Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 118

A Sideshow and a Showdown in Kyiv

This week, with much of the world’s attention diverted to Washington and Jerusalem, Kyiv has been home to some high-stakes political drama of its own. Since Tuesday, Ukraine’s capital has been roiled by a pair of intense confrontations: one a personalistic clash of wills playing out across rooftops, amid mobs, and in full view of the cameras; the other a less camera-friendly but more consequential showdown, unfolding in the halls of Parliament and within the bowels of the state.

At the heart of the personal confrontation is Mikheil Saakashvili, the ex-Georgian President who quit his post as Odessa Governor last year in defiant protest of the corruption of Ukraine’s ruling class. Since then, he has been causing continuous headaches for President Petro Poroshenko—so much so that Poroshenko later stripped him of his Ukrainian citizenship in retribution. But that hasn’t stopped Saakashvili, ever the opportunist, from continuing to rail against his former patron. Three months after storming across the border with a supportive mob at his side and one month after stirring up anti-government protests outside the Verkhovna Rada, things came to a head in dramatic fashion on Tuesday, as the embattled Georgian eluded the state authorities who sought his arrest and accused him of a criminal conspiracy to betray Ukraine.

The morning began with the Security Forces of Ukraine (SBU) arriving at Saakashvili’s apartment in central Kyiv, sending Saakashvili scurrying to the rooftop to evade capture. After speaking to a gathering crowd of onlookers and supporters below, and reportedly threatening to jump at one point, Saakashvili was eventually led off the rooftop by SBU forces.

While the security services took Saakashvili into a police van, supporters put up makeshift barricades to prevent their exit. After a lengthy standoff, the crowd eventually forced its way to the van, opened the door, and forcibly dragged Saakashvili away from police custody. With one hand still cuffed, Saakashvili made his way forward to address the onlookers, calling for the impeachment of President Poroshenko and a new Maidan revolution to remove the “bandits” currently in power.

State authorities, meanwhile, publicly presented their charges against Saakashvili. At a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko claimed that Saakashvili had conspired with Serhiy Kurchenko, a crony of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych who is currently on the lam in Mosow, to finance protests against the government in Kyiv. To back up the charge, Lutsenko then played snippets of recorded phone conversations that allegedly proved the two men’s collusion. Saakashvili has insisted the recordings are fake, and as of Friday was still at large in Kyiv, in defiance of an open arrest warrant.

The cat-and-mouse intrigue and explosive allegations have naturally rocked Kyiv, exacerbating a confrontation between Saakashvili, a perennial populist showman, and his one-time ally Poroshenko, who is increasingly using his powers as a strongman. Fundamentally, though, the dynamics here haven’t changed much since Saakashvili’s border-crossing adventure in September. The falling out between Poroshenko and Saakashvili has been a long and bitter one, but their protracted conflict in itself is unlikely to have much impact on Ukrainian politics (though it will reinforce Russian propaganda aimed to discredit the country). For all his efforts to claim the populist mantle in opposition to Poroshenko, Saakashvili lacks a substantial following of his own—roughly 2 percent of Ukrainians support him—and as a non-citizen, he cannot run for President. His fair-weather friends, whether young reformers like Mustaffa Nayyem or old-guard populists like Yulia Tymoshenko, have been carefully keeping their distance in the wake of his latest scandal, even as they criticize the government’s heavy-handed tactics. Nayyem has asked Saakashvili to explain the serious allegations against him, a sure sign of the lingering suspicions surrounding Saakashvili.

In short, Saakashvili’s heavily publicized face-off with the authorities is unlikely to boost his political standing or tell us much about who will come to power in 2019. But there is a more serious and consequential showdown in Ukraine running parallel to this sideshow: namely, the determined effort of Poroshenko to clamp down on his critics and assert control over the independent forces that pose a threat to his rule.

The prime focus of this battle has been the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), an independent agency effectively forced on Poroshenko by the International Monetary Fund as a condition for financial aid. Since its establishment in 2014, NABU has been celebrated by civil society activists and Western patrons as a crucial achievement of Ukraine’s reform drive. It has also been a longstanding thorn in Poroshenko’s side, with its independent director Artem Sytnyk proving all too willing to investigate the dealings of Poroshenko and other major power players.

In October, for instance, NABU agents detained the son of the powerful Interior Minister Arsen Avakov on suspicions of embezzlement. Avakov interpreted the move as a covert power play against him by Poroshenko, even though NABU lies outside Poroshenko’s official control. In any case, the result has been an intensified campaign by Poroshenko to discredit NABU: smearing its officers, accusing the agency of illegal cooperation with the FBI, and allegedly deploying security forces to intimidate and unmask undercover NABU agents.

Poroshenko’s war on NABU moved into Parliament this week, after members of his party introduced a bill that would have removed Sytnyk as director of the agency and placed it firmly under presidential control. The measure was ultimately removed from consideration in the Rada, but only after a furious campaign by reformers to stir up opposition and bring Western pressure to bear. Pleas to #SaveNABU proliferated on social media, financial backers like the World Bank and IMF issued condemnatory statements warning Ukraine against backtracking on reform, and the U.S. State Department echoed those concerns, noting that actions “to undermine independent anti-corruption institutions” could “undermine public trust and risk eroding international support for Ukraine.” Former officials were much blunter. Michael Carpenter, a former National Security Director and adviser to Joe Biden in the Obama Administration, called the pressure on NABU a “disgrace” and said he would recommend that the United States cut all assistance to Ukraine if anti-corruption forces were undermined.

The international outcry clearly persuaded Poroshenko to table the legislation on NABU, but he has not been definitively foiled in his efforts to bring the anti-corruption movement under his thumb. Even after quietly shelving the bill to remove Sytnyk from NABU, the Rada passed a separate measure on Thursday to remove the outspoken head of Parliament’s Anticorruption Committee. Sytnyk, for his part, remains under scrutiny from the Prosecutor General’s Office. And that office itself remains hopelessly politicized. Its current leader, Yuriy Lutsenko, is a political ally of Poroshenko’s with no legal training, appointed to the role only after the Rada rammed through a law allowing a non-lawyer to hold the position. In recent months, his political nature has become abundantly clear as he has opened cases or cast suspicions on the President’s rivals—including young reformers like Mustafa Nayyem and Serhiy Leshchenko, whom Lutsenko sought to tar with their association with Saakashvili at Tuesday’s press conference.

All of this adds up to a clear pattern that has been apparent for several months now. Like many a Ukrainian President before him, Poroshenko is seeking to squash his rivals, slow walk or roll back reforms, and bring independent agencies under his control. As Ukraine’s economy slowly gets back on track and the country reduces its dependence on foreign assistance, he is acting with audacity to consolidate his power, jeopardizing the fragile progress made since the Maidan Revolution.

Ultimately, this is the battle that really matters for Ukraine: not Poroshenko’s squabbles with Saakashvili or the turf wars between rival oligarchic factions, but the long-term struggle to establish an authentic rule of law, which will hold whoever is in power accountable. To judge by recent events, Ukraine is on the verge of losing that battle. But as this week also showed, the West still has some leverage to combat Poroshenko’s backsliding, and there seems to be a growing awareness of the depth of the crisis.

Whether that awareness and pressure will make much difference at this point, sadly, is far from certain. As the situation stands now, things look quite bleak for Ukraine. With the Donbas war still blazing in the east, the public losing faith in Poroshenko and distrusting his challengers, and the country’s anti-corruption forces coming under daily attack, Ukraine could be in for a long winter of discontent.

The post A Sideshow and a Showdown in Kyiv appeared first on The American Interest.

To End Foreign Meddling, End Anonymity

The Washington Post ran a headline two weeks ago that captured the country’s fevered mood perfectly: “Wondering if the Russians reached you over Facebook? You can soon find out.” In a middling bit of clickbait, the Post managed to conjoin the prevailing sentiment of collective victimhood with the media’s favorite theme of 2017: Russia’s attempts to influence last year’s presidential election. “Together nearly 150 million Facebook and Instagram users may have had pieces of Russian disinformation content—both paid ads and free posts—reach their accounts,” the article gravely intones, before admitting that there’s no way of telling how many people actually noticed the content being fed to them.

Of course, Russia did try to disrupt and undermine trust in our elections. Hacking into people’s servers and strategically leaking purloined emails is egregious behavior that deserved the sanctions Congress mandated in response. Public discussion has gone beyond that, however, with embittered Clinton supporters in particular convincing themselves that Russian attempts at information warfare on social media successfully changed voters’ minds, and may have had a material effect on the election’s outcome. While writers like Masha Gessen have argued that Russia’s efforts were ineffective, they haven’t convinced many. In part this is because it’s difficult to prove a negative. And in part, it’s because the debate over Russian hacking appears to have surfaced latent anxieties over how social media is affecting society.

It’s tempting to dismiss the whole thing as just another moral panic among coastal elites set off by the election of Donald Trump. But we shouldn’t. Even if the Russians failed in their task, the concerns being voiced are real, and the consequences of some of the remedies being proposed could be lasting. What follows is not a definitive treatise as much as a set of thoughts to stimulate further argument. The moment is ripe for a good, calm discussion.

What does it mean to “influence” a voter? Loose talk of Russian information warfare has occluded some of the basic issues at play. Stripped down, an “influence campaign” is just another term for what we think of as politics in a modern democratic society. One might object that this was not always the nature of politics—that things changed since the advent of television, and for the worse. Modern political campaigns are arguably less about citizens freely associating and debating issues as the Founders might have imagined, and have instead become slick marketing campaigns that generally flow in one direction: from party or candidate to voter. But let’s leave aside for the moment whether this marketing paradigm shift is bad for our democracy in the long run. Today, it is a fact of democratic life: deep-pocketed political parties run “influence operations” on voters to secure victory in elections.

What the Russian operation seems to have crystallized in many people’s minds is the conviction that we object to our citizens being influenced by non-citizens. The idea of sovereignty in a democracy is tied to the sovereign will of its people, and the intuition underlying the recent outrage is that our sovereignty is compromised if a citizen’s vote is somehow swayed by foreigners. But does that intuition remain coherent under scrutiny?

Given the state of technology at the time, the Founders were less worried about manipulation of voters by foreign media, and instead focused on preventing foreign money and gifts from directly influencing office-holders. Over time, however, the original intent of the Founders’ famous “emoluments” clause has been watered down. The Nazi-era Foreign Agents Registration Act, originally meant to counter foreign propaganda, is these days mainly invoked as an important precedent for how we should force transparency on foreign lobbying. Indeed, in its modern, toothless guise, it implicitly approves foreign countries spending money to influence our democratic processes: it’s all legal as long as it’s transparent. And in deciding Citizens United, the Supreme Court further complicated the issue by ruling that political spending by corporations—buying political ads—is equivalent to speech. The Court didn’t explicitly mention foreign money in its ruling, and most have argued that it would not stand in the way of Congress putting up further restrictions on foreign money entering our system. But given the complex nature of corporate ownership, the ruling did open the door further to foreign money influencing U.S. citizens’ vote.

The problem is with the category of “speech.” Though foreign money being spent in our elections remain illegal as a matter of law, speech is very difficult to restrict under the U.S. Constitution, even for foreigners. The 14th Amendment, which stipulates that a state cannot “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” is frequently invoked when these kinds of questions arise. This tension, between statutorily illegal influence and protected free speech, resolved itself in a fascinating way last month. Increasingly frustrated with the Trump Administration’s lack of enthusiasm for punishing Russia’s meddling, Congress compelled the Russian television station RT to register as a foreign agent under FARA, ostensibly invoking the old law in its original intended context. RT’s ability to broadcast was not impinged upon, but it was forced to completely disclose its funding. Influencing American citizens through speech is fine, the reasoning goes, as long as it’s made abundantly clear if the influence is coming from abroad.

For some, this is not troubling. As Masha Gessen argued in a recent interview, the idea that a foreigner, who is in all likelihood going to be affected by American policies, would seek to influence an American’s vote is not only normal, but acceptable. For others who believe in the importance of guarding democratic sovereignty, that arrangement does not feel wholly satisfying. But even for the sovereigntists, it should not be too hard to convince themselves that demanding absolute transparency from foreigners is a good-enough compromise solution. Voters, it has to be assumed, know their own interests, and if provided with adequate information on who is trying to convince them of something, can make sound decisions. Transparency, however, remains paramount.

