves in front of tanks, Tiananmen style.

Far from giving Trump pause, such signs of resistance may instead give him exactly what he seeks. If ever the President had a concrete notion of how to govern from the middle, he long ago gave it up. Instead, from assigning blame to “both sides” for violence at the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, to barring transgender service members from the military, to rejecting efforts to extend legal protections to so-called Dreamers, Trump has repeatedly staked out positions that have little chance of growing his low favorability ratings (much less advancing viable law or policy), but that do serve to rally his base.

Focusing on so-called “unexpected cultural flashpoints,” such as those presented by the Charlottesville rally and the decision by some NFL players to kneel during the national anthem in protest against police brutality, may be the only discernable governing plan that the President plans to take into the 2018 midterm elections. And while, as a political strategy, this approach seems unlikely to win converts, Trump has demonstrated time and again that he can use it to politicize and negatively impact cultural and governmental institutions.

The NFL has thoroughly absorbed this lesson in the past year. The league quickly lost its status as a relative bastion of apolitical fandom after Trump reacted to protests by suggesting that team owners fire players exercising their First Amendment rights. To their credit, NFL owners did not take the President up on his suggestion, and the league paid the price: Trump’s broadsides slashed the NFL’s net favorability rating along largely partisan lines. While Republicans’ views of the NFL rebounded somewhat throughout the winter, they again dipped when Trump used his State of the Union address to take a thinly veiled swipe at the league’s players on the same topic.

A similar story has played out with respect to Trump’s attacks on the FBI and Justice Department. While, until recently, most Americans ranked the FBI among the top federal agencies in terms of performance, Trump’s efforts to damage the bureau in order to weaken Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation have taken their toll. A poll taken earlier this month shows precipitous declines in support for the FBI, again along highly partisan lines.

Unlike his approach to the NFL and FBI, President Trump seeks to wrap himself in the mantle of the U.S. military, rather than to attack it. Nevertheless, if Trump’s behavior to date is any guide, the most likely outcome of his parade idea will be increased polarization surrounding one of the few American institutions that still enjoys the broad-based confidence of the American people.

Why? Because Trump can’t help but label those who oppose his policies as unpatriotic, and will no doubt seek to tar anyone who speaks against the parade in such terms. This deliberate conflation of patriotism with support for an unnecessary show of militarism will, of course, engender blowback of its own. Hyper-partisan media and Russian trolls will spring into action, eager to inflame passions.

The military, meanwhile, will be caught in the middle. Members of the U.S. armed forces are prohibited by law, regulation, and custom from most political activity, and yet, come parade time, they are likely to be thrust into the center of a deliberately crafted culture war.

Since America’s disaster in Vietnam and the reinvention of our military as an all-volunteer force in the 1970s, Americans have grown accustomed to a quiet bargain. Under the terms of this deal, fewer and fewer serve, and, in exchange, those who do are generally lionized. Thoughtful critics of this state of affairs—many themselves veterans—lament that the result is a growing divide between a professional warrior class and a distracted public.

A healthy way to bridge this divide would be to reinstate a form of compulsory national service, which would reconnect the American citizenry to those who fight in its name. But this outcome remains remote—and President Trump may soon force a change in civil-military relations of a very different, highly troubling kind.

Trump is, of course, far from the first U.S. President to seek to bolster his own position by making an outward show of his role as Commander-in-Chief. He is seemingly unique, however, in his capacity to break with longstanding norms that undergird America’s institutions. A President hell-bent on wielding the military as a political cudgel will take America into civil-military territory unseen since the tumult of the 1960s and early 1970s. That is the true cost of an unnecessary parade.

The post The True Cost of Trump’s Military Parade appeared first on The American Interest.

How to Talk with Russia

On January 1, 1986, millions of Soviet citizens turned on their TV sets to be addressed by their greatest enemy.

“Good evening, this is Ronald Reagan, the President of the United States…”

After years of lobbying, Reagan had convinced Mikhail Gorbachev to allow him to speak to the Soviet people directly. His pre-recorded, five-minute talk saw him use his acting gifts to the full. He spoke not as a man of power, but as a regular American, troubled by years of confrontation, able to differentiate between the Russian people and the Communist party and government. He urged a partnership for peace and spoke in Russian when he looked forward to a future of “clear skies.” He also insisted on his values, saying “Our democratic system is founded on the belief in the sanctity of human life and the rights of the individual.” He described as “a sacred truth” the conviction that “every individual is a unique gift of God, with his or her own special talents, abilities, hopes, and dreams. Respect for all people is essential to peace.”

This address—which was coupled with a similar opportunity for Mikhail Gorbachev in the United States—demagnetized the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and lent a human element to the pre-existing military and diplomatic avenues of communication between the two superpowers. Soon after, Margaret Thatcher went one step further, when in a live interview on Soviet television she deftly inspired the audience to examine the problems inherent in the Soviet system. “Nothing like this had ever happened on Soviet TV screens,” remembers Boris Kalyagin, one of her interviewers. “We… let her tell our audience what she thinks about our domestic politics.”

Thatcher and Reagan’s breakthrough appearances took place during a wave of well-funded and concerted public diplomacy towards the people of the USSR. Millions of Soviets tuned in to Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and the BBC, which were censored and muted but all the more trusted for that, spreading the gospel of human rights, individual freedom, and access to information. Meanwhile, Western cultural and commercial products—jazz and soap operas, jeans and chewing gum—had an almost magical appeal. Soon after, the barriers between the USSR and the West crumbled, and the world seemed to be celebrating a new era of convergence and mutual understanding.

Today we live in an age where the internet and cable channels allow countries and cultures to communicate to an unprecedented extent; where the relative freedom to move and exchange goods and services was meant to lead to a “global village,” an interconnected world of peace and prosperity. Yet for all this openness, the psychological barriers and divisions within countries and between states are more marked than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

Today there is no iron curtain. Russians have at least some access to an alternative information flow if they want it. The Kremlin, however, has been very effective at making the population not want to access alternative sources of information.

The challenge for anyone who wants to speak to the Russian people—whether states engaged in public diplomacy, international broadcasters, NGOs, companies or individuals—is therefore to stimulate the desire to seek out high-quality information. The central issue is not the flow of information as such, but motivation, developing the “reason” to talk in the first place. But to understand this we need to investigate why Russians were prepared to engage with Western voices before—and what went wrong.

Defining Public Diplomacy

Public diplomacy is often associated with Joseph Nye’s concept of “soft power.” Soft power is the “ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction rather than through coercion or payment.” A country’s soft power “rests on its resources of culture, values and policies.” As Nye argues, public diplomacy has a long history as a “means of promoting a country’s soft power and was essential in winning the cold war.”

A good starting point for understanding  20th-century public diplomacy is Alexander Wendt’s theory that the state can be understood as a person. States have recognizable personalities, which affect how they are perceived and their behaviour. These personalities are consciously constructed to reflect what elites believe their country stands for. According to Alexander Wendt, “state personalities” may mimic human behavior patterns: Some states are friendly, extroverted and loud communicators, while others may be melancholic and slow.

Public diplomacy, however, should not be confused with propaganda, strategic communication, or PR. As Nick Cull, Professor of Public Diplomacy at USC Annenberg, defines it, “Propaganda is about dictating your message to an audience and persuading them you are right. Public Diplomacy is about listening to the other side.” I would expand this definition to “listening to the other side and finding causes for communication.” In the age of social media and interactive technologies the need to understand and listen to your target audience is more important than ever. Public diplomacy becomes even more of a self-critical conversation rather than a lecture.

This conversation can be explained with the language—if not the theory itself—of memetic culture, first articulated by Richard Dawkins and later taking on a life of its own. “Memes,” in Dawkins’s original formulation, were units of cultural transmission like “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases” and fashions, which spread by “leaping from brain to brain” in a process of “imitation.” Whenever an idea—or a meme—travels, it is transformed by the process of traveling to a new political context. For an individual to remember an idea, it needs to be relevant to their own political circumstances. For an individual to adopt the idea into their thinking and to thus transform it, the idea needs to be able to fit into a pre-existing individual narrative and fill a pre-existing individual need.

State Personality: From the Cold War to 2018

During the Cold War, the United States’ “personality” was based around the concept of freedom. The roots of this freedom narrative can be found in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms—freedom of speech and worship and freedom from fear and want—which had been articulated in 1941 as the basis for a democratic and peaceful world. With the onset of the Cold War, the United States quietly dropped the idea of “freedom from want” as a right: It was difficult to uphold while denouncing the Soviet provision of social housing. Instead the United States emphasized civil, political, and cultural rights. The “freedom personality” was packaged in support for “free-form” arts such as jazz and abstract expressionism; promoted through the allure of economic freedom and its material benefits such as Western cars or cosmetics; institutionalized in political freedoms such as religious rights and the right to travel; and expressed through freedom of information. This “personality” also gave reasons for engagement: Russians would tune into Radio Free Europe or the BBC World Service because they provided information which Russians had no access to domestically; and they broadcast music and cultural products which were censored in the USSR.

Today the Kremlin has co-opted and spun many elements of this “freedom” personality. Western cultural symbols such as pop music and reality television sit next to Kremlin hate speech and renewed authoritarianism on Russian television, proving that you can watch MTV while spurning democracy, drive a Mercedes while imprisoning dissidents. Freedom of movement and religious freedom have been granted, while Kremlin propaganda works hard to undercut the allure of other political freedoms.

The Kremlin puts forward the narrative that democracy and human rights are, at best, irrelevant to success, and, at worst, a tool of the duplicitous West used to justify intervention in domestic affairs. Kremlin propaganda reiterates the idea that Western democracy is a sham; that the democratic revolutions of 1989 led to unhappiness in Central Europe; that Western polities are governed through conspiracies and cabals. The Kremlin may have failed to provide a strong “Russian idea,” but it has been successful in promoting the concept that the whole world is rotten: Cynicism has replaced communism. Meanwhile the West has abandoned human rights as a priority, preferring trade and security, making its talk of “values” easier to attack. The West has continued to do business with autocratic rulers, even in the face of evidence of corruption and worse—something Russian audiences are very aware of.

Back in the Cold War, the Kremlin jammed and censored foreign broadcasts. Today the Kremlin’s approach could be defined as “white noise jamming”: No physical technological device is used to disturb foreign messaging, but a mental block does the work instead, as all foreign criticisms are discredited as a symptom of Russophobia.

The overarching conspiracy narrative of the whole world being opposed to Russia is highly successful. After Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, 30 years of good will towards America were ruined when the Russian President commanded his mass media to describe America as an existential enemy. Media outlets responded with enthusiasm. Positive attitudes to the United States, which were usually in the 60 percent range and had rarely fallen lower than 50 percent (during the 1999 NATO bombing of Belgrade, for instance) decreased immediately. By 2015, only 15 percent of Russians had a favorable opinion of the United States. NGOs and educational ties were cut. When Western media predictably responded with Cold War-style projections of Vladmir Putin as an all-powerful Bond villain, they walked straight into the Kremlin’s narrative trap by helping the Kremlin define itself as under attack.

Russia can be described as a state wearing a propaganda Walkman, inside a permanent loop where any Western criticism is now interpreted as part of an “information war” against the country. Thus the Panama Papers leak, which showed how members of President Putin’s closest entourage were laundering money, or the investigation into state-sponsored sports doping by the Kremlin and subsequent ban on Olympic Russian athletes, only helped reinforce the sense that Russia is under attack.

The challenge, then, lies in breaking through the cynicism. So far, Western statesmen, editors, and journalists have responded to Russian propaganda defensively: pointing out lies, rebuffing accusations, disclosing hidden motives, and demonstrating the ugliness of the Russian regime. But while such responses are natural, they are also by nature reactive, and risk helping the Kremlin by reinforcing its messaging.

We need to move from reaction to a positive approach, which means rethinking the old freedom brand—and deliberately choosing the new personality, communicators, and content to fit our present moment. 

A New Model

1) The Personality

The original “freedom brand” the United States built up in the Cold War long ago lost its coherence. The challenge for today’s public diplomats and broadcasters is to find aspects of the American idea that are still powerful and resonate with Russian audiences. To understand this will require consistent and in-depth social media sentiment analysis and target audience analysis. However, the over-arching idea should be the Pursuit of Happiness, with a sequence of supporting themes.

Progress and The Pursuit of Happiness: The positive, progress-orientated, future-envisioning nature of the United States and European Union contrasts with illiberal regimes like the Kremlin’s, which feed on nostalgia and cynicism and are never concerned with progress. Open societies embrace change and are quicker to adapt and grow; autocratic societies tend to reject unplanned development for institutions and humans alike. Autocracies inevitably limit the potential of their citizens.

Whether the messenger is Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Sergey Brin, there is no more powerful message for U.S. public diplomats than the message that anything is possible.

Imagine the Future: The future has disappeared from the Russian regime’s public discourse. A cynical society cannot imagine a way forward. Economic modernizers with coherent plans for the future have been banished. Focusing on Western ideas of the future, from urban planning to economic policy, technology, and teaching can stimulate a discussion inside of Russia about where its own regime is leading it.

