Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 109

Dimensions, Detours, Fissures, and Fault Lines

President Xi Jinping’s signature initiative “One Belt One Road” (OBOR, 一带一路 or yidai yilu in Chinese), unveiled in 2013 and later renamed in English as the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), aims to take China where it has never gone before. The initiative, which envisages linking China with Asia, Africa, and Europe through a vast network of railroads, highways, pipelines, ports, and industrial zones, signals not just the emergence of China as a great continental power but its desire to be a global maritime power as well. Elevated to the status of a “core interest” at the 18th Party Congress in October 2017 (much like Tibet, Taiwan and the South China Sea), OBOR has nevertheless come under increasing scrutiny.

While supporters see it as a Chinese “Marshall Plan” or a blueprint for a China-led “Community of Common Destiny” to spread growth and prosperity, critics see it as an example of China’s “imperial overreach” at best and as “debt-trap diplomacy” at worst that is intended more to assert Chinese dominance than to promote development. To date, states ranging from India, followed by Japan, the European Union, the United States, Australia, France, and Britain (in that order), have either criticized or expressed skepticism over Xi’s megaproject of the century.

India was the first country to boycott the Belt and Road Forum held in May 2017, and since then Indian concerns have helped shape the West’s response. Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Australia’s Minister for International Development and the Pacific, recently articulated those concerns: “China is ensnaring small Pacific states in a debt trap with ‘white elephant’ projects.” French President Emmanuel Macron began his January 2018 state visit to China in Xian, an eastern departure point of the ancient Silk Road, by calling on China and Europe to work together on the Belt and Road initiative, arguing that if it was “one-way,” it would not work because “the ancient Silk Roads were never only Chinese.” Macron cautioned: “These roads cannot be those of a new hegemony, which would transform those that they cross into vassals.”

Macron’s rebuke came within days of the U.S. National Security Strategy’s portrayal of China as a “revisionist state” engaged in “predatory economics” and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s warning to Latin American countries to beware “a new imperial power [offering] short-term gains for long-term dependency . . . reminiscent of European colonialism.” The resistance against Xi’s project of the century is not limited to Western countries or Asian rivals but has spread to countries enjoying traditionally close ties with China, such as Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal, and Pakistan. To quote Senator Tahir Mashhadi Saeed Shah of Pakistan: “Here’s the danger: the banks are Chinese. The money is Chinese. The expertise is Chinese. The management is Chinese. The profits are for China. The labor is Chinese.”

President Xi’s OBOR initiative is, however, not as new as it is made out to be. It actually builds upon the “Great Western Development” and “March West” campaigns launched under President Jiang Zemin and President Hu Jintao, which aimed at establishing a China-centered “hub-and-spokes economic system” as a strategic counter to the U.S. “hub-and-spokes security system.”

Given the relative weakness of an economically and demographically declining Russia and the absence of peer competitors in Eurasia, China faces fewer obstacles along the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB), which resurrects the ancient Silk Road as a modern transit and economic overland corridor to link western China with Russia and Europe through Central Asia. In contrast, the oddly named 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR) component of the BRI—a maritime route to connect China with the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, Africa, and Europe—faces several road blocks, detours, fissures, and fault lines. Unlike the Belt, the Road is not only home to another rising power, India, but also vitally important to all major trading and maritime powers that depend on the Indian Ocean sea lanes. Hence, the economic, geopolitical and maritime dimensions and fissures of the BRI beg careful examination.

The Economic Dimension

For China today, economics is strategy. Money has replaced Maoism as the tool for gaining global influence. Bandwagoning with an economic juggernaut transforms the fortune of nations. In trade and commerce, nations do not pick sides but play all sides. For conflict-torn countries with autocratic regimes that cannot get funding from global financial institutions, China’s aid and investment comes in handy. Being part of the Chinese sphere of influence may well be, or seem, a small price to pay for economic success.

Of course, many countries may not trust China, but they depend on it for their own growth. The quality or durability of Chinese-built infrastructure projects in the developing world may be questionable but bad roads are still better than no roads. In terms of cold, hard cash, China clearly trumps the West and Japan. For countries that want to build factories, schools, roads and ports, Chinese capital and engineering prowess is a godsend. China’s cash-rich state-owned enterprises (SOEs), backed by the China Development Bank and other government institutions, have established a reputation for delivering big infrastructure projects quickly and without delays caused by environmental, labor, or human rights concerns.

Chinese leaders and official media always stress the megaproject’s economic dimension insofar as it can accelerate economic growth in less developed regions. This initiative was unveiled in the aftermath of an investment boom in China that ended in vast overproduction and overcapacity, particularly in the steel, machinery, and construction material sectors, thereby necessitating the need to find new export markets abroad. It required the building of railroads, ports and trade corridors to link manufacturing centers in China with markets and natural resources around the world. These spokes or arteries would bring in raw materials and energy resources while exporting Chinese manufactured goods to those regions and beyond. Beijing has promised hundreds of billions of dollars in funds for investment in Asia alone. Money matters and development requires investment. Many coastal states (such as the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and the Philippines) are courting Beijing to leverage Chinese financial and technical prowess (e.g., in creating artificial islands via dredging on a scale and speed that is unmatched).

To finance this infrastructure network, Beijing has launched the $40 billion Silk Road Fund and the $100 billion Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The disbursement of large amounts of money as loans and aid for countries participating in MSR will enhance China’s influence. Most projects are linked by their proximity and utility to diversify, insulate, and secure China’s resource and trade access. Chinese investments in developing countries’ ports, power plants, railroads, and townships fulfil their development needs. Having lost its low cost comparative advantage in manufacturing, Beijing needs to move manufacturing offshore to low cost producers such as Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Pakistan. China’s size, proximity, economic complementarity and familiarity work to Beijing’s advantage.

The Geopolitical Dimension

Economic expansion creates overseas interests, fuels grandiose geopolitical ambitions, and inevitably leads to military expansion. The colonization of Asia, Africa, and Latin America by industrializing European powers in the 18th and 19th centuries was driven by the search for natural resources to fuel industrialization, markets to dump manufactured goods, and bases (coaling stations) to protect both. These three variables—resources, markets, and bases (RMB)—usually go together. Trade, markets, resource extraction, and port and infrastructure development are also now major ingredients of China’s foreign policy.

As in the past, the “new” great game or President Xi’s dream of “Community of Common Destiny” is actually very old; it is essentially about having pliant and friendly regimes in resource-supplier nations and ensuring access to their markets and ports. Not surprisingly, some have drawn parallels between China’s OBOR and Lenin’s theory of “imperialism as the highest form of capitalism.” Both are indeed driven by capitalist surpluses in search of overseas RMB, which bring them into conflict or competition with other overproducing capitalist societies in quests for their own RMB. There is no denying that OBOR has a strong economic agenda, but it blends geopolitical and strategic objectives as well. It points to China pursuing a foreign policy that seeks to simultaneously secure its continental and maritime interests via dominance of the Eurasian heartland and exploitation of its natural resources for its future economic growth, and development of a powerful two-ocean navy. The influence of 19th-century geopolitical thinker Halford Mackinder and maritime strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan is writ large on Xi’s scheme.

Given China’s significant advantages over its Asian neighbors in terms of geography, military, and economic power, infrastructure diplomacy could redefine and reinforce relations with its neighbors. China’s emergence as the fulcrum of the world economy is supposed to restore its traditional supremacy, and make countries seeking prosperity and security gravitate toward the Middle Kingdom as they did in the past. China is thus building an empire of “exclusive economic enclaves” (EEEs) run by Chinese conglomerates through a network of “geo-economic alliances” to usher in the age of Pax Sinica.

Beijing’s growing might has strengthened the hold of traditional notions of hegemony, cultural supremacy, and tributary relationships whereby patronage, protection and trading privileges are dispensed to countries in return for their obescience. Some Chinese officials joke about buying off smaller countries instead of invading them. Countries with resources, markets or chokepoint naval bases tend to be the largest recipients of Chinese generosity. With its infrastructure development and export-oriented industrial strategy, China is creating economic interdependencies that will constrain others from making policy choices that run counter to China’s interests. A Chinese analyst Hu Weijia recently called for “strengthen[ing] economic cooperation with Myanmar, Nepal and Bangladesh to put pressure on India regarding issues related to the disputed region.” Through its economic stranglehold over Cambodia and Greece, Beijing has come to hold an effective veto over the disputed South China Sea issue and the European Union’s stance on human rights and trade issues.

Their nationalist traditions and democratic pretensions notwithstanding, Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and many other recipients of Chinese largesse are leaning toward “the China model” of state-driven development, thereby weakening whatever democratic institutions they may have. China’s economic muscle has ensured that geopolitical tensions or adverse political change, whether in Zimbabwe, Myanmar, the Maldives, or Sri Lanka, will not damage Chinese economic investments and strategic interests. Those wanting to push back against Beijing’s overbearing influence have found it difficult to do so. China’s global clout ensures that neighbors have everything to gain from cooperation with China and a lot to lose from containing China.

A Forward Basing Strategy: “String of Pearls 2.0”

In 2004, President Hu Jintao spoke of the “Malacca dilemma” and the need to develop China into a maritime power. This led to speculation about Beijing’s plans to develop port facilities around the Indian Ocean in a “string of pearls” strategy to secure its own trade and energy supplies. The proverbial pearls on the string included the ports in Cambodia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Pakistan. While no official acknowledgement of such maritime ambitions was ever made, Chinese analysts and retired naval officers gradually began advocating acquisition of overseas bases to ensure stable energy supplies and to break through the perceived geopolitical encirclement of China by the United States and its allies. As soon as China’s navy began anti-piracy operations off the coast of Yemen in 2008, influential Chinese voices started calling on Beijing to pursue formal military alliances, build overseas bases, and openly compete with Washington. 

Coinciding with this chorus for overseas bases was a concerted effort at reclaiming and militarizing artificial islands in the SCS, which was widely viewed as a strategic stepping-stone for naval supremacy in China’s own backyard and for projecting power into maritime Southeast Asia. China’s 2015 Defense White Paper formalized a new maritime strategy encompassing “open seas protection” for which its naval capacity to protect its overseas interests and assets must increase.

Xi’s MSR is a logical culmination of the Chinese navy’s two-ocean strategy (the Pacific and Indian oceans). Many Chinese analysts view Myanmar and Pakistan as constituting the West Coast of China that would help Beijing overcome the risks associated with trade and energy supplies through the Malacca Straits. Rear Admiral (ret.) Yin Zhuo has called for building “at least five to six aircraft-carriers” in order to maintain “two carrier strike groups in the West Pacific Ocean and two in the Indian Ocean.” Senior military officers acknowledge that in order to safeguard the MSR, “the PLA Navy needs to gain the capability to act globally, which means more overseas logistic bases will also be needed.” Major General (ret) Xu Guangyu opines that China “will need at least 10 to 20 ports around the world in all oceans and continents.” Beijing is indeed on a base-buying spree. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s major 50 ports are either owned by China or have received some Chinese investment. While the PLA-Navy is militarizing the First Island Chain, Beijing is buying off the Second Island Chain in the Pacific Ocean. Within a decade, China is projected to have the largest naval and submarine fleets.

Despite China’s propensity to conceal its naval ambitions, coupled with the rhetoric of mutually beneficial “win-win” relationships, the strategic approach dominates in the Indian Ocean as well. Beijing acts in a piecemeal, quiet, and patient fashion, only bringing the pieces together “when the conditions are ripe.” This was the case in Sri Lanka, where China took advantage of the Sri Lankan civil war in the mid-2000s to establish a strong foothold in that country. In return for becoming the regime’s largest benefactor during its fight against Tamil separatists, China’s navy obtained a strategic toehold in the critical sea lanes in the Indian Ocean through its development of the Hambantota and Colombo ports.

China’s strategy of fusing its maritime expansion with regional economic development and multilateral integration is yielding rich dividends. Having acquired on lease Pakistan’s Gwadar port for 40 years, Greece’s Piraeus port for 35 years, Djibouti port for ten years, Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port for 99 years, 20 percent of Cambodia’s total coastline for 99 years, and the Maldivian island of Feydhoo Finolhu for 50 years, Beijing is now pressuring Myanmar to raise China’s stake from 50 percent to 75–85 percent in the Kyaukpyu port on the Bay of Bengal, and to lease it for 99 years as well if Myanmar does not want to pay penalty for reneging on the $3 billion Myitsone energy dam deal. A military base in Djibouti, along with major port development projects in Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Cambodia define the contours of China’s Maritime Silk Road—an oceanic connectivity project centered on the Indian Ocean.

For Beijing, the Xinjiang-Gwadar railroad and pipeline and the Kunming-Kyaukpyu railway and pipeline constitute the two most critical veins of the Belt and Road, as both provide access to the Indian Ocean and help overcome the Malacca Strait strategic vulnerability. With a fusion of commercial initiatives and strategic goals, Beijing is courting many resource-rich countries and strategically located small states that may facilitate a forward presence and help China thwart any encirclement by a concert of hostile powers. Said one Chinese analyst, “China’s ‘Maritime Silk Road’ is not only an economic development plan, but also a strategic solution to breaking the tight U.S. control of the Strait of Malacca.” China will not spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure projects without the promise of future strategic benefits, and de facto control or privileged access to dual-use naval ports and airbases. “China usually bundles military and civilian uses in a [single] project,” explains naval analyst Li Jie. Not just commercial ports, but nearly all infrastructure projects (for example, telecommunications and highways) are dual use and can be upgraded to support naval operations in wartime situations. Those who used to claim that, unlike America, China has no military bases abroad or soldiers on foreign soil, or that China was going to be a different, new type of great power now seem to have fallen silent.

Roadblocks, Detours, Fissures, and Fault Lines

Despite its endorsement by nearly 80 countries, major problems confront MSR. Whether it succeeds or falls short of its original objectives depends on how China responds to the hurdles in its path.

At the geopolitical level, “peaceful rise” and “win-win” rhetoric notwithstanding, China arouses unease among Asian countries because of its size, history, proximity, power, and more importantly, because memories of “the Middle Kingdom syndrome” have not much dimmed. Strategic mistrust pervades bilateral relations. “China fever” of the 1990s has given way to “China fear” in the 2000s. Given Beijing’s penchant for using its economic and military muscle to corrupt and coerce others, they worry more about China than about the United States, Japan or India. Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi’s statement to his Southeast Asian neighbors in 2010 that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries and that’s just a fact” still rankles many in the region. Beijing expects others to respect its core interests by placing them above their own national interests—a sort of tributary relationship that acknowledges China as the lord of Asia. Asians want to benefit from economic ties with China, but none wants to become a Chinese vassal. Against this background, linking the Silk Road to China’s national rejuvenation as a maritime power or as part of the “China Dream” may do more harm than good insofar as it arouses suspicions that it is “a Trojan horse for extending geopolitical clout, and dumping excess capacity abroad as China’s economy flags.”

Even as governments in poor developing countries welcome Chinese investments, opposition parties and civil society push back against Beijing’s economic dominance. Chinese aid and loans provide a vital lifeline to beleaguered regimes that allows their leaders to disregard human rights and become more repressive. Far from generating goodwill, the growing economic interdependence creates its own stresses and strains. Tensions center on the use of imported Chinese labor, poor environmental standards and debt accumulation by host governments. The cancellation of the Kunming-Kyaukpyu and Thailand’s railway projects, dam deals in Nepal and Pakistan, and highway project in Bangladesh over bribery charges show the limits of this approach. Beijing often faces the consequences of cutting shady business deals with corrupt and autocratic leaders who get voted or booted out when citizens rise in revolt over corruption.

