Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 124

The Black Box of Saudi Politics

For a man of 32, Mohammed bin Salman has taken on an awful lot of responsibility. The Saudi Crown Prince’s official title is Minister of Defense, but his portfolio includes Saudi Arabia’s expansive Vision 2030 economic reform package, prosecuting the war in Yemen, and negotiating the crisis with Qatar. In what ought to have been a sufficiently large task for a lifetime, just two weeks ago Mohammed bin Salman called for Saudi Arabia to return to “moderate Islam,” a turn he apparently intended to lead. If that wasn’t enough, over the weekend the young Crown Prince added an unprecedented anti-corruption crusade (well, jihad) to the mix, as Reuters reports:

A campaign of mass arrests of Saudi Arabian royals, ministers and businessmen widened on Monday after a top entrepreneur was reportedly held in the biggest anti-corruption purge of the kingdom’s affluent elite in its modern history. [….]

A no-fly list has been drawn up and security forces in some Saudi airports were barring owners of private jets from taking off without a permit, pan-Arab daily Al-Asharq Al-Awsat said.

Among those detained are 11 princes, four ministers and tens of former ministers, according to Saudi officials.

The allegations against the men include money laundering, bribery, extortion and taking advantage of public office for personal gain, a Saudi official told Reuters. Those accusations could not be independently verified and family members of those detained could not be reached.

The most prominent figure now under arrest is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a politically outspoken billionaire whose Kingdom Holding Group owns large stakes in companies like Twitter and Lyft. For Saudi watchers, the arrests include a number of other key figures. Alwaleed bin Ibrahim is the owner of the Middle East Broadcasting Center, one of the region’s largest news and entertainment groups. Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah was, until the day of his arrest, the head of Saudi Arabia’s national guard, which is charged with the internal security of the Saudi family and government.

At face value, the notion that these men are guilty of corruption is hardly shocking. Rather, what’s shocking is that Saudi Arabia would charge them at all. The Saudi government has facilitated grand corruption since its inception. Kickbacks from Aramco, ticket grants from the state airline, private fiefdoms from state monopolies, and general graft and largesse have been the means of political control in a country where proximity to the ruling family is the surest path to wealth. Like Captain Renault collecting his winnings while shutting down gambling at Rick’s, it takes a certain kind of chutzpah to accuse others of corruption when your father spends $100 million on a Moroccan holiday palace.

That raises obvious questions about the extent to which the arrests are politically motivated. Anti-corruption purges with political characteristics are a familiar feature of Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China. In countries where some degree of money laundering, corruption, or other illegal activity is practically unavoidable, selective prosecution can be a powerful tool of political control.

Saudis supportive of the arrests are already accusing Western observers of cynical hypocrisy for pointing these facts out. Before the purges many of those same observers complained about corrupt Saudi elites; now that something is being done about corruption they complain about a political purge.

But while the twin complaints about corruption and political purges might seem hypocritical, the fact is they really aren’t mutually exclusive. The root complaint is not merely that Saudi Arabia is corrupt; it’s that its legal system lacks anything like the kind of transparency that would give the impression that the current moves are a correct application of the rule of law.

The same can be said of Saudi Arabia’s political system as a whole. No analyst of Saudi Arabia saw this coming, and don’t believe anyone who says they did. Saudi politics is a black box. As one of the world’s last absolute monarchies, and an especially clannish one at that, the study of Saudi internal politics makes Kremlinology seem like an exact science.

What one can discern, however, is that Saudi Arabia is at a pivotal, precarious moment in its history. Mohammed bin Salman’s economic reforms are proceeding apace and achieving some clear successes. In just the past year, the IMF reckons that Saudi Arabia successfully cut its budgetary break-even oil price from almost $100 per barrel to just $70. With Brent trading at about $62, a balanced Saudi budget looks surprisingly attainable. On the other hand, concerns about an embarrassing market valuation have prompted the Saudis to consider halting the Aramco IPO. Despite President Trump’s encouragment to go ahead with the listing on the New York Stock Exchange, that decision seems to be very much in the air. The Saudis seem to have grasped that economic reform will also require serious cultural reform. Despite the announcement that women will finally be allowed to drive, Saudi Arabia remains far more repressive than even conservative neighbors like Kuwait.

And none of this is to consider Saudi Arabia’s regional position, which this weekend seemed to be undergoing several simultaneous crises. Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced from Saudi Arabia that he was resigning over fears of an assassination plot against him, as well as Iran’s nefarious role in his country. Yemen’s Houthi rebels launched a missile that was intercepted dangerously close to Riyadh’s airport. While the Houthis have fired dozens of such missiles before, this was the longest-range strike they have carried out, suggesting a greater degree of Iranian involvement. While the extent of Iran’s support for the Houthis is an open question (Iranian expertise in modifying existing missile stocks seems more likely than out-and-out proliferation), the Saudis have said that the attack might constitute an act of war by Iran and promised retaliation against the Houthis.

The regional rivalry with Iran may not have any direct bearing on Saudi Arabia’s domestic political moves, but it does make the stakes clear. If he’s taken at his word, Mohammed bin Salman is engaged in a project that will revive Saudi Arabia’s ability to compete for regional hegemony by fundamentally altering its economy, culture, religion, and politics. A serious anti-corruption drive would be a significant part of that. But, as I’ve written before, as positive as some of these developments may be, there’s every reason to be skeptical about whether or not Mohammed bin Salman can pull it off.

Viewed more cynically, there doesn’t seem to be much point in handwringing about a political purge in a country that’s already part absolute monarchy, part fundamentalist theocracy. This is not like the Turkish purges, in which a country has painfully retreated from liberal democratic norms. If Mohammed bin Salman is consolidating power ahead of his accession to the throne, he would merely be following the example of every monarch in history. And as far as purges go, the suspects can’t complain too much. They’ve apparently been imprisoned in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. North Korea on the Persian Gulf this is not.

No one knows how this will pan out—no doubt including Mohammed bin Salman. If he pulls off even a fraction of his goals, he can look forward to a half century of rule that might well include a reputation as a populist reformer who re-founded his country—a kind of Saudi Atatürk. Should he fail, the least bad scenario might be a palace coup. After that, the costs of failure rapidly get worse—war with Iran, civil strife, economic collapse, or a retreat into cultural and religious conservatism that has done so much to destabilize the region.

It’s not yet clear just how risky a bet Mohammed bin Salman might be. For now though, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to bet against him.

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Political Consequences of the Protestant Reformation, Part III

This article is based on a talk given at Aarhus University, Denmark, at a conference on the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, May 21, 2017. Part I on the Lutheran phase of the Reformation is here. Part II on the Reformation and the origins of identity politics is here.

The Reformation and the Birth of Modern Liberalism

A third consequence of the Protestant Reformation was its role in the emergence of modern liberalism as a political doctrine. In this respect, it was not doctrine as much as the accidental chain of real-world consequences of the Reformation that led to this result.

Liberalism is a political doctrine that begins with the premise that individuals are born with natural rights, which include the right to life, private property, and individual autonomy with regard to religion, speech, and other aspects of personal choice. Governments in this view are legitimate only to the extent that they protect those rights; there is no collective good or divine right of rulership that overrides these rights.

There was of course a doctrinal connection between Protestantism and liberalism, in the sense that Luther and other Reformation thinkers emphasized faith and the individual believer’s direct and unmediated connection with God. But it is also the case that early Protestant societies, both Lutheran and Calvinist, were anything but liberal in the sense we understand that doctrine today. As noted earlier, Lutheranism spread initially not simply through sermons and individual conversions, but as the result of princely power that simply imposed Protestant worship on often unwilling subjects. Calvin’s Geneva was essentially a theocratic dictatorship in which other confessions were not tolerated, and in which the state intervened in the private lives of its citizens to an extraordinary degree.

Modern liberalism emerged only in the second half of the 17th century as the accidental byproduct of the wars set off by the Reformation. With the rise of the post-Tridentine Church and the Counter-reformation in the second half of the 16th century, the Papacy, the Empire, and individual Catholic monarchs were willing to use force to contain the spread of the Protestant heresy. This led to civil wars across Europe, most notably in France, England, and above all Germany, where the Thirty Years War led to the deaths of perhaps a third of the German population in the first half of the 17th century.

Many of the doctrines underlying modern liberalism were born in England, as a direct consequence of the religious conflicts that culminated in the great English Civil War of the 1640s that pitted a heavily Puritan Parliament against a high-church Anglican Stuart monarchy and led to the beheading of King Charles II in 1649. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan was published in the immediate aftermath of those traumatic events and became a foundational work in subsequent Anglo-American liberal thought. Hobbes argued that rights were not inherited or conventional, but inhered in human beings qua human beings. The most vivid human passion was the fear of violent death, which established the fundamental right to life itself. The social contract establishing the state is an agreement on the part of citizens to give up their natural freedom to deprive others of their lives, in return for protection of their own rights. The horizon of politics was thereby lowered: instead of seeking the good life, as determined by religious doctrine, the modern state would seek merely to preserve life itself and relegate disputes over the good life to private life. Though Hobbes and Locke represented different sides in an enduring controversy between English liberals and conservatives, the conceptual distance separating them was not great. John Locke accepted Hobbes’ natural right framework, and argued that governments could also violate those rights, leading to a right on the part of citizens to resist governments that did not receive popular consent. Political legitimacy in liberal societies would henceforth be based on “consent of the governed.”  Locke directly influenced Thomas Jefferson and the American Founding Fathers, who declared their independence from Britain on the basis of the protection of their rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Liberalism originated in a pragmatic compromise between religious factions that understood that they would be better off settling for religious tolerance than seeking their maximal goals of a religiously grounded polity. But the stability of this system depended also on the emergence of ideas that legitimated a regime preserving individual rights. Individualism was deeply ingrained in English culture from well before the Reformation, but the Reformation’s emphasis on inner faith cemented the view that all human beings were autonomous agents who were subject to God’s grace as individuals. In later years the religious component underlying notions of agency would erode, but the individualism would remain as a foundational principle of modern Western civilization.

The emergence of modern liberalism out of sectarian conflict has implications for the present. The early 21st century has seen the spread of not just terrorism on the part of Islamist groups, but also spreading sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shi‘a throughout the Middle East and beyond, funded and provoked by Iran and Saudi Arabia. There was no real liberal tradition in Muslim history; there was a degree of tolerance in Muslim societies as under the Ottoman millet system, but not a notion of individuals as rights-bearers untouchable by the state. Religion and the state tended to be less separated than in the Christian West. (The idea that such a separation was impossible in the Muslim world and native to Christianity is not historically sustainable, however; see Fukuyama 2011). How then will liberal politics be introduced into this region? The rise of liberalism in Europe may serve as a precedent: 150 years of unremitting violence prepared the ground in Europe for the spread of a more tolerant form of politics after 1648, as populations grew to realize that religiously linked states were a formula for endless violence. Liberalism was not a doctrinal or direct political child of the Reformation; rather, it was an adaptation to the reality posed by the decline of the Catholic Church’s universal authority and the spread of sectarian religious politics. One can only hope that this recognition will occur in a shorter amount of time than it did in Europe.

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The Not-So-Magic Kingdom

On June 16, 2016 in Pudong, Shanghai, the Walt Disney Company opened its largest theme part ever. In his dedication speech, CEO Bob Iger described the $5.5 billion, 943-acre Shanghai Disneyland Park and Resort as a “happy place . . . created for everyone,” a world “of fantasy, romance and adventure,” a land of “magical dreams,” and “a source of joy, inspiration, and memories for generations to come.”

