Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 123

Lyricism as Poetry in 21st-Century America

We still have poets in the Western world, bless and keep them, even in these crass commercialized times when language, like almost everything else, has been dragged down to the sticky dust of the marketplace floor. But their cultural status in most countries has long since been displaced by song lyricists. That is not entirely to be rued.

Few read and memorize poetry anymore. Even fewer—indeed, maybe no one at all—hold poets equal to prophets, their words the stuff of heavenly muses and other forms of divine visitation, as was almost universally believed true three millennia ago. Nearly everyone, however, knows at least shards of popular song lyrics. Some people who do not sing especially well think little—too little, usually—of bursting forth in the presence of other people just because they know the words; or can readily access them. Think karaoke. Then think aspirin.

The ubiquity of unbidden singing features in a recent television commercial in which two people, each alone driving their cars in urban traffic, are singing along—and soon singing with and for each other—to Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” I’m not fond of the song, and am radically less fond of the commercial—but that’s just me.

At any rate, thanks to radio and other technologies of musical reproduction, exposure to lyrics has become so ubiquitous that a great many people think they know the words. For this reason, the wondrous neologism “mondegreen” had to be invented for our age. Sylvia Wright did that for us in 1954, she of the aging classics Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts (1957) and A Shark Infested Rice Pudding (1969). While her writing may be mostly forgotten, her neologism has a bright and shinning future.

Ah, but this is no time for nostalgia or snobbery. It’s time for illustrating the point: Lyrics really can work as poetry.

Not always, to be sure. Most popular song lyrics drift light years away from anything one could reasonably call poetry. Take for example Shirley Ellis’s horrifying song “The Name Game,” which became a big pop radio hit back in 1965. As the Marines hit the beach at Da Nang, countless American teenyboppers were singing this:

Shirley, Shirley

Bo-ber-ley, bo-na-na fanna

Fo-fer-ley. fee fi mo-mer-ley, Shirley!

Lincoln! Lincoln, Lincoln. bo-bin-coln

Bo-na-na fanna, fo-fin-coln

Fee fi mo-min-coln, Lincoln!

and so on and drearily on, until it ends:

Little trick with Nick!

Nick, Nick, bo-bick, bo-na-na

Fanna fo fick, fee fi mo-mick. Nick!

Nick? “Well, it did rhyme,” some may rise to defend Ms. Ellis as an accidental poet. Yes, and a leaky faucet rhymes too.

But just as there is plenty of lyrical tripe out there, real beauty—genuine poetry—also abides in many song lyrics. The fact that lyrics by definition are set to music changes them definitively, of course, into something not precisely poetry. In poetry, the sheer artistry of the construction creates its own subtle music through devices like cadence, alliteration, and assonance. In that sense, poetry is to language art the precise opposite of what instrumental music is to song. It is, in a sense, a form of demur solo a cappella singing, which comes clear in less demur forms such as unaccompanied rap, which, whether you like it or not, qualifies as a form of poetry no less than the hipster-beat “slam” variety.

Lyrics nevertheless can be read aloud without music or any form of percussion, and doing so can magically transform (some of) them from lyrics into poetry—but not any kind of poetry. Because most lyrics must fit the music they are joined with, and music has usually a certain structure, they cannot be entirely free form. Whether taken from musical comedy, light opera, big-band or sextet jazz, pop, blues, rock, folk, cajun/zydeco, or even “AM country” music, they are far more inclined to obey a regular meter and, yes, often enough even to rhyme.

The same observation read backwards makes the point just as well. Some poems are regular enough in structure as to be amenable to being put to music. The folksinger banjoist Debbie McClatchy long ago transformed two of Robert W. Service’s best-loved poetical sagas—“The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee”—into songs. I like the songs so much that I can no longer read the poems without hearing the music.

Lyrics shorn of their music would seem to render them “old-fashioned” or simple compared to how “serious” poets usually construe their challenges these days. But lyrics-as-poetry are not thereby rendered bad, and more: Their constrained, simpler structures gives them a certain mnemonic advantage over free-form poetry, just as acrostic structures did and still do in many oral language traditions. That renders them in a sense more democratic, liable to appeal to many who would never think to open a book of poetry, old or new.

So if fiction can reveal truths about human nature, history, and the divine that ordinary writing cannot—and, yes, it can—then poetry and lyrics-as-poetry can do so in a particularly concentrated way. It’s by no means unfortunate that many can find some of these truths through lyrics who would never find them through poetry. Song lyrics can also be for a young person the gateway to the appreciation of poetry as a mature adult. That has been my experience, but hardly mine alone.

But my experience has produced over time perhaps something of an oddity: As a massively plural and accumulating experience, lyrics by the ton sit somewhere in my preconscious layers like a rich archeological mound, with more long-ago-learned and then “archived” lyrics concentrated toward the bottom. For reasons rarely clear in the moment, I sometimes find myself in accidental dig mode, excavating this or that buried item. In other words, I sometimes think with and through my memory of song lyrics.

Not everything I think about is remotely serious, but some of it is, remotely at least. Let me then set that scene for you by offering four recent fragments of this phenomenon, the first two bordering on harmlessly silly, the latter two perhaps otherwise.

Fragment I. Last month, while sitting here at Antebedlam for dinner with wife, a couple of adult children and associated mates, and a skittering of granddaughters careening around and under the table, I suddenly broke into song. I didn’t mean to; it just happened. For that I have perhaps “The Balvenie” company to thank. We had mentioned and commiserated at the table over the distressed victims of Hurricane Harvey, and out of my bemused body came not just a lyric shard but a good half measure of song, my voice growing louder with emphasis on the second couplet:

Look out Cleveland, storm is comin’ through;

and it’s runnin’ right up on you.

Look out Houston, there’ll be thunder on the hill;

come on baby, don’t you lie so still.

If I need to reveal to you which song those words comes from, then you will have been able to read this lyric as poetry, since the associated music will not have stuck to your frontal cortex like molasses sticks to fingertips in winter. If, on the other hand, you’re a normal American person of a certain age and musical temperament, you will know it as an excerpt from “Look Out Cleveland,” written by Robbie Robertson but sung by the incomparable Levon Helm, on The Band’s 1969 Brown Album.

The reference to Houston was obviously Hurricane Harvey-relevant, and it was surely the storm that evoked it. The foregoing reference to Cleveland I had to sing because if you don’t render a complete musical phrase you risk having your brain explode (sort of like what happens to Roger Rabbit: “Shave and a hair cut…”—BOOM through the animated wall—“two bits!!”) Little did I realize at the time that it was prophetic of the Indians’ collapse in the playoffs after their stunning 22-game winning streak. (We’ll return to lyrics as prophecy anon.)

Fragment 2. Not long after the Brown Album eruption, I had one of those pesky elder moments, defined specifically in this case as remembering all the lyrics to a song except the first one. So there I sat, ready to avalanche into croon mode, but unable to find the damned start button.

It was a Sabbath eve at my daughter’s house, the Big Red we call it (as opposed to The Band’s Big Pink…look, you either get the allusion or you don’t). We were in minor klezmer minor mode. My youngest son was there, mumbling something about me, his father; so the scene invariably called forth a 1946 Benny Bell tune, “Son of Pincus the Peddler,” which I had learned off a 78 RPM slate in my grandmother’s 16th Street row-home basement a long time ago.1 (I still have unbroken and unchipped the old slate record—recorded by Benny Bell and the Agony Trio—which is an antique now, just like me.)

But I couldn’t remember how it began. It was not entirely clear to me whether, upon my sudden silent hesitation, the expression in my daughter’s eyes was one of disappointment or deliverance. In any event, about twenty minute latter, after the soup course and with everyone in mid-chicken, it came to me. I dropped my drumstick, lifted my chin, and out it ripped:

My father was a peddler,

His name you all should know.

He used to live in Brooklyn,

A long, long time ago.

When a dirty, rotten woman,

Simply made his life a wreck…

I heard the wonderful instrumental accompaniment, especially the dancing clarinet and saxophone, in my mind’s ear, so I was enjoying myself immensely. I ended the transcription of the lyrics just above in mid phrase because that was exactly the point at which the others seated at the table managed through threats and a variety of shaming techniques to get me to just shut up and eat.

Fragment 3. As I warned, there isn’t much deep meaning in “Look Out, Cleveland” or the “Son of Pincus the Peddler.” That is not always the case, however: very much to the contrary. Poetry and prophecy are still intermingled, and that includes lyrics-as-poetry as both prods and aids to thought. By way of illustration, note this one of many examples, from a song first recorded in August 1969, several eons before Donald Trump became President of the United States2:

How can we listen to you

When we know your talk is cheap?

How can we ever question

Why we give more and you keep?

How can your empty laughter

Fill a room like ours with joy?

When you’re only playing with us

Like a child does with a toy?

How can we ever feel the freedom

Or the flame lit by the spark?

How can we ever come out even

When reality is stark?

That was a wonderful remark

I had my eyes closed in the dark,

I sighed a million sighs

I told a million lies,

to myself, to myself.

See what I mean? And so now, without further ado, on to fragment 3.

As we mourn the political-correctness insanity going on at so many college campuses in the United States today, one lyric in particular stands out for me as prophetic protest aimed against the radical undifferentiated egalitarianism that has become the uber-theme of the conformist theology of postmodernism. Here, from 1964, is some poetry for you:

I’ve heard you say many times

That you’re better than no one,

And no one is better than you.

If you really believe this,

You know you have nothing to win,

And nothing to lose.

From fixtures and forces and friends

Your sorrows do stem.

And they’ll hype you and type you

And make you feel,

That you gotta be just like them.

Written even before the coalescence of the “free speech” movement at Berkeley, the poet was perhaps reacting to an isolated case amid the timeless ubiquity of cliques and the conformity they engender. But I still find these words suitable rejoinder to the “you didn’t build that” crowd, and to those who would enjoin the preemptive surrender of agency among the supposedly helpless victims-du jour of today’s identity politics cant.

It works as well as instruction to all those who, whether they realize it or not, reject the premise of the famous correspondence between Adams and Jefferson on “the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue.” Equality under the law is what a free and just society needs not because everyone is equal by any practical, pragmatic measure, but precisely because everyone is not.

Every sentient American adult used to know this, and I remain baffled by how anyone could screw up so thoroughly—and with such damage wrought to those who can least afford it—the understanding of anything so obvious. So thanks be to the poet-prophet Robert Allen Zimmerman for giving us hopeful words of restoration and wisdom, in his song “To Ramona,” from which the foregoing lyric has been extracted. Too bad it’s not one of Dylan’s better-known songs, but it is at least good to know that sometimes a Nobel Prize for literature is deserved.

Fragment 4. I will lay the final fragment of the promised four on you soon, but before I do I want you, dear reader, to realize that my archeological mound of lyrics is volcanic these days. These are four recent examples of what is a frequent, if not constant, bubbling up of phrases, with their associated melodies usually but not always attached.

The lyrical phrases sometimes mingle with upsurges of language from a quotations file I have been building for forty years. This can be disconcerting to those for whom acts of free association can resemble a demolition derby between the ears. So, for example, right next to Marx’s mid-19th century coinage of the noun “lumpenproletariat,” which I turned into “Trumpenproletariat” for an analytical purpose back in March 2016, my brain decided recently to park this classic lyric from a 1973 Johnny Russell song from the AM-country genre:

There’s no place

that I’d rather be

than right here,

With my red neck,

White socks,

And Blue Ribbon beer.

So what is the final of my four fragments? It is uncommon, but lyrical prophecy can be expressed in the very cadences of the prophets of old, at least as rendered in American music through the majestic English translations of the 1611 King James Bible. I thought of one such lyrical expression while reading a recent David Brooks column, “The Essential John McCain.”

Brooks uses McCain’s integrity and courage to make some general points about civic life, as he is wont to do lately. Let me assemble from his column an abbreviated illustration:

[M]ost moral education happens by power of example. . . . Public figures are our primary teachers in this mutual education. Our leaders have outsize influence in either weaving the moral order by their good example or ripping it to shreds by their bad example. . . . [McCain] has turned his own heroes into educational resources for his country. . . . These sorts of testimonies help weave a shared moral order, which is necessary to unite, guide and motivate a diverse country.

That is an essential bulwark in the age of Trump . . . this wounded and twisted man. . . . Through his daily utterances, Trump is influencing the nation in powerful ways. . . . Few would say he is spreading a contagion that we’d like our children to catch.

The moral fabric of society is invisible but essential. Some use their public position to dissolve it so they can have an open space for their selfishness. . . . [Y]ou never trade spiritual humility for worldly ferocity because in humility there is strength and in pride there is self-destruction.

In pride there is self-destruction: Yes, we have it famously from the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel and from Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” And in my mind at least, we have it in the lyrics to a song called “Pride of Man,” also written in 1964 as it happens, by Hamilton Camp, an England-born semi-itinerate songwriter, actor, and mystic.

The lyrics give away that Camp was focused on the threat of nuclear war, but he by no means ignored the more general theme—a theme that cannot help but resonate at a time when a wounded and twisted leader exudes arrogance, ignorance, and a bullying meanness of spirit unique to the history of the Oval Office.

The song is perhaps best known to folkies via Gordon Lightfoot, but the San Francisco acid rock band Quicksilver Messenger Service made a minor hit out of it in 1968 by electrifying and slowing it way down. I know the song best from the jazzgrass guitarist Tony Rice, who recorded it in 1983. It matters not for lyrical poetry’s sake, for the various covers do not significantly alter the lyrics.

Assuming that most of you, dear readers, have never heard or heard of this song—it being very far off the beaten Top 40s path—you have the privilege of reading it, sans musique, as poetry.3 I supply the full lyric of what is part admonishment, part prophecy, and part prayer. You are wise to read it aloud, as is the case with all poetry; and I will let this essay come to rest with it still shimmering in your ears:

Turn around, go back down

Back the way you came.

Can’t you see that flash of fire

ten times brighter than the day?

And behold a mighty city

Broken in the dust again.

Oh God, the pride of man

Broken in the dust again.

Turn around go back down

Back the way you came.

Babylon is laid to waste,

Egypt’s buried in her shame.

Their mighty men are beaten down

The kings have fallen in the way.

Oh God, the pride of man

Broken in the dust again.

Turn around go back down

Back the way you came.

Terror is on every side

Lo, the leaders are dismayed.

Those who put their faith in fire

In fire their faith shall be repaid.

Oh God, the pride of man

Broken in the dust again.

Turn around go back down

Back the way you came.

Shout a warning to the nations

That the sword of God is raised

On Babylon that mighty city

Rich in treasure, wide in fame.

It shall cause thy tower to fall

And make it be a pyre of flame.

Oh, thou that dwell on many waters

Rich in treasure, wide in fame.

Bow unto a god of gold,

Thy pride of might shall be thy shame.

Oh God, the pride of man

Broken in the dust again.

And only God can lead the people

Back into the earth again.

Thy holy mountain be restored:

Have mercy on thy people, Lord.

1You probably have never heard of Benny Bell, but you probably do know of the song “City of New Orleans.” If so, you probably think Arlo Guthrie wrote it, but if you do you’d be wrong. Steve Goodman wrote that song, and one his lyrics owes its origin to none other than Benny Bell! One of the lyrics, in the final verse, contains the following words, “The passengers will please refrain, this train’s got the disappearing railroad blues.” The phrase “the passengers will please refrain” is an alternate title for another Benny Bell novelty song, “Humoresque in C Major,” and Goodman’s lyric, repurposed to send a very different message, is a clear allusion to it. The original Bell lyric went like this: “The passengers will please refrain, from flushing the toilet on the train.” No doubt Goodman heard the original on a 78 rpm record played in his grandmother’s row-home basement in Chicago.

2From Van Morrison’s “A Wonderful Remark.”

3Anyone wishing to hear the song can readily summon all four versions noted in the text on YouTube. Anyone focusing on comparing the acoustic Camp, Lightfoot, and Rice versions will be quick to ask how come no one taught Camp and Lightfoot how to play a guitar.

The post Lyricism as Poetry in 21st-Century America appeared first on The American Interest.

A Dismal Performance

The End of Theory

Richard Bookstaber

Princeton University Press, 2017, 224 pp., $29.95

The hundreds of economics books released by the popular press since the beginning of the Great Recession have grappled post hoc with the failure of the guild to predict and prevent the downturn. As with their theories, their conclusions diverge. A minority of skeptics believe that economists should admit defeat and concede that they will never be able to predict, prevent, or control recessions. Optimists and apologists would like us to believe that economists are doing well and are always improving, and that, if they just try a little harder, they will finally make the elusive Promethean breakthrough that will wrest control of the business cycle from the gods and grant it to humanity (or at least to economists, who are very nearly human).