Innovation: Silicon Valley represents American dynamism. For all their efforts, Russia has not been able to create its own version or boost its nanotechnology sector as trumpeted by former President Medvedev. Even more painfully, many successful American tech entrepreneurs have Russian roots, a clear case of the Russian state’s failure to empower its own people.

Health, Social Welfare, and Charities: Some of the most important activism in today’s Russia is around the subject of health provision. High-profile charities focus on cancer care for children and adults, hospices, finding a cure for cystic fibrosis, and so on. The elite’s access to Western medical care outrages ordinary citizens and undermines the official anti-Western line: When “patriotic” Russian politicians head to Germany for treatment, they show their utter hypocrisy. The lack of provision for the elderly, and the early age of death, highlight the weaknesses of the Russian model. By supplying constant and accurate information about health care in the West, public diplomacy can stimulate a conversation around a subject that reveals the Kremlin’s false equivalence to be a sham.

Education: Even Kremlin elites who pose as anti-Western send their children to study in the West, especially the United States. This is a clear case where American achievements are admired. 

Consumer Culture and Commercial Culture: States in propaganda Walkmans are still very much exposed to the Western consumer culture; this is a weak spot of all developing countries with authoritarian rule. Domestic content cannot match that created in Hollywood or London; domestic goods are not of high enough quality to satisfy demand. Autocratic states are incapable of producing relevant “import substitutions” for the iPhone and Tesla, nor do they have the creative powers and professional capacity to churn out Avatar or Star Wars. Despite the rapid development of its entertainment sector, the Kremlin is still reliant on Western stars and products, from soap operas to arthouse cinema. These remain a strong conversation starter. If films and programs with Western stars were made about themes that resonate with a Russian viewer, they will be watched. If Western stars engage Russians in communication, they will be listened to.

2) The Communicators

The United States and European countries need a pool of communicators whom Russians will immediately listen to, who command respect above the barriers and who can cut through the mess of digital media. Most State Department officials, democracy promoters, and human rights activists will immediately be pigeon-holed as out to subvert Russia. “Russia experts” can come with baggage.

America (and the West in general) needs a “dream team” of communicators, who would be involved in a consistent way, making timely and emotional interventions at critical junctures. Cultivating such a group would demand effective interagency coordination and strategizing—but it would also demand that these communicators maintain some distance from official U.S. government hierarchies, and can operate independently from official government policy.

There is some precedent for such a mandate. During the Cold War, the State Department (and later the now-defunct United States Information Agency) effectively leveraged the appeal of non-political artists, seeking to export the best of American culture abroad. The “jazz diplomacy” that shared the works of Louis Armstrong and Oscar Peterson with Warsaw Pact countries did not just introduce audiences to a particularly American art form; it also sent a positive human message about African-Americans’ own “pursuit of happiness.”

Apart from positive cultural messaging, the U.S. government also developed a coordinated strategy to fight back against Soviet disinformation. The Active Measures Working Group, an interagency organization that functioned between 1981 and 1992 to confront and mitigate Moscow’s informational warfare, could provide a blueprint for a new effort along these lines. Such an initiative should lie outside the State Department and Pentagon, and cannot be coupled with the Broadcasting Board of Governors, as Voice of America and RFE/RL should maintain their legacy operations.

Instead, the group should have a mandate that allows it to engage people and institutions that have a leverage in the information space—from Hollywood stars to Silicon Valley tycoons, from SpaceX to CNN—in order to coordinate messaging and monitor its effects.

These communicators would have to brave the battles of Russian television, but could also talk directly through social media, whether YouTube or Twitter. Effective messages are sent over multiple platforms and targeted to multiple audiences—with messengers carefully chosen for the task.

An A-list selection might include:

The Innovator: Elon Musk, who appeals to Russian ideas of the visionary scientist.
The Soldier: High-ranking U.S. military officials like James Mattis and H.R. McMaster are highly respected in Russia, even in the present environment, and are rarely ridiculed on Russian media (unlike their political counterparts). Senior officers known for their combat and strategic achievements could make more effective spokesmen than commonly understood.
The Movie Star: George Clooney, who combines star status with a social conscience and commitment to journalism, would be a strong candidate.
The Philanthropist/Activist: Melinda and Bill Gates, or digital activists like Eli Pariser or Beau Willimon (who is also greatly respected as the showrunner of House of Cards) could be included in this category. Russians are sensitive to the issue of social justice, while they are generally powerless to achieve it in their own country. It is crucially important to demonstrate how personal actions and investments in social change may make the world better place.

This might all sound fanciful, but if one considers how effectively the UK has used David Beckham as a spokesperson, or how the French government can talk through Bernard Henri-Lévy, then it comes to seem not so speculative.

3) Content:

Beyond the News: The Russian mass media, controlled and orchestrated by the government, offers a mix of home-grown and imported high-quality entertainment to attract viewers towards its own propaganda. If the West wants to compete with Kremlin channels, they would ideally need to invest in entertainment with an underlying social message relevant to Russian audiences. This means creating fictional films and documentaries especially for Russian audiences. This sort of investment is probably only possible if Western countries deliberately pool resources through a mechanism akin to the Nordic Film Board. Current funding is tragically fragmented, making any kind of impact minimal.

At the very least, existing Western cultural assets which embed core democratic values as a part of their message should be made more readily available. That means translating everything from the foundational works in liberalism, social justice and ethics, to relevant modern scholarship in communications, political science, international relations, history and philosophy, to classic movies and TV series. Relevant articles in magazines, think tank reports, TED talks and so on should be immediately available in Russian, as should press releases from state institutions and NGOs. Relevant archives which relate to Russia-West relations should also be translated into Russian. There are already some EU-based initiatives (like the Adenauer Foundation or Adam Smith Institute) which support this kind of work for a narrow group of social scientists and students. But a more broad-based approach is needed, and could be conceived and developed by the interagency group mentioned above.

Such efforts may not yield immediate results, but in the long run they are key.

The News: When broadcasting news into Russia, Western public broadcasters are faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, accurate information about such issues as Ukraine and Syria is part of any news agenda. On the other hand, providing that information can play right into the Kremlin’s propaganda strategy, which portrays all Western voices as part of a campaign to discredit Russia. Western broadcasters cannot pretend they are not voices from the United States or European Union; Russian audiences instantly see them as such and Kremlin propaganda will always frame them as following a hidden agenda. The more they attack Russian foreign policy, the more it reinforces the Kremlin’s message that the West is out to get Russia.

This rejection of direct criticism is borne out in the social media interactions of Russian viewers on the Facebook page of Current Time, Radio Free Europe’s premier Russian language TV news program. Posts about the war in Ukraine usually receive less engagement than more human stories about Russian lives beyond Moscow. The highest amount of interactions were for stories about Karelian villagers defending their forest and about the provision of laundry for the homeless.

In order to pursue an effective news strategy, international broadcasting needs to differentiate between Russian language audiences. One could estimate that Ukrainians, for example, need reassurance that the West cares about their (military) security and reforms; Baltic Russians that they belong in the European Union; while Russians in Russia want to hear about examples of positive change throughout Russia and beyond. Programming needs to move beyond mere Kremlin bashing and an obsessive focus on Moscow political intrigues to include constructive and solutions-based news, which gives viewers concrete examples of how to improve their lives.

Crowd-Sourcing a New Deal

Post-Soviet Russians feel they never received a true deal from the West. Whether fair or not, symbolic gestures such as G8 membership on the one hand and lectures about democracy on the other did not a “new deal” make. Russians were offered nothing of the sweep and scale as the EU membership given to Central European countries.

Today’s challenges demand an open dialogue with a broad array of Russians on the “terms of coexistence.” The U.S. and EU governments must decisively articulate their goals towards Russia. There is no need to sugarcoat the message or pursue a false balance in interests: Russians expect America to penetrate every aspect of their life and many believe the West is out to destroy Russia’s very existence. Notwithstanding the groundlessness of such convictions, they will probably not disappear even when Vladimir Putin vacates the stage. And with Putin’s inevitable fourth (and last) presidential term approaching, it is only growing more urgent for Russians and the West to start asking what life will look like without him. It is also crucial to keep the dialogue as broad as possible, reaching out to ordinary Russians and not elites only, and engaging the most indoctrinated social groups, like the military and law enforcement.

Crafting a comprehensive public diplomacy strategy of this kind is a tall order. However, the enduring popularity of Western culture and way of life shows that Russians are not intrinsically opposed to the West. With the right communicators, new media can open up the space to create a transnational conversation with the ultimate promise of freedom, security, and prosperity for all. Such an effort will not be easy, and it will no doubt be attacked by trolls and cynics—but ultimately, it is the only way forward.

Ronald Reagan, “New Year’s Messages of President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev ,” January 1, 1986. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=36367.

BBC, “Boris Kalyagin: interview with Thatcher – the beginning of glasnost”, April 17, 2013. http://www.bbc.com/russian/russia/2013/04/130415_thatcher_soviet_interview.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., “Public Diplomacy and Soft Power”, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 616, Public Diplomacy in a Changing World, (2008), pp. 94-109.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Alexander Wendt, “The state as a person in international theory”, Review of International Studies, 30, (2004), 289-316.

Nicholas J. Cull, Public Diplomacy: Global Engagement in the Era of Social Media (London: Polity, forthcoming).

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, “The misunderstanding of memes: Biography of an unscientific object, 1976-1999”, Perspectives on Science, 20, no. 1, (2012): 75-104.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (revised ed. Oxford: OUP, 1989), 192. Cited in Asunció Álvarezm, “Memetics: Evolutionary Theory of Cultural Transmission,” Sorites.org, December 2004, http://www.sorites.org/Issue_15/alvarez.htm.

For the full data in Russian, see the Levada Center, “Otnoshenie k stranam,” February 12, 2018, https://www.levada.ru/2018/02/12/otnoshenie-k-stranam/.

Peter Pomernatsev, “Vladimir Putin’s message to the world: you are just as bad,” Financial Times, July 19, 2016. https://www.ft.com/content/de025422-4d9b-11e6-8172-e39ecd3b86fc

For more on this subject, see Lisa E. Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009).

As a popular joke in Russia in 2015 went, “Never have Russians lived such a hard life as they do under Obama’s presidency.”

The post How to Talk with Russia appeared first on The American Interest.

Farewell, Jacob Zuma

Last week, South Africans bade farewell to President Jacob Zuma.

Jacob Zuma, who accepted 783 irregular payments from a financial advisor convicted of graft. Jacob Zuma, who spent $16 million out of public coffers for “enhancements” at his homestead, Nkandla. Jacob Zuma, who once had unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman—she says it was rape—and took a shower afterwards to “minimize the risk of contracting the disease.” Jacob Zuma, who curried favor for the Gupta brothers—an industrialist trio who run a sprawling business empire in South Africa—and looked on as his family members accepted plum positions at Gupta-owned companies. Jacob Zuma, who had hoped to install his ex-wife as his successor so he could avoid prosecution in his retirement. Jacob Zuma, who only stepped down after his own African National Congress (ANC) party threatened to join with opposition parties in a parliamentary vote of no confidence against him. Jacob Zuma, whose divisive rhetoric and corrupt rule undermined the promise of “nonracial democracy” at home and sent South African influence plunging abroad.

Good riddance.

Some are celebrating Zuma’s departure as a sign that South Africa’s institutions, while challenged by the Zuma years, retain their vital strength. Writing in The Washington Post, Patrick Gaspard, who served as the American ambassador in Pretoria from 2013 to 2016, trumpeted, “There is nothing wrong in South Africa that cannot be fixed by all that is right in South Africa.” John Campbell, a career diplomat who also served in South Africa, wrote on his blog, “Zuma, in so many ways a disaster for South Africa, was a challenge, but never an existential threat, to the country’s democracy and rule of law.”

The language of “existential threats” sets up a straw man argument that distorts our thinking about the health of South African democracy. Jacob Zuma may not have been a nuclear missile inbound for Pretoria. But he was “patient zero” in a corruption epidemic that threatened—and still threatens—to rot South Africa’s institutions from within. We should not understate what Zuma hath wrought.

Recall that it was not South Africa’s much-vaunted political institutions and social movements that dealt the Zuma presidency its death blow. His own party turned on him in the end.

President Zuma’s time in office might have been short-lived, after all, had the National Prosecuting Authority not mysteriously dropped its corruption case against him in 2009. Countless journalists worked tirelessly to expose corruption at the highest levels, but until February 2018, Zuma retained enough support in Parliament to thwart a vote of no confidence. Even as hashtag after hashtag and banner after banner read “#ZumaMustFall,” Zuma was still standing.

Mere months ago—with the courts, the press, and civil society arrayed against him for years—Zuma remained firmly ensconced in power, the consummate survivor. At the ANC party conference in December 2017, he nearly succeeded in passing the torch to his handpicked successor. Zuma’s fall was far from inevitable.

Journalists and judges may have chipped away at Zuma’s armor, but it was the ANC—eyeing its worsening poll numbers, worrying about the next election—that finally thrust the dagger.