I don’t know about you, but after living in the United States these past few years, I could see spending a couple of weeks in a place like that.

There’s only one hitch. Of the park’s 11,000 full-time employees, 300 are active members of the Communist Party. They adorn their work sites with hammer-and-sickle insignia and spend several hours a week attending lectures and study sessions in the park’s “party activity center.” Not only that, but in the wake of the 19th Party Congress, these employees are now under added pressure to bring their colleagues into line with “Xi Jinping Thought.”

In the same speech, Iger characterized Shanghai Disneyland Park and Resort as “authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese.” This was, of course, a reference to the park’s cuisine (90 percent Asian) and décor (faux European jumbled with faux Chinese in a way bound to give spiritual dyspepsia to any visitor cursed with artistic taste or historical memory). But it was also a confession that the iconic Walt Disney Company, which for almost a century has symbolized the United States and its ideals, is kowtowing to the world’s most powerful autocrat.

The Magic Kingdom is hardly alone in groveling before the gates of the Middle Kingdom. Just this past week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg donned a jacket and tie to appear before Xi—and applauded a speech in which Xi stated that the purpose of education was to “train the builders and successors of socialism with Chinese characteristics, not bystanders and opponents.” Clapping along was Apple CEO Tim Cook, apparently in the same state of shock as other Silicon Valley wizards who, having been warmly welcomed to the PRC just a few years ago, are now being shown the exit.

Why are these tech wizards no longer welcome? Because by paying close attention (a.k.a. intellectual property rights theft), the Chinese have developed their own sophisticated digital technology, which the security services are now deploying to censor, propagandize, and surveil all those bystanders and opponents not in lockstep with what Xi calls “the glorious tradition of listening to the party’s words and following the party’s path.”

Because movies are not as easily replicated as software, a somewhat different story is playing out between China and the magicians of Hollywood. Dazzled by visions of vast new audiences flocking to shiny new theaters across China, the six major media conglomerates—National Amusements, Disney, Time Warner, Comcast, News Corp, Sony—have all gone through the same five-step process.

First, they lobbied to increase quotas on the import of foreign films to China. Second, they altered film content to satisfy the gatekeepers in Beijing. Third, they invited Chinese investment in Hollywood. Fourth, they partnered with Chinese firms to co-produce big-budget films aimed at the global market. And fifth, they agreed to make movies in China, where in exchange for allowing the party to tailor content, they get a bigger slice of the profits.

Apart from concerns expressed in Congress last year, this process has gone all but unremarked in the United States. When it is mentioned, most Americans shrug and say, hasn’t Hollywood been cutting deals with foreign governments since Day One, and always to its own advantage? It has indeed. But take a look at where these recent deals are leading: to the mighty American entertainment industry lending its resources and talents to the manufacture of propaganda aimed at strengthening the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power. Walt Disney would roll over in his grave, if he had one.

Speaking of Walt, here’s another reason why Americans shrug at this particular company’s kowtowing to China. Ask a professor of film studies to use Disney and autocrat in a sentence, and you will not get a sentence about Xi Jinping. Instead, you will likely get a whole paragraph about Walt Disney being the autocrat—because when his underpaid employees organized a strike back in 1941, he accused them of being Communists. He also appeared as a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, and later made anti-Soviet propaganda for the U.S. government.

The gist of this narrative is captured in the Guardian newspaper’s 2006 assertion that “kind Uncle Walt” was really “an uncaring husband, bullying boss and rabid anti-communist witch-hunter.” Not just in academia and Hollywood but throughout blue-state America, the same people who would pass this judgment on Disney would also have us believe that there were no Communists in America during the 1930s, and that the Soviet Union posed no real threat in the years following World War II. From this surprisingly tenacious perspective, it was Walt, not the Left, who was living in Fantasyland.

The first Disney product to penetrate China was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which opened in Shanghai in June 1937, six months after its extraordinary success in America. A sentimental favorite today, Snow White was the Avatar of its time, in terms of labor, stress, cost, missed deadlines, predictions of disaster—and, in the end, total triumph.

It also inspired the Wan brothers, China’s pioneering animation team, to create that country’s first feature-length animated film, Princess Iron Fan. The Wans’ film appeared in 1941, but any further development of a distinctive Chinese style of animation was thwarted by a succession of traumas: war with Japan, revolution, civil war, famine, mass poverty, “cultural revolution,” and political repression.

Fortunately for the Chinese people, the post-Mao era has brought relief from all of these traumas—except the last. Under Xi, the Communist Party is pushing for a return to “the core values of socialism,” and a rooting out of such “false ideological trends” as constitutional democracy, civil society, unregulated markets, a free press, critical historiography, and political dissent. What this means, according to Duncan Hewitt of Newsweek, is that the writing is now on the wall for the compliant magicians of Hollywood:

In April an article in China’s official army newspaper denounced Disney’s Zootopia, a big hit at China’s box office, as U.S. propaganda, saying it reflected twisted values and distorted the natural order of the animal world, by presenting wolves as victims and a sheep as a villain. Such irreverence for the natural order was a dangerous trend, the paper said, and it encouraged soldiers not to watch such movies. One well-known actor even made a public appeal to young people not to attend Disneyland since it represented “pure American values.”

That may be too great a compliment, given that Jiminy Cricket is now in Shanghai, singing, “When you wish upon a (red) star…”

See “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere: A Notice from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’s General Office” (also known as “Document 9”), published April 22, 2013.

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Honor and Compromise, and Getting History Right

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly does not have a Ph.D. in history, although he does have two master’s degrees, in Strategic Studies (from the National Defense University) and in National Security Affairs from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. So perhaps it was simply that he believed what he said about the Civil War this past Monday on Laura Ingraham’s new Fox News ‘Ingraham Angle’ was so innocuous that he could also believe that it wouldn’t even become a blip on anyone’s radar screen.

He could not have been more wrong. Asked for comment on the decision of Christ Episcopal Church in Alexandria, Virginia, to remove two identifying plaques, marking pews occupied by George Washington and Robert E. Lee, Kelly responded, “Robert E. Lee was an honorable man.” When Lee resigned his commission as the colonel of the 1st U.S. Cavalry in April 1861 and accepted a general’s commission in the service of the breakaway Southern Confederacy, Kelly added, he was simply acting in defense of his native state of Virginia. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today.”

But Kelly didn’t stop there. He went on to add that the reason “an honorable man” found it necessary to make such a decision in the first place was because of the bungling of wooden-headed politicians. The Civil War was triggered by what Kelly called “the lack of an ability to compromise… and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

This touched off not only political fire—that Kelly would seem to be justifying the man who, especially since the August 12th riot in Charlottesville, has become a symbol for the American Left of much that is repugnant in American life—but historical fire as well. After all, Kelly was describing as “honorable” an American soldier who raised his hand against his own flag, and in defense of a cause that placed the slavery of 3.9 million African Americans among its principal reasons for fighting. Both CNN and the Washington Post rushed to enlist commentary from prominent academic historians, condemning Kelly’s remarks. Juana Summers, writing for CNN Politics, cited African American historian Edna Greene Medford and the president of the American Historical Association, James Grossman, who criticized Kelly as “just too simplistic.” Grossman particularly scorned Kelly’s comments on “lack of an ability to compromise” as “fantasies.” Grossman asked, “What compromise was available once states had made it clear that they would secede from any nation that would interfere with their right to own human beings? Prolonging the enslavement of those people?”

The Washington Post turned to Yale’s David Blight and Columbia’s Stephanie McCurry for even more stringent criticisms of Kelly. McCurry accused Kelly of promoting a ‘Lost Cause’ view of the Civil War, a version of the war’s origins which insisted that state rights or tariffs or resistance to centralized government was the “real” Southern motive for secession and the war that followed, rather than the defense of slavery. “What’s so strange about this statement is how closely it tracks or resembles the view of the Civil War that the South had finally got the nation to embrace by the early 20th century,” she said. “It’s the Jim Crow version of the causes of the Civil War. I mean, it tracks all of the major talking points of this pro-Confederate view of the Civil War.” McCurry professed incredulity at Kelly’s naivety. “It was not about slavery, it was about honorable men fighting for honorable causes?” McCurry said. “Well, what was the cause? […] The reason there was no compromise possible was that people in the country could not agree over the wisdom of the continued and expanding enslavement of millions of African Americans.”

Simplification is the bane of good history. Unfortunately, simplification is what the 24/7 media-cycle feeds upon, and it did not take long before the comments were subjected to the most dreary and hyper-compressed of conclusions, starting with the New York Times editorial board, which fatuously declaimed that Kelly’s “central message is, ‘Racists, we’re your guys.’”

If so, there have been a lot more “racists” in the fields of historical academe than we ever dreamt. The great Allan Nevins, whose multi-volume Ordeal of the Union series dominated the field of Civil War history in the era of the Civil War Centennial, entitled one of the chapters in The Emergence of Lincoln, “The Failure of Compromise.” Nevins described “the thinking” of North and South alike as “largely irrational, governed by subconscious memories, frustrated desires, and the distortions of politicians and editors.”

Nor was it the Lost Cause mythmakers who invented the idea that the war was caused by a “blundering generation” of politicians. That was the argument of Progressive historians of the generation preceding Nevins. As James Garfield Randall (whose textbook on the Civil War era was the standard in college classrooms until the 1980s) wrote, “To suppose that the Union could not have been continued or slavery outmoded without the war and without the corrupt concomitants of the war, is hardly an enlightened assumption.” Instead, the American mind of the 1860s became “a sorry mélange of party bile, crisis melodrama, inflated eloquence, unreason, religious fury, self-righteous, unctuous self-deception and hate”—somewhat like the New York Times editorial board. Northerners, Randall believed, were particularly prone to be obdurate because they regarded “war as an elemental, purifying force”—in much the same way that it appears Kelly’s critics would like to regard the Civil War.

The fundamental problem lies in the word compromise. After all, in her 2012 book, Confederate Reckoning, McCurry herself described the rush to Southern secession as leaving Southern Unionists with “no power to deliver the compromise necessary” to “hold their states back from the precipice of secession.” The real objection seems to be that anyone today should ever imagine that there was anything about slavery that could be the basis of compromise—which is, in itself, an uncompromising position and, presumably, an example of what Kelly was talking about. The 750,000 soldiers who died in the war might have had something to say about the desirability of compromise, but their voices have long since been stilled.

There were, in fact, numerous proposals for compromise on offer during the nervous “secession winter” of 1860-61, two of them hatched in Congress: the Crittenden Compromise of December 18, 1860, and the Washington Peace Convention (February 4-27, 1861). But both of them fell colossally flat. Why? Partly because when Southerners spoke of  “compromise,” what they really meant was “concession,” especially the concession of a federal slave code that would nationalize legalized slavery across most of the nation.

But another aspect of the problem was that Northerners, including Abraham Lincoln, simply could not believe that the South wasn’t simply bluffing. Richard Yates, Lincoln’s Illinois political ally, laughed-off Southern threats of secession and civil war as mere stereotypical Southern bluster. “We are told that the South will not submit and that the Union is to be dissolved,” Yates said. “Do you want my advice on this subject? Then all I have to say is, keep cool. […] I confess I have but little fears of secession or disunion. […] We believe it will not be one year till the whole South, except the traitors bent on disunion… will hail the election of Mr. Lincoln as one of the greatest blessings.” Why compromise when you don’t believe there will be any penalty for remaining unmoved?