The title and first few chapters of Richard Bookstaber’s The End of Theory seem to make a good case for the pessimistic view. The book is strongest in these pessimistic sections. Bookstaber describes oversimplified mathematical models that often ignore some of the basic human factors that influence the economy, like the visceral feeling of panic in the face of plummeting prices. They also tend to ignore historical context, like the way the trauma of growing up during the Great Depression influenced how corporate and government financial risk was managed during the rest of the 20th century. Some economic models make facile inductions from individual decision-making to whole markets, ignoring the possibility of “emergent” phenomena. And anyway, our social world is so complex that any simplified model must miss something important. All of this is true, though none of it is new.

Bookstaber argues that these failures of modern economics herald “the end of theory”—hence the title of his book. Notwithstanding the book’s extraordinarily repetitiveness—all of its essential ideas could have easily been expressed in a long-form essay—I could not find or infer a consistent definition of “theory,” whose ostensible end is its subject. What would it mean for theory to end? After all, the idea that theory has ended is itself a theory.

Bookstaber often seems to use “theory” to mean “neoclassical economics as I understand it,” for example when writing, “this book is my manifesto for financial crises, a declaration that the neoclassical economic theory has failed. . . .” At other times, however, he seems to be arguing primarily against mathematical reductionism, claiming at one point that since context matters in human experiences, “our probability theory and statistics can be thrown out the window.” Some of his criticisms of “theory” read like attacks on the very possibility of economics as a scientific field:

What we are doing is more akin to writing a story than building a theory. I do not believe there can be a general theoretical approach for understanding crises . . . when there is a high degree of complexity, you have to figure it out as you go along.

This is jarring. If we are only writing stories and improvising, why would we need economists or economics at all? Wouldn’t it suffice for the Federal Reserve to be run by historians and talented extemporizers?

At one point in the book, Bookstaber describes the way he believes the flash crash of 2010 should be understood. Without citing hard evidence, he makes a string of assertions linking liquidity events to crashes:

In a normal market, there is . . . a similar level of liquidity supply on both sides. . . . Liquidity demand starts to enter the market . . . the flood of liquidity demand reduces market-making capacity. . . . The drop in price increases the amount of liquidity demand but has yet to elicit more liquidity supply. . . .

And so on. Maybe these evidence-free statements are true, but what are they if not theories about how markets work? Even in a book about the “end of theory,” theory cannot be avoided.

To fixate on Bookstaber’s linguistic equivocations is pedantic, but his inability to clarify what he means by “theory” is but one manifestation of the broad incoherence of both the book and of the economics profession generally.

The second half of The End of Theory includes a brief for agent-based modeling, which Bookstaber describes as “an alternative to neoclassical economics that shows great promise in predicting crises, averting them, and helping us recover from them.” After centuries of the economics establishment’s failure to predict crises (much less prevent or control them), it takes some great boldness, optimism, or ignorance—or a blend of all three—to suggest that a new method could be the first to succeed.

What is agent-based modeling? My favorite example is “Boids,” an influential computer program created by graphics expert Craig Reynolds more than 30 years ago. The program draws lots of little moving dots, called “boids,” on a screen. A boid is meant to behave like a bird, and a group of dozens of boids is supposed to exhibit flocking behavior just like a real flock. If you think of how flocks behave, with their spontaneous formation, elegant movements, and appearance of almost being a single organism, creating a computer program like “Boids” seems daunting or impossible, especially on the computers that existed in the 1980s. You might have to store hundreds or thousands of vectors capturing the movement of each boid, so that it fit in smoothly with the movement of the flock as a whole.

It was not so difficult as that. Reynolds hypothesized that nothing—neither the code governing individual boids, nor any part of the program itself, nor even the computer running it—needed to govern the high-level behavior of the flock. Instead, each boid was programmed to follow three simple rules: (1) separation (don’t collide with other boids), (2) alignment (point yourself in the same general direction as the boids near you), and (3) cohesion (drift toward the center of mass of the boids near you).

Each individual boid thinks not at all of the flock as a whole, but merely follows those three rules based on its immediate surroundings. And yet when many boids follow the rules, beautiful and complex-looking flocking behavior emerges. You can see a hypnotic modern implementation of it here, which also allows you to create a new boid moving in a random direction to see how it affects the whole system. This example uses only 249 lines of code (available at the link) and yet I feel I could stare at it for hours and remain entertained.

Of course, bird behavior is not the only thing that can be modeled in this way, with autonomous agents following simple rules and generating complex emergent behavior. We could program simulated investors and banks as the agents, and simulate the economy. Simulated bankers would follow some plausible rules for interacting with each other and other economic actors—regarding when to issue a loan, how much to invest and where, and so on. We could run the program in fast-forward mode to see what the economy might look like in five or fifty years, including what types of crises we might expect and when we might expect them.

If you are like me, and enjoy economic prediction and artificial intelligence and flocks of birds, then you may find plenty to be excited about in Bookstaber’s suggestion that we use agent-based modeling to predict crises. But agent-based modeling has severe limitations that prevent it from being a viable alternative to neoclassical economics.

The first problem with agent-based modeling is that the models can lead to literally any conclusion. If you reload the simple “Boids” simulation several times, you could get birds flocking to the left, or the right, or up, or down, or some diagonal direction. Wait a few minutes, and it will look a little different. This simulation, like every other serious agent-based model, has some amount of randomness built in by design, which leads to a huge range of possible outcomes. An agent-based simulation of the economy will sometimes show that a speculative bubble pops early because one hedge fund manager makes a disastrous bet, and sometimes that it continues unpopped for years because everyone behaves angelically. The randomness underlying these models cannot be removed, because social behavior remains inscrutable to us. We cannot predict with certainty whether an individual will (for example) anxiously short sell a teetering market, and therefore we must model such decisions as the products of random chance.

Another problem with agent-based modeling is that the simulated outcomes are completely at the mercy of the input parameters. If we alter the “Boids” code just a bit so that the boids like to get a little closer to each other, we could get a radically different flocking pattern. If we tell our financial simulation that investors have a 2 percent rather than a 1 percent chance of panicking and overselling when the market shows signs of falling, we will get a very different idea of what crises are in store. Of course we do not know exactly what these percentages are, and if we have indeed reached “the end of theory” and cannot even theorize about their values, then the situation is even more hopeless.

These limitations of agent-based modeling make it useless for the purpose of precisely predicting financial crises. We could run an agent-based simulation exactly as Bookstaber describes and have it tell us that there will be a huge crash tomorrow. We could reboot the simulation and run it exactly the same way and it would tell us that things will continue humming along perfectly for another hundred years. Then we could retool a few of the huge number of unknown input parameters, and get entirely different results again.

If agent-based modeling has value, it is in the visualization and salience it provides. By setting up toy soldiers in a diorama, a general does not learn exactly how a battle will go or how to win it, but he might notice some useful hill that had escaped his attention before. If we ran agent-based simulations of the economy, we might similarly notice some financial sector or industry that could be a fault line in future crises. But these should be noticeable to an observer even without agent-based modeling. More importantly, merely noticing salient features of crisis simulations does not grant us predictive power or control over those crises.

It is not clear whether Bookstaber is unaware of the weaknesses of agent-based modeling or whether he understands them completely but didn’t want them to get in the way of his book sales. He vacillates between hyping agent-based models as an “alternative to neoclassical economics” and a “new paradigm” and making statements like “as the crisis unfolds . . . there is no solution or answer.” From one page to the next, he seems incapable of deciding whether economists are wizards who can predict and control economic movements, or spectators who can only observe and tell stories about what happened in the past. It seems to me that when economists are collecting their paychecks and Nobel prizes, they favor the former definition, and when excusing their failures, they favor the latter. This inconsistency is not unique to Bookstaber, but is common in the economics field generally.

Consider prominent economist Robert Lucas’s response to criticisms leveled against the profession after the embarrassments attendant to the Great Recession. Writing in the Economist, he defended Frederic Mishkin, formerly a governor of the Federal Reserve, who just before the crisis presented some “reassuring” simulations predicting a rosy future for the macroeconomy. Lucas wrote defensively of these simulations:

The simulations were not presented as assurance that no crisis would occur, but as a forecast of what could be expected conditional on a crisis not occurring. . . . [The] forecast was a reasonable estimate of what would have followed if the housing decline had continued to be the only or the main factor involved in the economic downturn. . . . After Lehman collapsed and the potential for crisis had become a reality, the situation was completely altered.

This is appalling. In other words, “our predictions were great except for the huge, crucial things we didn’t predict that made all of our predictions invalid.” Or “we can predict everything perfectly as long as nothing unexpected happens.” Imagine, by contrast, a weatherman who forecast dry, sunny weather all week. After four days of thunderstorms prove his predictions completely incorrect, he defends himself à la Lucas with “[The] forecast was a reasonable estimate of what would have followed if the sunny weather had continued to be the only or the main factor involved in the weather.”

If the weatherman behaved this way, with a callous indifference to the impotence of the predictions from which he made his living, we would fire him immediately. Why then should we continue to subsidize professional economists who can predict everything except the future? If their predictions are useless and we all know they are useless, we should rethink the place of economists in our society—we probably don’t need to employ so many at all levels of government or give them the credulity they have historically been afforded. No doubt Lucas and Bookstaber do not desire that outcome. But Lucas, by admitting that all economists’ forecasts are useless, unwittingly provides a good argument for it. The End of Theory, in-between its flawed claims that agent-based modeling can save the field, also denigrates our economic forecasting abilities and so implicitly agrees.

Maybe theory will continue (whatever that means), despite Bookstaber’s claims. But something needs to end. There is a radical mismatch between economists’ pretensions to a deep understanding of the macroeconomy and their repeated failures to predict or control it. Economists must either abandon these pretensions and embrace a more modest role, or end their record of failures and begin delivering on their explicit or implicit promises. Meanwhile, we the public should probably refrain from placing any trust in the economics profession at all.

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How to Reverse the Degradation of Our Politics

The world is facing a gathering crisis of liberal democracy. As I argued here last month, freedom and democracy have been retreating in many countries, including in Europe. Authoritarian regimes like Russia and China are pushing anti-democratic values with increasing energy, resourcefulness, and determination. If they succeed, the world will be a very different place—and for the United States, a more hostile one.

The United States and its liberal democratic allies must develop a new global strategy to counter the power projection of expansive autocracies, and to reboot an international campaign to promote democratic values and ideas. But we also need to renew the core of what we are fighting for: the worth of our own democracy.

The problems with our democracy—ever-deepening polarization, incivility, gridlock, dysfunction, conflicts of interest, and disregard for democratic norms—are not just problems of political culture and behavior. Politicians are driven by incentives, especially the desire to get re-elected. Institutions heavily shape these incentives, and our institutions are in need of reform. Unless we reform our democracy, we will be increasingly hard-pressed to improve the health of democracy globally.

The reform agenda for American democracy is a long one. It must include measures to reduce the implicit corruption in our systems of lobbying and campaign finance, and to eliminate the grotesque unfairness of partisan gerrymandering. But we must also address other factors that have reduced our politics to a wasteland of bitter, uncompromising partisan polarization. To a degree not seen in more than a century, Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill now operate in incompatible ideological corners, with virtually no common ground or willingness to compromise. As a result, legislative and confirmation battles, not to mention elections, have become zero-sum struggles in which anything goes and the only aim is total victory. Since 1947, the voting record of the average Republican in Congress has moved dramatically to the right, the average Democratic voting record has moved less dramatically but still significantly to the left, and (not coincidentally) the average number of bills passed per Congress has dropped by about two-thirds.

Among the mass public, people are sorting themselves into partisan and ideological tribes.  The percentage of Democrats and Republicans with a “very unfavorable” view of the other party has roughly tripled since 1994, to about 45 percent. Fewer and fewer party identifiers socialize with, or even live among, people with different partisan and ideological views. And in recent years, social media have put this sorting process on steroids, with the predictable consequences for tolerance of opposing points of view.

Social and cultural drivers of this process admit of no easy fix. But we can change the perverse institutional incentives. A key factor pulling the parties to the extremes is our electoral system, which nominates candidates in low-turnout party primaries and then elects them in November through “first past the post” voting (in which whoever gets the most votes wins, even if it is far from a majority).

There is a clear step pattern in the polarization problem. Congress is much more polarized than the people. And among the people, the politically engaged are much more ideologically polarized than the general public. But it is the politically engaged who turn out to vote in party primaries. They increasingly punish incumbents too ready to compromise with the other side, or candidates (incumbent or not) who lean toward moderation. Consider Richard Lugar and Robert Bennett, two highly respected conservative senators who were defeated some years ago by more radical conservatives in low-turnout Republican primaries (or in Bennett’s case, an even more narrowly based party convention). Or consider Eric Cantor, the former Republican House Speaker in waiting. Despite Cantor’s staunchly conservative voting record, he was defeated for re-nomination in 2014 by Tea Party candidate Dave Brat, who had accused Cantor of being soft on immigration.

With these grimly polarizing trends in mind, Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, a principled (but for this day and age, distinctly quaint) conservative, took to the Senate floor on October 24th to announce that he would not run next year for a second term. This followed a similar announcement by Senator Bob Corker, the mainstream Tennessee conservative who followed in Lugar’s footsteps as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Neither Flake nor Corker buys into the nativist, slash-and-burn politics of the Tea Party and the ascendant Trump-Bannon wing of the Republican Party.

In one of the most eloquent and important speeches in recent Senate history, Flake decried the “indecency of our discourse” and the “coarseness of our leadership.” Liberated from a Republican primary battle he seemed likely to lose and clearly alluding to President Trump, Flake denounced the “casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals.” Corker sounded similar themes, condemning Trump for a pattern of instability, enmity, and deceit that is debasing our democracy.

The dilemma faced by Flake and Corker is placing more and more members of Congress in a partisan and ideological straitjacket. Flake won the 2012 Republican nomination in a primary that drew about a sixth of registered voters, with Arizona’s Democratic primary drawing only another 12 percent. By contrast, Arizona’s 2012 general election drew 74 percent of registered voters. When only a small fraction of a state’s voters bother to turn out in the primaries, they tend to be the most ideologically committed. If the 2018 Arizona primary turnout is the same as in 2012, less than ten percent of the state’s voters will determine the Republican nominee for Senate.

There are antidotes to this damaging distortion of our electoral process. One is to make primaries open to independents and even voters of other parties. Another is to move primary elections closer to the general election, when voter interest is greater. These fixes might help at the margins to mitigate the current polarizing trends, though in the case of Arizona, primaries are already open to independents and occur relatively late in the summer.

The most promising change is ranked choice voting, sometimes called “the instant runoff.” Imagine that Arizona’s voters had serious options beyond a Democrat and a Republican, and that instead of voting for a single Senate candidate in the general election, voters could rank their choices one, two, three, and so on.  Under ranked choice voting, if no candidate gets a majority of first place votes, the candidate with the lowest number of such votes is eliminated, and his or her votes are redistributed to their voters’ second choices. The process continues until someone gets a majority or a final-round plurality. The instant run-off has the potential to lower the temperature of political polarization, by enabling voters to opt for an independent or third-party candidate without fear that in doing so they will “waste” their vote and thus help elect the candidate they dislike the most.

What if Arizona had ranked choice voting? Flake could have made his clarion call on the Senate floor and then announced that he was running as an independent. Corker could have done the same in Tennessee. Under ranked choice voting, each might have had a decent chance of winning. Indeed, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski did (just barely) win re-election as an independent in the 2010 general election after losing the Republican primary to a Tea Party candidate. But she had to mount a heroic and improbable write-in campaign because of the “sore loser” rule, which (in 45 states) prevents a candidate from getting on the ballot in the general election if he or she loses a party primary. If states also moved to eliminate this undemocratic rule, incumbents could wage a principled campaign in defense of moderation in the primary, and if they lose, come back to run in the general election as an independent. Joe Lieberman did this in Connecticut after losing the Democratic primary in 2006, and he won as an independent—because Connecticut is one of the few states without a sore loser rule.

There is growing interest in ranked choice voting. It is being used in a number of American cities, including Minneapolis, St. Paul, San Francisco, Oakland, and Portland, Maine. This past November, the voters of Maine approved a citizen’s initiative to implement ranked choice voting for all of the state’s elections beginning in 2018, including primary and general races for governor, state legislature, and the U.S. House and Senate. However, the state’s two political party establishments, including almost all of the Republicans and key leaders of the Democrats, swiftly moved to kill the effort. First, they obtained a non-binding ruling from the Maine Supreme Court that the initiative was in conflict with a provision of the state constitution requiring that state officials be elected by plurality. This advisory opinion did not affect the use of ranked choice voting in party primaries, or in electing Maine’s two U.S. House members and two Senators, but both houses of Maine’s legislature nevertheless voted on October 23rd for a bill essentially burying the initiative.