The Brutus to Zuma’s Caesar is Cyril Ramaphosa. Elected last December as President of a deeply divided ANC, Ramaphosa has moved quickly to flip pro-Zuma votes in the ANC’s elite National Executive Committee (NEC). The NEC—an ANC party organ, not an institution of state—sided with Ramaphosa in its call for Zuma to step down, beginning the cascade that led to collapsing support for Zuma in Parliament and Zuma’s eventual resignation.

That it took Zuma, Ramaphosa, and the NEC a full week of “constructive discussions” (read: tense late-night meetings) before Zuma agreed to resign raises several questions. What was discussed at those meetings? What were the terms of Zuma’s resignation? Was there a deal? Answers to these questions will emerge in coming weeks.

It bears emphasizing: ANC leaders didn’t jettison Zuma because he was corrupt. They knew that ages ago. They dumped him because he was no longer popular.

The ANC is a political party, so its prime objective is to win elections. Having Jacob Zuma serve out his term as President of the Republic would have threatened the party’s performance in 2019. But disowning Zuma isn’t smart politics either, as the former President remains popular in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’s second-most populous province and a major bastion of votes for the ANC. Hence the absurd political dance between Zuma and Ramaphosa that has played out in recent days.

First, in his State of the Nation Address, Ramaphosa thanked Jacob Zuma “for his service to the nation,” a conciliatory gesture that drew boos from the assembled parliamentarians. A few days later, Ramaphosa threw a farewell party for his predecessor at Tuynhuys, the presidential residence. In a group photo from the event, Zuma could be seen beaming, standing at the very center of the group, surrounded by the cabinet he unnecessarily expanded over the years. Ramaphosa was standing off to one side, his head askew, his arms tucked awkwardly by his sides.

Former president Jacob Zuma had an opportunity to say goodbyes to his Cabinet ministers and their deputies pic.twitter.com/fHN92M3iLY

— MinPresidencyRadebe (@radebe_jeff) February 20, 2018

Soon, if he keeps his promises, Ramaphosa will be standing at the center of a considerably smaller—and hopefully more competent—cabinet. Ramaphosa and his cabinet will busy themselves with restoring confidence in South Africa’s finances, ginning up economic growth, and preparing the ANC for victory in the 2019 elections. Much less certain is their dedication to the anti-corruption agenda. They cannot seriously pursue anti-corruption without touching Zuma.

This much is certain: In Ramaphosa’s new cabinet, Jacob Zuma will no longer be in the picture. But, somewhere out of the frame, will Zuma still be smiling?

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Black Panther: An Afrocentric Ethical Fable

Black Panther is a rarity in the over-crowded universe of superhero film: a critical and commercial success. One is tempted to compare it to last year’s Wonder Woman: Both films revitalize a tired genre dominated by white male leads by exploring the possibilities of a diversity of protagonists. But neither film is an easy, politically correct exercise; both succeed, first and foremost, as popular entertainment in which social and ideological themes are subordinate to plot, character development and, of course, loud action.

Subordinate, but not absent. Black Panther takes up the politics of pan-Africanism and post-colonialism and will doubtless inspire scores of graduate student dissertations. Most of the action takes place in the fictional African nation of Wakanda, a near-utopia where traditional customs seamlessly coexist with hyper high tech: Supersonic aircraft are shaped like African ceremonial masks, spears and machetes are supercharged with electricity, a bustling open-air market thrives in the shadow of skyscrapers.

Wakanda is, of course, Afrocentric wish fulfillment: Africa as it should have been, preserved in its rich traditions, free of the exploitation of the colonial encounter and the horrors of the slave trade. To the outside world, Wakanda is a stereotypical impoverished Third World country—the kind of place the ignorant and bigoted might call a “shithole” full of undesirable potential immigrants who will never “go back to their huts” if allowed to taste the pleasures of the advanced West. In fact, the Wakandans have carefully cultivated this image in order to ensure that unenlightened outsiders do not discover their country’s secret riches—in particular, a precious metal called Vibranium, which has been responsible for their technological advancement.

In one sense Vibranium is simply the explanation for the Black Panther’s super power—like Spider Man’s radioactive spider bite or Superman’s extra-terrestrial heritage. But in the Afrocentric mythos that defines the film, it is also a metaphor for black culture—a treasure trove of artistic and spiritual resources that, like Wakanda, are “hiding in plain sight”— disdained by whites, but also always at risk of being exploited by them.

Here I say “black culture”—not African—because Wakanda has less to do with Africa than with black America. The film appropriately begins and ends not in Africa, but in Oakland, California, birthplace of the Black Panther Party. The black nationalism of the 1960s combined the tradition of pan-Africanism pioneered by W.E.B. Du Bois with the post-colonialism of the late 20th century, developing an analysis of American racism as a form of domestic colonialism: black inner cities were analogous to Third World nations, simultaneously denigrated and exploited by white capitalists. The central conflict in the film involves the two competing strains of the black nationalism that defined the Panthers. Wakanda in its splendid isolation represents the apotheosis of the separatism that has inspired ideals as diverse as Booker T. Washington’s focus on black self-reliance, the “buy black” movement, and the Panthers’ community service ethos; the villain—or perhaps counter-protagonist—in the film represents the ideology of violent resistance. The pivotal question in the film is whether Wakanda will remain hidden like El Dorado, or use its technological prowess to free Africa and the African diaspora from poverty and exploitation BAMN—“by any means necessary,” for those who do not speak Sixtyese.

The pathos of the film lies in the limitations of both visions. Isolation is a viable option for Wakanda only because of the supernatural Vibranium, which magically and inexplicably allows an advanced civilization to develop without the benefits of trade and cross-cultural learning or the ill-gotten gains derived from conquest. Consequently, Wakanda is an odd blend of old and new, tradition and modernity: Its warriors use technologically enhanced spears and shields; but its futuristic weapons, medicine, and transportation are overseen by a form of absolute monarchy that most of the world cast off centuries ago.

The separatist vision inspired black self-sufficiency movements across the United States, from the dream of thriving “chocolate cities” such as Detroit and Oakland, to the creation of smaller majority black cities such as East Palo Alto. The flaw in the idea that isolated black communities—whether in central Africa or in the central cities of the United States—could mirror the prosperity of wealthy white ones is apparent, however, from the political critique of white imperialism and exploitation that underlies black nationalism. Whites—in America and elsewhere—do not simply have autonomous institutions; they have hegemonic ones, and hegemony is not a position everyone can occupy.

In a sense, the ideal of black separatism is the photo negative of the myth that “Western civilization” is the product of the solitary genius and industry of the Europe. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argued in an excellent series in the Guardian, what we call Western civilization is actually the product of the combined genius and industry of the many cultures from which Europeans have learned, borrowed, and stolen: Chinese industrial and administrative skill, the mathematical and scientific genius of the North African and Arab world, the political philosophy of Mediterranean societies, and of course wealth acquired through both free trade and plunder from people and lands the world over. Western civilization has been the civilization of empire—as were the great Chinese and Arab civilizations from which Europeans learned so much. And while it is plausible that a society could become as advanced as the West without the fruits of conquest, it is implausible that it could become so without the benefits of cosmopolitanism.

Hence, the competing strand: violent resistance. The Black Panther’s nemesis is an American raised on the mean streets of Oakland who wants to use Wakanda’s advanced tech to wage war against imperialists and white racists everywhere. Once again, only the magical Vibranium makes this a viable option: Violent resistance has a nasty tendency to provoke a violent response, which, in the real world, makes it a losing strategy for the dispossessed. This practical flaw, as much as ethical or religious opposition to violence, inspired the non-violent resistance of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.—the late-20th century resistance movements that have achieved durable successes.

The film ends with the Black Panther deciding to devote Wakanda’s resources to the global improvement of human kind: “the wise build bridges; the foolish build barriers” he opines, a not-too-subtle dig at America’s 45th President. Cosmopolitan engagement wins out over the politics of both isolationism and violent resistance. The film thus serves the classic function of myth— to provide a poetic account of the political ethics of a community.

Black Panther offers a syncretic, stylized pan-Africanism to be sure—closer to Ron Karenga’s Kwanza than to DuBois’s scholarly engagement with African and black American culture. But the Africa of Black Panther is scarcely more fanciful than many widely accepted national myths: King Arthur’s Round Table or even the idealized drama of the American frontier. And if the pop Afrocentrism that combines Swahili, the artifacts of Nubia and tribal rituals of sub-Saharan peoples is unfaithful to history, so is, for instance, the reimagined Scottish Highland tradition, which the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper points out was developed in the late 18th century, a mishmash of disparate Celtic practices, promoted by social climbing Scots and Anglo-Saxon profiteers. If the historian Benedict Anderson is correct that nationalism is to be judged, not by its truth or falsity, but by the style in which it is imagined, the black diaspora could do worse than the stylish imaginings offered in Black Panther.

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The Economic Origins of Populist Support

The rise and spread of populist leaders across the West has become a defining feature of our current political moment. And in the United States, the election of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election has launched a debate among scholars as to why so many Americans supported his candidacy. In particular, opinions diverge as to whether cultural or economic anxiety contributed more to Trump’s victory. The supporters of the former viewpoint referenced surveys that linked cultural anxiety to support for Trump. Scholars discovered, for example, that a preference for Trump’s candidacy was closely linked to the racial resentment or “a moral feeling that blacks violate traditional American values.” By contrast, economic explanations emphasized the role of the Rust Belt regions in Trump’s eventual victory. Proponents of this viewpoint argue that the regions that suffered from job losses and economic decline as a consequence of globalization and market openness were more likely to vote for Trump.

In the U.S. context, many on the Left have preferred a simplistic narrative of racism (or, more generously, cultural anxiety) to explain Trump’s election and the broader resurgence of populism in the West. But there are several obvious problems with this approach.

First, methodologically separating the economic and cultural concerns is tricky, since a decline in one’s individual well-being may drive racism and anger against more “privileged” cultural groups. Second, racism-related theories fail to explain why radical and populist politicians tend to attack different social groups in different contexts. They attack blacks and Mexicans in the United States, oppose Muslim immigration in Western Europe, and criticize the Roma and Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe. One could argue, of course, that the original driving factor behind all of these groups is globalization, which made large-scale immigration and related cultural change possible in these countries. Yet in Central and Eastern Europe the anti-Roma sentiment predated the immigration crisis, and the radical Right has long attacked the ethnic minorities that historically resided in these countries. Similarly, in the United States the influx of immigrants over recent years is comparable to previous periods. It strains credulity to believe that these countries became “racist” or “culturally intolerant” overnight.

Racism, then, cannot be considered the single decisive variable behind the current resurgence of populism. Economic anxiety is the more compelling explanation, the factor that underlies the apparent increase in xenophobia and racism across different countries, and which found its release in the scapegoating of various population groups.

This logic is particularly clear in Eastern and Central Europe—and especially so in Hungary, where populist and radical parties have enjoyed great success of late. Hungary’s radical Right party Jobbik—which has been in the Hungarian parliament since 2010 and consistently polls as the second largest party—was, until recently, notorious for its use of extremely xenophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric. For example, a 2014 Jobbik election manifesto offered two ways to solve the “Gypsy question:” “The first one is based on peaceful consent, the second on radical exclusion … Our party wishes to offer one last chance to the destructive minority that lives here, so first it will consider peaceful consent. If that agreement fails, then and only then the radical solution can follow.”

In the paramilitary anti-Roma marches that Jobbik organized in the late 2000s and early 2010s, even harsher statements were made. Some participants went so far as to suggest that “all the trash must be swept out of the country,” and that “the Gypsy is genetically-coded for criminality.” While Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party has by and large not adopted Jobbik’s harsh anti-Roma rhetoric, it has at times also tapped into anti-Roma sentiment in subtler ways.

But it is not the Hungarian people’s deep-seated xenophobia that explains the electoral success of the radical Right. Jobbik’s popularity is better explained by processes of socioeconomic dislocation than by racist prejudice.

First, Jobbik tends to be more popular in the economically poorer, northeastern regions of Hungary. These are former Communist industrialized zones that failed to successfully integrate into the new economy following the market transition of the 1990s. The situation resulted in a substantive decline in socioeconomic well-being and loss of previous social status for many Hungarian peasants and blue-collar workers. This has been exacerbated by the dramatic upsurge in unemployment among the ethnic Roma groups, who previously had lower-skilled jobs in Communist factories. This situation fueled the ethnic conflict between the Roma and Hungarian groups.

Cultural anthropologist and sociologist Kristof Szombati conducted an in-depth ethnographic study of northeastern Hungary, which revealed that anti-Roma sentiment was galvanized by large-scale socioeconomic dislocations and political pressures that were acutely felt in these areas. According to Szombati, anti-Gypsyism was primarily fueled by rural Hungarians’ disenchantment with their place and trajectory in the new democratic regime and exacerbated by what they saw as “undeserved attention and support” granted by left-liberal elites to the Romani minority. The key to this story is that the underlying cause of the eruption of anti-Roma passions was the loss of social security and the increasing reliance of downwardly mobile rural citizens’ livelihoods on the state, rather than perennial ethnic hatred or prejudice.

