Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 117

China’s Seoul Solution to North Korean Nukes

In the first year of the Trump Administration, the mutual saber-rattling between Pyongyang and Washington has become so commonplace as to be almost numbing. As North Korea launches missile after missile and President Trump tweets taunting threats to “Little Rocket Man,” the regular muscle-flexing, name-calling and button-pushing can be all too easy to tune out—ignored in the confident conviction that cooler heads will ultimately prevail, and that the cold logic of nuclear deterrence will prevent a rhetorical war from escalating into a hot one.

This may yet prove to be a sound assumption. But if recent dispatches from the Chinese border are to be believed, it is one that Beijing is not taking for granted. As top Trump officials and prominent Republicans increasingly weigh a preemptive strike on North Korea, China is planning for the worst along its border, according to the New York Times:

A Chinese county along the border with North Korea is constructing refugee camps intended to house thousands of migrants fleeing a possible crisis on the Korean Peninsula, according to an internal document that appears to have been leaked from China’s main state-owned telecommunications company.

Three villages in Changbai County and two cities in the northeastern border province of Jilin, have been designated for the camps, according to the document from China Mobile. […]

The camps are an unusual, albeit tacit, admission by China that instability in North Korea is increasingly likely, and that refugees could swarm across the Tumen River, a narrow ribbon of water that divides the two countries. […]

“It is highly possible that there is a conflict between North Korea and the United States now,” said Zhang Liangui, a professor of international strategic research at the Communist Party’s Central Party School. “What China does here is to be prepared for any kind of situation happening on the Korean Peninsula.”

China’s contingency planning here speaks to its abiding fear of a protracted refugee crisis in the event of war or regime change in Pyongyang. And it suggests that China is taking that prospect more seriously than ever before. As hawks in Washington beat the drum for war, Beijing is making preparations for a worst-case scenario on the Korean Peninsula.

At the same time, the Chinese have begun an assertive new diplomatic push to forestall that outcome. This past week, in a little-noticed diplomatic overture, Beijing hastily dispatched its Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Zheng Zeguang, to Washington for what China-watcher Bill Bishop described as a “firefighting” mission. The backdrop of that mission was Pyongyang’s latest ICBM test, which suggested that Kim Jong-un had the capability to strike the entire U.S. mainland and sparked a new round of saber-rattling in Washington. President Trump, for instance, threatened “additional major sanctions” on North Korea, which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson later hinted could include Chinese financial institutions. H.R. McMaster said on December 3 that the potential for war with North Korea was “increasing every day” and called on China to implement a full oil embargo. In recent days, variations on that theme have repeatedly issued from both Trump officials like Nikki Haley and unofficial foreign policy advisors like Senator Lindsey Graham, who warned that “we’re heading to a war if things don’t change.”

Beijing presumably sent Zheng to Washington to calm these escalating tensions and plead for patience. And in the short term, he may have been granted his wish: the United States has imposed no new sanctions since the November 28 test, and President Trump has refrained from publicly pressuring China since then. And in a surprising development on Tuesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson even opened the door to beginning talks with North Korea “without preconditions.” Notwithstanding these positive signals, though, the Chinese know all too well that a growing contingent in the Administration is inclined toward a preemptive strike. And they cannot have been encouraged by the pushback to Tillerson’s remarks from the White House, which insisted that President Trump’s position on North Korea had “not changed.” Rather than trying to change minds in Washington, then, Beijing seems to be focusing the bulk of its diplomatic efforts on Seoul.

China’s strategy here has a certain logic. Under the dovish President Moon, South Korea is the American ally that is at once most vulnerable to the North Korean nuclear threat and least receptive to Trump’s combative approach. Earlier this fall, Beijing sought a thaw in relations after a misguided economic boycott over South Korea’s installation of the American THAAD missile defense system. Today, Xi Jinping is hosting Moon in Beijing for a major state visit, hoping to bury the hatchet and sell Seoul on his preferred solution to the crisis. From the Financial Times:

Some analysts believe that efforts by US officials to invoke the spectre of conflict in the region could push Seoul and Beijing closer together. […]

Kim Jae-chun, a professor at Sogang university, said: “South Korea believes there is a role to be played by China. That role is an arbiter between the US and North Korea.”

“The Moon government will be turning to China to say you guys have to calm things down with North Korea. But China will also ask South Korea to try convince the US to lower its rhetoric.”

China is pushing a “freeze for a freeze” deal in which North Korea would put a moratorium on its advanced weapons development in exchange for a halt to regular joint US-South Korea military exercises.

Moon’s trip to Beijing this week is one to watch. If the South Korean President endorses China’s “freeze for freeze” framework—which some in his own party believe he is inclined to do—the United States will appear out of the loop and off message with a key ally. And that would be just fine with Beijing, which has been eager to exploit tensions to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington (not to mention Seoul and Tokyo).

This will be easier said than done, of course. Whatever differences Moon may have with Trump and Abe, security cooperation between their three countries is only growing; this very week, they are engaged in missile-tracking drills over the vociferous objections of Beijing and Moscow. And whatever interest Moon may have in Xi’s diplomatic overtures, he would be loath to turn on a dime and embrace China wholeheartedly. Moon’s office has already announced that he will not agree on a joint statement with the Chinese President, in a sign of how difficult the bilateral talks could be. “The two countries are not in a situation to present a mutually acceptable position on a pending issue,” according to a top official at the South Korean Blue House.

That said, China may try to win over Seoul more gradually, playing off Moon’s misgivings with the American approach to North Korea. South Korea has already requested that the United States delay their joint military drills until after the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, a prudent enough request given the heightened tensions in the region. But if Washington grants that request as expected, Beijing may see the concession as an opening to persuade Seoul to delay those exercises indefinitely, as part of the “freeze for freeze” scenario. Evan Medeiros made the point in yesterday’s Financial Times, noting that the delay “dangerously validates North Korea’s claim that the exercises are a source of tension” and that “the next step could be to shrink the exercises or cancel them all together.”

For good measure, China is also seeking to repair trade ties with Seoul, and has even been calling for a long-awaited free trade agreement with South Korea and Japan. This, too, seems no accident: at a time when the Trump Administration has been antagonizing Seoul by threatening to rip up the KORUS trade agreement, Xi Jinping is launching an economic charm offensive.

Whether these Chinese moves will meaningfully change Seoul’s calculations remains to be seen; Moon may have misgivings about Trump, but he has good reason to distrust Xi even more. But it is clear, in any case, that China genuinely fears that the Trump Administration is prepared to go to war, and is positioning itself to exploit similar fears in Seoul.

For all these reasons, it counts as a rare piece of good news that the Trump Administration is finally about to nominate an Ambassador to South Korea, the well-respected Victor Cha. At this critical juncture, the United States needs a credible representative in Seoul to make its positions plain, shore up credibility with South Korea, and ensure that diplomatic options are exhausted before it rushes headlong into confrontation. Otherwise, China could be well placed to to seize the diplomatic initiative and frustrate American policy.

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Russia Jumps Into LNG With Chinese Money

Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the West carefully calibrated its ramp-up of sanctions to balance the need to turn the screws on Moscow without endangering European energy supplies. This targeting of Russia’s medium- and long-term energy projects pushed Russia to look elsewhere for financing for the development of its fledgling Yamal peninsula hydrocarbon projects.

Last week, Russia began loading the first cargoes of liquified natural gas (LNG) from an export terminal located on the peninsula. This landmark shipment wouldn’t have been possible without significant foreign investment, and because of those aforementioned Western sanctions, that money came from China. Though France’s Total owns 20 percent of the project, China’s CNPC owns another 20 percent, and China’s Silk Road Fund owns another 9.9 percent. Moreover, it was Chinese banks that stepped in to the void left by Western lenders post-Crimea sanctions. In that context, this isn’t just a step towards Russia’s oil and gas future in the Yamal region, it’s a strengthening of ties between one of the world’s largest energy producers and the largest energy consumer.

China’s involvement with Russian LNG extends beyond the role of financier, too. The liquified gas now being loaded onto ships along Russia’s northern coast will be able to travel east towards China for five months out of the year, when the route isn’t blocked by ice. As the global climate continues to warm, it’s reasonable to expect that the Arctic’s ice-free “season” will grow, giving more opportunities for Russia to supply east Asia. For Beijing, this is an opportunity to diversify its energy imports while reducing its reliance on coal, the burning of which has clouded its urban areas with toxic smog.

For Russia, this is a sign of defiance against the West. Not only was this LNG facility able to come online as scheduled and within the budget, it was able to do all of that without Western capital and know-how, in one of the most extreme environments on earth.

And this is just the beginning. Novatek, Russia’s second-biggest gas producer (behind Gazprom, who else?) and the company behind this Yamal facility, just announced plans to construct a second export terminal nearby, bringing its investments in Arctic LNG projects close to $50 billion by 2030. Interestingly enough, Novatek is reportedly in talks with Saudi firms as they look to secure investors. If that happens, it would be another example of Russia getting closer with another energy giant. Riyadh and Moscow have been working together on the ongoing petrostate oil production cut, but that cooperation could soon extend to natural gas, as well.

This suggests that the West’s sanctions against Russian energy interests aren’t as strong as they were believed to be when they were drawn up. The West deliberately left current Russian oil and gas production alone, but it doesn’t appear to be seriously constraining Russia’s future production, either—or at least, not to the degree that might give Putin reason to think twice in the geopolitical arena.

In the long run, Chinese or Saudi money won’t be able to smooth over all of the wrinkles in Russian energy production. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that the Bazhenov shale formation—which extends onto the Yamal peninsula—contains 285 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas, and nearly 75 billion barrels of oil. But China won’t be of much help getting those hydrocarbons out of all that shale rock, as it’s struggling to achieve commercial production at home. For that, Russia will need the kind of equipment, technical savvy, experience, and in all likelihood capital that only America can provide.

But Russia has plenty of conventional natural gas supplies, and an export hub on its Arctic coast makes it suddenly relevant in the supply-rich global LNG arena. For the United States, this means more competition in an already crowded market. For Europe, this means that Russia now has more choices for where to sell its gas, which means more leverage for Moscow. While most analysis of the Europe-Russia energy dynamic focuses on the Continent’s dependence as a consumer, there’s a similar over-reliance from the Russian suppliers’ perspective that LNG could help ease.

In the end, Arctic conditions—and not Western sanctions—will place the real limits on how much Moscow hopes to accomplish in its suddenly very real push to be a major LNG supplier.

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Don’t Undermine Democratic Values in the Name of Democracy

We’re in a kind of “hair on fire” moment with respect to the public mood about social media’s effect on democracy. Popular political commentary reflects this pervading negative mood with headlines such as: Do Social Media Threaten Democracy? Can Democracy Survive the Internet? How Twitter Killed the First Amendment. Your Filter Bubble is Destroying Democracy. 

The growing perception is that “the internet” generally, social media specifically, and dominant American platforms like Facebook and Twitter, even more particularly, are eroding the quality of discourse necessary to sustain democracy.

Citizens and governments are justifiably alarmed over the perceived deleterious effects of social media across multiple dimensions, ranging from creation of echo-chambers that increase polarized political discourse; to serving as megaphones for populist demagogues, terrorists, and authoritarians; to eroding the business model of traditional journalism, which is supposed to play an important watchdog role in democracy. Perhaps the most terrifying threat comes from the “weaponization of information”—manipulative use of social media by foreign governments reaching across borders to “hack discourse” and affect the outcome of elections.