Many people in Maine reacted with outrage that the two party establishments would so blithely disregard the will of the electorate. This included not just supporters of ranked choice voting but also opponents like conservative columnist Jim Fossel, who opined: “The Legislature’s inability to accept the outcome of a free and fair election shouldn’t just be of concern to ranked-choice voting supporters, but to all of us as citizens.”

Maine’s citizens then mobilized again, this time to gather the 61,000 signatures needed to place a “people’s veto” on the June 2018 primary election ballot. Since it was adopted in 1909, the people’s veto has been used in Maine about 30 times, most recently in 2011 to restore a provision for same-day voter registration that the state legislature had modified.  But it has never before been used to restore a citizen’s initiative that the legislature had nullified.

The battle is on. If reform advocates in Maine can gather the necessary signatures within the brisk 90-day time limit (from the public release of their petition on November 6), then ranked choice voting will be used in the June 2018 party primaries. If the voters then approve the veto that June, ranked choice voting will be used for Maine’s U.S. House and Senate elections beginning in November, and for all subsequent party primaries. Rarely in recent American history has a political struggle so clearly exposed the gulf between a two-party duopoly that does not want more electoral choice and a public that craves it.

A growing portion of the electorate is fed up with politics as warfare and politicians who just aren’t listening to the public’s frustration. Many reforms are needed, but ranked choice voting can be the Archimedean lever of change, enabling a small force to move a great weight. The people of Maine are now that small but resolute force. The choices they make in the coming months could begin to move the great dead weight of political polarization and decay in our democracy.

The post How to Reverse the Degradation of Our Politics appeared first on The American Interest.

The Future of Saad Hariri

It takes a certain level of political naiveté or blindness to continue to believe that Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned last week of his own volition.

Given all the information that has come to light since this stunning development, the more convincing explanation is that Riyadh forced Hariri to resign as part of a more aggressive Saudi strategy to counter Iran in Lebanon and across the region. The Saudis were fed up with Saad presiding over a government that’s effectively run by Hezbollah—one that has also furthered the Shi‘a group’s international legitimacy and given it a platform to pursue its pro-Iran regional agenda.

But there’s still something baffling about this story. The fact that Saudi Arabia, now under the tight control of Crown Prince and soon-to-be-King Mohammed bin Salman (also known as MBS), instructed Saad to quit wasn’t necessarily shocking, given the two countries’ old patron-client relationship. Instead, it was the manner in which it chose to do so which might provide clues into Riyadh’s new Lebanon policy.

The Saudis have not minced words with regard to their new intentions toward Lebanon. They consider the government in Beirut as hostile and dominated by the Iranians, and they will fight it in various ways, including prodding the Israelis to wage war against Hezbollah, coordinating with Washington on more painful anti-Hezbollah sanctions, and pulling Saudi deposits from Lebanese banks—even if that leads to political ruin and economic collapse in Lebanon. The fact that Riyadh has asked Saudi nationals to leave Lebanon immediately is certainly not reassuring.

Now that Saad is no longer part of the Lebanese government, the question becomes whether the Saudis want to pursue their goals in the country with or without him. If it’s the former, it’s unclear why the Saudis insisted on Saad announcing his resignation from Riyadh, and not from Beirut. After all, they could have easily instructed him to leave the government while still allowing him to return to Beirut to share the news with the Lebanese people and his own allies, so that they might have better prepared for the day after. Instead, the Saudis humiliated Saad by reinforcing the perception that he strictly and unconditionally follows orders, and has no room for independent action in his bond with Riyadh (unlike Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who has plenty of room to maneuver in his relationship with Tehran).

The Lebanese Sunni street is still primarily pro-Saudi, given the lack of credible alternatives, but the sight of their leader possibly being detained and treated as a puppet in front of the entire world has left many of Saad’s supporters angry and confused. Even Saad’s rivals, including Nasrallah, were sympathetic with his predicament, dismissing the notion that Hariri quit on his own and calling on the Saudis to release him immediately.

If the Saudis’ objective is to enable Saad to switch to the opposition and sponsor his run in the next Lebanese parliamentary elections (scheduled for May 2018), they might have just shot themselves in the foot by possibly burning him politically with their degrading treatment of him. Strong-arming Saad so publicly was bad optics, which won’t win him more supporters among the Sunnis and others not entirely under the spell of Riyadh, who have been disappointed with Saad and longing for a stronger leader. Yet even if Lebanese Sunnis forgive and forget about Saudi Arabia’s uncharacteristically bullish antics, they, like all Lebanese, won’t support its policy of collective punishment as a means to hurt Hezbollah—a move taken out of the Israeli playbook.

But maybe removing Saad from the Lebanese political scene was the Saudi plan all along. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that Saad is the first casualty of Riyadh’s new Lebanon policy. Not seeing Saad as willing or able to take on Hezbollah—at least in the way in which they specifically want him to—the Saudis eliminated him by charging him with corruption (Saad is a dual Lebanese-Saudi citizen and whatever is left of his financial assets resides in Saudi Arabia), just as they did with dozens of other prominent and wealthy Saudi figures who might have challenged or refused to invest in MBS’s vision for the Kingdom.

This means that the Saudis will have to find and prop up a replacement for Saad (if they haven’t already) who will be fully on board with their confrontational Hezbollah strategy. They could rekindle their old relationship with former Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, a protégé of the late Rafik Hariri (Saad’s father, whom the Assad regime and Hezbollah most likely assassinated in 2005) and a friend of Washington, who’s traditionally perceived as less accommodating and more hawkish toward Hezbollah. But Siniora’s been out of politics for some time, and it’s unclear how much support he still has in the Sunni street and, perhaps more importantly, whether he would want to join the Saudis on such a risky gambit. A more likely candidate is the popular Ashraf Rifi, the former head of the Lebanese internal security forces and minister of justice, who had been criticizing Saad’s leadership and suggesting a tougher stance against Hezbollah.

Whatever Saudi Arabia decides to do with Saad, his political future is quite uncertain. If Riyadh decides to work with him, he will forever be seen as a hostage of MBS and a more aggressive Saudi policy, which cannot but hurt Lebanon. If it sidelines him, he could end up bankrupt, and therefore with no influential domestic standing. November 4, 2017 might be remembered as the day when Saad Hariri not only involuntarily relinquished his duties as prime minister, but also forfeited his political career, creating a large and dangerous void in Sunni leadership in Lebanon.

The post The Future of Saad Hariri appeared first on The American Interest.

The War That Never Ends

The Vietnam War

by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

written by Geoffrey C. Ward

Florentine Films, 2017

Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War series, a 900-minute extravaganza written by Geoffrey C. Ward that began airing on PBS on September 17, and that took ten years to complete, is an extraordinary effort to, among other things, educate Americans younger than 60 about a sequence of events that remains eerily familiar for many Americans older than 60. It is not the filmmakers’ intent to provide a final judgment on the war; rather they wish to show what happened from many perspectives: the decision-makers, with their strategic political choices; the public, with their responses to those choices; and a wide array of nations and representative individuals whom the war impacted. In other words, their method for presenting a fair and unbiased portrait of what remains to this day a controversial and divisive subject is to present in rough balance the biases of others.

That is the series’ strength—besides which, it was the only way to convince millions of viewers to watch more than 15 hours of American history and justify the cost of the lengthy project: $30 million. In a sense, The Vietnam War is the latest example, only larger, of Ken Burns’s series of docutainment hits, some of them about serious historical episodes like World War II and the Civil War, some about less momentous subjects like Prohibition, and still others about cultural artifacts like baseball and jazz. All of them have been captivating and have shown high production quality. The formula clearly works, at least for commercial purposes.

One example of The Vietnam War’s lateral commercial impact is that novelist and Vietnam Vet Tim O’Brien’s 1990 work on soldiers in Vietnam, The Things They Carried, just appeared on the Washington Post Top Ten bestseller list (October 28). The fact that The Vietnam War has been a boon for fiction about the war is cautionary, perhaps. No one ought to expect scholar-level history from a television series. The key medium of television, after all, is the picture (the series draws from 24,000 photographs and 1,500 hours of archival footage), not text. Such a presentation is bound to rely more on the evocation of emotion than on cold reason. And the writer, a frequent Burns collaborator over the years, though sometimes described as an historian, has only an undergraduate degree. And the series’s soundtrack, made up of classic “oldies,” is of course available for purchase.

But by following the series, whatever its frailty as serious history, Americans nevertheless come face to face with a range of controversial policy issues woven into the larger narrative, some of which remain relevant in the contemporary context. That policy story, and the larger lessons of Vietnam with them, have to be stitched together by the viewer. This is a task for which not all viewers are created equal in terms of experience or interest. That, in turn, will color one’s perceptions of bias in the series.

Given the still-lingering controversies and divisions associated with the Vietnam War, any treatment would encounter some accusations of bias, and the more extreme the views of the accuser, the more energetic the accusation. The Burns/Novick effort has been thusly challenged, but the criticisms more or less balance out. All told, is it fair to all sides, or at least is everyone’s point of view included? In my view, generally yes. Did Burns and Novick, while mostly avoiding political lectures, illustrate that the war from the American perspective was a mistake, and certainly badly run? Yes, but given that America’s specific goal in Vietnam—keeping the country from falling to North Vietnam—was not achieved, it is hard to see how any honest account could escape that obvious conclusion.

The exception is the series’s ninth episode, covering the 1970–73 period, in which Burns and Novick undercut the credibility of their more general, reasonably balanced observations. The narrative of that episode dryly describes the triumphs President Richard Nixon achieved in 1972, diplomatically with China, the USSR, and North Vietnam, politically in the presidential election, and militarily with the defeat of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) in the Easter Offensive. But this comes only after 100 minutes of almost unceasing negatives on the war: from a Vietnam Veterans Against the War-heavy focus on the minority of veterans who bitterly opposed to it to Jane Fonda in Hanoi, John Kerry’s Senate testimony, drug-addicted U.S. soldiers, the Pentagon Papers, My Lai, and extensive footage of South Vietnamese army (ARVN) troops retreating in Laos and initially in the Easter Offensive (although ARVN soldiers won that battle). The plurality of Americans still supporting the war, which in that period included most veterans, got little airtime. A viewer could easily ask whether Burns and Novick were describing the same country that gave Nixon an overwhelming victory in 49 states in the 1972 election.

The Vietnam War covers, at times with new information, the well-known, seemingly unique aspects of the conflict: the antiwar movement; the pervasiveness of falsehoods, particularly those manufactured by Washington and the U.S. military; and the challenges a democracy faces in fighting an unconventional “war of choice” in the media age. Apart from the resistance such a war generates in the home country, it has a built-in military downside. Viet Cong and NVA combatants who were interviewed stated consistently that they fought to repel a foreign invader. As one of their foes, heroic South Vietnamese Marine officer Tran Ngoc Toan, stated in one interview, the entry of American ground troops generated ten Vietcong partisans for every one who had been active before. LBJ’s and Nixon’s seeming inability to tell the truth to the American people, and the impact that lack of candor had on the war effort, is covered well, but the series reveals a similar tendency in Hanoi’s approach to its population, ranging from characterizing the 1968 Tet Offensive as a victory to refusing to reveal casualties or to inform families of them in a timely manner.

But beyond Vietnam-specific lessons, The Vietnam War lays out in a non-didactic, illustrative manner strategic truths of great import, including for us today. The four that matter most are about containment, incremental versus major war tactics, definitions of victory, and the criticality of determination in conflict.

Contradictions of Containment

In watching The Vietnam War, a viewer, hearing American officials pondering options, is tempted to burst out “stop, no, make the other choice.” But those making decisions did not know how the story would turn out. They had to act with the experiences they had lived through, not those we have accumulated since, based on imperfect knowledge and the typical set of “all bad” options. Those experiences, brought out by The Vietnam War in excerpts particularly with Presidents Johnson and Nixon, were from World War II and the Cold War. Their formula to avoid a repeat of the former, and to win the latter, was containment. The Vietnam War does not discuss containment as such except marginally, but it is palpable in the statements of American leaders. At one point Johnson bursts out, “they (the Communists) keep coming at you,” illustrating containment’s logic: You have to fight them, so better now and there. At another point Johnson, fearing escalation, summoned the specter of Korea (while generally understood at the time as a containment “success,” that war ended in stalemate, with 35,000 Americans killed and Truman’s opting against running for another term). Johnson was prescient.

A “yin/yang” dynamic characterized containment. To avoid unthinkable world war, the U.S. government waged less costly and risky “wars of choice” in which, because the local stakes were not high, the commitment would be limited and unenthusiastic, while that of its local adversary would be total. The result was usually ambiguous, compromise endings. One cannot understand Johnson entering the conflict, or Nixon trying to get out, without grasping the agonizing pickle they were in. You could shut down engagement in Vietnam, but they would “keep coming at you,” possibly more lethally (the Cuban missile crisis was fresh in everyone’s mind).

Containment was a global defensive strategy. Its alternative, “rollback,” had been rejected near the onset. Clausewitz wrote that defense is the stronger strategy, but with a “negative” outcome; it prevents defeat but does not win and thus was unappealing to Americans then steeped in notions of “total victory.” It also allowed the other side to chose time and place, usually when and where the West was weakest. As The Vietnam War discusses well, the jury-rigged South Vietnamese state, created after the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) predecessor, the Viet Minh, defeated the French, was just such a vulnerable prey.

In illustrating that the Vietnam War was not so much international aggression as a civil war in a place of at most middling strategic importance, the series highlights containment’s contradictions. But these contradictions were characteristic of containment as a whole. Most Cold War conflicts involved either divided countries (beyond Vietnam, Korea, China, and Germany) or internal conflicts with communists on one side and America on the other, from Cuba to Greece to Indonesia. From a traditional power politics standpoint, none were vital. But for these “greatest generation” American leaders, World War II was caused by the previous generation’s ducking low-cost engagement in equally unimportant places, Ethiopia, Manchukuo, the Sudetenland, Austria, only then to have to fight existential struggles in important places.

Could Burns and Novick have spelled all this out better? Perhaps, but the series is on Vietnam, not the Cold War. Unfortunately, the most detailed exposition of containment in The Vietnam War is presented by its original proponent, George Kennan, before the Senate in 1967. But Kennan had abandoned his taste for containment well before Vietnam and disdained extending it to distant, minor showplaces, arguing that America was “like an elephant frightened by a mouse.”

The problem was that some of the mice were on our side. Along with defending a perimeter, containment was centered on collective security. This had both a practical logic, that the whole is stronger than the sum of the parts, and a legal-moral one: The sanctity of sovereignty under international law for the weak as well as the strong has been a fundament for world peace since Wilson. Furthermore, even America’s most powerful allies were “mice” compared to the U.S. elephant, and abandoning one would likely unsettle all the others, along with the smaller but still important sinews of collective security. At one point, Johnson, obviously frustrated with Saigon, mused that the United States should pull back to Thailand. Those around him undoubtedly knew that wasn’t a solution. The communists would follow us there, and Thailand offered the same tableau: ineffective, undemocratic government in an unimportant place. Containment would therefore have been undercut by abandoning the Vietnamese “mouse.”

Incrementalism Can’t Win Wars

Another strength of the series is the light it shines on the Johnson Administration’s preference for escalatory baby steps rather than major military moves. American advisers could accompany South Vietnamese combat troops but not fight themselves. Marine infantry battalions initially could defend bases but not take the offensive. The U.S. Army First Cavalry Division late in 1965 did receive a combat mission—defeat an invading NVA division in the Central Highlands—but once it succeeded it was blocked from pursuing the enemy across the Cambodian border. And in the ensuing two years America increased forces slowly, in contrast to the build ups of 300,000 or more ground troops within six months in the Korean and 1990–91 Gulf Wars.

Likewise with the temporary, half-hearted ceasefires and bombing halts Johnson announced: None were significant before the enduring halt in 1968 that opened space for negotiations. Burns and Novick don’t really explain Johnson’s rationale beyond his generally skeptical attitude toward the war, but in general such military and diplomatic moves focus on “signaling” intentions while in themselves changing nothing, a low-risk low-return strategy that must have reassured Johnson, at least in the moment. However, there were many such moments, and the accumulation of them was anything but reassuring. In the minuet of deterrence diplomacy this can be useful, but once war begins, such signaling often produces the worst of all possible worlds: military fecklessness combined with a manifest lack of resolve. This was particularly true in conflicts such as Vietnam, in which the other side had absolute victory as a war goal. Only after repeated defeats and a U.S. withdrawal commitment did Hanoi give up its trump card, U.S. prisoners of war, for a “compromise” deal that held within a fair chance to win later.

