Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 122

Europe Revisits Common Defense, Yet Again…

In Europe today discussion about security and defense is a two-track exercise. On the one hand, European NATO allies and partners speak of their commitment to the alliance, responding on balance positively to Washington’s call to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense. On the other hand, Brexit and the political churning, confusion, and at times barely concealed disdain that has defined how many a European capital has seen the White House since the arrival of the Trump Administration have revived the idea of a European Security and Defense Union as the second rail of the Continent’s security. Increasingly today one hears of a European Defense Minister speaking in an open forum about the need to revisit the original French idea from the 1950s, or of someone from the European Commission calling for resources to shore up EU security and defense. The Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), once dormant, is preoccupying EU leadership once again, with three initiatives in the making: the Coordinated Annual Review on Defense (CARD), the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), and the European Defense Fund (EDF). CARD is already in play, PESCO was just signed on November 13 by 23 countries at a ceremony in Brussels, and EDF is supposed to be initiated before the end of this year, with the Capability Development Plan slated for Spring 2018. So much for the current state of play. But if the past is any guide, one ought not to be too easily taken in by the interwoven institutional matrix that is, yet again, in development.1

The reality of European defense is much simpler, and frankly harsher, than the current round of institutional adjustments and organizational initiatives seems to suggest. What is once again missing is a discussion of the type of investment strategy Europe’s militaries will need going forward in order to meet the morphing security and defense criteria. Left unaddressed is the fundamental lack of capacity and coherence that has marred practically all good planning intentions since the end of the Cold War. Taken separately, European states have retained, albeit to varying degrees, some elements of core military capabilities, though Britain’s departure will deal this overall picture a serious blow. Yet even with such selective elements of military capabilities in place, Europe lacks the larger architectural vision it needs to coalesce individual states around a coherent EU approach. Without it, national military planning processes will remain a serious impediment to delivering meaningful capabilities for European defense.

The defense ministries are aware that if the European Union is to actually build a larger capability that is more than the sum of its national militaries, national long-term planning can no longer be done in isolation. And yet domestic political constraints continue to rule, especially when it comes to the funding of acquisition programs. Even here, new weapons and systems designs that ought to eventually produce the much talked about “system-of-systems” solutions lag behind because of national procurement policies and the conflicting spending priorities of individual states. In the end, plans for EU defense seem always to follow a familiar pattern whereby a lack of leadership and, most importantly, political will and political risk avoidance reign supreme

There is another important issue that the current round of European debates over defense capabilities needs to address, namely how in an extreme situation the Continent’s militaries would move beyond performing various limited crisis management tasks to ensure that in an all-out war scenario the Europeans and the Americans could work together. Here no country’s defense plans and financial commitments will play a greater role than Germany’s when it comes to affecting Europe’s ability to work with the United States. Germany remains the most important entry point for the U.S. Army into continental Europe, and yet the country has seen an approximately 40 percent overall reduction in the size of its military. These cuts have been accompanied by significant infrastructure reductions, which in turn continue to pose a significant obstacle to the U.S. Army’s prepositioning of stocks. If the U.S. military is to be able to work with its European counterparts, there is an urgent need to ensure guaranteed access to transport infrastructure, plus freedom of movement, as it currently can take up to two weeks to get the requisite permissions and documentation for U.S. forces to move across Europe to position themselves along the eastern flank.

It is a positive sign that Europe appears to be getting serious about addressing the capabilities deficits that have perennially plagued the ever-increasing number of its armed forces. But rather than offering up another permutation of de Gaulle’s chimeric vision of a pan-European security and defense system, the Europeans need to make not just a series of declarations, but also (and most importantly) make their investments in European defense closely aligned with American planning for multiple contingencies in Europe, including the extreme scenario of an all-out war. And as things stand today, there is no better alternative structure available to the Europeans than the NATO alliance, which also badly needs more European resources to remain credible.

1Editor’s note: For more on this topic, see Camille Pecastaing’s “Euromacht: Brussells Über Alles?”

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The Rise of the “Westernists”

When imagining what globalization looks like in practice, few envision a more Senegalese or Sri Lankan world. Globalization is of course a complicated process, but due to the immense economic and geopolitical power of the U.S. and Europe, it has resulted in the continual expansion of Western norms and values. For many, this was a welcome development. As globalization proceeded, their thinking went, a common human culture would emerge, leading to ever more progress and cooperation. We would never necessarily be the same, but our aims and hopes would converge.

Globalization’s ideal, however, has been turned upside down. From annual debates over whether Americans should celebrate Christopher Columbus, to new veil bans in Austria, lightning rod identity controversies have come to dominate the headlines for weeks or months at a time. After the technocratic moment of the 1990s and 2000s, politics is returning to its natural state: answering the fundamental question of who we are, not what sorts of policies we support.

The dividing lines have become predictable: on one side line up liberal individualists, who maintain almost as a matter of faith that any form of personal expression is to be protected and even celebrated. On the other end lies a new brand of conservative nationalists, who—perhaps channeling their inner Paul Revere—see it as their personal responsibility to warn the nation when certain symbols and identities begin to threaten the values that (in their eyes) any self-respecting Western society ought to hold dear.

Though not often coupled together, both Islamists and the West’s conservative nationalists (whom we might term “Westernists”) place great importance on the communal dimension of human society. Both aim to privilege a certain set of beliefs and symbols at the local level, starting with the family, and both are inclined to prioritize the communities, regions, and nations in which they live. In this sense, both are also “supremacist” (we say this descriptively, not necessarily pejoratively). In our research studying Islamism across the Muslim world, we’ve written about how elevating Islamic law and morals in the public sphere forms a central motivation for its supporters. Though they view their aims as diametrically opposed, Islamists and Westernists mirror each other in their preoccupation—and even obsession—with collective identity and cultural integrity.

Take, for instance, President Donald Trump’s July speech in Poland. In it, he asserted the greatness of Western civilization and its values, and how they must be defended with vigilance. “The West was saved with the blood of patriots,” roared Trump. “Each generation must rise up and play their part in its defense… every foot of ground, and every last inch of civilization, is worth defending with your life.”

Liberals roundly decried the speech as racist and exclusionary, and they no doubt have a point. But before automatically attacking his rhetoric—however problematic it might be—we might try asking: Why should Trump or anyone like him be ashamed to be heir to a set of values that they view as the pinnacle of human society? Indeed, more than a billion Muslims believe as a matter of doctrine in the finality and perfection of Islam, the Quran, and the Prophet Muhammad. People have a right to believe that anything—whether a religion, a philosophy, or a civilization—is supreme Truth. If Trump erred, it’s not because it’s a crime to prefer one mode of living to another. It’s because of the dangerous policy effects his words might have.

Interestingly, the “alt-right” and other conservative nationalists recognized the populist sentiments underpinning the impulse to defend Western values, and they exploited it for electoral success. Though often simplistically portrayed as racists (and many of them surely are), many nationalists see Islam and Muslims not merely a security threat, but as a civilizational one as well. In a quickly deleted tweet that shocked his audience in the brief time it was up, alt-right darling Mike Cernovich wrote: “I say this without regard to what I want or wish were true…Islam is the future. Muslims have a vision and will. That is destiny.”

Richard Spencer is similarly on record saying that “religions have a civilizational component…a kind of supranational, supra-ethnic order…I think we can see this in the way that Christianity functioned in society for many centuries, and I think we can see that in the way that Islam functions now.” Key figures in the Trump Administration, including White House senior advisor Stephen Miller and ousted strategist Steve Bannon—the architects of the infamous “Muslim ban” and subsequent restrictions on refugees—share aspects of this worldview.

Such people see sounding the alarm against a rival Islamic civilization and all its symbols—and the supposed decadence of fellow Westerners—as a patriotic duty. Islamists too, in their struggle against liberal modernity and sin, often find themselves engaged in this same project, that of playing savior to the supposed communal soul of their societies.

That politics is becoming basically tribal has been surprising to some, but this is really just a confirmation of what political life has been for most of history: a battle over who we are, what we stand for, and what we want to believe in. A series of academic studies (Democracy for Realists being the most prominent) has argued with the benefit of growing empirical data that people, even the better educated, don’t vote based on policy. The authors Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels make the case that the “most important factor in voters’ judgments [is] their social and psychological attachments to groups.” In other words, if the same person, with the same genetics and life experience but no political attachments, decides to become a Republican, he is likely to become more pro-life. If that person decides to become a Democrat, he is likely to become more pro-choice.

The West’s merry band of new nationalists—who despite profound national differences see themselves as brothers in arms—seem to instinctively grasp the need for group solidarity, however dark, in a way that many of us won’t (or can’t). This is their built-in advantage. This helps explain why Westernists have been so successful lately in influencing those in power and reshaping their societies. Whether it’s Trump’s meteoric rise, the Brexit vote, or high turnout rates for ethno-nationalist parties all over Europe, the resonance these groups have should give us pause. Clearly, appealing to these sorts “tribal” bonds can both garner and sustain a real constituency.

To write off the impulses fueling our populist moment seems not only wrongheaded, but also like something of a cop-out. Whether with Islamists, Westernists, or anyone else, humans want to have a mission—as Samuel Huntington put it, we want to know “who we are.” Rather than fault those that dare to answer this question in ways we may not like, we might instead dare to dream up alternatives ourselves. Some mainstream politicians seem to be beginning to grasp this: French President Emmanuel Macron and Senator John McCain have both spoken passionately on the need to give voters a grand narrative. Scoff all you want, but the collective self represents not only the politics of the past, but also, apparently, those of the future as well.