Even Lincoln, who was ready to go so far as to offer guarantees to the Southern states for slavery within their own boundaries, drew the line at allowing slavery to be legalized in the western territories. “Let there be no compromise on slavery extension,” Lincoln wrote. And if Southerners thought their solution lay in seceding from the Union, then “My opinion is that no state can, in any way lawfully, get out of the Union, without the consent of the others; and that it is the duty of the President, and other government functionaries to run the machine as it is.” But Lincoln likewise dismissed the possibility that the secession crisis would come to war. “There is really no crisis except an artificial one!” he said in a speech on February 15, 1861. “There is no crisis, excepting such a one as may be gotten up at any time by designing politicians.”

Randall and Nevins were wrong to attribute the “inability to compromise” to “blundering.” Both sides in 1861 were actually driven by the most glittering, hard-edged logic. But logic can be just as uncompromising as stupidity, and in this case it provided a lethal formula in which both sides refused compromise and then dismissed any need for compromise. Four years later, in his second Inaugural Address, Lincoln acknowledged the hardness of that logic (and in precisely the terms Kelly used about the “lack of an ability to compromise”) when he said, “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”

Nor was Kelly stretching points by describing Robert E. Lee as “an honorable man.” Honorable men are sometimes called upon to serve bad causes, something both Lee and Ulysses Grant experienced while serving in the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War. “To this day,” Grant wrote in 1885, he regarded the Mexican conflict as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation,” and Lee agreed, saying that, “It is true we bullied” Mexico. “Of that I am ashamed, as She was the weaker party.”

Grant’s own opinion of Lee ratifies Kelly’s. At Appomattox, Grant “felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” Even then, Grant did “not question… the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.” In fact, not even Winston Churchill, as World War II raged, would withhold a word of praise to an honorable opponent in the German army, Erwin Rommel: “We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.”

I may, in some respects, actually be less forgiving than Grant, in that I think Lee’s decision to serve the Confederacy was at least treasonous, if not an act of treason. (It is odd that the New York Times did not seem to regard treason worth complaining about.) But Kelly was right to observe that there were legal and constitutional questions that complicate that judgment, and which prevented Lee from actually being tried for treason after the war. The most significant of these, as Lee himself pointed out before a congressional committee in 1866, was the uncertain constitutional relationship between state and national citizenship. “The act of Virginia, in withdrawing herself from the United States, carried me along as a citizen of Virginia,” Lee insisted, “her laws and her acts were binding on me.”

That is hardly unreasonable. Before the Fourteenth Amendment, the Constitution was maddeningly vague on the relationship between national and state citizenship, and the obligation to respect the “privileges and immunities” they entailed. Whatever distaste I feel for Lee’s cause, no one was ever able to accuse him of ordering wartime atrocities. Others did order them, but not Lee. Even Lincoln, who wished in 1863 that he had had authority to arrest Lee before Lee could join the Confederacy, acknowledged in 1865, when shown a photograph of Lee, that: “It is a good face; it is the face of a noble, noble, brave man.”

“The past is a foreign country,” wrote the British novelist L.P. Hartley, “they do things differently there.” It is also a complicated country, and it doesn’t pay to rush through its landscape, looking for quick gotcha! moments. John Kelly may not be an historian, but he has been a good and honorable soldier. He knew another honorable soldier when he saw him, even at a distance.

Sources:

“Historians respond to John F. Kelly’s Civil War remarks: ‘Strange,’ ‘sad,’ ‘wrong,’” Washington Post, October 21, 2017.

Summers, “John Kelly gets Civil War history wrong,” CNN Politics, October 21, 2017.

“About John Kelly’s Racist History Lesson,” New York Times, November 1, 2017.

Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln: Prologue to Civil War, 1859-1861 (New York, 1950), pp. 386-411, and The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857-1859 (New York, 1950), pp. 15-16, 19.

G. Randall, “The Blundering Generation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (June, 1940), pp. 8, 18-9.

McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA, 2012), p. 68.

Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), p. 53.

Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, ed. M.D. & W.S. McFeely (New York, 1990), pp. 41, 488.

Lee to Mary Custis Lee (February 8 and 13, 1848), DeButts-Ely Collection, Library of Congress.

Terry Brighton, Patton, Montgomery, Rommel: Masters of War (New York, 2008), p. 114.

Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, at the First Session, Thirty-Ninth Congress (Washington, DC, 1866), p. 133.

Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (New York, 1868), p. 137.

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Social Media’s Half-Measures

Last week, Facebook, Twitter and Google sent their lawyers to testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee and the Senate and House Intelligence Committees on their platforms’ role in Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. But while the testimonies brought new revelations about the extent and nature of Russian information operations, the firms failed to offer real solutions, instead offering up proposals that amount to slapping band-aids on gaping wounds. It’s not surprising; meaningfully addressing foreign interference on social media would require a rethink of these firms’ revenue models. At least for now, political pressure has apparently not been strong enough to force such a reckoning.

Several lessons emerged from the hearings.

Chaos is cheap. Ahead of the hearing, Facebook released approximately 3,000 ads that it said were paid for by Russian sources, including the St. Petersburg troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA). Lawmakers made a portion of these ads public on Wednesday. The purpose of the ads, displayed on posters during the committee hearings, was clear: push on hot-button issues, amplify social and political divisions, and encourage visible, public protest. The content was non-ideological: some ads supported the Black Lives Matter movement, others promoted Southern pride with confederate symbols; some were pro-gun, others against it. The ads were not randomly released: they micro-targeted based on geography, users’ interests, and cross-referenced with users other “likes.” The ads show that the Russians launched a sophisticated information operation that required a nuanced understanding of American society and culture. And the IRA spent only $46,000 on the ads in the lead up to the elections.

Algorithms are easily manipulated. The Russians were able to reach 150 million Facebook and Instagram users in their influence campaign with only 80,000 posts. Twitter identified over 2,700 Russian linked troll accounts and 36,000 automated (bot) accounts, which together posted over 1.4 million “election related tweets.” These tweets received 288 million views—and this was only over a two-month period from September to November 2016. What these remarkable numbers tell us is that with clickbait headlines and a little bit of cash, Twitter’s and Facebook’s algorithms can be leveraged to devastating effect. Social media firms have consistently insisted that they are neutral content platforms, not media organizations or content publishers. The algorithm, the tech titans tell us, cannot be biased; it is merely automated to prioritize content that users like. But it is precisely this type of automation, lacking human editorial oversight, that leaves the platforms open to sinister manipulation. Claims of official neutrality are simply not cutting it with the public, or lawmakers, any longer.

There’s a lot more we don’t know. The testimonies from all three firms focused primarily on accounts or content that could be linked to the IRA, the Russian troll farm. The firms used various indicators for identifying Russian ads, including IP addresses and whether the payments were made in rubles, but their overall methodology remains murky. Case in point: Twitter’s flip-flopping on the number of Russia-linked accounts. In September, Twitter said that it had identified only 201 such accounts, but now the number has increased to 2,752. According to congressional testimony, Twitter identified 36,746 Russia-linked bot accounts that were “tweeting election-related content” in the lead-up to the elections. Twitter went out of its way to suggest these efforts were insignificant, testifying that these “represent approximately one one-hundredth of a percent (0.012%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time.” The specific qualifiers in this statement—Russia-linked and election-related—should raise additional questions about how exactly Twitter chose these specific accounts. As the diversity of Facebook ads suggest, the majority of the Russian ads could not be easily identified as “election-related content” in support of specific candidates. This also brings up the bigger question of what proportion of all Twitter accounts are bots. Twitter did not directly answer this question, leaving researchers to infer, based on incomplete data, that bot account could represent as much as twenty percent of Twitter’s overall users in some countries.

Google was also cagey in its testimony, focusing only on one of its products: YouTube videos. Google said that Kremlin linked accounts posted over 1,100 YouTube videos on similarly divisive issues that were viewed 309,000 times. Compared to Facebook and Twitter, this number suggests the impact was low, given that people watch a billion hours of YouTube videos per day. But like their colleagues at Twitter, Google’s report seemed to leave out potentially important analysis. YouTube is hardly the only vulnerable vector. The company’s own search algorithms are also vulnerable to manipulation: illegitimate “news” sites have often popped up at the top of Google searches, especially under the “News” category.

Band-Aids

Directly after the hearings, Facebook unveiled an action plan against foreign interference. It boils down to Facebook agreeing to cooperate with Congress in the future, and in the meantime hiring more people to review potentially fake accounts and tweak its algorithm to reduce the appearance of clickbait. The plan also places most of the burden on users to seek out information about ad funding sources by clicking though posts to learn more about the sponsor or taking the initiative to research whether a news site is legitimate. This may sound like a reasonable proposal, but on average, Facebook users “click through” an ad only .9 percent of the time, so they are unlikely to educate themselves.

Twitter also announced that it has blocked RT and Sputnik—Russia’s state funded media outlets—from buying ads, and that it is working to more aggressively shut down automated accounts and identify fake accounts. RT and Sputnik will however continue to be able to tweet on the network.

Google had not yet made a public announcement at time of writing.

This will not be enough. Facebook, for example, collects reams of users’ personal information and preferences, which it then uses to sell advertising opportunities to other companies. The targeting tools that the Russians used in their ads were provided directly by Facebook itself. Political consultancies, such as Cambridge Analytica, mined Facebook’s “likes” to micro-target voters in the United States during the elections and in the United Kingdom during the Brexit referendum. Rather than recognizing the threats posed by the weaponization of personal information early on, Facebook expanded users’ ability to emotionally react to posts with “emoticons” in 2016. This feature, if mined by a savvy malicious actor, opens a potential Pandora’s box for emotional manipulation. Now malicious actors have an even deeper trove of information to access, knowing what content makes people happy or sad, or better yet, angry.

It’s of course no surprise that Facebook, Twitter, and Google are reluctant to make the kinds of changes that could make a difference. At the end of the day, these tech firms depend on ad dollars for their bottom line, which in turn drives them towards more mining of their users’ personal information—not less. Furthermore, their pitch to advertisers depends on the premise that all that personal information is attached to real people. Getting to the bottom of anonymous accounts could be bad for business. Twitter is particularly vulnerable if it turns out that a significant number of its users are bots or fakes. Ad revenues depend on the premise that these eyeballs are real.

The digital revolution has completely transformed human interaction. Our Silicon Valley giants, the authors of this great transformation, have been allowed to operate freely without much government regulation or oversight. Russia’s disinformation operations have revealed just how easily these influential platforms can be manipulated to the detriment of our democracy. These companies have to get serious about proactively curtailing this manipulation on their own. But if in the process they fail to re-examine and tweak their business models, the harder hand of governmental regulation is probably inevitable.

Twitter recently admitted that it had been overestimating its user numbers for three years. The company has also been struggling to increase new user growth and ad revenue with negative effects on its stock price.

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Donald Trump and the Future of U.S. Power

After nine months of Donald Trump, let’s try a first-cut explication of his foreign policy. Where is he coming from? What drives him? And where will be take country? The short answer is: He will make America small again.

