Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 115

The Top Ten TAI Essays of 2017

During calendar year 2017 the staff at The American Interest solicited, sifted, collected, edited, and published more than 400 feature essays and reviews—and that does not count the many “shorts” and podcast offerings we also worked to present. Most of these essays appeared via TAI Online only; only about six dozen appeared as well in the print magazine on account of some combination of their quality and durability against the news cycle’s onslaught.

Here below, accompanied by a descriptive blurb, are my top ten titles for the year, which, thanks to the wonders of electronic archiving, can be easily summoned by subscribers old and new for review or first-time perusal.

1. Scott Alexander,“Notes on Cost Disease”

Important goods and services—especially health care and education—are costing Americans vastly more over time. But why? Here’s an in-depth look at the numbers, and why the truth of the matter is more complicated than it appears.

2. James Henry,“The Curious World of Donald Trump’s Private Russia Connections” 

Did the American people really know they were putting such a “well-connected” guy in the White House? James Henry explores the twisted web of business partnerships that links Trump to some very shady figures.

3. Dee Smith,“Flattened: Disintermediation Goes Global”

The unpredictability of the current global system goes all the way up, and all the way down. The disruptive technologies of the modern day are marching through economies and societies, remaking old orders.

4. Claire Berlinski, “The Warlock Hunt”

Our sexual harassment moral panic: Why this one, and why now? And most importantly, are we going to like the results?

5. Robert Pearl,“The Path to Real Health Care Reform”

As national politicians re-litigated the Affordable Care Act, we made it our business to put forward more innovative ideas. Here is Robert Pearl with four pillars for transforming health care delivery.

6. Neil Gilbert,“The Inequality Hype”

Inequality is billed as one of the horsemen of modern America’s apocalypse. Is that a fair picture? In truth, this progressive bogeyman turns out to be mainly a figment of accounting. Better data gives us a cheerier picture of American well-being.

7. James Jeffrey,“Making Diplomacy Great Again”

We won’t have more foreign policy successes without better diplomacy. And the first step is to understand what diplomacy can and can’t do. Here’s former Ambassador James Jeffrey with a list of recommendations that will get the State Department on a better track.

8. Carolyn Stewart,“Shooting the Messenger”

So many of us huddle in little social-media silos, defending them against enemy action by our political opponents. Courteous behavior faces a structural disadvantage in such an environment. And it’s costing us big time.

9. Michael Herzog,“Inside the Black Box of Israeli-Palestinian Talks”

All sides failed in the most recent round of negotiations—but there was an opportunity for actual progress. This eye-opening account from Michael Herzog is the real inside story.

10. George Walden,“Through the Mist”

Lord Robert Vansittart took the measure of Germany in the 20th century before most of his peers. His writings may foreshadow the dangers of Russia in the 21st, argues former British diplomat George Walden.

The post The Top Ten TAI Essays of 2017 appeared first on The American Interest.

The Top Ten Films of 2017

As with any movie year, it is impossible to identify a single, overarching theme that unites the best films of 2017. In this year of immense political change, there were some films that resonated eerily with contemporary anxieties (Get Out), others that quite deliberately sought to evoke them (Steven Spielberg’s The Post), and many more still that offered an escape, happy or not. At the multiplex, escapism ruled the day; the year’s top ten grossers included the usual assortment of franchise tentpoles and superhero films, some (Wonder Woman) more worthy than others (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2). At the arthouse, the outlook was bleaker: both in the chilly subject matter so frequently on screen and the disappointing quality of much of the work itself. Celebrated auteurs like Terrence Malick and Michael Haneke were running on fumes with their latest films, and the big winner at Cannes, Ruben Ostlund’s The Square, was an empty exercise in sneering satire.

For all that, there was much to celebrate in 2017. And if there is indeed one nebulous quality common to all my favorites, it was a willingness to bridge sensibilities, scramble genres, or confound expectations. The Florida Project brought an unexpected warmth and joy to a story that might have called out for pure despair. With Faces Places, Agnès Varda showed that the French New Wave is still alive and kicking, in a charming, cheerful odyssey across France that doubles as a meditation on art and aging. Darren Aronofsky implausibly brought the surreal fever dream that is Mother! to mainstream audiences, while Christopher Nolan and Edgar Wright stamped their idiosyncratic personal visions onto major blockbusters. And no film mixed genres more effectively or stirred more debate than my number-one pick—a wholly unanticipated and welcome February surprise.

10. Mother!

Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, a cinematic curio that polarized critics, appalled audiences, and spectacularly flopped at the box office, already has the makings of a cult classic. It might be the strangest big studio release of the year: a set-bound psychological thriller, shot largely with handheld cameras in uncomfortably intimate close-ups, that places Hollywood’s current It Girl (Jennifer Lawrence) in a violent, often darkly funny Biblical and ecological allegory. Javier Bardem is the alternately forgiving and wrathful patriarch, Lawrence his long-suffering wife, and a strong supporting cast led by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer embody the wretched masses of humanity.

Aronofsky is nothing if not ambitious: his film aims to make familiar religious parables strange by placing them in a radically different context, while folding an additional environmental allegory on top. He seems to be inspired by the open-ended metaphorical conceits of Luis Buñuel’s films—think The Exterminating Angel, about a group of dinner guests who inexplicably cannot leave the table—and in its best moments, Mother! captures some of Buñuel’s surreal, anarchic spirit. The movie is not entirely consistent, and the final scene tilts from the clever to the juvenile and irreverent. But the movie is a technical marvel throughout, admirably audacious in both concept and execution, and worthy of inclusion on those merits alone.

9. Baby Driver

It is rare enough these days to find an action blockbuster not derived from an existing franchise; rarer still to find one as purely entertaining and masterfully constructed as Baby Driver. That is not to say that Edgar Wright’s film is wholly original: ever the pastiche artist, Wright lovingly lifts material from movies like Heat and The Driver in this tale of a teenage getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) reluctantly enlisted by an Atlanta mob boss (Kevin Spacey) to run heist jobs with a ragtag group of ex-cons. The movie distinguishes itself through its unconventional mixing of genres, with moments of high comedy juxtaposed with shockingly non-cartoonish violence, and above all in its technique. The opening chase scene is already a classic: a wordless exercise in carefully calibrated tension, with every swerve, skid, and windshield wipe perfectly synced with the retro soundtrack.

8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

The latest film from Martin McDonagh—he of In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths fame—is another mordant, violent, witty black comedy, although this one arguably tips the scales fully toward drama. The premise is certainly no laughing matter: Frances McDormand stars as the angry mother of a rape and murder victim, who puts up three billboards on a lonely stretch of road castigating the local sheriff (Woody Harrelson) for failing to find her killer. When the movie begins, it seems set to be a righteous saga of revenge, but McDonagh keeps complicating it with unexpected nuance. McDormand’s character is no paragon of virtue, Harrelson’s sheriff is a good man beset by a fatal cancer diagnosis, and even his racist brute of an assistant (Sam Rockwell) earns a redemptive character arc. It is a tribute to McDonagh’s gifts as a screenwriter that he can both keep the audience guessing and paint his morality play in so many shades of grey.

The movie occasionally suffers from McDonagh’s writerly faults, too: he is sometimes too enamored of his own voice, putting verbose screeds in the mouths of characters ill suited for them. (An early scene with McDormand and the local priest is especially egregious.) And the movie’s brutal violence is dispensed so casually, even flippantly, that it sometimes verges on the grotesque. But in the end, all the bloodletting does serve a purpose. Far from being a Tarantinoesque revenge fantasy, Three Billboards ultimately argues for ending the cycle of violence to achieve a more lasting civic peace—though it leaves open the question of whether its characters will have the courage to do so.

7. The Lost City of Z

When people complain that “they don’t make them like they used to,” they are probably thinking about a movie like The Lost City of Z: an old-fashioned and intelligent adventure on a grand canvas, made with flesh-and-blood characters and carrying real dramatic weight. A shame, then, that this excellent historical drama, about a British explorer’s search for a fanciful lost city in the Amazon, barely made a blip when it came out this spring.

The movie, based on a 2009 nonfiction bestseller, is the brainchild of writer-director James Gray, a critical darling whose work often recalls the best of 1970s New Hollywood. His latest plays like a cross between David Lean and Werner Herzog, offering both the straightforward thrills of a jungle adventure and the weightier merits of an art film about obsession and delusion. The central figure is Percy Fawcett (a surprisingly good Charlie Hunnam), a British officer whose fervent belief in a lost Amazonian city earns him the mockery of his colleagues and send him on repeated expeditions to prove them wrong. The film takes Fawcett’s quests seriously—he is a heroic figure, not just a foolhardy dreamer—but it also chronicles the toll of his obsession on his family, and on his own sense of judgment. The movie is a stately and somber thing, patient in its pacing but accumulating gravitas as Fawcett makes trip after trip into the heart of darkness. The film’s final passages have a foreboding, lyrical sense of unreality—and the very last shot is one of the most haunting of the year.

6. Lady Bird

The most critically acclaimed film of the year is far from the most ambitious. Much of Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, covers well-trodden thematic territory: adolescent angst, teenage rebellion, sexual awakenings, and the perennial teenage fear of becoming one’s parents. But Gerwig’s film is a cut above the usual. Movies like this live or die on the details, and Lady Bird gets just about every one right.

Saoirse Ronan plays the titular Lady Bird, née Christine, a spunky and sometimes insufferable senior at a Catholic girls’ school in Sacramento, eager to flee her lower middle class upbringing and overbearing mother (Laurie Metcalf) for the cosmopolitan paradise of New York. The movie hits many of the usual beats for a coming-of-age dramedy—there is stress about college applications, a teenage romance or two, and a climactic scene at senior prom—but it does so with unusual sensitivity, wit, and a wise awareness of the ways that parents and children project their deepest hopes and fears onto each other. Though Lady Bird is the protagonist, the movie is really about her awakening to a world beyond her narrow wants and needs, her growing understanding of—and gratitude for—the friends and family she is at first so eager to leave behind.