Second, the choices of the political establishment in Hungary exacerbated the situation. Many Hungarians associated their economic hardship and loss of social status with the policies of the left-liberal elites, in particular the Socialist Party (MSZP). In the mid-1990s this formerly pro-labor party switched to a pro-market policy, embraced economic openness, and implemented austerity reforms. While these reforms succeeded in fostering Hungary’s reintegration into the European economy, they also accelerated the export of low-skilled jobs outside of Hungary. Hungarian peasants and blue-collar workers harmed by newly opened markets and globalization felt unprotected and abandoned by the political mainstream.

Populist and radical right-wing parties saw this situation as a political opening. They increasingly adopted an agenda that combined both anti-Roma and economically protectionist slogans, and reached out to disaffected population groups. In today’s Hungary the blue-collar workers tend to overwhelmingly support the radical and populist parties (Jobbik and Fidesz) rather than the leftist parties (Socialist Party and LMP). In particular, during its breathtaking rise in 2010, Jobbik won many of the counties in northeastern Hungary that previously were considered the bastions of the Socialist Party, including Borsod-Abauj-Zemplen, Szabolcs-Szatmar-Bereg, Hajdu-Bihar, Jasz-Nagykun-Szolnnok, Heves, and Nograd.

My own research has shown that constituencies that voted for the Socialist Party in 2006 were statistically likely to support Jobbik in the 2010 parliamentary election. And as Szombati shows in his book, in these regions Jobbik was able to instrumentalize deep-seated but previously depoliticized socio-ethnic frictions at a moment when those who saw themselves as the “rightful owners” of the state were gripped by powerful anxieties regarding their social status, security, and the future of their communities. More generally, Jobbik’s reactionary anti-Gypsyism and its promise to implement policies of “reverse affirmative action” gained traction against the central government’s policy to emancipate the Roma minority, which created incentives for formulating claims and demands in the language of ethnicity.

This process, however, is not unique to Hungary, but represents a common trend in European countries. Kai Arzheimer shows that the so-called “proletarization of the radical right” stems from a twin process of de-alignment and social change, in which the working-class groups increasingly became available for other parties than the traditional Left. In response, the radical Right in different countries has modified its programmatic appeal considerably, thereby becoming more palatable for members of the working class.

The American case further confirms this trend. In his book The New Minority, the political scientist Justin Gest focuses on the example of Youngstown, Ohio to suggest that support for the populist Right is primarily driven by the deprivation—the loss of social status and political importance—felt by white working-class voters, who are significantly concentrated in the Rust Belt and once occupied the center of American politics. This sentiment is exacerbated by resentment towards the liberal political mainstream, particularly the Democrats, whom they view as giving an unfair advantage in government assistance to the non-white immigrant population. Gest highlights that these economic and cultural narratives intertwine to create a sense of post-industrial abandonment among these voters, who are primarily lost and unhappy rather than fundamentally racist.

Donald Trump, of course, was the one political candidate who saw this situation as a political opening. In the 2016 election Trump ran on an openly populist platform, portraying himself as an opponent of global financial elites. For example, he promised to reintroduce the Glass-Steagall regulations, increase trade protections, and withdraw from NAFTA. This arguably brought Trump the support of the traditional Democratic bastions of the Rust Belt. As an acting President, Trump continues to emphasize the need for job creation and his successes in bringing the American jobs back to the country. According to Gest, this plays directly into the white working class’s acute sense of economic loss. Trump’s constant attacks on the political establishment also aimed to foster the support of the working classes, who feel abandoned by the political mainstream. Much like other populists across the globe, Trump used the scapegoating of different ethnic groups (for example, Mexicans and Muslims) as a way to channel the socioeconomic resentment of the white working-class voters.

Overall, this cross-country comparison suggests that rather than being overwhelmingly xenophobic and racist, the lower educated and working-class voters across the developed world have experienced a substantive decline in socioeconomic status and well-being. Combined with a feeling of abandonment by the liberal establishment, these grievances primarily drive the cultural resentment towards various ethnic groups who are perceived as being given an unfair advantage, and eventually culminate in support for radical candidates. Understanding this link should help policymakers everywhere to address the grievances of these voters, and to prevent further political radicalization in their countries.

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1968 Plus 50 Years: The Irony of History

Particular calendar years in modern history have the reputation of being exceptional—twelve-month periods in which the turmoil and upheaval were so great that they changed the world. At the top of the list stands 1789, the year of the French Revolution, the first and most enduringly important such upheaval. Also included are 1848, when liberal revolutions that ultimately failed erupted across Europe; 1989, when communism in Central and Eastern Europe collapsed; and 2011, which witnessed the fall of governments across the Middle East that became known as the Arab Spring.

The year 1968 belongs in this company. Between January and December of that year, in East Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, and North America, the crack of the tectonic plates of history shifting sharply seemed almost audible. It was—or at least at the time seemed to be—“the year that rocked the world,”as the subtitle of a recent book put it. Now the golden anniversary of 1968 has arrived. Seen from this perspective, the year appears less a global turning point than an example of one of history’s signal features—irony, which is present when the outcome of individual acts and national policies turns out to be quite different from what it initially seemed to be, and from what the people involved in them intended.

As 1968 began, the United States had been fighting in Vietnam for five years, during which 20,000 Americans had died. In the course of that year American troop strength reached its high point of 550,000. A vocal antiwar movement was staging protests against the conflict across the country, mainly on college campuses. A Democratic senator, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, declared his candidacy, on an antiwar platform, for his party’s presidential nomination in opposition to the incumbent Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s government assured the public that, unexpectedly protracted though it was proving to be, the United States was in the process of winning the war against the Vietnamese communists, who controlled the northern part of the country and were fighting to take possession of the south as well.

Then, on the last day of January, on the occasion of the Lunar New Year known to the Vietnamese as Tet, the communists launched a massive surprise attack on 36 provincial capitals and five major cities across South Vietnam. Communist forces even appeared on the grounds of the American embassy in Saigon. American and South Vietnamese troops fought them off: An estimated 50,000 communist fighters were killed, missing, or captured. Yet what became known as the Tet Offensive proved to be a major victory for the communist side because of its impact on American public opinion. It demonstrated that, contrary to the assurances of President Johnson and his senior foreign policy officials, the United States was not close to victory in Vietnam.

In the months that followed, the American public turned against the war. In March, McCarthy came stunningly close to defeating Johnson in the first presidential primary election in New Hampshire. Johnson announced that he would not stand for re-election and began negotiations with the communists. His Republican successor, Richard Nixon, wound down the American troop presence. In 1975, when all the American soldiers had left, a North Vietnamese military offensive conquered the south and united the country under communist rule.

The principal victors of Vietnam appeared, at first, to be the American antiwar movement, which had seemed to have forced a reversal of national policy on the war, and the communist side, which derived a major political benefit from the Tet Offensive and went on to win the war. A half century later the balance sheet from 1968 looks, ironically, different.

Despite the efforts of the antiwar movement, American troops continued fighting in Vietnam for four years thereafter. Indeed, it is arguable that the American combat role continued because of the antiwar movement. For while the war became increasingly unpopular in the United States, that movement—associated in the public mind with disorder, lawbreaking, and anti-Americanism—became even more unpopular. President Richard Nixon used the protests as a foil to generate support for his policy of withdrawing American troops gradually, rather than immediately as the war’s most vocal opponents demanded. Moreover, while the United States did lose the war—its ally and client, the Republic of South Vietnam, was defeated and disappeared—America ended the conflict with its position in East Asia strengthened rather than weakened by virtue of the rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China engineered by the antiwar movement’s bete noire, the same President Nixon.

As for the Vietnamese communists, they did achieve their goal of bringing the entire country under their control. Having done so, however, they found themselves at odds with their erstwhile ally but historic adversary, China, which invaded and occupied a slice of northern Vietnam in 1978. Nor did the reunified country prosper, and so the communist bureaucrats followed the Chinese pattern and introduced free-market reforms, borrowing the economic ideas and institutions of the system—global capitalism—that communism was created to oppose. By 2018, with a rapidly growing China bidding to dominate all of East Asia, communist Vietnam had entered into something like a military alliance with the only country capable of offsetting Chinese power: the United States. Having evicted the American navy from Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam’s deepwater port, in 1975, 41 years later the Vietnamese government welcomed it back in the form of the USS John S. McCain, a ship named for the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy’s Pacific Command during the war between the two countries. His son, also named John S. McCain and by then a member of the United States Senate, had spent six years, between 1967 and 1973, incarcerated and tortured in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” where the communists kept American prisoners of war. It would be difficult to find a purer case of historical irony than the long-term results of the Vietnam War.

As winter turned to spring in 1968, the world’s attention shifted to Europe. Students launched protest demonstrations at the University of Nanterre, in a suburb of Paris. The authorities responded harshly and anger at their response helped to spread the demonstrations to the heart of the capital. Students there refused to attend classes and occupied university buildings. The police cracked down on them as well, leading to more demonstrations and occupations. Then, on May 13, French workers went on strike; ultimately an estimated ten million walked off their jobs.

France has a storied tradition of revolutionary upheavals, going back to 1789 and continuing through 1830, when one monarchy was overthrown and replaced by another; the aforementioned 1848; and 1871, when, in the wake of the nation’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the civil strife that followed, citizens of Paris formed a radical commune that governed the city, after a fashion, for several months. Because of that tradition, because some of the striking workers belonged to communist-dominated unions, because some of the more active students had far-Left political agendas, and because Marxist rhetoric infused the rhetoric of students of all political stripes, that historical pattern seemed to be repeating itself during what came to be known as les événements de mai-juin (the events of May and June).

The government of 78-year-old President Charles de Gaulle—an old regime if ever there was one, considering he had been a French army officer during the First World War and led the anti-German Free French Movement in the Second—appeared to be on the brink of falling. De Gaulle himself flew, unexpectedly and without explanation, to a French military base in Germany.

In the end, however, his government survived. It awarded the striking workers generous pay raises and they returned to work. The student strikes and demonstrations petered out; and even at their height, and even with the violence involved, the demonstrations had more of a festive air than a menacing one. Over five decades, the episode has remained a cultural touchstone for those who took part in it, who became known as the soixante-huitards, the generation of 1968. Seen through memory’s haze, les événements have entered French history as a chapter of bravery and romantic radicalism, a cross between an insurrection and a glorious outdoor party. Perhaps the most enduring mementoes of that spring are the colorful, clever, silk-screened posters that Parisian art students produced by the hundreds, and some memorable slogans, one of which captured the mischievously playful spirit that inspired many of the students: “Je suis marxiste, tendance Groucho.” (I am a Marxist—a Groucho Marxist.)

In the subsequent half century two major trends have dominated French public life: the ongoing process of European economic integration culminating in 2002 in the establishment of a common European currency, the euro; and the effort to achieve robust economic growth, both to satisfy the desires of the French public and to maintain political and economic parity with France’s enemy-turned-partner, Germany. As a passionate champion of French national grandeur, de Gaulle was resolutely committed to keeping up with Germany, but he never believed in surrendering French sovereignty to a supranational body. In the decades after 1968 France abandoned de Gaulle’s vision of its national future. By 2018 France had fallen well behind Germany, had joined the euro, and was attempting, through its president, Emmanuel Macron, born in 1977—almost a decade after les événements—to create powerful European Union-wide institutions that would absorb even more of the sovereign prerogatives of Europe’s historic nation-states. As for the students who had taken to the streets in the spring of 1968, in the many speeches they made and the manifestoes they issued neither of these two subsequently dominant issues played any significant part.

A few months after the Paris events, 500 miles to the east in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, another defining episode of 1968 took place. For the previous two decades the country had had an orthodox communist government, imposed by the Soviet Union, whose troops occupied Czechoslovakia in the course of their battle against Nazi Germany in World War II. At the beginning of 1968 the communist leader, Antonin Novotny, an orthodox Stalinist, was removed from office and replaced by Alexander Dubcek, a little known party functionary of Slovak origin who had lived for several years in the Soviet Union. The new leader turned out to hold two extraordinary ideas: One was that communist rule was compatible with central features of Western democracy, especially freedom of expression. The other was that as he reformed the Czech communist system to make it freer, the Soviet leaders—who had, he believed, every reason to trust him—would not interfere. Both beliefs, as the events of August 1968 would show, were unfounded.

Dubcek lifted censorship in the country. The Czech press exploded with stories of corruption among Communist Party leaders and criticism of the policies of the Soviet Union. Groups dedicated to discussing and addressing the country’s ills proliferated. Czech youth adopted Western styles of dress and embraced Western music, both of which were forbidden to their counterparts in other communist countries. The cultural and political flowering centered on the capital and became known as the “Prague Spring.”

The leaders of the other communist countries grew increasingly concerned about what was happening, fearing that the spirit of liberty would spread from the Czechs to the people they governed and subvert their own rule. Dubcek assured them that he had matters under control and that his country would remain a faithful member of the communist bloc. In the last week in August, however, the Soviet Union spearheaded an invasion of Czechoslovakia from four directions. Soviet tanks put an end to the Prague spring.