At the economic level, China’s rise has fundamentally restructured the regional political economy in its favor. This economic dependency creates despondency. Many fear that large-scale investment could open the floodgates to Chinese economic dominance—as it has done in Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Zimbabwe—and, by extension, political influence. Several infrastructure projects and billion-dollar investment promises have failed to materialize. Even when they do, they tend to provoke socio-political backlash fearful of the long-term hidden costs of the panda hug. Debt for equity swaps provoke domestic backlash as they lead to foreign ownership. As noted earlier, China’s growing economic and strategic foothold ignited protest among Myanmarese worried about external control over their country. One Myanmarese diplomat said: “We don’t want Myanmar interests trampled on by China on its road to greatness.”

Despite Beijing’s “mutual benefit” rhetoric, and promises of unconditional aid, the recipients of Chinese largesse know that strings are always attached. Beijing warms to national elites willing to co-operate with its strategic agenda, but angrily rebukes them when it is rebuffed. Arguing that host countries’ “embrace of China’s strategic agenda is always at the back of the mind of Chinese officials when they sit at the negotiation table,” Yun Sun adds: “China’s support always comes at a price.” Economic integration has strategic consequences. There is invariably a strategic element attached to enterprises that begin with commercial port construction or management and end with naval presence and long-term ownership rights. To cope with the mounting debt of nearly $8 billion, Sri Lanka was forced to offer China its Hambantota port in debt-for-equity swap, thereby enabling Beijing to acquire a full-fledged Chinese enclave at a strategic location on the Indian Ocean. Accusing China of “seizing land” in the politically-troubled archipelago, Maldives’ opposition leader Mohamed Nasheed laments that 80 percent of his country’s foreign debt is owed to China.

The modus operandi of Chinese state-owned enterprises in Angola, Kenya, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Kyrgyzstan, and Greece—all weighed down with heavy indebtedness due to high interest rates of 4 percent to 8 percent on Chinese loans—holds lessons for others to avoid falling into Chinese debt traps that usually end in strategic entrapment. China’s practice of bankrolling huge infrastructure projects through big loans with high interest rates in return for strategic concessions causes tensions internally and anxiety externally. The greater the debt, the more leverage Beijing acquires in negotiating exclusive ownership or access to land, resources, ports and airports. Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and others have expressed unease with unequal deals that burden them with high interest loans for buying Chinese products, services and labor, yet do not alleviate unemployment, corruption, or environmental degradation. China is thus seen as doing in Asia and Africa what powerful European powers did to China and others in their moment of weakness in the 19th century.

For historical reasons, most Asians and Africans remain highly sensitive to foreign domination. Most nations prefer open markets (if not, open politics) and are wary of putting all their eggs in the China basket. Faced with growing criticism of Chinese firms’ work practices, trade imbalances, and low environmental standards, China’s leaders have begun to acknowledge commercial disputes and “growing pains” in the partnerships. Dealing with vibrant civil society and democratic political transitions remains a major challenge for an authoritarian China.

Furthermore, the organizing principle of Xi’s OBOR is a Sino-centric unipolar Asia which is diametrically opposite to the vision of a multipolar Asia held by China’s rivals; its cumulative effect will be to bring Central, Southeast and South Asia closer into China’s orbit, and extend its economic, diplomatic, and possibly military supremacy across the entire region to disadvantage Beijing’s rivals. In geostrategic terms, OBOR’s success would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, Japan, India, and Russia which have long dominated these regions. Far from integrating, OBOR is polarizing Asia. China’s irredentism also encourages Asians to seek greater American, Japanese and Indian involvement in regional affairs to countervail China. Thus, China’s economic and strategic forays are not without repercussions. Wherever China goes, Japan, India, and the United States are not far behind, offering potential partners options and opportunities to look beyond China.

To counter China’s AIIB, Japan announced a $110 billion “partnership for quality infrastructure” (PQI), with very low interest rates, funded through the Asian Development Bank. Japan’s focus is on increasing its investments and trade and building East-West corridors in competition with China’s north-south railroads to Southeast and South Asia. Japan’s partnerships with India in port and infrastructure development in the “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor” (AAGC) and with the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation on financing infrastructure are aimed at countering Beijing’s neo-mercantilist policies.

Like Japan, India is deeply suspicious of growing Chinese naval presence in the Indian Ocean and views the Silk Road as a disguised “String of Pearls 2.0.” To balance China’s north-south transport corridors in Southeast Asia, rival India is pitching to gain an entry into Indo-China by building an east-west corridor (the India-Myanmar-Thailand Highway and the Kaladan Multimodal Transit Transport Project) that cuts horizontally through Myanmar toward Thailand and on to Vietnam. India’s construction of ports at Chabahar in Iran and at Sittwe in Myanmar are seen as India’s counterbalance to the Chinese-built Gwadar Port where CPEC culminates and to Kyaukpyu port in Myanmar where the pipelines start for Kunming. With Myanmar allowing Japan and India to build ports on its Bay of Bengal coast, the prospects of China gaining unimpeded access to a western seaboard now look dim. India has reportedly committed around $25-30 billion in credits and grants to its extended neighborhood from East Africa to Southeast Asia, and offered an alternative vision to MSR with “Project SAGAR” (Security and Growth for All in the Region) declaring that the “responsibility for peace, prosperity and security rests with those who live in the Indian Ocean.” This is Delhi’s counter to Xi’s “Asia for Asians” rhetoric and attempts to revive India’s ancient trade routes and cultural linkages around the Indian Ocean region.

The greater frequency of naval forays by Chinese warships and nuclear submarines in the Indian Ocean reinforces those suspicions and increases the risk of blowback for Beijing. As China’s navy goes south to the Indian Ocean, India’s navy is going east to the Pacific Ocean. Beijing’s MSR has prompted the Indian navy to unveil a three-pronged strategy: fortify its defenses in the Indian Ocean by acquiring privileged access to bases in Mauritius, the Seychelles and Madagascar; conducting joint naval exercises in the East and South China Seas; and launching an ambitious naval expansion program. Since 2011, India’s naval voyages have grown in number by 300 percent.

The U.S. government has helped. The U.S.-India Logistics Exchange agreement benefits both as it provides India’s Navy access to American bases in Diego Garcia, Djibouti and the Pacific, while the U.S. Navy gains access to India’s ports. More of the LEMOA-type agreements with Australia, France, and Japan to gain reciprocal access to ports are reportedly on the anvil. The U.S.-India “Joint Strategic Vision” of 2015 mentioned “support for regional economic integration” and “accelerated infrastructure connectivity.” Beijing’s efforts to acquire sea-denial and sea control capabilities have also prompted leading maritime powers (the United States, Japan, Australia, and India) to coalesce together in a Quad to ensure that the northern Indian Ocean does not fall under Chinese hegemony. While India and the United States are collaborating in tracking Chinese submarines in the Indian Ocean, India and Japan plan to build a sea wall of “hydrophones”—microphones with sensors placed on the seabed—between southern India and the northern tip of Indonesia to keep a check on Chinese submarine movement.

Washington has noted that OBOR treats Asia and Europe as a single space for creating a Eurasian Co-Prosperity Sphere, wherein China, not the United States, is at its core. Not only that, the only part of the world that remains untouched by OBOR is the Americas. For, the new Silk Road is mostly about building alternatives to U.S. power. Since the new great game is about supply chain geopolitics, both China and the United States are vying for influence over the crucial industrial, financial, and commercial nodes across Eurasia. China’s growing economic stranglehold over small states has had the effect of weakening regional cohesion and organizations (for example, the European Union, ASEAN, and the Pacific Islands Forum). Beijing and its cheerleaders claim that while the Western democracies are in utter disarray, China has built a successful alternative governing model that works and should be emulated. Xi’s OBOR has raised the strategic stakes for small nations which are under intense pressure to choose one side or another in the contest. Though Washington is not opposed to China’s infrastructure projects—provided they are open to competitive bidding by all, do not incur unsustainable debt burdens (that is, no predatory lending), are environmentally sound, and generate local employment and good governance—the United States is seeking like-minded democratic, free-market societies as partners in upholding the rules-based order.

Signs of pushback are growing. Neither the Belt nor the Road would succeed in completely de-coupling Asia or Europe from the United States. For the Quad, the OBOR challenge is both economic and ideological. The lurch toward authoritarianism in Cambodia and the Maldives could not have occurred without Beijing’s financial backing. The Quad versus OBOR contest of clashing values and visions is on not just in the Maldives but in other countries as well. The Quad countries are now coordinating on tactics and strategy to offer an alternative vision of development finance across the Indo-Pacific. Even Jakarta has come up with its own vision to transform Indonesia into a “global maritime fulcrum”—a key goal being the development of Indonesian maritime infrastructure and connectivity. And the possibility of a post-Putin Russia turning China’s strategic latitude on its northern frontiers into Beijing’s “northern discomfort” cannot be ruled out.

China always plays by its own rules. The BRI-inspired overseas “exclusive economic enclaves” (EEEs) distinguish themselves from the domestic “special economic zones” (SEZs) that transformed China into an economic superpower in the sense that, while Chinese SEZs welcomed multinational corporations (MNCs) from all over the world, the OBOR-driven EEEs are meant primarily for China’s state-owned enterprises and closed to foreign competition from other multinational corporations. One study shows that of the contractors working on China-funded transport infrastructure projects in 34 Asian and European countries, 89 percent were Chinese, leaving only 11 percent from other countries. So the downside of “globalization with Chinese characteristics” is that it could split the world economy into two rival trading blocs—one bloc of non-OBOR economies and the other bloc dominated by Chinese financial institutions, conglomerates, and technology, pursuing mercantilism and governed by Chinese laws, courts, standards, rules, and dispute resolution mechanisms. Of the G-20 countries, China remains the most closed to foreign investment, even as Chinese companies seek to acquire strategic industries and critical infrastructure in other countries.

A related problem is that OBOR projects enmesh China much more closely in other countries’ domestic politics. Negative portrayals of China rise in conjunction with its increased involvement in other countries. That leads to situations where Chinese businesses bear the brunt of criticism for the governance failures of ruling elites. Beijing’s nod for the military coup in Zimbabwe in 2017 and support for the Cambodian and Maldivian regimes’ suppression of democracy shows that China will intervene in the domestic affairs of other states should it perceive Chinese interests at stake, and if the costs of intervention are relatively low. In short, China’s expanding economic footprint often weakens democratic institutions, shifts civil-mil relations in military’s favor, favors strongman politics, increases corruption, and results in restrictions on civil liberties.

Not only that, economic slowdown coupled with dramatic falls in the Chinese currency market and in foreign exchange reserves from $4 trillion to $3 trillion raise questions about the longevity of the “China Dream.” Official estimates show that Xi’s dream would require $4–8 trillion of investment to bring to fruition. Some wonder if it is wise to pour such huge amounts into low-return projects and high-risk countries at risk of default when China’s own debt is 250 percent of its GDP and climbing. Many of the infrastructure projects, driven not by commercial logic but by the geopolitical consideration of acquiring a strategic foothold, don’t make money and, often end in “white elephant” projects saddling host countries with heavy debts. Chinese officials privately expect to lose 80 percent of their investments in Pakistan, 50 percent in Myanmar, and 30 percent in Central Asia. Of the 68 nations China lists as its BRI partners, Bloomberg reports the sovereign debt of 27 are rated as junk, or below investment grade, by the top three international rating firms. In fact, Beijing may have already overreached itself by creating a far-flung empire of “exclusive economic enclaves” as the problems of harsh terrain, political change and geopolitical rivalries add to financial woes.

Lastly, China’s vision may be backed with trillions worth of investment, but money alone (or often at all) cannot buy love and loyalty. At most, it can buy short-term influence, as in Cambodia. China’s railroads, highways and pipelines may bring about physical integration with Asian countries, but the politico-security integration will take place only when their interests, values and vision are in harmony with those of China’s. Put simply, Beijing may have accumulated unmatched comprehensive national power, but it needs enviable positive national identity to court friends and win allies. Until then, China’s neighbors may well take its money but balk at allowing greater Chinese influence over policy or granting strategic concessions to Beijing. Suspicion and distrust of China would deliver less than promised. Beijing needs to outline a vision of the regional order that transcends the centrality of Chinese world order in ways that appeals to other peoples.

Will It Succeed or Fail?

As in the past, the Silk Road is an avenue for development and expansion. OBOR is cold-blooded geostrategy. Should it succeed, it would bend borders and change internal and external power dynamics. China’s infrastructure diplomacy plays to its strengths and offers insights into Beijing’s long-term strategy for reshaping both the landscape and the seascape of the Eurasian continent and its maritime domain. There is always a strategic element attached to Chinese enterprises that begin with commercial port construction and management and end with naval presence and long-term ownership rights. It is the ultimate “China solution” to dealing with domestic problems of economic slowdown, growing wages and excess industrial capability in conjunction with the geostrategic imperatives of acquiring strategic footholds along the vital sea lanes and maritime chokepoints, undermine the U.S. dominance and usher in a post-American Sino-centric order.

Many countries seeking to improve their living standards are tilting toward Beijing. Some are, however, uncomfortable with Beijing’s neo-colonial diplomacy that invariably ends in a trail of debts, IOUs and strategic entrapment in the form of long-term Chinese presence. From Myanmar to Mexico, concerns over China’s stranglehold over local economies often generate domestic pressure for political change. As its experience in Myanmar and elsewhere indicates, Chinese companies will need to grapple with the additional socio-political and economic considerations and adopt international best practices for sustainable development.

Other major players—Japan, the United States and India—could create major road blocks along the Silk Road as Beijing has failed to get their buy-in. To be successful, OBOR may well need to become “an order based on rules” (OBOR), and the rules have to be arrived at consensually. No single country built the old Silk Road in the past; it developed organically. No one country can build it alone again. Its dimensions will be determined by the laws of supply and demand. As in the past, there will be not one but several roads in the future. While optimists predict the Silk Road will kickstart flagging global economic growth, skeptics see it as China’s play for power and influence that is doomed to fail. However, Xi’s OBOR is too big to fail completely. Beijing can take credit if it stimulates development and galvanizes its rivals to step up to contribute to others’ development. Since many, if not all, of the projects that sport the label would probably have been built anyway, by 2049 Beijing can proclaim success, whatever the realities or paths taken to get to them.

Walter R. Mead, “Xi Wants Foreign Support for One Belt One Road,” The American Interest, May 26, 2016.

Hu Weijia, “China can respond if India breaks status quo in disputed border area,” Global Times, February 5, 2018.

Xu Yao, “Overseas military bases not alliances,” China Daily, January 14, 2015; Tu Debin, Ma Yahua et al., “Research on China’s Maritime Transportation Security” [中国海上通道安全及保障思路研究], World Regional Studies [世界地理研究], 24(2), (2015), pp. 1-10.

The State Council Information Office of the PRC, China’s Military Strategy (2015).

Yang Sheng, “China’s navy budget based on security needs: experts,” People’s Daily, February 28, 2017.

Yang Sheng, “Top PLA Navy promotions suggest intent to build up combat capability,” Global Times, January 24, 2018.

Liu Zhen, “Pakistan port on China’s radar for naval base, Pentagon report says,” South China Morning Post, June 7, 2017.

Li quoted in Liu Zhen, “Pakistan port on China’s radar for naval base,” South China Morning Post, June 7, 2017, p. 5.