This is a dramatic and dire turn of events: We used to assume social media and the general trend toward democratization of the means of distributing content were net positive forces for democracy: that social media disproportionately empowered civil society, expanded citizen access to information, and enhanced civic engagement. Now, we fear that social media is turning free speech against free society and actually undermining the integrity of democratic elections. The sad fact is that malign actors have figured out how to use social media very effectively against democracy, both inside and outside the United States.

But crafting effective interventions is much more difficult than expressing fear and outrage. The most basic point for democratic governments to keep in mind as they develop solutions is to be careful not to undermine democratic values in the name of protecting democracy.

The political reality is that policy-makers are facing pressure to “DO SOMETHING” about the negative effects of big digital platforms on democracy, without fully understanding all the dynamics at play. Policy-makers don’t have a clear conceptual framing for the various negative effects of social media they seek to reign in, much less a reliable empirical base for assessing those effects. The risk is that well-intentioned governing actors will move to “protect democracy” without thinking through the unintended negative externalities of their proposed solutions.

The core challenge we face is to quickly find effective ways to combat real threats, without undermining our own democratic values like freedom of expression and access to information.

As a starting place, before moving down a path to crafting solutions, policy-makers need to differentiate between platforms and functions within the same platform, rather than lump all “digital platforms” into one category. “The internet” is not the same as “social media.” Social media is not equivalent to search engines. Twitter bots are not the same as Facebook personalization algorithms. User-generated content simply posted on Facebook should not be conflated with newsfeed content pushed to the top of the feed by algorithms.

Second, the various ills in the digital information ecosystem and their deleterious effects on democracy should not all be collapsed into one category. Much of the animating energy driving policy makers to address the “problem of social media” flows from national security concerns about foreign information operations intended to disrupt democratic election outcomes. Foreign disinformation campaigns are not the same as the creation of political filter bubbles or the disruptive effect of social media on the business model of professional journalists in democracy. These distinctly different policy concerns will need different policy solutions.

Furthermore, much of the commentary seems to merge effects driven by inherent features of the technology with effects caused by malign uses of the technology by bad actors who manipulate platform tools for nefarious purposes.

For example, a core critique of Facebook has been that personalization algorithms and micro-targeting capacities shape access to information, create echo chambers and reinforce tribal mentalities, all of which intensify polarization and animosity in society.  (Apparently, the underlying empirical evidence with respect to Facebook’s polarizing effects is still being sorted out by independent researchers.)  BUT, even assuming the polarization effect of Facebook is substantial, the echo-chamber problem is distinctly different from the intentional manipulation of social media by foreign actors seeking to affect election outcomes. Delineating between inherent features and malign uses will help us define platform responsibilities and yield better solutions.

This is a pivotal moment for democratic governance in the digital realm.

To say that digital technology has disrupted society is a cliché. Yet, we are only just starting to grasp the radical break we are facing with respect to our legal institutions and norms, now that digital tools pervade our social relations and information flows. Policymakers are struggling to deal with this transformed information ecosystem, where existing doctrine and regulatory approaches don’t work. The speed, scale, and extraterritorial reach of “bad” online speech makes it qualitatively different from dangerous speech in the non-digitized realm, so we need new tools and rules to counter it. In American parlance, to say that we need “more speech to counter bad speech” just won’t cut it.

But there is an additional wrinkle on this already complex challenge: characterizing the nature of speech in the digital realm and whether it can be legitimately restricted in democracy is itself a very slippery subject matter. We are dealing with a kind of shape-shifting phenomenon where hate speech can look like core political speech that must be protected in democracy, when in fact that speech might be part of a foreign disinformation campaign intended to polarize American political discourse.

We see a bizarre interplay between domestic fringe hate groups and foreign anti-democratic actors, troll farms, and bot armies—mixing political themes with hate speech to sow seeds of discontent, mistrust, and polarization across borders. The hard part is that polarizing speech sometimes looks like it should be protected political speech in a democracy when it’s actually part of a sophisticated information operation we need to protect against.  This has created category confusion for us all.

Here’s the dilemma for democratic governments and policymakers:

Protection of free expression is now coming into tension with protection of democratic processes.  Protection against the pernicious effects of free speech and access to information have become top national security and cybersecurity concerns.

While we sort through this category confusion and develop new doctrine for a dramatically different information ecosystem, we must NOT give up on core democratic values. Our challenge is to stop malign actors while protecting free expression. To do this we need to internalize a “do no harm” mentality and think through the negative externalities of any interventions, especially when those policies might be replicated and go global.

During this period of tumult, democratic governments must not fall into the lazy and cynical view that they can no longer afford to protect free expression because of the dangers of social media. If they do, they will become unwitting participants in the erosion of democracy and help finish the work that foreign information operations started.

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Will Big Sister Be Watching?

The swinish behavior currently exemplified by Harvey Weinstein is, sorry to say, a constant in history. Indeed, it would be easy to cast the disgraced producer in a lurid film about any one of countless potentates—kings, feudal lords, warrior chieftains, sultans, bishops—who with impunity commanded the sexual services of wives, concubines, slaves, and other subjugated persons. To produce such a film, all it would take would be a quick raid on a studio costume department and the discarding of a certain hotel bathrobe. The star already knows the script.

And so do the rest of us—which is odd, since our society purportedly respects the dignity of every human being. Weinstein confined his swinishness to aspiring actresses, but others throughout history have preyed on both sexes, not to mention children. Today’s potentates—media celebrities, politicians, corporate executives, sports icons, religious leaders, educators, professionals—no longer claim in law what the French nobility once referred to as droit de cuissage (roughly translated as “right of the thighs”). But they certainly claim it in practice.

Their ranks a trifle thinned, the media are now taking credit for having exposed a previously unknown problem. Some are calling for an army of empowered women and enlightened men to lead us all into a bright future where the male of the species will cease not only to harass, assault, and rape, but also to act on lustful impulses. No one knows how, exactly, this bright future will be realized. But this is America, where every human problem has a technological fix. So let us appeal to the Titans of Silicon Valley. What advice would they give?

First of all, they would advise using their own highly profitable social media to name-and-shame offenders. This advice has already been followed. Right after the Weinstein story broke in October, indignant Facebook posts by Ben Affleck and other Hollywood icons attracted tens of thousands of likes, comments, and shares. On Twitter, the hashtag #MeToo is a viral rival to #Groper-in-Chief. And, as usual, the digital wave is being whipped into a tsunami by broadcast outlets hoping to regain the hefty profit margins reached by last year’s blockbuster reality show, Celebrity Candidate, starring Donald Trump.

Unfortunately, this naming-and-shaming is unlikely to make much of a dent in behavior that, while ugly, is deeply ingrained in human nature. But rather than despair, let us appeal once again to the Titans. After all, their embrace of innovative disruption shows an impressive disregard for human nature. Perhaps they have been working on some amazing new digital tools that, if deployed correctly, could halt sexual misconduct in its tracks.

As it happens, this is exactly what the Titans have been doing. Every December, Forbes chooses a “Businessperson of the Year,” and the choice for 2017 is Jen-Hsun (“Jensen”) Huang, a U.S. citizen born in Taiwan, who is cofounder and CEO of the semiconductor and software company Nvidia. According to Forbes, Nvidia isn’t a household name because “it doesn’t make a chat app or a search service…  meant to appeal to the average smartphone-toting consumer.” Instead, Nvidia is a world leader in “developing artificial intelligence systems that can take advantage of the more than one billion video cameras in cities to help manage everything from traffic congestion to parking.”

The key to these systems is “deep learning,” a term that refers not to serious human thought and reflection but to massive data-processing algorithms that can detect, analyze, and classify billions of distinct visual and auditory patterns. In short, deep learning allows a state-of-the-art surveillance camera to do much more than simply watch us walk down the street. Connected online to a phalanx of super-computers, it can also identify us, eavesdrop on our conversations, and sift through our entire digital footprint, all for the purpose of figuring out where we are headed—and why.

The reader can figure out where this is headed. If every luxury hotel, swanky restaurant, executive suite, and yacht frequented by Weinstein and his ilk were equipped with deep-learning technology, which, in addition to recognizing faces and voices, can see in the dark, pinpoint ambient sounds, read documents in multiple languages, and crunch terabytes of information on every individual in its crosshairs, then a lot of women might be spared a lot of pawing, flashing, and slobbering. In other words, if Big Sister were watching, the world would be a better place.

Or would it?

A recent report from the British research firm IHS-Markit states that, “thanks to deep learning, the futuristic type results popularized in films and TV which influences end users’ expectations for VCA is significantly closer than ever before.” And the report waxes bullish on the industry’s long-term prospects: “China is the largest video surveillance market in the world […] With the numerous large installations of surveillance cameras and massive amounts of video data, the end users in China are eagerly seeking ways to interpret the large amounts of data they collect.”

This prediction would be chilling even if the prose did not sound like Google Translate. It is chilling because, although this world-transforming technology was born in Silicon Valley, it has matured in China. As the Economist wrote one year ago:

The idea is to harness digitally stored information to chivvy everyone into behaving more honestly. . . .  That sounds fair enough. But the government also talks about this as a tool of “social management”: i.e., controlling individuals’ behavior . . . .

In the West, too, the puffs of data that people leave behind them as they go about their lives are being vacuumed up by companies such as Google and Facebook. Those with access to these data will know more about people than people know about themselves. But you can be fairly sure that the West will have rules—especially where the state is involved. In China, by contrast, the monitoring could result in a digital dystopia. Officials talk of creating a system that by 2020 will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

American society has a long history of moral self-regulation, as opposed to conceding that power to the government. But lately three things have changed. First, America’s moral self-regulation has, like the rest of our politics and culture, become polarized, with blue-state righteousness locked in bitter combat with red-state righteousness. Second, this combat is eroding America’s capacity for moral self-regulation. And third, our technological elites are partnering with the world’s most advanced police state to think up new ways to suppress the liberties on which our nation was founded.

In sum, America has much in common with China these days. Both fear the erosion of social trust and the proliferation of moral and financial corruption. Both have been heavily investing in technological solutions to the daunting task of keeping their citizens safe. In China, the latest stage of this investment is the building of entire “safe cities,” in which each and every citizen can be continually tracked and monitored as part of a vast “social credit system” that rewards and punishes behaviors—and thoughts—deemed correct or incorrect by the authorities.

The two countries are also very different. The Chinese Communist Party justifies building its digital dictatorship with constant allusions to crime and immoral behavior, but under President Xi makes no secret of its deeper intent to fine-tune the system so that it can crush every spark of political dissent. No American leader would admit to a similar intent. But as the leaden prose of IHS-Markit makes clear, the incentives to move in that direction are pretty powerful:

The global market for safe city solutions was estimated to be over $14 billion in 2016. This is projected to be worth more than $20 billion by 2021. Big data analytics, increased sensor connectivity through IoT [Internet of Things], and the ability to pool and share resources and ubiquitous access through the cloud will all emerge as key themes into 2017 with agencies and governments wanting to ensure that they are maximizing the use and business case to continue to ensure the success of their safe city deployment and ultimately the safety of their citizens and emergency service front line personnel.

Substitute “control” for “safety” in that final line, and you have the prospect facing us. The worst horrors of the 20th century were committed by totalitarian state actors seeking to straighten out, once and for all, what Kant called “the crooked timber of humanity”—either by exterminating or enslaving certain kinds of people or by eliminating through means of extreme prejudice certain social classes. We should be careful what we wish for.