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The Paradise Papers: A Reading Guide

This past Sunday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism released the Paradise Papers, a new trove of documents showing the opaque networks, shell companies, and gaping regulatory loopholes that the world’s wealthy use to stash their gains abroad. The revelations therein are still sending shockwaves through Western capitals: From London, where the papers are raising questions about a top Conservative Party donor’s efforts to hide his wealth in Bermuda and Belize, to Washington, where Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is facing scrutiny over his stakes in a shipping company linked to Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law. Elsewhere, the reputational damage has engulfed everyone from Apple CEO Tim Cook to Bono, Madonna, and the Queen of England herself.

While the specific details may be new, though, the larger problem is a longstanding one. The contents of the Paradise Papers largely pertain to officially legal activity, thanks to a patchwork of legal loopholes and a proliferation of secrecy jurisdictions that allow the world’s wealthiest citizens to shield their vast riches from taxation. The implications are grim. Not only does the current legal framework empower wealthy Western tax dodgers, it also enables foreign kleptocrats to plunder state coffers and launder their proceeds in the West, compromising our own moral authority while emboldening autocratic adversaries who are quick to cry hypocrisy.

The American Interest has been covering these issues for more than a decade. As the Paradise Papers provoke more public scrutiny of offshore finance and dirty money, here are seven articles from the TAI archives that provide a helpful guide to the legal, political, and moral questions at stake.

Back in 2006, Jennifer M. Nordin and Raymond W. Baker sounded the alarm in “Toolbox: Dirty Money,” explaining how Western legal structures facilitate the spread of ill-gotten gains:

Clandestine funds move around the world, and both in and out of our own country, thanks to a comprehensive dirty money structure that has evolved over the past forty years. Components of this system include more than seventy tax havens and offshore secrecy jurisdictions; one to three million disguised corporations worldwide; “flee clauses” that allow disguised corporations to relocate from one secret enclave to another; anonymous trust accounts; fake foundations; false documentation; mispricing in international trade transactions; and loopholes in Western laws that facilitate the movement of proceeds through the dirty money structure into Western financial institutions. U.S. banks and businesses bear too large a share of responsibility for dirty money, especially those financial institutions that actively solicit deposits from clients and corporations that abuse transfer pricing as a normal part of their international activities. These banks and businesses help the perpetrators of dirty money reach their goal: to get their cash into the legitimate financial system.

“Catching Up With Corruption,” a piece by John Christensen, Nicholas Shaxson, and Raymond Baker from September 2008, argued for a broader definition of corruption, to include the technically legal tax-avoidance maneuvers now at the heart of the Paradise Papers:

There are many consequences of refining our perceptions of corruption. One is that tax evasion is identified as a form of corruption, even if it does not involve the abuse of public office or entrusted power. While those people and institutions dedicated to tackling corruption today tend to focus on the theft of certain types of public assets, tax evasion is generally overlooked even though evaded taxes are stolen public assets, too. Tax evasion also looks very much like more traditionally defined forms of corruption because it involves abusive activity at the intersection between the public and the private sectors. It allows sections of society to bypass accepted norms, and provides one set of rules for the rich and well-connected, and another set for the poor and weak. It involves insiders operating in secret, without restraint. It corrodes governments. Furthermore, the proceeds of tax evasion, along with the proceeds of bribery and criminal activities, use exactly the same mechanisms and subterfuges as they shift across borders: dummy corporations, shielded trusts, anonymous foundations, falsified pricing, fake documentation and more, all abetted by a supporting array of mainstream bankers, lawyers, and accountants. Dirty money in many forms welcomed by the United States and Europe allows the proceeds of drug trafficking, racketeering, corruption and terrorism to tag alongside. These are parallel rails on the same tracks coursing through the global financial system.

For those seeking to understand legislative remedies to the problem, Heather Lowe’s “Law as Leverage” provides a helpful resource. Writing in 2010, Lowe took stock of proposed legislation to combat secrecy jurisdictions and tax evasion, and explained why those issues were essential to a broader financial reform agenda:

Secrecy jurisdictions are magnets for illicit funds and facilitators of illegal and often dangerous activities. They support capital flight out of developing countries, transnational crime, terrorism and massive tax evasion that unfairly burdens ordinary citizens, and as we now know, they imperil the stability of the U.S. and international financial systems. In short, they are a manifest threat to U.S. national interests. We therefore must reform not only the laws pertaining to banking secrecy but also related laws concerning anonymous corporations and accounting rules that allow for non-transparent transfers of funds within corporate families. We must understand the problem not only as an integrated one but also as one that must involve both domestic and international parties.

The laws and bills that Lowe discusses here are still politically relevant: The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), passed in 2010, has come into the crosshairs of libertarian Republicans like Senator Rand Paul, who is eager to repeal it. And an updated version of the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act—first introduced in 2009 but never acted upon—was reintroduced in April by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Representative Lloyd Doggett (D-TX).
Moving beyond the legal sphere, Ben Judah’s “How Offshore Finance Sank Western Soft Power” from 2014 explains the reputational costs of Western complicity in tax evasion and money laundering. Using the example of Ukraine, Judah explains how activists amenable to Western messages about transparency can grow quickly disillusioned, as they follow the money trail from plundered state coffers at home to secretive tax havens in the West:

Imagine you spent the past decade fighting Ukrainian corruption. The model of good governance you looked up to was Britain or Germany. You applied for European Union funds. You were trained by Western foundations and EU funded think-tanks to follow the money stolen by your state. But then you discovered something horrible: the money was flowing right back to the West. Those models of good governance you looked up to turned out to be providing money-laundering services to the very people and institutions stealing your country’s future.

In “Big Bills” from 2014, James S. Henry takes a look at the hard currency of kleptocrats and tax evaders the world over: namely, the high-denomination banknotes needlessly issued by Western central banks:

Thanks in part to the permissive policies of these “quasi-reserve” countries’ central banks and treasuries, these larger denomination bills are all freely available in highly liquid global markets. Even though big bills serve no purpose for ordinary retail transactions back home, for decades the world’s key central banks have behaved as if the international criminal class were a kind of premium customer segment whose special money-diet needs they had studied in detail. Accordingly, they happen to have issued notes in just precisely the denominations that are most convenient for international transport, safe storage, bulk payments, and anonymous, untraceable exchanges of value.

Readers may also want to check out Henry’s 2016 follow-up, “Come on in, the Party’s Nearly Over,” about European and American policymakers’ belated recognition of the “big bills” problem.
In “Stage Hands,” Oliver Bullough uses the example of the London real-estate market to explain the three-stage process by which Western enablers facilitate kleptocracy. He also summarizes why we should be concerned:

Firstly, and most importantly, it is simply wrong to assist theft. Secondly, we are undermining our own nations’ security by buttressing regimes that are hostile to us, while disenchanting their citizens, who are increasingly likely to conclude that we are as hypocritical as their governments say we are. And thirdly, what Western enablers do is in a sense more egregious than what foreign kleptocrats do, because in the West we have a genuine, institutionalized rule of law, while kleptocrats operate in systems where no real rules exist. The result is that Western enablers effectively undermine democracy in foreign countries, even as Western governments lecture those same countries about civil society and the rule of law.

Finally, Neil Barnett explains how dirty foreign money poses an “existential threat to democracy” by giving kleptocratic states leverage to subvert open societies:

Combining these two developments—the new malleability of Western democracies and the dark pool of offshore wealth—creates a potent recipe for subversion. Françoise Thom, the Sorbonne historian, says, “the Russian strategy is to build up pro-Russian oligarchs to finance co-operative Moscow-oriented parties and ‘movements’, buy up media outlets, influence those in power and in some cases, to take power themselves. The aim is not only to ‘Finlandize’ Western states (i.e. to bring their foreign policy under Russian control) but also to ‘Putinize’ their domestic systems.”

The Paradise Papers have rightly shone a spotlight on the West’s vulnerability to these threats. The above articles help to demonstrate the scope of the challenge—which is the necessary first step to finally reckoning with it.

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The Primary Problem

In 1968, Hubert Humphrey received his party’s presidential nomination without participating in any primaries. At the time, many Americans regarded this as an affront to democratic principles. How could party leaders justify a decision to select the sitting Vice President as the Democratic nominee when nearly 70 percent of the party’s electorate had chosen either Robert Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy in the primaries? The heavy-handed tactics deployed by Mayor Daley and the Chicago police against the mostly young, antiwar protestors on the streets starkly epitomized what was happening politically on the convention floor.

Nearly five decades later, the notion that party leaders could ignore the will of their primary voters and caucus attendees by designating a candidate of their choice is almost inconceivable. The “Never Trump” movement in 2016 for this reason never had a chance, even in a party that had so often found ways to “clear the field” for establishment front-runners like George Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.

This same selection by election presumption also filtered down to congressional, state legislative, and local races, steadily increasing the voting burden placed upon U.S. citizens. Full participation now meant going to the polls at least twice every other year (more in the case of special elections and off-cycle local elections), first to choose nominees for numerous Federal, state, and local candidates and then to make the final determination of a winner. We implicitly assumed that citizens would embrace these expanded participation opportunities with diligence if not enthusiasm.  The prospect and consequences of voter fatigue and disinterest received little or no serious attention.

Since the 1960s, voter turnout has both dropped and become more variable. The dip in overall turnout among eligible voters was mostly the result of lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1971. Older people vote at higher rates than younger ones. The variability problem is tied to the number and type of elections, with lower turnout in non-presidential years, special elections, and primaries and higher turnout in November presidential contests.