In so doing they put an end to the most elaborate experiment in the political reform of European communism ever attempted. A poster that appeared after the invasion depicted Lenin, the leader of the communist revolution in Russia and the founder of modern communism, weeping. The idea the poster expressed, that Lenin had envisioned a very different kind of communism than the harsh totalitarian system that his acolytes and successors had actually built and would have supported what Dubcek was trying to do, died in the streets of Prague. Thereafter the term “communist idealism” became an oxymoron. The system, it became clear, could only change by collapsing; and 21 years after the tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia that is exactly what occurred. Attempting to preserve communism in 1968, the Soviet leaders doomed it.

While Prague held the world’s attention that year, however, the events that would determine communism’s long-term fate—that would lead, that is, to its demise—were taking place in neighboring Poland. There, too, students demonstrated—on a very modest scale—in protest against existing political conditions. There, too, their efforts came to naught. The communist government’s campaign to suppress them included one of the oldest and ugliest themes in European history, anti-Semitism.

The students recognized that, by themselves, they had no hope of standing up to the Moscow-supported regime in Warsaw, and ten years later they helped to forge a broader, more powerful anti-government coalition that included Polish workers and the Catholic Church as well. That coalition stood behind the free trade union, Solidarity, which emerged in 1979. Repressed by the communist authorities in 1982, it moved underground and resurfaced in 1989, when it forced the establishment of the first non-communist government in Eastern Europe since World War II, a crucial development in the sequence of events that finally destroyed communism in Europe. In 1968 the Prague Spring got all the attention but, in yet another irony, it was the events in Poland that set in motion the developments that changed the course of history.

The disruptions everywhere had a common feature: young people, often students, created them. Not only in the United States, Paris, and Prague, but in Tokyo, Mexico City, Madrid, London, and elsewhere students marched in the streets, manned the barricades, and occupied buildings. (Chinese students had an experience all their own. Hundreds of thousands of them, inspired by Mao Zedong, became “Red Guards” and rampaged through the country’s cities and towns, destroying property and persecuting and sometimes murdering their elders, including senior communist officials, in the name of stamping out “bourgeois elements.” The Chinese upheaval came to be known as the Cultural Revolution.)

The theme of 1968, it was often remarked at the time, was a worldwide “youth rebellion.” The year marked the debut in the affairs of their respective countries of the largest age cohort in human history, the so-called Baby Boomers, comprised of people born in the years following World War II. Of all the Western countries the United States had the largest population of Boomers, with 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. In 1968, American Boomers plunged into political activism. Students in the United States—mainly in selective institutions; the large numbers in the workforce mainly stayed on the sidelines—not only protested the war but also disrupted the institutions in which they were studying, notably Columbia University in New York City.

Moreover, American Boomers saw themselves as a distinct, and distinctive, generation. Many of them—certainly the most politically active ones—believed that they were righting historical wrongs and overturning obstacles to social progress and human fulfillment. They were, that is, changing the world. From the perspective of 50 years, is that what the generation of 1968 did?

The world through which they moved certainly has changed, perhaps, in some ways, due to them. They spurned hierarchy, and over the last half-century the United States has become a less hierarchical society. Ethnic and racial minorities and women have greater occupational opportunities now than they did then. The Boomers prided themselves on their informality, and America has become a less formal place. To take one minor but representative example, in 1968 almost every man wore a coat and tie and almost every woman wore a dress for air travel. In 2018 virtually no one does. Whether these changes would have come to pass had 1968 been an entirely uneventful year is, of course, impossible to say.

Individual Boomers have been responsible for some of the most visible and consequential changes of the last half century. These changes have come not from political leaders harnessing the energy of popular fervor and commitment, however, which was the 1968 model. They have arisen, rather, from individual entrepreneurship combining two different and time-honored features of American life: technological innovation and mass consumption. More than any other members of their age cohort, and more than almost all people who have ever lived anywhere at any time in human history, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos, along with Sergei Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg (the last three not themselves Boomers, having been born in 1973, 1973, and 1984 respectively) have altered the daily lives of virtually every American and hundreds of millions of others around the world. In the context of 1968, moreover, their achievements carry with them an irony: The technology with which the Boomers grew up, of which they made use to spread their message of protest, and that in a sense defined them, was television. The combined efforts of the digital entrepreneurs dethroned television as the world’s most important means of communication.

The institution that incubated the defining events of 1968 in the United States, which the activist wing of the Baby Boom generation did eventually come to dominate, is the university; and the fate of the university presents another, final, ironic coda to that year. The student demonstrations of that year were descended from the series of protests, leading to large-scale arrests, that took place in the fall of 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley. A geographic restriction on distributing political literature on the Berkeley campus triggered the protests, which came to be known as the “Free Speech Movement.” 50 years later, at Berkeley and at similar institutions across the country, the Boomers who assumed control of them had promulgated, or acquiesced in, speech codes, smothering political orthodoxy, and violent responses to speakers propounding views unpopular with students and faculty, all of which ensured that speech in universities had become, in 2018, distinctly less free than it had been in 1968.

  Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, New York: Ballantine Books, 2005.

The post 1968 Plus 50 Years: The Irony of History appeared first on The American Interest.

The Continental Congo Crisis

Border zones are by nature rather tense, unpleasant places, but the actual significance of any particular border is simply a reflection of the politics of the region. An incursion by soldiers into the Korean Demilitarized Zone or along the border of Nagorno-Karabakh, for example, will have profound geopolitical consequences, while we would probably not be too perturbed if we learned tomorrow that some drunken members of the Guardia Civil had accidentally stumbled into France.

The Congolese-Rwandan border is one of those with tremendous geopolitical significance, which makes last week’s reports that Rwandan troops crossed over and killed five Congolese soldiers especially disconcerting news, even from a region most Westerners already associate with biblical scales of calamity. In no other part of the continent is the geopolitical situation so opaque, the nature of borders so porous, and the flow of displaced people so weaponized as in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The past two decades of turbulent Congolese history have been propelled by invasion, proxy warfare, interethnic strife spilling across arbitrary borders, and African statesman who have seen little interest in anything but a weak state in Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest, most resource-rich country.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide catalyzed two catastrophic wars in the DRC (then Zaire), the second of which was dubbed “Africa’s World War” due to the involvement of nine African nations and a death toll between 2.7 and 5.4 million. And in many ways, the Second Congo War never really ended—as evidenced by the United Nations’ announcement this past October that the humanitarian situation in the DRC constituted a Level 3 emergency, on par with Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

At present, roughly 120 armed groups operate in eastern DRC alone, necessitating the presence of the largest UN peacekeeping force in the world, MONUSCO. The Congolese security sector is in shambles, with the fractious and corrupt Congolese Armed Forces (FARDC) acting as a vehicle for political patronage for erstwhile warlords of questionable loyalty. The Congolese state is further weakened by a dearth of infrastructure within the vast country and the combined effects of neopatrimonialism, interethnic tension, and secessionism, all working together to undermine the nation’s social cohesion.

Meanwhile, the political situation continues to deteriorate over President Joseph Kabila’s desperate, illegal machinations to cling to power through the delaying of elections, dubbed Glissement (“slippage”) by Congolese. The longer this process goes on, the greater the opportunity for warlords with parochial politico-economic interests to rebrand themselves as national political figures. This has already happened in the fascinating case of the racketeer-turned-“liberator” William Yakutumba, and the trend shows signs of spreading. As the chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration in Congo recently noted, “Whilst initially some of these armed groups were in it for themselves—they would burn a village, and pillage, rape, burn and scorch the earth—it seems now that they have more of a political agenda.” It may seem absurd to suggest that an obscure militia operating in the jungle 500 miles from Kinshasa could overthrow the President, but such rebellions have historically been vehicles for the Congo’s neighbors to attempt regime change.

As seemingly intractable and remote as the DRC’s problems are, the United States has humanitarian, economic, and political interests in managing the multifarious conflicts within Congolese borders. For example, any conflict that spills over into Uganda or Burundi consequently affects multinational efforts against Al Shabaab in Somalia. More importantly, a reversion to widespread interstate warfare in Central Africa would undermine the fragile progress made in building up collective security mechanisms and diplomatic forums in Africa.

If the United States and its allies wish to ameliorate or at least contain the current insecurity in the DRC, they must first understand how deeply interconnected the country’s problems are with the wider geopolitics of the region—and how limited Western influence over relevant Congolese actors may be. Because the DRC’s crisis rebounds on its neighbors in such complex and often contradictory ways, we should ask ourselves if and how other African states may play a role in peacefully pushing the Congolese President aside—which demands a fresh analysis of the region’s most consequential stakeholders.

The Southern Powers: Zimbabwe, Angola, and South Africa

New leadership to the DRC’s south will play a significant role in determining if and how President Kabila exits the political stage. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has thus far tolerated Kabila’s election delays in large part because two of its most influential members, Zimbabwe and Angola, are long-time backers of Kabila. Robert Mugabe was one of the closest allies of Joseph’s father, the late President Laurent Kabila. During the Second Congo War, Mugabe and then-President of Angola Jose Eduardo dos Santos airlifted hundreds of troops into Kinshasa to defend Laurent Kabila’s fledgling regime from an onslaught of Congolese rebels and Rwandan and Ugandan forces. Throughout the course of the war, Mugabe provided between $260 million and $1 billion in military assistance to the fledgling regime in return for lucrative mining and timber contracts for Mugabe’s clique.

One of those cronies, Emmerson Mnangagwa, is Zimbabwe’s new president following a November coup that finally sidelined Africa’s most notorious nonagenarian dictator. Another is Major General SB Moyo, reportedly one of the key nodes in the coup plotters’ network, and Mnangagwa’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. We should be under no illusions about the nature of the new Zimbabwean leadership. The country remains an effective one-party state under ZANU-PF, and Mnangagwa needs to ensure the loyalty of the party elites who helped him usurp the presidency.

Due to its own economic collapse, Zimbabwe significantly scaled back its role in the Congolese mining sector in the early 2000s, although there are rumors that Zimbabweans continue to serve in Joseph Kabila’s bodyguard. Mnangagwa is economically savvier and less of an international pariah than his predecessor, and is thus looking to jumpstart Zimbabwe’s economy with more foreign investment and international debt relief. Assuming Zimbabwe’s fortunes rise as the DRC’s decrease, we can expect Mnangagwa to look for ways to reinsert ZANU-PF into the most lucrative sectors of the Congolese economy. The question is whether he will see Kabila’s Glissement as a means of ensuring a trusted friend remains in power in Kinshasa, or as a foolish, unsustainable gambit which threatens Zimbabwean investments. Needless to say, Kabila would be foolish to put too much faith in a man Zimbabweans have dubbed “The Crocodile.”

Angola’s long-serving dictator, dos Santos, also left office last year, although in his case the decision was voluntary. Like Zimbabwe, Angola remains a militarized one-party state, and the new president, João Lourenço, is a general and former Minister of Defence. Angola’s interests in the DRC are largely economic as much of its oil, which accounts for over 90 percent of its exports, is located in Congolese waters or in Cabinda, an enclave separated from the Angolan mainland by a strip of Congolese territory. Angolan foreign policy is also heavily informed by historical considerations: For decades, enemies of the ruling MPLA party operated with impunity from the Congo, nearly overthrowing the regime on several occasions.

Angola has been a key backer of Kabila since the day he took office in 2001, even though Angola is also one of the prime suspects in the assassination of Kabila’s father—a testament to the often unscrupulous nature of regional politics. In 2006, Angolan troops flew to Kinshasa to defend the younger Kabila, this time as the President’s bodyguards were fighting troops loyal to warlord-turned-politician Jean Pierre Bemba following a contested election. Angola’s support has shown signs of waning of late, however. A new and terrifying conflict in the DRC’s previously calm south-central province of Kasai—prompted by Kabila’s ham-handed attempts to replace hereditary chieftains with political cronies—has led to a massive influx of refugees into neighboring Angola. The Angolan government has been understandably concerned by these developments, to say nothing of a number of massive prison breaks near the Angolan border, and reportedly played a role in pushing Kabila to accept the December 2016 San Sylvestre agreement with the opposition. Kabila has since reneged his end of the deal. Perhaps more than any of the Congo’s other neighbors, Angola needs a modicum of stability in the DRC. Unpredictable as Angolan foreign policy can be, we can safely assume that Lourenço will not back a losing horse in Kinshasa, and that is exactly what Kabila looks like these days.

Finally, South Africa has a new President who appreciates the importance of his country’s international standing better than the recently resigned Jacob Zuma. While South Africa has not traditionally played as significant a role in the DRC’s internal affairs as Zimbabwe or Angola, the country is a pivotal diplomatic force on the continent and has been a key broker in previous negotiations within the Great Lakes region. (Thabo Mbeki oversaw the 2002 Pretoria Accord between Rwanda and the DRC). South Africa is also the biggest player in the SADC. Where Zuma had tolerated Kabila’s Glissement for reasons both ideological (who are former colonial powers to lecture Africans on democracy?) and practical (Zuma’s nephew was named in the Panama Papers as a major investor in Congolese oil fields), Cyril Ramaphosa enters office looking to reclaim the nation’s role as a pragmatic arbiter of regional disputes. He will need to tread carefully: The issue of term limits is a very sensitive one in African politics these days, and he needs good relations with his neighbors as much as he does with the West. Still, subtle diplomatic efforts to push Kabila out the door could earn South Africa some much needed international goodwill.