But it doesn’t end there. If we take the reasoning outlined above as an adequate model for how to approach these issues, we find ourselves confronted with another problem: How do we square our stated need for transparency of political speech by foreigners with the pervasive anonymity of the internet? The easy response is to call for social media companies to immediately start verifying the identities of all their users. Cyber expert Clint Watts, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year, put it succinctly:

With features like account anonymity, unlimited audience access, low cost technology tools, plausible deniability—social media provides Russia an unprecedented opportunity to execute their dark arts of manipulation and subversion.… Anonymous posts of the Kremlin’s design or those generated by the target audiences power smear campaigns and falsehoods that tarnish confidence in America and trust in democratic institutions.

Watts is correct to raise an alarm. While our hyper-connected reality does multiply opportunities for free expression, it is not obvious that it automatically leads to a better, or more liberal, democracy. The opportunity to exploit the system and its inherent anonymity—even if only to create chaos in an “open” system—cannot not be easily dismissed.

Still, it’s important not to assume that all of these issues are new. Pundits have noted that the rise of radio spooked people in much the same way that the rise of the internet seems to be doing today. Even back then, elites had worked themselves up into a froth fretting over how susceptible and helpless the common man is to the messages he passively receives over the air. And anonymity itself arguably has an even longer pedigree. The various pamphlet wars throughout history featured anonymous authors on all sides of any one argument. In the United States, “Common Sense” was released without the name of its author (Thomas Paine). The essays comprising the Federalist Papers were also published anonymously. The idea that a foreign power might try to smuggle in texts hostile to a country’s ruling order is also not new. This practice reached an early peak during the height of the Counter Reformation, with the Catholic Church working hard to get its pamphlets into Protestant England and the Netherlands, and has continued ever since.

Responses to these threats, real or perceived, have also been attempted. Widespread concerns about mass media’s pernicious effects did trigger its regulation. In the United States, for example, the late 1930s and early ‘40s saw the rise of the Federal Communications Commission and the implementation of the Fairness Doctrine. (Our own Martha Bayles has argued that the weakening of these early initiatives has had an overwhelmingly negative impact on the quality of our democracy.) And neither Henry VIII nor Queen Elizabeth looked upon Catholic meddling, anonymous or not, with equanimity. Many a head was severed to prevent and deter the circulation of seditious materials. Today, Watts is right to focus on the question of scale of social networks—the “unlimited audience access” at staggeringly “low cost.” Queen Bess could have been in real trouble if the Holy See had had access to Twitter and Facebook. Similarly, one wonders how the American Revolution would have gone had the British been able to deploy an army of bots in the service of the Crown. And anonymity at scale, leveraged by a hostile foreign power, is of particular concern.

Still, it’s not obvious that there is a strong legal case to be made for compelling social media companies to unmask their users, at least in the United States. While anonymity itself is not granted blanket protection in the U.S. Constitution, various judges have argued that one can read implicit guarantees in the text. Ever since the Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that an Ohio state law preventing the distribution of anonymous campaign literature was an unconstitutional limitation on free speech, a growing body of case law has been delineating where the appropriate balance lies. One intuition underlying these debates is that only anonymity can allow for certain ideas to be considered fairly and on their own terms, independent of any prejudice attached to the author. Social media companies are likely to invoke this rationale and this precedent if the government attempts to force them to change their ways. One could imagine a First Amendment absolutist making the case for Russian disinformation campaigns, saying that distributing “divisive” information is in no way illegal, and that under the 14th Amendment, the same anonymity protections afforded Americans should apply to foreigners as well.

In other words, our desire to impose transparency on foreign influence in the United States runs headlong into the robust constitutional protections surrounding free speech.

Does this mean we are at an impasse? Not necessarily. Even if it might be unconstitutional to compel companies to fight anonymity on the internet, a moral case can and ought to be made for it. Silicon Valley’s tech titans are, after all, public companies, susceptible to pressure both from their customers and their shareholders. As I suggested above, the resonance of the Russia story suggests that the outsize effects of social media are making people nervous. This is a good opportunity to articulate some of these broader anxieties, quite independent of the vexed legal question of foreign influence, in order to encourage change on an emerging industry loath to undertake it.

One such argument is that the kind of easy anonymity afforded by social networks quickly brings out sociopathic behavior in many users. It’s one thing to avail oneself of anonymity to speak out about ideas that could threaten one’s career or one’s personal safety. It’s another to act irresponsibly, using anonymity as a shield from social censure. Civility is in large part a product of concern for one’s reputation. If one can free oneself from the threat of all consequences, all sorts of shameful acts become conceivable, including harassment and freely issuing death threats.

This need not mean that companies demand that people only post under their real names all the time. Pseudonyms could, and perhaps should, continue to exist. But it would mean that every active account be matched to a real person by the tech titans, so that a potential chain of accountability exists somewhere. Obviously this would not be a perfect solution, especially for human rights activists who may not trust the likes of Facebook or Twitter to keep that information adequately secure. Unfortunately, there is no way to both create accountability and ensure perfect anonymity for vulnerable users. While it might be true that both the Maidan in Ukraine and the Arab Spring across the Middle East would not have been quite as big without the level of credible anonymity afforded to users on these social networks, this is a cost I suspect most citizens of Western democracies would be willing to countenance.

Democracies require an active and engaged citizenry. But they also require a responsible citizenry. Responsibility entails owning your speech, not carelessly sniping at your fellow citizens and political enemies. Never in the history of humanity have states grappled with the scale of something like the anonymous internet, and in aggregate, there’s little to suggest that such a thing is healthy for societies. The “public square” has atrophied into a mere metaphor as democracies themselves have scaled up, but taken literally, it points to a lingering antecedent prevalent in earlier times: an open public space where people would meet face-to-face to discuss the issues of the day. We need to try to keep this idea firmly in mind as we think our way through the consequences of emerging technologies in these uncertain times. Achieving perfect accountability is an unlikely end state. But fetishizing anonymity as some desirable baseline similarly cannot be the way forward.

This of course brings into question the limits of U.S. territorial jurisdiction given the global reach of the internet—an even more complex subject that is well outside the scope of this short essay.

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Murphy’s Law and Saudi Foreign Policy

Yemen’s former President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is dead, and Saudi Arabia’s plans to resolve the quagmire in Yemen died with him.

Killed by his erstwhile Houthi allies on Monday, Saleh died attempting the kind of Machiavellian, self-serving political maneuvering that defined his 34 years in power and the five years he spent trying to regain that power following his ouster in the Arab Spring. Ending years of partnership with the Houthi rebels, Saleh declared on Saturday that he and his faction would join with the Saudi coalition and battle the Houthis for control of Sanaa. After this miscalculation—either of his own strength or the strength of his allies—the Houthis killed Saleh and declared that they had taken over most of the capital.

Obituaries of Saleh have thus far been repetitive and predictable. They inevitably quote his claim (perhaps not original) that ruling Yemen was like “dancing on the heads of snakes.” Yemen is indeed a country of profound regional-tribal-sectarian complexity, but Saleh himself was very much one of the snakes. In 1990 he sided with Saddam in the Persian Gulf War, but then claimed American support in Yemen’s brief 1994 civil war. His own generals accused him of failing to destroy the Houthis when he had the chance as President. His later support for the Houthis and complicity in the deaths of thousands during the Arab Spring protests means that he leaves behind a legacy of death, destruction, and disunity.

While Saleh’s death might prompt reflections about Mubarak, Qaddafi, and other dead or deposed dictatorial peers, hopefully it will also contribute to a growing understanding of the catastrophe that has unfolded in Yemen. The Economist‘s cover story this week is “Yemen: The War the World Ignores.” The New York Times has described Yemen’s ongoing cholera outbreak, which has infected more than 500,000 people, as a man-made disaster. Seven million Yemenis are on the brink of famine, with millions more in need of humanitarian aid, a huge proportion of them children.

This catastrophe did not happen in isolation; it is not an act of God. It is the direct result of the failures of the military and foreign policy of Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia’s rulers believe that in fighting the Houthis they are fighting for the legitimacy of the government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and against foreign interference from Iran. For Saudi Arabia and Iran, Yemen is a proxy battleground in their struggle for regional hegemony.

But it’s the Saudi strategy to defeat the Houthis, a naval blockade combined with near-constant aerial bombardment, that has produced the stomach-churning humanitarian crisis. It should be impossible for those who criticized the Assad regime’s butchery in Aleppo to look the other way as a U.S. partner uses U.S.-supplied weapons to commit similar atrocities. A growing and bipartisan group of U.S. Senators has taken notice. Republican Senator Todd Young is leading an effort to convince the Trump Administration to get the Saudis to restore humanitarian aid shipments. Over the summer, Rand Paul (R-KY) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) nearly succeeded in blocking a Saudi arms deal over concerns about the Saudi prosecution of the war.

Unlike Assad, however, the Saudis are no closer to victory against the rebels. Two years ago, the Saudis promised that the coalition was two months away from retaking Sanaa. Given the inability of Saudi Arabia’s partners to win the fight, Saleh’s switch offered the coalition the chance to contest the city for the first time. While his faction (now led by his son) hasn’t entirely been defeated, the Saudi coalition now lacks any leader on the ground who could plausibly bring an end to the conflict. President Hadi is such an unreliable partner that the Saudis have barred him from returning to Yemen. Saleh’s son was under house arrest in the UAE, and remains outside of Yemen.

It’s not clear whether Saleh’s death or his faction’s defection will make conditions on the ground much worse—if that’s even possible at this point. What is clear is that what must have been a long-negotiated Saudi plan to win the conflict outright has just gone up in smoke, and that the disastrous status quo is likely to prevail for the foreseeable future.

That includes the steady growth of Iranian influence in Yemen, which is now stronger than ever. When I first wrote about the Yemen conflict for The American Interest three years ago, Iran’s known aid to the Houthis consisted of “a relatively small but steady stream of automatic rifles, grenade launchers, bomb-making material and several million dollars in cash.” Today, though the means of supply is disputed, Iran is helping the Houthis build missiles that can strike Riyadh, and the Houthis now claim that they intend to target the UAE’s nuclear power plant. While the Iranians are spending a few million dollars per month in Yemen, the Saudis are spending hundreds of millions.

Saleh’s death and the Yemeni quagmire are unfortunately just one facet of Saudi’s bungling of its counter-Iran efforts. The past month, in particular, has been a string of embarrassments. In a bizarre episode, the Saudis pressured Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign during a visit to Saudi Arabia, which prompted conspiracy theories that he was forced to resign under duress or even that the Saudis had kidnapped him. ABC News has reported what seems to be the reality of the harebrained scheme, which was to replace Saad with his more hawkish brother Bahaa. When that failed, France and the United States discreetly moved in to help both the Saudis and Hariri save face. Two weeks ago, Hariri returned to Lebanon via France and on Tuesday he “withdrew” his resignation, bringing the sorry episode to conclusion.

Then there was the development that excited regional observers perhaps more than any other—the possibility of an open peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel. We have long written about the rapprochement between Israel and the Sunni Arab states over their mutual fears of Iran. But for the first time this week, there seemed to be evidence that the Saudis no longer cared what a Palestinian peace deal looked like. The New York Times reported  that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had pressured Mahmoud Abbas to accept a deal with no right of return, without a contiguous West Bank, and without Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. The reception was explosive, and rightly so. The problem is that the details of the plan, which the White House had kept under wraps, seem to have been intentionally leaked by the Palestinians in order to poison the deal.

The poison worked.

Even before President Trump’s announcement recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the Saudis were forced to backtrack. After the announcement, whatever deal might have been in the works can safely be thrown out. As I wrote during the Temple Mount Crisis, even if Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi leadership don’t care about these issues, Abbas knows that he can strike a nerve across the Muslim world whenever Jerusalem is under “threat.” Whatever Mohammed bin Salman may think of peace with Israel and an alliance with it against Iran, the Palestinians have forced the Saudis to toe the line by appealing to popular resentment toward Israel within the kingdom.

It doesn’t especially matter whether or not the Saudi leadership might privately be able to live with Trump’s decision. The statement from the Saudi royal court yesterday denouncing the decision as irresponsible makes clear that we are now very far away from overt cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Israel. It might even lead to a public rift with the United States. President Trump has called for immediate humanitarian aid to Yemen, perhaps in response to the Saudi condemnation on Jerusalem.