The variability problem is consequential with respect to primaries. As the less-engaged voters opt out, the remaining electorate tends to skew to the left and right of the ideological spectrum. This exerts a centrifugal force on the candidates in both parties, incentivizing them to move toward their party bases in order to win the nominations.

This is not so problematic if candidates can tack back to the middle during the November election. But in the age of social media and strong party polarization, the strategically savvy movement in the fall away from the “purer” promises made in the spring looks increasingly to the public and the press like opportunism, weakness, and a lack of integrity. The party bases today expect loyalty to core principles. And when tactical compromises for the sake of winning fail for any reason, the party base argues counterfactually that the outcome would have been better if only the candidate had adhered more closely to ideological principles.

In sum, the promise of liberation from the control of autocratic party leaders post-1968 has morphed into the contemporary reality of capture by an engaged, attentive, and more ideological activist base. The noun primary has turned into a verb: The fear of being “primaried” is pervasive, reversing the power relationship between the leaders and the activist base in America’s political parties.

Party bosses like Mayor Daley no longer exist. The new power brokers run the super-PACs, nonprofit organizations, grassroots movements like the Tea Party, or alternative media like Breitbart News and the Huffington Post. The party base and outside power-brokers intimidate elected officials in both safe and marginal seats, undermining legislative leadership, especially on the Republican side at the moment.

These problems lie at the heart of the current presidential nomination reform discussions. Historically, presidential primary reforms aimed to correct the perceived errors of the previous election cycle. During the 1970s and ’80s, the Democratic Party repeatedly tweaked its rules to correct for failed presidential campaigns. The Republicans opted for more proportionality in their delegate allocation rules in 2016 to head off the party’s usual tendency to anoint a frontrunner as quickly as possible. Today the “establishments” of both parties sense their vulnerability to outside populist candidates. They ask themselves whether the rules can be changed to strengthen their hand in the face of this challenge.

The solution to date for restoring a balance between party leaders and their base has been to create more unpledged superdelegates. However, the experience with superdelegates in recent elections indicates that they are reluctant to oppose the will of the primary electorate even when they can. The presumption of selection by election is simply too strong.

There are alternatives. For instance, the parties could adopt ranked-choice voting. This would entail asking voters to rank all primary choices and then eliminate the candidates with the fewest first-choice votes. The votes for eliminated candidate are redistributed according to the individual voters’ rankings until you get to a winner. A polarizing candidate like Donald Trump would almost certainly have lost if this rule had been in place.

There are better reasons for adopting ranked-choice voting in primary elections than simply to thwart a particular candidate. For instance, there is evidence that ranked-choice voting tends to incentivize coalition building and civility. However, adopting rank-choice voting in the current political context will almost certainly be perceived as a power move by the establishment to suppress the grassroots. Rule changes are less politically fraught when the short-term political consequences are unforeseen.

Below the presidential level, primary reform largely hinges on the question of which primary rules to adopt. The choices between closed, open, semi-open, and top-two reflect the underlying question of whether the nomination should be open to outside voters or restricted to a narrower base of loyal party followers. Unfortunately, experience has taught us that independents and weak partisan voters do not participate at the rate and in the manner that they need to in order to moderate the ideological skew problem. Even California’s radical top-two experiment has had little or no effect on party polarization in either the state legislature or congressional delegation.

So we are left with the conundrum that Americans believe that voters should determine party nominations and the reality that doing so exacerbates both polarization and the gap between election rhetoric and the realities of governance. Activists and outside groups do not have to get their hands dirty. They never have to make compromises. They are free to demand purity and rationalize the adverse consequences when it leads to policy stalemates and failure to resolve problems. Elected officials realize that flashy promises about building a wall and making Mexico pay for it or offering free college education for all are not feasible, but are trapped nonetheless into making promises they know they cannot meet.

In the language of game theory, public officials are in a repeated game where cooperation and compromise are necessary tools, especially in the fractured American political structure. Political parties, when they are functioning well, harmonize these competing pressures. But that is not the current state of play in our party system, and it is not clear that it will change anytime soon.

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The Real Lessons of RT’s Foreign Agent Registration

The Russian television channel RT has at last registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), complying with a Department of Justice request after loud public protest.

Well, almost.

In fact, there is no single legal entity known as RT operating in the United States. Instead, RT’s television content is produced by T&R Productions LLC, which has registered as a foreign agent of the Moscow-based ANO TV-Novosti.

The general manager and sole member of T&R is Mikhail Solodovnikov. A former Moscow reporter, Solodovnikov receives an annual salary of $670,000. According to the FARA filing, RT’s two-month spending for August and September 2017 totaled roughly $6.6 million. If we project those figures outward for the whole year, we can assume an annual budget of roughly $40 million for RT’s American operations.

RT was known for its enormous budgets long before its registration under FARA, but the freshly disclosed documents confirm what I had previously written at TAI.

The simple fact that huge amounts of money are being poured into Russian media projects, however, is no guarantee of their effectiveness, because some of that money is inevitably skimmed off the top, or “absorbed” by the managers, as we say in Russian. I would estimate that roughly 95 percent of all the projects started in Russia are initiated with the sole purpose of “absorbing” the financing. And the scale of corruption in Russia is such that money is routinely stolen not only from governmental projects, but from privately financed ones, too.

This is precisely what happened to the stillborn television channel Kommersant TV. Alisher Usmanov, a Putin ally and media magnate who privately owns the Kommersant media holding, decided to launch the channel in 2011 after the successful rollout of a radio station, Kommersant FM. The money was allocated for the new project, and ten editors and two managers started their work. Four months later, it was all over: no television channel was ever launched, and the money was gone. The general manager of Usmanov’s media projects resigned.

Money vanished in a similarly mysterious fashion at another Russian media outlet, the New-York based RTVi television channel. The former Russian media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky had founded the channel in 1997, before selling it in 2012 to the former CEO of Zvezda, a channel owned and operated by the Russian Ministry of Defense. RTVi has always positioned itself as an independent channel, and in late 2016, it announced a major relaunch after claiming that it had received new financing. The channel never disclosed the name of the investor, though rumors say it could be Sergey Chemezov, the head of the Russian state corporation Rostech. In any case, the channel was relaunched this spring—but by October, production of two of its major programs, including a political talk show broadcast online from its Moscow studio, was suspended indefinitely due to lack of financing.

If you look at RT’s newly disclosed budget, its major expenses fall under the categories of salaries and construction/improvements: at $1.7 million and $2.7 million, respectively, for the two months reported. The only well-known television star employed by RT is Larry King, whose compensation is presumably quite high. As for general manager Mikhail Solodovnikov, his salary looks absurdly generous, and it remains a mystery what the money allotted for construction/improvements is really going towards.

In theory, such line items could provide perfect cover for legally transferring money from Russia to the United States, to spend on agents and cooperators, or to bribe politicians, officials and think tankers. The expenses would appear officially on paper allocated to employees or vaguely defined budget items, while being deployed for far more nefarious and subversive purposes.

RT’s registration under FARA primarily suggests two lessons. First, its huge budgets don’t correlate to its effectiveness. From previous reporting we know that RT lies about its viewership, probably in order to please the investor: the Kremlin needs to see good numbers to justify its generous budget allocations, after all, and we know that Vladimir Putin relies heavily on the information that Russian state-controlled media send him. Second, the money RT receives from the Russian state might well be spent on much more than high-end television shows.

So yes, RT must be recognized and confronted as a foreign agent—but the primary danger it poses is not in the realm of television.

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The Anatomy of a Homeownership Crisis

In the discussions about repealing our home mortgage interest deduction as part of the Trump Administration’s tax plan, one frequent argument for repeal is that other countries don’t have one, and their housing markets are doing just fine.  The United Kingdom is commonly cited as an especially relevant example; they are like us, with the same common-law legal framework.

This rose-colored view, however, is not shared by the British themselves. Earlier this year, the latest UK national housing survey showed that the homeownership rate has been dropping since 2003 and is the lowest in 30 years; it is also the fourth lowest rate in the European Union. This news was greeted with headlines across the political spectrum, from the liberal newspaper The Guardian to the conservative Daily Telegraph. The Resolution Foundation, which focuses on UK living standards, reports that, for the last 40 years, each cohort of young families has had lower homeownership than the cohort before it at the same age. The Legatum Institute, whose objective is “to ensure the legacy we pass on to the next generation is one of increasing prosperity and human flourishing,” calculates that the average new home in Britain is about 800 square feet, 60 percent the size of the average new home in Germany, and even at that size too expensive for most homebuyers. It goes on to state that “People’s impulse to homeownership is right and natural. People who own homes have a stake in their community.” Both of these policy research institutes are developing new programs to promote homeownership.

Political leaders have already created several programs, collectively known as “Help to Buy,” in an effort to reverse the trend.  Some will seem very familiar to Americans. From 2013 to 2016, for example, the government offered something very much like FHA mortgage insurance, guaranteeing mortgage loans up to 95 percent of the purchase price. In 2015, the government began making 25 percent contributions into Individual Savings Accounts (much like Roth IRAs) if the account was used for the down payment on a home. In the United States, IRAs and 401(k)s can be used for a down payment, but there is no contribution by the government. More generous assistance is now available in the UK for buyers of newly built homes: the government itself lends them up to 20 percent of the price (40 percent in London). The interest rate on this loan is zero. The buyer does not have to make any repayments until he or she sells the house; at that time the government receives 20 percent of the purchase price.  These programs are all quite recent; the reaction to the continuing decline in UK homeownership indicates that they are not regarded as adequate.