In a movie filled with grace notes, two scenes stand out in particular. One is the moment when Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith), a nun at Christine’s school who was once the object of her mockery, offers her a gentle, generous life lesson on love and attention. The second comes on a car ride to prom, when Lady Bird embraces a decidedly unhip Dave Matthews song over the objections of the hipster poseurs around her. It’s the turning point of the movie, when Lady Bird learns to embrace her roots, no matter how middle-class or middlebrow they may be. Lady Bird embraces them, too, and it soars.

5. A Quiet Passion

Emily Dickinson’s life story is not one that lends itself naturally to biopic treatment. A semi-recluse whose poetry languished in obscurity during her own lifetime, Dickinson rarely strayed from the company of her close family and the comforts of their Amherst home. Seen from the outside, her life was almost entirely devoid of incident—which only makes Terrence Davies’s A Quiet Passion all the more remarkable an achievement.

Starring a commanding Cynthia Nixon in the lead role, A Quiet Passion offers a complex and contradictory portrait of its subject. The film’s early stretches are full of the zippy, witty dialogue one would expect from a literary period piece, establishing Emily as the kind of free-thinking heroine one might find in an Austen novel, while sketching her friendship with her sister Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle) and their neighbor Vryling (Catherine Bailey). But A Quiet Passion really distinguishes itself during its second, more somber half. As Dickinson withdraws ever more into herself, pushing away her sister and her suitors alike, she becomes a compelling, paradoxical figure: a woman who is steadfast in her convictions but insecure in her own image, free from society’s expectations but curiously repressed, able to see the world more clearly than those around her but unable to participate fully in its life. The movie is a stately study in how pride and independence can curdle into contempt. The young Emily who begins the film in an intellectual rebellion against her family’s Puritan mores ends trapped in an emotional prison of her own making, with poetry her only outlet.

The film is also an apt meeting of subject and artist. Davies, like Dickinson, is an uncompromising master who has gone under-recognized in his own day, and something of an aloof ascetic as well (he has spoken frankly about his struggles as a celibate gay Catholic, and is frequently attracted to emotional loners as subjects). He is also a filmmaker with the rare ability to convey inner emotional states through cinematic language. Two scenes stand out in particular: one, a haunting dreamlike interlude with an overhead perspective of a mystery man ascending to Emily’s chamber; the other, a languid pan across a candle-lit living room, where Emily’s friends and family are gathered in concert as she peers in solitude from the doorway.

4. Dunkirk

For all his critical and commercial success, Christopher Nolan has often been haunted by three familiar complaints: that his films are cold and clinical, with only the most perfunctory expressions of human emotion; that his plots are unnecessarily convoluted, enamored of intricate puzzle box structures; and that his action sequences are incoherent and uninspired. Dunkirk answer Nolan’s detractors on all three counts, while staying true to the qualities that endeared him to viewers in the first place.

On the face of it, Dunkirk offers Nolan his most straightforward plot yet: a recreation of the Allied troops’ pivotal evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk in late May 1940. In a typical Nolan move, however, the director divides the film into three separate threads, depicting the evacuation by air, sea, and land and cutting between the three even though each is occurring over a different time frame. At first, this decision may seem a confusing contrivance, but it pays off: Nolan’s intercutting heightens the intensity of each section and provides one especially jarring moment of dislocation, which instantly causes the viewer to see one character’s actions in a new light.

It is true that Dunkirk’s characters are more chess pieces than fully developed human beings, but that is beside the point: there is no need for elaborate backstory in a film that is fundamentally about the primitive, urgent human need to survive. Nonetheless, the movie is a textbook example of how to develop character through action rather than dialogue. And there is one moment in particular, on the civilian ship captained by Mark Rylance’s character—when an adolescent makes a grown-up decision to lie so as to spare a soldier pain—that counts as one of the most touching human gestures in Nolan’s filmography.

Most importantly, when it comes to action Dunkirk is by far Nolan’s most satisfying film, displaying a more confident command of craft than his memorable but sometimes sloppy Batman movies. Whatever else one may say about it, Dunkirk is quite simply a first-rate war movie: one that often matches the visceral impact of Saving Private Ryan but with only a fraction of the blood and guts.

3. Faces Places

A portrait of the artist as an old lady, Faces Places finds octogenarian filmmaker Agnès Varda, who first cut her teeth at the height of the French New Wave, crisscrossing the country with JR, a 30-something street artist. Together, the unlikely duo take their artistic talents on the road, creating a kind of traveling ethnography of contemporary France as they create larger-than-life portraits of the ordinary citizens they encounter.

Like much of Varda’s work, Faces Places is characterized by an airy, casual tone that disguises its quite serious concerns: aging, the transience of memory, and the shifting paradigms of working-class life chief among them. The film is both a rewarding exercise in artistic collaboration and a tribute to the individual artist at its core. If this is indeed Varda’s last film, it will be a fitting swan song. (See my full review here).

2. The Florida Project

“Celebrate good times, come on!” blares the music over the opening credits of Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. This may seem a strange choice for a film about childhood poverty, single motherhood, and family breakdown in the Sunshine State, but it is a fitting initiation into a film that refuses to treat any of these subjects in a predictable way.

The Florida Project is set at the Magic Castle, one in a cluster of cheap motels on the outskirts of Disney World; it follows the day-to-day life of the impoverished families who make this land of strip malls and swamps their home. There is an obvious juxtaposition at the heart of the film—the fantasy paradise of Disney World existing side-by-side with the hardscrabble poverty next door—but Baker complicates it at every turn. The movie’s color palette is consistently sunny and vibrant, and its episodic early stretches suggest how the simple joys of childhood can be accessed no matter one’s upbringing. Baker brings a playful, childlike perspective to the scenes of the kids exploring their world, and he elicits an endearing and natural performance from the six year-old Brooklynn Prince.

Yet The Florida Project is not some starry-eyed ode to childhood innocence; it offers an unsparing (and often unpleasant) look at the broken social fabric in which its characters live. The movie is full of irresponsible adults making poor decisions and children who act out in obnoxious and destructive ways, seemingly doomed to repeat the cycle. What makes this all tolerable is the warm humanism that animates the entire film, embodied most visibly in the kind-hearted, over-worked but endlessly patient motel manager played by Willem Dafoe (cast against type in one of the best performances of his career). Squint just a little at the character, and you can see a surrogate for the director himself: a man who may be infuriated and exasperated by his subjects, but who extends them his love and empathy all the same.

1. Get Out

The year’s best film and biggest surprise came early: rolling into theaters in February with little advance notice and leaving a trail of hype in its wake, Get Out instantly generated the kind of water-cooler debate that vanishingly few American studio releases can command. What was this film, anyway: a cringe comedy about racial anxieties, dressed up in the trappings of a horror film? A bizarre mashup of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The culminating satire of the Obama era, or just one man’s deeply personal waking nightmare?

In truth, Get Out is all of the above; above all, it is the brainchild of writer-director Jordan Peele, one half of the sketch comedy duo Key & Peele. The movie’s basic premise could be pitched as a comedy skit: a wealthy young white woman (Allison Williams) brings her black boyfriend (Daniel Kaluuya) home for the weekend to meet her parents, whose eager profession of progressive shibboleths (“I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could!”) masks a sordid sci-fi scheme to exploit, and effectively enslave, African Americans through mind control. In lesser hands, the movie could have been a one-note send-up of liberal hypocrisy, or a strained allegory of the sins of white America. Peele avoids both traps, filling out a sketchy scenario with imaginative visual conceits while deftly mixing tones, styles, and genres into one hard-to-categorize but impossibly entertaining package.

Get Out works in the best traditions of both horror and comedy, code-switching naturally between the two while drawing out both genres’ potential for subversive social commentary. The movie wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve—think George Romero, The Stepford Wives, and Kubrick’s The Shining for starters—but it is far more than the sum of its cinematic callbacks. Peele’s film is rife with inspired and resonant images of its own, from the nightmarish void of the Sunken Place to the midnight sprint of a possessed groundskeeper. Yet for all these otherworldly touches, Get Out is at its most unsettling when it is grounded in familiar social reality. The arresting opening visually echoes the death of Trayvon Martin, for instance, and much of the film’s disquieting dread comes from its characters’ subtle diversions from expected social behaviors. Peele has a sharp ear for the ways in which members of different races and classes relate to each other, and his script cleverly subverts those social expectations to chilling (and often funny) effect. In one already famous scene, for instance, he derives immense tension from the linguistic distinction between “tattle-tale” and “snitch.”

Many a forgotten Oscar hopeful has strived for relevance by trying to make a statement about race; most have retreated to the comforting conventions of Great Man biopics or historical parables. Get Out, by contrast, feels vitally of the moment. Much like Spike Lee’s seminal Do the Right Thing, Peele’s debut is a surefooted entertainment that asks uneasy questions about race in America without providing easy answers, a film that implicates the audience but does not insult it. The laughs catch in your throat, the scares cause jolts of recognition—and the whole film lingers in your mind long after it is over.

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Replacing NAFTA

The Peace Arch is a granite monument in the middle of a park straddling the United States and Canadian border at Blaine, Washington and Surrey, British Columbia. The inscription on the American side reads “Children of a Common Mother” and on the Canadian, “Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity.” The Stars and Stripes and Maple Leaf flags fly atop the elegant structure and overlook a scenic, 22-acre park that attracts 500,000 people annually. Visitors do not require a passport or visa to enter so long as they stay within the boundaries of the park and exit back through their country’s entrance.

About 1,400 miles to the south is El Bordo, a dry concrete riverbed with fences and barbed wire on both sides that once held the flowing waters of Tijuana’s main river. The swath divides San Diego suburbs from Tijuana and is a mile-wide militarized zone patrolled by border guards and helicopters to keep out illegal workers and contraband. On the Mexican side is a gigantic refugee camp populated by tens of thousands of deported and homeless Mexicans and Latin Americans removed or kept out of America as a result of its most recent migration crackdown.

This is the North American neighborhood: A monolith in the middle with a friendly neighbor to the north and a troublesome one to the south. The existence of such dissonant borders is itself a metaphor for the reasons why the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is being, and should be, reconstituted or replaced.