In contrast, the series ably illustrates that in conflicts major moves have dramatic impact. But the nature of such effects was variable, from decisive victory to tactical victory, from tactical success, provoking an opponent’s response, to failure.

The initial moves by North Vietnam and the United States were incremental: The United States, backing the non-communist regime in South Vietnam after the French Indochina War, and Hanoi, then launching an insurgency against that regime using its former Viet Minh cadre in the south. Gradually, successive U.S. Administrations (Eisenhower and Kennedy) added thousands of advisers, and North Vietnam stepped up weapons deliveries and the deployment of NVA soldiers in limited numbers, a tit-for-tat escalation without strategic success.

The first major move was political: the U.S.-approved military coup in 1963 against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, whose inept leadership provoked the Buddhist majority and contributed to military reversals. The result was failure, with two years of Saigon government chaos that demoralized the military and helped the Vietcong win much territory.

In 1964–65 Washington and Hanoi upped the stakes dramatically, putting regular ground forces into direct contact. The result was a tactical victory for the U.S. side, by reversing the creeping defeat of ARVN forces, but at the cost of a more deadly stalemate. In particular, as noted above in reference to Tran Ngoc Toan, the direct participation of U.S. forces in an attrition strategy transformed the psychology of the war for the communist side. It joined nationalist energies at ground level to communist ones at the leadership pinnacle, and the result was powerful.

Burns and Novick’s coverage of the two sides’ decision-making is thorough. U.S. actions, beginning with the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident and culminating in ground combat units in offensive operations a year later, are well-covered territory, but the authors capture the reactive, feeling-in-the-dark nature of Johnson’s decisions, with no enthusiasm and little idea of long-term positive consequences, but seemingly no choice. As U.S. diplomat John Negroponte made clear, only American troops could stem the disintegration of the ARVN and its losing battles like the one graphically portrayed at Binh Gia. Particularly impressive is the description of North Vietnamese decisions, with the USSR and North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh arguing for a less aggressive approach, but Party General Secretary Le Duan, backed by China, prevailing in his effort to commit major NVA forces to topple Saigon before America could respond. The depth of the divisions in the Communist Party was remarkable, suggesting the conflict could have taken a different path.

But both sides then pursued strategies unlikely to produce victory. The Vietnam War describes new U.S. commander Westmoreland’s push in 1965 for a troop-heavy strategy of bleeding out the NVA along the borders, backed up by the massive bombing campaign against the north and the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and Cambodia. The idea was to reach a “crossover,” at which point the U.S. effort would be killing more NVA soldiers and destroying more equipment than Hanoi could replace. This sort of attrition approach had successful precedents (Grant’s in the Civil War in particular), but it works only if the supply of enemy personnel and equipment is less than the casualties and damage the friendly side can inflict. Given the enormous mobilization of the North Vietnamese population and the support provided by Russia and China, that crossover point could not be reached even with 500,000 U.S. troops in the country. As The Vietnam War relates, two of Westmoreland’s key subordinates, Marine Lieutenant General Victor Krulak and Army Lieutenant General Frederick Weyand, argued that U.S. troops should deploy to protect South Vietnam’s populated areas, not go into the mountains, but Westmoreland persisted in his border areas campaign.

The bombing campaign was the least successful tactic of the war. It was hugely expensive, generated hundreds of U.S. POWs, added mightily to the “David versus Goliath” moral opprobrium of the war, and failed to either break North Vietnamese morale or interdict sufficient forces and supplies flowing South. That first goal has almost never been achieved by bombing. The second makes sense only when joined with a decisive ground campaign, such as Normandy, which was absent in Vietnam.

Hanoi, for its part, having little choice once U.S. ground forces had entered the conflict, pursued an extremely costly war of attrition in hopes of wearing down U.S. forces and the U.S. public, as had been the case with the French. But then in 1967 Hanoi and Washington, for various reasons, changed strategies, for the worst.

When it became clear to Westmoreland that the crossover attrition approach would not succeed, he shifted to “political attrition” to justify the same strategy of high casualty offensives against the NVA. The idea was that even if Hanoi could replace its horrendous losses it would lose the political will to do so. But while a military commander could measure “military attrition” well enough, attrition of another state’s will was a political assessment beyond the ken of a military man. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, whose job it was to do such assessments, concluded in a secret letter to Johnson that the U.S. military would never break Hanoi’s will, a conclusion that area experts in the U.S. government generally shared. It was a case, like many before and since, where the balance of interests trumps the balance of power.

Meanwhile, Hanoi leader Le Duan, over the objections of more cautious party elders, opted for the 1968 Tet Offensive, first to draw U.S. forces deeper into border mountains fighting NVA units, with the American base of Khe Sanh near the North-South Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as bait, then to hurl the Vietcong and some NVA at cities far from the borders to spark popular uprisings and crush the ARVN—despite no evidence that either outcome would occur.

Without doubt the Tet Offensive was the most significant move of the war before 1975. The Vietnam War covers Tet well from the perspectives of the Vietcong/NVA, the South Vietnamese, the U.S. military, the leadership in Washington, and American public opinion. While Tet was a turning point, its strategic effects were disparate and much debated, with the American military largely believing that public misunderstanding of Tet turned their victory into defeat. But the truth is more complex: What Tet did was change the nature of the war.

After Tet, the significance of the two previously dominant ground forces, the Vietcong and U.S. Army, began to fade, with the South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese regular armies becoming more and more the primary players. This resulted first in dramatic success for the South Vietnamese through February 1973, aided by a U.S. military that was gradually returning to its pre-1965 roles of airpower, logistics, and advisers. But in the end Saigon was overrun in 1975 not by the Vietcong but by the NVA.

The destruction of the Vietcong was the result of Hanoi throwing that force against U.S. and ARVN firepower in Tet and follow-on offensives. Ironically the “crossover” point Westmoreland sought in vain with the NVA was thus attained against the Vietcong. Here The Vietnam War is particularly good, with Vietcong soldiers describing the growing odds against them, and at least indirectly justifying the American military’s argument that it had won Tet.

Yet proximity to events blinded the U.S. military to North Vietnamese and Vietcong successes. As the series describes well, Saigon region commander Weyand’s clever positioning of forces defeated the communists in the capital, but not before television footage of the apparent overrunning of the U.S. Embassy and nearby the execution of an unarmed man in civilian clothing shocked Americans. The cameras misled: The Embassy chancery building was never penetrated, and the “civilian” was an out-of-uniform Vietcong commando leader who had just murdered the wife and six children of an ARVN officer. But revulsion was immediate and the Administration’s explanations were not believed.

One reason was that Tet had destroyed the credibility of the U.S. war effort. As the series recounts, to arrest sagging credibility in late 1967 Johnson had Westmoreland stress to a skeptical Congress and public that the war was being won because Communist will was being eroded. Tet, however, seemed to conclusively demonstrate the opposite.

This credibility never fully recovered from Westmoreland’s mishandling of Tet. That reality (and much else underway in America in the terrible year of 1968) led Johnson to reverse course, denying Westmoreland’s request for more troops, halting the bombing of North Vietnam, entering peace talks, and pulling the plug on his candidacy for re-election in November. From that standpoint Tet looked like a Hanoi victory; the decimation of the Vietcong did not become clear until later.

The political need for a new approach to the war enabled the Nixon Administration to adopt a more successful strategy. Entering office with a commitment to end the war, Nixon empowered the new American commander in Vietnam, Creighton Abrams, to carry out the radically different strategy of Vietnamization. As Burns and Novick also summarily recount, the new strategy had two elements: building up the South Vietnamese forces in numbers and capabilities; and defending the urban and major rural populations, drying up support for the communists and forcing them to go on the offensive against mass firepower. Even while primarily on defense, Abrams launched offensives into Cambodia and Laos to keep the NVA off balance, and into Vietcong strongholds with the controversial but effective Phoenix program. Unlike Westmoreland’s offensives, Abrams’s had strategic purpose: eroding NVA and Vietcong base areas to allow further U.S. troop withdrawals without losing battlefield momentum.

But as often in this war, tactical defeat stimulated a new, bigger bid to rescue victory from disaster: the North Vietnamese 1972 Easter Offensive by NVA regular divisions, which is very well covered by The Vietnam War. But that invasion, rather than collapsing the ARVN, pushed Nixon to respond dramatically, mining Haiphong harbor and sending B-52 bombers against Hanoi while leaving the ground fight to ARVN troops. The resulting major success, with few American casualties, was exploited to build relations with China and the Soviet Union while entering conclusive peace talks with Hanoi. When North Vietnam reneged on some of its foregoing agreements in December, Nixon unleashed the infamous “Christmas Bombing,” which forced the North Vietnamese leadership to accept a compromise diplomatic settlement—in the end a tactical victory for both sides.

The decisive move of the entire war turned out to be the NVA conventional invasion in 1975. The rapid collapse of the South Vietnamese forces would seem to suggest that victory was inevitable, but it was not. As the series recounts, the 1975 offensive was largely a carbon copy of the disastrous North Vietnamese invasion in 1972. But South Vietnamese troops had won in 1972 because they were backed by massive U.S. air power and logistics. The U.S. Executive Branch, now led by Gerald Ford in the wake of Watergate, was blocked by Congress from assisting. The U.S. military provided virtually nothing to Saigon in 1975. When a few White House aides begged Ford to act anyway or risk losing all the foregoing years’ efforts, Ford replied simply: “I’d be impeached.”

Hanoi could not have been sure in advance that the U.S. government, which had promised in writing to support South Vietnamese President Thieu, would not act. But Le Duan bet that the Americans would not intervene effectively, and won the bet. So it was that the U.S military came close to winning a very difficult unconventional war, only to lose by default a conventional one that would have been vastly easier for it to fight. Regrettably, The Vietnam War fails to clearly articulate this basic irony.

As noted above, Le Duan’s roll of the dice in early 1975 achieved what he had failed to deliver earlier: victory. While congressional opposition to an American response to the NVA offensive largely explains why the NVA offensive in 1975 succeeded, another factor was in play: recognition that the core American rationale for Vietnam—containing China—was no longer necessary.

In a sense, then, the United States had won, if not in Vietnam, then in Asia as a whole. Beginning in 1972 China shifted from an anti-status quo Soviet ally into a near-partner of the United States, abandoning internal revolution and regional expansionism.

That expansionism had failed thanks largely to the U.S. effort in Southeast Asia. Successful for ten years after World War II in defeating the Nationalist Chinese, fighting America to a standstill in Korea, and aiding Ho Chi Minh against the U.S.-sponsored French, China and its protégés then ran out of luck: the 1950s Straits confrontation with the Nationalists; North Korean probes in 1968; internal conflicts from the Philippines to Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia—all failures. And despite 300,000 Chinese troops supporting Hanoi, the U.S. military seemed to be winning in Vietnam by 1972. All this—and the feud with the Soviet Union—encouraged Beijing’s “flip,” ushering in forty years of almost total regional peace.

The Vietnam War touches on all this only in passing, just as it earlier all but ignored the critical context of global containment. More attention to the two topics would have significantly shifted the tone of the series, making it much better history, albeit much more ponderous as entertainment.

Iron Determination Triumphs

The failures of all but the last major move to achieve decisive results were due more to the determination of the other side than to each side’s blatant blunders. There were plenty of the latter: Washington’s assumption that toppling Diem would aid the war effort; Le Duan’s belief the South Vietnamese population would rise up and the ARVN crack during Tet; Westmoreland’s claim that he could assess Hanoi’s political will—and Washington’s civilian leaders allowing him to try. But the explanation for the relative failure of most major military and political moves was the resilience of both sides at every level, from leaders to soldiers.

There is much to deplore about Johnson’s conduct of the war, with his doubts and incrementalism, and about Nixon’s cynical lying. But they believed that what they were doing was for the nation’s good, and both persisted until their presidencies collapsed, directly or indirectly because of Vietnam. From one perspective, this was a case of blind sacrifice by Americans and Vietnamese both; from another, it’s what nations do to survive. If anything, the North Vietnamese leadership was even more stubborn, backing Le Duan in hopeless offensive after offensive, until after ten years he got lucky.

Toughness at the top was more than matched by the pathos and commitment of those who risked their lives in combat on all sides. Nowhere does The Vietnam War do better than conveying soldiers’ love of their comrades and pride in their missions, including even the ARVN, which held out for almost two weeks in March 1975 at Xuan Loc, allowing many to evacuate Saigon when the war was already lost.

American accounts of the Vietnam War justifiably tout the heroism of the Vietcong and NVA, fighting as they did against horrific firepower. For example, it records legendary Green Beret “Charging Charley” Beckwith affirming that the enemy combatants were “the finest, most dedicated soldiers I’ve seen.” But The Vietnam War’s narratives and interviews underscore that the enemy met its match in their American foe. This is the series’ gift to the American people. The fears and skepticism of American soldiers came to the fore, but no less than did those soldiers’ refusal to abandon their duty and their comrades. At one point an NVA officer describes how a second American would inevitably try to rescue a downed buddy and then would himself become a casualty. The officer was not so much criticizing questionable acts as conveying his boundless respect for such soldiers. To quote one of the series’ favorite subjects, Japanese-American infantry Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto, “How does America produce young men like this?”

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Schlesinger’s Vital Center

Relaunching The American Interest last month, TAI chairman Francis Fukuyama wrote of “our hope that reestablishing a vital center will reconnect America with itself, and America with the world as we confront similar challenges.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr made that phrase “vital center” famous in his 1949 book of the same name.  His “vital” center was not “the so-called ‘middle of the road’ preferred by cautious politicians of our own time.” (That position, after all, is only somewhere to stand if you want to get flattened.) Instead “the vital center was in a global context,” Schlesinger wrote, “liberal democracy as against its mortal enemies—an attempt to strengthen the liberal case against the renewed totalitarian impulse.”

In the Manichean world of the 1930s and 1940s, intellectuals such as Schlesinger grappled to make sense of the horrific experiences of Nazism and Stalinism. Numerous books on freedom appeared in the immediate postwar period, including seminal works such as Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1945), Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

Orwell in particular, with “with his vigorous good sense, his hatred of cant,” had a profound influence on Schlesinger, but even his impact paled in comparison to “the tragic sense of the predicament of man” evinced by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Schlesinger “immersed [himself] in Niebuhr,” particularly the two-volumes of the Nature and Destiny of Man (1941-42) and The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness (1944).

Here he found arguments about the mixed nature of man and what Niebuhr called the “humble recognition of the limits of our knowledge and our power,” including how man’s wickedness made government both essential and dangerous. The aim of government, therefore, was not “the creation of an ideal society in which there will be uncoerced and perfect peace and justice, but a society in which there will be enough justice, and which coercion will be sufficiently non-violent to prevent [our] common enterprise from issuing into complete disaster.” Niebuhr’s approach, often called “Christian realism,” provided a key for Schlesinger in its warnings against utopianism, messianism and perfectionism. “He persuaded me,” Schlesinger wrote later, “that original sin provides a far stronger foundation for freedom and self-government than illusions about human perfectibility.”

Niebuhr gave Schlesinger both the confidence and the intellectual underpinning for his first overtly political book, the aforementioned The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. It was through the experience of Fascism and Communism that his generation had “discovered a new dimension of experience—the dimension of anxiety, guilt and corruption,” Schlesinger wrote in the foreword. “Or,” he added, paying his philosophical debts, “as Reinhold Niebuhr has brilliantly suggested, that we were simply rediscovering ancient truths which we should never have forgotten.”

But if mankind was not perfectible, what was the postwar liberal to do in the face of totalitarianism and extremism? If Schlesinger accepted Niebuhr’s essentially conservative notion that consistent pessimism about humankind inoculated democracy against authoritarianism and totalitarianism, then, in Schlesinger’s own words, “Wherein lies the hope?”

Departing from Niebuhr, the answer certainly did not come through traditional religion, which Schlesinger saw as passé in a new scientific age. But equally the notion “that doubt and anxiety” would be banished by science and a rising standard of living he saw as another false dawn. And although society needed “a revival of the elan of democracy, and a resurgence of the democratic faith,” the evolution of democracy into a “political religion,” like totalitarianism, was not the answer either. The only way forward was to “recharge the deepest sources of moral energy” to create a society in tune with “the emotional energies and needs of man.”

For that notion, Schlesinger found an echo in the American poet, Walt Whitman, who wrote that “to work for Democracy is good, the exercise is good—strength it makes and lessons it teaches.” So in the end, for Schlesinger in The Vital Center, it is the very process of democracy itself, not perfect ends, which forms the bulwark against extremes. “Problems will always torment us, because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important,” he wrote in the conclusion. “The good comes from the continuing struggle to try to solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution […] The totalitarians regard the toleration of conflict as our central weakness. So it may appear to be in an age of anxiety. But we know it to be basically our central strength.” Thus it was through a renewed commitment to the very exercise of democracy itself that “the center” might indeed hold.