The developments in Saudi Arabia under the leadership of Mohammed bin Salman are undeniably momentous. Despite limited results so far, the promised scope of his economic, cultural, political, and religious reforms has electrified the country. What’s more, both the Saudis and the Israelis are on the same page as the Trump Administration about the need to counter Iranian influence. With so many opportunities to shape the future of the region for the better, it’s unfortunate that both Saudi Arabia and the United States are squandering the opportunity.

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When “Top-Two” Means “Only One”

There’s been a surge of interest in electoral reform among TAI’s columnists lately. Larry Diamond argues that the system of ranked-choice voting, on the ballot now in Maine, might be one possible way to ameliorate the viciousness of contemporary electoral politics. Bruce Cain, meanwhile, explores various options for reforming party primaries, looking for ways to bring problem-solving statesmen into office rather than just the uncompromisingly partisan sharks who invariably do well among base voters left and right. Overall, he’s pessimistic, especially regarding California’s open primary system, commonly known as “top-two.” He writes that it “has had little or no effect on party polarization in either the state legislature or congressional delegation.” He’s right but doesn’t go into detail on the top-two system. It deserves a deeper look.

California’s top-two primary system was implemented statewide first in 2014 after having been passed into law by ballot proposition in 2010, at the end of the Schwarzenegger governorship. The argument for Prop 14, at the time, was that party primaries produce the worst of both parties, resulting in extreme candidates, liberal or conservative, being the voters’ only choices. Top-two was intended to give people more moderate, compromise-friendly choices in a state whose past is closer to purple than red or blue.

The mechanism of top-two was simple: It replaced party-specific primaries with a general “jungle” primary, mandating that only the top-two vote-getters in the primary election—regardless of party registration—would advance to the general election. Theoretically, this would be good for sane, centrist, third-party candidates who would be able to make their enlightened case to a public no longer shackled by party rules. Theoretically, it would also be good for sane, centrist major-party candidates, who would no longer have to appeal to the most extreme elements of their parties to secure nomination. All seemed to be set for the 2014 elections, when the measure would be implemented and a new generation of moderate, bipartisan office-holders would rise to elected leadership.

Except it didn’t work.

Top-two was in large part based on the assumption that California was a state with a lot of moderate voters who were anxious to have their voices heard, not drowned out by extreme partisan activists. There was a lot of statistical evidence for this view, as well: Since the mid-2000s, political scientists had been noting the rise of Decline-to-State (DTS) and later No-Party-Preference (NPP) voters, and even now in 2017, DTS/NPP voter registration in California is at an all-time high, rivalling and almost surpassing Republican registration. For whatever reason, though, these voters weren’t turning out.

The 2014 elections were the last gasp of the old semi-competitive bipartisan order, where Republican candidates squared off against Democratic candidates for most of the statewide offices in the general election. But this might have been an aberration; Democrats Governor Jerry Brown, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, and then-Attorney General Kamala Harris were all incumbents and inspired no party challengers, so Republicans Neel Kashkari, Ron Nehring, and Ronald Gold were able to run against them. Even the open office of Secretary of State had both a Democratic and a Republican seeker, Alex Padilla and Pete Peterson, in what turned out to be a close race (though the presence of a Republican on the ballot may have been due to the other Democrat, Leland Yee, bowing out over a corruption scandal). The other statewide offices saw the same trend: The Democrats generally fell in line behind a party champion, while competitors were edged out (the State Controller race being an exception.) This allowed a Republican to garner enough votes to be on the ballot.

Still, when the dust settled after Election Day, no Republican stood as a new California statewide official. The Democrats had won all the constitutional officer seats, and the California GOP began its short descent into general statewide irrelevance. This would be further cemented in the 2016 U.S. Senate election for the retiring Senator Barbara Boxer’s seat. With GOP registration dipping, pragmatic Republicans like Assemblyman Rocky Chavez and former state GOP chairman Duf Sundheim tried to run on a platform reaching out to Republicans, Democrats, and No-Party-Preference voters, which was what the top-two primary was originally supposed to encourage candidates to do. But Sundheim and Chavez—and other low-level GOP candidates like Ron Unz and Tom del Beccaro—never stood a chance against the two Democrats in the race, Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez of Orange County and Attorney General Kamala Harris of the Bay Area.

Had the CAGOP endorsed a Republican candidate, perhaps a Republican would have edged past Harris and made it a competitive partisan Senate race. The presence of half a dozen Republicans on the ballot didn’t help any one of them, though, and Loretta Sanchez and Kamala Harris easily made it into the general election. Of the two of them, Sanchez was widely viewed as the “moderate” Democrat, who would reach out to working-class Latinos and Republicans in an effort to build a bipartisan, multiracial electoral coalition to beat the more progressive and establishmentarian Kamala Harris. With the Republicans having failed to use the top-two as it had been designed, Sanchez would use it and prove that it could work.

But that was not to be. On November 9, 2016, as Donald Trump celebrated his own upset victory, Kamala Harris and California’s more progressive and establishmentarian Democrats rejoiced over her 20-point victory over Congresswoman Sanchez. The top-two system had failed twice in the same election—first by precluding a partisan race, and second by failing to elevate a self-identified “moderate” candidate to victory.

In the aftermath of 2016, a new political reality has dawned in the collective political imagination of the California political operative class, left, right, and center. California is a one-party state, and not just a one-party state but one in which the elite, left-leaning faction of that one party calls all of the important shots. Future elections may disrupt this trend and bring more centrist-leaning “Mod Squad” Democrats into power, but for now, the money, power, and endorsements are in the Democratic Party’s elite progressive wing. That’s one step worse than one-party rule.

The 2018 election is projected to look less like the 2014 election—where Republicans squeaked out spots in the general election because the Democratic incumbents faced no challengers—and more like the 2016 election. Open seats in the Governor’s office, Lieutenant Governor’s office, and most other statewide offices are inspiring a feeding frenzy among ambitious Democrats. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, an institution unto herself who has announced her 2018 reelection bid, has even inspired a crop of progressive challengers (and no serious Republicans challengers yet). The state GOP, defeated and nearly destroyed, has turned to such helpful antics as inviting Steve Bannon to speak at their convention. It is in no place to check the ascendant Harris wing of the California Democratic Party.

Next year’s leading Democratic candidates for Governor—Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and State Treasurer John Chiang—are all popular enough that they will almost certainly edge out the Republican lightweights quixotically pursuing the governorship. The 2018 governor’s race, in fact, is starting to look a lot like the 2016 U.S. Senate seat race- a progressive Bay Area Democrat, concerned with climate change and taking donations from the public-sector unions around the state, adored by the Democratic Party’s kingmakers and touted as a future presidential candidate, versus a low-level Southern California Latino Democrat, actively working to build a cross-party coalition, focused on bread and butter issues and gaining the support of physical industries and private sector unions, whom no one pays much attention to. All the money and machine power of significance will go to Gavin Newsom this time around, and he’ll probably beat Villaraigosa easily.

There are two implications to this story of incredible significance. First off, in electoral reform, the political constellation on the ground matters. The biggest lesson of top-two in California is that the political interest groups that dominate a polity, when faced with a reform to the power structure, will seek to take advantage of it. And in California’s Democrat-dominated politics, when 54 percent of voters chose to move from a multiparty, first-past-the-post primary system to an open, top-two blanket primary system, they inadvertently institutionalized a mechanism for the politically dominant Democratic Party to get its preferred candidates into office regardless of how “moderate” or “extreme” they were. This, importantly, subverted the original goal of the open primary system, and so should be a cautionary tale for reformers—particularly those in deep-blue or even deep-red states—who would like to mimic California’s open primary system to some degree. This is not to say that some reform of state party primary systems isn’t necessary, but reformers should make sure those reforms don’t backfire in spectacular fashion.

Second, in Democratic Party politics, we are seeing the rise of a “bench” of young, prospective future presidential contenders in the Obama-Plus mold—brought to power partly because of California’s political and demographic trends, and partly due to the historical accident of the top-two primary system. Senator Kamala Harris owes her easy victory to it, and Gavin Newsom may owe his future governorship to it as well. Given that much of the rest of the country is turning red, and that California remains one of the last statewide bastions progressive Democrats can roam freely in, it is more than likely that California Democrats will be powerful players in the near future when it comes to rebuilding the Democratic Party. Their social liberalism and climate activism, in particular, gives them a bit of cover against the Berniecrat progressives’ worst criticisms, despite their somewhat plutocratic financial backers. And those backers also make them somewhat more acceptable to the current Schumer-Pelosi old guard, whose time on the political stage will soon be over.

Wallace Stegner was at least partly right to say that “California is America, but moreso.” It does seem true, at any rate, that the Golden State is a laboratory for ideological and policy experiments to be tested nationally later. Thus anyone interested in implementing top-two experiments at the state or local level elsewhere in the country needs to understand California’s experience. It may yield better outcomes in more ideologically and politically heterogeneous states, but in states that are dominated by a single party—that is to say, most states these days—a top-two system is likely to further shield the party in power from competition. And in a still polarizing America, that kind of regionalism would be destructive.

The post When “Top-Two” Means “Only One” appeared first on The American Interest.

How the Olympics Ban Helps Putin

The verdict is in, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has officially banned Russia from the 2018 Winter Olympics for systematic, state-backed doping. The state-run Russian propaganda machine has already denounced the move as an attack on the country from the West, one allegedly designed to incite revolution and Putin’s removal from power. And Western outlets like the New York Times have been quick to declare that Moscow faces its “largest international sporting crisis since the Soviet era,” posing a thorny political problem for Vladimir Putin on the very week that he finally declared his intention to run for another term as Russia’s President.

But has Vladimir Putin really lost from the IOC decision or is it, paradoxically, a win for him? I, for one, would wager that Russia’s President crossed himself and sighed in relief when the news broke.

Whatever they may say publicly, Putin and his cronies suffer no illusions about the truth of the doping scandal. Russian athletes knowingly committed state-sponsored doping fraud on a massive scale, with the explicit assistance of the government and the FSB. Moreover, Russian officials knew that Russian athletes were simply not good enough to win without doping.

As the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) uncovered in its 2016 report, Russian officials, with the support of the FSB, ordered, controlled, and manipulated doping test results for Russian athletes. The Russian government no doubt found it easier and cheaper to create a federal doping machine than to seriously fund the long-term development of sports in Russia—for example, by building training facilities and new stadiums, or by investing in sports programs for kids and teens.

Indeed, doping might have been seen as a better way to buy athletic glory in Russia than pouring money into major federal construction projects, whose budgets often balloon as officials skim money off the top. For example, one of the main soccer stadiums for the 2018 World Cup, Zenit Arena in Saint Petersburg, cost $50 billion instead of the initially declared $6 billion. The cost soared because the stadium had to meet international requirements far beyond Russia’s usual shoddy standards. If the stadium had not been specifically commissioned for a world championship, it may still have cost a fortune, but would have been built at a much lower quality, if it was built at all. Such is the sad and steady decline of Russian sports infrastructure since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In any case, the truth is that Putin now need not fear the embarrassing failure of Russia’s poorly prepared Olympians on the world stage—and the inevitable outrage of the Russian people had the athletes been allowed to participate on a level playing field, and lost badly.

We don’t know if Vladimir Putin personally knew his athletes were doping when he triumphantly opened the Sochi Olympics in 2014. But we do know that Russia’s President did not punish those found responsible for state-sponsoring doping in the report by Richard McLaren, which was commissioned and approved by WADA. Putin fired the main culprit, Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko, only to promote him to Deputy Prime Minister. The only person who did lose his job was Mutko’s assistant Yury Nagornykh. According to the testimony of Grigory Rodchenkov, the WADA whistleblower and former director of Moscow’s Anti-Doping Centre interviewed in Brian Fogel’s documentary Icarus, Nagornykh was very likely an FSB officer. But no investigation into the matter has been opened in Russia since Rodchenkov testified—except for the one into Rodchenkov himself.

Why did Putin support Mutko and his accomplices? IOC and WADA repeatedly said that their decisions would be affected by the way Russia treated those responsible for doping. In other words, the prosecution of Mutko and his allies would have probably saved Russia from being barred from the 2018 Olympics.