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Don’t Sweat Institutions, Fix Relationships

Policy discussions in Europe today are filled with gloomy predictions of more hard times to come. Political uncertainty generated by the shock waves from the largest postwar surge in Muslim immigration, the continued pressure from Russia along the eastern flank, and the surge of public rebellion against the established political parties continue to chip away at an EU institutional construct that only a decade ago was touted as the future not just for Europe but perhaps for the rest of the world as well. Europe’s relationship with the United States has come into question too. Discussions in most of Europe’s capitals now routinely default to criticism of the Trump Administration and U.S. politics and policy in general, but they offer precious few insights about the path forward for Europe beyond assertions that foreign policy independence is imminent. In European politics, where the center has fractured, shrunk, or simply imploded, political inertia is increasingly the default. And that’s bad news for Europe, in terms of both the future of the European Union and the continent’s overall security.

Historically, whenever a turbulent political wind hit Europe, the default response was to press the “institutional button,” seeking to address each crisis du jour by expanding the supra-European organizational overlay in a seemingly unshakeable belief that the crisis was merely another sporadic manifestation of residual nationalism and that “more Europe” was the panacea. Even today, as the United Kingdom is about to march out of the European Union and established parties from the Netherlands to France to Germany reel from electoral body blows, “more Europe” remains the go-to answer, as though tightening the institutional screws could somehow infuse fresh energy into the vision of European federalism. The common European project seems stuck in a rut, and the fresh fault lines between the Continent’s western and central parts are a sign that Europe’s populations are ready for anything but more business as usual. And yet the European fascination with institutional restructuring is cresting again: The leader of Germany’s SPD, Martin Schulz, has called for the creation of a “United States of Europe” by 2025.

Europe is locked in a race against time to determine whether in fact its leaders can shed the ideological straitjacket forged in the past two decades of would-be, all-encompassing federalism that saw Europe’s future as one of incessant progression towards a supra-national Union. Today it is precisely the elite’s continued unwillingness to let go of its misconstrued conviction that federalism must absorb and subsume ever-more of the legitimate prerogatives of sovereign democratic nation-states that is causing Europe’s political paralysis. This ideological straitjacket, and the attendant fear that any accommodation of individual states when it comes to how they choose to respond to public pressure at home, will undermine the very idea of Europe. The idea that centralized federalism can or should be imposed on Europe’s nations constitutes arguably the greatest potential risk to Europe’s future. If unaltered, this ideological certitude may lead the continent to split into a “two-tiered Europe”—with the post-historical Western half finally launching the long-touted federal project while the peripheral non-Eurozone remains stuck in its “modern phase.” But, even more likely, it may actually cause the Continent to splinter into ad hoc clusters of states driven by shifting security considerations and national priorities. The idea that such a “Carolingian Europe” can in the 21st century be anything but a fallback position from what should have been—and can still be—a robust European treaty-based organization of strong nation-states should have been exposed as a dangerous delusion when the British decided to call it quits on the EU project. While one can certainly entertain various institutional schemes whereby such a new “core European Union” could become more governable from the center than the pre-existing design, it is simply dangerous to believe that a Europe without the United Kingdom engaged in its security and defense can be a serious actor in world politics, or that it will remain stable and continue to thrive economically if newer members of the European Union are condemned to a peripheral status. Furthermore, Europe’s security and prosperity without a strong Transatlantic link to the United States embodied in a revitalized NATO is a chimera; while the common European project is an important part of that larger architecture, Europe has always been more than the European Union, and the United States remains its essential ally and partner.

Amidst the calls for “more institutionalism,” at times in Europe one still hears voices of pragmatism and common sense that seem willing to acknowledge that a nation’s right to determine its destiny is not antithetical to values like democracy, free markets, and open societies. In fact, a number among Europe’s elite are beginning to wake up to the realization that, while European and American publics may not have all the right answers to their nations’ current predicaments, they are nonetheless asking the right questions on immigration, economic policy, national power, defense priorities, and most of all national sovereignty.

The idea of a Europe that is more than the sum-total of its nation-states remains one of the most captivating and valuable projects to come out of the carnage of the Second World War. Since its inception, it has embodied a tension between the European and the national, both within and between states, as the two vital elements that could ensure a “Europe whole and free and at peace.” Backed by American security guarantees, from their inceptions the Coal and Steel Community, the European Economic Community, and even the early iterations of the European Union ideal were still grounded in the fundamental premise that a continent with more than two millennia of history—indeed the birthplace of the modern nation-state—is not reducible to a vision of a centralized supra-national entity, regardless of how postmodern and post-national its leaders may believe themselves to have become.

What Europe needs today is less preaching from Brussels about the impending brave new world of a two-tiered Europe and more direct capital-to-capital engagement, with political leaders speaking privately and plainly to each other, cutting deals that will lay the foundations for a new intra-EU compromise. It is time to set aside the belief that Brussels has even most of the solutions to what ails Europe today, as well as the notion that re-engagement at the national level within the European Union’s structures would somehow doom the common European project. The reaffirmation of core Western democratic values should be a sine qua non of this process, but so should a deep respect for the sovereign rights of nations to chart their course and enter into binding agreements, all buttressed by a sense of genuine humility in every capital about the limits of what federalism and supra-nationalism can accomplish in Europe—i.e., a recognition of the fact that it can only go as far as the demos is willing to allow.

The common European project—the child of founding fathers such as Konrad Adenauer, Jean Monnet, and Robert Schuman, as well as Joseph Bech, Johan Willem Beyen, Winston Churchill, and Walter Hallstein—remains as open to our competing interpretations and as relevant today as it was in the 1950s and beyond. However, at its core the success of the European Union going forward depends upon the relationships among its member-states. Hence, planning for Europe’s shared future is not a “glass half-full/half-empty” discussion over how to reframe its institutions yet again, but rather a discussion about what is in the glass in the first place. If Europe accepts that supranational institutions are only as good as the relationships between the states who forged them, then it will have finally begun the process of breathing new life into its common project. It’s well past time.

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Liberal Democracy Is Stronger Than Trump’s Populism

When Donald Trump unexpectedly won the presidential election of 2016, many observers worried that the new President’s populist proclivities would do serious damage to American democracy. International experiences as much as Trump’s domineering personality and autocratic style inspired these concerns. After all, hosts of populists over many decades—from Juan Perón in Argentina to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and dozens of others in-between—have pushed their states toward illiberal or even authoritarian rule.

In general, populism stands in inherent tension with liberal democracy. Populist leaders seek to boost their personal power and hence see checks and balances as obstacles to their efforts to advance “the will of the people.” Whereas liberal democracy disperses and limits political power in order to guard against tyranny and promote fair political competition, populist leaders seek to concentrate power. Therefore, successful populism tends to hollow out, if not strangle, democracy.

Furthermore, populist leaders mobilize their supporters through direct, personal appeals rather than relying on party organizations: They create new, broad and amorphous mass movements or layer them on top of conventional party organizations with the aim of weakening or smothering them outright. Populist leaders use confrontation and polarization to attack “enemies” and incite conflict in hopes of energizing their followers and solidifying their backing. Populists demonize critics and treat their political opponents as foes to be destroyed. By turning politics into a war of “us vs. them,” populism de-legitimates fair competition and weakens free and open public debate, both of which are crucial for democracy. Populism’s stridency and Manichaean worldview undermine the toleration and humility that are central to liberal democracy.

One year into the Trump presidency, how have these threats played out to date? And what can we expect in the years ahead? Because this country has not had a populist leader occupy the presidency in 180 years, initial expectations varied. Some thought President Trump would be able to grab political power, infringe on institutional rules, and undermine democratic competition. Others believed that independent parties, a robust civil society, and a strong checks-and-balances framework would contain his populist assault and forestall damage to democracy. What does the record show so far and what is likely to occur in the future?

One way to get at this question is to employ a comparative perspective. In recent years, many democratic countries in Europe and Latin America have seen the rise—and sometimes fall—of populist leaders. These experiences provide lessons on how contemporary populists operate, and how liberal-democratic forces might respond. From them we can learn much about the conditions under which populist strategies and tactics tend to succeed and those that more often portend failure.

Four Obstacles in Trump’s Path

While populists in Europe and Latin America bear many similarities to Donald Trump, they have operated in different political contexts that need to be taken into account when drawing comparisons. The main differences concern aspects of the institutional framework, the party system, the cleavage structure, and the state of the economy when the populists take power. These four factors augur well for liberal democracy in the United States, making it difficult for President Trump’s putative populist machinations to triumph.

First, the United States has a presidential system of government with a clear separation of power between the chief executive, the two houses of Congress, and the courts. These institutional checks and balances hinder the populist quest for concentrating personal power. The parliamentary systems prevailing in Europe offer less resistance to would-be populist autocrats. A party that wins a majority in the legislature elects the Prime Minister (such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary), who heads the Executive Branch. This adds up to a great deal of concentrated power, which facilitates attempts to strangle liberal democracy.

Not only is the distinction between legislative and executive branches blurred in such systems, but in most continental countries the judiciary has less sway over politics than in the United States. Not even a politically appointed Attorney General can readily obstruct this separation of authority: Indeed, under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, Congress can impeach an Attorney General found guilty of criminal behavior, whether the President who appointed him objects or not.

In practice, Latin America’s systems of government also diverge from U.S. presidentialism. While the continent’s constitutions prescribe a clear separation of powers, Presidents in the region typically enjoy much greater formal or informal authority than their counterpart in the United States does. Moreover, some chief executives in Latin America accrue more power through various machinations that override formal strictures. In Europe and Latin America, therefore, populist leaders who command majority support can often establish political hegemony—which enables them to undermine democracy as they deem desirable. Due to the institutional framework of the United States, it is much harder for President Trump to do so.

Second, populist leaders usually rise to power in countries where party systems are weak or are collapsing. Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, became Prime Minister after a massive corruption scandal devastated Italy’s postwar party system. Similarly, Peru’s Alberto Fujimori and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez won the presidency when established parties were crumbling. In such fluid settings, populist leaders can create and dominate their own flimsy, unorganized mass movements. By contrast, Donald Trump has needed to deal with an existing party that he does not control and that did not want him to win its presidential nomination. The new President commands fervent support among the Republican mass base, but faces at least the residual distrust and aversion of the GOP establishment.

Because he has to deal with leaders and legislators of an established party, no matter how hollow and weak compared to earlier times, Trump is in a comparatively poor position. In this sense, he resembles Carlos Menem, the Argentine populist who won the presidential candidacy of the Peronist Party through a primary election in 1988, but who never managed to dominate his venerable party during his ten years as President (1989–99). In fact, another Peronist leader eventually blocked Menem’s attempt to perpetuate himself in power.

The political constraints that influential GOP barons still impose on President Trump are also similar to those facing some populist leaders in European multiparty systems. Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, for instance, never achieved a parliamentary majority on its own. Instead, the Italian populist needed coalition partners to win and maintain his premiership. For this purpose, he had to negotiate with powerful politicians whom he did not control. This is one important reason why Berlusconi never achieved unchallengeable political hegemony, and so did not do lasting damage to Italy’s liberal democracy.

