Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 110

Two Belts, Two Roads

The recent National Defense Strategy of the United States opens by describing a strategic environment of growing competition with revisionist powers. Revealingly, the first example is how China is using its military and economic power to coerce neighboring countries to reorder the “Indo-Pacific region” to its advantage. China, it adds, is pursuing “Indo-Pacific hegemony.” Later the document stresses the capacity to deploy military force in three key regions. Two of them are, unsurprisingly, Europe and the Middle East. The third—and in fact the first one mentioned in this context—is the Indo-Pacific.

Our mental maps are being redrawn. One of the most striking examples of this process is the emergence of a new concept: the “Indo-Pacific.” Changes in mental maps are arguably the great disruptors in the history of world politics. They influence how actors perceive political reality, the way they plan and act, even the way they come to understand cooperation and conflict, and the precise nature of threats.

The first thing to notice about the term Indo-Pacific is that it signals an extension, an enlargement of the orbit within which actors operate. As often in the history of geopolitics, the concept was originally employed by biologists who were aware that marine life in the Pacific and Indian oceans formed a single continuum, and who saw borders as an obstacle to scientific work. Geopolitical thinkers have slowly come around to the same conclusion. Can political and economic questions be addressed within the confines of a narrow definition of the Western Pacific or the Indian Ocean? Or should we attempt to combine the two areas in a larger geopolitical unit? The answer should not be taken for granted, but many recent developments point towards the need to think in terms of larger and larger units. And these larger units are not abstractions but practical considerations for the actors involved.

What first and foremost gives force to the concept of Indo-Pacific is the expanding role of China and India on the global stage. Seen from the traditional centers of political power in Europe and North America, it is still tempting to think of China as an East Asian nation, and of India as a South Asian nation, but in reality, this is an increasingly meaningless distinction.

For two decades, China has been extending its influence and activities into the Indian Ocean. It has invested in ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, sent its submarines across the Malacca Strait with increasing frequency and even—in the most dramatic instance of this trend—opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti at the other end of the Indian Ocean. More recently, this expansive strategy has been given an official name: the Maritime Silk Road, a complex of infrastructure and economic projects spanning the region from the Chinese to the African coasts, onwards to the Suez, with its final destinations at Greece and Turkey.

India has followed suit, albeit a bit more slowly, reflecting the historical lag in development of the two countries. India started to realize that, with China increasingly present in its own backyard, perhaps the inverse movement had become necessary. At first blush, this may have looked like a pure power play—a means of preventing China from abusing its newly acquired presence in the Indian Ocean by developing corresponding leverage points in the Western Pacific. But in truth, the decision to do so was always inevitable, and merely reproduced longstanding dynamics simmering along the countries’ lengthy land borders in their neighboring maritime spaces.

That one of the great civilizational borders existing today is being slowly eroded should not be underplayed. Consider how momentous a perceptual transformation would be realized if we started thinking of Europe and the Middle East as a single unit. It is a process of that magnitude that we are watching manifest itself all along the Asian littoral arc, as the border between East and South Asia—a border which has in the past stopped whole armies in their tracks—is being questioned, doubted, and perhaps, in the end, forgotten. The emergence of the Indo-Pacific represents a key moment—perhaps the key moment—in the wider historical process of Eurasian integration.

To a considerable extent, sharp divides between the regions in question have their root in European colonialism, originating either from the competition for territory and spheres of influence between rival European powers, or from administrative expediency to organize territories in separate units. Often these divisions were superimposed on older and more permanent racial or religious divides. In some cases, European colonial powers did much to reinforce them, and in others, they created them out of whole cloth. Different regions in Asia were connected to Europe—the center—in such a formalized way that relations between them never were directly established. Instead, everything passed through the colonial center, which worked as a hub assigning and distributing culture, ideas, and money. The hub-and-spoke model was the original organizing principle of the system. The borders existed, but they mattered most to the European powers in charge of the whole.

At the beginning of the 20th century, as the age of European empires seemed to be coming to an end, a number of visionary thinkers like Mackinder and Mahan started to ponder the possibility of a Eurasian supercontinent from which these divisions had been removed. In some ways, they were ahead of their time. A new age of divisions, ideological rather than cultural or political, would soon follow—a century of spasms triggered by the Europeans’ halting retreat and the lunge of an entire world into modernity.

Today, we have returned to the question of Eurasia with renewed vigor. India and China are outgrowing their historical boundaries. Civilizational borders are more fluid and fragile than we thought, and the old order is receding. The process is much further along in the former peripheries in East, Southeast, and South Asia—where borders between countries were less central to the system—than along the Europe-Asia frontier. As all these distinctions dissolve, a new concept of Eurasia rises. And the Indo-Pacific is the central theater where a new order is being rehearsed. That the United States has finally discovered the Indo-Pacific means that a new geopolitical reality is upon us.

There is a page in K.M. Panikkar’s India and the Indian Ocean, published in 1945, where the great strategic thinker seems to discover the Indo-Pacific. He notes that the strategic importance of the Indian Ocean had dramatically changed since the 19th century. In an earlier time, it represented nothing more than a conduit to the Atlantic and, after the Suez Canal was built, the Mediterranean too.

Japan’s conquest of Singapore and the Bay of Bengal changed everything. It showed that India could be dominated from the east. Japan’s ultimate defeat did not change India’s new calculus. A rising China would one day grow to be a much more formidable competitor than Japan could ever have hoped to be. The strategic fulcrum shifted to the geography connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Consider trade and economic development. We have grown so used to thinking of India and China as the two economic giants in Asia that we often tend to overlook a third pole, which, as a pivot, may turn out to be just as significant: Southeast Asia. Both India and China are discovering that in a world of deepening economic integration and transnational value chains, their prosperity is closely linked to the fate of Southeast Asia, where opportunities for trade, infrastructure investment, and outsourcing abound. India, in any case, can’t cede ground there to China, if it hopes to keep up. There are no other options open to it. To its west, it faces a stagnant and turbulent Middle East; beyond that, mature European economies. By turning east, it finds ample opportunities for investment and trade with Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

A related issue is control over the physical transport and telecommunication infrastructure—the networks that connect both China and India to each other and the rest of the world—which are bound to be the keys to the world economy by the middle of the century. In this field, too, India can’t sit idly by. It seems far more prudent to ensure from the very start that this will be a collective project, one pregnant with rivalry, but where both countries have major stakes.

This is the most singular and important fact—and paradox—of contemporary geopolitics in this region: political and economic integration and the attendant dilution of borders goes hand in hand with increasing competition regarding how this enlarged space is to be managed and defined.

New clashes, new alliances, new mental maps.

In June 2017, Chinese troops were spotted extending a road through a piece of land also claimed by Bhutan. India perceived this as an unacceptable change to the status quo and crossed its own border with Bhutan to block the Chinese project. Troops from both countries stood facing each other for weeks in Doklam, until a disengagement was negotiated. Retreating a few hundred meters, they are now busy digging in for a larger clash in the future.

India’s broader rejection of China’s mammoth geopolitical project, the Belt and Road Initiative, seems to have triggered the confrontation that developed last summer. One month before the standoff, China had gathered about thirty national leaders at its first summit devoted to provide guidance for the Belt and Road, part of a broader media and cultural blitz that included television programs and interviews, comprehensive newspaper coverage, music videos, and even bedtime stories for children. For the first time, the Belt and Road was the main story in most international media outlets—many in Europe and the United States were for the first time introduced to the concept.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loud launch was accompanied by several displays of loud opposition to the project. India announced just one day before the launch event that it would not be participating, explaining that in its current form the Belt and Road would create unsustainable burdens of debt, while ignoring Indian core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity. It was a slap in the face to which Beijing felt it had to respond. Three months after Doklam, Washington finally made up its mind about the initiative, calling it a Faustian pact by which countries would exchange their sovereignty for cheap credit.

So what is the Belt and Road, exactly? It is a name, and little more than a name—a means of grouping together and invoking a number of highly significant developments and realities: China’s growing international clout, its need to reshape the international economic system in its image, and even the growing reactions and responses to that project. Past equivalents to the Belt and Road were just as shapeless and ambitious—perhaps concepts such as “capitalism” or “the West” come the closest in spirit.

Chinese authorities feel at home with the idea of a world system articulating the relations of economic power and dependence at the heart of the global economy. Patterns of specialization and comparative advantage determine the place each country assumes in the global economy and, as a result, the levels of absolute and relative prosperity it may hope to achieve. The global economy is less a level playing field than an organized system in which some countries occupy privileged positions and others, such as China, try to rise to commanding heights. It was always thus, you will be told in Beijing. The difference is that now someone else is inching closer to the center.

In economic terms this means that China will be organizing and leading an increasing share of global supply chains, reserving for itself the most valuable segments of production, and creating strong links of collaboration and infrastructure with other countries, whose main role in the system will be to occupy lower-value segments. Politically, Beijing hopes to put in place the same kind of feedback mechanism that the West has benefited from: deeper links of investment, infrastructure and trade which can be used as leverage to shift relations with other countries even more in its favor. The process feeds on itself. Until recently, it seemed that China’s growing influence would be contained to its own peripheries. The fact that countries such as Greece and Hungary now openly defend Chinese positions during important meetings in Brussels has been a rude awakening for the traditional Western center.

The Belt and Road poses a number of specific challenges for India. First and most importantly, as a major economy hoping to pursue a trajectory of fast economic growth, India needs to develop deep international links and supply chains, most immediately in its neighborhood. The Belt and Road may force it into new forms of economic isolation—this time involuntary, as opposed to the years of Indian economic autarchy. Strategic encirclement, the geopolitical counterpart to economic isolation, is a second challenge India faces. When China opened its first military base abroad in Djibouti in 2017, the reaction in India was unsurprisingly negative, with New Delhi seeing the move as a clear statement of China’s ambitions in the Indian Ocean.

In the east, China has built runways and fortified seven artificial islands in the South China Sea, while increasing its presence in Myanmar and planning for a vast network of railways connecting Kunming to the sea. To the north, garrisons, airfields, and new roads stretch along the border in the Himalayas. To the south, China has built a new harbor in Hambantota and modernized the Colombo port for Sri Lanka, a country whose dependency on Beijing keeps increasing. The corridor linking Xinjiang to Gwadar in Pakistan, where China is now preparing to open a military base, only its second extraterritorial outpost—closes the circle.

The Indo-Pacific, as a geographic concept, is neutral. Every actor is coming to the realization that it needs to act in this extended sphere or, in other words, that its objectives cannot be pursued within individual limited areas alone. China and India may be more directly implicated in the change of perspective—indeed, China’s rise is leading this shift in the region—but it affects an external actor like the United States no less powerfully when Washington realizes that it is better able to develop a coherent policy towards China and India if it thinks of the two together as part of the same system. Thus the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s speech prior to his visit to India invoked the “Indo-Pacific” 19 times, while President Donald Trump repeated it like a mantra during his subsequent trip across Asia.

Although every actor shares an understanding of the Indo-Pacific as a single system, individual understandings are to some extent also mutually exclusive. When the United States speaks of the Indo-Pacific as a space of freedom managed by a condominium of India, America, Australia, and Japan, this is not only a project very different from China’s Maritime Silk Road, but is, in fact, increasingly being defined in opposition to it. What these four countries seem to share—what separates them from other democracies in the region—is a deepening suspicion of Chinese plans. Thus the attack on the Belt and Road Initiative as a tool for “predatory economics” by Rex Tillerson, for instance; thus the meeting at the sidelines of the recent ASEAN summit between officials from the United States, Japan, Australia, and India to discuss the idea of the “quad” for the first time since it was first suggested by Japan a decade earlier. While Australia and India have remained lukewarm towards the idea, the Belt and Road has moved them closer to Japan and the United States.

India and Japan, too, are exploring increasing synergies created by the common perception of rising threat to the Asian maritime commons—whether in terms of the Indo-Pacific space (such as the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor) or in more general terms (such as economic and technological cooperation). And theirs is a longstanding flirtation. Their shared Indo-Pacific concept first saw the light of day during a 2007 visit by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to India, where he spoke about the “confluence of two seas.” In the spring and summer of 2007, the Indian navy sailed all the way up to Vladivostok, a Russian port on the Pacific, and conducted a series of bilateral and multilateral exercises with the United States, Japan, Russia, and China.

Unsurprisingly, it was Japan rather than the United States that first realized great power competition would take the form of different projects and models of Eurasian integration. Once you come to the conclusion that integration across the supercontinent is inevitable, the most interesting question immediately arises: What form should it take and under what guidance should it be developed? Geographical realities cannot be understood in a politically neutral way.

That, in the final analysis, explains why China sees a strategic threat in the very concept of the Indo-Pacific. Understood as a geographic concept it merely repeats ideas conceptualized by Beijing in the context of the Belt and Road, but the same underlying reality carries different—opposed—political meanings. The term “Indo-Pacific” is less the acknowledgment of an ineluctable political geography than an initial, inchoate move to create a political initiative, one intended to rival China’s Belt and Road.