The Eastern Front: Burundi, Uganda, and Rwanda

To the DRC’s east, Burundi remains in the midst of a protracted crisis that at points has appeared dangerously close to civil war. For the past three years, President Pierre Nkurunziza, a former Hutu rebel leader, has stoked ethnic resentment in attempts to dismantle a broad-based, multi-ethnic coalition that challenged his decision to run for a controversial third term. Roughly 2,000 people have been killed (overwhelmingly by state security forces), another 10,000 arrested, and nearly 400,000 have fled the country, including to the DRC. UN and African Union efforts to resolve the crisis have stalled and Burundi has rejected African Union peacekeepers and observers. In September, at least 36 Burundian refugees were killed in clashes with Congolese security forces in South Kivu, sparking a diplomatic row between the two neighbors. Given the role Burundi’s internal conflicts have played in Congolese history (anti-Hutu pogroms in 1972 and civil war from 1993-2006 saw hundreds of thousands of refugees crossing into the Kivus, radically altering local ethno-political dynamics), any further fallout from Burundi’s upcoming elections and proposed constitutional amendment on presidential term limits is liable to spill into the DRC.

After Kabila, no men will probably be more influential in determining the future of the DRC than Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. Both presidents have their separate interests, but their personal histories are intertwined and their worldviews reflect a similar hard-earned cynicism from years fighting in the bush. Kagame was Museveni’s chief of intelligence when the latter was a rebel commander in the 1980s. Several years after Museveni usurped the Ugandan presidency, Kagame invaded Rwanda with his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels, sparking a civil war with the Hutu extremist government in Kigali. In 1994, it was the RPF who ended the 100-day genocide by pushing the Hutu genocidaires into the Congo as the world stood watching. The repressive state model and militaristic foreign policy of post-genocide Rwanda is Kagame’s response to what he sees as the utter failure of democracy and international law to save his people.

Together, Kagame and Museveni have twice invaded the Congo, once gone to war with each other (over the conduct of the second invasion and control of the Congo’s natural resources), and to this day are both heavily invested in ensuring that perceived threats to their regimes are held at bay within the DRC’s borders, rather than their own.

Trilateral relations between the DRC and its two powerful neighbors to the east remain frosty, although they began to improve slightly in 2013. Kagame and Museveni have heretofore tolerated Kabila’s Glissement for their own practical purposes. Kagame won re-election for a third term last August after his party pushed for a constitutional amendment (ratified by popular vote) that eliminated term limits. Museveni has been in power since 1986, and his party recently voted to scrap presidential age limits to allow the 73 year old to run again in 2021, a move that sparked an angry brawl in the Ugandan parliament. Understandably, both leaders are reluctant to see either the African Union or Western powers take a hard line on electoral malfeasance in the DRC, lest it set a precedent for the rest of the continent.

Kabila’s relatively cordial relations with Rwanda and Uganda these past few years have been a historic aberration, and they look set to deteriorate as the situation in the DRC unravels. Uganda’s decision to moderate its meddling in eastern DRC was in response to supposedly significant progress against the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF)—a vaguely Islamist Ugandan rebel group—on the part of the FARDC and MONUSCO’s new Force Intervention Brigade (FIB), a muscular peacekeeping unit with a more aggressive mandate. This progress was illusory. MONUSCO hastily cut its budget in 2017, leading to the premature closure of peacekeeping bases in ADF areas of operation.

Even prior to the budget cuts, Tanzanian soldiers in the FIB who I spoke with last year were pessimistic about the UN force’s ability to root out the ADF and had little praise for the FARDC’s efforts. This is the backdrop to the startling series of Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF) airstrikes within the DRC last December that killed 100 ADF militants, as well as Museveni’s subsequent chastising of the United Nations. While these strikes were reportedly coordinated with the FARDC, the UPDF is unlikely to always be so courteous with their Congolese counterparts. With plans to increase oil production in western Uganda under way, Museveni will look to establish a buffer against the ADF in eastern DRC which could take the form of UPDF presence or Congolese proxies.

Another oft-overlooked dimension of Uganda’s strategic landscape is the resurgent conflict in the DRC’s northeastern Ituri region, along the Ugandan border. Tension between pastoralist Hema and agriculturalist Lendu bubbled over into open warfare during the Second Congo War, during which time the Ugandans alternately supported militias from both ethnic groups to counter Rwandan (and later Congolese) influence. Major operations by Lendu rebels resisting integration into the FARDC continued well into 2015, and FARDC soldiers I spoke with last summer confirmed that the area was one of primary concern for their commanders even though it had not been getting any international attention. Then Xinhua reported this month that 26 people had been killed in fighting between unidentified Hema and Lendu groups, and that some 34,000 people had fled into Uganda this year as a result of the violence. Given the high level of ADF activity in Ituri, the onset of a broader Hema-Lendu conflict will complicate Ugandan efforts in the region.

Rwanda’s strategic interests in the DRC are not so fundamentally different from what they were twenty years ago. Rwanda seeks to neutralize the FDLR rebels, whose ranks include many former genocidaires; prevent the emergence of new rebel movements that are strong enough to challenge the Rwandan state; and ensure Rwandan access to Congolese natural resources. Malleable leadership in Kinshasa allows Kagame to secure these interests, just as it allows Museveni to secure Uganda’s. If Kagame finds Kabila recalcitrant, he can weaken his hand through proxies. This is precisely what Kagame did in 2012, when Rwanda helped catalyze a mutiny-turned-rebellion, the M23 movement (which also received modest Ugandan backing). In a matter of weeks, M23 routed the FARDC and temporarily occupied the major eastern city of Goma, humiliating the Congolese leader.

The subsequent diplomatic scramble to prevent a Third Congo War succeeded in pushing Kagame to drop his support of M23. While some hopeful Western commentators heralded this as the beginning of a new chapter in Congolese-Rwandan relations, the reality of the situation was never so encouraging. Kagame had never intended for the rebels to overthrow Kabila. As former Tutsi rebels of the CNDP group who had recently been integrated into the FARDC, the M23 rebels were solely interested in maintaining their privileged positions in the politico-economic sphere of eastern Congo; they never numbered more than 2,500 and their social base was much narrower than previous Rwanda-backed insurgencies, meaning that they would have never managed to overcome the popular anti-Rwandan sentiment that dominates the Kivus. Furthermore, Kagame had no compelling interest in seeing Kabila overthrown in 2012 so long as Kabila continued to tolerate Rwandan smuggling in eastern Congo.

It is much more likely that Kagame was simply trying to maintain his influence in eastern DRC by weakening Kabila’s position, which had been growing slowly stronger since 2009. In Kagame’s eyes, M23 would not only serve as a bulwark against the FDLR, but a defection of Tutsi soldiers from the FARDC would erase any legitimacy the Congolese state once enjoyed among the Rwandophone population of the Kivus. Kagame’s eventual decision to sever ties with M23 was the result of intense international pressure, namely the Obama Administration’s withholding of U.S. military assistance to Rwanda, as well as the fact that the rebellion inevitably fell apart shortly after its inception due to conflict between its two leading commanders, Bosco Ntaganda and Sultani Makenga.

None of this suggests that Kagame has any desire to become what we might consider a responsible stakeholder in a regional order. On the contrary, the militaristic and interventionist mindset of the RPF vanguard still dominates Rwanda’s foreign policy. Kagame’s Minister of Defence since 2010, General James Kaberebe, is known in the Congo for his widespread use of child soldiers during the Congo Wars as well as his propensity for daring commando operations—including the 1998 Kitona Airlift that nearly toppled Laurent Kabila. Just months after the M23 rebellion ended, Kagame’s former chief of external intelligence, Patrick Karegeya, was found murdered in a posh Johannesburg hotel. In exile, Karegeya had secretly been advising South African and Tanzanian intelligence in their efforts to target M23 for the FIB. Kagame officially denied involvement in the assassination, but speaking on the matter to a domestic audience shortly thereafter, said “You can’t betray Rwanda and not get punished for it.”

With the advent of Burundi’s crisis in the spring of 2015, Pierre Nkurunziza, an erstwhile friend of Kagame’s until 2013 (when relations soured over the M23 rebellion), quickly began casting the blame for his country’s instability on Rwanda. It would have been easy to brush off such claims as little more than Nkurunziza’s efforts to split the Burundian opposition by stoking Hutu fears of a nefarious Tutsi dictator orchestrating the current unrest. Unfortunately, a report by a UN panel of experts in February 2016 found that the charges had some merit: Rwandan intelligence officers had indeed conscripted Burundian refugees, including children, and provided them with military training in the hopes of toppling Nkurunziza. As of yet there has been no RPF-style invasion and Nkurunziza remains in office, but the crisis in Burundi continues among high tensions with Rwanda.

None of this recent history can tell us precisely how Kagame will react to an increasingly unstable DRC. In some ways, the case for Rwandan intervention is weaker than ever, as the FDLR, traditionally the justification for Rwanda’s aggressive foreign policy, is a shadow of its former self. But insecurity allows insurgencies to rebuild. Nkurunziza’s government was also probably not an existential threat to Rwanda, yet this did not stop Kagame from assembling a nascent Burundian rebel force. Furthermore, after two decades of Rwandan interventions in eastern DRC, the various communities there have no shortage of grievances against Kigali. It seems the only way Rwanda has managed to stay on decent terms with any eastern Congolese community is through illicit trade. Even most Rwandophone Tutsi in the Kivus long for integration into Congolese society and see Rwandan backing as a scarlet letter.

In short, Kagame knows that most of the armed groups operating in eastern DRC are at best highly skeptical of Rwanda and at worst openly hostile. And, of course, last week’s deadly clash with FARDC troops 100 meters inside Congolese territory is further testament to how precarious the situation between the two neighbors is, as communication between the two armies is lacking while mutual distrust is in high supply. Finally, as a rule of thumb, one should never underestimate Paul Kagame.

A Way Forward?

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to the crises in the DRC so long as its neighbors continue to see little downside to a weak Congolese state. For one thing, the European Union and United States, despite their tremendous financial power and international standing, do not possess the same sort of leverage over the relevant Congolese actors, most notably Kabila, that other African states do. Nevertheless, some common ground for preventing a further deterioration of the situation exists, as a complete collapse of the DRC would constitute far too great a risk for neighboring states which are generally rather fragile in their own right.

Our best chance of ameliorating the situation, however slightly, rests on the various African stakeholders acknowledging that Kabila’s presidency is unsustainable, which seems to be clearer every week with new reports of growing chaos. The question then becomes what form any regional pressure on Kabila would take: diplomatic efforts in forums such as the African Union (of which Kagame is now Chairperson) and SADC, or the blunter tools of statecraft all too common throughout the region’s history: proxy warfare and invasion.

We should not fool ourselves into thinking that the fundamental failure of the Congolese state would be remedied overnight with new leadership, nor into believing that African nations will abandon their realpolitik if Western diplomats and NGOs deliver enough sanctimonious lectures about cooperation and development. But coordinating American diplomacy with regional blocs like the SADC and the East African Community (of which Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania are members) can help push for an orderly transition of power in Kinshasa and hopefully avoid another regional war.

Washington can make it clear that they would be happy to see Kagame use his new bully pulpit to pressure Kabila. Insurgencies might be what Kagame is best known for, but he is also a shrewd diplomat, a skillful negotiator, and a forceful personality (rarely do brutal dictators manage to charm audiences at Davos as successfully as the Rwandan President). Kagame would no doubt appreciate that if the African Union were to match existing U.S. and EU sanctions against Kabila’s coterie and send a high-level envoy to the country to engage the government and opposition, this would send a clear signal to the Congolese leader that he is running out of allies. Washington can also send out feelers to Pretoria to see if Ramaphosa is willing to take a harder line on Kabila than his predecessor. If South Africa ratchets up pressure within the SADC, Kabila will be in a very tough spot diplomatically.

Renewed international efforts to resolve the crisis in Burundi are also imperative. Unfortunately, Nkurunziza looks set to finish his illegal third term in office, if only because the East African Community (EAC) has decided it’s too late to challenge the 2015 election. The United States and the European Union—which have both slapped sanctions on four of Nkurunziza’s allies—should push the EAC to take a stand on holding legitimate elections in 2020. In the meantime, there is a pressing need to ensure the safety of Burundian opposition parties, namely by pushing Nkurunziza to dismantle the Imbonerakure, a pro-government youth militia eerily reminiscent of pre-genocide Rwanda’s Interahamwe, and pressuring the government to enforce the post-civil war ethnic quotas for the civil service and, most crucially, the army.