Third, Donald Trump won the chief executive office in a country that suffers from an unusual degree of political and ideological polarization, which offers him some political opportunities, but also imposes important constraints on his populist designs. Populist leaders usually emerge when mainstream parties have converged in their policy programs and ideological positions.1 Because “the political establishment” leaves voters few real choices, many citizens flock to populist outsiders who promise to raise neglected issues. Venezuela’s Chávez, for instance, addressed widespread social problems that previous governments had failed to resolve; in this way, he won the backing of 65-70 percent of the citizenry. In the United States, by contrast, the Republican and Democratic parties have engaged in significant ideological and cultural sorting from the civil rights era onward. As a result, their party delegations in Congress vote in ever more distinct ways. The mass bases of the two parties have also moved further apart in recent years; in particular, fervent right-wing movements have pulled the GOP away from the moderate center.

The polarization prevailing in the United States makes it very difficult for Donald Trump to win majority support, despite the significant appeal of populist entreaties across the political spectrum. Indeed, his presidential approval ratings have since May 2017 hovered below 40 percent. How can this U.S. populist credibly claim to represent “the people” when a majority disapproves of his job performance and expresses its aversion to his personal leadership? Latin American populists, like Chávez and to a lesser extent Nestor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández Kirchner in Argentina, have used landslide victories in plebiscites and elections to cement their political hegemony and dismantle or weaken democracy, but the new U.S. leader’s middling level of support makes such a strategy unfeasible. Americans are unlikely to coalesce into a broad mass base of support for Trump’s populism as long as ideological and cultural polarization offers real choices that divide “the people.”

Fourth, Donald Trump faces a paradox, because President Obama left the U.S. economy in good shape as measured by conventional standards, such as growth, inflation, and unemployment. When Trump ran for and subsequently took office, the country was not suffering from a perceived severe or acute crisis. In comparative perspective, the absence of pressing problems is unusual. Right-wing populists often emerge when their country is sliding toward the abyss. By claiming the mantle of the providential savior, these political outsiders can benefit from dramatic crises as long as they seemingly or actually manage to pull the nation away from the brink. Peru’s Fujimori and Argentina’s Menem, for example, faced hyperinflation of four to six thousand percent per year. When these populist presidents boldly defeated the scourge of inflation, large majorities felt enormous relief. As a result, Fujimori and Menem won sky-high popularity ratings of up to 70-80 percent, which subsequently allowed them to dominate politics, change the constitution, and engineer their own reelection.

The United States, however, did not suffer from a crisis in 2016 comparable to, say, the Great Depression of the 2007–09 period. Therefore, President Trump has lacked an opportunity to boost his backing dramatically. The structural problems that helped to fuel Trump’s rise, such as de-industrialization and the loss of well-paying jobs, are not amenable to quick fixes. A bold adjustment plan can stop hyperinflation from one day to the next, but there is no rapid way, especially in a market economy like that of the United States, to bring back millions of industrial jobs. Even a determined populist leader like Donald Trump cannot turn the Rust Belt into a string of shining, modern factories, or magically resuscitate demand for coal when market factors decidedly point in the opposite direction. The absence of an acute but resolvable crisis deprives President Trump of the chance to win over masses of new followers from the ranks of independents or Democrats. And a populist who is not very popular is not very powerful.

In sum, international experiences suggest that President Trump lacks important preconditions that would allow him to win overwhelming support, relentlessly concentrate power, and undermine liberal democracy. Populist leaders like Berlusconi and Orbán, Fujimori and Chávez encountered open doors and unusual opportunities. By contrast, the U.S. President faces four sets of interlocking obstacles. Firm checks and balances limit his power. The unreliable backing of his own party prevents him from overriding these institutional and political constraints. Ideological polarization and the absence of an acute crisis restrict his mass support. For these reasons, he cannot make an end run, grab power, and weaken checks and balances, as Fujimori and Chávez did by convoking government-controlled constituent assemblies. By international comparison, President Trump confronts an unfavorable environment for establishing populist hegemony.

President Trump’s Populist Strategy

Given these four obstacles, what are the prospects of populism in the United States? International experiences can shed light on President Trump’s political options for dealing with the institutional and political limitations he faces. These experiences suggest that his limited mass support makes his strategy of relentless confrontation likely to fail. Comparative insights also elucidate the strategic dilemmas confronting the opposition, which can choose between a direct counterattack against the brash populist or pragmatic efforts to entrap this inexperienced chief executive in a web of constraints.

What emerges from the following discussion is a sanguine conclusion: Liberal democracy in the United States will survive the challenges and risks that populist leadership poses. Certainly, Trump will continue to transgress norms of accountability and civility during his term, but he is unlikely to effect lasting changes, enshrine them in institutional reforms, and thus do more than temporary damage to liberal democracy. The U.S. system, sustained by a pluralist civil society, has great resilience. In fact, there is a good chance that the new President’s norm violations may generate a liberal-democratic backlash that will reaffirm these principles after Trump’s departure, and perhaps even strengthen their institutional protection.

How can Donald Trump advance his agenda? Populist leaders commonly employ confrontation and foment polarization. To prove their boldness and charisma, they act like attack dogs. They deliberately seek enemies in order to induce their followers to offer intense support. As is evident in his Twitter barrages, President Trump has consistently used this contentious strategy. This approach has its advantages. Because Trump cannot easily expand his backing, given the high levels of partisan polarization in the United States and the absence of an acute economic crisis, it makes sense for him to solidify the support he does have by attacking enemies.

But this confrontational approach also has substantial downsides. After all, the system of checks and balances puts a large premium on negotiation and compromise if a President wants to get his measures approved by Congress and to survive challenges in the courts. The cost of confrontation is especially high because President Trump does not fully control the GOP delegation in Congress. By turning his ire not only against Democrats, but against the Republican leadership as well, he risks antagonizing legislators whose support he needs. No wonder that, so far, Trump has established a very meager legislative record. Moreover, this legislative weakness may set him up for political failure. His problems in steering his bills through Congress not only generate a sensation of government paralysis, they also limit his ability to provide benefits to his supporters, for instance via substantial tax cuts for middle- and lower-middle class people.

Of course, some populist leaders manage to turn adversity to advantage. They parlay legislative stalemate and gridlock into radical institutional reform, which weakens checks and balances and boosts presidential powers. Peru’s Fujimori, for example, closed Congress and then convoked a constituent assembly that strengthened his institutional armor and facilitated his political hegemony, which persisted for years. Hugo Chávez achieved even longer-lasting predominance by calling elections for a constituent assembly, which he used to rewrite the constitution, strengthen his hold on power, and ultimately suffocate Venezuelan democracy. Will Donald Trump be tempted to bend, if not break liberal democracy as well? The party polarization prevailing in the United States could facilitate such machinations. Hostility to the opposition could induce the GOP to use its majorities in Congress to impose illiberal reforms and to allow Trump to skew democratic competition.2

But while such a slippery slope toward soft authoritarianism is imaginable, the obstacles described above make this risk remote. The interlocking nature of the checks and balances system makes serious erosion of democracy unlikely, and open infringements highly improbable. For instance, even a Republican-dominated Supreme Court would forestall a descent into authoritarianism. Moreover, it is doubtful that the GOP would want to empower Trump, whose unpredictable, arbitrary leadership many party barons distrust. Indeed, they have incentives to keep the new President fairly weak so they can extract concessions and keep him under control.

Another big obstacle arises from Trump’s limited mass support – the flipside of partisan polarization and of the absence of an acute crisis. A President with 55 percent disapproval rates is exceedingly unlikely to get away with a serious assault on democracy. Even limited restrictions, such as a further tightening of voting rights, will draw a determined response from the vibrant U.S. civil society, which can challenge his policies through the courts. Thus, the four interlocking limitations that Trump’s populism faces offer a great deal of protection for liberal democracy.

By definition, the political strength of populist leaders depends on their popularity. What are the chances that President Trump can augment his mass support? Contrary to the Latin American populist leaders who confronted hyperinflation, for example, Trump lacks an opportunity to rescue the country from a severe challenge and thus win sky-high approval. Consequently, Trump has focused on solidifying his limited but fervently committed base with controversial measures and polemical symbolic steps, such as his travel bans and proclamations on white-nationalist violence.

But this narrowly targeted strategy has serious downsides. With his politics of resentment, Trump further cements ideological divisions and thus precludes any effort to broaden his support. As a result, he has clearly failed to win the sweeping backing that allowed his Latin American counterparts, such as Chávez and Fujimori, to establish political hegemony and strangle democracy. Indeed, Trump may be setting the GOP up for failure in the upcoming midterm elections. Given that the Republican leadership has always disliked him, a disaster in 2018 may be the beginning of Trump’s political end—and a big victory for liberal democracy.

Strategic Options for the Opposition

While Trump’s populism confronts important challenges, the opposition, especially the Democratic Party, faces a dilemma as well: Should it frontally combat the imperious chief executive, go on the counterattack, and carry out mass protests? Or should it primarily work through institutions, especially Congress and the courts, to block Trump’s political agenda? A decision on priorities is required. It would be self-defeating for a party to approach its political adversaries for the sake of negotiation and compromise and at the same time mobilize its more militant supporters for street demonstrations. Given the weakness of party organizations in the United States, a mobilizational strategy requires clear ideological appeals, which then make it much harder to reach across the partisan divide and seek support within the Republican Party in defending the basic rules and norms of liberal democracy.

International experiences with populism show that extra-institutional strategies of protest and contention have low chances of political success; indeed, they hold considerable risks. Demonstrations work only when they proceed in an orderly fashion and when focused on fundamental values, as in Poland in mid-2017, where they induced the President to veto illiberal measures adopted by a parliamentary majority from his own party. In this case, however, an additional constraint was probably crucial as well, namely supranational scrutiny from the European Union, which monitors the quality of liberal democracy in its member states. Given the unique position of the United States as a global superpower, President Trump does not face any serious external pressure.

Moreover, a protest strategy risks backfiring and fueling the polarization between the populists’ supporters and the opposition parties that populist leaders deliberately foment. In Venezuela, for instance, an escalating sequence of mass demonstrations and extra-institutional challenges ended up playing into Chávez’s hands. Assailed by powerful enemies, this populist firebrand redoubled his appeals to the masses and fought back with all means, trampling on liberal rights and strangling competitive democracy.

Given the political risks of a protest strategy, the strength of institutional checks and balances in the United States, and the lingering animosity between President Trump and the Republican leadership, an institutional and electoral strategy looks far more promising. Democrats in Congress can peel off some GOP support on specific measures, as the repeated failure of the efforts to repeal “Obamacare” show. Moreover, in upcoming electoral contests, they should be able to benefit from divisions in the Republican camp. Besides the disagreements at the top, the party is pulled in different directions by zealous but divergent movements among its bases. Moreover, Trump’s populist strategy to target his core supporters with hardcore appeals should open up political-electoral space in the center. As hostility to the President guarantees the Democrats support from their more militant constituents, they can afford to employ a centrist strategy designed to win over independents and swing voters.

Certainly, however, charting this promising path may require some adjustment in the Democrats’ programmatic appeal. One reason why the party lost the presidency in 2016 was that an extravagant, flashy multi-billionaire managed to capture voters among the white working class that the Democrats used to claim as a core constituency. These people, many of whom live in the Rust Belt, felt neglected by a party that has put less emphasis on socioeconomic issues while stressing progressive cultural values. If the Democratic Party wants to re-gain support among these sectors, it will need to focus more on the basic economic and social problems facing most people. By winning back some of the white working classes, the Democrats can weaken Trump’s hold on power in the 2018 elections and end it in 2020.