Where does Trump fit into the American tradition? He is not an isolationist like Washington, who would have “as little connection with other nations as possible.” Nor is Trump a doppelganger of John Quincy Adams, who would “not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

Nor is Trump an interventionist in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson. TR improved on the Monroe Doctrine by asserting America’s right to intervene anywhere in Latin America, and Wilson kept going into Mexico to “teach them to elect good men.” After World War II, U.S. interventionism went global. Harry S. Truman would support all “free people resisting…subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Eisenhower would commit U.S. forces anywhere to combat “overt armed aggression” by communism. John F. Kennedy famously declaimed: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden…”

Onward and upward. LBJ stood ready intervene in the Western Hemisphere to prevent “Communist dictatorship.” Nixon wanted to shield all “whose survival we consider vital to our security.” Jimmy Carter pledged to “repel by any means” any “attempt to gain control of the Persian Gulf.” Ronald Reagan told the Soviets that he would rout them from “Afghanistan to Nicaragua.”

First prize for interventionism goes to George W. during America’s “unipolar moment.” He would launch preventive war “before threats materialized.” He would go after any country harboring terrorists. And he preached regime change: “The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom.”

This trip down memory lane is to show that Trump does not fit into the classic isolationism-interventionism mold. Then what is he? Ironically, there is more kinship between Trump and Barack Obama than we like to admit. A key Obama line reads: “We will engage, but we will preserve our capabilities.” Hence, no more costly ambition. Like John Quincy Adams, Obama was “not seeking new dragons to slay,” he confided to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in a series of interviews. Trump must nod.

As paraphrased by Goldberg, Obama was loath to “place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless they pose a direct security threat to the United States.” There goes moralism, and Trump would applaud. He himself has orated: “We will seek gradual reform, not sudden intervention.”

Obama rejected “the idea that every time there is a problem, we send in our military to impose order. We just can’t do that.” Trump refuses “radical disruption.” Then what? “Come home America,” George McGovern famously cried out in his 1972 campaign. Obama’s mantra ran: “It’s time for a little nation-building at home.” Over to Trump, who wants to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure while railing against “globalism” as a mortal enemy of American jobs.

Obama scolded UK Prime Minister David Cameron: “You have to pay your fair share.” He also growled that “free riders aggravate me.” Trump told a NATO summit in the same words “members must finally contribute their fair share.“ Or else.

So where do we place No. 45? We may have to go back to No. 7, Andrew Jackson. Trump just loves to compare himself to Old Hickory, and there are indeed plenty of parallels.

Like Jackson, Trump does not believe in an American mission that would redeem the world by example as the Founding Fathers did, celebrating the country as a “city upon a hill “ and “light unto the nations.“ Nor do/did both believe in idealist interventionism à la Woodrow Wilson and George W. For Jackson and Trump, it is “America first” in the sense that its wealth and power must not be squandered on lofty global designs that benefit foreigners, be they unwanted immigrants, free-traders, or free-riding nations.1

But note: Though Trumpism, like Jacksonianism, is inward-bound, it is not isolationist. It is not about retraction, as in Obama’s case, but assertion. It is about the lavish use of power, not to reform the world, but to recast it in America’s favor. It is zero sum—more for us and less for you. We want to cash in, not invest.

Trumpism is Jacksonianism 180 years later. It is not about the institution-building that inspired American policy after World War II. Trump’s approach is transactional, as we would expect from the author of The Art of the Deal. The game is about wielding leverage to increase profits. Flex your muscles to skew the terms of trade in America’s favor.

Andrew Jackson set the example with respect to Europe. The issue after the Napoleonic Wars was America’s spoliation claims against France for the capture of American ships and sailors. As the French hemmed and hawed, Jackson huffed and puffed, threatening trade reprisals. Sounds familiar.

Intimidated, the French coughed up $5 million, worth about $200 million today, a prize that had eluded the U.S. for 30 years. Similarly, Jackson gouged reparations out of Denmark, Portugal and Spain. He concluded bilateral trade deals with Russia, Spain, Turkey, and Britain. For both Trump and Jackson, it is mano-a-mano bilateralism rather than multilateralism

To go back 180 years is to make a basic point: Whether old or new, Jacksonianism is the very opposite of American grand strategy since World War II. Of course, the United States was no pussycat in those days. This global giant did throw his weight around. Recall the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, plus a slew of lesser forays around the globe. This is what hegemonial powers do. But what really made “America great” has been unique in the history of world politics. The name of the game was institutions rather than imposition, architecture rather than the arrogance of power.

The United States served up an alphabet soup of institutions: UN, IMF, GATT (later: WTO), OECD, World Bank, NATO, and a slew of subsidiary alliances like ANZUS with Australia and New Zealand. The acronyms all designate international public goods. A public good delivers benefits everybody can enjoy once it exists—like a park or public school. International public goods are security systems, free trade, freedom of navigation, or monetary stability. Any nation that joins up can profit from them. America became great as a producer of international public goods, rising to No. 1 as an obsessive institution-builder.

Trump thinks the United States is a sucker for safeguarding this order. Think again. Naturally, No. 1 always invests more in public goods. He sets up the assembly lines and keeps them humming. Hence, everybody else is to some extent a free rider. Tiny Belgium gets more out of NATO than it pays in.

Yet for Mr. Big, gains vastly exceed costs as well. First, recall Field of Dreams where Kevin Costner builds a baseball park in the middle of nowhere, a typical public good. The motto is: “If you build it, they will come.” Unlike previous greats, who exploited the system, the United States engaged in supply-side international politics. It offered stuff that lured others into the American ballpark. That is the essence of convening and agenda-setting power, hence global influence.

Point two is about leadership, the most economic form of power. Empires from Rome to Soviet Russia had to use force to keep in line those they ruled. The United States, by contrast, is an “empire by invitation,” not by imposition. It rests on consent, which breeds legitimacy and authority. Instead of satrapies, the United States gained stakeholders who want to be with you. Such leadership is cheaper than coercion.

Three: All these club members amplified American power, which Trump ignores while staring at the bill only. Take Europe. In exchange for its security guarantee, the United States got a million allied soldiers in the contest with the Soviet Union. Today, allied armies hold the line against Putin’s expansionism.

The fourth point is about the peculiar genius of American diplomacy post-1945. Donald Trump thinks that the United States is a patsy, claiming: “We’re being taken advantage by every nation in the world.” But savor the elegance of the U.S.-made order. By serving the interests of others, the United States served its own.

Start with stability, which is good for the caretaker of the global house because it keeps trouble away. Free trade is a boon for the largest economy on the planet. So is freedom of navigation for an island nation whose arteries stretch across two oceans. Institutionalized conflict resolution spells profit, too, for rules are better than rumbles.

International security is a winner, too. As in the Cold War, the United States can rely on allies in Europe while Vladimir Putin is changing borders by force. It helps to have Japan and South Korea in the American orbit while China, which has no allies, is expanding into the Pacific. Allies are partners of the first resort, and so the United States does not have to assemble new coalitions every time a fresh threat arises.

By way of metaphor, the United States is like the conductor of a symphony orchestra with four score solo players, an onerous task. What does he get for his labors? Harmony instead of cacophony, leadership instead of sullen obedience. And he gets to keep his baton.

Trump would rather wield the crowbar to “make America great again.” He told the UN General Assembly: “I will always put America first. Just like you, as the leaders of your countries, will always…put your countries first.” That is a truism. All governments put their country first, and so does the United States. With a critical difference: In the glory days, Presidents maximized American interests by turning the classic zero-sum game of nations into a non-zero game where all can win. They embedded the national interest in the common interest, reaping both synergy and leadership.

How did this work? Europe was down and out in 1945. So the United States provided capital under the Marshall Plan to restart the economy, but not out of sheer altruism. Once the Europeans were up and running, they earned enough to buy American. Clients became customers, and both sides scored. There were not enough dollars to fuel international trade. So the United States set up the IMF to provide global liquidity. Instead of playing a tit-for-tat protectionist game, the United States opened its borders while building institutions like GATT/WTO, where conflicts were resolved under common rules. Killing NAFTA would hurt not just Mexico and Canada, but also U.S. workers and consumers.

By inserting the national into the common interest, Truman and his heirs made America great—and not by coercion in the ways of Andrew Jackson. Schoolyard bullies can go a long way on force and intimidation, but they will never be elected class president. To be anointed, they can’t steal the other kids’ lunches. They have to look out for them to make power legitimate.

So as Trump is putting the axe to the U.S.-made global order, he will make America small again. China just loves Trumpism, which allows this expansionist to posture as guardian of global goodness. Trump has killed the Pacific Trade Partnership. So China offers a home in its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Putin smiles when Trump alienates his European allies, which increases his opportunities. Moscow and Beijing are the two most egotistical players on the world stage. Yet with the United States slinking off, America’s rivals will shape a post-American world. As old alliances succumb, new ones will arise that exclude the United States.

Is there an upside? Trump’s learning curve is not quite as flat as a pancake. Suddenly, NATO is no longer “obsolete,” but a bunch of reliable friends. Trump is deploying troops and heavy equipment to Eastern Europe to boost deterrence against Russia. He has not yet killed NAFTA; he is just trying to frighten Mexico and Canada into concessions. He is reassuring Japan and South Korea by dispatching naval units and anti-missile systems. And no, he will not push the UN out of New York to free up acres for new Trump Towers.

This is where the Old Hickory analogy falters. No. 45 is not quite pulling a Jackson, perhaps realizing between tweets that No. 7 could afford the antics while the United States was only a regional power, not the linchpin of the system. He may also realize that the cost of securing the global order is actually quite low. The United States now spends 3.6 percent of GDP on defense. In World War II, it was almost one-half.

What if Trump won’t do his arithmetic? Then let’s appeal to his craving for attention and glory by addressing him thus: “Mr. President, even if they play us for a sucker, it is a lot more fun to stand on the bridge than to hunker down in the hold. Do you really want Putin and Xi Jinping to get all the photo ops?”

That should clinch it, and the American empire might be saved.

1See also Walter Russell Mead, “The Jacksonian Revolt,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2017).

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Shine On: The Balfour Declaration at 100

Just as I felt obligated to comment back in May 2016 on “The Bullshistory of ‘Sykes-Picot’” on the occasion of its centenary, this past June I felt obligated to comment on the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War. In the course of doing so I reflected on the psychological power of anniversaries and the potential dangers they posed to understanding, concluding thus:

Anniversaries are shiny. They attract a lot of attention, much of it self-interested and sentimental enough to lure some people into excessive simplifications if not outright simplemindedness. If someone will bait the hook, someone else will swallow it. We witnessed exactly such a spectacle not long ago at the 100th anniversary of Sykes-Picot, and we’ll see it again a few months hence with the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.

Well, here we are, in November, on the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, and on the eve too of the 70th anniversary of the UNSCOP decision, rendered at Flushing Meadows, New York, on the partition of Palestine. And just like clockwork, the bullshistory pours forth, some of it new but most of it deeply marinated over the years in basins of self-serving intoxicants. So pervasive are the resultant funhouse mirror images of these historical events that they form echo chambers that ratify their distortions by dint of habitual repetition. These rounded-off caricatures have thus become like nails without heads: not all that hard to hammer in, but almost impossible to remove.

Fortunately, this time around there is no need for me to summarize at any length the real history of the Balfour Declaration and the UNSCOP vote, since it has already been lately done by a steady and sober hand—that of Martin Kramer. He handled the former in a June 5 Mosaic essay entitled “The Forgotten Truth About the Balfour Declaration.” The latter is treated in another Mosaic essay to appear in a few days. The gist of both arguments is that, contrary to the image of these events as having been unilateral gestures by the major great power of the day, first Britain and then the United States, both were in truth wider in their origins than that. One implication is that the legitimacy of these events in affirming the Zionist project rested on wider shoulders than the distorted tales tell.