There is no guarantee, of course, that this strategy would succeed. The situation is too multivariable, U.S. leverage is limited, and the relevant regional players each have their own often conflicting interests, to say nothing of strategic philosophies molded by years of warfare. But efforts to resolve the crisis that narrowly focus on Kabila’s actions in isolation from the wider geopolitical context are certain to fail. So long as the state remains as fragile as it is, the Congo’s history will continue to be disproportionately shaped by outside powers. For those of us who are realistic about the country’s near-term prospects but nonetheless see a need for international efforts to ameliorate the growing suffering and anarchy, we must start by acknowledging this reality.

The post The Continental Congo Crisis appeared first on The American Interest.

After Parkland: An FBI Post Datum

By the time I finished writing my blog post on the tragedy in Parkland, Florida on Thursday evening, I was not yet aware of the monumental FBI screw up in this case. When that news spilled forth the next day, I was distressed but not surprised. This is not the first time the FBI has ignored warnings from the public that could have saved dozens of lives. So in addition to the other non-gun control problems we face in coming to grips with the mentally ill perpetrating gun violence in our society, we can add “fixing the FBI” to the list.

Some people have used the FBI role in the tragedy to make partisan political points. Ann Coulter, for example, has said that if the FBI had not been obsessed with trying to bring down the Trump presidency, it might have spared some time to take warnings about Nikolas Cruz seriously. Of course, this is an obscene remark of the sort of remark we have come to expect from Coulter. But she is not the only one to miss the point about what is going on here. Florida Governor Rick Scott called the behavior of the FBI in this case “unacceptable,” and called on Director Christopher Wray to resign. (With the Nunes memo business, it’s sort of amazing that the Director hasn’t resigned already anyway, but that’s another story.) What we really have here with the Governor, and others, is a slightly more civilized form of political posturing. Governor Scott gives no evidence of understanding what the underlying problem is. He seems to think it’s a simple matter of outing the failed employee. Alas, it’s not so simple.

The basic problem is that large organizations, like the FBI, that deal with the public have a serious signal-to-noise ratio challenge. These organizations are limited in size and budget, even if both are not small. The frequency and nature of communications from the public—and that includes tips about dangerous characters like Nikolas Cruz—are such that large organizations create protocols based on probabilistic assessments that enable them to grapple with the overwhelming volume they would otherwise have to contend with. Some organizations do this efficiently and effectively, others not so much. The FBI, regrettably, seems to fall into the latter category.

Perhaps the key issue for large organizations attempting to filter communications from the public concerns how to nurture a sense of ownership and responsibility for even small judgments. The basic rule is that the more people and the more layers a bureaucracy has, the less likely those on lower levels are to take responsibility for outcomes. No one wants to be accused of hysteria, of taking every possible threat so seriously that acting on all of them would paralyze the organization. So they will often pass the buck, trying to make the least amount of noise while so doing, hoping that someone higher up the bureaucratic food chain takes responsibility for outcomes.

Moreover, the employees at the FBI who interface directly with the public are relatively low-status employees compared to agents and managers. Their training usually involves getting them to recognize key words or phrases in what they are hearing, and they are encouraged, in essence, to count rather than to think for themselves. That sort of standard operating procedure tends to efface a sense of agency, with the result that the key interface between the public and the FBI exhibits structural risk aversion on the part of the employees most likely to be in contact with the public. Again, they are trained to listen for certain key words, and these days that means that someone out in the public who wants to get their attention had better use the word terrorism, or bomb, or Muslim somewhere in their story.

Another way to put this is that lower-level interlocutors with the public will tend to size down threat levels to accord with their acquired perception of  institutional capabilities and priorities. The higher ups want to know about terrorism threats, about violent organized crime, lately about massive election hacking by foreign agents using U.S.-based technologies, and a few obvious others. Disturbed teenagers able to buy automatic weapons make the list, but rank not that high on it. A good employee, one likely to be promoted and compensated more generously, is an employee who responds accordingly to priorities set above them. Someone who is always crying wolf, so to speak, or goes off on a tangent to the key priorities, will not thrive in organizations like the FBI.

Finally on this point, after 9/11 a debate over the proper siting of counterterrorist efforts in the U.S. government took place. Some, like General William Odom, argued that the FBI was very unlikely to do the counterterrorist mission well. As a part of the Justice Department, its entire culture from the very start has been directed toward apprehending criminals and jailing them. They kick into action after a crime has been committed and they surveil suspects accordingly. Preventing terrorism requires an entirely different mindset:  no crime has been committed and the constraints on surveillance and other detection methods “fit” differently from the common criminal enterprise. The conclusion: The U.S. government needs a new organization, along the lines of the British MI-5, to do domestic counterterrorism.

It was an excellent analysis and argument, but it demanded bold leadership and change—so of course it failed. The decision was to saddle the FBI with this new mission. The result was that the FBI got more budget, but not enough to cover the new missions and the old ones together. Over time the new missions essentially pushed out the status and some of the resources available for working on the older missions—missions that include preventing the kind of thing that happened in Parkland on Wednesday. Whether the FBI has yet overcome its subcultural history to do a good job at counterterrorism is a matter of opinion.

What is true for the FBI is also true for many other organizations, such as the State of Florida Department of Children and Families that judged Nikolas Cruz to be a low-risk problem despite reams of evidence suggesting otherwise. Some of this simply has to do with caseload. When an employee from such a department scores a potential problem as high risk, then a great deal of work has to be done, and a number of difficult legal and other hurdles overcome to deal adequately with that risk. All of this costs money and takes up time. So again, the institutional bias baked into bureaucratic reality is to underplay potential dangers.

Some of the legal hurdles seem frequently to reside in certain judges who refuse to take this sort of thing seriously, even though they are fast to sign no-knock search warrants for all kinds of fairly pedestrian drug misdemeanors. They want to curry favor with the police, but public health officials seem only to cause them trouble. It would be useful for some intrepid researcher to examine systematically the incentive structure of local judges to explain the observed tendency for them to make life difficult for those who would get potential mentally ill murderers off the street.

It also goes without saying that tragedies averted never make news, and no one can ever be certain that what an organization does to prevent a tragedy is really what is responsible for the non-event of a tragedy—if anyone ever asks the question in the first place about a non-event, which is unlikely. In other words, also baked into the situation is a tendency to think that a massive catastrophe is so rare that this particular case can’t be the cause of one, and if I fix it to make sure, the employee may well think, no one will ever know precisely because I’ve fixed it; and I will never get any credit for it.

That clarifies the imbalance in the typical incentive structure of low- to mid-level employees in such an organization: Do something and neither you nor anyone else will ever know for sure if it was the right thing to do; don’t do something and nothing is likely to happen, and you avoid scrutiny for wasting departmental resources and causing bureaucratically superior others to do more work. And if, God forbid, something does go really wrong, the likelihood is that it won’t be traceable to your decision, or even if it is, somebody higher up will get blamed, if anyone gets blamed. In sum, there isn’t much of a positive feedback loop for being vigilant, and there is at least a modest benefit in that bureaucratic setting to letting gray-area cases slide.

That does not mean that we should forgive those who make critical errors. Even as their bureaucratic environment militates against the mass of employees taking responsibility for outcomes, it is nevertheless their job not to miss these sorts of dangers. The low-ranking FBI employees who failed to transmit two clear and timely warnings about Nikolas Crus to the FBI’s Florida field office screwed up and should be held personally responsible for so doing.

That said, real culpability lies with the more senior directors and the ways they train and manage the personnel beneath them. Clearly, many such senior directors and managers are doing a poor job of instilling a sense of agency and responsibility in their mid- and lower-level employees, those most likely to be first-contacts with the public. Either these senior personnel do not understand the social-psychological dynamics at play, as laid out in very summary form above, or they do not know how to mitigate them.

If this were a serious society, a real outcomes-based meritocracy, those more senior people who are derelict or inefficacious in their duty would be identified and either demoted, punished, or fired. But we no longer live in a serious meritocracy insofar as public service functions are concerned, so I doubt that anyone at the FBI or at the Department of Children and Families in the State of Florida will be fired for their disastrous failure to properly do their jobs in the Parkland case. No one will seriously call into question the frail existing protocols that allow such disasters to repeatedly take place. The result is that the present outrage will be wasted, things will calm down after a while, and things will go on as they have. We will need good “luck” to prevent the next massacre and hence never know how lucky we have been; typical “luck” of the sort we know only too well will go on, and on and on.

I have made the case that the FBI confronts a structural problem typical of organizations of its kind that interact with the general public, and I stand by that assessment. But I have also said that in my view the FBI is not the most efficient or effective in dealing with the structural problems it faces. Why do I say that?

I claim no particular deep knowledge or experience in dealing with the FBI. I’ve talked to several people who do have such knowledge and experience, but beyond that I have but anecdotal experience—and as every social scientist knows by heart, anecdotes ain’t data. But since this is a blog post and not a formal essay, I will share now what little direct experience I do have with the FBI—for whatever it might be worth.

Back in 1999 and 2000 I was a staff member for the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, also known as the Hart-Rudman Commission. The commission proceeded in three parts over more than two years’ work: first to assess what the national security environment would look like twenty years into the future; second, to devise a strategy suitable for dealing with that environment; and then third, ask whether the bureaucratic structure inherited from the Cold War was the best structure for implementing the strategy. The obvious answer was no, which is the reason the commission was created in the first place.

This third rubber-meets-road part of the commission was focused largely but not entirely on deficiencies in homeland security. The three key border agencies of the Federal government were located in three different Executive Branch departments: the Customs Agency in the Department of the Treasury; the Border Patrol in the Department of Justice; and the Coast Guard in the Department of Transportation. We had Customs and Border Patrol agents in the same districts along the Mexican border who did not even have interoperable walkie-talkies. Meanwhile, the Immigration and Naturalization Service had been tasked by Congress to do two incompatible things: let some people in, and keep other people out—with both tasks massively underfunded by the Congress.

The Commission took testimony from about three dozen Federal agencies and departments in its research phase. Of the twelve commissioners, six Republicans and six Democrats, a number would show up for every hearing to ask questions.  Members of the staff were invited to attend, so long as there they merely observed the proceedings from the back benches—after having briefed the commissioners on the situation at hand within each given agency or department, and suggested relevant questions to pose to witnesses.

I served as the chief writer for the commission, so I brought no particular specialty to the table for the organizational analysis we undertook. But I attended quite a few of these hearings over a period of a year or so, and I learned a great deal from them about how the U.S. government actually works. I distinctly remember the two fairly senior officials who came to testify before the commission from the FBI being without question the stupidest officials we hosted, and you will just have to trust me when I say that my impression was not just mine alone.

Basically, the FBI came with reams of statistics laid out neatly on charts, and they proved simply unable to imagine anything happening that had not already happened, something they had no numbers for. When first one and then a second commissioner asked them about the possibility of mass-casualty terrorism in the United States, they found it difficult to answer anything at all. They looked at their charts and numbers and shrugged their shoulders. When all was said and done, their answer was, in essence, that the probability of such a thing happening was completely unknowable because it had not already happened.

Toward the end of the session, I remember one of the commissioners present, James Schlesinger, looking over his shoulder at me sitting back against the wall about 15 yards away, and fixing me with a dyspeptic sort of grin that could have bent steel. Schlesinger had been CIA Director back in the day, and his impression of the FBI had been formed long before the Hart-Rudman Commission was impaneled. He had warned me what was likely to happen before we all took our seats that morning, and his grin’s message was clear: “See, what’d I tell you?”

My second anecdotal experience is much more recent. Earlier this month I learned that I was a victim of attempted identity theft fraud. Someone out there has my Social Security number, home address, birthdate, and is using my name for various illegal purposes. This person tried to steal our IRS refund this past April, tried more recently to file for my Social Security retirement benefits, and using my credit tried twice to buy a Land Rover—once in Orlando, Florida and once in a suburb of Atlanta. I learned about this because careful salesman in both car dealerships warned me what was going on.

I filed a police report with my local Montgomery County, Maryland police. I had previously filled out the proper protective form for the IRS. I was also counseled to fill out an identity theft report with the Federal Trade Commission. Thanks to information I got from one of the car dealers, I also contacted both the Macomb, Illinois police department and the Illinois State Police district for that town—this because of a mailing address the culprit instructed the car dealer to send certain papers to for signature. From that dealership I also got photocopies of a forged Maryland driver’s license in my name linked to my home address, and a copy of the fraudster’s Geico insurance card, made out in my name and connected to my address, as well.

Of course I thought about contacting the FBI, too. So one day when I was downtown, not far from one of the main FBI buildings on 6th Street, N.W., I decided to stop in to see if I could get any help. I was informed that the door that the FBI does not do walk-ins. This did not surprise me. Anyone with a little imagination can envisage what a zoo the building would be if just anyone could wander in with some crazy story to tell. So a guard at the door, dressed in uniform with a hat and badge and holstered gun, gave me a card to help me convey my information to the FBI. You can see what the card looks like below (the reverse side is blank).

[image error]I was cheered by the prospect of emailing my information directly to the Washington field office of the FBI. But then I noticed that the email address given for that purpose misspelled the word “field.” So I filed my report using two email addresses: one with the word “field” misspelled, and one with it spelled correctly. It didn’t matter: both emails bounced.