The post Two Belts, Two Roads appeared first on The American Interest.

Trump’s European Misstep

Considering the slew of negative things Donald Trump has uttered about Europe and NATO both prior to and since his election, the U.S. Administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) and National Defense Strategy (NDS) should be welcomed by its European allies and partners. Although starkly different in tone from the Obama Administration’s strategic outlook, both these documents are surprisingly “un-Trumpian” on several matters concerning European security.

The main takeaway of the NSS and NDS is that the global landscape is increasingly marked by strategic competition, especially with China and Russia. The NDS puts it plainly: “Inter-state competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” European capitals concerned that President Trump still harbors positive views about Russia should be thankful that the Administration now officially considers Russia a revisionist power and a challenge to American interests.

Moreover, both the NSS and NDS offer a clear endorsement of America’s traditional alliances. The NSS acknowledges the importance of allies and partners to advancing “U.S. interests and help[ing] push back against U.S. strategic competitors.” Indeed, the word “allies” is mentioned 78 times throughout the document, far more than in the 2015 Obama version. In a similar fashion, the NDS states that the U.S. “network of alliances and partnerships remain the backbone of global security.” Both documents make a case for active U.S. engagement in Europe, with the NSS noting that “a strong and free Europe is of vital importance to the United States.”

Also notable is that the NSS and the NDS offer unequivocal support for NATO and commit to upholding the alliance’s Article 5, an issue that has visibly plagued the Transatlantic relationship since Donald Trump announced his candidacy. Even the language on defense spending is somewhat milder in tone than what European leaders have been used to hearing from Trump. Both documents make clear that the U.S. “expects” European allies to fulfill their defense spending commitments, but thankfully avoid the mistake of conditioning U.S. support upon said fulfillment.

However, a subtle but important shortcoming of both strategic texts is their failure to acknowledge ongoing European efforts not only to spend more on defense but also to give the European Union a greater role in the continent’s defense affairs. While there is a long-standing tendency in Washington to approach EU defense cooperation with disinterest and skepticism, often for good reasons, the Trump Administration seems to go even further by downplaying or even ignoring the role of the European Union altogether. For example, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s November speech on the Administration’s policy towards Europe and Transatlantic relations barely mentioned the European Union at all. This is unfortunate. If, as the new strategic documents suggest, the international system is indeed moving toward great-power competition, having a Europe that is more integrated, including on defense issues, and better able to withstand pressure from Russia and China ultimately serves America’s own interest. The United States should therefore support the European Union to help itself.

The fact is that over the past year, European defense collaboration has made significant strides, notably including the creation of Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) and the European Defence Fund (EDF). PESCO encourages smaller constellations of likeminded EU countries to team up on developing capabilities and increasing operational ability. The EDF allocates significant EU Commission funding toward common defense projects and can provide new incentives for cooperation on innovation and defense industrial consolidation. These and other ongoing efforts are part of a comprehensive yet pragmatic approach to the EU defense dimension that seeks to utilize different EU instruments to build national capabilities. The idea is that these capabilities can then be used for deterrence and operations either on behalf of the European Union and NATO or in another format (such as a coalition or a UN-operation).

Crucially, unlike past attempts to deepen European defense, there seems to be both genuine political will and a sense of urgency this time around. While many of the current initiatives pre-date the election of Donald Trump, uncertainty regarding U.S. foreign policy and Trump’s erratic leadership has certainly intensified the demand for alternatives for European security. On top of this, Brexit and the election of the overtly pro-European Emanuel Macron in France have added a new dynamic. The United Kingdom is no longer blocking EU defense initiatives and Macron’s seminal speech at the Sorbonne in September 2017, laying out his vision for Europe, included a clarion call for a more ambitious EU defense.

Even NATO seems to welcome a stronger European pillar. Today, it is widely recognized that both organizations play crucial and complementary roles in providing for European security. Assuming that EU initiatives are correctly implemented and sufficiently integrated with NATO efforts to avoid duplication, this should be precisely what the United States and the Trump Administration are calling for—a Europe that assumes more responsibility for its own security matters.

While it is still too early to tell what real-life impact these EU defense initiatives will have, dismissing them outright would be a mistake. Not only can EU defense collaboration provide a vehicle for greater collaboration between European states on specific projects, it can also justify an increase in defense spending for skeptical governments like Germany’s. Examples of areas where the European Union can make practical contributions to broader Transatlantic security efforts include counterterrorism and addressing hybrid warfare (a new EU Counter-Hybrid Threats Center in Helsinki was set up last year). The European Union is also promoting the concept of “military Schengen” to allow for greater freedom of movement across Europe for NATO reinforcements, a high priority in ensuring credible deterrence against Russia in areas like the Baltic states. Finally, having Europe assume more responsibility, particularly in its own southern neighborhood, should be a welcome development for Washington, allowing it to devote its attention and resources to other problems, such as managing China and Russia.

The post-Cold War Transatlantic security bargain used to be that Europe would help maintain global security in exchange for a continued U.S. commitment to European security. While this is still welcomed by Washington, a stronger European pillar within NATO is now also necessary to keep the United States present and engaged on the continent. A balanced approach that seeks to promote deeper European defense cooperation through practical measures while safeguarding NATO as the bedrock of European security is the right way forward. The failure to encourage such a development in the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy was a missed opportunity. The next NATO summit in Brussels in 2018 provides an excellent forum for the Trump Administration to reverse it.

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The US Needs to Boost Bilateral Relationships in Europe

It is difficult to give up on the old ways of doing business, for established patterns and routines bring comfort and predictability to everyday interactions, allowing bureaucracies to coast along the lines of pre-existing guidance and leaders to tout minor adjustments as breakthroughs. This truism also applies to how nation states approach national security, how they structure their interactions, and what assumptions politicians and diplomats bring to the table when looking at the international chessboard. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the evolution of U.S.-European relations since the end of the Cold War: Established institutions and familiar processes have remained at the center of U.S. foreign and security policy, even as we, together with our allies, devised a new mission set for NATO, enlarged the alliance, and supported the enlargement of the European Union. The evolution of post-Cold War Transatlantic relations over the past quarter century has been about extending and adjusting the existing “security infrastructure” so as to reach the assumed end point, one in which Europe is “whole and free and at peace” and the United States is finally able to take full advantage of the “peace dividend” that (many in Washington believed) was its due.

That was then, but today Europe is no longer marching toward a universal liberal order. Europe is re-nationalizing, multilateralism is on the wane, and the current form of the EU federal project has all but reached its limits. And yet despite all this change, both the European Union and to a lesser extent NATO remain wedded to the idea that institutional adjustments are the key to addressing the overall security deficit on the continent. Pursuing this trajectory—be it through a “two-tiered Europe” formula for the European Union or the building of still more NATO headquarters—takes us only so far in addressing the fundamental reality of Western security, namely that in the end sovereign states’ decision-making processes continue to trump institutional arrangements. Likewise, the key problem for NATO is not simply the inadequacy of its legacy institutions to address current security threats (though its new headquarters and the development of new logistical nodes are all positive steps), but rather the fact that its capabilities deficit is a direct result of national spending priorities that continue to leave the alliance dangerously overstretched. Simply put, NATO lacks the requisite military capabilities because most of its member states continue to invest at a level insufficient for addressing current and emerging threats. Only when there are changes to defense spending at the state level will institutions adjust accordingly and acquire the capabilities needed to act in a crisis. It is for this reason that the current U.S. National Security Strategy calls on the allies not only to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense by 2024, but also to ensure that 20 percent of those expenditures fund real, usable military capabilities. The current dilemma for NATO’s viability going forward is the fundamental mismatch between the actual priorities of the majority of European NATO allies versus what the United States wants the alliance to be able to do.

Notwithstanding the continual assertions of NATO’s unity and solidarity, the alliance is far from sharing the kind of threat consensus that kept the Euro-Atlantic glued together during the Cold War. Rather, today European security is defined by the progressive regionalization of individual nations’ security optics, with countries along the Eastern flank viewing Russian military pressure and irredentism in Ukraine as the preeminent threats, while Southern and Western Europe look to the Mediterranean, the MENA region, and increasingly deeper into Africa where war, terrorism, and migration are now a clear and present danger for Europe. This progressive bifurcation of how European NATO members prioritize threats presents a dilemma for the United States as the linchpin of NATO and the core security provider for Europe. NATO remains the umbrella covering all of America and Europe, but its institutions also need to be buttressed by a series of strong bilateral relations to undergird the Euro-Atlantic security system. For starters, the United States needs to prioritize three core relationships in Europe to reflect the distribution of threats across Europe. This core “European triad” of U.S. strategic engagement should include London, Berlin, and Warsaw.

As it exits the European Union, the United Kingdom will underscore and leverage its relations with the United States, including the countries’ close military cooperation. Britain’s current reinvestment in its military, most recently through the purchase of two new aircraft carriers, aligns well with the planned rearmament cycle in the United States. More importantly, London has historically shared with Washington the understanding that military power remains part of the full spectrum of statecraft. Admittedly, the jury is still out on whether the National Security Capabilities Review currently being conducted by Theresa May’s National Security Adviser Sir Mark Sedwill will result in cuts to an already strained UK defense budget, or if the country will become a full-bore military partner of the United States. In the coming months, Washington’s continued engagement with London on defense issues may prove decisive for the future of the bilateral security relationship.

Though the positive outcome of UK defense modernization is not yet assured, the good news is that, in growing recognition of the fact that state-on-state conflict should once more be a major focus of planning, London has taken some important initial steps to reassert itself as a serious military power. In addition to British investments in the Royal Navy, British airpower will see a considerable increase in capabilities, including the acquisition of F-35B fighters (with a target number of 138 F-35 aircraft) with the aim of ensuring that that each aircraft carrier has at least a squadron of stealthy aircraft by the time they are both fully deployed in 2023. More importantly from the U.S. and NATO perspectives, this restoration of British military capabilities highlights the importance of carrier strike capability—an essential development for the United States to consider NATO as an integral component of its power projection.

The second and arguably most important pillar of America’s strategic “European triad” is Germany. Despite being Europe’s largest and most powerful economy, it has actually reduced its military capabilities to the point that some have begun to question whether the Bundeswehr could actually deploy in sufficient numbers in a major state-on-state crisis. German national security policy is at an inflection point. On the one hand, the traditional commitment to the Adenauerian vision of maintaining the essential U.S. anchor remains strong, while at the same time—especially in light of the election results from last September—Berlin seems determined at least to explore what some in the German policy community term “strategic autonomy,” manifest in the European Union’s PESCO initiative. And yet, for the first time since the Cold War, Berlin has moved to stop and reverse the progressive reductions in the size of the Bundeswehr, with the country once again poised to expand its military by adding 20,000 soldiers, with the goal being an almost 200,000-strong army by 2024. The Germans have also stood up a new Cyber and Information Space Command (CIR), which became operational in April 2017. Though public opinion in Germany remains divided over the need to expand the country’s military, Germany has been moving in the direction of strengthening its armed forces. It is precisely because Germany’s debate about national power is at an inflection point that Berlin and Washington need to engage in a strategic dialogue about Germany’s contribution to NATO’s capabilities.

Although a growing number of European analysts see Germany’s strategic choices as tracking increasingly towards a reformed and redefined EU federal project, with “strategic autonomy” ever more at the center of thinking about national security, the issue of how much military capability Germany will bring to NATO is far from settled. Contrary to the prevailing skepticism about Germany’s ability to make a contribution to NATO forces commensurate with the country’s economic might and its population, I would argue that it will have this capacity sooner rather than later, as Berlin adapts its military posture to the rapidly shifting geostrategic landscape around it and beyond. As a quintessentially Central European great power, Germany cannot escape the growing pressure along Europe’s eastern and southern flanks, nor can it ultimately build an effective national security strategy that is not anchored in its core relationship with the United States. Bringing about a greater alignment of U.S. and German national security policy optics is as essential as it has ever been post-1945 for ensuring Germany’s security—and European security writ large. Last but not least, as the principal entry point into Europe for U.S. military forces, Germany remains essential to all U.S. and NATO planning going forward. Hence, for both larger geostrategic and practical reasons, the U.S.-German bilateral security relationship remains essential to NATO’s long-term health.

Poland is one of five NATO countries that actually spend 2 percent of its GDP on national defense, and it has pledged by 2030 to reach 2.5 percent GDP, which, at $21.5 billion, will represent a doubling of its defense spending from current levels. The country aims to provide a land power anchor for NATO’s eastern flank, with Warsaw intending—perhaps too ambitiously—to increase its armed forces by another 100,000. Still, though there has been considerable criticism of Warsaw’s plans to rapidly expand its ground forces—especially its new Territorial Defense Forces concept—there can be no denying that, as the Bundeswehr has shrunk, Poland has been trying to position itself as an essential component of NATO’s conventional capability on the Continent. Poland’s 2017 “Concept of Defense of the Republic of Poland” seeks to maximize the country’s ability to defend itself in the event of a Russian attack in order to give NATO forces enough time to assemble and come to the rescue. Although Poland’s military is unlikely to become self-sufficient, Warsaw’s efforts to provide meaningful capabilities which, in a crisis, could buy Washington time, attest to the importance for NATO’s posture along the eastern flank of a closer strategic partnership between Washing and Warsaw.