As to the Balfour Declaration, an event captured in not one but several lengthy volumes published over the years,1 the British War Cabinet would never have issued a unilateral public declaration had its major allies in the war not been in agreement as to its essence. That went for France, which had earlier issued the Cambon Letter thanks to the careful ministrations of Nahum Sokolow. It went for Italy, too. But it also went for the United States, despite the fact that it was not technically an “ally” of Britain but an “associated power.” President Wilson was shown a draft of the Declaration and approved it before it was issued; had he not approved, the British War Cabinet almost certainly would not have issued it. Put differently, at a time when there was yet no League of Nations, not to speak of a United Nations, British diplomacy amounted roughly to seeking what in our day would be a UN Security Council Resolution.

As it turned out, French approval of the Zionist project was short-lived. Though allies in the war, France and Britain were competitors before it and again after it, at least when it came to the Levantine Arab zone of the lately dismembered Ottoman Empire. French politics entered a tumultuous period just after the end of hostilities in November 1918, and in any event the high politics of Jules Cambon’s gesture never gained full traction in the French Foreign Ministry. So as Presidents and Foreign Ministers came and went with some speed after the war, French diplomatic inertia, shaped first by dour realities on the battlefield and then by perceptions of British perfidy in egging on the Arabs all the way to Damascus, swung French policy away from the Zionists back to where it has been more or less before the war. The window of opportunity in Zionism’s courtship of World War-era France was very narrow, but it turned out to be open at exactly the right time as Zionist diplomacy leveraged Anglo-French suspicions into joint support. (The same thing, if rather more stretched out in time, happened again later on: French support for Israel in the 1950s and 1960s was critical to its security, but France’s volte face into opposition in the spring of 1967 jeopardized that security.)

As for the UNSCOP affair, here the caricature, focused on the United States, offers another “great man” theory: Harry Truman is its November 1947 hero, even more than Arthur James Balfour was in November 1917. So it has come down to us that, even in Truman’s own words, the President was “Cyrus,” restoring the Jews to their ancestral home. It’s a great story, and there is much to admire in how Harry Truman comported himself at the time. Whole books have fairly recently been written based on this historical pretension.2 The only problem is that it just ain’t so.

As Kramer reminds us, the key pre-vote declaration of support for partition was not American but Soviet. And the Soviets had not just one but three General Assembly votes at the time thanks to the accepted fiction that Ukraine and Byelorussia were independent nations. Before the proliferation of General Assembly membership after the decolonization spasm of the late 1950s and early 1960s, three votes represented just shy of a tenth of the 33 votes cast in favor of partition. Soviet support, and hence the fact that the Russians and the Americans agreed, also swayed several smaller countries in the 33-13 (with ten abstentions) final vote.

More than that, while the U.S. government slapped an arms embargo on the region, the USSR armed Israel through the so-called Czechoslovak arms deal. The U.S. delegation to the United Nations also voted for UNSCR 194, which called for the repatriation of Arab refugees to Israel; the Soviet delegation voted against it.

Why? Even beyond with French coolness toward Zionism before World War I, Soviet coolness toward Zionism up to World War II was downright icy. The Soviet interpretation of Zionism was sharply negative: another petty and ideologically retrograde bourgeois nationalism. One would never have known that from the impassioned pro-Zionist speeches Andrei Gromyko made in 1947 at Flushing Meadow. What changed? What changed was that Stalin’s atavistic view that the British Empire remained the most formidable capitalist opponent to Soviet Communism led him to conclude that supporting partition was the best way to get the British out of Palestine. It so happened, as well, that the Zionists, remembering the lessons of the Balfour Declaration, set to use the U.S.-Soviet competition to their best advantage to elicit Soviet support—Kramer has details full on view.

And as with the quick reversal of French attitudes, so Soviet attitudes toward Zionism and Israel rapidly reverted to form—witness the bald anti-Semitism of the Slansky trials and the Doctors’ Plot. Being a Zionist inside the USSR again became a criminal offense. Once the British were gone from Palestine, and India too, the Soviet pro-Zionist tilt lost its realpolitik rationale. The earlier French and later Soviet window of support for Zionism each lasted about 18 months, give or take—a wink of an eye as historical time goes—sandwiched in between decades of mild or pointed hostility.

Of course it has been convenient for Zionists first to laud the British alone for the Balfour Declaration. After all, throughout the interwar period they needed the continuing help of the mandatory authority above and beyond support from any other government. (Whether they got it or not is another story, and another endless debate.) And certainly it was convenient after 1948–49 to read the Soviets out of the events of 1947, increasingly so after 1967 when Israeli reliance on U.S. support grew apace. So the distorted stories are understandable from a political perspective; that does not, however, render them accurate.

Another problem arises as well. The original form Zionism took under Theodor Herzl is often called political Zionism. It banked on receiving great power support for the Zionist project, but before World War I it failed miserably at attaining it. After Herzl died in 1904 at the age of 44, the movement shifted away from political to practical Zionism. Herzl’s successors did not give up entirely on winning support from the great powers, but they focused more on having pioneers build a Jewish society in Palestine from the bottom up, creating the necessary pre-sovereignty institutions as they went. By the onset of war in August 1914 they had achieved a going concern, if but barely. It was at that very moment, ironically, that political Zionism scored its greatest success with the Balfour Declaration.

The optic of the Balfour Declaration as a diplomatic coup remained so strong that, in the 1947–49 period of Israel’s birth, it seemed to many that Truman’s support is what created the State of Israel in yet another success of political Zionism. Many people remain today convinced that this was the case. But this is not true. The U.S. government at the time did not wholeheartedly support Israel; just as the French Foreign Ministry had quickly acted as a drag on Cambon’s tactical pro-Zionism, so the State Department and the young Defense Department and CIA quickly acted as a drag on Truman’s gesture, however pure or mixed its motives may have been. And Truman himself in 1949 followed without visible resistance his advisers in policies not at all to the liking of David Ben-Gurion and the other founding leaders of the Jewish State.

No, Israel’s birth and its history since is the doing of its people, who, for all their divisions and defects, have proved brave enough, stalwart enough, and intrepid enough to have been successful. Would Israel have come into being eventually without the Balfour Declaration and the UNSCOP vote? Alas, as with all counterfactuals, we’ll never know, but I think the answer is “probably.” We can know that without the determination and devotion of Jews to the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, and the sacrifices and the hardships they endured on its account, no number of successes of political Zionism would have sufficed. No external power can do for a people what that people is not ready to do for itself.

Besides, there was William Wilberforce. Say what?

If we look a bit deeper into history, we see that Wilberforce helped overturn a multi-millennia norm that slavery was a normal characteristic of human society; it turned out to be no great leap within a single generation no less, that just as it was morally wrong for one man to own another (singular), it was also wrong for one nation to own another (plural). There we have a key to the undermining of the legitimacy of the imperial principle, the steed Woodrow Wilson road into the palace at Versailles in 1919, and one main goad to the rise of ethno-linguistic nationalism in the latter half of the 19th century—Zionism being a one-off latecomer to the trend.

In the end, shiny or no, how are we to really understand the meaning of this centenary? How, for example, can we explain according to the rules of evidence of social science, the critically timed blink-of-an-eye support for Zionism from France in 1917 and the USSR in 1947? And how do we explain the seemingly sudden turning away of support by the two most Judeophilic Western political cultures thought to be Zionism’s greatest patrons—the British in the still-early years of the Mandate and the Americans almost immediately after the Rhodes Armistice agreements in 1949—that might have doomed the whole enterprise, but somehow didn’t.

We don’t typically find any of this passing strange, because we know how the story has gone. We have become inured to it, our curiosity short-circuited by the “all’s well that ends well” palliative we know so well. But when one ponders it with an eye ranged on raw, coldblooded probabilities, it is nothing if not passing strange. I will not press the question further, except to allude to a certain recorded three-word remark in translation once made to Pharaoh by his court magicians. And I’ll just leave it at that.

1One fairly recent example is Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Random House, 2010).

2For example, Allis and Ron Radosh, A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel (HarperCollins, 2009).

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Political Consequences of the Protestant Reformation, Part II

This article is based on a talk given at Aarhus University, Denmark, at a conference on the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, May 21, 2017. Part I on the Lutheran phase of the Reformation is here.

The Calvinist Phase and Political Corruption

The Calvinist phase of the Reformation was less the work of princes than of the grassroots organization of individual communities of believers throughout Europe, and the behavior changes this entailed. Its effect on political development was therefore less in the enforced consolidation of national states, than in the normative viewers of power-holders within states. Philip Gorski (2003) has provided two rather different examples of this, in the Netherlands and in Prussia.

Contemporary theorizing about political corruption seeks to put the phenomenon in a principal-agent framework.  Hierarchical organizations are seen as authority structures in which a principal delegates decision-making power to tiers of agents; corruption occurs when the agents begin pursuing their own interest at the expense of the principal.  Fighting corruption is then seen as a matter of aligning the agents’ incentives with those of the principal.

This economic framework is adequate for understanding certain forms of corruption, but it does not answer one very fundamental problem when applied to politics:  namely, what if the principal himself or herself is corrupt, and seeks to use political power not on behalf of the public, but for private purposes? State modernity is built around the distinction between public and private, and the idea that governments are instituted to serve public rather than private purposes.  Contemporary rational choice political science has a hard time explaining state modernity, since predatory rent-seeking is always a live option for rulers in place of honest public stewardship.  Without a normative belief in something like public interest and moral individual behavior on the part of rulers, it is impossible to truly modernize a state.

This is where Calvinism played a critical role through what Gorski labels a “disciplinary revolution.” The Protestant Reformation located the source of social control within the individual, rather than in external social institutions like the Church and its rituals. Calvinism reinforced this view through its doctrine of predestination, which paradoxically motivated believers to regard their own personal behavior as a sign of divine election.

In the Netherlands, the introduction of Calvinism passed social control from a large hierarchical institution not so much to individuals as to local congregations, which took on the responsibility for regulating social behavior. Gorksi points out that the Netherlands did not exhibit many of the characteristics associated with modern state-building: it did not create a strong centralized bureaucracy or uniform rules governing the whole of its territory. The United Provinces remained more of an alliance than a state, with power further devolved to individual communities within it.

Nonetheless, these communities were able to exert enormous social control over their members, which Gorski measures through indicators like rates of crime, adultery, civil disorder, and through personal accounts that compared Dutch orderliness very favorably with that of other cities like Paris at the time. This type of self-disciplined behavior applied to political and not just personal life in the Netherlands, and aggregated upwards. There was no powerful central government able to extract taxes, as in the case of England; rather, Dutch local communities agreed to pay high levels of taxes to support common interests like ship-building. Gorski shows that Dutch military spending in the 16th and 17th centuries was one of the highest in Europe on a per capita basis, reflecting not just the wealth of the United Provinces, but also the acquiescence of Dutch elites in national projects aimed at the common good of national independence.

The second channel through which Calvinism promoted development of modern states was through a top-down process in Prussia. The latter country is famous, of course, for the project of modern state-building undertaken by the Hohenzollern dynasty, beginning with the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm’s effort to centralize authority in the wake of the Thirty Years War. What is sometimes less well known is the fact that the Hohenzollern family were Calvinists in a largely Lutheran society. Modern state-building often requires creating an impersonal administration through a cadre of new officials with no family or personal ties to the citizens over whom they preside. This occurred in Prussia as the Hohenzollerns’ distrust of the established nobility led them to import Calvinist and Huguenot administrators from the Netherlands and France, and to use them in key posts. The Prussian state achieved a high degree of autonomy from the surrounding society because it was confessionally separated from it; absolutism came to Prussia not simply over fiscal issues but because the Hohenzollerns wanted to overcome the Lutheran estates’ resistance to the spread of Calvinism.