For details, see Mohan Malik, “Balancing Act: The China-India-US Triangle,” World Affairs (Summer 2016); and Jane Perlez, “Chinese Move to Eclipse U.S. Appeal in Southeast Asia,” New York Times, November 18, 2004.

Quoted in John Pomfret, “US takes a tougher tone with China,” Washington Post, July 30, 2010.

Charlie Campbell, “China’s Xi Jinping Talks Up ‘One Belt, One Road’ as Keynote Project Fizzles,” Time, August 18, 2016.

“An auspicious moment,” Economist, January 15, 2015.

Author’s discussion with a senior Myanmarese diplomat, October 2016.

Richard McGregor, “The price tag of China’s threats,” Nikkei Asian Review, October 13, 2016.

Yun Sun, “Suu Kyi’s Visit to Beijing,” Panglong.org, August 19, 2016.

“Exiled Maldives leader accuses China of ‘land grab’,” Straits Times, January 22, 2018.

Ding Gang, “Populism Constitutes Risks to Belt & Road,” Global Times, March 29, 2017.

Lucio B. Pitlo III, “China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ to Where?” Diplomat, February 17, 2015.

Nikkei, “Japan races China to secure Asian port rights,” Nikkei Asian Review, June 8, 2017; “Govt set to start naval security aid to Sri Lanka, Djibouti,” Yomiuri Shimbun, January 21, 2018.

See Wang Jin, “Can China Keep India Silent Over the South China Sea?” Diplomat, August 17, 2016; Liu Zongyi, “India’s political goals hinder cooperation with China on ‘Belt, Road’,” Global Times, July 3, 2016; “To counter China’s clout, India offers to stand by Myanmar ‘at every step,’” Times of India, August 30, 2016.

“‘China a disruptive power,’ say navy chiefs of Quadrilateral nations,” Times of India, January 19, 2018.

Manu Balachandran, “India is flexing its maritime muscles in the Indian Ocean,” Quartz India, December 19, 2016; IANS, “Seychelles allows India to build military infra on island,” Business Standard, January 28, 2018.

Wang Yiwei, “No need for India to fall in US-Japan trap,” China Daily, March 15, 2017.

Pepe Escobar, “Why the New Silk Roads Terrify Washington,” RT.com, October 7, 2016.

James Kynge, “Chinese contractors grab lion’s share of Silk Road projects: Beijing fails to share benefits of transport infrastructure programmes,” Financial Times, January 24, 2018.

Michael Schuman, “China’s Global Ambitions Could Split the World Economy,” Bloomberg Business, October 26, 2017.

Oliver Stuenkel, “The Political Economy of China’s New Silk Road,” Post-westernworld.com, November 6, 2016.

“China’s Silk Road Cuts Through Some of the World’s Riskiest Countries,” Bloomberg News, October 25, 2017.

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The Liberal Democratic Order in Crisis

As two recent reports have made clear, the global recession of freedom and democracy is deepening. The latest “Freedom in the World” report, released last month by Freedom House, warns that electoral integrity, freedom of the press, and rule of law are “under assault and in retreat globally.” 2017 was the 12th consecutive year in which average levels of political rights and civil liberties have trended downward. 71 countries declined in freedom, while only 35 gained; and among those countries with significant changes, 20 sharply declined, only 6 sharply improved. Since 2006, twice as many countries have declined in freedom as have improved.

The annual Democracy Index, released by the Economist Intelligence Unit, notes a similar trend. Of the 165 countries (and two territories) measured, 89 declined in their democracy score, more than three times the number (27) that improved. Virtually every region in the world declined, and since 2006, western Europe has seen almost as much erosion as the east. Globally, the erosion encompasses not only growing curbs on freedom of speech, media, and the Internet, but declines in democratic trust, tolerance, and participation.

While the net numerical decline in democracies has so far been modest, the geopolitical weight of retreat is more alarming. In recent years, democracy has failed in big emerging-market countries, including Turkey, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Kenya. It is under serious pressure from autocratic leaders or parties in the Philippines, Bolivia, and Peru; from religious extremism in Indonesia; and from corruption and criminality in Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. Most of the countries that experienced uprisings during the Arab Spring—notably Egypt—are now more authoritarian than they were at the time, and even the one successful case of democratic transition, Tunisia, is flailing due to regional insecurity and the resurgence of old authoritarian forces. In Pakistan and Myanmar, the military is ever more obviously in the driver’s seat, presiding in the latter case over large-scale ethnic cleansing of the country’s Rohingya minority.

But the most alarming setbacks are now coming in the once-solid core of liberal democracy, the West. In the postcommunist states of the “new Europe”, a crisis is gathering. Some of the biggest global declines in freedom last year were in Hungary and Poland, which continued their descent from liberal democracy to what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán calls “illiberal democracy” but is better termed “postmodern autocracy.” It is an arrangement that leaves the shell of democratic institutions standing but hollows out the pluralist essence—a free press and civil society, an independent judiciary, a fair electoral playing field—that it is nearly impossible to defeat the ruling party through normal politics. By this means—long since perfected in Russia, Venezuela, and Turkey—the ruling party barricades itself in power. After neutering independent institutions and systematically rigging the political system, Orbán’s Fidesz regained its two-thirds majority in parliament in 2014 despite winning only 45 percent of the vote—and a smaller number of votes than in the party’s losing efforts in 2002 and 2006. He seems set to pull off the same trick in elections this April.

Orbán’s right-wing populist assault on liberal norms and institutions has inspired emulation across postcommunist Europe. According to a new report by the Tony Blair Institute, populists have won power in seven Central and East European countries (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Serbia); they have joined as junior coalition partners in two more; and they constitute the primary opposition in another three. Between 2000 and 2017, the average populist vote share in the region more than tripled, to 32 percent, and the number of populist parties doubled (to 28).

In “old Europe”, the rise of xenophobic populism has not eviscerated liberal democracy, but it threatens key elements of the liberal order: historic Western commitments to freer movements of people, goods, and services; to social, political and religious tolerance; and even to individual and minority rights. The milestones include the victory for Brexit in the 2016 British referendum; the record 34 percent vote for the anti-immigrant, pro-Russian National Front candidate, Marine LePen, in the 2017 French presidential election; the prominent entry into Austria’s government of the far-right Freedom Party, after it won more than a quarter of the vote; the rapid emergence of the right-wing, populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) as the third largest party in Germany (with one in eight votes); and substantial electoral gains by extreme anti-immigrant parties winning in other very liberal democracies, such as the Netherlands and Sweden.

As Freedom House notes, the biggest jolt to the liberal democratic order came with the election of a populist, polarizing American president, Donald Trump, who has challenged key democratic institutions—the judiciary, the mass media, and the integrity of the electoral process—while denigrating immigrants, racial and religious minorities, international trade and engagement, and American support for civil society and liberal democratic norms abroad. A year into his presidency, Freedom House reported a significant decline in freedom in the U.S., as a result of Trump’s violations of basic norms of transparency and democracy.

Why is the erosion of liberal democracy now suddenly reaching crisis proportions? There is general agreement among analysts such as William Galston, Yascha Mounk, and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt on three crucial drivers of populist backlash and normative erosion in the West: economic insecurity, cultural insecurity, and the polarizing effects of social media. In Britain, the U.S. and continental Europe, the strongest electoral constituency for rightwing nativist and illiberal parties has been among groups who feel threatened in their economic and social status by stagnant or falling wages, rising inequality, the closure or migration of factories, a general decay of infrastructure and living standards, and surging immigration and cultural pluralism. Whether the locus is the marginalized and de-industrialized interior of the U.S., Britain, or Germany, the common factor is threat to existing social status, which leaves people feeling that a world that once offered comfort and predictablity is now being torn asunder. In his classic mid-century work, Political Man, Seymour Martin Lipset identified declining middle class groups as a crucial base of support for right-wing extremist movements, in reaction—even revenge—against sweeping social and economic changes, big, impersonal corporations and institutions, and urban, intellectual elites.

The problem has been compounded by historically high levels of immigration, particularly in Europe but also in the United States. The current proportion of immigrants in the United States (about 14 percent) is nearing the record level (14.8 percent) set in 1890; it is three times the level in 1965; and it is projected to rise to 18 percent in 2065. The number of immigrants in the U.S. quadrupled between 1970 and 2013, to over 40 million, and the composition of the immigrant population has changed dramatically, from mainly European in the 1970s to predominantly Latin American and Asian today. Europe, which has less experience with immigration, particularly from outside Europe, has lower levels of foreign-born populations. But the proportions are rising more rapidly (to eleven percent, on average), and as a result these countries are feeling greater cultural stress. For example, while Hungary’s population was less than 6 percent foreign-born in 2016, it experienced the second fastest surge of immigration in Europe. And by 2016, the proportion of immigrants was greater than the U.S. level in Germany, Austria, and Sweden, which also have among the fastest-growing immigrant populations. These new waves of immigration are bringing degrees of cultural and religious diversity that most of these countries have little experience absorbing, especially so rapidly. Thus, they present a ready target for blame attribution.

With economic and social change have come anxieties about national sovereignty. And the three anxieties are deeply intertwined. In Europe, rightwing anti-EU parties condemn a politically distant Brussels bureaucracy for forcing their countries to accept European migrants, Syrian refugees, and open markets, which they blame for the loss of jobs and economic security. The common chord is a deep-seated fear of losing control, security, status, and tradition—of falling, falling into the unknown. Rightwing populist demagogues have brilliantly exploited these fears, as Trump did with his famous characterization of Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” The common vow of illiberal populists is to roll back globalization and restore “the good old days” of economic security, social order, and (relative) cultural homogeneity—one or another national version of “America first” and “make America great again.”

Stirring this mix of toxic forces has been the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. In empowering anyone to broadcast anything, social media have further eroded the traditional gatekeeping (and norm-preserving) roles of established media and political party organizations. In the process, they have coarsened the political dialogue, facilitated the easy proliferation of “fake news”, and made it vastly easier for extreme and marginal figures to mobilize followings. By enabling like-minded people to quickly find and engage one another exclusively, they have also heightened social and political polarization. There have been positive effects as well, in leveling the playing field for political mobilization and campaign finance, but social media have fit populist politics like a hand in a glove.

Most devastatingly, social media have lowered the barriers to foreign authoritarian manipulation of democratic politics. And that points to a fourth driver: the resurgence of Russian power and the rise of China as the next global superpower. With different styles and methods, these two powerful autocracies have been penetrating the political systems and cultures of democracies new and old, putting at risk the integrity of elections and information flows, and even endangering some freedom of expression. By hacking into digital information stores, manufacturing fake news, and flooding social media with outrageously polarizing posts, Russia has ruthlessly fanned fear and division. Having succeeded brilliantly in Britain and the United States in 2016, Putin’s troll and bot factories are now targeting the 2018 elections in Mexico and the United States.

As democracies appear ever more dysfunctional, divided, and irresolute, as authoritarian regimes exploit and propagandize these difficulties, and as China expands its economic and political muscle through its Belt and Road Initiative and surge of development “assistance”, global faith in democracy as the best system is eroding. The specter that now haunts the world is something unseen since the 1930s: an authoritarian zeitgeist celebrating the suppression of political and individual freedom as a better way to govern.

A simplistic reading of the social science literature could say the rollback of democracy was to be expected in countries lacking the key conditions for democratic success—a large middle class, highly levels of education, a strong civil society, and a cultural of tolerance and mutual restraint. But many democratic success stories began under difficult circumstances. It is analytically fatuous and morally wrong to write off democratic aspirations anywhere. As India and Botswana have shown, democratic norms and institutions can take hold in poor countries. And they can unravel in rich countries—including, we should not be so arrogant to doubt, our own. Democratic values must be cultivated and renewed in every generation. And they need to defended and promoted across borders.

The most important contribution of Samuel Huntington’s landmark study, The Third Wave, was not to give this name to the democratic expansion of the late twentieth century, but rather to see how indispensable international—and especially American—efforts to foster democracy were to this transformation. In particular, the renewal of American power and resolve under Ronald Reagan, and the expansion of efforts and instruments to support democracy abroad, helped bring about the end of Soviet communism and the rapid spread of freedom. Back then the zeitgeist was all about democracy. Now it is about democratic weakness, apathy, and decay.

We are at a tipping point. Around the world, many democracies are hanging by a thread and autocrats are preparing more savage assaults on what remains of freedom. Two things stand in the way: pressure from below, in civil societies that will not go quietly into the dark authoritarian night, and pressure from outside, particularly from the United States and the European Union. Although doubts about democracy are growing, public opinion polls still show considerable support for democratic and accountable government, not just in Europe and North America but in Africa, Asia and Latin America as well. Democratic parties, mass media, think tanks, and associations need material support and technical assistance. At least as much, they need diplomatic support—clear messages of Western democratic solidarity with people struggling to fight corruption and defend their freedom, and clear warnings of consequences—in terms of economic aid, security assistance, and political support—if rulers trample on democratic constitutions and individual rights. These messages need to come both from our ambassadors on the ground and our highest officials in Washington.

No great power can pin its global engagement on principle alone. But in most countries, we can do and say something on behalf of freedom and the rule of law. And on many fronts, including the troubled transitions in Ukraine and Tunisia, our engagement and pressure could make the difference between success and failure. If we do not renew our global leadership for freedom, and our resolve to assist and defend it where we can—including against Russia’s ongoing cyber assaults—the long decade of democratic recession will give way to an authoritarian rout.

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Syria in the Rear-View Mirror

It is a touching characteristic of the optimistic liberal soul that it perennially inclines to believe that bad situations cannot get worse. But of course they can and often do get worse. This would seem to make it hard to be an optimistic liberal for very long, but some people accomplish it for decades on end apparently without much effort. How do they do it?

A hint to the answer reposes in something Archie (the cockroach) once said to Mehitabel (the cat)—according to that suave literary bystander Don Marquis: “An optimist is a guy without much experience.” It may be tentatively inferred, therefore, that the longevity of liberal optimism, at least when it comes to the understanding and conduct of global affairs, relies on superficial experience, or none at all, over an extended period; and relies especially on the kind of memory that exhibits an aversion to anything particularly unpleasant, such that the dour images taken in never make it from the hippocampus to one of those soft folds in the frontal cortex.

Those with scant relevant experience and an aversion to the unpleasant are likely aided in building up a protectively poor memory when what they would remember is complicated. Americans in particular tend to prefer their stories about global conflicts in the shape of a secularized passion play. There can be only good guys who are morally right—and we know them because they look, speak, or act like us—and bad guys who are morally wrong. When there are more than two sides, and when none of the sides reminds us of ourselves, some become too confused to follow the action—sort of like a tennis match with six or seven players and three or four nets set about at various angles. They therefore flip their memories off, obliging themselves to recall as a little as they can manage, so that if and when the subject again barges into their consciousness they are as innocent of it as possible.

Case in point for all of this: U.S. policy toward Syria.

It almost had to seem to casual observers that after last year’s protracted “battle of Aleppo” the Syrian civil war could not get worse. It had not gotten obviously worse since the battle of Aleppo; indeed, until recently the war’s tempo had slowed significantly. That led some to think that the war was nearly over, petering out because either one side had all but won, or because a general fatigue had settled in, or some of both. That is how some wars do end, after all, in mutual exhaustion.

But no, the war did not end, but merely went into temporary remission. The relatively subdued pace of armed conflict in recent months has had more to do with the weather and with the need of government forces to consolidate, recuperate, and rearm for the next phase. The next phase is now upon us. About 687 Syrians died from unnatural warlike causes in January alone, and that number will seem small once the February data has been totaled up.