Poland’s view of the utility of military power is informed by its historical experience as a country that vanished from the map of Europe for more than a century. The seriousness with which Poles approach their military’s readiness is again a function of the past: After defeat in 1939 the country was overrun and subjugated again for half a century after a mere 20 years of interwar independence. Today, as it is entering only its third decade of independent statehood since the collapse of communism, clouds are fast gathering over the eastern horizon.

Today Poland is a country in search of a national narrative that takes it beyond the nearly three decades of post-communist adaptation. Nevertheless it remains deeply committed to its strategic relationship with the United States. Both London and Warsaw provide the essential pillars anchoring U.S. European policy in areas that matter: in the case of the UK, the strategic Transatlantic dimension of (once more) growing British naval power; and in the Polish case, the land power of the largest country on NATO’s eastern flank. As the dominant economic power in Europe sitting at the continent’s geostrategic crossroads, Berlin needs to become again the essential contributor to NATO’s military capabilities that it was during the Cold War. As threats to U.S. security commitments in Asia grow, those allies’ capabilities are an important part of Washington’s overall strategic calculus.

Alliances and security institutions must reflect the real distribution of power and interests of states if they are to be effective and embraced by the public. If NATO is to see real military capabilities emerge from the approaching NATO summit in Brussels, the strategic “European triad” discussed above needs to become the foundation of U.S. bilateral engagement with Europe. Next, Washington should buttress this core triad with enhanced engagement with the states bracketing the larger NATO space—Norway, France, and Italy—with the latter two being key to NATO’s southern flank (especially as U.S. relations with Turkey remain in flux) and Norway serving as the critical entry point for the High North.

Adjusting NATO’s legacy institutions will only take us so far. It is through enhanced U.S. bilateral relationships with allies that the alliance will restore its military capabilities, and with it its ability to deter—and if need be to defend—against rising threats in the east and south. Only then will there be more genuine willingness on the part of the public to continue supporting NATO and a national reinvestment in defense.

The post The US Needs to Boost Bilateral Relationships in Europe appeared first on The American Interest.

Hard Problems and Democratic Procrastination

Some of the hardest public policies for any democracy to adopt are those that impose present-day costs on their constituents for the sake of diffuse future benefits. There is a renewed optimism in Washington these days about passing an infrastructure bill now that tax reform and the budget have been completed. Both parties agree that the country has serious infrastructure needs. While the Democrats want to spend more public dollars on this and the Republicans fewer, there are few if any advocates for doing nothing about our decaying roads, bridges, water systems, and the like. Even so, nothing (or next to nothing) is quite possibly what we will end up with.

The large deficits created by the tax reform and recent budget bill don’t make things any easier. Even the comparatively modest $200 billion Federal government investment the Trump Administration proposes has to come from somewhere. Unless the dynamic scoring assumptions built into the recent Federal budget prove to be prophetic, a plan to fund infrastructure would likely imply cuts to other domestic programs—a prospect that will be even more unlikely if the Democrats gain control of even one Congressional chamber in 2018.

While it would be unwise to bet the family farm on any major infrastructure bill in the near future, it is worth having a discussion about it now in the event of a more politically propitious moment to come. The infrastructure problems in this country are critical and will not fix themselves. At some point, the disrepair and loss will be too great to ignore.

To the credit of the current administration, its proposal engages in some serious thinking about the how to stimulate and fund infrastructure projects. Democrats will likely reject some of these ideas on ideological grounds and question the degree to which Trump’s plan relies on state, local, and private funding as opposed to Federal money. But 35 states, including very blue California, have enacted statutes that enable so-called P3 (i.e. Public-Private Partnerships) transportation projects. California’s state government has also successfully leveraged matching funds from local and regional jurisdictions to finance much-needed local water projects in recent years.

Trump’s plan represents a paradigm shift for the U.S. Federal government. The interstate highway system and massive dam projects, such as those along the Columbia River, were built with a much heavier Federal commitment than the four-to-one match that the Trump Administration is proposing to state and local entities. The Medicaid expansion under President Obama succeeded in part because the Federal government promised to pay for 90% of it from 2020 on. While the idea of finding state and local money makes sense, it is not clear how enticing the present level of matching funds will be, particularly if the money comes with many conditions. One thing we know for certain is that local jurisdictions do not like being told what to do by state and federal governments, no matter which party is in power.

Another important question is the degree to which infrastructure design should look forward to new systems of water, energy, and transportation as opposed to restoring or replacing old infrastructure that is currently in disrepair. This question is further complicated by the challenges of climate change. Sea level rise, floods, droughts, and extreme weather events must be factored in. While the Trump proposal allocates 10% of its expenditure to a “Transformative Projects Program,” it will for obvious reasons give little guidance on coping with climate change or ways to facilitate the transformation to alternative energy infrastructure.

Relying on local initiative is no guarantee. Consider this puzzle. California’s citizens overwhelming believe that climate change is real and that the state needs to undertake adaptive measures to protect its airports, roads, power plants, and wastewater facilities along its coast and bays. Despite several state programs that mandate local governments plan adaptive measures that would protect residences, businesses, and infrastructure, California’s local communities have done little in this regard to date. The collective action problems associated with funding and implementing regional sea walls or natural capital protections have simply been too formidable so far. The catastrophic flooding that occurred in Houston could easily also happen in the San Francisco Bay Area in the near future, but there is no apparent urgency at the moment.

Unleashing local initiative will also require permitting reform. Some Democrats and environmental groups will strongly resist this suggestion. And given that the Trump Administration is pretty firmly on the side of big business, Democrats will not view them as trusted agents of regulatory change. There is a big difference between expediting the permitting process and gutting it. Moreover, a top-down approach to this issue ignores the fact the state and regional regulatory authorities must also be part of the streamlining effort. This means that permitting reform will itself have to be a collaborative effort.

Because many infrastructure projects touch on separate laws and several agencies, the process of permitting large infrastructure projects can be confusing, lengthy, expensive, and duplicative. This was fine for liberals when the issue was balancing environmental concerns against economic development. But now the problem is that large infrastructure related to utility-scale wind and solar, levees that protect against sea level rise, desalinization plants, and other projects that either mitigate or adapt to climate change also face formidable permitting processes. This pits environmental priorities against one another.

A related problem that local communities struggle with is the huge disparity in local capacity. Communities with ample resources can play the infrastructure matching grant competition game quite well as they have the necessary staff, expertise, and connections to compete successfully. The same is not true for disadvantaged communities. California achieved some success with this problem when it incentivized wealthier communities to incorporate poorer ones into their grants in order to qualify for lower matching fund requirements, but this problem is not addressed in the Trump proposal to date.

Some rural disadvantaged areas may benefit from the Trump plan’s rural block grant component, but it would be better designed if it had more explicit targets. For instance, it is hard to get specialist health care in remote rural areas, and telemedicine offers a possible alternative. Targeting broadband expansion to rural health care needs explicitly would address this critical problem more effectively.

In the end, the right solution is neither a purely top-down or bottom-up infrastructure initiative, but some mix of the two. Private-public partnerships that rely on matching grants tend to follow the money path, and that leaves some important projects and communities behind. Moreover, the multilayered and fractured public component of P3 is quite complex and likely to remain so into the future. The dream of standardizing processes across levels of government and agencies will likely hit a wall of parochial resistance. But eventually, our infrastructure needs will become so apparent that even voters and elected officials will have to respond. Hopefully, it will turn out to be a case of better late than never.

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The Populist Surge

Recent years have seen the rise of new forms of populist nationalism, which today constitute the chief threat to the liberal international order that has been the foundation for global peace and prosperity since 1945. Liberal democracy had been continuously threatened by authoritarian regimes over the past century, with the exception of the period from 1991–2008 when American power was largely hegemonic. Today, a different kind of threat has emerged, with established democracies themselves succumbing to illiberal political forces driven by popular passions. The term “populism” has been used very loosely, however, to describe a wide range of phenomena that don’t necessarily go together. We need, therefore, to put some boundaries around the term.

There is no firm consensus among political scientists as to the definition of populism, but there are at least three characteristics that in my view have been typically associated with it. The first is a regime that pursues policies that are popular in the short run but unsustainable in the long run, usually in the realm of social policies. Examples would be price subsidies, generous pension benefits, or free medical clinics.

A second has to do with the definition of the “people” that are the basis for legitimacy: Many populist regimes do not include the whole population, but rather a certain ethnic or racial group that are said to be the “true” people. Thus Viktor Orbán in Hungary has defined Hungarian national identity as based on Hungarian ethnicity, something that would exclude non-Hungarians living in Hungary, and include the many Hungarians living in surrounding countries like Slovakia or Romania. Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India has similarly been trying to shift the definition of Indian national identity from the inclusive liberal one established by Gandhi and Nehru to one based on Hinduism. The Polish Law and Justice Party has emphasized traditional Polish values and Catholicism, and has stimulated the rise of more overtly racist groups, like the one calling for a “white Europe” in November 2017.

A third definition of populism has to do with the style of leadership. Populist leaders tend to develop a cult of personality around themselves, claiming the mantle of charismatic authority that exists independently of institutions like political parties. They try to develop a direct and unmediated relationship with the “people” they claim to represent, channeling the latter’s hopes and fears into immediate action. It is typically coupled with a denunciation of the entire existing elite, which is of course invested in existing institutions.

This personalistic approach to leadership is what makes populists such a threat to democratic institutions. Modern liberal democracies are built around power-sharing institutions like courts, federalism, legislatures, and a free media that serve as checks on executive power. All of these institutions are potential roadblocks to the populist leader’s ability to achieve his or her goals, and therefore become direct targets of attack. The personalistic nature of populism thus makes it a threat to liberal institutions.

These three definitions then allow us to distinguish between the different movements that have been given the label “populist” in the past. Latin American populists like Hugo Chavez or Néstor and Cristina Kirchner emphasized popular but unsustainable social programs, and tried to create personality cults around themselves. The Argentine pair portrayed themselves as re-embodiments of the classic populist power couple, Juan and Eva Perón. They did not, on the other hand, entertain a restrictive definition of national identity. The same could be said of Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, the former Prime Minister, in Thailand: They promoted redistribution programs for poorer rural Thais but did not have the same restrictive view of Thai identity as their yellow-shirt opponents.

Leaders of the Brexit movement, by contrast, did not stress an expansive economic program, nor did they have a single charismatic leader. But they did appeal to anti-immigrant cultural fears and traditional British identity, as well as to unhappiness about economic dislocation. Viktor Orbán fits all three definitions: he has tried to protect Hungarian savers from “predatory” European banks; he has a restrictive definition of “the people”; and he would certainly like to be considered a charismatic leader. It is not clear whether Vladimir Putin fits any but the last of the three definitions: he has been cautious on expansive social programs; while he has stressed Russian identity and traditions, that tradition is not necessarily restrictive in ethnic terms. Putin has certainly built a cult of personality around himself, though it is hard to argue that he is an outsider seeking to overthrow the entire elite, having come up through the ranks of the KGB and then the Russian FSB. The same can be said about India’s Narendra Modi and even China’s Xi Jingping: they have both become popular by attacking the existing elite, though they themselves are very much part of that elite.

It should be noted that Donald Trump fits all three definitions. During his campaign, he stressed economic populism, threatening to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement once in office. He promised to protect entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security—though since becoming President, he has governed more like a traditional conservative Republican, seeking for example to cut social benefits by repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. And while Trump has never explicitly endorsed white nationalism, he has been happy to accept support from those who do, and went out of his way to not single out neo-Nazis and overt racists during their rally in Charlottesville. He has had a very problematic relationship with African-Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities; black sports stars and performers have been frequent targets of his Twitter posts. And he has acted like a classic charismatic at rallies with his core supporters: When accepting the Republican nomination in 2016, he said that “I alone understand your problems,” and that “I alone know how to fix them.”

Thus, within the realm of movements labeled populist, we can distinguish between at least two broad categories. In Latin America and in Southern Europe, populists have tended to be on the Left, having a constituency among the poor and advocating redistributionist social programs that seek to remedy economic inequality. They do not however emphasize ethnic identity or take a strong stance against immigration. This group would include Chavez’s Bolarivarian movement and Kircherismo in Argentina, as well as Spain’s Podemos and Greece’s Syriza.

In northern Europe, however, populists are based less on the poor than on a declining middle or working class, and takes a more right-wing ethnic and anti-immigrant turn. They want to protect existing welfare states but do not emphasize rapid expansion of social services or subsidies. Groups in this category would include Brexiteers, France’s National Front, Holland’s Party of Freedom, the Danish Peoples’ Party, and in the United States, many of Donald Trump’s hardcore working-class supporters.