The situation in the UK is relevant to the current political discussion in the United States.  The UK had a mortgage interest deduction for more than a century. It was part of the original income tax law enacted in 1842, and it stayed in full force until 1974. At that time, the UK homeownership rate was 50 percent. Then the deduction was phased out. Beginning in 1974, the deduction was limited to mortgages of 25,000 pounds or less. Few homeowners were affected; the average house price in the UK was 10,000 pounds. But house prices were rising and the ceiling was not adjusted for inflation. By 1990 it applied to half of mortgage originations. Between 1993 and 1999, the deduction was reduced from year to year; by 1999 it was gone.

The beginning of the repeal process coincides with the beginning of the decline in homeownership rates by age cohort noted by the Resolution Foundation. Renters were having a more difficult time buying a home as lenders required larger down payments. The problem was especially acute for young families. The proportion of homeowners among households headed by a person younger than 25 dropped from 32 percent in 1981 to 10 percent by 2012; among households headed by a person between 25 and 34, the homeownership rate dropped from 62 percent to 43 percent; and among households headed by a person between 35 and 44, the rate dropped from 69 percent to 64 percent. Among older families, the homeownership rate increased.

The difficulties confronting renters in the private market have been overshadowed by a dramatic change in assisted housing programs. During the 1960s, the UK established a small program to allow residents of council housing (the counterpart of public housing in the United States) to buy their homes. When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, she made this program a “flagship policy,” first liberalizing it and then establishing a statutory “Right to Buy” allowing council housing tenants to become homeowners. The Housing Act of 1980 set the base price at half to two-thirds of the valuation of the home, depending on how long the family had lived in it.  This discount from the market value gave the tenant substantial equity in the home, making it possible to obtain an affordable loan in the mortgage market. While Mrs. Thatcher was prime minister from 1979 to 1990, almost 150,000 families each year bought their council homes. Since then, sales have continued, at a slower pace. As of 2014, about three million social housing units have been sold to their residents—over 10 percent of the housing stock.

Right to Buy gave a substantial boost to homeownership in the UK. The homes would have remained council housing, and remained rental, in its absence. The program accounted for most of the increase in homeownership during the 1980s and 1990s. The homeownership rate peaked at 69 percent in 2002; in the absence of Right to Buy, it would have been 59 percent, about where it was in 1983, despite the growth in the UK economy. Since 2007, the UK has experienced a major recession and an unusually weak recovery, much like the United States. Indeed, as bad as the U.S. housing market has been, the UK market has been even worse. The overall homeownership rate has dropped to 63 percent; without Right to Buy, the rate would be about 52 percent—just about where it was when the UK started to eliminate the mortgage interest deduction, and far below the United States, Canada, and Australia.

The UK experience over the last 40 years is not much of an argument for repealing the mortgage interest deduction in the United States, unless we want to make it harder for our children and grandchildren to own their own homes. And also, as the British try to promote homeownership, they might want to take another look at the mortgage interest deduction.

The post The Anatomy of a Homeownership Crisis appeared first on The American Interest.

Curing USAID

In a recent TAI article, “Making Diplomacy Great Again,” former Ambassador James Jeffrey argued for a simplification of the State Department’s mission. He suggests that State has focused historically and correctly on realpolitik diplomacy, wherein America’s diplomats try to persuade the political leaders of another country to do things that help America achieve its own tangible self-interest. Now State has two objectives, says Jeffrey. In addition to state-to-state realpolitik engagement, the second, now dominant “transformational” diplomacy compels diplomats to dive deep into the inner workings of other countries, seeking to reshape them into something presumably more tolerable to America. It’s a mistake, says Jeffrey, mostly because it distracts diplomats from their proper mission, but also because experience tells us it’s bound to fail.

In the course of his discourse, Jeffrey misconstrues the mission of USAID, mistakenly blaming development assistance for State’s current troubles. I want here to clarify the objectives of USAID, and suggest a restructuring of security and other forms of assistance that concurs with Jeffrey’s view that at least some of USAID’s functions should be more closely aligned with State’s fundamental mission of realpolitik diplomacy. Indeed, the best solution is to transfer responsibility for implementing security assistance to the State Department so that USAID can concentrate on development assistance.

Jeffrey argues that transformational diplomacy, sometimes called “nation building” or perhaps “meddling in the internal affairs of other countries,” is not what the State Department is supposed to do. He believes that it should not be the mission of USAID, either. Most of the career professional staff at USAID (not to be confused with their more transient political leadership) would probably agree with him.

Jeffrey makes a cogent case for the refocusing State on its historic, realpolitik mission. His views are in line with organizational theorists who argue that the most successful agencies of government are the ones with a single, clearly defined objective.

Jeffrey’s arguments would be stronger, however, if he dealt as systematically with USAID as he does with State.

He perplexingly blames USAID for leading State astray, but in doing so he confuses development assistance with security assistance, an all too common mistake in both the Truman and Reagan buildings. Jeffrey applauds the elimination of development assistance within the President’s 2018 budget request, and yet it’s really security assistance that causes State the heartburn Jeffrey seeks to alleviate.

What is to be done? Because so many people misconstrue the objectives of USAID’s four main categories of assistance programs, it is worth clarifying the defining characteristics of each:

Security Assistance: Of all of USAID’s organizational objectives, this one will be most familiar to and best understood by Ambassadors like Jeffrey. It is funded under a special account created by Congress called the Economic Support Fund (ESF). It has cousins that restrict funding to particular regions, but they all share a common operating procedure that awards final control over spending to the State Department. Congress intended the funding for this objective to be used when development assistance itself could not be justified, as for example was the case in Vietnam. Though USAID spends most of the money, and generally couches its spending plans in language that looks like development assistance, these funds are intended support State’s security objectives, with an outlook typically of one to two years.

Humanitarian Assistance: This will be most familiar to and easily understood by the American public. It is funded under the eponymous Humanitarian Assistance account to provide basic shelter and food in the event of crisis or disaster. It is perhaps the most successful of USAID’s programs, perhaps because it is so segregated from the rest of the agency. Senior staff take pains to keep it that way, which arguably detracts to some extent from the mission itself. It is certainly the case that staff in other parts of USAID make a considerable effort to explain that humanitarian assistance is not the same as development, public health, or security assistance. The outlook for those who respond to things like tsunamis or refugees fleeing wars is obviously very short term.

Public Health Assistance: This is funded under a variety of accounts, perhaps the most notable being the President’s Malaria Initiative and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. The fairly recent outbreak of Ebola is also covered by this mission. In responding to epidemics, USAID public health experts collaborate closely with the Centers for Disease Control and other organizations, including the World Health Organization. A principal aim of Congress is the protection of the American public from diseases that might spread within our borders. The outlook is often very short term once an epidemic is identified. Note that public health funding in response to particular epidemics should not be confused with assistance designed to help a country build a national system of medical practitioners, clinics, and hospitals; that sort of capacity-building is more appropriately addressed with development assistance.

Development Assistance: This is arguably the heart and soul of USAID, and is also the sole objective of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, though the MCC focuses its development assistance on countries that are more advanced according to political metrics. The nature of programs of this type is straightforward: When countries request it, we help them eliminate poverty by assisting with the development of economic and political systems, including systems for funding and delivering basic needs like education and health care. The outlook is long term, often five years or more. Efforts to alleviate poverty sustainably can take years to become successful, and depend largely on the political situation within the country receiving assistance, but the benefits of generating goodwill and expanding the community of friendly nations are often immediate, precisely as Congress intended.

Focusing the Mission at USAID

Where State arguably has two competing diplomacies, USAID has four very different types of assistance programs. If two are too many for State, surely four are too many for USAID. And yet all four of USAID’s objectives address real needs that in one way or another also serve the security interests of the United States.

The problem is that they are all so different, yet are housed within a single organization. Unlike the solution at State, which Jeffrey says is to eliminate an objective that is bound to fail, the best bet at USAID is to reorganize so that each of the four important but competing, or at least highly dissimilar, objectives is housed in a separate organizational structure, thereby affording each a better chance to succeed. With clear mandates and independent funding, technical experts in each case will have the discretion to make sound judgments toward their particular objective, without having to compete against others that may be equally laudable but require different solutions. Appropriators will have a clearer view of each problem, and can make judgments accordingly. Positive results are much more likely to follow.

What specifically needs to be done? Consider each of USAID’s four objectives in turn:

Public Health Assistance: USAID’s public health programs that respond to disease outbreaks already operate for all practical purposes as an independent organization within the agency. They have their own methods of operation in line with their segregated funding and strong focus on particular diseases. There is very little cross-fertilization of staff, and there are few synergies with other programs within USAID. There is thus no real rationale for housing these programs within the same organization that also delivers humanitarian, development, and security assistance.

For disease-specific public health crisis programs, it would make better sense to create a Foreign Public Health Service, perhaps within the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. It would be constituted out of USAID’s Global Health Bureau, and akin in some ways to the Foreign Agriculture Service of the Department of Agriculture. Within the CDC, a specialized corps of Foreign Service officers would be trained to organize and lead responses to outbreaks overseas, drawing upon the additional skills of their domestic colleagues as needed.

There is one important exception. In contrast to programs that have special funding from Congress to address particular disease outbreaks, USAID is often asked to help countries design and build entire health care systems. In such cases, the drivers of debate in Congress are not fears for America’s own immediate safety. This is not a public health exercise per se, though of course in the long term it may have a sustained, positive impact on public health. Rather, it is a development exercise. The skills required to deliver health care system development assistance closely parallel those required to deliver any other kind of development assistance, having much to do with the challenges of public administration and effective governance. Specialized medical expertise may be required in specific instances, but that will be secondary to the broader craft of development assistance.