About a year and half ago, as the doping scandal hit its peak, Putin probably realized that without doping, Russia’s Olympians could not be seriously competitive. They have already underperformed at the ongoing Biathlon World Cup 2017-2018, under a new, more rigorous drug testing regime that has made it impossible for the Russians to cheat. Even the reliably pro-Kremlin newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets published an article arguing there was no other reason for the terrible results. Even Kremlin loyalists could see an inevitable catastrophe coming.

Russia has experienced national sport embarrassment before. In 2010 the country ranked 11th at the Vancouver Olympic Games, which led to much teeth-gnashing at home. This is what TIME wrote about Russia’s performance in Canada that year:

The poor showing in Vancouver couldn’t come at a worse time, with the economy having contracted 8% last year, following years of rapid growth. “[Sporting success] is very important as an instrument of legitimacy for the political regime,” says Andrei Ryabov, a political analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center. “When the economy is struggling, it’s better to focus people on how great the country is rather than thinking about problems in economic and social policies. But that hasn’t happened.”

And that year, in contrast to 2002 when Russians blamed “biased” judges, the nation put the blame on the country’s leadership. Then-President Dmitry Medvedev called for heads to roll, demanding resignations from the Russian Olympic Sports Committee. The soon-to-be world famous Vitaly Mutko nonetheless kept his position as Sports Minister, and proceeded to find a miraculous way to revive the collapsed sports system in just four years.

It is important to emphasize that after Vancouver Russians were united as never before in their frustration and grief over the Olympics, and they channeled their outrage toward Russia’s leadership. The Russian public’s united, anti-governmental mood surely spooked the Kremlin—and not for the last time.

The prospect of the Russian Olympic Team spectacularly failing in South Korea at a time of acute economic crisis could not have been a pleasant eventuality for the Kremlin to ponder. Putin would not want the Russians to come in, say, 10th place three weeks before presidential elections on March 18. Given the stakes, Putin may well have consciously backed Mutko and others responsible for doping in the hopes that Russia would end up banned from the Olympics.

These days, average Russians are struggling to scrape by. They may not explicitly link their fate to Putin’s policies, which have left the country isolated and in serious financial trouble, but they need not be reminded of how bad things are either. In times like these, the Kremlin likes to invoke a transcendent struggle: when it annexed Crimea, invaded Ukraine, intervened in Syria, banned European food imports, or devalued the ruble, the Kremlin claimed it was fighting for something higher, against forces from outside that sought to bring the country low.

A humiliation at the 2018 Olympics would be difficult to frame in that way. Sports have been sacred in Russia going back to Soviet times. Rather than creating a political crisis for Putin, the ban actually helps him avoid one. In the days to come, the Kremlin is likely to frame the ban as an evil Western plot against Russia. It’s hard to imagine a better way to kick off a presidential campaign.

The post How the Olympics Ban Helps Putin appeared first on The American Interest.

The Warlock Hunt

#Metoo, of course. Women are not going nuts for no reason. We’re fed up with feeling prickles down our spine as we walk alone on dimly lit streets. Fed up with thinking, “If he feels entitled to send me that message, what might he feel entitled to do to if he knew where I lived?” Fed up with strangers who smack their lips and murmur obscenities at us. Fed up with thinking, “No, I don’t want to go to his hotel room to discuss closing the contract. I’ll have to tell him my husband’s waiting for me to call. ‘My husband? Oh, yes, he’s pathologically jealous, bless his heart, and a bit of a gun nut…’” My husband is perfect in every way but one—he doesn’t exist—but he has served me so well over the years that I’m willing to overlook his ontological defects. I shouldn’t need him, but I do.

I’ve been fortunate. My encounters with law enforcement have been contrary to reputation: The police have taken me seriously, once arresting a stalker when he failed to heed a warning to cease and desist. But too many women have been murdered because they could not persuade the police to take them seriously. That stalker doubtless believes he was “unjustly accused” and “his life destroyed” by a hysterical woman. He’s full of it. I’ll bet he did the same thing to many women before me. Sexual predation tends to be a lifelong pattern.

Among us, it seems, lives a class of men who call to mind Caligula and Elagabalus not only in their depravity, but in their grotesque sense of impunity. Our debauched emperors, whether enthroned in Hollywood, media front offices, or the halls of Congress, truly imagined their victims had no choice but to shut up, take it, and stay silent forever. Many of these men are so physically disgusting, too—the thought of them forcing themselves on young women fills me with heaving disgust. Enough already.

All true; yet something is troubling me. Recently I saw a friend—a man—pilloried on Facebook for asking if #metoo is going too far. “No,” said his female interlocutors. “Women have endured far too many years of harassment, humiliation, and injustice. We’ll tell you when it’s gone too far.” But I’m part of that “we,” and I say it is going too far. Mass hysteria has set in. It has become a classic moral panic, one that is ultimately as dangerous to women as to men.

If you are reading this, it means I have found an outlet that has not just fired an editor for sexual harassment. This article circulated from publication to publication, like old-fashioned samizdat, and was rejected repeatedly with a sotto voce, “Don’t tell anyone. I agree with you. But no.” Friends have urged me not to publish it under my own name, vividly describing the mob that will tear me from limb to limb and leave the dingoes to pick over my flesh. It says something, doesn’t it, that I’ve been more hesitant to speak about this than I’ve been of getting on the wrong side of the mafia, al-Qaeda, or the Kremlin?

But speak I must. It now takes only one accusation to destroy a man’s life. Just one for him to be tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion, overnight costing him his livelihood and social respectability. We are on a frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt that does not pause to parse the difference between rape and stupidity. The punishment for sexual harassment is so grave that clearly this crime—like any other serious crime—requires an unambiguous definition. We have nothing of the sort.

In recent weeks, one after another prominent voice, many of them political voices, have been silenced by sexual harassment charges. Not one of these cases has yet been adjudicated in a court of law. Leon Wiesenthal, David Corn, Mark Halperin, Michael Oreskes, Al Franken, Ken Baker, Rick Najera, Andy Signore, Jeff Hoover, Matt Lauer, even Garrison Keillor—all have received the professional death sentence. Some of the charges sound deadly serious. But others—as reported anyway—make no sense. I can’t say whether the charges against these men are true; I wasn’t under the bed. But even if true, some have been accused of offenses that aren’t offensive, or offenses that are only mildly so—and do not warrant total professional and personal destruction.

The things men and women naturally do—flirt, play, lewdly joke, desire, seduce, tease—now become harassment only by virtue of the words that follow the description of the act, one of the generic form: “I froze. I was terrified.” It doesn’t matter how the man felt about it. The onus to understand the interaction and its emotional subtleties falls entirely on him. But why? Perhaps she should have understood his behavior to be harmless—clumsy, sweet but misdirected, maladroit, or tacky—but lacking in malice sufficient to cost him such arduous punishment?

In recent weeks, I’ve acquired new powers. I have cast my mind over the ways I could use them. I could now, on a whim, destroy the career of an Oxford don who at a drunken Christmas party danced with me, grabbed a handful of my bum, and slurred, “I’ve been dying to do this to Berlinski all term!” That is precisely what happened. I am telling the truth. I will be believed—as I should be.

But here is the thing. I did not freeze, nor was I terrified. I was amused and flattered and thought little of it. I knew full well he’d been dying to do that. Our tutorials—which took place one-on-one, with no chaperones—were livelier intellectually for that sublimated undercurrent. He was an Oxford don and so had power over me, sensu strictu. I was a 20-year-old undergraduate. But I also had power over him—power sufficient to cause a venerable don to make a perfect fool of himself at a Christmas party. Unsurprisingly, I loved having that power. But now I have too much power. I have the power to destroy someone whose tutorials were invaluable to me and shaped my entire intellectual life much for the better. This is a power I do not want and should not have.

Over the course of my academic and professional career, many men who in some way held a position of power over me have made lewd jokes in my presence, or reminisced drunkenly of past lovers, or confessed sexual fantasies. They have hugged me, flirted with me, on occasion propositioned me. For the most part, this male attention has amused me and given me reason to look forward to otherwise dreary days at work. I dread the day I lose my power over men, which I have used to coax them to confide to me on the record secrets they would never have vouchsafed to a male journalist. I did not feel “demeaned” by the realization that some men esteemed my cleavage more than my talent; I felt damned lucky to have enough talent to exploit my cleavage.

But what if I now feel differently? What if—perhaps moved by the testimony of the many women who have come forward in recent weeks—I were to realize that the ambient sexual culture I meekly accepted as “amusing” was in fact repulsive and loathsome? What if I now realize it did me great emotional damage, harm so profound that only now do I recognize it?

Apparently, some women feel precisely this way. Natalie Portman, for example, has re-examined her life in light of the recent news:

When I heard everything coming out, I was like, wow, I’m so lucky that I haven’t had this. And then, on reflection, I was like, okay, definitely never been assaulted, definitely not, but I’ve had discrimination or harassment on almost everything I’ve ever worked on in some way,” she said during Sunday’s candid talk at Vulture Festival L.A. The more she reexamined her experiences, other incidents come into sharp relief. “I went from thinking I don’t have a story to thinking, Oh wait, I have 100 stories. And I think a lot of people are having these reckonings with themselves, of things that we just took for granted as like, this is part of the process.

If I were suddenly to feel as Ms. Portman now feels, I could destroy them all—just by naming names and truthfully describing a flirtation or moment of impropriety. All of the interchanges I’m replaying in my mind would meet the highly elastic contemporary definition of “harassment,” a category vague enough to compass all the typical flirtation that brings joy and amusement to so many of our lives, all the vulgar humor that says, “We’re among friends, we may speak frankly.” It becomes harassment only by virtue of three words: “I felt demeaned.”

Do not mistake me for a rape apologist. Harvey Weinstein stands credibly accused of rape. He must face a real trial and grave punishment if convicted, not “therapy and counselling.” Tariq Ramadan, likewise. No civilized society tolerates rape. Many of the men whose professional reputations have recently been destroyed sure sound like they had it coming. The law will decide whether the accused are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but I don’t require such arduous proof: I’m already convinced that Roy Moore is a sexual predator and so is Bill Clinton. Neither my certainty nor anyone else’s should be allowed to displace the law. I may be convinced, but I might also be mistaken.

These reservations aside, I am gratified that at last we all agree that a rapist—or a serial groper of random women’s genitals—should be behind bars, not the Resolute Desk. It was outrageous and unjust that we ever thought otherwise.

Revolutions against real injustice have a tendency, however, to descend into paroxysms of vengeance that descend upon guilty and innocent alike. We’re getting too close. Hysteria is in the air. The over-broad definition of “sexual harassment” is a well-known warning sign. The over-broad language of the Law of Suspects portended the descent of the French Revolution into the Terror. This revolution risks going the way revolutions so often do, and the consequences will not just be awful for men. They will be awful for women.

Harvey Weinstein must burn, we all agree. But there is a universe of difference between the charges against Weinstein and those that cost Michael Oreskes his career at NPR. It is hard to tell from the press accounts, but initial reports suggested he was fired because his accusers—both anonymous—say he kissed them. Twenty years ago. In another place of business. Since then, other reports have surfaced of what NPR calls “subtler transgressions.”

They are subtle to the point of near-invisibility. It seems Michael Oreskes liked to kiss women. Now, it is an embarrassing faux-pas to kiss a woman who does not wish to be kissed, but it happens all the time. Kissing a woman is an early stage of courtship. It is one way that men ask the question, “Would you like more?” Courtship is not a phenomenon so minor to our behavioral repertoire that we can readily expunge it from the workplace. It is central to human life. Men and women are attracted to each other; the human race could not perpetuate itself otherwise; and anyone who imagines they will cease to be attracted to each other—or act as if they were not—in the workplace, or any other place, is delusional. Anyone who imagines it is easy for a man to figure out whether a woman might like to be kissed is insane. The difficulty of ascertaining whether one’s passions are reciprocated is the theme of 90 percent of human literature and every romantic comedy or pop song ever written.

Romance involves the most complex of human emotions, desire the most powerful of human drives. It is so easy to read the signals wrong. Every honest man will tell you that at times he has misread these signals, and so will every honest woman. The insistence that an unwanted kiss is always about power, not courtship, simply isn’t a serious theory of the case—not when the punishment for this crime is so grave. Men, too, are entitled to the benefit of the doubt, and even to a presumption of innocence.