Then there are groups or movements that don’t really fit either category. Italy’s Five Star movement like other populist movements is resolutely anti-establishment and denounces the Italian elite as a whole. But it differs from both its Northern and Southern European counterparts by being both urban and middle- or even upper middle-class, rather than being based in a declining working class.

Why Populist Nationalism Now?

There are three reasons why we are seeing the rise of populist nationalism now, in the second half of the 2010s. Those reasons are economic, political, and cultural.

The economic sources of populism have been widely noted and discussed. The same trade theory that tells you that all countries participating in a free trade regime will be better off in the aggregate also tells you that not every individual in every country will be better off: Low-skill workers in rich countries are likely to lose out to similarly-skilled but lower-paid workers in poor ones. That is in fact what has been happening in many industrialized countries with the rise of China, Mexico, and the like. According to a recent IMF study, some 50 percent of Americans are no better off in terms of real income than they were in 2000; many more of those in the middle of the income distribution have lost ground than have moved up the economic ladder. In the United States, this relative economic decline of the middle or working class has been associated with a number of social ills, like increasing rates of family breakdown and an opioid epidemic that in 2015 claimed about 60,000 lives. At the same time, globalization’s gains have been heavily concentrated among the well-educated cognitive elite, who tend to set broader cultural trends.

The second source of populism is political. The traditional complaint against many liberal democracies, with their numerous checks and balances, is that they tend to produce weak government. When such political systems combine with polarized or otherwise severely divided electorates, the result is often political paralysis that makes ordinary governing difficult. India under the previous Congress Party government was a striking example of this, where infrastructure projects and needed economic reforms seemed beyond the government’s ability to deliver. Something similar occurred in Japan and Italy, which often faced gridlock in the face of long-term economic stagnation. One of the most prominent cases is the United States, whose extensive set of constitutionally mandated checks and balances produce something that I elsewhere have labeled “vetocracy”: that is, the ability of small groups to veto action on the part of majorities. This is what has produced a yearly crisis in Congress over passing a budget, something that has not been accomplished under so-called regular order for at least a generation, and has blocked sensible reforms of health care, immigration, and financial regulation.

This perceived weakness in the ability of democratic governments to make decisions and get things done is one of the factors that set the stage for the rise of would-be strong men who can break through the miasma of normal politics and achieve results. This was one of the reasons that India elected Narendra Modi, and why Shinzo Abe has become one of Japan’s longest-serving Prime Ministers. Putin’s rise as a strong man came against the background of the chaotic Yeltsin years. And finally, one of Donald Trump’s selling points was that, as a successful businessman, he would be able to make the U.S. government functional again.

Moreover, there have been major policy failures by elites in both America and Europe. The United States embarked on two unsuccessful wars in the Middle East in the 2000s, and then experienced the biggest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Both of these were rooted in elite decisions that had terrible consequences for ordinary citizens. The European Union created a monetary union around the euro without a corresponding way to unify fiscal policy, leading to the Greek debt crisis. And it created the Schengen Zone and a host of other rules liberalizing the movement of people within Europe without establishing a credible mechanism for controlling the European Union’s outer borders. While laudable from an economic and moral standpoint, internal freedom of movement became problematic in the absence of such controls. This turned into a legitimacy crisis in the wake of the mass migration triggered by the Syrian civil war in 2014.

The final driver of populist nationalism is cultural and has to do with identity. Many years ago, Samuel Huntington pointed out that the most dangerous socio-economic class was not the poor and marginalized, who often lacked the time and resources to mobilize, but rather middle classes who families felt they had lost ground economically and were not being adequately recognized by the political system. Such people can make economic demands, but they tend to interpret their loss of status culturally, as well. They used to constitute the group that defined national identity, but were now being displaced by newcomers who were being given unfair advantages over them. They are driven by a politics of resentment against elites who benefit from the system, and they tend to scapegoat immigrants and foreigners as agents of this loss of status. In this respect, economic motivation overlaps substantially with cultural concerns, and in many ways cannot be distinguished from them. It also distinguishes North European or American populism from that of Southern Europe or Latin America. The social basis of Brexit, Trump, and Le Pen voters lies in declining middle or working classes, whereas Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, Chavez in Venezuela, or the Kirchners in Argentina are more traditional left-wing parties representing the poor.

This has what has made immigration such a powerful issue in driving populist nationalism in Northern and Eastern Europe and the United States. Rates of immigration and refugees have become very high in Europe and the United States, and concerns over rapid cultural change have motivated many voters to support populist parties and leaders even if they have not felt under direct economic threat. This is reflected in the oft-stated goal of populist parties to “take back our country.” In many ways, questions of identity—language, ethnicity, religion, and historical tradition—have come to displace economic class as the defining characteristic of contemporary politics. This may explain the decline of traditional center-left and center-right parties in Europe, which have lost ground steadily to new parties and movements built around identity issues.

The Future of Populism at Home and Abroad

What is the likelihood that the populist nationalist parties threatening to undermine the liberal order will succeed?

For better or worse, a lot depends on what will happen in the United States. American power was critical in establishing both the economic and political pillars of the liberal order, and if the United States retreats from that leadership role, the pendulum will swing quickly in favor of the nationalists. So we need to understand how populism is likely to unfold in the worlds leading liberal democracy.

The American Constitution’s system of checks and balances was designed to deal with the problem of “Caesarism,” that is, a populist demagogue who would accumulate power and misuse it. It is for this reason that vetocracy exists, and so far into the Trump Administration, it appears to be working. Trump’s attacks on various independent institutions—the intelligence community, the mainstream media, the courts, and his own Republican Party—have only had modest success. In particular, he has not been able to get a significant part of his legislative agenda, like Obamacare repeal or the border wall, passed. So at the moment he looks like a weak and ineffective President.

However, things could change. The factor most in his favor is the economy: Wages have been growing after stagnating for many years, and growth has reached 3 percent for two quarters now. It may move even higher if the Republicans’ tax cut turns to be stimulative. All of this is bad policy in the long run: The United States is not overtaxed; the stimulus is coming at the exactly wrong point in the business cycle (after eight years of expansion); it is likely to greatly widen fiscal deficits; and it will lay the ground for an eventual painful crash. Nonetheless, these consequences are not likely to play themselves out for several years, long enough to get the Republicans through the 2018 midterm elections and even the 2020 presidential contest. What matters to voters most is the state of the economy, and that looks to be good despite the President’s undignified tweeting.

Foreign policy is another area where Trump’s critics could be surprised. It is entirely possible that he will take action on some of his threats—indeed, it is hard to see how he can avoid action with regard to North Korea’s nuclear ballistic missile program. Any U.S. move would be highly risky to its South Korean and Japanese allies, but it is also possible that the U.S. administration will call North Korea’s bluff and force a significant climb-down. If this happens, Trump will have lanced a boil in a manner that has eluded the past three Presidents.

Finally, it is not possible to beat something with nothing. The Democrats, under a constant barrage of outrageous behavior from the Administration, have been moving steadily leftward. Opposition to Trump allows them to focus on the enemy and not to define long-term policies that will appeal to voters. As with Britain’s Labour Party, they are increasingly dominated by activists who are to the left of the general voter base. Finally, the Democrats have lost so much ground in statehouses and state legislatures that they lack a strong cadre of appealing, experienced candidates available to replace the Clinton generation. Since American elections are not won in the popular vote but in the Electoral College, it does not matter how many outraged people vote in states like California, New York, or Illinois; unless the party can attract centrist voters in midwestern industrial states it will not win the presidency.

All of this suggests that Trump could not just serve out the remainder of his term, but be re-elected in 2020 and last until 2024. Were the Republicans to experience a setback in the midterm elections in 2018 and then lose the presidency in 2020, Trump might go down in history as a fluke and aberration, and the party could return to the control of its elites. If this doesn’t happen, however, the country’s polarization will deepen even beyond the point it has reached at present. More importantly, the institutional checks may well experience much more significant damage, since their independence is, after all, simply a matter of politics in the end.

Beyond this, there is the structural factor of technological change. Job losses among low-skill workers is fundamentally no longer driven by trade or immigration, but by technology. While the nation can try to raise skill levels through better education, the U.S. government at all relevant levels has shown little ability or proclivity to do this. The Trump agenda is to seek to employ 20th-century workers in their old jobs with no recognition of how the technological environment has changed. But it is not as if the Democrats or the progressive Left has much of an agenda in this regard either, beyond extending existing job training and social programs. How American society as a whole will cope with this is not clear. But then, technological change is the ultimate political challenge that all advanced societies, not just the democratic ones, must face.

Outside the United States, the populist surge has yet to play itself out. Eastern Europe never experienced the kind of cultural liberalization experienced by Germany and other West European countries after World War II, and are now eagerly embracing populist politicians. Hungary and Poland have recently been joined by Serbia and the Czech Republic, which have elected leaders with many Trump-like characteristics. Germany’s consensus politics, which made it a rock of EU stability over the past decade, appears to be fraying after its recent election, and the continuing threat in France should not be underestimated—Le Pen and the far-left candidate Melenchon between them received nearly half the French vote in the past election. Outside Europe, Brazil’s continuing crisis of elite legitimacy has given a boost to Jair Bolsonaro, a former military officer who talks tough and promises to clean up the nation’s politics. All of this suggests that the world will be in for interesting times for some time to come.

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What Europeans Can Learn from Donald Trump

With his abrasive manners and his “America First” rhetoric, Donald Trump has not made many friends in Europe—and for good reason. The U.S. President’s idea of America’s interests is crude, often clouded by mercantilist dogma, and only rarely accompanied by a strategy and a follow-up. Still, Europeans would do well to pick up on a few of Trump’s tricks. In particular, the European Union’s foreign policy posture and the continent’s domestic policies would benefit from a dose of ruthlessness in the pursuit of power and economic dynamism.

Whether Europeans admit it or not, the Western-dominated international order is at its end. The reasons are manifold, including the declining willingness of Americans to play the role of a global policeman, stepping in to fix all the world’s problems. And notwithstanding the signals provided by both Barack Obama’s and Trump’s presidencies, Europe, with its atrophied defense budgets, sluggish economies, and a lack of strategic focus, shows few signs of being able to take effective care of itself.

Instead of a laser-sharp focus on the pursuit of interests shared by Europe’s democracies, with all the tools that are necessary, the European Union’s engagement with its neighborhood has been reduced to lukewarm efforts to export its own rules. The Eastern Partnership agenda and Brussels’s work in the Western Balkans, for instance, revolve around the idea that European countries outside of the European Union are aspiring to become just like the West. If that is the case, then all that is needed for Brussels to do is to help them ingest a heavy dose of acquis communautaire.

Looking at the world as if it were aching to become like us adds up to a retro, 1990s-style foreign policy. Notwithstanding ongoing developments in Hungary and Poland, that same approach did wonders in the case of post-communist Central Europe and the Baltic states, where populations and political elites overwhelmingly did want to become a part of the West. Today, the same cannot be said even about the more promising countries that are involved in the Eastern Partnership—not even Ukraine can tick that box without hesitation. And it goes without saying that Turkey does not see itself as a Western liberal democracy-in-waiting, either.

As a result, writes Bruno Maçães in his new book, The Dawn of Eurasia, “the borderlands between Europe and Russia increasingly seem like areas of darkness and chaos.” Maçães, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, earned his doctorate from Harvard under Samuel Huntington’s supervision, and served as Portugal’s Europe Minister between 2013 and 2015. His book reads as much as a travelogue as a piece of geopolitical analysis. He travels to Azerbaijan, China, and Russia, among other places, to observe the contours of the emerging Eurasian world, which seems to pay little heed to the desires of Western liberal democracies.

Instead of a gradual convergence of the world towards democratic capitalism, Maçães predicts that the future will involve a juxtaposition of mutually incompatible political and civilizational models. Unlike in the past, when such models—Qing China, the Habsburgs, or the Mughals—existed in relative isolation, in today’s world they are tightly integrated. That is bound to be a source of new frictions and conflicts.

Europe’s response to those challenges, including the rise of new rivals in the East, is characterized by complacency. For many, including the European Union’s chief diplomat Federica Mogherini, it is easier to lambast the Trump Administration than to stand up to the world’s autocracies that are threatening Europe’s security—Russia and Iran. The appeasement now extends even to Cuba, which has arguably very little to offer to the European Union. As Maçães puts it, “Brussels’ grand strategy starts to resemble that of Qing dynasty China: if all we ask is to be left alone why would others not grant us that?”