What is striking about The Vital Center is the gap between gloomy, fatalistic diagnosis and hopeful, confident prescription; “the movement,” James Nuechterlein notes, “from conservative assumptions to liberal conclusions.” Schlesinger himself was not unaware of this sometimes uncomfortable shift, writing in Encounter two decades afterwards that the background of being “much influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr … accounts for the combination in the book of a certain operational optimism with a certain historical and philosophical pessimism.”

That conflict was something in itself that he had inherited from Niebuhr, who, while often an appealing writer for conservatives, considered himself a liberal. But as Schlesinger later pointed out, these internal traditions within the democratic tradition were not the point. For “fascism to the right, communism to the left” were the “mortal enemies” of the vital center.  Within that framework, different impulses could co-exist, because the vital center referred “to the contest between democracy and totalitarianism, not to contests within democracy between liberalism and conservatism.” The balancing trick, as a Niebuhr later helpfully summed up, was that “Democracy is on the whole the vital center, but it must be worked so that it doesn’t go to dead center.”

The Vital Center and the articles that had led up to it plunged Schlesinger headfirst into bitter disputes that would divide the American Left. There was a world of difference between his brand of antidogmatic liberalism and what turned into McCarthyism; the question became whether it fed the same appetites. Opponents argued that Schlesinger’s critique was too strident and ignored the rapid decline in size and influence of the U.S. communist movement, particularly in the wake of growing disaffection with rigid Stalinist practices within the Communist Party of America. Some worried that a split on the Left might open up an opportunity for extremism, even fascism, on the Right. For others, the historian stood accused of being a quisling, a charge made in the most vitriolic terms by Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Communist party and one of the infamous “Hollywood Ten” brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

“He takes his stand squarely in the tradition of chronic confessors who have plagued the earth since the first establishment of orthodoxy,” Trumbo wrote. “Whatever inquisitorial courts have been set up, Mr Schlesinger and his breed have appeared in eager herds to proclaim: ‘I do not wish to imply approval of your questions, but I am not now nor have I ever been a dissenter. I am not now nor have I ever been a Communist. I am not now nor have I ever been a trade unionist. I am not now nor have I ever been a Jew. Prosecute those answers differently, O masters, send them to jail, make soap of them if you wish. But not of me, for I have answered every question you chose to ask, full, frankly, freely—and on my belly.”

Schlesinger fired back that Trumbo had been the one grubbing around on the floor. While he, Schlesinger, had always affirmed the “the basic constitutional principles that men may be questioned and prosecuted for their acts, never their thoughts,” Trumbo he found cowardly in his failure to take the stand at HUAC to defiantly proclaim his First Amendment rights to private opinions. “This accusation is a fair one,” notes Christopher Trumbo in a biography of his father. “They [the Ten] clearly harmed their case with the general public by evading questions.”

Schlesinger had been one of the 130 liberals who founded Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) at its inception on January 4, 1947. Others included Niebuhr and Schlesinger’s Harvard friend, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith  The organization itself called for an expansion of the New Deal, and was given the blessing of FDR’s widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, and their son, Franklin Jr. But the central objective of the new group was to become a vehicle for the non-communist Left in its vehement opposition to Stalinism.

The presence of the Roosevelts was important for Schlesinger. The 1917 generation, of which both Schlesinger and John F. Kennedy were members, had not grown up with the utopian notions about Marxism of earlier generations, but in a time of depression when Communism offered the Scylla of Stalinism to the Charybdis of Nazism. That was why progressives like Schlesinger continued to revere the New Deal. “The whole point of the New Deal,” he wrote, “lay in its belief in activism, its faith in gradualness, its rejection of catastrophism, its indifference to ideology, its conviction that a managed and modified capitalist order achieved by piecemeal experiment could combine personal freedom and economic growth.” But many were baffled, like Walter Lippmann, at why cooperation with the USSR should be such an untenable position, or why, for that matter, Dalton Trumbo shouldn’t be allowed to write his screenplays.

A modest bestseller in 1949, The Vital Center would turn out to be among Schlesinger’s most enduring works, with new editions published in 1962, when he was a special assistant to President Kennedy, and 1998, after the original had been extolled both by President Clinton and Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. (The Speaker in 1996 had quoted the line that “The conservative must not identify a particular status quo with the survival of civilization, and the radical equally must recognize that his protests are likely to be as much the expressions of his own self-interest as they are of some infallible dogma”—a plea for humility, Schlesinger drily noted, “that neither Gingrich nor I have always observed.”). Looking back, the New York Times would conclude that it was with The Vital Center that Schlesinger “solidified his position as the spokesman for postwar liberalism.”

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 147.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Long Shadow,” New York Times, June 22, 1992. Reinhold Niebuhr to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Nov. 14, 1951, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. papers. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library [NYPL] 100/4. Barton Swaim, “Sifting the Wheat from the Chaff,” Review of Major Works on Religion and Politics, by Reinhold Niebuhr, Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2015. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 511. On Schlesinger and Reinhold Niebuhr more generally, Daniel F. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 113-144.

Schlesinger., The Vital Center, ix. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence, 116. James A. Nuechterlein, “Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and the Discontents of Postwar American Liberalism,” The Review of Politics 39, no. 1 (1977): 3-40. Christopher P. Loss. “Educating Global Citizens in the Cold War” in In Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 121–62.

  Schlesinger., The Vital Center, 4, 170, 246-48.

  Schlesinger., The Vital Center, 251.

Nuechterlein, “Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and the Discontents of Postwar American Liberalism,” 10. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “The Vital Center Reconsidered,” Encounter, Sept. 1970, 89-93.

Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo, Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 203-206.

Alonzo L. Hamby, Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), 279-280. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and his Circle of Influence, 116-121. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 57-59.

Douglas Martin, “Arthur Schlesinger, Historian of Power, Dies at 89,” New York Times, Mar. 1, 2007.

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Russia’s Brexit Subversion

The last two weeks have seen Britain’s gravest secret finally break into the public domain: that Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum. The fact that such an operation happened is not surprising or even, in itself, much disputed at this point: if the United States, Germany, France, and other Western democracies were targeted, it would be odd if the UK were left alone. What is extraordinary is that it has taken over 15 months for the news to be properly discussed in public. In that time, a small army of journalists has been working to overcome offshore secrecy and Britain’s repressive defamation laws to bring the matter to the public’s attention. A few MPs, notably the Labour Party’s Ben Bradshaw, have worked to break the silence, and now the quasi-governmental Electoral Commission is investigating.

But even today, the government remains committed to its code of silence: ministers will not comment, the intelligence services are standing aside, and the police are doing nothing. The government has appointed no special counsel and ordered no public inquiry, even as mounting evidence suggests that Russian subversion operations in Britain and the United States were closely connected.

There are several reasons why the British government would act in this way. Before explaining those reasons, though, it is worth setting out the series of revelations that have captured the public’s attention in recent weeks.

First came a series of pieces by Open Democracy on the strange political funding activities of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which props up the Conservatives in a virtual coalition government. In particular, the work focused on a £435,000 donation to the DUP by the obscure “Constitutional Research Council.” Inexplicably, most of this was spent on pro-Brexit advertising in London.

Next, Open Democracy ran a brilliant investigation into the Brexit donor Arron Banks by Alastair Sloan and Iain Campbell on October 19th. The article forensically examined Banks’s business dealings and concluded that he appeared to lack the wealth required to make £7m in cash donations to UKIP and the Leave.EU campaign group. Within days the Electoral Commission announced a direct investigation into Banks’s donations, including “Whether or not Mr. Banks was the true source of loans reported by a referendum campaigner in his name.”

Meanwhile, researchers at City, University of London discovered that an army of 13,500 Twitter bots had promoted Brexit during the campaign. In response, Damian Collins MP, chairman of the culture, media and sport committee, has launched an investigation. He has also written to Twitter asking the company to share information on the bot network.

The Labour MP Ben Bradshaw has been one of the few voices in Parliament to raise the matter of Russian interference in British democracy. On October 23rd he asked Theresa May:

[…] have the UK Government or their agencies been asked for help or information by the American congressional team or U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller, who are investigating alleged Russian subversion of the U.S. presidential election?

The Prime Minister ignored the question, which Bradshaw repeated three days later to Andrea Leadsom, Leader of the House. She replied: “If the Right Honorable Gentleman wants to write to me on this, I will see whether I can get him an answer.”  Finally, the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told another Labour MP, Chris Bryant, that there had been no requests from Mueller’s office, and indeed that he was not aware of any Russian meddling in the referendum. It seems a remarkable claim that Mueller has not made contact with one of Washington’s closest intelligence partners, despite the relevant activities of Trump associates like George Papadopoulos and Julian Assange in the UK.

The Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) would be a natural venue for these matters to be examined, including the Foreign Secretary’s surprising statement. However, the committee has not been re-convened since the election, supposedly owing to problems in agreeing its composition, leaving the ISC temporarily unable to act. Given the centralization of power in the British system, and the diminishing willingness of senior public officials to resign in the public interest, the government has considerable power to obstruct state institutions from discharging their duties.

While the government remains conspicuously silent, revelations in the press continue to suggest the extent of Russia’s interference. On November 4th, the Mail on Sunday published an interview with a whistleblower from the St. Petersburg “troll factory” at 55 Savushkina Street:

The former insider at the 24-hour Russian troll factory revealed: ‘At the time of the Brexit referendum, the gist of posts was in favour of leaving the EU.

‘Our workers were given a line to take and what we wrote was monitored by our chiefs.’

During the Election, messages were sent out on social media and political debate forums ‘supporting Labour Party arguments, attacking May and backing Corbyn.’

Asked what the objective was, the troll replied: ‘You have to ask the high-level bosses, but it seems to me, to make discord in London and the UK.’

As these revelations were surfacing, Robert Mueller’s investigation unsealed its first indictments. The surprise was George Papadopoulos and his mystery professor contact, who was quickly unmasked as Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor of diplomacy. Both men were based in London.

It is worth noting that the Trump campaign and UKIP leadership have gone to great lengths to publicize their co-operation and warm relations. Nigel Farage, the former UKIP leader, was one of the first foreign politicians to meet Trump after he won the U.S. Presidential election, resulting in the famous “golden door” photo with Arron Banks, Andy Wigmore, Gerry Gunster and Raheem Kassam.

It is also notable that as far back as June, the Guardian reported that Nigel Farage was a “person of interest” in Mueller’s investigation, owing to his visits to Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is voluntarily incarcerated in the tiny Ecuadorian embassy behind Harrods. The crucial question regarding Assange is who supplied him with the hacked DNC emails that he subsequently posted on the internet. Farage’s friend Roger Stone admits to “contact” with Guccifer 2.0., a front site used to release some of the DNC material. Although Farage was spotted entering the Ecuadorian embassy in March 2017, the question of what earlier visits he made and what he might have delivered is of paramount interest to U.S. investigators.

It is indeed puzzling that Theresa May and her ministers will not say a word about British elements of Mueller’s investigation, or indeed about the attack on Britain’s democracy. But there is some precedent here. My security sources say that during David Cameron’s time as Prime Minister from 2010 to 2015, at least two reports by the security services into Russian influence and political funding were ignored in cabinet. In June, Heidi Blake of Buzzfeed published an investigation into 14 Russia-related deaths on British soil, most of which had been overlooked or explained away by the police and the security services. Blake was inundated with U.S. security and intelligence sources complaining that their British colleagues were no longer willing to counter Russian murders on their own soil.

The pusillanimous attitude of the previous Cameron government can be explained by several factors. These include the strategic naivety of senior figures in the government and the conviction of senior ministers, particularly the Chancellor George Osborne, that Britain’s prosperity could only be maintained by massive capital inflows, no matter how dirty that capital might be. If the Kremlin’s assassinations were vigorously investigated, Russia would be alienated, and the inflows would be reduced. No doubt there are still some in government who share this distinctly sub-Churchillian view.

Shocking as the murders described in the Blake investigation were, the stakes have risen immensely with the Brexit vote, which may have permanently altered the UK’s destiny. Whether Brexit is a good thing or not is, in a sense, irrelevant, as is the theoretical question of whether the interference carried the Leave vote over 50%. What does matter is that a hostile power, whose aim is to split the Western alliance and to weaken each of its members, was seemingly allowed to operate unchecked. British people of all stripes—whether Brexiters or Remainers, Labour or Tory, Scots, Irish, Welsh or English—ought to be united in their will to expose what has happened, to punish the perpetrators and to put an end to these operations.

Why, then, does the elected government, whose first duty is national security, devote itself to concealing this story, rather than exposing it? There are four reasons:

The Conservative Party, and in particular the cabinet, is deeply divided over Brexit. Theresa May, although herself ambiguous on the merits of the policy, has committed herself to executing the withdrawal from the EU. If information emerges that casts doubt on the legitimacy of the referendum process, her task will become even harder and the government may even collapse (bearing in mind that it only clings to power thanks to a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party, itself embroiled in these questions). Therefore, she may well prefer to ignore information about Russian interference.


May made a point of visiting Trump ahead of other leaders and publicly associating herself with him; the two leaders held hands, although it was later revealed that this was because Trump is frightened of staircases. If there is indeed a “Brexit strategy,” then a central element of it is a fast and comprehensive trade deal with the United States. May simply cannot contemplate a breakdown in relations with the Trump White House. Thus, she may be loath to investigate any connections between Russian operations targeting the U.S. 2016 presidential election and the EU referendum. Moreover, the earliest signs of suspicious contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia were provided by Britain’s GCHQ to the U.S. Intelligence Community, thanks to assistance given by other NATO allies. It is fair to assume that if Britain’s intelligence agencies were to continue delivering information on this theme to their U.S. counterparts, the White House would be displeased and the chances of a favorable and fast trade deal would diminish.


From Cameron’s election in 2010 until his departure in 2016, Theresa May was Home Secretary, responsible for security. It was during this period that the aforementioned Russian influence operations were carried out. From a government responsibility point of view, she has no one else to blame but herself.


The Conservative Party itself has accepted sums from Russian sources and would therefore risk being discredited itself. From one perspective, these donations may be seen as mostly marginal and not especially suspicious. For example, Lubov Chernunkin, wife of a former Russian finance minister, offered to pay £160,000 in 2014 to play tennis with David Cameron and Boris Johnson. There were also donations from financial companies with deep links to Russia. But rumors are now surfacing in Whitehall that more substantial donors to the Conservatives under Cameron gave “dark money” whose origins are extremely difficult to ascertain.

The entire story boils down to a single sorry fact: the British government has chosen to put its own political interests above those of the country and of national security. It has also decided to elevate a relationship with a U.S. President over the Anglo-American military and intelligence partnership (admittedly a distinction that has not arisen before).

The probability that the May government will act decisively is small. The intelligence services may know a great deal about Russia’s influence already, but accounts of the government burying their reports into the matter suggest that they are being muzzled. So far, there is no sign of any willingness on the government’s part to pull the trigger on a thorough and transparent investigation.

In the meantime, the government and the Conservative Party will struggle on through the mire of sex scandals, petty rivalries and Brexit squabbles that characterize the current political scene. But as they do so, they should think of their obligations to the British people, and reflect on the ancient definition of treason: “giving of aid and comfort to the King’s enemies.” A cynical, weak, and cowardly abdication of duty in the face of Russia’s interference is an error of omission, not commission, but the effect is much the same. To use the language of the Justice Department, have the UK’s leaders stumbled into being “accessories after the fact”? In a legal sense, the answer is no—but in a moral sense, the answer may well be yes.

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The 1,002nd Arabian Night?

It was on the fourth night, very early in the great Arabic tale, that Shahrazad, in telling the story of King Yunan and his evil vizier, says as follows: “Oppression hideth in every heart; power revealeth it and weakness concealeth it.”1 It’s hard to say from Washington, DC, how oppressive it really is for a passel of princes (11 at last count) and assorted retainers (as many as 500, according to some reports) to be held under “hotel arrest” at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, but it’s easy to suppose that Mohammed bin Salman, the 32-year-old Saudi Crown Prince—and King in all but formal title—senses that his burgeoning power gives him license for a bit of what he no doubt considers necessary oppression. It no longer hideth entirely in his heart.

We’ll see how all this ends in due course: whether MbS remains the banquet hall’s premier diner long into the future, or rather sooner than that becomes the entrée. Both outcomes are possible. What is not possible the longer his coup from above lasts is that Saudi political arrangements will be put back the way they were pretty much since the end of 1953. He has destroyed the status quo, presumably with his feeble 81-year-old father’s blessing—or maybe not. He did so possibly because he thinks the future of the Kingdom depends on it, possibly because his will to power and personal ambition far outrun his wisdom and experience, and likely because he shrouds, even to himself, the latter truth with the former conviction.