The Resilience of Liberal Democracy

Contrary to the widespread pessimism among academics, this comparative analysis arrives at an optimistic conclusion. President Trump is caught in a web of limitations and constraints. The venerable U.S. system of checks and balances prevents him from exercising power in an arbitrary fashion and governing as he sees fit. His lack of control over his own party and his problematic relationship with the Republican establishment further undermine his capacity for determined action. Ideological polarization confines Trump’s popular support, and the absence of an acute crisis nullifies any opportunity for him to become a proverbial “savior of the country.” He cannot simply override these constraints and impose his will, as Peru’s Fujimori and Venezuela’s Chávez did.

For these reasons, one can venture a prediction: Trump’s passage through the presidency will not do lasting damage to democratic institutions in the United States. But might he nevertheless weaken liberal-democratic norms? Trump has already committed numerous violations that are typical of populist leaders. First, he has used unusually harsh, even insulting language to criticize the media, the political opposition, past and present government officials, and even members of his own party and Administration. Second, the President has exacerbated inter-ethnic tensions by accusing Mexican immigrants of being rapists, proposing to ban Muslims from entering the United States, denouncing black protests of police violence, and appearing to sympathize with white nationalist groupings. Third, he has undermined faith in the electoral process by depicting it as rigged and suggesting, without any evidence, that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 presidential elections. Fourth, he has flouted long-held traditions of releasing tax returns and avoiding financial conflicts of interest. Finally, he has aggressively sought to block investigations of his Administration by firing the Director of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence, among other actions.

The main problem for liberal democracy is that such violations can create a precedent and stimulate a process of escalation and polarization as opponents resort to transgressive tactics as well. In these ways, Trump’s defiant words and actions could embolden future politicians and Presidents to employ similarly coarse and polarizing rhetoric, to question the integrity of democratic institutions, to protect themselves and their allies from prosecution, and to ignore principles of transparency and probity. If the liberal norms that underpin U.S. democracy erode, rules and institutions may also become vulnerable in time to attacks or politically self-serving changes. Office holders may abuse their power and pass regulations that dismantle checks and balances, skew democratic competition, and disadvantage the opposition. With these means, incumbents may unfairly try to perpetuate their stranglehold on the government.

Yet this doomsday scenario is unlikely to transpire as long as a majority of citizens continue to view Donald Trump’s populist strategy as a failure. Success breeds imitation, but failure rarely does. Clearly, the new President’s approach to governing has registered few successes to date. His plans to repeal Obamacare have foundered in the legislature, his strident rhetoric and impulsive behavior have alienated opponents and allies alike, and his approval ratings are the lowest any recent U.S. President has attained at this stage of their terms. Nor are Trump’s populist strategies likely to yield many governing achievements in the years ahead, given the web of constraints and limitations that hamper him. As a result, this confrontational, transgressive approach is unlikely to spawn imitators. Future candidates for the Republican nomination may well copy his campaign, which was surprisingly successful; but there is a low risk that future Presidents will copy a populist governing style that has yielded so few benefits.

Indeed, it seems more likely that Trump’s violations of democratic norms will prompt a pro-democratic backlash. The current pulse of populism may well serve as a warning—and end up inducing a wide range of political forces in the United States to prevent a repeat experience. Such a salutary reaction occurred in several Latin American countries. Peru, for example, experienced a democratic resurgence after Fujimori was forced to resign in a monumental corruption scandal. His successor, Valentín Paniagua (2000–01), decisively foreswore populism. The new President scrupulously respected the norms of liberal democracy, guaranteed press freedom, and helped congress and the courts regain their independence. A similar democratic recovery occurred in Brazil after the downfall of populist Fernando Collor de Mello in 1992. Once this imperious outsider was impeached on corruption charges, mainstream parties and civil society stabilized the country’s fragile democracy and instituted rule by broad-based, pragmatic coalitions. Respect for liberal-democratic rules and norms gradually increased. For instance, president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva did not follow his leftist counterpart Hugo Chávez and overhaul the institutional framework through a constituent assembly.

Violations of democratic norms by past U.S. Presidents have also triggered a liberal-democratic backlash. In particular, Richard Nixon’s abuses of power led to a wave of reforms that reined in the Central Intelligence Agency through the creation of oversight committees; asserted a greater role for Congress in the use of military force abroad; imposed restrictions on the President’s ability to remove a special prosecutor; attempted to regulate campaign finance more closely; required members of Congress to disclose their personal finances; and restricted lobbying by former members of Congress and their staff. These measures helped strengthen democracy in the United States and restore faith in its political system.

As these comparative lessons from Latin America as well as the U.S. experience in the 1970s suggest, norm erosion does not inevitably continue once set in motion. The path does not always point downhill. Instead, deterioration can prompt recovery. As the risks of further decay become obvious, a growing range of political forces may deliberately try to restore civility. Perhaps the shock of President Trump’s populism can exert this salutary effect.

Interestingly, Donald Trump’s election has already had such a pro-democratic impact—namely in Western Europe. His victory arguably drove voters away from Dutch populist Geert Wilders and from French populist Marine Le Pen, who lost elections in early 2017. As Trump has exerted a deterrent effect on Europe, his problem-ridden government may have the same impact in the United States. Indeed, Trump’s actions have already prompted some legislative responses, including bipartisan bills to make it more difficult for the President to remove a special counsel. According to the New York Times, Senator Lindsey Graham (R–SC) issued the following warning in introducing one of these bills: “I want the President to know that there is a process in place and there are checks and balances long before you got here, and they will be here long after you’re gone.” A comparative analysis suggests that he is correct.

1Kenneth Roberts, “Parties, Populism, and Democratic Decay: American Democracy in Comparative Perspective,” to appear in, Does Trump’s Populism Endanger U.S. Democracy? Lessons from Europe and Latin America, edited by Raúl Madrid and Kurt Weyland.

2This is the risk of democratic backsliding that Mickey, Levitsky, and Way highlight in their Foreign Affairs essay of May 2017.

The post Liberal Democracy Is Stronger Than Trump’s Populism appeared first on The American Interest.

The History of Tomorrow’s Wars

The Future of War: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

PublicAffairs, 2017, 400 pp., $30

 In 1892, a British journal called Black and White published a fictional account of a future pan-European war. Remarkably, the spark the authors invented to ignite the conflict was an assassination attempt in the Balkans of a man named Prince Ferdinand. In the ensuing war, however, they pitted an Anglo-German alliance against France and Russia.

Such intermingling of predictive success and failure exemplifies the story Sir Lawrence Freedman tells in his latest work of wide-lens historical synthesis: The Future of War: A History. Freedman, an emeritus professor of history at King’s College, London, is one of the most renowned academic writers on military strategy, widely respected by scholars and practitioners alike. His previous book, Strategy: A History, took on a similar task: to make sense for the layman of a subject of unwieldy scope and complexity.

The Future of War is more modest by comparison, at around half the length and reaching back in time only as far as Bismarck instead of the Old Testament. While its brevity demands compromises in depth, the book largely succeeds in offering a thoughtful synthesis of a diverse body of literature in clear and simple prose.

If there is a single key theme in Freedman’s story, it is the persistence of undue optimism about future war, albeit of two distinct sorts.

The first is the elusive promise of “decisive battle,” a quick and devastating blow that settles the political issues of the war in a single stroke. Freedman documents resilient nostalgia for “classical warfare” where generals maneuver in search of a large, climactic clash between regular forces. The book begins with such a set-piece collision of armies, the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War. But the decisive battle concept extends into more modern and complex territory as well. Early Cold War strategists contemplated the potential for preemptive nuclear strikes. In a similar vein, the dawn of the information age and development of precision weaponry promised a “revolution in military affairs,” which Freedman characterizes as “an idealized version of classical warfare.” And today’s often-invoked potential for a massive politically motivated cyber attack is another entry in the genre. A related theme is the fear of surprise attack. Pearl Harbor in particular reappears throughout the book, casting a long shadow across American strategic thinking from 1941 to the present day.

Freedman’s view, however, is that history justifies neither the fear nor the promise of such surprise or war-winning single attacks. The Battle of Sedan turned out to be less decisive than it first appeared. More recently, American forces pioneered cutting-edge information-enabled precision strike only to find themselves bogged down for years in Iraqi and Afghan insurgencies. Even Pearl Harbor, after all, was only a tactical success for Japan, and ultimately precipitated its catastrophic defeat.

The second flavor of unwarranted optimism Freedman finds is the promise of an end to war altogether. He describes the earnest efforts of multiple generations of diplomats, scholars, and activists to impress upon the world’s leaders the inherent illogic of warfare. In the wake of the recent Nobel Prize for Peace award to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, it is interesting to be reminded of much earlier Nobel award recipients with similarly ambitious (and improbable) projects. The 1933 winner was Norman Angell, now remembered mostly for his book The Great Illusion, which had the misfortune to advance the notion that major wars were an anachronism only a few years before the outbreak of World War I.

In these sections of the book, Freedman taps into questions extending beyond war and peace, and into the plausibility of a progressive view of history and the perfectibility of mankind. As students of philosophy know, there is evidence on both sides of this debate, and Freedman’s story includes some of each. On the one hand, war has by some measures become less frequent, pervasive, and violent. Democracy has expanded with some—albeit complicated—beneficial impact on the incidence of conflict. On the other hand, expectations of major progress in limiting war have been repeatedly dashed, and seemingly compelling arguments that the next innovation in deadly technologies will make war less attractive (the machine gun, strategic bombing, nuclear weapons, and so on) have been successively disproved.

Freedman’s comments on United Nations peacekeeping operations could serve as a good summary of the larger peacemaking projects throughout history:

Here was the core problem with peacemaking at any level. Peace required a political settlement, but was that to be based on a calculation of the balance of power at the time, or a sense of the rights and wrongs of the conflict, which might address the underlying, and probably still simmering, grievances that had led to the conflict?

The Future of War: A History is divided into three main sections, each quite different from the others. Part I covers the ways in which modern wars between 1870 and 1991 were—and, more often, were not—anticipated. Part II, nominally focused on the post-Cold War era, is really more of an academic literature review on the causes of conflict, from international relations theory to scholarship on civil wars and terrorism. Part III then addresses a set of issues that preoccupy today’s military futurists, such as “hybrid war,” cyber war, robotics, and artificial intelligence. This is a very wide swath of territory to cover, and significant portions of the book are devoted to high-level sketches of the history of international relations and conflict over the past 150 years. While these sections are compact and easily digested, readers with professional interests in the field may find themselves wishing for a more selective but incisive treatment of these topics.

A more novel and compelling feature of the book is its interweaving of future wars as depicted in fiction and film. Often, of course, writers and filmmakers got it wrong. But occasionally, they were quite prescient, and Freedman uncovers a few instances in which fiction actually influenced the course of war preparations, such as H.G. Wells’s early vision of atomic weapons and the interest Ronald Reagan took in the movie War Games and Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising.

This is not a highly conceptual book. Freedman describes but does not really analyze the conceptual problems that his story surfaces, for the most part seeming content to leave open fundamental questions about the validity of forecasting, the design of military doctrine and plans, the interaction of technology and operations, and the like. He does, however, construct an extended critique of academic analysis of warfare. In general he finds unfolding history to have consistently wrong-footed political scientists. The end of the Cold War in particular confronted international relations theorists with a major problem, and Freedman opines:

One response to this might have been to go easy on the theory, concentrating on observing carefully what was going on in the world, and only offering propositions on causal relationships as and when they seemed appropriate and always with regard for context. Yet the dominant trend in the field was not to abandon theory but to make it even stronger. Only then could it become more predictive.