The problem is that Europeans cannot really check out from an increasingly globalized, connected, and mobile world. The 2015 refugee wave and its political reverberations throughout Europe showed just how vulnerable the continent is to wars and political crises happening thousands of kilometers away. Similar events can easily unfold in the future. Moreover, it is entirely conceivable that the world’s authoritarian powers, such as Russia, Iran, and China, will deliberately exploit such vulnerabilities in the pursuit of their own ends. The Kremlin in particular thrives on chaos, both at home and abroad—that way, it is able to deliver on Putin’s key promise of providing stability through force. Unless Europeans resist, including by credible threat of force, Vladimir Putin will continue on his quest to undermine Eastern and Central European democracies, annex territory, and extend Russia’s sphere of influence to rectify what he sees as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”—the fall of the Soviet Union.

If being left alone increasingly seems to be Europe’s overarching foreign policy objective, preservation of the status quo motivates many of its domestic policies, especially regarding new technologies. By contrast, many a Western visitor returns from Asia with admiration for the observed work ethic and embrace of innovation. “Asia seems addicted to change, often for its own sake,” writes Maçães.

In China, he writes, the internet is seen “as a tool to act in the world and perhaps even to change it, not a way to interpret it” and mobile messaging apps are used “to pay your rent or get coffee at a shop, to find parking spaces, to get directions, to exchange contacts after a meeting, hail taxis from traditional taxi companies, make a doctor’s appointment, donate to charity, send money to your friends and family or to watch a live stream of a university lecture.”

Westerners might be happy to post pictures of their breakfast on Instagram. Yet they appear to spend substantially more time worrying about the potentially adverse effects of new technologies—from genetically modified organisms to the sharing economy to self-driving cars— than to translating the latest technological advances into marketable goods and services. And Europeans are not the only Westerners prone to Luddite sentiments—a 2017 Pew survey found that “Americans are roughly twice as likely to express worry (72%) than enthusiasm (33%) about a future in which robots and computers are capable of doing many jobs that are currently done by humans.”

In the European context, that mindset sometimes translates into outright bans, such as of genetically modified crops in the European Union, or of Uber in Italy. At best, the 21st-century platforms are required to comply with legislation written with 20th-century business models in mind. Even more worryingly, if one is to take seriously the message of economic historians such as Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University, the fear of technological change can become a substantial cultural hurdle to entrepreneurship and economic growth. Mokyr’s work shows that the economic rise of the West, particularly the Industrial Revolution, was contingent on the embrace of innovation across social classes and on the approbation given to innovators and entrepreneurs.

To be sure, there is a difference between catch-up growth—which emerging economies, oftentimes authoritarian, seem to be fairly good at—and innovation occurring at the technological frontier. The lack of intellectual freedom in one-party authoritarian regimes like China’s might easily prove to be their economic undoing. That would confirm the idea popular among economists like Bill Easterly, Daron Acemoglu, or James Robinson that good institutions come in bundles. A dynamic market economy, underpinned by what Acemoglu and Robinson call “inclusive economic institutions,” cannot survive without a political system that respects human rights and gives people a voice—“inclusive political institutions.”

The coming decades will likely settle the disagreements that may exist among economists about the compatibility of political repression and growing economic prosperity. In the meantime, however, it would be naïve to expect rising powers to Europe’s East to hold themselves to the same standards of rule of law and political freedom. “What is the alternative?” asks Maçães. “A more strategic and, yes, competitive approach. We need to look at the map and see what is most important for us at each moment to increase our influence, our leverage, thinking in terms of power.”

But for that, vibrant economies in the West are a necessity. Whatever one thinks of President Trump’s tax cuts and the deregulatory agenda pursued by the administration, there is a decent chance that the two might provide a boost to U.S. growth rates, at least in the coming years. With the exception of Emmanuel Macron’s labor market liberalization in France, it is difficult to even imagine—let alone observe—similar initiatives in Europe, either in individual countries or at the EU level, where the single European market remains far from complete. In addition to powerful special interests protecting the status quo, the biggest obstacle to far-reaching regulatory reform is a deeply rooted Luddite mindset, which posits that the European way of doing things is the best and cannot be perfected. And unless that mindset is reversed, history will not be kind to Europe—just as it was not kind to complacent, inward-looking civilizations of the past.

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Russia’s Rich Exiles Are Gone For Good

Last week, the Russian economic elite breathed a little easier after the Trump Administration unveiled a long-awaited, congressionally mandated list of Russian oligarchs that had been hastily cobbled together from an online Forbes list, while declining to impose further sanctions for now. Putin, ever eager to project an air of cool confidence in the health of the Russian economy, publicly shrugged off the latest list, while several oligarchs close to Putin proudly touted their inclusion as a badge of honor—suggesting that Western economic pressure was driving Russia’s oligarchs closer to Putin, not further away. This week, the Kremlin echo chamber has been busily hyping another story to promote this narrative: this time centering on a list of exiled businessmen looking to come clean with Putin, and come home to Moscow.

But are things really going so swimmingly for the Russian economy that its exiles are begging to bring their money home? A closer look at this week’s events, and my own reporting, suggests just the opposite. Far from seeking to return, Russia’s overseas businessmen are staying as far away from their homeland as they can—and the Kremlin, as ever, is resorting to desperate spin to cover up the ugly truth.

The saga began last week with a trip to London by Boris Titov, the Russian business ombudsman officially tasked with representing the rights of entrepreneurs within Putin’s government. Titov is also an officially declared candidate to challenge Putin in next month’s presidential election. His supposed presidential ambitions were hardly on the agenda during his trip to London, however, where Titov made headlines for meeting with a group of Russian businessmen who had fled their country for the United Kingdom.

After the meeting, Titov claimed to have compiled a list of names of wealthy Russians hiding from Russian law enforcement in Britain, who had asked for permission to return home. Titov then claimed on Facebook that he had passed on the list to Vladimir Putin. Russian papers pounced on the story, but the report was instantly disputed: Some of the businessmen who attended the meeting publicly denied that their names were on the list. Some even expressed doubts about the list existing at all.

Evgeny Chichvarkin attended the meeting with Titov. Chichvarkin has been living in London since 2008, having fled after Russian siloviki raided his self-made cell phone retail company Euroset—then the largest in the country—and charged him with extortion and kidnapping. Chichvarkin then started selling his share in Euroset to pro-Kremlin oligarch Aleksandr Mamut. In 2010, on the anniversary of Euroset’s founding, Chichvarkin’s mother was found dead in her apartment in Moscow in mysterious circumstances. Months later, Russian attorneys dropped charges against the businessman and his companions, and in early 2011 the deal selling Euroset was closed. Mamut later sold Euroset to Putin’s crony Alisher Usmanov, a well-connected Russian oligarch whom a group of Republican Senators have recently sought to sanction.

After the news about Titov’s list had broken, Chichvarkin posted a sarcastic, cutting rebuttal on Facebook. He accused Titov of consistently acting in the Kremlin’s interest (“he has always cooperated with the Gestapo openly”) and vehemently denied Titov’s account of the meeting. According to Chichvarkin, “No one discussed the list of applicants. No one applied [to return to Russia]. No one asked anyone to return to Russia…I’ll return to Russia either in a coffin or when Putin is in a coffin.” Chichvarkin also predicted that the business climate in Russia will only get worse. “Business in Russia will keep being raided and pressured with particular cynicism after the elections,” he wrote. “Putin doesn’t need private business.”

Andrey Sidelnikov, a former Russian politician who fled Russia in 2007 and founded the London-based opposition movement “Speak Up,” also attended the meeting, and likewise disputed Titov’s version of events. He claims the meeting with Boris Titov was open to the public, and advertised as a panel to discuss the fresh U.S. Treasury report which listed 210 Russians, including Titov, suspected of being close to the regime. The question of exiled businessmen returning to Russia was never discussed. Indeed, such matters lie outside of Titov’s traditional purview. According to Sidelnikov, at least one London-based exile had previously sought Titov’s help in closing a criminal case against him back in Russia. But this person made that request so that his name could be cleared and his credibility restored, not because he wanted to return home.

Despite the disputed accounts of Titov’s list, however, it is clear that he communicated some form of it to the Kremlin. The Russian newspaper Kommersant received a copy of the letter Boris Titov sent to Vladimir Putin. In it, the business ombudsman says that “entrepreneurs ask to pay attention to the issue of their forced isolation from their own country, for whose benefit they can and want to work honestly, developing the domestic [Russian] economy.” Titov suggests the issue could be resolved if he were given the authority to “quickly and effectively facilitate the return of businessmen who had been unlawfully and groundlessly persecuted by law enforcement.” Titov also asked Putin to consider whether those who were justly targeted could return to Russia, too, provided they pay damages to the government.

On Wednesday Boris Titov revealed sixteen names on the list he has passed to Vladimir Putin. At least one of the people on the list, Alexey Shmatko, told MBK media that he’s settled in the UK and his only conceivable reason to come back to Russia would be to visit his late mother’s grave. The discussion around the list, Shmatko says, “is all about one only thing: to drop unlawfully pressed criminal charges.” As for other businessmen seeking to return, Shmatko only said that it’s up to individuals to decide where they want to live.

I tried to track down other prominent Russian businessmen in London, to hear their take on Titov’s visit. I got a hold of Mikhail Zelman, a successful restaurateur who ran a large food holding and owned a chain of premium steak houses in Russia, before leaving the country years ago to pursue business in London. Last year his restaurants expanded to New York City, with further locations in the United States soon to follow.

Zelman told me he did not attend the meeting with Titov, but his brother did. When I asked him why he didn’t go, he said that he didn’t know about the event—but that he wouldn’t have attended even if he had. His brother, he says, only went out of respect for a friend who invited him, and whom Titov had once helped.

Zelman says he sees no reason why any businessman would want to come back to Russia. In his eyes, the story about the list of businessmen enlisting Titov’s help to return home is a desperate pre-election ploy, an elaborate deception carried out at the Kremlin’s behest to distort perceptions and turn reality on its head.

When I asked him about the risks for foreign entrepreneurs, particularly Americans, who are considering investing in Russia, Zelman’s reply was stark: No sane American would want to do so in the first place. Russia, he says, was not a competitive country for investment even before sanctions were imposed. Since then, Zelman added, there has been no real private business in Russia—only the gas and oil industry and those who receive rents from it.

Regardless, the popular narrative around Titov’s list has already served its purpose in Moscow. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that the list had been received, saying that “every case is unique” and that law enforcement will carefully consider each request in turn.  The optic here is undoubtedly a useful one to the Kremlin, creating the impression that scores of exiled businessmen are begging on their knees to return to Russia; that Putin is the ultimate decider of their fates; and that Western sanctions, far from hurting the economy, are only sending its rich émigrés back to Russia to repatriate their assets at home.

If any of this were actually true, it would indeed be a real victory for Putin. But in reality, the hubbub around Titov’s list only disguises an unpleasant reality: that Russian exiles who have found success in the West are eager to stay there; that a cash-strapped, corruption-ridden Russian state can offer few appetizing incentives to attract entrepreneurs; and that Western sanctions have been far more effective than Russia can publicly admit.

A lesson, then, for Russia watchers in the West ahead of next month’s presidential “election”: Beware of token presidential candidates and the stories they tell. All too often, they are only thinly disguised, self-serving narratives designed to reinforce the Kremlin’s messaging.

 As it turns out, law enforcement has swiftly acted against one of the exiled businessmen already: on February 9, after the initial publication of this article, RBC reported that a Moscow court ordered the arrest in absentia of Evgeny Ryzhov, who had been included on Titov’s list.

The post Russia’s Rich Exiles Are Gone For Good appeared first on The American Interest.

Limiting Chinese Aggression: A Strategy of Counter-Pressure

For the United States and its allies and partners, China is the common thread linking most of today’s challenges to the rules-based international order in what used to be called the “free world.” This is true whether the challenge is cyber security, maritime security, or the commons of space. China is implicated for intervening in other countries’ domestic politics and for not intervening enough into the affairs of at least one state—North Korea. China spurns international economic protocols concerning intellectual property rights and labor and environmental standards, and has attempted to expand its political influence through a mixture of economic threats and incentives. Its government lacks respect for a rules-based order and for international law as a whole on the grounds that it was not present at the creation of a Western-inflected set of arrangements. The sum is that in multiple locations and domains, China is exerting considerable pressure on commonly held values, practices, and interests in the international system.

The United States has neither the desire nor the ability to contain China, given the open system it has supported and the deeply intertwined natures of their two economies. What it does have is a deep, abiding, and persistent interest in ensuring that Asia remains as open, rules-based, liberal, and democratic as possible. And yet, instead of discussing how the United States and its allies can achieve an open, rules-based, liberal, and maximally democratic Asia, the mainstream debate over U.S.-China policy is framed around a false dichotomy premised on the assumption that China and the United States are “destined for war,” and that the rest of the world must make a “China choice.” This “debate” assumes on both sides that China’s desire to dominate the Asia-Pacific region is inevitable, treats the future of the region as a matter of binary decisions, and encourages the false belief that China cannot be deterred. The only decision left in such a framing is whether to accommodate the supposedly inevitable or to court disaster by opposing it.