To Canadians, NAFTA was imposed on them by the United States, concerned about Mexico, after they had signed a two-way trade agreement. But to ordinary Americans, NAFTA brings to mind not Canada but rather Mexico and its gigantic political, social, economic, and legal problems. To corporations, NAFTA is an opportunity to tap Mexico’s inexpensive wages, which are the lowest among the 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Wages have not risen since NAFTA’s implementation in January 1994, as hoped, and the exodus of jobs from Canada and the United States to Mexico has gradually hollowed out their industrial regions. This is why the three are now back at the bargaining table to hammer out a new trade arrangement.

Frankly, NAFTA was ill-advised in the first place. President Donald Trump’s NAFTA-bashing (“build that wall”) merely channels what Presidential candidate Ross Perot warned about in 1992: “It’s pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor . . . there will be a giant sucking sound going south . . . when [Mexico’s] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals.”

From a Canadian viewpoint, NAFTA interrupted the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (signed in 1988) and added a level of unwanted complexity. In 1990, following the catastrophic Latin American debt crisis, Mexico’s President appealed to President George H.W. Bush for a trade deal like Canada’s. Washington decided that a near-bankrupt, struggling Mexico was a political and social threat to the United States, and that, without help, the thousands then migrating illegally could turn into millions. Thus, talks began.

Canada became concerned that its deal would be undermined by a bilateral deal with Mexico and asked to become a party. The three-way negotiations dragged on for two years, and by 1992 a deal was cobbled together with “side deals” attached months later involving environmental and labor protections. But no sooner had the ink dried than the first challenges surfaced. The day that NAFTA was launched, indigenous rebels captured and occupied four towns in Chiapas along Mexico’s southernmost border in protest. Months later, Mexico’s leading presidential candidate was assassinated, and by fall the country had to be bailed out by the United States, Canada, and others because its foreign reserves had been spent to artificially prop up the peso for months as a result of all the mayhem.

Predictably, nearly 24 years later, NAFTA has differing impacts on each of the three parties. The Canada-US agreement in 1989 has proven to be a win-win for the two nations. Trade has roughly tripled between the two since then, and deficits have been minimal in proportion to the size of the commerce. By 2016, the United States racked up a surplus of $12.5 billion with Canada—the only major trading partnership where this has occurred.

Mexico’s involvement with the other two has not been win-win. Since 1994, American exports to Mexico have quadrupled from a very small base, but imports from Mexico have jumped five-fold. The result is that by 2016, America’s trade deficit with Mexico was $55.6 billion, just behind Japan and Germany’s and showing no sign of ebbing. Similarly, the Canada-Mexico trade relationship is one-sided. In 2016, Canada’s trade deficit with Mexico was $19.3 billion. That’s a combined total of $74.9 in deficits for the United States and Canada versus Mexico.

As Perot prophesied, and Trump exploited, NAFTA’s Mexico involvement has contributed toward the hollowing out of what’s known as “Auto Alley”—the industrialized region in both Canada and the United States surrounding the Great Lakes down the Mississippi River to the right-to-work states. Such negative outcomes are why NAFTA should be replaced. But for many reasons, Mexico cannot be orphaned. Perhaps the best solution would be to launch a separate set of bilateral negotiations: a US-Mexico agreement and another Canada-Mexico one.

Ideally, the United States and Canada should revert to their free trade agreement and graduate into a customs union, where workers and goods can move freely across the border, based on the fact that wages, cultures, and institutions are similar. This strategy would result in a perimeter—a low-friction border between the two. In fact this is a process that has already begun through a collaborative program called “Beyond Borders.” Today, United States and Canadian customs, military, naval, taxation, law enforcement, and immigration officials share information and work together. For instance, a pilot project called “cleared once, accepted twice” has been underway in which cargo, and eventually people, arrive in one city in either country and can travel freely throughout the two nations. This is the beginning of a perimeter.

Mexico cannot be inside such a perimeter. Mexico’s institutions remain as corrupt and weak as they were in 1994. Courts, the church, police, the military, the press, and politicians have been unable to stanch the flow of drugs through the country. The United States has also given tens of billions of dollars in interdiction funds to do so. But the country is fighting a “war” with vicious cartels, and in 11 years, the militarized crackdown has resulted in 200,000 deaths and 30,000 missing persons.

Within NAFTA, however, Canada and the United States have continued to move on and dramatically integrate. Canada is America’s biggest customer and supplier. It is the largest export destination for 39 of the 50 U.S. states. Canadians buy more than do the European Union’s 28 nations in total. In 2017, Canadians made more than 40 million trips across the border to shop, live, travel, work, visit, or play. Corporations and individuals in both countries own enormous portions of one another’s economy and assets, with the result that most of the $2-billion-a-day “trade” is intra-corporate transfers of resources, goods, or services between one another’s head offices and subsidiaries.

The American and Canadian economy combined is bigger than the European Union’s, and also bigger than that of Japan, China, Germany, and France combined. The U.S.-Canada combo is bigger than South America in size, with more energy, metals and minerals, water, arable land, and technology than others, all protected by America’s military. Mexico can and should remain a valued trading partner, but it remains a generation or two away from full-fledged membership in the world’s biggest economic neighborhood.

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What Happened, Indeed

With a coronation-like Russian presidential election coming in March, it easy to forget that exactly six years ago Vladimir Putin seemed to be wobbling on the edge of political oblivion. In disastrous December 2011 parliamentary elections, his United Russia party—in a rigged election—officially won less than half the votes cast. Russian and Western analysts alike were wondering if he would even survive the March 2012 election that Putin envisioned as his triumphant return to the helm at the Kremlin. This was the year of the Arab Spring, after all, with autocratic allies of Moscow (and Washington) being driven from their palaces across the Arab world. Peaceful democratic upheaval was trending!

A recent news report underscored how nervous Putin was then—and how anxious he clearly remains today—about his electoral viability. Surely the most important overlooked news story of 2017 was the December 8 report by John Hudson in BuzzFeed that Vladimir Putin sent a senior envoy to Washington last July to propose a mutual non-aggression pact regarding elections. I have confirmed independently that Hudson’s account is accurate. Why is it important?

This high level diplomatic foray not only provided solid confirmation from a senior Russian official that Moscow indeed sought to disrupt America’s 2016 elections, but it also made clear its motive. For all his bravado and saber rattling, Putin is terrified that he cannot win a fair (or even an unfair) election. This is why he jails, disqualifies or has murdered his political rivals, and firmly controls the broadcast media on which Russians depend for their news. Anyone who has watched Moscow’s official English-language propaganda outlet, Russia Today (RT’s official motto “telling the untold” translates back into Russian as “telling the untrue”), can imagine what gets broadcast every day on television in Russia!

At the same time, Putin cannot fathom why so many Russians came out to protest his electoral shenanigans the last time he was on the ballot, three months after those Duma elections. Following those discredited legislative elections—the first time that thousands of volunteer videographers uploaded to YouTube footage of ballot box stuffing and other fraud—it was the election monitors who were prosecuted, not the election riggers. New laws were soon enacted to throttle GOLOS, the civic network trained by American experts and supported by numerous Western governments to provide independent analysis of the overall election process, as counterparts are doing on every continent these days.

Starting on the day after those December Duma elections, tens and then hundreds of thousands of Russians across the country came out to protest the corruption that was endemic in Russia and was so blatant in the elections. These were the largest public protests since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many of the people wore white ribbons, and were not only peaceful, but often joyous. Young families with children in strollers were coming out to demand a better Russia. These were not the marginalized and the angry; these men and women were part of the nascent modern Russian economy—they were the successful and the angry. True, some made it personal; many of the hand-lettered signs called for “Russia without Putin” or declared “Putin is a thief.” Putin was not amused. He was angry, and he was afraid.

The protests continued and grew larger, through Putin’s own fraudulent March election—when 99.82 percent of the voters in Chechnya were reported officially to have voted for the man who razed their capital city of Grozny—right up to his inauguration day in May. Once back in the presidential office, Putin embarked on a campaign to stifle future protests. Over many months, show trials of individuals arrested at the protests delivered the message that even passive participation would be punished. Laws were quickly enacted to hobble civic groups and make it harder to organize in public. By September 2012, the U.S. Agency for International Development was kicked out of Russia—for having supported independent civic and media voices, as USAID does worldwide. When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov archly informed Secretary of State Clinton that USAID was being expelled, during a “bilat” at the APEC meeting in Vladivostok that month, he mentioned closing GOLOS as one of the rationales.

Throughout the ensuing six years, however, the thing that appears to have rankled Mr. Putin most about the unrest that attended his finagled election was a straightforward statement made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the day after those December Duma elections. Echoing the preliminary statement of the hundreds of observers deployed countrywide by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the GOLOS network, Clinton said at a meeting of OSCE Foreign Ministers in Vilnius, “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve to have their voices heard and their votes counted, and that means they deserve fair, free, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them.” I was sitting behind Secretary Clinton in the plenary meeting, a member of her delegation, and I recall seeing the steam coming out of Lavrov’s ears as Clinton spoke.

Putin later said that this public statement, coming after the fraud was exposed and after the protests had emerged, somehow “sent a signal” to secret American agents in Russia to stir up the protests, and he consistently exaggerated the amount of grant money USAID and the State Department were dispensing to Russian beneficiaries—even though amounts and recipients of the grants were publicly listed on websites.

So let’s return to the next presidential election, slated for March 4, 2018, and Moscow’s renewed effort to further diminish American support for honest elections in Russia, which means a return to John Hudson’s scoop. It is hard to imagine a scenario that would better illustrate the immense gulf in understanding between the American and Russian governments than the conversation he reported. In the July meeting with Under Secretary of State Tom Shannon, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, in effect: “If you stop trying to make Russian elections more transparent and genuine, so that the right of the people to choose who governs is respected, we will agree to cease stealing private communications and manipulating the American people with false and misleading narratives that confuse the issues and the personalities.” Ryabkov even presented the American side with a draft document to memorialize the proposed non-intervention compact. Both governments essentially confirmed Hudson’s reporting, in press briefings in Washington and in Moscow days later.

In the statement by Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Russians rather bizarrely invoked a pre-World War II precedent:

There was nothing new in this proposal since the same principle was stipulated when our countries restored diplomatic relations on November 16, 1933. . . . [T]he Foreign Commissar of the USSR Maxim Litvinov and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt exchanged personal notes stipulating the indisputable right of each country to order its own life within its own jurisdiction in its own way.