What has gone on in Saudi Arabia over the past few days—along with its related external emanations, from the shocking resignation of the Lebanese Prime Minister while in Riyadh to the Houthi missile attack on Riyadh—is the most significant cluster of events to hit the region since ISIS burst onto the scene, seemingly from nowhere, to overrun Mosul in June 2014. But unlike ISIS taking Mosul, the Saudi events may well reverberate for far longer than three and a half years, and their ultimate significance could be far more profound.

Anyone can see from the mainstream American press what has happened in sketch form, but, as is usually the case these days, the mainstream press is frail at delivering two services: connecting dots and providing context. When it comes to this set of interlocked stories, these weaknesses are fatal to adequate understanding. So the purpose of this brief analysis is not so much to tell you what has happened (though some review is necessary to set the scene), but rather to tell you what it means, not least for U.S. interests in the region and beyond.

The Saudi Way

The current Saudi King, Salman bin Abdel Aziz Al-Saud, ascended to the throne in late January 2015 upon the death of his half-brother Abdallah. In June of this year Salman elevated his son Mohammed to the position of Crown Prince in place of his cousin Mohammed bin Nayef. That act created additional ill will inside the Saud family, which compounded other conflicts bubbling and burgeoning for other reasons (mostly) below the surface.

For example, Prince Abdel Aziz bin Fahd— a major shareholder in the Middle East Broadcasting Company, which operates the Al-Arabiya television network, and also in Saudi Oger, the distressed company of the family of recently resigned Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri—got hauled into court in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2015 by his cousin, Prince Turki bin Sultan. Turki, an outspoken reform-minded member of the family, accused his cousin of orchestrating his abduction, sedation, and forcible repatriation from Switzerland in 2003 because he was about to blow the whistle on family corruption shenanigans in the Saudi defense and interior ministries. Abdel Aziz is either under hotel arrest now or dead, as a rumor has it. Turki is not.

What this shows is that in the Saudi royal family personal and political positions are hard to untangle: policy positions may be adopted because they either align with or oppose a personal enemy or competitor, or one can make allies and enemies from adopting certain policy positions—but after a while it’s often hard even for the principals to tell which is which. That is not unusual, and it certainly applies to current accusations of corruption, a concept that in Saudi Arabia lacks anything like a specific legal definition. But two things have changed in the past few years.

First, the sense of urgency about making decisions believed to have existential importance has risen as the era of oil appears to be waning and as the reliability of the United States as the Kingdom’s protector appears less certain (even as the perceived threat from Iran looms larger) thanks first to the standoffishness of the Obama Administration and now to the sheer strangeness of the Trump Administration (of which more below).

And second, ever since the founder of modern Saudi Arabia died in November 1953, the principle of ijma’—consensus of the family elders—has kept contending family sections and members in rough balance with one another, and kept most contentions from public view. Consensus has been deployed, above all, in choosing kings—and in a single case deposing a king, Abdel Aziz’s own successor Saud, in 1964 after nearly 11 years on the throne. Every Saudi king since Abdel Aziz bin Saud died has been his son. (He had 45 sons, of whom 36 survived to adulthood.) But it also applied to lesser positions in government and in business.

Alas, the actuarial tables have turned on Abdel Aziz’s remaining sons, all of whom are either very old now or not kingly material. Everyone understood that the transition to the next generation required a particularly exquisite implementation of ijma’. Some believe that the generational transition should have happened already, and that Salman should not have become king. But evidently no agreement was forthcoming as to who should be enthroned, so Salman may well have been the only acceptable, temporary compromise. And now his son Mohammed has short-circuited the ijma’ process, having established at least temporary control over the army, the national guard, and the internal security apparatus.

That is not quite all. Before this past weekend’s coup from above, MbS had been responsible for several other major initiatives. Two were foreign policy oriented: the war in Yemen and the squeeze against Qatar. But at least three others were domestic: a host of high-profile economic reform quests, most notably the Saudi Vision 2030 initiative; promising women the right to drive, which is a highly symbolic issue; and most important but least remarked upon in the Western media, removing the arrest power from the Religious Affairs Ministry’s “morality police.”

Clearly, MbS has been moving boldly and simultaneously on both foreign and domestic fronts, hoping to demonstrate an iron will in order to steal a march on his cousinly competitors and win the hearts of younger Saudis, who have for the most part applauded his reformist efforts as well as his brash and seemingly intrepid national security initiatives. But in so doing he has undone not just one kind of balance in the Kingdom—the aforementioned family ijma’ process—but two. An even older and more basic balance forms the very constitutional backbone of the Saudi state: the biumverate between the Al-Saud and the Al-Wahhab, the temporal and religious halves of the whole Saudi enterprise going back to the 18th century.

The relationship between the royal house and the clergy has shifted about over the years, in recent times coming to favor the court over the mosque. But the basic division of labor has endured: the Saudis ran the economy and the country’s foreign policy, and the Wahhabi clergy ran the education system and set the standard for proper public behavior in all forms. Now the clergy is suddenly on its heels, not only because MbS has ripped the teeth from its ability to control public etiquette, but because the Crown Prince has publicly challenged the very model of religiosity that has defined the nation for as long as anyone can remember.

The clergy and other social conservatives in the Kingdom also see the attack on the religious establishment and the economic and social reform programs as being closely related: merely letting women drive, they aver, will lead to the total gender integration of the workforce and soon thereafter the brazen violation of Islamic standards of female dress and behavior. God will punish this sin. This is the Saudi version of a slippery slope argument. Under the circumstances, it is not entirely idle.

Missing the Point

Casual Western observers generally miss the significance of this because they do not understand the origins of the Saudi state and hence what kind of Islamic society it has spawned. Contrary to what the vast majority of Americans seem to think, Saudi Arabia is not a traditional Muslim country. Saudi Arabia is an attenuated neo-fundamentalist country from having been taken over, by force of arms in the early 20th century, by a “revitalization movement”—to use Anthony F.C. Wallace’s classic 1956 description of the type. The Wahhabi movement is therefore similar in some ways to the 19th-century Mahdiya movement in Sudan and the early 20th-century Sanusiya movement in Libya, also to the Almohad convulsion of the 12th century and its long-delayed doppelganger, ISIS—and, not entirely coincidentally, to the original rise of Islam in Arabia under Muhammad himself.

To condense and simplify a bit, revitalization movements are: socially integrative and hence trans-tribal; highly hierarchical and disciplined; based on the charisma of a leader; tend to be literalist and intolerant in their religious interpretations; tend to be militant even sometimes to the point of suicidal, and to subsume all political energy invariably directed against some perceived outside threat; and carry a neo-messianic tone. These characteristics bear no overlap with traditional Sunni Islam at least since its medieval synthesis reconciled a still young, conquering Islam with the realities of its own division amid a recalcitrant world—in, say, the ninth or tenth century.

It is very hard to maintain a revitalization movement at full fervor for long. Since the messianic era does not dawn, all examples wind down if they are not first defeated from without or overthrown from within. So do secular utopian revolutions and similar movements in other religious domains—double predestination Calvinism, for example. When they do wind down, they find themselves in a condition of permanent cognitive dissonance, at least until the next “big social thing” comes along. On the one hand they acknowledge high ideals and maximalist goals, but on the other they know that these ideals and goals are very far out of reach.

What happens most of the time in such circumstances is the construction of a serviceable hypocrisy that, eventually, can permeate many aspects of ordinary daily behavior. An example: If a typical pious Muslim woman from Pakistan gets on a plane in Islamabad in order to visit Paris for some reason, she will probably exit the plane wearing the same clothing she was wearing on entering the plane, for she has internalized the rules of her religious culture; when a Saudi woman flies from Riyadh or Jedda to Paris, she will likely enter the plane in standard Saudi attire but exit the plane in the latest Western fashion, for she cannot internalize an externally enforced set of obligations in service to an obviously impossible goal. So she tows the line at home where others see her in that apparently stable if stultified, hypocritized context, but outside of that context she feels little obligation to otherwise empty forms. Similarly, Saudi men will not usually violate restrictions on alcohol and non-halal food at home, but many with the means to do so think little of crossing the causeway to Bahrain to indulge in what some entrepreneurial locals there call a Saudi Special: champagne and barbecued pork ribs. And finally in this regard, it is extremely rare inside the Kingdom for anyone to profess atheism, not least because it’s both illegal and dangerous to do so. But whenever an anti-common sense religious orthodoxy is shoved down people’s throats, it is bound to boomerang, at least from time to time. There are more “private” atheists in Saudi Arabia than you might suppose.

To return to MbS and the point: Saudi society is built on a massive serviceable hypocrisy that is more vulnerable to disruption than it usually is, just as its politics have been built on the above-described double balance that has now been disrupted. The two are not separate. So when conservatives in the Kingdom right now wonder and worry how all this will end, they are not wondering and worrying for no reason. The whole Saudi house of artificial and by-now-antiquated religious fantasy could collapse almost overnight. This you do not usually read about in the newspapers.

Obvious and Not

The Western press has noted the apparent contradiction between MbS wanting to attract more foreign investment to Saudi Arabia and the instability that the coup from above has generated. Yes, that’s obvious.

It has noted, too, that in wanting to confront Iran MbS has been talking tougher, and now has pulled away the curtain of Lebanese politics by apparently forcing Saad Hariri to resign so that everyone can see the raw truth: the diabolical betrayal of the Maronite President Michel Aoun in laying the country at the feet of Hezbollah and hence Iran. (If there is any country in the Arab world that Americans tend to misunderstand even more than they misunderstand Saudi Arabia, it’s Lebanon, but never mind that for now.) That could spark a renewed civil war in Lebanon, thus raising the price to Iran of controlling its satrapy now that the war in Syria seems to be turning Iran’s way, but it could also maul the Sunni community there in the process. That’s fairly obvious, too.

And the press has called attention to the fact that just yesterday the Houthis again lobbed a missile about 800 miles to the outskirts of Riyadh, where a Patriot missile battery apparently intercepted it, meaning that we’re closer to turning an already extant proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran into a direct one. Well, maybe.

What’s not obvious in the press, seeing as how it is not mentioned, is that neither country can mobilize a conventional expeditionary force worth so much as a skewer of shishtawook, and there is anyway no land border between them. Nor is the right analogy obvious in the press: Iran helping Yemenis to use their territory to rocket Riyadh is something a bit like Nikita Khrushchev putting missiles in Cuba, because it undermines the asymmetrical advantage of one side. In 1962 we could hit the Soviets but they could not hit us, and the Saudis can bomb Sana‘a but not the other way around . . . until now.

In any event, the air forces and navies of both countries (with the UAE probably helping the Saudis), such as they are—and Iranian militias in Iraq and Houthi allies in Yemen ankle biting, rocketing, and terrorizing Saudi cities—look to be the modalities of any fight, if there is one. That and Iranian-supported and equipped Shi‘a saboteurs in Bahrain, perhaps, trying for a head shot at a Saudi ally/client. All kinds of interesting if improbable larger scenarios can be spun, too: Pakistan supporting Saudi Arabia by attacking and seizing Iranian Baluchistan, for example.

We don’t know what might happen if anything major happens at all, but it’s obvious that we don’t know because the locals don’t yet know what they will do. It could well be, as Lord Vansittart put it long ago in a different context, that “there are moments which unmistakably portend slaughter,” and this may be one of them. Or not. But for sure MbS brings to mind another Vansittart witticism, about Kaiser Wilhelm: “He does not like war, but he likes doing the things that lead to war.”

Innocents Abroad, and at Home

Ah, but the real wild card in all this is not what the Pakistani authorities might or might not do, but what the U.S. government might or might not do. No one is sure about that either, and that certainly includes the clueless President of the United States.

The Trump Administration, just possibly, had one sensible idea in foreign policy: stop playing footsie with the Iranians and organize the Sunnis to confront the real threat—creeping Iranian imperial recidivism—and to whack ISIS at the same time. But having a decent idea and knowing how to make it happen are two different things. The Saudis did not whack ISIS; if any locals did, it was the Kurds, and look where their efforts have got them. The Trump White House (which in this weird situation may or may not speak with and for the Defense Department, the State Department, and the intelligence community on any given point, and vice versa!) has nevertheless dumped virtually all its regional eggs into the Saudi basket, assuming, or hoping, that the Saudis can organize all the ambient anti-Iranian energy floating around the region, bankroll it, and point it effectively anywhere the Iranians are encroaching—Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and so on.

That, presumably, is why the President has audibly blessed the coup from above, saying that, “the Crown Prince and King know exactly what they’re doing.” That, also apparently, is based on the takeaway the President got from his son-in-law, who reportedly just returned from his third trip to the Kingdom, having talked one-on-one with MbS into the wee hours of the morning. I shutter to imagine what was said, and promised, in this conversation between a 32-year old daredevil driving a country at top speed with no brakes and an experience-free B-minus student who has not the slightest idea what he is doing. The White House’s gilded optimism in the Saudi capacity to successfully bump chests with Iran thus qualifies as something between blind faith and sheer fantasy.

This mess is not all the Trump Administration’s fault. It was the Obama Administration that exaggerated the ISIS threat (even as it underplayed the Iranian one) and so made American arms the objective ally of Syria, Iran, and Russia; the Trump Administration merely continued what its predecessor set in motion, and arrived at the inevitable dilemma: Now that ISIS is dead as a holder of real estate and Syria doesn’t have a government that can control its whole territory, what do we do next? Any Administration fool enough to pursue a faulty strategy to the end would have faced this question, for which there are not many good answers.

And it was the Obama Administration that acquiesced in the idiotic Saudi decision to ensnare itself in Yemen, just because we wanted to assuage their anger at us for having dallied with Tehran—not that Washington could necessarily have stopped the Saudis had it tried. It is a war the Saudis cannot really win (can anyone imagine a Saudi army marching up those mountains and surviving?), and it actually draws Iran closer into Yemen, as we’ve lately seen. This is the same mistake the Bush Administration made with regard to Iraq: One of the unexpressed but real reasons for going to war in March 2003 was the hope that by flipping Iraq into an ally hosting U.S. forces, Iran, also looking at U.S. forces across its Afghan border, would come to heel. Screw up a war based on that premise and exactly the opposite occurs: the war-maker becomes a soft target of opportunity for the attacked. But the Trump Administration ignored the lesson and, once again, doubled down on its predecessors’ bad judgment.

Good heavens: New Administrations of the other party are supposed to be revolted by its predecessors’ ways, as with, in this case, health care, Title IX, environmental regulations, and more. Why, then, did the Trump Administration persist with some of the dumbest things previous Administrations did? Getting continuity where we least needed and could afford it has got to rank as some kind of bad joke, because it’s just too stupid to qualify as mere irony.

Be that as it may, the Trump White House has given MbS a green light to drive Saudi Arabia 90 miles per hour over a cliff. Consider the components of likely disaster. The Yemen war will not be won, and Saudis—soldiers and civilians—

may die in politically significant numbers. Missiles may fly into Saudi cities now from many directions, and not all of them will be intercepted. Most Saudis have gotten used to almost perfect material and physical security in recent years; this is a pampered and brittle society not used to pulling together or suffering hardship. The touted MbS-signed economic reforms, though indeed necessary, may not work; or, maybe worse, they will work and catalyze the usual social instability that comes from rapid change—except it could be much worse than the historical norm given the rigidity of Saudi Arabia’s frozen neo-fundamentalist social mindset.

At some point, too, those now designated as the family “delinquents,” with much of the clergy in support, might use failure at home and abroad to try to get rid of MbS. After all, not only was one Saudi king deposed after 11 years on the throne, another, Faisal, was assassinated by a relative. What might that look like? For now, it’s safe to assume that the 11 arrested princes are in effect hostages and hence useful for deterrence: If their near kin try to discomfit MbS, the detainees might lose their heads. But that tactic has a half-life. And if foreign and domestic threats combine at a sour moment to threaten the Saudi regime itself, will the Trump Administration send U.S. forces to save it? What would that look like?

Whatever it looks like, the U.S. government, if not actively complicit in the consequences short of or actually in a war, will nevertheless be associated with them. What a deal, especially if President Trump does send the cavalry in a crisis, and they do not prevail against rolling chaos.

And so it was, on the 544th night that, as Shahrazad told the story, Sindbad the Seaman felt remorse, and said, “Would heaven I had tarried in the island. It was better than this wild desert; for there I had at least fruits to eat and water to drink, and here there are neither trees nor fruits nor streams. . . . Verily, as often as I am quit of one peril, I fall into a worse danger and a more grievous.”2 Oh yes, Dinarzad, these things happen.