We now have, in effect, a crime that comes with a swift and draconian penalty, but no proper definition. It seems to be “sexual behavior” or “behavior that might be sexual,” committed through word, deed, or even facial expression; followed by a negative description of the woman’s emotions. Obviously this is inadequate. Human beings, male and female, are subject to human failings, including the tendency to lie, to be vengeful, to abuse power, or simply to misunderstand one another. It is hard to define sexual harassment precisely, because all of these human frailties are often involved. But we must nonetheless reason out together a definition that makes sense. Mass hysteria and making demons of men will get us nowhere we should want to go.

Finding a consensus is tricky because our social standards are rapidly changing. We appear now to be converging upon new rules for interaction between men and women—for example, “Never kiss a woman without explicitly asking her consent beforehand.” Such a rule is now the law on college campuses in some states. Whether we think the rule good or ridiculous, we can certainly agree that it is new. Those in doubt can may consult pre-2017 television and cinema, where men routinely kiss women without asking permission. Grandfathering or statutes of limitations can’t possibly be irrelevant to this, and only this, category of wrongdoing. This is not how we view any other crime. It has only recently become mandatory for Americans to purchase health insurance. Would we condemn a man for failing to purchase health insurance in 1985?

Several cases recently in the headlines are simply baffling. They do not involve the workplace—or vast discrepancies in power—at all. Perhaps there is more to the story, but from what I’ve read, the improprieties committed by the UK’s (now former) Defense Secretary Michael Fallon amount to this: He kissed a journalist—not his employee, and not someone over whom he had power, but another adult in another profession—fifteen years ago. What transmogrified Fallon’s kiss to a crime that cost him his career were these words, and only these words: “I felt humiliated, ashamed.” Had the object of his affection said, “I felt flattered,” there would be no offense.

Fallon apparently also touched another woman on the knee. Fifteen years ago. The latter incident has been reported thus:

“I calmly and politely explained to him that, if he did it again, I would punch him in the face. He withdrew his hand and that was the end of the matter.” Julia said she did not feel like she was a victim of a sexual assault, and found the incident nothing more than “mildly amusing.”

The facts as described are nothing like sexual assault. Any woman alive could tell similar stories. Many of us find such incidents, precisely as Julia said, “mildly amusing.”

There is apparently a “list” of women prepared to make similar accusations against Fallon. Secret lists are inherently sinister tools. The words “I have here in my hand a list … ” are never a salubrious portent.

Mother Jones’ editor David Corn, it seems, offered unwanted backrubs. So what? From the prose in Politico you’d think he ravished Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The accused, we are to understand, “came up behind [his accuser] and put his hands and arms around [her] body in a way that felt sexual and domineering.” He gave her a hug, in other words; but it felt to her sexual and domineering. There is no reliable way to know if a hug will feel sexual and domineering to a woman or whether she will find this disagreeable, let alone how she will feel about it twenty years from now. So the lesson to men is clear: Never hug women at work, period. But this is insane. The project of eradicating physical affection from the workplace is cruel to men and women alike, and if it is successful, we will all go nuts.

Nor does it make sense to hold all men to the same standards. Some of the accused have made entire careers out of their lewdness and exhibitionism. After revering them for decades for precisely those qualities, we are overnight scandalized to learn they are lewd and exhibitionistic. Take Louis CK. There’s an almost preternatural emotional obtuseness at work here: Did no one notice that in his stand-up routines he speaks incessantly of suicide, masturbation, self-loathing, masturbation, self-hatred, masturbation—and this is all he ever speaks of? If we’re determined to worship a comedian whose work clearly emerges from a profoundly exhibitionistic instinct and self-loathing of the deepest sort, how can we be so astonished to discover it’s not just an act? I grew up around performing artists, so perhaps my view is jaundiced. But yeah, I could have told you: Stay out of his hotel room.

My point isn’t that it’s no big deal to whack off in front of your lady friends. It’s disgusting. What Louis CK did is not as banal as offering a woman a backrub or touching her knee. But it’s exactly what you’d expect from him if you’d ever watched his routines. If the man has a delusional view of the appeal to women of watching a self-loathing man whack off, shouldn’t it be relevant to our moral assessment that we, the American public, are the ones who nourished this delusion with applause, laughter, money, and massive crowds at Madison Square Garden screaming his name? How can we suddenly be so censorious upon discovering that he took his onstage act to its logical extension in his hotel room? What makes the reaction to this all the weirder is that the women in question were comedians. Didn’t they see the potential? This is gold! It’s going to bring the house down. Sure, tell the whole world and humiliate the hell out of him—obviously he had that coming. But “outraged and shocked?” Grim faces and utter solemnity? Seriously?

The comedians, by their own account, screamed and laughed—and only later revealed they were “outraged.” They say that they shrieked with laughter because they were traumatized. But if you can’t understand why someone like Louis CK might have genuinely understood their laughter as “consent,” your emotional acumen is deficient. He says he asked first, and that they said yes, and that’s why he thought it was okay. Plausible? Of course. Really true? Who knows. But either way, I wouldn’t be surprised if now he hangs himself, because obviously, it isn’t all just an act. I expect everyone to be shocked, shocked, when he does.

In any case, none of us gets to watch Louis CK again—or Kevin Spacey, for that matter. They’re literally going to airbrush Spacey out of All The Money, like water commissar Nikolai Yezhov in that photo of the Moscow Canal. Comrade Spacey has been vaporized. He’s an unperson. Long live Comrade Ogilvy. Isn’t anyone a bit spooked by this?

Nor for the life of me can I make sense of the allegations against Leon Wieseltier. “The only problem with that dress is that it’s not tight enough,” he is reported to have said to a woman who worked for him. A lewd comment, to be sure. The daily banter of men and women the world around is full of lewd comments. ‪At times, we have learned from The Atlantic, Wieseltier drank too much and made passes at his co-workers. That’s not a wildly rare occurrence.

Above all, this is Leon Wieseltier—a man legendary for babbling on publicly about his sexual appetites. He has always been known as a megalomaniacal asshole. Didn’t this occur to anyone at the Emerson Collective before they hired him? If they were surprised to learn that Leon was an asshole, they must have missed this Vanity Fair profile, written in 1995. He seems to have become a better man since then. At least he no longer spends the day snorting coke off of his interns’ rear ends.

Even if every allegation against him is true, do they warrant his total professional destruction? Wieseltier’s a windbag, but I would still have read any journal he edited with interest. I’m sorry I won’t have the chance.

We just can’t hold people like Louis CK and Leon Wieseltier to the same standards of probity and decorum we would—in a highly imaginary alternate universe—hold the President or a Senator from Alabama. Americans love these people precisely because they’re outrageous, lewd, and willing publicly to violate sexual and social norms. Why wouldn’t you expect Louis CK, in a hotel room, to be Louis CK, only more so? What do people imagine John Belushi was like in his hotel room? He was like John Belushi, only more so. That’s why he was found dead in his hotel room, having taken “being John Belushi” to its logical conclusion.

For that matter, isn’t anyone else a bit spooked by the ritual tenor of the confessions that always follow? The most profound mystery of the Moscow Trials was the eagerness of the victims to confess. What prompted them to say things like this?

I once more repeat that I admit that I am guilty of treason to the socialist fatherland, the most heinous of possible crimes, of the organization of kulak uprisings … as will be clear to everybody, that there were many specific things which I could not have known, and which I actually did not know, but that this does not relieve me of responsibility. …  I am kneeling before the country, before the Party, before the whole people. The monstrousness of my crimes is immeasurable especially in the new stage of the struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the U.S.S.R. become clear to all.

Torture, of course, forced many of these confessions. But something more profound was at work. As Lavrentiy Beria said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Every man, in his soul, feels guilty. The confessions we are seeing now have been dredged from the same place in men’s souls.

They are all confessing in the same dazed, rote, mechanical way. It’s always the same statement: “I have come to realize that it does not matter that, at the time, I may have perceived my words as playful. It does not matter that, at the time, I may have felt that we were flirting. It does not matter that, at the time, I may have felt what I said was okay. The only thing that matters is how I made these three women feel,” said Representative Steve Lebsock. Now that is a remarkable thing to say. Why doesn’t it matter what he thought what was happening? Why would we accept as remotely rational the idea that the only thing that matters is how the women felt? The confession continues in the same vein: “It is hard for me to express how shocked I am to realize the depth of the pain I have caused and my journey now is to come to terms with my demons and I’ve brought on a team of therapists and I will be entering counselling and reflecting carefully on issues of gender inequality, power, and privilege in our society and—”

For God’s sake, why are these men all humiliating themselves? It’s not like confessing will bring forgiveness. They must all know, like Bukharin, that no matter what they say, the ritual of confession will be followed by the ritual of liquidation. If they said, “You’ve all lost your fucking minds, stop sniffing my underwear and leave me the fuck alone,” they’d meet exactly the same fate. Why didn’t Bukharin say, “To hell with you. You may kill me, but you will not make me grovel?” I used to wonder, but now I see. Am I the only one who finds these canned, rote, mechanical, brainwashed apologies deeply creepy? Isn’t anyone else put in mind of the Cultural Revolution’s Struggle Sessions, where the accused were dragged before crowds to condemn themselves and plead for forgiveness? This very form of ritual public humiliation, aimed at eliminating all traces of reactionary thinking, now awaits anyone accused of providing an unwanted backrub.

We are a culture historically disposed to moral panics and sexual hysterias. Not long ago we firmly convinced ourselves that our children were being ritually raped by Satanists. In recent years, especially, we have become prone to replacing complex thought with shallow slogans. We live in times of extremism, and black-and-white thinking. We should have the self-awareness to suspect that the events of recent weeks may not be an aspect of our growing enlightenment, but rather our growing enamorment with extremism.

We should certainly realize by now that a moral panic mixed with an internet mob is a menace. When the mob descends on a target of prominence, it’s as good as a death sentence, socially and professionally. None of us lead lives so faultless that we cannot be targeted this way. “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

Your computer can be hacked. Do you want to live in the kind of paranoid society where everyone wonders—Who’s next? To whom is it safe to speak freely? What would this joke sound like in a deposition? Do you think only the men who have done something truly foul are at risk? Don’t kid yourself. Once this starts, it doesn’t stop. The Perp Walk awaits us all.

Given the events of recent weeks, we can be certain of this: From now on, men with any instinct for self-preservation will cease to speak of anything personal, anything sexual, in our presence. They will make no bawdy jokes when we are listening. They will adopt in our presence great deference to our exquisite sensitivity and frailty. Many women seem positively joyful at this prospect. The Revolution has at last been achieved! But how could this be the world we want? Isn’t this the world we escaped?

Who could blame a man who does not enjoy the company of women under these circumstances, who would just rather not have women in the workplace at all? This is a world in which the Mike Pence rule—“Never be alone with a woman”—seems eminently sensible. Such a world is not good for women, however—as many women were quick to point out when we learned of the Mike Pence rule. Our success and advancement relies upon the personal and informal relationships we have with our colleagues and supervisors. But who, in this climate, could blame a venerable Oxford don for refusing to take the risk of teaching a young woman, one-on-one, with no witnesses? Mine was the first generation of women allowed the privilege of unchaperoned tutorials with Balliol’s dons. Will mine also be the last? Like so many revolutions, the sexual revolution risks coming full circle, returning us right where we started—fainting at bawdy jokes, demanding the return of ancient standards of chivalry, so delicate and virginal that a man’s hand on our knee causes us trauma. Women have long been victims, but now we are in so many respects victims no longer. We have more status, prestige, power, and personal freedom than ever before. Why would we want to speak and act as though we were overwhelmingly victims, as we actually used to be?

Women, I’m begging you: Think this through. We are fostering a climate in which men legitimately fear us, where their entire professional and personal lives can be casually destroyed by “secret lists” compiled by accusers they cannot confront, by rumors on the internet, by thrilled, breathless reporting denouncing one after another of them as a pig, often based only on the allegation that they did something all-too-human and none-too-criminal like making a lewd joke. Why would we even want men to be subject to such strenuous, arduous taboos against the display of their sexuality? These taboos, note carefully, resemble in non-trivial ways those that have long oppressed women. In a world with such arduous taboos about male purity and chastity, surely, it is rational for men to have as little to do with women as possible. What’s in this for us?