Anyone who has been following the conflict knows that the only major populated area of Syria not under the control of the Asad regime is the province of Idlib. Idlib governate is the area west of Aleppo toward the Lebanese border, reaching north to the Turkish border. The entire district is reported to have a population of about 1.5 million, with the town of Idlib itself having a population of about 165,000. But the region is swelled with refugees, mostly Sunni Muslims like the majority of the local inhabitants. Most of these figures come from before the onset of violence in 2011, and Idlib has already been the scene of much fighting. The result is that some of the prewar population has left the area, but others have fled into it. The net gain or loss of population therefore comes down to a guess, but whatever the guess we are talking about a lot of people, far more than in the non-contiguous map blotches of rebel-held areas around Damascus and in the southernmost tip of the country near the Jordanian border.

As the regime, with its Russian allies and Iranian proxies (Hizbollah but increasingly a group of militias), ramps up the pace of the war, several areas in the country have come under new attack. In addition to Idlib, some suburbs of Damascus and parts of the province of Hama have also been hit—including with deadly chlorine gas. In Idlib, the air attacks have been following a familiar pattern already discernable in this early stage of the campaign.

One target is bakeries. The bakery is one of the sinews of an integral Levantine Arab neighborhood, because individual households take their risen sourdough goop to a central bakery to be baked. If you destroy the big ovens, people have no ready way of making bread; so there goes the neighborhood. A second related target set consists of hospitals and clinics, and a third consists of schools and mosques. The purpose of this target set is to destroy communities, and create refugees. It can also be seen, when directed against Sunni Arab communities, as a preliminary form of not ethnic but sectarian cleansing conducted by the Alawi regime.

It could be that these tactics were devised by the Syrian regime without any assistance, but they follow uncannily the tactics used by the Russian military in its onslaught against Chechnya. Draw your own conclusions.

In the past, refugee flows created in this manner have not remained always in Syria. There have been heavy flows of people northward out of the country into Turkey, and for a while some years ago from Turkey into Europe—particularly Germany. These refugee flows accelerated dramatically after the Russian intervention in September 2015. It was my view at the time that this was a deliberate if second-order aim of Russian policy: to weaponize the refugee flows in order to harm Western political order within and among nations.

Heavy refugee flows will likely start up again soon, and again, Turkey will be an obvious attempted destination. Really the only other possibility is for those who are fleeing violence to try to enter Lebanon. But that is not an attractive option for a country at the mercy of Hizbollah, an Iranian proxy and Syrian regime ally.

Meanwhile, the Turkish role in the Syrian civil war has changed significantly, such that the Turkish attitude toward new flows of refugees is unclear. Turkey has inserted military forces into Syria on several occasions, but most recently and most seriously in Afrin, where combat operations are ongoing. The purpose of the Turkish deployment is to prevent Kurdish-controlled cantons from linking up to form a contiguous zone of Kurdish control adjacent to the Turkish border. A good deal of what the Turkish government is up to is a wag-the-dog phenomenon attuned to Turkish domestic politics—specifically a potentially portentous election in 2019. But the rhetorical tones aside, any Turkish government of any party make-up would probably be doing something similar.

The reason is that the Turkish leadership believes that the Kurdish organizations in northern Syria, notably the PYD (Democratic Union Party) and various auxiliaries, are aligned with the PKK, the Kurdish military organization inside Turkey against which the government has been waging an on-and-off counterinsurgency campaign for many years. And they would be correct, for the Kurdish groups in Syria are a vestige of Soviet Cold War efforts to harm Turkey, as a NATO ally, by stoking the Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey from what was then a bordering Soviet ally in Syria using Syria’s own Kurdish population as a conduit. This history partly explains why the Turkish government has been able to establish reasonably cordial and mutually useful relationships with the Kurdish rump regime in northern Iraq since the early 1990s, but not with groups like the PYD in Syria.

Fighting has been raging recently in the Afrin sector not just between the Turks and the PYD, but also between Arab Free Syrian Army rebel groups and the Kurds. In other words, the Free Syrian Army groups have been acting as objective allies of the Turkish invaders, because they have a common adversary in the Kurds, whom both fear—and because the Turks are materially helping them, since the United States really no longer is. As those who follow the news know, there have been some grisly scenes from this fighting, including the recent mutilation and abuse of the corpse of a female Kurdish soldier—all captured on video by jubilant, if quite sick, Arab fighters. Thus did a war within a war become not only bloody and gut wrenching, but also disgusting and perverse.

And the Asad regime’s view of this? It can hardly welcome a Turkish invasion of its territory, even though the target is a Kurdish group that constitutes a problem for it. But the Free Syrian Army is a bigger problem, so the regime’s attitude has been one of tacit support for the Kurds. It hasn’t done much of anything, however, because in that part of the country it isn’t able to do much of anything.

It was not difficult for anyone paying attention to understand the Russian attitude toward the Turkish intervention: The Russians were for it, whatever the equivocations and calculations of their Syrian client. Why? There are so many reasons that the Russian attitude was over-determined.

First, the Turks seemed interested in weakening an enemy of the Asad regime, and that aligns with Russian interest in protecting that regime. If both Kurds and Free Syrian Army soldiers die in the fight, restful sleep at night in Moscow will not be hampered.

Second, Russian support for the Turks would contrast with necessary American ambivalence occasioned by two of its allies fighting one another. Support is thus useful for driving a wedge between United States and a NATO ally—not that U.S. relations with Turkey have not been troubled for a variety of reasons already: It’s easy to shove a wedge into a rotting log.

Third, less important but not unimportant, the Turks are pro-Qatari in the Arab Gulf pissing contest, having even sent some troops there. So Russian support for Turkey works as indirect vexation of the Saudis, who are opposing (what has become) an Iranian proxy in Yemen.

And fourth, Russian verbal support for Turkey amounts to a chit for a favor to be returned. That returned favor could take any of several forms, including Turkish obstructionism within NATO councils should Russia ever try to muscle one of the Baltic States, for example. Not that Turkey could thereby stop a NATO response to such Russian bullying, but it could mightily complicate it given NATO’s decision protocols.

Did Russia lose anything by supporting the Turks? Not much. The Russians had established relations with the Kurdish groups in Syria, or perhaps it is more accurate to say re-established them from of old. Doubtless, the Syrian Kurds are not very fond of the Russians right now. But affinities are not as important as interests, and interests shift. It would not therefore be wildly out of whack with reality for the Russians and the Syrian Kurdish groups to make amends one day if the two sides have good enough in-the-moment reasons to do so.

This contrasts sharply with the mess facing U.S. policy. The Obama Administration chose to use the Syrian Kurds as proxies to fight against the Islamic State. The Kurds did so with distinction, but the choice was bound to alienate Turkey. And it did. The Trump Administration inherited this choice and its consequence for U.S.-Turkish relations, and instead of rethinking it doubled down on it. By focusing U.S. policy almost exclusively on the Islamic State, and not really figuring in the larger consequences with respect to Syria itself, U.S. policy boxed itself into an impossible future problem. At some point the Islamic State was going to be deprived of real estate, and at that point some decisions would have to be made about the Kurds. It was never in the cards that U.S. policy could please both the Kurds and the Turks for very long, and the attempt to do so has predictably persuaded no one.

Insofar as the Obama Administration had a policy with regard to Syria, it was to keep clear of opposing the Asad regime too vigorously, lest it befoul the high-priority effort to get a nuclear deal with Iran. Indeed, at one point the Administration terminated a small interagency group whose task it was to put a strategy behind the President’s ill-considered declaration that President Asad must step aside. Otherwise, it responded to congressional pressure by reluctantly agreeing to support the “free,” which is to say the non-Islamist, Syrian opposition to the regime, but the effort was always too small, in part because it was deliberately halfhearted (but not also thereby cheap). Eventually it too was terminated.

One result of this process is that the so-called Free Syrian Army is still around to fight the Kurds in and near Afrin. So consider the situation: three U.S. allies or proxies are engaged in a triangular fight among each other. It is the Turks against the Kurds, and the Arabs of the Free Syrian Army against the Kurds, but the Arabs would as soon fight the Turks on Syrian soil if the Kurds were not a temporary common enemy in that border zone.

Now amid this nasty confusion note that something like 3,000 to 4,000 Kurdish militiamen who had just finished, pretty much, vanquishing the Islamic State, found themselves in northeastern Syria, just across from the Turkish border in the general vicinity north of Manbij—north of the road headed northeast from Aleppo to Kobane. The Kurds have a much larger military presence and hence a firmer grasp over this area than they do over the area around Afrin. So it happened that a mid-level U. S. military decision figured on turning these seasoned troops into a vehicle for a cordon sanitaire along the border. No U.S. military officer on the ground decided to consult Washington about this, but the Turks figured that this was a directive taken from on high, and they did not like it.

What was the thinking behind this impromptu plan? Well, you would have to ask the officers who thought this up to get a definitive answer. But in the meantime, logic suggests a couple of possibilities. First, we had this friendly force on hand, standing around with pretty much nothing to do except some mop-up operations against ISIS further to the east, near the Iraqi border. It was a competent force as well as a friendly one, so you use it for something; you don’t just let it lie fallow or go to seed.

Second, it might be that the United States would wish to introduce more forces in the area in the context of a diplomatic effort to claim a seat at the table for a political solution to the Syrian conflict. If so, the U.S. military would need a place that qualifies as a reasonably permissive environment to take in and bivouac those troops. If the Kurds could vanquish the Islamic State, they could surely perform perimeter guard duty for any U.S. forces that might arrive. But did anyone think how this idea would play in Ankara, or how it might affect U.S. diplomacy? Apparently not. So some public affairs type spoke to an enterprising journalist out in the field, the story made front-page news the next day, and, not for the first time or the last, the city of Washington was perplexed.

Of course this raises a larger and difficult point. The number of U.S. troops in the area of northeastern Syria right now is not large—something like 2,000, if you don’t count the occasional special-forces groups coming and going. That constitutes enough troops to die, but not enough to actually do anything successfully in a vast if scarcely populated expanse of land.

They are in a vulnerable spot, too. Iranian officials recently vowed publicly to kick the Americans out of eastern Syria, and their militias would be the obvious instrument of choice. Clashes have already occurred, back in May of last year. But never mind those militias for a moment: Suppose some enterprising Kurdish militiamen go behind the backs of U.S. forces and fire rockets over their heads into Turkish territory; what do we think the Turks would do in response? Clearly, the Turks intervened in Afrin, where there are no U.S. forces, in order to avoid the possibility of a direct clash between American and Turkish troops. But such clashes could take place anyway, even though neither side wants them. Things like that just happen sometimes in confused combat situations, especially when someone wants to make them happen.

The larger and difficult point is not about an accidental clash breaking out, but about what those U.S. troops are doing there in the first place. They were there initially to support our Kurdish proxies in fighting the Islamic State, largely but not entirely with air power—so the truth is that the small number of U.S. soldiers on the ground does not really give an accurate sense of the larger U.S. resources that are focused on Syria. The Islamic State is all but defeated in terms of territorial control, but U.S. forces are still there. Why, and insofar as it matters, under what legal dispensation? Well, as noted, there is mopping up to do. But the real reason is that the White House believes we need “skin in the game” to play a role in the future of Syria. We don’t have much skin in the game right now compared to either Russia or Iran; but we could have more. The question is, should we?

Needless to say, expert opinion differs. Some contend that the U.S. government should insist on a role in the future of Syria lest it defer to its enemies, namely Russia and Iran, and sully its leadership reputation. If it takes the introduction of more muscle to establish that position, so be it.

But others see only trouble ahead with such a course. What exactly is to be gained in Syria anyway? It is not as though a reconstituted Syrian government after Asad is going to be a compliant American ally. It is not as though the Russians will just leave. A new Syrian government is not going to waltz into a peace settlement with Israel,. There is almost no oil, or any other natural resource worth a damn.

And it is not entirely obvious in the first place just what kind of settlement is even possible that can accommodate the interests, and the wounds, of the various sectarian groups in the country after all the bloodletting of recent years. Moreover, if there is some kind of agreement to create the new Syria, it would have to be phased in over time, and external forces would need to police that settlement, and to pay for it. It is not entirely obvious that doing either is a vital American interest.

Note too that we and the Russians support different constituent groups in Syria, pursuing a political settlement—with all the minor and perhaps major battlefield pushing and shoving likely to go along with it—is more likely to further aggravate U.S.-Russian relations then it is to improve them. That might be a price worth paying if something really valuable were at stake, but it isn’t because there isn’t.

We do have a general security interest in the war coming to an end, for the soul-searing of a civil war, especially among young people liable to be psychologically traumatized by what they have experienced, is bound to produce human tinder for political violence and terrorism into the future. But most of that damage is probably already done, or certainly enough of it has been done to pass the threshold of concern. So if the Russians want to herd Levantine cats for the next two or three decades, and turn to pet the Iranian lion from time to time as well—so this line of argument goes—let them: They all deserve each other.

It is true that the U.S. government needs to make sure that neither Syria nor Iraq nor any other country in the region—or any part of a country not under some government’s control—becomes a gray zone that could host terrorist forces, as was the case in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. It would be best if that objective could be accomplished in the context of a political settlement to the Syrian civil war, but it can still be accomplished short of that by other means. Those “other means” imply a use for some U.S. forces on the ground long into the future.

And there is perhaps a different reason, as well, to expand the U.S. position: to head off a wider war that might spin out of control.

There has been a creeping change in the situation in Syria in recent months growing into a year or two. There are now four outside powers with troops on Syrian soil: Russian, Iranian, American, and Turkish. And Israel is close and concerned enough that it needs to be counted in as well, even though its military reach into Syria is mainly by air. Each outside power (except Israel) has its clients and associated armed forces in country, so that the potential for an outside power to get dragged into a fight, or to be the target of an attack, is much higher now than it was three or four years ago. In this month alone already a Russian jet has been shot down by Kurdish rebels (February 3), U.S. and Syrian government forces clashed near Deir ez-Zour (February 8), a Turkish helicopter, an Iranian drone, and an Israeli jet were all downed (on February 10). In the Deir ez-Zour battle at least four and possibly many more Russia soldiers—excuse me, “contractors”—were killed, a vivid example of the aforementioned fact that we and the Russians support different constituent groups in Syria, and of the “accidental” dangers of the war as it has come to be shaped.

By far the largest change among the outside powers since the Russian intervention of September 2015 has been the dramatic increase of the Iranian presence in Syria. Aside from Hizbollah, which was there from nearly the start of the civil war on the regime’s side, Iranian-supported militias backed on the ground by IRGC cadres have proliferated significantly. That is the backdrop for the Iranian drone that ventured from its T-4 airbase in Homs province into Israeli territory on February 10, which was followed by the downing of the Israeli jet amid the Israeli pulverization of 15 Syrian air defense targets just a few hours later.

Now this is dangerous. Israeli and Russian officials, with backing from the top, have strained to make sure that Israeli and Russian forces do not clash directly in Syria. Iranian behavior threatens that understanding. The hope is that the Russians, having saved the Asad regime, will now see it as being in their interest to calm things down and limit Iranian mischief making. That’s logical, even rationale—but alas, it is also optimistic. Will it happen? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps the Russians instead prefer to help the regime finish off the opposition first, in Idlib and elsewhere. Can the Russians control the Syrians and Iranians to the extent necessary? Can the Iranian regime control what the IRGC is doing in Syria even if it wants to? No one knows the answers to all these questions right now.