Much has happened since 1933 to refine the global sensibility about “the indisputable right of each country to order its own life within its own jurisdiction in its own way.” World War II. The Holocaust. The United Nations. Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Decolonialization of half of the world. And much, much more in the subsequent 50 years. Oh, yes: also including the end of the Soviet Union, more than a quarter century ago.

When the USSR collapsed as a result of its own economic, political, and security failures, the United States set out to do for Russia and its neighbors what it had earlier done for Germany and Japan and other vanquished foes over the years: help the country get back on its feet and become a contributing member of the world community. For more than two decades, the United States spent billions of dollars to help Russia modernize, democratize and become a more prosperous country engaged productively with the rest of the world.

But when Putin decided to reclaim the presidency in Russia – after a four-year hiatus as Prime Minister while his protégé Dmitry Medvedev served as President – and when it appeared the people of Russia were not as keen for his return as he was, he decided that Russia no longer needed this help. Economic and security cooperation with the West was not more important than Putin’s personal grip on power and the wealth he and his circle were amassing. Since U.S. assistance to Russia included as a matter of course support for democratic processes and institutions, it would all have to end.

The good news is that U.S. policy remains forward-leaning; the professional diplomats, foreign service officers and civil servants alike, continue to profess and support American values, even while waiting for their president and secretary of state to come around. Officials have said repeatedly that they will provide support to those democratic-minded individuals and organizations that want American assistance. These are not large amounts, and the recipients are scattered and under constant harassment from Russian authorities. As much as any tangible benefit they might provide, these grants are intended to send a political message—not to the government of Russia, but to the Russian people. The United States supports democracy and wants them to be able to exercise their internationally recognized human rights.

That is the message that Ryabkov brought back to Moscow last July after his meeting at the State Department. As Hudson reported the exchange, a

senior State Department official said any potential gains would come at too high a cost. “We would have to give up democracy promotion in Russia, which we’re not willing to do,” said the official.

Russians know this, and it encourages them to stand up for themselves. Putin also knows this, and it frightens him. Watch how he conducts the upcoming presidential election. Watch how he continues to disrupt our elections.

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Trump Teases Reasonable Energy Policy

President Trump unveiled his National Security Strategy (NSS) on Monday, and though onlookers had held their breath out of fear that the document would reflect the President’s blustery rhetoric, what emerged was actually a surprisingly staid set of organizing principles to guide U.S. foreign policy. Presidents use the NSS as a document to articulate a grand strategy for an administration’s term—a framework by which specific policies will be developed—so there was no small amount of trepidation leading up to this release. But this latest installment of the NSS has been characterized as “shockingly normal,” and has been welcomed by foreign policy experts as a largely balanced strategy that could serve the Trump administration well if enacted. There were especially encouraging signs in the section on energy, which ratcheted down the administration’s often inflammatory tone.

Although the energy part of the report is provocatively titled “Embracing Energy Dominance,” a closer read reveals a surprisingly reasonable vision of energy policy, grounded in a self-consistent case for why economic strength and energy security underpin national security. The NSS energy strategy aims to support allies and partners, encourages North American energy cooperation, and tempers the definition of energy dominance suggested elsewhere, asserting that such dominance arises from “America’s central position in the global energy system as a leading producer, consumer and innovator.”

Many elements of the NSS energy strategy do not break with the energy policies articulated by the Trump administration to date. For example, the strategy calls for reducing regulatory barriers to energy production, streamlining approvals for new oil and gas infrastructure, and expanding energy exports. Where the NSS differs from previous policy statements, however, is in the way that it couches its goals in a nuanced understanding of global geopolitics. For example, it says that expanding energy exports “helps our allies and partners diversify their energy sources,” a clear departure from prior Trump administration rhetoric that exports can be used to “dominate” other countries. The NSS also sets out the laudable goal of protecting global energy infrastructure from both physical and cyber threats.

Predictably, the NSS does not identify climate change as a threat to national security, reversing the precedent set by the Obama administration’s 2015 strategy. The only mention of climate change in the NSS implies that climate policies around the world form an “anti-growth energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic and energy interests.” The failure to acknowledge climate change as a threat to national security is in direct conflict with the U.S. military’s heightened focus on addressing the clear threats posed by climate change. The NSS even breaks with Congress, which earlier this month passed its latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) containing provisions requiring the Department of Defense to evaluate the risks climate change poses to military activities and installations.

It’s somewhat surprising, then, that “environmental stewardship” is a recurring motif in the NSS energy strategy. The section calls for ensuring such stewardship even while reducing regulations on the energy sector. It also implicitly acknowledges the importance of reducing climate-warming emissions, claiming, “The United States will remain a global leader in reducing traditional pollution, as well as greenhouse gases.” Finally, the document aims to realize environmental benefits through developing “innovative and efficient energy technologies.”

The problem is that the reasonably written NSS energy section directly contradicts Trump’s policies thus far. For example, the NSS celebrates the integration of the North American energy system, positing that “vibrant cross-border energy trade and investment are vital for a robust and resilient U.S. economy and energy market,” and that the administration is committed to “unlock the enormous potential of our shared region.” However, to date President Trump’s approach toward North American cooperation has been far less constructive, characterized by attacks on the U.S.-Mexico trade relationship and threats to “terminate” NAFTA.

In a strange move for an administration that has prioritized withdrawing from global humanitarian leadership, the NSS makes achieving universal access to energy a priority action. Though Energy Secretary Rick Perry has argued for the importance of increasing electricity access, especially when generated by fossil fuels, the Trump administration has never made this a prominent policy priority. Power Africa, the landmark energy access initiative launched by President Obama, which has proven effective at expanding electricity services in sub-Saharan Africa, only narrowly avoided being cut in the Trump administration’s proposed budget. Its modest funding remains threatened by Trump’s disdain for soft power instruments like foreign aid.

The NSS also contains strong language about supporting innovation and funding technical research, particularly at the National Laboratories, to “further America’s technological edge in energy.” The administration’s technology priorities include next generation nuclear, battery, and carbon-capture technologies, though renewable technologies are conspicuously absent. However, this promotion of innovation and research diverges sharply from actual Trump policies, including a proposed budget which suggested zeroing out funding for Mission Innovation, an international effort to invest in clean energy innovation, and eliminating ARPA-E, the Department of Energy program which funds the development of cutting-edge energy technologies.

The energy section of the NSS is a restrained document that champions international cooperation and environmental stewardship, but reconciling that with reality produces a tangled mess of contradictions. The administration’s wholesale abandonment of policies that protect the environment from greenhouse gases, hazardous waste, air and groundwater pollution and destruction of habitat are entirely incongruent with its claims of “stewardship.” The emphasis in the NSS of supporting universal energy access and innovation research as top priorities is in almost direct opposition with broader administration policies that have slashed funding for foreign aid. The continued hostility of the administration towards free trade clashes with the goal of building a “vibrant cross-border energy trade.” And the administration’s likely decision in 2018 to relax fuel economy standards for the U.S. vehicle fleet would make the U.S. less, not more, energy dominant by increasing domestic demand for oil, exposing the U.S. economy to volatile oil markets, and reducing U.S. exports.

The divergence between the words of the administration and the actions of the security and foreign policy officials has been described as a “kabuki dance”, and the NSS brings that clear tension to center stage. The NSS was written by respected national security policy professionals and vetted through an extensive interagency process, and the result was a set of largely sensible guidelines. By contrast, many of the policy initiatives that the Trump administration has pursued to date have resulted from impulsive and improvised decisions by officials comparatively lacking in experience and expertise, or by the President’s own tweets (the Kremlin apparently sees said tweets as official statements). Thus far, the administration’s record suggests that the latter officials tend to have the upper hand in shaping actual policy initiatives.

In any administration, the value of an NSS is to provide a window into how the executive branch views its security strategy, and to convey overarching goals rather than offering a prescriptive policy doctrine. It is reassuring that the NSS does not embrace some of the more extreme policies espoused by members of the Trump administration, and perhaps most importantly by the President himself. From an administration that has repeatedly advocated for isolationist views, this emphasis on American leadership strengthening an inclusive global energy system is welcome. But the question remains: is it credible?

Unfortunately, the administration’s chaotic energy policy so far does not align with the principles set forward in the NSS, and there is little reason to expect greater coherence moving forward. If anything, the NSS energy section is yet another example of the schism in the Trump administration between hotheaded elements keen to upend policies pursued by previous administrations and seasoned professionals intent on implementing deliberate and responsible processes. To the extent that we see smart, reasoned energy policy emerge under the Trump administration, it’s likely to happen in spite—not because—of the President himself.

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A House Divided

Cyril Ramaphosa has waited more than twenty years for this moment. Earlier this week, the union organizer-cum-business magnate—who is worth an estimated $450 million, making him one of South Africa’s wealthiest men—finally clinched the presidency of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). As ANC President, Ramaphosa is likely to become South Africa’s next president when elections are held in 2019—if not sooner, should he choose to oust sitting President Jacob Zuma like Zuma ousted Thabo Mbeki in 2008.

Ramaphosa’s victory comes more than two decades after he was passed over for Mbeki as Mandela’s successor—a move that sent Ramaphosa into the world of business where he licked his wounds, made his fortune, and planned his eventual comeback. After three years as Jacob Zuma’s Deputy President, Ramaphosa is now the leading candidate for South Africa’s top job.

The markets cheered and the rand rallied when Ramaphosa was named ANC President, reflecting his reputation as a pro-business reformer. But the challenges before him are legion, and even a politician of Ramaphosa’s considerable managerial prowess and charisma may not overcome them. Here are the questions Ramaphosa will have to answer: Can he unite the ANC? Will he oust Zuma as President of the Republic before 2019? Can he lead the party to victory in the 2019 elections? And even if he is elected, will Ramaphosa be able to deliver the reform South Africa desperately needs?

Uniting the Party

Ramaphosa’s opponent in the leadership race was Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the former Chairperson of the AU Commission. Dlamini-Zuma had the backing of the ANC Women’s League and Youth League, as well as the support of President Zuma, who is also her ex-husband. She lost by only about 170 delegates—that is, less than four percent.