For the past several decades, U.S. policy has focused on reducing tensions and narrowing areas of disagreement. According to this logic, maintaining bilateral Sino-American stability would aid China’s integration into the global economy, promote liberal democratic values, and elicit greater Chinese collaboration on common global challenges. Such well-intentioned impulses were not entirely misguided, were appropriate responses at the time, and yielded some important results in areas ranging from curbing nuclear proliferation to combatting terrorism to addressing climate change. But, by privileging cooperation and stability above all else, they also ceded the strategic initiative to Beijing. And in doing so, it has allowed Beijing to engage in “probes,” seeing which activities elicit responses, and which are only met with some combination of consternation, anguish, and ultimately resignation. Because these probes are specifically designed not to cross the threshold of military intervention, many have not been met with counter-pressure, enabling China to gradually erode the existing order.

This has been as unfortunate as it has been unnecessary, because a range of potentially effective options are being overlooked. With the release of the U.S. National Security Strategy in December 2017, and the National Defense Strategy in January 2018, the Trump Administration did brand China (and Russia) as long-term strategic competitors. While this does bring the challenge into sharper focus, the Administration has not yet articulated the details of how it plans to counter China’s efforts. Furthermore, in the broader public debate, there remain a number of key misconceptions and misunderstandings that continue to limit the range of options being discussed.

Within the NSS and the NDS, elements of a new, more synoptic approach are now discernible, but a comprehensive strategy based on them has not formed. Such an approach is not without risk, but it is less risky than continuing on the current glidepath, which is likely to result in a China-dominated Asia-Pacific. The sum of such actions would amount to a multilateral and sustained—though not overly or even necessarily aggressive—endeavor to apply counter-pressure against Beijing’s efforts to create its own sphere of influence. Ultimately, a strategy of counter-pressure is more likely to stabilize the region than destabilize it, helping to provide the continued basis for the sustained economic growth that has transformed the region, including China.

To grasp that future, five strategic fallacies currently distorting the public debate need correcting. The first strategic fallacy is that America is at some point likely to pack up and go home. While America’s regional allies have long expressed a fear of abandonment, and while the current unpredictable nature of Trump’s White House likely exacerbates such concerns, a brief familiarization with American history should underscore just how unlikely this outcome is. Second is the problem of linear extrapolation, which assumes that China’s rise and America’s decline—relative to each other and to the other countries in the region—will continue unabated. A third strategic fallacy of the current debate is that it reduces the challenge to one that is bilateral in nature. Doing so ignores both the interests and the capabilities of allies and partners, while stripping them of any independent agency. A fourth fallacy paints policy choices as black or white, appeasement or war, ignoring the reality that there are about a million shades of gray in between, and that it is far more likely that this competition will be waged in this gray zone between peace and war over the next several decades. Finally, because the United States and its allies have not figured out the formula for deterring the Chinese at an acceptable price, some have assumed that China is incapable of being deterred and is, sooner or later, bound to dominate the region. But imagining a future of inevitable, and undesirable, outcomes assumes that China is undeterrable, rather than undeterred thus far.

While arguing assumptions might seem like an academic exercise, it has real policy implications and points the way toward a completely different set of policy outcomes. If America and other like-minded nations get their multilateral and sustained strategy right, Asia’s future isn’t locked into any particular outcome. Rather than imagining a future of undesirable outcomes, a counter-pressure strategy offers a future in which all the nations of the Asia-Pacific region can collectively envision and shape their common destiny.

A Pacific Nation

The first strategic fallacy regarding Asia is that at some point America will just pack up and go home. America’s regional allies have long expressed a fear of abandonment, and the current unpredictable nature of the Trump Administration is exacerbating these concerns. But abandonment is highly unlikely. Since the Empress of China set sail from New England in 1783, America has pushed its boundaries westward. That interest has manifested itself in a desire for access to Asia for American commerce and ideas, and in efforts to neutralize threats in the region before they threaten the American homeland. Debate over where the furthest outward line of America’s defensive perimeter should lie has been a near constant, but the question has always been about how far it should be extended, not whether it should be extended. And even when the United States hinted at a retreat from Asia, such as the period after Nixon’s Guam Doctrine or Carter’s flirtation with a retreat from the Korean peninsula in 1977, Washington proved unable to stay away for long.

For economic, geographic, strategic, and ultimately political reasons, America is unlikely to withdraw from Asia or abandon its allies and partners. From an economic perspective, Asia is already the fastest growing region in the world and most projections suggest that future global economic growth is likely to come largely from Asia with American businesses now seeing India and Southeast Asia at the forefront of that growth. Moreover, much of Asia—particularly East Asia and Australia—stand at the forefront of the digital economy and are driving research, development, and innovation in several advanced fields. From an investment, commercial, and financial perspective, American businessmen and investors are more likely to double-down on their investments in Asia than to withdraw them. Most Americans understand and support that trend. Despite President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and despite the prominence of trade as a problematic issue in the 2016 American election, recent polling shows that 72 percent of Americans say that international trade is beneficial to the U.S. economy overall, 78 percent believe it has benefitted U.S. consumers, and a majority now agrees that trade is good for American job creation.

Furthermore, America is strategically invested in the region to a strong degree. America has operated a naval squadron in the Pacific since the early 19th century, and since World War II American troops have been permanently forward deployed in the region. In order to contain the spread of communism in Asia, the United States developed a hub and spoke model of bilateral security relationships with two main purposes in mind: to deter aggression against allies and partners and to suppress security competitions among allies and partners. This provision of common security goods served American and allied interests well during the Cold War, and had the additional benefit of setting the conditions for the Asian economic miracle.

Perhaps most importantly, despite President Trump’s antipathy to the liberal rules-based order, critiques of American allies, and rejection of an internationalist foreign policy for a more zero-sum and nationalistic set of policies, the American public has hardly rejected America’s historic commitment to its allies. During the 2016 presidential campaign, polling showed that the public thought that maintaining existing alliances was very or somewhat effective at achieving American foreign policy goals, and indeed such support seemed to be increasing, with more Americans convinced that alliances are very effective. While Trump has continued to claim that many allies are free riders who drain U.S. resources and provide no discernible benefits, 2017 polling concluded that “the U.S. public is not buying this argument.” When the focus narrows to the Asia-Pacific region, the numbers overwhelmingly support a robust American military presence in Asia, with 78 percent of respondents saying that the U.S. government should maintain or increase that presence.

The Limits of Linear Extrapolation

The second fallacy in the U.S.-China policy debate derives from the problem of linear extrapolation, which assumes that China’s rise and America’s decline will remain consistent and uninterrupted. This is highly unlikely.

Even discounting the unreliability of Chinese economic data, and the opaqueness of its true military capacity, China’s extraordinary economic growth since 1979 has significantly affected the Asia-Pacific regional balance of power. China has undoubtedly increased its military spending during this period, and its overt military modernization efforts are impressive. However, as most economists agree, future Chinese economic growth is likely to be less dynamic than it has been up to this point. China will grow old before it becomes rich, and it faces other challenges such as debt bubbles in multiple markets and chronic, if currently low-level, forms of social instability. These could lead to slower economic growth in the near-term and suggest significant structural challenges. This is not to say that China’s economy won’t outperform many others in and beyond the region, but it does suggest that that projecting future growth based on the recent past provides an unreliable forecast.

Linear extrapolation also minimizes the structural strengths underlying American growth. As a result of many decades of immigration, the United States has a relatively healthy demographic profile. In addition, the United States also has a strong culture of innovation, repeated resilience in the face of macroeconomic shifts, and an ongoing energy revolution that is upending the energy markets and bolstering America’s economic heft. Overall, the longer-term drivers of American growth look healthier than those of most other countries.

While it is generally true that defense spending correlates with the overall economic position of a country, budgets also tend to grow with the perception of increasing threats. It might be hard to imagine a future where nations in the Asia-Pacific region are willing to contribute more than 2 percent of their GDP on defense. But if multiple states in Asia became willing to spend in the range of 3-5 percent, it would presage a significant alteration in the regional balance of power, and it would create pressures where today there are none.

The Challenge Isn’t Bilateral

A third strategic fallacy is the tendency to view the Sino-American future as a bilateral issue. This construct assumes that war or peace are the exclusive prerogatives of leaders in Beijing and Washington, and they alone have the ability to work out deals without the buy-in of other regional powers. China has deliberately framed the challenge this way, seeking to advance a “New Model of Great Power Relations” that avoids the so-called Thucydides trap by characterizing America and China as the only great powers. Beijing’s approach is deeply troubling to U.S. allies for suggesting that they must subordinate their interests to China. Buying that frame would also harm U.S. interests by enabling a flip of the traditional approach, which has embedded China within Asia rather than the other way around. This “G-2” model appeals to some to U.S. policymakers because it seems to hold out the promise of one-stop shopping for stability. But it is a false promise, for other major Asian states—most notably Japan, Australia, and India—would never accede to an order that placed their independence, sovereignty, and ultimately security in a subservient position, and these states would justifiably resent the United States for seeming to suggest that they should. Hence, even tacit acceptance of such a model would weaken U.S. leverage over China and decrease the potential to align regional counter-pressure on Beijing during a crisis.

A second and related problem of the bilateral construct is that it posits that any actions taken by nations other than China or the United States, alone or in concert, have negligible importance. But judging by the enormous lengths Beijing has gone to scuttle collective responses to its actions, this is not at all how Chinese policymakers see things. They merely want foreign observers to believe otherwise, as is manifest in Beijing’s persistent attempts to keep ASEAN member states divided (alas, not very difficult), in their diplomatic push to obviate strong statements supporting the Hague’s rebuke of China’s illegal behavior in the South China Sea, and in their hostility to any quadrilateral arrangement between Washington, Delhi, Tokyo, and Canberra. Chinese policymakers seek to smother any narratives that portray China as acting in contravention to its preferred narrative of a “peaceful rise.” It also suggests a deep-seated fear that concerted and collective action might actually force a change in Chinese behavior.

Such a construct also discounts the reality that allies and partners possess both independent agency and significant capabilities. Analysts who portray the competition over who gets to define the rules, norms, and institutions of Asia as divided between China and the United States fall into several traps, including, most prominently, a counting problem. Pitting China’s growing naval capabilities against only America’s fails to take into account the surface, sub-surface, air, strike, and automated systems its allies and partners collectively bring to bear. For instance, adding in Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force alone substantially changes the naval balance. The JMSDF has three light carriers, more than 30 destroyers, and 19 submarines, all modern. Even this rudimentary count excludes the frigates, fast-attack craft, and amphibious assault vessels that are in Tokyo’s inventory. Adding in the navies of South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia changes the calculation still further. South Korea deploys Aegis-equipped destroyers. Taiwan has the predecessors to the Aegis, Kidd-class destroyers. Australia is putting to sea three state-of-the-art air warfare destroyers and is embarking on an ambitious program to build 12 new submarines. Add in the anti-access/area-denial systems of Japan and Taiwan on the first island chain and the balance shifts further still. One could do a similar calculation for airpower, with Japanese and South Korean F-15s regularly training and exercising with the U.S. Air Force. And if one adds in partners like Singapore and India, who are likely to side with America and its allies in a conflict, the balance shifts again. In essence, the Chinese prefer excluding the capabilities of the U.S. Asian alliance system and partners taken together; the Chinese frame it this way to negate the advantages that the United States and its partners hold collectively. To fall for that would be quite stupid for, with it, a look at a map shows that China is de facto contained as a maritime power.

Further, as all military analysts know, capabilities are not based on numbers alone, but on the strategy and competence of the forces that wield them—net assessment, in other words. (The basic point holds outside the military realm, for example in assessing the size, strength, and resilience of various Asian economies.) This is necessarily a subjective business since it must factor in variables that cannot be readily counted, such as professional education, training and simulations, deployments in stressful conditions, coordination with multiple actors in military exercises, and active warfighting. None of this is to say that China’s military isn’t modernizing and becoming more professional—it is. The point here is evaluating the regional balances of power requires more than just counting military hardware.

To suggest that only Beijing and Washington have a real choice in shaping the future is also to willfully ignore history. In 1967 Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand originally formed the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which has now grown to encompass the ten states of Southeast Asia. Australia’s call for more coordinated economic cooperation across the region led to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in 1989, and the concept of an East Asia grouping, first promoted by Malaysia in the early 1990s, grew into the East Asia Summit (EAS) and expanded to include the United States in 2011 at Japan and India’s urging. Even the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was initiated by Brunei, Singapore, New Zealand, and Chile in 2005, before broadening into a larger trade deal between 12 Pacific countries. Indeed, with America’s withdrawal from TPP in January 2017, the other Asia-Pacific signatories, the so-called TPP-11, are left to build its future—but there is no reason to think they are not up to the task. None of these countries or entities by themselves can shape Asia’s future, but taken together they have shown more initiative, ability, and effectiveness than some imagined they could.