1The Thousand and One Nights, A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, made and annotated by Richard F. Burton (Heritage Press, 1934), Volumes I & II, pp. 58–9.

2Burton, Volumes III & IV, p. 2,027.

The post The 1,002nd Arabian Night? appeared first on The American Interest.

Studying Stalin

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

Stephen Kotkin

Penguin Press, 2017, 1184pp., $40

Richard Aldous: Hello, and welcome. My guest this week on The American Interest Podcast is Stephen Kotkin, professor of history at Princeton and author of a new book, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941. Stephen, welcome to the show.

Stephen Kotkin: Thank you for the invitation.

RA: Congratulations on the new book, this is volume two on the life of Stalin. What do we need to know as we pick up in 1929?

SK: Stalin is enveloped in mythologies. For example, his father beat him as a child, and as a result, he killed millions of people. He usurped Lenin’s position in the party, when it should have gone to Trotski or somebody else. He committed a genocide in Ukraine during a famine in 1931-33. He trusted no one, but somehow he trusted Hitler, and went into the pact with Hitler blinded by what was at stake.

There’s this caricature of Stalin’s mediocrity, that Stalin wasn’t quite as good or as smart as the rest of the intellectuals around him, that he somehow ended up in power, somehow stayed in power for 40 years, somehow presided over a victory against the German land army in World War Two, somehow built a nuclear superpower.

This version of Stalin is extremely large in the historiography and in the imagination. The trick, though, is to check the documentation. We have an unbelievable amount of new material that has come forward in the last 20 years. What does that documentation say? That’s what I’m embarking on with this book.

RA: One of the things that I remember from volume one, which you show again in the second volume, is this fascinating sense of Stalin as someone who is on the one hand a rigid Marxist Leninist, devoted to Lenin, but who is also somebody who has this unbelievable work ethic about him. As you say, he is somebody who is not a mediocrity, but rather is quite clearly somebody who is brilliant right from the very early stage, or at least certainly from the revolution.

SK: He’s a very talented individual. You don’t ever get into power fully by accident, but even if you do get into power by accident, you don’t stay in power by accident. In order to survive in a system like that and to build what he built—that is to say, a personal dictatorship inside the Bolshevik dictatorship that Lenin created—in order to build something like that, you have to have a certain kind of talent. Now, it’s not the talent we would associate with some of our heroes in a moral sense. I don’t share the values that Stalin espoused and that motivated him to build what he built, but it’s really awesome, what he did.

RA: While thinking about the story that you tell over the two volumes, I was struck that about through the first few hundred pages, you describe Stalin as a dictator, and then you start describing him as a despot. Is that really the story that has been going on in these first two volumes, from dictator to despot?

SK: Yes. First, we have a person who’s born on the periphery of the Russian empire to a poor family—father a cobbler, mother a seamstress—there’s no way to imagine that anybody like him could get near power. Of course he does, and that’s in large part because World War One destroys the old order. There’s a leveling process that happens with World War One, and after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, Stalin is appointed as Lenin’s right hand, because Stalin is very effective at organization. Lenin has a stroke and gets incapacitated, Stalin takes his place, and then we watch Stalin build what I was describing, this personal dictatorship.

Now, this process is not something that was foreordained. We debate who the right successor to Lenin was, who deserves to inherit the mantle. The real questions, though, are how could somebody have created and amassed that much power in that system, and how could that person have exercised that power on the day to day basis that Stalin did? This is a guy who folds together in one person the equivalency in the U.S. of Washington DC, New York, and Hollywood—politics, the economy, and culture. He answers for all of these spheres simultaneously, and moreover, he does it as a single person.

However, no matter how much power he gets, just like you pointed out, it’s never enough. After he builds this dictatorship, he then breaks the men surrounding him who have facilitated his rise in dictatorship. He breaks them psychologically and politically in order to form a despotism. This one of the big stories in the second volume.

RA: One of the really striking things about the story that you tell of what we sometimes describe as the Great Terror is how Stalin effectively destroys the upper cadre of the revolutionary class, and in their stead creates this new intelligentsia who are effectively his people, and his kind of people as well: ones who will deliver on Stalinism.

SK: You’re right, Richard. It’s very hard to explain why anybody would murder that many loyal people. If you compare it to the Nazi regime, for example, Hitler does not murder his own officer core, he doesn’t murder the SS leadership, the provincial Nazi bosses, his diplomats abroad, his intelligence agents. Stalin does murder them. He kills and he destroys large numbers of loyal people. This is mind boggling, because not only do we have to understand what motivated him to do that, but how he was able to pull it off and not destabilize his own regime.

Part of the answer is that he had in mind who their replacements would be, and he promoted them. He cultivated an entire new elite, a replacement elite that was in the mold that he himself had come through: strivers, partly educated, men and women from the people, up from modest roots. These people were as loyal or even more loyal than the elite that he destroyed. The problem for them, however, was that they were all morally compromised, because they rose up and took the places of people who had been murdered by Stalin for no good reason.

RA: Let’s talk about some of the effects of his policy, and in particular, collectivization. Can you explain to us exactly what that is, and can you also tell us a little bit about the controversy surrounding this? For example, we had Anne Applebaum on the show recently to talk about her book Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. As you know, she says that this was not a genocide, but Stalin is very clearly targeting and punishing Ukraine. You have a very different take, so can you explain what that is?

SK: Let’s start with collectivization. What you have in 1917—and by the way, today is the exact 100th anniversary, November 7th, 1917—what you’ve got are separate revolutions. There is an urban Bolshevik theater of power in the cities, obviously, which will take over industry so that it’s state-owned and state-managed. But there is also a separate parallel peasant revolution where the peasants—not the Bolsheviks, not the socialists in the cities—eliminate the gentry class themselves and seize the land, and become de facto landowners. That’s about 25 million peasant households, about 120 million souls.

This parallelism is troubling for the regime because the regime believes, as most Marxists will tell you, that the political structure is determined by the underlying socioeconomic structure, or what they call the mode of production. If you have capitalism in the countryside, where the vast majority of people live, over the long term a socialist regime in the cities cannot survive. Therefore they must eradicate capitalism in the countryside, and build socialism there too, in order for the urban regime to survive. This is what they call collectivization of agriculture. What that means is that the property is not only collectively owned, but collectively worked.

The problem for the Bolsheviks—and this is where Stalin’s will and personality come in—is that the peasants don’t want to be collectivized. Only 1 percent of all the arable land in the Soviet Union as of 1928 was worked collectively, which is to say, collectivized. 99 percent of the arable land was worked by households and individuals who then sold their produce on the market, in the style of capitalism. Stalin decided that this couldn’t go on any longer, and to the shock of everybody, including the other Bolsheviks, who supported the idea of collectivization but just didn’t think it was feasible, he imposed forced total wholesale collectivization across all of Eurasia. The result is what the critics called dislocation, but on a bigger scale than they anticipated, because there was a horrific famine. This second Bolshevik famine, from 1931 to 1933, was a result of the social engineering of this collectivization that Stalin embarked on.

RA: In terms of the famine, what do you make of Anne Applebaum’s argument that Ukraine was particularly punished?

SK: I’m an empirical person. Today, in our country, it’s more important than ever to have facts and to line up your facts and to substantiate, to document. You can’t just argue what you want to be true, you have to argue on the basis of evidence. What’s the evidence we have on this question of the intentionality or not of the famine of 1931-33?

First, there is no question of Stalin’s responsibility for the famine, his policy caused the famine. The controversy, to the extent that there is one, is about his intentions. We have an unbelievable number of documents showing Stalin committing intentional murder, with the Great Terror, as you alluded to earlier, and with other episodes. He preserved these documents—he would not try to clean up his image internally–and these documents are very damning. There is no shortage of documentation when Stalin committed intentional murder.

However, there is no documentation showing that he intended to starve Ukraine, or that he intended to starve the peasants. On the contrary, the documents that we do have on the famine show him reluctantly, belatedly releasing emergency food aid for the countryside, including Ukraine. Eight times during the period from 1931 to 1933, Stalin reduced the quotas of the amount of grain that Ukrainian peasants had to deliver, and/or supplied emergency need. Ask yourself, why are there no documents showing intentional murder or genocide of these people when we have those documents for all the other episodes?

Secondly, why is he releasing this emergency grain or reducing their quotas if he’s trying to kill them? No one could have forced him to do this, no one on the inside of the regime could force him. These are the decisions that, once again, were made grudgingly, and they were insufficient—the emergency aid wasn’t enough. Many more people could have been saved, but Stalin refused to allow the famine to be publicly acknowledged. Had he not lied and forced everyone else to lie, denying the existence of a famine, they could have had international aid, which is what they got under Lenin, during their first famine in 1921-23. Stalin’s culpability here is clear, but the intentionality question is completely undermined by the documents on the record.

There are many other examples of this, but let’s take one more piece. There is a story about how Stalin blocked peasants’ movement from the regions of starvation to the areas where there might have been more food. With all those documents, we also know that of the roughly 17 million farmers in Ukraine, about 200,000 peasants were caught up in this interdiction process. The regime’s motivation for this was to prevent the spread of disease that accompanied the famine that the regime caused, however unintentionally. It was a foreseeable byproduct of the collectivization campaign that Stalin forcibly imposed, but not an intentional murder. He needed the peasants to produce more grain, and to export the grain to buy the industrial machinery for the industrialization. Peasant output and peasant production was critical for Stalin’s industrialization.

RA: You’re very good in the book on presenting the “human” Stalin, if you like, the real man. Some of the details are fantastic, where you talk about his bowel complaints for example, and his addiction to tobacco and many of his human frailties. You’re talking there as well about getting inside the man’s head—presumably he’s Georgian, so he must be thinking in both Russian and in Georgian. I just wonder what kind of challenges that presents you as a historian, not just the fact that he’s a monster, but also that he has this kind of complex worldview and different perspectives and even different languages.

SK: You’re right, you know the more I get inside, and the closer I get, the more I feel I understand, and I have now levels of insight into his personality that I didn’t have before I started this project, given the amount of documentation that I’ve been able to use. But as close as you get to him, he’s still an enigma. This is a guy who had no patience for what we would call the sanctity of human life. If people died in big numbers, he didn’t then have pangs of conscience, he didn’t go back and wonder if he had done the right thing.

On the contrary, he reacted most strongly when he was criticized by others. As far as we can see, the peasant deaths in the famine didn’t give him a second of hesitation or regret or remorse, but he became obsessed with those people who criticized the imposed forcible collectivization. Part of the story I’m telling in the book is how he became the Stalin that we know, this monstrosity. The answer is: it’s the politics. We sometimes think that a person’s personality is formed from childhood experiences or other influences, which then gets expression in their life and what they do, but I’m considering the opposite. It’s the experience of building the dictatorship, it’s the experience of amassing and exercising this kind of power, holding life and death power over hundreds of millions of people, it’s this experience that makes Stalin who he is.

The more we see him through the earlier episodes chronicled in volume one, about the so-called Lenin Testament calling for Stalin’s removal, through the collectivization campaign for which he was criticized, the more we see him exercising power and the politics influencing his personality, and the more we can see the Stalin we know emerge. The politics creates a personality more than the personality creates the politics.

RA: You take issue in the book with Henry Kissinger, who in Diplomacy described Stalin as the ultimate realist, that he’s patient, shrewd, and implacable, but as you point out, there is also another side to Stalin—the gratuitous mayhem, the mistrust—so we really we have to understand both of those things in order to get closer to the man.

SK: Yes, the sadist and the charmer is the same person, and the realist or the real politicker in also the communist ideologue and the gratuitous murderer. The problems that we sometimes have with Stalin’s behavior we separate out, we fragment, we compartmentalize. We have the chapters on the Great Terror, when he seems to be gratuitously murdering everybody, and then we have the chapters on foreign policy, where he seems to be a far-thinking realist and acting to preserve or enhance state interests.

The problem with that type of compartmentalization is that he’s the same guy when he’s gratuitously murdering his own elite, and he’s engaging in foreign policy. One of the things I tried to do in the book was to weave the foreign policy considerations all through the rest of the terror and the murder, not because they’re causing the arrests, terror, and the murder—they’re not—but because this is what Stalin’s day to day life looked like. He could line edit a novel, he could screen a film, he could write a diplomatic communiqué, or sign a foreign treaty, or have one of his minions sign a treaty, he could sign execution lists, he could give instructions for torture of exactly how someone should be tortured and to what degree. All of this is Stalin.

RA: The book is subtitled Waiting For Hitler, and in many ways, I found this to be one of the most radical parts of the book. The traditional view of Stalin is that he trusted Hitler too much, but in some ways, you almost argue that he didn’t trust Hitler quite enough. You have this amazing scene where Ribbentrop offers Molotov the opportunity to essentially carve up the world together with Japan and Italy. Stalin decides that Hitler is trying to trick him, and he turns this down, and it’s this moment when Hitler really decides, “We have to deal with the Soviet Union.” Is that a fair summary, and what was it that put you on the track of thinking about Hitler and Stalin in that way?

SK: When I was looking at the Hitler-Stalin pact, and as you pointed out at this pact in August 1939 that Ribbentrop signs on behalf of Hitler and Molotov signs on behalf of Stalin, I was saying, “What did this piece of paper mean to Stalin?” Hitler had never kept his agreements before—there were shredded agreements all up and down Europe, including the recent Munich pact in 1938, the infamous Munich pact, the negotiations to which Stalin was not invited, nor was any Soviet representative. I said, “Why would Stalin believe that Hitler would all of the sudden begin to honor his word, when he hadn’t before, when the track record was the opposite?”

I came to the conclusion that Stalin perhaps didn’t believe that Hitler would honor this. You’ll recall that Hitler invades Poland on September 1st, 1939, and that a little bit more than two weeks later, the Soviet Union strikes into Poland from the other side, and they carve up Poland together. There’s an episode described in the book in the second and third weeks of September when the German army crossed the line that had been agreed in Stalin’s office. Right then, the division of Poland, on the map agreed in Stalin’s office, was violated by the German land army. They had gone farther east than had been agreed, and no coincidence, this was where the Elysium oil fields were.

The Wehrmacht—the German army—had captured very valuable oil fields that were supposed to be on Stalin’s side of the map. Stalin called the German military attaché in Moscow and the German ambassador into his office, and he let them know that in fact the Soviet Union was going to take back those oil fields which had been agreed were on the Soviet side. Stalin took them back by force, and in this clash both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht each took casualties. The pact still held, but it was an indication of the distrust and the conflict of interest. Stalin had no guarantee that the Wehrmacht would stop anywhere in Poland. Why wouldn’t they just march all the way to Moscow? By retaking those oil fields, he demonstrated that he had force at his command.

In the middle of this, Hitler, by the way, was in Poland, near the guns. He called the Wehrmacht back from their occupation, and as they were retreating under Soviet fire, they returned fire. This kind of episode leads you to think that we need a better understanding of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Falsely, many people characterize the Hitler-Stalin pact as an alliance, when in fact it was a non-aggression pact, and neither side wanted an alliance in the summer of 1939 when it was signed.

The negotiations to convert the non-aggression pact into a full-fledged alliance, which took place in Berlin in November 1940, failed, but it’s clear that Stalin contemplated signing a formal alliance with Germany, which could have redirected Germany away from the Soviet Union and spared the Soviet Union the war. But Stalin proved incapable of the kind of clever manipulative sophistication in November 1940, because by then, Hitler had the upper hand. When Stalin negotiated the pact originally with Hitler’s representative Ribbentrop, in August 1939, Stalin had the upper hand, but by November 1940, after the fall of France in June 1940, Hitler had the upper hand and Stalin misplayed his hand.

RA: Now finally, Stephen, let’s talk about you for a moment. A historian writing about Abraham Lincoln doesn’t have the kind of emotional and  psychological challenges that perhaps you have, studying someone like Stalin, or which historians or biographers of Hitler might have. How do you deal with living with Stalin on a day to day basis?

SK: You know you’re right, and it’s been a number of years now, having worked through volume one and volume two. I still have another one to go, which goes through World War Two, the Cold War, and Stalin’s death. It’s oppressive, there’s no question. Imagine that there are some documents which are interrogation protocols, that concern people who were beaten to confess to crimes they didn’t commit, and on those documents, there are lingering traces of those people’s blood. It’s dried up, it’s discolored now, it’s not the original red, and it’s fading, but nonetheless it’s there, and you see that again and again and you read the words in addition to the bloodstains. It’s hard, it’s very hard.

At the same time, the arc of the story is so grandiose, something like the story of Russian power in the world, where you’re getting someone who’s going to build a military-industrial complex far greater than this country ever had, who’s going to have the communist movement with global reach, who’s going to command a huge flourishing of production in the arts—quality issues were difficult, but nonetheless, a massive amount of culture that’s produced. This story is a big one, and it’s breathtaking, and it’s the story that got me into this in the first place. All through the mayhem and the horror and the tragedy, it’s the part that keeps you going.