From the Salem Witch trials to the present, moral panics have followed the same pattern. Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics remains the classic study. To read it is to appreciate that we are seeing something familiar here. The media has identified a folk devil, which it presents in a stereotyped way, exaggerating the scale of the problem. The “moral entrepreneurs,” as Cohen terms them—editors, politicians, key arbiters of respectability—have begun competing to out-do each other in decrying the folk devil. The folk devil symbolizes a real problem. But so vilified has the scapegoat become, in popular imagination, that rational discussion of the real problem is no longer possible.

Cohen argued that moral panics must be understood in their wider socio-historic context. We may understand them, he proposed, as a boundary crisis: At a time of rapid change, they express the public’s uncertainly about the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. The widespread anxiety about unsettling change is resolved by making of certain figures scapegoats—folk devils. They symbolize a larger social unease.

Why this moral panic, and why now? I’m not sure, to be honest. I can hazard a few speculations. We’ve in the past thirty years experienced a massive restructuring of gender roles. When Hanna Rosin wrote her 2010 Atlantic essay, “The End of Men,” she was not exaggerating. “What if,” she asked, “the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” What if? Because it seems very much that it is. “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength,” she wrote. “The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male.” America’s future, Rosin argued, belongs to women. “Once you open your eyes to this possibility, the evidence is all around you.” And it is.

Let us put this in the crudest of Freudian terms. Women have castrated men en masse. Perhaps this panic is happening now because our emotions about this achievement are ambivalent. Perhaps our ambivalence is so taboo that we cannot admit it to ourselves, no less discuss it rationally. Is it possible that we are acting out a desire that has surfaced from the hadopelagic zone of our collective unconscious—a longing to have the old brutes back? That is what Freud would suggest: We are imagining brutes all around us as a form of wish-fulfillment, a tidy achievement that simultaneously allows us to express our ambivalence by shrieking at them in horror.

The problem with Freudian interpretations, as Popper observed, is that they’re unfalsifiable. They’re not science. But they’re tempting. Certainly, something weird is going on here. It is taking place in the aftermath of the most extraordinary period of liberation and achievement women have ever enjoyed. No, of course we don’t want the old brutes back. But perhaps we miss something about that world. Wouldn’t it be comforting, for example, at a time like this, to believe what women used to believe—that responsible men were in charge of the ship of state, and especially our nuclear weapons?

Moral panics have a context. They emerge at times of general anxiety. Scholars of the Salem witch trials point to Indian attacks, the political reverberations from the English Civil War, crop failures, and smallpox outbreaks. Residents of colonial Massachusetts filtered these apprehensions through the prism of their Calvinist theology. If their moral panic was prompted by the anxieties of their era and adapted to the theology of their times, why should we be any different?

I’m not sure what, precisely, is now driving us over the edge. But I’d suggest looking at the obvious. The President of the United States is Donald J. Trump. Our country is not what we thought it was. We’re a fading superpower in a world of enemies. The people now running the United States cannot remotely persuade us, even for five minutes, that they know what they’re doing and are capable of keeping us safe. Who among us doesn’t feel profound anxiety about this? Daddy-the-President turns out to be a hapless dotard. Women who had hopefully imagined rough men standing ready to do violence on our behalf so we could sleep peacefully in our beds at night have discovered instead—psychologically speaking—that Daddy is dead.

That’s enough to make anyone go berserk. Perhaps this realization is powering some of the hysteria we’re now seeing about sexual harassment. Rapid social and technological change, a lunatic at the helm, no one knows what tomorrow will bring—we’re primed for a moral panic par excellence. That it has something to do with men and male beastliness is an adaptation to the theology of our era: American culture has been obsessed with gender—the rarer and odder the better—for at least the past decade. What’s more, we really do have an unreconstructed slob in the Oval Office, one who is genuinely offensive to women. Some of the anger directed at these poor groveling schmucks is surely—really—meant for him.

No woman in her right mind would say, “I want the old world back.” We know what that meant for women. Nor would we even consciously think it. But perhaps, instead, we are fantasizing that the old world has come back, rather than confronting something a great deal more frightening: It’s never coming back. We are the grown-ups now. We are in charge.

Maybe it doesn’t matter where the sources of the present moral panic lie. But could we at least get enough of a grip to realize that it is a moral panic—and knock it off? Women, I’m begging you: Please.

The post The Warlock Hunt appeared first on The American Interest.

Macron’s African Ambitions

Emmanuel Macron is nothing if not self-possessed. The 39 year old’s rapid and stunning rise to the French presidency this year was fueled in no small part by his charisma and his ability to embellish centrist policies with radical rhetoric. It was no surprise, then, that during Macron’s first major, multi-country trip to Africa last week, he chose to engage skeptical students in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou on the controversial issues that continue to strain relations between France and its former colonies. While expressing regret for the crimes of colonialism and his admiration for African leaders like Mandela, Macron proudly assured his audience, “I am from a generation that doesn’t come to tell Africans what to do.”

But while the President’s trip, which included the EU-Africa summit in Abidjan, was intended to turn a new page in Franco-African relations, it was largely overshadowed by the recent revelations of slave auctions of migrants in Libya. In response to the ensuing international outcry, Macron announced on Wednesday that the EU would undertake an immediate evacuation of several thousand migrants stranded in Libya as part of a larger police and military action against human traffickers. The prospect of another French military intervention should give pause to those who had suggested that Macron’s election would herald the abrupt end of Françafrique, the pejorative term used to describe France’s controversial policies in Francophone Africa. Macron’s visit featured plenty of sympathetic language and vague pledges, but fell short of setting concrete policies to fundamentally alter the nature of Franco-African relations. That will be just fine with France’s partners in Washington and Brussels.

Fran çafrique, Then and Now

Françafrique began with decolonization and the paternalism and vindictiveness of Charles De Gaulle, who famously ordered all the public buildings in Guinea stripped down to the light fixtures after the Guineans shocked the then-Prime Minister by overwhelmingly voting “yes” in an independence referendum. The Cold War years were characterized by support for unabashedly kleptocratic dictators (including one possibly cannibalistic, self-proclaimed “Emperor”), which entailed all the cash-stuffed suitcases and hastily staged coups one would associate with neocolonialism.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and talk of a “third wave” of democracy globally and a “new generation” of African leaders specifically, many Africans and French alike hoped that France’s policies would shift accordingly. Unfortunately, the 1990s and 2000s saw tremendous upheaval across the continent, and France, still deeply involved in the economic and political life of its one-time colonies, felt compelled to launch some 16 military interventions between 1990 and 2010 while maintaining relationships with many unsavory leaders.

The mentality underpinning Françafrique has proven pervasive across the French political spectrum, hardly confining itself to the Right. At the twilight of French empire, socialist Prime Minister Guy Mollet oversaw a brutal counterinsurgency against the Algerian FLN independence movement and participated in the 1956 Suez invasion to punish Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser for his support of FLN insurgents. Under socialist President François Mitterand, the French provided extensive military and economic support to the Hutu extremist government of Juvenal Habyarimana in Rwanda, and launched a “humanitarian” intervention after the killings began, which had the effect of providing a safe haven for the genocidaires (Mitterand was also a man cynical enough to bomb a Greenpeace boat).

Macron is not the first French President to promise more equal Franco-African relations. Nicolas Sarkozy campaigned on such a pledge in 2007 only to immediately disappoint a hopeful continent when, on his first trip to Senegal, he repeated the tired Hegelian trope of the African as a man “who has not fully entered into history.” Five years later, and with more tact, Francois Hollande declared the end of Françafrique on a visit to Dakar, but subsequent interventions in the Central African Republic and the Sahel region reinforced the perception among many Francophone Africans that the former colonial power was not prepared to fully relinquish old possessions.

As we approach 2018, aspects of Françafrique remain prominent across the continent. French corporations exercise quasi-monopolistic control over key sectors of many Francophone nations’ economies such as infrastructure, telecommunications, and mining. The CFA Franc, the monetary union binding 14 African countries with France, requires African central banks to hold 50% of foreign exchange reserves in Paris in return for fixed-rate Euro convertibility—and, by extension, prevents governments within the union from exercising control over monetary policy. Proponents of the CFA, including some African heads of state, argue that the monetary union insulates their economies from the effects of political instability and the volatility of commodity markets, and the Paris banks make only paltry earnings from the arrangement. Nevertheless, the CFA Franc is increasingly unpopular in Africa as the anti-inflation orthodoxy of the European Central Bank is at odds with the development needs of some CFA nations that would benefit from devaluation-driven growth. Finally, the deployment of roughly 4,000 French troops in an expansive counterterrorism mission across the Sahel—dubbed Operation Barkhane—in addition to a 1,700-man base in Djibouti and garrisons of several hundred soldiers each in Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire, Gabon, and the Central African Republic belie any notion that France has abandoned its interventionist mindset.

With that said, there is no reason to doubt Macron’s sincerity when he speaks of his regret for colonialism’s brutality and his admiration for African heroes. His generation is one with no memory of French empire, and his background in finance and unabashedly globalist outlook would suggest he is sympathetic to the “Africa Rising” narrative promoted by many a development expert and optimistic pundit. A six-month stint at the French embassy in Nigeria a decade ago may have also given him an appreciation for the dynamism of Africa’s most populous country and largest economy. But Macron is a skilled politician cognizant of the constraints on his policy options and capable of prioritizing strategically. The West Africa visit should be seen as a well-tuned exercise in offering affordable concessions while holding fast on the trade and security policies that are most critical to the French national interest.

What Macron Can and Can’t Promise Africans

Most significant on the economic front, Macron stated in Ouagadougou that he would be willing to either adjust the exchange rate-setting procedure of the CFA Franc or even abandon the monetary union altogether, provided the decision is made by African leaders. The French would be sacrificing little more than colonial nostalgia by ditching the arrangement, and unpegging the currency could prove tenable for some of the CFA countries given the rebound in global commodity prices. Political elites in those countries, however, may be hesitant to abandon the system that has long facilitated their offshore holdings. Whatever the CFA nations decide is of little consequence to Paris.

Macron also pledged a billion-euro fund for African small and medium enterprises, the details of which have yet to be laid out, as part of his plan to increase France’s foreign aid budget by 45 percent by 2022. While a significant investment, it will yield few tangible results in a policy-relevant timeframe and it falls well short of the “African Marshall Plan” that African governments have eagerly anticipated, but which has so far proven to be little more than a vacuous buzzword of Brussels bureaucrats.

As part of his public reckoning with the unsavory history of Françafrique, Macron promised to release classified files related to the 1987 assassination of Burkinabe President Thomas Sankara (a national hero, dubbed “Africa’s Che Guevara,” whom many Africans believe was killed with French support). Such a move in itself does not improve relations—much as Obama’s acknowledgment of the CIA’s role in the 1953 Iran coup did little to help America’s image in the Middle East—but it is a sign of goodwill that should not be ignored. The President also went for the low-hanging fruit, offering vague assurances that the return of African artifacts from French museums would be a “top priority” for his administration.

Undiscussed during the visit was the future of the Economic Partnership Agreements between the EU and various African trade blocs. While neoliberalism has hardly been the death knell to Africa’s development that critics claim, most African governments complain that the current EPAs impede industrialization by flooding local markets with high-quality European products and incentivizing an export model based on extractive resources and commodities. Western aid programs have the potential to help boost African competitiveness in the long term, but they are insufficient to offset the immediate costs incurred by the EPAs. As such, EU trade policy remains a contentious issue for Africans and one that Macron seems understandably unenthusiastic to address.

That the biggest announcement of the trip was the EU action against human traffickers underscores the continuity in French policy towards Africa that we should expect under Macron. Macron was elected during a nationwide state of emergency, first declared after the horrific November 2015 Paris terror attacks and lingering for nearly two years afterward. He has identified Islamist terrorism as the top security threat facing France, and a recent poll showed that 80% of French citizens support the country’s tough new anti-terrorism legislation. Affiliates of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda operate freely throughout multiple regions of Africa at a time when massive migrant flows from Libya have raised fears of terrorists entering Europe. A tough EU response to the migrant challenge has in turn left hundreds of thousands of Africans languishing in Libyan transit camps, prompting international outrage that has led to this newest call for military action in the region. If Macron had hoped to conduct a less hawkish foreign policy in Africa, he picked the worst time to get elected.