Humanitarian Assistance: Humanitarian assistance programs also have their own logic, personnel, and methods within USAID. USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and its Office of Transition Initiatives, along with the State Department’s own refugee programs, already operate as independent programs with their own specialists and methods of operation. These various offices collaborate far more with each other than they do with the rest of their respective organizations.

As with public health, it would be sensible to create a Foreign Disaster Response Service, perhaps as part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, incorporating both USAID’s disaster response and State’s refugee response functions. Within FEMA, a specialized corps of Foreign Service officers would be trained to organize and lead responses overseas, drawing upon the additional expertise of their domestic colleagues as needed.

Security Assistance: Assistance in service of America’s immediate security interests is the purview of the State Department and realpolitik diplomacy. In “Making Diplomacy Great Again,” Jeffrey calls this “development assistance,” a common mistake even within USAID. The funding account is the Economic Support Fund, along with similar accounts that are earmarked for specific regions. The Development Assistance account is used altogether differently.

Because security assistance is implemented under different circumstances than development assistance, the skills required of the Foreign Service officers who administer the assistance will also be different. Often, USAID officers foolishly try to remain true to the principles of development assistance, and thus appear to their State Department colleagues as clueless when it comes to security assistance. State officers gnash their teeth due to the failure of USAID officers to understand the mission, and bemoan even the existence of USAID’s longer-term planning process, which they deem to be irrelevant.

It makes sense then to merge the organizational delivery of security assistance with the organizational design and implementation of security policy. Let security assistance be implemented by the State Department directly, rather than through a suboptimal intermediary. A portion of USAID Foreign Service officers should have the opportunity to transfer to State to form the backbone of a new security assistance corps or “cone” within the Department. As careers progress, State officers from political and economic cones can rotate briefly through overseas tours in the assistance cone, and vice versa.

Development Assistance: That leaves us with one remaining objective for USAID, and one is enough. Congress had the right idea from the start.

What most fail to realize is that development assistance is its own craft. USAID’s officers may be hired for particular areas of technical expertise, such as health systems, agricultural extension, or business supply chains, but during their careers they perfect the craft of development assistance, which has to do with the particular challenges of applying technical knowledge in political, economic, social, and cultural environments very different from our own. The learning process for Foreign Service Officers implementing development assistance occurs through thoughtful mentoring by senior officers, sophisticated and expertly delivered seminars, and the experience of both success and setbacks.

For example, discerning actual rather than expressed need is a matter of conducting research and sharing it with beneficiaries and their representatives. Culture and history play important roles. There is always a risk of paternalism when what is really required is active and constructive listening. What may be beneficial to one group within a society may be harmful to another. The way forward is typically less reliant on technical solutions, which are often already well known, than on sharing experiences and offering alternatives so that individuals can choose for themselves, for better or for worse, the way forward they deem best.

The most sustainable solution is rarely the easiest. Pressure to generate immediate results, rarely wise, must be resisted by actively seeking teachable moments where complexities are rendered more apparent, and understanding can advance. In particular, the art of the Congressional staff delegation, squarely focused on learning more about development assistance rather than on issues of shorter term strategic self-interest, is essential to continuance of funding.

All of the above will undoubtedly sound like gibberish to the typical State Department diplomat. The clash of organizational cultures and practices is precisely why it is so wasteful when USAID development assistance officers are diverted to other duties for which, frankly, they are ill-equipped. In particular, there is virtually no formal training program at USAID that prepares officers to implement security assistance within a State Department program. The wasteful practice of having highly trained development assistance officers implement security assistance simply must be stopped.

A USAID that is focused purely and independently on development assistance, as Congress in 1961 intended it to do, will be a much smaller agency than it is today, though merging USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation will restore some of that size. One bureau within the newly merged development agency can then employ assistance methods appropriate for countries with problematic political systems, while the other can engage more politically advanced countries through higher level grants and partnerships to perfect existing national systems.

In the President’s 2018 budget request, which will fund USAID programs beginning in September 2019, the proposed level for the development assistance account is zero. Jeffrey, and presumably many of his former colleagues at the State Department, think that’s a good thing. They’re wrong. USAID’s historic mission will be terminated if Congress approves the President’s budget, and yet that historic mission remains as valid today, when poverty and despair continue to breed terrorism and extremist ideologies, as it was in 1961 when the principal fears were Cuba, Vietnam, and nuclear proliferation. The vote should take place sometime before December. A lot is riding on it.

James Jeffrey responds:

Jeffrey Cochrane, in his critique of my piece, writes that my view of USAID’s role in proselytizing foreign assistance as an elixir for nation-building is off base. But in fact he buttresses my point repeatedly. In Cochrane’s own words: “Most of the career professional staff at USAID (not to be confused with their more transient political leadership) would probably agree with (Jeffrey)” (emphasis added). But of course it’s the “transient political leadership” who “sells” USAID capabilities and programs to the outside world, and sits at the table at National Security Council staff meetings.

And why shouldn’t those leaders think this way? Claims of transformational assistance programs are hard-wired into the selling of them. As Cochrane states, “development assistance “help(s) . . . eliminate poverty . . . assisting with the development of economic and political systems.” While he correctly warns that real progress can take many years, he then adds: “but the benefits of generating goodwill and expanding the community of friendly nations are often immediate.”

Faced with such claims, our results-obsessed and time-challenged foreign policy leadership immediately pounce on “eliminate poverty” (“helps” is conveniently forgotten), “development of political systems” (that is, the ones that do what we want), “expanding the community of friendly nations,” and above all (emphasis gleefully added) “often immediate.” And away goes the next presidential diplomatic initiative or Marine Expeditionary Unit landing to exploit this all-but-magical capability we supposedly have.

The post Curing USAID appeared first on The American Interest.

Make Conservatism Moderate Again

In 1964, Barry Goldwater addressed the Republican National Convention with a famous speech that argued “extremism in defense of liberty [was] no vice” and “moderation in pursuit of justice [was] no virtue.” Few understood him as making a prediction about the future of right-wing thinking and politics across the English-speaking world. Yet that speech foreboded perfectly the revolutionary zeal that has since spread through conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic, and which appears to have reached its apotheosis with the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election.

Today, ideas for a radical disruption to the existing political and economic system abound within the political Right in the United States and Britain. Some U.S. Republicans have argued for a return to the gold standard. In the United Kingdom, the Tories have accepted the idea that it is desirable to undo 40 years of economic and political integration with the European continent. Meanwhile, the former chief strategist to the President of the United States stated that his ambition was to “deconstruct the administrative state.”

Of course, the political Left has more than its fair share of eccentric ideas, including its veneration for tyrants of the world and murderous utopias, or its efforts to destroy the system underpinning global trade. What makes right-wing radicalism stand out is not so much whether it is right or wrong, but rather the fact that it sits ill with central tenets of conservatism, which as its name suggests, is keen on conserving things, especially those that work.

For Michael Oakeshott, change is something that “[has] to be suffered.” “[A man of conservative temperament],” he writes, “prefers small and limited innovations to large and indefinite.” A conservative, Oakeshott adds, “is unadventurous; he has no impulse to sail uncharted seas; for him there is no magic in being lost, bewildered, or shipwrecked. If forced to navigate the unknown, he sees virtue in heaving the lead every inch of the way. What others plausibly identify as timidity, he recognizes in himself as rational prudence.”

To be sure, even in such a version of conservatism, there is time and space for Goldwater’s uncompromising spirit. In the face of evil and injustice—totalitarian ideologies, slavery, or apartheid—there is no place for timidity, compromise, or equivocation.

Critical junctures of history, too, favor decisive action. When communism collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe, reformers had to move fast and be ruthless in order to create conditions for democracy and markets to take root, and to avoid the trap of incomplete, dysfunctional transitions followed by Russia or Ukraine. It is easy to understand why the Winter of Discontent in the United Kingdom created a sense of urgency for reforms of the “Thatcher Revolution”—although Margaret Thatcher’s reforms were deeply connected to the UK’s membership in the European Economic Community. Similarly, when it came to regulatory policy, there was more continuity between the Carter Administration and the “Reagan Revolution” than typically meets the eye.

However that may be, Western liberal democracies are not characterized by a persistence of unadulterated evil, nor are they permanently standing at a decisive crossroads of history, as Poland did in the autumn of 1989.

If our societies face numerous social ills, they tend to be chronic and complex. Real incomes across the West are growing at a sluggish rate. The UK in particular has seen a disappointing real wage stagnation, driven in part by growing costs of living. Children from poor backgrounds only have access to worse schools, greatly limiting their prospects in life. In the United States, there is a dramatic economic, social, and health crisis among men. Women, in turn, are often confronted with bigotry and discrimination at their workplaces. Race relations in America remain difficult, and European countries are struggling with the integration of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.

Reasonable people of good faith will disagree about how such ills should be diagnosed and treated. That is hardly a surprise given the complexity of human societies and the proclivity of even the best thought-through policies to engender unintended consequences. That alone should make conservatives wary of sweeping changes to policies and institutions and make them more attuned to small, local, and evidence-based interventions.

But there is more. For all the problems of the West, we are also living in the best of times: a time of historically low rates of poverty and violence, and an era of unprecedented prosperity. Again, that gives little credence to some conservatives’ attempts to smash the system or to follow the logic of Flight 93. Instead, any attempts to modify existing arrangements, whether domestic or international, have to start from the recognition of what a marvelous achievement the post-World War II world has been for Western societies.