That Ramaphosa triumphed narrowly over Dlamini-Zuma despite the sitting president and much of the party machinery supporting her suggests two things. First, Ramaphosa is a tireless campaigner who overcame early expectations of a Dlamini-Zuma win. Second, the Zuma faction remains strong and influential—so much so that it could thwart Ramaphosa’s desire to remake the party in his image.

The makeup of the ANC “Top Six” and National Executive Committee (NEC) is even more troubling for Ramaphosa. Zuma supporters make up half of the Top Six cadre. The other 80 members of the NEC are more or less evenly divided. As The Sunday Times explains:

Half of the Ramaphosa’s camp’s 80 preferred candidates who appeared on a list circulated at the ANC’s national conference in Johannesburg won election to the NEC. Forty-seven of those favored by the faction led by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who lost to Ramaphosa in the party presidential race, were chosen. Seven of those picked were on both lists and their allegiances are unclear.

Ramaphosa is inheriting a house divided. Instead of delivering the decisive majority Ramaphosa needs to quickly unify the party, the ANC has crystallized its internal divisions in the composition of its top governing body. The Zuma camp appears to have performed better in the NEC election than in the leadership race; apparently Ramaphosa’s coattails were not long enough.

Whither Zuma?

Unless Ramaphosa manages to flip enough members of the NEC to his camp, the body’s composition is a recipe for paralysis on the most pressing issue for the ANC: Jacob Zuma’s future. Apart from the National Assembly, which is unlikely to hold another vote of no confidence after the motion failed this past August, the NEC is the only body that can force the ouster of President Zuma. As Ramaphosa is currently serving as South Africa’s Deputy President and would presumably become President if Zuma resigned, ousting Zuma is an attractive option for Ramaphosa.

Forcing Zuma out would help Ramaphosa distance himself from an unpopular incumbent of the same party who is widely perceived as corrupt. It would also give Ramaphosa the incumbency advantage, strengthening the ANC’s position going into the 2019 elections. With a divided NEC, however, such a maneuver will be difficult to execute. Unless Ramaphosa is able to cobble together a majority on the NEC, Zuma may well serve through the end of his term.

2019 Elections

While the ANC is sorting out its internal divisions, the political opposition in South Africa has been gathering strength. The center-right Democratic Alliance (DA) is led by a charismatic young pastor named Mmusi Maimane, whom some have called the “Obama of Soweto.” Maimane has helped the DA expand its support beyond the Western Cape; the party won control of four metro areas in the 2016 elections. The far-Left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, led by former ANC Youth League President Julius Malema, offers a more radical critique of the ANC. The EFF rails against “neoliberalism,” advocating expropriation of land and nationalization of banks and mines, among other industries.

The ANC finds itself increasingly outflanked by the pro-business Right and the radical Left. Compared to Maimane or Malema, Ramaphosa is a candidate of the status quo. Still, Ramaphosa is a stronger candidate than Dlamini-Zuma, and his selection does not appear to have galvanized the opposition as hers might have. Ramaphosa is the candidate of muddling through, and the ANC will most likely muddle through the 2019 elections.

Prospects for Reform

Let us assume the best-case scenario for Ramaphosa. He unifies the ANC, ousts Zuma, and leads the party to a commanding victory over the DA and the EFF. Through competent staffing and predictable policymaking, Ramaphosa could deliver relief from economic uncertainty. He could tame worrisome inflation, lift South Africa’s credit rating from “junk” status, and accelerate economic growth. That much will reward the confidence that the stock market and the rand have placed in him this week. It’s enough to make him a better leader than Zuma.

But competence and confidence are not enough to make a dent in South Africa’s persistent challenges: stubbornly high unemployment, stark economic and racial inequality, and widespread corruption. To tackle unemployment, Ramaphosa could adopt measures to promote mass employment through low-skilled industrialization—the labor-intensive model Ann Bernstein has proposed. To confront inequality, Ramaphosa could emphasize education reform, adult literacy, and entrepreneurship—changes that would benefit the black majority. He could address the concerns of the #FeesMustFall movement, cutting university fees for students from low-income families. To combat corruption—which drains public coffers and depresses economic growth—Ramaphosa could strengthen the office of the Public Protector by increasing its budget and, unlike Zuma, actually following its advice. He could even follow neighboring Botswana’s example and launch an independent anti-corruption agency.

Only dramatic reforms like these can lift South Africa out of its recent doldrums. Ramaphosa has marketed himself as the candidate of reform. But is he personally invested in reform? Ramaphosa has, after all, prospered handsomely in the post-apartheid era of rising inequality and falling hope. Even if he is personally invested in reform, will Ramaphosa be capable of rallying the ANC to the reform agenda? Will ANC members who have profited from corruption under Zuma give up their privileges without a fight? These are open questions, and the odds for reform are long.

Even with a promising leader, the ANC may not be capable of delivering the reforms South Africa needs. In the post-apartheid era, the portraits on the walls keep changing, but the realities of economic and political life remain the same.

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The Mirage of Populism

How can we explain the new populism, this rise of social media-empowered, elite-bashing, partisanship-promoting politics? Is it due to economic inequality, the revenge of the “left behind”? Or is it down to culture, the “localists” pushing back against the “globalists”? Is it all because of Neo-liberalism? Neo-Nationalism? Old-fashioned racism? Every time someone proposes a single solution (The economically disadvantaged voted Trump!) someone else comes along to show how the model doesn’t fit (The rich voted Trump too! The poorest voted Democrat!).

As Francis Fukuyama expertly laid out in these pages, all of the above are relevant. But there might be another angle from which to view the phenomenon, one that looks at it from the perspective of the campaign manager—a perspective that sees populism not so much as a result of socio-economic forces, but as a strategy for success.

Consider the landscape from the point of view of the spin doctor. Increasingly you need to target voters split up into little causes on social media. They have vastly different interests: animal rights and hospitals, guns and gardening, immigration and parenting. Some of these interests might be overtly political, while others are private. Your aim is reach out to these different groups in completely different ways, tying the voting behavior you want to what they care about most. Animal rights groups need to be persuaded that your campaign has some sort of relation to their cause; anti-immigration activists that it relates to theirs. So, for example, if you were running a campaign for exiting the European Union, you would argue to animal rights groups that the EU is bad for animal welfare due to EU regulations, which demand that animals be cruelly transported across long distances before they are slaughtered, or because the EU supports farmers who raise bulls for bullfighting. Meanwhile, you would target anti-immigrant groups with a message about how the EU enables migration.

The animal rights supporters may actually have a very different stance on immigration—they may well be for it—but that doesn’t matter as you are sending different, targeted ads to various groups which the others won’t see.

You can even avoid using your main candidate in ads to audiences who don’t like him. During Donald Trump’s election campaign, ads targeted at some middle-class voters conspicuously avoided showing the main man, and focused instead on touchy-feely messages quite out of sync with Trump’s vitriol. (Jamie Bartlett’s BBC documentary about the dangers Silicon Valley poses to democracy is a must-see.)

This sort of hyper-targeting, where one set of your voters shouldn’t know about the others, means you need some big, empty identity to unite all these different groups, something so broad these voters can project themselves onto it—a category like “the people,” or “the many.” The “populism” which is thus created is not a sign of the people coming together in a great groundswell of unity, but a consequence of the “people” being more fractured than ever, of their barely existing as one nation. To seal this improvised identity one needs an enemy. Best to keep it, too, as abstract as possible so anyone can invent their own version of what it means: the “establishment” will do, or “elites.”  Of course this means you’ll lose some voters who are the said “enemy,” but if you keep the definition of the enemy elastic enough, people will be able to define their own version of who exactly the enemy is.

One could even imagine a situation where one group of voters you have seduced chant about some awful “elite,” while in truth the “enemy” they have in mind is another group you have persuaded to vote for you. The Labour Party in the UK is pulling this off rather well. By defining themselves as being “For The Many, Not The Few” they have created a semantic space wherein metropolitan middle-class types vote Labour considering themselves as opposing the “Few” super-rich and landed gentry, while Labour voters in the north of England see themselves as “the Many” opposing the privileged middle-class metropolitan “few.”

This approach is the opposite of “centrism,” which tried to find a pot of common policies to bring different camps together under one big tent, and to reduce polarization. That made sense when campaigns played out on a limited number of TV channels that people of different political persuasions watched together—when you had to engage in debate and to win many over simultaneously. Now your job is to fire up little disparate groups, to energize and polarize them as much as possible, not to win a rational argument in a disappearing common public space. This pattern is most advanced in America, where cable TV began the fracturing work that social media is now augmenting, with its inhabitants living in parallel informational worlds of alternative facts. But even in countries less far gone, one can see emerging signs of a similar future. Researchers from Oxford University have recently shown how Japan’s President Abe preached one centrist message on TV about economics, while pursuing a hidden campaign online which reached out to his right wing. The combination of the two helped him to victory in 2014.

If the secret to a successful campaign is to speak in different tongues to different groups, then it doesn’t make sense to try to defeat the data populists by choosing one message oneself. The debate among U.S. anti-Trumpers, about whether a “centrist” or “economically radical left-wing” platform is best suited to defeat the current regime is already a case of asking the wrong question. Instead, they should be asking how you create a campaign liquid enough to reach out to centrist dads, millennial economic radicals, the “left behind,” and whoever else you need to win.

This was the mistake the British Tory party made in the general election immediately following Brexit. Misinterpreting the referendum result as simply being about immigration, they over-focused their subsequent campaign on nationalism. It flopped as it ignored all those other causes, from animal rights to saving the health service, which the original Brexit campaign had skillfully played on. Labour, on the other hand, have kept their policies vague, attracting Europhiles with one message, while keeping their anti-European base in the north. I remember being struck by the use of gerunds in their election campaign literature, which featured phrases like “creating an economy which works for everyone,” “leading richer lives,” and “extending democracy.” Gerunds can be a sign that the author doesn’t quite know, or doesn’t want to reveal, what they really think. Many editors don’t like them. But in this case they were just what was needed. Gerunds, it turns out, don’t always decline.