He also catalogs the challenges analysts have faced in building and employing large analytic databases on interstate conflict, such as the Correlates of War and Militarized Interstate Disputes (hosted by Penn State University). On this point he notes, “Historians, whose observations had been dismissed as being too intuitive or speculative, could retort that the yield from the effort that went into refining the methodologies and interrogating the data turned out to be meagre.”

Freedman titles his main chapter on this subject “A Science of War,” making clear his skepticism that such a science is possible. Many of his points rehearse long-standing complaints from historians about political science. Some of the arguments are more than fair, and Freedman marshals them well. Nevertheless, as the book also makes clear, one need only scratch the surface of any discussion of the future of war to reveal a set of assumptions—perhaps explicit, perhaps inchoate—about the causes of past wars. Indeed, this principle applies to any predictive enterprise. And discerning the causes of past and future wars remains a necessary task, whatever its required mix of artistry and scientific measurement. So despite all the difficulties of data and logical inference in this field, it seems odd to imply, as Freedman does, that remedies are to be found in a less systematic approach to studying the causes of war.

In his introduction, Freedman writes, “We ask questions about the future to inform choices, not to succumb to fatalism.” His analysis steers clear of fatalism, but what is his final message for those burdened with choices about the future of war? Ultimately, he warns against expecting either too much or too little continuity between the present and the future, and concludes that many forecasts of war “will deserve to be taken seriously. They should all, however, be treated sceptically.”

For today’s leaders, then, his story sheds a little more light on the path ahead. But that path, along with the debates about the best ways to peer ahead, remains as wide open as ever.

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How “America First” Turns Into “America Last”

In the first year of Donald Trump, Amerikakritik, a pseudo-academic euphemism for anti-Americanism, has finally made it into the Duden, the German version of the OED. Of course, there is no such thing as anti-Americanism in polite German society; “we are just against this or that U.S. policy/president,” runs the standard disclaimer. In the official German discourse, the disparagement of America-as-such has remained coded and couched in professions of trans-Atlantic fealty.

Time-honored politesse was yesterday. This week when Chancellor Merkel’s foreign minister, the Social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel, turned a startling new page. In a speech entitled “Europe in an Uneasy World,” he first affirmed the orthodoxy: yes, the United States remains “Germany’s most important global partner,” and “we will need and sustain this partnership in the future, as well.”

But then, the tonality turned and the silk gloves of diplomacy came off, marking a watershed moment. For ages, European and German resentment has always targeted American dominance and arrogance: “Dirty Harry” as “Globocop.” This time, Gabriel pounced for the opposite reason. As of this year, he decreed, “we have been witnessing a weakened willingness or ability to project and shape [the global] order.” Is it “intentional retraction or waning power?” asked Germany’s diplomat-in-chief. It doesn’t matter—a vacuum is a vacuum, and “whenever somebody leaves the room, somebody else will enter.”

Overbearance, it seems, has yielded to underperformance. With Trumpist America pulling back, Gabriel claimed, the U.S. was shedding its “role as reliable guarantor” of the liberal order. So far, so half-correct, given that Trump is hardly withdrawing from the world, but is in fact reversing the retrenchment of the Obama Administration. Gabriel was right, though, in faulting Trump for dismantling America’s ancient multilateralist tradition (which, as I’ve argued before, is not such a bright idea).

In this new dispensation, Trump offers a lot more “Dirty Harry” and a lot less “Globocop.” This role reversal, according to Gabriel, should prompt Germany and Europe to reconsider their old allegiances, assert “their own interests,” and take matters into their own hands. This logic cannot be gainsaid. Others will move in if the U.S. checks out.

Alas, the cold-eyed analysis came with a baleful undertone. We are facing, the foreign minister growled, “the surrender to American policy, something we have never experienced in the past.” The message read like Gabriel’s very own Emancipation Proclamation from American slavery.

As Anna Sauerbrey, columnist at the Berlin-based Tagesspiegel, asked: “Emancipation from what?” This German victim of American hauteur may have bowed and scraped during the Cold War, when keeping America’s strategic umbrella in place defined the supreme national interest. But after the demise of the Soviet Union, strategic dependence fell, and with it the price Berlin was wiling to pay for American protection. To wit: A reunited Germany refused to join George W. Bush’s war against Saddam’s Iraq. Under Obama, it did not fly along with NATO’s bombers going after Qaddafi’s Libya. It is not cutting diplomatic ties to Pyongyang, just reducing them.  Some slavery.

How to emancipate Berlin from Big Brother today, then? Not to put too fine a point on it: by cozying up to Russia, Big Brother next door. Putin may be a bad guy—expansionist and anti-Western, Gabriel intimated—but Russia is “Europe’s neighbor,” and “a very influential one, to boot.” This said, Gabriel followed up with an old Social Democratic mantra going back to Willy Brandt’s New Ostpolitik of the 1970s: “Security and stability can be had only with, and not  against, Russia.”

None of this amused most of the Western diplomats listening to Gabriel’s Berlin peroration. Why now take swipes against Chancellor Merkel, who insists on beefing up the German military and keeping the Russia sanctions in place?

Naturally, Gabriel was also addressing his comrades in the SPD. After the party’s disaster in the September elections, the Social Democrats have been moving to the left, bridling against rearmament and hankering for détente with Moscow. As the SPD mulls yet another grand coalition with Angela Merkel, Gabriel went for a “twofer”, invoking German-European nationalism as a counter to U.S. might, while still presenting himself to his peace-minded SPD colleagues as guardian of the proper faith. Read his speech as a job application submitted to the party congress: please nominate me for four more years at the head of the Foreign Office.

Honi soit qui mal y pense, quip the French—shame on him who thinks ill of it. All foreign policy begins at home. But in terms of grand strategy, Gabriel struck yet another blow with this pitch for Moscow. Merkel, the once and future chancellor, wants to hold on to Russia sanctions. Gabriel was softly signaling acceptance of Vladimir Putin’s indirect conquest of southeast Ukraine with the help of local surrogates. He proposed loosening the sanctions should Moscow agree to a ceasefire. But ceasefires freeze the status quo, which in this case would allow Putin to consolidate his gains. So listen up, Mr. Trump, Gabriel hinted: if we are caught between a shrinking America and a resurgent Russia, we will have to make nice to the Kremlin next door.

Who is this “we” Gabriel is alluding to? The European Union, of course, and its new savior, Emmanuel Macron of France. Forget Angela, the previous empress of Europe. Unfortunately for Gabriel, this is all pie-in-the-sky thinking. Monsieur Macron will not lead the EU into an anti-American alliance. Just look at the pomp and circumstances he bestowed on Donald Trump when he welcomed him to Paris on Bastille Day. Nor will Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy and Europe’s most populous nation at the center of the Continent, tag along behind France. Finally, for all its fabulous riches, the EU will not magically gestate into a strategic actor—and certainly not with Herr Gabriel’s butter-instead-of guns Social Democrats.

For Washington, there is a still larger point to ponder. While the U.S. in its glory days was living up to its global responsibilities, no European, not even Sigmar Gabriel, would have unloosed such a broadside against the vaunted “leader of the free world.” Think Spider-Man. As he lay dying, Uncle Ben famously told his superhero nephew: “With great power comes great responsibility.” The dictum works in reverse, too: If you shirk responsibility, your power dwindles.

That is the central problem of Trumpism. Leave aside the subtext of Amerikakritik in Gabriel’s unparalleled challenge to the U.S. and stick to the gist of his analysis. It whispers: If you want influence, you must take care of friends and allies; don’t clobber them with “America first.” Power, Peter Parker muses in Spider-Man, is “my gift” and “my curse.” Shed the curse, and you’ll lose the gift.

The post How “America First” Turns Into “America Last” appeared first on The American Interest.

“If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem”? Not a Chance

President Trump’s announcement on Wednesday that the U.S. government would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital predictably set off a preternaturally gigantic spilling of electronic ink. A good deal of it on the radio and in social media, as best I can tell, amounts to semi-ignorant blather; hence it constitutes a blathard—not as natural or as beautiful as a blizzard, but piled high and irritating all the same.

The ink also naturally forms a kind of political Rorschach Test: Tell me what someone says about the announcement, and I’ll tell you their views, well-considered or otherwise, about all the pertinent issues in the universe of Arab-Israeli contentions.

It would be tedious to march our way through it all. Some of it, however, bears entertainment value and hence deserves mention. For example, the Hamas political directorate in Gaza has proclaimed that Trump’s decision ends forever the possibility of a positive U.S. mediation role in the conflict. This implies that before one p.m. yesterday the Hamas directorate acknowledged the positive U.S. role in mediating the conflict and was willing to participate in good-faith negotiations with the Israeli government under that aegis. This is funny, no?

Then there is the chorus of tongue clucking and tut-tutting from our European allies. The domestic realities of Arab-Muslim political clout—as against relative Jewish political impotence—in Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and elsewhere differs from analogous realities in the United States. That difference—added to both a residual and varying economic bond having largely to do with energy supplies and prices and a supine fear of making of oneself a plumper target for terrorist attacks—accounts for many differences over the years between what those governments say and what by now a long skein of American administrations have said.

Just sticking to the Jerusalem issue in this regard, official European voices said very similar things in the past every time a candidate for President promised to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the embassy there—and when the Senate voted to formally favor the move back in 1995. And as before, the almost total contemporary fecklessness of the former “great nations of Europe”—if I may be allowed a Randy Newman allusion—makes their complaints as insignificant as they are predictable. That doesn’t mean a small country like Israel can afford to ignore them, but still. They’re not as funny as Hamas, true, but a droller kind of humor is anyway their métier.

And of course this self-protective rhetoric has never prevented European government officials (or those of other nations) from meeting with their Israeli counterparts in their Jerusalem offices or visiting the Knesset. So the rhetoric has been and remains just that; it affects the practical protocols of diplomacy not one whit—hasn’t done so in the past and very likely will not do so in the future.

So what does this announcement mean, and do? Well, it bolsters a part of President Trump’s political base and bids to expand it at the expense of Democrats generally. It comes at a time, too, when an otherwise achievement-free White House is feeling—as it should—the white-hot scrutiny of Robert S. Mueller’s investigation closing in all around it—also as it should. So is this a “wag the dog” ploy, when you get right down to it? Could be.

The announcement also marginally helps Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu wiggle away from not one but three corruption scandals threatening to bring him down. Wag-the-dog squared? That could be, too.

There is a less seamy side to the timing, however. Just last week the United Nations General Assembly passed a typical clot of anti-Israel resolutions, and one of them piggybacked on a fairly recent UNSECO resolution asserting by fiat that there is no historical Jewish association with Jerusalem. This accords with one of Yasir Arafat’s wildest lies: that there never was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, that it was instead somewhere in Yemen.

Muslim historiography itself, available to any literate Arab, makes clear that the Dome of the Rock was knowingly and deliberately built over where the Temple’s “holy of holies” once was. Seventh-century Sunni Islam acknowledged openly its debt and connection to Judaism, even as it believed Islam superseded Judaism. Jewish sources from the period reveal, too, that the Jewish residents of Jerusalem at the time welcomed the building of the Dome of the Rock because it protected the site, which had for a long while been used by the now-vanquished Byzantine Christian authorities, deliberately, as a garbage dump.

Keeping all this in mind, not to speak of the archeological evidence, for Palestinian leaders to continue to insist on the fiction of there being no Jewish historical connection to Jerusalem is simply embarrassing. It identifies those who peddle such bullshistory as unserious people. For the United Nations to ape this nonsense identifies it as an unserious organization. That it ought to embarrass everyone concerned, but doesn’t, says all we need to know about the UN—and the clearer that becomes to normal people, the better. As with Israel and the Europeans, that doesn’t mean we can afford to ignore the UN, especially the Security Council, but still.