Until the situation becomes clearer, having some U.S. power in theater functions as a kind of insurance policy against worst-case developments. So far, the Trump Administration has left the Israelis pretty much on their own in dealing with Iranian probes. But knowing that the Americans have their back might make it more likely that the Israelis will not overreact and, say, stimulate a Hizbollah missile attack from Lebanese territory. So there is a good reason not to pull all U.S. power out of Syria right now, but it is not the same reason as looking to the “day after” of some supposedly negotiated “new” Syria.

There is a variety of optimist, called a Panglossian after the famous Candide character, who thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds. It’s the only possible world we have right now, and therefore by a philosophical process of elimination it is also the best. That is no cause for merriment, but philosophical processes rarely are. We have the best/only possible world right now only because other possible worlds have been obviated by decisions either taken or avoided in the past that reeked of bad, optimism-infused judgment.

Over the course of the past nearly seven years there have been a great many decisions taken in the U.S. government regarding Syria. Let us not get down into the weeds, however. Only three of those decisions have been truly generative of the outcome so far: a decision taken in the March 2012, on the occasion of the visit to Washington of the Turkish Foreign Minister, to do nothing militarily about what was happening in Syria; the decision taken in September 2014, after the seizure of Mosul by the Islamic State the previous June, to start bombing ISIS without any strategy connecting that military action to the future of either Syria or Iraq; and the aforementioned decision to deploy and support Kurdish proxies to fight on the ground against the Islamic state in Syria and in proximity to Iraq.

To truly exhaust the analysis of these three decisions would require a book, and we certainly are not about to write or read a book just now. So let’s review these three decisions only in brief.

In the early months of the violence in Syria many observers believed that the Syrian regime would not survive the fight, anymore than other Arab dictatorships (in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya) survived earlier eruptions of the so-called Arab Spring. So U.S. efforts were limited to public relations designed to put the President on “the right side of history,” but otherwise to do essentially nothing. In other words, a media and public relations strategy substituted for an actual strategy. This was tragic, both because it misread what was happening in Syria, and because there was perhaps a way to staunch the violence without a major introduction of U.S. forces before it spun into mass murder.

There was a moment, before the vast number of victims of the war had become victims, when U.S. and NATO support for a limited Turkish incursion into Syria, designed to stimulate a coup in the palace and take a piece of territory as escrow against a future negotiation, might have worked. But the White House, leery of doing stupid shit (its language choice, not mine), concerned about cluttering the politics of the upcoming presidential election, and afraid to derail budding negotiations with the Iran, decided to do nothing. It turned out that Asad was not toast after all, that Russian efforts to save him would not turn into a quagmire as later posited, that the nuclear deal would not moderate Iranian behavior but accelerate its aggressive probes, and that before very long something like 450,000 innocence and mostly unarmed civilians would be killed.

The decision to start bombing the Islamic State on Syrian and Iraqi territory after two American journalists were telegenically beheaded was above all a decision driven by domestic politics. While there were some who fantasized morbidly that the Islamic State represented an existential threat to the United States, anybody with a little knowledge of history, and an understanding of what an order-of-battle is, knew that the Islamic State would become no such thing and probably would not last very long.

The verdict is out, and may remain out forever, as to whether the initial American bombing harmed or helped ISIS recruiting. Obviously, someone had to go after these murderous lunatics. Not so obvious was that it had to be the United States Air Force and Navy directly, and more or less alone for all practical purposes. There is no way to prove a counterfactual, of course, but if the United States government had been a bit more reticent and multilateral about its approach to ISIS, there is at least some possibility that the regional Sunni Arab states would have figured out a way to do at least a hefty part of the work for themselves. We’ll never know, and of course their general fecklessness cannot be denied. Still, if the Saudis can fight in Yemen (never mind if they’re fighting well), and if the United Arab Emirates can bomb there, they both could have done more directly against the Islamic State. Maybe they could have rented Egyptian expeditionary forces for the purpose as well.

The main problem with the U.S. policy, however, was that it was connected to no discernible American regional strategy. It was as if the phenomenon of the Islamic State never intersected, or would ever intersect, with the messes going on side by side in Syria and Iraq. How could anyone imagine that introducing American military force into the region, and engaging an array of proxies to do one thing or another under its aegis, would not end up affecting these struggles and relations with nearby countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, not to speak of generating implications for countries like Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel? You really have to be an optimist to imagine such a thing, though “optimist” is not the only word that comes to mind.

So here we are, with the Islamic State bereft of nearly all its real estate, but with a host of noisome consequences flowing from American policy—including the aforementioned U.S. soldiers on the ground in Syria whose purpose is now indeterminate and legally near-naked, and the impossible mess we are in over the fighting in Afrin.

None of this is the fault of the Trump Administration. Had the November 2016 election gone the other way, a Clinton Administration would be facing more or less the same dilemmas, because they were baked into U.S. policy errors from the start. It is just like the Trump Administration to claim credit for defeating the Islamic State, when all it did was to inherit a policy and tweak the rules of engagement a bit.

But it was the third decision, the decision to rely on Kurdish proxies in fighting ISIS, that has perhaps done the most harm. When the decision was made in 2016 foul consequences did not seem inevitable, for Turkish attitudes themselves about how to deal with the Kurds were in flux. But it did not take long for the fault lines to form, and when they did the decision needed revisiting—but it was not revisited. That is what has unnecessarily roiled relations with Turkey, making it seem that the Turkish government is otherwise pure and innocent in all this—quite a feat. And that is the decision which has left a small U.S. force on the ground vulnerable to the vicissitudes of counterinsurgency warfare.

If the Islamic State were really such a serious security threat to the United States, the proper way to have dealt with it would have been directly. Even if we thought at the time that the threat was really not very serious, that it was something that even the LAPD, properly armed, could have handled, it still should have been handled directly in order to avoid future complications that were completely predictable even two to three years ago. This is what excessive risk aversion and cheap hawkery will get you every time—gratuitous problems, smaller mistakes later piled on top of them, and so altogether a crapulation of unanticipated vexations that could have and should have been avoided.

Lord Vansittart, lately my favorite long-deceased diplomatic mastermind, once wrote that, “it is usually sound to do at once what you have to do ultimately.” By the autumn of 2014 it was clear that, whatever came before, we were going to have to make some difficult decisions about Syria, and we were going to have to do something about the plague of the Islamic State; and we should have known that those issues could not be kept in separate policy baskets forever. But the Obama White House, with liberal optimists skittering around all over the place, thought that a form of Micawberism—waiting for something to turn up…..—would suit just fine.

What would turn up? The fall of Asad without our having to do anything; the transformation of the region with the Iran deal; the successful no-fault use of proxies against ISIS set within a multisided fight thought by all local parties to have existential implications for them. They should have worked on inventing a dietetic deep-fried twinkie while they were at it. So here we are, and you have to look really hard to find any optimists left in the diplomatic trenches of the moment.

There is of course a place for optimism. Optimism, as a former boss of mine used to say, is a force multiplier. It certainly can be, and it is certainly the case that pessimism is its own worst enemy. But for optimism to be a force multiplier it must be tethered to reality in one way or another. But as soon as you try honestly to do that in a Middle Eastern context, optimism tends to take an extended Viennese lunch break.

In the Middle East, it seems to me, we would be wiser to set our course by less buoyant sentiments. I offer for consideration this fictional 17th-century exchange from John Barth’s 1960 novel The Sotweed Factor, wherein the serving man Bertrand engages in some speculation with our hero Ebenezer. The exchange speaks for itself, and needs no further interpretation from me:

Bertrand: “There’s a lot goes on behind the scenes, if ye but knew it. More history’s made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.”

Ebenezer: “And are all human motives really so despicable?”

Bertrand: “Aye, sir. Why do you ask?”

Garfinkle, “Russian Motives in Syria and the Implications for US Policy,” in The Kremlin’s Actions in Syria: Origins, Timing, and Prospects, John Herbst, ed. (Atlantic Council, Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, March 2016). My claims were greeted initially by some skepticism; there is little skepticism anymore.

See my “The Wisdom of Sheik Zubar: A U.S.-Turkish Option for Syria,” The American Interest Online, March 6, 2012.

See my “To Strike or Not to Strike, That Is the Question,” The American Interest Online, June 26, 2014.

See my “Do We Have a Strategy Now?” The American Interest Online, September 11, 2014.

 

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After Parkland

Again: dead school children, semi-automatic weapons much too easily obtained, mental illness, missed opportunities to act on an observed behavioral pattern. Is this ever going to end?

It is easy to get emotional at a time like this. I certainly have, just imagining the unspeakable pain in the hearts of bereaved parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends—pain that will oever really go away entirely—caused by Nikolas Cruz. But emotions alone won’t solve this problem. So what will?

The first task is to separate out the multiple problems involved here. Let’s start where most people start—with the guns.

I know rather little about guns, but I have a problem imagining why a sportsman needs an automatic or even a semi-automatic weapon of the sort Nikolas Cruz used to go hunting. The gun people will have ready-made answers to my puzzlement, I know. They are well practiced, and maybe some of the answers cling near to some truth. I still don’t buy any of them, looking at the bloody other side of the argumentative coin, and I certainly don’t buy the strained ahistorical interpretation of the 2nd Amendment peddled by the NRA—and the paranoid “black helicopter” government conspiracy theories that often go with it.

There is something very deep and even mystical about the American love of guns, so deep that most Europeans, for example, think we’re mad. Logic, and certainly Europeans, can rarely even budge it. Consider the obvious reality that the main reason it is so dangerous to be a policeman in the United States, and hence as a consequence so dangerous to be an ambiguous object of police attention, is the fact that there are more guns in the United States than there are people. Yet few professional law enforcement groups in the United States have ever argued for more stringent gun control—the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence is an exception, and you’ve probably never heard of them.

Consider, too, that every state in the union requires that people pass a test before they get a driver’s license. Automobiles, motorcycles, and trucks can be dangerous, so we expect people to be able to show that they can operate them safely before they can get a license. Are guns not as dangerous? At the very least, common sense suggests that every state should require gun safety training before enabling someone to buy and use a weapon. Reports suggest that Cruz did take a course in gun usage, but that’s a far cry from a rigorous state-staffed program. If conscientious trainers espy an erratic personality seeking a license, just maybe that filtering process alone could save lives. What if the State of Florida had required Nikolas Cruz to pass a gun safety course before he could buy that AR-15?

Of course, that’s not enough. Suppose a trainer had spotted Cruz as an erratic and suspicious individual: What could he or she do about it? Plenty of people in Parkland apparently understood the potential danger Cruz represented. But it is not so easy anymore to lock up someone against his or her will to protect public safety on suspicion of mental illness—there are plenty of cases in the past where such authorities were abused and misused. And Cruz is 19-years old—legally beyond parental and loco parentis control.

It is all very well for President Trump to address the children of the nation and urge then to seek help if they think they need it. His words were well chosen, and appropriate for many cases. But Nikolas Cruz was beyond all that, both in terms of his mental state and probably in terms of his age. Reports tell us now that Cruz received counseling after his adoptive father died, and again after his mother passed away. Nice presidential words, and perhaps not unhelpful; but they don’t really fit the Parkland case.

It makes sense, it seems to me, to provide authority to police, health care professionals, and in some cases school authorities to order individuals held temporarily for mental health evaluation—48 hours may be enough in most cases. We should not want to go back to the bad old days when avaricious children could have granny committed so as to get their hands on the farm. But it seems irresponsible to have no way, no recourse, to legally get people like Nikolas Cruz off the street once a potential tragedy hovers into sight.

The point: gun control isn’t the only avenue of remediation we have.  If that road is blocked for political reasons, the response should not be to throw up our hands and scream or tweet obscenities at the President—as one distraught young woman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School did—but rather to keep thinking about alternatives.

This problem—of the excessive blue sky between law enforcement authority and mental health vulnerabilities—is part of a broader issue in American society. Over time we have medicalized a lot of behaviors that arguably should never have been medicalized, and indulged in pharmaceutical fixes for such behaviors that in some cases have caused more problems than they have solved. Never mind for now how and why the DSM handbook has ballooned in size in recent decades—a subject that has been the focus of much analysis and debate. As I see it, Philip Rieff’s warning in his 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic qualifies as modern prophecy; and essays on the therapeutic university by Matthew Crawford and Frank Furedi in the backpages of The American Interest are mandatory reading for anyone concerned about the trend.1

You can sense the trend by analyzing the use of the common phrase to “reach out.” It used to be that “reach out” was said only in the context where someone’s emotional needs took center stage. Now everyone uses this phrase for least causal thing, and I doubt very much that this is entirely coincidental. With everyone “reaching out” all over the place for every little thing, if you didn’t know better you might think that we’re all prospectively fragile mentally and in need of near constant collective vigilance lest we lose our shit.

But ironically enough, while we medicalize some behaviors that arguably should not be medicalized, we fail to medicalize some behaviors that ought to be medicalized—and nowhere is this failure clearer than in the interstice between law enforcement and mental health.

When mentally ill or drug-crazed people act out weirdly and sometimes violently in public spaces, who are the first responders? Usually the police, or sometimes the fire department. But they’re not trained mental health professionals. They do what they can, they’ve learned as they go, some big city police forces now have mental health professionals on staff, and those that do not know how to liaise with local hospitals when necessary. But this isn’t the ideal matchup between someone in need and someone who can help, to say the least. Back in the day, before the Reagan Administration all but destroyed Federal support for the mental health infrastructure in many American towns and cities, it was fairly common for hospital emergency rooms to go expeditionary in such circumstances—the “men in white coats” coming to take a poor soul “away.”2 This has become much rarer as the definition of responsibility for such contingencies has shifted, or in many cases been left more or less in abeyance, as cost disease has ravaged the availability of quality health care for so many Americans.

It would be nice to have a saner gun control regime, and certainly in the Parkland case—once all the factors are weighed—it really does seem to come down to the easy availability of the gun. But that’s not the only problem that enables tragedies like Parkland. There are these other problems, but there are also ways to solve some of them. We need to think harder and act resolutely on putting those solutions into action, at the state level if not also the Federal one. Better gun control may have to wait, unfortunately, but we don’t.

1 See Matthew B. Crawford, “Medicate U.,” The American Interest (September/October 2008), and Frank Furedi, “The Therapeutic University,” The American Interest (September/October 2017).

2 For one reasonably fair-minded assessment, see http://www.povertyinsights.org/2013/10/14/did-reagans-crazy-mental-health-policies-cause-todays-homelessness/.

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Lithuania’s Centennial and the Success of Democracy

On February 16, 2018, Lithuania is celebrating its 100th anniversary since its independence was reinstated and the country was formed as a modern democratic state. Neighboring Estonia and Latvia are also marking their centennials this year, but the three countries have a lot more to celebrate than a shared historic milestone. The Baltic states have been among the most successful countries of the more than 20 post-communist states, and they send an important message as Washington and the American public are growing fatigued with spreading democracy abroad, and while democracy is backsliding in some states of Central and Eastern Europe.

Lithuania’s success as a democratic state that has not only survived but thrived in a region historically prone to conflict should be recognized and celebrated by its allies in Washington, NATO, and the European Union. The Baltic countries serve as beacons to Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and many democratic-minded individuals in Russia, Belarus, and further afield. Their success also serves to refute the daily Kremlin propaganda against Western liberal democracies by demonstrating the economic, security, and societal benefits of open societies and of EU and NATO membership.