Calvinist self-discipline was most critical however in setting a strict moral code within Prussia’s burgeoning bureaucracy.  This was the most true during the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm I, the Great Elector’s grandson, who ruled from 1713-40.  Friedrich Wilhelm was called the “soldier king” who was known for his personal austerity, thrift, and intolerance of corruption. He imposed military discipline on his own household and bureaucracy, turning the grounds of his palace into a parade ground and imposing severe austerity on his court. Recruitment into the Prussian bureaucracy became ruthlessly meritocratic, as indicated by the large number of non-aristocrats who were promoted to high positions. Frederick William implemented a wide-ranging system of surveillance over the accounts of his subordinates and ruthlessly punished any that were caught stealing from the treasury. These normative constraints became a deeply entrenched tradition in the Prussian administrative system, protected in later years by the bureaucratic autonomy it had achieved.

The Reformation and the Origins of Modern Identity

The second major political consequence of the Protestant Reformation was the way in which it laid the groundwork for the eventual emergence of the concept of identity, and of what we today call identity politics. In this respect, Martin Luther himself was a key figure.

The concept of identity has not always existed, but emerged only as societies started to modernize a few hundred years ago. While it originated in Europe, has subsequently spread and taken root in virtually all societies around the globe. The term identity did not come into widespread use until the 1950s, but the foundations for it were laid centuries earlier.

The idea of identity begins with a perceived disjunction between one’s inside and outside. That is, one comes to believe that one has a true or authentic identity hiding within oneself that is somehow at odds with the role one is assigned by one’s surrounding society. The modern concept of identity places a supreme value on authenticity, on the validation of that inner being which is somehow not being allowed to express itself. It is on the side of the inner and not the outer self.  Oftentimes an individual may not understand who that inner self really is, but has only the vague feeling that he or she is being forced to live a lie. This can lead to an obsessive focus on the question “Who am I, really?” The search for an answer produces feelings of alienation and anxiety, and can only be relieved, in the end, when one accepts that inner self and receives public recognition for it.

Hence the concept of identity would not even arise in most traditional human societies. For much of the last 10,000 years of human history, the vast majority of human beings lived in settled agrarian communities. In such societies, social roles are both limited and fixed: there is a strict hierarchy based on age and gender; everyone had the same occupation (farming or raising children and minding a household); one’s entire life was lived in the same small village with a limited circle of friends and neighbors; one’s religion and beliefs were shared by all; and there was virtually no possibility of social mobility—moving away from the village, choosing a different occupation, or marrying someone not chosen by one’s parents. In such societies, there is neither pluralism, diversity, nor choice. Given this lack of choice, it did not make sense for an individual to sit around and brood over the question “Who am I, really?”

In the West, the idea of identity was born, in a certain sense, during the Protestant Reformation, and it was given its initial expression by Martin Luther. Luther received a traditional theological education and received a professorship at Wittemburg; for ten years, he read, thought, and struggled with his own inner self. In the words of Elton (1963), Luther

…found himself in a state of despair before God. He wanted the assurance of being acceptable to God, but could discover in himself only the certainty of sin and in God only an inexorable justice which condemned to futility all his efforts at repentance and his search for the divine mercy.

Luther sought the remedies of mortification recommended by the Catholic Church, before coming to the realization that there was nothing he could do to bribe, cajole, or entreat God. He understood that the Church acted only on the outer person—through confession, penance, alms, worship of saints—none of which could make a different because Grace was bestowed only as a free act of love by God.

Luther was one of the first Western thinkers to articulate and valorize the inner self over the external social being. He argued that Man has a twofold nature, an inner spiritual one, and an outer bodily being; it was only the inner man that could be renewed, since “no external thing has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or freedom.” As he noted in Christian Freedom:

faith alone can rule only in the inner man, as Romans 10[:10] says, ‘For man believes with his heart and so is justified,’ and since faith alone justifies, it is clear than the inner man cannot be justified, freed, or saved by any outer work or action at all, and that these works, whatever their character, have nothing to do with this inner man.  (Luther 19??)

This recognition—central to subsequent Protestantism—that faith alone and not works would justify man, in one stroke undercut the raison d’etre for the Catholic Church. The Church was an intermediary between Man and God, but it could shape only the outer man through its rituals and works. Luther was of course horrified by the decadence and corruption of the Medieval Church, but the more profound insight was that the Church itself was unnecessary and, indeed, blasphemous in its efforts to coerce or bribe God.

Martin Luther however stands very far from more modern understandings of identity. He celebrated the freedom of the inner self, but that self had only one dimension: faith, and the acceptance of God’s grace. It was, in a sense, a binary choice: one was free to choose God, or not. One could not choose to be a Hindu or Buddhist, or decide that one’s true identity lay in coming out of the closet as a gay or lesbian. Luther was not facing a “crisis of meaning,” something that would have been incomprehensible to him (Taylor 1989); while he rejected the Universal Church, he accepted completely the underlying truth of Christianity.

The conversion of Luther’s concept of the inner self possessing moral freedom would have to pass through several other thinkers before it would evolve into the modern concept of identity. Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy sought to ground Luther’s inner freedom on reason alone, free from scriptural authority; the categorical imperative was an expression of this freedom. However, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who played the key role in secularizing Luther’s idea of inner moral freedom by pointing, in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, to man’s “perfectibility” and the sentiment de l’existence as the core of the inner self. He understood the whole of human history to be a progressive effort at the corruption of this innocent selfhood that existed in the state of nature. Society introduced competition and comparison, and hence the emotions of pride and envy that ultimately served to alienate social man from his true being. The solution to this lay either in a social contract that reunited the inner person with the rest of society through a “general will,” or else an individual escape through solitude and contemplation, as in Rousseau’s late work Promenades d’un Reveur Solitaire.

The concept of identity blossoms in the 19th century into much broader moral valorization of both autonomy and authenticity. This took a variety of paths—towards the celebration of the artist and creative genius that lies at the root of what is today called expressive individualism, or towards the emergence of collective identities that legitimated modern nationalism. In the latter project, the philosopher Johan Gottfried Herder was critical.  He argued that the critical inner self that was being suppressed by a corrupt external society was the “genius” of a people’s folk traditions. When coupled with the identity confusion surrounding economic modernization—the uprooting of settled peasant communities and the urbanization of European societies—the grounds for modern nationalism were laid. European nationalism was the first major expression of what we today call identity politics, in which groups seek public recognition of identities that they believe to be undervalued or otherwise marginalized.

It is, of course, very unfair to blame Martin Luther for the kind of aggressive nationalism that would engulf Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was primarily concerned with knowledge of God and inner salvation. And yet, his connection to later nationalism is not a trivial one. He was a brilliant polemicist who wrote in vernacular German, which when coupled with Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press led to his pamphlets and sermons being read widely throughout the German-speaking world. The Luther Bible played a role in establishing a common German language, much like Cranmer’s slightly later Book of Common Prayer for the English, and hence a distinctive German national identity. And finally, the uptake of Lutheran doctrine by German princes reflected their own resentment of having to share sovereignty with a Catholic emperor with a power base in Spain, and with an Italian Pope. The political unification of Germany would wait another three centuries, but the cultural unification took off during the Reformation.

The post Political Consequences of the Protestant Reformation, Part II appeared first on The American Interest.

The End of Liberalism?

“It’s not that I’m a Trump supporter. It’s just that you, my friend, are actively undermining the very foundations of everything you purport to defend.”

Over the past ten months, that conflicted sentiment has led me into countless debates with people much more implacably opposed to the President than I am. I live in Washington, DC. We voted for Hillary Clinton by an overwhelming 90.9 percent. Most of the people I end up arguing with are my friends and colleagues.

My interlocutors increasingly think they are at a world-historical inflection point, and only their unwavering commitment to what they simply know to be right can avert certain catastrophe. I emphatically agree with them that we are at a critical inflection point. But to me, Trump’s presidency is just a symptom of a much bigger problem.

“It’s about our shared values,” my friends might say to me. “Trump is attacking them. Liberal democracy is at stake. This is existential.”

“Democracy is just fine,” I might answer. “Liberalism, however, is slitting its own throat.”

You didn’t have to be a Trump supporter to have seen all this coming. The brilliant Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev predicted much of it ten years ago in a remarkable essay for the Journal of Democracy titled “The Strange Death of the Liberal Consensus.” The financial crisis that would soon hit was on almost no one’s radar, and yet Central and East Europeans had already started their electoral revolt. Though Krastev’s focus is the rise of what was even then disparagingly called “populism,”  his essay is vital to understanding the dynamics that shape our current political reality across the West.

Seven years into the new millennium and not even a decade after the launch of the single currency, familiar faces were already being cursed and abused in the halls of power in Brussels: Robert Fico was serving his first term as Slovakia’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban was on the rise in Hungary, and the Kaczynski brothers’ Law and Justice Party was leading a coalition in Poland. The abuse was not completely unwarranted. Fico’s nationalist coalition partners were notorious for making impolitic, and often drunken, statements about Hungarians and Roma at rallies. (Jan Slota of the Slovak National Party said in 1995 that solving the country’s “Gypsy problem” was a matter of a “small courtyard and a long whip.”) And Law and Justice was raising hackles, then as now, with both its heavy-handed attempts to appoint loyalists as nominally independent civil servants, and its paranoid, conspiratorial approach to democratic politics.

Yet their critics were no less over the top, making comparisons to Weimar Germany as a matter of course. The problem with the so-called “Weimar interpretation,” Krastev wryly noted, is that it was both wrong on the merits and transparently self-serving. “The streets of Budapest and Warsaw today are flooded not by ruthless paramilitary formations in search of a final solution,” he wrote, “but by restless consumers in search of a final sale.” Democracy was in fine shape, as was market capitalism. What was being roundly rejected, however, was what we might describe as a common-sense liberal worldview—a kind of political correctness that since the end of the Cold War had taken questions otherwise vital to politics “off the menu.”

The European Union had stumbled into imposing a political conditionality in their accessions arrangements with the eager Central and East Europeans. You will not only reform your institutions to our standards, the eurocrats demanded, but you will also forbid a certain kind of political discourse to flourish in your countries. “In order to prevent anticapitalist mobilization, liberals successfully excluded anticapitalist discourse,” Krastev wrote, “but in doing so they opened up space for political mobilization around symbolic and identity issues, thus creating the conditions for their own destruction.” Another way to put it: after the Cold War, victorious liberals made liberalism into a moral matter, a set of tenets beyond political question. Instead of defending individual and property rights and free, open markets on rational grounds, they shut down discussion by casting anyone who happened to disagree as some kind of reprehensible throwback—not just wrong, but bad.

Krastev perhaps didn’t realize at the time that it wasn’t just “anticapitalism” that was verboten. The very concept of the nation and national culture had through the years become deemed too dangerous for democratic politics. This was due in no small part to the bloody Balkan wars that buffeted Europe’s periphery shortly after the fall of communism. But as Frank Furedi argues in his penetrating new book Populism and the European Culture Wars, a profound rejection of nationality as a legitimating concept was at the core of a Good European’s own historical self-understanding.