While the French army is quite effective at the type of low-intensity conflict being fought in the Sahel, their forces in the region are overstretched, and Paris has accordingly sought to internationalize the Barkhane mission as part of its exit strategy. France has therefore been a key backer of the G5 Sahel Force—a multinational military force comprised of units from Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania. The G5 force conducted its first mission against Islamist insurgents in Mali last month, but despite its billing as “an African solution to African problems,” the force is heavily dependent on French air support and logistics as well as Western funding. Given the poor capacities of the G5 militaries, their lack of experience operating effectively together, and the dependence of African multinational forces on continuous foreign support, Operation Barkhane is likely to continue for the near future.

No doubt such a continued French commitment will be welcomed in Washington. From what little we can ascertain about President Trump’s policy priorities in Africa, counterterrorism is high on the list. After the fallout from the October 4 ambush in Niger that killed four American soldiers, the White House is looking for ways to maintain pressure on jihadist groups in Africa without incurring additional risk to U.S. forces. This may explain the Trump Administration’s recent pledge to partially fund the G5 force at France’s request, despite its previous skepticism of the effort. If the White House feels that France won’t prematurely pass off responsibilities in the Sahel to a nascent African joint force or a beleaguered UN peacekeeping mission, then the Administration will likely be more amenable to France’s strategy, even if it includes unpopular capacity-building programs for African security sectors.

With no clear end to France’s Sahel intervention in sight, it may be tempting to think of Franco-African relations as a case of plus ça change, but Macron would undoubtedly dispute such a characterization. If he follows through on his pledges by boosting development aid, concentrating that aid in the most promising sectors of African economies, and phasing out the CFA Franc with African nations’ support, then Macron could be remembered as a President who oversaw a shift towards more equal relations.

Unfortunately, such developments are well beyond the horizon. The near term is less promising. For all Macron’s apparent sensitivity and impassioned speeches, Françafrique is not yet in its death throes.

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Is Trump Taking The Gloves Off Against Beijing?

When President Trump visited his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing last month, he made sure to smile for the cameras. Trump’s “state visit plus,” which came shortly after the Chinese President’s historic consolidation of power at the 19th Party Congress, saw both leaders lavish praise on each other and celebrate their unlikely partnership. “China and the United States, once involved in animosity, have grown into a community with our interests converging,” Xi toasted Trump, while the President lauded the “highly respected” Xi and controversially tweeted praise for the Chinese strongman’s “great political victory.”

If Trump is making a public show of getting along with Xi, however, his subordinates are sending quite different signals. Last week, Trump’s trade team took three major steps suggesting that the gloves are about to come off in the U.S.-China economic relationship. As always, China-watcher Bill Bishop provides a useful round-up in Axios China, the free version of his Sinocism newsletter. To wit:

This week the U.S. has:

Initiated a probe into China’s alleged dumping of certain aluminum products in the U.S.
Filed a brief to the World Trade Organization in support of the European Union against China’s demand it be designated a “market economy.”
Appeared to have announced a halt to the Comprehensive Economic Dialogue with Beijing, based on comments Thursday by David Malpass, under secretary for international affairs at the Treasury Department.

At first glance, these may seem merely minor, symbolic moves to register disapproval with Chinese trade practices. And to be sure, the Trump Administration is hardly the first to object to Beijing’s dumping of metals in global markets, or to litigate its grievances with China through the WTO. Until recently, for all his appeals to economic nationalism, Trump appears to have been appeased by small-scale trade concessions offered by the Chinese.

But there is reason to believe that winds are shifting. The aluminum probe, for instance, was initiated directly by the Commerce Department in a departure from the usual procedure, which requires American businesses to formally request an investigation into unfair trade practices. By taking matters directly into his own hands, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is invoking powers not used since 1985, and fulfilling a pledge to take the lead on pursuing trade cases to protect U.S. industry. Aluminum is likely to be just the first Chinese target in the crosshairs of an energized Commerce Department; according to the New York Times, solar panels could be up next.

Beijing has other reasons to worry about the signals coming from Washington these days. The Trump Administration may soon see a shakeup that would tilt the balance of power decisively in favor of economic hardliners. Gary Cohn, the Goldman Sachs veteran who has often resisted Trump’s protectionist impulses as Director of the National Economic Council, is widely expected to step down after playing his part in the GOP’s tax reform efforts. As Bill Bishop aptly notes, that would leave “no checks in the White House against a much more aggressive trade agenda against China.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s initial point person on China, Jared Kushner, has lately been sidelined by Chief of Staff John Kelly, while Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been undermined by a succession of harmful leaks and rumors about his imminent resignation (which the President denies). With their usual American interlocutors handicapped or heading for the exits, the Chinese may well be bracing for a reshuffling that would empower the Trump Administration’s nationalist wing.

Beijing would be wise to prepare for that possibility. It is too often assumed that Trump’s hawkish views of China have softened, or alternatively that they represent some aberration to be carefully managed by the “adults” in his inner circle. But in truth, many high-ranking U.S. officials share his basic assessment that China has too long been allowed to game the Western economic system and operate with its ambitions unchecked. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer certainly fits the mold, as does Defense Secretary James Mattis. And many of the positions that Trump is now taking against China—like his efforts to deny them market economy status at the WTO—enjoy broad support among our European allies as well. At a moment when both the U.S. and EU are eyeing Beijing warily and seeking legislative remedies to limit Chinese investment, Trump’s get-tough approach is arguably a mainstream position.

Just how aggressive Trump’s economic confrontation of China will be remains to be seen, and it might well depend on how helpful China decides to be against North Korea, given Trump’s history of linking the trade and security agendas. If the Commerce Department sanctions a top Chinese bank, for instance, it will be a major signal that his Administration is willing to play economic hardball with Beijing and that it is fed up with China’s lackluster efforts to constrain Pyongyang. Judging by this week’s actions, it certainly seems like such a hard-nosed approach is in the cards.

In any case, the real determinants of the U.S.-China relationship remain the concrete policy outputs of the Administration, not the tweets and photo-ops that dominate so much of the conversation. President Trump may look like he’s getting on famously with President Xi, but appearances, as always, can be deceiving.

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The Future of Northern Ireland: Brexit and EU Borders

Almost twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the Troubles, the future of Northern Ireland is once again in the international headlines. This time, the crisis is being refracted through the lens of European, rather than regional, politics. The issue has taken some of the shine off the immediate positive impact of the Brexit referendum result, and the problems raised by the crisis seem insurmountable: How can the United Kingdom leave the European Union while avoiding the imposition of the “hard border” that its government does not want and that the Irish economy might not survive?

The crisis abounds in ironies. One side in the debate is astonished that the centenary of the struggle for Irish independence is being marked by the Republic’s government frustrating its closest neighbour’s pursuit of its own ideal of national sovereignty. Another side in the debate cannot understand why unionists across Ulster campaigned to leave, knowing that the success of that vote would encourage nationalist and separatist movements across the UK. Discussions of the “will of the people of Northern Ireland” too often forget that constituencies in the province returned some of the highest tallies for both the leave and remain campaigns: Brexit has become another indicator of the polarization of the electorate under political formulas that were negotiated by the centrist unionist and nationalist parties that have been pushed to the side-lines by the relentless rise of Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). And, of course, these ironies reach into Westminster, where the political ascendancy of the DUP has highlighted the on-going vilification of unionism within British media culture, and where the negotiations for Brexit are being led by a Prime Minister who campaigned against it and criticized by a leader of the opposition who, like many on the far left, has a long history of Euroskepticism and is thought to have privately supported the campaign to leave.

The debate about the future of the Northern Ireland border, with its apparently unsolvable mathematics, has precipitated a crisis of almost existential proportions in London, Dublin, and Brussels. While refusing to get involved in the violence and political irregularity of the Catalonian crisis, which they regard as an internal matter for the Spanish government, European leaders have proposed solutions for Brexit that threaten to undermine the integrity of the United Kingdom: Michel Barnier, the European Union’s chief negotiator, has called for Northern Ireland to remain within the customs union and to have its own Brexit deal, effectively pushing EU borders into the Irish Sea. While this may represent a negotiating position in a complex discussion designed to achieve a more conciliatory conclusion, the suggestion has provoked the fury of unionists across Ulster, who recoil from any move that further distinguishes Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom, such as those that British negotiators apparently tabled today.

But while Northern Ireland politics resurface at the center of an international debate, there is no forum for their discussion at home. The devolved assembly at Stormont has been out of operation since January, when Sinn Fein walked out of the power-sharing administration, apparently in protest about a badly mismanaged renewable heat incentivizing scheme, and the protracted negotiations that followed, which were aimed at the formation of a new power-sharing administration, have been frustrated by disagreement about a controversial rights agenda. Discussions have stalled over an Irish language act, but the disagreement may be interpreted by those outside the secret negotiations to represent the reluctance of the DUP to govern through the imposition upon the province of same-sex marriage and the reluctance of Sinn Fein to govern through the implementation of Brexit. This week the total failure of these negotiations became apparent, with Sinn Fein indicating that there is no basis for the continuation of these talks, even as its politicians object to the possibility of direct rule from Westminster. If this interpretation stands, the province’s politics are caught in a vicious circle: Local politicians need to meet to consider the implications of Brexit, but will only reconstitute the devolved assembly once the crisis has passed.

If they have no forum for debate in Belfast, the views of Northern Ireland politicians are certainly being heard in Westminster. The DUP, the province’s largest unionist party, effectively holds the balance of power in the House of Commons, where, after her failed gamble of a general election, Theresa May’s government hangs by a thread and only with the support of ten Northern Ireland MPs. Playing on this advantage, the DUP negotiated £1 billion of additional public funding for Northern Ireland, in return for agreeing to support the Conservatives in a “confidence and supply” arrangement. Conservative dependence upon the DUP seriously weakens the government’s hand in the Brexit negotiations. Northern Ireland unionists have long been wary of their English counterparts, and can point to a long history of betrayal by Westminster administrations upon which they have relied: Even as stalwart a British hero as Winston Churchill, for example, repeatedly offered Northern Ireland to the southern state in return for its entering the Second World War on the side of the Allies. Unionists are again worrying about whom to trust. With her small majority depending upon unionist MPs, Theresa May cannot make any gesture towards rearranging the UK-EU border without seriously, and perhaps fatally, destabilising her own Conservative government. UK negotiators have very little flexibility in these discussions, simply because they cannot over-ride the wishes of the DUP. But Northern Ireland unionists fear that their principles will be sacrificed on the altar of British expediency—a plausible fear, as today’s headlines suggest.

The Republic’s sometimes unstable coalition government also seems to have a narrowing range of options. Ireland is the EU member state most at risk from a badly negotiated Brexit. Economically, it must protect open access to the UK market, which consumes 44 percent of exports from Irish firms, including 90 percent of Irish exports of cereals, fruit and vegetables. But, on the other hand, Ireland’s coalition partners must also respond to the recent electoral successes of Sinn Fein by moving closer to older nationalist ideals—a move that seems especially critical in light of an expected general election, an early poll for which has been made more likely by a scandal relating to a political cover-up and a smear campaign directed against a whistle-blower in the Irish police. A hard border would re-inscribe the north-south jurisdictional differences that were softened by the administrative ambiguities of the Good Friday Agreement. In the referendum that supported the Agreement, the Republic dropped its constitutional claim to the northern counties. But Barnier’s negotiations for Brexit may be re-opening that question.

The solution to the Irish border problem seems imponderable, but it may be that the difficulty is not caused by the competing national interests of either of the governments most immediately affected by the negotiations. Ireland and the United Kingdom have a great deal more in common than the billions of euros of shared trade that is now at risk by the imposition of customs barriers on a hard border. The common travel area, established in 1923, allowed for free movement between the United Kingdom and the Irish Free State, and enacted what was virtually a common immigration zone. The two countries joined the European Community on the same day in 1973, recognising their mutual political and economic interest—a striking acknowledgement, given that the northern troubles were then at their height. During the economic crisis of 2007–09, the British government contributed around £20 billion to the Irish economy in a kinder bail-out than the €85 billion deal organised by the troika, the European organizations and International Monetary Fund, for which, as a national newspaper recently put it, “Ireland gave up its sovereignty.” While real differences exist, and in some areas becoming increasingly pronounced, in terms of culture, media, law, education, and in strong tourism sectors, the two countries have a very great deal in common.