Yesterday’s announcement has of course ticked off a lot Arabs and Muslims, Palestinians in particular. Rage and violence among the latter were very predictable and have already begun.

Some have predicted as well that rage and violence will spread afar in Arab capitals, putting post-“Arab Spring” survivor governments in jeopardy as anger directed toward Israel and the United States metastasizes—as anger in mob form often does—into threats against more proximate targets. I doubt this will happen to any significant scale. Survivor and successor Arab regimes are battle hardened against domestic unrest today as they have rarely been in the past, not that they ever ignored that portfolio. And past predictions of explosions on the fabled Arab “street” on account of things going on in Palestine have usually been overwrought. Nevertheless, it would be prudent to beef up embassy security in Cairo, Amman, Baghdad, Tunis, Islamabad, Ankara, and so on.

The general effect within Palestinian politics will be to push a beleaguered Mahmoud Abbas to take a harder line with regard to Israel and a softer line with regard to ongoing “unity” or “reconciliation” negotiations with Hamas—negotiations undertaken through joint Egyptian-Saudi-Emirati supervision, and pressure (of which more below). Logic dictates that such an outcome will make a peace deal harder to reach, but that only matters if one thinks a peace deal is reachable at all in the near future. It isn’t, no matter what the U.S. crown prince may think. By the time a deal might be reachable, the temporary tactics that Abu Mazen feels put upon to implement will have long since taken their place in the bulging archive of snakehead dancing—to deploy the late Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s colorful phrase—at which Palestinian leaders have been forced to become adept.

As to the announcement’s broader impact, looking to the future, on efforts to resolve the conflict, it is mild if it is anything. A look at the terminology of the announcement, and of the somewhat strange White House communiqué speaking of the President in the third person that accompanied it (as if somehow his own words were not sufficiently authoritative or clear…echoes of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy?), shows that the embassy decision was taken with a careful concern not to prejudge or prejudice the solution to the Jerusalem problem in the context of a two-state solution. (Actually, the White House commitment to a two-state solution en passant is as significant as the Jerusalem announcement, given the doubts on that score that were allowed to spread earlier this year.) There is no reason to doubt that assertion. If the parties eventually come to some agreement, of which the future of Jerusalem is a part, nothing said yesterday will be an obstacle. The announcement does not bless the Israeli annexation of the city, nor does it sanctify the pre-June 1967 inner-city boundary that arose de facto on account of the 1948-49 war. It intelligently avoids defining any boundaries whatsoever. It does not say where in Jerusalem a U.S. embassy would be located, and it does not even say when.

It is true that the narrow legal status of the city is bound up in the Partition Resolution of 1947, and to a lesser extent in a between-the-lines reading of the Israel-Transjordanian Armistice arrangement at Rhodes in 1949, and that the announcement runs against the grain of that legal status in Israel’s favor. But the internationalization of the city called for in the 1947 resolution was stillborn: Both the Zionist Executive and the Hashemite court agreed that it would and should not happen, the eventual result being the physical division of the city as a result of the 1948-49 war.

More important, perhaps, the Hashemite claim to speak for any part of Arab Palestine or for any part of Jerusalem was rescinded in 1988 in favor of “Palestine” and the Palestinians , which meant at that point the PLO. That marked the end point of a series of declensions of Jordanian involvement that began with the Arab League Summit at Rabat in 1974.

The Hashemite crown has kept its finger formally in the Temple Mount ever since solely through its stewardship of the Islamic waqf there, and such practical cooperation as there has been since late June 1967 between Israel and the local Arabs has run mainly through Amman. That has irritated the Palestinians—as it was no doubt intended to do—but Jordan’s connection in this residual, limited sphere anyway grew stronger with the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty of October 1994. The point is that the legal status of the city according to international law has been frozen despite a good deal of fluidity in practice, which that legal status was powerless to arrest. Yesterday’s announcement falls fairly innocuously into that flow.

That said, the President’s optimistic claim that the announcement “marks the beginning of a new approach to conflict between Israel and the Palestinians” falls somewhere between cryptic and risible—cryptic since no details were broached, risible because the intimation that every approach that could have been tried hasn’t already been conceived and tried is absurd. There is nothing new in the Administration’s approach, insofar as we have a sense of what it is. What is new, arguably, is the context in which an old idea may find a new application.

What is this not-really-new idea? It’s called the outside-in approach. And here, with respect to the current implementation attempt, is where things get strange. Bear with me for a moment.

The outside-in approach takes for granted that, left to their own devices, Palestinian political leaders and Israeli government leaders will not be able to seal a deal. The substantive divisions are too great, and the readiness of relevant publics to accept compromise too thin. So the only way to get the deed done, and thus eliminate the irritation the conflict represents to interested third parties, is to bring in outside parties to leverage the protagonists to come to heel.

This notion has taken several forms over the years since 1967, including the old idea of bringing Israel into NATO in order to limit its policy flexibility in return for indelible assurances about legitimacy and security. But in recent years, the notion has focused instead on cocooning Palestine, and Palestinian nationalism, beneath the tender folded wings of the Arab states. That was the thinking behind the supplementary “multilateral track” established after the Madrid Conference of autumn 1991. It has been the thinking behind several iterations of the Jordanian Option through the years. And the Arab actor that has now become primus inter pares for the outside-in approach is Saudi Arabia.

The idea, depending on its variations and who is explaining it to whom, is to either re-contain the toxin of radical Palestinian nationalism, as it had been contained before 1967, or to protect a nascent Palestinians state from several forms of its own misbehavior, division, and vulnerability until such a time that it can stand responsibly on its own feet with regard to Israel and the larger international “community.” Since Israel is no longer viewed by Arab state elites as an existential problem for them—thanks in part to lasting peace treaties with both Egypt and Jordan, and de facto normalization arrangements with several other Arab states—a real difference of interest exists between the Arab states and the Palestinians. So, goes the logic, the Arab states could “deliver” the Palestinians to Israel on behalf of their own parochial state interests, which sees the troublemaking capacities of the Palestinians as inimical to those interests. The palliating argument that goes with this logic—again, depending on who is making the argument to which kind of audience—is that this kind of arrangement is also better for the Palestinians than the creeping status quo of occupation, and better in the long run for Israel too, for mostly similar reasons.

There is nothing wrong with this logic, and a lot right with it given the paucity of alternatives that might work. I myself have made the argument. Thoughtful Israeli leaders have in recent years endorsed the logic, too. The problem has been, until recently, that the Arab states refused to play their parts. In their judgments, the risks of trying to deliver the Palestinians to a deal they would need to do public and palpable things to support outweighed the benefits.

What has changed, may have changed, or still might change? Pretentions of Iranian regional hegemonism have altered Arab state calculations at a time when faith in U.S. protection has waned. Especially if Israeli power can be concorded with Sunni Arab efforts to thwart Iran, selling out the Palestinians would be a small price to pay for that benefit, especially if it could be made to look like something other than a sell-out. And here we have the origin of the aforementioned strangeness.

Without belaboring the backdrop too much, suffice it to say that the Trump Administration has seen Saudi Arabia as the linchpin of what it imagines to be its strategy for the region. The Saudis are supposed to be the deus ex machina for marshaling and bankrolling the Sunni Arab world in dealing with the Islamic State and any pop-up successors, the key to solving the Palestinian mess, and the partner of preference (along with the UAE) in managing the security infrastructure of the Gulf and beyond. Saudi Arabia, in short, has become a Nixon-like “pillar” in a one-degree-of-separation U.S. regional security architecture—although the chances that the President himself would understand the historical analogy are nil.

The appetite for an Israeli-Saudi connection pointed against Iran is already a longstanding one, and has usually constituted a fantasy of one kind or another. A few years ago some fevered minds “uncovered” a secret deal in which the Israeli Air Force would destroy the Iranian nuclear program secretly using Saudi air space and bases in the process. There was no such deal. More recently, rumors have been flying faster than beer pours at a frat party. So the secret deal this time has Netanyahu and Saudi Crown (and very generous art collector) Prince Mohammed bin Salman—with the U.S. crown prince as mediator—agreeing that Israel will hammer Hezbollah in Lebanon and, in return, the Saudis will muscle the Palestinians into accepting a tenth of a loaf in an arrangement with Israel.

Now, this is the kind of thing that might arise from “wee hours” private conversations between MbS and Jared Kushner, since from all appearances neither one of them remotely knows what they’re doing. Still, the reports seemed to me too wild to be true, or even if “wee-hours” true, much too fragile a notion ever to be successfully implemented.

To save his political skin it’s not impossible that Netanyahu would order a massive first-strike against Hezbollah, but it would be very hard to get the IDF senior staff to agree to such a thing for all the risks and costs it would involve. And I frankly doubt that Netanyahu is quite that selfish and irresponsible in a pinch; his behavior with respect to the latest failed peace process effort suggests otherwise. Moreover, it’s not clear at this point, his coalition weakened so much, that Netanyahu even wants to get involved in a negotiation with the Palestinians that might require Israeli concessions to succeed.

If such a deal had been floated, and if Netanyahu proved reluctant to embrace it, that might explain at least some of the strangeness of recent days. It has proceeded more or less like this.

According to many press reports, MbS summoned Abu Mazen to Riyadh a few weeks ago to “brief” him on the outside-in plan up his sleeve, and the plan was said (later by Abu Mazen) to be so draconian that no Palestinian leader could possibly accept it. My guess is that for purposes of self-protection, Abu Mazen exaggerated the downside of what the Saudis told him. But he has reason to worry. It is well known that the Emirati and Egyptian leaderships have been plotting, with Saudi knowledge and approval, to insert Mohammed Dahlan into Abu Mazen’s seat at some point. Dahlan is the kind of corrupt pragmatist that an outside-in deal requires; he supposedly gets along even with thugs-turned-cabinet ministers like Avigdor Lieberman. Reportedly, the Saudis told Abu Mazen that if he did not swallow the terms proffered, the Emirati-Egyptian-Saudi phalanx would replace him with someone who would. Abu Mazen did not have to guess at the name.

When word got out about this—whether the story is true or not, or half true and deliberately exaggerated, is almost beside the point—it forced the Saudis publicly to disavow at least the Jerusalem aspect of this supposed plan, since they knew in advance what was planned to be announced on Wednesday. This would be an easy call if by then they knew there was no “big deal” to be had with the Israelis—at least not yet. They asserted publicly that East Jerusalem had to be the capital of a Palestinian state and strongly urged the White House not to change U.S. policy. The White House went ahead anyway. Then, also Wednesday, for the first time the White House, not the State Department, called on the Saudi government to lift the “humanitarian” siege of Yemen, an announcement that is sure to piss off MbS.

None of this makes a lot of sense: If the Trump White House put all its eggs into the Saudi basket, then why do things guaranteed to alienate your preferred proxy? That’s exactly what it did: By picking on the Jerusalem issue, Trump gave Abu Mazen a club to whack the Saudis with, and the Saudi recoil in turn has harmed the U.S.-Saudi relationship Trump is depending on. This is statecraft malpractice in the first degree.

And why send Vice President Pence to the region to discuss the fallout rather than Kushner or Tillerson? Just because Kushner and Tillerson are involved in a pissing match that resulted in a headline last week about Tillerson’s imminent departure from the State Department? That’s so petty. More important, it reflects the fact that no adults are firmly in charge in and around the Oval Office.