Radicalism, on the Left and Right, rarely proceeds by weighing costs and benefits of policies, or by articulating strategies that are meant to produce desired outcomes. A repeal of Obamacare in itself will do nothing to improve the quality of healthcare in the United States, nor reduce its cost. A “no-deal” Brexit is bound to disrupt trade and economic activity and alienate Britain’s friends on the continent. Declaring NATO “obsolete” is not going to induce America’s allies into taking their defense obligations seriously.

Radicalism instead requires making leaps of faith, and often making impossible promises to mobilize the masses. But that sets in motion a dynamic that inevitably appears in the context of revolutions driven by utopian ideologies. Once the impossibility of promises made becomes apparent, a search for saboteurs and traitors gets underway in order to identify those responsible for derailing the will of the people from being translated into effective policy. At some point, shifting the blame around becomes unsustainable. The revolutionary edifice collapses and is replaced by reactionary backlash.

Both Brexit and the Trump presidency have already moved far down the path of impossible promises. To any fair-minded observer, it should be evident by now that real economic trade-offs are involved in leaving the European Union, that a “no-deal” or “hard” Brexit would cause real disruption to existing business chains, and that the UK on its own is unlikely to strike significant trade liberalization agreements to make up for those losses. For some, Brexit might be still the right choice, perhaps because of sovereignty considerations. But as recent polling indicates, there are many who will sooner or later discover that they were sold a fantasy by the Leave campaign. The same logic applies to Mr. Trump’s promise to “make America great again” by “renegotiating” or leaving NAFTA and building a wall on the United States’ border with Mexico.

Given young people’s generally reserved attitudes towards conservatism, radicalism is bound to make the conservative label and ideas of conservatism and classical liberalism toxic for at least a generation. British Tories and U.S. Republicans already do poorly among young people. Doubling down on the most retrograde ideas, including anti-immigration rhetoric and economic nostalgia coupled with a revolutionary zeal, is helping drive the youngest generation of voters into the hands of an increasingly regressive political Left.

Conservative caution and humility has to cut both ways. If many on the political Right are trying to smash the existing order without regard for consequences, there are also many—myself included, on occasion—who are tempted to deepen and extend the open society in ways that risk producing a political backlash.

For instance, most economists agree that a freer immigration regime would not only increase economic welfare but would do so on a magnitude far exceeding the effects of any other policy intervention. If humankind eliminated barriers to migration, global GDP could double. There are also sizeable—albeit much smaller—gains from reducing regulatory barriers to trade, through trade agreements, harmonization, mutual recognition, or other forms of regulatory cooperation.

However, there are political flipsides to both freer immigration and deeper economic integration. Whether driven by xenophobia or other reasons, many voters do not want to see dramatic changes in the ethnic composition of their societies. For others, trade agreements and other forms of economic integration remove decision-making authority over important, politically charged decisions, away from elected representatives towards opaque international authorities.

Intellectuals and political leaders still have the responsibility to make the case for more open immigration and trade regimes if their social benefits outweigh the costs. However, there is a difference between carefully building support for that case and taking such support for granted, while dismissing dissenters as bigots and protectionists. The experience of the past decade shows that particularly in environments of zero-sum politics—which are usually associated with periods of sluggish or absent economic growth—utmost care needs to be exercised in making decisions that can be seen, albeit wrongly, as benefitting foreigners at the expense of “our people.”

In themselves, prudence, humility, and moderation are hardly winning political messages. But in a world of complexity and unintended consequences, they are necessary components of any honest right-of-center politics. Let us remember it when the time comes to rebuild on the ashes of the current conservative radicalism.

The post Make Conservatism Moderate Again appeared first on The American Interest.

China’s Influence Game Down Under

Tragedy hovered over the birth of the American Republic. But that tragedy was not defined mainly by the carnage of the American Revolution, which resulted in the death of more than one percent of the population. Rather, for the American statesmen who came together to draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and met a dozen years later to design the Constitution, the life and death of the republics of antiquity preoccupied their thoughts. Steeped in the history of Greece and Rome, the Founders realized that the odds of creating and maintaining a self-governing republic in the face of hostile autocratic states were stacked against them. Nowhere was this danger greater than in the threat foreign interference posed to political independence.

America’s founding generation obsessed over this danger. During the debates at the Constitutional Convention, John Jay made the case in The Federalist (No. 2) that the “dangers from foreign force and influence” could exacerbate the country’s internal divisions and leave it distracted, weakened, and vulnerable. These fears materialized in the 1793 Genêt Affair, when France’s Ambassador to the United States sought to interfere in American politics on behalf of France. Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s Secretary of State, charged that such blatant interference in America’s democracy was “hazardous to us” and its implications were “humiliating and pernicious.” He demanded that the French immediately recall their ambassador. John Quincy Adams warned his fellow citizens that “of all the dangers which encompass the liberties of a republican State, the intrusion of a foreign influence into the administration of their affairs, is the most alarming, and requires the opposition of the severest caution.”

In the aftermath of U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of several Trump campaign officials on charges of conspiracy, the problem of foreign interference in our democracy now hangs over the White House. But Putin’s Russia is not the only country seeking to shape the choices of democratic societies. A different, subtler, more sophisticated, and potentially long-ranging effort is being waged by Xi Jinping’s China.

Because Washington is riveted by the unfolding Russian drama, because most of Beijing’s efforts fly under the radar, and because Beijing has repeatedly claimed that its state-directed activities are solely the exercise of soft power, many Americans have missed China’s attempts to influence, shape, and suborn democratic decision-making. But a look at the debates currently roiling the Australian political, educational, and business communities offers some notable insights into Beijing’s influence efforts. It also previews likely challenges ahead for American policymakers.

Over the past several months, the Australian media and government have sought to analyze Chinese influence across Australian society. The resulting reports, which began appearing in print and on television in early June, revealed that Beijing was monitoring and directing Chinese student groups in Australia, had threatened Australian-based Chinese dissidents and their families, was attempting to silence academic discourse in Australia deemed offensive to China, and was seeking control of all Chinese-language media in Australia. This came on the heels of revelations that individuals in Australia with links to the Chinese Communist Party had made major political donations to Australian politicians. The sum of these actions has prompted an intensifying debate among Australia’s national security community and politicians.

The Australian intelligence services have long known about the risks posed by Chinese influence, but the matter is now attracting significant public scrutiny. In late May, Duncan Lewis, the head of ASIO (the Australian equivalent of the FBI), warned Parliament that foreign influence efforts in Australia were occurring at an “unprecedented scale.” The implications to Australian democracy, he noted, were potentially extreme, as such interference “has the potential to cause serious harm to the nation’s sovereignty, the integrity of our political system, our national security capabilities, our economy and other interests.” And while Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull did not cite China by name in early June, he amplified this concern by noting that Australian “interests are also directly threatened by attempts by foreign states to compromise the integrity of our democratic institutions and processes.” Discussing Russian influence operations and cyber disinformation campaigns in the American election, and noting that similar threats could compromise the integrity of Australia’s “democratic institutions and processes,” Turnbull called for a revamping of the legal framework governing political donations and disclosures.

Unlike America, which requires individuals acting on behalf of foreign governments to register their activities, and which theoretically bans political campaign contributions from foreign sources, Australian law has no such provisions. As revealed in an Australian television investigative special this summer, this loophole allowed for several prominent Australian-Chinese businessmen with ties to the Chinese government to make substantial contributions to Australian politicians. In some instances, these appeared tied to a quid pro quo of support for Chinese government positions. Prompted by growing concerns of Chinese influence in its electoral system, the Australian government is now drafting legislation in an effort to address these gaps. Expected in early 2018, the new laws are likely to tighten campaign finance rules, require the registration of foreign agents, further define espionage, and provide a more effective legal framework to combat foreign interference.

On Australian campuses, too, a vigorous debate has been occurring over the nature of Chinese influence. Journalists have reported instances of Chinese agents monitoring Chinese students in Australia and threatening their families in China when they voice opinions contrary to Beijing’s. In Sydney and elsewhere, an uptick in protesters disrupting lecturers deemed offensive to Chinese sensibilities is a sign of the times; and concern is growing that universities, eager for donations, investments, and fees generated from foreign students paying significantly higher tuition, might not defend their institutional values as forcefully as they otherwise might. Australian politicians now acknowledge that this type of activity poses a threat to free and open societies, since free speech serves as the basis of liberal education, and is more broadly the cornerstone of democratic debate.

In early October, the Secretary of Australia’s Foreign Ministry spoke bluntly of “untoward influence and interference” at Australian universities. Speaking at the University of Adelaide’s Confucius Institute, a Chinese-government-funded academic institution, Frances Adamson, who formerly served as Australia’s Ambassador to China, warned, “The silencing of anyone in our society — from students to lecturers to politicians — is an affront to our values.” Julie Bishop, Australia’s Foreign Minister, echoed this point recently, stating that Australia will not tolerate “freedom of speech curbed in any way involving foreign students or foreign academics.” Penny Wong, the Labor shadow Foreign Minister, made a similar point declaring that “we would not want any group to seek to silence another in the contest of … ideas.”

Along similar lines, Australia’s Chinese-language media now largely speaks with one voice. A major report in 2016 documented that the Chinese Communist Party exerts significant influence over Chinese-language media in Australia. The report cautioned that “the notion that the Chinese-language media in Australia has been ‘taken over’,” was too simplistic. However, leading Australian Sinologist John Fitzgerald has noted that the “extensive reach of the Chinese party-state silences and intimidates alternative voices and commentaries” in Australia. Attempting to govern the debate in Australia among the Chinese-speaking community, Beijing also appears to be trying to control the flow of advertising dollars to independent Chinese-language newspapers.