It’s worth remembering that Ireland and the United Kingdom also share a tradition of Euroskepticism. The British example is better known, but successive Irish governments’ enthusiasm for European integration must be balanced against Irish voters’ rejection in referenda of the treaties of Nice (2001) and Lisbon (2008), both of which referenda had to be re-run for these treaties to be ratified. The confidence of some senior administrators in the goodwill of EU institutions was dented by the media manipulation that pushed the Irish government into accepting the bailout. Sinn Fein’s move to promote the values of EU integration is reasonably recent. And arguments about the real value of membership may be less persuasive as the Republic becomes a net contributor to EU beneficiaries elsewhere.

Perhaps the two governments can build with imagination on this shared history. They may get little help from Northern Irish politicians, who, with a long history of underachievement, are not noted for imagining creative solutions. But perhaps the debate can be re-framed. One solution might be to consider whether Ireland should pursue its own exit from the European Union—a proposal that has gained small traction in Irish media. A more realistic suggestion might be to consider whether Ireland should pursue special status within the European Union, combining its access to the European common market with access to that of the United Kingdom, thus satisfying many of the demands of the Irish government and its European minders. But there are problems with each of these solutions—and with many others besides.

Brexit may present intractable problems for the Irish border—but failure to resolve these problems is not an option. After all, if the border issue cannot be solved, and the UK government agrees to trade on the basis of WTO rules, it could become the responsibility of the Irish government to create the hard border that neither country wants, and to control the 44 percent of exports from Irish firms that currently arrive in the United Kingdom. Not for the first time, an Irish political crisis calls for creative imagination. Meanwhile, EU leaders continue their power-play. Ireland has fulfilled its role as “model prisoner” of an unwanted program of austerity that was designed principally for the benefit of French and German banks, as Yanis Varoufakis has argued. And Ireland’s transformation is complete: Last Friday, Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, emerged from a meeting with Leo Varadkar, the Irish Taoiseach, to confirm Ireland’s new status as the end of EU diplomacy: “Let me say very clearly. If the UK offer is unacceptable for Ireland, it will also be unacceptable for the EU.” But as Ireland becomes the end of EU diplomacy, so it risks becoming its means. Not for the first time, to protect its own interests, the European Union may be gambling with Ireland’s future to make its own kind of point.

Meanwhile, as today’s headlines suggest, the UK government can contemplate the possibility of an exit deal requiring Northern Ireland to stay within while Britain leaves the single market and customs union—a suggestion abominated by the ten DUP MPs upon whom Theresa May’s Parliamentary majority depends.

Brexit abounds in ironies. Ireland may stay within the European Union at the cost of its own sovereignty, as the Irish Independent suggested—but, as today’s headlines suggest, the United Kingdom may be prepared to leave the European Union at the cost of its own territorial and legal integrity.

The post The Future of Northern Ireland: Brexit and EU Borders appeared first on The American Interest.

The Future of Northern Ireland: Brexit and EU borders

Almost twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the Troubles, the future of Northern Ireland is once again in the international headlines. This time, the crisis is being refracted through the lens of European, rather than regional, politics. The issue has taken some of the shine off the immediate positive impact of the Brexit referendum result, and the problems raised by the crisis seem insurmountable: How can the United Kingdom leave the European Union while avoiding the imposition of the “hard border” that its government does not want and that the Irish economy might not survive?

The crisis abounds in ironies. One side in the debate is astonished that the centenary of the struggle for Irish independence is being marked by the Republic’s government frustrating its closest neighbour’s pursuit of its own ideal of national sovereignty. Another side in the debate cannot understand why unionists across Ulster campaigned to leave, knowing that the success of that vote would encourage nationalist and separatist movements across the UK. Discussions of the “will of the people of Northern Ireland” too often forget that constituencies in the province returned some of the highest tallies for both the leave and remain campaigns: Brexit has become another indicator of the polarization of the electorate under political formulas that were negotiated by the centrist unionist and nationalist parties that have been pushed to the side-lines by the relentless rise of Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). And, of course, these ironies reach into Westminster, where the political ascendancy of the DUP has highlighted the on-going vilification of unionism within British media culture, and where the negotiations for Brexit are being led by a Prime Minister who campaigned against it and criticized by a leader of the opposition who, like many on the far left, has a long history of Euroskepticism and is thought to have privately supported the campaign to leave.

The debate about the future of the Northern Ireland border, with its apparently unsolvable mathematics, has precipitated a crisis of almost existential proportions in London, Dublin, and Brussels. While refusing to get involved in the violence and political irregularity of the Catalonian crisis, which they regard as an internal matter for the Spanish government, European leaders have proposed solutions for Brexit that threaten to undermine the integrity of the United Kingdom: Michel Barnier, the European Union’s chief negotiator, has called for Northern Ireland to remain within the customs union and to have its own Brexit deal, effectively pushing EU borders into the Irish Sea. While this may represent a negotiating position in a complex discussion designed to achieve a more conciliatory conclusion, the suggestion has provoked the fury of unionists across Ulster, who recoil from any move that further distinguishes Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom, such as those that British negotiators apparently tabled today.

But while Northern Ireland politics resurface at the center of an international debate, there is no forum for their discussion at home. The devolved assembly at Stormont has been out of operation since January, when Sinn Fein walked out of the power-sharing administration, apparently in protest about a badly mismanaged renewable heat incentivizing scheme, and the protracted negotiations that followed, which were aimed at the formation of a new power-sharing administration, have been frustrated by disagreement about a controversial rights agenda. Discussions have stalled over an Irish language act, but the disagreement may be interpreted by those outside the secret negotiations to represent the reluctance of the DUP to govern through the imposition upon the province of same-sex marriage and the reluctance of Sinn Fein to govern through the implementation of Brexit. This week the total failure of these negotiations became apparent, with Sinn Fein indicating that there is no basis for the continuation of these talks, even as its politicians object to the possibility of direct rule from Westminster. If this interpretation stands, the province’s politics are caught in a vicious circle: Local politicians need to meet to consider the implications of Brexit, but will only reconstitute the devolved assembly once the crisis has passed.

If they have no forum for debate in Belfast, the views of Northern Ireland politicians are certainly being heard in Westminster. The DUP, the province’s largest unionist party, effectively holds the balance of power in the House of Commons, where, after her failed gamble of a general election, Theresa May’s government hangs by a thread and only with the support of ten Northern Ireland MPs. Playing on this advantage, the DUP negotiated £1 billion of additional public funding for Northern Ireland, in return for agreeing to support the Conservatives in a “confidence and supply” arrangement. Conservative dependence upon the DUP seriously weakens the government’s hand in the Brexit negotiations. Northern Ireland unionists have long been wary of their English counterparts, and can point to a long history of betrayal by Westminster administrations upon which they have relied: Even as stalwart a British hero as Winston Churchill, for example, repeatedly offered Northern Ireland to the southern state in return for its entering the Second World War on the side of the Allies. Unionists are again worrying about whom to trust. With her small majority depending upon unionist MPs, Theresa May cannot make any gesture towards rearranging the UK-EU border without seriously, and perhaps fatally, destabilising her own Conservative government. UK negotiators have very little flexibility in these discussions, simply because they cannot over-ride the wishes of the DUP. But Northern Ireland unionists fear that their principles will be sacrificed on the altar of British expediency—a plausible fear, as today’s headlines suggest.

The Republic’s sometimes unstable coalition government also seems to have a narrowing range of options. Ireland is the EU member state most at risk from a badly negotiated Brexit. Economically, it must protect open access to the UK market, which consumes 44 percent of exports from Irish firms, including 90 percent of Irish exports of cereals, fruit and vegetables. But, on the other hand, Ireland’s coalition partners must also respond to the recent electoral successes of Sinn Fein by moving closer to older nationalist ideals—a move that seems especially critical in light of an expected general election, an early poll for which has been made more likely by a scandal relating to a political cover-up and a smear campaign directed against a whistle-blower in the Irish police. A hard border would re-inscribe the north-south jurisdictional differences that were softened by the administrative ambiguities of the Good Friday Agreement. In the referendum that supported the Agreement, the Republic dropped its constitutional claim to the northern counties. But Barnier’s negotiations for Brexit may be re-opening that question.

The solution to the Irish border problem seems imponderable, but it may be that the difficulty is not caused by the competing national interests of either of the governments most immediately affected by the negotiations. Ireland and the United Kingdom have a great deal more in common than the billions of euros of shared trade that is now at risk by the imposition of customs barriers on a hard border. The common travel area, established in 1923, allowed for free movement between the United Kingdom and the Irish Free State, and enacted what was virtually a common immigration zone. The two countries joined the European Community on the same day in 1973, recognising their mutual political and economic interest—a striking acknowledgement, given that the northern troubles were then at their height. During the economic crisis of 2007–09, the British government contributed around £20 billion to the Irish economy in a kinder bail-out than the €85 billion deal organised by the troika, the European organizations and International Monetary Fund, for which, as a national newspaper recently put it, “Ireland gave up its sovereignty.” While real differences exist, and in some areas becoming increasingly pronounced, in terms of culture, media, law, education, and in strong tourism sectors, the two countries have a very great deal in common.

It’s worth remembering that Ireland and the United Kingdom also share a tradition of Euroskepticism. The British example is better known, but successive Irish governments’ enthusiasm for European integration must be balanced against Irish voters’ rejection in referenda of the treaties of Nice (2001) and Lisbon (2008), both of which referenda had to be re-run for these treaties to be ratified. The confidence of some senior administrators in the goodwill of EU institutions was dented by the media manipulation that pushed the Irish government into accepting the bailout. Sinn Fein’s move to promote the values of EU integration is reasonably recent. And arguments about the real value of membership may be less persuasive as the Republic becomes a net contributor to EU beneficiaries elsewhere.

Perhaps the two governments can build with imagination on this shared history. They may get little help from Northern Irish politicians, who, with a long history of underachievement, are not noted for imagining creative solutions. But perhaps the debate can be re-framed. One solution might be to consider whether Ireland should pursue its own exit from the European Union—a proposal that has gained small traction in Irish media. A more realistic suggestion might be to consider whether Ireland should pursue special status within the European Union, combining its access to the European common market with access to that of the United Kingdom, thus satisfying many of the demands of the Irish government and its European minders. But there are problems with each of these solutions—and with many others besides.

Brexit may present intractable problems for the Irish border—but failure to resolve these problems is not an option. After all, if the border issue cannot be solved, and the UK government agrees to trade on the basis of WTO rules, it could become the responsibility of the Irish government to create the hard border that neither country wants, and to control the 44 percent of exports from Irish firms that currently arrive in the United Kingdom. Not for the first time, an Irish political crisis calls for creative imagination. Meanwhile, EU leaders continue their power-play. Ireland has fulfilled its role as “model prisoner” of an unwanted program of austerity that was designed principally for the benefit of French and German banks, as Yanis Varoufakis has argued. And Ireland’s transformation is complete: Last Friday, Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, emerged from a meeting with Leo Varadkar, the Irish Taoiseach, to confirm Ireland’s new status as the end of EU diplomacy: “Let me say very clearly. If the UK offer is unacceptable for Ireland, it will also be unacceptable for the EU.” But as Ireland becomes the end of EU diplomacy, so it risks becoming its means. Not for the first time, to protect its own interests, the European Union may be gambling with Ireland’s future to make its own kind of point.

Meanwhile, as today’s headlines suggest, the UK government can contemplate the possibility of an exit deal requiring Northern Ireland to stay within while Britain leaves the single market and customs union—a suggestion abominated by the ten DUP MPs upon whom Theresa May’s Parliamentary majority depends.

Brexit abounds in ironies. Ireland may stay within the European Union at the cost of its own sovereignty, as the Irish Independent suggested—but, as today’s headlines suggest, the United Kingdom may be prepared to leave the European Union at the cost of its own territorial and legal integrity.

The post The Future of Northern Ireland: Brexit and EU borders appeared first on The American Interest.