RA: You’ve been going at a fair clip, 1,000 pages in three years. When are you expecting to bring out volume three?

SK: This is the problem, Richard, with a multi-volume work, there’s no victory lap. You finish a volume, and naturally, rightfully, readers want to know where the next one is. I can confess that I have not yet written volume three, it lies ahead. I’m at it right now, but I can’t predict how long it would take. Patience.

RA: The book, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, it’s written by my guest, Stephen Kotkin, and published by Penguin Press. I have to say, it really is a staggering feat of scholarship, but for now, Stephen, congratulations again, thanks for joining us on the American Interest podcast.

SK: Well, thank you so much, Richard, my pleasure.

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Nile Dynamics

As of July 2017, Ethiopia commenced filling the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) reservoir on the Nile River. The GERD is the African continent’s largest dam project, with more than 6,000 megawatts of hydroelectricity potential for domestic use and sale to the international market. Situated in one of the world’s poorest regions, and home to 90 million people, Ethiopia is in the process of modernization and the GERD in particular has become nothing less than transformative. But the problems involved in its construction, both environmental and political, are considerable, and have become a priority in the ongoing negotiations between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan—the three countries most affected by the dam. The world speculates and waits for favorable outcomes from these negotiations, as conflict in northeast Africa could destabilize the continent beyond the Nile River Basin.

There is no agreement on how development of shared Nile resources will be coordinated among the 11 Nile Basin countries, though institutional platforms for dialogue are established. Despite increased interest by upstream countries in developing Nile water resources for their growing populations and developing economies, the shared water resources are primarily—at more than 90 percent—used for domestic consumption and agriculture in downstream Sudan and Egypt. Meanwhile, the GERD has displaced close to 20,000 people in Ethiopia alone, and stands to create a host of unknown downstream effects on the environment and on riverine communities, especially in war-torn Sudan. Anticipated population increase in the Basin as well as the possibility of more frequent flooding and droughts due to climate change could aggravate the political challenges presented by the GERD. However, if the upstream and downstream countries can find a way to cooperate, coordinated water flow management through dam infrastructure can mitigate these demographic, economic, and environmental challenges. The question is—can they?

The Nile’s Hydro-Political History

For millennia the Nile has been a source of food, water, and identity. The river’s water and nutrient-laden sediment support agricultural civilizations even today. Historically, Ethiopian Kings threatened to divert Nile waters when downstream Muslim neighbors threatened their Orthodox populations. Yet the days of such upstream power did not last; all of the major treaties of the 20th century, some in force today, favored the downstream countries. The 1929 Agreement between Britain and Egypt was the first major colonial treaty to affect the Nile, privileging Egypt’s water needs and compelling any upstream state under British rule (and exhorting those that were not) to acquiesce. The 1959 Nile Treaty was another important agreement that, unlike its 1929 predecessor, remains valid to date—at least between its signatories. Negotiated and signed by Egypt and Sudan as independent countries, it effectively divided the waters of the Nile between them. But demographic changes have rendered this old status quo especially unfair. Since 1959, the population in the Nile River Basin has tripled, especially in Egypt and Ethiopia, which each boasted a population of approximately 90 million in 2016.

For years, Egypt’s and Sudan’s hegemonic positions on the Nile were supported by both the Soviet Union and the United States. Demands by upstream states for a renegotiated 1959 Treaty and “a seat at the negotiating table” did not receive serious support from either superpower. Indeed, both the United States and the Soviet Union were attempting to court Egypt in the mid-1950s by promising to fund the Aswan High Dam—Egypt’s mega reservoir project designed to control floods, provide water for irrigation, and produce hydroelectricity. Ultimately, the United States withdrew its offer of financial aid to the Egyptians, allowing the USSR to finance the project. While this may have brought Egypt closer to the Soviet camp at the time, the flow of great-power diplomacy, and later the collapse of the Soviet Union, paved the road to close U.S.-Egyptian ties. Ultimately, Egypt leveraged such backing to assert its position in the Basin. Claiming that it was 100 percent dependent on Nile waters, Egypt even threatened war in 1979 should Ethiopia or any upstream country challenge its use of the river.

The threatened war never materialized. Since then, additional agreements signed in the Basin have included upstream countries like Ethiopia. In December 1992 and July 1993, for example, Ethiopia signed agreements with Sudan and Egypt respectively. These agreements, however, were limited in scope and have not prescribed any specific action to achieve a more equitable distribution of the waters—a principal demand of the upstream countries. Thus, while these agreements stated that the use of the Nile waters would be worked out in detail on the basis of international law, they also seemed to affirm the 1959 Treaty. Furthermore, the agreements stated that the parties would refrain from engaging in any activity that could cause appreciable harm to any of the other parties. The status quo established by the 1959 agreement was therefore essentially maintained.

Only recently has the situation changed. Founded in 1999, the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) was a successor to earlier efforts to bring the various Nile riparians together, focusing on the pursuit of long-term development and management of the Nile waters through the brokering of a new international agreement. The World Bank, the main backer of the NBI, demonstrated a willingness to further the equitable reallocation of the Nile waters. This was a significant milestone in Nile hydro-politics, since the World Bank effectively recognized the main positions of Ethiopia and other upstream riparians. While the proceedings of the NBI have not been made public, its Secretariat has claimed that the participating states have reached important compromises.

Despite these promising developments, the move toward a more equitable distribution has proved to be slow-going. In May 2010, nearly all of the Nile’s riparians signed the Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA). While part of the NBI, the motivation behind the CFA was to replace the previously negotiated treaties with an agreement based on the principle of equitable use. Furthermore, the CFA strives to transform the NBI into a permanent Nile Basin Commission, recognized both by the NBI member countries and by regional and international organizations. If ratified by all Nile Basin states, the CFA could end the near-monopoly Egypt and Sudan have enjoyed for decades. To date, six countries have signed the CFA, but only three have ratified. Egypt and Sudan have both contested the CFA as a unilateral move by upstream states.

Into this contested political environment comes the GERD, which will transform it. Understandably, the three major competing powers have different reactions to its advent.

Ethiopia

As economies in the region have improved over the past decade, Ethiopia has seen astonishing growth. Its consistent 8 to 11 percent GDP increase surpassed even Kenya’s in 2016. As a nation increasing in economic prowess and population, its enthusiasm for the GERD is boundless. Ethiopians assert that the GERD will benefit all three countries by providing flood control during the rainy season, water storage during the dry season, regulated water flow in general, and energy generation for a future regional grid. The marketing campaign promoting the GERD in Ethiopia touts it as a means of alleviating poverty­, and nothing less than the symbol of modern Ethiopia.

At 6,450 MW capacity, the GERD is the largest dam project under construction on the African continent. It is designed to triple the existing Ethiopian domestic power capacity, which at commencement in 2011 was under 2000 MW nationwide. The electricity generated will serve to increase the less than 42 percent coverage of the country, as well as produce revenue from energy sales to surrounding countries. The dam is scheduled for first commissioning before the end of the year and, depending on how tripartite talks conclude, its reservoir will fill over a period of several years before reaching total potential capacity production.

Though the GERD is not the first dam project that Ethiopia has constructed on shared waters, it is the first that will have major downstream impacts for Sudan and Egypt. Ethiopia made the decision to begin and continue construction of the GERD unilaterally; since the existing 1959 Nile Treaty does not include Ethiopia, Addis Ababa contends that it is not in violation of any international agreement. However, it has since engaged with Sudan and Egypt in an evaluation of the project and in high-level diplomatic talks. As of this writing, Ethiopia is in a declared national state of emergency following internal violent conflict in 2015 and 2016, so the outcome of previous diplomatic progress is unknown.

Egypt

The powerhouse of the Nile countries, Egypt has seen its position shaken by internal political upheaval. The Arab Spring engulfed the country on January 25, 2011. Eighteen days of protests followed, after which President Hosni Mubarak stepped down. Mubarak’s ouster from power may have altered Nile hydro-politics. While he was in power, Mubarak regularly leveraged Egypt’s military and geopolitical weight to resist any change to the country’s dominance of the Basin. In March 2011, Ethiopia announced the construction of the GERD, right in the middle of this fragile political period for its downstream neighbor. Whether or not its internal upheaval had anything to do with it, Egypt’s softer stance on the Nile was immediately apparent. In May and September 2011, Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi met and agreed to establish a committee of technical experts to review the GERD. In an unprecedented change in Egypt’s official position, Sharaf even proclaimed that the GERD project “could be a source of benefit” as well as “a path for development and construction between Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt.”

With the exception of Muhammad Morsi’s presidency in Egypt, which included official and unofficial threats to Ethiopia for damming the Nile, and the distraction of Ethiopia’s recent civil war, the three countries have been engaged in closed-door discussions about the technical aspects of the GERD since 2013. On March 23, 2015, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, and Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn signed a declaration of principles on the GERD.

Egypt’s stance on the Nile has moderated over the years since the Egyptian Revolution. This moderation accompanied by increased cooperation, however, does not prove that Egypt has reversed its position regarding its historic rights to Nile waters. Rather, Egypt sees its options as limited by the speed and determination with which Ethiopia is constructing the GERD, and the relative international support Addis Ababa is enjoying.

And though Egypt may consider itself boxed in, the GERD stands to offer it substantial benefits. Egypt’s High Aswan Dam holds back an estimated two years’ worth of water in Lake Nasser, but the lake has one of the world’s highest evaporation rates at more than 85 percent. Through the GERD, Egypt and Ethiopia could cooperate on mechanized water storage further upstream, away from the high evaporation zone in the desert.

Yet Egypt remains concerned about several issues: 1) how its share of the Nile water will be affected, immediately or in the long term, 2) ensuring that the GERD is not used for any other purpose than to generate electricity, and 3) how the filling of the dam and the production of hydroelectricity will be managed and the dam administered once it begins operation. A team of French consultants is investigating these and other impacts of the dam, yet the final report is not likely to be ready until after the GERD is in operation.

Sudan

The other major downstream actor, Sudan, also stands to benefit from the GERD—but only if its precarious and bloody politics don’t get in the way. Close to 95 percent of the country depends on Nile water resources. Sediment and flood control from the dam would bolster development plans for expanding Sudan’s agricultural sector, while the GERD could also provide Sudan with more hydropower for water pumping and electricity generation.

However, Sudan has been enveloped by civil war in various forms almost without respite since 1962. The population in the south of the country fought to gain independence from the north, which it finally achieved in 2011 with the influence and aid of the United States. South Sudan was born and, as a result, Sudan lost control of the southern water resources of the White Nile River and the Sudd, potentially important places for development. In 2013, a civil war broke out in South Sudan that continues to this day, rendering both Sudan and South Sudan politically, socio-culturally, and economically unstable.

Despite the ongoing conflict, decisions about Nile River water resources remain a priority for both countries, as is exemplified by the language about Nile water in the peace agreements between Sudan and South Sudan. Sudan, for its part, is actively engaged in the tripartite talks with Egypt and Ethiopia. Given its strong interest in the benefits of the GERD and historical relationship with Egypt, the country might act as a bridge between Egypt and Ethiopia in these discussions.

Local Communities

While Ethiopia’s frenetic promotional campaign dismisses the human costs of its construction as a small price to pay for prosperity, those costs are considerable. Local people and indigenous communities have been and continue to be displaced from ancestral lands and traditional water access points, often without adequate compensation or recourse. While payment may be calculated based on economic concepts, compensation for the removal of a people from their known environment and their ancestral identity presents a more difficult challenge. Even though Ethiopia itself was never colonized, the international donor community has emphasized the advantages of Western-style economic development, while ignoring the importance of solutions that fit the ethnically diverse fabric of Ethiopian society. One report estimates that Ethiopia alone will displace more than 1.5 million people through contracts with foreign investors for large-scale farming projects and related land-leases.1 To take only one example, 20,000 people largely belonging to the ethnic minority groups of Gumuz and Berta have lost land, land rights, and water access due to displacement from the area that became the dam’s reservoir. The numbers are higher, but not readily available, for development in the White Nile catchment of the Gambela region. No assessment has been made of the impact on river communities directly downstream in Sudan, where subsistence farmers live alongside large numbers of internally displaced people from the ongoing Sudanese conflict.

There is also little to no information available about the dam’s likely environmental impacts. No adequate study of sediment or water modeling has been done, due to the lack of existing data. The Ethiopians in charge of the GERD’s design have given little attention to the environmental and ecosystem impacts, as preservation of these systems is not as big a priority as addressing issues of poverty and the health of the country’s GDP. Nor has anyone studied how downstream communities of subsistence will be affected by flow regulation. Subsistence farming on the Nile includes the use of seasonal fluctuations in the river to reach different tracts of land, flood recession agriculture, which the GERD could substantially alter.

The Nile River Basin is located in the heart of what many climate scientists deem to be a hotspot for climate change activity—a major threat to rural communities, which are numerous along the river. Such environmental threats, combined with the displacement of populations and political tensions, could lead to violence on a sub-national level. Yet local communities are left out of the talks between Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia, even though the decisions made therein will have lasting and sometimes irreversible impacts on their cultural, economic, and environmental well-being.

The Nile Basin countries need a comprehensive water development plan for the entire Basin if the governments want to provide water, food, and energy for future generations. As foreign investment increases, regional economies grow, and populations expand, more pressure will be put upon existing natural resources. Co-management of natural resources is key to regional development.

International influence in the Nile Basin through treaty negotiation, direct investment, loans for development, or aid is very powerful. The United States has long supported Egypt financially. It receives the fourth-largest U.S. foreign aid package after Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel. China has long supported Sudan in the development of oil and gas resources. The newest player on the international development front, China is also investing in nation-building by constructing electrical transformers and transmission towers, as well as supplying material for extending the grid to the boundaries of Ethiopia and Sudan, in exchange for raw materials.

Development in the Nile Basin is inevitable given the economic ascendancy of certain Basin countries, population pressures, and under-developed water resources. Such development potential requires coordination beyond the reactive cooperation that currently predominates, epitomized by the tripartite talks among Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Other large and complex river basins, such as the Mekong in Southeast Asia, benefit from a regional basin organization that acts as a platform for development discussions among the affected countries. While basin organizations are controversial and imperfect, the institutional presence adds a level of stability to fragile water-sharing systems.

While the Nile Basin Initiative is an attempt at achieving basin-wide institutional capacity, it has largely struggled given the intransigence of Egypt and Sudan toward any new institution that challenges their regional hegemony. Today, the NBI continues to suffer from several institutional and financial challenges, yet at the same time, a permanent arrangement for international basin management eludes the basin states. Any new regional organization would need to assuage Egypt’s and Sudan’s concerns regarding the GERD. This includes how it will be filled, and how it will be operated in the short and long term, particularly in times of drought. A successful basin-wide organization will also need to create benefits for all parties concerned, so cooperation becomes a win-win situation in a hydro-political context that historically has been considered win-lose by upstream basin countries.

Looking to the future, the Nile Basin countries could also create a regional organization that would serve local communities in water-resources development, rather than just the respective governments. The people impacted by Nile River Basin development today whose voices are left out of the meeting rooms, but whose stability and quality of life are just as important as those of the people who live in national capitals and benefit from development efforts. This regional organization could transcend political boundaries and serve to amplify those voices, thus adding a new and sustainable dimension to future Nile plans, increasing cooperation, and bolstering regional security.

The United States has a potential role to play as well. The 2012 National Intelligence Council Report titled Global Water Security analyzed seven international river basins that included countries important to U.S. national security interests. The Nile was among the basins examined. The report found that the Nile Basin will likely see a decrease in per capita water, impeded water flows due to new dam construction (possibly referring to the GERD), and increased variability in water availability causing floods and droughts.  These environmental consequences are likely exacerbated by inadequate water agreements and management structures. Consequently, water and food security will suffer, possibly leading to political and economic instability. As the United States contemplates its interests in North Africa and the Middle East, paying close attention to developments in the Nile River Basin, home to almost half the population of continental Africa, is fundamental.

The GERD offers a platform upon which the governments of the Nile Basin can revisit their diplomatic relationships, power positions, and future visions for economic development. Not only could hydropower produced in Ethiopia be sold, but the regulation of the Nile through the GERD could effectively eliminate the annual Nile flood, making the flow of water reaching Egypt and Sudan seasonably stable, and reduce evaporation rates, making more water available. Meanwhile, the basin countries continue to engage in discussions despite internal conflict and changes in leadership, setting the tone for cooperation that could bolster security and stability in an essential world region.

1Cassandra Herrman & Ben Hoffman, “Ethiopia: A Battle for Land and Water,” Center for Investigative Reporting, February 28, 2012.

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