Although some of these issues resonate in the Australian business community, the debate there has been quieter. China may be a near-peer economic competitor of the United States, but it looms much larger for the smaller, export- and capital-dependent Australian economy. The relative size of U.S. and Australian trade flows with China bears the point out. About 31 percent of Australian exports go to China, which is by far Australia’s largest export market, whereas China is the United States’ third largest export market, and the destination for 8 percent of U.S. exports. The common narrative in Australia is that it got through the financial crisis of 2008 without a recession because of Australia’s close trade relationship with China. This narrative is only partially correct, since Australia’s massive exports to China rest in no small part on the industrial and technical capacity built up by decades of foreign investment, especially from the United States, whose investments in the country are more than five times greater than China’s. But even with this important qualification, the different sizes of the U.S. and Australian economies and the relative share of each country’s exports to China shape very different mindsets among the business communities in the two countries.

In the United States, there has long been discussion of unfair Chinese trade practices, state-sponsored cyber attacks on American companies, and the theft of intellectual property. In Australia, the broad contours of the debate are different, primarily because most of the country’s trade commodities—iron ore, coal, and tourism—are less hackable. While the debate has intensified around access to and vulnerabilities of Australia’s critical infrastructure, and there is considerable public opposition to foreign ownership in the agricultural sector, the business community has not yet been convinced that the risks outweigh the opportunities.

But even here, the debate is slowly changing as a growing number of business leaders in Australia acknowledge the challenges of dealing with a command economy practicing mercantile policies. James Packer, the Australian casino magnate who has expanded his businesses into Macau and Hong Kong, previously advocated for Australia to start offering its Chinese friends a better return on investment. But after his employees were jailed by Chinese authorities in 2016, and he took a considerable financial hit, Packer became acutely aware of the risks of doing business in China.

Absent rule of law, secure property rights, and any guarantees of procedural fairness in China, the Australian business community increasingly recognizes that little will safeguard their investments. Multinational companies have learned the hazards accompanying demands for access to proprietary commercial information, with large-scale thefts of intellectual property that negate investments in research and development. Australian businesses are now learning similar lessons, but the China debate in the Australian business sector is probably five years behind the same debate in the United States.

While Australia has lately begun paying more attention to Chinese actions in the political, academic, media, and business spheres, the breadth of these activities is only starting to become clear. Behind most of these activities is a Chinese state-directed campaign to build support for Beijing’s larger political agenda. Referred to as “influence operations” and “political warfare” in an earlier era, such efforts combine overt and covert methods to create an environment in foreign capitals that is politically and socially conducive to Chinese interests. Professor Anne-Marie Brady, of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, has documented these efforts in an extraordinarily thorough report tracking China’s political influence activities under Xi Jinping. Brady examines the attempts of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party to “guide, buy, or coerce political influence abroad.” While most of her research focuses on activities in New Zealand, it is broadly applicable to liberal democracies around the world.

Coincidentally, the Austrian political philosopher Karl Popper published The Open Society and Its Enemies at the very same university in New Zealand some seventy years ago. Having fled the Nazis for New Zealand, Popper argued that history could be understood as a drawn-out battle between proponents of open, dynamic societies and authoritarians preferring closed societies, with citizens “who obey, who believe, and who respond to [their] influence.” According to Popper, it would always be in the interest of the authoritarians to try to influence the affairs of open societies to further their own agenda. Popper cautioned that the enemies of open society were powerful and numerous, while liberal democracies were rare, fragile, and required extreme vigilance to maintain.

In this instance, it is necessary to emphasize that criticism of the Chinese Communist Party’s activities is not, and never should be, equated with criticism of people of Chinese ethnicity. As Rory Medcalf, Head of the National Security College at the Australian National University observed in September, failing to address this issue relegates Australian citizens of Chinese descent to a second-class status, and dismisses the protection of their rights as less important than stable relations with the Communist Party that runs China. An open society welcomes, and indeed encourages, the integration of talented individuals from all backgrounds.

An open and free society will always be vulnerable to external influences. America’s Founders recognized this reality, and sought to build protections against foreign interference. When Citizen Genêt attempted to meddle in America’s sovereign democratic processes, it was Alexander Hamilton who suggested sunshine as the best disinfectant. In a cabinet meeting of the President’s advisors, Hamilton strongly urged that the government lay “the whole proceedings” with “proper explanations” before the American people in order to prevent Genêt and his American sympathizers from undermining the country’s confidence in Washington’s administration.

Hamilton understood that transparency and open debate were critical to preserving the sovereignty of the American Republic in the face of foreign interference. More than two hundred years later, confronted by Russian and Chinese influence efforts, Australia and the United State are re-learning the lesson that open societies demand vigilance and require defenders. The first step is recognizing the threat posed by authoritarian states seeking to influence free societies. Governments must also inoculate the public to these threats by conducting public education campaigns to ensure broader understanding. Fundamentally, without a more robust defense of liberal values, open societies could find their core national interests of sovereignty, freedom of expression, and the free flow of ideas, goods, and people irreparably damaged. As the American Founders understood, the preservation of national interests requires the unceasing defense of liberal values.

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All’s Atonal on the Western Front

The World War I memorial in Washington, DC, is very well-mannered. Ten fluted columns support a white marble dome, tucked away on a strip of lawn between Constitution Avenue and the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool. It doesn’t demand attention, will gladly shelter weary tourists, and is forgiving of errant kick balls sent flying by congressional staffers. Occasionally, it becomes a memorial to eternal love and happiness when it is co-opted as an impromptu wedding altar. To be specific, it memorializes citizens of the District of Columbia who fought in the Great War. But with no formal national World War I memorial, it’s the only one we have in our nation’s capital.

For many, our conception of World War I is not unlike DC’s understated memorial. From what little we remember of it from school, we may recall it as a war gracious enough to have a definitive beginning and end, with a clear cast of characters. The scope of tragedy—nine million combatants killed, seven million civilians—is so overwhelming, we almost gladly relegate it to history book status.

To comprehend 16 million deaths, we might begin with two fictional ones.

Wozzeck, the 1925 opera written by an Austrian solder who served the entire length of World War I, provides a singular entry point into the chaos and tragedy of those who experienced the war firsthand. Alban Berg composed the opera and wrote its libretto precisely for the shattered societies coming to terms with a world irrevocably changed. While centered on war, Wozzeck is far from a historical retelling. The source of its inspiration is an unfinished stage play written by Georg Büchner nearly a century earlier.

At this year’s Salzburg Festival, the annual, month-long celebration of opera and music where Europe’s well-heeled come to play, South African universal artist William Kentridge directed a standout production of Berg’s Wozzeck, featuring the Vienna Philharmonic led by Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski, Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic. Markus Hinterhaüser, the new artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, tapped Kentridge and Jurowski as part of his larger design to reflect on the strategies of power, the “loss of human connections and the slipping of social structures.” And so he did, with an unforgettable staging of Wozzeck that delves into the violent potential of mankind’s dehumanizing tendencies. Metropolitan Opera subscribers will have the opportunity to attend Kentridge’s same production of Wozzeck in the 2019–20 season, where it will surely challenge James Levine’s much-beloved stagings of Berg.

What is tragedy in the age of mass casualty warfare? Berg answers this question with the story of a simple soldier whose dignity is slowly dismantled by his superior, lover, and comrades until he breaks under the strain. In the process, Berg broke with dramatic tradition and centered his opera on the working class, using a new tonal language for a recently scarred world. In Salzburg, Kentridge drew on his own darkly expressive artistic style and decades of theatre experience to create a restaging that is honest in spirit and free of gimmicks. Paired with Jurowski’s powerful conducting, the cumulative result is poignant storytelling that scours audiences raw.

The title character, Wozzeck, is a soldier whose life consists of performing remedial tasks for the Captain. To supplement his meager earnings, Wozzeck submits to medical experimentation at the hands of the Doctor, enduring horrifying visions that loosen his grip on sanity. He shares his wages with his common-law wife Marie and their son, who are increasingly alienated by Wozzeck’s erratic behavior. Marie’s eventual infidelity, coupled with the cruel treatment of the other soldiers, ultimately leads Wozzeck to murder his only love and accidentally commit suicide. War does not allow for noble deaths, as Berg and his disillusioned countrymen have learned.

Nothing could have prepared Europe for the mass conflagration that began in the summer of 1914. In the decades leading up to the war, the belief prevailed that industrial growth had brought a new era of economic interdependence and peace ensured by commerce. When warfare did occur, blood was primarily shed on foreign soil. Colonial powers sought to partition the African continent, where battles were short and with comparatively low body counts. The asymmetrical nature of these campaigns would devastate African kingdoms, while fueling stories of battlefield glory across Europe.

The romance of military service would ensnare Alban Berg, then a young Viennese musician, impelling him to join the Austro-Hungarian Army at the outset of war. Like many others, Berg had little conception of just how quickly and brutally the war would escalate. French artillery officers still wore white pants and red-plumed hats into battle, making fine target practice in uniforms that had hardly changed in a century. “You cannot stop me; I spend thirty thousand men in a month,” wrote Napoleon Bonaparte to an Austrian adversary in 1810. Nearly a century later during World War I, France would lose that many men in a single day.