West European democracies had assiduously worked to banish nationalism from the Continent’s politics in the decades following World War II, in an attempt to expiate their collective sins associated with the Holocaust. It would be wrong to minimize the importance the task played in helping the Europeans get back on their feet, both economically and psychologically. But the exercise certainly left its mark. With the “defeat” of international communism in the 1990s, this convenient piety now seemed the cause of liberalism’s triumph, and was embraced with intensifying fervor. Political theorists like Jurgen Habermas began to argue that the nation-state was a necessary stepping stone on the path to the gas chambers. The post-national European Union—now increasingly seen as a universal project, the means by which mankind would finally transcend its atavistic and tribal impulses—was the only moral way forward. This pious post-nationalism was of course tangled up with unexamined justifications for markets mentioned above. In a globalized economy, the argument went, smaller European countries simply could not compete without ceding their sovereignty to the European Union and opening up their borders to both capital and labor. It’s no coincidence that Good Europeans like Angela Merkel and George Soros both saw openness to migration—at first to workers within the EU, but since 2015 to the wretched masses trudging overland from Syria, North Africa, and Afghanistan—as a defining mark of European civilization.

The problem for European liberals, Furedi writes, is that voters have only ever regarded their project as weakly legitimate. The threat of the Soviet Union and the postwar economic boom proved to be adequate glue for several decades. But as the economic crises of the 1970s started to bite, it became apparent to even the EU’s most stalwart supporters that this was not going to be enough in the long run. More than 40 years later, however, that sharp insight has not led to anything more than a few weak attempts at manufacturing a bloodless transnational EU identity through lazy PR. By 2011, even a giant such as Jacques Delors was conceding that a European project that hid its Judeo-Christian heritage was in trouble.

But his warning found few listeners. As the European project accrued universalist, global pretentions, its most fervent defenders lost the ability to appeal to the common heritage of the Continent’s constituent peoples. Today, the situation is as acute as ever. “The very public assertion of the principle of national sovereignty by [so-called ‘populist’ leaders],” Furedi argues, “has created an ‘Emperor Has No Clothes’ situation” for the EU itself.

It’s not that voters have necessarily grown more illiberal. Rather, it’s that they were never as closely wedded to liberal ideals as their elites had hoped or imagined. In Central and Eastern Europe, at least, the intellectual case for liberalism was never really made to people. As long as blind adherence to liberal shibboleths was the price one needed to pay for rising living standards and the promise of future prosperity, most were willing to go along. But the universal aspirations of liberalism-as-religion had always rung more than a little hollow. When the future arrived and European integration underdelivered on its promises, these pieties were trivial to discard.

While the backstory in the United States is quite different, the underlying political dynamics at play today are strikingly similar. Faced with a broad revolt against the common-sense liberal worldview, panicked American elites are prophesying an apocalyptic, totalitarian future for the Republic. And when it comes to “doing politics,” liberals seem keen to double down on what worked in the past.

I have noticed that a kind of sickly grey hope hangs around most people’s hottest anti-Trump vitriol, lingering like stale morning breath: a hope that once everything is sorted—all the disinformation exposed, all the dossiers verified, all the tax returns audited, and all the President’s men jailed—the “adults” will wrest back control of politics, and things can get back more or less to the way they were before. Established, institutionalized parties representing well-defined and time-tested electoral coalitions will once again vie for the affections of so-called “independent” voters, whose demands define a sensible middle ground where the parties are compelled to make concessions to common sense. We will still have disagreements about important issues, my friends might say to me—issues like abortion, taxes, trade, and immigration will of course remain divisive. Banishing Trump does not mean the end of politics: after all, we remain a deeply polarized country. But the bigger frame of the debates will no longer come into question. Our values, to which Trump personally and Trumpism more broadly is such an affront, will no longer be up for debate.

Maybe.

But ten months into Year Zero of Trump’s first term, Trumpism has, if anything, strengthened its hold on the Republican Party. The press rapturously praised the recent remonstrations of Senators Corker and Flake, but without noting that their fine words largely fell on deaf ears among their constituents, and were rendered less than cheap by their decision to avoid discovering the true price in the upcoming elections. Whoever follows Trump on the Right almost certainly will not be a #NeverTrumper. Rather, it will probably be someone like Senator Tom Cotton, a man who has clearly read the mood of Republican voters and is willing to meet them more than halfway on most issues.

The nostalgics could still be proven right by the Democrats, who could conceivably field a slate of broadly “centrist” candidates of the old mold in the upcoming midterms. But early indicators suggest that the Left too has little appetite for anything like it. Ezra Klein, founder of the influential Lefty-millennial online publication Vox, was recently boosting the fortunes of a young Muslim candidate for Governor in Michigan: “Obama-like biography and political style paired with Sanders-like policy ideas sounds like the fusion the Democratic Party is searching for.”

It seems to me that it’s precisely the old framing—Krastev’s “liberal consensus”—that’s done for. Gone with it is any certainty about free trade and immigration, as well as any certainty surrounding the so-called liberal international order. As Nils Gilman astutely noted two days ago in these pages, what Trump has done is vastly expand the realm of what is politically possible (and permissible) in the United States. Arguably, he has done so across the existing political spectrum, not just on the Right.

For someone who had previously bought into that liberal consensus, these are disorienting times, to be sure. But the truth is, democracy is not only working, it’s working quite well. Popular discontent with an overweening and increasingly ossified ideology is finding its voice across Europe, and has found a (deeply flawed) tribune in the United States. The future of liberalism depends on smart politicians getting the message loud and clear, and then working out a path forward that preserves all the elements of the philosophical tradition that are worth preserving. The shrill screeching of the high priests of the liberal clerisy are not helping things at all.

The post The End of Liberalism? appeared first on The American Interest.

Russia’s Virtual Reality

The continued downward spiral in U.S.-Russian relations during the initial phase of the Trump Administration may have come as a disappointment to Russians, but it could hardly have come as a surprise. With a weary sense of déjà vu, many Russians perceive the current tensions as only the latest episode of an age-old historical drama—the relentless Western campaign to contain Russia and prevent the state from achieving the greatness that is Russia’s destiny and its due.

In every age, it seems, some Western power has assumed the task of keeping Russia confined to the periphery of Europe. One after another they have taken up the cudgels—Sweden, Poland, France, England, Germany, and latterly the United States. Notwithstanding temporary reverses, Russia has always managed ultimately to turn the tables on its foes. Who today even remembers that Sweden was a great European power until it unwisely tried to block Russian access to the Baltic Sea? The haughty Polish Rzeczpospolita, which vainly (in both senses of the word) sought to prevent Moscow’s “gathering of Russian lands,” instead found itself wiped off the map. Napoleon’s Grande Armée, Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa—history is littered with the bones of Russia’s Western adversaries. It is aggravating, of course, that as soon as one Western opponent is dispatched, another seems to pop into place automatically. Veritably the enemy never sleeps, so the price of Russian greatness, evidently, is eternal vigilance.

The reasons for Western hostility are clear enough in most Russian minds. At the most basic level, greedy Westerners have always coveted Russia’s territory and natural resources; you could hardly expect otherwise from people whose colonialism plundered the globe and soaked the earth in blood and tears. No less importantly, Westerners instinctively perceive the superiority of Russian civilization to their own. Envious of Russia’s moral authority and jealous to maintain their own ill-gotten predominance in global affairs, Westerners manifest a pathological compulsion to denigrate Russia and impede its rise. This attitude lies at the root of the rampant Russophobia that Moscow feels compelled to denounce with increasing frequency and vehemence. Especially in this period of terminal Western decay – the ultimate collapse of the rotten West anticipated by Russian visionary thinkers for the past two centuries – one should anticipate a spirited (if futile) rear-guard action before the West yields its geopolitical leadership position once and for all to a more worthy civilization, and shuffles off the world stage to a well-merited irrelevance.

Nowhere is Russian superiority more manifest than in its treatment of its neighbors. Russians are confident that their country, in contrast to European empires that expanded through conquest and ruthless exploitation, grew organically and largely peacefully.

Thus, the restoration of Russian dominance over the post-Soviet space is not dictated solely—or even principally—by the need to defend Russia from the depredations of the envious West (as important as that task might be). Rather, the gratitude of its neighbors for Russia’s past beneficence and their innate gravitation toward Moscow’s leadership simply makes a Eurasian vocation the natural choice for all of Russia’s “little brothers.” Hence, the emergent Eurasian Union championed by Moscow will be just as consensual an arrangement as the Russian Empire had always been in the past. The assertion of a “zone of privileged interests,” in Russian minds, is merely a recognition of this state of affairs.

Perhaps my first experience of cognitive dissonance in connection with this mindset came in 1983, at the outset of my first trip to Moscow. In the course of the standard tour of Red Square, the guide pointed out St. Basil’s Cathedral, remarking laconically that it had been built to celebrate the “liberation of Kazan” in 1552. Even at the time I thought her formulation curious—why “liberation” rather than “conquest,” “capture,” or “fall?” In 1552 Kazan had been the capital of a Tatar khanate, so from whom, exactly, had the city been liberated? Presumably from its own Tatar inhabitants, who endured a lengthy siege, storming, pillaging, and the resettlement of the surviving Tatar population some distance from Kazan, which was then repopulated with Russians.

The fate of Kazan was by no means exceptional by the contemporary standards of siege warfare. Moreover, the fall of the Khanate of Kazan eliminated an acute long-term threat to Russian security and brought freedom to many thousands of Russian captives and slaves; the celebration of this event in Moscow was perfectly understandable and received a worthy commemoration with the construction of St. Basil’s. All the same, it would be just a bit incongruous to suggest that the Tatar inhabitants of Kazan in 1552 felt themselves in any sense “liberated.”

A second epiphany came from contemplating Vasily Surikov’s famous painting entitled “The Subjugation of Siberia by Yermak.” In the late 16th century Siberia was another Tatar khanate, and Surikov’s canvas graphically depicts the climactic battle between the determined, musket-wielding Russians and a native army, armed with bows and arrows, whose faces display a mixture of defiance, bewilderment, and incipient panic.

Surikov lived and painted in simpler times than ours, when men boasted of conquest with no evident embarrassment or pangs of conscience. It is hard to imagine such a painting being executed in Russia after, say, 1930, when the theme of subjugation would have been completely out of step with the dominant narrative about the eternal friendship among the peoples of the Soviet Union. Surikov’s assignment would then have been to depict something along the lines of “the Peaceful Liberation of Siberia by Yermak,” and his dramatic battle scene would have been quite inappropriate.

My point in recalling these two vignettes is not to chide Russia for picking unfairly on the poor Tatars. Rather, it is to posit the existence of an iron law of history—that one people’s glorious triumph is, of necessity, another people’s catastrophic defeat, and one nation’s expansion is another’s loss of territory or even independence. Therefore, between any two nations that interact historically, there are bound to be differences in perspective, and thus in their historical narratives. No matter how well-disposed modern-day Tatars may be toward Russia, they can hardly view a historical event like the fall of Kazan without some sense of national tragedy.

In the case of Russia’s post-Soviet neighbors, these discrepancies in perspective and narrative are overlain by further differences in national interests. In previous essays I have noted some perceptual disconnects between Russians and the Ukrainians, Georgians, and Balts. While people tend to focus on the sharper disagreements between Russia and some of its more assertive neighbors, it is instructive to observe the disconnect in perspectives between Russia and even its closest post-Soviet partners. Consider Belarus, Armenia, and Kazakhstan.