So I called the telephone number on the card, and quickly learned that the FBI does not accept emails. I then asked the FBI woman on the phone why, then, did someone in uniform at the FBI building on Sixth Street give me a card with an email address on it? Here is how the conversation more or less went, as best I can recall it after a two-week period.

FBI: Good afternoon, FBI.

AMG: Hi, I’m trying to convey some information to the FBI about an identity theft fraud being perpetrated against me, and I’m a little puzzled by the information I got on a card given to me by a guard at the door of the FBI building on Sixth St., NW. The card has an email address to be used to convey information, but the email address misspells the word “field,” and even if I use the email address with the spelling corrected, it still bounces back to me. So can you give me an email address please that works?

FBI: The FBI does not accept information by email.

AMG:  Well then why is there an email address on this card?

FBI: What is it about the card that makes you think that there is an identity theft problem?

AMG:  What?! The identity theft fraud is what I’m trying to report.

FBI:  Are you the victim of the identity theft?

AMG:  Yes, I am, which is why I am trying to report it.

FBI: Did someone put the card under your door or something?

AMG: No, as I just told you, I got the card from an FBI employee at the door of the FBI building on Sixth St. N.W. That was about 45 minutes ago.

FBI: The way to report information is to go online to http://tips.fbi.gov.

AMG:  I see that on the card, but I also see the phone number I used to call you. The card suggests that I can give you the information, as well. That’s why the number is 1-855-TELL-FBI.  Well, I want to tell the FBI.

FBI:  This number is only to report suspected terrorism or criminal activity.

AMG:  Isn’t an identity theft fraud that now spans four states an example of criminal activity?

FBI: The FBI needs evidence to consider criminal activity.

AMG:  Yes, well of course that is entirely reasonable, which is why I am trying to provide evidence to you.

FBI:  Well just go to the online address and provide it there.  [CLICK]

I did that. So now I have contacted my local police department, the FTC, the FBI, the IRS, the police department in Macomb, Illinois, the Division of Motor Vehicles of the State of Maryland to report the forged driver’s license, and finally, Geico, to report the insurance card acquired under false pretenses.

And the results? Geico cancelled the insurance policy at my request. The Maryland DMV called to assure me that my information is safe, and that the photo I sent them of the forged driver’s license was indeed that of a forged driver’s license. I heard back from the Macomb, Illinois police, informing me that the address I had given them was that of an assisted living facility, and was clearly not the domicile of any bad guys but just a typical part of the organized crime methodology that identity theft usually is. My local police department informed me that my case would not be turned over to a detective, since all they have is suspicion of attempted fraud in Montgomery County, and there are just way too many identity theft fraud reports to follow up. I have heard nothing whatsoever from any Federal agency: the IRS, the FTC, or, of course, the FBI.

In sum, someone out there is actively targeting me, trying to take advantage of and steal from me, and no law-enforcement agency, local, state, or Federal, is willing to do anything at all on my behalf. They all tell me it’s someone else’s responsibility, and so no one claims agency and it ends up being no one’s responsibility. I’m on my own, and so is virtually everyone else in my situation. As far as the FBI is concerned, it’s just as well. If they got involved, they might end up taking the side of the crook and accuse me of attempted identity theft.

Every so often I read some commentary in which the writer claims that Americans, relatively speaking, are under-taxed compared to the citizens of other advanced countries. Even in the past, when I have added up all the Federal deductions from my gross pay and from the small family business I help to manage, and then added state and local taxes to both personal and business accounts, I have not felt particularly under-taxed. But maybe that’s just me. Imagine how I feel now, given the “service” I have received lately from law enforcement? Hard to imagine that’s just me, given the rather low approval ratings for government these days and the tendency of most Americans to applaud any tax legislation that seems to lower their tax burden.

Now try to imagine the bereaved in Parkland, Florida, and how they feel about the services they have received lately from the Florida Department of Children and Families and from the FBI. My problems are utterly negligible compared to theirs, I know. But the two problem sets are not entirely unrelated: It seems to always be someone else’s responsibility to assume genuine agency, whether within organizations or among them.

So, finally, let me ask this: Whose responsibility is it to connect the dots between the very large problems we face on account of dysfunctional government that cannot get bureaucracy to work properly and the often similarly generated small ones? If you know the answer, please tell me.

The post After Parkland: An FBI Post Datum appeared first on The American Interest.

The Dangers of Amazon’s Dominance

In 1589, a British curate named William Lee invented the stocking frame knitting machine, which used many needles to produce finer textured products more quickly. Aware of his invention’s potential, he travelled to London to demonstrate its effectiveness in order to obtain a patent from the monarch of the day, Queen Elizabeth I. She watched the demonstration and asked many questions about its efficiency. Then she refused his request, and the machines were not introduced for two more centuries.

“Thou aimest high, Master Lee,“ said the Queen. “Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects? It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.”

Today the courtship has reversed, and governments are abrogating their responsibility to protect their “poor subjects.” Leaders now subsidize and court innovators, including those who need no help and are wildly successful, like Amazon. In the past few months, dozens of governors and mayors, and even the Prime Minister of Canada, have personally called on Amazon’s fabulously wealthy CEO Jeff Bezos to persuade him to locate his second headquarters, with 50,000 jobs, in their jurisdictions.

Especially unseemly was a reported $7 billion offer by the governor of New Jersey, clearly involving money drawn out of taxes paid by the retail businesses, warehouses and logistics companies that Amazon is destroying. Yes, Amazon’s new head office would arguably plump up Newark’s employment figures, but leaders should be scolded for helping dig mass graves with the shovels paid for by those about to be buried.

On the other hand, 16th century benevolent paternalism and protectionism is not the answer either. But old-fashioned competition laws created to stop monopolies and robber barons after the first Industrial Revolution should be brought into play.

Amazon, in just 23 years, has gone from a website offering books at a discount to a behemoth with revenues that now surpass all of America’s department, grocery store and restaurant chains combined. Most worrisome is that the company dominates all e-commerce, which grows five times faster than brick-and-mortar retail, and is going to enter the financial services and healthcare sectors. This is in addition to its recent entertainment ventures and its new entry into the $8 trillion industrial market, providing everything from valves to industrial motors and maintenance supplies.

The company has a market capitalization value of $602 billion, which is, ironically, bigger than was New Jersey’s GDP in 2016. Clearly, this company needs no financial help, and its owner-founder Bezos is not only one of the richest men on the planet but one of the most influential men in America, thanks to his sole proprietorship of the Washington Post.

Concern about Amazonian dominance is valid. In retail, Amazon accounts for 53 percent of all e-commerce sales growth and cannot be matched by rivals given its robotized fulfillment centers and immediate deliveries. This has been devastating already. Twice as many stores closed in 2017, or 8,600, as the year before. Department store jobs have plummeted from 1.782 million in June 2001 to 1.27 million by November 2017. Projections suggest that between 2016 and 2026 the average annual growth of jobs across the economy will increase by 7 percent annually, but retail will increase by only 2 percent.

Of course, success and efficiency are not crimes, nor is bigness, unless it prevents anyone else from competing. Unfortunately, Amazon is on its way to becoming the next Standard Oil, which gained a stranglehold on the oil industry and related sectors so severe that capitalism itself was threatened and the company had to be busted up into competing companies in 1911.

The logic behind this is that extreme market dominance leads to monopoly power and abuses, eventually sweeping away workers, competitors, and potential competitors, while bullying suppliers and stifling innovation. A market dominated by a gigantic player is a hockey game without referees and only goons on the ice who will sideline smaller, more innovative players. Think Russia’s oligarchy. Think banana republics.

There have already been nasty price disputes involving book publishers and others over the years, but Amazon’s digital domination is now another, separate issue. The dependence on its platform and services allows it to dictate terms and prices to suppliers. Moreover, as Stacey Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance wrote last year at Motherboard, Amazon seems to use the data it gathers from companies selling on its platform to weaken them. According to Mitchell, “A company that designs a popular product and builds a market for it on Amazon’s site can suddenly find that Amazon has introduced a nearly identical version and given it top billing in search results. One study found that after a retailer becomes a seller on Amazon, it’s only a matter of weeks before Amazon brings the merchant’s most popular items into its own inventory.”

Atop this all is concern about the fact that Amazon has inordinate market power to set the terms by which goods are bought and sold in the United States digitally, and which products will be on offer. This cartel, or oligopoly power, is why investors have bid up the value of Amazon stock beyond normal levels. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya described Amazon in Forbes last year as “a multi-trillion-dollar monopoly hiding in plain sight.”

Another less publicized danger concerns the company’s growing control over the underlying infrastructure of the economy itself: From its digital platform which dominates commerce, to its growing 44 percent control over cloud computing capacity used by everyone from the Central Intelligence Agency to Netflix, to the building of its own army of planes, trucks and drones, which all competitors will be forced to hire.

Such aggressive “vertical integration” is precisely why Standard Oil had to be busted up. Like Amazon, Standard Oil controlled all its marketplaces and forced all its competitors out of business or to become captive buyers and sellers of its goods and services.

The battle to protect markets and jobs is nothing new. Neither are solutions. As the Queen astutely recognized in 1589, allowing one innovator to prosper at the expense of everyone else is not only unfair but quite foolish—and simply cannot be allowed.

The post The Dangers of Amazon’s Dominance appeared first on The American Interest.

Russia’s State Takeover Hits the Grocery Aisle

For the past few years we have extensively covered the slow-motion siloviki takeover of Russia. The whole process started when oil prices dramatically dropped in 2014, and accelerated when the European Union and United States imposed sanctions on Russia for the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine’s eastern territories. Russia’s shrinking pie of assets made two major FSB departments start a war against each other, fighting for control of financial flows into and inside of Russia. The rivalry eventually led to the arrests of several governors and high-profile law enforcement officers.

Separately, the Central Bank of Russia launched its own effort to acquire more assets under the Kremlin’s control, leading a major operation to nationalize private banks. This led to the destruction of every large privately-owned bank in Russia, except for the notorious Alfa Bank.

But until now, at least some pretext was needed for these asset grabs and acquisitions. Not anymore: February 16, 2018 marked a milestone for how the Kremlin will operate from now on.

On that day, the Russian billionaire Sergey Galitsky unexpectedly announced the sale of his share in Magnit, the giant supermarket chain he had first founded in 1994. Magnit is currently valued at around $8 billion, standing as the largest food retailer by number of stores and the second largest by revenue in the country. The new buyer of 29.1% of the company is the state-owned VTB Bank, who paid 138 billion rubles (approximately $2.45 billion) for Galitsky’s share.

What made Galitsky sell his stake? In 2012, Magnit was at the height of its success, with its market capitalization even exceeding the French Carrefour chain. For the past two years, though, Magnit’s profit has been declining, leaving the food retailer with 35.5 billion rubles ($600 million) in net profit in 2017, compared to 54.4 billion rubles the year before. Because of the losses, Magnit decided not to pay dividends to its shareholders last year.

Despite these troubles, though, Magnit was far from the verge of collapse. The company brought in $20 billion in revenue in 2017, only 10 percent less than its closest rival. One can hardly call this bankruptcy or anything close to it.

Nor does Galitsky’s public conduct since the announcement suggest a willing sale. When Galitsky announced the deal at the Russian Investment Forum in Sochi, he became emotional; some journalists reported that he nearly cried, and even had the look of a hostage. According to the terms of the deal, he will keep 3 percent of the company but will leave his job as CEO. He will also step down from the board of the Russian Soccer Association. (Galitsky is the founder and owner of the soccer team FC Krasnodar).

Alexei Krivoshapko, the director of the Russia-focused asset manager Prosperity Capital Management, said the deal was “hideously structured.” The law requires that the seller offer a buyback to minor shareholders if the sale exceeds 30 percent of the company. Yet as Krivoshapko pointed out, VTB “bought a little less on purpose, so as not do this. This is absolutely ugly and the worst behavior on the part of the state-owned bank. It speaks volumes about how VTB doesn’t care about the market and minor shareholders.” He said the deal amounted to “spit in the faces of all the investors.”

We don’t know precisely what made Sergey Galistky sell the company now, considering that as recently as November, he insisted that he would not do so. But we do know something about the buyer, VTB Bank. This is the same bank that financed the so-called privatization of 19.5% of Rosneft twice: first to the consortium of Qatar Investment Fund and Glencore, and more recently to a Chinese company that bought the shares.

VTB is also the bank whose former subsidiary, VTB 24, was led by Mikhail Zadornov—most recently appointed to head Otkritie Bank after its takeover by the Central Bank of Russia.

In short, VTB is as closely linked to the Kremlin as a bank can be. And acquiring a good, working business with stable cash flow, like Magnit, provides a perfect solution for a bank that is obliged to sponsor the Kremlin’s dubious deals and projects.

In my recent piece about the private banks’ takeover, I pointed out that Russia’s state-owned banks desperately need cash and are looking for creative new ways to acquire it. VTB’s forced takeover of a thriving private business shows a new method for doing so. When it comes to squelching private enterprise and extending the long arm of the state, Russia these days is giving Venezuela a run for its money.

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