Lithuania’s road to being a committed defender of democratic values and principles has not been an easy one—something the country’s people and its allies should not forget. In 1918, in the upheaval following World War I, Lithuanians, like many other nations, rose up against outdated empires and asserted their independence and right to sovereignty. Many oppressed nations were inspired by U.S. President’s Woodrow Wilson’s support for self-determination and his commitment to protecting democracy. For Lithuania, that meant escaping the recent occupation of Germany and the previous rule of the Russian Czarist Empire, which itself was rocked by the Bolshevik Revolution. Modern Lithuania was reborn with the memory of the historic statehood it had enjoyed from 1253 to 1795, albeit with a much smaller geographic territory.

After 22 years of growth and prosperity, the Second World War brought three rounds of occupation for Lithuania—Soviet, Nazi, and Soviet again—the last of which persisted 50 years when the country was annexed by the Soviet Union. The crumbling of the Berlin Wall, which as of February 5th has now been down for longer than it was up, brought cracks to the edifice of Soviet power. On March 11, 1990, Lithuania proclaimed the re-establishment of independence once more. It was the first among the Soviet republics to do so, launching the unraveling of the Soviet Union.

The United States was a strong advocate of the new Baltic democracies, just as Washington had supported the nations during the Cold War by never recognizing the illegal incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union. As a child growing up in Soviet Lithuania I already understood the symbolism of America’s support for Lithuania, at a time when even raising the country’s flag in commemoration of February 16th could land you in a KGB prison. When I moved to Los Angeles later in my youth, I took part in the Lithuanian-American community’s appeal to our state representatives and the President George H. W. Bush Administration to officially recognize the independence of Lithuania.

By 2004, again with much support from the United States, Lithuania together with other Central and East European states joined NATO and the European Union, returning to the family of democratic states. Even if the last few years have been marked by concern regarding Russia’s resurgent ambitions in the region, NATO membership makes the Baltic states safer today than ever before in their modern history. Article V guarantees from the alliance, reiterated again by President Donald Trump’s Administration, ensure that as a member Lithuania could count on its allies in the face of Russian aggression. This is priceless in an era when Russia has recently waged military campaigns and annexed territory in Georgia, Ukraine and beyond. At the same time, the Baltic countries have also proved themselves strong allies of NATO and the United States in the fight against terrorism by participating in missions to Afghanistan and Iraq and now contributing 2 percent of their GDP to defense spending.

EU membership has also ensured that Lithuania is more integrated with Europe than it has been in its modern history. The accompanying reforms and access to a common market have made Lithuania, along with the other Baltic states, among the most prosperous states in Central and Eastern Europe, and far more prosperous than all former Soviet republics. Indeed, Lithuania’s 2016 GDP per capita of $14,879 significantly exceeded Russia’s figure of $8,748, even if the latter benefits from a vastly larger territory, population, and endowment of natural resources.

In the past few years Lithuania has even solved its energy security dilemma. While previously 100 percent dependent on Russia for natural gas imports, it has emerged today as a pioneer in the liquefied natural gas (LNG) markets, having launched one of the world’s first floating LNG import facilities, the Klaipeda FSRU. It now imports gas from a variety of countries such as Norway, Qatar, and even the United States. At the Vilnius Energy Forum in late November last year, the government and energy sector leaders highlighted how they now share their experience with other energy-vulnerable states.

Today, Lithuania and other countries of the former Iron Curtain who have chosen democracy are safer, more prosperous, better integrated with the world, and are endowed with the greatest potential in their modern history. They are success stories for their people and their allies. At the same time, the seeming backsliding of liberal democracies in countries like Hungary and Poland also highlight that democratization is not a one-way progression but rather a winding road, marked by vulnerabilities and setbacks.

There is still uncertainty to what extent President Trump and other future administrations will promote democracy abroad. Fatigue and disillusionment have set in. America’s setbacks in building democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq have overshadowed the real successes of democracy in most of Central and Eastern Europe. While the National Security Strategy released in December states that Washington will “not impose our values on others,” it also reiterates that American democracy “serves as an inspiration for those living under tyranny.” How policymakers will navigate these broad guidelines remains to be seen.

What the case of Lithuania has shown is that many countries and their societies do not need convincing about the benefits of democracy and market economies, but do seek Washington’s support in meeting their aspirations. The road to self-government that Woodrow Wilson outlined a century ago is long and can be difficult—but it is worth following nonetheless.

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Thornton Wilder’s Overbite

The Skin of Our Teeth

by Thornton Wilder

Constellation Theater Company, Washington, DC

$25-$55, through February 18

In the beginning, there was a man and a woman. No, not Adam and Eve: Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus (think “anthropos,” or human). At the start of Constellation Theatre Company’s delightful production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, they appear onstage as the perfect mid-century couple, with the requisite two kids, a boy and a girl, a knockoff Frank Lloyd Wright house, and a few adorable pets. The only difference? Their comfortable life has been plunked down in prehistory.

This is Wilder’s cheerfully surreal allegory of the calamities of humanity, in which we survive disasters, wrestle with sin, and try to raise our kids right. Wilder, the author of Our Town (1938), one of the most beloved American plays, finished the script only a month after Pearl Harbor. First produced in 1942, it delivered an uplifting message to a country still recovering from the Depression, and now in the midst of its second major war of the century. We might be tempted to read Wilder’s play as an allegory for our era as well, with its political unrest, huge disruptions of populations around the globe, and changing world economy.

Historical resonances aside, Constellation’s charming production is a treat to watch. In the tiny black box theater in Washington, DC, you can see every gesture the actors make. They perform with an understated physicality that is thoroughly appealing and perfectly calibrated for the space. No less enchanting is the set, a beautiful, intricate toy that folds and unfolds before your eyes. Of special note is Tonya Beckman as the rebellious and seductive maid, Sabina. On the page Sabina is often irritating—a clichéd, scheming servant/seductress—yet Beckman manages to make her charming, mildly ridiculous, and sympathetic. And Steven Carpenter as Mr. Antrobus couldn’t be more perfect as a bureaucrat or businessman (in DC, it’s impossible not to assume the former, though the play doesn’t specify). Forget central casting—he’s straight out of the Office of Personnel Management. If you want a delightful evening this President’s Day weekend, buy a ticket.

This wonderful production does full justice to Wilder’s cleverness, but does his cleverness do justice to humanity? Compared to Wilder’s era, ours is comfortable and secure. It’s understandable that we would look to an earlier time for wisdom and reassurance, especially a time of darkness that gave way to decades of prosperity. Sadly, the play is more ambitious than effective. It celebrates humans’ ability to survive, true. But in doing so, it reduces them to less than what they are.

The first act of the play is its most effective, a gem almost worth the price of admission by itself. We are in mid-Ice Age, the glaciers sweeping across North America and freezing everything in their paths. In the midst of the chaos, Mr. Antrobus keeps trekking to the office every day to invent the wheel and compile the alphabet. (He’s particularly proud of “separating n from m.”) Mrs. Antrobus is a homemaker in charge of two unruly children, a pet mammoth and dinosaur, and a dark secret. Wilder made a clever choice in pairing the archetypal mid-century family, artificial in its own right, with the absurdity of a bureaucracy that invents letters. He emphasizes the rickety foundations of human civilization with sympathy, not condescension. And when deployed against a descending wall of ice, the chin-up attitude of wartime is especially poignant.

While the ice is looming, the Antrobuses open their home to those whom Sabina calls, pregnantly, “refugees.” In 1942 these poor souls must have evoked war refugees or people made homeless and destitute by the Depression. Nowadays, of course, the scene has another resonance. It seems to be a moral lesson, that the immigration policies of Trump and the European nationalists are cruel. Wilder does his best to dramatize the conflict between selfishness and kindness, but the scene ends up pulling its punches, a victim of its own conceit.

The Antrobuses make a choice in the face of certain death, as people freeze on the roads out of town. The glaciers are within sight of their house. Certainly, giving away food that could feed your children for another week or two is heart-wrenching—Mrs. Antrobus is against it at first. Yet selfishness is often borne of hope, and there is none here. Nor are there the logistics of a future to consider. In our times, immigration policy is made by those who face election next year, or who have to reknit a society made up of both newcomers and natives. We should still be kind and merciful, of course, and the Antrobuses’ generosity is inspiring. But the mercy of a new life is much more difficult to offer than the kindness of a last meal. An allegory that doesn’t wrestle with this fact is less useful for all of us. In certain ways, reality is sadder than Wilder lets on—and yet still, people do the decent thing.

Director Mary Hall Surface made the right choice, playing it straight and keeping the actors earnest, instead of festooning the production with winks and nods at modern politics. Unfortunately, and through no fault of the company’s, the play simply gets weaker as it goes on. The second act is particularly puzzling, a flood narrative robbed of its religion and pathos. Wilder is charming enough that you’ll enjoy watching it anyway—most amusingly, Mr. Antrobus gives a speech to a Convention of Mammals.

We find our once-struggling family on the boardwalks of Atlantic City in all its decadence. (How did they survive? Who knows? They’re allegorical.) Mr. Antrobus is planning an affair with Sabina, who seems to be the same person as Sabina the Maid in Act I. Yet the family is still selected for survival on the Ark, though they exhibit little more virtue than the dissipated society around them. There’s no God exhorting Noah to believe in his salvation. Worse, the Ark is no endeavor of human faith and ingenuity, but a taxi that pulls up, fortunately indeed, at the very last moment.

I can’t help but see the shadow of the 1940s, of a society tired of watching war and poverty ravage people who were no worse or better than their luckier neighbors. It’s a deus ex machina ending without deus. True, blind luck is often what saves people from disaster. Yet there are aspects to the Noah story that inspire even if you don’t believe in God—the fortitude of Noah’s family, their organizational capacity, their craftsmanship, the love and cooperation that see them through the near-total destruction of their world. Deprive the narrative of God, and you deprive humanity of its grandeur in rising to meet God’s expectations. Generally, what we find inspiring amid the carnage and despair of war are those people, religious and not, who prove so much better than their circumstances. This version of human survival is meaningless and bleak—perhaps bleaker than necessary.

Fittingly, the play ends in war. By the third act the family is wasting away in bunkers. The most affecting element in this act is that the war occurs between actual family members, a closer bond than mere shared humanity. (I won’t tell you who.) The actors handle their final outing with admirable poise, finding pathos in their limited material. Yet this chapter is also the weakest, because the war is so unreal—totally abstracted from circumstances, attributed to the persistent evil of one character through the ages. It offers false comfort by making evil obvious, instead of rendering it as it often appears: in an alluring disguise. It’s difficult for a modern audience, familiar with the decades of excuse-making for Soviet crimes, to credit that evil is so constant and self-evident that supposedly decent people will always recognize it.

Which brings us to another disadvantage of the allegory: These humans never change. Mr. Antrobus is always subject to temptation, Mrs. Antrobus always proud. Sabina is always (understandably) resentful, trying to get ahead as she can. This play is clearly intended to be optimistic on the whole, albeit with some reservations. But if survival is all that we do, and there isn’t even the chance of moral change, it’s hard to be truly uplifted.

Maybe it says something about this clever play that the aspect I found most frustrating at first grew more appealing by the end—in concept, if not execution. Thornton Wilder is famous for breaking the fourth wall in Our Town, a play about the small yet sometimes beautiful lives of ordinary people. In Skin of Our Teeth he takes the device to new extremes. Sabina the maid keeps interrupting the play to talk to the audience, telling them at one point not to be disturbed by the sight of humans dying of cold—the Antrobuses lived ages ago, back when people were “savages.” At other times, the action simply breaks down, upon which a “stage manager” materializes to kick the actors’ rears into gear. While these interruptions are incredibly contrived, I began to think of them less as the playwright showing off and more of an argument about human nature. We all try to escape our worst moments, mentally exiting from reality and indulging in rationalizations, sometimes cruel ones. And stage plays are contrived to begin with, sailing by the seat of everyone’s pants. Thornton Wilder saw fit to make the backstage contrivances obvious, linking the struggle of actors putting on a show to the struggle of humans to survive.

The lesson of this allegory is emphasized with a sledgehammer: Humans have survived and will keep surviving. With the help of books, they will restart society from the worst of ruins (Mr. Antrobus makes sure to save his volumes of Shakespeare). Yet after the initial and rather basic achievements of the wheel and the alphabet, we see nothing more of human inventiveness in action. The great philosophers are analogized to the hours in the day, as if they were simply features of existence like the passage of time. (Homer, the Muses, and Moses wander in with the refugees of the first act, but as humanity is still stuck at “n,” they seem more like natural resources than human achievements.) Yet it’s impossible to understand the great epochs of horror and survival independently of the knowledge gained (or not), or the cultures that endured and perpetrated them.

I can’t help but admire a play of such cleverness and ambition, especially in this splendid production. And perhaps it’s carping to suggest that Wilder bit off more than he could chew; no two-and-a-half-hour play is going to be the final word on human history. You might argue that the Antrobuses are average by definition. But if they are given to feats of cruelty like total warfare, why not other, nobler extremes of human behavior? Wilder shows his own creativity to dazzling effect—and I encourage you to see it unfold in person. Ironically, he does not endow his creations with the same facility.

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Congress: Where Politics Goes To Die

Sayre’s Law says: “In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.” Or, as it is often remembered, sometimes as a Henry Kissinger quotation, sometimes as a gloss on something Woodrow Wilson reportedly said as president of Princeton University: “Academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low.” Contrasted with academe are those venues of decision-making in which matters of real consequence are decided, making it easy to disregard minor slights rather than nurse them for decades: corporate boardrooms, centers of high finance, military situation rooms, and—once upon a time—the halls of Congress.

But maybe not Congress these days. Instead, Congress now seems like a place where Sayre’s Law applies all too naturally. Members may arrive in Washington with big ideas about how to change policy in service of their constituents’ interests, or even about pursuing politics as a vocation, with all the difficult compromises that entails. The Capitol seems like the right place to pursue these ambitions, given our legislature’s constitutionally prescribed responsibility for making fundamental choices about our government’s role in its citizens’ lives and on the world stage.

Unfortunately, most members of Congress justly feel they are given no real part in these decisions today. Fewer bills pass; those that do are assiduously shielded from any amendments; and nearly all of the development of crucial omnibuses (like the budget deal just passed) happens in leadership offices, with the work of committees mostly unceremoniously ignored. Normal members find that their job description as legislators is reduced to showing up to cast votes when the leadership instructs—and those are usually carefully stage-managed votes, with little suspense about the outcome.

Would-be legislators are then encouraged to spend most of their time readying themselves to carry their party’s banner in the next election, which entails a full-time job’s worth of fundraising. Individual donors, who tend to reward ideologically extreme posturing, are the primary source of funding, while state and local parties who might keep candidates focused on pressing concrete interests have mostly receded. Candidates respond accordingly, competing to see who can be most memorably polemical. This overall job profile does not create the conditions for members to develop productive working relationships with their colleagues across the aisle, because they are not actually doing any work together. Members can be forgiven for mostly dreaming about escaping to some more consequential stage.

Contrast this picture with the Congresses of half a century ago. Then as always, junior members might find it frustratingly difficult to become influential, and leaders had tendencies to imperiousness. The famously manipulative Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson regarded most members as “minnows” who could be formed into obedient schools to cast votes when needed. But Johnson also had to deal with colleagues whom he regarded as “whales,” especially powerful committee chairmen. Chairmen in the House (especially Wilbur Mills of the Ways and Means Committee and Howard Smith of the Rules Committee), who held their positions by virtue of seniority, were equally formidable. Speakers and Majority Leaders were no doubt powerful, but they presided over an institution with many power centers. That multiplicity of significant players created more openings for members with ideas to press them forward, and more opportunities for genuine debate about issues.