As I said, strange….. maybe we’ll be privy to some eventual clarifications. For the time being, however, the best explanation seems to be that we are in the midst of a “monkey-in-the-machine-room” episode, in Washington-Riyadh stereo.

Meanwhile, the only practical way to solve the Jerusalem issue in the context of a good-faith negotiation has long been obvious—to me at least, and to a few others I could name (a former Jordanian King, a law professor at Tel Aviv University, a pope, and so on). Once again, here it is.

Since the symbolic profile of the Jerusalem issue is bound up with uncompromisible religious convictions that reach all the way up to heaven, the first condition of a resolution is to remove the symbolic obstruction—and do so in a way that both main sides—Jewish and Muslim—would be embarrassed to object to. How? Easy: Get the protagonists to agree to put in abeyance the question of national sovereignty over the Old City in perpetuity, and instead recognize the sovereignty of God. Jews, Muslims, and Christians are supposed to believe that Jerusalem, al-Qods (the “holy” in Arabic), is God’s city, the holy city of peace. So let them put their mouths where their theologies are.

Once the symbolic issues are set aside in this fashion, it takes just one more ounce of imagination to resolve the rest. Instead of seeing sovereignty in standard modern territorial terms, sovereignty needs instead to be vouchsafed in people. Like the old Ottoman millet system that worked for about 400 years, functional control has to reside in voluntary communal affiliation. So when it comes to, say, voting for local and national representatives, the Jewish citizens of Jerusalem can vote for their councils and the Arab citizens can vote for theirs, no matter exactly where in the city they happen to live. It takes a massive mutual failure of imagination not to understand this, but, unfortunately, such failures have been common. Overcoming them takes enlightened leadership. Wake me, please, when you detect any.

If the symbolic and political aspects of a settlement can be agreed, cooperation on things like garbage removal, street light repairs, and all the rest become about as easy as they have proved to be de facto for about the past half century. For a good-sized ancient (and partly modern) city, Jerusalem’s streets and parks are reasonably clean—at least compared to Tel Aviv or Ramallah. This is neither a coincidence nor a matter of dumb luck. Jewish and Arab residents of Jerusalem both revere the city in which they live, if not always for exactly the same reasons. That love creates sufficient bonds of pragmatism to transcend, or at least to bracket, differences and disagreements. It’s a basis for expansion, and for hope. There—some good news at last. Keep it safe; it’s rare.

Finally, a word about Zionism at its best and in its essence. Many Jews, in Israel but especially outside it, seem to think something truly important inheres in President Trump’s statement. They seem to think it meaningfully validates one of their own deeply held principles in some non-trivial way.

Well, it is true that international expressions of Israel’s legitimacy are of tactical significance—as the anniversaries of both the Balfour Declaration and the Partition Resolution remind us. But for Jews to imagine that they need outside concurrence to ratify their own decision as to where the capital of the State of Israel should be means they have failed to grasp the real meaning of Zionism. “Hatiqva,” the anthem of the State, includes the line, “to be a free people in our land, in the land of Zion and Jerusalem.” A free people does not need anyone’s permission to decide such matters.

And, just by the way, the same principle will apply to free Palestinians if they ever determine to make the collective decisions that will enable them to possess the state that has long since been offered them. It is in everyone’s interest that they do that soon, before it is too late.

The post “If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem”? Not a Chance appeared first on The American Interest.

Statesmanship at the Movies

Darkest Hour

 

Directed by Joe Wright

 

Focus Features (2017), 125 minutes

Good decision-making is the very essence of politics. Yet as we see all around us, the virtue that the ancient writers called phronesis and which we sometimes call prudence is exceedingly rare. One way that the capacity for good judgment is formed is through the study of history; indeed, Thomas Hobbes argued that the teaching of prudence was the ultimate goal of all historical inquiry. For this reason, Darkest Hour, the new film about Winston Churchill’s first days as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in World War II, is a significant historical film. By showing Churchill’s mastery of the political forces of the country in the spring of 1940, the film offers a marvelous illustration of that most necessary and rarest of political virtues.

To be sure, the movie will win few plaudits for historical accuracy. To take just the strangest example, the film depicts Churchill taking an impromptu ride on the London Underground at the time of the fall of France, querying stunned passengers about whether the country should fight on. The Churchill of Darkest Hour is a bit of a bumbling drunk, hampered by indecision and self-doubt. It does funnily and accurately depict his bumbling French in his meeting with French leaders and high military command before the fall of France.

Was Churchill nearly consumed by self-doubt? The evidence differs. As he later recalled, he went to bed on May 10, 1940, his first day as Prime Minister, “conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” Though Gary Oldman generally does a very worthy Churchill, he captures little of that frenetic energy and intelligence that, even at age 65 in 1940, astonished friends and enemies alike.

The secret to Darkest Hour’s importance is its selection of a question at the heart of Churchill’s brilliance. One can imagine many different plot devices related to Churchill’s war, including the fall of France, the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, D-Day, and many others. Indeed, these subjects have been endlessly treated in other works, and Darkest Hour touches on both the fall of France and Dunkirk. Yet the movie is ultimately about a political judgment that Churchill has to make, and the complicated factors he has to confront in making his judgment prevail.

The film revolves around the question of whether Britain should be open to negotiating an independent peace with Nazi Germany in May 1940, as all of Western Europe stands on the verge of collapse. Advancing the cause of peace negotiations are two members of Churchill’s war cabinet, Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane) and, to a lesser extent, the ailing former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup). Churchill is adamantly opposed to their entreaties, insisting that Britain must fight on to the end. How could one negotiate with the maniacal tyrant Hitler and expect him to keep his side of the bargain?

In retrospect, Churchill might seem obviously right. Yet the film artfully offers a glimpse of the atmosphere of the time, when survival itself seemed at stake. In the days preceding the evacuation at Dunkirk in the last week of May 1940, Britain was faced with the potential capture or destruction of the whole British Expeditionary Force in France. America was sympathetic but noncommittal. Even if the troops in Northern France could be re-embarked, the German forces were superior by almost every quantitative measure. When behind the barrel of a gun, a negotiated peace can seem like an attractive option.

To its credit, Darkest Hour does not reduce Halifax and Chamberlain to stick figures. It gives their views an honest hearing. They argued that Churchill was in denial about the gravity of the British situation. Yes, they said, Hitler was our enemy, but he could be persuaded to tolerate an independent Britain and British Empire. Furthermore, what was the harm in trying? If Germany offered unacceptable terms, Britain could simply walk, and be no worse off. Though the movie doesn’t offer historical parallels for this side of the argument, Halifax, once an Oxford don, certainly thought in these terms. Sidmouth and Liverpool had signed the Treaty of Amiens with Napoleon in 1802, when he was master of all Europe. Yes, the peace collapsed, but hadn’t Britain gained precious time to regroup for the next round?

The arguments for an independent peace, in other words, had a certain rationale. It is indeed often forgotten, though never by Churchill himself, that Chamberlain’s appeasement policy was also based on a strategic calculus. Chamberlain had seen that Germany was a threat, and that its Luftwaffe was far superior to the Royal Air Force (RAF). Appeasement of Hitler over Czechoslovakia in 1938, he thought, could leave Britain valuable time to rearm. Whatever their flaws, Halifax and Chamberlain pursued the national interest as they saw it.

Darkest Hour thus shows us the complexity of Churchill’s task in May 1940. He had to outfox the formidable rivals within his war cabinet. He had to direct the war in France as Germany closed in on the Channel ports. And he had to make “never surrender” carry the day among the British public. Churchill responded marvelously, destroying the negotiated peace option through argument and maneuver. As for Churchill’s position, the film sums it up with his statement: “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.” Note that Churchill does not deny that you might have to reason with a tiger if you’re a safe distance away. Yet in Britain’s position at the time, negotiation would have equalled submission, slavery, and death.

The lynchpin of Halifax’s argument, by contrast, was that death was more likely if Britain chose to resist. To this claim, Churchill offers both a strategic and moral diagnosis, and offers a kind of moral psychology of national pride: “Nations that went down fighting rose again,” he tells his war cabinet, “but those who surrendered tamely were finished.” This sounds like death before dishonor, something Churchill did seem to believe. Yet he understood this in terms of national self-interest as well. If one consented to slavery, national death would follow anyway. If you have national dishonor, you will have national death. In fighting on in such circumstances, Britain was in a good position to gamble: it had nothing to lose, and a lot to gain.

The film also conveys Churchill’s subtle, important point that the British government could not even show a willingness to consider negotiation. This openness, Churchill knew, would so dispirit the troops, nation, and Empire that it could fatally damage the drive to continue the struggle. In the end, Churchill offered a better and more realistic assessment of the respective situations of Britain and Hitler, relying on his clear-eyed sense of the true moral and political stakes in the life of his nation.

Even if a bit too inclined to treat Churchill as an old bumbler, the film does let us see his masterful tactics in advancing his argument. We see him win over the formerly reluctant King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn). Most especially, we see how Churchill appealed directly to the people over the heads of a wavering elite, stoking their sense of patriotism and bucking up their willingness to fight on. He did this primarily through his speeches, which the film excerpts in part. Oldman’s wonderful delivery of these speeches may well represent his finest hour as an actor.

Churchill’s critics at the time saw something demagogic in his grand verbal and written appeals to the nation in the 1930s and during the war. They sometimes lacked detail or papered over potentially dispiriting or inconvenient facts. Yet this film reminds us that, in a democracy, the line between demagoguery and statesmanship is thin (though not indistinguishably so). Churchill successfully bound the “will of Parliament” with the “will of the nation,” putting Parliament under pressure to go along with his point of view and boosting the national appeal of the cause he knew to be the right one.

Some early reviewers of the film have seen connections between Churchill’s heroic anti-isolation stand and the contemporary situation of the UK. Just as Churchill rejected the argument for an “independent peace,” the argument goes, we should also reject Britain’s attempt to disengage from Europe today. Whatever the merits of Brexit, this argument strikes me as extremely forced. The film’s Churchill says not to negotiate with a tiger when your head is in its mouth. This would be apt today only if we considered Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron to be tigers. British history extends further back than World War II, and the country has always wavered between strenuously engaging in the affairs of continental Europe and shielding itself from European troubles. World War II and Churchill, alas, do not offer a clear guide to the contemporary challenge.

Darkest Hour will likely be compared to Dunkirk, another 2017 movie that treats of these days, but from the perspective of the civilians who manned ships to carry troops stranded at Dunkirk back home. In a way, these two films make a perfect pair. Dunkirk is told from the perspective of the ordinary men and women engaged in the struggle, while Darkest Hour offers a political viewpoint from the very top. But perhaps the better companion of Darkest Hour is Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), which is less a movie about the Civil War than a drama of political decision-making, as the President navigates the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery, and displays amazing prudence in holding the necessary parties together for the passage of the bill. Together, these films offer a compelling image of what statesmanship at the highest level could look like.

Churchill’s grandiose self-assessment happened to be true. His entire life had prepared him to lead Great Britain and the Allies at their most perilous moment. His preparation consisted of a remarkable mix of an illustrious family upbringing and an education in the ways of the world through school, sport, war, travel, technical experimentation, and involvement in politics. That kind of preparation and education frankly seems unavailable today, even if someone had Churchill’s natural gifts. Yet Churchill’s example shows us how much we lack—and the perception of a lack is the beginning of wisdom.

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