Asthma attacks would preclude Berg’s assignment to combat duty, and he spent most of the war doing deskwork at the Ministry of War. In a letter to his wife, he described the experience as leaving him “sick, captive, resigned, in fact, humiliated.” Wozzeck would become the vehicle for the profound disillusionment he and others felt during the war. He first became familiar with the tragic story when he attended a staging of Georg Büchner’s play Voyczeck months before the war. Berg began arranging a libretto based on the grim story, but paused his work to join his brothers in arms. When he returned to his unfinished libretto after Germany’s surrender, the circumstances of life had diverged profoundly from just a few years earlier.

On the day that Wozzeck first premiered in Berlin in 1925, concert halls were filled with people facing a complete breakdown of society. The war had ended seven years earlier. Political assassinations and coup attempts occurred seasonally in the Weimar Republic, and hyperinflation made a loaf of bread worth more than many elderly Germans’ life savings. Carl Zuckmayer, writing at the time, described Berlin’s atmosphere: “People were nervous and ill-humored. The streets were dirty and thronged with beggars, war-blinded and legless men.”

No aria of the past could portray this nightmarish new reality. The major-minor tonal vocabulary of Mozart, and even Mahler’s late Romantic style, was insufficient to express the nihilism that surrounded Berg. So he turned to the 12-tone musical theories pioneered by his teacher, Arnold Schönberg, to compose Wozzeck’s now-infamous music. Each word of the libretto is freed to inhabit its own expressive shape, unencumbered by strictures of melody. This allowed for “traces of blood in [the] fairy tale,” as Berg’s contemporary Theodore Adorno, put it. Wozzeck’s suffering and confusion is woven throughout the score. While the opera is highly structured, with 15 scenes equally divided over three acts, its technical mastery is intentionally obscured by Berg. The cumulative effect is an aural submersion that leaves listeners struggling to stay above the rising tide.

In the new production of Wozzeck, William Kentridge doubles down on the profound ruination contained in Berg’s libretto. Destruction becomes the inspiration, artistic process, and visual style that gives shape to the opera.

Kentridge sets his production in World War I-era Flanders, a region that served as a battlefield throughout the war. Entire prosperous towns were ground down by artillery. Atrocities against Belgian civilians were rife as German armies occupied villages and practiced collective punishment, with little distinction between military and civilian lives. In Flander’s fields the Battle of Ypres brought a half-million casualties on all sides, as well as the first use of poison gas on the Western Front. These historical associations bleed into the opera’s libretto as a nightmare lingers at the edges of consciousness. When Wozzeck hallucinates and sings “it’s strangely still and close, so close that it chokes you, stifles you. . . . Fire! Fire! It rises from earth, up to heaven,” he brings to mind a spiritual medium sensing the psychological scars imprinted on the land.

Charcoal, itself a product of incinerated wood, is key to Kentridge’s stage design. The artist would drag sticks of raw charcoal across rough-toothed paper, creating dark, soot-filled sketches of crumbling villages and battle-scarred fields. Drawings were torn up and stitched back together in the style of a Dada collage. This art would then be converted into stage-cloaking digital projections, where performers seem to emerge and dissolve effortlessly into the fog of war. Here, we see Kentridge’s particular talents as a multimedia artist and filmmaker inform the production. The projections created a slowly changing scrim of madness that kept the audience teetering between Wozzeck’s hallucinations and Marie’s war-devastated reality.

This is Wozzeck performed to its full potential, and it is many things—beautiful, devastating, masterful—but it is not feel-good opera.

We first encounter Wozzeck (baritone Matthias Goerne) as he is passing the barber’s blade under the chin of the Captain (tenor Gerhard Siegel), a staunchly bourgeois moralizer. Wozzeck must walk more slowly, the Captain admonishes, to be a man above reproach—a barbed reference to his subordinate’s illegitimate son and common-law wife, Marie. After tolerating the Captain’s cruel posturing for so long, Wozzeck explodes: “Wretches like us! Oh, if I were well bred and had a top hat, then I would be virtuous too! Men like us always will be unfortunate in this world and in any other world! If we ever got to heaven, we’d all have to manufacture thunder!” The Captain seeks to pacify Wozzeck with assurances that he is “a decent man,” that badge of approval with class connotations.

When we meet Marie (soprano Asmik Grigorian), she is locked in a loveless and menacing relationship with Wozzeck. Her only companion is their young son, a gas mask-wearing puppet unobtrusively maneuvered by minders in nurse costumes. “Girls like us have just a corner in the world and a shard of mirror . . . and yet, I have lips every bit as red as society ladies,” she sings to her son. Grigorian deftly plays the role with a light touch. Her Marie isn’t the seductress or wrathful figure of other Wozzecks, but a girl playacting adulthood, capricious and full of energy. When Marie succumbs to the aggressive advances of the Drum Major (heldentenor John Daszak), she is searching for validation with either foolish or nihilistic abandon.

All the while, Wozzeck endures hallucinations of hellfire as the Doctor’s test subject. In Berg’s world, we are reminded that scientific research was often focused towards lethal, rather than life-saving ends. Performed with brisk conviction by bass Jens Larsen, the Doctor giddily anticipates the suffering he’ll inflict on his journey to Hippocratic glory. Word spreads that Marie is sleeping with the Drum Major, and the other soldiers endlessly mock Wozzeck.

The tension reaches a near-breaking point when the Drum Major confronts Wozzeck at the tavern and wrestles him to the ground, just for the vicious pleasure of causing humiliation. Berg’s crass libretto still packs a punch. “Shall I pull your tongue out of your throat and wrap it around your neck?” the Drum Major asks Wozzeck while pinning him under a chair. “Shall I squeeze you ’til you’ve no more breath than an old woman’s fart?” At home, the barely-literate Marie is struggling to read her Bible and pleading with God to forgive her sins.

Baritone Matthias Goerne steers his Wozzeck to his devastating conclusion. Menacing one moment and confused by visions the next, the baritone delivers on the psychological demands of this role with some of the finest expressive singing and acting of the festival season. After confronting Marie about her affair, he leads her deep into Kentridge’s black charcoal swamps. She’s frightened, a girl in a poppy red dress several sizes too large. Wozzeck stands motionless, looming behind Marie with thunderous restraint. Seconds bleed by, and Wozzeck’s stillness slowly tightens the wire connecting him to every member of the audience. Marie sees the red moon rising in the distance—“like iron washed in wet blood,” Wozzeck offers. He plunges a knife into her throat. I release my breath.

In those last moments with Marie, Goerne inhabits Wozzeck’s silence with the intensity of a full-throated aria. All of the cruelty, all of the harassment endured by Wozzeck is contained in this single gesture of killing. The singularity of the act was important to Berg. In his production notes, he states that “everything that follows refers musically only to Marie and to her death. Any further carnage must therefore be avoided!”

At the Berlin State Opera in 1925, the premiere of Wozzeck scandalized critics and attendees alike. Put glibly by a critic at the time, “the unprecedented intensity of expression in Wozzeck continues to present many problems to an unprepared audience.” But the notoriously challenging opera quickly spread and was embraced across cultures and by former adversaries. It was performed on 25 different stages within five years. A performance in 1926 was shut down by nationalist demonstrations in Prague; in 1927 it premiered in Leningrad, and by 1931 premiered in Philadelphia under conductor Leopold Stokowski.

What is the point to all this suffering? The social message of a worker oppressed by the ruling class resonated with many at the time. There is no hope for Wozzeck and his petit bourgeois to ever join their better-heeled counterparts. Emotionally, there is a distinct pleasure to be found in watching Wozzeck suffer. Aristotle pointed out 2,500 years ago that effective tragedy causes us to feel pity and fear when we see a decent soul violated. A little selfishly, we are frightened at the possible violation of our own (undoubtedly) decent souls. Kentridge’s production of Wozzeck creates a potent distillation of these emotions, using moments of pain to bring into focus what we are afraid to lose.

In the age of mass casualty warfare, Berg’s opera takes the dehumanizing nature of reality and renders it in deeply humanistic terms. Dramatic tragedy, in its new form, acknowledges the profound disillusionment caused by war and elevates the wholesale violation of human dignity as a topic worthy of focus. For the first time in popular opera, Berg gave arias to “die Arme Leute”—the wretches like us, as Wozzeck exclaims.

Tragic suffering has long been the domain of the ruling class, in a tradition extending back to when Homer had King Priam kiss the hands of the man who murdered his son. Opera that concerns itself with war has also focused on the ruling class, with a few singing notaries mixed in. Aida has its Ethiopian princess and its captain of the guard; Norma has its high priestess and Roman proconsul; Così fan tutte’s devious soldiers are officers; La Fille du Regiment features a Noah’s Ark of military leadership. But the award may go to Prokofiev’s adaptation of War and Peace, with its singing Napoleon Bonaparte (performed with artistic license by a baritone).

The common man is capable of tragic suffering, Berg asserts, and deserving of the validation occasioned by an audience. Yet respect and dignity remain out of reach. While Wozzeck’s suffering is tragic, it is far from noble. He accidentally drowns himself while attempting to recover his murder weapon. When he screams for help, no one comes to his aid. The triviality of Wozzeck’s death is underlined when his son comes across his body, and not recognizing his father, hops along on his hobbyhorse. This represents a shocking departure from the cannon of operatic deaths. But for a disillusioned audience recovering from World War I, Wozzeck’s death may be more relatable than two lovers who seal themselves in a tomb for all of eternity.

When 500,000 men die in a single battle, the sheer scale of loss is numbing. The hopelessness feels too abstract to allow more than a passing thought. In telling a singularly tragic tale, Berg and Kentridge condense the irredeemable tragedy of war into a story that is deeply relatable. That a common man’s suffering could occupy a night of opera and the same stage as kings might be more significant than a happy ending.

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