Of course, the power of Southern Democratic committee chairs also created opportunities for obstructionism, most famously on civil rights laws. That led to epic battles between reformers and reactionaries, with the former eventually winning out and reconfiguring both the House and Senate in significant ways, as well as passing the raft of statutes that built the modern American welfare and regulatory state. Those epic battles did not lead to institutional paralysis, however, nor to mutual loathing among the members, even those who were frequent arch-adversaries. Instead, a gentlemanly (or sometimes clubby) comity mostly prevailed in relations among most members. The biggest difference was not that they lived in Washington with wives and families who socialized, but that they were aware of their shared privilege to shape the future of the country. And they did. That kind of responsibility produced a shared sense of gravity and institutional pride. The Senate of 1972 looked back at the struggles of its preceding decade and its two original office buildings for two recently deceased rivals: Richard Russell and Everett Dirksen, a conservative Democrat and moderate Republican, respectively. Today, the insignificance of contemporary deliberations produces mostly pettiness, and it is almost impossible to imagine our contemporary Congress wanting to honor its members’ institutional contributions in this way.

The only real power centers left in our current Congress are the leadership offices—and, consistent with Sayre’s Law, relations between the leaders are generally more cordial than they prefer to advertise. When he was Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell was wont to go along with then-Majority Leader Harry Reid far more than he needed to, adopting an attitude that the “grown-ups” needed to be able to protect themselves against the rabble, whichever party was in charge. And now that McConnell is Majority Leader, he does indeed employ many of the same procedural tricks to quash the possibility of open-ended deliberation that could lead in unpredictable directions, scramble existing political coalitions, and endanger the familiar lines of contestation that brought them into power. Meanwhile, leaders assume that they can band together and bring their pliant minnows along with them whenever the going really gets tough. They did so, for instance, when confronting the economic crisis in September 2008, though not without difficulty. In the House, the leaders were startled to find that their members distrusted them enough to vote down the first version of emergency legislation—but they had hardly laid the groundwork for a more trusting relationship. It is a safe bet that if we faced an emergency of similar magnitude now, they would find themselves with even less ability to win broad support for a decisive action.

We are generally conditioned to think of the nation itself as being bitterly divided, such that the poisoned atmosphere in Congress is best understood as a symptom of a more pervasive miasma.  Maybe, but research by Morris Fiorina and others in recent years suggests that this is not true in the main. We should consider the other direction of causality, too: Congress has structured its workings so as to produce embitterment among its members, and those bad feelings seep out among the public—who themselves feel like the ultimate backbenchers. If even their representatives feel cribbed, such that politics becomes the art of the insult amid the impossibility of significant change, the very ideas of political agency and self-government come to feel like cruel mockeries.

Today many observers feel we cannot afford to let really consequential decisions get decided in open debate among representatives of the people. The thinking goes that there is just too much at stake to risk airing out potentially explosive differences. Do the citizens of Red America and Blue America even share enough of a basic conception of reality to be capable of deliberating together any longer?

This way of thinking is precisely backward. In his classic In Defense of Politics (1962), Bernard Crick offered a corrective:

Diverse groups hold together, firstly, because they have a common interest in sheer survival and, secondly, because they practise politics—not because they agree about ‘fundamentals’, or some such concept too vague, too personal, or too divine ever to do the job of politics for it. The moral consensus of a free state is not something mysteriously prior to or above politics: it is the activity (the civilizing activity) of politics itself.

Practicing politics as it is supposed to be practiced in a democratic system will have a binding effect on diverse and even opposing factions, Crick explains, but only if these groups can actually share the experience of making decisions together. If “respectable” political discourse becomes an echo chamber for the dominant group, it ceases to be political in the authentic sense, and is as likely to promote divisions as togetherness.

Congress today is often portrayed as totally dysfunctional, but that is an exaggeration. After all, enough decisions do get made to keep the lights on and the military funded. And the members mostly get re-elected, so in some sense the institution is “working” for them. Nevertheless, member retirements are coming in at a record pace just now because Congress is utterly failing to provide a venue for meaningful political work. Until we can realize what an indispensable function this is—however frightening the prospect of doing actual politics, with real open-ended possibilities about what our polity will make of itself—all our efforts at reform are likely to make things worse.

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The Bygone Hope of South Sudan

In a journalism career that has taken me to a dozen countries in Africa and the Middle East, UN House in Juba, South Sudan stands alone as the single most dispiriting place I have ever been. When I toured the compound in March 2014, the world’s newest state was only four months into its now over-four-year-old civil war, sparked the previous December when President Salva Kiir accused his rival and first Vice President Riek Machar of launching a coup attempt against him. Kiir comes from the Dinka ethnic group; Machar is a Nuer and soon became the leader of a very loose collection of rebel groups fighting the central government, and often one another. In those first days of the conflict, around 10,000 people fled to UN House, a United Nations base on the edge of Juba.

Thousands of internally displaced were crammed into a dusty rectangular field gridded with trap-covered wooden shacks and ringed with berms and watchtowers. The camp was unimaginably squalid, its inhabitants gripped by a palpable fear of the outside. A few times during my visit, residents offered to show me video of what they claimed were Dinka beating and burning Nuer back in Juba. At this point, Juba didn’t look or feel like much of a conflict zone, but to the camp’s residents the superficially tranquil capital was a place of mortal danger to which even the depredations of UN House were preferable. The camp encapsulated one of the biggest open questions about South Sudan. Which was the more accurate reflection of the country’s path: The desperation and violence suggested in the displacement camp, or the apparent stability of the city surrounding it?

The past four years have answered that question. South Sudan is one of the most violent and dysfunctional countries in the world, with around four million people displaced over the course of its civil war out of an estimated population of 13 million. On February 2, Reuters reported that the United States plans to impose an arms embargo on Kiir’s government, which is credibly accused of massacring civilians, squelching the free press, and abetting ethnic cleansing (if not genocide).

It was not always this way. When South Sudan won its independence from Sudan in July 2011, hopes ran high in Washington; South Sudan partly owed its existence to sustained U.S. pressure on Khartoum during Sudan’s 25-year-long civil war, and the two countries appeared to be natural allies. Kiir even endeared himself to his American counterparts with his trademark cowboy hat, an echo of a gift that President George W. Bush is believed to have given him during a White House visit in 2006.

The new U.S. sanctions are a chance to reflect on how and why things went so wrong. In South Sudan, the United States made a strategic and moral investment in allies whose true motives and interests were never fully understood or accounted for in U.S. policy. Like its partners in Kiir’s Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the United States pursued a just outcome with little sense of what could or should come next.

At this stage, the arms embargo should hardly surprise. The United States first began sanctioning South Sudanese officials in April 2014, and Washington has implicitly wielded the threat of an arms embargo—a longstanding demand of human rights advocates—ever since. And although the Trump Administration is often perceived as more willing to tolerate or embrace autocratic regimes, in Africa there has been no real evidence of a greater American appetite for the continent’s strongmen. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has consistently threatened to cut off U.S. support if Congolese President Joseph Kabila fails to hold new elections this year. The Trump Administration suspended an Obama-era decision to remove most sanctions on Sudan’s dictatorship, in the hopes of extracting additional reforms or concessions from the country’s nominally Islamist regime. Haley also delivered a stern message to Kiir during a visit to South Sudan in October of 2017—a warning that the South Sudanese President clearly ignored.

A stereotypically Trumpian foreign policy might have embraced a putatively U.S.-aligned regime, whatever its alleged crimes. Instead, the Trump Administration has opted for the now-consensus view that U.S. support for Kiir no longer has any compelling moral or strategic justification. Given Kiir’s reckless waste of American good will over the past seven years, it’s doubtful that a President Hillary Clinton would have reached any other conclusion.

South Sudan began life as one of the poorest countries on earth, beset with problems that its militia army-turned-government was grievously unprepared to address: disputed borders, ethnic and clan violence, general lawlessness, a total lack of infrastructure, and disputes with Khartoum over management of the countries’ shared oil infrastructure. In its northern neighbor, Juba had a powerful enemy and recent battlefield adversary that saw a clear advantage in the new country’s continued destabilization.

At the same time, Juba had a crucial asset that had helped similarly vulnerable states navigate decisive transitional periods. South Sudan may have lacked paved roads, inter-communal harmony, basic law and order, and a functioning government, but it did have the friendship and strategic buy-in of the United States of America. Americans on both the Right and Left had championed South Sudan’s cause over the previous 20 years, and the 2005 peace agreement that ended the Sudanese civil war and set the stage for Juba’s independence was the result of concerted American diplomacy and activism. American right-wingers supported the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army because they viewed Sudan’s civil war as the struggle of a subjugated Christian population against an Islamist oppressor. Meanwhile, human rights activists on the Left believed that southern independence could end one of the world’s longest and deadliest conflicts while achieving some kind of accountability for Khartoum’s decades of atrocities.

The strategic logic of southern independence was similarly appealing: For the United States, a stable South Sudan would remove the primary obstacle to repairing relations with Sudan, a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism and then-ally of Iran whose regime nevertheless clearly desired closer relations with Washington. Importantly, the South Sudanese struggle also had a romance to which Americans were perhaps uniquely susceptible. Like the United States, South Sudan was a country founded by rebels who believed they had a higher sense of justice on their side. As a visiting reporter, it was hard not to admire what the SPLM had accomplished just by casting off the northern yoke and overseeing the establishment of a Western-aligned independent state—and perilously easy to miss the reality that no real transformation had taken place yet, or ever would.

The American narrative about South Sudan imposed a coherency on the country that never existed in reality. The tendency to treat South Sudan as a unitary state, governed by normal statesmen who were vaguely comparable to the leaders of any other independent country, has skewed and hamstrung U.S. policy throughout the independence period. At the ground level, South Sudan never looked or felt like anything resembling a sovereign state. On my two trips to the country, the government was barely in evidence outside of Juba, while the capital crawled with UN peacekeepers, aid organizations, assorted foreign military types from both the public and private sectors, international bureaucrats, and various other outsiders working to prevent the new country’s collapse (or, in some cases, to exploit a slow-burning crisis).

In what’s still one of the most compelling analyses of South Sudan’s disaster, William Davison wrote in October 2016 that the country “remains a deeply troubled, terribly governed, untamed territory where a nascent battle for state power is violent and ethnic, reflecting decades of oppression, internal conflict and marginalisation.” Davison declared that ongoing negotiations to resolve the conflict held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia were a “blood-soaked circus” that foreign mediators, including Washington and its partners, were badly mishandling: “The international community has tried to even-handedly solve the war through formulaic conflict resolution that culminated in nothing more than a classic elite stitch up.”  International negotiators focused on such pointless and inevitably self-defeating objectives as returning Riek Machar to the vice presidency—as if the country’s fate hinged on cosmetic rearrangement of its ruling clique, rather than factors which no treaty or battlefield agreement are really capable of solving.

Davison invited a key question, though: Is South Sudan so dysfunctional that the typical levers of statecraft, designed as they are to govern relations between and within sovereign political units, no longer really apply? True, the leaders of South Sudan are not statesmen comparable to the leaders of most other independent countries—but does that change how the United States should treat them? It is, and was, possible to see a naked U.S. strategic interest in giving Kiir maximal leeway. He is the legitimate president of South Sudan, and has been a U.S. partner for well over a decade. The logic in sticking with the last semblance of centralized government in a collapsing country was fairly strong for a while. But if supporting Kiir once seemed like a reasonable choice for the United States, that is clearly no longer the case. The arms embargo is the culmination of a long string of fairly mild U.S. sanctions against South Sudanese officials, a process whose incrementalism speaks to the extent of American patience with the country, along with a vain hope that things could improve. That hope is now largely gone.

There are a number of lessons for U.S. foreign policy in South Sudan’s ongoing collapse. South Sudan is a reminder that even for a country with the limitless resources and awesome coercive potential of the United States, allies aren’t always going to decide that their interests are best served by keeping Washington happy. This is especially true of Washington’s non-state partners, who seldom turn out to be the people they seem to be from afar.

The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) is a perfect example of this mismatch between perception and reality. For the past four years, American observers have wondered why Kiir would choose permanent conflict and ethnic warfare over the supposed panacea of American friendship. The SPLM’s post-independence actions have often smacked of ingratitude, as in mid-2012 when the Juba government expelled Ted Dagne, a U.S. government researcher and advisor to Southern leaders who had drawn attention to the appalling extent of the SPLM leadership’s financial corruption.

But the explanation is simple: Kiir answers to an ethnic cadre within a militia movement, not to the U.S. State Department. The friendship of the United States is nice to have, but Kiir’s survival doesn’t strictly depend on pleasing Washington or other foreign friends and one-time true believers. The same cannot be said of such life-and-death matters as Kiir’s relationship with Dinkas in the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), or his close ties with Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, whose army intervened on the South Sudanese President’s behalf in the early days of the 2013 crisis and likely saved his regime from total collapse.

If the United States misread how badly Kiir needed or wanted its help, it also misunderstood the very nature of the South Sudanese president and the SPLM. Americans, myself included, had a tendency to view the SLPM as a Western-aligned movement with latent—or at least, potential—democratic instincts. This failure of analysis isn’t really that surprising: After all, the inner dynamics of the SPLM have proven incomprehensible even to the major players in the movement, many of whom have been purged or exiled. The optimistic view of the rebels-turned-government also accorded with American and Western assumptions about the basic desirability of stable, unitary state control—assumptions that not everyone shares.

Within the SPLM, interpersonal and inter-communal score-settling was always a higher priority than any kind of state-building project. The SPLM was never an engine of national consolidation, but a loose and fractious consortium of militias with dubious loyalty to one another. (Machar was one of several militia leaders who had defected from the SPLA during the civil war and then later returned to the movement). Kiir and the SPLM recognized that South Sudan was a meaninglessly abstract notion compared with the tangibility of Nuer or Dinka identities, the utility of pilfered state resources, or the security of controlling loyal armed factions or holding titular political power. Kiir, Machar, and the conflict’s constellation of other participants had freed themselves from the delusion of a coherent South Sudan long before anyone else did.

These days it is fashionable to argue that the partition of Sudan was a mistake, and to identify the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the Sudanese government and the SPLA as the United States’ original sin in the country. I don’t believe this to be the case: The aim of the 2005 accord was to resolve the decades-long war between Khartoum and the southern rebels, and to reduce the potential of renewed conflict by turning any future dispute between the two into a more easily regulated interstate conflict. The CPA has achieved those narrow aims, at least so far. Meanwhile, the irresponsibility of the SPLM government shouldn’t obviate the South Sudanese people’s right to self-determination—a right that Khartoum itself eventually recognized after 38 total years of war, and a lopsided independence referendum vote which the CPA mandated. Moreover, it smacks of condescension to believe that any country’s freedom was an error.

Independence was the correct outcome, even if it has proven to be a disastrous one in the near-term. Such ironies are not uncommon in international affairs, and South Sudan is hardly the only recent reminder that there can be horrific consequences to doing the right thing. As with the United States’ 16 years of war in Afghanistan or the well-intentioned but ill-fated Middle East peace process, there’s also no telling what the costs of a less ambitious approach might have been.

Still, South Sudan’s current misery cautions that even major diplomatic breakthroughs should never be thought of as a cure-all. The 2005 CPA, and South Sudan’s independence, should have been understood as a transition point in an ongoing crisis, rather than its ending. South Sudan’s plight doesn’t mean that the United States should deal with all of its non-state allies with icy pragmatism, or give up on pushing ambitious and risky solutions to international conflicts. But the new arms embargo should also be a timely exhortation to humility, and skepticism about what even the best diplomacy can and can’t achieve.