The Missing Middle Path

The fourth way that a “China choice” framing leads to a false policy logic is that it suggests an either/or dichotomy in which any American response to Chinese actions is inherently escalatory. For those who see a stark choice between China and the United States, between war and peace, there are no shades of gray. Painting the dynamics in this way suggests that any American response to Chinese actions will catapult a crisis straight up the escalation ladder and into nuclear war. According to this logic, Beijing would supposedly be willing to raise the stakes faster, higher, and with greater local capabilities than its rivals, and the United States would find itself having to either back down or run the risk of fighting a war with China over issues peripheral to U.S. national interests.

It is true that the balance of interests often trumps the balance of power when it comes to regional competitions. But it is foolish to entertain a two-dimensional caricature of this point. Any major war would greatly stunt Chinese economic development, dependent as it is on myriad international connections. A war involving the United States could threaten the survival of the Chinese regime, which is far more fragile than that of the United States in many respects. China would risk war over certain discrete issues, such as the prospect of Taiwanese independence, but to assume that China’s Communist Party would risk its own grip on power by going to war over the future of the South or East China Seas is unwarranted.

From the U.S. perspective, multiple middle paths exist between waging a preemptive war with China and a U.S. retreat from the region. Sino-American competition will most likely be conducted along these middle paths over the next several decades. After all, the American experience with the Soviet Union during the Cold War illustrated clearly that Washington has the capacity to take a strong line against destabilizing activities while working together with other powers on areas of mutual concern such as nuclear nonproliferation. What is true for America also applies to less powerful states. As Southeast Asia observers have long pointed out, the preferred method of dealing with more powerful states has been to hedge; neither fighting nor surrendering to a stronger power’s ambitions.

Counter-Pressure Works

Finally and most critically, it is simply not true that China cannot be deterred and is, sooner or later, bound to dominate the region. The size and capability of the American military still deter outright military conflict between China and the United States and its treaty allies in the Asia-Pacific region. Everyone knows that, so the present situation is not the issue. The issue is the path to the future, and it is here that Beijing has chosen an asymmetrical approach to achieving its aims—specifically by working to develop “gray zone” operations.

Note, for example, Chinese actions in the South China Sea. Advances have been taken slowly and in disparate locations. They are usually first probed not by visible state-forces, but by seemingly private actors; and they are justified in shifting and ambiguous language. The result is a complicated incremental assault on the status quo. Meanwhile, if the United States and its allies act first to blunt such “precedent creep,” they open themselves to the charge of needlessly provoking the revisionist power. But if they wait too long, they will confront a degraded security environment, increased questions about their commitment and credibility, and concerns that they have surrendered the initiative.

But for all the questions that Chinese probes have raised, the proposition that China is undeterrable, rather than undeterred to date, stands badly in need of testing. This assumption is based on a highly selective version of recent history that minimizes effective counter-pressure efforts, exaggerates Chinese strengths and resolve, and fails to note Beijing’s weaknesses. Finally, to assume that concerted counter-pressure, discriminately applied, will have no discernible effect on Beijing’s calculations is preemptively to concede not only the initiative on policy, but also an ever-enlarging Chinese sphere of influence in the region—for absent U.S, leadership, the other regional powers, their collective clout notwithstanding, will have a hard time concerting their efforts.

Far from being undeterrable, recent history suggests a much more varied picture of China. When Beijing perceives that its actions are unlikely to cause pushback or counter-pressure, it has continued pushing. But when Chinese activities have been met with concentrated counter-pressure, the response has not been predictably escalatory. Just note: Japan’s response to the PRC’s ham-handed rollout of an ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone) in the ECS in 2013; South Korea’s refusal to bow to Chinese economic pressure over the deployment of THAAD as a defense against DPRK ballistic missiles; President Obama’s 2015 threat to impose sanctions in response to Chinese state-sponsored cyber activities; and Obama’s purported drawing of a redline around the reclamation of Scarborough Shoal to Xi Jinping in March 2016. While it’s unclear who saved face and who lost face in Doklam, India’s response to Chinese activities in Bhutan caused neither war nor acquiescence to Chinese probes. Similarly, Vietnam’s 2014 response to the Chinese oil rig operating in its waters, and China’s withdrawal of the rig, demonstrate that Beijing was willing to recalibrate, if not withdraw, its activities when met with a resolute response. Finally, for all the hand-wringing that accompanied the debate about a quadrilateral arrangement between India, Japan, Australia, and the United States, Beijing’s actual reaction has been muted.

The same goes in the economic realm. In 2012, Washington imposed sanction on the China-based Bank of Kunlun for its dealings with Iran. Yet despite Chinese warnings that such a move would sour bilateral relations and undercut Beijing’s support for curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, Beijing offered merely a formulaic protest, directed the bank to cease its activities, and continued cooperation with the United States. With respect to secondary sanctions at least, a high-ranking Obama official who was in charge of implementing such sanctions concluded that, despite the fears of a furious Chinese reaction and calls for caution, “history teaches that we should not worry too much about an adverse Chinese reaction.”

The actual, as opposed to the imagined, record of Chinese responses suggests that Beijing’s reaction is as dependent on how others respond as it is on what they wish to achieve. It also implies that Chinese pressure is carefully calibrated to fit, but not necessarily exceed, any given situation. China will not always roll over and play dead when confronted with counter-pressure; it depends on what it thinks is at stake and what counter-pressure indicates about the intentions of others. Note, however, what happens no counter-push exists. China has not only manufactured features in the South China Sea, but has continued its push to build out its infrastructure and rotate military assets on them. Faced with the menace of increased activity around Scarborough Shoal, while being dangled the promise of Chinese economic largesse, the Philippines, under Rodrigo Duterte, has ceased protesting Chinese activities. And by using Cambodia and Laos and now the Philippines to undermine any unanimity in ASEAN, ASEAN has not even been able to condemn Chinese bullying by name.

Chinese policymakers have demonstrated a logical aversion to conflict. They do not want to put the regime’s stranglehold on Chinese society at risk or do things that harden the existing American alliance structure into something more multilateral and more offensively directed against Beijing. As a result, Chinese actions are less reckless gambles than premeditated probes. When the reaction has been formidable, Chinese activities have been recalibrated.

A Strategy of Counter-Pressure

Lenin, the inspiration for the Chinese Communist Party, is quoted as saying “probe with a bayonet: if you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.” Evidence suggests that when Beijing meets steel, it backs down, despite overheated rhetoric and vague threats. However, when it meets mush, it keeps pushing.

If true, a range of policy options opens up bilaterally, trilaterally, and regionally. The first set is in the military operational realm and could include military maneuvers similar to those being used in the Persian Gulf region by the United States. Conducting such operations would require a greater willingness to tolerate risk, incur friction, and adapt tactics and procedures.

A second set of options is in the strategic military realm, and could include augmenting America’s regional force posture, changing the types of military platforms bring used, increasing the U.S. defense budget, and accelerating the capacities of regional states to defend their own interests.

A third set falls in the informational realm. These could include efforts to boost maritime awareness of other South China Sea claimants and put greater public scrutiny on Beijing’s activities there and elsewhere.

A fourth set is in the institutional arena—re-energizing Asian-Pacific regional institutions and global forums to give maritime security and international law pride of place.

A fifth and critically important category comes in the realm of alliances. This would involve rededicating efforts to promote a rules-based order, enhancing interoperability, broadening and networking the security arrangements of like-minded states, and clarifying the extent of U.S. security commitments.

A sixth policy dimension is economic. To have any chance of success for preserving an open order that remains free from coercion, the U.S. government must be an active participant in the shaping of the region’s economic architecture.

A final aspect is bureaucratic. Because so many different parts of the U.S. government touch China policy, and because they all bring different institutional perspectives and priorities, oftentimes U.S. policy toward China is much less than the sum of its parts. The exception is in reaction to a crisis or in advance of particular events. Without consistent attention, coordination, and deconfliction to ongoing lines of effort, such a policy is highly unlikely to succeed.

The sum of increased activity across all levers of allied statecraft has the potential to hold the line and deter further Chinese advances. Such activity would demonstrate that bullying behavior invites a stronger, broader, and more coordinated allied presence in the area, and a greater willingness to build capacity in the region. While disparate in nature, all of these options would require greater political willingness to tolerate risk and incur friction with Beijing.

The same is true at the strategic level. Not all counter-pressure and pushback need be symmetrical, or use the same methods that the Chinese have used to reach their current position. Confronting China through conventional military means is impractical from a budgetary, operational and force structure perspective. Additionally, symmetrical counter pressure would be unlikely to deliver the desired political effects in Beijing alone. A successful counter-pressure strategy should focus not only on defensive measures, but must attain a degree of asymmetry, apply pressure in places and in ways that could force China off-balance and, periodically, even catch Beijing by surprise. Such actions should range across the diplomatic, informational, economic, and military sectors and could include everything from joint statements repudiating Chinese activities, to working with allies and partners to alter the dynamic in some of China’s border regions, to enhancing regional defense relationships, to aiding countries developing their own anti-access area-denial capabilities to penalizing predatory economic policies to mounting information operations exposing the corruption of the CCP to encouraging more legal challenges to Chinese activities.

While undertaking any of these would make for an effective start at countering China’s actions in the region, they are admittedly laden with constraints. In various capitals across the Asia-Pacific region, it still isn’t clear that there is a political appetite for taking on a China that has thus far seen its gains come at virtually no cost. Trump’s volatility may also erode the foundation of regional support for American-led initiatives. And without any indication that the Trump Administration has a Plan B to revive or at least reconceive the TPP, it remains uncertain how enthusiastically the Asia-Pacific region would react to an American response that ignores the element believed most vital to the region.

It is a mistake to frame the problem as a Sino-U.S. competition. Other states have been willing and able to push back. Australia, Japan, India, and the United States are more likely to succeed when China perceives a firm and consistent approach from multiple countries. As Admiral Harry Harris, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, recently stated, doing so does not require rocket science; it simply demands political courage. “We must be willing to take tough decisions and ally with like-minded nations to ensure the Indian Ocean region remains free and prosperous.”

This of course requires grasping the difference between core and peripheral national interests; it is not necessary to push back on all fronts all the time. Doing so would be neither strategic, nor coordinated, nor likely to have the desired effect. But where there is aggression, counter-pressure is a reasonable and likely effective response. The odds of success are heightened when doing so in concert with other nations.

Finally, there is a distinction between cost-imposition strategies and counter-pressure strategies. Whereas the former seeks to punish China for its probes, the latter is non-punitive. This is not to say that the Chinese might not view it as such—especially if they stake CCP legitimacy on a move. However evidence points to the conclusion that the CCP is more a calculating poker, or chess, player than a reckless gambler. Cost-imposition strategies have their place, but they’re not the only game in town.

“The aggressor is always peace-loving,” Clausewitz once remarked. “He would prefer to take over our country unopposed.” The great Prussian strategist was of course referring to Napoleon Bonaparte’s France, and not to Xi Jinping’s China. But he might well have been. Pressure comes in many forms: physical confrontation, economic coercion, political intimidation. But the most corrosive, and by far the most subtle, is psychological pressure, which causes one side to accept the will of its opponent based on fear of an anticipated response. If buckling to such pressure is beneath the dignity of most nations, there is only one question to ask. That question is not whether China and the United States are destined for war, nor is it whether other nations must choose between these two countries. The only question worth asking, rather, is whether the political will exists in Washington, Tokyo, Seoul, Canberra, Delhi, Singapore, Hanoi, and elsewhere to execute a concerted, consistent, and calibrated strategy of counter-pressure.

Policy is most often limited less by some objective reality than it is by the conceptual barriers of a statesman’s imagination. A new vocabulary can help us think about the challenge in a more realistic framework. Doing so is more likely to offer up real policy options.

Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017); Hugh White, The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power (Oxford University Press, 2012).

For an overview of America’s engagement with the region, see Michael J. Green, By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 (Columbia University Press, 2017).

The Chicago Council, “Pro-Trade Views on the Rise, Partisan Divisions on NAFTA Widen,” August 14, 2017.

On the origins, intent, and continuing relevance of this model see Victor D. Cha, Powerplay: The Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia (Princeton University Press, 2016).

2016 Chicago Council Survey, “America in the Age of Uncertainty,” p. 29, and “What Americans Think About America First,” p. 10.

Chicago Council Survey, p. 11.

Eliot A. Cohen, “Net Assessment: An American Approach,” memorandum no. 29, (Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, April 1990); Stephen Peter Rosen, “Net Assessment as an Analytical Concept,” in Andrew W. Marshall, J.J. Martin, and Henry Rowen, eds., On Not Confusing Ourselves (Westview Press, 1991).

See Thomas J. Wright, All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the 21st Century & the Future of American Power (Yale University Press, 2017).

See Bilahari Kausikan, “Dodging and Hedging in Southeast Asia,” The American Interest (May/June 2017).

For a catalogue of China’s gray zone operations, as well as recommendations to counter them, see Michael Green, Kathleen Hicks, Zachary Cooper, John Schaus, and Jake Douglas, “Countering Coercion in Maritime Asia.”