But before one rushes into whole-heartedly copy-catting populism as a strategy, one should consider its fatal flaw. Having sold itself in such different ways to different groups, it struggles when it comes to actually governing. In Britain the first party to use social media effectively in a campaign was the Scottish Nationalists, who managed to market themselves in different ways to the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie (won over by the idea that Scottish nationalism meant being European and England was holding that back), “little Scotland” nationalists (inspired by anti-foreigner sentiment), and the economically deprived (convinced that England was stealing Scotland’s wealth). When it came to ruling, that unity began to fracture: finding one tax policy to fit all, for example, is hard. Similarly, Donald Trump has struggled to pass policies, and the ones he has passed, like the massive tax cut, barely register with the “left behind.” In Italy the digital-populist movement par excellence, Five Star, sold itself as addressing concerns ranging from immigration to the environment to basic income, all the fault of “the elite,” but is struggling to make those promises a reality since gaining power in regional governments.

That’s the thing about this digital “populism”: it’s great at campaigning, less good at creating any sort of sustainable politics. It’s of no surprise that those who have used it best continue in an ersatz campaign mode once they have won, constantly searching for new enemies (“Remoaners” for Brexiteers in the UK, “the Swamp” for Trump) to maintain coherence. Instead of arguments about ideology, policy, or a vision of the future, the challenge for the digital populist is to create mirages of membranes, imaginary walls that don’t actually have anything on the other, “enemy,” side, but which can, for the length of a few tweets at least, give their disparate followers the sense that their interests are aligned. Thus conspiracy theories become their favored idiom. As the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev has pointed out, you can’t argue and engage with a conspiracy the way you can with a policy or ideology; you have to be either on the side of people who believe in it, or on the side of who don’t.

And of course, social media itself is about creating soap bubbles of identity rather than engaging in ideas. And like so much on social media, digital populism is a phenomenon full of sudden surges and seeming meaning, that dissolves as soon as you try to reach out and find something real.

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Policing Disability

Needless to say, the study of illness and disability has been with us for a long time. Many of us old enough to have been reading books 50 years ago can recall the excitement generated by Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Erving Goffman’s Stigma, and later works by Susan Sontag (Illness As Metaphor) and other writers. These works alerted us to a great many things most of us had never thought to consider. They also made what had seemed obvious suddenly problematic. The British cultural critic Peter Sedgwick noted that “no attribution of sickness to any being can be made without the expectation of some alternative state of affairs which is considered more desirable.” That observation, and others like it, opened up an entire field of study which drew attention to the “construction” of illness and the implications inherent in widely shared assumptions about “normality,” “deviancy,” and the “logic” informing concepts of “human pathology.” Over the decades debates have continued to form around one or another dimension of the research and theory generated within this arena. But only recently have particular ideas promoted by academics and health specialists working in “disability studies” seemed—to some of us, at least—genuinely alarming.

Those particular ideas were lately brought to my attention when I found myself agitated by a poster hung all over campus at the college I’ve been teaching at for 49 years. A younger colleague had told me about it, and at once I made the rounds, stopping at various department offices to see the thing for myself. A homely thing, visually no more compelling than most of the notices routinely covering every available surface in hallways and stairwells, the words “KEEP SKIDMORE SAFE” at the top not at all unusual at a time when “safety” seems much on many minds.

Of course “safety” can refer to a great many different things, to actual dangers and imagined dangers, to imminent harm and prospective harm, to reasonable and delusional notions of security. There are those for whom the will to “safety” is so great that the prospect of what Norman Mailer once called “the slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled” is not at all dreadful. Clearly, those who hope to be protected from unfamiliar or challenging ideas demand a kind of “safety” decidedly different from the safety sought by those who rightly fear violence, sexual abuse, or gross intimidation. Advocates of protections for children with abusive parents are invested in a kind of safety far removed from the “safety” at issue in campaigns against academic courses that feature primarily dead white males. Whatever the virtues of one or another movement focused on “safety,” it is essential to think seriously about what can conceivably be gained, or lost, in the event that a “consciousness-raising” campaign actually succeeds in accomplishing its ends.

The “KEEP SKIDMORE SAFE” poster was, in this respect, a token of drastic changes that have lately come to pass in the academy. Its focus was “ableist language,” an idea promoted in recent years in numerous courses associated with disability studies. Examples of this ostensibly dangerous species of language, cited on the Skidmore poster, included “stand up for,” “turn a blind eye to,” and “take a walk in someone’s shoes.” These expressions are routinely said to be demeaning and offensive by proponents of the campaign targeting such linguistic “abuses.” As in other such campaigns, intention is said to be at most an incidental consideration, the “abuse” associated with the willful ignorance or insensitivity of those who use language thoughtlessly. A professor who encourages a student to “take a walk in someone’s shoes” may think she is promoting empathy when in fact she is creating an awkward situation for another student who is unable to walk and thereby painfully reminded of his disability. That at least is at the heart of the case not only for strenuously calling attention to “ableist language” but for doing something about it.

In the early stages of academic disability studies there seemed nothing remotely disturbing about efforts to think about embodiment and normalcy. Why not look closely at the works of gifted writers whose experience of disability allowed them to see the common world in original and sometimes shocking ways? Why not probe language itself so as to reveal the relationship between bodies and metaphor and to expose practices built into ordinary speech? Why not, indeed, move on to ask political questions about the rhetoric of diversity and wonder why disability issues are not always cited in conversations built around inclusion? All of that seemed, as I say, not only plausible but valuable, and some of the scholarly research sponsored in the field was rigorous and challenging.

But it is one thing to identify practices and assumptions and another to suppose that they can or should be eliminated. It’s one thing to open up a lively conversation and another to promote a conversion narrative in terms of which a cadre of language activists teach everyone else to watch what they say and thereby put an end to practices that are neither injurious nor offensive. Activists in this precinct regard ordinary terms like “blind” and “deaf” as casually “denigrating.” Such terms are said to reinforce so-called ableist attitudes and thus to foster inequality. More, such terms are said to be charged with a history of oppression which should alert us to the danger inherent in resorting to such epithets. Though some scholars regard the linguistic turn in disability studies as an unfortunate distraction from other kinds of struggle, the focus on language is especially appealing to those with an appetite for calling out and guilt-tripping liberal academics who have not yet gotten with the program.

The “KEEP SKIDMORE SAFE” poster was in this sense a harbinger of things to come in an academic culture increasingly committed to thinking about all things in terms of harms, protections, and legal recourses. Directed at students, drafted (as I was later informed) by “Peer Health Educators” enrolled in courses taught by health professionals and disability scholars, the message was unmistakable. Specifically, students were encouraged to ask their own teachers to stop using ableist language and, failing that, to contact advisers and file an online “bias report” naming the professor. Informing this message was, of course, an assumption that the mere sounding of words like “blind” and “deaf” ought itself to be regarded as injurious and thus forbidden.

Clearly, those responsible for such a message have moved on from any misgivings about their premises, and are unwilling to entertain the thought that expressions like those cited in the poster have nothing at all to do with any reasonable person’s notion of keeping the campus safe. All apart from the advice that would have students filing a bias complaint, the recommendation that they take offense at the language all of us use is sufficiently bizarre.

Disagreement in this precinct will not turn on whether or not it is objectionable to speak respectfully to persons who are disabled. This goes—ought to go—without saying. But the notion that students will feel unsafe when I tell them I have to “run” to catch a train, or that I’ve long been “deaf” to certain kinds of music, is a lie. No doubt some students can be trained to take offense where no offense is intended. But there will be a price to pay for creating a generation of young people who are unwilling and unable to differentiate between actual offenses and casual utterances that clearly do not rise even to the level of so-called micro-aggressions.

A former student assistant, now a close friend, spoke with me about this at a recent dinner party, and asked whether I did not sometimes find myself hurt or at least taken aback by a casual ableist affront. I don’t think so, I said, though of course at 75 and counting I’m old enough to have thought quite a lot about all the things I used to do that are no longer possible for me. But the difference between innocuous speech acts and openly rude or hostile utterances intended to wound, I went on, has always been compelling to me. For example, I offered, I’ve never quite been able to erase the memory of an encounter in Saul Bellow’s novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, when the elderly protagonist is delivering a lecture and a student in the audience interrupts him with the words, “Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He’s dead. He can’t come.” If you want to be offended, I told my friend, there’s something you can sink your teeth into.

And did I think, my young friend asked, that old age is a form of disability? Maybe so, I said, and sure, if I were to sign on to this business, and learn to take offense where none was intended, I’d soon discover that just about every conversation had become a mine field, and I’d be accusing even my friends of insensitivity. I’d bristle when a colleague at my dinner table, a Victorian scholar, spoke of Thomas Carlyle’s “virile” prose, or of Matthew Arnold’s “lame” attempts at humor. Once you start down that road you rapidly discover that ableist language is not some exotic phenomenon but a pervasive feature of our speech.

When I read over the poster and decided to write a letter to the professor whose name appeared as the official contact person for “KEEP SKIDMORE SAFE,” I first thought to assemble examples of ableist language from Shakespeare, Dickens, and other canonical authors. But then I wondered whether I might instead turn to a contemporary writer whose stature among people in my own Left-liberal cohort is especially high, and I thought of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose book, Between The World and Me, was sent to incoming freshmen last year and was a required text in all freshman seminars at the college, including mine. Though I was less than thrilled by the selection of that work, I dutifully discussed it with students in my seminar, and found ways to share with them my admiration for Coates’s prose. Were there, in Coates’s book, examples of ableist language? I hadn’t taken note of them when I prepared for my seminar a year earlier, but there the book was, on a crowded shelf in my office, waiting to be scanned. In five minutes of random browsing I found more than a dozen ableist passages, and quoted them in my letter. From page 25: “If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left.” Same page: “I suffered at the hands of both.” From page 33: “The society could say, ‘He should have stayed in school,’ and then wash its hands of him.” And from page 141: “She said this with no love in her eye.” And so on.

And the point of this silly exercise? Simply to note that a recent book by one of the most esteemed writers in the country, a book with the imprimatur of our college, is studded with ableist language. Indeed, literary prose is more apt than casual or journalistic language to be marked by varieties of metaphor that rely upon embodiment. And in composing my letter, which asked that the posters be taken down, I speculated that if Coates were to be recruited to teach at Skidmore, professors who objected strenuously to his language would presumably encourage their students to demand he change his evil ableist ways and, when he refused to conciliate them, urge them to file a bias report naming him as one who had made our campus “unsafe.”