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Nothing Personal, Strictly Business

The Russian media has been consumed this week with another bombshell revelation from Alexey Navalny, the anti-corruption activist known for his exposés of Russian corruption and graft. Navalny’s latest effort is another tawdry tale of escort girls, yachts, and bribery—but it’s also caught the attention of the American media, fanned the flames of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, and brought down new censorship pressure on YouTube and Instagram within Russia.

It all began this past Thursday, when Navalny uploaded his latest video exposé to YouTube. As ever, Navalny’s investigation relies primarily on open source materials, primarily the Instagram account of one Nastya Rybka, an infamous escort girl who first caught his attention after her scantily clad posse barged into Navalny’s headquarters last fall for a viral video stunt. The opposition leader, rightly sensing a trap to embarrass his team, decided to find out who sent the girls—and then made a major discovery.

Through careful scrutiny of her public Instagram content, which had been ignored by the public for months, Navalny quickly learned that Rybka had been seeing the famous oligarch Oleg Deripaska for the better part of a year. And in the background of one selfie video she had taken aboard his yacht, he discovered a tantalizing snippet of dialogue between Deripaska and Sergey Prikhodko, the Russian Deputy Prime Minister of Foreign Affairs. In the audio from the yacht, Deripaska explains why U.S.-Russia relations are broken, blaming Prikhodko’s “pal Nuland,” a reference to former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. “When she was young, she spent some time on a Russian whaler, and since then she has hated Russia,” concludes Deripaska.

As Navalny points out, Prikhodko’s very presence in the video implies an act of bribery, with an oligarch hosting a top government official aboard his yacht. What’s more, their conversation is sure to fuel the flames of the “collusion” narrative in the United States, since Deripaska is a former client of Paul Manafort, and is here seen casually chatting about the U.S. relationship with a major player in the Russian government. (Navalny implies that Prikhodko could be the “missing link” connecting the Trump campaign and the Kremlin).

In Russia, however, the public discussion has not focused on an unproven conspiracy theory involving President Trump or an act of all-too-common corruption. It has, however, struck a real nerve—and could presage a new round of fighting among rival oligarch clans.

For a day after the video dropped, both Deripaska and Prikhodko kept silent. Then the oligarch made the first move, promising to file a lawsuit. Three hours later, the court in Deripaska’s hometown ruled to block online access to Navalny’s video and its coverage in the media. According to timestamps on the court documents, it only took half an hour to make the decision. Nine hours later, the Russian media watchdog issued an official warning to YouTube demanding the video be taken down.

On February 9, Vice Prime Minister Sergey Prikhodko officially commented on the story. He called Navalny “a political loser” who “tried to organize a provocation and remind [the world] of himself, chaotically mixing all the possible and impossible together—from my friend Oleg Deripaska to the American President Trump and Manafort, whom I haven’t met.” The high-profile official added that Navalany’s accusations deserved a “man-to-man” response, but he would content himself with Deripaska’s lawsuit.

Oleg Deripaska did file a lawsuit, but the plaintiff was not Alexey Navalny. The oligarch is suing Nastya Rybka and her alleged pimp Alex Lesley, the owner of an agency that trains women to seduce men, for unlawfully distributing personal information without his consent. As a pretrial measure, the court has demanded that both YouTube and Instagram delete Rybka’s posts. If the media platforms don’t, Russian authorities may block both platforms entirely.

The speed of the legal response has surprised even Navalny, who says he’s never seen such an expedited procedure before. “That’s what Prikhodko’s political authority multiplied by Deripaska’s money is capable of,” the opposition activist said.

In the meantime, the story is growing more salacious by the day. In an Instagram post after the video, Nastya Rybka accused Deripaska of raping her, threatening to press charges if he did not agree to marry her. She later clarified that she was “trolling”—only to follow up by asking Vladimir Putin out for a date, promising kompromat on many important figures.

Unsurprisingly, public opinion in Russia has not focused on the corruption part of the yacht story, even though Russian law prohibits officials from accepting gifts or services from private persons. And needless to say, there has been no reaction from the Kremlin about Sergey Prikhodko’s ethics violation. In a country where the acting federal minister can be arrested for bribery with a briefcase full of $2 million in cash, the joint yacht voyage of a vice prime minister and a friendly oligarch barely registers as abnormal.

But the story has opened another important discussion. Deripaska belongs to a broader circle of Yeltsin-era oligarchs and to a narrower one: The Family. The Family consists of Boris Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana, and a select number of officials close to Yeltsin, like the late former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. Deripaska became part of The Family in 2001 when he married Tatiana’s stepdaughter Polina Yumasheva, daughter of the former Yeltsin Administration head Valentin Yumashev.

To me personally, this recent story about Deripaska seems a thinly veiled pretext for attacking the oligarch’s business. There are several reasons to suppose this. Deripaska’s political fortunes have been declining since at least 2008, when Vladimir Putin publicly scolded him for a critical situation at one of his factories outside Saint Petersburg. Workers blocked a federal highway demanding their salaries, which had gone unpaid for months. Putin publicly made Deripaska sign a business agreement that would resolve the problems at the plant, and dressed down Deripaska in a humiliating way.

Moreover, Deripaska’s ties to The Family have weakened after he separated from his wife and rumors about an upcoming divorce spread in August 2017. In October, Deripaska’s En+ company launched its IPO on the London Stock Exchange, revealing that Polina Deripaska was the owner of 6.9 percent of the company, worth approximately $500 million. The spouses had never signed a prenup, and the deal was perceived as Oleg Deripaska’s alimony to his soon-to-be-ex-wife.

Finally, Russia is still undergoing a massive redistribution of assets, which started after the drop in oil prices and annexation of Crimea seriously shrunk the size of Russia’s economic pie. Two years ago I wrote a piece about possible scenarios of power change in Russia, marking out three major elite groups: the siloviki, Putin’s close friends who are the new oligarchs, and the Yeltsin-era oligarchs who have lately come under fire as old elites.

What a surprise to me, then, to read a column yesterday by the prominent pro-Kremlin political expert Konstantin Simonov in Vedomosti making much the same point. In a piece entitled “Old Clans Awaiting Spring,” Simonov says that asset redistribution is the number one political issue in Russia now:

As to the assets, there are two major issues that come up: how to distribute state-owned property and what to do with the property of the old Yeltsin elites. Every powerful player keeps it in mind. These issues are complicated and potentially explosive. Take the old property, for instance. Could the new elites seize it sooner? Sure, but it would mean they’ll face the same fate in the future. That is why the process of asset redistribution has turned out to be far more complicated than it seemed after the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. However, the interest in old assets has not at all been lost; moreover, the remaining state-owned assets are not enough for everyone.

Simonov then describes the case of Oleg Deripaska on the yacht. With Deripaska now publicly tarnished by the scandal, his rivals may smell blood and pounce, seeking to further undermine his standing and get their hands on some of his old assets.

But that doesn’t mean that Navalny’s latest exposé was actually ordered by a rival of Deripaska’s. In fact, this whole strange saga may boil down to something even more mundane. Nastya Rybka is simply a very talented student of her mentor Alex Lesley, who specifically deployed her to get involved with Deripaska and promote their strange business which offers training courses in seduction.

And if, as a consequence, they managed to accidentally create a massive scandal, dragging the billionaire’s name through the mud and disgracing a member of the old Yeltsin-era oligarchy? Well, it’s nothing personal, as the saying goes—it’s strictly business.

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Carter Page, Useful Idiot

As someone who has followed Russia for four decades, I perceive Carter Page as a bit of a naif. Our assessments of Russian foreign policy, by all accounts, are diametrically opposed, and Page’s inclusion, along with Mike Flynn, on the Trump campaign’s foreign-policy team gave me yet another reason not to vote for The Donald. With all due respect for Page’s native intelligence and high level of education, he comes across as what Lenin pithily called a “useful idiot.” Useful idiots were stock characters during the Cold War—earnest, deeply concerned Westerners, often Communist sympathizers, who wondered why can’t we all just get along, and who were convinced that we could resolve our differences with Moscow by meeting the Russians halfway (wherever that might be). While having no discernible effect on the course, let alone the outcome, of the Cold War, such people have nevertheless been considered by the Russians to be of some utility.

Indicative of this attitude is the surreptitiously taped characterization of Page by the Russian intelligence operative who vetted him in 2013 for possible recruitment: “I think he is an idiot.” Apparently, however, Page didn’t even qualify as a useful one—the operative decided he was not even worth recruiting.

This assessment should be borne in mind, since Trump’s detractors, to the contrary, have decided that Page is extremely useful indeed, albeit in an entirely different way.

Following the February 2 release of the Nunes memo, Trump’s political and journalistic enemies have been at pains to justify the FISA warrant to surveil Page by alleging that his suspicious activities—quite apart from any unverified allegation in the Steele dossier—had already deservedly brought him to the FBI’s attention. “You actually had been on the FBI’s radar for working with Russia for several years,” charged George Stephanopoulos in an interview with Page, adding ,”You were recruited at one point by a Russian agent, then you wrote yourself that you were an informal adviser to the Kremlin.”

A little bit of clarification is in order here.

Reading some of the recent hyperventilating headlines (“Carter Page admits to advising the Kremlin”), one could be forgiven for wondering whether Page’s years in Moscow were spent working from an office adjoining Putin’s. The reality is disappointingly pedestrian. What Page actually wrote in a 2013 letter is that, “over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda.”

Color me underwhelmed. So, it evidently was not Page, after all, who first suggested that Putin use the Ukrainian domestic crisis as a pretext for seizing the Crimea, or who counseled the Russian government to expel USAID, declare NGOs to be foreign agents, or murder Nemtsov and Magnitsky. Rather, he offered his thoughts (quite possibly unsolicited) on energy matters to working-level Kremlin staffers preparing to host a routine G-20 summit in St. Petersburg. Did any of his ideas have any impact on the summit deliberations? Did the summit lead to any noteworthy energy-related developments? For that matter, can anyone recall any results of any consequence whatsoever from the 2013 St. Petersburg G-20 summit? No, no, and no. Nevertheless, Page’s banal indulgence in a little résumé-padding is being magnified into sedition and used to justify the FBI’s interest in Page. Quite apart from the inherent flimsiness of the pretext, it’s not clear from the accounts I’ve seen whether this letter, which has only recently been publicized, was even known to the FBI when it sought the FISA warrant.

Equally disturbing is Stephanopoulos’ mendacious assertion that Page was “recruited by a Russian agent.” Of course Page was not “recruited.” He was only vetted for a possible recruitment attempt—and found to be not worth the effort. But such vetting is standard operating procedure for the Russian intelligence services, who have doubtless conducted a similar vetting of virtually every American diplomat, journalist, and businessman who has spent any time in Russia, or dealing with Russia. If an American being vetted by the Russian security services merits an FBI investigation, then the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had better start hiring and training the hundreds of judges that will be required to issue all those FISA warrants.

The assault on Page goes beyond mere misrepresentation of his relationships with Russians. Luke Harding’s recent article on Page gratuitously denigrates the man as a nerdy, ill-at-ease, socially inept misfit. It then goes on to accept at face value what is possibly the most improbable episode in the entire Steele dossier: the allegation that Igor Sechin, the second most powerful man in Russia, invited Page to a secret conclave during Page’s July 2016 visit to Moscow. There Sechin supposedly laid out a deal—the dropping of U.S. sanctions on Russia in return for a large financial consideration in connection with the privatization of a portion of Sechin’s company, Rosneft. In a follow-on meeting, one of Sechin’s subordinates allegedly dangled the prospect of sharing damaging information about Hillary Clinton, but warned that the Russians had dirt on Trump as well.

Never mind that this account contradicts one of the main allegations in the Steele dossier—that the Russians had already been feeding the Trump campaign compromising information on Clinton for years. Harding’s disparaging portrayal of Page as a hapless “wackadoodle” (his sneering quote of Page’s former employer) completely undermines the plausibility of the scenario Harding so desperately wants us to swallow. It is an enormous stretch to believe that Trump would entrust such a sensitive and fraught mission, not to a member of his inner circle, but to a campaign volunteer with whom he was barely even acquainted. However, it simply beggars the imagination to suppose that Sechin, Russia’s Darth Vader, would summon a nonentity like Page to his Death Star to lay out his proposal for collusion between Russia and Team Trump. Make no mistake: If the account in the Steele dossier were true, it would represent a quantum leap in Russian risk-taking with regard to manipulation of foreign elections. Things like hacking and leaking, or planting slanted stories, are low-cost, low-risk activities impossible to trace back to senior Russian officialdom. However, if the Russian leadership were taking the gamble of personal involvement in such a high-risk scheme, would it trust a man whom their own intelligence services had assessed as worthless? What would prevent such an individual from flying home from Moscow and taking the story straight to the press, or the FBI? Sorry, but from the Russian perspective, high-level intrigue is emphatically not a game for useful idiots.

The coup de grâce in Harding’s Picassoesque portrait of Page is a liberal helping of good old-fashioned slander and innuendo. Page, Harding intones ominously, “was on suspiciously good terms with Russia.” His pro-Russian proclivities, we are led to believe, provide ample evidence of his treasonous intent. Page gave some innocuous energy-related papers to a Russian acquaintance who turned out to be an undercover agent, an incident Harding twists beyond all recognition to describe Page as “[an] American willing to provide information to Putin’s foreign intelligence officers.” Even Harding’s apparently random comment that “during his navy days, [Page] spent lavishly and drove a black Mercedes” is intended to elicit a knowing smile from the reader (“Aha, you see—he was probably already on their payroll!”).

The point of this brutal character assassination, of course, is to demonstrate that the tainted, politicized nature of the Steele dossier and the investigation it engendered does not compromise the validity of either Page’s surveillance or the wider collusion allegations against Team Trump.

A frisson of gleeful anticipation greeted the news in fall 2017 that charges were being brought against Paul Manafort and his protégé Rick Gates, and that Mike Flynn and George Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and were cooperating with the authorities. Amid the satisfaction and self-congratulation about Trump’s impending downfall, no one seems to have paid much attention to the fact that none of the charges had anything to do with collusion with Russia, nor did they suggest that any of the damning allegations in the Steele dossier had been verified. Rather, there was an assumption that Trump’s associates, nabbed by the long arm of the law, would start “singing,” and that their chorus would quickly and undeniably implicate the President in impeachable wrongdoing.

But the hopes of autumn are giving way to a silent spring. Is this deafening silence from Manafort et al. a token of their undying loyalty to The Donald—the omerta of mafia thugs? Or is it just possible that there is simply no song to sing—no collusion, no payoffs, no information-sharing—maybe not even any “golden rain?” And what did the FBI, armed with its FISA warrant, learn about Page during the months its agents were surveilling him? Did this unlikely hypostatic union of awkward geek and master of intrigue manage to cover his tracks so well that the Feds could not even muster the risible amount of evidence required for a conspiracy charge?

It’s hardly a secret that, for a broad swath of the U.S. political classes and the American press, the removal of Trump has become the Holy Grail, the goal to which all other things must be subordinated. In this sacred endeavor, Carter Page is useful in ways that even the most cynical Russian handlers could hardly have imagined. And if his dignity and reputation must be utterly trashed in the process—well, so much the worse for Page.

Responsible journalism dies in darkness. Or is it dankness?

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