Belarussians are renowned for their pro-Russian sentiments, consistently express little interest in joining the EU, let alone NATO, and employ the Russian language virtually to the exclusion of Belarussian. In 1996 the Russian and Belarussian governments created a “union state” intended to become a sort of federation or commonwealth joining the two countries. It was widely anticipated that this “union state” would provide a suitable vehicle for easing Belarus expediently back into Russia. Such a turn of events was tempting to Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko when it appeared that, as the leader of the “union state,” he might finagle his way into becoming the de facto ruler of Russia at such time as the aging, ailing Boris Yeltsin might depart the scene. For many Russian nationalists, the prospect of Lukashenko as co-ruler of Russia and Belarus seemed a reasonable tradeoff for bringing Belarus back into the Russian fold.

Yeltsin’s anointing of Vladimir Putin as his successor threw a wrench into the works of this project, and Minsk’s interest in further integration of the “union state” dissipated as it became clear that a big Kremlin office for Lukashenko would not be part of the package. While some Russians have reproached Lukashenko for the slacking of his integrationist fervor, no one should really have been surprised at his disinterest in trading the presidency of an independent country for the governorship of a Russian province, with the consequent loss not only of prestige, but of basic job security.

Public spats between Minsk and Moscow can involve heated rhetoric and may even occasionally give the impression of an impending showdown. However, ultimately they have not been about the nature of Belarus’s relationship with Russia, but about how much Moscow is willing to pay for the fealty and stability of the Lukashenko regime—a question not of principle, but of price. A more significant development is the gradual and ever-so-tentative assertion of a Belarussian national identity with its own historical narrative at odds with Moscow’s. Indicative of this tendency are assessments of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania as something of a consensual joint undertaking between the Lithuanians and Belarussians, with concrete benefits accruing to both nations. This view of the Grand Duchy as a benevolent symbiosis is at odds with Moscow’s narrative, which depicts Lithuania as a conqueror, exploiter, and divider of the Russian people. The historical controversy might seem abstruse and pointless, but the divergent views about Belarus’s past are understood by everyone to represent disparate opinions about the country’s destiny.

The project of reintegrating Belarus has suffered from the tensions created by the Russo-Ukrainian War. The ardor for reunification cannot help but cool as Belarussians contemplate the dubious privilege of front-line status in Russia’s standoff with the West—not to mention the prospect of Belarussian men someday being drafted to fight in the North Caucasus, the Donbas, Syria, or heaven knows where else. While Belarussians, for the most part, will remain favorably disposed toward Moscow, the notion of a smooth, “natural” Russian reabsorption of Belarus is looking increasingly dubious.

The case of Armenia is altogether different but indicative in its own special way.

The Russian Empire, and later the Soviet Union, served as a refuge for Armenians fleeing poverty, persecution, or outright massacre, or seeking to revive some semblance of Armenian national life within the construct of the Armenian SSR. Post-Soviet Armenia exists in a hostile neighborhood and relies existentially on Russian security assistance and guarantees. Thus, there are probably few nations with greater cause to feel gratitude toward Moscow than the Armenians.

Russians therefore reacted with some consternation to the 2016 erection of a monument in Yerevan to Garegin Ter-Harutyunyan, better known as Garegin Nzhdeh, a man who fought in the Armenian national liberation struggle in the early 20th century not only against the Turks, but also against the Soviets, and who even collaborated with the Nazis in World War II to advance the cause of Armenian independence. This controversy underscores the fact that Armenians, even while appreciating Russian protection both past and present, nevertheless maintain their own national perspective on matters such as the Soviet suppression of Armenian independence in 1920, the boundaries drawn by Moscow in the South Caucasus in the 1920s, and the physical liquidation of Armenian intellectuals in Stalin’s purges. Moreover, considering the importance of Western humanitarian and development aid, as well as the large Armenian diasporas in countries like the United States and France, Yerevan is not about to burn its bridges with the West for the sake of post-2014 solidarity with Moscow. No matter how close its relationship with Russia, Armenia will not abandon its own national interests or perspective, and will insist on celebrating its own national heroes.

Kazakhstan, for its part, presents a most thorny conundrum for Moscow.

Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev is the father of the “Eurasian Union” concept that Putin has championed since his 2012 re-election campaign, and Kazakhstan was a charter member when the Eurasian Economic Union became an institutional reality on January 1, 2015. Yet all the while that Kazakhstan was being solicitous of Russian interests and anxious to demonstrate its integrationist bona fides, a curious demographic dynamic has been at work within the country. In 1989, on the eve of the breakup of the USSR, there were nearly as many ethnic Russians as Kazakhs in Kazakhstan (37.4 percent and 39.7 percent of the population, respectively), and the total European population (counting Ukrainians, Belarussians, Germans, and Poles, who were largely Russophone) was nearly 50 percent. By current estimates, ethnic Kazakhs are approaching two-thirds of the population, ethnic Russians are hovering just above 20 percent, and the combined European population is barely a quarter. This remarkable demographic transformation has occurred as the result of a higher Kazakh birthrate, massive emigration of Europeans (especially in the 1990s and tapering off thereafter, but continuing to the present), and the immigration of ethnic Kazakhs from Mongolia, China, and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

This demographic shift is in large measure an acceleration of trends already visible since the 1959 Soviet census. It is difficult to assess how much of it was planned or encouraged and how much has occurred spontaneously, but its implications are profound. Even as Kazakhstan has embraced Eurasian economic integration, its weight in the Russian World (Russky Mir) has been contracting apace. Time is running out for those Russian nationalists who dream of joining northern Kazakhstan (or “southern Siberia,” as they call it) to Russia, and by the middle of this century there might no longer even be a demographic basis for doing so.

While the demographic transformation of Kazakhstan has hardly passed unnoticed in Russia, there is actually very little the Kremlin can reasonably do about it. A Donbas scenario for northern Kazakhstan would be inordinately risky. It would provoke a flood of Slavic refugees from whichever parts of Kazakhstan could not be “liberated,” and any destabilization of the country could provide an opening in Central Asia for jihadis, a threat that has rightly concerned Moscow for the past two decades. Moreover, there never seems to be a suitable triggering event for a Russian intervention. Kazakhstan has no pretensions to EU or NATO membership, it maintains Russian as an official language, and it takes pains not to irritate Moscow unduly in foreign-policy matters.

It is a very tricky matter for Moscow simultaneously to foster integration with the Central Asian states while berating them for the living conditions—and high emigration rates—of their ethnic Russian minorities. It faces a dilemma in Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia between promoting the Eurasian Union or the Russian World, and has generally chosen the former. For Russian nationalists, the steady decline in the number and percentage of Russophones in Kazakhstan is an issue that is ever important yet never urgent, and there will probably always be satisfactory reasons to delay addressing the problem—chiefly because there don’t appear to be any good options. The Kremlin can take comfort in Kazakhstan’s pro-Russian orientation, albeit with a nagging suspicion that the Kazakhs, as their demographic position strengthens, might prove increasingly less inclined to genuflect in Moscow’s direction.

It is revealing that neither Belarus, nor Armenia, nor Kazakhstan has joined in Russia’s post-2014 countersanctions against the West, nor have any of them offered military contingents to fight alongside Russia in Syria. And while none of them has denounced Russian military intervention in Georgia or Ukraine, they have not exactly enthused about it either. The reason for this ambivalence should not be difficult to grasp.

There was a telling remark in a recent piece for Chatham House’s The World Today by Fyodor Lukyanov—as careful, nuanced, and authoritative a Russian expert as you will find on his country’s foreign policy. Speaking of Putin’s achievements in restoring lost Russian influence, he listed “the recovery of a small portion of territory ceded in 1991, the Crimea.” Of course, the Crimea had been gifted to the Ukrainian SSR by Khrushchev in 1954 and—certainly as far as Kyiv is concerned—was already indisputably Ukrainian territory when the Soviet Union fell apart. Lukyanov’s observation cannot help but raise a troubling question in the minds of Russia’s post-Soviet neighbors: Exactly how much of the former USSR do Russians consider as “territory ceded in 1991,” and therefore subject to restoration at an appropriate time by Moscow? The impression given by many Russians, and echoed by poorly informed Western analysts, is that the entire Soviet Union was “Russia.” The other states in the post-Soviet space have a very different perspective. Regardless of what Russians might think in this regard, not one of Russia’s neighbors appears prepared to offer up any of its territory as a sop to Russian sensibilities, nor to prioritize Moscow’s burning desire to reclaim the status of a great power.1

In these chaotic times it must be comforting to Russians to perceive that some things never change—the animosity of an envious, hypocritical West and the natural, age-old gravitation of Russia’s neighbors toward Moscow. And if the gravitational pull seems not quite as strong as anticipated, that problem—like most others—can plausibly be attributed to the machinations of the Western foe. Accordingly, the Kremlin has charted a medium-term foreign-policy course with the complementary elements of repulsing Western encroachments and accelerating the pace of Eurasian integration.

But what if the West, in fact, perceives Russia not as an existential threat to be eliminated, but rather as a persistent but limited problem to be managed? What if Moscow’s dramatic post-1991 loss of power and influence was not the culmination of nefarious Western intrigues, but the largely unavoidable result of the complete political, economic, and moral collapse of the Soviet Union?  What if Westerners do not view Russia enviously as the emerging colossus of the 21st century, but as a corrupt, inept petrostate in chronic decline—an object more of horror than of dread? Even assuming the worst about Western covetousness, is it just possible that Westerners recognize that whatever they want from Russia they can better obtain through trade and investment rather than a clearly suicidal policy of armed conquest?2

What if the West is not responsible for the difficulties in Russia’s relations with its post-Soviet neighbors? What if these problems, instead, are principally the result of differing national interests and perspectives, and mirror the decolonization process that followed the break-up of other 20th-century empires? What if “color revolutions” in the post-Soviet space have been driven by domestic discontent rather than Western conspiracies? To what degree do Russia’s neighbors perceive it not as a wise and benign older brother, but rather as a domineering sibling with a distinct proclivity toward fratricide and even cannibalism? To what extent has Moscow’s sway over its perceived “zone of privileged interests” been consensual, and to what extent has it relied on force or the threat thereof? And is it just possible that Russia’s own actions have been the primary motivation behind its neighbors’ interest in NATO and EU membership?

Current Russian policy seems likely to perpetuate a vicious circle. A tough anti-Western line and efforts to force the pace of post-Soviet reintegration will result, to the shock and dismay of Russians, in even greater “Russophobia,” attributable—as always—to Russia’s cunning and implacable enemies. The Kremlin will then double down on its original approach, with drearily predictable results.

The greatest dangers from Russia’s foreign-policy virtual reality actually arise not from misjudgment of the West, but from Russia’s failure to comprehend its own post-Soviet neighbors. It makes a world of difference for all involved if Moscow will be satisfied with friendly but independent states on its borders, or will insist on their subjugation.

Or, if you prefer, their liberation.

1A related question is what would constitute the western border of Russia’s “zone of privileged interests.” There is no agreement on this fundamental matter, not merely between Russia and the West, but among the states currently wedged rather uneasily between Russia and the EU. Nor is there even a single consistent understanding among Russians themselves. The appetite is likely to grow with the eating; after all, why settle for the Bug River when the Neisse would be nicer?

2For me personally, the greatest insult has never been the supposition that Americans are greedy, but the assumption that we are too stupid to conduct a simple cost/benefit analysis.

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