It was that last piece of advice that made the poster seem to me, and to many of my colleagues, not only problematic but grotesque. I’m willing to agree to disagree with some of my colleagues about the significance of ableist language, but not willing to smile and roll over at the peculiar species of intolerance that is entailed in the idea that users of words like “blind” and “deaf” are guilty of actionable offenses. The professor to whom I sent my letter responded in an entirely thoughtful and courteous way, noting that she hadn’t officially approved the poster designed by students she was working with, and that she shared my “concerns,” and was therefore moving to have the posters removed. This seemed to me a welcome conclusion to what was, after all, a very tiny affair.

And yet I don’t want quite to leave it at that, not when department heads and other faculty at colleges and universities are more or less on board with efforts to enlist students in their misguided campaigns. Underwriting these efforts is the wish to create a hierarchy of the saved—those, for example, who mobilize to forbid routine speech acts weirdly deemed offensive—and the unredeemed—those who persist in any practice of which the new guardians disapprove. Colleagues sympathetic to these recent campaigns, however ill at ease about what they call the “too-quick turn to punitive measures,” as one colleague put it to me in an email communication, are nevertheless unapologetically invested in the moral one-upmanship, in which a self-anointed elect dictate to everyone else what is and is not acceptable.

Odd, of course, that people determined to extinguish hostility and intimidation are themselves open to a regime in which disapproval leads more or less inexorably to censure and “punitive measures.” If anything like the “KEEP SKIDMORE SAFE” poster were to be taken seriously—as seriously as a number of students told me it is among their classmates—and acted upon, it would cause members of the college community to become suspicious of one another, to sniff around for instances of language crime, and to search for opportunities to ingratiate themselves with the local thought police. It’s hard to imagine a better example of a hostile work environment, and no optimism about what one colleague calls “a new awareness of inequities” and a desire to “spread the word” can cover over the alarming features of the zealotry unleashed in movements of this kind.

To be sure, the usual persuasion for which campuses have lately mobilized tends to be friendly rather than openly punitive. But the informing consensus is that in due course everyone will be on board, and that the recalcitrant will be dealt with, one way or another. Though students especially are convinced that they are coming of age and learning to think for themselves, they have no misgiving at all about yielding to guardians who promise to protect them from unwanted ideas or utterances. Though they bristle at the thought of domination, they don’t at all object to domination by the right-minded, and those who have learned to mouth the platitudes served up in their consciousness-raising classes have no sense that they are “brilliant,” as Scott Fitzgerald once put it, “with a second hand sophistication.” But then neither do the professors themselves often note their own lack of what Rochelle Gurstein calls “the conceptual resources” to think about “the common good,” paralyzed as they are by “habits of mind [which allow] them to mistake their ever more sentimental valorization of the most ‘vulnerable’ in society for a commitment to radical politics.”

In effect, our institutions of higher learning have fostered a new paternalism, promising an environment in which surveillance is the norm and citizens need not worry, for they have been delivered into the hands of persons whose sole reason for being is to protect them from discomfort. Most of those who have signed on for this arrangement have come to believe that there is self-fulfillment in tacitly resigning themselves to a species of carefully structured subordination. But what one writer calls “dependence as a way of life” entails the gradual erosion of the conviction that we can, all of us, find ways to cope with things that belong to the fabric of everyday experience. No one doubts that there is a place, and a need, for the helping ministrations of family, friends, teachers, and health care professionals. But we ought not to doubt that we should feel equipped to contend with ordinary unhappiness and the small shocks and contradictions we are bound to confront. The idealization of autonomy and self-sufficiency was always somewhat misleading. But the turn to the idea of a fully administered, indisputably correct, and ever watchful regime, academic or otherwise, in which miscreants can be admonished and punished for inviting someone to walk in another person’s shoes, is the leading edge of a new—and by no means benevolent—tyranny.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, Take Your Places

It may be a long time before we fully understand all the implications of the complex Trump/Goldman tax law, as I like to call the recently passed tax “reform.” This 1,079-page monstrosity contains at least 121 tax code changes that will affect more than $8 trillion of gross Federal tax revenues over the next decade. The bill was drafted by the Trump Administration and the Republican majority entirely in secret and crammed through Congress in less than a week with no hearings or debate and no independent evaluations. We now know what all this opacity was really all about: Overall, Trump/Goldman bill amounts to a massive “tax heist,” one of the largest transfers of public wealth to private elites and corporations in U.S. history—at least since the massive taxpayer-funded bailouts of Goldman Sachs and other giant Wall Street banks in 2008–09.

Most criticisms of the bill to date have focused on its domestic implications. These are indeed formidable. They include increased inequality, soaring budget deficits, poorer health coverage for many Americans, and a fire sale of the country’s strategic oil reserves, mineral rights in national parks, and drilling rights in the Arctic wilderness. All these domestic harms are further aggravated by the total lack of any requirements for multinational corporations like Apple and Google to actually invest any of the $2.6 trillions of never-taxed U.S. royalties and profits that they managed to cook up and stash offshore to create any jobs back home, before they get to repatriate it all at less than half the original tax rates and stuff it in their back pockets.1 A very Merry Christmas indeed!

Details as to the domestic implications of this bill must await elucidation at a later date. At this point, however, I would like to interrupt that analysis for an important piece of late-breaking news: Not even a single day into this new law’s existence, there are already signs that our worst fears about its dire global effects have been confirmed. Far from leading quickly to higher U.S. economic growth, more jobs and higher wages, the deep corporate tax cuts contained in this bill have already triggered, or at least substantially accelerated, a global tax war—an aggressive “race to the bottom” in international corporate tax rates, rules, and regulations that will be deeply harmful, especially to developing countries. Take note, please:

Soon after the Trump/Goldman’s final passage on December 20, Australia’s Finance Minister warned that its passage meant that his country was “falling behind” in global tax competition, and that Australia’s growth rate might fall by up to a third unless it responds. Accordingly, he promised that Australia will soon be slashing its own corporate tax rate by at least one-sixth, from 30 percent to 25 percent.
Similarly, in the European Union, Austria’s new government has just announced that it is considering a similar reduction.
This comes on top of Norway’s one-point rate cut from 25 percent to 24 percent this month, President Macron’s recent decision to slash France’s corporate rate by nearly a fifth from 33 percent to 27 by 2022, and the United Kingdom’s decision this past April to cut its corporate rate from 20 percent to 19 percent.
Just this week, too, Argentina’s conservative President Macri has announced plans to cut Argentina’s corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent by 2020. This comes on top of the deep reforms to public pensions that he narrowly force-fed through Argentina’s Congress just this week.
My interviews with key global tax analysts around the planet confirm that several other leading OECD countries, including South Korea, Mexico, and Chile, are also actively considering a new round of corporate tax cuts, in response to the U.S. measure.

Of course, this bout of international tax competition is only the latest in a long series of tax cuts by many countries that dates back at least to the 1980s era of Thatcher and Reagan. Ironically, after leading the way for initial round of global corporate rate cuts in the 1970s and 1980s, the United States itself resisted further cuts throughout the 2000s, even while dozens of other countries reduced their rate significantly. Pressure for the United States to join the flock of rate cutters was partly relieved by the fact that that many of the largest, most influential U.S. companies—in oil, defense, software, pharmaceuticals, and energy—were also very international. This permitted them to take advantage of the complex “deferred tax” system on international profits to stash income from non-U.S. assets and investments offshore, and maintain overall effective rates well down in the single digits, very far below the nominal 35 percent.

Meanwhile, it was not as if all that offshore loot was going idle; resourceful tax lawyers found clever ways to borrow against the “offshore” funds and invest the proceeds wherever the multinational corporations desired.

Eventually, however, the pool of offshore funds just became too appetizing, especially after Trump’s surprising election victory in November 2016 provided an opportunity not only to repatriate all this loot at modest rates, but also to trade it in for a territorial tax system that will manage U.S. offshore corporate business in a virtually tax-free manner (at least not much more than 10 percent.) Meanwhile, in the thirty years since global tax competition really took off, at least 26 of 33 other OECD countries have also adopted various forms of territorial corporate taxation. So it now appears to be quite natural for the United States to join the club.

With a few exceptions, the real problem is not this “happy few” of relatively affluent OECD countries. By now, most of them rely on corporate taxes for well under 10 percent of all government revenues. For the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, this figure is only about 8 percent; for France it is 5.8 percent; for Germany it is 4.7 percent. The handful of OECD countries that are still most exposed includes (as expected) Australia (18 percent), Korea (14 percent), Chile (22 percent), and Mexico.2

On the other hand, many developing countries outside the happy OECD family not only have relatively high nominal corporate tax rates, but they also still rely on corporate taxes—and international multinational corporations—for a high share of all tax revenues.3 For example, as of this year, the median nominal corporate tax rate for a sample of 36 poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa is 30 percent, with five of them still at the “old” U.S. rate of 35 percent.4

Of course, the real scandal is that very few multinational corporations that do business in Africa ever pay anything like these developing country’s high nominal tax rates. They and their enablers are masters at using devices like transfer (mis)pricing and pseudo-interest “asset stripping,” by way of thinly capitalized offshore subsidiaries, in order to drain profits from their local African subsidiaries.

At least under the old system developing countries have had a chance to crack down on these abuses by making them more clearly illegal and by improving tax enforcement. Under the territorial approach just adopted by Trump/Goldman, on the other hand, U.S. multinational corporations, in particular, will no longer owe much if any U.S. tax on their offshore operations. So they will no longer be able to make use of any tax credits that have been generated by paying these countries’ corporate taxes. That in turn will increase their incentives to even further minimize the taxes they pay in developing countries through a combination of dodgy practices, on the one hand, and increased pressures for tax competition among desperately “rich poor” developing countries, on the other.

From this angle, one of the few bright spots of the Trump/Goldman bill—albeit unintentional— is that it may suggest ways for developing countries to penalize multinational corporations that try to fiddle with asset-stripping along the same lines as Trump/Goldman’s “Base Erosion” penalties. Ironically, several EU Finance Ministers have already complained that such penalties may violate U.S. tax treaties and the OECD’s model tax agreements.