For a useful analysis of strategic options in the South China Sea, see Hal Brands and Zach Cooper, “Getting Serious about Strategy in the South China Sea,” Naval War College Review (Winter 2018).

James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, “Deterring China in the ‘Gray Zone’: Lessons of the South China Sea for U.S. Alliances,” Orbis (Summer, 2017).

The official quoted is David S. Cohen, who served as Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence during the Obama Administration.

For more on the nature of “probing behavior,” see Jakub Grygiel and A. Wess Mitchell, The Unquiet Frontier: Rising Rivals, Vulnerable Allies, and the Crisis of American Power (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Ely Ratner, “Course Correction: How to Stop China’s Maritime Advance,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2017. More recently, see Hugh White and Ely Ratner’s thoughtful exchange in The Interpreter, especially Ratner’s “Making Sense of the Known Unknowns in the South China Sea,” August 3, 2017.

This is one of many Lenin quotes that are impossible to pin down. The closest published formulation can be found in Lenin’s “Report on the Polish War, 20 September 1920,” in Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (Yale University Press, 1996), p. 100.

See, for example, Andrew S. Erickson, “The South China Sea’s Third Force: Understanding and Countering China’s Maritime Militia,” Testimony before the House Armed Services Committee Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, Hearing on Seapower and Projection Forces in the South China Sea, Washington, DC, September 21, 2016.

On this point, see Kurt Campbell, The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia (Twelve, 2016), especially p. 310 ff.

For an exhaustive and comprehensive overview of policy and strategy options, see Ross Babbage, “Countering China’s Adventurism in the South China Sea: Strategy Options for the United States and its Allies,” 2017, esp. 59–65.

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1976, 1984 indexed edition), Book VI, chapter five, p. 444.

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The EU Embrace

EU enlargement used to be a big deal. It made academic careers, filled up newspaper columns, and set foreign ministries abuzz. Nowadays it is more of a niche subject. You do meet the odd Brussels think tanker or European Commission functionary who is enthused about Montenegro clearing benchmark X, Y or Z in its membership talks or eager to discuss the latest report on the state of Albania’s judiciary. But that’s not what keeps most EU watchers up at night.

It is not difficult to grasp why EU expansion feels so passé. Turkey is not even pretending to be interested in membership anymore. Ukraine is a decade or more away from membership, if it’s lucky. The Western Balkans are about the only region where the game is still on. But outsiders seem to care little—unless there’s a link to hot issues such as Russian meddling, ISIS recruitment, or the Chinese economic expansion across Europe. It is the shrinking or the splintering of the European Union that grabs most headlines: Brexit, the north-south cleavage polarizing the politics of the Eurozone, and the challenge posed by the likes of Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczyński.

Yet it is still too early to write off EU enlargement. The European Commission, the Western Balkan governments, and a handful of EU countries are ensuring that the prospect does not fade. On February 6, the Commission unveiled a new strategy to inject dynamism into what some dismiss as a technical exercise. It comes with a big promise to “frontrunners” such as Montenegro and Serbia: If they do everything right, they might achieve accession in 2025. The choice of year is far from arbitrary. It’s when a new EU five-year budget will kick in. After all, new members cost money, whether it is for infrastructure or agricultural subsidies. With a pro-Western coalition in power since May, Macedonia also has a fair shot at accession later in the 2020s, if (and it’s a big “if”) it somehow succeeds in settling the long-standing name dispute with Greece.

Further down the list are the rest of the pack, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, which do not cheer Jean-Claude Juncker’s new proposals. “Why reward Serbia, which remains at the root of many problems across ex-Yugoslavia,” politicians and pundits are asking in dismay, “and penalize us?” To be fair, there is a bitter pill for Serbia, too, in that the EU Commission has made it abundantly clear Serbia would need to recognize Kosovo’s independence to gain membership. Belgrade is also under pressure demonstrate “full alignment” with EU foreign policy (translation: please join the sanctions against Russia).

The whole fuss about who is entering the European Union when and at whose expense is perfectly understandable. But it misses the point. The big question, looming even larger today with democratic norms and institutions under strain across Europe, is what good does membership do for the countries and societies entering the EU. The received wisdom that accession advances democratization and anchors the rule of law is being put to the test in Hungary and Poland, where governing parties seek to perpetuate their control over the state. Furthermore, it is ironic that the grand vision for the Western Balkans’ entry into the Union will be announced at a summit in Bulgaria, which currently holds the EU Council presidency. Sofia’s record of combating state capture and rooting out corruption (described recently by a cabinet member as a “matter of perceptions”) is not exactly stellar. One can safely bet that—all things being equal—Serbia, Montenegro, and other post-Yugoslavs will be a replica of Bulgaria, where political elites love Brussels’s cash but have little time for its sanctimonious talk about accountability and the rule of law. By the standards of Milo Djukanović, Montenegro’s uncrowned prince, Orbán is a mainstream democrat. At least he has spent time in opposition, while Djukanovic has hopped back and forth from the presidency to the Prime Minister’s office.

Perhaps the greatest misconception about European integration is that it changes countries. It does not. The truth is that Europe helps countries change themselves. EU institutions did not transform Central and Eastern Europe—they amplified or locked in domestic processes that had been underway. And now, we find out, some of the gains are reversible. Conditions in the Western Balkans are recognizably worse than in Central Europe, starting with the legacy of wars and the unresolved territorial and constitutional issues and ending with a lack of economic development. It is not a hospitable environment for the growth of a robust civil society that could hold elites accountable and resist state capture. The EU, with its political conditionality and arsenal of carrots and sticks, is in a position to compensate in part for the deficits within countries. But Eurocrats need local stakeholders, not merely elites who have learned how to talk the talk without walking the walk. There are green shoots, to be sure: the “colorful revolutionaries” who marched on the streets of Skopje for more than two years between 2015-7, the Don’t Let Belgrade D(r)own movement triggered by abuses of power in the Serbian capital’s city hall, students protesting in Pristina, and the civic assemblies in Bosnia. Yet bottom-up civic mobilization matters little unless it is translated into ballots on election day. And there are significant impediments from on high. To only one example, omnipotent Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić decides when elections take place, how the media covers the campaign, and who will be counting the votes.

However, for all intents and purposes, the Western Balkans long ago made it into the EU sphere. There are no longer visas (except for Kosovo) preventing people from traveling to Vienna, Paris, Rome, or Stockholm. The European Union is by far the most significant trade partner and source of foreign direct investment in the region, for all the talk about Russia, China, or Turkey. It is also enmeshed in the Union’s regulatory space. Thanks to the European Common Aviation Area, citizens in the West Balkans have access to low-cost flights connecting them to remote corners of the Continent. In short, while the EU has no magic wand, it does deliver. The new Commission strategy showcases ideas such as abolishing roaming charges and rolling out broadband connectivity. People are aware of the benefits. Even in skepticism-ridden places like Serbia, where enthusiasm for membership is low, polls register that those who see the Union in positive or neutral light form a majority (that was the case in Croatia before joining in 2013, too).

In a sense, enlargement has already taken place—with all its pros and cons.

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Against Piggybacking

Put President Trump in front of, say, thousands of Boy Scouts at their National Jamboree expecting to hear (as they’ve been hearing from U.S. Presidents for generations) an endorsement of good character and the Boy Scout way, and he’ll rip into his political enemies as if he were speaking at one of his rallies. What, exactly, is he doing?

He’s piggybacking. He’s making use of an occasion to do something for which the occasion was not designed. In doing, so he breaks no law and violates no formal rule, but he does violate a civic norm and transgress an informal but well-established boundary.

The President is hardly alone in this practice. Though historically frowned on, piggybacking is widely practiced today on both the Right and the Left, almost always with harmful results. Moreover, because it’s bipartisan and also because it’s such a pure expression of the age we live in, the practice remains somewhat opaque to us, difficult to discern as a widespread form of behavior that has a name and is dangerous. Let’s try to fix that.

The First Amendment protects the right of entertainment celebrities to use occasions of televised award ceremonies such as the Oscars to give political speeches in favor of left-wing causes, just as it protects the right of professional football players to kneel during game-day observances of the national anthem to protest police brutality against African-Americans. In both cases, we’re seeing the practice of using an extra-political platform to make political points. In both cases, then, we’re seeing people seeking to advance causes in which they believe in a way that’s legally permitted but neither fitting nor (to use another old-fashioned word) proper. In both cases, the conduct displayed is contrary to the purpose of the occasion.

Let’s go to Washington, DC. The rules of Congress permit either party to stonewall budget negotiations or refuse to extend the national debt ceiling and thus shut down the Federal government in pursuit of political concessions from the other party. Republicans pioneered this strategy during the Clinton and Obama years (“cut spending or else!”) and now Democrats are following suit in the Trump era (“legalize the Dreamers or else!”). What is happening here?  These members of Congress are piggybacking. They’re using one of their general constitutional duties—the duty to tax the citizens and pay for the government—to play games of chicken with each other over particular disputes. Imagine the teacher of a class of third-graders saying, “I know all you children want to go to lunch, but no one leaves this classroom until Billy hands in his homework!”

Let’s visit university campuses, where most of the professoriate is politically left of center and conservative students are usually in the minority. Whenever professors use their status as educators and grade-givers to make their progressive political views perfectly clear to their students, while also perhaps conveying at least indirectly their opinion that conservative political views are signs of an ill-formed intellect, no actionable violation has been committed, yet these professors are piggybacking. They’re using their platforms as educators to propagate their politics. The essence of piggybacking is the loosening of inhibitions, the blurring of distinctions. That’s what’s happening here. Piggybacking is me contriving to cook my dinner on your stove.

As examples go, we’ve only just begun. Look around you tomorrow morning with open eyes and you’re likely to see many examples of the practice, on your side of the political aisle as well as on the other. What explains it?

One answer is that piggybacking is a transgression and, especially on the populist Right today, transgression in the service of anger is the flavor of the year. I hear many pro-Trump friends say that, in their view, taking a blowtorch to today’s established political conventions is just what the doctor ordered, and the quicker, the better. Eviscerate an establishment norm? Wipe out a boundary that many fussbudget liberals appear to hold dear? Where do I sign?  How soon can we begin?

Another answer is that both contempt and fear can make the old platitudes seem like excuses for timidity, and on the Left today both contempt for President Trump and fear of Trumpism are so strong that the values least supportive of civic restraint—values associated with “resist,” “fight harder,” and even for some “by any means necessary”—are in the saddle.

Finally, and more fundamentally, once upon time in America most of us lived, or at least believed we lived, under the general influence of what some scholars called a “civil religion,” and what the great sociologist Peter Berger called a “sacred canopy.”1 These writers were pointing to a set of moral and ultimately spiritual values that existed above politics and to which politicians were expected to be ultimately accountable. These sacred-civic values included honesty, civility, openness to other views, a commitment to reasonable argument in the search for truth, and the belief that all persons possess equal dignity. Political actors under this regime certainly fought each other hard and often unscrupulously, but they were expected at least to pay lip service to these overarching values, and could usually expect to be punished by society when they did not act in accordance with them.

According to many ways of measuring, in recent decades that civil religion has weakened significantly, displaced in part by an ethic in which political values are paramount and pursuing what’s thought to be politically good constitutes life’s highest purpose. If you want to hear a voice guided by the old civil religion, here’s the actor John Wayne (b. 1907) speaking in 1960 about newly elected President John F. Kennedy: “I didn’t vote for him but he’s my President, and I hope he does a good job.” To hear a voice guided by what’s replacing that civil religion, you could just turn on your television or glance at your Twitter feed, but here’s the radio personality Rush Limbaugh (b. 1951) speaking in 2009 about newly elected President Barack Obama: “I hope he fails.”2 Which of these moral regimes do you think is more open to piggybacking?

Some caveats are in order. First, on a scale of violations of civic decency, piggybacking admittedly ranks fairly low. In addition, one-sided demands for civility are sometimes used by the powerful to seek control over the less powerful. For example, those in power frequently—and wrongly in my view—accused both A.J. Muste and Martin Luther King, Jr., America’s great 20th century exemplars of civil disobedience, of inciting others to uncivil conduct. Finally, no value is absolute, including the value of civility. There are times when choosing civility over other values is morally the wrong choice.

Yet a decent political culture—in fact, civilization itself—depends significantly on sub-legal norms of restraint, and one of those norms is the idea of voluntarily keeping political words and deeds in their proper lanes. If you want to give a political speech, do it at a political gathering. If you want to insult a fellow citizen, do it from somewhere other than the Oval Office.

Stigmatizing what I’m calling piggybacking might be a small but meaningful step in our journey back from the wilderness. I’m for trying.  You?

1See Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew (Doubleday, 1955). Herberg wrote of the prominent role and influence in U.S. civic life of what he called a “common” or “American” religion. See also, importantly, Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967); and Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Doubleday, 1967). The term “civil religion” was first popularized by the writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century.

2Todd McCarthy, Howard Hawks (Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 1997), p. 583. “Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails,” The Rush Limbaugh Show, January 16, 2009.

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