In any case, all the increased global tax competition resulting from Trump/Goldman is likely to undermine the bill’s own heroic assumptions about deficits, jobs, and growth that its supporters used to justify its hasty adoption. Evidently Republican leaders and their lobby elves did not even consider all these reverberations in their optimistic projections.

As we’ve seen, however, for many OECD countries, most of damage of global tax competition has long since been done. Those rich countries that care about tax justice are already moving on to other approaches, like progressive individual wealth taxes. The real problem devolves on developing countries. For them, by far the most damaging aspects of Trump/Goldman lie far beyond U.S. borders in its effects on global tax dodging, global fiscal deficits, global austerity, and global inequality and poverty.

This is especially true for countries like South Africa, mid-tier developing countries that are wealthy enough to control their own destinies, but also very dependent on conventional approaches to corporate multinational corporation taxation. This remains true, even as these very same multinational corporations, aided by their accounting firms, law firms, and lobbyists, have been beavering away night and day to overturn this relatively successful global corporate tax system.

It is one thing for America’s aging elite, their enablers, donors, and friends on Wall Street to infect themselves and their offspring with affluenza, an unhealthy obsession with the accumulation of unlimited private wealth and power. It is quite another to infect the entire rest of the world with it.

1Depending on whether the offshore assets are cash or “illiquid assets,” a murky distinction if ever there were one, the repatriation tax rates will be 8 to 15.5 percent This compares with the 35 percent Federal rates that applied when the funds were originally accumulated.

2For the period 2001–15/16, the median ratio of corporate tax revenues as a share of all government tax revenues by country was as follows: US 8.3 percent; Germany: 4.7 percent; the UK: 8.6 percent; France: 5.85 percent; Australia: 17.9 percent; Korea: 14.3 percent; Canada: 10.35 percent. Source: OECD data (2017), author’s analysis.

3For example, South Africa: 18.4 percent; Chile: 21.7 percent; Colombia: 22 percent; Peru: 24.6 percent; DRC: 13.4 percent. Source: OECD data, author’s analysis.

4OECD data on African country tax rates (12/2017), author’s analysis.

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What Was the Cold War?

When an historical era comes to an end the pundits move on and the historians move in. When major issues have been decided, or have faded in importance, commentary on them thins out and looks backward rather than forward. The emphasis shifts from arguments about what should be done and speculation about what will happen to judgements about significance and insignificance, right and wrong, and success and failure.

The passage of time, along with the publication of memoirs and the opening of official records, affords historical perspective. Up to a point, judgements tend to converge. To be sure, no verdict on a major chapter of history ever commands unanimous assent. Historians continue to disagree about aspects of the Roman Empire. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl called the writing of history an “argument without end.” Still, perspective enables historians to achieve a degree of consensus on events and trends that is unavailable while they are under way, just as the Manhattan skyline is clearer and more sharply defined when seen from the palisades of New Jersey than from the the heart of Times Square, even if disagreement persists on which of its buildings are the most graceful.

At a certain point after an historical chapter closes it becomes possible to write an account of it that incorporates such consensus as exists, and that may therefore stand as reliable, and as close to definitive as it is possible to come, for a generation. The Cold War, extinct for more than a quarter century, has reached that point, and with The Cold War: A World History Odd Arne Westad has written such an account.

Westad calls the Cold War “an international system,” by which he means a conflict, with its origins in Europe, whose impact radiated outward to the rest of the world. Between the end of World War II in 1945 and the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the great contest between the Western democracies, led by the United States, and the communist order, with the Soviet Union at its helm, affected—although it did not entirely determine—developments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Hence a history of the Cold War must be global in scope, and Westad’s book fulfills that requirement. He overlooks no part of the world and omits no event of any consequence, and he strings them all together in a clearly written narrative. The author of a number of other works on this subject, he has plainly absorbed as much of the voluminous corpus of documentary records and secondary sources as any individual can hope to do. The Cold War qualifies as a considerable achievement.

Some of the book’s strengths also count as weaknesses. The reporting of historical details, for example, sometimes comes at the expense of larger trends. The discussion of the Korean War faithfully reconstructs what is now known from the still-incomplete historical record about the decision by three communist leaders—Kim Il-sung of North Korea, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, and Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China—to launch it. The reader does not learn, however, of the wider consequences of that decision, namely that Korea turned the Cold War from a European to a global conflict and from a largely economic and political to a military contest, as well as introduced into the repertoire of Western foreign policy the concept of limited war, which replaced the World War II aim of total victory.

A book such as this one renders many judgements, and they are, for the most part, balanced. Westad writes critically, sometimes very critically, about the United States but does not neglect the mistakes, failures, and above all the crimes of the communist side. The treatment of some parts of the world is, inevitably, more thorough, accurate, and convincing than of others. The author is best on East Asia, an academic specialty of his, and Europe, his home region: he was born in Norway and taught in London before moving to Harvard.

The Cold War is weakest on the Middle East. Of the 1967 war there, for example, Westad writes that Israel “was undoubtedly the aggressor.” To the contrary: It was the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser who ordered the removal of the UN peacekeepers from the border between the two countries who had been stationed there as part of the multinational agreement to end the previous Arab-Israeli war in 1956; it was Egypt that blockaded the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s outlet to the Red Sea, an act of war that the Eisenhower Administration had promised Israel in the wake of the 1956 war it would reverse if it were ever undertaken—a promise that, in 1967, the Johnson Administration did not honor; and it was the Arab countries’ repeated declarations that they would erase the Jewish state from the map that convinced the Israelis that they faced the prospect of individual and collective annihilation.

Similarly, Westad devotes only a single paragraph to the Iran-Iraq war that killed more people between 1980 and 1988 than any other interstate conflict during the Cold War era, and pronounces it “a needless, aimless struggle.” Iraq’s Saddam Hussein began that war in order to unseat the recently established Islamic Republic of Iran, to maintain the dominance of Sunni Muslims, his own sect, over the majority Shi‘a Muslims in Iraq, and to assert his own primacy in the Arab world. Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, insisted on continuing the war even after evicting Iraqi troops from Iranian territory, for the purpose of consolidating his revolution at home and extending it beyond Iran’s borders. These were not, perhaps, admirable goals and were not, for the most part, achieved, but because the two leaders pursued them doggedly, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, it seems odd to call the conflict “aimless.”

By contrast, the book’s explanation of the two most important and controversial features of the Cold War—its origins and its conclusion—are likely to stand the test of time. The defeat of Germany and the severe weakening of Great Britain and France in World War II left a vacuum of power in Europe, the heart of the international system. The United States and the Soviet Union filled it. They became competitors rather than cooperating with each other because of their strongly held and incompatible ideologies. The Cold War, as Westad emphasizes, was from the first a contest of contrasting political and economic systems. In the 1970s a revisionist interpretation of the origins of the conflict appeared in the West, which imputed the principal responsibility for it to the United States, the stronger of the two major adversaries, and implied that it could have been avoided. Westad rejects this interpretation. While he argues that the American side might have done more to moderate the conflict, particularly after the death of Stalin in 1953 when his successors seemed momentarily open to better relations with the West, he is clear that a conflict of some kind was all but inevitable.

If the vacuum of power in Europe made the Cold War possible and the opposing ideologies of the two sides rendered it unavoidable, a third feature of the world of the mid-20th century gave it its global scope: decolonization. The end of the European overseas empires, and Japan’s Asian empire as well, led to conflicts over what would replace them in which the two opposing camps became entangled. The two major wars that the United States waged in the second half of the 20th century had their roots in the retreat of imperial powers: that of Japan from Korea and that of France from Indochina.

As for the end of the Cold War, the reader of Westad’s book will learn that the conflict’s unexpected and almost miraculously peaceful conclusion also had three main causes. First and foremost, in the contest of systems one of the two contestants scored a clear victory. The economic trends of the last decades of the century enhanced the advantages of Western capitalism over communist central planning in producing economic well-being. The superiority of Western free markets, all the more obvious because they worked so well for non-Western countries, especially in East Asia, had something like the effect that the kind of military victory that neither side came close to achieving in the Cold War has in shooting wars: It delivered a clear victory to one of the two conflicting parties.

Still, the Soviet Union and its satellites could have muddled along for years even as the economic gap between them and the West widened. They did not do so, and communist rule in Europe ended instead, because of the policies of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. In trying to revitalize the communist system he unintentionally set in motion the events that destroyed it. Westad portrays him as having become, by the end of his time in power, a kind of Western liberal. What made him such a consequential figure, however, was his singular and hardly common combination of three character traits: ignorance—he so little understood the empire over which he presided, for example, that he believed that the countries of Eastern Europe would willingly belong to a revived socialist commonwealth of his design; arrogance—he was convinced that he knew how to fix the multiple economic and political maladies that afflicted communism; and decency—at a number of points he could have stopped the disintegration of European communism by authorizing the use of force, but he didn’t.

Finally, the Cold Was ended because one of the two parties to it was subverted by the political power of nationalism. For the countries of Eastern Europe, their rejection of communist rule in 1989 was an act of national liberation. After 1991 the Balts and Ukrainians preferred national independence to membership in a larger, Russian-dominated political order. If inferior economic performance discredited the communist system, the force of national feeling tore apart the communist empire and ultimately the Soviet Union itself.

Nationalism as a major factor in international politics predated the Cold War, beginning, as it did, with the French Revolution of 1789. During the Cold War it worked, on the whole, to the advantage of the communist side. Although committed in each case to an ideology of global scope, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, the communists of Vietnam, and the militant clerics of Iran all succeeded in mobilizing nationalist sentiment in furtherance of their own ambitions and at the expense of the United States. Moreover, this form of political allegiance has persisted in the wake of the Cold War. Twenty-first-century Russia and China have abandoned orthodox communism, but nationalism is central to their domestic and foreign policies.

In this way nationalism is the great survivor of the era that Westad chronicles. The other principal causes of its beginning and its end now belong to the past. A vacuum of power in Europe, belief in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, the great multinational empires of the traditional great powers of Europe, the economic competition between free markets and central planning and the leaders of the Soviet Union—indeed the Soviet Union itself—can now be found only in books such as The Cold War, while nationalism goes marching on.

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